Biology of the Worst Kind

On Sleep from London Review of Books July 2008

If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep. Why would we ever allow ourselves to drop off if sleeping was entirely optional? Sleep is such a dangerous place to go to from consciousness: who in their right mind would give up awareness, deprive themselves of control of their senses, volunteer for paralysis, and risk all the terrible things (and worse) that could happen to a person when they’re not looking? As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the dangers of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time. Instead of trying to extend the life of human bodies beyond their cellular feasibility, the men and women in lab coats could be studying ways to retrieve all the time we spend asleep. A third of our lives, they say – and that probably doesn’t take the afternoon nap into account. Even if we died aged what is these days a rather youthful 70, finding a way to stay awake would increase our functional life to the equivalent of 93. And if we happened to live to 93 then we’d effectively be . . . oh, even older. Plus the nap time. Sleep, we’re told, is essential, repairing the wear and tear on body and mind, but sex was once solely for the purpose of propagating the species and we pretty much found a workaround for that biological constraint.

Obviating the need to sleep would also take care of the second most absurd thing we do: wake up. You can buy an alarm clock advertised in one of those catalogues of marvellous necessities like LED digital-musical-weather-station-photo-frames and electronic nail-polish driers. The alarm clock is on all-terrain wheels. If you don’t immediately turn it off, it rolls off your bedside table and cruises around the bedroom beeping and flashing until there’s nothing for it but to get out of bed and chase it. Or there’s the airborne alarm clock which takes off from its base and flies around the room making a noise like an infuriated mosquito. Such extreme measures – which must contravene several health and safety regulations – suggest that waking up is not as popular as you might think coming round from unconsciousness would be.

At any rate, that’s how I’d look at the subject if it weren’t for the fact that sleeping, for all its inherent dangers and waste, is and always has been my activity of choice. Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness. One of my earliest memories of sensual pleasure (though there must have been earlier, watery ones) is of lying on my stomach in bed, the bedtime story told, lights out (not the hall, leave the door open, no, more than that), the eiderdown heavy and over my head, my face in the pillow, adjusted so that I had just enough air to breathe. I recall how acutely aware I was of being perfectly physically comfortable, as heimlich as I ever had been or ever would be, and no small part of the comfort was the delicious prospect of falling slowly into sleep. Drifting off. Moving off, away, out of mindfulness. Leaving behind. Relaxing into hypnagogia (a condition I may always have known about and desired, if not been able to name), anticipating the blurring of consciousness. It must have been a familiar routine, because I was so filled with confident pleasure of what was to come. Daydreaming a story (princes, princesses, cruel guardians, rescues), trying to hold onto the narrative as the thread of it kept drifting away, or I did, out of reach into a storyless place, a gentle fog. The great delight was in deferring sleep, hovering on the edge, pulling myself back to the same point in the story and trying to move it along, but always dropping off, hanging by the story-thread, the fingertips losing their grip but managing to haul back to the tale on the waking side of the world. The trick was to sustain my stay in the no man’s land for as long as possible, knowing all the while that I would inevitably, sooner or later, lose my grip on consciousness.

So I remember it, and so it still is, at its best, the border territory of sleep. It is most readily reachable during a daytime nap, though the result is that ‘naps’ can take hours. The whole point is to extend the unsleeping moment, and to drop into a state where all logic and reason disappears, while I nevertheless retain an essential degree of awareness of the strangeness I’ve achieved. Euclidian geometry disappears and irregular objects and abstractions with a dimensional existence appear to inhabit and shape the reality of this space. Chairs, cups, laptops, gardens, or impossible, indescribable forms, floating and structural, replace the basic rectangles and polyhedrons of the regular world, and aside from their architectural purpose, their meaning, and they surely have a meaning, is unguessable, though just occasionally sideways, shimmering in some corner, if corners existed, there is a glimpse of something that would turn it all into sense if it didn’t immediately flit away. Thought itself becomes mad geometry, another building block of this alien strip of universe, familiar because I’ve been there so many times before, but always as weird and ungraspable as air and water.

And then finally and inevitably, sleep. A nothing: existing only in anticipation or recollection. Dreams are remembered afterwards as narrative or vague left-over feelings, but are not experienced by me, because in sleep there is no me. The dreamer sometimes mistakes itself for me, or I do for it, but really sleep is a state of coma, death, of involuntary spasms or paralysis that I can only know about if someone (including me) tells me about it later. Unconsciousness itself is desired, but only in anticipation or retrospect. Obviously, by definition. Sleep, while it is happening, is nothing to the sleeper. To an observer all kinds of things are happening to the sleeper while she sleeps. Watch the cat, twitching paws and whiskers, purring, gruffling. Watch sleeping people smile, or mutter, fidget, laugh and shriek. So the observer knows about it, watching you; you do not. Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me – retrospectively or in anticipation, of course. That one has the capacity to be not here while being nowhere else. To be in the grip of unconsciousness, and consciously to lose consciousness to that grip. My first experiment with drugs was sniffing ether to make myself unconscious, then waking after what seemed an eternity of absence to discover that while I had been nowhere, just a moment or two had passed. Even the absence was mysterious to me, since when I came round, there were whole sagas of remembered dreams, as if I had experienced them, yet I knew nothing of them at the time. It was a great adventure in time travel and disappearance. But then the dreams turned very bad. Now and then I can treasure that second or two after the anaesthetist has pressed the plunger – count backwards from 10 – 10, 9, 9, 8, 7, 9 . . . 9 . . . 9 . . . Hanging onto the narrative for as long as I possibly can. The same brief encounter with being and not-being. But then there’s post-operative pain as a rule, though usually also the morphine to wake up to: a state of hypnopompia provided by the NHS.

Hypnopompia is the compensation at the other end of sleep. The brutality of waking, if you don’t have to catch a flying alarm clock, is soothed by the equal and opposite blurring of consciousness. Coming to, coming round. Slowly. Holding onto sleep, then hovering in hypnoland for as long as you can. Jung almost redeems himself from creepy spiritus munditude with the story in which he asks his new patient, a pathologically anxious, blocked writer, to describe his day in detail. ‘Well, I wake, get up and . . .’ ‘Stop,’ Jung says. ‘That’s where you’re going wrong.’ Not likely to be true, but perfectly correct. The hinterland between sleeping and waking is what compensates for having to start and get through the day, blocked writer, besieged schoolteacher or sullen secretary as I’ve been in my time. If you must have an alarm clock, don’t get a flying one, but set it to wake you early enough to give you all the drifting time you need. Between getting extra sleep or drifting, drift wins.

But because, in my view, sleep itself has nothing to do with me, it constitutes something of a danger. Apart from practical hazards, such as being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger or bludgeoned to death by a serial killer who is too insanely cunning even for the lab rats on CSI, there are more nebulous and sinister perils attested to in fairy tale and anthropology. I have never slept in a plane or on a train, nor, since I was a child, slept anywhere in public. It’s not for lack of trying, but I guess that I can’t allow myself to be so vulnerable to the gaze of others. On the other hand, the only pleasure to be got out of a long, sequestered, wakeful journey that everyone else is dreaming away, is to wander up and down the aisles in the deep of night and look at others sleeping. Of course, as children we sleep like babies, in all kinds of public circumstances, but then small children don’t make the distinction between self and other that prevents them from chatting to themselves in a room full of people and make-believing in full view of friends and strangers. I keep all that sort of thing strictly private – it’s the way of the adult – or try to, and although I do occasionally find myself talking to myself or the bottled water in supermarkets, I never fall asleep in public. It’s always extraordinary to patrol a planeful or trainful of people, trusting as newborns, sprawling in search of minimum discomfort, slack-jawed, legs apart, hair awry, skirts and trouser legs crumpled and careless, snorting and snoring in full view of a crowd of strangers. I suppose the assumption is that the strangers, too, are asleep, and a condition of mutually-assured unconsciousness obtains. But there is always me, at least, peering at the touching and terrifying vulnerability of the publicly unconscious. Vulnerable, not to sabre-toothed tigers but to being watched. I do not want anyone looking at me when I’m not looking at them. Like Yogi Bear, throwing a towel over his head when the warden comes along, if I can’t see you, you can’t see me. Do I worry about my spirit being stolen, like the Aborigines who are supposed to fear that a photograph will do just that? I think I just don’t like being looked at when I can’t turn and say: ‘What?’ Or perhaps that’s the same thing. ‘Are you looking at me? Are you looking at me?’

Who leaves when you fall asleep? They do, of course. So how can they look at you when they’re no longer there? Otherwise it would be you who is not there and everyone else is where they always were, getting on with what they were always doing. That would suggest, on the constant pairing of sleep with death (‘Death be not proud . . . ’), that when you die the world carries on without you, and that is clearly ridiculous. It is said that when Franco was dying, his ministers (lying, I hope) said: ‘Generalissimo, all Madrid is standing outside the palace to say goodbye to you.’ ‘Why?’ the Generalissimo said. ‘Where are they going?’ This is the first time I have identified with a Fascist dictator, but he was, in this single instance, completely correct in his understanding.

All of which may be the reason the phrase ‘fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow’ is as strange to me as cuneiform. The drifting ritual, and the early training (which is why the light in the hall is on, and the door open, wider) of listening for catastrophe in the night, means that I have always taken an age to get to sleep. Sometimes this tips over into insomnia. Not a chance of drifting. Just the mind growing increasingly frantic with thoughts lining up round the block to get their moment in the sun of night-time fretfulness. This is more like my Methedrine phase. I enjoyed hyperconsciousness then (until, as with the ether, the thoughts turned bad). These days I’m much more on the side of oblivion. It goes in phases, and if I had a scientific interest in it, I’d be fascinated by the transformation of the world in the early hours to the place of uncertainty and woe that it actually is. The veil of coping shreds as the hours go by and all the disasters and horrid failures that can undoubtedly occur, and indeed are crowded, stage left, simply waiting for their moment, make themselves known to you. People have always asked which is the reality, sleep or wakefulness, but no one ever dares suggest that the horrors of half-past three in the morning are indeed as likely to happen as not, and are at least as possible as they are impossible.

Reality cannot stand too much wakefulness. My longest period of sleeplessness (aside from the Methedrine binges) occurred for no reason I could figure, but, years ago, for two days and nights and some more, I simply could not get to sleep. I did the required tossing and turning rather than getting up and doing something useful all through one night and set myself to sleep the following day – it was a weekend – but nothing happened. All day nothing happened, and in the evening I lay in bed more mad with wondering about the cause and the fear that sleep had deserted me for ever, than with sleeplessness itself, and turned on the television just in time for the start of Fantastic Voyage. In that wonderful movie, Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch among others are miniaturised in an attempt to save the life of a crucial Cold War US scientist with a blood clot on the brain. They are injected in a tiny submarine into his bloodstream and do battle with the monstrous currents of the circulatory system. They negotiate the waving cilia forest of the lungs and the sucking whirlpools of osmotic action. They do battle with an army of white blood cells charging at the foreign body inserted into their scientist host, and overcome the fearful turbulence of the heart valves to get into the aorta and finally into the electrical storm of the brain. And all along, one of them is a Russian plant, sent to subvert the mission and prevent the sub’s missiles breaking up the life-threatening clot in the frontal lobe of the enemy genius.

It is a thrilling film at any time, but after 36 hours of sleeplessness it took on the quality of oracular truth. I felt the tiny sub’s embattled passage through my every interior part. I became Donald Pleasence determined to fulfil his evil mission (for who else could it have been but him?), and Raquel, pneumatic in her scientific white overalls but dismissing her irrelevant though mighty breasts and luscious hips and lips, serious and brilliant neurologist that she was, focused on surviving in order to save the scientist and the beleaguered world. And what was more, there was a time constraint. The miracle miniaturising procedure would last only 60 minutes before they and their vessel would begin to grow and present a threat to their patient even worse than the clot in his brain. A race against time and wickedness, and I sat bolt upright in bed, living out every dangerous second of the passing hours. I must have fallen asleep eventually, later that night or day or whenever it was, because I haven’t been awake ever since, but I do live with a sense that part of me is still weirdly wide awake, unable even to blink my eyes, while Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch fight it out, riding the tides of my pumping blood, as the clock ticks.

Review in London Review of Books November 2008

Help-Self

Jenny Diski reviews

• All in the Mind by Alastair Campbell 

I recently received an email headed ‘Literature and Madness Network’ inviting me to the ‘1st Seminar of the Madness and Literature Network’, which is to culminate in the ‘1st International Conference in Health Humanities’ in 2010. Leave aside the use of the word ‘network’, and the mystery of ‘Health Humanities’: at least the upshot is a conference, which is something I can grasp. What got me stuck for a moment was the Literature and Madness of the subject line, and the Madness and Literature in the body of the email. I find I’m always pretty near the edge of Alice’s rabbit hole, but the apparent randomness of Literature and Madness and Madness and Literature – the ‘do cats eat bats or bats eat cats’ quality of the switch – almost had me tumbling. Which? Does it mean what it says or say what it means? Does it matter? Carroll says: ‘As she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t matter much which way she put it.’ Well, it does matter, I think, though I’m not totally sure. One seems to be a category (unfortunately) within the discipline of literature, while the other suggests two equal but different disciplines. Still, I’m at a loss to know what question is asked by either. But then I read the seminar title, ‘Fat beyond the Call of Duty: The Nature in Power within Psychiatry’, and I quite lost my footing. There are certain verbal nonsenses that induce the feeling – check the marmalade on the shelves and practise curtseying for when you land – that Alice experienced. Just close enough to sense and yet entirely meaningless. Unless, that is, I’ve drifted into a state where the sense of the world no longer functions: if it persists we call it madness. I was saved by changing the t in ‘fat’ to an r, and replacing ‘in’ with ‘of’. ‘Far beyond the Call of Duty: The Nature of Power within Psychiatry’. Typos can be dangerous. Reality may not be as exciting, but finding it can be a great relief to a troubled mind.

I describe this passing moment partly as an example of how easy it is to lose one’s bearings about what makes sense, but also, quite gratuitously, to avoid grappling with my real task for as long as possible. Although making sense in and of the world is not irrelevant to a review of Alastair Campbell’s first novel, All in the Mind, it was my initial plan, after reading it, to extend the preliminary discussion of the niceties of sanity and madness to about 2975 words, after which I would round up to a respectable 3000 words with a final sentence: ‘Alastair Campbell’s novel is about a psychiatrist who is having a breakdown while helping his patients come to terms with their problems: it is not good.’ But it turns out once again that I have serious superego issues (I use the word to get into the swing of the novel’s discourse) and so I find that I’m obliged to engage (ditto) in more detail with the matter of my task.

Campbell’s novel is about a psychiatrist who is having a breakdown while helping his patients come to terms with their problems . . . Oh, let me evade for a moment more. Campbell’s first book was The Blair Years. That was not a novel, but an account of being spin-doctor supreme in the government of Tony Blair. As Blair’s director of communications and strategy and then adviser, Campbell was involved, among much else, in presenting the massaged facts that took us to war, and dealing with the press after the death of David Kelly. He was a gleeful fixer, bully and phrase-maker for a prime minister who had streamlined the Labour Party (as in discarded anything that smacked of socialism) until it was indistinguishable from the Tories, and oversaw a government obsessed with wealth, targets and the corporate organisation of public services. Nothing in his public life inclines me to like him.

I don’t know Campbell personally, but he has been forthcoming about his private life. In an article in the Telegraph entitled ‘I’ve Been to Hell and Back’, he explained: ‘It happened in 1986 when I was 29. I’d been a journalist at the Mirror and was poached by Eddy Shah’s Today when it was launched. It was a disaster. I’d left a professional and political base I felt totally at home with and gone somewhere I felt a bit alien. I was over-promoted; I hit the bottle, got completely manic and cracked.’ He was banged up in jail in Scotland, then admitted to a private psychiatric clinic for a week or so. Since when, less dramatically, but more chronically, he has suffered from spells of depression which he finally decided to combat using anti-depressants when necessary. His breakdown was the subject of an hour-long documentary shown on BBC2 three weeks before the publication of his novel, and although he can’t be held responsible for the moody Byronic poses he was asked to hold for far too many seconds while the camera moved in for extreme close-ups of his eyes to peek into the anguished soul that lay behind them, he described his persecutory breakdown in considerable detail. He explained that he presented the programme in the hope that it would help to dispel ignorance about mental illness, give comfort to current sufferers to know that others had gone through similar experiences, and to assure his viewers, finally, that mental illness ‘does not have to be a weakness, it’s a fact of life’ (though I would have thought that weakness is also a fact of life).

So Campbell’s private mental distress is laid out by Campbell himself for all to see just as his novel on the subject appears. I am a great believer in keeping fiction and author separate. But there’s fiction and fiction. Campbell’s fiction and the recent documentary are too close to each other not to be connected by a reader: he speaks similarly in interviews of hoping the book will have a benign effect on attitudes to mental illness, and several of his descriptions in the documentary clearly foreshadow events and some of the characters’ experiences in the book. On the one hand, we know Campbell is an expert witness on the subject of his novel, and on the other, we know that a novel is not to be judged by the life of the writer.

Campbell himself is concerned about being wrongly judged. In an interview with the Bookseller, he was asked what he hoped for from reviewers and replied: ‘I think anyone who reads it fairly – as opposed to it’s got Alastair Campbell’s name on it therefore I’m going to say it’s shit – will be hard-pressed to say it’s not an interesting, pretty well-crafted book. But I am not going to pretend I was put on this earth to be a great novelist.’ If, however, this is a bad novel, published at a time when it is increasingly difficult even for good first novels to be published, then the fact that ‘it’s got Alastair Campbell’s name on it’ is relevant to a reviewer. Moreover, I can’t see that an experience of madness and depression excuses a bad novel on the subject from criticism; but then again, if the writer tells the prospective reader as Campbell did in the interview that writing is ‘therapeutic’ and ‘a way of giving a creative expression to a pretty horrific time’, life and art, as it were, become inextricable. I’m aware of the awfulness of mental illness, so I find myself needing to say that I’m very sorry for Campbell’s personal suffering before I quote again from the Bookseller: ‘One executive from a chain bookseller sniffed: “I started reading it for ten minutes, and I’d like those ten minutes back.”’ And when chain booksellers sniff about the badness of a book, things are very dire indeed.

Then we come to a further quote: ‘Campbell says that he will judge the success on what his friends and family say about the book, and on how it goes down with readers, making reference to the reader-driven success of the Katie Price books. “It will only sell if it is good, regardless of what people say about it.”’ That’s Katie Price, a.k.a. Jordan, who has an interesting take on authorship: ‘I’m not going to lie, I don’t sit there with a typewriter and write it, of course I don’t. I don’t have time to do that. I say how I want the storyline to be, each chapter is done, I read through it, change it and then it goes away to be written.’ Her publisher defends her as the ‘author’ of a ghost-written book. There is no doubt that Campbell has written his own book. It begins: ‘Professor Martin Sturrock was feeling stressed enough already, even before the phone call from Simon telling him Aunt Jessica had died.’ But can he really expect reviewers to forget his former role in the New Labour government when he uses ‘sell’ and ‘good’ in that combination in relation to – well anything, but in particular writing? He will, at least as far as I’m concerned, have to settle for the praise – printed on the jacket – of Stephen Fry (‘a trademark assured elegance . . . devastating penetration of the human mind . . . A brilliant debut novel’) and Anne Robinson (‘It is an unexpected pleasure to discover that Alastair Campbell can tell a tale quite so brilliantly’).

So . . . Alastair Campbell’s novel is about a psychiatrist who is having a breakdown while helping his patients come to terms with their problems. It is set over a single weekend – Friday to Monday. This, I suppose, is part of what he means by ‘well-crafted’, though ‘crafted’ would work better for me. The problem with such a scheme is that as you get to the heading ‘Saturday’, you know that you’ve got to get through Sunday and Monday before you’re done. Professor Sturrock, who rather oddly is referred to almost throughout the book as ‘Professor Sturrock’ by the third-person narrator, sees five patients over this period: David the depressive, Arta the asylum seeker who was raped after settling in England, Ralph the alcoholic government minister, Emily the facial burns victim, and Matthew the QC whose wife thinks he’s a sex addict. This crafting, too, has the problem that you know you are going to have to get through each of them suffering, resisting and then having their epiphany before the end is in sight. There are further structural efforts. Patients unknowingly intersect on their way to or from the consulting room: the QC’s taxi causes the bus to pull up short, making Arta drop her notes. Sometimes crafting helps a book, sometimes it just doesn’t.

Sturrock seems to be a practitioner of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – the quick fix so welcomed by the cash-strapped, budget-driven NHS. He gives homework to his patients: write lists of all the good and bad things that have happened to you. Make a list of the best and worst moments in your day. Buy a packet of raisins, examine it and its contents carefully and then write about the experience. (My word, it gives you a perspective on your own troubles.) He encourages lucid dreaming. He gives David the depressive an elastic band to put on his wrist and snap every time he finds himself thinking negatively, saying to him: ‘That’s your positive-thinking band . . . Just try to think a little bit positively.’ There are glimmerings of a deeper approach when Sturrock suggests to Ralph the alcoholic that his drinking might be caused by ‘something in you that you want to forget. It may be something in your past.’ He’s also a bit of a philosopher: ‘He believed that humility was the key to self-respect and mutual respect.’ And he’s a ‘skilful and profound observer of human nature’ who ‘always tried hard to imagine how his patients felt’. He works in a hospital, where only the most difficult cases are referred to him, but also takes on private work – Matthew the QC and Ralph the MP, for example – because ‘the income helped him fund his various research projects, his current one being a study of the psychiatric impact of resettlement on asylum seekers.’ (Things must be even worse than we thought with the NHS if medical research is funded from private-patient fees donated by doctors.) He offers his patients buzz words like key triggers, and the phrase downward curve is unvaryingly used, along with plunge, to describe the experience of beginning to feel depressed. I dare say some or all of these techniques and insights are useful to people desperate for a solution to despair, but I believe that research has shown they aren’t useful for long. Even so, time is the thing with depression, and if a person and those involved with them can be tided over with elastic bands, key triggers and generalities such as ‘Sometimes these illnesses can be every bit as bad for the family as for the sufferer,’ then I suppose that’s a good thing. The question is, is it a good novel?

I don’t doubt that Campbell drew deeply on what he found when he had his breakdown, both personally and in the psychiatric community, but suffering and even observation don’t necessarily make a person think and write with more subtlety (‘as she was forced onto the sofa, she felt physically and psychologically powerless’). Subtlety may not be an essential quality in a self-help book, but it goes a long way to making a good novel. Still, All in the Mind functions well enough as one of those books for children called ‘Milly Has Two Daddies’ or ‘Dickon’s Mummy and Daddy Get Divorced’. It seems to be designed to explain mental illness and how it is treated to people who have never thought much about it before.

The stigma of mental illness is constantly referred to in the book, feared by all the patients and their families – even the QC finds it deeply shaming to be going to see a shrink. But then in his BBC documentary Campbell himself and the friends and family he interviewed expressed their bafflement at what was happening to him when he had his breakdown. Campbell’s partner, Fiona Millar, who coped with being Cherie Blair’s adviser for eight years, had no idea that Campbell was likely to sink into a depression after his ‘breakdown’, or what to do about it when he did. He got medical help only after she became paralysed down one side of her face and her GP asked her if anything unsettling was happening in her life. His journalist friends still look quizzical when he talks about mental illness and suggest that he just had a drink problem. If this book is read by millions who still know nothing about psychological distress, and are enlightened by it, so that they can either get or give help, then again that’s a good thing. Still, it remains a self-help book disguised as a novel.

Mind you, even if they are enlightened (up to a point) on the subject of psychiatry, readers won’t receive much help for any lurking gender prejudices they may have. Professor Sturrock, it turns out, has been making visits to prostitutes for years and is filled with self-loathing, which tips him into a crisis. When the crisis occurs, his wife chooses eventually to forgive him (forgiveness is very important in the essential epiphany-healing of Sturrock’s technique), but she does so ‘amid her shame at his use of prostitutes, and any failings in her that led him down that path’. Arta the asylum seeker, so distressed at having been raped in the country she fled to for safety, is told by Sturrock that ‘the basic vision she had of herself was as a devoted wife and mother. The rapist must not be allowed to take that from her.’ Sturrock’s wife, ‘though she had a second-class degree in fine art, had been a full-time wife and mother for most of their marriage.’ Not even a good second-class degree, yet with such a brilliant husband. And, most Byzantine, when he tries to imagine what it must have been like to be raped, Sturrock finds he can’t because he can only think of male rape, yet he can understand that ‘a heterosexual man was likely to be raped in a part of his body he shared with nobody. And so Sturrock believed . . . that male rape was less likely to destroy the victim’s long-term interest in a sex life with a female partner. Arta’s problem, as well as the dreams, was that she now couldn’t face sex with her husband.’ In addition, Sturrock also knew ‘that rape of a woman could change her partner’s self-image which in turn could badly affect not just his sex drive, but his self-esteem.’

There is no doubt that a lot of work has gone into writing this book. This is true of all novels, every damn one – eighty thousand words and more take a long time to write, and getting them in the correct order requires a good deal of effort. But though admirable in some Protestant sort of way, trying hard, even trying very hard, isn’t quite enough if you can’t write and lack wit. Sturrock monologues about a eulogy he is required to write: ‘When will I finish the eulogy? But you have an outline. It’s rubbish. It’s just a sketch. It has no life in it. It has no colour and texture. People’s lives come alive with stories and colour and texture.’ Well, people’s lives come, if you must, alive in a piece of writing if the writer can make the writing work. The words story, colour and texture are no more helpful to a writer than key trigger, downward curve and plunge are to someone in the grip of a depression without a way to use them effectively. If Alastair Campbell wanted to write a novel about such a thing as people’s lives coming alive, then he or his editor should have tried much harder to wrench the language away from the turgid and the thought beyond the banal. The craft of fiction is not working out a plan that looks balanced on a spreadsheet and then clothing it with words. The trick about writing a good novel is to be a good writer, though I understand that many A-level students these days are assured that there is no such thing as good writing, or even good novels, only what readers like. That’ll be the market. ‘It’ll only sell if it’s good,’ Campbell says. Or was that ‘It’s only good if it sells’? And there’s that rabbit hole again.

Jenny Diski is writing a book about St Helena. A novel, Apology for the Woman Writing, is coming out in November.

Other articles by this contributor:

It’s so beautiful · V is for Vagina

The Housekeeper of a World-Shattering Theory · Mrs Freud

Seriously Uncool · Susan Sontag

Diary · Jenny Diski tries to stay awake

Oh, Andrea Dworkin · Misogyny: The Male Malady by David Gilmore

Giving Hysteria a Bad Name · At home with the Mellys

Diary · On Not Liking South Africa

It wasn’t him, it was her · Nietzsche’s Bad Sister

Every Little Hurts

Obviously I had no intention of going, but The Poet set off and I cheered him on from my sofa in the solitarium.  It was the Stop Tesco Opening in Mill Road March, yesterday.  Mill Road, I learned, is called 'the most multi-cultural street in Britain' by The Telegraph - in what tone I can't say.  And I live directly off it.  It is a very fine road, full of shops selling ingredients for, or the food of every cuisine under the sun, well, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, American, New Zealand; and bicycles, old fashioned hardware, electrical bits and pieces, organic this and that, as well as booze, printer ink, computers, electronic music stuff, toys.  There's a mosque, a couple of chapels, and a new age bookshop.  And Tesco has just discovered a triple fronted vacant shop to begin the ruin of it.

But my foot doesn't walk half a mile without pain, I've got a streaming cold that's refused to go away for a week, and as well as being entirely idle, I've got an aversion to crowds, actually an aversion to more than three people on the street at the same time.  I've avoided demonstrations, though mostly they have my whole-hearted blessing, since that march on Grosvenor Square in 1968 (was it?) when they got the horses and backed us up against the trees in the square and I was anyway speeding and it was all a bit much quite honestly.

But the drums and whistles of the Mill Road march could be heard all the way up in my solitarium.  Really great drumming, and I'm a sucker for anything with a powerful beat.  After about half an hour, I couldn't bear it, and headed off down the road, just like one of the rats in Hamelin, inveigled by the Pied Piper towards the river Weiser deep and wide.  And there I was on my first march for 40 years or so (OK there were a couple since). 

Actually, the march had just reached the top of my street when I got to it, and the proposed Tesco site is about 100 yards away from it, so to say that I marched would be stretching it.  I found The Poet, who waved me towards him in the crowd of a good few hundred.  I got there in time to hear the man from Al Amin, grocer and post office, make his speech and to  cheer, though I declined the placard The Poet offered me, even though it said  'Every Little Hurts'.  We reminisced with a couple of friends about the old days of throwing ball-bearings under the horses' feet to unseat the police, but decided that animal welfare considerations over rode such behaviour.  Anyway there weren't any horses, there were community police officers who for the most part were taking photos on their phones - not for the records, like they used to - but to take home to show their mums.  And then the crowd gradually dispersed to do their Saturday afternoon shopping in the deli, Al Amin and the co-op, or have a coffee in the Black Cat Cafe; the dreadlocked, the pink-haired, the grey haired and the bald went their amiable ways.  And, unless Tesco have not been cowed and continue their vile plan to ruin our excellent street, I have had my quota of exercise and activism for another forty years. 

PS Toolbar Manhaters

PS:  It's worth taking a look at Wayne's comment in the previous post, for another take on my MetaFilter dissatisfaction.

Toolbelt Manhaters - A MetaFilter Mystery

Sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel because it turns out it never got invented in the first place.  An object lesson over on these two MetaTalk  threads of MetaFilter, about which I wrote an LRB article  recently.  The subject is whether or not men dominate the space and how they do it.  I got involved reading a conversation started by a post about a flasher.  Women were talking about their experiences.  Very rare to see so many women involved in the comments.  Suddenly the thread wasn't there any more.  The moderators had deemed it a bad post, which always overrides a good discussion.  So I was told when I set up another post on the same topic which was deleted because it was 'making a point' and that isn't what MetaFilter was about either.

My mistake.  I didn't remember that you have to accept the rules of a place when it isn't collectively run.  But the complaint threads developed, and women began to say how uncomfortable they felt with the 'boyzone' talk, and some of the men fought back with talk of zealots, how women always make victims of themselves instead of getting on the right wavelength...oh god, all that stuff, decades and decades gone by, and there it all is.  Someone suggested I was having a fit of the vapours (and the thread is headlined 'Hysterics') and when I objected was told that it was a joke, ironic, dontcha get it. 

There are a handful of men who are agreeing that the ethos is bad, and fighting their corner, insisting that women claiming they find it hard to participate ought to be listened to.  It's a proper discussion, dismal in places, but as clear a description of how not very much has changed since the Seventies as can be got.  The discussion that eventually is being had is the upside of MetaFilter, just as, it seems to me, the privileging of 'best of the web' posts over debate is the downside.

Worth looking, if you're feeling strong.  But I think I've done with the site.  I'm 60 years old, and it's too tiring (actually shocking) still to be told that a discussion by women about their experiences of being flashed is 

like manna from Heaven for the toolbelt manhaters that roam Metafilter with a fried chicken leg in one hand and Camila Paglia's panties in the other. More succinctly, it massages their prejudices.

Playtime

The truth is I'm besotted by technology.  Actually, the truth is I love toys.  I like diminutive objects that do clever things.  Computer software has all the nooks and crevices of a dolls' house, tiny drawers that slide in and out and have minute working models of kitchen implements inside.  I only liked toy cars that had doors that opened and steering wheels that turned.  I adored a doll that pee'ed into a nappy after being given a bottle, not for any innate maternal pleasure it gave me, not so I could nurture my faux baby, but because of the one thing one thing following another, and the fact that I could set it in motion.  It worked like a real life object, but wasn't.  It was a trick.  A delight.

So I finished the novel and celebrated by giving up on the horrors of Windows Vista and migrated to an Mac.  A thing of beauty, and best of all it's toytown, though a bit dinky, even for me.  I hate the dock and its little bouncing icons - but I've discovered Quicksilver and my fingers are beginning to flick my applications into life.  What it means is that I've had to spend days learning a completely new system and discover all kinds of new software.  My happiness/craziness quotient runneth over.   I've got no knowhow, you understand, everything about software is just beyond my comprehension, except that bit by bit I begin to see what it does, and  just glimpse slightly how it works, how it's organised and what I can make it do. 

Databases thrill me, but are so fathomless I feel like I've been shipwrecked in a wilderness.  The fantasy is that I can put all information into my machine and it will link together to surprise me with the oddest connections.  That's a toy brain, really.  I can't get my head around the multiplicity of Tinderbox , though I think it's probably just what I want.  DevonThink  is remote and massive.  VoodooPad is wonderful and magically wiki and Journler looks to me almost just right, like the baby bear's porridge, though I have to make the magical connections myself. 

I want a word processor that pulls together notes, research, lets me play around with text and makes patterns.  Scrivener does all that with knobs on, and opens two different windows at the same time.  But Jer's Novel Writer (call it like it is) lets you make marginal notes, though you can't have a notecard view.  So much to play with.  Though the truth is that I know Word so inside and out it's virtually invisible and exactly what's required to writing.  But I want something new, that does things that make me go 'Oh' and 'Ah'.

I don't seem to get bored with looking at software.  I haven't done a stroke of work, just buried myself in methods and organisation on the optimistic assumption that I will actually get round again to doing some writing with these tools.  In fact, it's like my mobile phone, I'm not really interested in getting phone calls, I want to set it up and play with the options.

Does this mean I should have been a software designer?  Maybe.  I could just sit around and doodle patterns that make things happen, or seem to happen.  But I haven't got the math, or the logic, to put it very mildly.  Yet there's a hankering for investigating structure, for playing with things that appear to perform a clear task when really it's all done with smoke and mirrors.  Actually, that's quite like human beings and all that overt social and mental  existence which turns out to be the result of an underlying system of proteins.  It's also quite like being a writer.  Or a writer like me, at any rate.  I've never been terribly interested in telling stories or inventing what they call rounded characters.  For me, writing is much more about making shapes, fitting disparate things together, finding out about the workings of seemingly inevitable behaviours.  Or perhaps, I just should have been a geek.

It also means that I've got two redundant Window's Vista laptops.  I could flog them on ebay to defray all this expenditure on new software, but I'm rubbish at packing parcels.  Any suggestions?

Down Among the Handbags

There's a new review by me in the LRB.

• Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre by Dana Thomas

There’s a science-fiction short story, I can’t remember by whom, which has a New York journalist on a hiking tour, lost in the Appalachians. He comes across a ramshackle house lived in by a family of hillbillies and they give him a bed for the night. In the morning at breakfast he notices that one of the girls has her headscarf tied in a manner he’s never seen before – it’s strange but very elegant. One by one he discovers that all the other members of the family are wearing an article of clothing in an unknown way, or have run up a frock or made a sweater or decorated their dungarees to look startlingly different. When he asks about it, they each tell him they just sort of thought they would, no big deal, gotta milk the cow, chop some wood, see ya. He stays a while and it emerges that he has discovered in this one family the actual source of fashion, the single place from which all new trends spring and stream out to couturiers, glossy magazines and eventually the city streets. No one, not even the family themselves, had any idea that was how it worked....

The rest is here if you are a subscriber.

 

What a Cunt, I Adumbrate

Adumbrate or Advocate?   Martin Amis writes an open letter to Yasmin Alibhai Brown for her suggestion that after reading everyone's favourite last-living Marxist Terry Eagleton's comments  on this, Amis is 'with the beasts' on Muslim-hating. He may have been adumbrating not advocating, but is there another way to describe patronising and smug? Known for his writing, he was, in his day.  Bright, some people thought him.  This contributuion to thought and debate doesn't confirm either of those beliefs. But that's not my problem.

I've eschewed the word 'sexist' for many years now: I've never even been tempted to use it, but really 'patronising and smug' won't do it.  They don't get into the crevices of my reading of Amis's letter.  Sexism, as a word, is a crude and instant response to what was usually a crude and instant attitude to women. I'm after some other word that conveys what it is when in 2007 someone publicly responds to a woman making a point by hoping 'Yasmin, for your soothing hand on my brow!', suggesting 'you've been listening, rather dreamily perhaps' to Eagleton, and repeatedly using her first name.  Oh, Martin, Martin, what's the word I'm looking for?  A friend suggested 'cunt' - as in 'What a cunt', and in truth that would do it for me.  But I'm trying for a more writerly way of describing this middle-aged man's laboured tone.  There's something of the travelling salesman trying to keep his end up.  What's the word for that?  Pathetic?  Yes, pathetic.  I think that will do.   

Metafilter's Talking Cure

Here's a new piece of mine in the LRB on Metafilter:

The word ‘resources’ sets my spine tingling. My old hippy-but-curmudgeonly soul had high hopes of the World Wide Web. The future, in some respects, was living up to expectations, providing videotapes of movies you didn’t have to leave home to see again, music remastered to a complexity not heard even in the concert hall let alone your own bath; and now here was a space that couldn’t be pictured, and didn’t require going out to be in, where minds from anywhere on the planet, full of knowledge and knowhow, wit and wondering, could chatter together, collaborate, pass information and the time of day. The internet would be a planetary depository, freely available, a dream library of everything. Borges and Brautigan thought of it but never fully imagined the weird airiness of its actuality.

So it has turned out: Project Gutenberg puts great texts freely online, Google plans to digitise the universe (which makes some people’s spines tingle for quite different reasons), Wikipedia has users collating and collaborating to explain everything, and everywhere bloggers are witnessing the world, one hundred million of them. But in no time at all, abundance became too much. The noise is deafening. The best of the planet did not exclude the worst of the planet. The internet filled up with garbage, and the good stuff sank to the bottom. I gave up, being of a giving-up nature....the rest is here

Life in the Very Slow Lane

Lassitude, indolence, extreme laziness, idleness beyond belief - I don't know how to convey the degree of my incapacity for activity.  People don't believe me.  You don't believe me.  You think I exaggerate.  No, I don't.  You won't believe that either.  You think it an affectation.  So yesterday I went out.  I did a reading with the estimable Francis Spufford at the Small Wonders Festival at Charleston.  There was nothing unpleasant about it (apart from the Bloomsburyness of Charleston.  Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Virginia visiting.  God I hate that drippy painting and twee tastefulness). 

My publisher sent me in a chauffeur driven car from Cambridge to Sussex, causing much hilarity to The Poet who pointed out that I'd have my very own chauffeur on Yom Kippur.  (The academic term might be starting again but even that doesn't stem the flow of punnery from the turmoil, no, maelstrom, in The Poet's mind.)

'Thank God,I'm back,' I wailed as I walked through the door and collapsed into The Poet's arms at eleven o'clock last night.  'I've done it.  It's over now.  I've don't have to go out for the next ten days.'

I'd been out since 2.30 that afternoon.  All I'd done was sit for two and a half hours in the back of a Jaguar ('Would you mind not wearing your cap?' I asked the driver nervously), spent three hours talking and reading to people, signed a few books, and sat for another two and a half hours in the back of the Jag.   If you live what they call A Life, my abjection and exhaustion might strike you as extreme.  What can I say?  I think my blood runs slower than your average three-toed sloth, and that I got born without the gregarious gene that made the human race the monstrous social success it is today.

Actually, I'm about to find out exactly what my problem is, why I'm such a sliver of a soul.  My friend S. send me a card the other day.  We were best mates in the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in 1968.  Difficult, annoying, angry young women in the bin.  It turns out, astonishingly, that they've still got the medical records from back then, and that the Data Protection Act means I have the right to get copies.  S. got hers.  Every session with the shrinks is noted, all their diagnoses and comments still there.  'Are you sure you're up to it,' S. said.  'What with being madder than I am...'  It's a debate that's been going on between us since 1968.  In fact, she is madder than me, but she just refuses to see it.  So I've filled in the form and I'm awaiting a shoebox full of my deviant past.  Just nobody mention Pandora.  But perhaps it will explain my epic idleness.  Or idyllness, as I prefer to  think of it.

Very excitingly, just by the by, I got paid for doing the reading in scarves.  Instead of real money (hey, writers don't need money, do they, it's not like they need to earn a living?) F. Spufford and I got a voucher each to spend at the Charleston gift shop.  So now I'll be spending the winter with my neck swathed in bloomsbury-hued silk and satin.  I looked on the shelves for elegantly rounded stones to keep in one's pockets in the event of a sudden river in one's vicinity, but they must have run out.  So I shall have to content myself with wearing my Vanessa-and-Virginia scarves sitting in the room of my own in which I plan to stay for as long as I possibly can.