When the Floods Came James Meek on England’s Water Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist. Read more

The Iron Rule
Jacqueline Rose: Bernhard Schlink’s Guilt

• Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink translated by Michael Henry Heim

Towards the end of Bernhard Schlink’s best-known novel, The Reader, the narrator is pondering his future after taking his state exam in law. He has just seen his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a 15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him: ‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all.’ He has lost his belief in post-Enlightenment law as enacting a gradual but steady progress towards ‘greater beauty and truth, rationality and humanity, despite terrible setbacks and retreats’. Now the law seems to him more like Odysseus’ journey – a process that endlessly circles back to its original starting point only to set off again. In this reading, the Odyssey is a story of motion, at once successful and futile, driven and without aim: ‘What else is the history of law?’ Read more

Diary
Jenny Diski tries to stay awake

If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep. Why would we ever allow ourselves to drop off if sleeping was entirely optional? Sleep is such a dangerous place to go to from consciousness: who in their right mind would give up awareness, deprive themselves of control of their senses, volunteer for paralysis, and risk all the terrible things (and worse) that could happen to a person when they’re not looking? As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the dangers of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time. Read more

Also in this issue

Short Cuts
Jeremy Harding tries to listen to the World Service
In the Park
Peter Campbell: Frank Gehry’s Pavilion

Subscribers can also read:
Daniel Finn: After Ahern
Stefan Collini: On Raymond Williams
Tom Shippey: Celticity
Barbara Graziosi on Bacchylides
Roxanne Varzi on Muslim Women’s Memoirs
Michael Sheringham: The French Provinces
Megan Vaughan: Fanon’s Psychiatric Hospital
Uri Avnery: Calm in Gaza
Eric Foner: What was it like on a slave ship?