On betrayal

Warning: political rather than literary post ahead!

So a certain D Cameron has the effrontery to say that the EU had been poisoning the nation’s politics for years and he was right to allow the referendum. Of course, it was the Tory party’s politics that had been poisoned, and Cameron gambled and lost, and thus betrayed the future of younger generations.

If you’ve read more than a handful of posts on this blog, you’ll know I’m half-Polish. But I was born here, raised here and have lived, worked and paid taxes here all my life. I’ve taught English language and literature as my career, and count myself as English: many people and many things tie me to this country. And this week I feel well and truly betrayed by our rulers, by our entire political class, and by the Labour party who should have been an opposition rather than supporting mayhem.

I can remember being glad that we’d decided to join the ‘Common Market’ when I was still a teenager; a couple of years later when there was a referendum and it might have made sense to leave, as I was going through a hard left phase as a student, I voted to leave what seemed to me at the time to be merely a capitalist club. We didn’t leave, and over time and after much travelling and learning rather more about the world, I came to appreciate more and more the significance of the European project to the countries on the mainland: it cemented peace and co-operation and a whole new way of going about things into their world, after the insanities through which they had lived a generation previously. Britain, on the other hand, came off relatively lightly from the Second World War, which we thought we had ‘won’ (although we did finally lose an empire). It always seemed a great shame, as well as a serious error, that we did not commit ourselves whole-heartedly to the project and seek to exert a real and formative influence on its development. We never really took Europe seriously.

In my darker moments I realise that I owe my very existence to a betrayal, Britain’s betrayal of the Poland for whom she allegedly went to war in September 1939 and then betrayed at Yalta in 1945; the country was allocated to the Soviet sphere where it languished for forty-five years, and my father’s region was annexed by the Soviet Union and he could never return. Yes, I know about realpolitik. I’ve also read about the grubby way this country treated her ally, and the men who made such arduous journeys to make their way here and join the fight for freedom.

I find myself rather envious of several friends who may read this, who have left these shores to make their lives elsewhere in Europe; you, of course, are rather younger than me, which perhaps makes it easier to uproot yourselves, and make a new or different life not too far away, but spared the mayhem here; I wish you well. I’m not a free agent for a number of reasons, and won’t be following you. I also know that I’m relatively fortunate in that I am retired and fairly contented in many other ways, and that I may perhaps not be too badly affected by the coming chaos. I am much more concerned for the future of my own children and their families, and their prospects in a straitened and inward-looking nation, indeed for entire generations who will not have the broader futures and prospects that will shortly vanish. And yes, I am aware of the many flaws of the EU, its organisation, bureaucracy and governance. Babies and bathwater and so on.

I can see that we will leave the EU; personally I do not and will not accept this decision, although I cannot change it; if I am eventually offered some form of voluntary European citizenship, I shall accept it gratefully. I can and do enjoy my Englishness, but I count myself equally European, and I am deeply ashamed of what this country has decided to do.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Dystopia time again

Margaret Atwood’s novel has been clearly on the radar ever since it was first published, but is making waves again since the election of D Trump in the US, and is due to appear as a TV series next month. I’ve also spent a year or so working on a study guide to the text, for sixth form students, which has recently been published. There was a film made by the German director Volker Schlondorff in 1990, but it’s a film that’s better passed over because of its gratuitous change to the ending of the novel.

So I’ve been reflecting on twentieth century dystopias more generally; Atwood’s novel for me sits alongside Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, and the three novels all have pertinent things to say about the current state of the world, from radically different perspectives. To many of us, the present situation in the UK and in the US verges on the alarming – or am I being too cautious? – and revelations by Wikileaks and Edward Snowden among others only increase our feelings of paranoia.

Orwell’s new-found relevance is obvious, with the huge growth in surveillance, both by the state and other organisms, of all citizens, made easier by the development of the web and mobile technology, and justified by authority in the name of security against terrorist threats. Smart TVs now do perform the functions of Big Brother’s telescreens, your mobile will reveal your location, and everything you do online is likely to be logged somewhere… and yet the state does not need to stamp out dissidence in the way Orwell imagined – a boot stamping on a human face, forever – because Huxley’s vision coincides, and has made such violence redundant.

Huxley’s future is even more sinister, in many ways, because based on hedonism: offer humans pleasure, through sex and drugs, and you can render them passive slaves, incapable of rebellion because they are totally uninterested. It’s hard not to feel that in some ways and in some places this is already happening: alcohol is cheap, recreational drugs are available, sex is a commodity to many, and there are so many shiny shiny consumer durables to distract and use up one’s money, before being thrown away and replaced – ending is better than mending! One learns that there are so many people who cannot conceive of being without their mobile phone or online 24/7, and who are totally uninterested in any security threat or monitoring of their lives via these desirable devices.

The fact that I can still say that Atwood offers a gender perspective on current dystopian trends feels patronising at the same time as its truth underlines the still-existing inequalities in what some would have us believe is a post-feminist age. Perhaps her vision is sharper viewed from the USA where the fundamentalist Christian right wing is still hell-bent on restricting access to reproductive rights and maternity leave; some of the language used and the proposals made by various public figures recently have been truly shocking. In Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, after the right-wing coup, women have been openly objectified and commoditised, under the guise of freeing them from the worst aspects of their lives now. And, of course, it’s men who have been kind enough to do this. All in the name of religion, too. It will be interesting to see what aspects are foregrounded in the TV series; Atwood said at the time of the novel’s publication that she wrote of nothing that wasn’t either happening or possible already – back in 1985. She didn’t let men, religion or feminists off the hook…

It’s worth comparing how the three novels are differently presented, too: Orwell offers a traditional narrative, but filtered brilliantly through his invented language Newspeak, which shapes the alternative facts for the regime, Huxley offers a non-linear, modernist narrative, jigsaw-like in places, but Atwood is probably most original and experimental. Offred’s narrative is her mind, her consciousness and her emotions, fragmented like her life was before, and is in the new times; it has both a dream-like (nightmare-like?) quality as well as an immediacy which bring us up short. Atwood allows her to revel in words and language, to ask sharp questions, and to shock us…

Here we have three very powerful novels, more relevant today than they have been for some years: we should read, reflect and let them inform our conversations and actions. Here’s your essay title:

Which of these three novels do you think is most relevant to 2017? Justify your choice.

On a sadly neglected epic

I was reminded by a magazine article I read a couple of days ago that next month marks the 350^th anniversary of the publication of John Milton‘s epic, Paradise Lost. It deserves a post here, as it’s one of my favourite works of literature, and, as most critics seem to agree, sadly neglected nowadays.

Why sadly neglected? Firstly, it’s poetry, which doesn’t get much of a look-in nowadays, especially after some of the death-by-poetry onslaughts to which many school students are subjected by exam boards at the moment. And it’s epic poetry, which means it’s very long – twelve books, each of some thousand lines or so – remember, we are in pre-novel days here. Though prose narratives of a kind had been written by 1667, a subject like Milton’s deserved verse, and got it. That’s how stories were told.

Once we are past poetry and length, then there’s the subject-matter: religion. Specifically, to ‘justify the ways of God to Man’, as the poet himself put it. And religion does not figure large in many people’s lives nowadays. In Milton’s theology, everything, but everything centres around the felix culpa, that ‘happy fault’, the Fall, which allowed God to manifest his love and mercy to humans and the Son of God to offer himself as a sacrifice to atone for that original sin. The whole of human and cosmic history revolves around the events of Book IX. And of course, for Milton, it was all Eve’s fault, a silly woman deceived by a talking snake, who then tricks her gullible partner into repeating her sin… truly in this twenty-first century Paradise Lost doesn’t seem to have a great deal going for it.

Why do I like it? For me, the Adam and Eve story is at the level of a legend, but it’s part of our cultural past in the West, whether one is Christian or not. And it’s a good story. I don’t buy the Son of God sacrifice and redemption story either, but again, the Bible stories, whatever your take on them, are all part of our past, out history and cultural heritage, whether or not one accepts them as true. And to lose our past is just that, a loss.

But it goes deeper than that. Whether intended or not, Milton explores and shows us just what makes us human: our free will, our choices, our wish not to be limited or confined by others’ rules. The Adam and Eve after the Fall, after their comfort sex, are people like us, with our flaws and faults; before the fall they were not human as we know it. And in the cosmic story which surrounds the little, human story of Adam and Eve, the same issues are fought over: good and evil, and the origins of evil in the world; freedom and servitude; the very purpose of existence. It’s no surprise to me that as brilliant a writer as Philip Pullman has offered a contemporary take on this story and its implications for human beings nowadays, in his Northern Lights trilogy, and in the up-coming Book of Dust. Pullman celebrates the liberation offered by what Milton the Christian must condemn…

And, for me, these philosophical arguments are reinforced, if not surpassed, by the poetry. It is stunning, and a work of true genius: Milton’s style matches the subject-matter. There is the grandeur of God in his Heaven, the magnificent defiance of Satan and his cohorts, and the human intimacy of out human forebears. There is magnificent description on a cosmic scale, warfare in the heavens, the beauty of Paradise: the rhythm of Milton’s verse captures it all, as he extends the scope and scale of the English language with far more newly-coined words than Shakespeare (though more of Shakespeare’s have survived into contemporary usage). I will admit that it’s a challenge, nowadays, to read on the page, though well worth it; this is the reason why I usually recommend the outstanding, unabridged audio recording by Anton Lesser on Naxos Audiobooks as the way to enjoy the poem. It deserves to be enjoyed by more people…

Sara Maitland: A Book of Silence

I felt drawn to re-read this (there’s an earlier review on this blog if you want to look) by Maitland‘s occasional columns in The Tablet, which I always enjoy. She’s a radical Catholic hermit – at least that’s how I’d sum her up – and recently mentioned a lengthy period of recuperation which had tested her decision to live in extreme isolation in Galloway.

She considers silence compared with solitude, observing that they do not necessarily go together, and nor are they mutually exclusive. Her own journey, in the latter part of her life, has moved from noise to silence to solitude. In many ways I see her personal account of silence as a companion to the excellent Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, which I’ve also written about.

Is silence the absence of language or the absence of sound? Is written language silent? I noted that she always has reading matter with her when she isolates herself. As I Quaker, I worship in silence, but share that silence with a group of other like-minded people. Maitland had me reflecting again, in many different ways.

My personal interest in silence comes from how I find the world increasingly noise-ridden; perhaps this is exacerbated by my hearing difficulties. But I dislike how everywhere I go I must be accompanied by noise: traffic and people (and I choose to live in a town rather than miles from anywhere, I know) but in shops I am assaulted by random music, and quite often driven out of shops before I’ve made any contemplated purchase; in the street harangued by talking vehicles; deterred from entering cafes and restaurants by the thought of music I haven’t chosen accompanying my food or drink…I find unnecessary noise intrusive, and I also do worry about how so much of the world gets on my nerves as I age!

Maitland reminded me how much of every other aspect of life apart from the human is quiet or silent; I’d not ever seen the world like that before. She explores an enormous range of human experiences of silence and solitude, and places of hermitage in woods, mountains, islands and deserts through the ages, quoting in detail, as well as narrating her own journey of self-discovery and the choices which led her to her current retreat from the world. At times, she seems to take her pursuit of attentiveness to extremes, certainly much deeper than I might; she is fascinated by others’ observations and wants to emulate them, perhaps in the way that a novice hermit might seek a mentor? It was interesting to follow her as she gradually worked out what, exactly, it was that she was seeking…

She catalogues closely and in great detail the effects that silence and isolation has on her, particularly during a lengthy retreat on the isle of Skye, and links these in to others’ experiences as well. Her observations about research which suggest that too much exposure to noise has the potential to make people ill, made sense to me.

When I go away travelling, I often spend considerable lengths of time alone, walking and thinking, as far away from other people as I can get; curiously, this does lead to occasional very interesting chance encounters and conversations. But I am always glad to get back to the company of those I know and love; though I’m occasionally tempted by the thought of hermit-like silence and solitude, I honestly don’t think I’m called to it. But I really enjoyed seeing how someone else gradually found herself in that place.

My travels: O for Orange

I have happy memories of this small town in Provence from my hippy student days; I visited it a number of times. It’s most famous for its stunning Roman theatre built into the side of a hill: the seats are on the hillside, and then facing them, the stage and the immense main facade, in gorgeous golden stone. There is also a modest surviving Roman triumphal arch commemorating I have forgotten what and whom on one of the main roads leaving the town.

On the top of the hill was a pretty basic and very cheap campsite where I spent many happy days and nights – I seem to remember in those days a pitch was about 4 francs a night. My needs were simple in those days; I hitch-hiked with my tent and sleeping bag and few other necessities in a rucksack, and I could walk into town, have my daily ice cream, choose my different cheese-of-the-day, and get the necessary beer, bread and fruit and veg for the next twenty-four hours.

I particularly remember one evening’s adventure. Orange uses its amphitheatre for sumptuous live opera concerts in the summer; one day a Belgian traveller and I sat chatting and working through a bottle of red in the campsite and decided we’d try and sneak through the woods on the hillside into the opera for nothing (as opposed to paying 200 francs for a seat). We didn’t realise that the theatre was guarded by the Foreign Legion whose job was to prevent just what we intended to do; we spent a drunken and merry hour trying to slip past and outwit the legionnaires who were having none of it, of course, and fortunately for us were relatively good-humoured about our escapades; eventually we realised we should give up, and instead chatted about life with some of the legionnaires. Hell, neither of us like opera anyway.

Provence is lovely; I fell in love with it on my trips there. The feel of the heat, and the smells are special, the landscape beautiful. And I saw hoopoes in the campsite at Orange, the only place I’ve ever come across them in the wild. Orange is pretty central for a good number of interesting places in Provence. Avignon is not far, and I have fond memories of rambling around Mont Ventoux, and exploring the amazing place which is Vaison-la-Romaine: the mediaeval town perched on the steep hill, the vast Roman town below, and the modern-day French country town with its market alongside.

My travels: N for (Grotte de) Niaux

I don’t think I fully realised what I was seeing when I was taken to the Grotte de Niaux when I was seventeen. There are caves in southern France and northern Spain where our stone age ancestors lived many thousands of years ago, and as part of their culture drew wonderful drawings, painted fantastic paintings of their hunts and their prey, pressed their inked palm-prints onto cave walls. I’ve read fascinating and hair-raising accounts of the cave explorers who first found, mapped and explored these caves nearly a century ago.

Nowadays, visits to such places are strictly limited, if not actually impossible; replica caves and replica paintings have been built there for tourists to visit in safety and comfort, and so that the originals can be preserved for the future. Even forty-five years ago, before such replicas were constructed, only a small number of visitors were allowed into the actual caves at any one time: the paintings were at risk from the very warmth of our breath and its dampness, which would eventually have resulted in the growth of lichens and other things on the cave walls and the paintings, eventually destroying them. We had to carry acetylene lamps, which give off very little heat, but which also provided scant illumination. I think the guide was allowed something more useful in order to be able to point out things to us. The darkness, the silence and the stillness helped but it was very hard to get my mind around those twenty or thirty thousand years that separated the oh so sophisticated teenager from his ancient forebears; I remember a feeling of awe something like that which I experience when looking up at the stars, and although now my memories of the visit are quite faint, I do have a couple of postcards which show some of those marvellous paintings and drawings: human handprints, animals leaping, hunting.

Dostoevsky: Notes from a Dead House

Thinly disguised autobiography (to get past the Russian censor) by Dostoevsky here, and another really good translation from the Pevear and Volokhonsky duo. I’ve read a number of accounts of being a prisoner and an exile in both Russia and the Soviet Union, so there was also a chance to do some comparing.

Nothing prepares you for the utter sadism which led Dostoevsky to prison and exile. One of a number involved with opposition to the Tsar, he was initially condemned to death; this I had known, and obviously that the sentence was commuted, but apparently the Tsar planned, down to the minutest details, the mock execution to which the writer and his associates were to be subjected, before being reprieved at the very last minute…

So the account is initially carefully framed and disguised, although the mask slips fairly rapidly. We meet a range of the prisoners and hear about their crimes and punishments (as a nobleman, Dostoevsky was spared the compulsory corporal punishment, beating with rods – up to 4000 strokes – before his hard labour). There is much about the prison regime and the food, too, and here there is such a difference from the twentieth century accounts of like in the gulags by such writers as Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov or Evgenia Ginsburg. Dostoevsky and his compeers had the right to buy a pound of beef a day from the market and have it cooked for them… there is so much food and (illegal) alcohol available, compared with the starvation rations in Stalin’s camps. The description of their Christmas festivities does not sound like prison at all.

Prison does mean deprivation of liberty, hard labour does mean being made to work at tasks you’d not freely choose, and exile does mean being made to live somewhere not of your choosing, and it’s clearly these aspects that have the greatest effect on the writer. He and his fellow noblemen prisoners, including the many Poles who are in prison because of their efforts to win their country’s freedom from the Tsarist yoke, are isolated from the vast bulk of ordinary Russian prisoners, with whom they can enjoy no bonds of comradeship. An educated man like Dostoevsky is deprived of so much more along with his liberty, and again this lurks behind his accounts of friendships and kindnesses from others, and more general analysis of his condition and experiences, and those of his fellows. There are no kindred spirits, and you can feel the writer’s isolation behind his words.

Chekhov’s account of his visit as a doctor (so not a prisoner) to the convicts on Sakhalin island on the extreme eastern coast of Russia paints a far grimmer picture, but the nineteenth century accounts pale into insignificance compared with the horrors of the twentieth century gulag. It is important to remember that such camps were not per se designed to work men to death, as some of the Nazi concentration camps were, but they might as well have been, from the accounts we have of extreme conditions – the mines in Vorkuta in the Arctic or Magadan in far eastern Siberia – and permanent insufficiency of food. And yet, prisoners did live to be released and eventually tell their stories. And we are fortunate that Dostoevsky did, or we would not have his greatest novels to read today..

On the two cultures

Years ago C P Snow wrote about two cultures, the arts and the sciences, and the gulf between them. I oversimplify greatly, I know, but it’s an opposition that I regularly return to in terms of my own life and experience.

I’m clearly on the arts side, from my studies at school, at university and my teaching career, as well as my wider interests throughout life: languages, literature, history, religion for starters. I was about to say that science never really got a look in, when I recalled an interest in astronomy from a very young age, and that at primary school, my best friend and I wanted to be the first men on the moon (!). He’s now a Russian Orthodox priest, by the way, or was when I last had news of him…

At boarding school, there was no real opportunity to study science properly, and so the die was cast, I suppose. Maths was interesting, as our teacher was one of the pioneers of what was called ‘modern maths’ in those days; I understood and liked a good deal of it as far as O Level where I managed grade 2, but it was arithmetic, especially mental arithmetic, that was always my strongest point. I retained my interest in astronomy, even going to evening classes at one point, but whenever it strayed into the realms of maths and physics, I have to say that I very quickly got lost, and began to develop a headache. I genuinely do seem to have a mental block about some things once they go beyond a certain level… How much of this is because of my background, my upbringing and how much is the real me, as it were?

I do stray out of the arts bubble in my reading. I’ve long been interested in the calendar and its development over time, and there’s a fair amount of arithmetic involved in that. I’ve read some works on science and astronomy – Carl Sagan on the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos I found particularly interesting, and I have actually read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, though how much of it I understood I cannot honestly say. I like to read about the development of human knowledge in all fields, and find books like Pliny’s Natural History and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies fascinating because they show us learning about ourselves and our world, developing our understanding over time. This relentless desire for knowledge, and the pursuit of it, are surely one of the things which make us human and allow us to be proud of our species.

I’ve also found myself wondering about gender-related issues in connection with the arts/sciences dichotomy. I have the picture that maths and sciences are largely a male field, and the arts rather more female, and yet I know this is clearly a gross oversimplification. But do some subject areas and ways of thinking lend themselves more readily to brains of one or the other gender, despite the opening up of opportunities in recent decades? And what does this say, if anything, about female scientists and mathematicians of whom I have known many, or male students of literature and languages, of whom I have known rather fewer. And what about me?

Is the separation between arts and sciences inevitable, a result of there nowadays being so much knowledge in so many areas that it’s impossible for anyone to acquire mastery of everything? It has been said that Athanasius Kircher, in the seventeenth century, was the last man who knew everything, as in the amount of available learning and knowledge was capable of being mastered by a single person. I don’t think that the separation does us any good, in terms of our society, or our education systems; I have often felt intellectually poorer for my lack of scientific and mathematical knowledge. And of course currently we are made to feel that only subjects with practical applications, ie maths, science and technology, are worth expending the time and money on, and our country and the world is the poorer for such philistinism. It is curiosity, the act of studying and the eagerness to learn that are important, rather than the subject-matter.

On translation (again!)

The Qur’an is only the Qur’an in the original Arabic; if it’s in another language, it’s only a ‘version’, not the authentic Qur’an. At least, that’s my understanding of its status, and it led me once again to thinking about the business of translation. Obviously in my learning of languages, I’ve had to do plenty of it; I first became aware of the complexity when studying French at university. Turning the French words into English ones was straightforward enough, but making the whole read and flow like something in real English was much more of an art, and in the other direction was far harder, for coming from outside French, as it were, how well could I judge whether my effort felt like proper French? Nuance and idiom were everything, both ways…

Speaking the language was different: the revelation, epiphany even, which had come much earlier, before O level, when I was visiting my French pen-pal, was that I could speak the language more than passably and was understood by real French people, and that what I was saying did not involve any translating from English to French. The thoughts were there in my head, I articulated and they came out in French, because I was in France, talking with French people.

So what is a translation? Etymologically, from the Latin trans = across and latum, supine of the verb ferre to carry, so ‘carried across’. What do translators do? Somehow they enable us to read and understand a text written in a language we are unable to use. This involves putting the meanings of all the words into our language, and so much more: the sense, the feel, the meaning of the text as a whole also must be conveyed; idiom ideally is retained so we get a sense of the style of the original, the nature of the diction, the impression that the original author was trying to convey to her/his readers in the first language. Once you think of all these aspects of the task, it becomes formidable. And how can I be sure that, as a non-Russian and a non-Russian speaker (for these are surely different things) I’m actually getting what Tolstoy or Dostoevsky was saying?

I’ve enjoyed many of the novels of Ismail Kadare, some in English, more in French. And, to the best of my knowledge, most of the translations available in English until recently were done from the French, not the original Albanian. So how far am I from Kadare’s original meaning when I read Broken April, or The Pyramid, for example? Or, looking at an example in the other direction, consider Joseph Conrad, nowadays rather a neglected modernist writer. First language Polish, second language French, and yet he wrote brilliant novels in English, his third language, for heaven’s sake! Yes, you can detect French-isms in his English occasionally, but not that often…

I was struck many years ago when I read a comment by Umberto Eco about his translator into English, William Weaver. Eco actually said that he thought Weaver’s version of The Name of the Rose was better than his (Eco’s). Now (a) what does this mean, and (b) how could Eco actually know? My head spins. And for me, it is a brilliant novel – Weaver’s version, that is, for I don’t read or speak Italian. So what have I read?

I’m currently reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from A Dead House, translated by the well-known pair of translators of Russian literature, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. From articles I’ve read, one either hates their translation style or loves it. I’ve read many of their translations, and I’m firmly in the latter camp: for me they bring the stories alive, and with a modern enough idiom to make them comfortable to read unlike some of the stilted and wooden older translations. I’m not qualified to comment on accuracy or anything like that as I don’t speak Russian, but what they do works for me. But the more I read and think about translation as an art, the more in awe of its practitioners I am.

Manuel d’économie critique

Some regular readers will know I read Le Monde Diplomatique, a left-wing French current affairs magazine whose awkward title hides a wealth of detailed commentary and analysis, and which has an English-language edition. Another thing the magazine does is publish occasional one-offs on specific themes, and this was one of them. It seems to be aimed at the equivalent of sixth-formers or undergraduates: it was quite a challenging read but very informative and had some excellent graphics.

As I’ve grown older I’ve noticed that what I read tends to fit in with my existing opinions, and this was no exception: it confirmed my long-held conviction that our economic system is utterly insane, and geared to helping a relatively small number of people to continue to grab the largest slice of the pie while the rest of us fight over the crumbs. What I get from reading things that chime in with my opinions is usually more evidence, as well as prompting to think more deeply about an issue.

The idea that economics is in any way a ‘science’ worthy to sit alongside fields like chemistry or physics is thoroughly debunked; we are regularly reminded that the ‘Nobel Prize’ for economics isn’t actually one of Alfred Nobel’s awards at all but a later invention by the Bank of Sweden who thought it would be a good idea to name their award ‘in honour of’ Nobel… Orthodoxies are evidenced, challenged and demolished in this excellent book. And it’s made clear how, increasingly, non-orthodox economists and their analyses are being squeezed out, excluded from academia, from media interviews and presentations by the current hegemonic neo-liberal orthodoxies. Indeed, recently economics students at the University of Manchester protested about the narrow range of what they were being taught.

The mantra of ever more growth being either possible or desirable is challenged, as is the myth of ‘green capitalism’; the myth of business as the creator of wealth is debunked, too, along with an examination of the negative aspects of charity and volunteer work.

I felt there were flaws in the work, though: it suffered from the currently common failing of trying to present every topic in a double-page spread, which meant that some key topics and ideas were insufficiently explored and explained. This led to it feeling rather ‘bitty’ at times. Does every text aimed at a school or college readership really need to have everything finely chopped for short attention-spans?

Reading the entire book does work on the macro level, though: so much of how the economy ‘works’ (ie is supposed to but doesn’t) is clearly contradictory, not making sense as a whole, and thus it becomes clearer exactly why we are in such a mess at the moment: there is nothing coherent about how the present system works at all, and why would there be when the system is basically snouts in the trough elbowing everyone else out of the way? What I finally learned and understood after many years was how the banking system, and money-creation system currently operates: clear explanations and excellent graphics helped here.

I wish the British press went in for publishing ventures like this one: the French do seem to believe in the mission to explain and inform citizens, and surely this can only be good in a democracy?