JUST NOT CRICKET IN MY BOOK

I have just read Netherland. It is very much the livre du jour, or rather the literary-novel-now-out-in-paperback du jour. I don’t generally feel any compulsion to read fashionable books, especially if I know in my bones that they aren’t going to be for me (viz Dan Brown). Who can say what leads one to read one book rather than another? The Origin of Species is now atop my pile, a little because Professor Dawkins has re-piqued my interest (I have had my Pelican edition since the 1960s) but mostly because I feel it would be “nice” to read it in its anniversary year; indeed, if I were to miss this occasion, I doubt that I would ever get around to it.

But back to Netherland. I am not unduly surprised to find that it has been absurdly over-praised. So many literary novels are hyped with a degree of desperation that beggars belief. Certainly Joseph O’Neill is an enormously intelligent writer and his command of his material and of his style are both enviable. And I liked it more than I had expected.

I was braced to be repelled. After all, it is marketed as being “about” cricket in New York. Indeed, the HarperCollins paper edition, which includes an interview with O’Neill and other sidebar material, focuses on this aspect of the book. Well, I can think of few subjects better calculated to bore me to tears than cricket and had the book featured that dreary pastime in, say, Birmingham, Perth or Mumbai, I doubt that I would have purchased a copy.

As it turns out, cricket is no more than a textural ingredient. There is a partial account of one match. And the great character of the book, the Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon, is ostensibly attempting to establish a proper cricket ground in Brooklyn. But cricket here is what Alfred Hitchcock used to call The McGuffin: a set-up or mechanical device that kick-starts the plot and serves as a surface attraction for getting the punters in. The main traffic of the novel concerns an unravelling and then reknitting marriage. This, at any rate, is how I read it and (though I haven’t discussed it with any of them) I bet that’s how my women friends would read it too. But this – it seems to me – foregrounded story is not even alluded to, let alone discussed, in the aforementioned interview. It is as though O’Neill has written one novel for (straight) men and another for women and for men bored to tears by cricket.

I’m perplexed that Sam Mendes is in development with a movie of Netherland. As I read it, it’s a discursive, reflective, internalised narrative, the kind that routinely defeats those who try to dramatise such novels. But of course Mendes will make the version that is “about cricket in New York” rather than the one about Hans and Rachel and their growing apart and then back together.



Perhaps this is all a measure of the novel’s excellence. Some months ago, I read another well-regarded contemporary novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. This shares much in tone and material with Netherland, depicting another immigrant highflier in Manhattan and displaying a hugely intelligent grasp of the way the various sensibilities of different nationalities rub against each other. And I found that a (woman) friend who liked the book as much as did I had read it from a very different perspective and so had a very different take on it from mine. This elusive novel too was planned for filming (by Mira Nair) but that plan appears to have been shelved.

Just as well, I think. Excellent novels deserve to be known for what they are, rather than being forever supplanted by routine movie versions. The best outcome for the writer of an exceptional novel is for a producer to pay out serious money for the rights and then make a movie so bad that it is soon forgotten. Thereafter, the novel regains its status as the only widely known work bearing that title. This is what happened to the lucky Louis de Bernières with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, another hugely popular literary paperback.

The overhyping of novels, especially by new writers, can be quite destructive for the future of the writer so marketed. Donna Tartt has been unable to meet the expectations that The Secret History raised. Alex Garland, now evidently a fixture in the lucrative world of writing unmade movies, must miss the attention that The Beach attracted. I thought both these hit books so bad – derivative, ill-written, poorly imagined – that they made me quite disproportionately angry.

Another preposterously overpraised first novel was A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka, which critics and others fell upon as if no novel like it had been written before. I wonder how many of those fans can name either of her subsequent efforts.

Two more highly fashionable reads that I succumbed to were Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe. I dare say I enjoyed both of them very much but in all good conscience I can recall not a thing about either of them. Perhaps they indulged too many characters. So many novels, if not written by someone as smart and fecund as Dickens or Joyce, are prone to dribbling away into a crowd of nonentities. Another novel that made me cross was Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson, which I thought unfunny and incredibly sloppy. I’m assured that her headline-grabbing first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is worth reading but I’m inclined to be once bitten, twice shy. It served me right for buying a book purely because it had a nice dog on the cover.

The fashion for writing comedically about a large cast of characters has always had its attractions for novelists but it is incredibly hard to make work. It defeated Gore Vidal in Duluth and I don’t expect writers lower down the pecking order to bring it off either.

Let me not come off here as an old curmudgeon. I can certainly think of one novel that was in every other traveller’s hands on the tube for several months back in 1986 and that, when it was in my hands, would not allow itself to be put down. The McGuffin of that book was highly unpropitious too: chemical elements. It was Primo Levi’s wonderful The Periodic Table, his first (I think) to be published in Britain but the fifth he wrote – happily all the others have followed in translation.

At the back of Netherland is Joseph O’Neill’s “Capricious XI of Favourite Books”. I always spurn favourites, “best-of”, “greatest”, “all-time tops” and other such reductive lists but simultaneously cannot resist being provoked by them. Of course as soon as I began my own capricious XI, I remembered the absurdity of it. If you arrange such a list alphabetically, most of us wouldn’t even make it out of ‘A’ before our number is up: The Age of Innocence, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, All the Pretty Horses, The Ambassadors, American Pastoral, Animal Farm, Anna Karenina, Ape and Essence, As I Lay Dying, Atonement, At Swim-Two-Birds and that’s not to mention À la recherche du temps perdu. By the time you get to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy or even Disgrace, let alone The Tin Drum or Ulysses, you are hundreds over your quota. And then what of those writers whose canon you’d want to include, never mind the horror of choosing one: Austen, Flaubert, Trollope, Zola, Dostoevsky, the Brontës, Balzac, Gaskell, Hardy, Lawrence, Wells, Maugham, Fitzgerald, Greene, Steinbeck …? How long is a string of literature?

Given that there is such a cornucopia of great books, it really doesn’t signify if a passing sensation escapes your clutches. And that doesn’t even begin to consider the vast other library of fiction, the so-called “popular” rather than literary novels: all those writers like Catherine Cookson, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Wilbur Smith, Bernard Cornwell, Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins, not one volume of whom you and I (or at any rate I) will ever have in our hands, let alone read.

ROWAN and BARACK and ALL the GANG

My regular reader may perhaps be surprised to have found no comment here yet on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s outrage. (For the record, he tentatively advanced the notion that certain disputes in the Muslim community in Britain might be settled by specially convened courts operating under Islamic Sharia law). It seems an obvious one for me to write about, he or she would hazard (and not be far off the mark). I confess I have not “privileged” (as they say) my own blog on this matter. Upon listening to His Grace’s interview on The World at One (which preceded the formal address in which he formally unveiled his thinking on Sharia law), I did something that I have never done before which was to email a comment to the programme. For a few hours, I believed that my comment had been sucked into cyberspace. There were apparently no comments at all posted within three hours of the programme – all were timed later – and many of them were trivial and even rude. I wrote to the website asking why I should have bothered to email. Impressively, I received a prompt reply from no less a personage than the deputy editor of The World at One (who certainly must have more pressing duties to which to attend) and was able quickly to verify his assurance that my comment was after all there in all its glory. (Needless to say, I sent him a grateful and admiring response). The BBC had by then received upwards of 17,000 emails. Just processing them must require a dedicated team.

I was also an early joiner of the thread that inevitably spun out to inordinate length on the Richard Dawkins website. On-line newspapers and every other kind of forum have been humming with this matter. Cantab has unleashed a vast hornets’ nest and very, very few of those roused are buzzing in his support. The (pretty feeble) consensus among his few apologists appears to be that his view has been misunderstood, misinterpreted or taken out of context. It is true that there is a large amount of personal abuse in the reaction, not least in the tabloids. I tried to give Dr Williams some credit in my postings. He is, after all, about as liberal a leader as the Anglican church can boast in my lifetime (since Michael Ramsey, anyway) and, if this storm ensures that his successor is a flint-faced fundamentalist, the church and wider public life in Britain will be the poorer for it.

The argument that I put forward in my postings which I have yet to see in any others is this: I rather suspect that Rowan Williams is fundamentally a decent and caring man (and far from stupid) but he doesn't appear to comprehend the aspiration of Islam to control the whole planet. Here's a refinement of his proposal that would leave him with less egg in his beard and, at the same time, would demonstrate vividly where Islam stands. Let the Archbishop propose that all Islamic nations reciprocate and allow non-Muslims and (especially perhaps) apostates to bend to arrangements other than those prescribed by Sharia. I have no expectation that any Islamic nation would subscribe to such an arrangement but, if I were wrong, it would constitute a major breakthrough.

Further, I made this point on the Dawkins site: I remember lodging for a while in the 1960s in the Bourneville area of Birmingham (England). There wasn't a pub to be found for miles because the Cadburys were religious teetotallers of some stripe (quakers?) and their writ ran throughout the area. Maybe it still does. By itself, this is of no great moment (unless you're a lush) but it is really only a small step from that to the Bishop of Rochester's “no-go areas” and then on to a situation where Sharia is more powerful than the law of the land in the ghettoes that we always said we didn't want.

Another poster asked “How will it affect you if you're not Muslim?” Not to put too fine a point on it, I repeat that Islam is set on world domination. Today Southall, tomorrow south London, next week the home counties. If I live in a society or a world where being an infidel (which is to say, not a Muslim) is a capital offence, I think I will justifiably feel that the rise of Sharia has affected me more than somewhat.

This week is General Synod. Someone from high in the Anglican church must be monitoring the Dawkins site, it being always one's duty to keep an informed eye on the enemy (serious lefties take The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal). That spy, I suggested, should encourage Synod to tell Cantab that he ought to resign unless he can satisfactorily answer the largest question that his musings raise: whether anyone whose convictions run against the law of the land might expect to be heard before a court more sympathetic to his own stance.

In another part of the forest, the American primaries game (much relished by me if evidently not by everybody) has moved nearer to a resolution. In my earlier entry Five Days Are a Long Time in Politics (January 9th), I counselled that the respective party conventions were months away. Time enough for much to occur.

Events over the last month have refined my analysis and eliminated a number of the players. It seems to me now that the next president is most likely to be Barack Obama. He has astutely handled the obvious negatives that hang about him – his inexperience, his race – without offering other hostages to fortune. He has remained unknowable while yet firing up millions of voters. Who, even among the American chattering classes, could list five of his policy positions? What he offers is freshness, charisma, his mantra of change, the promise (probably undeliverable) of politics very much not as usual. Will he cope with his first crisis as president? Well, he will have shrewd advisors to head him away from the rocks.

Why him rather than Clinton or McCain? Because I think neither Clinton nor McCain has smothered the negatives so well. Every advance by Obama hurts Clinton double because it makes her look less and less the inevitable and the unbeatable candidate. Obama can cast himself as the underdog all the way to November. Clinton looks less and less likely to be able to maintain her image as the heir apparent. What is more, Bill Clinton has unexpectedly begun to seem more of a hindrance than a help. When he shines, he dims her light and people fear that he would interfere in her administration. When he attacks, he makes her seem simultaneously mean and weak. Meanwhile, McCain is no nearer being loved by his own party. The Republican electorate sent him a stark message in the votes yesterday. Mike Huckabee cannot hope to catch McCain in the delegate count but he certainly can hurt him.

No candidate is a sure thing. There may be more racism hidden in the anonymity of the November ballot than anyone has yet bargained for. Clinton would be just as hurt by unspoken misogyny and indeed McCain will be deprived of the votes of deep-dyed conservatives who might even switch to “punish” him. But I feel sure that the Democrats will begin crucially to realize that Obama can beat McCain more surely than Clinton can. Obama offers a sense of the positive that neither McCain nor Clinton can match. His presence underlines the doubts that the electorate have about two candidates who are both seen as machine politicians and yet who are both seen as divisive. To a degree, I think this a pity and that the Democrats may be missing a trick. I argued before for a Clinton/Obama ticket that could look forward to holding the White House for 16 years. But Hillary sure as hell won’t agree to be Barack’s running mate. When Obama wins the nomination, she and Bill will decide to retire to the semi-showbiz world in which Bill now operates.

In The Sunday Times today, Andrew Sullivan argues that the catastrophe (not his word) of the Bush presidency is the ingredient that will most determine the outcome of the state primaries and the national vote. There is something in his argument as presented, though to hazard that Bush has “crafted” (Sullivan’s word) the election is absurd. Had America enjoyed two terms of President Al Gore (whose Vice-President Joe Lieberman – perhaps not his only VP – would hardly be running now as a Democratic contender; what he is actually doing now is backing John McCain), the contenders would probably be the ones we have and the situation would probably be just as poised.

Few retiring presidents are able to bequeath a satisfied nation to an anointed successor as Ronald Reagan did (or could have done, had he taken the remotest interest in the identity of his successor). As president, Al Gore would surely have found a more cultivated response to 9/11 than the attack on Iraq. He would certainly have ratified the Kyoto Agreement and the US might now be in the vanguard of tackling climate change. But I bet Gore’s popularity would have suffered accordingly, especially insofar as his measures required personal sacrifice. So it’s just as likely that the 2008 candidates would have been distancing themselves from a Gore presidency (as indeed Gore himself did in 2004 from the Clinton administration of which he was part).

Most political careers, as Enoch Powell sagely observed, end in failure. Even President Obama’s may do that. And of course archbishops may also make a conclusive bish of it.

FIVE DAYS ARE A LONG TIME IN POLITICS

The United States has enjoyed some striking names among its presidents – Millard Fillmore, Ulysses S Grant, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge – and perhaps even more among its vice-presidents – Aaron Burr, Eldridge Gerry, Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, John Nance Garner, along with two recent ones we’d all rather forget: Spiro Agnew and J Danforth Quayle. But though the world’s media and the political chattering classes had all but crowned Barack Obama as the 43rd president 24 hours ago, the absurd presumption of that éclat has suddenly been tempered by reality. Between now and the Nevada primary (for complex reasons, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate at the intervening vote in Michigan where the Democratic Party has ruled that no delegates will count towards the national total), Mr Obama may find himself no longer expected to be the next chief executive with a funny name. His campaign will perhaps be dismissed as having “peaked too soon”. Like Senator Clinton, he should be patient. The convention, which will finally endorse the official candidate, is all of seven months away.

It’s odd how the media and the chatterers never learn anything. Today’s lead story on the front page of The Guardian and the cover of the new issue of Private Eye were already as dead in the water before they reached the shops as they thought Mrs Clinton was. Perhaps the letters editor of The Daily Telegraph (to whom I wrote because The Guardian seems no longer prepared to run my letters) will regret that he did not publish this on Monday:

Dear Sir,

Two observations on the Iowa caucuses: first, the results may well have no significance in the long term. In 1988, Vice-President Bush got 19% of the Republican vote to Bob Dole's 34%. Mr Bush went on to be President, Mr Dole to be the defeated presidential candidate eight years later. Even more strikingly (and resonantly), Bill Clinton won only 3% of the Democrat vote, as against Tom Harkin's 76% in 1992. Mr Clinton became President, Mr Harkin a mere footnote in presidential history.

Furthermore, I note that commentators were united in their pre-caucus view that both parties' races were "wide open", "too close to call" and so on. Had Dennis Kucinich or Duncan Hunter won their respective caucus votes, the exclamations that the results produced might be justified. But in a "wide open" race, it seems curious that either actual result should be thought so earth-shattering.

Yours faithfully,

W Stephen Gilbert

The paper might have been unique (come on, I couldn’t check them all) in having a view dissenting from a consensus that proved wide of the mark. Indeed, the consensus had been so clamorous that the Clintons had begun to believe it themselves (if – and it’s a big if – those same media outlets are to be credited at all). And who could blame the Clintons for feeling written off when the BBC Washington correspondent is yelling at you “Will you withdraw if you lose New Hampshire, Senator?”?

I adore elections in the US, precisely because they offer such a switchback ride. I’ve watched fascinated some astonishing campaigns: Jack Kennedy’s white-knight charge to a White House that became Camelot; Barry Goldwater’s campaign, the most right wing in American history and easily shrugged off by Lyndon Johnson, though we now know that Goldwater was in favour of gay rights before more than a handful of people knew they might want them; Eugene McCarthy’s thrilling student crusade of 1968; the strange and disruptive interventions of George Wallace, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader; the inevitable disaster of the most liberal candidate ever, George McGovern, still serving at 85 as the United Nations’ global ambassador on hunger; the bitter humiliation for those would-be second-termers thrown out of office by the electorate (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush); the serial runners who didn’t make it – George Romney (the father of Mitt), Robert Dole, Jesse Jackson; the candidates who, though clearly not up to the job, still reached the White House (Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, the last two twice).

The one thing I feel sure of this time is that there is no Republican candidate, even the standing-by and credible Michael Bloomberg, who can win the presidency. There may be Democrats who can lose it and they may include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright astutely observed in a World at One interview the other day, all candidates have negatives but Senator Clinton has the undoubted advantage that hers are already all known. Senator Obama may bristle at the questions that Mrs Clinton has asked of him but they are very small beer compared with what the Republican attack machine would unleash, were he to win or to be drawing near to winning the nomination.

There is no doubt, however, that Mr Obama has caught a wave. In states as virtually all-white as both Iowa and New Hampshire, it is wonderfully reassuring that a man of colour can draw such levels of support right across the electorate. The respective races for the nomination – but especially the Democratic race – have attracted unprecedented numbers going out to vote in the snow that traditionally accompanies these primaries and caucuses.

Whether Obama’s wave will peter out cannot be predicted. If it doesn’t (or even if it does), Mrs Clinton would be smart to invite him to be her running mate. He would then be in a very good position to run as the Democrat candidate in 2016 (as Vice-President Obama) when he would still only be 55. That way the Democrats could be looking at a healthy prospect of providing the administrations until 2024, by which time no doubt Jeb Bush’s half-Hispanic son John will be ready to carry the Republicans back to the White House. As he will no doubt be known officially by his current nickname of Jebby, he will be able to extend the run both of previously unrepresented demographics in the Oval Office and of unusual names on the presidential roll.

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This blog is not the only task (or friend) neglected by me since yule. The internet of course is the greatest time-waster and displacement activity since the spread of television and I have lately been much exercised by debate and discussion on the richarddawkins.net site wherein those who know that there are no supernatural powers, beings or states of being hammer out their differences. Furthermore, I have (rather late in the day, characteristically) discovered the enormous pleasure of repairing errors and omissions on Wikipedia. I shall endeavour to do better. (After all, I have a play that I’m supposed to be writing).

The SEASON TO BE JOLLY

I spent a merry hour yesterday evening searching for and downloading Christmas carols. Not that we lack for piles of CDs and indeed LPs of traditional favourites in this house, but the beauty of iTunes and other sites is that you can cherry-pick what you want; you don’t have to acquire the whole album and hence a bunch of duplications.

I had been especially missing ‘Adam Lay Ybounden’, an anonymous 15th century madrigal most widely known these days in its 20th century setting by Boris Ord. We used to sing this one when I was in the school choir and I was always moved by the way Ord caught its medieval spirit without being either unduly pious about its age or unsympathetic in his own modernity.

A second favourite unaccountably missing from the CD compilations was ‘The Boar’s Head Carol’, another 15th century lyric that was later published in the collection of Christmasse Carolles by Wynkyn de Worde, great ally of William Caxton in the fledgling business of The Print and possessor of one of the most enviably distinctive names in fame’s history. ‘The Boar’s Head’ is so rumbustious a crowd-pleaser that it warms up the most perishing congregation, even in the bleak mid-winter.

Despite my knowledge that there are no supernatural powers, beings or states of being, I have absolutely no difficulty in appreciating carols or, come to that, hymns from all through the calendar of ‘Ancient and Modern’. Music is music and poetry is poetry and one doesn’t need to be put off by the illusory nature of its inspiration. A huge proportion of art of all kinds is expressive of fantasy and none the worse for that. What’s more, low-church music is very redolent of my childhood and so has a powerful claim on my emotions.

Brought up in the Anglican tradition – by which of course I mean a calm, benign and very nearly agnostic approach to worship – I was well able to distinguish between the theatre and the propaganda from an early age. Had I been a Catholic, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jainist, a Jew, a Parsee, a Zoroastrian, a Mennonite, a Sikh, an Amish or a member of any of the other faiths, I would doubtless have had a bloodier battle to escape. As it was, once I was confirmed by the then Bishop of Peterborough, I rapidly moved from being a daily reader of selected passages of the Bible (“that boy’s going to be a vicar” said my Dad, who never possessed the gift of prophesy) to the warm embrace of apostasy. In my book Common Sense (see the link in the right column), I wrote about my rationalism, but it wasn’t until this year, when I started to read Richard Dawkins and then Sam Harris (the latter of whom is nearer to my own position), that I discovered that the battle against the dangerous power of religion is at last being joined in earnest. The site richarddawkins.net has been the year’s best discovery for me and I have been greatly stimulated by the range of (often heated) discussions among people who are, at the level that counts, like-minded.

In an unusual declaration, Nick Clegg answered the question of whether he believed in god, posed on Radio Five Live yesterday, with the word “no” (at least that’s what The Guardian says; I listened to the entire phone-in on the BBC iPlayer and the matter never came up). It is rare indeed for party leaders anywhere in the capitalist world to reveal such things and Clegg was instantly transformed from being the least promising-looking Liberal Party leader since Clement Davies to a bold and interesting chap. Alas, as politicians are apt to do, he blew it immediately. “I have enormous respect for people who have religious faith,” he ‘clarified’ later in the day. “I’m married to a Catholic and am committed to bringing my children up as Catholics”. So, rather as his website cites “Jonny [sic] Cash” as his favourite singer, Clegg looks like another disingenuous opportunist saying what he hopes is the ingratiating thing rather than what he knows is the true thing.

In another part of the (same) forest, year’s end is the conventional time for the computation based upon the names given to the year’s new-born (not, one assumes, that there will have been no more over the remaining twelve days before January 1st). The Office of National Statistics – whose data, you imagine, could hardly be expected to extend beyond, say, June (say, 1994) – reckons there were 6,772 Jacks joining us this year. Thomas was the next most popular name with 5,803 votes; that is unless you count together those christened – to use entirely the wrong word – Mohammad, Mohamad, Muhamet and Muhammed, in which case Thomas is relegated to third, the M guys registering 6,368 hits.

What this demonstrates is the alarming penetration of Islam into British society. Will our children or our children’s children find themselves constrained under Sharia law in Britain? It will surely occur sooner in France, where more than five million Muslims have settled and where they are widely expected to become a majority before 2030. That’s France, our nearest neighbour on mainland Europe. In due course, Nick Clegg may find himself saying that he is “committed” to his grandchildren being brought up as Muslims. And, by the way, Islam is a faith that promises suicide bombers the attentions of the curiously precise number of 72 virgins in paradise (I don’t think the Qur'an specifies that they should be attractive or female or even indeed human virgins) and that routinely countenances murder for the 'sins' of adultery, homosexuality and being an infidel, which is to say not being a Muslim. By the time the first Muslim government is sworn in at Westminster – and don’t doubt that it will assuredly be an all-Muslim government – Adam will certainly lie ybounden.

LET MISS GIBBONS GO OR THE BEAR GETS IT

The urgent need for all courageous and determined people to band together and rid the world of the scourge of religion has been heavily underlined this week. If you have yet to hear of it, here is the grotesque situation: a 54 year-old teacher from Liverpool, Gillian Gibbons by name, volunteered out of the goodness of her heart to teach in a primary school in Khartoum, Sudan. The school was founded a century ago, when The Sudan (as it was apt to be called then) was a condominium jointly administered by Egypt and Britain. Its catchment is comparatively wealthy but I dare say a British teacher is still an asset and the school and its pupils can consider themselves lucky to have her.

One of the children brought a teddy bear to class and Miss Gibbons suggested that the children might like to think of a name for the toy. With a commendable – if perhaps unwarranted – regard for democracy, the teacher accepted the children’s choice of a name. It was Muhammad. There are two things to note about this moniker. First, it is the name of the prophet of Islam. Second, it is commonly given to Muslim boys or assumed by Muslim men (the world famous boxer Cassius Clay converted to Islam and renamed himself Muhammad Ali).

Now accounts diverge. Some say fellow teachers raised objection, others that parents protested to the school authorities. What is not in doubt is that offence was taken, the prophet had been “insulted” and Miss Gibbons was detained by the authorities and held in jail where, at the time of writing, she waits to discover her fate. She may be released in the unlikely event that common sense prevails or if the British embassy makes a sufficiently cogent case. Or she may be incarcerated for up to six months. Or she may be assaulted by forty lashes. Here we see the full wisdom, might, compassion and (above all) righteousness of Sharia Law in action. And – hoorah for the thoughtful pastoral care of the little children – the school has been closed down until next year. Everyone’s a winner, baby!

You might wonder, as I do, about Islam’s confidence in its own prophet if he can be “insulted” by a harmless teddy bear being given his name. Isn’t he just a bit bigger than that? Just a touch more untouchable? Doesn’t this touchiness on the part of his advocates make him seem something of a wuss?

Fundamentalist Muslims think nothing of threatening to kill infidels and anyone else to whom they take a gratuitous dislike. The charmingly preferred method is beheading, a suitably medieval method. We infidels might find such menaces a bit offensive. What about our sensibilities? For my part, apart from being scorned as an infidel, I am condemned as a homosexual. There isn’t any religion in the world that respects me, yet I am expected – indeed obliged by law – to respect them. The miserable, hypocritical bastards.

Who are these Imams who make their self-important, posturing, anti-human, po-faced pronouncements? It’s a teddy bear, for Pete’s sake. Grow up. And what about the seven year-olds who decided to call the teddy bear Muhammad? Are they to be flogged? Or their parents who didn’t teach them any better? Or their religious instructors who didn’t teach them any better – more at fault, surely, than a foreign non-Muslim teacher of secular subjects. And what about the prophet’s name being given to mere mortal boys? Doesn’t this insult the prophet? If a boy called Muhammad turns out to be laggardly in his studies of the Qur’an or parsimonious in the payment of zakat or progressive in the licence he gives to his wife or a butterfingers in goal, does he not dishonour the prophet more than a boy named Muhafiz or Mujaddid or Muharrem? Isn’t his name (to coin a phrase) a cross to bear?

Whatever the fate that awaits Gillian Gibbons, I hope that, when she’s safely back in Liverpool, she will have the gumption to take the Sudanese government before the International Court of Human Rights. I hope that the United Nations will have the gumption to take an effective stand on the issue. Most of all, I hope that others, apart from me and Professor Dawkins, will stick their heads above the parapet, even if the result is that those heads are swiftly separated from their bodies. And anyway, Muhammad: it’s a crap name, isn’t it?

HOW IT REALLY IS

Tony Blair never learned one of the basic laws of politics: how it looks is more important than how it is. He imagined that the constant use of the techniques of spin-doctors would make everything right. But the proportion of the electorate that swallows the doctored medicine is not large enough for the gambit to be worth it. Most of us see these nostrums for what they are. (Incidentally, surprise has been widely expressed that doctors and other health workers have appeared to be the moving forces behind the recent bomb attacks in Glasgow and London. I don’t know why. Doctors have always been rogues and vagabonds. Among the most disreputable characters in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers is a pair of young general practitioners to whom you would hesitate to entrust a scratch on a finger).

Blair never got his head round the problem that the invasion of Iraq and its lamentable consequences couldn’t possibly be made to look desirable, successful, wise, necessary or even a fairly honourable failure. To most impartial observers, it came across only as repellent, vain, dumb, misguided and a craven catastrophe. It made no difference how many times Blair assured us that it was “the right thing to do”. That was never going to be how it looked. He could argue until he was blue in the face. Iraq will be written on his heart just as Calais was written on Queen Mary’s.

The case that, whatever the final outcome, is going to go down in the annals of the Blair years as The Cash for Honours Scandal was also one that could never be made to look other than fishy. It is his misfortune (and Blair’s) that, no matter what high degree of probity he evidently brought to the task of raising money for Labour’s coffers, Lord Levy strikes you as oleaginous, ingratiating and insincere. You want to lock him in a cupboard with Daniel Corbett, David Dickinson and Michael Winner. I have no doubt that the Daily Mail singled Levy out for grotesquely biased treatment, underwritten by a subtext of anti-Semitism. That’s about The Mail’s level (I aver, without actually reading the paper) and I hope Levy sues them and makes off with a healthy cheque for damages. But that doesn’t mean I have to want to cosy up with him myself. If Blair couldn’t see that Levy would not come across to the public as someone you would rush to trust, he certainly wasn’t able to get his head round the notion of how it looks.

It will be hard for the voters to walk away from this saga without suspecting at some level that there can’t be smoke without fire. The director of public prosecutions may have concluded that there is “not enough evidence” to proceed but the public requires no such rigorous examination of the prospects to form its conclusions. Blair is, across a broad range of matters, a busted flush. Gordon Brown has been shrewd to make it his priority to put as much discernible space between his style and method and those of his predecessor as possible. The handy side effect is that, the further Blair slips into history, the more irrelevant is made to seem his true stylistic and spiritual heir, David Cameron. The voters of Southall and Sedgefield seem to have thought so. In a perverse and roundabout way, the tarnishing of Blair’s golden image may have done Labour a favour after all.

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Late last evening, we strolled down to the local shops. My partner reads the Harry Potter books (I had had my fill with two) and had ordered the final volume. At my prompting, we decided to join a ritual that will surely never be repeated in our lifetimes: the midnight massing of children and adults outside a bookshop.

There must have been a hundred people there, a far cry from the 6,000 or so apparently queuing outside Waterstone’s biggest store on Piccadilly but astonishing enough for a small town. The mood was festive and friendly, only briefly compromised by passing teenaged drunks. The two kids who had made the most effort in their appropriate costumes were rewarded with a free copy each. Then the rest of us filtered into the shop to pick up our copies. (I bought The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins).

Had I been JK Rowling, I would have supplied independent book sellers with free or at least heavily discounted copies so that they could undercut the supermarkets and chain stores that can sell at a discount through their bulk and preferential deals. But perhaps Bloomsbury would have vetoed such a gesture. It’s a pity, however, that a brand that has made so much money could not have done more to help the dwindling independent sector. The individual shops like our local one could not but open at midnight in order to avoid surrendering important territory to the big guys that only stock the bestselling titles.

I don’t subscribe to the view that the phenomenon of the Potter books (along with the vast successes of Josephine Wilson and Philip Pullman) indicates a new golden age of kids getting their noses into books. Unless kids read stuff that isn’t relentlessly marketed at them through the large and small screens that occupy their eyes for most of the time, all they are doing is obeying Big Brother. When I see a child reading Robinson Crusoe and Kidnapped, Billy Bunter and Just William, I’ll believe that junior fiction is still alive and well.