By Hook Or By Rook

Chess fans wondering if Ronan Bennett was just dabbling in the dark arts of chess for the sake of some hoity-toity backdrop to ZUGZWANG can relax – according to a very nice piece over at Chess Base, the guy’s very serious about it all. Quoth Ronan:

“Chess was, to some degree, my saviour at a certain point in my life. I was on remand awaiting trial in Brixton prison in London. It was a tough prison and there were very few facilities. We were locked up for 23 hours a day. The boredom was excruciating. I read a lot, of course, but after a while, in those conditions, it was hard to enter the mental worlds the novels were trying to invite me into. The contradiction between my reality and the author’s imagined world was just too great. My lawyer was a Jewish man named Larry Grant, a keen amateur player and actually quite strong. Larry and I played a correspondence game, a King’s Gambit – he crushed me! But he gave me my first chess book – Irving Chernev’s THE MOST INSTRUCTIVE GAMES OF CHESS EVER PLAYED. Before that I didn’t realise that you could record the moves of games. From that moment on, chess captured me.”

So there it is, chess fans – hands up anyone else who can say chess kept them sane in prison. Hmmm, thought so … and no, Ludo doesn't count.

Ready, Amis, Fire …

Just when you start to believe that today’s writers are only in it for the Ferraris and hot chicks, along comes Ronan Bennett (right). In a piece in Monday’s Guardian, the author of ZUGWANG takes Martin Amis to task in no uncertain terms for what Bennett believes are Amis’s inflammatory remarks about Muslims. Bennett, who was wrongly convicted of murdering an RUC officer in 1974, and spent 18 months imprisoned in Long Kesh, was subsequently arrested in London in the mid-’70s for the now-legendary offence of “conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown” and tried at the Old Bailey in the so-called ‘anarchists’ trial’. Acquitted after defending himself in court, he has perhaps more capacity than most for the ‘imaginative sympathy’ he believes is lacking in the West for a persecuted minority. The gist, proceeding by excerpts, runneth thusly:

What do you make of the following statement: “Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” While we’re at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: “The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Or this, the same speaker again: “I just don’t hear from moderate Judaism, do you?” And (yes, same speaker): “Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.” The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam - though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book IDEOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the “hounding and humiliation” of Muslims so “they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law”. […] The views quoted by Eagleton first appeared last year, in an interview Amis [right] gave to Ginny Dougary of the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says a great deal about the depoliticised state of intellectual debate in Britain. While a great deal of media time and energy is spent discussing the latest translation of WAR AND PEACE or the artwork in the refurbished St Pancras station, there has been, with a few notable exceptions, a puzzling lack of effort when it comes to something as critical as expressing support for an increasingly demonised minority in our society. Martin Amis should have been taken to task by his peers for his views. He was not. […] This is a community under attack, and not just by novelists. By every official index, violence and discrimination against Muslims have increased since 2001. The victims of physical violence will always be a minority – although Asian people are twice as likely to be stabbed to death than they were ten years ago – but what the majority experience in their daily lives is much more insidious, the kind of coded rejection that in this more enlightened age takes the place of outright expressions of racism. And, of course, hanging over them are threats of control orders, curfews, arrest and extended periods of detention without trial. Just as the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act left the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation, so the infinitely more repressive anti- terrorist legislation – including 28 days’ detention without charge rather than the old seven when the IRA were active – of today intimidates, alienates and inflames Muslims. […] I can’t help feeling that Amis’s remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines. And I can’t help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.

Ronan Bennett wrote the screenplay of THE HAMBURG CELL, a film about the 9/11 hijackers. His latest novel is ZUGZWANG.

The Chess Bit: In Which A Dominant Queen Bashes The Bishop

Being the kind of cerebral pygmies who need to use both hands to move their checker pieces, the Crime Always Pays elves don’t generally find themselves rooting around in chess-orientated blogs. But then Ronan Bennett, damn his beautiful eyes, went and wrote the chess-inspired ZUGWANG, and now the corridors of CAP Towers ring to the dulcet tones of elves banging on about something called a Queen Endgame – although they’re also planning a Freddie Mercury tribute band, so who knows what the hell they’re up to? Anyhoo, it’s with a weary heart that we zoom diagonally across the interweb board to Susan Polgar’s Chess Blog, there to shamelessly steal the ZUGZWANG big-ups she has so patiently collected and – ahem – pawn them off as our own, to wit:

“A breathtaking, cliffhanging, breakneck race through the worlds of Russian chess, Bolshevik terrorism, and international espionage. Surely the most thrilling chess thriller ever written.” – Katherine Neville, author of THE EIGHT
“A mesmerizing tale of shifting political allegiances and double dealing… Bennett is now the closest we have to Graham Greene; he looks squarely at the human condition, and attains a rare gravitas.” - The Observer (London)
“Readers who love ANNA KARENINA as much as they enjoy a gripping mystery will find a little slice of heaven here.” - Booklist
“A heady historical thriller … the plot packs more than enough surprises to keep any suspense junkie sated.” - Publishers Weekly
“A taut, intricate thriller … a hugely enjoyable, brilliant high-wire act.” – Kirkus Reviews
“A classy, literate thriller” – The Times (London)

Chess – it’s like boxing without boxing gloves, no?

Havoc In Its 51st Year

Some writers are born to great plots; others have great plots thrust upon them. If Ronan Bennett (right) – author of Havoc In Its Third Year, and interviewed in The Guardian to promote his current offering, ZUGZWANG – ever runs out of story ideas he could always turn his hand to autobiography, to wit:

Bennett was born in 1956 and raised in Belfast by his Catholic mother; his Protestant father left home when his son was a few years old. Bennett went to St Mary’s Christian Brothers school on the Lower Falls Road, where he became politically active as he experienced what he later referred to as the “endemic violence and hatred” of Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. After his spell in Long Kesh, he left for England, where his friends were “voluble, if unsophisticated, young enemies of the state”: activists, anarchists, revolutionary socialists. “I squatted,” he recalls. “I worked in a bookies ... I went to Paris and hung around with Chilean refugees ... I demonstrated, talked a lot of bollocks and wrote articles I would never want to re-read now.” Before long, he was arrested again. Police raided his Bayswater flat and found a copy of THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK, along with wigs, false moustaches, balaclavas and false documents. Bennett was accused of leading a terrorist gang and charged with the legendary offence of “conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown”. He spent 20 months on remand, sometimes in solitary confinement. At his 14-week trial at the Old Bailey - which became notorious as the “anarchists’ trial” and the “persons unknown trial” - Bennett took the unusual decision to defend himself. “I really enjoyed it and would have enjoyed it even more had I known we would be acquitted. The judge let me sit with the advocates, so it was Michael Mansfield, Helena Kennedy, Geoffrey Robertson and me. They were in full legal gear, I was in T-shirt and jeans.”

Beware all enterprises that require new clothes, quoth HD Thoreau ...

“Cheque, Mate?”

The hup-yas are popping up like shrooms in an autumn evening’s dusk for Ronan Bennett’s chess-inspired ZUGZWANG, to the extent that The Guardian – which originally published the novel as a series – has run a quick compilation for those of you who don’t have time to trawl the review pages. To wit:

“This classy, literate thriller is about chess, psychoanalysis, Russian skulduggery, history, mystery, romance - and more,” wrote Kate Saunders in the Times, reviewing ZUGZWANG by Ronan Bennett, which features a long game of chess between the psychiatrist narrator, Dr Otto Spethmann, and RM Kopelzon, a Polish violinist. “The book includes diagrams of the Spethmann-Kopelzon game which gives it an extra dimension for chess buffs,” said Matthew J Reisz in the Independent on Sunday. “Yet one needs to know nothing of ‘mysterious rook moves’ or the Maróczy Bind to enjoy this atmospheric, ingenious and perfectly paced novel.” “Action of a more dramatic kind flows as the story reaches a crescendo of dizzying complexity,” wrote Carola Groom in the Financial Times.

Hark! Is that the merry sound of tills we hear a-ching-chinging? From checkmate to cheque’s mate in six easy moves, it’s no mean feat …