Reviews

________________________________________________________

Reviews. Readers often turn to the newspaper for information about local entertainment. In addition to looking for what's happening when and at what price in the community, readers also want an expert's opinion of the value or worth of an entertainment option. Articles that discuss the quality and value of films, concerts, art exhibits, dance performances, plays, books and even restaurants are called reviews. Because they reflect the individual writer's responses, reviews are written more freely than news articles and are typically highly personal.

A review

• seeks to persuade readers that the subject (play, concert, restaurant and the like) is either worthy of their consideration (and money) or not

• introduces the subject by giving an overview and by placing it in a context, including information about the artist or group responsible, the genre, background, kind of food served and the like

• focuses on the most important, most interesting or most thought-provoking ideas for examination

• describes both strengths and weaknesses

• includes needed information (location, dates, times, phone numbers, cost and the like)

• makes with an evaluative recommendation

Forever eighties

The 1980s was the decade that turned Britain upside down. Overnight, recalls Tim Adams, his fellow students put on shiny suits and started talking about money instead of Marx. As the that best captures the Thatcher years comes to television, he looks back on epoch of twisting loyalties and stark oppositions

I think of the 1980s I always think of a very long day I spent in 1987 in the company of a. recruitment manager from Scottish & Newcastle Breweries. We sat together in a windowless room in a hotel in Cambridge while I did psychometric tests in the morning, and in the afternoon, along with a keen group of fellow undergraduates, conducted short role plays about the brand identities of Newcastle Brown Ale and Foster's lager.

I was there, I suppose, out of peer pressure, or at least because the decade was finally getting to me. That spring term, not long before I was due to take final exams, a curious thing had happened. I had started to see friends of mine, people who had not been out of jeans and T-shirts for three years, wearing shiny suits and ties. In the bar, with their hair combed, they would be clutching folders of promotional literature and talking excitedly about the promises of various investment banks. I had no real idea of what an investment bank was, beyond a vestigial – sense that it was almost cer­tainly the enemy of the people. Even so, instead of finishing essays or plan­ning the evening's entertainment these friends were going to cocktail parties thrown by corporations at local hotels.

The Big Bang had happened the previous year and there was, as a result, a sudden one-upmanship about 'starting salaries'. I don't remember ever having a conversation that involved money before that term but suddenly there was unguarded speculation about the bloke down the hall who had been offered 30 grand, but he was holding out for 35, plus bonus and options (options?). That cartoon cliche of dollar signs in the eyes was suddenly vividly true. There was the mythic tale of a graduate from a couple of years before who had grown up in a council house in the Midlands. He had picked up a top City job on the recruitment milk round and was now living in Gstaad and had bought his parents their first house with his bonus cheque.

A few friends, taken with this thought, had been whisked up in helicopters and flown over the Square Mile and Canary Wharf as various banks vied for their attention. Quite a few of these people, like me, had grown up in industrial cities in the north and Midlands - there were, we didn't need telling, three million people unemployed in Britain in 1986 - so there was undoubtedly something profoundly seductive about all of those promises, all of that cash.

Even so, I thought a particular mate of mine was joking at first when he told me one night he was planning to be a chartered accountant. Course you are, I suggested, with your double first in English literature and your devotion to the Ramones. And then he started talking about the importance of professional qualifications and how the real money these days was in futures and this was a stepping stone and you had to think of the housing market and it was all a laugh really and he would have retired by the time he was 40 to write his novel. Forty, I'd thought, crikey.

It clearly got me worried though, all that talk. I'd gone to university, the first generation of my family to do so, and existed there for three years with not a single notion about the future, let alone about futures. Panicking suddenly, I must have taken myself along to the careers office and picked up a few brochures. Banking was beyond the pale, but presumably on the basis that I knew something about its beer, and because the northern connection did not make it sound too much like selling out, a crucial notion at the time, I made an application to Scottish & Newcastle with the inten­tion of becoming a marketing executive. On that morning with the recruit­ment manager, my sketchy knowledge about his range of beers did not get me too far. My lack of interest in the world of commerce, and my extreme fear of spending the ensuing 40 years fretting about brand recognition quickly became apparent. I have a vague, repressed memory of discussing at one point, in broad brush terms, Ezra Pound's theory of money with the interviewer.

Certainly it did not take him long to ascertain that my slightly unusual angles on the Black Mountain poets were perhaps not exactly the skill set he was after. Unfortunately, though, there was the rest of the day to negotiate. I still squirm when I recall the detail of my 'presentation' that sought to weigh the alcoholic allure of strong lagers against their perceived risks to health.

I did learn a few things that afternoon though, apart from the fact that I was probably not cut out for marketing. One was that, thereafter, I knew I'd always feel slightly adrift, hopeless sometimes, for not engaging properly in the world of money, as many of my friends, and just about everyone else, seemed so keen to do. Lots of things changed in the 1980s, the decade which decisively formed the Britain in which we now live, but the most striking of them was the way in which market forces inveigled their way into everything.

After about 1983, it seemed, you no longer found a decent place to live, you invested in property. Ideas often seemed worthwhile only if they could be exploited commercially: politics became an extension of marketing, books became important if they were in the bestseller lists, and there was a general feeling that if someone had made a lot of money, he or she had to be taken seriously (cue Richard Branson, Madonna). The option, a refusal to go along with some or all of this, was increasingly a kind of redundancy, not quite an opting out, but a sense, somewhere along the line, that you were a sucker.

I was reminded again of this recent history watching a preview of the BBC's three-part adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst's novel is the most seductive and exact portrait of the decade in which the market took over Britain, the age in which everyone came to know the price of everything. The adaptation - by the inevitable Andrew Davies – captures a good deal of the architecture of Hollinghurst's insight without always conveying its subtlety.

The Line of Beauty is told mostly through the eyes of Nick Guest, the gay son of a provincial antiques dealer, just down from Oxford, who both adopts and is adopted by the family of his best college friend, and unrequited fantasy, Toby Fedden. Fedden is the son of a rising star in the Thatcher government, Gerald Fedden MP and, in the summer of 1983, Nick is invited to house-sit for the family in their extraordinary Kensington home while they holiday in the Dordogne. He ends up staying for four years, through the high-water mark of Thatcherism.

The adaptation is a kind of morality play, but one in which, as in the book, you are never quite certain where the high ground lies. The decade always lent itself to caricature because the oppositions it constructed - geographical and social - were so abrupt. If you were in the north of England or in industrial Wales or Scotland, your life was quite likely suddenly barren of hope and purpose; if you were in south-east England, by and large, it was party time.

The significant writing of the decade mostly defined itself in opposition to Thatcherism and thereby in opposition to the dominant material culture that followed. Alan Bleasdale's wonderful Boys from the Blackstuff not only documented one bleak side of the era; it also seemed to set up a line which should not be crossed – 'which side are you on, boys?' as Billy Bragg asked – where a writer's sympathies were concerned.

While books from the other side of the Atlantic, Bright Lights, Big City, say, could be dazzled by the full glitter of sudden wealth as well as its hollowness, here it seemed possible for a long time only to describe the place where all of us began to live in terms of grim despair or savage satire. If there was no such thing as society, if the ties that bound us had loosened to breaking point, then there seemed no way either of looking at the whole of Britain through a social novel.

Various alternative strategies were invoked. Martin Anus's indelible comic creation John Self, in Money, or, in 1994, the scathing romp of Jonathan Coe's what a Carve Up! Were the most notable attempts to define the spirit of the times. (But it was an irony too far to point out the fact that many of the writers savaging the Thatcherite economy were themselves splendid beneficiaries of it; Amis for one famously decided to ditch his publishing loyalties and offer his work to the highest bidder. 'This one time in my life,' he suggested, 'I wanted to see what I was worth...'

It has taken 20 years to begin to get a fuller perspective on the decade, to balance what Britain was with what it had become, but Hollinghurst's novel opened that possibility. When I spoke to him about his book at publication, he said he had embarked on it partly because the Eighties seemed so criminally underwritten about. He had wanted to examine in minute detail the individual shifts of choice that led to wholesale change, but crucially he wanted to be alive both to the allure of that set of individual forces we now call Thatcherism and their consequences.

‘I thought it would be fun to do it from inside,' he said, 'through the eyes of one who is impressionable, who is poking on in horror but is susceptible to the glamour of it and corrupted by the forces of power.' Nick Guest was faced with the paradox that troubles a good deal of contemporary aspiration: that people with a lot of money have most of the beautiful things, but are in themselves far from beautiful.

One of the problems that has beset and divided previous chroniclers of the period was that where other decades were defined by culture (the Sixties) or by war (the Forties), the Eighties was defined squarely by the British disease of class; which side are you on boys? Hollinghurst approached this problem by attempting to capture its every nuance as power shifted from an old-fashioned Tory gentry to a more go-getting entrepreneurial elite exemplified in the novel by the assert stripping millionaires the Tippers, friends of Gerald Fedden, who rather welcome being asked how much they are worth.

One of the things made clear by Andrew Davies's version of the book is the fact that all this conspicuous wealth very easily corrupted or seduced those in its proximity. Nearly all of us were bought off by the glamour of material culture in one way or another. Nick Guest, doing his PhD in Henry James, full of romantic idealism, thinks he is above all that, but he is quickly sucked in. There is a telling exchange between him and the father of his closeted and wealthy lover Wani Ourani. Nick and Wani are indulging themselves in creating a magazine, called Ogee, after the curve described by Hogarth as the apotheosis of beauty. The original idea is to create a new aesthetics. Wani's father, a self-made multi-millionaire supermarket owner, however, is only interested in the bottom line: 'But will you make any money from it, Nick?' For all his principles Guest is effortlessly fluent in the language of the time: 'Well we hope to have high-level advertising, Gucci, Mercedes...'

Hollinghurst's novel carries several powerful echoes. The most obvious perhaps is to that other perfect parable of a gilded age, The Great Gatsby, but there is also a structural gesture toward Brideshead, if only to point out the fact that Waugh's moneyed langour was no longer a possibility. The driving force of the Eighties was to make everything – beauty, education, culture, and sex – a means to a money-making end. Nick Guest's hopes of spending a few years on a thesis are quickly revved up into cocaine-fuelled dreams of a film deal, which is where the cash lies.

In all of this, Hollinghurst paid his dues to the Master. Nick is asked at one point in the novel 'What would Henry James have made of us?' and he replies, unconsciously, with his own author's intent: 'He'd have been very kind to us, he'd have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realised until just before the end that he'd seen right through us.'

After I'd read Hollinghurst's book, I recommended it to just about everyone I met as the definitive book about the Eighties. I was struck however, by how it divided people along generational lines, or social ones, just like the era it described. Some of this was probably to do with the explicit gay sex – which will no doubt make some of the headlines again in reviews of the adaptation – but also it seemed to me that for some people, certainly those a few years younger than me, the tiny moral shifts Hollinghurst was concerned with no longer had the power to shock. They had grown up with nothing else but Eighties' values. The historical parable looked a good deal like the status quo.

It takes maybe a generation for the effects of an ideological shift like the one Britain experienced under Thatcher to work itself out. The point about the Eighties is that they have never finished, really. The spirit that emerged with such force in the period of Hollinghurst's novel persists.

The bravura comic scene in the book and film is the one in which Nick Guest asks Thatcher to dance. 'The Lady', as Gerald Fedden calls her reverentially, is mostly a remote figure in the The Line of Beauty, but as a climax to his devotion she attends an anniversary party at his house. Spurred by cocaine and champagne, Nick escorts her to the floor for 'Hey you get off a my cloud'.

I had my own opportunity – minus the coke and the Rolling Stones – to get close to the Lady a couple of years ago. I went along to the unveiling of a statue of her at the Guildhall, London (the one that was, a couple of weeks later, beheaded). Her attendant Lords were in evidence, Parkinson and Tebbit, and she made a grand entrance with exactly what Hollinghurst called her 'gracious scuttle, with its hint of long-suppressed embarrassment, of clumsiness transmuted into power'.

At one point, as the evening wore on, I saw her standing alone and took my chance. It was a little like confronting the ghost of Christmas past. She gave me her stare. 'Now what do you do?' she said. We talked a bit about what I did -'Oh I always look out for The Observer/ she said, pointedly.

I wondered what she was up to these days; could she put her feet up?

She looked slightly aghast. 'Oh no, I'm always busy.'

'Busy, busy, busy,' I said.

I could see Lord Parkinson approaching, coming to her rescue. We looked up at the great white statue of her holding its handbag.

'Blimey, I bet it all seems a very long time ago,' I said.

'No,' she insisted, 'no, no. You see it is still all just like yesterday to me.'

The Observer

April 23, 2006

OP-EDS

____________________________________________________

Op-eds (an abbreviation representing the words "opinion" and "editorial") are written for newspaper publication and present the writer's opinion on an issue of current public interest. They are concise enough to appear in 2-3 columns of a standard newspaper, and therefore need to be sharply focused. When writing an op-ed, you should present your opinion and relevant facts to support your position. These facts usually should be drawn from your own expertise or from research using relevant sources, including interviews and current statistics.