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Marika Cobbold was born in Sweden into a family of journalists and newspaper publishers. She moved to England when she was nineteen and has lived here ever since. Her most recent novel is Drowning Rose. Her first book, Guppies For Tea, was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Marika’s other novels are A Rival Creation, The Purveyor of Enchantment, Frozen Music and Shooting Butterflies. She lives in North London with whichever members of her family happen to be around. Below she discusses Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist.

Marika Cobbold on The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler came into my life at a time when my love affair with novels had reached a depressing low. You know how it is? You still have the memory of passion but when faced with the object of your waning desire, try as you might, you simply can’t re-create those early days of heady bliss.

Like most, if not all, writers I was a reader first. In fact I did little else but read from about the age of four to twenty-four. I was never bored or lonely and if, when a teenager, I skipped school, it was to finish the book I’d been reading most of the night. To get my hands on a book by a favourite author was about as good as it got as far as I was concerned, although I liked a mug of tea with my reading rather than the wrinkled apple favoured by that arch bookworm, Jo in Little Women.

And then, in my early twenties, something happened. Or rather didn’t happen. I started novel after novel but that old magic just would not come along. The joy had gone out of the relationship and as often as not, I had to force myself to get to the end of the book I was reading. The literary novels of the time were too tricksy for me at that stage of my life, yet I had grown out of the commercial bonkbusters by Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz and even Jilly Cooper… although The Thorn Birds did cast a spell.

I craved novels that combined the best qualities of literary and commercial fiction. Books with that wondrous mix of great plot and characters, first-rate writing and depth of thought and imagination found in the classics but rarely in contemporary novels.

Then Anne Tyler came into my life. The Accidental Tourist was recommended to me by my best friend, who in turn had been shown the light by her mother. We were sitting on the veranda of their island home talking about books as the slow sun set over the dark-blue North Sea. Bemoaning the lack of ‘my kind of books’, I was handed a copy of The Accidental Tourist, and Reader, we didn’t quite get married and the love might be one-sided, me to her, but I was in love again; with the quietly stunning, quirky and oh-so-humane writing of Anne Tyler.

Like all Tyler’s novels, The Accidental Tourist combines comedy and tragedy without veering into farce or sentimentality. It’s a novel that runs deep and it showcases Tyler’s ability to make the everyday both entirely recognizable and extraordinary. Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates travel and the entire purpose of his guides is to make the traveller feel as if he had never left home. ‘Other travellers hoped to discover distinctive local wines; Macon’s readers searched for pasteurized and homogenized milk.’

The novel starts on a sombre note. A year after their young son was killed, Macon’s wife Sarah wants a divorce. But tragic is not the same as depressing and Anne Tyler doesn’t do depressing. By chapter two I’m smiling at Macon’s attempts to ‘systemize’ his life now he was free of the woman who ‘stored her flatware intermingled’. But when he falls and breaks his legs he and Edward the dog are forced to move back with his three siblings who have all, one way or another, ended up back in the family home. The chapters spent in the company of the gentle, other-worldly, infuriating Leary siblings are some of my favourites. Edward, however, deals with his feelings of loss by biting strangers. Macon calls on Muriel the dog trainer to help sort Edward out. Muriel, with her mass of dark hair, her sharp face and eyes ‘like caraway seeds’ is the devoted single mother to a small endearing wheezy, pasty-faced son. Muriel never shuts up and doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘routine’. Like Macon, I’m not sure that I approve of Muriel or her dog-training methods. But a relationship develops and Macon’s frozen heart begins to thaw. Yet there are no simple solutions in Anne Tyler’s novels. Sarah, the ex-wife, mother of his dead child, gets in touch and she wants her husband back. Macon has to decide between the known pleasures and comforts of his old life and a new, unknown and very untidy kind of love.

I lived that novel while I read it, just like in the good old days, and when I got to the end I started another, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. I loved it every bit as much as I had loved The Accidental Tourist. I moved on to Morgan’s Passing, which I didn’t like quite as much but well enough to keep reading with enthusiasm right to the end. I had got back my reading mojo, all thanks to Ms Tyler.

My mother was an artist but she stopped painting when she was still quite young. I keep asking her why and she always gives the same answer: ‘Because I wasn’t creating anything new. To be a great artist you have to break new ground and I was not able to do that.’

It was an uncomfortable way of looking at life and art. If she is right to feel the way she does, does it also apply to writing? And if so, how? Is it really all about Ulysses and To the Lighthouse? Is everything else, what I and most of us do, simply the equivalent of that dread thing, the ‘nice watercolour landscape, pleasant, inoffensive, easy on the eye and mind’?

Anne Tyler tells me it isn’t so. Her writing is pitch perfect but the style never dominates. The focus is on character and plot. It is writing that sneaks up on you with its brilliance, its insights, its sheer humanity. By the time you get to the end of one of her novels you will more likely than not perceive the world a little differently from the way you did before. To my mind that’s breaking new ground with every sentence. To borrow from Emily Dickinson, Anne Tyler tells all the truth, but she tells it slant.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Tim Soutphommasane discusses the Australian federal government’s proposed human rights and anti-discrimination bill, and says:

We may have free speech, but it has its legal limits. Most of us would say it has its moral limits too.

It’s a remark made only in passing, but I think it’s worth noting that the apparent symmetry of legal limits (which, Tim’s right, there are) and moral limits (which there are too) could be misleading.

Legal limits to free speech are real limits; they restrain people from saying certain things on pain of incurring clear penalties if they go ahead and do say them. Moral limits don’t work in the same way. You might think, as I do, that there are moral reasons why people shouldn’t engage in Holocaust denial. But our thinking this doesn’t prevent anyone from actually doing so; nor, in my view, should they be prevented. People’s moral views do, of course, have an influence on how others conduct themselves, including in speech; still, a moral influence is different from and (usually) weaker than a legal penalty. One shouldn’t imagine – not that Tim himself does – that legal and moral limits are of a kind, or that it would be desirable for all moral limits on free speech (as judged anyway by whom?) to be translated into legal ones.

I’ve registered this point myself enough times before, but never as forcefully as Matthew Parris did in the Times this weekend:

Where have all the South American Indians gone? The question should haunt any traveller to Argentina, the second largest (and third most populous) country on the South American continent.

You could enter from next-door Paraguay, for instance, where Spanish settlers intermarried with the native Guarani inhabitants to produce a thoroughly mixed-race nation whose second language is Guarani. Or you could arrive from Bolivia, where some 60 per cent of the population are indigenous, millions of them pretty much full-blooded, and whose president is himself of Aymara Indian stock. In Peru, too, a huge indigenous population plays a central part in the country’s rural and urban economy, and cultural life.

But there’s something ghostly about Argentina. The overwhelming majority of the population are white, or almost white. Ghostly in another sense too, because sometimes in the street you’ll spot a distinctively bridged nose, unusual cheekbones or the impenetrably dark eyes that betray a dash of native blood. Perhaps this is a migrant from Bolivia, or a Mapuche Indian from Chile; or perhaps – like a ghost walking among his assassins, like a race within a race – this is a death’s-head reminder, a throwback: the hint of a descent from a people who have been wiped from history.

Because “wiped from history” is the only phrase for it. The European settlers who now populate Argentina – Italian, Spanish, German, Welsh – are the relatively recent inheritors of colonisers who quite simply exterminated the peoples whose land this was.

And take note, anyone tempted to mutter “Ah, but the 16th and 17th centuries were a more brutal age”: the Argentine campaign to erase the indigenous population was Argentine, not Spanish, for it was substantially a 19th-century crime against humanity in a country whose war of independence began in 1810.

It makes the blood boil to hear the current President of Argentina, in her recent letter to David Cameron, describe a pantomime skirmish involving a handful of people (most of whom stayed put anyway and kept their property) on some windswept islands far out into the ocean as having “forcibly stripped” her countrymen of their rightful land; and as being “a blatant exercise of 19th-century colonialism”. The hypocrisy!

Colonialism? And this from a country that was the Rhodesia of the New World. Forcibly stripped? If Britain forcibly stripped Argentina of the Falkland Islands, what does Cristina Fernández de Kirchner think the nation she leads did on the mainland? What words would she find for the cold-blooded and systematic destruction and total dispossession of Argentina’s original population by the European invaders whose descendants’ votes she now seeks? The present population of Argentina are the beneficiaries not just of occupation by force of arms, but of an odious, merciless, calculated genocide stretching over centuries.

In no way is Argentina solely responsible for this genocide. The Spanish Empire made a pretty vigorous start. And in no way is the former Spanish Empire the only imperial power to have stolen land, nor its modern successors the only former colonials to have persecuted those they stole it from. Britain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal must feature, too, on that list. But Argentina, especially because the new country actually intensified the genocide after the expulsion of the imperial power, has been among the most cruelly clinical “cleansers” of its original inhabitants in all of Latin America.

There’s more here (£) for those who can get to it.

Damon Runyon is always a source of advice about life. Here, in the story ‘A Nice Price’, there’s a guy laying three to one that the Yales will win the boat race against the Harvards, and Sam the Gonoph is tempted to take a punt on the Harvards at those odds:

‘I do not know anything about boat races,’ Sam says, ‘and the Yales may figure as you say, but nothing between human beings is one to three. In fact,’ Sam the Gonoph says, ‘I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is six to five against. And anyway,’ he says, ‘how can anybody let such odds as these get away from them?’

Writing in connection with Holocaust Memorial Day, Owen Jones takes the Nazi genocide as showing that evil doesn’t exist:

The Holocaust should teach us that evil does not exist. An odd, perhaps ludicrously offensive statement. But to dismiss such atrocities as “evil” is to abdicate responsibility, to comfort ourselves by pretending somehow it was not human beings committing such sickening acts, but monsters who are nothing like us. Germany was one of the most advanced countries on earth at the time. Studies suggest that only about 1 per cent of humans are genuine psychopaths. Millions helped the organised slaughter of Jews – as well as Roma, disabled people, socialists, Slavs and so on – and they were thinking, feeling human beings capable of grief, love and fear, however distressing it may be to accept that fact.

The atrocity teaches us about what it means to be human. As a socialist, I am compelled to have an optimistic view of humanity, to believe we are not all motivated by greed, selfishness or hate. But what the Holocaust reveals is the almost infinite malleability of humanity: that we have the capacity to do wonderful things, and yet to perpetrate the most unimaginable horrors.

Some of what Owen says here is true: that the crime was committed by ordinary human beings, by and large, and human beings are capable of terrible things. But the inference he draws from this, that evil doesn’t exist, is mistaken. At first, I assumed he must mean it doesn’t exist as a separate metaphysical entity, as it were governing the actions of people from without. But, clearly, that isn’t his meaning or his whole meaning; he wants, rather, to insist that what we think of as evil acts come from ordinary, that is, psychologically normal, human beings, with their virtues and their failings. The same has been said by many witnesses and scholars of the calamity – Levi, Arendt and Bauman among them.

From the fact that evil is not a separate entity outside human individuals, however, it doesn’t follow that evil doesn’t exist. We wouldn’t say that compassion and intelligence don’t exist, even though neither of these is a disembodied force acting outside and upon individual persons. There are human aptitudes and impulses and outcomes to which the relevant words can properly be used to refer. Why not, then, the same for ‘evil’? It may not be a single human impulse even, but there are instincts, emotions, weaknesses, vices, limitations, all of them human in standard ways, that in certain combinations and circumstances lead people into atrocious acts against others; and there seems no reason not to have a name for what this collection of attributes can produce. Nothing, finally, in use of the word ‘evil’ need entail abdication or discounting of moral responsibility.

Here’s Ian Birrell on music in Mali:

After the end of colonialism, musicians were used to fuse countries carved out of often disparate communities. Nowhere was this truer than Mali, a nation on the faultline between the African and Arab worlds in which music is more threaded into the fabric of cultural, social and political life than perhaps any other place on Earth.
…..
Mali stakes a claim as birthplace of the blues – the foundation stone of modern music – and many of its best-known artists have taken their songs around the world. They remain respected political voices at home. Oumou Sangaré, the country’s biggest female star, made her name in her early 20s with a breathtaking album tackling issues such as female circumcision and women’s roles in society. Now one of her former backing singers, Fatoumata Diawara, has pulled together 40 stars from all over the country to sing together in a symbol of unity.

The current tragedy of Mali is intensified by its tradition of tolerance. Its strand of gentle Sufism could not be further removed from the hate-fuelled Islamists of al-Qaida. So when an outspoken reggae singer called Tiken Jah Fakoly upset the rulers of his native Ivory Coast and was then declared “persona non grata” by Senegal’s president, he made his home in Bamako, where he can fill football stadiums.

But not these days. For music is banned in two-thirds of Mali following its collapse last year with first a coup, then the capture of the vast northern desert regions by Islamist militias, whose members come from as far afield as Pakistan. Even in the south of the country, despite the Franco-African intervention, there is such instability that these artists whose music provides pleasure around the world cannot perform in their home towns.

The banning of music is hideous anywhere, but in Mali of all places it seems somehow sacrilegious. This is a poor country; as one of its most famous artists says, music is its mineral wealth. And the mujahideen have not just banned it: they declared war on musicians, destroying their equipment and threatening to slice off their fingers. It underlines how at heart this is a cultural conflict, between those embracing the turbulent values of liberal democracy and those seeking the certainties of theocracy.

To ban music is an act so appalling that it is hard to characterize it adequately. Politically reactionary? For sure. Culturally repressive? You can say that again. But there is, beyond all that, a deep inhumanity about it, a yearning for impossible control. ‘Hideous’ and ‘somehow sacrilegious’ kind of fit. You’d think that anyone with an ounce of sense would be able to see in what Birrell reports here a conflict within the Muslim world between antithetical sets of values. But no, for some it’s always corner of a foreign field that is forever the west’s war with the Islamic world. It reminds me of Scrooge McDuck, a figure I used to enjoy reading about when I was but a lad. At the prospect, or even the thought, of money, he’d get dollar signs in his eyes. In the vision of the Milnes and the Greenwalds, the American eagle toting weaponry blocks out everything.

Here are excerpts from some of the tributes to him I’ve seen since the announcement of his death.

Matthew Engel:

Sometimes a line would just whack you between the eyes, as when one of the monks at school promised to take him to watch Bradman at Worcester “but the black-cowled swine reneged”.

Gideon Haigh:

A superb writer and an utter gentleman. This book was my favourite of his. There is no more intimate or empathic retelling of a cricket tour. The vignettes of ‘the magnificent loony loner’ Boycott are priceless, whether coming through customs (‘As usual, this time, I noticed Sir Geoffrey filled in his ‘Purpose of Visit’ as ‘Business’. Typical’), or trying to make sense of his first-innings dismissal by Michael Holding at Barbados (‘With Ann beside him, Boycott’s blue contact lenses fiercely glinted in concentration, his nose almost touching the tiny TV monitor. Scarce a word was said except for him to ask for the over to be replayed again. And again. At the end, he said knowingly: ‘Thanks, I think I’ve seen all I need to see.’)

Alex Massie:

Keating… was one of this country’s great sportswriters.
…..
Not for nothing was Tom Graveney Keating’s favourite cricketer. This is worthy of Cardus: “Our Tom was of the orchard rather than the forest, blossom susceptible to frost but breathing in the sunshine. Taking enjoyment as it came, he gave enjoyment which still warms the winters of memory. Still the hero.”

John Samuel:

Few have written with such sympathy, able to laugh with them [sports people], not at them, at the same time minting fresh, inventive phraseology. He created a new language for the nation’s sporting press. He was unique, and beloved by contemporaries, who saw his writing skills and awards as a guiding path for their own.

A friend reminded me of Keating’s description of Bob Willis: ‘A 1914 biplane tied up with elastic bands trying vainly to take off’. (Thanks: RB.)

What was so wrong with what he said? I mean he only said that having visited Auschwitz twice, he’s saddened that the Jews could go on to inflict atrocities on Palestinians ‘and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza’. He didn’t say the Jews are Nazis or as bad as the Nazis. Listen to his responses regarding the critical reaction to his words; listen here (from 47 minutes in) or to the audio clip here. Ward is concerned about man’s inhumanity to man wherever it takes place and about learning the lessons. What’s unacceptable (he asks) about referring to the horrors of the Holocaust and to actions taking place in Palestine/Israel? Or, again, listen here where Ward demurs at the suggestion he was comparing Nazi Germany with Israel. At Holocaust-memorial events, he insists, everyone says it is necessary to learn the lessons, so it seems entirely appropriate to him to raise the issue of man’s inhumanity to man as it still goes on in different parts of the world, including by those who suffered most during the Holocaust. What could be wrong with any of this?

Plenty, that’s what. Many will find this too obvious to be worth spelling out, and to all of you I apologize if I take up your time. But there will be others who are swayed by Ward’s protestations of innocent intent, and explanation and argument are therefore necessary.

One of the things wrong with Ward’s style of combined reference (to the Holocaust and Israel’s actions against Palestinians) is the indifference at once to scale and to the specific nature of Holocaust inhumanity. These are points I have made before, in a discussion with Martin Shaw concerning comparisons between the Warsaw ghetto and Gaza (see section [e] here): ‘In little over a year after the Warsaw ghetto was sealed, some 50,000 of its inhabitants had died of starvation, and in the end the population there was “liquidated” – deported to the death camps.’ Not altogether similar, then, to Gaza today.

Ward’s particular references include Auschwitz and this can only accentuate the same points. More than a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, to say nothing of the cruelties inflicted on them before they were murdered or in the process of murdering them. Furthermore, they were killed not as part of any two-sided conflict in which they had taken up arms against Germany or were threatening it, resolved to end its existence and so forth. The victims were done to death for who they were, in an attempted genocide. Whatever Ward conceives to be the rights and wrongs of the Israel-Palestine conflict, a political conflict is what it is, the Palestinians are not subject to genocidal mass murder in gas ovens and the Palestinian leadership – or parts of it anyway – precisely are resolved, or so they keep saying, to ending Israel’s existence. Once again, consequently, not altogether similar to Auschwitz.

You may believe that a parent who gives a child a slap is behaving wrongly. But should you invoke – in condemning it, and in all apparent seriousness – the recent shootings to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School, people may well take you to be making an unjust and odious comparison, since there are relevant differences of both scale and content. It bears repeating here: anything can be argued to be like virtually anything else in some respect. But the differences can also matter morally. To focus on the general phenomenon ‘inhumanity’ without due regard to its variants and their moral significance is a form of obtuseness.

Another thing that is wrong with the Israel-Nazism combination in contemporary hostile discourse towards Israel is the extreme selectivity of it. It just has to be Israel and Nazism. Not Israel and something ‘smaller’ – say, Britain in Northern Ireland or the Falklands War, the United States in Afghanistan. And not, for that matter, some other country than Israel and Nazi Germany. In this way the Jewish state is like no other, and no other is like Israel, in resembling the Nazis. It’s a privileged form of combination and comparison, the damning taint of the very worst inhumanity reserved, more or less, for the people who were its primary victims.

So if David Ward is innocent, this is innocence in one of two other meanings than the blameless meaning. It is either the innocence of a political fool, someone who should know better and is culpable for not going to the trouble of knowing better; or it is the dishonest innocence of the person who chooses not to understand what the fuss is about.

There are contexts where it is proper to point out how smaller wrongs or sins or misdemeanours can foreshadow much worse. Primo Levi was amongst many survivors and witnesses of Nazi barbarism to tell us that the perpetrators were human beings, not monsters, and we need to be on our guard against where our own fragilities might lead. But the context and the overt purpose of writing in this way show it not to be a deliberate calumny against the Jews. David Ward has no such protection. His remarks were aimed at one group of people and no other. They were just such a calumny.

That’s what was wrong with what he said.

Here’s a tale from a different era, about Cliff Morgan:

When Cliff Morgan made his debut for Wales in 1951, he caught the bus from his home in the Rhondda and travelled down to Cardiff with a full load of supporters.

“The bus was packed,” he told me. “So I stood for the whole journey.”

The letter from the secretary of the Welsh Rugby Union, Captain Arthur Rees, is a quaint reminder of how players used to be informed of selection. The note at the bottom reflects the austerity of those early post-war years:

“Please let me know by return of post whether you can attend. You are to wear the white-topped stockings issued for the Scotland match. Please do not forget them, as stockings have become very scarce.”

It’s a story Frank Keating would have enjoyed and might well have written about. Keating has died at the age of 75. He was a fine writer on cricket and other sports, and one featured on this blog on a number of occasions. (Thanks: RB / AM.)

I’m all for rationalism, for being guided, so far as possible, by reason and (good) reasons. But when rationalism leads someone to underestimate the force and the importance of beliefs which they see as beyond reason, that’s not so clever. Here’s Jonathan Miller in conversation with Laurie Taylor. Miller:

And he [a questioner] said, “No, seriously, are you an atheist?” And I said, when I say I’m not an atheist, it’s not that I’m an agnostic and I’m hedging my bets. It’s just that I cannot think it is worth having a word to describe it. It’s so trivial, my not believing in God in the present day. I don’t believe in witches, but I don’t call myself an ahexist.

Yes indeed, and I don’t believe there’s a zhnarp hiding in my desk drawer or anywhere else about town, yet I haven’t adopted the label ‘azhnarpist’. Religion, however, is different from belief in zhnarps – believe me it is – in being an all but universal feature of human societies and having attracted the passions of generations of human beings, to say nothing of having inspired architecture, art, music, literature, works of charity and some less benign things than that. It’s kind of useful to have a word for not believing in its most central propositions.

Then there’s this. Taylor suggests that the revival of religion in fundamentalist forms has confounded the expectations of sociologists, and Jonathan Miller replies:

But we have to remember that in the case of the Islamic fundamentalism it’s associated with an objection to what they see as the military tyranny inflicted upon their people by the United States and by NATO. It’s a politically motivated thing.

There you go – what comes back Taylor’s way is sociology of the playpen. A religious phenomenon as widespread as this Miller deals with as an expression, essentially, of politics. Leave aside the Comment-is-Free level of the remark, but you might suppose from it that religion could have no independent power over people’s thinking.