Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Culture, Drama, Films, Literature

Hamnet

FILM REVIEW

Intro: This film adaptation is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s deeply moving historical novel that reimagines the life of William Shakespeare’s family, specifically focusing on the death of his only son, Hamnet, and how that tragedy may have influenced his most famous play, Hamlet

In 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. Sometime between three and five years later, Shakespeare wrote a play which almost shared the boy’s name, and which has since become one of the most lauded dramatic works in existence. The possible link between these two events was the subject of an acclaimed 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell.

Now comes this quietly astonishing screen adaptation – with a script sensitively adapted by O’Farrell and the film’s director, Chloe Zhao – and with Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.

As in the book, Hathaway is here called Agnes, the name she was given in her father’s will. Her husband, meanwhile, is no famous playwright yet – his name is not mentioned for more than an hour – but the educated son of a Stratford glovemaker keeps pootling off to a London theatre for work. Agnes, meanwhile, remains with their three children – daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet – close to the ancient woodland with which she shares a deep and strange bond.

– In cinemas now

We see in this play that Zhao has swapped the Terrence Malick-like lyricism of Nomadland and The Rider for a less insistent style that allows the story’s emotions to naturally drift to the fore. These emotions are often tough – Agnes’s life, alongside her mother-in-law (a superb Emily Watson), can be hard, even before the plaque comes that will claim the life of one of her children. But there are also constant flashes of everyday wonder and joy, many of which we’re invited to imagine might have inspired elements in Shakespeare’s future work. (The twins often disguise themselves as one another for a game: very Twelfth Night.)

The slow start to this production is groundwork, and the sober visual approach puts a greater burden and expectation on Zhao’s leads, but they don’t so much rise to the challenge as spiral above it. Mescal has never been better, while as Agnes, Buckley seems to discover her character before your eyes: every moment she plays rings transparently true.

This is a category of film that is described as devastating, heartbreaking, even hard to watch – and at times it is certainly all of these things. But, without any doubt, it isn’t a downer, thanks in no small part to the sublime final reel.

Here, Agnes makes the journey to her husband’s playhouse in London – only for her grief to be both complicated and clarified by this play he has written called Hamlet, and is now staging with acutely moving variations on the same two-humans-swap-places trick that the couple’s children once adored.

One of these springs from the casting: the actor appearing as the young Danish prince is played by Noah Jupe – the real-life older brother of the child actor, Jacobi Jupe, who portrayed Hamnet in the earlier scenes.

The play’s speeches are raw and revelatory, despite being among the most worn in the English tongue: that sense of freshness is one of the film’s wildest achievements. What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration. 

Hamnet U cert, 125 min

Verdict: An exceptionally delivered adaptation ★★★★★

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Arts, Books, Denmark, Europe, Greenland, Society, United States

Book Review: Polar War

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: As Trump sets his sights on Greenland, Kenneth Rosen’s new book asks whether the Arctic region is the next site of global conflict

Following the extraordinary rendition of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, Donald Trump has ramped up his threats to seize control of Greenland. The acquisition, which he clearly perceives as a “large real estate deal”, has been on his mind for almost a decade. “I think we’re going to get it,” he said in an address to Congress last year. “One way or another, we’re going to get it.”

Polar War by Kenneth R Rosen is provocatively titled and hugely timely. It contends that the whole Arctic is warming up for a fight. Eight nations, including Russia and the United States, already maintain “research” bases in the region. All five military academies in the US now offer a course on the Big Northern White, and in 2021 India declared itself “a near-Arctic state”. “The possibility of conflict” up there, Rosen declares, “now feels inevitable”.

But does it? In a series of short chapters arranged loosely by circumpolar geography, Rosen makes a mostly convincing case that trouble lurks behind the bergs. The Arctic is warming four to five times faster than the rest of the world, and the author demonstrates how “complex dovetailing of national interests and disinterests” – hydrocarbon extraction and strategic ambition – poses far greater dangers now that it is paired with rapid climate change. In today’s world, as the commander of the Norwegian navy tells Rosen, “What happens here, happens everywhere.”

Russia, rather than the US, is “leading the charge”. “With more military bases in the Arctic, greater competency in cold weather operations, and a fleet of icebreakers that dwarfs the maritime Arctic fleets of every other nation,” it has become far and away the region’s biggest player. Another Norwegian naval commander tells Rosen, “Putin is saying, ‘I’m the boss in the Arctic,’ and he is.”

Russia has raised concerns, as in their 2020 Arctic Strategy report, about the region’s declining population, inadequate development, and hobbled natural resources exploration industry posing threats to their national security. However, Rosen thinks that the invasion of Ukraine, along with “interventions in Western elections” and so on, “might indicate that Russia thinks as far as the Arctic is concerned, (that) it has already won” the polar war, and can therefore move on to other zones of strategic value.

Meanwhile, China is building icebreakers (four are already in service) to open up an exciting “Polar Silk Road”. Rosen suggests that the nation is “teaming up” with Russia to spy on NATO on or off Norway’s northern rim, citing a new Chinese satellite in Kiruna, Sweden. Its spectral exterior is enough to rouse suspicions of covert surveillance. In the same area, Russia “is probing Sweden’s defences” with “hybrid attacks” that “remain deniable on Russia’s part”.

American unpreparedness is a major theme that runs through the book, and hawks in the White House might (but won’t) take heed as they turn their eyes to Greenland. The author points out that “historically, the American desire to control Greenland has existed nearly as long as America itself… It was not Trump’s rhetoric of a takeover that struck me… It was the ineptitude surrounding the idea.” Such failure, incompetence even, might allow rivals to secure control of the Arctic, or trigger clumsy, uncoordinated US manoeuvres that tip a tense region into the war of the book’s title.

And, yet, who is paying attention to these tremors? Rosen paints a good picture of polar talking-shops, at which delegates emit hot air in the saunas of five-star hotels viewing the Northern Lights. At the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, the US delegation numbered 160. An increase in militarised fishing vessels across the region (warships, essentially, in disguise) also merits serious attention.

Although the UK doesn’t have a permanent military base in the Arctic, these troubled polar waters could break on our shores. Rosen doesn’t mention it, but recently a House of Lords committee picked out the “evolving interests of Russia and China” as a key reason why Britain must keep its Arctic strategy under review.

The author is an American reporter who has spent several years up on the ice, and he’s at his clinical best when he extrapolates from experience. In one thrilling chapter, he does a two-week stint on a US Coast Guard cutter on routine patrol in Alaskan waters.

In more abstract sections, however, his prose style can be opaque. Pages gain immediacy from the narrative present tense (“we head north”), but at the same time lose gravitas, or any notion that the author has reflected on the issues he is reporting. To some extent he has reflected, but why, the reader should ask, has he chosen to limit his prescriptions to an eight-page Appendix framed as a “policy note” to Washington? It would have been much better to have seen this woven into the main text. This would have allowed the book to present a coherent, argued whole.

By the end of this volume, compelling as it is, the reader should think whether polar war is “inevitable”. Grandstanding is one thing, but surely nations would pull back from costly all-out war on the unforgiving ice. Many leaders have spoken in defence of beleaguered Denmark in recent days, the UK referring to Denmark as an “allied nation”.

Rosen says little of those on whom conflict would have the most devastating effect. He dedicates the book “To the people of the north, from whom we have taken so much and granted little” – but their voices are not heard. The polar indigenous peoples are powerless in the global skirmishes over the land of which their ancestors were proud custodians. That is the real tragedy of this new Cold War.

– Polar War by Kenneth Rosen is published by Profile, 320pp. The author is a veteran correspondent known for his reporting from conflict zones like Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine

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Arts, Books, Philosophy

Book Review: The Score

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: If you feel like your life is just a game, this book explains why. As philosopher C Thi Nguyen explains, have we let metrics twist our values? The author argues that when we use simple, clear metrics to measure success, we often “capture” our complex values and shrink them down to fit those metrics

In the Domesday Book of 1086, a manuscript record of the Great Survey conducted at the behest of William the Conqueror, philosopher C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the “hide”: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. No doubt that was a useful measure, but you need local knowledge to use it. Some places are more productive than others, so how much land, exactly, would the average family need? It could be 40 acres, or 60, or 120.

If decisions are taken locally, there’s little issue. But as soon as authority and powers begin to centralise, units such as the “hide” disappear, replaced by standardised measures that are easier to record and act upon. Local knowledge is forgotten. The more centralisation advances – and in our modern age it has only advanced – the greater the problem grows.

– Nguyen examines how institutions and bureaucracies use game-like scoring to control behaviour, often at the cost of our autonomy and personal joy

The Score is part polemic and part philosophical inquiry. At its heart, Nguyen’s argument is that in an effort to be objective and unprejudiced, our governments have turned metrics into targets and built rules around them. The result is that our civic life has become a superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral – not to mention inescapable – game. As well as being a philosopher, Nguyen is a lover of board games, video games, technical climbing, and even yo-yoing; or, in other words, he understands the utility of rules. Yet, he writes, that, in the desire to make life ever more frictionless and reasonable, we’ve let metrics twist our values.

Early on, for instance, he mentions a pastor who, instructed to meet a baptism quota, finds himself ignoring the pastoral needs of the rest of his flock. At least the pastor works in a setting where the problem can be aired. For most of us, fixated on annual targets in various settings, the number of likes on social media, and the steps recorded on our fitness apps, external metrics work beneath our notice, replacing our original values. ‘I have 1,000 friends and took 10,000 steps today’: supposedly makes the claimant healthy and popular.

Academia, to no one’s great surprise, is far from immune either. Nguyen argues that the US News & World Report university rankings “no longer celebrate academic distinctiveness”, because prospective students now outsource their reasoning to the US News algorithm. Do you want to fight for social justice or make a killing on Wall Street? Either way, you’ll apply to the same law school – the one at the top of the list.

More ominous examples follow. There is, for example, a US department of state metric called Tip (Trafficking in Persons), which measures the effectiveness of policies to reduce modern slavery, and sex trafficking in particular. It is well established that slavery flourishes in areas of extreme poverty. But if a country reduces its ambient poverty and, as a result, reduces sex trafficking, the Tip report’s metrics indicate failure – because conviction numbers drop off. As Nguyen explains, the metric “incentivises countries to keep sex trafficking around so that there will be plenty of traffickers to convict.”

The author’s most profound insight lies in plain sight: to quote Wordsworth, “our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things”. Games do exactly that, and offer a refreshing refuge – for a few minutes or a few hours – from the ambiguities of the real world. The gamification of real life, on the other hand, traps us all, with no prospect of an ending.

So how do we escape a gamified world? Read more books? Take up the violin? Stick it to The Man wherever we can? Such things don’t sound like a call to revolution, and I’m not sure Nguyen’s heart is in the fight. Individuals may recover their agency – and this book will help them do so – but it’s hard to see why businesses, governments, and bureaucracies of all kinds would abandon their self-empowering rhetoric of “objective” metrics.

In the early part of the narrative, Nguyen says: “I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.” This is well put.

In an otherwise trenchant and entertaining book, critics may well point to the fact that Nguyen follows the rules of his genre very closely. Like every “popular thinker” on the shelf, he can’t resist sharing his personal journey to enlightenment. If you’ve ever read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to children, you’ll know how much young readers delight in repetition. Nguyen, to many readers, is the Eric Carle of philosophy. For those up to speed with his topic, his steady circumspection may prove exasperating.

But don’t discard him. A book, too, is a kind of game, in which “we adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want.” It’s about going the long way, a particular way, using a particular method. If we truly want to understand our civic plight – and not just merely tick off some talking points – then The Score should be read. You’ll find that Nguyen has planned this particular long way round with adeptness.

– The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game is published by Allen Lane, 368pp    

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