Today I accompanied my President, Staffan Nilsson, to the Norwegian Mission to the European Union, where we signed the book of condolences. It was impossible not to be moved. A simple white-clothed table, two candles, a white rose and the condolences book, a steady stream of people of all ages, joining the silent queue. And people had clearly thought about what they wanted to say. They brought texts and copied them carefully into the book. They took their time, some times a long time. I hope that these expressions of solidarity and sympathy will somehow find their way to the Norwegian people who have, collectively and at every level, given us all an object lesson in responsibility and dignity. My quotation had to be John Donne: ‘every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.’ We are all involved in the Norwegian tragedy.

I managed to squeeze in one more book before the weekend, Julian Barnes’s Pulse. It’s a collection of short stories, mostly published elsewhere first, and that fact at first made me suspicious. But this is a very cleverly and carefully constructed collection. The reviewer at the link I have provided says it all so much better than me. Barnes, like Foulds, is at one and the same time extraordinarily meticulous in his use of words and yet brilliant at writing flowing prose and dialogue. It is only on a second reading that the true depths of his reflections become apparent. Indeed, for a budding writer, Pulse is a sort of masterclass on how to write short stories: in turns humourous, poignant, and acerbic, Barnes never loses sight of his underlying aim, which is to analyse human connections in all their glory and frailty.

So much has been going on in the UK and Europe over the past week that few noticed the passage of the EU Bill through the British Parliament last Wednesday. The British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, published an article in The Daily Telegraph on 16 July in which he summarised the Bill’s provisions and set out his own views. ‘After its entry into force this summer,’ he declared,  ‘no British government will be able to sign up to a treaty change or a so-called “ratchet clause” – the self-amending provisions brought in by the Lisbon Treaty – that shifts further powers from the UK to the EU unless the British people consent in a referendum. That will be the law.’ Moreover, he continued, ‘Now no British government will be able to agree a new Lisbon Treaty, or join the euro, or give up our border controls, or set up a European army, to give just a few examples, without first gaining the explicit agreement of the British people. I am confident the British people, if asked, would say a resounding “no”, but whatever the people say, they should be asked for their view and not denied a say.’ It is, to say the least, a significant development.

This evening I read a fascinating article in Parliamentary Affairs, by Stephen Fielding entitled ‘Fiction and British Politics: Towards an Imagined Political Capital?’ Borrowing from a burgeoning scientific literature in the US, Fielding’s introductory piece describes how and why art and artifice are central to politics: ‘before one of the most elemental concepts – the nation – could exist in reality it had to be ‘imagined’ by those who read newspapers – and novels.’ ‘Fiction fills a gap left by lack of personal experience, helping to create an ersatz form of political ‘knowledge’.’ There are historians who believe that Hollywood’s interwar emphasis on Americans as individuals (rather than as members of the working class) played a decisive part in the making of anti-socialist identities and, in similar vein, others argue that the political novel (Disraeli, Trollope) played ‘a significant part in the British élite’s strategy of incorporating newly enfranchised voters within an existing system in which the Palace of Westminster was central.’ The question arises, where is the fiction about European politics? I can think of a few examples off of the top of my head: Stanley Johnson’s The Commissioner (1987 – later made into a film starring John Hurt); Bill Newton Dunn’s The Devil Knew Not (1999), Alex Hunter’s Shadows (2009)… (Is it significant that they are all thrillers?) In the nature of things, a body of EU fiction is more likely to develop through television. True, it is difficult to imagine an EU version of The West Wing (it would have to star several Presidents for a start!) but the EU does badly need to be humanised and there clearly is a creative space out there waiting to be filled…

I read Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece (that’s not hyperbole), All the Pretty Horses, in more-or-less a single sitting today. The distinctive prose, the rich vocabulary, the elegiac atmospherics, the taut dialogue, the taciturn and entirely authentic characters; it is simply a joy to read McCarthy’s work. On this occasion, uncharacteristically, the basic story is a romance, though it is nevertheless hemmed around by the raw violence and savagery for which his novels are generally better known. The Guardian newspaper is quoted as declaring this book to be ‘one of the greatest American novels of this or any time’ and it is profoundly true that this could only be an American novel. Where, in Europe, are there wildernesses to ride off into? Mountains to traverse without seeing another human soul? I’ll cite just one passage to demonstrate McCarthy’s peerless imagery; ‘They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.’ Beautiful and brilliant.

This afternoon I took a gang of youngsters to see the final Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II. The event was enlivened by the fact that we watched the film in a converted military riding school in Givet (France), Le Manège, and in French (‘Hogwarts’ becomes ‘Poudlard’, for example). Well, leaving aside the quality of the film (it’s actually rather good, though they could have cut the scene where a seemingly dead Harry meets Dumbledore in limbo) and of the story (the complex and apparently treacherous Severus Snape is a brilliant invention and, of course, brilliantly played by Alan Rickman), it was end of an era stuff. N° 1 sprog read the first book and watched the first film when she was seven; she is now seventeen. The actors playing the three children are now fully-grown adults. Indeed, I wonder if we will come to refer to the ‘Harry Potter generation’, so dominant has J.K. Rowling’s creation been. I hope e.j. thribb has written a suitable epitaph.

This evening I finished Paul Auster’s most recent novel, Sunset Park. It’s another Blue Jay Way, I’m afraid (see this earlier post). In January this year, at the Brussels Fine Arts and Antiques Fair, a gallery-owning friend told me he had a Spillaerts ‘within striking distance’. He showed me the picture. Sure enough; there was Spillaerts’ signature. It was brilliantly executed technically. But half of the picture was white space and the image was a faithful and entirely pedestrian representation, not of dark and windy Ostende streets, but of a rectangular, red-roofed church. This, my friend explained, was because Spillaerts had earned money by doing some publicity posters for an architect (the blank space was for the architect’s publicity blurb). In other words, it was by Spillaerts, but it wasn’t a Spillaerts (hence the ‘striking distance’). Well, in the same way I would argue that Sunset Park is by Auster, but it’s not an Auster. His omniscient narrator never shows but always tells, and he writes always in the first tense in order to emphasise what is apparently the main theme of the novel; live in the moment rather than for the future, but you will still mourn the moment’s passing. There’s the usual technical ease but also a lot of irritating space fillers: baseball trivia en masse; a treatise about the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Liu Xiabo; and a lengthy analysis, plus quotations, of the classic film, The Best Years of Our Lives. If the acknowledgements are to be believed, he has even borrowed passages from his daughter’s sixth grade paper on To Kill a Mocking Bird. As for the story, everything is connected expertly but it ends up feeling like light entertainment – an affectionate look at the vestiges of Brooklyn’s bohemians in post-2008 crash America. Come on, Paul!

Mario Soares

I always state that it is invidious to single out opinions from the many debated and adopted during a plenary session but on this occasion I would like nevertheless to cite an own-initiative opinion on the economic crisis, education and the labour market, drafted by Mario Soares (Portugal, Employees’ Group) and adopted unanimously by the plenary this afternoon. The opinion’s arguments are the red line that runs through many of the discussions I have been listening in to over the past week, from the Ajaccio Chamber of Commerce last Friday through to Lewandowski’s proposals for the financial perspectives presented earlier today. As Soares put it, ‘The cost of ignorance is higher than the cost of education.’ Now, more than ever, the Union must invest in the targeted creation and maintenance of a highly-skilled and educated workforce and that, as Jan Truszczynski stated in Ajaccio and Janusz Lewandowski declared in the EESC’s plenary, is something the Commission has firmly put on the table for the 2014-20 period.

At midday today our plenary session was addressed by Janusz Lewandowski, European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget (and, by coincidence, also a Pole). He came to present the Commission’s proposals for the 2014-2020 multiannual financial framework. ‘We are at the beginning,’ he declared, ‘of a procedure that must result in the unanimous agreement of twenty-seven member states.’ (And, he could have added, be approved by the European Parliament.) Therefore, the Commissioner hinted, the way to see the Commission’s proposals is as a set of opening bids, a negotiating package that must be balanced in its composition and its results, so that, if there are winners and losers on one issue, the losers are winners on another issue and nobody wins too well or loses too badly. It is the pragmatic approach he had already spoken about when he visited the EESC’s Bureau last November and is necessitated by the political realities of member states’ pre-emptive starting positions (already loudly declared). All of this must therefore take place within an overall envelope of 1% of GNI – which everybody knows is peanuts – and therefore the budget has to be very carefully targeted if leverage is to be maximised. And that, as he explained, is where some of the innovations come in: freezing or reducing agriculture and cohesion spending to favour education, research and development, for example. The headlines will be about percentages and rebates and own resources but underneath the headlines some interesting cultural changes could be under way.