Top 10 Films of 2016

It's that time of year again so here are my favourite films seen in the cinema this calendar year:

Julieta : the latest Almodovar is stunning and intensely moving. If this tale of a lost daughter is inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone, you can see the pomegranate seeds of guilt and loss in each generation.

Embrace of the Serpent : I can report that my serpent was, so to speak, fully embraced. Bracing, evocative, heart rending, psychedelic and beautifully photographed and directed.

Arrival : It was remarkably  emotional watching a film about the empathy of the alien in a dark and depressing week in which a narcissistic sociopath was elected to be the next President of the US. Forget the plot holes, this is a tour de force; Amy Adams is stupendous and the film gives us a faint glimmer of hope for humanity.

Manchester By The Sea (which hasn't opened in the UK yet) : the third great film by Kenneth Lonergan (after You Can Count On Me and Margaret - the latter probably one of my all time favourite films). A study of misery and guilt which packs a huge emotional punch.

Paterson : 'A bus driver who likes Emily Dickinson. Cool.' The quiet poetry in the everyday. Even more amazing, the usually monumentally annoying Adam Driver is absolutely brilliant in this wonderfully understated film.

Victoria : One of the most heart-poundingly intense films I've ever seen and one that reinforces the old adage that you should never underestimate someone who can play a note perfect version of the Mephisto Waltz at 5 in the morning after a night out clubbing.

Summertime : I really loved this: the dynamics that are explored in terms of gender, class, urban and rural culture, sexual orientation and age are familiar but this is a very engaging treatment with stellar acting all round. It's heart warming and heart breaking in the best manner.

Tale of Tales : Wonderfully realised. These are folk tales 'curated' in the early17th century with all of the weird, unsettling, shape shifting quality of a different time, their own often violent logic and delight in grotesques, a focus on bringing into the light things that lurk in the dark both of the imagination and human conduct. As with most fairy tales and folk tales they are deeply psychological. I loved it.

Things To Come : another Isabelle Hupert acting masterclass. It's never too early, or too late, for philosophy. The director Mia Hansen-Love bang back on form after the disappointment (to my mind) of 'Eden'.

Mustang : it may have elements of a fairy story but it is also bitingly realist in tone and completely absorbing.


Bubbling under the top 10 were:

Childhood of a Leader

A Bigger Splash

Baden Baden

Liberals (Always) Have The Best Tunes

In the near future 2016 is just going to be the year about which sane people say 'we don't talk about that' and move on to happier times. Let's hope that's true because this is a dismal time to be alive if you believe in, you know, stuff like liberal democracy, the rule of law, the separation of powers, one could even say western civilisation founded on Enlightenment values.  Indeed believing in such things seems now to be the test of belonging to the famous 'liberal elite'. 

One of the saddest effects of the vile, pernicious and mendacious campaigns that have been run by thoroughly unscrupulous politicians in the UK and the US has been to make identity based on race, origin or belief the test of whether one truly belongs. This breathtakingly illiberal tidal wave is now making how you look, how you speak and how you behave a matter of political concern rather than a matter of personal choice. It will affect how people are treated and indeed whether they are able to remain in places in which they have lived for generations. 

So whilst we have been well aware of culture wars for decades, particularly in the US, these have been framed as battles within a still predominantly liberal democratic context. Now that very context is under direct threat and if you are deemed to come out on the wrong side in whatever tests are applied all bets are off.

Culture is therefore centre stage in a political context in a way that many of us consider it should never be. In my view that is a catastrophe for the west and shaming for our nations and the best of their traditions. 

In such times one wonder whether there is any hope at all. 

I was musing about that on the way to hear the wonderful Anais Mitchell earlier this week. She is a fantastically gifted singer and songwriter from the US who has been developing amongst other things a musical set after the apocalypse based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice called Hadestown.

The second song that she played was a simple, plaintive piece originally written just after the younger Bush had been elected President called One Good Thing. The point was - is there a single good thing about this benighted country that has just elected such a person to the highest office? 

The answer for me was clear. Yes, you. And other people like you.

This was followed by a plea for us not to cut ourselves off from the US for the next four years, at least culturally.

There may be all sorts of cultural battles to be fought over the coming years but the one that it seems to me that liberals win hands down every time over the reactionaries and the demagogues and the bigots is when it comes to creativity.

Older readers may recall the film Bob Roberts which took as a central conceit the frank absurdity of a right wing protest singer. The basic point was that Bob was a fraud and only out to use this unusual career as a way of being elected. He even ended up arranging to be shot (non fatally) to boost his appeal.

So why is a right wing singer a much more unusual phenomenon than a liberal one? And why are liberal ones frankly so much better.

Back to culture linked to liberalism. If you believe that how you look, how you speak, what you believe and how you live your life is fundamentally a matter of personal choice to be respected in those terms your starting point is to value others. 

In artistic terms empathy and the ability to inhabit the perspective of others and a more instinctive curiosity about difference and what happens when you combine and mix is always going to open up far more possibilities than a perspective that simply wants to reinforce and control and separate.

But there's more to it than that. A liberal perspective makes it far more likely that that multiple points of view will be recognised and understood. And that extends to being critical of your own side. And being prepared to make fun of it because you want it to be better.

If you don't think you have all the answers you are going to see the inherent absurdity in much of the human condition but nonetheless value it greatly. It inspires a great deal of humour, particularly satire and irony. Its part of a commitment to improving the human condition as well as puncturing the posturing of the powerful and those who do think they have all the answers.

Liberals are also much more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. The sense that there aren't simple answers and that we move forward unsteadily. In contrast conservatives simply tend to want an end point (or a return to the past) and to have that point reinforced. 

Whilst conservatives often castigate liberals as preachy the opposite is more likely to be true. Talk radio in the US, dominated by conservatives, is preaching by another name. Generally to the converted.

Clearly there are lots of right wingers who sing. Just consider forms like country and western. But leaving to one side the alt and nu forms of country which have subverted it from a more liberal perspective, the traditional version is all about creating an echo chamber of self reinforcing values and morality within strict boundaries and formulae and with a clear conclusion. 

It's easy to mock some of the further reaches of sessions on Radio 3 at midnight that bring together gamelan, electric guitar and mouth organ to see what happens when you put three people in a room together and ask them to get on with it. But I'm personally very, very happy that it happens. And frankly it happens as a product of liberal values.  

My suggestion is that liberals are far more disposed to creative engagement with others, to self reflection and to a level of curiosity that leads to far better art. 

I recently saw a piece at the theatre called Heartbeats and Algorithms which amusingly but quite profoundly looked at the consequences of developing an algorithm that will predict how you will behave in any given situation. 

The conclusion was clear. Heartbeats win out over alogrithms. We don't want to be predictable and we don't want to be controlled.

That's a fundamentally liberal perspective. And it's why in my view liberals will always have the best tunes. 

Something to hang on to in these dark times.

Oh, and Anais finished with this.

Poised. Inscrutable.

I've been musing about the exhibition which recently closed at the National Portrait Gallery of photographs by William Eggleston. The focus on the quotidian and the mundane and his unsparingly realist aesthetic is nonetheless utterly compelling when presented as art in a gallery. There are no feints just wonderful composition.

Yet looking at his pictures put me in mind of David Lynch with all the unsettling, slightly off kilter and quite simply worrying intensity that suggests. Whilst the style is realist and the subjects are familiar the way that objects, but most particularly people, are presented is markedly distinct. I thought at tines that I might have entered the world of Mulholland Drive.

There is a constant sense, much sought after by photographers, of having captured a moment with a very clear before and after. The sense that these subjects are caught in the act but also that there is something almost alchemical happening. These moments rarely look comfortable. Some subjects stare at the camera with a slightly knowing quality. Others seem almost to ignore it. Some seem hardly able to bear it. Some seem all too aware and almost resigned.

Many seem both poised but also unknowable. Somehow inscrutable. There's a paradox for a photographer in being able to capture people so exquisitely in all of their detail and give the sense that they have just been interrupted and yet somehow leave them completely alien to the viewer. You have the sense that he doesn't want the photograph to tell you everything about them. In fact, he wants you to know that the other is truly unknowable.

He can show the moment and you know there's a story from which it is taken but the book is elsewhere and the cover can only be opened by the person in picture.

So I emerged feeling that these were stills from a whole series of films that I was sure that I'd seen ...but couldn't quite place.

Films that I wasn't really being invited to watch.

Flashes from a past around which we can weave dialogue and narrative.

But scintilla.

Ravishing and secret at heart.

Ou Est Pierre? A Dream Play

Where indeed is Pierre? Furthermore, who is Pierre? And who is looking for him? And why?

In the fabulous production at The Vaults of Strindberg's A Dream Play, the question is posed in ludic and ever more exaggerated manner by an ostensibly French woman situated in what might be a kitchen set for a rudimentary breakfast or what we might take to be a rather down at heel bistro. Either way she is accompanied and indeed prompted by increasingly urgent cello refrains. Her desperation is palpable. The precise focus for her question much less so.

The play won't yield easy answers, as Strindberg himself said of it:

"The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, dissolve and merge. But one consciousness rules them all: the dreamer's; for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples and no laws. He does not judge or acquit, he merely relates; and because a dream is usually painful rather than pleasant, a tone of melancholy and compassion for all living creatures permeates the rambling narrative."

The evening has begun listening to Laura Moody playing cello whilst people that we gradually come to recognise as members of the cast mingle with the audience and listen to our conversations. Who is who is not apparent and not intended to be. The sense is that we are being lulled as we start out on our dream journey being met by the gods who have descended to witness and experience human life and in particular its pain manifest through the everyday, the familiar and the familial in particular through marriage and its discontents.

Initially Agnes (the daughter of the gods) cannot speak but only utter guttural sounds. She touches people and looks surprised, occasionally pleased, almost satisfied. Then we move inside.

Using the arches and spaces below Waterloo Station as a setting for a peripatetic production is a stroke of some genius because they allow for the kind of perspectival shifts from crowded intimacy to long vistas exactly as in a dream. The cavernous spaces, the shadows, the echoes, the rumblings from the tubes and trains all add to the sense of dislocation.

A couple argue in their bedroom as we stand around as observers, the dialogue interrupted periodically by a man constrained by a chain round his waist attached to an unseen post or person, who enters to hand over notes. He cannot speak. His messages look urgent. We don't know their content. We have heard muffled shouts and arguments and sounds from beyond the room.

There are bravura sequences in which we sit as children cross legged in front of Miss having to finish lines in a doggerel song - and then the lights go out. Altogether.

In such sequences, presided over by Laura Moody looking for all the world like Athena with a cello, the strokes of the bow at times almost guide the pace and the diction of the characters and at others seem to act as a refrain of what has been said.  We are never sure in the dream world whether we are actors or authors.

At the culmination, Agnes 'dies' reflecting on the pain that she has seen and experienced; a pain for which she has compassion. And whilst we can rightly see this play as a monumental achievement which presages the explicitly surreal; at root it is actually the humanity that shines through. We all dream. There is still no answer to the problems of life. But we can empathise with the plight of our fellows.

When the cello strikes up again at the end of the play one senses that this is just one cycle of the dream. Recurrence is the theme. It will all happen again and again. Subtly different depending on the dreamer but running over the same traumas and problems and seeking a resolution that is always just out of sight, just out of reach.

El Sur: A Triumph In Chiaroscuro

'The South' is a 1983 film by Victor Erice - the director of the spellbinding Spirit of the Beehive. Both films deal with aspects of Spanish history and in particular the consequences of the civil war. El Sur is set in the very north of Spain in a deliberately damp and cold landscape, the family around whom the story is spun living in a house on the edge of town joined to the rest of the area by a long, straight road which is referred to as the border.

The father used to live in the South, in Sevilla, but left for reasons that are shown to be both personal and political. The effect of the fracture in the family, in politics, and in the his way of life is reflected in the way that characters are frequently lit half in the light and half in shadow. The expertise with which this contrasted light and shadow is used throughout the film is little short of astonishing.

This contrast can be seen as reflecting both the sun and light of Andalucia and the dreary winter in Galicia (or similar); of the period before and after the civil war but most profoundly in what it conveys about the essential unknowability of the other. Even the doting daughter comes to realise that her father has many secrets which revolve around his former life in the South.

Throughout there is a feeling of inhabiting liminal space and peering into obscurity. Scenes emerge only gradually into light, frequently lit from one side in a deliberately painterly style and even then as likely to fade away into nothingness as to become clear.

The obscurity of what has happened is mirrored in the quasi magical powers of dowsing and hypnotism with which the father is suggested to be endowed. In one sequence at the daughter's first communion, he appears from the shadows at the back of the church to which he then returns having promised not to 'go away'.

The daughter of the family acts as the centre of gravity seeking to understand her father as her mother retreats further and further away. In one sequence she hides under the bed and refuses to be found thinking that if she retreats into silence like the others it will shake them into behaving differently. Instead, the father appears more and more of a revenant; someone who is in many senses dislocated. His refusal to go back to the South but the increasingly clear emotional bonds that it holds for him ultimately conflicting to tragic effect.

The music heightens this sense of dislocation. The wondrous piano music of Granados is a modernist take on traditional Spanish forms; Ravel in minor key melancholy mode adds a sense of muted but simultaneously profound interiority.

As a film it is simply magical; a work of subtle genius that conveys huge amounts through small inflections. At the very end the daughter does indeed leave on a visit - it is clear that she is coming back - for the South. The visit, it is suggested, will aid her return to health. More profoundly, it will perhaps start to mend the wider fractures that have been evident throughout.

Referendum PTSD

The mental health charity Mind describe PTSD in the following manner:

"If you are involved in or witness a traumatic event, it is common to experience upsetting, distressing or confusing feelings afterwards. The feelings of distress may not emerge straight away – you may just feel emotionally numb at first. After a while you may develop emotional and physical reactions, such as feeling easily upset or not being able to sleep.

This is understandable, and many people find that these symptoms disappear in a relatively short period of time. But if your problems last for longer than a month, or are very extreme, you may be given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder."

I'm beginning to think that large sections of the British population are suffering from some of the early symptoms following the catastrophe of the EU referendum - and that whilst we are still well under a month on from the event itself many of us are going to succumb to a fuller version of what might be termed Referendum PTSD.

Emotional numbness was the first reaction. The sheer horror of what had happened was so intense that the mind did indeed focus on some quotidian tasks like the ironing or the washing up. That shifted gradually into a mood of really intense anger punctuated by moments of utter sadness in which people just wanted to cry. 

Anger was the dominant emotion though: for the first few days after the referendum I would have verbally assaulted anyone I met who was an Outer and traduced them for their stupidity, perfidy, arrogance; you name it. This was an absolutely overwhelming anger of the kind that reflects sheer disbelief that some of your fellow citizens can have been so wilful, so blind, so frankly crazy as to have ditched the future of country on the basis of prejudice. I ran conversations in my mind in which I sarcastically asked Outers whether they were an idiot or a bigot - although they did have the option to be both. I went round kicking street furniture and hitting street lamps with newspapers. We all posted furiously on social media as if to exorcise some of the pain by sharing it with others. I shouted in coffee shops to such an extent that I just had to leave.

Then there was the disbelief. Or rather a refusal to accept. I ran through increasingly bizarre and Byzantine schemes to overturn the result of the referendum - everything from a General Election to a refusal by Parliament to ratify the result even to the extent of wondering whether someone could be impeached - although quite who and about what was never clear.  

The desperation to deny, to find ways to overturn the result, to just shout abuse at the leadership of the Outs for their arrogance all start to fade. 

Underpinning all of this surface emotion had been a sense of dread that then took over and started to form a kind of occlusion; all is grey and misty, skies are leaden and there is no sign of light. There is a pain behind the eyes and headache that never fully dissipates

This sense of ongoing dread was founded on the growing realisation that there really was a new dispensation and one that was here to stay.

A dispensation in which all that is worst about the country was celebrated; the narrow minded, Little England, atavistic and indeed nativist sentiment that has been confined to the wilder extremes seemed to have moved towards the centre of the stage. That this country was never going to look and feel the same again and that the open, tolerant, sceptical and outward looking approach that seemed the obvious way to engage with a complex and inter-dependent world were not obvious to many and indeed was being directly assaulted. 

Many of our fellow citizens started to be victimised and abused as bigotry and hatred of difference emerged fully from the shadows. The sheer speed with which this has happened and the scale to which it has done so is extremely frightening. 

It feels as though the world outside the front door, even in 78% Remain Hackney, has changed greatly for worse and that we are peering into an abyss in which yet more horrors are the more likely to be unleashed.

That deep and pervasive sense that you no longer feel as at home in your own country as you did a matter of weeks ago is traumatic. There is a general sense of apprehension. It feels as though my view of the world has been taken out and stamped on by people who have no true sense of what they are doing and may have no awareness of the sheer damage that they have inflicted on society. Principles and bonds that we had taken as just part of being a modern European nation have been shaken such that we now don't recognise ourselves. Our European friends look on us with alarm and pity and incomprehension and they are right to do so. A circular firing squad is never a good place to be and we seem to have committed our future to just such as formation.

Anxiety, detachment, being easily upset or incandescently angry and moving between them at speed, being constantly irritable and just feeling intense distress at any reminders of what has happened are classic PTSD symptoms. Put on top of that a pervasive sadness and a deep seated loathing of those who have wilfully led us to this pass and you have the full sense of it.

So what would a CBT response to Referendum PTSD suggest? I think it would start from the well observed tendency of the depressed and traumatised to catastrophise and to over generalise; to magnify the negative and minimise the positive.

Is there any opportunity to re-conceptualise the referendum at the moment? Initially, maybe we can try to see the humour, however dark, in what has happened and the degree to which disaster has already been visited on some of the architects of Out. They will left to chew over the degree to which their little elite debating society game in which it matters not whether you are really right as long as you can muster the most plausible argument has backfired on them. So there is some satisfaction to be had in the hubris of some of the main players. Laughter is something demagogues hate. But there are only so many times that you can write pieces about turbots.

So most importantly, we can also realise that the most awful thing that we can do for ourselves and for our fellow citizens is to succumb to the trauma, to the feeling that it is all so awful that we are powerless. Those I dread most feed off that sense of desperation and hopelessness. They sound plausible if your narrative is that all is broken. A modern, outward looking country needs to be confident that it benefits from living in accordance with Enlightenment values: rationality, respect for the value of the individual, abiding by the rule of law and putting superstition of all kinds into a box marked for private consumption.

We can all live by these values a small amount each day. I think in CBT terms its the equivalent of learning to walk along the street able to look others in the eye with mutual respect, being kind when we can and thinking that, however tempting it is, the best thing is not to get mad - but to get even.

Thoughts On The Causes Of The Present Discontents

Edmund Burke's pamphlet written in 1770 was focused on what he saw as the malign influence of the Court operating through the Royal prerogative on the operation of Parliament and in particular the House of Commons.  Those favouring exit from the European Union have a similar obsession about the degree to which the sovereignty of Parliament is being trammelled by others.

Even if that is a stretch it's still a neat title for some reflections on just why we are so unhappy as a nation at the moment as to do something as ridiculous and self defeating as to leave a trading bloc with our major partners and turn our back on an institution which was founded in large part to prevent a return to war in Europe.

The single most depressing aspect of the result is what it says about us culturally: insular, nativist, backward looking, increasingly xenophobic and in some respects simply bigoted and with a wholly misguided view about taking back our sovereignty in a world which is in fact increasingly inter-dependent and in which the major threats on the environment, the economy and security can only be addressed through international and multi-lateral action.

That is not the country in which I want to live so here are some reflections on our present discontents in the light of what can only be described as a catastrophe for the country and for liberal democracy in yesterday's referendum result:

1. Our politics has been irretrievably coarsened by the pernicious mendacity of the Out campaign which traded from the outset on fear, fostered hatred and racism and told several major lies which it failed to retract. The fact that it worked should worry us all greatly. Even more worrying is that anti-politics has taken hold and been used egregiously by those who themselves belong to the elite. If you no longer trust your politicians where else do you go in a democracy?

2. We live in a post factual and increasingly an anti-rational country. This is a threat to the very Enlightenment values that underpin liberal democracy and the rules by which we consent to live for the benefit of all. If there are no facts that cannot be trumped by prejudice and no rational analysis that cannot be overcome by common sense (of a particular kind - that of the angry, white, middle aged or elderly male for the most part) how do we sensibly regulate discourse and debate?

3. Referendums are favoured by those who are no friends of liberal democracy. They are by their very nature binary. The world is not. It is astonishing that Gove, Johnson and others suggested that they had to wrestle with their consciences and weigh up the arguments to the final moment before declaring for Out. Having done so they gave every impression that the world would end if we did not leave the EU. Referendums divide and push to the extremes. Liberal democracy needs nuance and balance and pragmatism to make difficult choices and reflect the spectrum of opinion. I know which version of democracy I want to live under.

4. Culturally, we are a divided nation and one that increasingly sees those divisions as impossible to bridge. I am a metropolitan liberal living in inner London, in one of the most diverse societies in the world and wholly comfortable with an outward, open, tolerant and cosmopolitan atmosphere. Where I live Remain scored 78% in the referendum. I know no one who voted Out. Yet outside most of the cities and towns we have the reverse; we have people who feel ill at ease and uncertain about openness because it seems to have few if any benefits for them. The two increasingly do not meet. They shout at each other and mutually despair. That is a disaster for the country.

5. Young people have been screwed by older people. It's a clear and ongoing pattern that young people are having their futures sacrificed and their opportunities trammelled because of the views and actions of their parents and grandparents generation. How can it make remote sense to allow the Baby Boomers who have had such a cushy life compared to their parents to screw the living daylights our of their children's generation? We will all be the poorer for it and our political system does nothing to help address the issue.

6. More and more people feel that their lives are precarious. This is at root an economic problem - those responsible for the Crash were never held to account properly and instead politicians obsessed by counter productive austerity have enforced draconian punishment on their own workforces and populations. Economically insecure people will understandably look for an answer and demagogues are all too ready to give them scapegoats to blame. If we do not have greater economic equality our democracy is further degraded.

7. Our wider framework of rights and liberties is under threat. The European Convention Human Rights was not on the ballot paper but we can be sure that the Outers will have it in their sights. The obsessive concern with removing rights from the vulnerable because of a few marginal cases which seem to favour undesirables is one of the most disturbing aspects of current political debate. Yet again we are at risk of ditching the very stuff that makes liberal democracy function.

8. Fascism is happening now in Britain in 2016. We have just witnessed the brutal killing, in cold blood, on the street, of a Labour MP by a member of a far right party. This is an incident that should shock us to very core. In other parts of Europe there are fascist or neo-fascist parties already in power  and they play on exactly the kind of divisions that are developing in the UK. In Poland or Hungary they play on a largely poorly educated rural population to outvote the metropolitan areas and provide a foothold in power from which changes to the constitution and the whole apparatus of politics can be made. We need to be fully aware of what is happening because if we hide under the duvet we know that eventually 'they' come for you and by then there's no-one else left to help.

9. Populism is ugly. Classical republicanism was fundamentally a system the protects against the arbitrary exercise of power. It is the foundation of a free society. If we let our economic insecurity allow us to throw away the rules and mechanisms that allow us to make decisions in an ordered and grounded way through our elected representatives we will all live to rue the day.

So we are a discontented nation; increasingly angry and increasingly focused on purported remedies being sold by snake oil salesmen and charlatans. The experience of the Referendum should make us all worry about the degree to which our whole democracy is at risk if we do not start to come to our collective senses and make the arguments of principle about why, however imperfect, liberal democracy is better than anything else on offer.

The Three Cornered World

The missing corner of the three cornered world is common sense.

This absolutely exquisite novel from 1906 by one of the most revered of Japansese writers, Natsume Soseki, considers to droll but also profound effect how a slightly hapless artist seeks to engage 'non-emotionally' with the world as he visits a remote mountainous spa or hot springs.

As the protagonist describes this aesthetic using the analogy of the game of Noh; the pleasure that we take from engaging in the game is not from any skill at presenting the raw human feelings of the 'everyday' world but:

"...from clothing feeling 'as it is' in layer upon layer of art, and in a kind of slowed serenity of deportment not to be found in the real world".

That phrase 'slowed serenity of deportment' (instantly becoming one of my favourite ever lines) is a beautiful way of capturing a wholly different disposition towards the world is required in order to be truly able to appreciate its radiance.

One might now think that this is a novel of insufferable self indulgence and endless noodling about the struggles of the artist to capture the ineffable with a cover by Roger Dean. The good news, including for the ineffable, is that it isn't.

It is indeed a serious meditation about the ideal of writing a novel composed entirely in haiku (don't worry, this isn't it) and Soseki was clearly expressing his scepticism about the general movement in Japan to embrace Western modernism and realism.  The culmination of the plot, such as it is, reflects precisely that concern.

It is, however, a wonderfully light meditation focused on the bewitching daughter of the spa owner who in my mind now ranks up there with Elizabeth Bennett as the literary character you'd most like to find on Guardian Soulmates.  The interaction between artist determined to live non-emotionally and the rather emotional feelings that he clearly has for her is delightful:

"Were one to enumerate all the words, in every language from East and West from classical times until today, that writers have devoted to evaluating the qualities of beautiful women, the list may well rival in length the complete canon of the Buddhist sutras."

Nami is a deeply intriguing character who has suffered a great deal and but is able to discombobulate our protagonist with ease. In effect the central sections of the book play out as a series of engagements between the two of them wonderfully undercut by a sense of playfulness but one that also reflects profound despair, certainly on her part.

This emotional engagement is then refracted by the artist in his attempts to write haiku and his failure to paint.

It is also wonderfully realised in a way that is true to the divergence between what Soseki was seeking to achieve and what a conventional plot would demand, in that nothing actually happens.

But just listen to this passage about the artist's appreciation:

"Imagine that a fault appears in the earth where once stillness has reigned, and the whole begins to move. Aware that movement is contrary to its original nature, it strives to return to its original immobility; yet once unbalanced momentum compels it to continue its motion, so that now we see a form that from sheer despair chooses to flaunt the movement enforced on it. Were such a form to exist, it would serve precisely to describe the woman before me."

The central point of the novel for me is that whilst there is no consolation to be had from the fact that the world is indifferent to us - not in a way that is fickle or tricksy but just in the profound sense that it will go on regardless - our efforts to be brave or do the right thing and our all too frequent experience of suffering need to have something to bring balance.  It is the pleasure from art - from painting, from poetry and from drama - that provide that pleasure 'within this anguish'.

So on the rare occasions when the artist is able to achieve the intoxicating appreciation of the thing in itself, the pleasure that is secured for the artist and the observer matters all the more.

And here, by way of a sign off, is the great man himself with a slightly less prominent handlebar moustache than was sometimes the case.

"A world where falling in love requires marrying is a world where novels require reading from beginning to end".

That's the 'non-emotional' way of reading. But you should read this one, non-emotionally or otherwise.

Raise a thimble of sake, one and all.