“Cats” was my first experience doing musical theatre, and I can blame much of my subsequent decade of semi-committed chorus-line participation—and some of my ongoing attraction to cultural phenomena that reside on the border between hellscape and paradise—on this baptism into Webber’s feline world. The magic began with the shimmery melodrama of the musical’s overture, its melody descending like a diva on a staircase; then came the opening number, “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” which is lyrically unhinged but musically transporting, a series of syncopated adrenaline spikes and key changes, to which we flung our tiny cat selves around in a big, stupid whirl. The heavy-handed pop-rock pastiche of the “Cats” soundtrack turns adult sentiment into an accessible playground—I was entranced by “Macavity,” with its “Pink Panther” burlesque swing, and “The Rum Tum Tugger,” with its cartoonish version of rock and roll. Fittingly, the show’s story line, insofar as it has one, is like something that a five-year-old would invent while coming down from dental anesthesia: there are a bunch of cats, and they’re called Jellicle Cats, and they’re about to go to the Jellicle Ball, which is where an old cat named Old Deuteronomy decides which cat goes to the Heaviside Layer to die and be reborn. One cat is named Skimbleshanks, and he lives on a train; one cat is named Mr. Mistoffelees, and he’s a magician; and there’s a fancy lady cat named Grizabella, except she’s not so fancy anymore; and, in the end, Old Deuteronomy picks Grizabella and she dies and gets to ride a big tire up to heaven, and that’s the end!
Lloyd Webber first had the idea for “Cats” in the late seventies. He grew bored one day during the technical rehearsals for “Evita” and got to thinking about writing music for existing lyrics, something he’d never done. Maybe he could use a book of poems—say, that old T. S. Eliot book his mom used to read to him. Those poems had a rhythmic flexibility, as though they’d been written to music. Later, Eliot’s widow, Valerie, would tell Lloyd Webber that Eliot always composed his light poems with popular songs in his head. Lloyd Webber approached her in 1980, inviting her to an annual arts festival that he threw at his country home, called Sydmonton. There he played her four sample songs from the musical he envisioned. He had set “The Naming of Cats” as an eerie, dreamy admixture of sharps and flats and had given “Macavity” an undertone of prowling lust. Eliot had once refused an adaptation offer from Disney; Lloyd Webber promised Valerie that he wouldn’t turn her late husband’s chimeric creations into mere “pussycats.”
The story seemed to be getting at some big question the culture was still struggling to figure out how to frame in 2010, one that was beginning to take on vital importance. At the time, the mainstream was only just starting to find the words to ask this question, but it went something like this: What kinds of stories do we consider to be worthy of respect? And to whom do those stories belong?
Persily hopes to pass the reins to a committed journalist willing to live in Skagway, a town of 1,000. Ideally, it would be someone who has lived in Alaska and knows the state’s quirks. “It’s weird up here,” he said. “It’s weirder than Sarah Palin is weird.” Getting to the printer requires a 125-mile drive through snow and ice over a mountain pass. Businesses close in the winter and there’s just one grocery store. Persily describes it as, if not an isolated life, then a “self-motivated” one.
They are London’s lost cathedrals. A few people still worship in them, a few more know of them, but few visit them. Whenever I have dropped by, they have been locked and seem deserted. Yet inside, these are masterpiece monuments of London’s age of confidence and flair, that of high Victorian gothic. They must be revived.
Where the novel’s first part was a character study, the second is a caper. Shafak’s narrative shifts from the internal to the external, from thoughts to action, and from the summing up of an entire life to the twists of one hectic day. Her skills as a writer — her confident pacing, emotional honesty and political consciousness — unite the two halves, making for a gripping and moving whole. Not every bit is perfect; a few characters are unevenly developed and the language can feel stilted in places. But these flaws hardly diminish the book’s overall quality.
Following on the heels of other books about exiting a religion (Educated and Pure being the most obvious), Leaving the Witness offers an intimate — at times painful, at times humorous — exploration of what it means to leave not only a religion, but an entire life.