Author: Will Bordell

Will Bordell is an 18 year-old student journalist who has been writing for around three years now on topics ranging from religion to the environment, celebrity culture to drug legalisation. His work has appeared in 'The Freethinker' and 'The Humanist' magazines, as well as on Ophelia Benson's 'Butterflies and Wheels'. More of his writing can be found at www.willbordell.co.uk.

Book Review: Brian Westby by Forrest Reid

It’s a good job Forrest Reid didn’t write to be famous. Almost seventy years after his death, his novels gather dust in libraries: unthumbed and unadmired. Highly thought of by friends like E.M. Forster and Walter de la Mare during his lifetime, the Ulster writer has since fallen into obscurity. Until now, that is.

Few of his works are more poignant than his 1934 novel, Brian Westby, which was republished by Valancourt Books at the end of last year. Despite Reid’s best protestations that “[a]ll the characters and incidents in this novel are imaginary”, it’s hard to avoid its semi-autobiographical resonances.

Modelled on the relationship Reid fostered with his young protégé Stephen Gilbert, Brian Westby records the chance encounter between novelist Martin Linton and the son his ex-wife has successfully hidden from him for the best part of two decades. So pervasive was Gilbert’s influence that Reid gave him the final say on what was ultimately included in the work: “Remember,” he goes so far as to write in a letter, “if you don’t like the thing I won’t go on with it.” Fortunately for us, he did.

Linton arrives at Ballycastle to recover from illness, and a creative malaise that has left him lacklustre and depressed. “Happiness is only made by affection”, he says, having realised only too late that “[n]othing else in the long run matters.” But on a seaside stroll, he runs into Brian, a teenager who happens to be reading the very first novel Linton wrote. The pair are involuntarily drawn to one another–Reid’s “technical trick” of alternating perspectives proves an ingenious way of exploring their shared fondness.

As strong and tender as their attachment may be, father and son remain tragically unaware of their true relationship. Meanwhile, Linton helps the youngster to hone his literary talents: “Art isn’t just life in the raw”, he tells the boy, expounding the virtues of imaginative integrity, “it is a selection from life: it is a vision:–life seen through a temperament, as Zola said.” The novelist’s inspiration is refreshed as Brian’s affection is cultivated.

Soon enough, though, reality bites. After Brian reveals that his real surname is Linton, not Westby, his mentor recognises a new obstacle: the boy’s mother, Stella, who considers her ex-husband to be a pernicious influence. When she discovers the identity of the stranger Brian has been seeing so frequently, she demands that Linton cut off all contact with the boy. In the novel’s touching final movements, Brian must take sides and learn to live with the consequences.

Youth is Forrest Reid’s particular concern, and his appeal is therefore limited–landscapes and dreamscapes feature regularly in his prose, and the natural world is one in which he thrives. Indeed, most of his sixteen novels wrestle with a single vision, a vision of “a country whose image was stamped upon our soul before we opened our eyes on earth.”

Early in Reid’s career, Forster correctly explained that his friend’s work concentrated on “a point which, when rightly focussed, may perhaps make all the surrounding landscape intelligible.” To strive after a vision such as his, is–as Reid wrote of W.B. Yeats–to throw one’s net among the stars. Brian Westby is one of the handfuls of stardust he was able to catch on the way down.

…up in a puff of smoke

It probably came as a surprise to most to see that The Economist’s ‘Country of the Year’ for 2013 was Uruguay.  Their decision was in no small part down to the nation’s recent move to regulate the production, sale and consumption of cannabis.

“Prohibition”, observed the late American economist Milton Friedman, “is an attempted cure that makes matters worse—for both the addict and the rest of us.”  It’s time for the industry to be decriminalised and regulated, not because drug taking is acceptable, but because drugs create a problem too complicated to leave to the black market.

Think of a friend who desperately wants to use cannabis but who doesn’t use it because it’s illegal.  Stumped?  That’s no surprise.  Whether they’re prohibited or regulated, those who want to take drugs will.  All we do by banning cannabis is shove them into the open arms of dealers, and hamstring society’s ability to persuade them not to bother.

Organised criminals can sell whatever product they like, using whatever methods work, charging as much as they can get away with.  The result: adulterated drugs, potential for violence, and hugely inflated prices.  Prohibition simply fattens the criminal underbelly.  What’s more, cannabis becomes a ‘gateway’ drug as soon as the dealer pushes his customer to try something stronger.

Just because we legalise a substance doesn’t mean we endorse it.  Anyone over eighteen can down a bottle of vodka every day until they die.  The fact that it’s legal doesn’t make it socially acceptable; but it does remove the taboos that stand in the way of open, honest discussion about substance abuse and its consequences.  In a decriminalised Britain, advertising campaigns and accurate statistics (on drug-driving, for example) would stand a good chance of deterring many cannabis users from harming themselves and others.

Decriminalisation, then, doesn’t solely benefit the user.  It would save taxpayers money, for one thing—up to £1.25bn in total, according to the Institute for Social and Economic Research, and it’s not like we couldn’t use that at the moment.  Prisons wouldn’t be so strained; acquisitive crime would tumble; and guns, ninety-five per cent of which are linked to drug gangs in Britain, would hold less sway on the streets.  The more drugs we decriminalise and regulate, the greater these impacts.

Further afield, it’s even harder to justify prohibition.  In Mexico, drug-related violence has claimed the lives of over 60,000 people since 2006.  Topple one kingpin, and another tries to fill the void—it’s a never-ending merry-go-round of violence.  Perhaps more relevant to Britain, though, is the case of Afghanistan.  Taleban fighters only strengthen their influence through the drugs trade, as farmers grow the crops that make the most money: marijuana plants and, much more extensively, opium poppies.

The basic model isn’t that complicated—and it’s viable.  Portugal decriminalised way back in 2001 and has seen positive outcomes; Uruguay and two American states have followed suit with new strategies.  In a legal marketplace, production, preparation and purchases can be carefully controlled.  Rather than concentrating on punishment, efforts can be channelled into prevention instead.

Like it or not, people take drugs, always have, and always will.  Relying on criminal gangs to supply them is like flipping a weighted coin: heads they win, tails you lose.  A new year calls for a new approach, and cannabis should be top of the list.

Here, There, Gone: An Interview with Sir Nicholas Hytner

Nicholas Hytner’s Othello was so good I saw it twice.  It’s not the first time Sir Nick has wowed the critics.  And I somehow doubt it will be the last.  I perch comfortably outside his office, staring at black-and-white action shots of hit after hit: Adrian Lester in Henry V, Simon Russell Beale in Much Ado About Nothing, James Corden in One Man, Two Guv’nors.  If there’s such thing as a grammar of theatre, Hytner is fluent in it.

These days, he needs little introduction: the Cambridge alumnus who arrived at the National Theatre in 1990 has become one of Britain’s most well-respected directors.  One bookshelf in his office hosts a glass poster for One Man, Two Guv’nors; another holds mugs commemorating the first night of each Shakespeare play he’s directed.  The Othello mug sits atop an unfingered script on the glass coffee table that separates us.

“None of these texts exists in isolation,” Hytner says, as if he’s noticed me looking at the mugs that sit side by side on the shelf.  “You kind of take [their] temperature;” he tells me, “every time you put them on, probably every time you read them, the temperature will change.”  Indeed, Hytner is well known for his modern adaptations (Othello takes place at a military base that recalls recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), and that fact underpins much of his philosophy: “what it says about our world is as much to do with our world as it is to do with the text.”

The air conditioning shuts off.  Hytner apologises, gets up, fiddles with the machine.  It’s the first time I’ve looked outside since I entered the room.  Late afternoon, and the view must be one of the best in London.  The last sunbeams dance on buildings that spear the sky—Blackfriars Bridge, St Paul’s, the Gherkin beyond—each mingling with each.  It feels as though the current of the Thames is driving daylight away, pushing it inch by inch towards the margins of evening.  It’s not long before he returns to his seat, clears his throat, and resumes: “If you’re performing Shakespeare, you’re only ever going to take a snapshot of it.  There’s always next time.”

It’s difficult not to be drawn in by the wonderful mildness of Hytner’s voice, and the diagonal smile that flashes across his face whenever he stumbles upon the mot juste.  I ask which Shakespeare character he identifies with most.  For a moment, he sits forward in his black leather chair like a kid forced to pick between his favourite toys.  “Benedick I like enormously,” he concludes.  What attracts him so much to the protagonist of Much Ado About Nothing (aside from the actor he cast to play him, Simon Russell Beale) is his willingness to do “something suicidally brave for Beatrice,” his adversary-cum-lover, when he challenges his former best friend Claudio to a duel he has little chance of winning.  Hytner doesn’t even think “you’d want to hang out with Hamlet as much as you’d like to hang out with Benedick.”

On Hytner’s watch, Shakespeare has become a vital force in the National’s bloodstream.  In fact, an awful lot has changed since his first days in the job way back in April 2003.  He settles a jeaned leg lightly on the coffee table, before reminiscing: “I do look back on 2003 and think that almost every one of the big decisions could have gone the other way.”  Fortunately, they didn’t.  Jerry Springer the Opera turned out better than expected (“and the people it offended it was good news to offend,” he adds); new plays in the intimate Cottesloe Theatre saw success; and His Dark Materials took the plaudits.  “They all worked—every single one.”  His relief and disbelief, even ten years on, is palpable.

“I wonder what I would say,” comes his inquisitive reply when I ask what advice he’d give to his former self if he could rewind a decade.  He pauses for a while.  I’ve got used to his way of sending his words across to me like chess pieces, each move contemplated and considered: “I think I would say, ‘you will never regret being wild and bold, and turning down the tasteful option in favour of the rough, provocative one.’  That’s what I’d say,” he reaffirms, this time with certainty.  “Ticking over” isn’t the Hytner way.  “I’ve never regretted having messy things,” he says, “but I’ve regretted having boring things.  I’ve hated that.”

What people think of his work barely registers.  “I don’t care really.  I don’t care,” he reiterates firmly.  He seems more genuine than blasé: “I’m very happy to get from day to day, and year to year.”  His chair rotates slightly, and leans his chin gently against finger and thumb.  Theatre is demanding at the best of times, but it hasn’t jaded him.  “To a very large degree,” he continues, “if I get to my last day here without the place sliding down the pan; if I can feel that for 12 years, it has deserved its title and it was as good as it needed to be, I’ll be very happy.”

And his legacy?  Hytner’s not too bothered about that, either.  He draws a parallel, hands moving in sync with voice, between theatre and film: “movie directors very much build up a legacy: it’s there, it’s immovable.  They spend their retirement going from retrospective to retrospective and festival to festival being lauded and honoured,” he laughs.  But the beauty of theatre lies in its ephemerality; night after night, season after season: “it’s here, it’s there, it’s gone.”

Soon enough, that will be the fate of Sir Nicholas’ tenure at the National.  But, characteristically, he won’t make a point of his departure: “I don’t think I want to do a big farewell spectacular,” he tells me.  “I’ve got 18 months more, I’m just finishing off the planning for next year, and I think I should just try and do the same as I’ve always tried to do.”  He shifts in his chair and his voice sinks low, as if he doesn’t want to presume too far: “at some point, I guess I’ll want to do what everybody else has done—sit down and try to write about what I’ve found out so far.  But I’d much prefer just to go on and work.”

The National will be a strange place when Hytner steps down from his post in 2015.  I, for one, am too young to remember what it was like before he took the helm.  One thing is certain, though: his successor has the mother of all boots to fill.  We stand, exchange thanks, and he opens the door.  I take a last look out of the window, before exiting, stage left.

The Inmate of Rome

“But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?”

— Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)

It’s a relief to be able to call him Joseph.  And it will be a relief once he’s treated just like any other Joseph.  It’s been said before and it will be said again: there’s a Ratzinger-sized space in Rome’s nearest prison cell just waiting to be filled.  The former Bishop of Rome should soon become the Inmate of Rome.

It shouldn’t have taken me by surprise when I discovered recently that the Vatican doesn’t actually have a prison system.  Earthly justice doesn’t seem to apply to the elect, after all.  Not to a man who personally granted the abuser of 200 deaf and dumb children in a Wisconsin school his wish to die without the oh-so-unconscionable spectre of a canonical trial hanging over him.  Not to a man who delayed the defrocking of a convicted child molester for four years, before writing and personally signing a letter asserting that the “good of the Universal Church” and that of the offender had to be considered for longer still – without even a hint of a mention for the trauma of his 11- and 13-year-old victims.  Not even to a man who disseminated the disgusting memo to every single Catholic bishop in 2001 that encouraged – nay, demanded – secrecy and silence with regard to every last case of child molestation and rape under pain of excommunication.  ‘Tackling’ the issue head on was something of a speciality of his, it seems.

In any other walk of life, that man would already be locked up.  And that’s just what he is: a man.  No more, no less.  Vaticanites may reason that elevating him from mere primate to venerable and venerated Primate lifts him above the law, as if a capital letter and a Latin intonation automatically give you special privileges; but strip him of his robes and his cronies, and you’ll soon find out that he’s no different from you or I.

Is this how brittle our values really are?  So brittle that we’re willing to excuse from justice anyone who can persuade us that they’re running a rather important errand for God?  ‘My apologies,’ he says, ‘but I happen to be infallible too.  Fancy that?’  Maybe what we should actually be questioning is the kind of God that would endorse such arrogance, such malevolence, such a sickening brand of despotism.  This is not morality; this is delusion and depravity.

And I, for one, am having none of it.  Think of every single one of the many thousands of victims of child abuse by priests; think of all those cases that Ratzinger could have stopped – and chose not to – as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  Just think.  And then imagine looking into a young child’s eyes and telling them that the man who put the welfare of a 2,000-year-old Church over that of 12 year-old children is likely to go unpunished.

Any decent human being simply couldn’t.

When Ratzinger announced his resignation, he talked about having “repeatedly examined my conscience before God”.  He can say that again, and again – in the jail cell where he belongs.  Apologies and excuses and stage-managed contrition won’t cut it anymore.  The most courageous thing he could do now is to hand himself in.  If the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church can’t subject himself to civil law and emerge unscathed, his 1.2 billion followers have got to question whether his ‘divine’ mission is one they want to be part of.

The Vatican is shaken, no doubt.  An institution that has insisted on being its own judge and jury for so long suddenly finds its carefully sealed totalitarian tinderbox at risk of being prised open.  Reuters recently quoted a Vatican official who commented revealingly that it was “absolutely necessary” for Ratzinger’s future place of residence to be within their jurisdiction.  Otherwise, he might end up as defenceless as the children abused at the hands of Father Keisle or Cardinal Law or Father Hullerman or Father Murphy: “He wouldn’t have his immunity, his prerogatives, his security, if he is anywhere else”.  What more needs to be said of the constipated morality that underpins the Roman Catholic Church?

After Ratzinger’s final disrobing, we mustn’t let ourselves be persuaded that he’s to be handled with care.  There’s no reason for us to respect his rights in a court of law any more or less than the next man.  There never has been.  But now, we can either make it our duty to challenge him and the institution he represents – on behalf of the children whose lives have been blotted by his signature, and on behalf of an entire civilisation whose progress surely relies on unflinching inquiry and scrutiny – or else face being complicit.

For if you look on impassively as Ratzinger slinks off to his very own 4,300-square-foot convent for the rest of his days, you’re like the kid in the playground who’s too timid to stand up for the victims of the mother of all bullies.  Only the stakes are higher this time.  Much higher.

Don’t Be Afraid To Listen: Protecting Free Speech

 
“Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”

— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

Oxford and Cambridge Universities have an awful lot in common.  And last week was no exception.  By inviting polarising political figures from the left and the right – George Galloway and Marine Le Pen, respectively – both institutions reaffirmed what is at once perhaps the most sacred and the most imperilled of all our values: the freedom of speech.

Le Pen was shuffled past protesters into the Cambridge Union last Tuesday – an organisation that prides itself on being a forum for all kinds of discussion and debate – to deliver a lengthy diatribe about the EU’s dilution of national identity.  The patina of xenophilia and inclusiveness that she wanted to solidify for the audience was derided and scoured away once the floor was opened to questioning.  In short, her politics were as unconvincing as ever.

So too with George Galloway.  His decision to refuse to communicate with an Israeli opponent at a debate at Christ Church college was juvenile at best, discriminatory at worst.  It did him no favours.  But his words as he swept up his coat and opened the door to exit made me shiver: “I don’t debate with Israelis,” he said.  Words full of hatred and ignorance and thoughtlessness.  But, as I listened to him, I couldn’t help being reminded of the message those protesting against Marine Le Pen’s speech at the Union were effectively giving out as I headed past them into the chamber: ‘We don’t debate with Fascists’.

This is not a marginal issue.  This is about me; this is about you; this is about the richness of the conversation we want to carry on when we can no longer participate in it.  If free speech is something we want to protect, we’ve got to be prepared to put our necks on the line sometimes.  Compromise is not an option.  For to protect our freedom to speak as we please is to commit ourselves to hearing ideas that we consider rebarbative, repulsive and untrue.

Indeed, the best – the only – response to sinister and disgusting speech is more speech: truth, not censorship.  Rather than give in to the temptation to stifle all that makes us cringe, we must be brave enough to engage with it.  Our moral authority is never stronger than when we stand up for our beliefs: for whomever, wherever, whenever.  The most admirable and effective response to bigotry and falsehood is to give them their say – because only then will we find out how baseless they really are.

Which is why the attempt to put a lid on ‘dangerous’ speech terrifies me.  (Who decides for us what is ‘dangerous’ and what is not?)  Sitting in the civil arena of the Cambridge Union during Le Pen’s lecture, the baying, drumming, chanting sounds outside prompted but one thought: why wasn’t all that energy being channelled into proving her wrong?  Hardly courageous.  More like cowardice, if you ask me.

If we’re confident of possessing arguments sound enough to defeat those of the Front National, then why should we be scared to engage in debate?  Her risible and reproachable ideas are what should be opposed, not her right to say them.  We should be using our voices not to hurl abuse from the other side of a brick wall but to defend our democracy, our freedom and our rights on our terms.  And the last time I checked, they didn’t include suppression or censorship.

So bring it on.

We can’t be so myopic.  As soon as we inhibit Marine Le Pen’s freedom to speak and think, our liberty suffers too.  It’s a self-inflicted wound.  Not only do we jeopardise our own thoughts, which are at any moment liable to be deemed too toxic to be heard, but we also willingly refuse perhaps the most critical intellectual duty we owe ourselves: the duty of listening.

Each and every time we muffle a dissenting voice, we forego the chance to reacquaint ourselves with why we believe what we believe.  It was John Stuart Mill who posited that even if every living being were in agreement on the absolute truth of a concept, except one person, then it would be imperative – more so than ever – to hear him or her out.  If he had a point, we would be better off for taking it on board; and if he were wrong, even in the most appalling manner, we would benefit from being forced to re-examine our greatest certainties.  There would be nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

To be sufficiently brave to listen to opinions we find uncomfortable or contemptible is to be intellectually honest and rigorous enough to ask just how sure we are of what we believe as often as we possibly can.  That’s all it boils down to.  It’s never a waste of time to wonder how we can prove that the earth is spherical or that two and two make four, let alone to question why we hold our idiosyncratic political and religious convictions.  We can’t afford to shirk self-criticism, forensic self-examination.  No pursuit could be more worthy; nothing could be more precious.