Graham – Graham Stull

My review of Robert Harris’ ‘Agrippa’

Agrippa by Robert Harris

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Historical fiction is the paint-by-numbers of fiction writing. It lets you do the fun part – adding the colours of description and the shades of narration to the dry outline of recorded history – but without having to do the hard work of skillfully sketching the contour lines that define plot and character. And because the story already has brand recognition, you are guaranteed some degree of buy-in from your readers, simply by choosing a piece of history everyone knows.
The downside is the limits to how much artistry you can achieve within the confines of a story once told by God, and then badly retold by a slew of stuffy academics. Your art is constrained by the fine lines you are forced to walk as you paint: Slip too much into history, and you bore your audience. Slip too much into fiction, and you risk the trust of readers who expect you to stay true to what actually happened.
In Agrippa, Robert Harris manages to walk this fine line, but only barely. On the one hand, the very choice of canvas is to the author’s credit. He has selected a truly interesting central character, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the right-hand-man of Augustus Caesar; combined with an equally interesting period in history, the turbulent years after Julius Caesar’s assassination leading into a civil war that brought down the Republic and gave birth to the Empire. For lovers of ‘Rome Porn’ like me, there isn’t much for an artist to do in terms of colour choice to guarantee an enjoyable read: a stab of red as bloodlusted legions clash on the battlefield, a few hard strokes of flesh-colour as adulterous togas fall to the tiled floor of a sumptuous villa overlooking the Tiber. The palette is tried and true.
The problem is Harris doesn’t try very hard to make Agrippa feel true. The narrative device, a first-person retrospective from the protagonist’s deathbed, means our eponymous hero comes into the story weary and disillusioned, and this tone is carried across the entire novel, leaving no place for a character arc. We should feel the bright colours of youth slowly turn muddy and dun, as Agrippa’s noble friend and patron Octavius rises to power as Augustus, and becomes mired in the hypocrisy and filth of Roman politics. Instead we are treated to moments where the narrator tells us that he is too tired and fed up to recount the details of this or that battle or journey across the Adriatic Sea. What the reader hears instead is that Robert Harris himself is too tired to finish painting in all the numbers on his canvas. Time is running out, but not the time Agrippa has left before succumbing to his old war wounds, rather the time Harris has left before succumbing to his publisher’s deadline.
For all this, Harris remains a competent, if pedestrian, writer – good enough to put into words some surprising and entertaining details. I was struck by the descriptions of the hydraulic engineering works credited to Agrippa: canals, aqueducts and sewers. But most of all, I liked the parallels to the modern era. For instance Augustus Caesar’s frequent references to ‘upholding the Republic’ decades after his uncle had crossed the Rubicon resonate in today’s world, where the United States still calls itself a ‘Republic’, decades after JFK was assassinated for attempting to stand against what was already an American Empire by 1963.
Enjoy Agrippa for the competent, interesting story that it is. But don’t expect great art out of a tired novelist who can barely write colours between the lines.

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My review of Colm Tóibín’s ‘The Magician’

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a longtime fan of Thomas Mann’s work, I was reluctant to pick up this quasi-biography, especially knowing it was written in the contemporary era; a time when the woke agenda’s revisionist impulses are injected into every historical account with the feckless zeal of an mRNA vaccine campaign – turning 18th England into a racial melting pot, and imbuing female protagonists with the physical strength and courage of ten doses of toxic masculinity. The risk of this one getting the tone badly wrong was magnified by Mann’s complex relationship with sexuality. I feared the biography of one of my favourite writers would be reduced to a prop for virtue signalling some banal cliche of the 2020s LGBTQ3.1415PI+ agenda.
I should have trusted in the craftsmanship of Colm Tóibín. From the early pages on, the author shows us that he has a deep love and respect for Mann’s oeuvre. Not only are we plunged straight into the small, mercantilist world of late Hanseatic Lübeck, but the very pacing and tone of the narration mirror the style of Buddenbrooks, Mann’s own autobiographical account of his early life in Lübeck. Tóibín outdoes himself in matching Mann’s own delicate descriptions that bring to life the austere subtlety of the Lutheran city-state, as it gets swallowed by Prussia just as the Buddenbrooks / Mann family’s fortunes become swallowed by those of outside Germany.
And so the biography continues apace, weaving Mann’s great works into the very source of those novels: the tale of Mann’s own life as it unfolds. We are taken to Italy to discover the true story behind one of the most beautifully written novellas in the German language, A Death in Venice. We join Mann and his wife Katia in the sanatorium in Davos to understand whence The Mountain got its Magic. We live with Mann the patriotic zeal that preceded World War 1, then the implosion of Germany and the rise of fascism, culminating in a break in biographical inspiration caused by Mann’s exile to the United States.
That Mann’s works were so uninspired by his newly built house in the sunny suburbs of Los Angeles highlights how destructive was 20th Century fascism for European intellectualism: By the time the war ended, Thomas Mann was already a figment of a destroyed past – he had nothing really to give to Post-War Germany. For me, this reflects a deeper truth: Those of Europe’s intelligentsia whose creativity was not starved to death in Nazi concentration camps, found their creativity saturated and bloated out of them by American hamburgers, hot dogs and ice cream.
But perhaps the best thing about The Magician is how deftly and delicately it tackles the question of Mann’s sexuality. It would be every bit as easy for a modern writer to overegg this pudding by making the entire book be about Mann’s repressed gayness, as it would have been for biographers of more prudish times to underegg it by evading the topic altogether. Tóibín avoids either trap, and instead allows Mann’s own work to dictate the place sex occupied in his life. The result is an account that is by times graphical, but more often nuanced and metaphorical.
The ending of The Magician was touching, but for personal reasons it also caused me to smile wryly. The final passages include a memory Thomas Mann indulges at the end of his life, while on his final trip to Lübeck: it is a story his mother told him as a child about the trip Bach took to Lübeck to meet the then more famous composer Dietrich Buxtehude. I was struck by the contrast with another book I recently read on that very subject, called Something of his Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S.Bach, by British author Horatio Clare. Tóibín’s beautifully written account of Bach’s journey – though only a few paragraphs; though only a story inside a memory inside a biography – is a thousand times more impactful that Clare’s entire book.
And that underscores the main point here. To attempt the biography of a writer as good as Thomas Mann, it takes a writer as good as Colm Tóibín.

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The case for switching to Heartbeat Time

Spring forward, fall back
As we move rapidly towards the end of October, an important seasonal calendar event approaches us with comforting certainty. No, I don’t mean Halloween, that perfect blend of processed sugar and devil worship that has emerged as one of the American Empire’s most beloved holidays. I’m referring to the other autumnal rite: the turning back of the clocks. The constant low-level grumbling about how unnecessary it is, has become almost as much a ritual as the time change itself.

Yet I confess I have never much cared about it either way. Do farmers need more light in the mornings for late planting? Does bumping peak traffic out of twilight more quickly reduce the amount of traffic accidents at dusk? My guess is that when all the variables are plugged into the cost-benefit equation, any effect either way will be more than drowned out by the hefty error term – meaning no one knows and it doesn’t much matter.

What’s in a base? A day by any other base would last as long
But allow me to hijack the discussion to propose something that, I believe, does matter: a simple and elegant means by which we can improve the quality of life of every human on earth. Society pays a small initial cost, and life gets better for everyone, until the end of time. Allow me to explain.

We all know that there is a reason why we have 365 days in a year (with an extra day added once every 4 years). The maths comes to us straight from God, who in His infinite wisdom decided the Earth should complete 365 axial rotations in the time it takes that celestial body to complete one orbit of the Sun.

But the Almighty set no such rules when it came to the division of a day into lesser units of time, and so man decided to create sub-units of the day as he saw fit. Different systems were tried, but the Egyptian solution survived, owing to its practicality: 24 is a good number to use because it has many factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24). Especially useful are the factors 2, 3 and 4 because they allow us to divide into halves, thirds and quarters respectively. This is something we often like to do. Ditto for 60. So on the face of it, 24 hours/day; 60 minutes/hour; 60 seconds/minute looks like a good, if entirely arbitrary, system. You might ask: If nature doesn’t demand otherwise, why on Earth would anyone want to change it?

Tick tick, boom boom boom
The problem is that this system does, in fact, clash with nature. Unfortunately, our current (mathematically convenient) temporal divisions are slightly out of sync with the most important clock nature has given us: our hearts. The average human heart rate at rest is about 80 beats per minute, just a little faster than the 60 seconds per minute set out by Greeks and medieval clockmakers.

The effect of this is subtle, yet I believe it can have far-reaching consequences. Our internal clocks are always struggling to calibrate to the artificial rhythm of the clock. It’s like we are trying to sing along to a song that is being played in slightly the wrong time. Counting seconds out loud is difficult as a result – and the point is it shouldn’t be. If clocks were synced to our bodies, counting seconds would come naturally to all of us. Indeed, the very act of doing so would have something meditative and relaxing to it. Time itself would become a form of mindfulness.

For most of human history, this asynchronicity was nothing to worry about. After all, most of us had no access to timepieces of any description: the only chronology that mattered was sunrise and sunset. But as more and more of us are now ‘on the clock’, I believe this problem of ‘horological asynchronicity’ has become a hidden and persistent form of stress. The only reason we are not more aware of it, is because it has been with us thousands of years.

It’s time to take time to heart
The solution has always been simple: simply change the division of time. A quick fix would be to rejig the divisions of time within a standard minute, so that there were 80 seconds a minute, rather than the current 60. I don’t think this is a good durable solution, because it simply kicks the can down the road: The asynchronicity still exists, but now it occurs through the misalignment of heart beats with minutes.

The solution is to rejig the entire arbitrary system, by creating a 32-hour clock.

^{A 16-hour analogue clock, marking half of a 32-hour ‘heartbeat day’}

This is done easily by speeding up each second by 33.3%. If we keep base 60, faster seconds yield faster minutes. Whereas Ptolemy’s system gives us a 1,440 minute day, Heartbeat Time has a 1,920 minute day – with each of those minutes feeling like a natural duration of time in terms of heartbeats. The next step is to divide the minutes by 60, (so keeping our base). This yields 32 hours in the Heartbeat day.

If this be the hour when we draw swords together, let’s at least shorten the hour by 33%!
I feel like heartbeat time would have subtle advantages over current timekeeping – beyond the natural rhythm it respects. For example, for me, a standard time hour feels too long. And that’s because for most practical purposes, it is too long. Hour-long meetings drag and drag. Hour long lectures in college always contained about 40 useful minutes of information and sitting through the rest usually meant fighting the urge to take a nap.

And what about waiting for a bus that comes ‘every hour on the hour’? How is that at all useful to commuters? Never mind the joy of being able to tell children they will now get to stay up until to 12 O’Clock at night!

I’ll admit, the 32-hour heartbeat clock does lose us the ‘3’ as a factor – which is useful, for example, for factory shifts. But I think it would work out even better: my guess is having 3 11-hour shifts eliminates a lot of problems, because it allows for two 30 (heartbeat) minute overlap at the two crunch changeovers (morning and afternoon). And for anyone who’s done shift work, we all know that these handovers can cause a lot of friction.

The only problem is getting the entire world to reprogramme their software systems, replace their clocks, change their watches and so forth. No big deal.

Are we still talking about human overpopulation?

A decade is a long time in ecology
Those who know me in real life, and those who have read my first novel, will know that I have a longstanding interest in the question of human overpopulation, and what to do about it. With all that has been happening – Artificial Intelligence dominating humanity, genocide in West Asia, World War III, Travis and Taylor’s Wedding – the topic seems to have taken a backseat. It’s fair to ask, does human overpopulation still matter? After all, climate alarmism has cooled off to such an extent that it feels safe to refire up some good old-fashioned coal power plants.

First, let’s take a look at the latest numbers. When I first started writing about human overpopulation in the early 2010s, the best estimates had the number of humans at a rounding error over 8 billion. Now that number has jumped to closer to 8.3 billion – even despite the horrible pandemic that was supposed to have claimed oh-so-many lives. While it is true that – almost everywhere – fertility rates are declining ( and quite steeply in the West), we are still on track for 10.3 billion eating, shitting and farting homo sapiens by the year 2080. In short, if there was ever a reason to be concerned in 2010, that reason is still with us in 2026.

If in doubt, draw some graphs
But was overpopulation ever really a problem? Or was it just another “Current Thing” onto which postmodern postgrads like me could project their anomie-induced angst? As always, it helps to be dispassionate. Step back and consider this graph of human population over time:

This graph shows the population of humans based on the Population Reference Bureau’s historical benchmarks, from the dawn of humanity in 190,000 BC, up to 2080, the year the UN predicts population to peak. In a way, the graph is quite hard to read without resorting to tricks like logarithmic scale, because the population growth since the dawn of the industrial age has been so extreme that the blue line merely clings to the X-axis for most of human history, then shoots up vertically. In other words, the explosion of population is so great, you can’t even visualise it. The inset graph helps a little bit, showing just the most recent years of the homo sapien’s stellar rise – but of course that loses the longer-term perspective and tends to hide just how anomalistic the current era really is. Short story: what has happened to our species’ population in the past ‘blink of an eye’ is completely unprecedented and literally off the charts.

This planet’s resources were promised to us 3,000 years ago
‘So what?’, you might say. ‘We have the ability to make food, build machines; to house and clothe this many humans and more. And we have the right to, because we are special, because we are human.’ This is certainly the line being pushed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. But is it true? Are we the breakout species that no longer needs to worry about ecological balance?

Consider a different metric. Let’s list the 150 largest land animals by average adult body weight, from the heaviest (African bush elephant – 5,500kg) down to the Antilopine kangaroo (40kg). Conveniently, humans clock in at exactly 100th place, with an average adult body weight of 62kg (I refuse to say how far over this average I am, beyond noting that I am going to the gym as soon as I complete this blogpost).

Now let’s multiply that average by the total estimated population of that species to give us a Total Species Mass (TSM). For example, there are 450,000 bush elephants, yielding a TSM of about 2.5 billion kg. In other words, the Earth needs to provide resources to sustain 2.5 billion kg of elephant flesh, fat and bone. For the antilopine kangaroo, with its smaller population of 100,000 and body weight of only 40kg, the species has a much smaller TSM of only 4 million kg.

But what about us? Well, our TSM is about 509 billion kg, or roughly 141 times the TSM of the next most resource-intensive animal (the wild boar). Once again, scale problems make this hard to chart, but here goes nothing:

_{(all data are from Wikipedia, using admittedly crude point estimates)}

The red line with the arrow needs to continue about another metre to the right of your computer screen, to give you a relative sense of human TSM. Once again, we are literally off the charts.

Oh reason not the need! Our basest beggars are in their poorest things superfluous
Of course, the TSM is only a very crude measure of resource-intensity: it fails to account for caloric efficiency or symbiosis effects. But these factors are likely to only make the contrast between us and other land animals more stark. For one thing, our nearest (but still distant) peers like the elephants, the deer, the kangaroos and the wild boar are all ecologically-conscious herbivores, whose calories require no resource-intensive ultraprocessing. Additionally, with the exception of the few species we have domesticated, we are the only ones who consume tooth brushes; synthetic textiles; video game consoles; artificially heated/cooled environments for our maximum comfort, etc, etc. Now add the fact that we even embalm our bodies after death to deprive the soil of the nutrients we have extracted from it, and the ‘human overpopulation’ begins to look much more like a ‘human infestation’.

So is overpopulation a big enough ecological problem, for us to divert our attention from pressing issues like a closed Strait of Hormuz, or an OpenAI? I’ll leave that for others to decide. In the meantime, go buy my book.

Thoughts on the Lindsay Clancy case

I tried very hard to steer away from the Lindsay Clancy case, but it kept somehow getting thrust at me. If you are not already familiar with the details, I won’t resume them here – there are plenty of places you can go for the facts, and they are not really in contention. Short version: She strangled her children.

What is in contention is the nature of her culpability for what she did, and a wider conversation about the responsibility individuals – particularly women – bear for their actions. The debate spawned by this case is highly toxic, going well beyond a legal drama to touch upon the very roots of pharmacological agency and even the state of feminism itself.

Yes, it’s personal
I have a particular dog in the game. 14 years ago, my then wife was suffering from some form of undiagnosed postpartum depression/anxiety, which included psychotic episodes – in one of which she became convinced that her then 11 year old stepdaughter would do harm to her and to our infant son. Even now, I can see in Lindsay Clancy’s dead eyes the same stare my ex-wife held in court. The divorce was messy, including wild accusations that I had tried to harm her and threatened her life, none of which happened.

What made all of this worse was the pro-feminist bias exhibited by the courts. Though none of my ex-wife’s accusations had any substance to them, I still ended up losing any access to my son, who is now completely estranged from me. This happened because the state ultimately refused to withdraw custody from the mother, even after repeatedly chastising her for failing to facilitate the reconstruction of the father-child relationship. The fact is, if a mother is sufficiently dogged in her demands to maintain sole effective custody of the child, and consistent in her lies about her fears and loathing for her child’s father, all she needs is a good lawyer and determination. Ultimately, the mother has all the rights.

What’s good for the Spiderman is good for the black widow
But with great rights comes great responsibility. And that is perhaps why I am so offended by the female-led attempt to exonerate Lindsay Clancy of her crimes on the basis that she or any mother suffering post-partum depression cannot be held responsible for her actions. There is even a current of the debate that blames the father for somehow not stopping her.

Let’s be clear about this. If society should choose to white knight women by treating them as too mentally weak to uphold the most basic moral rule in our society, the logical corollary is that women should be considered incapable of assuming the responsibility of motherhood. If the state can’t blame you for strangling your kids, you shouldn’t get to have any paternal rights over those kinds (much less ‘all’ the default rights).

Instead we have reached what has always been the endpoint to which fourth wave feminism was driving us: a society in which the state grants to women all of the rights, but refuses to hold them responsible for anything at all. Even strangling their own children with elastic bands.

Feminists fiddle while Rome burns
Such a society is sick and will fail. The results are nowhere more plain to see than in the fertility statistics: In every country that has embraced fourth-wave feminism of this kind, birth rates are in free fall. It’s not difficult to imagine why – what sane man would want to be a father in a world where he has everything to lose, has no rights, and can even be blamed for the most evil action of the mother to whom those rights are granted by default?

So when people wonder why Western civilisation is being slowly replaced by cultures who refuse to adhere to feminist norms, they need look no further than into the dead eyes of Lindsay Clancy and the legions of her feminist supporters.

Summer’s in the meadow – my 24th letter to you

Dear Daniel,

Well, the summer is upon us again. Already we’ve faced some extreme heat and while there has now been a window of reprieve, it looks like more overly excited molecules of nitrogen, argon and oxygen are coming our way!

I really hope you had a great year at school – not just in an academic sense, but in the sense of having fun and growing into the world. That’s something you are rapidly doing now.

I know that you will grow to be – not just a good person – but in fact a tremendous person; full of kindness, perception and energy. I feel that this is true in my heart, because I remember the last time I saw you – you were only a very small boy, but you had a light of goodness in your eyes and in your smile that I have not forgotten, even all these years later.

Your sisters are doing extremely well, by the way. Anna has had her first legal article published in one of the world leading legal blogs. She is now married and well on her way to what looks like a promising career in law.

Your little sister Daphne is also thriving. She broke her collarbone doing a cartwheel some months ago, but it has fully healed and she completed her end-of-year gymnastics show with flying colours. Aside from gymnastics, she’s all horses, horses, horses. Her current favourite pony at the stables is called Mowgli.

At this stage, it’s been so long since you and I last met that I am slowly starting to believe we may never see each other again. If that should prove to be the case, I just want you to know that I will always think of you. Always and forever.

You know, I was the one who chose the name Daniel, and I chose it because of a famous Irish song that I used to sing to you when you were a baby. It’s a father singing to his son, who has left him. The lyrics go like this:

…But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,

Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,

Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,

Oh, Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so!

The Archive Cafe – a digital detox

Modern digital life is tiring and draining. There are a lot of cranky, socially isolated people staring into their screens or tuning into their airpod-casts.

But there’s also the Archive Cafe in Saint Gilles, Brussels. It’s an independent coffee shop located on Avenue Adolphe Demeur close to the town hall. The specialty coffee is crafted and the baked treats are top-notch, yet Archive is much, much more than a place to caffeinate and refuel.

It seems to possess an almost magical ability to create community and buck the negative trends that surround us. Maybe it’s the vinyl albums you can browse as you wait for your coffee to be made. Maybe it’s the barista, a chill, brown haired woman who seems to be on a first-name basis with everyone and exudes unambiguously positive energy as she DJs her way through the vinyls, chats with customers or just with herself, and serves up delicious brews. Maybe it’s the fact that you can still pay in cash. Maybe it’s simply the location, in one of the more trendy and relaxed neighbourhoods in Belgium’s capital.

Sure there are smartphones even here. But you also see people writing poems in notebooks, reading paperbacks and talking across tables to each other. Dogs are welcome. Babies are welcome. And I always feel welcome too.

It’s a small oasis in the modern dystopia that surrounds us: unpretentious, friendly and positive. A reminder that not everything is online. And not everything is shit.

My review of Jo Nesbo’s “Blood Ties”

Blood Ties by Jo Nesbø

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

In these days of AI generated content, there is much talk about the ‘uncanny valley’ – where visual effects are neither purely cartoonish, figurative representations of reality; nor are they close enough to pass as photorealistic. Instead, they are in between, and create an uncanny sense of something that is ‘almost’ real.
Jo Nesbo’s Blood Ties occupies the uncanny valley of the written word, in between the genre of Scandi crime fiction, and actual literature. What makes the effect so unpleasant is that the book has some features of real writing to it. Nesbo wants to be a serious writer, and achieves that in places. At the same time, he is cursed with muscle memory from years of cranking out many, many scandi murder stories; he cannot quite escape the ridiculous and cartoonish tropes that made him a wealthy writer of comfortably bad genre fiction.
What results is simply awful. A truly unlikable protagonist named Roy who plods through the uni-dimensional, clumsy plot at a slow and pedestrian pace, yet still finds time to embroil himself in action scenes that are as unrealistic as they are unnecessary.
Worst of all is the warped moral lens through which the reader is forced to view Roy and his uninspiring mission to build a roller coaster in rural Norway. Nesbo tries hard to make the reader sympathise with this guy by backsplaining his childhood abuse into the narrative with a blunt instrument, yet even the heavy spice of child abuse feels so uncannily fake as to leave us emotionally cold. Meanwhile, in the present time, Roy’s brute-boy morality and sordid affair with a young woman are the side plot to his attempts to escape justice for the many murders we know he and his brother Carl committed in the past. Is Roy remorseful? It’s actually hard to say, because the character is so poorly written. Perhaps sensing that the child abuse doesn’t quite make Roy the likeable underdog the author was hoping to craft, Nesbo resorts to making the minor characters even less charismatic than the protagonist, so that Roy can shine by comparison.
It doesn’t work. Nesbo’s warped moral lens does little more than give the reader a headache and make him want to leave that depressing Norwegian town forever. Whatever Roy’s childhood, however corrupt and petty the cops and bankers that inhabit the town of Os, most of me wanted him to get caught and go to jail. But I didn’t want it badly enough to keep reading. I made it about halfway through, before committing my own sort of crime:

Leaving my paperback copy of Blood Ties at an Airbnb, for some other unsuspecting reader to suffer the same fate as me.

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My review of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To read or to watch on stage? That is the question when it comes to Shakespearean plays. And there is a clear consensus among middle class parents of teenagers condemned by the school curriculum to the former: it is better to take seats amidst a sea of theatregoers, than to suffer pages full of the slings and arrows of outrageous Elizabethan word salad.
I will make so bold as to disagree. I think you need to do both. First read and study, then go and watch a great performance. And while reading the first few of the Bard’s plays might feel toilsome, it is the only way to truly steep yourself in a language that – let’s face it – has grown archaic even to the most literate among us.
So as I picked up Hamlet to read it for the very first time, I thanked my English teachers who, 35 years ago, I once cursed for forcing me to chore through Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear…And I’m glad I saved the best for last.
For one thing, it is replete with quotable quotes I knew but did not know came from Hamlet; phrases woven deep into our cultural fabric – everything from the Rotten State of Denmark, to ‘Never a Borrower nor a Lender be’, to ‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’, to the latest Taylor Swift song, and many more I’ll leave for the reader to discover himself.
Beyond that, Hamlet is a cracking good story. It is the mother of all whodunnits – for though Hamlet’s father the king is dead, was he murdered? And if so, by whom? It is also the progenitor of the ‘unreliable narrator’ device. Can we believe that Hamlet’s interaction with the ghost is something more than a manifestation of his crescent madness?
And it is the prototype for the psychological thriller: the internal struggle the young prince endures when faced with the decision of whether to avenge his father’s death or to accept it not only gives rise to the most memorable quotable in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, but it is also a delicate and meaningful treatise on the nature of courage and cowardice. The poignancy with which Hamlet’s prevarications contrast with the bold decisiveness of the similarly wronged Laertes is so sharp it almost causes the reader to wince.
Most of all, though, we readers of this great play must never forget that Hamlet is what the middle class parents of high school scholars proclaim it to be: a set of instructions to actors, so that they can put on a show. Now that I have suffered my slings and arrows, I can’t wait to book a ticket and see this masterpiece come to life.

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Happy St Patrick’s Day!

Dear Daniel,

I find myself thinking of you especially today, as the sun shines on yet another March the 17th. St. Patrick’s Day is the saint day of the patron saint of Ireland, and although you may not know it, you should remember that you are Irish too.

Who knows? The day may come when you and I will walk together through the green fields of Ireland and feel the gentle rain against our faces, before tucking in, somewhere, to a bowl of chowder and a pint of Guinness.

In the meantime: be well, my son. May the road rise to meet your feet, and may the wind be always at your back.

Love,

Dad