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As ever with “golden age” television, the beauty of the picture is the first thing you notice and in the end the only thing you notice. Netflix’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard is gorgeously empty. It is worth your time only insofar as it sends you back to the 1958 novel.
True, the story is faithful to the original. 1860. A unifying Italy. The modern world is banging at the gate of an aristocrat, who responds with a blend of halfhearted reform and a kind of sumptuous inertia. But the screen cannot do paradox. The magic of Lampedusa is that he pines for the old feudal hierarchies, and dismisses them as untenable. He faults the likes of Garibaldi for their utopian excess, and for not going as far as the French revolutionaries. Lampedusa himself, a rooted Sicilian whose happy place was industrial, impersonal London, was as mixed-up as the book he wrote.
Is it the perfect novel? I’ll only say that it is the perfect mental training for a world that consists ever more of grey zones.
“We are not at war,” said German chancellor Friedrich Merz in a somewhat Lampedusan sentence last month, “but we are not at peace either.” He meant that Russia is subjecting democratic Europe to airspace violations and other tests that fall just short of direct martial attack. Under-react to this behaviour, and it will spread. Lurch the other way, and outright war beckons. People always worry about the west’s “resolve” and so on, but the challenge here is whether we can do fine intellectual modulation.
Or consider the US-China tussle, which leaves almost all the rest of the world as a grey zone. This isn’t the cold war, when America had upwards of 40 per cent of global output and total commitment to the protection of allies. In those circumstances, membership of its bloc was rational. Now, with an erratic US up against an unignorably huge economy, most countries, including western ones, have to play a double game. We are all “nonaligned” now.
How telling, by the way, that Sir Keir Starmer is a natural at this. He has nudged Britain closer to Europe and to China while somehow ingratiating himself with Donald Trump, who doesn’t much care for either. The rudderlessness that so costs Starmer at home is exactly what works on a fragmented world stage, where fixed commitments are a mug’s game. Perfidious? The word is a compliment.
There is no navigating this century without some talent for paradox. Last week, liberals complained as British and American comedians performed in the absolutist kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Good. I remember when the line was that we mustn’t “judge”. Still, given the relative rise of the non-western world — of Gulf investment in stagnant Europe, for example — it isn’t clear what a viable plan is other than one of simultaneous distaste and engagement. In The Leopard, the prince lets his nephew go off with a rich merchant’s daughter, while wincing.
Incidentally, Lampedusa believed that opera was a wrong turn as it got people hooked on clear and strong emotions instead of shades of meaning. Hence, in his view, Italy’s failure to “get” Jane Austen. Imagine being so committed to nuance that you regard Verdi as a mistake.
I never know what to make of the old line that holding contradictory ideas is the mark of high intelligence. Some minds are dogmatic and one-track but also first-class, such as Lenin’s. There are fence-sitters (such as those who “both-sides” the Ukraine war) who are obvious fools. Perhaps it is truer to say that being comfortable with contradiction is the mark of high character, because it entails loneliness. There is never a team to join. Lampedusa struck the left as a shill for the ancien régime and his fellow blue bloods as a class traitor. At least, having died before the book came out, he didn’t have to withstand their flak. Most dealers in ambiguity aren’t so “lucky”.
Looking back from mid-life, some of the most memorable romances lasted a few months: enough to build a bond but not enough to let routine set in. (We still have no grown-up way of talking about them. At 43, I am not saying “situationship”.) But being human, one or both parties will crave some steadier ground before long. Politically or personally, the grey zone is the zone of maximum exposure, which is a reason to salute those who stand there.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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