Never Give Up

Diary of a London Writer

This is a photo of my brother Anthony Hyman, a journalist and broadcaster who travelled widely and in 1982 published a book called Afghanistan under Soviet Domination. Tony died of cancer tragically early, when he was 53, and every year there’s a memorial lecture for him at SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies) in Bloomsbury, followed by an enjoyable dinner. This is a public lecture and also a family event. Last year the lecture was given by  Shahrazad Akbar, a human rights activist from Afghanistan, currently in exile. She is a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford and Academy Associate with Chatham House who spoke very eloquently about the terrible problems faced by women and girls in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

On Thursday evening I went along to hear this year’s lecture by the equally impressive Kate Clarke, who was the BBC World Service Correspondent in Kabul from 1999 – 21 and is now a researcher into Afghan Studies. The title of her lecture was The Taliban back in Power: Taking Stock of the Second Islamic Emirate. She said that after the abrupt withdrawal by the US and UK in June 2021 the Afghan government “toppled like a house of cards” and the Taliban filled the vacuum. So many people have left the country that there is no more organised opposition and the few who are brave enough to protest, including some women, are likely to be arrested, tortured and even killed. Girls are not allowed to go to secondary school or university and women are unable to work in responsible jobs. They are liable to be beaten by the Morality Police if they are “immodestly” dressed. The country is generally much poorer than it was but some farmers are still making fortunes out of opium. The daughters of the richer and more powerful Mullahs in the Taliban, however, often are sent to school abroad. Over the last twenty years it has been interesting and very sad to listen to these lectures about Afghanistan, a country I’ve never visited.

I loved Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s surreal and exuberant film, and wish it had won even more prizes. “Aren’t humans ridiculous?” the film’s  screenwriter Tony McNamara said in an interview. “Poor Things is the title and that’s what it’s about. In the way we try to control each other and our ideas, and people’s bodies and people’s views.”

Below is a photo of the last scene, when Bella (Emma Stone) has developed from a toddler into a sophisticated doctor and sits in her garden surrounded by lovers of both sexes and mutant animals. General Blessington, the cruel ex-husband of Bella/Victoria, who tried to destroy her frank pleasure in sex by forcing her to have a cliteridectomy, has been punished by having his brain replaced by a goat’s. I read this scene as that unfashionable thing, a happy ending, but like much about the film it's ambiguous. Emma Stone’s performance is brilliant and the sets and costumes are witty and beautiful.

Usually, I read a book before I see the film adaptation but I have only just read Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel with the same title, now reissued by Bloomsbury. The novel, like the film, sparkles with inventiveness and joie de vivre. It’s more socialist, feminist and philosophical than the film, full of jokes, playful illustrations and footnotes. The characters and their relationships are more complex; I’ve never yet seen a film that can convey a character’s inner life as fully as a good novel. The language is rich and inventive, the chapters narrated by Bella are particularly funny although “writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly.” Gray doesn’t allow Bella her exuberant ending; Her ex-husband shoots himself and the novel ends with a letter written by Dr Bella McCandless“to Posterity”, to be opened in the distant future (1974) by her “Dear Grand- or Great-Grandchild.” In this long letter she contradicts almost everything McCandless has written, extracting all the fantasy from her story. On the last page she tells her descendant: “the world YOU live in, dear child of the future, will be a saner and happier place” and then writes the date – 1^st August 1914.