Recent Reading - V13 by Emmanuel Carrère

In September 2021 a trial began in Paris. It had a nine-month schedule and its purpose was to provide some kind of justice following the terrorist attacks that took place on 13 November, 2015 in Paris, in which 130 people were killed, many others maimed - and following which at least one person who survived one of the attacks has subsequently committed suicide. In the court in 2021, twenty men stood accused of greater or lesser involvement in the attacks; many of the ringleaders were absent because they had detonated explosive vests during the attacks and blown themselves up. 

The French writer and journalist Emmanuel Carrère volunteered to attend the trial for its full nine months and write a weekly column about the experience for Le Nouvel Observateur. V13 is a synthesis of those columns.

Carrère begins by explaining his reasons for taking on the task:

1. "I am interested in justice";

2. "I am interested in religions, their pathological mutations, and the question: where does this pathology begin? When it comes to God, where does the madness start? What goes on in these guys' minds?";

3. He wants to hear the survivors tell of their experiences - this will be a major part of the proceedings.

Disappointingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the book doesn't really provide any clear answer to the mystery of what goes on in the minds of perpetrators of terrorist acts on civilians, although Carrère's comments on the video put out by Islamic State claiming responsibility for the attacks may contain a clue: "It's pure propaganda" he says, but propaganda of a kind that "is completely unprecedented...Normally propaganda hides horror. Here it puts it on show. The Islamic State doesn't say: this is war, sadly for good to triumph we must commit terrible acts. No, it lauds itself for its sadism. It uses sadism, displays of sadism and the permission to be sadistic to recruit." Carrère also mentions regularly, in passing, the extraordinary amount of marijhuana most of the perpetrators smoked habitually; although Carrère does not make the connection explicitly, I can't help wondering whether marijhuana may not play a considerable role in warping the minds of young Islamic men, allowing them to become open to the sadism that those directing them glory in. 

As to the witnessing Carrère was hoping for, the book is full of stories, mainly of the victims and their relatives, but also of courageous people who tried to prevent the attacks (notably Sonia), of survivors and of the lawyers, particularly those who are defending the men accused of terrorism - "we obviously do not defend paedophilia or terrorism, but we are prepared to defend a paedophile or a terrorist" one tells him '. I don't always see things as Carrère does - for instance, he claims that the judge's annoyance about a three-year-old who runs around screaming the whole time her Serbian mother is giving evidence would have been replaced by compassion if the child had been the daughter of a blonde woman from Bataclan, whereas I think screaming three-year-olds are always a pain, regardless of where they come from. All the same, he recounts many moving stories and introduces the reader to some intriguing details about those involved and their preparations, not least the strange fact that the computer upon which many of the perpetrators habitually watched Islamic State's videos of beheadings and torture was also used to watch "a recording of a stage production of Cyrano de Bergerac, Robert Hossein's adaptation of Les Miserables, and above all two comedies by Sacha Guitry, Royal Affairs in Versailles and The Virtuous Scoundrel ... black-and-white films...shot in the 1950s, with dated language and crackling sound."

Carrère's interest in justice might encompass, unspoken, an obvious operational question - how were the attacks allowed to happen? He certainly provides an answer of sorts, while reporting on the evidence of Bernard Bajolet, former Director General for External Security in France. Carrère tells readers that Bajolet admits the whole thing was "a cock-up",  explaining to the court that both the French and Belgian police forces had the information they needed to prevent the attacks, having picked up "a petty jihadist named Reda Hame in August 2015 on his return from Syria [who] divulges what Abaaoud [the ringleader of the plot] is planning". Sadly, the two police forces took absolutely no notice of this information.

As to spiritual justice, while not as full of forgiveness as Georges Salines, a victim's father who has begun a friendship with the father of his child's murderer, Carrère is not as unforgiving as Antoine Leiris, whose wife was murdered at Bataclan. Personally, I do not judge Leiris - forgiveness is a matter for those who suffered because of the terrible events of that November evening and, if he is not ready to forgive, that is a matter for him. 

V13 does not provide answers to all the questions provoked by the Paris attacks, but it is still a book worth reading for anyone curious about the Islamo-terrorism that has become part of life in the west. It is full of interesting detail, not least, for me at least, an introduction to the phenomenon called taquiya. Taquiya is a word used by Muslims to describe the Islamic tactic of living and working "like submarines in a society they hate and wish to destroy." According to Carrère, Muslims use taquiya because "to fool the unbelievers, you have to blend in with them. You have to pass yourself off as a nice Muslim who's happy to pray without bothering anyone, in full respect of the social pact." This means that "a cold monster could well be hiding behind your neighbour's familiar face."

Returning to the question of justice, Carrère ultimately comes down on the side of lenience. He is glad that some of those accused of peripheral involvement are not imprisoned, even though they are not declared innocent. He is troubled by the heavy sentence given to the terrorist who did not ignite his bomb belt and therefore is the only one of the main perpetrators still alive to be punished. Carrère seems persuaded by the idea that punishing this young man so severely will send a message to those on the point of blowing themselves up that they might as well go through with the act, as society will not be lenient to them if they back off at the last moment. I think this is naive. Anyone who has got to the point of wearing an explosive vest is beyond reason, even if they do hesitate and ultimately choose not to explode their device. Even though Carrère sat through this long trial and observed the accused and heard how keen they were to damage and destroy the society around them, he still seems to me to underestimate the threat men like them pose, living in our midst. For me his book - most particularly his insight into extreme Islam's embrace of sadism - increased my already growing suspicion that turning the other cheek against Islamic terrorism might be a misunderstanding of Christ's message and the West's most dangerous mistake. 

Recent Reading - You Are Here by David Nicholls

You Are Here is the most enjoyable of David Nicholls' books that I have read since One Day, (a book I absolutely love and hugely admire). Since reading One Day, I have also read Sweet Sorrow by the same author, which I quite liked but not enough to write anything about here (or was it laziness?) and Us, which I disliked so much that I decided not vent my spleen on the subject, as I felt it was obscurely unfair to do so.

What I found uncomfortable about Sweet Sorrow and maddening about Us was the way that Nicholls does not challenge the assumption inherent in each novel's plot line - that some people are naturally glamorous and out of reach, and those nice souls who are sparrows rather than birds of paradise ought to recognise they are too good for the likes of the glamorous and stay in their lane, worshipping from afar. Nichols doesn't seem to recognise the possibility that glamour might be worth questioning, that it might be a sign that a person has a desire to be admired and conducts themselves with that either in mind or perhaps only as a subconscious motivation. In Us, for example, the main character is so obviously worth a hundred of his wife, and yet at no point that I remember is there any faint hint that his wife is a self-satisfied idiot for despising her husband because he cannot get onboard with her appreciation of "the arts". He is supposed, apparently, to accept that the gift of appreciation she possesses sets her above him, rather than revealing her as a poseur. 

There is a touch of the same tendency in You Are Here, but it is somehow more bearable. The two main characters are slightly what the playground would term "losers", although endearing. In Nicholls-world, it is their lot to plod through life in their drab plumage and not to strive for glamour. If you accept the premise, the story is enjoyable, often amusing and from time to time touching. It certainly carries you along happily - I suppose what I am trying to say is that it is very easy to read, without ever being trashy (and in my view that is a huge achievement).

There are many amusing and touching moments in the book, and yet by the end I felt faintly melancholic. I wonder now what Nicholls's background is and whether he was brought up a Calvinist. It might explain the idea it seems to me that he always proceeds from, (whether consciously or otherwise) - the belief that individual fate is essentially preordained. 

Hotel Art

The pictures hotels choose to hang on their walls are usually awful and generally mass-produced. Those who select them probably sit in committee with a bullet list of requirements - not too striking or offensive, soothing, ideally, (or, as some might call it, bland). 

Clearly, having nothing on the walls might be a bit bleak in box-like rooms filled with mass-produced furniture but would good pictures really upset guests? Or is there a fear that they'd pinch them if they were actually nice? 

Anyway, here are some pictures hanging in a place we are staying overnight which happens to be in a wine growing area. A decision seems to have been made that really bad paintings that have corks glued onto them is a perfect decorative solution. I am fighting the temptation to pull a few corks off.

Oh So Primitive

I am enthralled by the works of the so-called Northern Primitives, so I was really pleased to see works by two of them in Sibiu this week. Some might say something about photographs making these paintings redundant but I disagree. The works that van Eyk, Memling and Rogier van der Weyden have left us transcend photographs - although I cannot explain how.

Van Eyk, Man with a Blue Hat, (a portrait of Duke Philippe I of Brabant), painted in 1430; Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man Reading, painted in 1470; Hans Memling, Portrait of a Woman at Prayer, painted in 1470.

Part of the collection of the Bruckenthal Museum's collection in Sibiu, Romania.

The Andrew Problem - a Solution

This house, deep in the Romanian countryside, belongs to King Charles III. It is miles from a good road so it is safe from paparazzi and other pursuers of gossip journalism. The King needs to establish his brother in it. As winter approaches, most of the local bears should be preparing for hibernation so Andrew will be able to go for long walks and think about what his mother might wish him to do with his future.

Recent Reading - Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy by Charles Darwent

Amedée Ozenfant was once a considerable figure in art circles, a celebrity of a sort, in his own time. One of the books he wrote, Art, in French, and Foundations of Modern Art in its English translation, was widely read, immensely influential and used as a standard teaching text. Ozenfant himself was described by senior figures in the French art establishment as the person who “represented modern French painting in London”. On 3rd December, 1937, he became a pioneer of arts broadcasting when he took part in a BBC programme called Three Artists and a Bowl of Fruit in which, live from the Alexandra Palace, using ten apples, eleven oranges and a pineapple, he produced three pictures - a realist composition; a Cubist still life; and a “Purist” landscape in which he transformed the apples and oranges into rocks and the pineapple into a palm tree. His performance elicited very positive responses from the handful of people then in possession of televisions and viewing that night.

In his youth, Ozenfant was exceptionally close friends with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, which may seem no great claim to fame, until you realise that Jeanneret is better known as Le Corbusier (a name that Ozenfant himself suggested.) The two men later fell out, but before they did they founded an artistic movement called Purism, collaborating in the writing of an essay, called “Le Purisme”, that set out what the movement aimed to be. The essay was published in 1920 in their own magazine, accompanied by a photograph of the two of them, standing together in the basket of a hot air balloon.

Strangely, despite his considerable fame in the years before the Second World War, as Charles Darwent finds when he begins to research Ozenfant and the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts, the school Ozenfant set up in Kensington in 1936 and ran until 1939, the artist seems to have largely disappeared from the consciousness of the art world in the post-war decades.

Darwent’s book is a delight, despite the fact that for a lot of the time he is wrestling with smoke. Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore both taught at Ozenfant’s school but the papers they left for posterity contain no trace of their time there. The papers of Julian Trevelyan, one of Ozenfant’s students at the academy, are equally silent on the subject of both Ozenfant and the school. Charlotte and Ronald Morris, the school’s generous backers (who I can’t help thinking of as a British John and Sunday Reed), “simply fade from view”, Darwent tells us, adding “nothing is known of their lives after 1939.”

One great friend of Ozenfant’s in London, Erno Goldfinger, the modernist architect who, according to David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, made the lives of journalists at the Daily Worker miserable with his open plan design for their newsroom and insistence on very low toilets to ensure a “more complete…bowel evacuation” has not by any means faded from view. While he was not a student at the school, his wife (the heiress of the Crosse and Blackwell business) was, and it is one of her works made at the academy that is among the very few pieces of art that survives from the work created under the tutelage of Mr Ozenfant. Her strange, even compelling, picture can be seen at Goldfinger House, 2 Willow Road, Hampstead. It is drawn in 9H pencil, the drawing tool Ozenfant insisted on (because it eliminated spontaneity!), and it depicts two ears. Typical of Darwent’s amusing style is his comment on this drawing:

“Goldfinger’s ears… are rendered outlandishly large by her outsized paper [Ozenfant not only insisted on 9H pencils and hated sketchiness; he made students work on the most enormous sheets of paper available]. This, together with the fact that so much effort has been expended on a part of the human anatomy so commonly overlooked in art, makes them seem slightly mad.”

The drawing, along with photographs of other similar works by other students of the academy, (the originals have mostly either been lost or destroyed, although Anne Cobham Said’s extraordinary Jo’s Wild Wood, is in the collection of the Tate), are very arresting and oddly haunting. Surprisingly, if I knew nothing about Ozenfant, I would describe them as surrealist, which given Purism, the movement that Ozenfant co-founded, was in direct opposition to Surrealism, is peculiar to say the least. *1.

Perhaps even more surprising, the most famous student to study at the school, (famous as a visual artist that is - Dulcie Gray was also an alumnus but went on to be an actress rather than a painter), Leonora Carrington, went on to be most definitely a Surrealist. In later years, Carrington spoke about her time studying with Ozenfant at the academy. Among her comments is the highest recommendation a teacher can be given, I think:

“He never left you disheartened.”

Although Carrington (and possibly Francis Bacon) are the only former students of the school to have gone on to become household names, the story Darwent tells of the academy is extremely diverting. Photographs reproduced in the book show its youthful students gathered in front of the building or working inside, in the studio, an enormous curtain stretched in the background, behind which Ozenfant laboured (in my view slightly ludicrously) on his vast obsessional canvas VIE. Looking at them, I sense enthusiasm and cheerfulness, despite the fact that war is coming.

Did they not know, I ask myself - and the photographs take on the poignance of hindsight. Here they all are, endeavouring to learn how to create beauty, unaware that - or trying to ignore their fears that - all such innocence is about to be shattered. Slaving away, day after day, drawing - on Ozenfant’s insistence “at a tar like pace”, as Darwent puts it - with 9H pencils on vast sheets of paper, while their demanding master struggles with a work no one other than him will ever really care very much about, I feel they are all in a pantomime and I want to shout, “Look behind you.”

It is this that, for me, provides the underlying fascination of the book - the glimpse it gives of that strange time. Was there a true innocence to those years, were the students of the academy able to conceive of a tranquil future where fulfilling their ambitions was possible, or were people deliberately fooling themselves, going through the motions of life, knowing in their hearts that peace wasn’t going to last?

In the book’s final section, Darwent provides a translation of Ozenfant’s diaries from the period and these throw some light on the attitudes of the time. Many passages are funny, (especially the section on mud wrestling), there is a great deal of preoccupation with VIE and its progress and fate - but, as the days go by, the political news from the wider world seeps in increasingly, as things become steadily worse.

At one point Ozenfant’s comments seem to be worryingly applicable to our own situation today, (and is it perhaps precisely that - the suspicion that we too are living at a moment just before something truly terrible happens that as yet we cannot quite foresee - that makes reading about the lives of people during the 1930s so compelling?):

“The powerlessness of moderate democracies comes from the fact that, when times are grave, we all count on a mass, which is to say on each other: and nobody does anything.”

At another moment, he is more prosaic on the threat ahead, or at least more personally focussed:

“I have no money. Hitler is a pain in the ass.”

Darwent writes brilliantly about pictures and is never boring. The book he has produced is a glimpse of an all-but-forgotten enterprise that existed during a precarious moment. I hope that the moment we are living through is not in any way the same.

—-

*1. Darwent I think explains this very well when he says of Anne Cobham Said’s works that although the subjects were simply things she found near her house in Wiltshire, “their treatment remained essentially the same: so hyper-real as to become surreal.”

(It should also be noted that post-war, Darwent points out, that one aspect of Ozenfant's work - his chromatic theories - were remembered by one person, David Medd, who, with his wife Mary, worked on the design of primary schools in Britain. As a result, Darwent says, "Generations of English schoolchildren would recite their times tables between walls whose colours had been dictated, at one remove, by Amédée Ozenfant.")

Recent Reading: Strange Meeting by Susan Hill

 

At the start of this beautiful short novel we meet John Hilliard, home in England, on leave from World War One France. He is unable to feel any pleasure in being away from the front as what he has seen and experienced there haunts him and no one in England has the faintest idea about how things on the battlefield actually are.

When he returns to France, he finds that most of the people he knew there before he left for leave have been killed. He discovers that he will be sharing his quarters with a new recruit called David Barton. He is at first a little put out by this development. However, Barton it turns out has the gift of lightening everyone's spirits. Furthermore, he and John form an extraordinarily warm and loving friendship, despite being very different in upbringing and personality.

Susan Hill creates these characters and all the others around them skilfully and provides a vivid and gripping picture of life in the trenches. She makes it very clear thanks to her brilliant descriptive power, that the war both young men are caught up in is little more than a meat grinder for the youth of Europe.

The book is very moving indeed. Hill's imagination is extraordinary and her skill as a writer is superb