History here
WEDNESDAY 19th MAY 2010
St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin
PRESENTED BY THE CULWICK CHORAL SOCIETY
Colette Boushell (soprano)
Sinead Campbell-Wallace (soprano)
Alison Browner (alto)
John Elwes (tenor)
Benjamin Hulett (tenor)
Nigel Williams (bass)
Jeffrey Ledwidge (bass)
and Orchestra
Bernie Sherlock (conductor)
Sunday, March 21, 2010
The Children's Book by AS Byatt
The moral seriousness of AS Byatt's fiction derives much from her concept of responsibility; and responsibility, for her, is most importantly the business of marshalling and applying one's intellect to every area of one's life. Her new novel, a staggeringly detailed and charged re-creation of the period between the end of the 19th century and the first world war, overflows with people attempting to define their responsibilities, whether to fulfil them or to evade them; with those in pursuit of enlightenment or seeking to manipulate it; and with some simply attempting to unearth who they are and what they should do to survive.
For Philip Warren, the boy whose discovery in the store-rooms of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) opens the book, survival is a matter of making good his escape from life in the Potteries and finding, somehow, a way of unravelling and realising his semi-articulated desire to "make something". His hideaway uncovered, he is brought before Major Prosper Cain, the special keeper of precious metals, and Olive Wellwood, a "successful authoress of magical tales" who is visiting Cain for research purposes. Enquiring about the starved boy's background, Olive suggests, "You wanted to make something of your life, of yourself ... That's natural."
We are clear, immediately, that Philip's sense of what "a life" might constitute is different from Olive's, though their backgrounds are similar: Olive, together with her sister Violet, has also fled an upbringing of unrelieved poverty and traumatic loss. By marrying Humphry Wellwood, a banker by trade though not by inclination, she has created a life of plenitude, productivity and no little luxury; by harnessing her memories of the mining community in which she grew up and linking them with her instinctive feel for fairy stories and folk-tales, she has also created an independent life for herself. But over the course of several hundred pages, Byatt demonstrates that creativity means entirely different things to Philip and to Olive, and has entirely different effects on those around them.
Humphry and Olive's rambling farmhouse on the Kentish Weald, named Todefright, is a wonderfully achieved emblem of the particular slice of late 19th-century society Byatt wishes to show in all its precariously utopian varieties: swarming with children who are allowed to speak not only when spoken to, with rebels ranging from politely insistent Fabians to fugitive Russian anarchists, with unstable artists, with ideas and projects and determination. Its inhabitants pride themselves on their ability to speak their minds freely and to arrange their affairs according to progressive and humane values rather than in the service of unblinking Victorian stricture; Byatt is slyly comic on the extent to which these ideals are allied to the profusion of decorative earthenware plates and bountiful mid-summer parties. Beneath the house's surface, though, secrets multiply: infidelities that have made a mess of lines of paternity and maternity; expedient accommodations of truth and finance; lapses of thought or care for the consequences of one's actions. For Todefright's children, given terrifyingly partial glimpses into the adults' muddied affairs, the family home shifts from idyll to prison and back, their parents - or who they think their parents are - from beneficent protectors to child-like incompetents.
Olive's work stands at the centre of the novel, and extracts of it run throughout - the baby prince whose shadow is stolen from his crib, the girl who imprisons a group of miniature human beings in her dolls' house only to be imprisoned herself by another, larger child - thickening not only our sense of her subjectivity but also providing Byatt's imitative commentary on the children's literature of the time. JM Barrie, Edith Nesbit and Kenneth Grahame all appear on these pages, their attitudes towards children both as consumers of their fictions and as conduits for their interpretations of the world nimbly highlighted; and, in Olive, Byatt probes the motives and contours of the process of writing for children further. When Olive is pregnant once again, she seals herself away in her stories, partly out of financial necessity but also to shore up her individuality and to insulate herself from her unborn child, reflecting on her pleasure thus: "Blood flowed from heart to head, and into the happy fingertips, bypassing the greedy inner sleeper."
For each of the household's children, Olive has created a book, revealing her allegiances and, indeed, her actual biological connection by the differing amounts of time and creative energy she bestows. "The stories in the books were, in their nature, endless," we are told. "They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit on to the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot had to contain a new beginning." Outstripping the others by far is Tom, Olive's eldest son, a boy who loathes the pretence of Peter Pan ("It's make-believe make-believe make-believe") and who decides to mimic an animal's non-attachment to the material world in order to protect himself. Eventually brought to grief by his mother's inability to separate him from his fictional alter ego, he is perhaps the novel's saddest and most significant casualty.
But casualties abound among the dizzyingly extensive cast of this novel, one that is powered by unexpected doublings, sudden appearances, disappearances and couplings, individual histories - and, for that matter, history itself - rapidly and uncompromisingly deployed. Mirroring the superficially orderly and harmonious Todefright is the ghastly Purchase House, the dilapidated home of Benedict Fludd, the master potter to whom Philip is apprenticed, a crazy makeshift household in which kilns explode and sexually explicit statues of children are kept in a locked cupboard. Here, the horrors of genius are writ large on the lives of Fludd's drugged-up wife, his traumatised daughters and angry son, his beleaguered and abused friends. Byatt's cleverness, in the dual figures of Olive and Fludd, is to keep the reader in thrall to their talents while showing the sinuous stealth of their neglect; and to underline that neither artist is left undamaged themselves.
It will probably never be said of Byatt's writing that she wears her learning lightly, and her lengthy disquisitions on the building blocks of her narrative both support and bloat the novel; her briskly delivered but expansive accounts of, among other things, the development of London's museums, of late Victorian banking crises, of pottery and puppetry and of the Arts and Crafts, Fabian and suffrage movements are never less than informative but sometimes a little less than compelling. A visit to the Exposition Universelle de Paris, in which electricity and machine guns are displayed alongside a Tyrolean Castle, and a later section in which the wonderfully drawn child-woman Dorothy travels to Germany to establish her parentage ("things got out of hand at a carnival", Humphry tells her), stay far longer and more suggestively in the mind because they are animated by characters with so much at stake.
But Byatt is brilliant on the gathering forces of England and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, their contrasting attitudes towards the part that the land plays in the collective unconscious, their differing forms of nostalgia. That her novel closes with the first world war, with its arbitrary culling of so many of the characters whose "book" the novel purports to be, feels entirely appropriate. The war never feels like an inevitability, nor the numerous characters artificially inflated in order to provide soldiers for it; instead, it feels like the vast, traumatising shock that it was, its victims randomly alighted on, its effects making nothing, and yet everything, of what has gone before.
One could say, in the survivors' parade that forms the very final pages of The Children's Book, that Byatt provides us with glimmers of hope; connections are reforged, tiny instances of justice done, gestures towards continuity sketched. But this is a very dark novel, driven by an unsparing view of human nature and a clear-eyed analysis of the idea of human perfectibility. Despite some of its structural similarities to Byatt's earlier novel Possession, and its thematic links to the tetralogy that featured Frederica Potter, it reminded me most of Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories. In that collection and in this novel, Byatt reminds us in chilling fashion of the perils of artistic creation, and the duties of its exponents to find out the difference between what is real and what is not.
• Alex Clark is the editor of Granta
For Philip Warren, the boy whose discovery in the store-rooms of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) opens the book, survival is a matter of making good his escape from life in the Potteries and finding, somehow, a way of unravelling and realising his semi-articulated desire to "make something". His hideaway uncovered, he is brought before Major Prosper Cain, the special keeper of precious metals, and Olive Wellwood, a "successful authoress of magical tales" who is visiting Cain for research purposes. Enquiring about the starved boy's background, Olive suggests, "You wanted to make something of your life, of yourself ... That's natural."
We are clear, immediately, that Philip's sense of what "a life" might constitute is different from Olive's, though their backgrounds are similar: Olive, together with her sister Violet, has also fled an upbringing of unrelieved poverty and traumatic loss. By marrying Humphry Wellwood, a banker by trade though not by inclination, she has created a life of plenitude, productivity and no little luxury; by harnessing her memories of the mining community in which she grew up and linking them with her instinctive feel for fairy stories and folk-tales, she has also created an independent life for herself. But over the course of several hundred pages, Byatt demonstrates that creativity means entirely different things to Philip and to Olive, and has entirely different effects on those around them.
Humphry and Olive's rambling farmhouse on the Kentish Weald, named Todefright, is a wonderfully achieved emblem of the particular slice of late 19th-century society Byatt wishes to show in all its precariously utopian varieties: swarming with children who are allowed to speak not only when spoken to, with rebels ranging from politely insistent Fabians to fugitive Russian anarchists, with unstable artists, with ideas and projects and determination. Its inhabitants pride themselves on their ability to speak their minds freely and to arrange their affairs according to progressive and humane values rather than in the service of unblinking Victorian stricture; Byatt is slyly comic on the extent to which these ideals are allied to the profusion of decorative earthenware plates and bountiful mid-summer parties. Beneath the house's surface, though, secrets multiply: infidelities that have made a mess of lines of paternity and maternity; expedient accommodations of truth and finance; lapses of thought or care for the consequences of one's actions. For Todefright's children, given terrifyingly partial glimpses into the adults' muddied affairs, the family home shifts from idyll to prison and back, their parents - or who they think their parents are - from beneficent protectors to child-like incompetents.
Olive's work stands at the centre of the novel, and extracts of it run throughout - the baby prince whose shadow is stolen from his crib, the girl who imprisons a group of miniature human beings in her dolls' house only to be imprisoned herself by another, larger child - thickening not only our sense of her subjectivity but also providing Byatt's imitative commentary on the children's literature of the time. JM Barrie, Edith Nesbit and Kenneth Grahame all appear on these pages, their attitudes towards children both as consumers of their fictions and as conduits for their interpretations of the world nimbly highlighted; and, in Olive, Byatt probes the motives and contours of the process of writing for children further. When Olive is pregnant once again, she seals herself away in her stories, partly out of financial necessity but also to shore up her individuality and to insulate herself from her unborn child, reflecting on her pleasure thus: "Blood flowed from heart to head, and into the happy fingertips, bypassing the greedy inner sleeper."
For each of the household's children, Olive has created a book, revealing her allegiances and, indeed, her actual biological connection by the differing amounts of time and creative energy she bestows. "The stories in the books were, in their nature, endless," we are told. "They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit on to the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot had to contain a new beginning." Outstripping the others by far is Tom, Olive's eldest son, a boy who loathes the pretence of Peter Pan ("It's make-believe make-believe make-believe") and who decides to mimic an animal's non-attachment to the material world in order to protect himself. Eventually brought to grief by his mother's inability to separate him from his fictional alter ego, he is perhaps the novel's saddest and most significant casualty.
But casualties abound among the dizzyingly extensive cast of this novel, one that is powered by unexpected doublings, sudden appearances, disappearances and couplings, individual histories - and, for that matter, history itself - rapidly and uncompromisingly deployed. Mirroring the superficially orderly and harmonious Todefright is the ghastly Purchase House, the dilapidated home of Benedict Fludd, the master potter to whom Philip is apprenticed, a crazy makeshift household in which kilns explode and sexually explicit statues of children are kept in a locked cupboard. Here, the horrors of genius are writ large on the lives of Fludd's drugged-up wife, his traumatised daughters and angry son, his beleaguered and abused friends. Byatt's cleverness, in the dual figures of Olive and Fludd, is to keep the reader in thrall to their talents while showing the sinuous stealth of their neglect; and to underline that neither artist is left undamaged themselves.
It will probably never be said of Byatt's writing that she wears her learning lightly, and her lengthy disquisitions on the building blocks of her narrative both support and bloat the novel; her briskly delivered but expansive accounts of, among other things, the development of London's museums, of late Victorian banking crises, of pottery and puppetry and of the Arts and Crafts, Fabian and suffrage movements are never less than informative but sometimes a little less than compelling. A visit to the Exposition Universelle de Paris, in which electricity and machine guns are displayed alongside a Tyrolean Castle, and a later section in which the wonderfully drawn child-woman Dorothy travels to Germany to establish her parentage ("things got out of hand at a carnival", Humphry tells her), stay far longer and more suggestively in the mind because they are animated by characters with so much at stake.
But Byatt is brilliant on the gathering forces of England and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, their contrasting attitudes towards the part that the land plays in the collective unconscious, their differing forms of nostalgia. That her novel closes with the first world war, with its arbitrary culling of so many of the characters whose "book" the novel purports to be, feels entirely appropriate. The war never feels like an inevitability, nor the numerous characters artificially inflated in order to provide soldiers for it; instead, it feels like the vast, traumatising shock that it was, its victims randomly alighted on, its effects making nothing, and yet everything, of what has gone before.
One could say, in the survivors' parade that forms the very final pages of The Children's Book, that Byatt provides us with glimmers of hope; connections are reforged, tiny instances of justice done, gestures towards continuity sketched. But this is a very dark novel, driven by an unsparing view of human nature and a clear-eyed analysis of the idea of human perfectibility. Despite some of its structural similarities to Byatt's earlier novel Possession, and its thematic links to the tetralogy that featured Frederica Potter, it reminded me most of Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories. In that collection and in this novel, Byatt reminds us in chilling fashion of the perils of artistic creation, and the duties of its exponents to find out the difference between what is real and what is not.
• Alex Clark is the editor of Granta
Shutter Island
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Sir Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Jackie Earle Haley
Details: US/138mins (15A)
Saturated in ambiguity from the very first frame, Martin Scorsese's fourth movie with Leonardo DiCaprio is an exercise in dense plotting, assembled with care and infinite panache by one of the best director's currently wielding a megaphone in anger. A mystery that really delves into the confines of the mind for answers, this may very well require multiple viewings to properly digest.
DiCaprio's compelling performance - complimented wonderfully by Sir Ben Kingsley and the always excellent Mark Ruffalo - is one that is wholly in sync with his director's mindset. From the anxious, layered ambience of the opening few frames, jolted by a moody, invasive score, and pretty much remaining that way for over two hours, your enjoyment of Shutter Island may still depend on whether or not you buy the payoff.
DiCaprio is US Marshall Teddy Daniels, who, along with Ruffalo's recently assigned partner is off to the mysterious Shutter Island - a home for the most dangerous criminally insane - to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Saldano, a patient who killed her children and seems to have now vanished. Teddy is only recently recovering from a tragedy in his own life; his wife died in a mysterious fire and continues to visit him in his dreams. But having spent too much time on the island, he begins to doubt his own sanity as he struggles to find anyone he can trust.
Exploring the troubled human psychosis is hardly new ground for Scorsese, but the material he's given here from Denis Lahane's novel presents that rare occasion when every single character feels like an important part of a particularly tricky puzzle. His casting in that respect is spot on; Ruffalo's obvious affability and Kingsley's ease veering from compassionate academic to someone seemingly harbouring Nazi's, really aides DiCaprio's committed lead performance.
The conclusion is either one you'll kick yourself for not figuring out, or get all smug for seeing it coming. Either way, your reaction to it will depend on if you'll want to revisit this production and see where you went wrong/right, or just write it off as hyperbolic pulp. I was firmly in the former camp, and I have an inkling most receptive film goers will be the same.
A top drawer director working with a top drawer cast, this is hugely entertaining stuff, once again showcasing the combined eclectic talents of the Scorsese/DiCaprio partnership
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Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Sir Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Jackie Earle Haley
Details: US/138mins (15A)
Saturated in ambiguity from the very first frame, Martin Scorsese's fourth movie with Leonardo DiCaprio is an exercise in dense plotting, assembled with care and infinite panache by one of the best director's currently wielding a megaphone in anger. A mystery that really delves into the confines of the mind for answers, this may very well require multiple viewings to properly digest.
DiCaprio's compelling performance - complimented wonderfully by Sir Ben Kingsley and the always excellent Mark Ruffalo - is one that is wholly in sync with his director's mindset. From the anxious, layered ambience of the opening few frames, jolted by a moody, invasive score, and pretty much remaining that way for over two hours, your enjoyment of Shutter Island may still depend on whether or not you buy the payoff.
DiCaprio is US Marshall Teddy Daniels, who, along with Ruffalo's recently assigned partner is off to the mysterious Shutter Island - a home for the most dangerous criminally insane - to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Saldano, a patient who killed her children and seems to have now vanished. Teddy is only recently recovering from a tragedy in his own life; his wife died in a mysterious fire and continues to visit him in his dreams. But having spent too much time on the island, he begins to doubt his own sanity as he struggles to find anyone he can trust.
Exploring the troubled human psychosis is hardly new ground for Scorsese, but the material he's given here from Denis Lahane's novel presents that rare occasion when every single character feels like an important part of a particularly tricky puzzle. His casting in that respect is spot on; Ruffalo's obvious affability and Kingsley's ease veering from compassionate academic to someone seemingly harbouring Nazi's, really aides DiCaprio's committed lead performance.
The conclusion is either one you'll kick yourself for not figuring out, or get all smug for seeing it coming. Either way, your reaction to it will depend on if you'll want to revisit this production and see where you went wrong/right, or just write it off as hyperbolic pulp. I was firmly in the former camp, and I have an inkling most receptive film goers will be the same.
A top drawer director working with a top drawer cast, this is hugely entertaining stuff, once again showcasing the combined eclectic talents of the Scorsese/DiCaprio partnership
Swan Lake
A STAR-STUDDED audience was last night treated to an elaborate performance of Swan Lake by the Russian State Ballet and featuring Bolshoi dancers as the new Grand Canal Theatre opened its doors.
President Mary McAleese was the guest of honour at the first of seven sold-out shows in the €80 million theatre which is located in the heart of Dublin’s docklands.
“It’s been nine long, hard years but we think tonight it has been worth it,” said project developer Harry Crosbie.
U2 manager Paul McGuinness said the 2,000-seat theatre would bring shows that previously could not have come to Dublin and would transform the docklands area. “The current U2 tour wouldn’t fit but I am sure we will be on that stage sooner or later” he said.
Among the well-known faces from the world of film and music at the gala opening were director John Boorman, actor Brendan Gleeson, writer and director Rebecca Miller, singers Paul Brady and Christy Moore.
RTÉ broadcaster Gerry Ryan said the theatre was planned during the boom so opening “in the midst of end of world” was a “fantastic success story”. Fashion designer John Rocha said it was “a great day for Ireland”.
The new venture also got the seal of approval from entrepreneur Bill Cullen who said it was “fantastic”.
Many broadcasters also attended the event including Gay Byrne, Kathryn Thomas, Colette Fitzpatrick and Anne Doyle.
Also present was architect Daniel Libeskind who designed the theatre which has seven bars, a rooftop terrace, a full orchestra pit and excellent technical and backstage facilities.
Soloists from the Bolshoi ballet company also featured in last night’s performance which included between 15 and 20 changes of scene.
Some 120,000 tickets have been sold to date for a variety of performances including Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Whistle Down The Wind.
President Mary McAleese was the guest of honour at the first of seven sold-out shows in the €80 million theatre which is located in the heart of Dublin’s docklands.
“It’s been nine long, hard years but we think tonight it has been worth it,” said project developer Harry Crosbie.
U2 manager Paul McGuinness said the 2,000-seat theatre would bring shows that previously could not have come to Dublin and would transform the docklands area. “The current U2 tour wouldn’t fit but I am sure we will be on that stage sooner or later” he said.
Among the well-known faces from the world of film and music at the gala opening were director John Boorman, actor Brendan Gleeson, writer and director Rebecca Miller, singers Paul Brady and Christy Moore.
RTÉ broadcaster Gerry Ryan said the theatre was planned during the boom so opening “in the midst of end of world” was a “fantastic success story”. Fashion designer John Rocha said it was “a great day for Ireland”.
The new venture also got the seal of approval from entrepreneur Bill Cullen who said it was “fantastic”.
Many broadcasters also attended the event including Gay Byrne, Kathryn Thomas, Colette Fitzpatrick and Anne Doyle.
Also present was architect Daniel Libeskind who designed the theatre which has seven bars, a rooftop terrace, a full orchestra pit and excellent technical and backstage facilities.
Soloists from the Bolshoi ballet company also featured in last night’s performance which included between 15 and 20 changes of scene.
Some 120,000 tickets have been sold to date for a variety of performances including Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Whistle Down The Wind.
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