The grim truth of being involved with someone to whom you scarcely matter – that looming sense of what you are not allowed
Posted in General on 30. Jul, 2010
The grim truth of being involved with someone to whom you scarcely matter – that looming sense of what you are not allowed to hope for, or even to say – is brilliantly realised. She is always trying things out in her head, and the few relationships she does have often seem more to do with investigation than intimacy.But the realities of her life swiftly sharpen when she decides to take matters in hand. She spends much of her time making up stories about people she meets: academics who come into the bookshop where she works, or the man she sees in a local cafe.
There is a provisional quality to everything in Claire’s life. Claire is only dimly aware that she is at some sort of crossroads, following her mother’s death. Somehow she is not wholly convinced by the facts of her life, and there lurks an idea that things might easily be very different, if she only decides so. We catch her at a point in her life where the structures of brave solitude are beginning to take form around her, but have not yet set. We have come to associate these arrangements of restraint and longing with characters nearing the ends of their lives, so it is particularly interesting that Claire Pitt, heroine of Undue Influence, is only 29.
The women in her novels often feel limited by the patterns of their lives, which they never quite intended but whose saving routines have grown thick around them. ANITA BROOKNER’s supreme talent lies in her ability to combine – with a remarkably robust delicacy – things that are very quiet with things that are absolutely extreme. Perhaps it was simply too early to write a history of these ideas; but then part of his purpose is clearly polemical – to rescue sociobiology from the Right – and the two aims don’t fit entirely happily together.Andrew Brown’s ‘The Darwin Wars’ is published by Simon & Schuster. Anyone interested in human evolution should read it.But there is a problem. Ignorance will always expand to encompass our knowledge and, for much of his account of human origins, Kohn is simply describing contending theories between which there is no good way to judge. The experiments have yet to be done, and possibly thought of. It’s not his fault Science has not come up with the answers; and it’s a great merit that he is so honest about it.
The practical experiments and the theory illuminate and balance each other beautifully. The evidence that we have for most of prehistory is hand-axes, and Kohn produces a dazzling meditation on what these axes might have meant to users; how they might have functioned as tools and signs, scrapers of flesh and hewers of status.This is model science writing: clear, conscientious and exciting, showing both what we know and what we don’t. This means, most importantly, an environment in which cheating did not pay, or at least paid no better than honesty in the long run.A large portion of this book considers recent attempts to reconstruct this environment, in which the route to sexual success lay through intelligence and a reasonable degree of trustworthiness rather than brute force and treachery. But looking at a species as a whole, any sufficiently widespread pattern of emotion, if analysed as a strategy, allows one to deduce the kind of society in which it made sense.