Dialogue: Feminist game for chauvinists

I have never seen a woman playing chess. Chess requires a peculiar form of intelligence and I don't know if women have it.

I do know that I don't. I play chess rarely and badly. I can see several moves ahead, but those moves are always my moves. Somehow I cannot see the game from both sides of the board at the same time. Many players have made me look foolish, but I have met three players who made me look imbecilic.

Two of those players were men.

The third was a machine. It was a folding chess computer which I bought at Heathrow to while away a flight to Canada. I set the machine at cretin level. It thrashed me before we took off. But I persevered and during the flight a group of people gathered at my shoulder to watch my humiliation.

Every time I made a move, I heard them suck their breath through their teeth, as if wincing. On an aeroplane it is impossible to throw things out of the window. So, somewhere over the Arctic Circle, I gave the computer to a Russian.

Russians like chess. If at any time the world champion is not a Russian, he is from some adjacent and similarly vodka-sodden, gloom-laden, formerly communist country. I don't know why.

The present world championship is being played between Alexander Kramnik and Gary Kasparov. Gary does not seem to me to be the most Russian of names, and indeed in the 1980s Kasparov defied his communist masters, but Russian he is and very good at chess. The only time he has been beaten for the world title was in his 1997 rematch with Deep Blue. Deep Blue was a computer. It won, just, and was promptly dismantled.

I do not find it remarkable that Deep Blue won. Deep Blue could make 12 billion computations a second. What is remarkable is that Kasparov won several games.

Apart from Deep Blue, Americans don't seem to be much good at chess, although they did have a champion called Bobby Fischer. He played for, and I believe won, the world title some time in the 1970s, which was the last time chess was sexy. The attraction of Fischer was that he was mad.

His apparent lunacy subtly confirmed the idea that chess is subversive. It is not an all-American activity like baseball or shopping. Even the vocabulary of chess suggests subversion. Instead of champions, they have Grand Masters, a title reminiscent of sorcery or the Ku Klux Klan.

I am in awe of chess. It is not just that the game is endlessly complex or that it is warfare by another name, but that it is so very human, so accurate a mirror of that animal called man and the societies that he forms.

The truth lies in the pieces.

The king is a feeble thing, a mere totem. So bloated with power is the king that he can only shuffle a step at a time. He shelters behind his defensive wall and takes the first opportunity to scuttle to the corner of the board.

The castle is a loyal and honest piece which looks after its master as the Earl of Kent looked after King Lear. It moves in emphatic straight lines and when the battlefield is sparsely populated, it can win a match in a few decisive strides. But when things are politically complex, the castle is unwieldy and somehow stupid.

The bishop may lack the castle's death grip but it is a far smarter piece. Like the castle, it is capable of sizzling attacks, but it's also a sleazy ecclesiastical sidewinder, less obvious, able to squeeze through crannies.

Most devious of all is the knight. The knight dances strangely into corners and out again. Trapping a knight is like trying to swat a mosquito. Always it flits beyond reach, then returns to tease you. I have known people like all of these pieces.

In front of them stand the pawns, the plodding footsoldiers, recruited from the working classes, serving a purpose but in themselves deeply undistinguished. Once the battle warms, they can be tossed aside like used tissues. Their only virtue is their physical existence. Unlike every other piece, they cannot go backwards. They walk stolidly to extinction. Their graves are not recorded nor their memories honoured.

But it is the queen who dominates the board. She can go anywhere and do anything while her hubby quakes at her back.

Chess would appear to be the most feminist of games. So why is it that few if any women play it? Is it perhaps that over the centuries while the men have been tussling over the chess board, the women have been doing all the work? Is it? It might be so.