Ian McEwan’s new one, What We Can Know, is, I think, his best ever. An academic in the year 2119 obsessed with getting to a lost poem written by a poet of Heaney-esque stature 100 years before. Doesn’t sound like a thrill-ride, but it is beautifully written (as you’d expect) and thrillingly ingenious. The future of the climate is incorporated into / mirrored by a page-turning domestic affair tale. Part Two flies by at a rate of knots. And the final pages are a shocking achievement.
Better than Atonement.
Watching - I Saw the TV Glow, dir. Jane Schoenburn
Buffy fans unite. A film has been made to finally express the wordless world of attachment to ‘90s TV. In I Saw the TV Glow, writer and director Jane Schoenburn has translated their love of Buffy into an image-driven suburban horror, inventing a show (The Pink Opaque) within the film itself. The result is a love-letter to TV shows that give marginal, burgeoning identities some material, images and relationships to live through, to make sense with and which, most importantly, offer permission to imagine alternative worlds within worlds. I watched it again this year for Halloween - a classic
Thinking - Catherine Connolly
Catherine Connolly is now President of Ireland. Thank God. I got a little obsessed over the election coverage, watching all her interviews and debates. Years ago, watching a politician respond to questions with nuance and intelligence might not have been quite as notable as it is now. But the political world is now characterised by an utter lack of shame (yes, Trump, but the NI ‘Education’ minister went to Israel on a ‘fact-finding mission’ this month), so a figure like Catherine Connolly who seems to think before she speaks has the quality of revelation.
The Left came together, and look what happened. I really do wish the left was more often known for its unity and not by its fractures. There are more types of left-winger than there are types of Protestant, though it’s close. Catherine Connolly is a good rebuke to anyone prizing purity of thinking over electoral pragmatism.
Anecdotal side note: people up here in the Six seemed to take notice of the Irish Presidential election this time, which is interesting. And the BBC are doing podcasts on the ‘constitutional future’ of NI. Catherine will be doing more visits up here than her predecessor, I think.
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