The Tain is one of 80 tales making up the Ulster Cycle, which tells the story of the Ulaid, the prehistoric inhabitants of Northern Ireland. The Tain begins when wife Medb is forced to concede that her husband Ailill possesses a better prize bull than she. In order to rectify the matter, Medb resolves to steal a better bull, The Brown Bull of Cooley, from the province of Ulster. The Tain documents the mission of Medb and her army, prevented as they are by the great warrior Cu Chulainn, who is eventually the main protagonist of the tale.

By translating The Tain, Carson takes on a daunting task. As with any story that is initially part of the oral tradition, The Tain has been a fluid entity, changing and growing under the hands of many generations, the needs of each different from one another. Carson’s translation is based on multiple texts, themselves fragmentary and influenced by the personality and beliefs of the transcriber. To make matters just a little more difficult, The Tain uses a multitude of linguistic forms, from poetry and prose, to ‘rhetorics’ – unpunctuated blocks of ryhthmic prose. Amazingly, Carson makes it work.

The epic gushes by in heated but steady waves. The action is always imminent but there is never too little time for a diversion into a character’s past or a dwelling’s layout. An emphasis on the landscape of Northern Ireland pervades throughout the book and creates something like the rhythm of a bass guitar; subtle but unyielding.

The melody of the work, the story itself, is a celebration of bloodthirstiness. While today, participation in war is usually, and rightly so, a source of guilt, there is no such guilt in The Tain. Indeed, the characters are happily driven by impulses to war with one another. Warring camps are not portrayed as those of in the conventional sense of the word, acting on real contempt for one another. Rather, they have a reluctant respect, even love, for one another. After all, the initial dispute which leads to great battles occurs between husband and wife. The importance of poetry, written messages and Druid prophecies attenuates the hideousness of war, until the decapitation of troops in Medb’s army is seen as part of some happy banter. To so remove our contempt for death is a difficult undertaking that Carson is, luckily, more than capable of.

by Mona Sakr

While essentially a children’s book, The Ingenious Edgar Jones will delight children and adults alike with its quirky tale of a porter’s son in nineteenth century Oxford. Liz Garner’s style is fluid and unctuous, and the whole book feels pleasantly like a warm breeze blown through your mind. It is even more enjoyable when you are intimately acquainted with the landmarks that form an intrinsic element to the story; one of the most evocative passages is a description of the view from the roof of the partially-completed University Museum of Natural History, with the Oxford we inhabit now taking shape amid the remnants of the medieval city.

Comparisons with Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequence are inevitable with such a book, but in reality entirely unnecessary. Liz Garner’s Oxford is firmly grounded in reality – the description of the porter’s walk to work from Jericho to New College is accurate in every detail, as any resident of the city will be able to attest. There is no attempt to encompass a similarly philosophical sphere, and the forays into evolutionary science and architechture are meticulously well-researched whilst remaining brief enough and simple enough to be completely subservient to the plot. The character of Edgar himself, a boy strangely gifted in ways adults are seemingly unable to understand, is just petulant and arrogant enough to be intensely likeable, while his parents are, in their different ways, equally blind to the progress and innovation that their son tries to drag into their lives.

The only disappointing moment in this book comes at the very end, when Edgar has escaped from prison only to discover that his family has disintegrated and his one passion, the Museum, no longer needs him. It isn’t that you wish that everything could turn out well, quite the contrary; it’s just that you wish it didn’t end in such a predictably ambivalent, cliché-ridden way. Other than this final let-down, this is a stunning novel, worthy of the very highest praise, and most definitely worth breaking free of the weekly grind of academic reading to enjoy.

by Caroline Crampton

When I left Oxford for my year out at the end of my second year, I headed for Scotland thinking that I was going to dominate Oxford on my return. My flatmate and I were planning to create a cult of mystery around ourselves, appearing only seldom on college premises to do fascinating and mysterious things, but never looking like we were trying. We were going to set up a sort of fraternity, consisting of ourselves and a collection of malleable fresher girls, attracted to our air of continental sophistication, as expressed through a love of Gauloises and real coffee. Although no berets were included in this vision of fourth-year bliss, we were certainly going to be living a Left Bank lifestyle dripping with Sartre and easy irony. That’s essentially how I envisaged my fourth year and how I imagined myself in it: too cool for Oxford and sitting at the top of the food chain, enjoying familiar pleasures with a new-found worldliness.

Unfortunately, it almost worked. Sitting on the Oxford Tube at the start of October, I realised I was left with a horrible dilemma: on the one hand, I didn’t want to be that guy who thinks he’s too cool for school and only talks about how much better things are elsewhere but, on the other, I did feel too cool for Oxford and couldn’t help thinking I’d rather be back in Berlin. I’d moved on. I think we all had. I don’t know about those who decided to study abroad, but those of use who worked and even those who spent a year asking French schoolchildren, "And what did you do on your ‘grandes vacances’, petit Pierre?" tasted the sweet air of freedom. It was particularly the financial freedom that brought me such joy. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to ask my parents for money, I didn’t have to fill in those ridiculous student loan forms, I wasn’t scrounging from anybody. The big difference between money you earn and money you get for free is that people aren’t giving it to you because they like you (your parents) or to with the long term aim of supporting the economy (the government), but because they want something from you. Immediately, you become an equal partner in the power relationship, because you are independent and can work or not work as you choose. If you decide not to work and then lose your job, you lose your money, but not your self-respect because you don’t owe anybody anything. If you decide to take every penny you have and blow it on a four-day rave in a Serbian castle, there is an added satisfaction in not wondering how many hours your parents had to work for it.

But, perhaps more important than this is that last year was not just an interlude with no result but a few anecdotes about bratwurst, it was a year of my real life and a lot happened in it: my first love left me; so did my second; I turned to nicotine; stopped again; started again; I got my first ever job, and my second; I went on holiday to a militarised zone and expanded my mind in a German sex club; I changed my hairstyle; I stopped wearing pink shirts; I grew up and moved on and all that shit and all the while, Oxford stayed exactly the same.

Of course, some things are different now: most of my friends have graduated and college is no longer full of familiar, if boring, faces, but nothing essential has changed. The student newspapers are writing articles I read in the first year: promiscuity, drinking, state versus private, rent rises and so on ad nauseam. My predictions for Trinity: there will be banter in the Rad Cam, some random Union hack will fuck someone and there will be a feature every week about the fascinating link between sunshine and libraries. This year, as every year, everyone will read the Isis and agree it’s pretentious, no-one will read the Owl and come to the same conclusion. Oh Oxford! Even this article has been written many times before. I particularly recommend "The Lot of the Linguist" from the Cherwell archives. Does it matter? Probably not, given that it seems clear that the university experience will remain similar from year to year, but the lot of the linguist is to hang around like an old ghost and watch a new generation rehash the same old tripe that seemed so important to us at the time.

 This is the horror for a returning linguist: that everything is marked by a stale familiarity and, as we know, familiarity breeds contempt. The issues and the conversations are the same as they always were, but they have lost the vitality that comes of being bound up in the fabric of university life. The news that Keith Barber is on a sex-crazed rampage is, I’m sure, fascinating to friends of Keith, but I don’t have the foggiest who the man is and all the information I’m left with is that people go on sex-crazed rampages, something I remember well from long forgotten members of college, the names of whom mean nothing to the first years I bore with their stories. And what is more, three years from now, Keith Barber will be forgotten as others were before him and and only briefly remembered by a sixth-year medic at Harris Manchester. Nothing leaves a mark. The legendary Somerville cuppers victory of 2005 is now nothing more than an entry in the records and it is sheer vanity to suggest that anything we do at Oxford will ever be more than that. You could come top of the year, captain every sports team, edit every paper, preside over the union (heaven forbid!) and still, this insitution, which has chewed over so many generations of ambitious young undergrads, would stay completely untouched for another thousand years. It is as if our time here as stretched on into a lifeless no-man’s-land We live in a limbo between our continetal sophistication and graduation.
However, this is not to say that nothing has changed. Some things seem to be shifting slowly and gradually. Now, it seems that the ladies with the scarves and Ugg boots pout to pendulum instead of hip-hop (but still think they’re street) and the smoking ban has made Filth even more disgusting (I assume). Also, the bureaufascists in charge of most colleges seem to be using the forces of darkness to expand their evil empires and impress upon us all: you are stupid little children and if you disagree, we will tell you to grow up. Perhaps more worringly, the union seems to have become even more vacuous. I notice that in this year’s term card, three officers (bureaufascists in the making) have chosen pictures of themselves drinking. Obviously there’s nothing like the ability to get pissed to get people to vote for you. And it is exactly this that seems most depressing about Oxford: the arrogance and the vapidity of so many people here, who don’t realise that, to the outside world, studying here doesn’t make you special, it doesn’t even make you clever, it just makes you a twat. Similarly disgusting is the snobbery and the belief that wealth is a virtue, to be paraded and envied. And what is worse: it makes me realise how completely I fell into all these traps and how foolish I must have seemed.
But we are clever, and it is the persistent anti-intellectualism of Oxford that is most depressing. It is the waste of talent, and of time, that perhaps characterises best the way I see my years at Oxford. For all those weeks I spent sitting about chatting about Vogue and chain-smoking, I could have finished my first novel or actually gone to something I signed up for. In fact, I could have even done my work properly instead of spending years handing in second rate nonsense that I’d cobbled together the night before. But perhaps that is the charm of Oxford life: there is such an abundance of riches that one doesn’t bat an eyelid at throwing it all away. Indeed, it does seem that true luxury necessitates waste and if time is the most valuable commodity we have, I must consider the first two years at Oxford the richest of my life.

And finally, develop an intolerance to the outside world. You’ve been at Oxford for a month and already you’re talking in a gay falsetto about pressie drinks, have rediscovered your teddy bear and become slightly afraid of the checkout assistants in Sainsbury’s Local. However unless you’re a member of OUCA you presumably intend to re-enter the world in three to five years, only slightly pasty and jaded. Dons on the other-hand only ever leave the city limits to go on bitchy conferences or dig manuscripts up and therefore have the permanent air of Prince Charles about them.
You have to love them really. They are much like the professors at Hogwarts, with strange names and costumes, sometimes sexually and ethically ambiguous yet redeemed by their quirkiness and the sneaking suspicion that they may just be figments of the imagination after all. Yet whilst they go off to the arctic wastes in search of the northern lights just think yourself lucky that, unlike them, you will one day escape this mad-house.

 The dictator meets his match in the shape of Thomas Corcoran

As time draws the twilight of his days into the realms of dusk, Fidel Castro occupies first place in the hall of the twentieth century’s great survivors. Since he took power on the island of Cuba, he has seen ten of the forty-three US presidents pass by: Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. In those heady days of 1959, Buddy Holly was hogging primetime radio and The Beatles were struggling to get a gig at the Cavern Club. The changes in the geopolitical environment since then have been immense, but rather than being left behind, Castro seems to have moved along with those changes and indeed acted as a symbol of them. From national guerilla leader to South American legend, from enemy of Amereican imperialism to Soviet client, from post-war leftover to grandfather of the anti-Bush New Left "Pink Tide": Castro seems to embody the history of the Radical Left, past and present.

The days of this frail, bed-ridden figure are drawing to a close, and he has finally decided to tell his story, if in a somewhat unconventional manner: Ignacio Ramonet, who is editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and on the faculty at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, has interviewed him for over a hundred hours and put down the results in a tome of over seven hundred pages. Yet, rather than moulding these interviews into a coherent, structured whole, Ramonet has simply regurgitated them in the form of an enormous series of question and answers, and we are denied even a dialogue of limited sophistication. Such a format is wholly appropriate for a Communist dictator, but completely unsuited to a biography of any form. For biography seeks to present to us aspects of an individual’s personality with which we have been unacqauinted, yet in this instance even the most intimately personal details of Fidel’s extra-political life are somehow bound up as part of a broad political doctrine. Even his beatings by his father are presented as important steps in the early life of a strong leader.

In fact, Castro comes across not only as a soulless dictator, but as an incredibly boring man. The events he describes – his early life in a Jesuit college, his student radicalism, his guerilla war, his battles with American assassins and relationships with Soviet leaders – should be interesting. But when they are recounted by a man who has descended to such levels of sadness that he prides himself on the fact that his abstinence from shaving saves him about ten working days per year, they induce sleep.

Thus Ramonet has produced an horrendous document here. Not only has he created something gargatuanly tedious, he has done something despicable. He has become an apologist for a dictator; a barely-reluctant instrument of political propaganda in the guise of a biographer. His introduction to the novel reads like it has been written by a bureaeucrat in the Cuban Ministry of Public Information, as he descends from the level of political intellectual to that of idiotic apologist. He calls anybody who opposes Castro (and that includes the entire Cuban pro-democracy movement) an instrument of American imperialism, to be lumped together in the same camp as General Pinochet. The repression of homosexuals and imprisonment of political opponents are swept under the carpet after the briefest of mentions: Fidel’s strange explanations are accepted as gospel truth. We can see why Castro ceremoniously presented this book to Hugo Chavez, the suspiciously dictatorial Socialist "Bolivarian" president of Venezuela who has allied himself with Iran – a nation where to display a Communist symbol is an imprisonable offence. It forms the basis of the propaganda upon which he has thrived since 1959: by appealing to left-of-centre sympathisers across the Western World, Castro has managed to prolong the existence of one of the most idiosyncratic dictatorships the world has ever known. We can only hope that Ramonet does not seek to make similar "biographies" in the future. Though I’m sure Kim Jong-il and Muammar al-Gaddafi would pay good money.
 

 Dickens Hard Times

Some consider this work of literature important, and important it may well be; yet it suffers from a debilitating problem which, for many, detracts from such elements as plot, theme, or characterisation – to whit, a disquieting predisposition to (and I see his bewhiskered, sealsome face frowning at me) to…

 by Ruben Tereshenko

A team from Oxford University have helped to uncover the true age of an ancient skeleton, casting new light on human presence in western Europe.The skeleton, named The Red Lady of Paviland for its red ochre covering, was thought to be between 25000 and 26000 years old. However, new technology has discovered the remains to be around 4000 years older than this.Oxford University experts teamed up with members of the British Museum to uncover new ideas about the ways in which people lived. The skeleton was first discovered in Paviland on Gower in the 1820s. Although named a "Lady", it was later discovered that the remains were actually those of a male.Dr Thomas Higham of Oxford University commented that the data was important for "our understanding of the presence and behaviour of humans in thi part of the world at this time." He went on to say that the details might suggest that the custom of burying people with artefacts was in fact a western European trend, rather than an eastern European one, as previously thought.

by Alexandra Hedges
“I like three things: I like cooking, I like eating, and I like writing about food.” These are the attractively candid opening words of Nigella Lawson as she stands up to promote her new book, Nigella Express, at Blackwell’s on Broad Street. She strides in, looking polished and serene, yet her tone is humble and honest. Nigella is not ashamed of her love of food. In a pleasantly self-deprecating manner she admits that she would rather spend her money on out-of-season plums than a new haircut. She rejects the fashion in top restaurants for creating ‘small but stylish’ portions; with hands proudly placed on her womanly hips, she announces, “miniature things depress me!” When asked what her ‘Last Supper’ would comprise, she launches with ease into a lengthy list, requesting “roast potatoes, mash and chips!”

Nigella advocates simple but well-prepared dishes, admitting that she rarely eats out because she dislikes “fussy food”. It is a family joke that the menu always includes roast chicken when guests are expected. When asked whether she has a favourite eating-place, she hesitates, before alighting on a cheap Chinese restaurant she frequented as a student at Oxford, where she enjoyed a plate of salty spare ribs between lectures. Nigella believes that good food does not need to be expensive; She remembers preparing an excellent onion soup in her college kitchen, using ingredients from the local Co-op. She is a fount of useful money-saving tips, recommending lining a cheap pan with ‘Bacofoil’ instead of buying costly non-stick equipment and suggests ordering utensils off eBay.
 

 Nigella believes strongly that everyone is capable of preparing a high quality dinner on a daily basis. She openly admits to having no formal culinary training; she has developed all her skills through experimentation and by watching others. Her new book demonstrates that even a busy career-woman can be a domestic goddess with very little extra effort.  Nigella Express is full of recipes for quick but delicious dishes. Whatever your work routine and whatever your tastes, her book offers a solution, from a roast duck which can be popped in the oven in the morning to be ready and waiting when you arrive home, to a five-minute Mexican dish, amusingly called ‘Speedy Gonzales’.

 Nigella’s passionate enthusiasm for cooking is endearing. She genuinely believes that a minute’s manual labour in the kitchen is more therapeutic than an hour of yoga. She feels she has found her vocation, and for her, nothing could be more fulfilling than sharing with thousands of others the pleasurable experience of good food.

by Lewis Goodall

I confess, I had no idea what to expect from Small Change, but it turned out to be a pleasantly surprising and at times genuinely quite moving production, exploring the relatively neglected but ever-fascinating topic of the mother-son relationship. It does so with aplomb. But what is it abou? Well, here’s the thing: not a lot. But don’t despair; it’s not one of those depressingly ‘post-modern’ pieces that few understand and even fewer like.

The play takes the form of exploring the memories of four characters and their development over time. The two male characters start the play as gawky teenagers, dominated by their mothers. There’s the subtlest hint of Oedipus complex going on here, but for the sake of our souls I’ll gloss over it quickly. By the end, all are emotionally hollowed out, sickened by life, by the mental deterioration of their mothers and the niggling fact that they’ve also never had the chance to sleep together.

There are some quite hefty gripes I have. Quite a few of them are associated with Alex Worsnip’s performance. Occasionally inspired but mostly quite constipated, Worsnip struggles with most of his dialogue. And please, Alex, don’t try and play 16 year old boys ever again, and, if you do, lose the “I’m a teenager therefore I mumble and never take my hands out of my pockets and move my head like a duck” routine. It’s just not a good look I’m afraid. However, I am in danger of being overly critical. His later scenes, where he is playing a more mature, angst-ridden character are far better, and the character’s gay epiphany with Vincent must surely rank as the highlight of the entire play.

This slightly cringe worthy teenage angst is easily forgotten by the stellar performance of Ellen Buddle. I’m not entirely sure that she is actually Welsh, but kudos to her for maintaining the accent, rather than lapsing into a dialectical tour of the United Kingdom which unfortunately befalls the other cast members. For me, her performance as the psychologically unfortunate Mrs. Driscoll steals the show. Everything’s perfect – the hollering (albeit increasingly annoying) agitated Welsh voice, the gaunt appearance (one gets the impression the character is altogether too on edge to eat regularly) – everything screams psychological issues. The only thing missing was an assortment of cats, though what Gill would have thought of that I’m not sure.

The debut of Archie Davies as Vincent deserves a mention. A more confident performance than that of Worsnip, admittedly it often feels he has less to do and appears merely as a side-show to Worsnip, but this is more a fault of the play than of the actor. An interesting future lies ahead I think. If nothing else because my companion for the evening, to whom I turned for any thoughts on the play, could offer only the gem “well, Archie’s a fittie.” Cheers Cheryl. Utterly profound. On a more profound not, we have here a deeply thought-provoking play, exploring the troubled tumultuous nature of human relationships. Surely one of the better things on offer this Michaelmas.

by Frankie Parham
 

It should be harder to go wrong if you start with something simple. Director Steve Loman has attempted to build The One That Got Away on this basis, as it begins simply with a park bench on a cleanly lit stage and continues with a single character entering and sitting on it throughout the performance. Henry (Sky Singh, who admirably shoulders the weight of the show) barely shifts from his sitting position, even though he is keenly searching for his hat and is all the while bombarded with one bizarre encounter after another. Barely halfway through, he has already faced a snobbishly smitten couple, a putrid pensioner and a rigidly mannered businessman.

 All these roles, and many more, are performed by an able cast. Mark Cartwright dons the businessman caricature, before becoming a nagging mother clutching her Primark shopping. Beth William proves all her upper class worth in a similar fashion to Ben Galpin, who tirelessly plays most of the other characters, having to cover just about every accent on the cheap gag spectrum. Roisin Watson also makes regular varied appearances, both as an excitable girl and Henry’s wife of old, Elaine. With such an energetic cast, it seems a shame that, more often than not, the characters they play are incessantly upper class. The cringing drill of prolonged Received Pronunciation is only broken by further cliché: a postman from up north (he’s called Pat by the way), a German spy or another posh guy, but this time with a farcical speech impediment, identical to that of Pontius Pilate in Life of Brian.

Much of the play’s structure is indebted to the all too familiar pattern found in Monty Python and Blackadder: the straight character, on the same (apparently sane) level as the omniscient audience, is pestered by several daft and ignorant idiots. Neither the acting, nor much of the material is at fault (although some of the dialogue could have been clipped), but the play’s reliance on this hackneyed theme is its downfall. Annoyingly, there are moments where the credibility didn’t have to be lost in monotony and could have been saved. Henry ironically talks of the irritation of losing something: “you don’t realise the pain and regret until the object is gone”.  “You get niggled from feeling regretful” and “it all boils…” he continues, but just short of turning over a new intriguing leaf, he finishes, saying: “it all boils to the same thing”. Likewise, the writer Cathy Thomas construes a satisfying twist for the conclusion, but it is predictable and only leaves the audience feeling more confused. The One That Got Away is certainly befitting of its title: there’s a nice ring to it, but the sense – anyone? 

 The One That Got Away runs through November 3rd at the BT in the late slot (9:30pm).