On Tuesday evening, Associate Editor Jo Case drew Monica Dux, Leslie Cannold and Karen Pickering into discussion of this seminal text. What has its legacy been? Is it still relevant? And why is The Female Eunuch – and Germaine Greer – still so compelling forty years on? See Jo’s Q & A with Monica from before the event, kindly produced by Readings.

ISBN: 9780670918874

RRP: $32.95

Publisher: Penguin

If you were to read the title, jacket blurb or publicity material for Robert McCrum’s new book you could be excused for assuming that it dealt largely with a modern phenomenon. ‘Globish’ or Global English is, after all, a relatively modish expression. You may be surprised, then, that McCrum starts his enjoyable Globish story more than two thousand years ago in the tar pits of Denmark.

It takes McCrum roughly 200 pages of the 268-page book to reach the postcolonial ‘Globish’ speaking world of the recent past. The bulk of this material – the history of the English language – has been well covered elsewhere, including a number of times by McCrum himself. Nonetheless, Globish offers a lively, entertaining account at a brisk pace and on this basis alone is a worthy addition to the fold. McCrum offers all the usual elements, from the Norman Conquest to the Gettysburg Address, with humour and a journalistic gift for anecdote. But it was always through the prism of ‘Globish’ that this book was going to offer something different.

The concept behind the word ‘Globish’ is not just that English is spoken globally, but rather that a new language – albeit one based on English – has been adopted around the world. If Spanglish is a Spanish-influenced dialect of English spoken in the Americas, and Tanglish is a Tamil-influenced dialect spoken in Southern India, then Globish is a globally influenced dialect spoken just about everywhere. If you have ever taken a taxi in Cairo or ordered from a menu in Vietnam then you have probably spoken some form of Globish. An important element of this new language is that it is not just a means of communication between English speakers and non-English speakers. Globish has arisen as the language of choice when two non-English speakers from different language backgrounds get together. A Chinese tourist taking a taxi in Cairo will probably be speaking Globish too.

‘Globish’, like so many words that have been co-opted by English, is originally French. The expression was coined by Jean-Paul Nerriére, a former IMB executive who observed that non-native English speakers often communicated better with non-native English speaking clients than a native English speaker was able. Nerriére decided this was because the non-native speakers were both speaking Globish, which he called ‘the worldwide dialect of the third millennium’. Like any pidgin, essential elements of Globish include a streamlined vocabulary, simplified grammar and the occasional resort to waving one’s hands around. There are currently at least two French/Globish handbooks in publication.

A slight problem with McCrum’s analysis is that he tends to confuse English and Globish. And it is certainly a difficult line to draw. For example, anecdotes about the UN or international big business increasingly relying on English for communication are clearly relevant, but at the same time do not quite support the idea of a new international tongue. If big business is dealing in true English, then surely this is a sign that Globish is inadequate for such complicated transactions?

Globish is a cracking account of the history of the English language and an appealing introduction to the concept of global English – but don’t expect it to be the definitive account of either subject. As McCrum demonstrates, the English language is always in flux, and its story is far from over.

Rafiq Copeland is an itinerant television researcher.

Rebecca Starford, editor of Kill Your Darlings, recently co-hosted The Conversation Hour with Waleed Aly. Their guests were Robert LaDouceur, Associate Professor at Laval University, and Sandy Jeffs, a poet who lives with schizophrenia. You can listen to the show here.

Read ‘Sleaze-hounds and Artists on Oath: The State of Australian Biography’ now.

War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times
Linda Polman
ISBN: 9780670918966
RRP: $32.95

First, a little story.

In 1854 Florence Nightingale responded to a request from the British War office for volunteers to help care for sick and wounded soldiers from the Crimean War. Her experience of the intolerable conditions and the disregard the War Office showed its own troops led Nightingale to a lifetime of lobbying legislative bodies to improve conditions for injured soldiers and civilians alike. Five years later in Italy Henri Dunant witnessed the battle of Solferino and saw the 38,000 wounded soldiers left on the field after the armies had withdrawn. Dunant’s experience led directly to his founding the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Dunant’s organisation was founded on humanitarian grounds – aid was to be distributed wherever it was needed; a strict model of neutrality, impartiality and independence was championed. Nightingale was appalled. It was her view, she expressed to Dunant in correspondence, that an organisation like the Red Cross alleviated the responsibilities of warring governments. By providing aid on humanitarian grounds, on a voluntary basis and funded by charity, it would actually make it easier for armies to carry on killing one another.

In War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, Dutch journalist Linda Polman argues that the problems raised by Florence Nightingale in the nineteenth century are still central to humanitarian aid in the twenty-first.  In many cases the aid industry not only doesn’t help, it actually makes things worse.  If Polman is right then the implications are scary. Expressions such as ‘the pressing moral issues of our times’ are often bandied around – particularly by aid organisations and book reviewers – but in the case of humanitarian aid such hyperbole is not inappropriate. The idea that a human enterprise of the scale and moral certitude of the modern aid industry is failing on a massive, systematic level is surprising and shocking.

Polman’s list of grievances with the aid industry is long, but can be distilled into two essential points. The first is the moral dilemma faced by Nightingale and Dunant – that delivering aid on humanitarian grounds can lead to prolonging, supporting and even worsening the problem. In Ethiopia in 1984 the Mengitsu regime carried out a systematic program of terror in the rebellious Northern provinces – rape and murder, burning of grain, slaughtering of livestock, poisoning of wells. In the end more than £90 million was raised from private donors through Geldof’s own Solferino moment – the LiveAid project. The Mengitsu government forced all money spent in Ethiopia to be changed to local currency at an exchange rate of its choosing, using the profits to carry on its murderous program in the North away from the cameras.

The second point Polman makes is rather more mundane but almost as troubling. Polman blames much of the inadequacies she has witnessed in the aid industry on the very fact that it is an industry – that aid organisations are competing for contracts, fighting for access to ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘clients’ and battling for media attention.  These two factors, moral impartiality and free market competition, turn out to be a very bad combination. Let’s look at another example given by Polman. In 2002 US$150 million was set aside by donor governments for a house-building project in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province. The money was assembled by an aid organisation in Geneva, which – after taking 20% for its own use – then transferred the project to an organisation based in Washington. The aid organisation in Washington also kept 20% of the money, before transferring the contract onto another organisation, which then passed the contract on to a fourth aid group. The last group began the implementation of the program by using what money was left to buy a consignment of wood from Iran. The haulage company that delivered the wood was owned by the governor of Bamiyan province, and charged five times the regular fee. With the money now gone the wood arrived at the housing project, but when it got there it was discovered to be too heavy for use in construction of the traditional Afghan houses. In the end the timber was used for firewood.

One would hope that stories such as these were extreme examples, but it seems they are closer to normal than you would imagine. A Report by the British National Audit Office found that the Department for International Development (DFID) was failing to achieve ‘all or most of its objectives.’ DFID’s own subsequent report found that less than five percent of its projects were ‘value for money’ and only a quarter of them could be deemed successful. DFID programs in Afghanistan alone were worth £520 million at the time of the report.

Polman, a Dutch journalist, has covered most of the places that get a mention in War Games. She has published books about her travels in Africa, and UN interventions in Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti. With this long established interest in humanitarian interventions, it is unsurprising that Polman’s writing is filled with personal anecdotes and experiences, which merge seamlessly with wider analysis of the aid industry.

War Games is a deliberatively provocative book (the original title translates as Crisis Caravan, which I think is much better). Polman is clearly angry at the failures of the aid industry and she pulls no punches in her criticism. To begin with, this can seem slightly over the top, but as the figures and anecdotes accumulate it becomes easy to share her anger. How can this industry enjoy so much goodwill when it has done so much wrong? How can the same mistakes be made again and again? And how come we don’t read about these issues more often?

Clearly there are problems in the aid industry, and Polman rightly demands they be addressed. Interestingly, Polman the book by admitting she does not have the answers. Rather, she says, it is important to be asking the questions.

Rafiq Copeland is an itinerant television researcher.

When: Tuesday 27 July, 6.30pm
Where: Readings Carlton
Cost: Free
Bookings: Appreciated. Email info@killyourdarlingsjournal.com.

View the Facebook page for this event here.

I spoke to Emma about what makes a good editor, the editor–author relationship and the best way to characterise the editor: as diplomat, midwife or handmaiden?

Produced by Rafiq Copeland. Music is Pompey.

Podcasts appear fortnightly. You can download the podcast here. Listen to previous podcasts here, or subscribe to the podcast feed.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (Allen and Unwin)

ISBN: 978-1-4088-0118-5

RRP: $32.99

It is August 1974, and at the bottom of the World Trade Centre, birds are being scooped into zip lock bags, so ‘dazzled by the building’s lights, they crashed into the glass’. It has just been constructed; the glossy, 110-story Twin Towers sit half empty, uneasily puncturing the New York skyline. In lower Manhattan, people emerge from the subway and begin to gather on the street corners. There’s a figure on the edge of one of the towers and watchers crane their necks and lean from apartment and office windows to see what will happen. The black, poised figure above them is Philippe Petit, who stepped from the tower’s edge and walked, high up in the air, from one tower to the other. The sprawl of characters in Colum McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin, spill out from this absorbing opening, each of them shadowed by Petit’s ‘act of beauty’, their lives shifted as he steps from the lip of the tower onto a trembling braided cable.

Each section is told by a different narrator. We start with the directionless Ciaran, who arrives in New York from Ireland to visit his brother, Corrigan, a radical Irish priest. Corrigan lives and works in the Bronx, clambering to find an accord between his faith and his love for the Guatemalan nurse, Adelita. In a grey block of flats in the projects, he leaves the door unlocked to his apartment so the prostitutes strolling the street under the Major Deegan Expressway, like Tillie in her day-glo swimsuit, can use the bathroom and the kettle. Across the Hudson, tucked into her Park Avenue apartment is Claire, heartbroken at the death of her son in Vietnam. She’s married to Solomon Soderberg, a judge at the Manhattan Criminal Court, a place where all the muck and grit of the city seems to have been swept into the lobby. There are many more, but the trouble with such a liberal line-up of different narratives is that a few of them feel superfluous, holding too little weight in such an otherwise deft collection of characters.

At times the prose is lyrically smooth, but McCann favours short sentences. For the most part they show the fractured thinking of his characters – for example, the neurosis of Claire. They lend to his work a style that is immediate and electric. Where they are less effective is in the prose that belongs to Tillie. Her narration, which comes in short fragments, feels overtly stylised and a little predictable. Although the brash dialogue suits her character, it lacks the nuance that allows McCann’s other characters to feel so elegantly composed and pitch-perfect. Perhaps it falls short because she is such a glinting, and more credible, character when we first meet her in the section narrated by Ciaran.

The figure of Petit quivers on the conscious of each character. The two sections that see Petit take the narration have some of the best passages of the book, including  McCann’s elegant descriptions of his numerous walks, and are carefully placed anchors for the other sections that sit either side. For Petit’s Twin Towers walk, some will him success and others want him to fall, and these differences are finely balanced. That the same narrative frame is repeated through almost every section could become tiresome for some readers. There is no climactic plot; rather, it is a slow and tentative build towards a neat, but elegiac conclusion.

Let the Great World Spin delivers a clamouring New York City: there’s the casualties of Vietnam, the imminent resignation of Nixon, the city is near bankrupt, graffiti is thick in the subway, and ‘no one in the world would go into Central Park’. Ultimately, it is an unfailingly generous story that pulses with an energy and grace that remains with you for weeks. It’s this line from Solomon that testifies to the kind of New York that McCann has given the reader: ‘every now and then the city shook its soul out.’

Belle Place is an editorial assistant at Affirm Press and writes for various monthly digital publications from Melbourne and Sydney.

Don’t forget: it’s launch week. In Melbourne, you can join the celebration (and win prizes) at our Issue Two launch tomorrow at Bella Union Bar, Trades Hall. Adelaide, you’re up on Thursday at The Wheatsheaf Hotel.

There will be glorious stacks of Issue Two, featuring Monica Dux, Michaela McGuire, Gideon Haigh, Virginia Peters, Philip Pullman and more. And there will be bingo.

The Hedgehog is French director Mona Achache’s first feature film and is an impressive debut. Adapted for the screen by Achache and based on the internationally acclaimed novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, it is a darkly comic and poignant tale about class, misrecognition and a child’s insight. Set in a wealthy Parisian apartment block, the film peels away the layers of class and conceit that have encased the life of the building’s live-in concierge, Renée Michel (Josiane Balasko).

We first meet her neighbour Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic); an emotionally neglected child who has decided to kill herself on her twelfth birthday. She is making a film to document, as she says, ‘why life is absurd’, and much of The Hedgehog is seen through the lens of her camera and thus from her perspective. It is the gaze of a child who resents the adult world, narrating in whispers behind the camera what she perceives to be its hypocrisy and tedium with utmost disgust.

As Paloma’s planned suicide draws near a new and intriguing neighbour, Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa), moves in and they are instantly caught in a web of mutual fascination for Renée. In their refusal to see Renée defined solely by her occupation and class, a replaceable cog in the building’s mechanics, they uncover her furtive lust for literature and film.

Achache brings a sensitive balance to this adaptation, astutely merging distinct stylistic elements. The Hedgehog is imbued with a robust sense of realism from the start, when Paloma introduces herself in front of an old video camera before moving around to film a satirical cinéma vérité–style documentary of her dysfunctional family. Then, as the film progresses, animation is used expressively to breathe life into Paloma’s world – she inks in days on a calendar that are animated like a living storyboard. This technique does not evoke astonishing realms for the protagonists’ escape, but reflects with a child’s imaginative clarity the way things actually are and a hope for what they might become.

At its heart The Hedgehog is about the dangers of mistaking a person’s class for their whole being, so its success relies on the actors’ ability to suggest complex landscapes beneath the surface. In this regard, Josiane Balasko’s performance as Renée is particularly convincing. She skilfully conveys an inner elegance and intellect, bubbling beneath the surface of her outer performance as the self-effacing concierge. Togo Igawa’s portrayal of Kakuro is likewise impressive, for he radiates an inner calm and acceptance that appears not as a result of his character’s wealth, but as a consequence of having experienced deep personal losses. Indeed, all the performances in this ensemble piece are strong, with Garance Le Guillermic surprisingly likeable as the petulant but sensitive Paloma.

Adapting a beloved novel for the screen is a risky business and some fans may have problems with the film’s departures from Barbery’s original. Unlike the novel, the film gives us only limited access into Renée’s acute understandings of philosophy and her awareness that she is playing a socially constructed role. However, it is to Achache’s credit that she chose to moderate Paloma’s philosophising for the screen. Without losing any of Paloma’s overall function in the novel, Achache’s screenplay constructs a more recognisable character for the requirements of a very different medium. And despite differences in form and detail the film remains faithful to the overall narrative and thematic impetus of Barbery’s novel, an ambivalent contemporary parable about scratching below the surface of class conceits to discover oneself.

Kate Harper completed Honours in Cinema Studies at The University of Melbourne and now works as a freelance writer.