One moment in the performance, however, has lingered in memory for its stunning beauty and dramatic truth, a moment that also thereby neatly framed and exposed the emptiness in the general conception.

In Act One, Brünnhilde, who holds the accursed Ring as a token from her lover Siegfried, is visited by her sister, the Valkyrie Waltraute, who begs her to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens. In a long passionate exposition she tells Brünnhilde of Wotan’s despair, his loss of power in the shattering of his spear, his cutting down of the great World Ash and preparation for general destruction—disorders in the cosmic scheme which are connected directly, according to Waltraute, with her sister’s selfish desires in holding the Ring.

This plea, we know in advance—as does Waltraute—faces major, perhaps insurmountable, resistance. In the final act of Die Walküre, Brünnhilde had justified her disobedience in protecting Sieglinde—incestuous bride of Siegmund, pregnant with Brünnhilde’s future lover Siegfried—by claiming to have acted on Wotan’s secret desire. Wotan nevertheless dooms her to an enchanted sleep behind a wall of fire, awaiting the kiss of only the bravest of heroes, the identity of whom we could foretell even then (from the Siegfried leitmotif), as Wotan kisses his daughter for the last time.

Brünnhilde now, in Götterdämmerung, is in no mood to save the father who disowned her, or to surrender her lover’s gift.

But here enters the unaccountable and serendipitous waywardness of live performance. Waltraute in this production is played by Waltraud Meier, the Wagnerian mezzo, one of the great Kundrys and Isoldes of recent memory. She is magnificent to start with. Tall, striking, costumed in full Arthur Rackham mode from greaves to winged helmet and in all other respects seems to have wandered in from another production, from another time, from another moral universe. She manages to represent her character as believing in the argument she is making, which in this production is equivalent to saying that it is the only argument being made. We do not have the answer Wagner wanted us to have to this passionate defence of tradition and authority, because it is not on offer. What is on offer—in Deborah Voigt’s clueless and bad-tempered Brünnhilde, and Jay Hunter Morris’s goofy pop-culture superhero Siegfried—lies somewhere between a post-modern ironical wink and sentimental inconsequence.

Inevitably, Art takes its revenge on anti-Art by inverting the intended direction of catharsis. Pity and terror at the end of this production must be reserved not for the dead hero, Siegfried, and for a grieving Brünnhilde, but rather for the dying Wotan, who has never appeared in person, and the devastated Valkyrie Waltraute, whom we cannot forget.

The people I grew up among, like many millions today, thought that you were saved by changing your mind, that the difference between God permitting you to go to hell or welcoming you into heaven rested not so much on what you did as on what you thought. Staying saved meant policing your thoughts. It meant not changing your mind again. The stress this caused must account for the high incidence in that society of people with fixed and unvarying dispositions, like characters in an allegory: Happy, Weepy, Good, Fretful, Pious, Busy, and so forth. To surrender to various, changing, whimsical or contradictory dispositions would have been to put salvation at risk.

The anxiety of the believer for the stability of his own beliefs is I think responsible for a great deal of trouble in the world. Many otherwise unintelligible public passions may perhaps be better understood as the political projection of this private anxiety.

As for religion, the best that can be said for it is that it may instill in the young a form of manners that can be usefully built on throughout life.

Mr. Passfield is interested in the novel as a form for investigating the roots of contemporary life. He has striven for a maximum degree of transparency in presenting the results of his research, making available free, on-line companion volumes, two for each of the novels. There are now thirteen of these triptych publications, based on themes as varied as Leni Riefenstahl, Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, and Jumbo the circus elephant.

Sergei Eisenstein, the subject of Death Day, is famous for his pioneering silent-era film Battleship Potemkin, and for the later sound films Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. He is credited, through his teaching and writing, with the systematic formulation of the idea of ‘montage,’ the assembling of moving picture images in contrasting, dramatically arresting sequences of short clips, as the essence of the new art of cinema.

Death Day pursues three narrative threads, in rotating sequence. In the foreground is the forced confession of error — the ‘Apology’ of the title — that Eisenstein made before an assembly of his fellow artists, sitting stoney-faced, unnerving, at the Bolshoi Theatre on March 19, 1937, in an attempt to save his career, or indeed even his life, after the fiasco of Bezhin Meadow, a film withdrawn, under orders of these same bureaucrats of Soviet cinema, for alleged anti-Soviet sins.

The second thread is Eisenstein’s detailed recollection of the artistic triumph of Battleship Potemkin. A glorious time of total commitment, concentration and control in the heady aftermath of revolution, a time full of confidence in the identifying and solving of unprecedented problems of technique and artistic representation. Mr. Passfield had the inspired idea, here and elsewhere in his novel, of interspersing passages that replicate the swift intercutting of clips from famous montage sequences:

Crowd running in a frenzy – mother and son falling – the Cossacks! – crowd running frantically – soldiers on horses – horses cutting off crowd – soldiers on steps advancing – people frantic to escape – soldiers firing on people – mother with baby carriage – soldiers marching down steps – mother fearful – baby crying – soldiers advancing – mother crying out – boots on steps – rifles firing in unison

The third and in some ways most absorbing of the narratives in Death Day has to do with Eisenstein’s failed attempt to make a film in Mexico. Conceived by Eisenstein as a grand epic of Mexican history and civilisation, the film project was encouraged and financed by the American leftist writer Upton Sinclair and Sinclair’s wife and brother-in-law. The enterprise quickly spun out of control and ended in a blizzard of tragi-farcical threats and recriminations. Sinclair recovered some of his investment by cutting up Eisenstein’s masterwork into saleable documentaries. Eisenstein returned to the Soviet Union with no film and to a much-altered and dangerous political climate.

Mr. Passfield’s Eisenstein is a toweringly gifted artist and visionary, a giant beset both by the smallness of Hollywood in an hysterically anticommunist America, and by the murderous totalitarian Molloch of Stalin’s Russia. This effect is achieved as much by what is left out as by what is included. There is nothing made of Eisenstein’s domestic or erotic life, nothing of his inner life at all except for his passion for his film projects, which are given everywhere the shine of moral and intellectual heroism. Taking the ‘Apology’ of 1937 as the centre of his narrative, Mr. Passfield presents Eisenstein without, for example, the murky history in which he found favour again with Stalin and went on to direct his two patriotic epics of the 1940s. Eisenstein in fact did rather better than many of his colleagues who had sat in judgment on him that day at the Bolshoi Theatre.

For many years I taught a university film course. In the early days, before DVDs, we made do with deplorable old 16mm prints. The silent films that were available lacked any sort of sound track. Of course, as Josef von Sternberg, the director of Blue Angel and ‘discoverer’ of Marlene Dietrich, once pointed out, in an amusing memoir, silent films were never silent: orchestras played; at a minimum, a piano tinkled incessantly and often inanely. Lacking a piano, or a pianist, to accompany my showings, I played tapes of vaguely suitable music. I did not routinely show an Eisenstein, but did regularly show a film of his contemporary Vsevolod Pudovkin, the beautiful and poetic End of St Petersburg, against which I used to play a recording of a Shostakovich symphony (I forget now which one). This unscientific psychological experiment yielded the observation that montage sequences can be made to mean anything, as the random application of music to moving images switched on, and off, all manner of degrees of irony, parody, portentousness, levity, or what have you, independent of the content of the image itself. It was Pudovkin rather than Eisenstein, as a matter of fact, who stressed the absolute primacy of context in establishing the meaning of particular images.

Eisenstein’s cinema of types and emblems in hectic collision is now almost unbearable to me. As opposed, say, to Yasujiro Ozu’s silent A Story of Floating Weeds, of 1934, that we watched recently, in which long static takes, exquisitely framed, constitute an entirely different grammar of the moving image, establishing character, intention, pathos.

On the other hand, a novel that places the harsh and unforgiving demands of Eisenstein’s propagandistic art at the centre of its vision has a paradoxical humanising effect. Not only because it takes the intention of the artist, as opposed to the so-called ‘human interest’ of his personal affairs, to be of chief interest, but because it raises a standard for the novel to be the imaginative grasp of unimagined worlds.

For anyone familiar with my first novel, Sister Patsy, it may be useful to know that I originally conceived of Yellow Room as part of a trilogy to be called Sunset Park, after the neighbourhood which was, for several generations, the Scandinavian colony in Brooklyn, and where I grew up during the War and just after. The plan for a trilogy fell by the wayside—among other things, the writing of Luggas Wood intervened—but the ‘American’ sections of Yellow Room share with Sister Patsy some of the same characters and social milieu: the world of immigrant chapel-folk and charismatic religion in the 1920s and 30s, the world of my father and mother.

But this is all secondary to other concerns. These novels—and Luggas Wood, which has nothng at all to do with Brooklyn—seem to me ultimately about the possibility of action in the narrow space between the brute facts of human violence and cruelty, and an increasingly impotent and fragmentary religious culture. In such a condition one is obliged to imagine forms of courage and resistance flowing from the solitary human heart.