Culture

Mark Lawson’s latest novel, set in Britain in the recent past, presents us with a nation in the grip of ‘moral fever’. Here, the ‘giving offence to anyone at all over anything’ is considered ‘a capital crime’; the ‘post-Savile sexual witch hunt’ has trained people to ‘reinterpret heartbreak as violation’; and retribution comes not just in the form of established legal proceedings, but also of the ‘modern madness of amateur arraignment’. Lawson wants to show how pernicious this culture can be. To do so, he presents us with two characters, both academics, who are out of step with it.

Perhaps because so many of them are former drunks and junkies, ‘addiction experts’ are touchy people. Often they don’t like each other — hardly surprising, since they are fighting each other for such a lucrative business. You can make bigger bucks out of selling ‘recovery’ than by peddling drugs. That’s not to imply moral equivalence, but the two do have one thing in common: plenty of repeat customers. In any media report of a celebrity’s battle with substance abuse, the words that you’re most likely to read before ‘rehab’ are ‘in and out of’. Ah, say the addiction gurus, but that’s because they’re suffering from a disease. This is one area in which the rivals speak with one voice.

Architecture is sometimes described as the second oldest profession, but often — in both theory and practice — it competes with the first. In his splendiferous office in Manhattan’s Seagram Building, Philip Johnson confirmed this when he told me, ‘Remember, son, I’m a whore.’ True to his vocation, this was a line he had often indiscriminately used. Architects need to have big personalities because their responsibilities are so huge. Frank Lloyd Wright said that surgeons can bury their mistakes, but architects have to live with them. And so do the rest of us. Few of us have ever met a reticent, self-deprecating architect.

Was it perhaps the landscape historian Oliver Rackham who gave rise to our present preoccupation with old trees through his pioneering works on ancient woodland? He certainly pointed out more than 40 years ago that 10,000 centurion oaks ‘are not a substitute for one 500-year-old oak’. Since then, shelves of books have been written on these veterans, and in The Long, Long Life of Trees Fiona Stafford makes a welcome and entertaining contribution. She draws on material from fields including folklore, natural science, literature, cultural history, European art, ancient mythology and modern medicine to illuminate such trees’ central place in western civilisation. Sometimes all of these are skilfully blended in her accounts of different species. The yew is a good example.

Elvis only ever appeared in one commercial in his life — for Southern Maid, his favourite jam doughnut shop. That commercial appeared on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1955. But since his death in 1977, Elvis has appeared in adverts all over the world: ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ has been borrowed to flog bathroom fragrances; a Greek dairy company used ‘Always on My Mind’; and Coca-Cola, BMW and Nike have all been promoted with ‘A Little Less Conversation’. Ted Harrison’s central thesis — that Elvis has been much more heavily and successfully commercialised in death than in life — is convincing. This is an odd, rambling, repetitive book, too clumsily written, even for Elvis maniacs like myself, to be worth buying.

We can all share the anguish in the downfall of a simple soul — for movie-goers Brando’s despairing ‘I coulda’ been a contender!’ in On the Waterfront still resonates — but I have a problem with heroic thickos: Othello, so easily duped; purblind Lear… So I’m ambivalent about the leading character in the new novel by the French-Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra — his wife’s name, adopted by Mohammed Moulessehoul to evade the military censors when he was an officer in the Algerian army. The award-winning author of more than 20 novels, most notably The Swallows of Kabul, he now lives in France but retains the pseudonym.