Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

A pattern begins to emerge after the third Rose Tremain novel in short order. She does the raptures of love very well, time and again, this time in The Gustav Sonata, but also the counter-balancing pain and difficulties.

Central to The Gustav Sonata is the humanitarian offence of falsifying the dates of Jews escaping Nazism into 'neutral' Switzerland and the question of who betrayed who when the police chief who facilitates as many migrants as he can before the border is secured more tightly against them is betrayed by his wife.

It's a complicated web of relationships in which the widow is left trying to lure Gustav, the son, into a relationship in her old age. Meanwhile, Gustav's close childhood friend has a career as a concert pianist undermined by stage fright. It makes for a grim book, no less beautifully realized than The Housekeeper or Absolutely & Forever, but somehow more discomfiting as the unhappiness outweighs the rapture.

It is a good time to wait before overdoing the Tremain, for fear of the law of diminishing returns applying to Music & Silence. Thus The Anatomy of Melancholy might add intervals of relatively light relief during 600 pages of Wittgenstein's life. When the primary texts are hard going- and Wittgenstein is surely a paragon example of that- then a biography can be an easier point of access. It looks like even Ludwig himself didn't expect anybody to understand his Tractatus. 

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The archive Middlemarch recently on BBC4 with Juliet Aubrey, Rufus Sewell, Robert Hardy et al was a masterpiece of both costume drama and seminal novel, a fine example of why the BBC is still worth all of its licence fee and would be even more so if showing more of what it has stored away and caught up with a few more recent good books.

I was once told that my preference for George Eliot over Dickens was somehow inevitable, I'm not now entirely sure why, but surely she is in a different class. Maybe Dickens is a bit more 'obvious' and Eliot is dealing with things more subtly but one can hardly accuse Dickens of creating lurid caricatures when Patrick Malahide's Casaubon, Aubrey's Dorothea, Hardy's Brooke and Sewell's Ladislaw were clearly delineated- to great effect- with minor parts tending towards cartoons, but all the better to make its points in a costume drama that, for the most part, resolves into a happy enough ending.

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Meanwhile, Unearthed: The Mystery of the Shaman Woman arrived at phenomenal conclusions from the discovery of a Mesolithic- 9000 year old- burial site in Germany. It's not for me to say that they came to some very specific conclusions from a few old bones and what was found with them but to create a female shaman who could put herself into a trance by leaning her head back to cut off the blood supply to her head and becoming renowned as a healer is a huge step.

Most compelling was how the discovery, once taken up by the Nazis as an Aryan icon, all white, blond and blue-eyed, was re-made as dark-skinned and the news to me that Europeans were dark-skinned 9000 years ago and those of us who became 'white' only did so due to a change in diet, starchy foods apparently gradually making us paler.

I'd have thought that was an absolute godsend to all us liberal left, 'intellectual elite' who don't think that white is naturally superior. Alongside the documentary about the vast libraries of Timbuktu, it all begins to make Western white culture- all that Bach, Shakespeare, relativity and space exploration- look more like a recent aberration in the longer perspectives of history.

Given the prognostications about the 10% chance of AI finishing off humanity in the next ten years, it could just be that, quite beautifully, all that arrogance and cleverness brought with it its own downfall. It was already clear that if AI was asked to solve such problems as climate change it would realize that it was caused by human beings and, if asked to prevent it, would thus wipe out its cause. It would be a great shame if there was nobody left to appreciate the irony so I suggest we appreciate now, in advance, just in case.