I.M. Beck - quote unquote

As promised last week, a squint at Lino Spiteri's book will be had now: For those of you whose grasp of

Maltese is not of the highest, I suggest you skip on along, because unless someone translates Mr Spiteri's oeuvre for you, this is all pretty much meaningless, since you won't be able to check me out.

To start with, the language employed is strong - it is Maltese as it should be written, not the artificially convoluted constructions that some authors try to employ, presumably in order to show that they're intellectuals. In a different context, because he was of a different era, Herbert Ganado's books give as true a reflection of the way Maltese can be written in the hands of someone who knows the language.

The book is somewhat disconcerting because the author does not use a strictly linear style - he seems to jump from subject to subject, rather than tying himself to a time-line. Once you get used to it, it's fine, but sometimes you wonder how come you've missed a few years.

Like every other work of an autobiographical nature ever written, what is almost as interesting as what is written is what is not: the bits he left out, wilfully or not, give as much of an insight into the author's mind-set as the bits he left in. The Prince of Darkness's little helper (aka Tony Blair's [remember him] spin-meister Alastair Campbell) speaking about his recently published diaries, tells us that it is a partial account from a particular perspective. Mr Campbell was spinning the way he had skated around certain bits that would otherwise have embarrassed the Labour Party. While the tabloids (and the Daily Telegraph) would have loved him to have spilled all 57 varieties of beans, it was hardly ever likely that he would and it is unreasonable to expect that Lino Spiteri should be any different.

In Mr Campbell's case, the Blair/Brown pas de deux is left to twirl only in the reader's imagination, while in Mr Spiteri's case, other dancers cavort off-centre and off-stage, because he wasn't involved in their particular gavotte. The doctors' dispute, with its attendant excesses and attacks on the integrity of a trade union (the MAM) by the workers' party, for instance, gets hardly a mention, if at all, presumably because Mr Spiteri was not a central player in that particular farce.

Similarly, the Church schools' issue happens somewhere off in the middle distance, with little, if any, mention of the underlying problems and the positions taken, and the reason why they were taken, by the Labour government. Mr Spiteri was not Minister of Education, of course, so he wasn't involved, but as someone who lived through the times, I have an opinion about them and I'm moderately surprised that his isn't expressed.

What is interesting, especially for someone like me who didn't live through it (I'm not that old) is the effect the war raged by the Catholic Church (more precisely, the Maltese version thereof) against the Malta Labour Party. Mr Spiteri married Mrs Spiteri in the sacristy of his church because the Curia's diktats prevented him from being allowed in the main body of the church for the purpose and this mind-numbingly fundamentalist pettiness must have gone a long, long way to forging the attitudes and sensibilities of people like Mr Spiteri and Joe Micallef Stafrace, who is mentioned as one of those who suffered from it.

In this day and age, if someone were to tell me that I wasn't to be allowed to partake of an important aspect of my religion because my politics weren't to the liking of the Archbishop, which is an astounding proposition but let's give it hypothetical legs, I'd simply gesture rudely and walk away.

In the early to mid-1960s, in Maltese society, this was hardly an option and Mr Spiteri's book brings this into stark relief.

I'd have preferred more chapter and verse, of course, about how Dom Mintoff and Alfred Sant and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici wheeled and dealed in their Prime Ministerial roles, because I love that aspect of politics and Mr Spiteri's point of view, detached and removed and absolved from the action and its consequences (as it reads from his book, anyway), would have been a great one to which to be privy.

It would also have been instructive to read how a man of Mr Spiteri's acknowledged integrity and intellect managed to work for as long as he did with certain types within the Labour Party, who, quite clearly, subscribed to the notion that the state was them, if I might be allowed to adopt the Sun King's personal motto. As it is, you get some tantalising glimpses and allusions to what could have been but there's not the detail that would have been available had what is now known in literary circles as "the Campbell method" not been adopted.

Still, it's an interesting volume and if you haven't yet, read it.

The earth shook

And the sky darkened over, the veil of the temple was rent asunder and all over was there wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth, because the Federation of Bird Killers also, and without a trace of irony, known as the Federation of Conservationist Hunters & Trappers, have made it clear that they are putting their electoral modesty up for grabs by the highest bidder.

In other words, the party, whether it is the Nationalist Party, the Labour Party, the Green Party (yeah right) or the AzzNazz Party (not the most unlikely of parties to be tempted by the prospect of easy ballot-box virtue) which dangles before the bird killers the prospect of unfettered opportunity for further bird killing will find a willing bed partner in the federation.

What a sad grasp of democracy some people have.

Let slip those pooches

Someone in the Labour Party's hierarchy has decreed that it was time to let slip the dogs of war and, lo and behold, those puppies were, indeed let loose. The war to which I refer, just in case you were getting worried that the apocalypse was approaching, is the electoral war, which is nothing as serious as all that.

But why do I think that the MLP is under starter's orders, I hear you ask.

Well, consider a few instances, if you will. Ministerial characters have become target number one and assassination attempts are as thick on the ground as environmentalists at an AzzNazz rally, but in the reciprocal thereof (figure it out). This is not to say that the ministers concerned didn't put their size nine-and-a-bits into the effluent. What possessed Minister Censu Galea, for instance, to bare his soul to a gentleman (and I use the term loosely) who, as soon as adversity bit, bared his own soul (such of it that wasn't already sold, of course) is beyond me, but really, was it worth making such a fuss about what was said?

And then there's Minister Jesmond Mugliett. The lightness of touch he demonstrated in making his opinion known about the effect the request (the request, mark you, not the grant, which there wasn't) for a presidential pardon should have had on the continued employment prospects of the guys who were found guilty of corruption was hardly earth-shatteringly deft.

Not to put too fine a point on it, he should have kept his ministerial proboscis out of the whole thing (I'm sure he agrees now) and then he shouldn't have made things worse by trying to explain it all away, for all world as if he hadn't heard that when you're in a hole you should stop digging. But again, is this of such earth-shattering importance? No doubt, the purer-than-pure will retort that this is yet another instance of Beck sticking up for the corrupt and the impure, but I prefer to see it as yet another instance of a great deal of fuss being made out of not much.

It's when the Labour Party, as given corporeal reality as One News, quote, with approval, The Times of Malta, that you really conclude that they've gone on full alert, with every man, woman and child manning the pumps. Usually, the words of The Times have the same effect on the MLP as a cross on a vampire, but needs must, ay?

The last bit

OK, here it is, the bit where those of you who don't really give much of a darn for my scintillating prose and piercing analyses go to figure out what to do of a weekend, in the face-stuffing arena.

Shisha, in Marsascala, next to the cinemas, is the place if you want your taste-buds tickled. It's the only place I know where you can BYO for a corkage fee of a couple of quid (euro four and a bit) and you need to book, because even though it only opened a few weeks ago, it's crowded.

It used to be called Labyrinth, now it's Chiaroscuro, in Strait Street a bit up the road from where the ladies of the night used to ply their trade. It has a lunchtime buffet that is copious and good and the rest of the menu ain't bad at all, either. There's a range of coffees that is almost bewildering, too.

And to close, if you fancy a relaxed pizza with a great view while up North, get yourself to La Terazza, in Xlendi. Or is it Il Terazzo? Who cares? It's the place on the point to the left as you look out of the fjord, with the tower in the background. You can sit there supping Buds and watching the sun go down.

The sheer poetry within my soul astounds me sometimes.

imbocca@gmail.com