Culture

Born in 1934 in Nigeria, Wole Soyinka is the author of more than twenty plays, ten volumes of poetry, two novels, seven collections of essays and five autobiographical works. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was the first black African man to win the prestigious prize His latest book, Of Africa, is a 200-page polemic that attempts to understand the contradictory nature of African politics. Two important questions that arise from Soyinka’s book are: what is Africa? And what do we understand of its history? Soyinka expends considerable effort in his book discussing how the nihilist nature of fundamentalist Islam is destroying societies in certain African nations: particularly in Somali, Mali, and Nigeria.

Some thirty-five years ago, in 1977 to be exact, I first published A Savage War of Peace, a definitive history of France’s war in Algeria. The war dragged on from 1954 to 1962, torpedoed six French governments, and the Fourth Republic itself, bringing de Gaulle to power. It also introduced a new meaning to the word ‘insurgence.’ Thanks to the indolence of my publishers, the book was allowed to go out of print. When the Iraq War began, to my fury I learned that it was changing hands on the free market in Washington at over $200 a copy, with quantities being bought by the Pentagon.

The joke has been made by Jack Stillinger, an American editor of Keats, that there have been so many treatments of the poet’s life that we know him better than his contemporaries did, and better than most people we see every day. This brilliant new biography by eminent Keatsian Nicholas Roe has caused controversy with the claim that Keats was an opium addict. The book’s blurb is certainly angled to capitalise on this, and states that it will ‘[explode] entrenched conceptions of [Keats] as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure.’ But surely, one would think, Keats being a drug addict on top of the tuberculosis and early death should enlarge his tragic currency? Luckily, Roe’s biography is much less sensationalist than the publicity makes out.

The bare statistics of the Great Irish Famine are chilling enough: in 1845-55 more than a million people died of starvation and disease and a further two million emigrated. Ireland’s population fell by more than a third. John Kelly does an excellent job of sketching the background in The Graves are Walking: massive population growth (the Irish population doubled in the second half of the eighteenth century and almost doubled again in the first four decades of the nineteenth), division of land into ever smaller plots and consequent dependence on the potato, exploitative landlords, resentment at rule by London. When blight struck the potato crop in 1845, it was not as if the British government was unaware of the danger ‒ ‘If the potato fails . . .

Philip Roth has retired. He told a French magazine that, at 79, he was ‘done’. There will be no more books. For the little it is worth, I think he ought to be a Nobel Laureate – American Pastoral stands as one of the best books written since the war about, among other things, the failings and failure of the post-war era, and The Human Stain and Portnoy’s Complaint aren’t too bad either. Roth is an obvious choice for the Nobel committee; but it is simply perverse of them to be scared of his renown, or even to mistrust it. Roth’s retirement recalls Martin Amis' view that writers die twice: the mind weakens, even though the flesh remains willing. Amis’ belief carries a negative, mournful air.

The words ‘Saville’ and ‘Inquiry’ have taken on a somewhat different meaning in recent weeks. But this is just to tell interested readers that my book on the original Saville Inquiry, Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry is out now in paperback. If you can still find a bookshop then you might find it there. Otherwise it is of course available on Amazon etc. Priced at £12.99, it includes updated material on the recently-announced police investigation. The book has been described by the Spectator magazine, no less, as ‘a real-life whodunit’, by the New Statesman as ‘compelling’, by the Literary Review as ‘indispensable’, by the Irish Independent as ‘riveting’, by Kevin Myers as ‘superb’.