Fleapit revisited:Nightmare Alley.

"You don't fool people, they fool themselves" - Dr Lilith Ritter

Carnivals, funfairs, freak shows, and 'geek' shows have always made good backgrounds for films. Bringing with them, as they do, a whole host of marginal and extraordinary characters - as well as the potential for both going on a journey (many of these entertainments tend to be peripatetic) and bringing in a whole host of fleeting, ancillary, characters who can be used, remorselessly, as you may wish.

They can be astounded visitors, simple dupes to be exploited, or, of course, bodies to be dispensed with as brutally and viciously as possible. But Guillermo Del Toro's new film Nightmare Alley (based on a book by William Lindsay Gresham and also made into a film, in 1947, by Edmund Goulding), despite containing some genuinely horrifying scenes, is not so much a horror as it is a film noir - and it's a bloody good one too.

Stanton "Stan" Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) is an, initially, taciturn drifter with an uncertain past who arrives at a carnival looking for work and is taken under the wing of the owner Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) who uses Stan for odd jobs, instructs him in the dark arts of the carny, and introduces him to a cast of colourful, unusual, and sometimes dangerous characters.

There's the violent and huge Bruno, "the strongest man on Earth", (Ron Perlman), there's Major Mosquito - a circus dwarf (Mark Povinelli), and, most disturbingly of all, there's an unnamed geek (Paul Anderson) who is kept in a cage, described as medical mystery - is he a man or is he a beast?, and is thrown live chickens to eat in front of agape mouthed, horrified, audiences.

To begin with, Stan falls in with the phony clairvoyant Madame Zeena (Toni Collette) and her boozy husband Pete (David Strathairn). When Zeena's not initiating some jiggery-pokery in the bathtub with Stan she, and Pete, are instructing in him in the art of cold reading and various other techniques they use in their stage show.

But Stan's head is turned, not by Zeena, but by Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara). Molly's show involves her wearing a bikini on stage and being electrocuted. Stan pimps it up with an electric chair and brings Major Mosquito in to pull the lever. He sees Molly both in a romantic light and as a ticket to better things. It's not long before the two of them have fled the circus and are touring upmarket New York venues where Stan performs as a mentalist (with Molly his glamorous assistant) to the cocktail sipping chattering classes of the big city.

One visitor, Dr Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), is less than impressed with Stan's psychic powers and sees, almost immediately, that he is a fraud. It doesn't bother her that much though. She's hardly a paragon of virtue herself and soon her and Stan are hatching a plan to divest her wealthy patrons, specifically Judge Kimball (Peter MacNeill) and the excruciatingly rich Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), of their fortunes.

That's the basic premise and, don't worry, I'm not being too spoilery here. A lot more happens both before, during, and after the plot outlined above. As befits the noir genre, we're never entirely sure of the motivations of the major characters but, adding an extra level of psychological thrust to Nightmare Alley, it often seems that neither are they.

Stan, the chief protagonist, is compelled by forces seemingly beyond his understanding. When Dr Ritter gets him to lie down on his couch and talk about his childhood, his father, his relationships, and the reason he never drinks he's clearly uncomfortable at being probed so deeply.

As Stan, Cooper gives a fantastic performance - the sort you could easily imagine Daniel Day-Lewis providing for Paul Thomas Anderson - but so does everyone else in this entrancing, spellbinding, and beautifully shot film. To add to the list of those mentioned above I'd give credit, also, to Mary Steenburgen as Judge Kimball's wife Felicia and Holt McAllany as Anderson, Grindle's thankful goon and minder.

Nightmare Alley is set during a hellish time on Earth, as the hope that war could be averted in the late 1930s gave way to despair that it could not in the early 40s. The rain and snow that seems to be falling more often than not suggests that humanity is moving into dark times. It was. But for Stanton Carlisle, whose sleeping demons are now starting to stir, it is not a global nightmare of an alley he is heading down but a very personal one. Great stuff.

Lights! Camera! Inaction! Helene Binet @ the Royal Academy.

"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot" - John Cage

"The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress" - Goethe

Atelier Peter Zumthor - Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Wachendorf, Germany (2007)

I'd never even heard of Helene Binet until the Royal Academy announced a retrospective, Light Lines, of the Swiss-French architectural photographer's work. On this basis I had assumed it would be poorly attended and I'd have the three upstairs rooms of the RA pretty much to myself.

Just as I like it. But, instead - and this could of course be simply down to people eager to get out now lockdown restrictions are all but entirely lifted, it was busy. There wasn't as much space as I'd have liked to take the work in and that's important because when it comes to appreciating, and discussing, the work of Helene Binet space is everything.

Atelier Peter Zumthor - Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany (2007)

Her work is as much about the gaps between the buildings as the buildings themselves and, even though her photographs are mostly monochrome, it is about the way the light infuses these buildings. Though there is more concrete and brickwork in her work than sky, or any nature really, the light of the sun is always a presence of sorts.

You can see it filling the skylights of Atelier Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Wachendorf or, elsewhere in Germany, more prismatically seeping through gaps in the walls of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. Considering the history of the Jews in Berlin, it is hard to look at this photo and not be reminded of Leonard Cohen's Anthem - "there is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in".

Daniel Libeskind - Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany (1996/1999)

Daniel Libeskind - Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany (1996/1999)

But Binet's work itself says nothing of human history and very little of humans except for their capacity to build and to create art. Specifically in the forms of both architecture and photography. Binet was born in 1959 in Sorengo in the south of Switzerland near the Italian border. She studied photography in Rome before working as a photographer, for two years, at the Grand Theatre de Geneva. 

The architect Daniel Libeskind encouraged her in her ambition to move over to architectural photography and it was, as we can see, the making of her. She has an eye for how buildings both enhance and respond to their environment and, looking at these photos, it seems she has the patience and foresight to wait until the light is just right before taking her pictures.

Based now in London, and with a house on Osea Island on the Blackwater estuary in Essex (an area I must visit one day), I would like to think she'd be proud to see her work displayed at such an august institution as the RA. I certainly felt it was a pleasure and a privilege to be able to go and see them in my home city. 

In a 1933 essay on aesthetics In Praise of Shadows, the Japanese author Jun'ichiro Tanizaki wrote "we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness that one thing against another creates". It seems apt that that quote is affixed to the wall in this exhibition as it seems, along with the Goethe and John Cage quotes that top this piece, as good a description of Binet's style as anything.

Binet realised, early on, that photography could never capture the complexities and infinite possibilities of a building in a single image so, instead of trying to, she pared down her images to what she felt was the essence of each building. There are large sections of the buildings that have become her subjects that simply do not appear in the images she creates. But we know they are there. The space, the emptiness, the light, even the dust motes that float seemingly insignificantly in that light, let us know that which we cannot see.

Jantar Mantar Observatory, Jaipur, India (1734/2002)

They open us up to the possibilities of architecture while refusing to delve into specifics. That is for the architects, and structural engineers, themselves. Binet's work is not a how-to kit but simply a chance to marvel at the symbiotic nature of human creativity and the natural world.

A form of collaboration, if you will, that is echoed in the relationship that Binet has with the architects she works with and whose buildings she photographs. The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, like Binet, works with, and manipulates, the play of light in his buildings. He utilises local, and natural, materials too. The Bruder Klaus Field Chapel was built by tightly binding one hundred and twelve tree trunks in a tapering frame before pouring concrete over them.

Zumthor, like Binet, is equally interested in modern building styles and techniques as she is ancient ones. After pouring the concrete, the timber frame was burnt away to leave a negative space and a charred, rugged interior that was odds with the smooth exterior walls. The light that pours through the open oculus exposes visitors to this in an attempt to make them feel more connected, spiritually one assumes, with nature.

Libeskind's Jewish Museum uses what we see described as "violent geometries, acute angles and seemingly impenetrable voids" to force visitors into an encounter with both the horrors and the absence of the Holocaust. It's a building I'd like to visit and an experience I'd expect to be an emotional one.

I'd also like to visit the remarkable Jantar Mantar Observatory in Jaipur. Built during the construction of the Pink City, Jaipur is Rajasthan's capital, as commanded by the ruler Jal Singh II, Jantar Mantar is a monumental series of astronomical structures which, to me, has something of Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings or even the peculiar architecture of Squid Game about it.

Le Corbusier - 'Canons de Lumiere', Couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, Eveux, France (1961/2007)

Le Corbusier - Couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, Eveux, France (1961/2002)

Le Corbusier - Couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, Eveux, France (1961/2002)

When Le Corbusier visited Jantar Mantar he was inspired not just by how it was a space where light and darkness were used to understand the cosmos but also what it represented. An exalted attempt by humanity to reach out it into the world, the universe even, and try to come to terms with it. A rational attempt to understand things that sometimes seem so great we invent supernatural forces, and beings, to simplify them for us.

Binet, unsurprisingly, has history with Le Corbusier too. The Couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette in Eveux in eastern central France is one of his last ever completed buildings and it was one that Binet, quite unusually, even took a colour photo of.

Equally unusually, her photos of John Hejduk's Wall House in Groningen are taken from a little further back than usual. Far enough back to get (nearly) the whole of the building in. She's even allowed a little cloudy sky into the frame. Hejduk, like Binet and most others mentioned here, was interested in shape and spatial organisation and he also considered his architectural practice to foreground poetic and spiritual narratives.

John Hejduk - Wall House II, Groningen, Netherlands (2001)

John Hejduk - The House of the Suicide and The House of the Mother of the Suicide, Atlanta, United States (1990)

Which does sound a little pretentious and egotistical but that's what you get with these creative types. Imagine conceiving of a building, designing it, and then actually building the thing. It would go to your head. Well, it would mine.

Though I'd not previously heard of Hejduk (though his buildings do look great and what on earth is The House of the Suicide and The House of the Mother of the Suicide in Atlanta all about?) I was more familiar with the work of the British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid who died in 2016.

He work, much of it award winning, is considered to have reinvented the concept of expressionist architecture so it's only right and proper that Binet captured that feeling in her photos. Which she has. Hadid, famously, struggled to get anything actually built until 1993 when she was commissioned to build the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein which, if you were to simply attend the RA show and research no further, you'd be none the wiser as to what it looks like.

Zaha Hadid Architects - Riverside Museum, Glasgow, United Kingdom (2010/2011)

Zaha Hadid Architects - Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan (2010/2011)

It's all sharp angles, smooth surfaces, and elegant piloti. To look at Binet's image of it you'd think it would resemble a multi storey car park. This is a little frustrating but not necessarily deceitful or distracting. Again, Binet has captured the essence, rather than the whole, of Hadid's work.

She's done much the same for the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and Glasgow's Riverside Museum though for the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku she's more generously given us a bit more than a glimpse of the building's ankles. It's curved, sloping, roof reminds me of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London and that's hardly surprising as that too is one of Hadid's creations.

Zaha Hadid Architects - Landesgartenschau/Landscape Formation One, Weil am Reich, Germany (1999)

Zaha Hadid Architects - Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnata, United States (2003)

Hadid had remarked, of Binet's work, that it allowed her to see beauty in unexpected places and that, in turn, enabled obsverations that fed back into the design process. Creating an almost ouroboros style cycle of creativity between architect and photographer. 

While many of Hadid's buildings use steel frames along with concrete, Binet is not against a bit of old school Brutalism for Brutalism's sake either. Gottfried Bohm, the first ever German architect to be awarded the Pritzker Prize, was commissioned, over half a decade ago, to build a series of concrete churches in Germany and the Church of the Resurrection of the Christ in Cologne is an eye catching work of concrete modernism that would surely stop any curious fan of architecture in their tracks should they stumble across it.

Gottfried Bohm - Church of the Resurrection of Christ, Cologne, Germany (1970/2020)

Sergio Musmeci - Ponte sul Basento, Potenza, Italy (1976/2015)

Of course, Binet has gone super close up and instead of showing us the majesty of the entire edifice she has captured the feel of it with some sharp and shadowy angles. She's done much the same for Sergio Musmeci's Ponte sul Basento in Potenza in the Basilicata region of Italy (that's in the south, the bit between the heel and the toes of the boot).

Musmeci, who died in 1981, was a civil engineer who built a large concrete bridge over the Basento river in Potenza that made use of curved concrete before computer aided design made that more common. He seems like something of an under appreciated pioneer and I must confess to always enjoying a bridge. There's something about them. They're practical and (often) beautiful and they connect both people and places.

Sergio Musmeci - Ponte sul Basento, Potenza, Italy (1976/2015)

Sigurd Lewerentz - St Mark's Church, Bjorkhagen, Stockholm, Sweden (1960/1989)

Yeah, bridges are okay. I'm all for bridges. Sigurd Lewerentz was another new name on me. A Swedish architect who died in 1975 he seems a stern and serious type (there are lofty claims made that his buildings questioned what it is to be human!) so it's perhaps appropriate he is most famous for building cemeteries and churches.

The RA has a Binet photo of his brick expressionist St Mark's Church in Stockholm and although it's a fine looking building it suffers (as does Dimitris Pikionis' somewhat unnecessary looking 'lanscaping' of the Acropolis in Athens) by being in a room alongside classical Chinese gardens, the work of Sverre Fehn and Jorn Utzon, and a couple of Hawksmoor churches. Always a favourite here at EIAPOE.

Lingering Garden, Classical Gardens of Suzhou, Suzhou, China (11c-19c/2018)

Humble Administrator's Garden, Classical Gardens of Suzhou, Suzhou, China (11c-19c/2018)

Humble Administrator's Garden, Classical Gardens of Suzhou, Suzhou, China (11c-19c/2018)

Jorn Utzon, Can Lis, Mallorca, Spain (1974/2019)

Utzon's Can Lis in Mallorca looks strangely idyllic, bathed in warm Iberian sun but yet made from the raw materials of industry. It's something of a departure from his earlier, and more famous, Sydney Opera House and Binet's photograph gives it a sense of deep and warm melancholy. Sverre Fehn's Hedmark Museum in Hamar, Norway (a museum that specialised in excavated artefacts from the region) is all mysterious curving concrete. With the curves leading to places which, no surprise, Binet refuses to show us.

The Classical Gardens of Suzhou in China's Jiangsu province are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and with names like the Lingering Garden and the Humble Administrator's Garden they evoke thoughts and images of China's history as well as its penchant for formalism. The gardens themselves are beautiful and full of wild, and seasonal, flowers and various other architectural whimsies and water features so Binet, as is her wont, focuses on the walls of the garden as if they are a tabula rasa in which she, and us - those that look at her photos, can feel free to create our own versions of the gardens.

As if building a prehistoric creature from the smallest amount of its preserved DNA. She's given us more to go on with the Hawksmoor - which is kind. Although many of us will be aware of what Hawksmoor's churches look like anyway. With St Mary Woolnoth, we're treated to a vertiginous wooden stairway but with Christ Church in Spitalfields we're given an alarmingly literal, for Binet, look at its majestic frontage and, perhaps more typically, a close up of the stone base and stem of one of its columns.

The chipped stonework, the play of shadow on the base of the column, the essence of a building captured in one small part of it, and the essence of an architect's work in one photo. It's Binet at her best which, as I learned from my visit to the RA, is very good indeed. She waited for the light, she got out her camera, and then she took photos of the inaction. But the inaction had within it histories and mysteries as deep as those buried in the very stones of these buildings themselves.

Nicholas Hawksmoor - Christ Church Spitalfields, London, United Kingdom (1729/2014)

Nicholas Hawksmoor - Christ Church Spitalfields, London, United Kingdom (1729/2014)

Nicholas Hawksmoor - St Mary Woolnoth, London, United Kingdom (1724/2014)

Sverre Fehn - Hedmark Museum, Hamar, Norway (1973/2009)

Sverre Fehn - Hedmark Museum, Hamar, Norway (1973/2009)

Atelier Peter Zumthor - Therme Vals (1996/2006)

Dimitris Pikionis - Landscaping of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece (1957/1989)

Fleapit revisited:Belfast.

"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart" - Pop

Kenneth Branagh's Belfast is a beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and just the right side of schmaltzy movie. It's evocative of both a specific place and time (Belfast towards the end of the sixties) while, at the same time, telling a tale of childhood that is universal and understandable to anyone who's ever had, or ever been, a child.

It's a warm, warm watch even though some of the things that take place around the action are anything but warm. Nine year old Buddy (Jude Hill) lives with his Ma, Pa, and brother Will in a terraced house a little north of the centre of Belfast. It's a predominantly Protestant neighbourhood but the few Catholic families who live there have always been accepted as neighbours and friends. 

Seen as being no different except for that they kick the ball with their left feet! Or at least that's how it used to be. Young Buddy is curious about the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism but, as a nine year old boy, he's far more interested in Star Trek, Thunderbirds, playing football, going to the cinema, and the cute and clever little girl at school, Catherine (Olive Tennant) whom he intends to marry when he grows up.

His family is a loving one but also one with its fair share of problems - most of them related to money (witness Ma hiding when the rent collector knocks round). At least until 'troubles' of a different form arrive. Ma (Caitriona Balfe) is a well dressed, beautiful woman and a loving mum who has lived in the area her whole life, knows everybody there, and can barely imagine a world beyond but Pa (Jamie Dornan) has been working on building sites in London and dreams of taking the family somewhere sunnier, and safer. 

Somewhere like Sydney or Vancouver. Both places he brings brochures home for Ma and Buddy's elder brother Will (Lewis McAskie, somewhat underused) to peruse. Buddy enjoys a very close relationship with his adorable grandparents, simply known as Pop (Ciaran Hinds) and Granny (Judi Dench). Doting Pop is poetic and practical (he's always fixing or cleaning something) and, after half a century, is still clearly in love with his wife.

Granny is less forthcoming in her affections for Pop but, as we delve deeper into their lives, we see how she still cherishes the soppy old sod despite his profligate ways. Just because she's less prone to flights of romantic fancy, that doesn't mean she can entirely hide her deep and loving heart.

Even with all this love around him, Buddy is tempted by others into typical acts of childish foolishness and petty acts of crime. He steals a Turkish Delight from Mr Singh's newsagents and, later, during the looting of a Catholic shop a box of Omo washing powder. Because it's "biological" he tells his aghast mother.

These normal rites of passage are sharply contrasted with the things he sees that no nine year old should ever see. Guns, tanks, bombs, and his own father being threatened for not taking a violent enough stance on the sectarian issues that are soon to rip the heart out of the community, the wider Belfast, and the whole of Northern Ireland.

These threats come, chiefly, from Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan), a local hardman who seems to have installed himself as the head of some kind of Protestant anti-Catholic militia mob. Clanton's hatred and violence permeates the community in such a way that Pa's desire to move away for a better life begins to create a wedge between him and Ma and exposes and aggravates already existing wider problems in the family.

Buddy finds solace in the cinema and, in one scene, at a theatrical production of A Christmas Carol. It's noticeable that in a predominantly black and white film the cinema and theatre scenes are shot in colour. As if to emphasise, underline, and italicise how silver screen viewings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. are not just escapism but a chance to enter, for an hour or two, a whole new world of possibilities.

It's a haven. Far away from the sweating priests fulminating alliteratively from pulpits, school kids singing the time tables in parrot fashion, and Billy Clanton and his goons wandering the streets intent on menace and violence against all those who don't line up behind them. 

But Belfast would be too hectoring, and I feel untrue, if that was all it was. Buddy's life, though poor, is a good one. He talks to Pop about Catherine and his feelings for her - she's always too busy doing her homework to speak to him, he's excited to be alive at the time of the first moon landings, he has lots of friends, and he desperately wants to stay in Belfast. Which presents his parents with a painful dilemma. 

Based, loosely, on Branagh's own childhood memories, and with a score by Van Morrison (with one enjoyable, if slightly arbitrary inclusion of Love Affair's deathless Everlasting Love), Belfast may be shot primarily in monochrome but it is a film that is full of all the colours of life and, for that, credit must go to Branagh and his wonderful cast. For a film that asks questions about moving, it felt right and proper that I was thoroughly moved (yep, tears again). For a film that asks deep questions about home, it was absolutely correct that it should be so full of heart.

Read It In Books:A Man Of Good Hope.

Somebody, I think, gave me A Man Of Good Hope:One Man's Extraordinary Journey from Mogadishu to Tin Can Town (to give it its full title) by Jonny Steinberg a few years back. At first I took it to be a travelogue (something Simon Reeve or Michael Palin might undertake) and then I wondered if it might be one of those of so fashionable (at least a few years back) misery memoirs.

It certainly wasn't the former and though there were elements of the latter, a refugee's life is not an easy one, it is, far more than that, a story of hope and a story of coming to know one's self. A story, quite simply, about trying to make the best of the hand that life has dealt you. As narrated to Steinberg, who allows himself - when necessary - to become part of it, it tells the tale of a Somalian boy, and later man, Asad Abdullahi, and his extraordinary two decade journey from Mogadishu to Cape Town. Not just the physical journey but the mental journey. It also has things to say about war, migration, humanity, and inhumanity.

I found it a compelling, interesting, educational, and, at times, poignant read. Asad, at the time of writing, is living in Blikkiesdorp - Tin Can Town, an area that has been described as "Cape Town's asshole, the muscle through which the city shits out the parts it does not want". It's a ghetto of one room structures thirty miles from Cape Town's centre for people who have been evicted after illegally squatting elsewhere in the city. 

Mostly South Africans but when Somali and Congolese refugees arrived there they find they are as unwelcome in Tin Can Town as they had been made to feel elsewhere in South Africa. What had brought Asad so far to a place so unfriendly and dangerous?

As with almost all migrants and refugees, it's a complicated story and one many of us prefer not to hear. To his great credit, Steinberg offered Asad 25% of any royalties received if he'd share his story and then set about visiting, if possible, the various places Asad had passed through and, again if possible, meeting with people who may have encountered him.

A Man Of Good Hope strives to, and I think succeeds in doing so, to tell a story of migration in the 21st century. In January 1991, militia men from the Hawiye tribe of Somalia attacked Mogadishu in an attempt to overthrow President Mohamed Siad Barre. Which they successfully did. They targeted all Darod men as they believed, one imagines mostly correctly, the Darod (or Daarood) clan were government affiliated.

Asad was, and is, Daarood. As a boy under fifteen he was not killed. Asad's father was a man however. Asad's mother was, of course, a woman and though Islam forbids the killing of women, the Hawiye were angry enough that day to orphan Asad. Not only had he lost both his parents, he also knew he had lost his home. Mogadishu was no longer safe for him.

So he left. As did thousands upon thousands of others. Before he had even reached the Kenyan border, his cousin Abdi (who was travelling with him) had been conscripted into a militia. From Kenya, Asad moved north (these migrant journeys are rarely direct) to Ethiopia where, in Addis Ababa, he would marry a woman called Foosiya for reasons that are both not exactly clear and more than a little disturbing.

Nevertheless he comes to love her and they set off, across Kenya (again), Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to a new life in South Africa together. Or, sometimes, apart. Life in South Africa is not easy. Somalis and many South Africans have very different ways of looking at the world and South Africans begrudge Somalis for taking what they see as their jobs. South Africa, it has long been understood, is a very violent society.

There was always a dream, a hope, even a promise, that America would be his final destination and that there he would start a new life. Free from persecution and with opportunities most of us take for granted. But in South Africa, the country he made home, he found that xenophobia was rife and that people were happy to blame, and punish, foreigners like Asad rather than the government for their problems.

Asad sat in Steinberg's car, day after day, telling his life story and Steinberg, for his part, had to make decisions on when to prompt him and when to stay silent and let Asad speak. Steinberg agonises over these decisions but mostly makes the right call so that can he tell a story, in a warm and conversational manner - but with the occasional poetic flourish, of a boy/man who appears to have been "kicked through life like a stone".

A boy who, even on reaching manhood, despite being conscientious, capable, and hard working, struggled for agency, struggled for acceptance, and, on occasions, struggled simply to survive. The moments of joy (playing table football in Dire Dawa and long conversations when "talk is given freedom" in vans with friends) are not dissimilar to the joys most of us will experience in our lives but what is noticeable is how rare these moments are in Asad's chaotic and difficult life.

Many stories are harrowing. A rumour goes round Blikkiesdorp that the South Africans in Tin Can Town would celebrate the end of the World Cup they were hosting by killing the foreigners living alongside them and there are punishment rapes in Kenyan refugee camps where rapist gangs would discuss if disabled women were too "crippled to rape" or if they were still "rapeable".

Unimaginable horrors like these sit along tales that are, quite simply, sad. Not least in the fact that Asad can no longer remember what his mother looked like or how she sounded. Smaller details, too, upset. Asad sleeps on the floor under a plastic chair in Afmadow, he wipes an injured woman's bum and cleans her after she has her period, and he walks around the town of Wardheer in Ethiopia grinding his teeth so he can imagine what it feels like to eat a meal.

At one point, Asad feels elated when an older man who has taken him under his wing shouts at him. He knows that someone, just one person in the world, cares enough about him to be angry with him. The passion makes him feel alive. The casual cruelty which meets him so often does not. Anyone with an ounce of empathy would be taken aback by the offhand nature in which Asad is informed of a terrible family tragedy several years after it has taken place.

More distressing still is the systemic nature of it all. Asad knows that as a foreigner in a foreign land, and a migrant to boot, he is more likely to be murdered and that the police are less likely to care. He understands explicitly the racial disparity in South African society and society as whole. These experiences have left him almost scared to contemplate his past or his position in the world. The bigger picture is so daunting that it is easier, more bearable, to simply live one day at a time. Prioritise what needs to be done and get it done.

Asad is merely one of one hundred and sixty Somali refugees in Tin Can Town. There are other refugees there and elsewhere in South Africa and, of course, all over the world. According to a UNHCR report last year, there are over 84,000,000 displaced people on the planet. Asad's story, and versions of it - some considerably more harrowing, is repeated eighty-four millions times across this globe that we all share and that is the greatest tragedy of all.

Many of those refugees, or people to give them their correct name, would ,if not displaced, no doubt be helping to make the world a better place with their wisdom, kindness, and insight. Asad can see through the bullshit of the world and does so on many occasions. When he witnesses a Somali man chase his sister through the streets with a pistol to protect the family's honour because she'd become pregnant while unmarried he remarks on the macho stupidity of it, noting that honour is a "thing you can't even see, let alone eat or drink".

It's a wisdom that is lost on many of us who live safer and wealthier lives and yet, in many cases, still choose to demonise those like Asad who face far more difficult and deadlier challenges. Jonny Steinberg, and Asad himself if he but knew it, have, by shining a light on one individual story, proved the lie peddled by those on the far right that refugees are somehow criminals and scroungers.

They are, of course, humans like you and I. They want to be safe, they want a roof over their heads, they want to be able to afford food and drink, and they, more than anything else at all, want for their children to have a better life than they have had. They are doing their bit to make that happen. Perhaps it's time we helped out. I can't remember who it was who gave me this book but I'd like to thank them anyway for an emotional, sometimes very raw, and sometimes quite upsetting but also a fascinating and worthwhile read.