Detail from the album cover for Neil Young’s Harvest Moon.
The giant harvest moon in the London sky sent me scurrying back to Neil Young, though rather than moonlight for harvesting farmers, it got me thinking song the last bastion for emotion. (Harvest Moon is about Young’s late ex-wife Pegi.) In English culture, such open-facedness, or vulnerability, can be frowned upon. Even a sometimes personal column like this one, I was affectionately told by an Englishman a few weeks ago, benefits from having a writer largely Scots apparently. Not that Neil Young is delicate: ‘I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars / But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars,’ he sang in Revolution Blues, about the gruesome Charles Manson murders.
Keeping quiet is a handsome theme in William Boyd’s satisfying new novel Gabriel’s Moon. Gabriel Dax is a writer who interviews Congolese politician and independence leader Patrice Lumumba. I won’t spoil it for anyone but I was reminded of just how close reticence is to bloodymindedness—the latter, incidentally, a million miles from the William Boyd I met one cold London night at the bar of the Groucho Club, where he was sitting with his wife in exactly the same seat as novelist Zadie Smith another time, and former Irish novelist, now filmmaker, Neil Jordan, another. We were discussing Boyd’s childhood in Ghana, a parallel education in Scotland, not dissimilar to my own, and my time in Takoradi by the Ivorian border for what it was worth. Far more than literariness was compassion and sensitivity on his part. Nor was he gregarious. It was me doing the shucking.
Reticence has indeed long been an English preserve. It manifests itself in many ways. Even extrovert introverts have it. Last week journalist Robert Peston posted how Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak seldom liked hosting weekly national security council meetings. Johnson was unenthusiastic about them, and Sunak ‘wasn’t desperately interested in foreign policy’. Under Johnson they usually met once a month, and he would often cancel at short notice. Keir Starmer hosts them every week. Lord Ricketts who was once Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office registered great pleasure that the band was getting back together again weekly: ‘Setting priorities is the essence of strategy and the NSC is the best place to do it!’ he posted on social media. These were meetings of course originally created after the arguably less scrutinisable ‘sofa government’ of Tony Blair, during which time sprang for example the Iraq war, resulting in thousands of dead US and UK troops plus hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Not that David Cameron’s subsequent approach—more like Starmer’s—improved things. Eight years ago, to this very month, a Foreign Affairs Committee report held Cameron responsible for failing to stabilise Libya after the death of Gaddafi, and his Libyan intervention is still widely seen as responsible for igniting other conflicts in Africa and the Middle East—not to mention fortifying al-Qaeda and Isis at the time. Not that anyone is talking about this.
Just as William Boyd was once commissioned by Ian Fleming’s well-heeled estate to write a new James Bond novel called Solo, it seems inevitable such roles in the future, even already, are fulfilled by AI. Human reticence remains, but intelligence through machines is out of control. Normally acute business heads are falling for it like flies, as if any mention of AI grants them a kind of commercial virility. Trained Brazilian parapsychologist Athos Salomé cites Japan’s Sakana AI as already possessing an AI scientist rewriting its own code, and I have one friend in media who anticipates a complete collapse of the scripted and unscripted market, and in five years just lots of AI and a well known short-form video hosting service, and no real networks or platforms, maybe no need for directors and producers. Canadian-American Lionsgate have already signed a deal with one AI company hoping to eliminate storyboard artists and VFX crews. (‘Real films about real people are hard these days,’ said a distinctly understated English producer to me last week—he could just as well have been discussing AI.) Every time we warn about AI, though, we forget how many disasters we have created ourselves—without AI. The Aberfan Colliery Slip. The Chernobyl Meltdown. Montana Asbestos Clouds. The Seveso Disaster. The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. The Bhopal Disaster. The Sidoarjo Mud Volcano. The North Pacific Garbage Patch. Californian Wildfires. The Jilin Chemical Plant Explosion. To name but a few.
The Evening Standard—once London’s leading newspaper—has ceased as a daily, after nearly 200 years, and is now a weekly. I used to write occasional features for it on the Wandsmen of St Paul’s, a mini-Balkan War played out on the streets of London, or the Nigerian community. Last week Zoe Williams wrote an excellent valediction for it in The Guardian: ‘We never took offence because we were drunk all day long,’ she said. ‘The rest of Fleet Street had phased that out more than a decade before, but somehow the Standard didn’t get the memo.’ I remember one such Friday lunch. There was a bookishly engaging Jonathan Meades; people popping cigarettes into mouths mid-course; my gracious Weekend editor Neil Norman—tall and dapper in a Sam Shepard leather jacket; tireless, possibly peerless, Peter McKay, in from the Daily Mail. Was AN Wilson there? Zoe Williams was certainly there. My first feature for the Standard was in 1990: ‘Peter Bach reports on the rise of the fundamentalists who preach theological intolerance,’ it began. What are Islamic fundamentalists? someone who read the piece asked me.
Talking of which, someone I met in Afghanistan went with his daughter to see the new Beetlejuice movie. I felt obliged to mention to him the time I received a certain message in New York in the late Eighties, asking me to look after a Californian who was in London at the time but was on his way to New York. Sure, I said, though I found it odd an American needing a Brit to look after him Stateside. Anyway, I’d forgotten all about him when a few weeks later the doorbell rang. I remember the person in the doorway looked edgy, like a successful drug dealer. But he said he was my friend’s friend. Come in, I said, apologising for any misjudgement. Busily, I told him I was making a film. (Low budget, struggling: he didn’t need to know.) I asked what he did. I make films, he said. Oh, I said, benevolently. I quickly finished another letter then joined him properly. This was when he said—without arrogance—his film was called Batman and it was with Jack Nicholson. Bloody hell, I recoiled. Why hadn’t my (naturally reticent) English friend told me it was Tim bloody Burton? Anyway, we got on like a goth house on fire. He even invited me to his wedding in London, though I couldn’t make it—I was, er, too busy making my ‘film’.
‘We know where the music’s playin’,’ sang Neil Young on Harvest Moon: ‘Let’s go out and feel the night.’ The evening after our full moon, the young musicians of the family were gifted tickets for us all to attend a Moby gig (during which he mentioned Neil Young). We rattled downhill to the venue on the top deck of a red doubledecker bus. 20,000 or so not so reticent people were gathered beneath the giant O2 dome (which from above must have looked like a moon). ‘Vegan for life,’ said Moby’s famous neck tattoo on the two giant screens. It was womnderful. We all moved in awe to his various hard-earned groove-beats, maybe me slightly less coordinated than the others: ‘People they come together / People they fall apart / No one can stop us now,’ he sang.
I have to say, I was speechless.
