Christopher Marlow (The Jew of Malta)

What made people like Guy  Burgess or Anthony Blunt rebel against their society, betray their  country and spy for the soviet union?  Was it a reaction against the seemingly inexorable rise of Fascism, or was it the rejection of a brutal class system?   Did their experience of having to hide their homosexuality from a bigoted society cause them to turn against the very establishment they were supposed to be members of?   I blame the father.  ‘Another Country’  highlights the projection of the strict father to be found in the hypocrisy and snobbery of the English public school.  Guy Burgess was at Eton.  The school was run not by the Masters, but by the Gods, the only boys who were allowed to wear coloured waistcoats.  And Guy, the aesthete, aspired to be elected to the Pantheon (if only to display the waistcoat).   

Miranda Carter, in her biography of Anthony Blunt, claims that his miserable time at public school, fostered a subversive but also superior attitude toward British society. This potent combination – insecurity and moral superiority – fed into a belief that this chosen elite had the right to be exempt from mere conventional morality for the good of the masses.

The regime of the Gods was repressive, militaristic and essentially corrupt, a system designed to create the rulers of Empire.  Guy was beautiful, louche, artistic and openly homosexual. He was confident enough to love whom he wanted;  after all several of the Gods had been his lovers.  And he was clever enough to be feared.  But when Martineau is discovered in flagrante in the boiler room and hangs himself in shame, the Gods clamp down on homosexuality in order to contain the threat of scandal.  Guy at first escapes public humiliation by threatening to expose his lovers.  But as desperate as he is to become a God, he is also desperately in love with James.  And this love leads him to indiscretion and exposure.  So he shields James him from possible expulsion, accepts the blame and the punishment and is customarily debarred from elevation to the Pantheon. 

So, was it his humiliation at school that that made Guy Burgess turn against the English class system and betray state secrets to the Russians?   Was it rejection by a system he secretly admired and aspired to?  Was it envy, revenge, the feeling of the outsider?   Was it then, on the verge of his adult life,  that he realized how much the British class system relied on outward appearance and how devastating being openly gay was for a diplomatic career?  Was that the point that he allowed himself to become radicalised by his best friend Tommy Judd – an intellectually committed Communist?

Or was it in part his betrayal by his adored mother?   In a tender moment with James at night in a punt on the river, he discloses how he had to release his mother, trapped in bed after his father collapsed and died while making love to her.  Quite soon afterwards, she married an army officer. 

Another Country portrays the road to betrayal as a personal, emotional crisis, rather than an intellectual identification.  As a young man, Guy was portrayed as mischievous, sensitive, intelligent, in love, but tragically crushed by the juggernaut of the English class system? He was being bred to inflict rule and punishment in the real world by playing at Gods at school. And against this inhumanity he rebelled.

The theme was composed, as with all of us, early in Burgess’s life, and had to be worked through.  Always an outsider, he ended his life, a broken, isolated, embittered man, living in a seedy apartment in Moscow with only the faded sepia prints of Eton hanging on his walls to remind him of the turning point.     

‘Another Country’ made me think of my time at Taunton School.  In the early sixties, the ancien regime of the English public schools still held sway; Taunton was still attempting to produce young men to run the Empire, even though that institution was all but dismantled.   They still had a combined cadet force; they still do, I think.   Sport, an essential component of the school curriculum,  encouraged teamwork, loyalty and identification with the system.  The establishment still didn’t foster original thinking and expression; it indoctrinated.  At the time, I had a strong sense of duty.  My parents admired that system and I felt bound by obligation to uphold it, but I never felt that emotional sense of belonging that many of my friends of that time still do.  My life has been patterned by ambivalence.   

For one of my school friends, Maurice, Taunton school fostered a deep sense of entitlement and rebellion.  What he did at school could be contained. Now, fifty years on, he is pitted against the Justice system, the General Medical Council and the House of Lords all at the same time.  But for every one damaged by the system, there were nine created by it.  Sir Peter Westmacott, one time our ambassador in Paris, was one of our contemporaries at school. 

‘Another Country’, starred Rupert Everett as Guy and a younger Colin Firth as Tommy Judd.  It was  directed by Marek Kanievska in 1984.

Related posts:

1. White ribbons; repression and its consequences Eichvald is a small Baronial village in northern Prussia, a...
2. Childhood and Schooldays Childhood and Schooldays When we are children, we just take...
3. King George, the stammerer. Bertie was never expected to become King.  David, his elder...

Oh My God!   Or as Mrs ‘Odge might say,  ‘Well, ‘eres a pretty pickle.’     

So why isn’t it easy?    Why shouldn’t people be free to love whom they like when they like?  Why do people get hurt?   Why do they feel guilty?  Why does it always turn bad?

Gilda is one of those delightful women, beautiful, intelligent, impulsive; a loving and free spirit with a real zest for life.  Otto and Leo are two sensitive and sensuous young men, who are both enjoying the  exhilaration of success.   Otto is a painter;  Leo an up and coming playwright.   They are young, and in love.   Gilda first chooses Otto and they live in a romantic garret in Paris.  Then Leo returns after a successful run in New York and she abandons Otto to live with Leo in London.  Then a year or so later, Otto returns and after a steamy night, she leaves them both and the next we know she has married the older, safer and rather tedious Ernest and become established as a New York socialite and art dealer.  Meanwhile, Otto and Leo get drunk, realise how much they love each other and go off round the world on a sequence of slow boats.  Two years later, they turn up in Ernest and Gilda’s apartment in New York, whereupon Gilda decides to leave Ernest and live with Otto and Leo in a ménage a trois.  

It is all so wonderfully romantic and amusing – so Noel Coward!   But is this so much a design for living as a strategy for loving?   And will it ever work?   One feels that it’s alright for Gilda.  She has the attentions of two handsome, successful young men who both adore her, but how will she cope with their love for each other?   It may be so exciting for the moment, but what will she do when they both get a bit fed up with her attention seeking and want a bit of basic male bonding?   Go off to Ernest again?   And can you imagine all three of them in bed together; the competitiveness, the jealousies?    Which of the men will go first and where?  How will she hold them together?  How will she satisfy two enormous egos?   For this to work, it would mean them all being terribly responsible and level headed.  When has Gilda ever been level headed?    

It’s not so much that it’s morally wrong.   It is, of course, but morality is a social construct;  there to protect us, not just an edict to be ignored.   Any one of us can love more than one person deeply,  but it is impossible to maintain an intimate relationship with two people for very long without resorting to a whole complicated web of secrecy and deception.  

When people fall in love, they expose the most vulnerable aspects of themselves.  It’s a courageous act of absolute trust and it risks nothing less than devastation of the personality through destruction of meaning.   Gilda and Leo and Otto may think they may have acquired sufficient experience and wisdom to maintain a stable triangle, but it takes enough time for any of us to sort out a relationship with one other person; how much more effort would it take to sort out a three-way intimacy?  And how long would it last without resorting to the rot of deception.    And finally, would it be worth it?  Some of the recent literature to come out of the middle east, illustrates the complex  jealousies of polygamy.  I can’t see polyandry being any better.    

Still, it’s wonderful entertainment and any good art; it makes you think. 

Design for Living by Noel Coward is currently playing at The Old Vic.  Lisa Dillon is delicious and delightful as Gilda (and that dress!),  though it was clear who was in charge.  The actors who played Otto and Leo were less credible.  And one had to feel some sympathy for Ernest, though his marriage to Gilda seemed less a meeting of minds and souls than a business arrangement, a mutual exploitation.  It was originally banned from performance on the London Stage.    

Related posts:

1. Nature cure; a case of living in the moment. When I read Richard Mabey’s book, Nature Cure, I could...
2. Show! Don’t tell! An appraisal of The Reader. Show! Don’t tell!  Let the reader decide why the characters...
3. Emma Bovary; incurable romantic or dangerous hysteric Flaubert’s heroine didn’t start bad.  She was a lively imaginative...

And in love, what is the real thing?   Stoppard is a much greater teacher on the mysteries of love than any of the psychoanalysts; he shows us what it is like.  Henry is arch Stoppard,  graded, defended, cynical, witty, prompting Annie’s comment  ‘You want to wait until it all goes wrong and then you will decide you were right all along.’

The script fizzes with insight and emotion.  Hannah Morahan as Annie captures the barely contained lust, a dangerous impulsiveness, as she goads Henry on to take the risk that will prove he truly loves her.   ‘Touch me!  Anywhere!  I dare you to.  Do it now on the floor. Let them find us.’  And when she returns with the dips and gives him her finger to suck, the look on Henry’s face reveals just where that finger has been.  It’s raw stuff.  The shift from the thrill, the excitement to the most dreadful pain is expressed so well.   So is there something about the thrill that just captivated Henry.   ‘Once you have loved, can you ever do without it?’

There is a dreadful compulsion about an affair, the awful conflict,  the compulsive danger of playing with fire, ‘All that lying.’ ‘Happiness expressed in banality and lust.’, passion fuelled by the fear and jealousy.  ‘Why aren’t you jealous?’ It bothers me that you are never bothered’  Annie complains.  Of course, if Henry were jealous, it would demonstrate the power she has over him.  Exclusive love is colonisation’.  And isn’t that the source of the excitement, the thrill of it all?   Annie wants Henry to prove she is loved, is loveable; she is so insecure,  she can only exist in her lover’s gaze. ‘The exclusive voracity of love.’ 

Henry eloquently explains being in love as colonisation, I write just for you.  I write just to be worth your love.  It has taken him over, subsumed all of the meaning in his life.  He lives with Annie in their own bubble of happiness.  ‘Love is knowing and being known’  So is being in love an enhanced image of self, air brushed and in soft focus.  Aren’t  lovers really in love with themselves, as seen through the gaze of the other.   ‘When its there, you are happy and nice to know, but when its gone, you count for nothing and all you have is pain.   So Henry is dependant, even though he fights it.  They both are.  They have given each other power over their lives, the power to destroy each other. Anything you think is right; what you want is right. This is the extent of the dependency.    But human relationships cannot be confined as Annie says when she admits her infidelity – this is not a commitment,  just a bargain – a deal and it gets complicated when you have an affair and enter into a deal with two people.  Maybe being in love becomes a performance, an obligation that you have to act out, because the threat of loss is so great.  It’s better to destroy the hope than to live a love that gives false joy. 

As  Annie says, ‘I have to chose whom I hurt more’  You are stronger, you can take it.  But I love you, I’m yours.  Henry finds it demeaning to be suspicious and jealous; he struggles to respond in what Stoppard calls ‘dignified cuckoldry’.   The unwritten rule of a relationship seems to be to respect the other’s privacy.  You must not trespass behind the make believe.  You must not try to discover the real thing; the ambivalent attachment of most human relationships. ‘What free love is free of is love!’   

The Real Thing was written in 1985 and has been playing at The Old Vic with Toby Stephens and Hannah Morahan as Henry and Annie.  Stoppard tackles an intense and important topic with insight, wit and style.  

Related posts:

1. Je t’aime. In one video,  the artist stopped people in the street...
2. Show! Don’t tell! An appraisal of The Reader. Show! Don’t tell!  Let the reader decide why the characters...
3. When the orchestra is mad, who can be sane? Tom Stoppard is of my generation.  Although, of course, I...

I listened but couldn’t identify with Ron’s experience. It felt disloyal to do so. Hadn’t Dad been sent up to Orkney to risk his life protecting the Arctic convoys?  Hadn’t he crashed and nearly died up there?  Did he deserve to have his wife stolen, his family disrupted by one of the sailors he protected?   So I suppressed my curiosity. 

Many years later, I grew to love Northern Finland.   So when I spotted  ‘Running with Reindeer’, that described an exploration of the Kola Peninsula,  the destinations of the Russian convoys, over 10 years in the nineteen nineties, I had to find out more.  

But it was the author, Roger Took, who intrigued me.  Why on earth would a sensitive, rich middle -aged man, an art historian and museum curator, an establishment figure, want to spend so long in  what he described as one of the most unfriendly and inhospitable places on earth? 

But Took was a man obsessed.  In just one month, he learnt to speak Russian well enough to get by and arrived alone in the derelict port and abandoned goods yards of Murmansk with its grim government buildings and decrepit five story apartment blocks.   His stated purpose was to find the remnants of the Saami, the Lappish peoples, still living in the far north of Russia, and to discover how much of their culture still survived.  

But there was more to it than that.  Took went out of his way to court suspicion, discomfort and danger.  There was little that was uplifting in his book.   He trudges across the tundra in freezing rain with inadequate shelter and food, he falls up to chest into bogs, he spends a night in a filthy cabin where he witnesses a drunken homosexual gang rape,  he visits restricted inlets where decommissioned  submarines rot, their reactors disintegrating and turning the sea radioactive, he sees mountains devastated by open cast mines and  he records a landscape blasted and polluted by nickel smelting.   He does finds isolated pockets of Saami, but realises that their traditional way livelihood of reindeer herding, hunting and salmon fishing was ruined collectivisation, their culture corrupted by alcohol and prostitution. 

His is a grim tale with no redemption.   So why wasTook so attracted to this, the most devastated and corrupt aspects of civilisation that he returned again and again.  That question bothered me increasingly as I persevered with the turgid academic prose of his punishing narrative.  What was it about this guy?  There was an unrelenting darkness about him.  But why?  I had to consult Google.  

I was shocked to discover that Roger Took is in prison.  There is a long article, written for The Spectator in 2008 by Carol Metcalfe.   He had bragged in his blog about being part of a group of men, who raped and murdered a 5 year old girl in Cambodia.  Although Took dismissed this as fantasy, there were scores of incriminating images on his computer and he had been paying his step grand-daughter to have sex with him.  Wikipedia lists difficulties in his marriage, another woman he could not forget, sexual frustration and a fragile, sensitive personality.  Any review of his book, which was nominated for an international prize for travel writing, has been removed.           

 So were Took’s expeditions deliberately punitive or just an escape from the perversity of his privileged lifestyle?   Was his book an attempt to purge himself of some dreadful shame? 

What made Took a paedophile?  Did an unduly close and controlling relationship with his mother make committed  mature relationships with women seem too threatening.   Did the difficulties he had in his two marriages instigate the need for the kind of controlling sexual relationships, he could procure only  with emotionally needy and vulnerable children?  Did his celebrity and privilege create a sense of entitlement; the feeling that he could indulge his perversions?  

His book fails to provide any answers to these questions, but the final chapter does allude to encounters with teenage prostitutes in Murmansk in 1998.  Ron had also mentioned picking up Russian women in Murmansk; the Winston Churchill House of Friendships catered for the needs of foreigners,  but few sailors ever realised the terrible price the women would pay for friendship.

Related posts:

1. Capturing the Look of Love; Waterhouse’s Women.    The long neck is bent, the skin pale, the...
2. The dread of feeling too much; Edvard Munch and his women ‘I was out walking with two friends.  The sun began...
3. The Running of Spring   In just two weeks, the greening ghyll Hides naked...

 The long neck is bent, the skin pale, the gaze serious and sustained, sad yet determined, the lips are slightly parted, the body lithe, nubile, not a child but not yet a woman.  Waterhouse’s depictions of women express an ambiguity, an inscrutability, a mysterious, thoughtful reflection that enthrals and captivates. They seem to float endlessly between dream and reality, never betraying their secret.  The look is vulnerable, fearful; it evokes a timeless adolescent beauty, a touching innocence.  But the young women in Waterhouse’s paintings are not innocent.  They are comfortable with their nakedness.  And the parted lips and lingering stare express an erotic intensity, a longing, aching melancholy that demands satisfaction while arousing conflicts of excitement and fear. .    

Waterhouse’s women are unattainable.  Romance, after all, is a fantasy, a make believe, so far removed from reality that it generates an ineluctable sadness.  Waterhouse’s heroines may escape reality, but we know that no happiness will come out of it.  The sad beauty of A Mermaid (1900) is almost unbearable. Her yearning gaze evokes an overwhelming desire to comfort her, but at the same time, she is so totally absorbed in her own pathos, that she can never love any man nor indeed be loved by them.  The shell beside her contains pearls, the tears of the drowned sailors, who have given their lives in pursuit or her poignant beauty. The pale skin of her lower abdomen shades off into the impossible slimy muscular tail of a fish.  This combination of promise and withdrawal,  the handmaidens of sexual dysfunction and fear of intimacy, promote a state of frustration and addiction. Such women, beautiful, vain, narcissistic, drive men mad with desire.     

The Lady of Shallott (1888), Waterhouse’s most enduring image, is condemned to view the world through a mirror and never enjoy love.  For years, she refuses to submit, but no sooner than she gives way to desire for Lancelot – not the first to fall in this way – then she has to die for it.  The mounting erotic charge that builds to a dramatic conclusion is so perfectly narrated in Tennyson’s relentless metre, like Ravel’s Bolero in words; prohibition, desire, surrender and death – the haunting allegory of illicit sexual longing. 

She left the web; she left the loom,

She made three paces thro’ the room,

She saw the water lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume.

She looked down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide,

The mirror cracked from side to side,

‘The curse has come upon me’, cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Tennyson was such a horny old goat!

There is a world weariness, a wistful, troubled melancholy about Waterhouse.  His images capture with painterly symbolism the complex aesthetic of  emotional narrative with an intensity few can match. Even the innocence of Wildflowers (1902), evinces the wind of change that is about to sweep the bright young girl away into a darker sensuality and passion.  The same feelings are evoked in Psyche Opening the Golden Box (1903).   

But other images express a more disingenuous look of lust, a need to possess and exploit, a dangerous narcissistic love that has the power to destroy men. The Naiad (1893), who emerges from the stream upon the sleeping youth knows what she wants, the sex appeal, the power.  La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1893) kneels naked and vulnerable by her palely loitering knight, but she has bent him to her gaze, wound her hair around his neck.  He is lost!      

I met a lady in the meads

Full beautiful – a fairy’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light

And her eyes were wild.

John Keats (1820)

That same look is there in his depiction of Hylas and the Nymphs (1896).  Look at the confident unblinking hypnotic stare off the lead nymph, as she gently pulls at Hylas arm to unbalance him and draw him into the water.  Look at the dark intensity of her sister’s eyes.  Do we feel joy for Hylas in his bliss?  No. There is something disturbing, almost alien, in those looks.  Hylas will surely drown in their embrace.

Other paintings take the theme of la femme fatale, the ruthless sex goddess, a stage further.  Lycius, encased in armour, gazes down into the imploring eyes of Lamia (1905), her snake skin wrapped around her, who sucks the blood of those she seduces in vengeance for her betrayal. There is no fury like that of a woman scorned.  And regard the deep evil green composition of Circe Individiosa (1892), who, enraged by the refusal of the sea deity, Glaucus to desert his beloved Scylla, poisons the sea in revenge. ‘If I can’t have him, then nobody else will’.  The look is ruthless, cold and lethal.  And here’s the sorceress, Circe (1891) again, clad in a transparent grey-blue diaphanous gown, fragile and vulnerable, but with a hauteur that brooks no resistance as she holds aloft both her wand and the cup that will subdue Ulysses.          

So is Waterhouse exploring the fascination and fear that Victorian men had of female sexuality?  In ‘Consulting the Oracle’ (1884), seven middle eastern women listen with mounting excitement as the priestess relays the pronouncements that emanate from a shrunken skull.  These are not innocent maidens; they are impetuous, seductive, irrational, everything that Victorian women weren’t.  Victorian men had double standards; at home they might have respected their wife’s sexual repression, yet outside the home they were excited by the erotic assertiveness of the new woman.     

There was, nevertheless, deep concern about the independence of women.  For centuries, society has sought to confine women’s sexuality as a dangerous thing that can entrap, weaken and destroy men. Waterhouse is a man of his time.  He started painting women at a time when female sexuality was taboo and romance always had tragic consequences.  The Lady of Shallott is a ‘femme fragile’, who devotes herself to domestic duties and succumbs to ‘Irritable Weakness’.  Yet his time also witnessed a braver, more dangerous aspect of women. He was still painting in England when the Suffragettes were chaining themselves to railings. Consulting The Oracle celebrated what he saw as the emotional and sexual emancipation of women.    

He was also working during the early years of psychoanalysis,  Freud and later Jung were fascinated by the rich symbolism of myth, the archetypes.  They understood the terrible power of the seductress; Kali, Salome, Marta Hari, Isolde, the erotic enchantment that can enslave and entrap by the addictive combination of gratification and withdrawal.   Fear, as Jung recognised, is the antithesis of love, yet gains its power through the language of love. 

But why is Waterhouse more popular now than ever before?  Is it that we live a narcissistic world of make believe, romance and vanity?  Are  modern relationships based  less on the comforts of friendship and affection than on the manipulations of romance and fantasy?  Is this why relationships do not last as long and marriage as an institution is declining?  Have we become slaves to the deceptions of Facebook?  And don’t we have our own Pre-Raphaelite beauty?  A veritable cult has grown up around the haunting image of Kiera Knightly.  

Waterhouse weaves a wonderful spell, creates the impossible romance.  He glorifies the unattainable woman, who is worth it.  His work speaks to a deep-seated yearning for the merger of souls with The One who is our destiny.  But such make believe is so often doomed. Sooner or later, reality will disappoint and ‘The One’ will come to bear an uncanny resemblance to your mother.

‘I look at you in sheer despair

And see my mother standing there.’

Related posts:

1. The dangerous politics of love. The seventeenth century was a bad time for women.  They...
2. Love and Glory; the wondrous madness of it all. ‘It’s still the same old story; a fight for love...
3. The dread of feeling too much; Edvard Munch and his women ‘I was out walking with two friends.  The sun began...

You’ll know the story.  It is 1958 in Berlin. Michael, just 15, meets Hannah in the porch of her apartment.  It is raining, he is ill.  She is kind to him.  When he recovers some weeks later, he returns to thank her.  They have an affair.  Hannah, much older,  is in control; she demands he read to her, then they make love, but their trysts end abruptly when she leaves suddenly without telling him.   

Michael next encounters Hannah when he is a law student attending the war trials. He is shocked to recognize her as one of the prisoners.  She was in the SS and was responsible with 7 other officers for transporting 300 Jewish prisoners. There was an air raid, the church in which their captives were locked, burnt down and all except one of them died.  The guards could have opened the church doors but they didn’t.  The other women accuse Hannah as the ringleader.  They say that it was her who wrote the false report of the incident.  To validate their claims, Hannah is asked by the presiding judge to provide a sample of her handwriting.  Instead, she admits she wrote the report and is sentenced to life imprisonment. 

But Michael guesses the truth.  He realizes that Hannah is illiterate.  That’s why she was so keen he read to her.  She couldn’t have written the report.  He could have saved her. 

Some twenty years later, after his marriage has failed and he is living alone, Michael again reads to Hannah via a Dictaphone and sends the tapes to the prison.  Hannah devours them eagerly and uses them to teach herself to read.  It is her purpose and a kind of redemption.  She has no family.  When her time for release comes up, Michael is contacted to take care of arrangements for her, but he is reluctant.  The night before he is due to pick her up, she hangs herself.   

Stripped down to its essentials, this is a raw disturbing story.  The plot is roughly sketched in broad brush strokes. The film, directed by Anthony Minghella, captures it brilliantly.  Kate Winslet conveys the nuances of Hannah’s defensive secrecy to perfection. David Kross, who plays the young Michael, convinces as the callow youth ridden by guilt.  The love scenes are tentative and caring without being salacious.  But the greatness of this film and indeed the book resides in how it raises questions, days, weeks after the credits have wound down.    

What was Hannah’s background?  Where was she from? She had no family. What had happened to her parents?  Why was she illiterate?  Did she have no education?  We suspect a deeply disturbed background, perhaps abuse. 

And why did she join the SS as a guard?  Was she afraid her illiteracy would be discovered.  Was it this fear of exposure that caused her to run away from Michael. She had just been promoted from being a conductor on the trams to work in the office. Her shame would be discovered.   

And why was her illiteracy such a deep source of shame that she would rather die than admit it.  Did it represent another shame?  Or was it more a fear that if she exposed her illiteracy, her vulnerability could be exploited? 

Hannah is an enigma. Her secrecy is her protection and power. Those who are so fearful of being exploited themselves, tend to exploit other people.  Hannah undoubtedly exploited the innocence of Michael for both sexual and intellectual gratification. She  devastated his life.  He could not love again.  But darker still, there were hints from the trial that she would target the weaker of her captives, get them to read to her, perhaps gratify her lust and then select them for the gas chambers. 

But could she have done that?  We are sympathetic to Hannah. We see her through Michael’s eyes, a kind woman caught up in an awful situation. She is the victim of a miscarriage of justice. 

We all need to know that the one we love is good and will care for us. We cling to the romance of it all, the make believe.  The reality can be impossible to bear.  So why didn’t Michael rescue her?  Why did he say nothing?  Did the trial strip away the illusion,  expose Hannah as a human being who could perform the most evil deeds if the risk of not doing so demanded it.  Michael had glimpsed her dark side. Did he fear her liberty?  Or was it the shame of exposure that he feared?  How could he admit that he had consorted, not only with a much older woman, but he had loved a war criminal and mass murderer?    

The only way Michael could reconcile his obsessive and enduring love for Hannah with the awful truth was to conduct their relationship at a distance by reading to her and sending her the tapes.  She was safe in prison. He could express his love with no risk to himself.  But then, the stark reality of her release fractured the cover. He had to look after her. His ambivalence was obvious. How could Hannah commit herself to a dependant relationship with anybody, let alone a man who could no longer care for her unequivocally. It was impossible. How could she manage outside prison. She had to kill herself.        

The Reader was released late last year.  Kate Winslet was successfully nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars.  

Related posts:

1. Haunted! ‘Trauma’ and McGrath’s ghosts. Charlie is a psychiatrist, an expert on trauma. His marriage...
2. Keep on dancing Every Saturday evening,  sixteen million people turn on their televisions...
3. Existential emptiness; the tragi-comedy of McEwan’s Solar. You see people like Michael Baird all the time at...

where the Blackbird’s beguiling flute

stirs the heavy scent that lingers

across the trance of summer’s eve.

April has lain a fragrant quilt

over the moss that clothes

the limbs and secret belly

of the darkening wood.

Nodes of eager bracken thicken, uncurl

and thrust through cobalt covers.  

Subversive tubers reach into damp hollows

that reek with the sex of garlic.

An owl hoots!  Leaves burst free from swollen buds    

Then the dark roebuck, his mission complete,

withdraws silently across the blue shades

while verdant canopies stretch out to hide his shame.

Related posts:

1. After the rain. A curtain falls across the secrets of the ghyll, the...
2. If you go down to the woods today …….   Dark eyed, tired, seemingly bored with life, they lumber...
3. He brings me frogs When trees turn dim and lose their scent, And birds...