Financial Times Europe - 21.03.2020 - 22.03.2020

21 March/22 March 2020 ★ FT Weekend 5

T

his week I was supposed to

be in Antwerp for the open-

ing of my adaptation of

Moby-Dick t the deSingela

arts centre. It was to be an

experimental reworking of the great

American classic. We were to have

Queequeg played by a black South Afri-

can soprano. It was to be an opera. I

heard, on the day before the premiere,

that the theatres in Belgium had closed.

The contagion of cultural closures

began to sweep across the world.

Broadway closed; the opera houses

shut. In London, they sought to brave it

out. I went to the opening of Brian

Friel’sAfterplayat the Coronet Theatre

in Notting Hill. I held out hope that the

piece I was co-staging there, calledOur

lives, an infinite improvisation, which was

to feature the dancing and choreogra-

phy of Charlotte Jarvis along with my

poetry, would somehow still be per-

formed.But I soon learnt that the show

was to be postponed.

I spoke to many friends who had suf-

fered the cancellations of their films,

plays, operas and dances, all across the

world. And this prompted the questions

in me of the ultimate value of culture ta

a time when humanity is under great

stress. While we must take great care in

protecting ourselves and others from

the contagion, it is worth asking what

the role of art is in these trying times.

It struck me that this is a time when

we need art more than ever. We need art

to remind us why life is worth living. We

need art to reawakenour sense of the

wonder of being, to remind us of our

freedom, and to highlight the things in

our cultures that enable us to withstand

the dreaded visage of death.

For too long art has been seen as an

extra, an add-on, something dispens-

able unless it can prove its worth by

numbers and quotas. It may be that we

lost sight of art’s special value because

prosperity obscured its meaning, its

profound questions, and its uncanny

capacity for transcendence.

It is in the face of death that art

becomes most powerful. It was said that

during the time of the Black Death in

Italy, people carried paintings through

the streets to confront the plague. Some

might say that it was not the paintings

themselves that were seen as death-

fighting images, but the subjects of the

paintings, the Madonnas and the

images of Christ, that were being used to

confront a scale of death the people

could not understand. It hardly matters

which it was:art became a weapon

against the plague.

How does a culture withstand the

onslaught of a pandemic? We survive

first of all with the presence of culture

within us. It is to

our inner culture

that we turn, the

culture we carry in

us through years

of unconscious

osmosis and con-

scious acquisition.

Art and litera-

ture bring this

spiritual reserve

to the fore, make it

visible, give it

form and charac-

ter. That is why, in

reading literature, we deepen our per-

ception of life, we live other lives.

It is a particular loss that we are

deprived of this nourishment when we

need itmost. Books can always be read

at home and perhaps we will never read

more attentively and be more pro-

foundly attuned to the deeper layers of

literature than when we read with the

sense of death all around us. But theatre

is poignantly needed now too. More so

because of the way that theatre restores

a sense of community and dialogue, rit-

ualises eternal concerns, and gives form

to the demons haunting our culture and

the redeeming angels at its core.

In the tragicomedy that isUncle Vanya

— which was playing at the Harold

Pinter Theatre until it and London’s

other theatres had no choice but to close

abruptly on Monday — a soaring note of

optimism for the future emerges from

the bleakness. InKing Lear, a man who

was a king is turned inside out as he real-

ises on the brink of death how pride had

blinded him to what matters. In Ibsen

the mechanism of our self-destruction is

always exposed to reveal possibilities of

redemption. In Greek tragedy, even

when the heroes perish, we sense some-

thing in them greater than their death.

In my adaptation ofMoby-Dick, I

wanted to show what happens when we

do not question our leaders who,

through their own private flaws, can

take the ship of state to hell itself. The

play helped me see that the destiny of

nations resides in the vigilance of citi-

zens. And in the poetic dance ritual, we

wanted to explore the relationship

between improvisation and living.

When the plotted script of society is

suddenly lost, we are left with improvi-

sation. And the quality of it depends on

the strength of the culture we have

internalised and the vitality of our free-

dom. These are both engendered by

storytelling.

I remember during the Nigerian civil

war, which I witnessed as a child, that

when the bombs began to fall, and when

the family was cooped up in a tiny space,

with little food, was when I learnt the

most about my cultural heritage, and

the lives of my father and mother. They

told stories to distract themselves, to

amuse us, but mainly to ward off fear.

It seems that the more society

advances, the more we need this prime-

val power of storytelling to keep us

going. When Boccaccio wanted to tell us

what qualities helped people survive

during the Black Death, he showed us a

group of people travelling through a

plague-stricken landscape. Their chief

resource was telling one another stories

to fortify, delight and strengthen them.

We often misunderstand the role of

the imagination at the heart of our cul-

tural life. One power of the imagination

is to enable us see an alternative future

where reason sees none. The triumph of

humanity is always its survival against

the odds. We always come through

when the cold statistics are against us.

And this is because of something in us

greater than our resilience. Our will

alone cannot do this. What does it is

something in us that transcends reason,

our psychic elasticity. When we least

expect it, we manage to be more than

ourselves. And the heart of this is imagi-

nation. What we can imagine, the will

can achieve.

We need to keep art and storytelling

alive. It is important that we remember

the Italians in their domestic quaran-

tines, singing arias from their balconies

in the face of the pandemic. We are

more than panic buyers. We are also

people who can pool our resources and

our humour. We are more than the

modern Ahabs who want to acquire the

antiviral serum only for their own

nations. We are also people who realise

that this is a profoundly human tragedy.

If the pandemic reminds us of anything,

it is that we either survive as a species or

we perish together.

It is a particular piece of cosmic

humour that after the divisiveness of

Brexit, whose central dispute was over

being an island or being together, that

we have a pandemic that forces each of

us to be an island in order to realise

what it means to be human together. We

are being forced to close our borders

and live behind walls. It has locked us in

and we don’t like it. We sense now, per-

haps, the unnaturalness of it. But if we

had listened to the stories our cultures

tell, we would know this more inti-

mately all along.

We have entered a fictional world.

The normal laws of reality are sus-

pended. Perhaps for the first time in

anyone’s memory, life has taken on a

surreal dimension on a mass scale. Fam-

ilies who normally don’t spend time

together now find themselves with one

another in an intense way. A normally

outgoing society is having to turn

inwards. For fear of the contagion, peo-

ple are thrown back on one another.

Now, with nowhere to go, faced with one

another, might we run out of games and

conversation? Might a culture suddenly

find itself challenged less by the pan-

demic and more by the weight of soli-

tude? When a culture finds that its

dreaded and most-avoided subject is at

the centre of the stage of our lives, what

happens to us?

For the first time since the second

world war, death has become a tangible

presence. Not an abstract death, not the

death of people far away, but our own

death. The crucial question is how does

a culture survive this onslaught? What

does it fall back on?

I see the wisdom of a lockdown in

order to contain the spread of the virus.

But we have to find a way to keep culture

alive. It is not only through viruses that a

people die. A people also perish when

they fail to keep alive the values that

make them human, the wellsprings of

their sanity. It may well be that it is not

only self-isolation and science that saves

us. We may also be saved by laughter, by

catharsis, by the optimism of being able

to see beyond these times, with stories,

with community, with songs.

Ben Okri’s latest books are ‘The Freedom

Artist’, a novel, and ‘Prayer for the Living’,

a volume of stories, both published by

Head of Zeus

A

s many of us brace our-

selves for a sustained

period of isolation, we

might discover ways to

navigate the disruption and

anxiety between the covers of a book.

For some, this may be the chance to

finally get around to finishing Joyce or

Proust, or to seek solace in works else-

where. Several colleagues have sug-

gested thatLife and Fate, Vasily Gross-

man’s epic novel about human endur-

ance in the face of Nazism and Stalin-

ism, puts our current troubles into

perspective. Others have made a case

for more light-hearted reads. Here we

list recommendations from some of our

editors, writers and contributors — and

we encourage you to join the discussion

online atft.com/comfortreading

Roula Khalaf

FT editor

Does the coronavirus feel like a brutal

war? Will it be the end of an era? Will it

change our way of life in ways we never

imagined? We are all asking ourselves

these questions. So for some distraction,

an escape to the past, one book I would

recommend (it has long been a favour-

ite of mine) is David Fromkin’sA Peace

to End All Peace, a rich narrative about

the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the

creation of the modern Middle East. It

explains a lot about a part of the world

that often feels inexplicable.

Simon Schama

FT contributing editor

Albert Cohen,Belle du Seigneur. One of

the most extraordinary novels ever

written; long (so good for sustained

reading); wildly funny in some chap-

ters; very sad in others; excellent trans-

lation by David Coward; one of the great

works about passion. Much shorter is

Lampedusa’sThe Leopard: a sustained

prose poem about time and the fragile

beliefs of humanity. You can read it over

and over again and never tire of its sen-

suously delivered wisdom.

Elif Shafak

Novelist

In hard times one should read or re-read

Empire Falls y Richard Russo. How dob

we deal with changes that are beyond

our control? Russo is that rare writer

who skilfully combines literary talent

with wisdom, humour and compassion.

His characters are struggling but some-

times succeed in love, life and friend-

ship, and we recognise ourselves in their

stories. To restore your faith in human-

ity it is the perfect read.

John Thornhill

FT innovation editor

For comfort reading, which so often

means rereading, few books beatThe

Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories yb

Arthur Conan Doyle, and not just

because I live round the corner from

221b Baker Street and often find myself

treading the same streets as the legen-

dary detective. There is something par-

ticularly satisfying about the way Conan

Doyle’s intricately plotted tales snap

together like pieces of a jigsaw. From the

originality of “The Red-Headed League”

to the ingenuity of “The Five Orange

Pips”, his stories are a joy.

Gideon Rachman

FT columnist

Every now and then, I encounter a book

that is so absorbing that I stay up most of

the night to finish it. This happened

Robert Shrimsley

FT UK editor-at-large

For fiction and underworld escapism,

James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy,

especially the first novel,American Tab-

loid. It weaves fact and fiction, as

Howard Hughes, J Edgar Hoover and

the Kennedys mix with fictional gang-

sters and FBI agents in the run-up to the

Kennedy assassination. The staccato

sentence style can grate at first but you

are soon too absorbed to notice. The sec-

ond and third books,The Cold Six Thou-

sand nda Blood’s A Roverare not quite as

good but by then you are hooked.

Rebecca Abrams

FT contributor

In an effort to keep corona-horror in

some kind of perspective, I’m going to

seize the opportunity to read Dosto-

evsky’sCrime and Punishment(I know, I

know).At the top of my non-fiction pile

isThe Author’s Effects: On Writers’ House

Museums y Nicola J Watson, a wonder-b

ful-looking exploration of the cult of the

author as seen through their homes and

objects, not least Agatha Christie’s

mahogany loo seat.

Simon Kuper

FT columnist

Some reading projects take too long to

fit into ordinary life. So this is the per-

fect time to tackle Anthony Powell’s 12-

volume cycle of novels,A Dance to the

Music of Time. Powell takes a large inter-

connected cohort of English people,

most of them upper-class or bohemian,

from about 1920 to 1970.Danceis a bout

Englishness, class, friendship, power,

ambition, family, art, the second world

war and a lot else besides.

John Plender

FT columnist

The happiest literary discovery of my

life was Michel de Montaigne when I was

at university. I can no longer manage his

quirky 16th-century French, but even in

translation his late essays are a bewitch-

ing primer on how to live and how to

confront death — the perfect distraction

from an ominously rising temperature.

Tony Barber

FT Europe commentator

In times of quarantine the place to go is

Herman Melville andMoby-Dick. Its

narrative is exciting, its prose has the

beauty of Shakespeare and the Bible,

and it offers the most compelling and

compassionate understanding of man-

kind’s place in the universe of any Eng-

lish-language novel.

Erica Wagner

FT contributor

Ann Patchett’sThe Magician’s Assistant si

my choice. A book about love and grief

and the redemptive power of kindness;

surely what we need now. Parsifal is a

glamorous Los Angeles magician — dead

in the book’s opening line. Only after his

death does Sabine, the novel’s wonder-

ful narrator, discover his secret and

track it down... Marvellous, unex-

pected, unsentimental.

Tim Harford

FT columnist

Escapism doesn’t get purer than a fan-

tasy trilogy, but Jack Vance’s modern

classicLyonesseis a long way from Tolk-

ien and his hobbits: the plot is fast-

paced, the action cruel, colourful and

whimsical, and the dialogue glitters and

gyrates like a gymnast in sequins.

Lionel Shriver

Novelist

English Passengersby Matthew Kneale.

An epic mid-19th-century sea journey

to discover the original garden of Eden

takes the mickey out of all the folks on

board the ship who deserve it. Both dra-

matic and hilarious, this is a great read

to get stuck into that will transport you

to another place and time. Though an

epidemiological subplot in Tasmania

will hit notes of the present.

Pilita Clark

FT columnist

Siri Hustvedt’s highbrow page-turner,

What I Loved, might not seem the most

obvious reading choice. Its jolting story

of two families in the New York art

world is haunting and at times unset-

tling. But it is also utterly gripping, so if

you want to lose yourself in another

world far from today’s anxious times,

this book will take you to it.

What to read in isolation? Leading FT writers give their tips

From classics by Dostoevsky and Melville to modern escapism and inspiring tales of love and friendship, here is a selection of comfort reads

From top: Ben Okri at the Coronet

Theatre, London, photographed for

the FT by Toby Glanville; the Booth

Theatre on a closed-down Broadway;

in Rome, people make music from

their balconies —Corbis via Getty; ROPI

with Wade Davis’sInto The Silence: The

Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of

Everest, which is simultaneously a por-

trayal of a generation shaped by the first

world war, a portrait of a period before

technology had shrunk the world — and

a tragic adventure story.

Rana Foroohar

FT global business columnist

I’d suggestStation Eleven, one of my very

favourite books of the last few years. It’s

by the brilliant young Canadian novelist

Emily St John Mandel, who has a new

one coming out titledThe Glass Hotel,

which I’ve just ordered online for my

shut-in period.Station Elevenfollows a

pre- and post-apocalyptic narrative, but

it’s not the type of book that makes you

anxious — I found it strangely life-af-

firming. The plot, which weaves every

character together seamlessly into the

same story, moving back and forth in

time, is like something you come up

with in a dream.

‘This is a

time when

we need

art more

than ever’

As theatres and cinemas shut up shop,

Ben Okri rgues that storytelling anda

the arts are no trivial ‘add-on’ but a vital

part of what makes life worth living

When we least expect it,

we manage to be more

than ourselves. And the

heart of this is imagination

Life under lockdown Life & Arts

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