The incisiveness of John Berger at 90

I am reading John Berger’s latest collection of essays. Pieces? Sketches? Vignettes? The title of the collection is Confabulations, so perhaps that’s the best description.

My Shorter Oxford English Dictionary tells me a ‘confabulation’ is: “talking together, conversation, chat; a familiar conversation”. This describes the tone of much of Berger’s non-fiction perfectly; the sense that he is inviting you into a conversation with him. A conversation, however, that you’re happy to leave one-sided and allow him all the words.

Reading Berger is like turning from the shrill to the serene. His prose — and the thinking it represents — is a warm bath of common sense. Perhaps common sense sounds a little mundane and almost derogatory. He takes a scalpel to the cultural and political concerns of the day. He has just turned 90 and remains as sharp as a scalpel, too.

In a gorgeous wee essay on Charlie Chaplin, called Some Notes About The Art Of Falling, he writes:

Today the global tyranny of speculative financial capitalism, which uses national governments as its slave-masters, and the world media as its dope-distributor, this tyranny whose sole aim is profit and ceaseless accumulation, imposes on us a view and pattern of life which is hectic, precarious, merciless, inexplicable.

I’ll just leave that there.