The Air Attack Warning

Well, while I'm here (not I'm not pissed, just couldn't sleep), I thought I'd update the world on the TTD Doomsday Clock. This interesting device measures the nearness of Threads to my imagination. At the moment it is quite close: the ideas and vocabulary of the teleplay are constantly at hand. For example, on Saturday the Thornbury Tesco suffered a powercut. Clearly my first thought was that a nearby nuclear explosion was to blame. It turned out to be rain. There was no need to panic buy, and no chance of hearing Five Live interrupting their premiership coverage to tell us that a US Carrier had been sunk in the Persian Gulf.

Bloody hell- the end of the world, as read by Richard Bacon. It's enough to make you seek out the prompt radiation.


This might have been influenced by a recent re-reading of Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence. This is an intriguing book, published in 1985, which posits a nuclear war as seen from er, the banks of the Severn (the other side from Berkeley and Hill). In this novel, written for teenagers, there are explosions at - Bristol, Oldbury, Cheltenham, Gloucester - everywhere. And the destruction is so complete that mutations become dominant from the next generation onwards. These mutations eventually form the basis of a new species of human, one with the memory of nuclear war embedded in their psyches. The curious thing about this novel is that there is a strong biblical subtext - this is a kind of Noah's Ark, except that the flood was caused by us, given space by God to do so, for reasons of his own, namely the new, superior race that was to emerge. In short - we, homo sapiens, had failed. We were to be allowed to fail in order to be destroyed by our own hand. The replacements, a kind of cross between Stone Age man and the Tomorrow People, would not repeat the mistakes.

Or so the story went. A silly one, at the end.

I also re-read Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters last week. This is a collection of 5 short stories on the subject of nuclear war. 3 are crap, two are good. The worst bit, actually, is Amis' introduction, which is typical 80s Amis, when he was still full of his own shit. He routinely denounces writers he doesn't agree with as "subhuman" but does not appear to have done *any* research on his subject beyond reading Jonathan Schell's book on it - he hasn't watched Threads or the Day After or The War Game, for example. Like a lot of writers, he pulls bits of quantum theory out of his arse and pretends he knows about physics and maths. He also completely gets geopolitics arse over tit and confidently announces we cannot possibly defeat the Soviets on any level, nuclear or otherwise, ever. This was written in 1987.

"Formal First"? Fuck me, Mart, not in maths, mate; not in maths.

I also had the deflating experience of re-reading The H Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter, which on a second reading turns out to have been copied straight out of Threads, and to have utterly mixed up 80s and 60s Civil Defence, and to have snuck in some shit references to Reagan and Thatcher as wanting to prolong the Cold War - how dishonest can you be? I mean really, how much of a liar do you have to be to think that Reagan, who instigated and carried through summit talks with Gorby with the ideal of getting rid of all nuclear weapons, just wanted to keep the conflict simmering for ever? And Thatch? Did she *really* want a strong USSR in perpetuity? Bollocks did she - she wanted it defeated by its own subjects, as it was (and the forces of economic necessity, etc etc). Bloody hell - I'll say this for your lefty writer - they can be utterly, deliberately, ignorant.

In that respect, maybe Daisy Dukes and bikinis on top have their attractions after all.


The TTD Doomsday Clock stands at 11.42pm

Bill Haydon

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this guy. I've just finished Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, and listened to it on the radio, so clearly I've experienced quite a lot of Bill Haydon lately. Briefly, my problem is this. He's an absolute fucking bastard. I mean the bastard of all bastards. He is a role model for the younger men at the Circus, is No2, is generally idolised - and has been a Soviet mole for 20 years! Worse than that, according to the Radio 4 version, he reckons he's a Colonel in Soviet Intelligence!

If I am writing this with all the subtlety of a 4 year old who's just realised that the witch in Hansel and Gretel isn't as nice as she first seemed, then fair enough. But, even though it is obvious who the mole is from an early stage, the unmasking of the hero of all these characters is still a shock. It's a shock you feel on the other characters' behalf more than on your own. It's the betrayal, the smiling, charismatic betrayal he has carried with him all this time - and which has killed so many people along the way. The brilliance of his career at the Circus is vastly exceeded by the brilliance of his career with the Soviets. Bastard Bill Haydon, not only being a good spy and a brilliant mole, but being loved so much by everyone else. Being loved and cutting it to pieces.

When he is debriefed by Smiley, he gives nothing away, and only makes Smiley feel that Haydon as a man doesn't reall exist at all. This is awful, because you desperately want Haydon to be beaten up, kneecapped and shot. But - the novel is only vaguely about spies and spy rings. Its about love and hate. Smiley does not, cannot hate Haydon, Guillam has to make himself want to hurt him. For neither of them does revenge really enter into it - nor does Haydon expect it to. He expects to keep his good reputation, his history of service, his charisma - all intact. He's not delusional as such, merely un-self aware. Smiley loves Ann of course, and Haydon slept with her - not because he loved her, but much worse than that - on orders. Subverting love altogether. Haydon tries to communicate to Smiley some kind of love for the USSR but it only comes out as a frustrated aristocrat trying to influence the world when he knows his own country can't. Smiley's greatest gift in this book is his love - of Ann, of duty, of Britain, even of his colleagues at the Service (eg Connie Sachs).

Bill Haydon is a sore, but not a festering one - he doesn't itch enough for that. He doesn't make enough itching. As a result, will he achieve the fame and notoriety he wanted? Will he be loved?

Nope. Chances are, even if he hadn't have been topped by another man who deeply loved him, ie Jim Prideaux, he'd have been like Philby. A scalp, but one who doesn't quite know his place. And the historians he thinks will write his apologia, thanks to Smiley, probably will never get to know about him.

He will be nothing, the net result of his betrayals.

Of course, he's based on that cunt Philby, who ruthlessly exposed agents in the Soviet Union only for them to be shot, and who was convinced he was a Colonel in the KGB only to find that he was, instead, a largely washed up communist arsehole, who like all the other fuckers, drank too much vodka.

In fact, I hate Bill Haydon so much, I'm changing my name - to Bill Haydon.

Poor Piggy

Proof, if any were needed, that the obesity crisis is a grave health issue.

Here we see the consequences of being overweight. Not only are you vulnerable to psychopaths levering massive rocks down at you, but you don't even get a decent death scene.

The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch
exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy,
saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air
sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded
twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his
back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff
came out and turned red. Piggy’s arms and legs twitched a bit, like a
pig’s after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow
sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went,
sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.

"twitched a bit"?
"stuff came out"?
"like a pig's after it has been killed"?
"no time for even a grunt"?

Where is the dignity? The sense of a life lost? The utter senseless waste? The deep tragedy of the death of civilisation?

No - "stuff came out".

Piggy's death is made comical by the shape and bearing of his bloated body. Had Piggy been slim, like Simon, there'd have been real emotion in his death.

My students yesterday laughed at the death of Piggy.

Laughed.

Kids - don't eat that pie. It's not worth it -

Do you want a comical death?

Three Types of Simile

Here's something I wrote while deeply bored some time ago. As you can imagine, I'm still desperately bored - too bored even to blog propely, though I've started posting again over at CTS. I had a volume of Hardy and a cup of tea to hand when I wrote it.

The first type of simile simply tries to invoke some genuine quality of a real object through reference to another object. The relevant cliché is “as hot as an oven”. With these “concrete” similes, the danger for the writer is that cliché is difficult to avoid; exaggeration also creeps up on you. But the possibility is always there for a simple simile of this type to contain other, hidden meanings or connotations. Take this example from Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Clock Winder’: “It is as dark as a cave”. Nothing too complicated there, the image is clear, the reference, obvious. But think for a while on the nature of caves. Claustrophobic, tapering into ancient rocks, the home of unknown streams, stalactites and stalagmites, the origins of human civilisation, hidden realms. The darkness of the very ordinary night Hardy is explaining now takes on a more psychological aspect. The depth of similes such as these is, of course, entirely up to the writer. But writers and students should be encouraged to think very carefully about the objects they choose to place into their similes.

The second type does the same thing, but invokes non-existent objects that people are nonetheless familiar with. For example: “Quick feet as light/As the feet of a sprite” from the poem ‘Signs and Tokens’. It is easy to see the reference, even though there are (as far as we know) no such things as sprites. The word “sprite” itself has become almost a metaphor for quickness and lightness. With this kind of simile a writer can convey some sense of numinosity or give an ethereal atmosphere to a scene or idea. A clichéd example of this type would be something like, “She looked like an angel”. A better one would be this, from Hardy’s poem ‘Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune’, “..sweet as angels’ laughters”.

The third type of simile intends to reference the object or quality only vaguely or slightly to anything, and is instead a satire, or a play with language for its own sake. This is exceptionally difficult to write appropriately. Most usually it is done to make the reader question the writing process and think about the difficulty of communication. It is mainly associated with modernist and post-modernist writing. An example would be “The years were like the cries of children”, in which a sense of fear is invoked, but otherwise the similarities are slight or non-existent.

These types of simile can also be adapted, extended or cut. Often a writer will slide the usual expressions into “hot like an oven” or “oven-hot” or “with the heat of an oven” or some other phrase. To avoid cliché and extend the image – though this has to be done with caution – a writer might take a simile like “she looked like an angel” and change it to “she looked like an angel, full of its sadness for humankind” – the idea being to give the object of reference more detail in order to make the image more complex. In the following quotation Hardy doubles his simile to give it more shades of meaning:
From tides the lofty coastlands screen
Come smitings like the slam of doors
Or hammerings on hollow floors

(from ‘The Wind’s Prophecy’)