"Still she haunts me, phantomwise..." - Margaret Thatcher

Another good way to start a fight, if such an activity it to your taste, is to mention Margaret Thatcher. Actually to really get things going, mention her in a positive light. Thatcher is one of those figures that nowadays people want to wrap up in one word – ‘monster’, ‘genius’, that sort of thing. As if any human being can be summarised in one word. The film, The Iron Lady, seems to have been criticised from both the Right and the Left, which suggests to me it’s pitched in a pretty good spot.  Its biggest problem is that it’s not that good a film, despite Meryl Streep’s astonishing performance.

One word can’t summarise a life. One film cannot summarise Margaret Thatcher. The impact she had on Britain was enormous and still controversial. John Campbell spent two large volumes discussing Thatcher (as indeed did Thatcher herself.) For those, such as myself, who are interested in politics and Thatcher but not madly, a one-volume condensation of Campbell’s books was released in 2009. It’s a worthwhile read.

As with the movie, The Iron Lady: From the grocer’s daughter to Iron Lady, is not going to reassure those who consider her the greatest evil since Hitler. But nor is it going to encourage those who think Britain would be better off if she was still in power.  Indeed his conclusion seems to be that she is the most contradictory, divisive figure in 20^th Century Britain and it seems those who think she destroyed Great Britain and those who think she saved it are both right. Everything you’ve heard is true: she took Great Britain and set the entire country in a new direction at a trememdous cost that is still being paid today.

But not everything is true. She is not the hardline privatiser and monetarist that some would have you believe. She moved more cautiously, was more aware of public opionion and was swayed much more by good advisors than her public image suggested. It was only when she seemed to believe her own publicity towards the end of her term of office that she lost her political touch.

She was a mass of contradictions. A loyal Conservative, she spent many years damaging the party, almost making it unelectable. Personally restrained and responsible, she unleashed a wave of greed and selfishness. A champion of the family, she was a distant mother. In awe of the 'Mother of Parliaments', she was an indifferent performer there.

Some parts even I could argue with. Campbell says her relationships with Reagan, Gorbachev and de Klerk, three leaders who had massive impact on their countries and the wolrd, were all examples of her lucking out with the people who came to power, rather than her having any real influence on their decisions. One such piece of luck might be plausible, two… maybe, but three? Campbell may be being less than generous here.

This is a minor quibble. Campbell gives credit where he deems it due, and blame too. I don’t think it is a left wing or right wing book – rather, it seems to be a history of the old school. You remember that? Where the writer would state what happened, in as full a manner as possible, rather than just tell you bits that agree with the thesis they set out to prove, while ignoring or distorting the rest.

Campbell sums up the Thatcher era in one telling image. Her father was a small businessman and local politican, and Thatcher’s greatest single influence. Then came Thatcher, PM for eleven years. Her son is a dodgy businessman under grave suspicion in several countries and unwelcome in several others.  That was her effect on Britain.

This is a book that will irritate supporters and opponents and that is all to the good. It is said that it wasn’t until 1988 that a history of the American Civil War was publlished that people agreed was a fair account of the causes and the course of the war – 123 years after it ended. I think a similar book on Margaret Thatcher might be even longer in coming.

"With great power..." Grant Morrison on comic books

Grant Morrison is one of the most successful and influential comic book writers around today. So much so his ideas were ripped off by the Wachowski brothers for ‘The Matrix'. He seems to have taken this in his stride; after seeing the sequels he reportedly said, “They should have kept stealing my ideas.” On the back of the dust jacket of his new book Supergods: Our world in the age of the superhero, he looks like a comic book villain, intense, bald, handsome, in a round collared jacked with gold buttons up to his neck. His life has been shaped by comic books, as he tells us. Not only were they a welcome diversion in his Scottish childhood and adolescence, they have been his career. And now he has produced a book about both comics books and his life.

And for the most part it’s good. Any successful writer of comic books is going to be converscent with the history of comic books, their characters, their stories, their tropes and conventions. His view may be a little limited – he credits the writers of Superman with the invention of the secret identity, ignoring the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro and countless others. But as a history of comic books, it was for me informative and interesting. He traces the impact of the world onto comic books and the impact of comic books on the world, finding why a genre that was born in the Depression and the Second World War, is increasingly popular in a time of globalisation, terrorism and uncertainty. Heroes who spoke to the masses at a time when the enemy was clear and in uniform, still speak, in altered voices and with different attitudes, to our modern age, and Morrison has some interesting ideas as to why.

The book lost me in its more autobiographical sections, and discussing comic books of which I have no idea. Reading an appraisal of any art work you don’t know is always problematic. Comic books in particular depend heavily on their fans’ knowledge. (This in itself was an innovation of Marvel, taken up by DC creating complex worlds and multiworlds for their heroes to play in.) So when Morrison discusses Spawn, for example, at some length my eyes glazed over. Fans of Spawn may well be gasping now, but having never read Spawn, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I also didn’t particularly care for his autobiography, and I skipped a lot of it. If I were more knowledgeable about his work or a greater comic book fan, I imagine this would have been much more compelling. Morrison comes over a little self-involved, and perhaps he is. Even so, it gave me some insight into how comic books are created and managed, both new and continuing titles and characters. But having someone tell you about their drug days are as dull as people who want to tell you about the enormous amounts they used to drink. It’s probably significant to them, but hardly interesting to the outsider. There are some exceptions to this rule, but this wasn’t one of them.

Al that said, I enjoyed the book. (Although he dismissed the Phantom with one line about the 1996 film. Humph, I say. For those who don’t know the Phantom, he’s a bit like Batman with a more positive upbringing – no superpowers, just fit, fast and intelligent. Also he lives in the African jungle.) Oddly for a book about comics, it could have used more illustrations. A minor quibble. Those with a greater interest in the genre will doubtless get more out of it, but still a good writer is a good writer, regardless of the genre in which they work.