Eka Kurniawan - Vengeance Is Mine All Others Pay Cash

This was a thoroughly enjoyable book full of interesting juxtapositions, images and ideas. On the one hand, it is a careering journey through a world of mobsters, whores, truck stops, extortion, hitmen, vengeance killings, fights and gangs. The atmosphere created is similar to a very violent cartoon or the sinister stylisations of a Tarantino movie. The prose and structure are simple and staccato. The story is told in snatches; sometimes a couple of lines of conversation, other times a more extended retelling of a series of events. The cast of characters is limited and the overwhelming focus is on the impotent hero Ajo Kawir. The disconnected paragraphs jump around geographically and chronologically and while this is never confusing sometimes it was a bit disjointed.


The book also had a funny, absurd side with Ajo constantly pulling down his trousers to consult his penis in front of other people, angry exchanges between posturing protagonists and pulse raising games of chicken in trucks at the dead of night. However, the book was far from superficial and also dealt with some weighty themes without ever becoming self conscious or explicit in examining them. I thought this was a significant achievement and the best aspect of the book.


Amongst other things, it was a commentary on corruption and authority in Indonesia and portrayed evocative scenes from this lush, lawless land. The roles sex and violence play in growing up and shaping definitions of masculinity were also integral to its story. The mercurial natures of sexual desire, love, fidelity and anger also played an important part in the story. At times, the relentless, gory violence was overbearing but it found a counterpoint in Kawir’s transformation and ability to philosophise and reconcile himself to his life. I found myself impressed by his cool simplicity and dedication to his chosen path. He’s in some senses stoic but also allows his emotions room to evolve and change. He is dispassionate but not, ultimately, to a sociopathic and destructive extent degree that he is at the beginning of the book. These attempts at extreme dispassion only end up in angry demonstrations of a different kind of passion, as the story shows. I felt I could sympathise with the raw, uncontrollable desires that many of the characters portray but was far more impressed and interested in Ajo’s ability to overcome them. This may be a matter time and experience, exemplified by the relationship between Ajo and Mono and the differences between them. While Mono is taking his first steps in his career as a tough guy, Ajo is retiring from his. It could also be more to do with the interplay between chance, circumstance and disposition which is expressed in the different actions Ajo and his wife take at the end of the book. One settles down to raise a child that isn’t his while the other goes out to seek revenge that isn’t hers. The chance appearance of Jelita in Ajo’s truck and the role she plays in his recovery of his erection also seem to point to the fact that large portions of what happen to us may be outside of out control. This kind of determinism also has a physical expression through Ajo’s penis, his consultations with it and his eventual acceptance of his powerlessness.


In the end, I found the book reassuring and reflective. In a world full of dark, traumatic experiences and savage abuses it is still possible to navigate, however circuitously, towards peace and acceptance. The book makes this point in an unromanticized, unsentimental way. Even though many of the scenes and people featured fall firmly in the category of caricature it ended up feeling far more profound and meaningful than I could have imagined when I began.

Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian - Tiger Woods

The overwhelming impression I got from this book is that Tiger Woods is a nasty guy. From dumping his high school girlfriend while at college by letter without explanation and refusing to speak to her - to abruptly severing long standing relationships and ‘friendships’ - to his self-centred and dismissive treatment of people he deems less important than him (everyone). Everything revolves Tiger and must take place on his terms or not at all. He seems socially disconnected, pathological and sometimes sociopathic. This is before you even consider his adultery, which is the most gratuitous example of this kind of behaviour. His attitude seems to have been, ‘I’m so good at golf and such an important person I should be allowed to do whatever I want’.


But beyond acknowledging how atrocious his behaviour was, why did he behave like this? And why did, and do, the public love him so much in spite of the highly unattractive side of his personality? Obviously, his exploits on the golf course and dominance of his sport are the most likely explanations. Here, the two questions - why was he so good at golf? why did his life become such a mess? - may share some common ground. Tiger Woods seems to have been raised as a golf machine and not a human. Both mother and father dedicated themselves to him to a startling degree and there seem to have been very few, if any, distractions from the all encompassing pursuit of golfing excellence. While other children learned how to play with each other and socialise, Tiger’s parents were concerned with creating a ruthless, competitive killer. The book reports that his father used to try and distract him while he played to help prepare him for this eventuality in tournaments. In extreme circumstances he would shout racist insults at his son in a tactic designed to build psychological strength. Meanwhile, his tiger mom would tell him to ‘kill’ opponents and ‘take their heart’. All told, this sounds like pretty good preparation for becoming an amazing golfer but also a good recipe for creating a sociopath. Tiger was almost unbelievably mollycoddled growing up but had to submit himself to an equally inconceivable and all encompassing schedule of training. Both parents and Tiger talk extensively throughout his life about how golf was his choice but it rings utterly hollow in light of the facts of his junior golfing career. As such, a young Tiger Woods would have grown up in an environment that valued golf, mental toughness, compliance with a schedule and, above all, performance as measured by a very limited set of narrow factors. Caring for other people was definitely not one of those factors. It is chilling to imagine that Woods played some of best golf while cheating on his wife and young family with multiple other women. This cold hearted lack of emotion might have served him well on tour but in a family context it has a more sinister and unsettling character.

Added to this already considerable burden to perform were the ideas and opinions of his father. Earl Woods regularly told people that Tiger would have a huge socio-political impact because of his status as a black player in the overwhelming white world of golf. When Tiger started playing their were courses that hosted the US Open that would not admit black members. While Tiger actively tried to defuse racial questions, his father seems to have wanted to turn his son into a living ‘fuck you’ to the white sporting establishment that may have curtailed his own baseball career. So, on top of the pressure to be the best golfer and to always win Tiger was also expected to be a symbol of black success in the face of white domination and to change the world. The weirdest expression of his father’s desire for their to be a racial significance to Tiger’s career comes in the form of a story he told about how Tiger was tied to a tree and stoned by his classmates while at school, which the book debunks fairly convincingly. So, Tiger grew up in a maniacally focused, aggressive, hyper virile, super competitive environment, which bore striking resemblance to the military world of the marines his father came from. However, his father quit his job to focus fully on managing his infant son’s career. At one stage, Tiger recalls how his father told him he had a choice of being a marine or being a golfer. Tiger’s obsession with the marines pays testimony to how deeply he had absorbed his father’s philosophy. The pressure to perform, to not let his parents down, to be a symbol of racial change and to change the world must have been unbelievably difficult to deal with.


The book is strong on Tiger’s amazing achievements on the golf course, albeit with a few too many misty eyed descriptions of clutch putts and famous tournament victories. His capacity for practice, his mental and physical toughness and his extreme competitiveness are truly breathtaking. Perhaps what stands out the most is the fact that he won the 2008 US Open only three weeks after being unable to walk and with no cartilage left in his knee. Less spectacular, but equally fascinating, was Tiger’s decision to remodel his swing after winning his first major in 1997. When most people would have been basking in the glory of victory, Tiger had his eyes on far bigger, longer term goals.


Tiger is a personification of modern, competitive, professional sports. Trained since early infancy for a sole purpose, he dispensed with fairplay, sportsmanship and etiquette in favour of a warlike, win at all costs mentality that made everything subservient to his golfing success. However, rather than gaping in awe at the achievements this strategy had yielded, as I would have done before reading this book, I finished the book feeling sad. What kind of life had this created for Tiger? What kind of person had emerged from this regime? Had the extreme micro management of his life ultimately helped or hindered him? Indubitably, he dominated golf in a way that’s never been seen before and made huge amounts of money. Nonetheless, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tiger grew up in a cold, loveless world focussed on what he could do rather than who he was. This seems to have created an equally cold, loveless man with little capacity for empathy or warmth. The fact that Tiger is still so popular and such a huge star says something about society. It made me think that Tiger is the quintessential example of the corrupt and questionable SportsWorld that Robert Lipsyte describes in his eponymous book. In this world, sports are not played for the development and enjoyment of the athlete as a person located in the context of broader society. Rather he plays for the benefit, more specifically the financial profit, of his parents, his school, his agent and his sponsors. Jack Scott’s 'The Athletic Revolution', which I am currently reading and hope to write about soon, is excellent on this topic. Modern sports, far from encapsulating and teaching the best principles essential for broader life, as is often claimed, teaches the philosophy of unshackled aggression akin to the mindset that predominates in war. In the same way that America, and much of the rest of world, glorify the fundamentally tragic character of war and combat; so too in commercialised sports. Dubious actions and morals are embraced in the pursuit of all-important victory while concepts of fairness, justice and wellbeing are thrown out and laughed at as soft and outdated.


Perhaps the most poignant part of the book is the story of Tiger’s record breaking third straight victory at the US Amatuer championships at the age of 20 in 1996. On the final round, Tiger and Steve Scott are neck in neck. Scott has a putt with Tiger’s ball in the way, Tiger marks it and moves the marker out of his opponent’s line. When he replaces his ball, he forgets to move it back to its original position. Scott points it out to Tiger and saves him from forfeiting the title. Tiger doesn’t even thank him.


Reflecting back on the event and his life afterwards, Scott said, ‘I think I am walking proof that you can win in life without winning’. Scott went on to have an underwhelming tour career and became a club pro. Of course, I can’t judge what a successful life constitutes and even if I could it would vary wildly depending on the individual. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would much rather be Scott, with his kids and his marriage of 18 years, than Tiger, with the chaos of pressure and media attention swirling around him. In spite of the 14 majors and a billion dollars, Tiger’s life as represented in this book reads like a tragedy. I don’t know if Tiger’s upbringing created his problems later in life or if his success lead him astray or if everything is pre-determined genetically; surely the question is too complex to have an easy answer. However, Tiger’s reckless adultery and possible sex and drug addictions do not strike me as the actions of a happy and healthy man.


This was an interesting and well researched book. It was a bit sentimental in places and undoubtedly glorifies his sporting exploits. While it doesn’t question the values and ethics of professional sport explicitly, I feel like it contains all the raw material required to start asking these questions and presents a fascinating case study of a true modern sporting icon. I really feel I got more out of this book because of reading 'SportsWorld' and 'The Athletic Revolution' at around the same time.

Andrew Sean Greer - Less

I was quite taken with the first 50 pages of this book. Our hero, Less, is a graphic character and the sketch of his years as the lover of an older, famous poet are well drawn. Equally, the narrator’s voice and the writer’s eye for detail are pleasing. I particularly enjoyed a reference to, ‘the quilted sides’ of food carts in NY. Less’s impending world tour seems like an good way of setting up the plot structure and, without further ado, we are off on an adventure with the engaging Less; our interest piqued by the narrator’s anonymity.


Sadly, it was largely downhill from there. I did think the author was good at doing scenes from the literary world like writing retreats, academic departments, publishers, book awards, drinks parties and receptions. However, he also had a Franzen-esque penchant for tossing long, pretentious words into his prose for no obvious reason other than to show how erudite he is. Some of these words defied even the definitive power of Google so he really must be extraordinarily clever! For example, I couldn’t work out what the phrase ‘groupe en biscuit’ meant in either English or French. And ‘sesh’? Not an abbreviation for session judging from the context. Alongside this tendency towards elaborate vocabulary there are some really sloppy mistakes in the prose. For example, Less puts his shoes on before his trousers at the beginning of the book, there is a poorly researched poker game and the contradiction, ‘Roman generals hire slaves’; a oversight that really annoyed me! I’d have preferred clearer vocabulary and closer proofreading.

The book seems to have been written, at least partially, as a work of comedy but it isn’t very funny. From the Mexican tour guide who says everything is closed to the lame jokes about Less’s grandmother’s vagina, the attempts at humour are hackneyed and puerile. The problem is compounded by repetition. Some of the travel writing is too cliched with caricatured bell boys, taxi drivers and tour guides. However, the worst aspect of the prose was definitely the dialogue. It wasn’t universally poor but some of the central sections are very clunky. For example, Less’s first meeting with his lover-to-be the poet and his wife. The reader is in the dark about who this mysterious straight couple on the beach, recollected from Less’s 20s, are. But when the foolhardy man wants to take a dip in the stormy ocean, his wife implores young Less to go with him saying, to a background noise of narrative sections being dropped noisily into place, ‘please look after him, he’s a wonderful poet but a lousy swimmer’! Oh, the cruel irony of her inviting this seductive homosexual predator into their marital bliss! Oh, the tragedy of prose so bad that it reads like a plot summary transposed into the mouths of the characters. The whole thing felt awkward and unrefined. Less’s big chat with Carlos at the luxury resort in India is almost as clunky and equally facile. Here too, Less inexplicably doesn’t want to hear more about Freddy’s wedding even though he is allegedly mourning the love of his life. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the novel where Less pines for his lost lover. Additionally, I couldn’t quite work out the root of Carlos and Less’s animosity, which continues throughout the book but is never really explained.


There were several minor aspects of how foreign languages are presented in the book that I didn’t like either. Some of the German in this book is written in German. None of the other languages are attempted for more than a sentence. The German that is contained in the book is not translated. This is a pet hate of mine, translate it in the footnotes for goodness sake! Alongside this, there are conversations that take place in German for the purposes of the story but appear in the text as broken English literally translated from the supposed German conversation. This wasn’t attempted in any other languages. It wasn’t particularly funny and was another example of an insipid reworking of an already overworn theme - ‘the things non-native speakers say’!! It was especially unsuccessful as to really get the jokes one would have to know the German words that are being mistranslated. The fact that this was only done for German was explained by Less only being able to speak this language but, taken as a whole, the book had a weird and unpleasant mishmash of presentations. As it progressed, the structure of the world tour itinerary started to get a bit stale as Less repeated his routine of turning up somewhere, blundering about a bit, learning something very precursory about the culture, having a romantic encounter or recalling one from his past and then stumbling on!


Less, who is initially drawn as hopelessly unknown as an author, surprisingly meets lots of fans of his work during his travels. Besides these minor massages to Less’s ego, he also wins an award and has several sexual encounters that no doubt help boost his confidence in the aftermath of his breakup with Freddy. However, like the acerbic woman who’s birthday party Less attends in the desert who comments on Less’s latest protagonist, I found myself asking, ‘who cares?’ The character of Less, who had started out with such promise, had turned out to be a bit boring and shallow. The prose and the narrative, that I had initially liked, turned out to be repetitive, cliched and full of empty humour. The more interesting aspects of Less, like his feelings about his past loves and the meaning of his life, are drowned out by clunky dialogue, bad jokes and superficial travel details.


To round off the disappointing experience of finishing this book, which ended up feeling like another episode of a middling sitcom - this week on ‘Less Flounders In Foreign Lands….’ MOROCCO! - the mystery narrator was revealed as Freddy. ‘REFEREE!’, I felt like shouting, ‘surely that’s not allowed’. Freddy the narrator had described himself in the third person earlier on in the book, which excludes him from being the narrator in my mind! The narrator’s voice also felt much older than Freddy’s mid-thirties when I was reading it. It was a sloppy, half-baked end to a sloppy, half-baked book and I felt cheated! The ending was also very neat and tidy with Less returning from his travels to be reunited with his lost lover leaving me wondering what the upshot of Less’s trip was ultimately. Is the moral of the story - if you are deeply in love but your lover marries someone else then don’t say anything and go away for a bit and then he’ll realise how much he loves you? Everything seems to fall effortlessly into place for Less in the end and I found this mawkish and twee.

Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games

There were lots of parts of this book that reminded me of other books, films or cultural reference points. It hung together well enough but I was a bit unsure about the overall effect. The most obvious parallel, for me, was to a film called ‘Battle Royale’ (2000), which in turn is based on an earlier book. The film is about a group of students who are taken to an island and forced to fight to the death by the Japanese government. There were also parallels to be drawn with the Roman Empire, Stoic philosophy, Romeo and Juliet, 1984, My Girl and many others, I’m sure. This pastiche approach reminded me of ‘Ready Player One’ (2011) although that book approaches cultural referencing far more explicitly, which I prefer. The two have other similarities - dystopia, a rise to fame, an exciting, dangerous adventure, a love story, both became films. I think I enjoyed ‘Ready Player One’ more because its content is aimed at middle aged geeks while ‘The Hunger Games’ is aimed at adolescent women. The PG rated love, looking beautiful in pretty dresses and worrying about popularity exemplify the young adult level this is pitched at. On the other hand, it’s violent, dystopian goriness would also appeal to adolescent boys so perhaps I have more of an issue with it because I am the wrong age rather than because I’m a man.


The love story is a bit cringe-worthy but it was saved by the intrigue over whether her relationship with Peeta is genuine and if she prefers him to Gale, her hunting partner back in the Seam. The fact that all the girls at school love Gale, and it’s heavily implied that he’s in love with Katniss, but Katniss has no idea is a bit sentimental and corny. As I mentioned earlier, all romance is very tame and Katniss has never kissed anyone in spite of leading such a deeply adult life and seemingly having many admirers. Similarly, the interviews before the games where Katniss apparently struggles because of her unlikeable personality are a hard to believe. In the end everyone loves her and Peeta declares his love for her in front of everyone; it is a bit vomit inducing. On the whole, I felt the strength of the central plot and the excellent pacing of the narrative saved the book from becoming too twee. I had read in the PLR, where this book was recommended and reviewed, that the pacing was outstanding and this proved to be the case.


It’s just as well because the plot was too facil and, in places, downright hackneyed. The character of Katniss was a slightly unhappy mixture of hardened hunter and ditzy school girl. Her almost inconceivable level of ability and suitability to the games are coupled with some equally inconceivable moments of stupidity. For example, she forgets to loot the bow and arrow from the girl who dies in possession of it even though she has been coveting it since the start of the games and it his her best chance of survival. Equally, it takes her a minute to work out what the sedatives she is gifted should be used for when she needs to subdue Peeta to go to the feast. I was also surprised that ‘the Careers’ didn’t train using more survival skills like Katniss’s given they work so well in the arena! The sponsorship meted out to the players seemed a bit unfair as well. While Katniss got a couple of meals and some burn cream, one of the other player’s got an impenetrable suit of armor! It’s mentioned in the book that gifts are very expensive but it’s also mentioned that the residents of the Capitol bet heavily on the event so I was expecting the gifts to play a much bigger role. The treatment of whether there was going to be one or two victors was a bit clunky but did set up the mutual poisoning scene at the end, which was good, and allows the is-it-real-is-it-not-real? storyline of Peeta and Katniss’s love to continue into the next book.


The themes of this book also saved it from becoming too saccharine or sentimental. Inequality, exploitation, subjugation of a population using the media, humanity’s bloodthirstiness, the morality of murder and the cruelty of consumerism and entertainment culture. These are all weighty topics for young adult fiction and they’re, for the most part, sensitively and subtly handled. In truth, the issue of murder isn’t nearly gory enough for my liking. Contestants help each other and behave in a remarkably civilised manner during the Games whereas I’d have thought they’d be ripping each other limb from limb and screwing each other over at the earliest opportunity. To me, this would’ve been a more faithful representation of human nature although perhaps I’m overly pessimistic!

The strong points of this book were the pacing and the subject matter of the Games. I didn’t really enjoy the way the story was framed or how things developed in the arena. The love story was corny but had interesting angles and some good twists. Overall, it was enjoyable but facile and I probably wouldn’t recommend it.

Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried

I really liked this interconnected collection of short stories. They weren’t self-aggrandising or filled with bravery and machismo. The tone was matter of fact and quotidian even though the content is a long way removed from the everyday facts of my own life. Nonetheless, O’Brien draws you into his world smoothly and skilfully.

Beyond the stories themselves, which are well told and frankly relaid, I also found the book to be full of interesting reflections on the nature and function of storytelling itself. The soldiers tell each other stories to alleviate their boredom, attempt to understand their situation and to make sense of their fear and exhilaration. O’Brien writes these stories later as a way to comprehend his own memories and experiences of the war. In both cases, the stories needn’t necessarily be true. Perhaps it’s in some sense necessary that they’re not factually accurate. Facts, empirical accuracy, perception and truth are all slippery concepts and this is acknowledged and explored exquisitely in the book. A story can be true that never actually happened. Something that really happened can be false in terms of what it represents or how it’s portrayed. Between the occurrence and the retelling there is so much in between. O’Brien states clearly that war stories with neat morals are almost certainly false for this reason. For example, his detailed, presumably imagined, description of the man he killed with a grenade seems infinitely more ‘true’ to him than the bare facts of the incident.

Beyond the tales of life in Vietnam, there are also stories about where these stories and experiences sit within a person’s life after the war. How do these experiences change a person? How do you talk about them? How do you understand them in such a violently different context? How do you make sense of your life and the experiences you’ve had? The answer seems to be through stories. Whether these are the stories O’Brien composes as a writer or through the narratives we all tell to ourselves about our lives; the need for a narrative seems ubiquitous. O’Brien doesn’t hide this away behind the stories he tells. He discusses it explicitly. Showing the reader how things are altered, adjusted and reinterpreted so they make sense. So they can become true in the sense that O’Brien understands the word. The simple dichotomy of true and false being inadequate to express the nuance of life as it’s really lived.

Of course, I can never know what it was like to fight in the Vietnam war. However, reading this book I did feel like I was closer to comprehending one man’s experience of it. Through the stories he heard, the stories he lived and the stories he created to make sense of all the other stories. It feels like an honest and unedited account and this gives it the quality of truth. Even if there isn’t, or can’t be, such a thing when dealing with a subject as complex and incomprehensible as war.

Khaled Hosseini - And The Mountains Echoed

I read ‘The Kite Runner’ several years ago and remember enjoying it a lot. Sadly, I never wrote anything about it so I can’t say why or compare it to this book. Certainly, ‘And The Mountains Echoed’ has much to recommend it. The prose is smooth and flowing. The sentences are short and evocative. The characters and settings are varied and rich. Details are well chosen and pithily expressed. However, it also had a sentimental quality most obvious in its extremely dramatic and shocking plot. Much of the dialogue also had this quality in a way that’s harder to pin down but permeated the whole text.

The story is woven together using nine perspectives, each contained in a chapter. These are: 1) A poor Afghan farmer (Saboor) taking his two children (Abdullah and Pari) to Kabul and telling them a story on the journey through the desert (1952) 2) The same farmer selling his daughter (Pari) to a wealthy, childless family (Wahdatis) where a relative (Nabi) works when they reach Kabul (1952) 3) Saboor’s second wife’s (Parwana) story of how she pushed her sister (Masooma) off a tree because she was jealous of her good looks and found out she was going to marry Saboor (1949) 4) Nabi’s story of working for Mr Wahdati and their long shared history 5) the story of two brothers (Idris and Timur) who are Afghans who emigrated to the US during the wars and used to live on the same street as Nabi and the Wahdatis. They come back to try and reclaim their property in Kabul (2003) 6) the story of Pari and Mrs Wahdati’s life in Paris after she leaves Mr Wahdati when he has a stroke (1974) 7) the story of a jihadi turned drug lord and his family who move to the village where Abdullah and Pari were born. The pair’s half brother attempts to reclaim his property from the gangster following time as a refugee in Pakistan (2009) 8) the story of the life of a Greek plastic surgeon (Markos) who lives in the Wahdati’s house when Nabi owns it (2010) 9) the story of Pari reconnecting with Abdullah in America and the relationship between her and Abdullah’s daughter (2010).

Some of the characters and the depth of emotional perception are really good. The brothers in chapter five, for example. However, I sometimes felt like the story was flitting around too much. The emphasis on the clever interconnections between the stories was too heavy and detracted from the quality of the individual stories themselves. For example, at the end of Chapter 5 the child who Idris agrees to help but then ends up ignoring seemingly thanks his brother, Timur, in the dedication to her book. This isn’t explored in any detail and is almost a throwaway whereas I felt it could have been interestingly expanded as another example of the brothers’ relationship, which was a highlight for me. Equally, Chapter 4, the story of Nabi, was really good partly because it didn’t have complicated interconnections that have to be worked out. In some ways I thought this aspect of the novel was overdone and not always successful. There are too many stories and they are too disparate. It’s like Hosseini is trying to do too much in one book. That said, the passing reference to ‘Abe’s Kabob House’ in Chapter 5, which is then explored in detail in Chapter 9, was really well done. I thought it spoke poignantly about the upheaval and change of migration and life as an immigrant and was very well handled.

Against the good writing, powerful characters and scenes, the book is somewhat overly dramatic. The whole thing is so stuffed full of tragedy and is so eventful it sometimes feels like watching a soap opera where something shocking has to happen every five minutes to keep the audience engaged. At times this felt facile, gratuitous and simplistic. Against this criticism, one of the main themes of the book is the turmoil and misery wrecked by the wars in Afghanistan so perhaps it is unfair to criticise the author’s attempts to place this in the foreground. Nonetheless, even the more domestic portions of the book that take place outside of Afghanistan can feel histrionic and overblown. The book is undoubtedly moving but sometimes it feels like the reader’s heartstrings are being pulled a little too hard a little too often!

This was an enjoyable, varied and readable book. I had a few issues with the structure and the intensity and frequency of its dramatic episodes but overall I would recommend it.

Ray Dalio - Principles: Life and Work

I was excited to read this book because of Dalio’s success with Bridgewater. His investment style could be broadly described as one of quantitative, macroeconomic trading, which is far from the long term, qualitative, bottom up, equities investment strategy I try to follow. I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn about how someone has had a lot of success with a very different style of investment to most of the books I read. In some senses this turned out to be true and in others rather less so! The publishers have done a good job in releasing this book, principles on ‘life and work’, before the second volume on ‘economics and investment’. Dalio is famous for his understanding of investment so most people would probably read the second volume over the first. That said, he’s sufficiently famous for his prowess as an investor that some punters, like me, will read this one anyway!


The book started quite well for me with an interesting overview of Dalio’s life and career. What becomes clear very early on is that he has a lot of ideas and a very high capacity for work. He is also an inveterate speculator, which I view as a positive. He writes in Chapter 3, titled ‘My Abyss’, about how he lost all his money early on in his career. I enjoyed this as many people might want to airbrush this from their career. Dalio is upfront about this mistake and, more generally, writes persuasively about the value of making mistakes in gaining experience and improving. Anyone with any experience trading knows the following is true, “I believe that anyone who has made money in trading has had to experience horrendous pain at some point. Trading is like working with electricity; you can get an electric shock” (p18 quoting from Jack Schwager Hedge Fund Market Wizards). Losing all your money is a sign of some naivety and excessive risk taking but it seems like Dalio definitely learned his lesson. That said, this is the only major mistake that Dalio mentions in the book and the rest of it is notably devoid of serious problems that he must have encountered in growing his firm. It is remarkable how many investors only focus on their successes, at least publicly. Although I suppose it could be viewed as good marketing. When it comes to the nitty gritty of running a company, the book is long on wishy washy management principles and very short on practical, painful examples. This is in spite of the fact that Dalio consistently refers to problems and mistakes as the lifeblood of evolution. I expected him to mention far more of them rather than just talk about their value in general terms and this was a disappointment.


As well as making clear that he is a bona fide speculator, the early chapters also demonstrate Dalio’s love of quantitative data and systems. To Dalio, everything is a machine that has rules and moving parts that can be understood and programmed to work more efficiently. The economy is a machine, so is a company, so is your brain. I’m not sure I agree with this assessment but this is how Dalio sees the world and operates within it. He states his quantitative approach definitively writing, “theoretically...if there was a computer that could hold all of the world’s facts and if it was perfectly programmed to mathematically express all of the relationships between all of the world’s parts, the future could be perfectly foretold” (p39-40). This reminded me of Keynes’ thoughts about the future and speculation and how contrary they seem to Dalio’s. Keynes writes, ‘“We have, as a rule, only the vaguest idea of any but the most direct consequences of our acts. Thus the fact that our knowledge of the future is fluctuating, vague and uncertain, renders wealth a peculiarly unsuitable subject for the methods of classical economic theory….By ‘uncertain knowledge’....I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable...The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European War is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth holders in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever’ (my italics). Whereas Dalio seems to have faith in the ability to model provided the computing power is of sufficient force. Leaving aside the theoretical and focusing on today’s imperfect computer models Dalio states, as anyone with any practical experience of uncertainty knows, that even the most powerful quantitative analysis can only produce a range of probabilities rather than one specific and definite outcome. Dalio writes, ‘Truth be known, forecasts aren’t worth very much, and most people who make them don’t make money in the markets….This is because nothing is certain and when one overlays the probabilities of all the various things that affect the future in order to make a forecast, one gets a wide array of possibilities with varying probabilities, not one highly probable outcome’. I thoroughly agree with him on this even if, ultimately, I’m probably closer to Keynes philosophically. Dalio’s skill is clearly not just modelling; it is also knowing when and how to bet. A lot of Dalio’s work seems to centre on the use of empirical logs and tools to eliminate human bias and errors. Having been thoroughly convinced about the faultiness of the human brain’s decision making by books like Thinking Fast and Slow I thought this was an area where Dalio is insightful and valuable. Especially given the advancements in AI and machine learning happening at the moment. Section 5.11 on algorithms, beginning p257, is very good on this and is something I need to learn more about and make use of.


In his early days as a commodity trader and consultant, he comes up with the idea of his ‘pure alpha’ fund through a combination of his love of speculation and his love of data. In researching his speculation he had come up with a huge number of strategies - ‘I had a large collection of uncorrelated return streams. In fact, I had something like a thousand of them’ (p58). He also had good, systematic data that recorded all of these systems and bets he had been trailing - ‘we had programmed and tested lots of fundamental trading rules’ (p58) in each asset class and they were trading lots of different asset classes. Combining this ability to come up with thousands of different types of trade, tracking and back testing them to see what was profitable, with his ‘eureka moment’ of realising that ‘having a few good uncorrelated return streams is better than having just one, and knowing how to combine return streams is even more effective than being able to choose good ones’ (p57) led to the creation of his fund management business.


On a less positive note, Dalio is seriously pleased with himself and never misses an opportunity for self-congratulation. A lot of this is dressed up in the most transparent form of false modesty, which makes it even worse. He makes a big song and dance about how relationships are the most important thing in the world before going on to list his wealth and influence according to Forbes and Time. He tells us about how much dating he was doing before he met his wife, compares his theory about uncorrelated income streams to Einstein’s theory of relativity and says he won’t talk much about his family before going on to boast about all of them at some length! He even states twice that Bridgewater is the most successful hedge fund ever and has made more money for his clients than anyone else in history. If this isn’t the writing of a very competitive and self satisfied person, then I don’t know what is. The whole concept for the book oozes self-importance!


Page 79 sees him talk about his ‘amazing achievements’ and about how most of what he does within the company ‘couldn’t be adequately delegated’. He feels like he is doing everything and needs help so sets up a management committee to monitor his performance. This all sounds fine and dandy until you learn later in the book that remuneration is very much Dalio’s domain and not the management committee’s. This sounds like getting a bunch of people who rely on your opinion of them to get rich to tell you how you’re doing. As I’ll try to explain later, this kind of duplicity applies to Dalio’s ideas of ‘radical transparency’ and ‘radical honesty’ in a similar way. It all sounds great and the ‘idea meritocracy’ sounds impressive until you realise it is, essentially, a Ray Dalio-ocracy where he makes the rules and chooses whether to enforce or suspend them at will.


Dalio thinks of himself as amongst history’s most incredible minds. For evidence of this, Dalio describes Bridgewater as ‘intellectual Navy SEALs; others describe it as going to a school of self-discovery run by someone like the Dalai Lama’ (p88). Not wanting to stop at comparing himself to the Dalai Lama, he also recounts a story where he meets the man himself. Apparently, he congratulated Dalio on his amazing understanding of humanity and asked him to join him in meeting but Dalio was too busy. The inference is very much that the Dalai Lama, too, has lots to learn from Dalio or that they are both ‘ninjas’ - a oddly fratty term Dalio uses to describe people who are very good at something. Pages 93-98, entitled ‘Learning what shapers are like’, are the most egregious example of his self satisfaction. Here he compares himself to just about any other great person you can think of. Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Einstein, Freud, Darwin, Muhammad, Jesus, Newton, Franklin - it’s almost impossible to believe he isn’t being sarcastic! He tries to mitigate this a bit on p111 by writing, ‘I want to be clear that I don’t believe that those who are ‘heroes’ or ‘shapers’ are either better people or are on better paths. It’s perfectly sensible to not have any desire to go on such a journey. I believe that what’s most important is to know one’s own nature and operate consistently with it’. However, the whole tone of the book and even his decision to write it indicate that Dalio most certainly sees himself as better than almost everyone else! Section ‘H’ on p230 where he talks more about ‘shapers’ is a good example of this.


The problem is, like many skillful market operators, Dalio takes his skill at navigating the market to indicate that he is an amazing thinker in all areas - not just markets. In Chapter 5 he describes himself as a impartial economic doctor in self-aggrandising section called ‘helping policy members’. Later on at p108, while boasting about his close relationship with Wang Qishan, he declares ‘I feel i get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe’ when the two of them talk!! Perhaps this level of self obsession is necessary to become as successful as Dalio. It certainly isn’t attractive and made me feel like Bridgewater is really a cult of personality rather than the utopian ‘idea meritocracy’ that Dalio would like us to believe that it is.


Alongside the infuriating smugness, I also found the book hard to read because it is quite badly written. Dalio is not a wonderful writer and most of the analogies he uses are related to baseball or skiing. He brands anything that doesn’t agree with his interpretation as ‘backward’, there is endless talk of ‘triangulation’ and ‘getting in sync’, which quickly becomes wearisome and repetitive. The book is presented as principles (e.g. 10) with sub-principles (10.1) and further details (10.1.A). This would appear to point to some kind of logical development and connection between the ideas being set out, as is the case with geometric presentations in philosophical books like Spinoza’s Ethics. This is definitely not the case with Dalio’s book! In spite of the appearance of logic and cohesion, these are really just vaguely connected statements or ramblings. Some of the sub points are just phrases like ‘show candidates your warts’, something he doesn’t really do in this book, with no examples or significant elaboration. By the latter stages of the book, I realised that I was just reading a list of poorly written general reflections that I would never be able to remember because they’re not cohesive, logical or supported by good examples. For this reason, I found the book a struggle to read and hard to follow.


Bridgewater definitely struck me as culty on the evidence of this book. Like Dalio’s arrogance and seeming perception of himself as some kind of hero, perhaps this is what’s necessary to have the kind of success that Bridgewater and Dalio have enjoyed. Nonetheless, I would like to call BS on a couple of the principles at Bridgewater. This is not to say the system doesn’t or can’t work; evidence would point to the contrary! More that the reality of the ‘idea meritocracy’ seems quite different from Dalio’s perception and presentation of it in this book. Section D on p159 is a good example of the difference I perceive. Here Dalio tell us, ‘the biggest mistake people make is to not see themselves and others objectively’. This sounds OK, but who is to say what is objective and who makes the rules about how these judgements are arrived at? For Dalio, there seems to be an idea that data can be completely objective but, the more I read about Bridgewater, it seemed that what Dalio means when he says ‘objective’ or ‘higher level thinking’ is ‘my belief in what is objective’ or ‘my thinking’! Further examples can be drawn from the ideas of ‘radical honesty’ and ‘radical transparency’, which are the key pillars of the ‘idea meritocracy’. In the idea meritocracy, the best ideas are supposed to be valued above the person who presents them’s rank in the hierarchy. However, when talking about the future, it’s sometimes hard to judge whose ideas are best as many outcomes are plausible and possible. When this happens, Dalio employs the idea of ‘believability’, which essentially means the person’s track record. As such, people with high believability will hold higher positions in the hierarchy meaning that the idea meritocracy essentially functions in a similar way to a traditional hierarchy! Dalio says he has never gone against the ‘believability weighted opinion’ when making decisions and this immediately made me think, ‘Dalio must have a very heavy believability weighting!’. Equally, radical transparency sounds interesting and good. All meetings are recorded and decisions about the company aren’t confined to a small management group. However, later on we learn that remuneration - probably the single most important and divisive issue in any company - is not subject to radical transparency (p334). Indeed, the only advice Dalio offers on pay is to ‘pay north of fair’ and ‘pay for time’. Given how important this issue is in running a company, I was disappointed that there was such little discussion of this. My conclusion is that Dalio makes most big decisions on pay in a radically non-transparent and individual manner! By the same token, talk of secret auditing (p513) and public executions (p514) seemed more akin to a dictatorship than a society governed by radical transparency!


I think Dalio’s principles are a bit like a religious text. It seems to provide an external, objective reference point for how things are decided and governed. However, inevitably, these principles can be interpreted and acted upon in a huge number of different ways so they end up being a tool to justify and vindicate the decisions of the leaders. Simply look at the incredibly disparate societies and communities the Bible has been used to support! Everything is in the interpretation and Dalio himself seems to recognise this in 6.4.B (p390), which in essence states that principles can mean lots of different things to different people but his interpretation of the principles is the correct one! So much for the idea meritocracy, unless everyone agrees that his ideas are the best - which they may well be when it comes to investment! On p391 Dalio argues that sometimes the idea meritocracy has to be suspended for the good of the organisation and, in the very next principle, that one should be wary of someone who seeks to suspend the idea meritocracy for the good of the organisation. This kind of contradictory thinking makes it seem like the principles are, like almost all principles, open to a large amount of interpretation and modification depending on what the most powerful people in a hierarchy want. In this way, Dalio’s way of operating sounds pretty much the same as most successful fund managers’; my way or the highway!


All this criticism might make it seem like I got nothing out of this book and that was not the case. He is very good on using algorithms to help investment and some parts of management and he writes persuasively about how the power and speed of the subconscious mind make it imperative to learn and analyse systematically before making decisions. His belief that people often get bogged down in details and his adherence to the 80:20 principle and general principles struck me as true. He also counsels that knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets to make (P253 5.6b), which I felt is important and true. In short, there is quite a lot of decent advice about investment in the book. Although little of it is ground breaking or particularly well exemplified. Unfortunately, what good stuff there is is wrapped up in a lot of self aggrandizing crap and meaningless waffle.


One thing Dalio definitely understands is the importance of matching your nature to what you do. I feel this is the single most important thing in becoming a good investor; trying to understand yourself and match your style to your strengths while making every effort to compensate for your weaknesses. Dalio understands this very deeply. He writes, ‘the happiest people discover their nature and match their life to it’ (p124) which I would wholeheartedly agree with. He also writes at length about the opportunity to learn from mistakes, which is also crucial. I think what Dalio has done in creating Bridgewater is to design a company that matches his nature extremely closely. This is a hard thing to do and I think he is exceptional in having done it to the extent he has. He also clearly has a gift for market speculation. However, rather than creating a new, broadly applicable way of thinking about managing a company, which is what Dalio thinks he has done, I’d say he has really just designed an environment that suits his nature very well. Lots of the book is couched in terms of, ‘I have had so much success, now my main goal is to pass it on to others’ but I would argue that very little of what he writes is easy to apply generally. The principles are vague, subject to modification and interpretation and are never fleshed out with really tricky practical examples. The problems he does talk about are largely trivial and the ones that people might really be interested in, for example the sexual harassment case brought against his CIO, are never mentioned. This is really disappointing given how much Dalio talks about learning from mistakes and difficult situations.


All in all, I didn’t get much from his book. The sections on Dalio’s life and career were probably the best bits as they’re not presented in the ‘principles’ style used later in the book. These sections also contained more factual information and fewer wishy washy aphorisms. As well as having a frustrating structure, the book isn’t well written and this made it a slog to read. However, given his track record, I’ll probably still read ‘Investment and Economic Principles’ when it comes out in the hope of getting more practical tips for making money! Hopefully with lots more concrete examples of his experiences in the markets.

Otessa Moshfegh - Eileen

Moshi mosh motherfeghers! Otessa? More like Grotessa! All bad jokes aside, this is a grotesque book. As with Homesick for Another World the author specialises in feelings of disgust. This takes many forms. Eileen, the protagonist and narrator, has many features that seem designed to make the reader feel discomfort. Physical things like her extreme malnutrition, her dirtiness, her habit of wearing her dead mother’s ill fitting clothes, her oceanic bowel movements and her propensity to vomit. Psychological disgust and repulsion are also front and centre. Eileen’s homelife is as depressing and squalid as the house itself. Her delusional, alcoholic father treats her like a slave and only speaks to abuse and denigrate her. Her work at a correctional facility for boys is mundane and repetitive. Her internal life is also sordid and degenerate. She fantasises about killing her father and plans to run away. In essence, everything is miserable and seems stage managed to make your stomach turn. It’s laid on very thickly and this can be a little much. However, it does serve to emphasise how mundane and unhappy Eileen’s life is both internally and externally.


There are two big turning points in the book. One - the arrival of Rebecca, a new educational consultant, at Eileen’s work and two - the subsequent happenings of their early friendship. The pace of the book is slow and drudging to begin with, which I enjoyed. Things suddenly explode into action later on. Rebecca appears in the book like a character from another world. She is beautiful, self-confident, educated and appears upper class and cosmopolitan. Eileen falls in love with her instantly and is disbelieving that Rebecca will even give her the time of day. It brings some meaning and enjoyment into her life beside her plans of running away, which she seems to lack the bravery to execute before Rebecca arrives. The shining ray of brilliant, almost implausible, sunshine that is Rebecca doesn’t last long before it is considerably dimmed and contorted by the novel’s monstrous filter. This was probably the best bit of the book for me. I loved the chaotic incongruity of what Eileen thinks is Rebecca’s house when she goes to visit. Eileen is expecting stylish decor, luxurious homeware and exotic alcohol served in refined glassware. When she arrives to discover a scene of poverty and disarray that Rebecca couldn’t possibly have curated in the few weeks since she moved to X-ville; it is obvious that something is up. Has Eileen imagined Rebecca’s sophistication at work? It is certainly possible given how deranged Eileen seems. Has Eileen invented Rebecca entirely? Will Rebecca turn out to be a murderous psychopath? I felt like it might be a caricatured plot twist like this but in the end it was so much better. Rebecca has had a chat with a, previously silent, inmate at the correctional facility. He tells her that the reason he killed his father is because his father used to rape him every night with the complicity of his mother who used to give him an enema after supper. If this seems quite heavy, it is a good example of the general tone of the novel; it is disgusting and repulsive in the extreme. In any case, it turns out that Rebecca has driven to the boy’s mother’s house and locked her up in the basement in order to extract a confession, to precisely what ends remains uncertain, and has called Eileen to assist her. This is a good plot twist and an excellent way of explaining the insane dissonance of Eileen’s view of Rebecca at work and what she encounters when she arrives.


Rather less good are the following scenes. The boy’s mother is threatened by Eileen with a gun and confesses. Apparently she permitted the rape of her son through a sense of spousal responsibility and obedience. She also says her husband’s raping of her son coincided with rejuvenation of her husband’s sexual desire for her, which she enjoyed enough to ignore the darker goings on surrounding it. Because the husband used to fuck her after sodomising his son, she gets vaginal infections and starts administering the enemas in an attempt to stop this. This all seems rather muddled, implausible and hastily flung together after the more considered pace of the earlier parts of the novel. Things continue in this vein when Rebecca drops the gun that Eileen happens to be carrying because her drunk father can’t be trusted with it anymore and, lo and behold, it accidently shoots the implausibly bound captive mother in the arm. It all feels a bit slapdash especially after the fantastic plot twist with Rebecca.


There are some excellent portions of dark humour in the book. Eileen’s awakening after a night of drinking with Rebecca on p152 is funny and accurately describes the disorderly aftermath of extreme intoxication. On p202 Eileen is perturbed by ‘Rebecca’s disregard for decorum, to put it lightly’ when, in the absence of a corkscrew, she smashes open the bottle of wine Eileen has brought on the countertop. Conversely, the scene where Eileen steals Jesus’s swaddling from the nativity scene to wrap up the bottle of wine seems a forced and clunky attempt at symbolism.


The book had some really great bits but wasn’t consistently good. It had an uneven, patchy pace and structure. With the exception of the scenes in Rebecca’s ‘house’ and the associated plot twist, I prefered the more quotidien sections. Everything I have read by Otessa Moshfegh is so militantly depraved and ugly, I wonder why she chooses to exclude more positive feelings and sentiments from her work so entirely. Perhaps it is something deep and philosophical relating to sin and moral corruption being more permanent facets of the human character than, for instance, joy, love and beauty. Whatever the case, I didn’t dislike this book for being dark. I did feel that it is overdone and poorly executed in some places. If it remains the sole focus of her work, would this end up making her a rather one dimensional author? It’s surely too early to tell but I think it would be a shame if such a good writer limited herself in this kind of way.

Otessa Moshfegh - Homesick For Another World

The prose is excellent and highly readable. It sounds casual and unrehearsed, like the author is simply writing down their internal monologue. However, there’s such a wide range of characters contained in this collection of short stories this can’t be the case. These, seemingly off hand, reflections also convey rich narratives of surprising depth even though the stories are rarely more than 20 pages of double spaced text. It’s impressive and very skillfully done. The language isn’t overly pretentious and the author does a good job of effacing her own style and personality from the writing. There’s the occasional glimpse of the writer behind the characters. For example, any beige substance is usually referred to as ‘dun’ coloured and body parts are often called by the physiological name for the bone within them - mandible, clavicle.


In spite of the broad variety of characters there’s a distinctive aesthetic to the stories. It’s a bit like Wes Anderson films. It’s identifiable and somewhat dreamlike but as opposed to being cute and quirky, it’s dark, nightmarish and misanthropic. Sometimes this goes a little far for my tastes. Everyone’s a dysfunctional drug addict or alcoholic. All marriages are empty and loveless. All sex involves extensive anal fingering or dildoing. The story that best exemplifies this is The Locked Room. It’s so outlandish but retains an ostensibly realistic setting unlike A Better Place, which is explicitly other worldly and much better for being so. The Locked Room felt self-consciously weird and disgusting and this made it cartoonish, shallow and meaningless. Malibu also falls into this category. As do Mr Wu, An Honest Woman and The Surrogate in less gratuitous and definitive ways. They all had a slightly inauthentic ring. This isn’t always the case by any means. The boyfriend in The Weirdos is odd and wonderfully unpleasant in an entirely believable and interesting way. The self-obsessed hipster in Dancing in the Moonlight is also brilliantly observed. Even if his abysmal negotiations in acquiring an ottoman are a bit of a stretch. Most of the other stories were engaging, credible and well written. Her younger characters have a richer texture than her older ones. A good example of this is An Honest Woman where the only thing less plausible than the narrative is the behaviour of the old man. I suppose that could be because the author is younger but some of her best characters are male and she’s not a man!


I really enjoyed reading this largely for the excellent prose. The narratives can be a little too self consciously gruesome or downright unlikely, which is also the case for a few of the characters. Nonetheless, the stories are rich and create a powerful ambience. When good characters and narrative combine it’s fantastic as the writing is of a uniformly high quality.

George Orwell - A Clergyman's Daughter

This is the worst Orwell book I’ve read so far. The book starts off well enough with a good description of a clergyman’s daughter’s life of drudgery. Her father is stuck up, lazy, distant and lives beyond his means, which makes her life all the more difficult. He squanders what savings he does have speculating on the stock market with disastrous consequences. This is very sad because they could be used to help his daughter’s desperate attempts to keep him in the style he has become accustomed. All of a sudden, she finds herself homeless and on the streets in London. This is where the trouble began for me!


From a narrative perspective, it feels a lot like Orwell has decided that he wants to write about something else or doesn’t know how to continue with the story and so attempts a clumsy segway into something else he has written. Dorothy's life on the street reads a lot like Down and Out in London and Paris and I had a suspicion that this was excess material from Orwell’s tramping trips that had been adapted to flesh out this novel. This suspicion was reinforced by the fact that Orwell makes no real attempt to explain how Dorothy came to experience such a dramatic change in circumstances. All that’s offered by way of an explanation is that she, ‘lost her memory.’ The newspaper articles that appear about her disappearance reproduce her nosy neighbour’s account that she eloped with the loose living Mr Warburton. However, this isn’t supported by the later stages of the book when Dorothy recovers from her amnesia. There’s no proper account of what happened to her and I found that deeply unsatisfactory.


Dorothy’s amnesia also seems to be a strange mixture of remembering some things while forgetting others. Usually, she forgets those things that would be most beneficial for the plot and this is an annoying and lazy characteristic of the book. She also fails to be prompted about her identity by photos of herself in the paper, the incongruity of her accent and education or any other of a thousand possible signs that might give her pause for thought. She dumbly accepts her circumstances and moves through periods of hop-picking, sleeping rough and begging until Orwell runs out of scenes of life ‘on the road’ and has her remember who she is all of a sudden. For me, this was a very weak narrative.


Once she does remember who she is, her father disowns her because of the scandal and she receives help from her aristocratic cousin who gets her a job as a school mistress. This period is just as disjointed as the other scenes of life on the road and reminded me of Bronte’s Villette, which I consider to be a terrible book! Eventually, she is given the sack by the abominable proprietress of the school. Luckily, it turns out that the slandering neighbour who gave the account of Dorothy’s elopement with Mr Warburton has herself been discredited and that Dorothy’s reputation is now clean. Again, this all struck me as rather too convenient and another example of Orwell’s lazy narrative construction in this book. Far from showing her horrible father any resentment for being tardy in helping her once she did eventually remember who she was, Dorothy seems delighted to return to her former life. This is implausible. For someone to show no anger or bitterness at having had such gruesome experiences of poverty and homelessness is frankly unbelievable. Indeed, Dorothy hardly seems to have undergone any changes whatsoever and moves seamlessly from her original condition to homelessness and complete amnesia to being a school mistress and back to her original condition! It’s all far too clumsy and facile to make a decent plot. The only substantial change that seems to have happened to her is that she is no longer religious. One might think that this loss of faith might have some impact on her choice of life but apparently she is just as happy to act as a church slave without belief as she was to act as one while she still believed! The book finishes with some trite, sentimental philosophising from Dorothy about the joy of duty and performing her plodding toil without complaint.


The prose in the book is good and this is its salvation. There are also some enjoyable portions like the opening chapters describing her life with her father and the ones about hop picking. However, the book as a whole had a very slapdash feel and an almost inconceivably weak narrative. It’s as if Orwell wrote three different stories; one about the domestic life of a clergyman’s daughter, one about life as a hop picker and vagrant and another about life as a schoolmistress in a bad school. It seems like he then tried to join the three parts together in five minutes while using as little of his creativity and intellect as possible! Both the plot and the psychology of Dorothy are unimaginable in the extreme and this really spoiled the book for me.

George Orwell - Burmese Days

The prose in this book was a bit more floral than what I’ve come across in Orwell before. The voice is more confident than that of Down and Out in Paris and London but also more verbose. I found it inferior to the more matter of fact tone of Down and Out in Paris and London. On the other hand, this book is more a through-going novel and so probably requires a slightly more expansive style. There is a lot more dialogue, which isn’t always a good thing. It’s not as lucid and pithy as his later books like 1984 and Animal Farm. Some of the description is a bit self-conscious and occasionally floral. I wouldn’t call it bad but it’s not as tight as the other Orwell I’ve read.


The characters and the subject matter are far better. The lonely, debauched figure of Flory is very well drawn. He is at once pitiable and detestable. His solitary existence amongst the boring, racist pukka sahibs of the club is excruciating. The inhospitable climate and the extreme isolation of his station complete the misery. His recourse to boozing and fornicating seem understandable and I was sympathetic to the self-loathing he experiences as a consequence. Against this, the spineless way he refuses to support his friend Dr Veraswami is horrible to read and really turned me against him.


The appearance of a young Elizabeth seems to be his salvation and no one seems to believe this more readily than Flory even though the two are a wildly unsuitable match. Elizabeth is a dyed in the wool racist and of the same species as the rest of the club bores. However, in his desperation to find something that he likes about himself and his life, Flory thinks she’s everything he needs to make his life complete. After an amorous shooting trip where Flory kills a leopard, which proves to be a strong aphrodisiac for Elizabeth, I thought he would propose. Flory wastes this opportunity and is then cast aside by Elizabeth when she learns Flory keeps a local mistress. Elizabeth has also been informed by her Aunt that a better prospect was arriving in their remote region of Myanmar. This part of the story is very good and the unrequited fawning of the locals on the newly arrived Military Police officer, his singular interest in a casual acquaintance with Elizabeth and his vanishing departure are all excellent. Rather less good is the way Flory wastes another chance at proposing to Elizabeth by being loquacious. I thought that after his first experience that he would not lose even a second in proposing to her when his fortunes had, unexpectedly, turned. I was also rather disappointed that Flory didn’t have more of an epiphany about Elizabeth’s suitability after being so unceremoniously dumped by her in favour of the dapper young Verrall. That he thinks he is still in love with her is probably only an indication of how dire his life is and how little he is prepared to do about it given his indolent nature.


Flory’s great moment of triumph is good scene. It’s nice to see him act decisively for once! In the aftermath of the riot I was also pleased to see that Dr Veraswami’s stock had risen and U Po Kyin’s machinations against him appear to have failed. The two plots of native, subordinate scheming and love story of a despairing colonial are skillfully intertwined. I also liked the way the book ended with evil eventually triumphing. This seems an appropriate outcome given the acerbic criticism of the colonial system that Orwell maintains throughout the book. Of course, it’s sad to see Flory, a not wholly unsympathetic character, commit suicide. Nonetheless, I felt it was in keeping with Orwell’s criticism of the colonial system that no good should come of it. The only issue I had with the final plot twist, where Flory’s mistress runs into the church to disgrace him in front of the whole congregation including Elizabeth, is that it is hardly new information. Elizabeth is already aware of Flory’s actions. First, through her Aunt and then through Flory’s letter to her admitting his sins but asking for forgiveness after she dumps him for the first time. I suppose it is plausible that the hypocritical, superficial colonial society, as Orwell paints it, would only be prepared to tolerate indiscretions if they were kept semi-private. For example, Elizabeth’s uncle’s furious womanising whenever he gets away from his wife. This phenomenon seems to be well known within colonial society but perhaps doesn’t draw the same disgrace because it isn’t as highly visible as Flory’s embarrassment. Nevertheless, even though the scene is dramatic enough, it felt a bit hasty and stretched from a narrative perspective. Flory’s suicide also seems an overreaction if it is taken as an isolated response to this incident. It makes more sense if, like me, you feel he is pretty close to suicide at the beginning of the book before Elizabeth turns up. The scheming, unctious U Po Kyin is a perfect representation of the kind of pond life that thrives under the rotten colonial system that Orwell attacks so violently. He is at once thoroughly unpleasant but strangely pleasing in his cunning. His eventual success, alongside Flory’s suicide, are the climatic damnation of colonial society and administration in Burma.


I liked this book even though the prose isn’t the finest example of Orwell’s writing. It is a scathing criticism of the colonial system. The plot is enjoyable but perhaps a little weak in the scene where Flory is disgraced in the church. The characters are excellent throughout.

George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

I really enjoyed this book. The prose is flowing and easy to read. It’s really impressive given that Orwell must have only been in his mid to late twenties when he wrote it. The characteristic clarity and economy is already there in abundance. One aspect of this book, which isn’t evident in the other Orwell books I’ve read, are the occasional justifications he offers for his writing. It’s as if he lacks confidence that what he is writing is sufficiently interesting or is worried that the purpose of his observations will be misunderstood; ‘for what they are worth...’, ‘I do this to...’, ‘These are only my own ideas...’, ‘I present them as a sample...’ etc. It’s unnecessary and a bit clunky. This is one of the weaker part of the book.


The characters are brilliant; Charlie, the shirker, rapist and bistro philosopher, Mario, the Italian expert cafetiere, Boris, the enthusiastic and overweight former Russian soldier, Paddy, the loquacious Irish moocher, Bozo, the stoic Screever. They are so well drawn I felt like I had an intimate knowledge of them. But Orwell never hammers out lengthy, self-conscious passages of description to achieve this. Rather, the idiosyncrasies are finely crafted into the general flow of the writing so I hardly noticed them as distinct. The book also contains street stories about more minor characters he has met or heard about. These too have an authentic feel. The swindles are probably my favourites. The couple selling pornographic postcards that turn out to be normal. The Serb who only takes day work, works hard and then tries to get sacked as soon after noon as possible so as to receive his day’s pay for the minimum amount of effort. The miser who buys fake cocaine didn’t quite ring true as, if he were the incorrigible miser he’s made out to be, then surely he would have inspected the goods he was purchasing more thoroughly.


The physical scenes that Orwell draws are excellent too. The chaos of the Hotel X, the squalor of the Russian restaurant and the filth of his various accommodations are all highly memorable. Like the characters, Orwell achieves this without too much laborious prose and it’s pleasurable reading throughout. The scene of drinking in the bistro in Paris during his day off was amusing and vivid. I did find myself incredulous at the extent of the dirt and the hardship that employed people suffered in the late 1920s. I thought perhaps that things had been exaggerated for dramatic effect. Even in a cheap hotel, the filthiness of the bedclothes and the magnitude of the insect infestation in Paris seem outrageous. It also seems astonishing that someone can work so many hours and be so abjectly poor. Later on, the hardships of ‘the spike’ and the dormitories in London seem equally unfathomable for a modern reader.


The book also contains interesting philosophical or sociological observations about poverty and different classes from Orwell, who’s experiences probably made him more informed on this subject than most. The freedom and relief of poverty is one counterintuitive aspect of this. He writes, ‘poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.’ And later on, ‘within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry….you have talked so often of going to the dogs–and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.’ Orwell also writes about the unwarranted fear rich people have of the poor. Perhaps this is because the rich know that the situation is so unfair! He writes, ‘Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ This passage is obviously also racist and there are several other examples of it in the book. It’s unpleasant to read but I suppose these sort of views were common for the time even among educated people like Orwell.


Orwell also offers an interesting justification of begging as a profession, ‘Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course–but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout–in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.’ Here it seems to me that Orwell is fundamentally correct. He is also insightful about the reasons people despise beggars, ‘I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue.’ If anything, money may have become an even more universal test of virtue today that it was then.


Chapter 22 is quite an interesting, if somewhat incomplete, reflection on the nature of employment. He asks why hard, unskilled work exists and why it must continue. He likens it to ‘slavery’ and asks if the ‘luxury’ it provides, or the end of ‘civilisation’ that it purportedly serves, are really so worthy after all. I would broadly agree with him on these points except for the fact that while Orwell seems to think there is something like ‘civilisation’ I see only people who want to do things and people who are willing to supply these desires. I don’t see an overarching aim or purpose to society’s various occupations save, perhaps, some broad species of self-interest. Equally, Orwell tell us ‘smartness’ simply means that the customer pays more and the staff work more and the only person who benefits is the proprietor. This also struck me as a slightly facile and naive understanding of the situation. A large hotel will employ many more staff than a cheap one and not simply make the same number of staff work harder. Equally, the staff there will earn more as Orwell himself describes when detailing the tips of the waiter. He also says nothing of the role of capital in the provision of a smart hotel experience. The hotel must operate in a building and in a capitalist system that cannot be had for nothing. He concludes that the system exists to keep the working class tired and servile. He goes on to speculate that most rich people would know this but want the status quo to remain for their own safety. This all struck me as a rather immature conspiracy theory without much genuine support or evidence. For me, he’s right to point out that lots of jobs are more or less pointless but to conclude that this indicates a grand, systematic subjugation of the poor by the rich is incorrect. The rich do benefit from many privileges the poor will never enjoy and this could be seen as unethical. However, to see the whole labour market as rigged is a step too far for me. This chapter was superficial and a bit naive.


The fact that being poor attracts the attention of many worthy types who wish to ‘help’ those less fortunate than themselves is well drawn in the book. Orwell writes, ‘It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.’ This strikes me as true and it easy to see examples of poor people been made the object of middle class people’s worthiness in many instances of charity. This may be a contributing factor in the scene described by Orwell in London where 100 or so homeless people jeer and mock a church service they have been forced to attend in exchange for some food. Orwell thinks that it may be a deeper human instinct, which I’m not totally convinced about. He writes, ‘a man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor–it is a fixed characteristic of human nature’.


I thoroughly enjoyed the prose, characters and scenes depicted in this book even though some of them may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. If none of them have been hyperbolised then I am glad that things have come so far in the last 80-odd years! Some of the reflections on how society operates struck me as grandiose, naive and superficial but even these sections contained valid points too. It’s not the best book I’ve read by Orwell but it is impressive to see how good his prose was even as a young writer and some of the characters and scenes are fantastic.

Hans Rosling - Factfulness

If you’ve watched one of Rosling’s famous talks then it’s debatable if it’s worth reading this book. If you haven’t then I’d say it’s definitely worth it. The book kicks off by asking 13 multiple choice questions about global health, development and education. If you’ve seen his TED talk, then you already know that the answer will always be the most optimistic answer. Because of this, a lot of the book is a bit slow paced and redundant if you’re already familiar with his message. The book is written so it will be comprehensible to almost anyone. It is very clear and easy to read. This makes it a little pedestrian for people who already know that not everyone outside of the ‘Western’ world is poor. On the other hand, it’s not a long book and the style is very light and easy to comprehend so it’s possible to skim some of the explanations if you’re already familiar with the facts.


The book has a clear mission: To encourage people to inform themselves by using statistics to combat their biases. Rosling’s approach to statistics is sensible and the advice he gives is clear and applicable. I’m a bit of a sceptic about huge scale stats like GDP, which strikes me as impossible to measure but, for the most part, the stats used in the book are more comprehensible. For example, child mortality rates, percentages of women in education and where the human population live in the world. Of course, it’s possible to argue that all statistics have their limitations but Rosling is prepared to accept that. I think it’s fair to say that some inputs are needed for a meaningful discussion about the issues that are addressed in the book and the stats are better than uninformed speculation.


Alongside a presentation of his message about the importance of statistics in informing our opinions and decisions there are enjoyable and interesting anecdotes about his life and varied career. These are delivered in the style of an experienced professor or lecturer who’s told the same story hundreds and hundreds of times. Sometimes there’s a bit too much name dropping but it’s not intolerable. The style is formulaic but this does give the book clarity and structure. The summaries at the end of each chapter are very useful and I’ll reproduce a version of these after this review. In the chapter on urgency, Rosling makes the point that information is best learned when it is returned to and reinforced over a period of time. This is one of my main aims in writing these notes. In an informative book like this I think it’s really great to have this feature included.


This book is aimed at the popular market and, in order to make the material clear and comprehensible, sometimes it is a bit superficial in its presentation. I was reminded of reading books like Bjorn Lomborg’s The Sceptical Environmentalist and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow by certain parts of this. These books offer more in depth analysis of some of the issues raised. Rosling doesn’t always use the academic terms for the psychological or behavioural phenomena he talks about. Nor does he reference the other people who have worked on these ideas and discovered them before him. I suppose this could be described as arrogant and taking credit for other people’s ideas. On the other hand, it’s not an academic book and lots of footnotes and references would make the text clunkier. Nonetheless, most of these ideas aren’t Rosling’s and he isn’t the first to write about them but this book gives the impression that they are!


Overall, I’d say this book would be a great introduction to statistics and behavioural biases for someone who knows nothing about them. If you’ve already read quite a lot about this topic then the book is a bit facile. Nonetheless, Rosling and his team should be heartily congratulated for quest to reduce ignorance and encourage people to have strong supporting facts for their opinions!


CHAPTER SUMMARY

1. To control THE GAP INSTINCT, look for the majority.
• Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
• Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.
• The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.
Page: 65

2. To control the NEGATIVITY INSTINCT, expect bad news.
• Better and bad. Practice distinguishing between a level (e.g., bad) and a direction of change (e.g., better). Convince yourself that things can be both better and bad.
• Good news is not news. Good news is almost never reported. So news is almost always bad. When you see bad news, ask whether equally positive news would have reached you.
• Gradual improvement is not news. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement.
• More news does not equal more suffering. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world.
• Beware of rosy pasts. People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories.
Page: 74

3. To control THE STRAIGHT LINE INSTINCT, remember that curves come in different shapes.
• Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends do not follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. No child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to. [cf. Malthus]
Page: 123

4. To control THE FEAR INSTINCT, calculate the risks.
• The scary world: fear vs. reality. The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected—by your own attention filter or by the media—precisely because it is scary.
• Risk = danger × exposure. The risk something poses to you depends not on how scared it makes you feel, but on a combination of two things. How dangerous is it? And how much are you exposed to it?
• Get calm before you carry on. When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.
Page: 143

5. To control THE SIZE INSTINCT, get things in proportion.
• Compare. Big numbers always look big. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something.
• 80/20. Have you been given a long list? Look for the few largest items and deal with those first. They are quite likely more important than all the others put together.
• Divide. Amounts and rates can tell very different stories. Rates are more meaningful, especially when comparing between different-sized groups. In particular, look for rates per person when comparing between countries or regions.
Page: 165

6. To control the GENERALISATION INSTINCT, question your categories.
• Look for differences within groups. Especially when the groups are large, look for ways to split them into smaller, more precise categories. And …
• Look for similarities across groups. If you find striking similarities between different groups, consider whether your categories are relevant. But also …
• Look for differences across groups. Do not assume that what applies for one group (e.g., you and other people living on Level 4 or unconscious soldiers) applies for another (e.g., people not living on Level 4 or sleeping babies).
• Beware of “the majority.” The majority just means more than half. Ask whether it means 51 percent, 99 percent, or something in between.
• Beware of vivid examples. Vivid images are easier to recall but they might be the exception rather than the rule.
• Assume people are not idiots. When something looks strange, be curious and humble, and think, In what way is this a smart solution?
Page: 184

7. To control THE DESTINY INSTINCT, remember slow change is still change.
• Keep track of gradual improvements. A small change every year can translate to a huge change over decades.
• Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.
• Talk to Grandpa. If you want to be reminded of how values have changed, think about your grandparents’ values and how they differ from yours.
• Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.
Page: 199

8. To control THE SINGLE PERSPECTIVE INSTINCT, get a toolbox, not a hammer.
• Test your ideas. Don’t only collect examples that show how excellent your favorite ideas are. Have people who disagree with you test your ideas and find their weaknesses.
• Limited expertise. Don’t claim expertise beyond your field: be humble about what you don’t know. Be aware too of the limits of the expertise of others.
• Hammers and nails. If you are good with a tool, you may want to use it too often. If you have analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating the importance of that problem or of your solution. Remember that no one tool is good for everything. If your favorite idea is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers, wrenches, and tape measures. Be open to ideas from other fields.
• Numbers, but not only numbers. The world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone. Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives.
• Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise. Solve problems on a case-by-case basis.
Page: 208

9. To control THE BLAME INSTINCT, resist finding a scapegoat.
• Look for causes, not villains. When something goes wrong don’t look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation.
• Look for systems, not heroes. When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system some credit.
Page: 242

10. To control THE URGENCY INSTINCT, take small steps.
• Take a breath. When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down. Ask for more time and more information. It’s rarely now or never and it’s rarely either/or.
• Insist on the data. If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful.
• Beware of fortune-tellers. Any prediction about the future is uncertain. Be wary of predictions that fail to acknowledge that. Insist on a full range of scenarios, never just the best or worst case. Ask how often such predictions have been right before.
• Be wary of drastic action. Ask what the side effects will be. Ask how the idea has been tested. Step-by-step practical improvements, and evaluation of their impact, are less dramatic but usually more effective.

Darren McGarvey - Poverty Safari

This book is about poverty and class relations in Scotland. In the interests of full disclosure, I live in Scotland and would classify myself as a bona fide middle class person. I went to private school, have a university degree and worked in a high status job. That’s if status can be defined by salary, which, rightly or wrongly, it often seems to be. So anyone reading this can take my opinions in the context of that cultural background. I don’t think this defines everything I say but it would be foolish to think it has no effect. As McGarvey writes, ‘From a very young age, we are all inculcated into the mores of a tribe and adopt those values often without thought, later mistaking them for our own.’ This seems like fair comment.


I had a mixed reaction to this book. It has interesting and powerfully expressed sections. Other sections are contradictory, incoherent or lack supporting evidence, which weakens the argument being made. It’s a bit disorganised and I wasn’t that keen on McGarvey’s style of writing.


From the outset, McGarvey admits the book doesn’t have a definite structure or argument. This is true and, for me, it affects the quality of the reading experience. The chapters take the form of short anecdotes, experiences or rants. It’s haphazard and I was often left wanting more discussion of the points it raised. I felt like the book highlighted problems more than it offered ideas for solutions. For example, I never felt like I had a good idea of what McGarvey thought about universal basic income’s efficacy as a means of solving poverty because it’s only referred to in passing. With the exception of some broad ideas like taking more personal responsibility, quoted above, engaging in cross-societal discussion and involving people more in their community it was short on specifics. Obviously, a book can’t do everything in a few hundred pages but I didn’t feel like it was very coherent in this regard. In terms of style, McGarvey writes some great passages and has a large vocabulary for someone who claims not to read much. I’m fairly sure this lack of reading has been exaggerated for dramatic effect as he references quite a few books and essays in the course of the book. In some sections the style feels needlessly wordy and verbose. Three or four adjectives or verbs are piled one on top of another where one would do just as well and give the text more clarity. As Orwell wrote in Why I Write, ‘good prose is like a windowpane’ because the writer struggles to efface their personality. McGarvey’s prose is quite the opposite of this and, for me, focuses too much on expressing his personality and too little on the underlying ideas. This book won the Orwell prize, according to google awarded ‘for political writing of outstanding quality’, and while this book is certainly political I don’t think the writing is of outstanding quality.


Some of the book takes the form of heartbreaking memoir. McGarvey writes that, for a while, telling his shocking stories about his Mum and his experiences growing up to middle class people were his specialist subject. He writes, ‘there’s no way someone like me would have been given the opportunity to write a book like this had I not draped it, at least partially, in the veil of a misery memoir.’ I’m not sure how true this is and I’m not well placed to say. I think it is effective insofar as it helps people with no experience of this kind of life gain some understanding of its challenges and hardships. These are things middle class people like me could never imagine as a child. Against this, the narrative McGarvey presents feels heavily redacted and there were points where I really wanted to know more about the other influences in his life. His father seems an interesting figure but is barely discussed in detail. He seems more responsible than McGarvey’s mum: he works, but we don’t find out as what, he encourages them to live a moderate lifestyle and takes them swimming once a week. He wanted to leave McGarvey’s Mum but found out she was pregnant and stayed with her. Did he then go on to have four more children with her or are the siblings McGarvey writes about half brothers and sisters? What was the history behind such a dysfunctional and ill women having so many children? When McGarvey says his relationship with his Dad broke down, why did this happen? Much like the criticism I made of the books structure, there were lots of parts where I wanted to know more. His aunt, who’s an MSP, is another example of this. She sounds like a formidable woman and I wondered what her experience of poverty had been and how she fits in to the narrative of communities isolated from the political process. Again, it’s not fair to ask a book to be several different things at once but I felt like I would have preferred a fuller account of the author’s life and a fuller account of his political ideas. I feel this would have helped provide a clearer presentation of both.


This book had an interesting, if unclear, approach to money. No one in Scotland is in poverty in an absolute sense, as defined by any widely accepted measure. What’s being talked about in this book is relative poverty, having less money or a lower income than most people in your country, which is in no way to say that it's a less serious issue. According to the Scottish government, poverty means less than £7,300 per year, after housing costs, for a single person. To me, that’s an almost inconceivably small amount of money whichever way you look at it. But would the problems of poverty disappear if everyone had more money? Theoretically, if everyone in Scotland's income doubled overnight this would have no effect on relative poverty. I’ve always assumed that giving people more money would have to be a major part of any solution to poverty. I’ve liked and been interested in the idea of Universal Basic Income for a while. This book made me less optimistic about it. I’m not even sure there could be such a thing as a solution to poverty now. The biggest problems that McGarvey writes about don’t seem to be directly related to money. Most seem to be about mental health and, speaking from my own experience as a relatively rich person, money doesn’t seem to be able to solve these problems across the board. Of course, incidence of mental health problems is far lower amongst higher income groups. This is probably in part due to lack of services and resources for lower income groups, which could be improved by more money. But, as McGarvey’s stories about his childhood make abundantly clear, it’s also because people with low incomes experience many more causes of mental health problems and I’m not sure more money would help this. What’s the main cause of these mental health issues? Childhood trauma, according to McGarvey, and this seems to impossible to reverse retrospectively. I may be completely wrong but the environment McGarvey grew up in, as he describes it, doesn’t seem like it would have been helped much by simply giving him and his mother more money. Addicts usually spend any extra money they get on their intoxicant of choice and giving them more cash won’t make the root of their addiction go away. McGarvey describes how he was given a £5,000 backdated disability allowance payment. He writes about how he spent it mainly on drinking and drug taking. I’m not trying to blame him for this, I’d have done the same at his age and I grew up with plenty of positive role models in far less traumatic circumstances. Meanwhile, McGarvey’s mother, who also suffered from addiction, seems a dreadful role model and the cause of considerable trauma for him. Giving large sums of money to young people with no idea how to manage it strikes me as a terrible idea whatever their circumstance. At one point in the book, it seemed like maybe McGarvey did think universal basic income would be the answer when he writes about the options available to people who are living in poverty right now. He asks, rhetorically, what ‘the people who’ll never see Universal Basic Income being rolled out?’ can do. This seems to imply that he feels that UBI could be a solution to poverty but it’s not clear. He doesn’t expand on this point and so it’s inconclusive.


I’m fairly convinced that spending more money on social services must be an important part of reducing poverty but I’m also convinced it can’t be the only part. The overall tone book offers a far more nuanced view of poverty so perhaps his comment on universal basic income was just a rhetorical throw away. I feel like he’s closer to the truth when he writes, ‘contrary to what we’ve been told, the issue of poverty is far too complex to blame solely on ‘Tories’ or ‘elites’. It’s precisely because of the complexity at play, and how difficult it is to grasp, that we look for easy scapegoats. Whether it be the left blaming the rich or the right blaming the poor, we tend only to be interested in whichever half of the story absolves us of responsibility for the problem. That’s not the sort of thing a politician looking to get elected can say to a potential voter.’ I think there’s a lot of truth in this passage. It’s not just a matter of money. It’s not a matter of any one, specific, easily identifiable factor. The worrying and saddening truth about poverty seems to be that no one really knows what to do. Would it have helped McGarvey if his Mum had had more money? Possibly, but the mental health and addiction issues would have surely remained. Would he have been better off if he’d been taken away from his mother at a young age and put in care? Probably not, but what do I know. These sort of counterfactual, theoritical questions don’t seem to be of much use to those experiencing poverty first hand.


I felt like one of the strongest and most powerful parts of the book was McGarvey’s call to take action and responsibility at a personal level. He writes, ‘What we now need to ask ourselves, as a matter of urgency is, which aspects of poverty can we positively affect through our own thinking and action? If poverty is negatively affecting our quality of life, is there any action we could take to mitigate this harm? Ultimately, which aspects of poverty are beyond our control and which are within our capability to change? On the left, I see constant talk of new economic systems, of overthrowing elites or of increasing public spending. I see endless debate about the overlapping, interdependent structural oppressions of western society and the symbolic violence inherent in capitalism. But I rarely see anyone talking about emotional literacy. It’s rare to see a debate about over-eating. I never see activists being more open about their drink problems and drug habits or the psychological problems fuelling them. Nobody ever seems to be writing a dissertation on the link between emotional stress and chronic illness or writing an op-ed about how they managed to give up smoking. As if somehow, these day-to-day problems are less consequential to the poor than the musings of Karl Marx.’ I once had an eye opening discussion with a former colleague of mine who came from a lower income background than mine. I remember espousing the idea that people in poverty were a product of their environment and couldn’t be expected to take full responsibility for what happened to them given they were coming from such disadvantaged backgrounds. Looking back on it, I was a tragically cliched middle class person in my approach to poverty! My colleague told me that this kind of thinking robbed lower income people of their agency and dignity. ‘Why haven’t I become a product of my environment?’, he asked me and I struggled to give a decent response. His theory was that it took him a huge amount of work and sacrifice to do it and that most people didn’t work as hard as he had. ‘But if you’re living a shitty life on a shitty council estate, do you want that to be your fault or somebody else’s?’ he asked me, ‘of course, you’d rather say it’s someone else's’, he concluded. I don’t think that his reasoning applies to all people living in poverty. Far from it, the reality is probably much more nuanced and complex than this rather black and white analysis makes allowance for. But I do remember suddenly realising how patronising my views were. McGarvey captures this brilliantly when he writes, ‘at some point, I started believing the lie that I was not responsible for my own thoughts, feelings and actions. That these were all by-products of a system that mistreated and excluded me.’


Similarly, across the class spectrum, it’s recently become fashionable to complain about Donald Trump’s presidency in America. McGarvey writes about being criticised by a fellow activist for bringing this up in a panel discussion. I see lots of people I know Trump bashing too. In no way do I feel like Donald Trump is a positive person or leader but I also don’t see how I can lay all the problems in the world at his doorstep. Wouldn’t I be better served trying to ‘be the change I want to see in the world’, however cliched that Ghandi quote has become? As McGarvey wisely points out, most of us have a lot of work to do in overcoming our own personal demons, whatever they may be, and Trump has nothing to do with these. I felt like this was one of the best parts of the book.


I wrote at the beginning that I had a mixed reaction to this book. A lot of this was to do with his confusing views on public spending and social work. Some of his criticisms are, to my mind, incorrect, confused or contradictory. For example:

At the beginning of the book he writes about how the news agenda is set by middle class people and gives the example of how a family taking the council to court over their decision to take their child out of school for a holiday was attracting more attention than a change in child benefit provision. However, he also acknowledges that people want to hear his ‘misery memoir’, clearly indicating that there is a place for working class issues in an undeniably middle class media. To my mind, the media focuses on dramatic issues and doesn’t care which class they come from. This is the reason why plane crashes get more coverage than traffic accidents even though the latter kills millions more than the former. Seeing everything through a class lens isn’t accurate in this instance.
He writes, ‘once you see the mechanics of the poverty industry up close, you realise it’s in a state of permanent growth and that without individuals, families and communities in crisis there would no longer be a role for these massive institutions.’ This seems to give the impression that there is a conspiracy to keep people poor and exploit them, which I’ve never seen any evidence for. Poverty costs society a huge amount in various ways that McGarvey eloquently describes in other passages of the book. So how could anyone, either rationally or morally, want it to continue? He also criticises austerity cuts in other passages of the book, which is odd if he really sees government spending as part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course, I’m not trying to say the government is perfect and totally free from bad decision making and bureaucracy but all large institutions suffer from these problems and to suggest that it is malicious strikes me as unfair and unsubstantiated.
He writes, ‘even the good guys make a mint from social deprivation’. By the standards of the middle class, no one in social work is making a mint. These people could be working in the private sector and making far more money so it struck me as unfair to have a go at people who have made personal financial sacrifices to try and help solve social problems. Again, not everyone’s perfect but this criticism struck me as unwarranted. Equally, he writes about his own working experiences in prisons, libraries and schools all of which, I am assuming, are paid for by the government but he doesn’t seem to see himself as part of the problem. Nor do I, to be clear, I think social work is necessary, demanding, largely underpaid and underappreciated. But how can he criticise this kind of work and also do it himself? It’s confused and contradictory.
He writes ‘the tools to fix the place are already here rather than parachuting government initiatives in who don’t understand the area. They want us to do work that looks good and sounds good; but isn’t always good.’ Again, I’m sure this is true in some cases but to use such a broad brush strikes me as incorrect. He also writes about the positive help he received from organisations like The Firestation, The Notre Dame Centre and The Prince’s Trust. These organisations don’t seem to be located in his community but are written about in a positive way so his criticism ends up looking contradictory. I’m also assuming that all these organisations receive at least some government funding, which, like all assumptions, may be incorrect! But would he really have been better off if The Firestation weren’t there to help house him when he was homeless and apply for the benefits he was entitled to? He explicitly mentions the Notre Dame Centre as providing him with a welcome opportunity to leave his area and go to the more affluent West End of Glasgow; should they be included in his criticism of parachutists?
Those who provide social services come in for some pretty harsh treatment. He writes, ‘success is not eradicating poverty but parachuting in and leaving a ‘legacy’. And when you up and leave, withdrawing your resources and expertise as you go, if a legacy hasn’t materialised, one is simply fabricated.’ This may be true in some instances but McGarvey doesn’t give any examples and I feel like if you’re going to make accusations like this then you should really back them up. I felt like it was an unsubstantiated rant at some points, which isn’t a crime in itself, but the argument would have been so much more powerful and persuasive if it had been supported by facts.

That’s probably enough examples for now! In summary, I felt the book argued against itself sometimes and made too many unsupported claims for my liking.


McGarvey writes some interesting reflections on how middle class people interact with poverty. For example, his description of how he quickly became less popular as a poverty media personality when he started to ask uncomfortable questions like, ‘Who makes the decisions about your budget?’ and ‘How do we solve poverty if all your jobs depend on it?’ is thought provoking. He writes, ‘What I soon learned was that, no matter your background, you are cast out the second you offend the people who’re in charge of your empowerment. Sometimes it’s a person, other times it’s an organisation. Sometimes it’s a movement and other times it’s a political party. But the minute you start telling your story in service of your own agenda and not theirs, you’re discarded. Your criticism is dismissed as not being constructive. Your anger is attributed to your mental health problems and everything about you that people once applauded becomes a stick they beat you with. Look out for these people. The people who pay wonderful lip service to giving the working class a voice, but who start to look very nervous whenever we open our mouths to speak.’ Some of this strikes me as true. There is always a power dynamic to any situation and this can often create perverse outcomes. Other good points I enjoyed were:

The decline of libraries and the impact this is having on lower income communities was described eloquently and accurately. I recently went to renew my parking permit at the council offices where I live and was told that this service had been moved. When I went to the new address it was in a library in a less affluent area of the city. First, I thought it was strange that half of the library reception area and one meeting room had been dedicated to council activities. Worse, was the fact that the library was no longer a quiet and peaceful place conducive to work and concentration. People were constantly coming and going, asking questions of the library staff in the mistaken belief that they worked for the council and generally disturbing the atmosphere. As McGarvey rightly points out, ‘the library is one of the few places in a deprived community that is quiet enough to hear yourself think’. The kind of repurposing he writes about has led to them becoming ‘busy, often quite noisy places, which seriously defeats their intended purpose.’ He goes on to explain, ‘essentially, the community centre is being imposed on the library to streamline the service in order to justify keeping the library open.’ This strikes me as a terrible loss to those communities that are unlucky enough to suffer this fate. In the instance of my experience, I would also question why it had been moved to a less affluent area on the outskirts of the city and not to a more central location. Equally, McGarvey’s accurate description of the importance of libraries in communities makes me wonder why he is so critical of government spending in poorer communities. Perhaps he is talking about different types of spending but he doesn’t make this clear and that’s why it’s strange to read such scathing criticism of ‘these massive institutions’ in the same book as such a well argued description of their benefits and importance.
The example of the council’s spending on the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow was very well drawn. He describes ‘a public Wi-Fi system, designed especially for the games so that affluent international sports fans could explore the city without having to log out of Facebook’. Meanwhile, in the same city, it can take up to 15 minutes to log on to an antiquated computer in his local community centre. Of course, there are arguments that could be made about how all the money spent on the Commonwealth Games is good for Glasgow’s global image and brand and will result in increased investment in the city, eventually leading to more jobs etc. etc. I think most of this is sophistry and that events like the Commonwealth Games are largely an excuse for government bigwigs to have a taxpayer funded jolly. The example of recent football World Cups suggests even more sinister motivations may be in play too. I may not be right about this, but McGarvey’s anger seems totally justified in this instance.
The section about ‘The Barn’ was very good insofar as it expressed what people working on the front line of poverty felt about how best to alleviate it. The sentence, ‘In an ideal world we would get funded for building trusting relationships with young people’ seemed so sensible and full of truth. What almost everyone needs, and most middle class people get from their families without giving it a second thought, are trusting relationships. This kind of writing began to give me an insight into the vitriol McGarvey expresses in the unsubstantiated rants against government agencies. If staff at The Barn are working to build lasting, trusting relationships but every four years a new government comes in with new initiatives to ‘solve’ poverty or cut spending, I can understand how frustrating and counterproductive that could be. Politicising poverty probably does result in a demand for statistics to make it seem like things are getting better or to justify money being spent when a government has promised to cut the budget. However, McGarvey doesn’t make this link or provide this evidence. As a reader, there is one chapter slagging off government agencies approach to poverty and then another, totally unconnected one, singing the praises of The Barn. I’m sure the staff at The Barn could provide plenty of examples to support but the type of criticism McGarvey makes in other passages of the book. But they are left unsupported and are much less powerful because of this. As opposed to a tightly argued comment, which it seems like it could become with the addition of facts, it’s left as an unsubstantiated rant. Readers are left to read between the lines and make assumptions about what he might be writing about and it would be so much better, and more coherent, if these connections were made explicit.
McGarvey is a really honest and self-critical writer. I have a lot of admiration for this as it’s not an easy thing to do. The book contains multiple sections where he takes a step back from a belief he’s strongly adhered to in the past and places it in a new context. Gaining this kind of perspective on yourself, your ideas and your shortcomings is, I know from my own experience, difficult and painful work and he should be congratulated for doing it in such a public way. When he discusses how he attacked artist Ellie Harrison’s publically funded project to stay in Glasgow for a year it’s really refreshing to see someone being honest about their mistakes and admitting when they’re wrong. In a section dripping with sarcasm he writes about how he attacked her, ‘believing myself to be well informed and deeply virtuous, unaware of how personal resentment was subtly directing my thinking. I am sure you have no idea what I’m talking about.’ I definitely know what he is talking about and I think anyone who claims they don’t isn’t being honest with themselves!

There were a few sundry sections of the book that I felt were either inaccurate or dealt with deep, complicated issues in too precursory a manner. When he writes about Brexit, ‘when people vote against their own interests because they don’t think it’s going to matter either way.’ It’s not clear to me that many working class people in Glasgow did vote for Brexit. Turnout was only 56% in the city and the results show voters voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the EU (67%). Even if we suppose they did vote for Brexit, which I don’t see much evidence for, how can he possibly say that it’s not in their interests to do so? No one even knows what form Brexit will take yet, let alone what it’s legacy will be in 10 or 20 years for working class people in Glasgow. It’s not possible to predict the future and I thought this section was misplaced and arrogant.


The discussion of the rise of intersectionality, social justice and identity politics was similar. I’m certainly no expert on this complicated topic but it seems unfair to me to dismiss it so summarily. Some of the points he makes are valid, like the lack of accountability in social media driven ‘call out’ campaigns. He’s making a good point when he writes, ‘ultimately, while holding everyone else to account, this culture is itself accountable to no one.’ He also raises an interesting idea when he writes of multinationals seeming endorsement of the social justice agenda in their marketing, ‘it’s certainly no bad thing that multinational companies like Pepsi, General Electric, Pfizer, Microsoft and Apple are using their clout to advance social justice. But it begs the question: what’s in it for them? Intersectionality in its current form, rather than an irritant to privilege, atomises society into competing political factions and undermines what really frightens powerful people: a well organised, educated and unified working class.’ However, I’m fairly sure these firms just do what their PR departments or advisors tell them to and those departments are just trying to concur with whatever they perceive the zeitgeist to be amongst the consumers they are targeting. The idea of a global conspiracy to keep the poor atomised assumes a level of collaboration that simply doesn’t exist, to my mind.


Lastly, and much more frivolously, McGarvey sometimes writes about drugs like none of his readers have ever taken any. He opines, ‘some people don’t get bad come-downs because they are not running away from anything when they get high.’ In my experience this is true of precisely zero people that I’ve ever met and is a bit like saying some people don’t get drunk when they drink! Of course, I can’t speak for everyone else’s experience but nor can McGarvey and I can only use my own experience and the reports other people give me of theirs. In the same manner, he seems to dramatise a, ‘Sunday morning...obligatory off-sales run after a night of partying’ when anyone who lives in Scotland and has had an all nighter on a Saturday knows you can’t buy booze until 12.30pm. It sometimes feels like he’s trying to make the safari more exciting for the punters.


This is an interesting book with some interesting ideas that suffers from being a bit haphazard and not fully developing or supporting the ideas it contains. There are good sections but overall it can seem contradictory. The style is a little self conscious and egotistical for my taste too. In the end, McGarvey adopts quite a conciliatory and conservative tone writing, ‘our system is riddled with internal contradiction, injustice and corruption, but is also very dynamic and offers a great many freedoms. For example, our current system, for all its flaws, is so dynamic that it can provide food, shelter and employment, as well as education, training and resources, for the very movements that are openly trying to overthrow it. This sort of liberty is not to be sneered at or taken for granted.’ While I would broadly agree with what he’s saying here, this kind of conclusion makes the more extreme sections of the book seem a bit incoherent. At some points he seems to be saying all government spending on poverty is a sham designed to keep poor people poor. This isn’t a bad book but it’s not amazing either.