Ghosts

He's come back to haunt support his old cabinet sparring partner, Brown, but Tony Blair can't run away from the by now well-worn ghosts that will follow him to the grave. One such ghost, however, could be a surprisingly fresh one. It's the eponymous novel written by Robert Harris a few years ago - and it's coming out as a movie, just in time for the general election, and Blair's return. What larks!



If you don't know the book, then you should have a little dip in before watching the film, otherwise, it'll be pretty baffling. Suffice it to say, it sails pretty close to the wind most of the time, in terms of its verisimilitude. As the Guardian review of the day said, Harris was out to get Blair, and get him good:

Most such references are almost dangerously obvious; a firm called Hallington, for instance, gets up to tricks just as sinister as those laid at the door of Haliburton. Others are designed to give Harris wriggle-room. Lang is having an affair with his personal assistant, the comely Amelia Bly, who would otherwise be a dead ringer for Blair's Downing Street aide Anji Hunter. The long-suffering ghostwriter even gets to bed the ex-PM's wife.

These few fantasies are all that save Harris from the charge that he is out for revenge on Blair, if not for the second sacking of his closer friend Peter Mandelson, then for Bush-dictated foreign policy that saw the author 'give up on' a government whose election he initially welcomed. Last year's Middle East debacle was apparently 'the last straw' for the already anti-war author; but he resists milking the irony that Blair is now a Middle East envoy, preferring a bleaker end for Lang.

Well, I thought the book was brilliant, fiction or not. And it had that delicious twist that all good thrillers should have at the end. Some aspects of the real Tony Blair's life are, in fact, stranger than the fiction, though. For instance, who would have thought that this former Labour prime minister would be worth £20 million+ after earning about 1/130th of that sum as prime minister? How did he manage that? Speaking tours?? Of course not. His rich friends in America showed him how to exploit business loopholes, while his chancellor here fuelled the property boom for as long as he could get away with it - or as long as it took for half the cabinet to become property multi-millionaires, just like Blair (and Mandelson, of course). Just these facts alone stink more than anything Harris dreamt up in his book about Blair facing charges as a war criminal.

But great book it is, and certainly worth the read. You really won't be able to put it down. As for the film, well, judging by the trailer, it's very faithful to the text - and Pierce Brosnan, judging by the glimpses we get, has judged the character of Tony Blair Adam Lang to perfection. Add to that the fact that it's a Polanski flick, and you would be forgiven for thinking that it's unmissable.

I wonder if Blair will be going to see it. I'm damn sure Brown will be - on the sly, naturally.

Food And Cheer

Dan Hannan has written a delightful post on his DT blog today, concerning Hobbits - or, rather, The Hobbit. He's been reading it to his young son and has found that Tolkien's verse and prose often far transcend the ordinary, but, strangely, we always seem to dismiss the whole, wonderful tale as a mere (admittedly magically escapist and fond) artifact of childhood. But it's so much more than that. Hannan explains how:

Tolkien understood the power of incantation: the way in which, as Philip Pullman puts it, reciting a fine poem makes you feel as if you were voicing words of power, chanting a spell. The story is filled with songs which follow the strict rules on metre and alliteration of the Old English verses which Tolkien loved, and whose force cannot be properly felt unless the lines are vocalised:

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep where dark things sleep
In hollow halls beneath the fells.

The prose, too, is studded with old Saxon words, and there is rhythm in even the most fast-moving passages. Try reading aloud the description of the fall of Smaug:

The great bow twanged. The black arrow sped straight from the string, straight for the hollow by the left breast where the foreleg was flung wide. In it smote and vanished, barb, shaft and feather, so fierce was its flight. With a shriek that deafened men, felled trees and split stone, Smaug shot spouting into the air, turned over and crashed down from on high in ruin. Full on the town he fell. His last throes splintered it to sparks and gledes. The lake roared in. A vast steam leapt up, white in the sudden dark under the moon. There was a hiss, a gushing whirl, and then silence.

Barely remember it as I do - I must have been no more than twelve years old the last time I read it (although, I did enjoy the ZX Spectrum game, too, I can just about recall!) - it really is gratifying to have Hannan revisiting and revealing it so well here to me-as-adult. And I'm grateful for it.

But what's more thoughtful and telling is not so much his appeal to grown-ups to give the story due credit as a piece of serious literature, but his invitation to understand its moral dimension, if it has one. Hannan, with some perspicacity in my opinion, identifies it and explains his discovery thus:

The only moral we can safely draw from the whole business is the one spoken by Thorin on his death-bed: “If more of us valued food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world”. Amen to that.

Given the behaviour of our perfidious, venal political classes, the woeful economic incompetence of our dear leader and his crew of merry morons, the 1.5 trillion pounds-worth of personal debt we've managed to accumulate as a society and the astonishing greed and stupidity of the world's money men, I could hardly imagine a more appropriate and timely sentiment. So, well done Dan Hannan but, as the debt default threat looms ever larger on the horizon, we may need to remember that it's no empty one: sooner or later, all of us are going to have to alter our priorities radically, and start to appreciate the simple things in life once again.

Suits me. Ramble on, people :)