Today

58 December/January April/May 2011 2015/16 Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today www.KCWToday.co.uk 020 7738 2348
December/January 2015/16
Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today
59
Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture
online: www.KCWToday.co.uk
Photograph © Sophie Winham
Bernard Cohen:
About Now
By Ian McKay
Flowers Gallery
ISBN 978-1-906412-71-5
92pp. £30
I
have always been a bit wary of
the word ‘zany’ - it conjures up
amusingly unconventional and
idiosyncratic humour, and derives from
a clownish character in Commedia
dell’arte, Zanni. Cohen states that he
struggles with the titles of his paintings,
and yet has named four Zany at Home,
Zany in Grey, Zany Again and Zany in
the Detail, which, apart from the lack of
humour, are certainly unconventional
and idiosyncratic. Complex swirling
shapes, overlapping colours, geometric
lines, rectangles and circles, squiggles,
all meticulously laid in acrylic or oil
on canvas or linen, using masking tape
to achieve the overlaying effects, some
like a smashed Victorian mosaic tiled
floor, others like those 3D stereogram
images, where one’s eyes have to go ‘lazy’
to see the hidden picture within. David
Hockney said, when trying to paint
swimming pools in California, he was
influenced not only by Dubuffet, but by
Cohen’s ‘Spaghetti Paintings’. In some
later works textures and stencilled and
painted shapes, are enmeshed in layers
of patterns and motifs, like aeroplanes,
to produce a dizzying assault on the
senses. He titled several paintings after
Billy Wilder’s Cold War comedy One,
Two, Three, starring James Cagney as a
Coca Cola executive in West Berlin, but,
for some inexplicable reason, called the
series One, Two, Three, Four, and there
are no clues in the works as to what they
have to do with this funny, rapid-fire
satire.
The academic and critic Ian McKay
has written what amounts to a treatise
on Cohen, and intellectualises on the
meaning behind his work, citing T.S.
Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Albert Camus and existentialism, Henri
Bergson, Thomas Hardy, even Joseph
Conrad. But are his paintings that
complicated and imbued with deep and
hidden meanings? McKay was minded
to ask Cohen whether he had painted a
self-portrait, but found the question no
longer relevant, as he now reckons that
his paintings are all self-portraits. Well,
call me old-fashioned, but I just don’t
buy that. He is patently obsessed with
his subject, even re-reading those novels
that Cohen has been reading; works by
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Philip Roth, and
Donna Tartt, concluding that what they
all have in common is “secrets that define
the human being”.
Cohen trained at St Martin’s, then
the Slade, in the 1950s, returning in
1988 to become Chair, Professor, and
Director of Slade School of Fine Art, a
post he held for 12 years. His first solo
exhibition was at Gimpel Fils in 1958,
and since then he has had one-man
shows at Kasmin, Waddington, and, of
course, Flowers East, West and Central,
a Retrospective at the Hayward in 1972,
and 48 of the works of this important
British abstract expressionist painter are
held by Tate, but none from the 2000-
2015 period covered in this book.
Don Grant
They All Love
Jack: Busting the
Ripper
By Bruce Robinson
Harper
ISBN-10: 006229637X
They All Love Jack is Bruce Robinson’s
800 page doorstop of an attempt to
figure out what has baffled many: just
who murdered (at least) five women
in 1888? Who was Jack the Ripper?
It started out as a £15 pub bet that
Robinson couldn’t solve the mystery,
made over a decade ago, but it is easy to
see that it developed into an obsession.
Robinson’s writing is personal,
engaging, and scathing; however his
gonzo-esque style means that he has a
tendency to ramble and sometimes the
direction of the dialogue will abruptly
lurch. A chapter focused on discussing a
particular murder will end up containing
a rant about the immorality of the
Victorians and a handful of paragraphs,
seemingly out of place, on Freemason
archaeology.
One really has to jump on Robinson’s
train of thought and hold on, as he
obviously considers all these things
relevant and in their proper place,
which, given that this is an argument
being made in support of a theory
and not fiction, means that it must
make sense to him, at least. And the
immorality of the Victorians and
Freemasonry are the heart Robinson’s
case, the target of his thrusts, joined
on the chopping block with the rest of
Ripperology.
It’s almost a shame that he felt
the need to try to solve the case.
As a criticism of an attack upon
the Victorians, the related culture
of Freemasonry, and self-declared
Ripperologists, the text is powerful and
merciless.
Robinson’s problem is that of many
conspiracy theorists; that just because
your argument makes sense doesn’t
mean it’s right. Robinson constructs
the theoretical framework within which
his argument runs smoothly, however
it comes short of persuading that this
is what actually happened: There is a
difference between what could have
happened and what did, what makes
sense and what is.
Robinson’s attempt to solve
the case is a shame, not because it
is unconvincing, but because it is,
obviously, the point of this behemoth.
Had it simply been a few hundred pages
titled Why I hate the Victorians, and why
you should too, then it would have been
far more tolerable to read; as it stands, it
is a task.
Approach it as a rational argument,
and Robinson’s writing style may quickly
obscure a clean reading; approach it as a
quirky text with a sharp edge, something
a little risqué, and all the Ripper stuff
gets in the way. Which, unfortunately,
leaves it somewhat unapproachable.
Fergus Coltsmann
John Le Carré:
The Biography
By Adam Sisman,
Bloomsbury, £25 hardback,
ISBN 9781408827925
For Anton Chekhov, “Every person lives
his real, most interesting life under the
cover of secrecy”. David Cornwell, spy
turned novelist John Le Carré, is no
exception then, and what a life it is. Now
aged 84, he decided to let Adam Sisman
loose on his authorised biography and
the result is nothing if not thorough.
Or is it? The biography is a brick
of a book, running to more than 600
pages including four pages of a select
bibliography, 16 pages of notes on the
text, and an index of hundreds of entries,
taking up 21 pages. So the first question
one asks is, does Le Carré the novelist
deserve such treatment and attention to
detail? He may be a great writer, but he
is hardly a Dickens or a Tolstoy.
Deception and duplicity are part
of the spy’s stock in trade, they stand
Janus-like with one eye perpetually
looking over their shoulder. Spies need
charm, cunning, and patience, for it is
a waiting game. With a record such as
his, posterity also plays its part and one
wonders whether the reader is given the
full picture or just an excuse for one.
In other words, just how far can this
account be trusted?
Like many others, I have grown up
with all Le Carré’s books starting with
his hugely successful third novel, The
Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).
There is only one I attempted three
times but could never get further than
a third of the way through due to its
lack of pace, and that was The Little
Drummer Girl (1983 ). As for the best,
it was undoubtedly A Perfect Spy (1986),
described by Philip Roth as “the best
English novel since the war”.
There is a good reason for this: it is
largely autobiographical, telling the story
of Ronnie Cornwell (1906-75), David’s
father, who was one of the most daring
conmen who ever lived. He beat and
sexually abused his boys, and beat his
women (his wife did a runner when the
younger brother was aged five), lived the
high life but ran away from his bills, and
served two jail terms. No wonder young
David had insecurities which were never
going to go away.
We read of Cornwell’s spying on
friends and tipping off MI5 about
their leftward-leanings; so loyalty to
his country came first, not them. After
studying modern languages at Oxford,
he switched his allegiance to MI6, and
then taught at Eton for a while. Once he
had made his first £20,000, in 1964, he
jacked it all in for full-time writing and
made a number of fortunes through book
sales and film and television rights.
He claims to be a lifelong Labour
voter. He will not allow his publishers to
enter his books for literary competitions,
such as the Man Booker. And he
has turned down gongs, including a
knighthood. Is this because of humility,
or vanity? His first marriage ended in
failure and he had a string of affairs,
including with the wife of a best friend.
He once contemplated suicide. Indeed
he comes across as not a very pleasant
character at all, so one wonders why he
supported this publication, and why now.
If one has a private inroad to certain
characters he encountered in real life,
but for some reason did not make it onto
the page, one can apply a different sort
of test. For example, there is no mention
of Czech President Vaclav Havel, or his
biographer Michael Zantovsky, recently
Czech ambassador to London. There is
no mention of Nick Scarf, also an MI5
and MI6 man who, he claimed, was Le
Carré’s inspiration for Barley Blair in The
Russia House (1989). Never considered,
or edited out?
There are some who argue, of course,
that definitive biographies can only be
written after the death of their subject.
This is hinted at, and one wonders what
new revelations are to come. And he has
promised his own memoir in maybe a
year’s time. Unfinished business?
And Le Carré has his critics as well
as his admirers: Salman Rushdie, the
late Christopher Hitchens, and Clive
James among them. One of James’s
many autobiographical books is entitled
Unreliable Memoirs and one wonders
whether this may apply too to Cornwell/
Le Carré?
So, even after more than 600 pages,
the man remains enigmatic to the end,
and therefore what is embarked upon
as a quest for the truth is ultimately
unsatisfying.
Or maybe he gave the game away
not in this book, but in a quotation
used in Ben Macintyre’s book, A Spy
Among Friends (2014). On page 245,
Le Carré states: The privately educated
Englishman “is the greatest dissembler
on earth… Nobody will charm you so
glibly, disguise his feelings from you
better, cover his tracks more skilfully, or
find it harder to confess to you that he
has been a damn fool…
“He can have a Force Twelve nervous
breakdown while he stands next to you
in the bus queue and you may be his best
friend but you’ll never be the wiser.”
After 600 pages, and £25, wiser is
exactly what you should be.
James Pallas
Fallout 4
By Fergus Coltsman
My first few hours experience of Fallout
4 were not of playing it, but of upgrading
my PC in order to actually run and
download all 24 glorious gigabytes of
it. This is a good thing, both that the
minimum specs for the PC version
recommend an obscene 8 gigs of RAM
and that it took an hour to download, it
illustrates in raw numbers the behemoth
of a game it is.
(Spoiler warning: This article will
contain incredibly minor spoilers for the
first two hours or so of plot.)
Fallout 4 starts you out in prenuclear
apocalypse Boston, 2077, just
as the US/China cold war turns hot
and you’re rushed into the nearest
bomb shelter. Things quickly take a
turn for the sinister and 200 years later
you stumble out, into the irradiated
wasteland Massachusetts has become.
This scene setting doesn’t take very
long, which is a shame. Fallout 3 forced
you spend a couple hours in the sterile,
claustrophobic shelter before thrusting
you wide eyed into the hellish nightmare
of the outside world, inspiring the sort
of joyous fear that only comes with
freedom. In contrast, F4 rushes you,
lacking the emotional punch of 3.
But what it’s rushing you toward is
good. Bethesda, the game’s developers,
have never been Shakespearean writers,
but they have always been fantastically
immersive world builders, and Boston is
no exception. Exploring long abandoned
towns in the morning sun, hunting
mutated wildlife in grey-green fogged
hills, and fighting running battles with
psychotic raiders in tight city streets as
thunder and lightning cracks overhead
all bring the world alive.
Further life is added by the colourful
cast of survivors eking out life in the
wastes. From wandering tradesmen to
almost-thriving towns growing inside
a baseball stadium, the characters are
lively and diverse, (if one can get past
the Boston accent). F4 offers a new
way to interact with them; previously,
aside from the odd grunt or Thu’um,
Bethesda player characters were silent,
F4 has a Mass Effect-esque dialogue
system, where conversing characters
actually have an immersive back and
forth; an actual dialogue. It doesn’t even
suffer too badly from the problem that
plagued ME, where the short prompt in
the options menu would not intuitively
relate to what your character ended up
saying. That said, very occasionally the
characters will fall into the Uncanny
Valley and throw the immersion off.
The overall gameplay is stronger than
previous games, F4 is actually a good
shooter rather than a tolerable one.
Enemies will dynamically duck in and
out of cover, your guns kick and click
satisfactorily, and bad guys stagger in
response to hits, often accompanied by
a visceral spray of blood; and ghouls and
other baddies visibly disintegrate as they
take damage.
The depth of customisation has
reached new heights. Characters can
be customised to ridiculous degrees,
weapons can be molded to the point of
being unrecognisable from their original,
settlements can be built and improved
to protect their occupants. The overall
effect is that not only is your character
and adventure unique, but your Boston
will be unique to you as well.
At time of writing, I’m only twenty
hours in, which is barely a scratch
on the surface, with much left to be
explored. Given the substantial engine
improvements over Skyrim, I don’t even
feel like I’ve figured out the fundamental
P E T A L
PAINTING AND EVERYTHING ELSE
JULIA WHATLEY supports PETAL ‘Painting and Everything Else’, a charity
which encourages creative attitudes and thinking from an early age and
sponsors creativity in children.
The emphasis is on childrens’ development. Julia says “When a child is
traumatised they need love and support to help them go forwards in life,
and creativity can help unlock the trauma”
Everything about Julia is to promote positivity in others, especially
children. She devotes her time to creating works of art. She says,
“Anything I have produced in the last 12 years is for the positive to
outweigh and replace the negative”.
Her work, is like her personality; overwhelmingly sensitive, colourful
and positive. The ideas, themes are poignant and powerful. Her desire is
to enable people to express their true selves in a an unhindered free way
and to create world peace
Anyone wishing to get involved in the charity should contact www.
talismanlondon.com jamesnalty@gmail.com or www.jennyblanc.com
The charity is currently seeking International Trustees.
Julia is working on a book to support The Crane foundation – for
the protection of birds.
PETAL ‘Painting and Everything Else’. Registered charity no. 1120847
workings; the two sided coin of mystery
and discovery, last seen when I first
played Oblivion as a wide eyed youngster,
has returned in force.
© ZeniMax Media
Collage © Julia Whatley