Hunger

I recently went to see Hunger, a film about the 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland, and more particularly about Bobby Sands, the first of the men to go on hunger strike and the first to die.

For me at least the film was unsatisfying. The hunger strikes had been such a large part of my own life at the time that I learned nothing new, either factually or emotionally. I know what happened, and I knew the passions on both sides - passions I shared, I would have been at Bobby Sands funeral if it had not coincided with my university exams.

The most strange thing about the film is the way it completely ignores everything that happened outside the prison, with the exception of the assassination of one prison guard. By doing so, it gives the impression that the hunger strikes were an intimate action that happened only within the secrecy of the prison, when in fact they represented a massive explosion of popular anger and activism. Hundreds of thousands of people marched, organised, agitated, and voted in support of the hunger strikers, but this was ignored in the film. The fact that Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone during his hunger strike was relegated to a mere title at the end of the film. Yet this is a fact that remains significant in Northern Irish politics a generation later.

Clearly the producer (Steve McQueen) set out to present only the intimacy of Bobby Sands life and death in the prison, but to an audience ignorant of the background this could have the effect of making the whole thing seem irrelevant. I watched the film in a Brussels cinema surrounded by Belgians who, in all likelihood, did not even recognise the voice-over of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps believing her entirely one-sided statements to reflect a 'neutral' narrator. The bilingual subtitling did not make clear that the drawling voice was one of the main protagonists in the story.

The Beach, by Alex Garland

I got (gently) criticised for piggy-backing on Amazon.com reviews when I blogged a few of the books I have read recently, so this time I'll ignore Amazon, and try to use only my own words.

My first thoughts on The Beach, before I started it, were slightly negative. My copy (shown above) has Leonardo di Caprio on the cover, as he starred in the film version of the book. I haven't seen the film, so I don't know what it is like, but when publishers use a film to retro-sell the book, it worries me. In addition, the group of figures on the cover (on Leonardo's chest!) look like an ad for Lost.

The book was not what I had expected, though.

Richard, the main character and narrator, is a credible example of the kind of rich western youngster that is seeking ever more extreme excitement in south-east Asia. His characterisation is fairly moderate - Garland resists the temptation to make him either heroic or anti-heroic. He just is what he is, warts and all. The cover blurb refers to Generation X, and in some senses Richard is a classic example of the stereotype - well-versed in TV and film culture, but largely uninterested in the actual cultures of the countries he is travelling in.

The plot is a strange mixture of utopian fantasy and The Lord of the Flies. Again, the cover blurb refers to The Lord of the Flies, but I had had that feeling even before I succumbed to the temptation of reading the cover reviews. The similarity, though was clear to several of the reviewers. Initially, though, I was more interested in the sense that Garland was trying to describe a type of Generation X utopia - an isolated beautiful spot inhabited by young people from all over the (western) world, where food and dope are free and plentiful, modern problems like illness and boredom are absent, and everyone is cool. Curiously absent is any mention of Generation X's other recreation, sex.

The utopia gets strained, though, and the modern world intrudes, ultimately destroying paradise. Perhaps Garland was trying to make some deep point, but it gets lost in the plot. Ultimately the book is simply a good read, retaining all the reader's attention right up to the end, which in typical Generation X style is a bit of a blur. Richard, the narrator, tends to take both the life and death of paradise fairly stoically, as if such things are expected by the jaded 'traveller'.

Garland's style is fairly sparse but effective. You are drawn into the book slowly - there are no clever literary hooks to grab you - but before long you want to continue reading simply because the book is interesting and readable. You don't really identify with Richard - he's too shallow for that - but you follow him nonetheless.

All in all, a good book, and Garland is a writer with talent. I have also read The Coma, his second book, and I would really ecomment that too.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

This morning I finished reading Atonement, by Ian McEwan. It is a lovely book and should probably have won the Booker Prize, instead of only being shortlisted (though, since I haven't read the 2001 winner, I cannot be certain). I entirely agree with the newspaper reviews quoted on Amazon which say:

'Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence', Independent .
'Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book - A superb achievement which combines a magnificent display of the powers of the imagination with a probing exploration of them', Sunday Times .
'... a fascinatingly strange, unique and gripping novel', Independent on Sunday

And Amazon's own review, which says:

'Atonement, McEwan's first novel since the Booker-winning Amsterdam, is an extraordinary achievement and possibly the finest work he has yet published. It is a engrossing book, full of narrative suspense and wonderfully defined characters. It is also a consciously literary novel, with allusions to Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James, but with none of the ponderous self-importance that label often suggests. Atonement confirms McEwan's great talents and well deserves its place on the Booker shortlist.'

Atonement is a classic Booker novel, in that it deals with powerful events and their effects on a small group of people, in a style more commonly associated with a number of Irish writers - Elizabeth Bowen, Ann Enright, John Banville and Willian Trevor.

It is hard to believe that Atonement was by the same author as Amsterdam. The latter was a weak book, I felt, and not a worthy winner of the Booker Prize.

A small unnoticed extinction in East Congo

The tragic situation in East Congo is outside the scope of this blog. The scale of death and suffering is unimaginable in modern Europe, and nothing I say below should take away from the misery of the people who have suffered for years and who are still suffering in Congo.

Apart from the humanitarian situation my interest in north-eastern Congo is due to the fact that it is - or was - the home of many variants of the great African game of Mancala. In the brief period between the colonisation of central Africa and its decolonisation several anthropologists collected tantalising glimpses of the richness of the region in terms of variants unknown elsewhere. Many of the writers said that many other variants existed, but had not yet been documented. Decolonisation, and the collapse of civilisation in several important mancala playing regions, mean that they may now never be collected. The widespread disruption and death in the region now means that much of the memory of these games is being lost. A displaced people is likely to lose large parts of its culture, through loss of artifacts (game boards), loss of the people who know the rules, or the homogenising effect of mixing with other peoples in refugee camps.

Men are the main players of mancala, but the war has separated many men from their friends and their children, and the knowledge of the games may not be passed on. The children will be more likely to play football or cards - these effects were visible even before the war. So by the time the war ends, as it must some day, there may have been a widespread, unnoticed, unknown, extinction of many mancala variants.

In 1977 a young anthropologist, Philip Townshend, published the biggest study of Congolese mancala games ever: Les Jeux de Mancala au Zaire, au Rwanda et au Burundi (Les Cahiers du CEDAF, Cahier 3, 1977)(Not on the internet - I got it via the library of the ULB in Brussels). In it he gives details of dozens of games played all over the region, many of which are threatened with extinction. How many more there were, we can only guess. In his conclusion, Townsheld says that "this study does not claim to be exhaustive. There are undoubtedly a large number of other games that are unknown to us, and it would be interesting if other researchers could complete this preliminary study" (my own translation from the original French). Unfortunately those other researchers never materialised, but instead war came, and amongst its sad unfortunate casualties may be a large part of the regions gaming culture.

Whether additional knowledge exists in the Africa Museum in Tervuren just outside Brussels is hard to know. The Museum only allows accredited researchers access to its collections, and provides no real information on its website. Townshend, in another publication in 1979, stated that the Africa Museum has a good collection of boards, but whether it has also the playing rules that they need, is unclear. In any case, boards and rules in cold wet Belgium do not compensate for the death of games in their natural habitat. If the games are lost in Congo, they are lost as real games. Our diversity as humans has probably just shrunk in this, as in so many other, aspects.

Janggi - Korean Chess

A short time ago I bought a set for Janggi, the Korean version of the great chess family. Janggi is more closely related to Chinese chess (Xiang Qi) than any other version, and it is generally believed that Janggi derives from an earlier version of Xiang Qi.

Janggi is played on a board similar to that of Xiang Qi, but without the river, which obviously affects some moves (in Xiang Qi the elephant piece cannot cross the river). The pictures below show the two sides set up in a conventional arrangement, and the empty board (paper, as is also common for Xiang Qi):

The pieces used in Janggi are flat, as in all other East Asian chess variants. They have the name of the piece written on the flat surface, in green for one side and in red for the other (or, at least this is the commonestcolour combination -modern Korean sets use other clours, such as blue). The pieces are usually hexagonal, as shown below, but again, modern Korean sets (and one reported from 1895) can be circular as well:

My set are basically cheap plastic pieces - I would like to get better wooden ones, but they seem to be unavailable in Europe. Most games shops are unaware of even the existence of Janggi - I asked in Just Games in Camden Lock (London), a long established games shop, and the owner has never heard of Janggi, despite selling nice wooden sets of Xiang Qi pieces. In Korea, though, you can get lovely sets, but I cannot figure out how to buy them, as the sellers website is in Korean only.

There are a few good websites that explain the rules of Janggi, including (of course) Wikipedia, and the Chess Variant pages. Written information in English is quite scare, and quite recent. The original source was the great games historial Stewart Culin, who wrote one of the earliest descriptions in his 1895 book Korean Games:

Unfortunately, Culin's book is not easily available - Amazon.com has some copies available second-hand, but at a price. I don't remember where I got my copy, but I think it was not too expensive at the time. It is a Dover Publications reproduction from 1991 (ISBN: 0486265935).

The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi

I recently read The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel. For the first half of the book I was pleasantly expecting it to be like Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani, a book I really enjoyed. (Incidentally, when you put "Londonstani" into Amazon.com as a search word, the second item on the list of 18 hits is The Buddha of Suburbia - by a different author, and with no obvious connexction. Obviously I'm not the only person who saw the similarity!).

The Buddha of Suburbia is not, unfortunately, anything like as good as Londonstani. It starts with promise, but the characters fail to develop, the plot never really comes together, and the story quickly becomes unbelievable and, frankly, silly. Although Kureishi may be drawing on his own experiences (though I doubt this), it certainly doesn't resemble what I know of the lives of Indians in England in the 1970s (and I was there during that time, and knew Indians).

The book's publisher, Faber and Faber, on their website say that "The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel, is a tour de force of comic invention, a bizarre, often hilarious, and totally original picture of the life of a young Pakistani growing up in 1970s Britain".

Oh dear ... they haven't even read their own book. One of the recurring threads in the book is Karim's annoyance at being called a "Paki" - he is, of course, Indian (the frequent references to Bombay may also give this away). Like this little fact, the rest of their self-serving review is also wrong - it is not a tour de force - more of a forced first novel. Read it if you want, but it isn't worth the price of a new book (I bought mine second-hand, of course).