The culture is having a strange World War I moment, or at least I am. The book I just finished reading, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, is all about England in the years leading up to that war—especially a bohemian family with kids who run wild in the woods and characters who make puppets and write fairy stories. The war looms like a giant black cloud over the pastoral scenes, and I couldn't help wondering which of the beautiful young men would never come back from France or Belgium.
Then there was Downton Abbey, the exquisite PBS/BBC miniseries about life upstairs and downstairs in an English country house in 1913. The first season ended with the announcement of war, and I'm partly dreading the next one, when no doubt many of the young men will be slaughtered or forever altered.
And now there's PJ Harvey's amazing new album, Let England Shake, which references WWI specifically, but also war in general. It's a big change for her—she usually sings of lust and anger in a growly voice with harsh blues guitar chords. This time she sings of death, blood and devastation in a strangely sweet voice with melodious keyboard and guitar sounds. It's shocking, almost like enjoying the beats of a hip-hop song and then realizing that the lyrics are ignorant and evil. Except that despite the blood-stained earth and the bodies hanging from battlefield wires, I still love Let England Shake... it's a beautiful piece of work.
Is it that WWI still occupies our psyche so much, that we're still freaked out at the massive change and destruction it set loose, or is it being used as a way to think about more recent wars? Like the way MASH was a way of dealing with Vietnam indirectly...
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