Mary Beard

Alice Thomas Ellis has a delicate touch with her fictional delinquents. In The Birds of the Air, her second novel, Sam, the nearly criminal son of a respectable academic couple, reveals all those conflicting qualities that make the young offender so hard to deal with and to understand. We feel at the same time revulsion and a sneaking admiration. True, Sam is in many ways an offputting specimen: he dies his hair virulently green; he talks in an almost incomprehensible adolescent jargon; and he gets his kicks from stealing bicycles and from other kinds of petty juvenile dishonesty. But with ATE we come to sympathise with Sam’s view of the world and his own sense of purpose. We begin to share his disdain for the hypocritical authority of his parents and share his excitement in trivial misdemeanours – like simply absconding from family celebrations or secretly taping (and then replaying at enormous volume) the pretentious chit-chat of a donnish party. It is even with a sense of wonder, rather than complete horror, that we read of his frankly appalling fantasies of mass murder: the dream of sitting on the rooftops, neatly unhooking the sharp-edged slates and aiming them at the necks of anonymous passers-by ‘until the air was full of their silly heads, flying around as thick as autumn leaves’. For a moment we can almost believe that these presumably innocent adults deserved their decapitation.’

If you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers’ money) has allowed an insurance company to take over and manage a large part of the town’s shopping centre. In the interests of ‘safety’, this company now patrols the area with security guards, whose job it is to exclude the more ‘undesirable’ elements of the local population. How these ‘undesirables’ in prosperous Hampshire are to be recognised is not entirely clear. But bouncers in Basingstoke probably operate much the same as bouncers anywhere and pick on the usual targets: dirty clothes, ghetto-blasters, cans of lager peeping out of the pockets and all the other outward signs of nuisance or just nonconformity. If your face doesn’t fit, no entry – and, in this case, no shopping.’

‘The Aristotle … was already burning. Meanwhile, some sparks had flown towards the walls, and already the volumes of another bookcase were crumpling in the fury of the fire.’ So, in the final pages of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco destroys ‘the greatest library in Christendom’, hidden away in the impenetrable labyrinth of his macabre abbey. The reader cannot help but feel some satisfaction at this apparent disaster. For the maze of the abbey’s library and its unpleasant secrets serve as a metaphor for the closure of Medieval thought and the dominance of oppressive monasticism, soon to be breached by the new sophistication represented by Eco’s hero, William of Baskerville. Paradoxically, the terrible fire brings light to the Dark Ages – and if its only major literary casualty is a ‘lost’ work of Aristotle, then not too many tears are to be shed.’

In 1951 Lady Diana Cooper turned up at a ball in the Palazzo Labia in Venice dressed as Cleopatra. The choice of costume was perhaps predictable. On the walls of that Palazzo is Tiepolo’s painting of an outrageously haughty Cleopatra, attended by her male servants. And it was this fresco, copied faithfully (apart from its exposed breasts) down to the last jewel, that provided the model for Cooper’s outfit. Throughout the evening, we are told, she enjoyed the joke of posing in front of her ‘original’. But, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett explains, this was more than a fleeting game of fancy dress. Cooper was apparently so taken with Cecil Beaton’s photograph of herself in the guise of Cleopatra that she decided to use it in her passport. Yet it was not quite as simple as that. For who could forget the end of Cleopatra’s story and the trail of destruction that her sway – over the world and particularly over men – was said to have brought with it? Even Cooper could not escape the paradox Hughes-Hallett so neatly exposes: that the myth of Cleopatra may offer women an image of power, but at the cost of implicating them in the misogynistic fantasies of patriarchy. For women, ‘Cleopatra’ is a trap.’