It’s inevitable that the joy and national unity over the killing of that monster bin Laden would cool. Already we’re debating the journalistic and political ramifications. On Wednesday, President Obama told CBS he wouldn’t “spike the football” by releasing photos proving Osama is dead.
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As the happy glow of that wedding fades, literature provides some brilliant examples of what’s in store when the honeymoon ends Any sap can have a bad marriage, but some unions rise above the masses to become classics of dysfunction. Similarly, many novels claim to show us the dark heart of modern marriage, but only a few pull it off with real panache. Being a newlywed is fun for those involved, but you only really become interesting to neighbours, and readers, when it all starts to unravel. Who cares about a beautiful Home Counties bride happily signing over her best reproductive years in a tasteful frock, when you could be reading the history of a disappointed couple throwing insults and gin tumblers at each other after a dinner party? Of course, there’s always the hope one will lead inexorably to the other. There is perverse beauty in marital breakdown, and writers who show us this, from Henry James to John Updike, are worth celebrating. What really distinguishes an ordinarily bad marriage from a truly terribly one is the lengths to which those involved are willing to go in their unhappiness. Madame Bovary is an early archetype of the genre for this reason. Emma Bovary’s response to a loveless union is the opposite of settling down with some needlework and making the best of things; there is a laudable extravagance to the way in which she sets about causing her own destruction, fitting in two failed affairs, bankruptcy and a lingering suicide before the marriage is over. Of course, being married to Charles Bovary might tempt anyone to knock back the arsenic – he is one of literature’s great boring husbands, and Flaubert excels in anatomising his dullness. This is a man who never aspires to anything beyond eating a lovely piece of cheese and falling asleep. The contempt bred by familiarity is perfectly articulated in a passage in which Emma has grown so sick of Charles that she’s angered just by seeing his back as he snoozes: “even his back, his tranquil back, was irritating to behold, and in the very look … she found all the banality of the man.” The kind of fury and disgust, often inspired by little more than boredom, that someone can feel against a spouse is explored at length in the novels and short stories of Richard Yates . For Yates, every husband is a moral coward, every woman on the verge of a breakdown, every tray of cocktail-hour hors d’oeuvres just moments from being hurled at the wall. He revels in exposing the hypocrisy and pettiness in both himself (he took all of his plots from personal experience) and his middle-class readership. Yates’s ultimate frustration is with the idea of uniqueness: the way that most people go through life with the conviction they are exceptional, and so go into marriage thinking their love and legacy will be correspondingly great. Reading Yates’s novels, however, you start to feel he lacks a sense of humour about marital disaster. Yes, a bad marriage is a hideous thing that sucks in all the life around it, but some of the best writing on the subject acknowledges the darkly funny aspect of warring lovers and their witty cruelty to each other. Edward Albee demonstrated mastery of this black humour in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The play’s central couple, George and Martha, are bleakly hilarious in their unrelenting torture of one another. Utterly worn down by conflict, beyond caring about social reproof, to them, no subject is off limits. They joke to their guests and each other about everything from career disappointments and sexual inadequacy to depression and death. George and Martha have salvaged grim wisdom and gallows humour from their wreck of a marriage; they have made for themselves a kind of marital purgatory in which they are utterly despairing, but it is inconceivable for them to leave each other, for in doing so they would be leaving the one person who understands their suffering and can match them blow for blow. While some modern marriages are difficult to leave, it is at least technically possible to escape them. The most tragic, claustrophobic depictions of unhappy marriage in English literature undoubtedly have to come from a time before divorce was legally or socially an option. In James’s Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer’s suffering once she realises she’s married a miserly sociopath is horribly compounded by the knowledge that, as a woman in the late 19th century, she has messed up the most important decision of her life, and cannot go back on it. Bad marriages are just as depressing, if not more so, in Jane Austen’s novels, precisely because so little time is given to discussing them. If the reader paused to consider what Lydia’s marriages to Wickham or Charlotte Lucas’s marriage to Mr Collins are actually like they might be less inclined to celebrate the inescapable march towards matrimony of the other characters. The realities are hastily swept aside while Lizzie makes another winning quip, and Darcy huskily mentions his annual income. I think we’re overdue for a more realistic sequel in the style of Updike’s Couples, where Darcy has a nasty opium habit and Lizzie talks constantly about how pregnancy has ruined her thighs. Fiction Edward Albee Gustave Flaubert Henry James guardian.co.uk
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As range, charging availability and performance have improved, our family is now on its third electric vehicle Like many families, we have always had two cars: one for long journeys and another for commuting, shopping and school runs. With the ever increasing cost of petrol, it made sense to find an alternative. So five years ago we bought a G-Wiz . Small, slow and very basic, the car made a certain amount of sense in town. It was small enough to park anywhere and nippy enough to make buzzing around the streets a lot of fun. It was never going to be big enough to be a main family car, but it did what it needed to do well enough. For anything involving the whole family, we simply took the other car. In late 2009, we had the opportunity to upgrade to a pre-launch version of the Mitsubishi i MiEV electric car. Big enough to take the whole family, travel further afield and fast enough to tackle motorways with ease, the Mitsubishi could genuinely be used as a main family car, relegating our petrol car to second place. It was an instant hit: the kids adored it and it was fast, practical and fun to drive. Because it was so driver-friendly and cheap to run, it rapidly became the car of choice for almost every journey we made. We kept hold of the G-Wiz when we took on the Mitsubishi. It meant our petrol car hardly travelled anywhere at all. Meanwhile, the Mitsubishi became the cool car on the block. Neighbours wanted lifts, friends of our children wanted rides. Everyone was impressed by the lack of noise, the performance and the smoothness. Thanks to its instant performance, the car could out-accelerate most other cars in day-to-day driving. When people had a short demonstration run and could see how user-friendly and competent it was, many of them were convinced that electric cars could be a genuine replacement for petrol power. We travelled an average of 22.5 miles a day and our most regular route was to the next village and back for the school run – a round trip of six miles. According to the Department of Transport, our car use was fairly typical. The average car journey is 6.5 miles and the average daily use is between 22-24 miles per day, while 93% of all journeys are less than 25 miles: ideal for an electric car. We charged the car up each night using off-peak electricity. Each morning, the car was ready to go. The total electricity cost in our first year was a mere £80. Of course, it was not perfect. The range of the car varied depending on the type of driving and ambient temperature. At the time, Mitsubishi stated a range of up to 80 miles (the latest production version has a range of up to 92 miles). That range could be achieved when driving in a city. But driving on a motorway, the range dropped to around 55 miles. Driving in the cold with the heater on, the range could drop to around 40 miles. Public charging points started cropping up in more cities. It became possible to travel further afield and recharge the car while it was parked. From my base near Coventry I could drive to Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Leamington Spa, Oxford, Milton Keynes and Leicester, knowing that I could charge my car up while it was parked. Our lease on the Mitsubishi came to an end after one year. We replaced it with a brand new Tata Indica Vista EV . Built by Indian car maker Tata from a brand new factory in the UK, the Indica Vista EV provides us with more space, greater comfort and a longer range. Meanwhile, our petrol car still sits idle with very little use. I suspect we may be ditching it completely in the not too distant future. • Michael Boxwell is the author of The 2011 Electric Car Guide , published by Greenstream Publishing Electric, hybrid and low-emission cars Travel and transport Ethical and green living Motoring guardian.co.uk
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Since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest this gifted bit-part actor has played the psychopath to perfection – but don’t expect him to come out into the light in his new vampire movie Priest Fans of the vampire apocalypse sub-genre will already be en route to the nachos, but no matter what your taste there is at least one reason to recommend the newly released Priest. That reason, buried as he usually is in the depths of the supporting cast, is Brad Dourif. Because I don’t think it would be rash to claim Dourif as king of the character actors – champion of that noble tradition of bit-part players and background colour, a self-confessed “whore” who never fails to elevate even the dopiest hokum, psychotic creeps a speciality but capable of much, much more. Almost everyone reading will, I imagine, have relished a Dourif performance at some point in their lives, in part because the man is as tireless as he is gifted, in part because among his many jobs have been a number of near-inescapable cultural behemoths (leaving aside Star Trek: Voyager, he reportedly dispensed with his eyebrows to appear in two of Peter Jackson’s three Lord of the Rings films). But he’s due far more reward than a place for life signing headshots at comic conventions. For all his workhorse tendencies, it would be a mistake to laud them over his actual talent – the waxy delicacy of his features the canvas for a rare, skewed intensity, his unnerving presence never once played as smirky camp. But his gifts were obvious from the start. Because, of course, when we rewind as far back as 1975, we find him as the very newest of Hollywood sensations, and rightly so – the breakthrough Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and his pivotal turn as frail, doomed Billy Bibbit, a role he fitted so perfectly it was if Ken Kesey had foreseen a vision of him writing the source novel 13 years earlier. For a boy of 25 it was a staggering performance, deft and touching and every bit as compelling as those of Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. His Oscar nomination was inevitable; a stellar career was assured. Except, as it turned out, it wasn’t. Instead of an ascension to the upper slopes of the industry, the decades since have provided a hectic route through strange landscapes and scenic backwaters. There were more great performances – shortly after Cuckoo’s Nest came some masterful jitters in the prime slice of New York kink that was The Eyes of Laura Mars, after that John Huston’s mordant Wise Blood, most recently a lovely moment as a melancholy alien (surely the role he was born to play) in Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder. There were also roles in a number of grand cinematic missteps: the daddy of them all, Heaven’s Gate; David Lynch’s Dune, in which he gamely held forth about “the juice of sapho”; Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s rickety Alien Resurrection. But while Lynch would hire him again for Blue Velvet, and Herzog has used him as a one-man rep company, the best part of the last 20 years has been spent paying the bills in all manner of horror projects, from the iconic (in some circles he’ll be forever best known as the voice of Chucky in the Child’s Play series) to the altogether less celebrated – but always performed with respectful sincerity. In interviews, Dourif himself talks about the shape of his career as simply a product of a working actor needing work, particularly as a father – in the same year Cuckoo’s Nest came out, his first daughter was born. But sometimes when I think about him I also find it hard not to picture that otherworldly bearing and remember the example of another thin young man too wispy and off-kilter to be anyone’s male lead: Anthony Perkins. But then, much as I love Anthony Perkins, Dourif is by a long way the better actor, both more intense and more versatile. He could always do repellent (as racist wifebeater Clinton Pell in 1988′s Mississippi Burning his presence is skin-crawling) – but his Doc Cochran in TV’s old west saga Deadwood was a masterclass in unexpected decency, while what made his work in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant so fine was the way he acted as a steadying hand amid the crazed whirl of breakdancing souls and watchful iguanas. And it’s important, I think, not to embrace him just because he’s a favourite of Herzog and Lynch, but because he’s been fantastic in their films as he has so many others – and because the risk with anyone so reliable is that they get taken for granted, particularly when the wonders they deliver are small in scale. I’m sure Dourif himself would see his career as anything but thwarted for all that he never did get that Oscar, and we should follow his example. Bills have to be paid, and it would be patronising to assume he would have been happier with his name above the titles of wood-stupid action flicks. In any sane hall of fame, his place is safe already. Horror Science fiction and fantasy Danny Leigh guardian.co.uk
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The detective’s creator says the character could return as a young man – could an Inbetweener do the job, or another teen with talent? Inspector Morse could to return to ITV in a prequel charting his years as an Oxford University undergraduate . But who should play him? Morse’s creator Colin Dexter is not one to give away too much of the great man’s back story – it felt like forever before we learnt his first name was Endeavour. But we do know that Morse’s time at Oxford spanned a doomed love affair and a lost scholarship which led him to join the army and then the police. And there are a few clues to be had from the short story Dexter wrote for the Daily Mail , on which the prequel will be loosely based. It turns out the young Morse was of “medium height, with a palish, slightly dolichocephalic face, and full light-brown hair, with the merest hint of ginger”. So Morse even had a long face as a young man. It sounds like a recipe for Matt Smith, frankly, although it’s hard to imagine him growing up to look like Morse and he’s a Doctor, not an inspector. The Inbetweeners are about to go to university, and one of them – James Buckley – starred in another TV prequel, Rock and Chips . But he’s not right, and fellow Inbetweener Joe Thomas is more of a Lewis than a Morse. Simon Bird maybe? Possibly. Morse would doubtless approve of Will’s fondness for briefcases, even if his fellow students didn’t . Other possibilities: Being Human star Russell Tovey; Rupert Grint, who would be a wildcard choice (offering so much more than a touch of ginger); and Misfits’ Robert Sheehan is about to have a little bit more time on his hands . But all of them look like also-rans compared with the Morse Jr in waiting – a young man whose face will be instantly familiar to millions of ITV viewers but has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent himself. He share’s Morse’s fondness for music – if not exactly the same genre – and, unlike the detective, is quite a mover on the dancefloor. Plus, he’s about to turn 18 – making him exactly the right age for when Morse turns up at Oxford. Step forward Britain’s Got Talent winner – and star of BBC1′s Waterloo Road – George Sampson! What? A terrible idea, you say? Then who would you cast instead? Crime drama Television Drama John Plunkett guardian.co.uk
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Classes abandoned at Valencia University after party advertised on social networking site A massive party organised by students using social networking sites brought university classes to a standstill on Thursday in the eastern Spanish city of Valencia. The law and economics faculties at the city’s university had to close their doors as drunken students began to run amok after more than a thousand people had gathered for an outdoor bring-a-bottle party at the campus. The party was organised as a protest against the university’s failure to put on a traditional student paella party this year. “It will end when people tire of it, or when we get chucked out,” organisers had promised on the Spanish answer to Facebook, a social networking site called Tuenti. “The aim is not to create a disturbance or to demonstrate against anyone, but to have a good time together.” Students carrying bottles, food, cooler bags and guitars packed out the campus, with the more drunken ones eventually disturbing classes. Authorities said they had suspended classes to avoid incidents. The students’ union said it had nothing to do with the impromptu party, but blamed university authorities for the failure to organise the traditional annual student paella party. Spain Europe Social networking Internet Students Giles Tremlett guardian.co.uk
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In a country known for its censorship, the internet has become a focus for complaints about the long-time ruling party It is a dangerous act in a country where graffiti can fetch eight strokes of the cane, and more dangerous still in that it parodies the leader of the long-term ruling Lee dynasty. With a few deft applications of spray paint, Skope One finishes a pig-head depiction of the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, with a Nazi-styled SS logo on the lapel and an Uncle Sam-inspired banner emblazoned with the words “Lee Wants You”. “We shouldn’t be scared any more – it’s about time something changed,” says the 35-year-old artist, known locally as the founder of Singaporean graffiti. “We need to have this freedom of alternative speech.” Singapore is known worldwide for its censorship and corporal punishment. But in the runup to Saturday’s elections more and more people have started to speak out against the clan that has ruled Singapore for almost 50 years. Parallels with the Arab spring are striking, even if revolution is not just around the corner. Most murmurs of discontent can be found online: fear of reprisal is diminished for an anonymous blogger. On internet forums, blogs, Facebook and Twitter, grumblings about high housing prices, the widening gap between rich and poor, immigration laws and the salaries of government ministers (among the highest in the world) are hot topics. The parliamentary republic’s incumbent People’s Action party (PAP) has been in power since independence in 1965, and is widely recognised as having turned this colonial outpost into a financial behemoth in a few decades. But it knows it has a battle on its hands. On Saturday, it will contest 82 of its 87 parliamentary seats, up from 47 of 84 seats in 2006. One in four voters in Singapore’s 5 million-strong population is under the age of 35, and the internet is a main source of their news. For the first time, political candidates have been allowed to campaign using social media, and the effect has been far-reaching: many Singaporeans say this is the most debated and politicised election they have seen. But not all young people will be using their mandatory vote to go against the grain. Some, such as 22-year-old economics student and first-time voter Sofina Toh, are swayed by the PAP’s recent apology for past mistakes and promise to do better. “The PAP has done so much for Singapore – just look at the country now from what it used to be,” she says. “Shouldn’t we give credit where credit is due? They’ve promised to make changes. Maybe we can give them another chance.” Others are not so convinced. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” tweets a management student, Ong Rei En. At the political rallies, for which turnout has arguably been the highest in Singapore’s history, the energy is electric. An estimated 50,000 people crowded together one last time on Thursday at an outdoor stadium to wave blue flags and wield inflatable hammers, the symbol of the opposition Workers’ party. As the crowds chanted for change and raised their fists in hope, police with machine guns watched awkwardly nearby, the sweat on their brows betraying the night’s humidity. Rally attendance does not always translate to the polling booth, however. In 2006, despite large crowds at opposition speeches, the PAP won 67% of the popular vote. Many Singaporeans have voiced concern that their ballots will be traced and their mortgages or jobs taken away from them if they vote for the opposition. Asked if Singapore is another Egypt in the making, Skope One furrows his brow as he bundles his spray-paint cans into a backpack. “We don’t want the same problems,” he says finally. “But we definitely echo the same feelings.” Singapore Protest Social media Facebook Internet Social networking Twitter guardian.co.uk
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Son of Pink Floyd frontman enters non-specific guilty plea and is granted bail to finish his exams at Cambridge University The son of Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour has admitted going on the rampage at a student fees protest. Charlie Gilmour was warned he could face a prison term after pleading guilty to violent disorder. He was granted bail until July to give him time to complete Cambridge University exams. Gilmour was accused of a string of offences during the riot on 9 December. He entered a non-specific guilty plea as he appeared at Kingston crown court, south-west London. The 21-year-old, from Billingshurst, West Sussex, has yet to specify whether he admits leaping on the bonnet of a car carrying royal protection officers escorting the Prince of Wales and his wife to the Royal Variety Performance. Judge Nicholas Price QC granted Gilmour conditional bail as he adjourned proceedings until 8 July. He said he would give Gilmour’s legal team time to decide the specifics of the plea before arranging another hearing. Gilmour, a former model, wore a grey suit and dark tie as he spoke to confirm his name and enter a guilty plea. Price told Gilmour: “You have accepted counts of a serious matter and it may well be the course of one of immediate custody. “This matter will come back to this court on 8 July.” Gilmour is accused of smashing a window at a high street store and throwing a rubbish bin at the royal convoy. The bin missed the royal couple but hit another car, it is alleged. Gilmour had been accused of stealing a mannequin leg but that charge was withdrawn. He was among thousands of people who protested in Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square on 9 December and was photographed hanging from a union flag on the Cenotaph during the march. He issued an apology the day after the demonstrations, describing it as a “moment of idiocy”, and added that he did not realise the Whitehall monument commemorated Britain’s war dead. Gilmour’s biological father is poet and playwright Heathcote Williams but he was adopted by the rock star when his mother, writer and journalist Polly Samson, remarried. Releasing a statement in the wake of the cenotaph incident, Gilmour said: “I feel nothing but shame. My intention was not to attack or defile the cenotaph. Running along with a crowd of people who had just been violently repelled by the police, I got caught up in the spirit of the moment.” David Gilmour’s former bandmate Roger Waters lost his father in the second world war and has written about his loss extensively throughout his career, including in a number of Pink Floyd songs. Gilmour has been on the books of the modelling agency Select Model Management and has also tried his hand as a journalist but is now completing a history degree at Girton College, Cambridge . His father is admired as one of the world’s finest guitarists. The Pink Floyd album Dark Side Of The Moon is one of the biggest-selling releases of all time. In an interview last year Gilmour talked about being bought two Savile Row suits before he headed off to university. A Cambridge University spokesman has said the matter is “for the civil authorities”. Students Tuition fees Protest Pink Floyd Crime guardian.co.uk
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Human rights chiefs want to know if US operation ever considered capturing al-Qaida leader alive Two United Nations human rights watchdogs have asked the US to provide details about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, in particular whether it ever included the possibility that he could be captured alive. A series of questions have arisen about the potential legality of the mission after it emerged that four of the five people killed when US Navy Seals raided the house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, were unarmed, Bin Laden among them . Pentagon officials initially talked of “a great deal of resistance” from inside the compound, but it was revealed that American forces only came under fire in the first few minutes of the operation. In a statement released in Geneva , the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, and the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Martin Scheinin, said the US “should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards”. They added: “For instance it will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture Bin Laden. It may well be that the questions that are being asked about the operation could be answered, but it is important to get this into the open.” Their call follows a demand by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay , for “a full disclosure” of the facts connected to Bin Laden’s death. In their statement, Heyns and Scheinin acknowledged that such issues were difficult to gauge during anti-terrorism operations. “Acts of terrorism are the antithesis of human rights, in particular the right to life. In certain exceptional cases, use of deadly force may be permissible as a measure of last resort in accordance with international standards on the use of force, in order to protect life, including in operations against terrorists. “However, the norm should be that terrorists be dealt with as criminals, through legal processes of arrest, trial and judicially decided punishment. Actions taken by states in combating terrorism, especially in high profile cases, set precedents for the way in which the right to life will be treated in future instances.” Both rapporteurs are law professors. Heyns specialises in human rights law at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and Scheinin is professor of public international law at the European University Institute in Florence. Osama bin Laden United Nations Human rights US military United States Pakistan Peter Walker guardian.co.uk
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Human rights chiefs want to know if US operation ever considered capturing al-Qaida leader alive Two United Nations human rights watchdogs have asked the US to provide details about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, in particular whether it ever included the possibility that he could be captured alive. A series of questions have arisen about the potential legality of the mission after it emerged that four of the five people killed when US Navy Seals raided the house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, were unarmed, Bin Laden among them . Pentagon officials initially talked of “a great deal of resistance” from inside the compound, but it was revealed that American forces only came under fire in the first few minutes of the operation. In a statement released in Geneva , the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, and the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Martin Scheinin, said the US “should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards”. They added: “For instance it will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture Bin Laden. It may well be that the questions that are being asked about the operation could be answered, but it is important to get this into the open.” Their call follows a demand by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay , for “a full disclosure” of the facts connected to Bin Laden’s death. In their statement, Heyns and Scheinin acknowledged that such issues were difficult to gauge during anti-terrorism operations. “Acts of terrorism are the antithesis of human rights, in particular the right to life. In certain exceptional cases, use of deadly force may be permissible as a measure of last resort in accordance with international standards on the use of force, in order to protect life, including in operations against terrorists. “However, the norm should be that terrorists be dealt with as criminals, through legal processes of arrest, trial and judicially decided punishment. Actions taken by states in combating terrorism, especially in high profile cases, set precedents for the way in which the right to life will be treated in future instances.” Both rapporteurs are law professors. Heyns specialises in human rights law at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and Scheinin is professor of public international law at the European University Institute in Florence. Osama bin Laden United Nations Human rights US military United States Pakistan Peter Walker guardian.co.uk
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