Skip to main content

An Honourable Woman

This extended television drama was an accomplished thriller wrapped in the charged politics of the Middle East.

The Stein children witness their father's, staunch Zionist and armorer of the new state of Israel, murder and grow up with a different vision of how Israel's fortunes can be secured - by building interconnections between Jew and Arab, particularly educational, as a contribution to a lasting peace.

However, enmity and suspicion are deeply set, and though Nessa Stein (the honorable woman) imagines their course set fair and each of their steps is conducted with the requisite integrity, her brother's path is a compromised one. Though often acting out of the best of motives, he lays himself open to a corruption by a vortex of competing passions and paranoia.

Out of which is woven the elements of thriller against an abiding backdrop of sorrow.

The sorrow is the continuing belief that violence (whether actual and brutal or in the more subdued tones of manipulation and deceit) is a route towards some kind of solution, rooted in victory. Sadly this route continually arrives at deadly ends that lead nowhere except deeper into the labyrinths of enclosing (and disorientating) hatred.

The best performance is given by the magnificent Stephen Rea as a disillusioned MI6 official, responsible for the Middle East desk, who acts as a 'deus ex machina' slowly untangling the mystery and enabling Nessa to (temporarily) escape the net that has enclosed around her. One of the sub-stories is Rea's attempts to reconnect with his estranged wife and the closing scene is the offering prospect that he has done so. It is as if as a counterpoint to people being lost in causes is the truth of a reality where people can be genuinely lost in one another.

Because in the final analysis, there is always the question: where do we actually want to find ourselves? In the face of a loving other, with all the risk and vulnerability that entails, or in a highly defended identity that offers us ersatz security? Why do we collectively keep preferring the latter, when we know the real joy is always in the former?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more