The book takes the form of two separate parts written by different authors at different times. First, an account of the ‘facts’ surrounding the case by an anonymous ‘editor’ looking back on them from a point in the future. Secondly, the confessions of the ‘justified sinner’ himself, observed more or less concurrently. The book was published in 1824 but the majority of the action takes place around the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. The ‘editor’s narrative’ that precedes and follows the central document appear to be roughly contemporary to the book’s publication, i.e. early 19th century.
The story conveyed by the editor at the beginning of the book tells of a pious woman who is married to an elderly laird of more secular tastes. The couple are not at all well suited, quarrell and arrange their affairs so they live separately in the same house and never see each other. In spite of this, they have two sons. However, the laird will only recognise one of them and sends the other to live with his, now departed, mother in Glasgow. It is strongly implied that the second son, Robert, was fathered by a Reverend Wringhim who is the spiritual adviser and confidante of the pious wife. The spurned son grows up inculcated with his mother’s religion, reinforced by the instruction of Reverend Wringhim who he adopts as his father. This religion takes the form of a radical antinomian type of Calvinism that maintains that salvation is preordained and proceeds from faith and divine grace rather than adherence to laws. The term antinomian comes from the Greek words meaning, ‘against’ and ‘law’. The narrative, which the editor claims to be reconstructing from facts and local traditions, goes on to follow the two brothers to Edinburgh where a divisive debate relating to Covenanting is taking place. The two brothers are on opposite sides of the debate but do happen to meet for the first time and have a fight. Later, George, the first son, is murdered in suspicious circumstances outside a brothel. The prime suspect for his murder, which is not Robert, flees the country. Shortly after learning the news of his son’s death, George’s father the laird also dies. The laird’s heartbroken housekeeper / mistress continues to search for clues relating to the death of her adopted son. She finds there were eye witnesses to his murder who could identifiy Robert as one of the culprits but they have kept quiet because of their own criminality. She travels to the castle Robert has inherited from his biological father with one of the witnesses to identify Robert as the murderer. During their trip, Robert reveals his part in George’s murder and discusses a plot to kill his mother in conversation with his friend Gil-Martin before he goes on the run to escape the various authorities that suspect him of previous murders.
The ‘confessions’ essentially cover the same narrative but from Robert’s perspective. In this sense, the book isn’t driven by the narrative in the same way as, for example, a whodunnit. Most people reading the book today would probably be aware of the fact that it details the exploits of a murderous sinner aided and abetted by the Devil and, in this sense, the culprit is presupposed. Of course, some of the niceties are covered in greater detail than they are in the ‘Editor’s Narrative’ but the facts are broadly the same as those discovered by the laird’s housekeeper during her enquiries. Indeed, from a purely chronological perspective the ‘Editor’s narrative’ contains far more material as it contains the family history and the actions of several different characters not mentioned in the confession. However, the autobiographical confessions are full of interest for the reader because of their unique perspective and the insight they give into the psychology of the perpetrator. Both sources agree that Robert committed fratricide but differ in their assessments of it. The editor makes far scacer mention of Gil-Martin, the Devil to which Robert ascribes a good deal of the blame in his confession. Nonetheless, even the editor lends credence to his existence sighting various eyewitnesses to his close companionship with Robert, his ability to assume the form of other people and the incriminating conversation between the two observed by George’s mother (de facto) and the eyewitness to his murder. As such, it is not simply a question of the rational, factual account of the editor against the supernatural ravings of a murder; both documents allow for occult occurances. While the confessions are more explicitly paranormal it is hard to say that either source is particularly reliable and so, as a reader, you’re left wondering what to believe. Robert clearly wants to exculpate himself or, at least, record his experience but, by the same token, the editor seems eager to incriminate him and seems opposed to his antinomian religious views. It’s hard to see either as a disinterested record of facts especially as there is no hint about the editor’s identity.
The two authors adopt very different tones in describing events, perhaps as one would expect, but the juxtaposition of styles is still jarring. The editor narrates events as an interested outsider and much of the material is light hearted and jocular. The edition of the book I read contained two short stories by Hogg as well, ‘Marion’s Jock’ and ‘John Gray o’ Middleholm’, which shared this amused tone. With the exception of some mild chiding of religious zealotry and stock revulsion at blackguardly behaviour, the editor’s narrative has the feel of a fairy story or folk tale. It is designed to pique the reader’s interest but not to scare or disturb them in any fundamental way. The confession itself, however, is quite different in character. Robert’s confession is chilling in its aloof statement of predestined superiority and salvation, saddening as he falls more and more enthrall to the devil and, finally, discombobulating and frightening as he loses his sanity on the run and eventually dies in suspicious circumstances. It is an altogether more grave and serious document than the editor’s and paints a far darker picture of psychological turmoil and deterioration. The only times I found myself smiling ryely were the boastful passages where Robert ascribes to himself far more bravery and skill in fights than the editor’s version.
Given the unusual structure and content described, almost any reader would ask - what kind of book is this? It could be the ravings of a lunatic but these ravings seem to be just about substantiated by the research of the apparently impartial editor. For instance, there is no reason for the reader to suppose that George was not murdered or Robert not discovered dead some time later. Under this kind of reading, the devil is either a figment of Robert’s imagination or serves a symbolic or metaphorical role. However, there is enough in the account given by the editor to suggest that the Devil has some external reality. In this way, the reader is kept on the verge of dismissing the whole thing as fantasy or mental illness while still reserving some credence, however doubtful, for Robert’s account. The editor comments on his beliefs about the book quite extensively in the postscript (pp209-10) saying, ‘it is certainly impossible that these scenes could ever have occured’ and that he greatly doubts whether Robert had any hand in his brother’s murder and calls the account ‘either dreaming or madness’. The editor also puts forward the idea that the confession might be a parable, as Robert himself says when he is printing it. However, Robert is attempting to hide the documents true nature from the owner of the printing press when he does this so this explanation does not seem in earnest. If it is a parable, the editor says its purpose is ‘scarcely tangible’ and resolves to pity the author as criminally insane.
In spite of this dismissal by the editor, I am inclined to see the book as a parable with the purpose of demonstrating the danger of unquestionable ideas and dogmatic philosophies. In the same way as Stalinist Russia allowed all manner of immoral means to be justified in pursuit of the unquestionable, infallible end of Communism so Robert is tempted into committing and justifying his sins on the basis of his unassailable membership of the elect. Some of this understanding comes from the way the editor frames the document itself. The Wringhim family are portrayed as distorting Christian teaching with their extreme beliefs long before Robert meets Gil-Martin and there is a general and persistent objection from the editor to their draconian, ascetic brand of Calvinism. However, there are also hints in this direction in the confessions themselves. For example, when Robert and Gil-Martin meet Mr Blanchard he warns Robert about Gil-Martin and the dangers of absolutism, which Robert duly records:
“There is not an error into which a man can fall, which he may not press Scripture into his service as proof of the probity of, and though your boasted theologian [Gil-Martin] shunned the full discussion of the subject before me, while you pressed it, I can easily see that both you and he are carrying your ideas of absolute predestination, and its concomitant appendages, to an extent that overthrows all religion and revelation together; or, at least, jumbles them into a chaos, out of which human capacity can never select what is good. Believe me, Mr Robert, the less you associate with that illustrious stranger the better, for it appears to me that your creed and his carries damnation on the very front of it” (p109)
By the same token, a few pages later, when Robert asks Gil-Martin, who he incorrectly assumes to be an exiled Russian tsar, “Are all your subjects Christian, prince?” He replies by saying, “All my European subjects are, or deem themselves so, and they are the most faithful and true subjects I have.” (p112) Later still, when Robert is installed at Dalcastle and seems to be losing touch with reality he asks his servant what the “wives of clachan” say about him. The servant replies that they say he is in cahoots with the devil or possessed by him but that he refuted this by saying that his master is a ‘strick believer’ and ‘fervent a prayer’ (p162-3). The auld wife dispatches a fantastic dressing down as a reply:
“Ye silly, sauchless, Cameronian cuif! Is that a’ that ye ken about the wiles and doings o’ the prince o’ the air, that rules and works in the bairns of disobedience? Gin ever he observes a proud professor, wha has mae than ordinary pretensions to a divine calling, and that reards and prays till the very howlets learn his preambles, THAT’S the man Auld Simmie fixes on to mak a dishclout o’” (p163)
This passage is central to my understanding of this book. Extreme pretension and totalitarian beliefs leave one especially open to corruption. The line between religious and moral ambition and evil actions is incredibly thin or even blurred. This passage also reminded me of an earlier section where Robert’s father, Rev Wringhim, argues with his servant John Barnet (pp87-89) who skillfully exposes the hypocrisy and sophistry of his character and religion. Throughout the book, those from criminal or lower class backgrounds are portrayed as the more honest and truly faithful to Christian principles and it is in their words and warnings to Robert that I find the central theme of the book. They tell us that it is those Christians who consider themselves better than others, who long to be raised up and recognised as superior to their fellow people and employ clever, complicated arguments and philosophies in support of their beliefs that are most at risk of committing evil.
As a slightly more speculative aside, it seems that Hogg may also attribute Robert’s especial susceptibility to the Devil to his breeding as well as his theology. When his brother George is complaining to his father about Robert harassing him in Edinburgh, his father replies that he is, ‘the third in a direct line who had all been the children of adultery; and it is well known that all such were born half deils themselves, and nothing was more likely than that they should hold intercourse with their fellows’ (p40). In the footnote to this sentence it is noted that Hogg had superstitious beliefs about the children of adultery and may have fathered two himself. While such an approach might strike a modern reader as irrational, it could broadly be seen as a contributing factor to Robert’s demise. In the same way as his totalitarian beliefs and ascetic practices are shown to be an unnatural corruption of Christian teaching, so Robert’s ‘unnatural’ status as an outsider in 18th century society may lead him into cruel thoughts and evil deeds. It is often mentioned that he is Rev Wringhim’s son, although never explicitly stated, and this fact could certainly foment a huge amount of resentment towards his brother and mother, both of whom end up murdered. This is never explicitly stated in the book but could be seen as a factor contributing to Robert’s susceptibility to the devil’s advances alongside his intellectual and religious pretensions and insecurities.
I also very much enjoyed the Scottish dialect used throughout the book. A few reveiws ago, I wrote that it was nice and unusual to find Scottish slang in the book ‘Hings’. I now realise that there is probably plenty of scottish slang in literature if I read Hogg and Scott and other famous 19th century Scots so it was more my ignorance that made it seem unusual than anything else!
I really loved the way this book played with the nature of testimony and the connection of documents to their surrounding reality. It reminded me a bit of Nabokov in this way (Pale Fire, The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight) as you’re never quite sure who or what to believe. The huge, uninterrupted blocks of dense text where sometimes a bit overwhelming as Hogg doesn’t use any chapter breaks. However, I overwhelmingly enjoyed this book and thought it was very interestingly and creatively conceived.
Tuesday 5 November 2019
Monday 21 October 2019
Eric Hobsbawm - Bandits
While this book is primarily a work of historical scholarship it was nonetheless an enjoyable read for the layperson. Hobsbawm starts by recognising the ubiquity of ‘the ideal social bandit myth’ in cultures as disparate and distant as medieval England and 20th century Latin America along with pretty much everything in between. The range of source material and scholarship he draws on is impressive. He also recognises the extreme longevity of certain social bandit myths, quintessentially that of Robin Hood who first appears in 14th century ballads, as supporting evidence for the value and interest of the genre.
What are the constituent parts of the ‘ideal social bandit myth’, as opposed to the common criminal? A few key attributes stand out as important but what follows will be by no means exhaustive given the extensive and nuanced account given of the dozen odd bandits in the book. Equally, each proclaimed proponent of social banditry may not display all the key attributes mentioned and, in some cases, none of them at all. First, the social bandit may be initially wronged by unjust authorities or the victim of exploitation; unfair taxes may be levied, excessive punishment meted out or a relative may be killed or raped by a nobleman or another figure above justice. The bandit will often refuse to bend to the greater power of the authority figure and, as such, may be seen as morally justified in his conflict. This moral justification may lend him, or very occasionally her, the help and support of the local community either implicitly or explicitly. Alongside these facets of the bandit’s origin, the bandit may have other ethical or moral advantages on his side. They may use violence and murder sparingly and only direct them against ‘fair’ targets rather than terrorising and otherwise abusing the general population. Indeed, in some cases they may even act as a protector of the local population. Equally, they may only steal from outsiders or other targets outwith the community they come from. As in the case of Robin Hood, they may distribute the spoils of their criminality amongst other members of their oppressed class. For Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, this class is almost always oppressed peasants and landless labourers or cattle herders. Thus, there is a broad image of the social bandit as justified in his grievance, pursuing this greivance fairly or, at least, with some ethical considerations as to who his victims are and philanthropically distributing some of the spoils of his criminality with the general population.
For Hobsbawm, it’s hard for this type of figure to emerge before the idea of an external authority. Before the advent of the state, almost all power is wielded by groups of armed men very similar to bandit gangs. The existence of laws or externally imposed rules is negligible or weak meaning there is little scope for the social bandit to be abused and consequently react against. ‘Laws’, per se, are not so much broken as feuds between rival factions are inaugurated. Banditry “cannot...exist outside socio-economic and political orders” (p7). Indeed, the original meaning of the Italian ‘bandito’ is ‘one placed outside the law’. Equally, according to Hobsbawm, the modern capitalist state also largely excludes the possibility of social brigandage because the apparatus of the state is more ever present reducing the geographical homelands of the bandit. Secondly, the poor are rarely as hungry as in earlier forms of government. Hobsbawm links famines and other outbreaks of hunger closely with explosions of brigandage. As one would expect of a Marxist, for Hobsbawm bandits are the poor, the assetless, the hungry, living far from the seat of power, unrepresented and oppressed. They ‘resist the encroaching power of outside authority and capital’ (p9). Nonetheless, social bandits are rarely true revolutionaries although they can be incorporated into revolutionary causes. Their concerns are ordinarily less wide ranging than the revolutionary’s and, while they usually want to act outside of the existing laws for whatever reason, they rarely have plans of overthrowing the existing government and ruling themselves.
As alluded to in the previous paragraph, geography can play an important role in the birth and development of social banditry. Far flung, mountainous regions are often poor, removed from the seat of central power, suspicious of outsiders and devoid of much power in the political process. As such, the bandit may function as an alternative to absent law enforcement or the apparatus of the judiciary, if such a thing exists. The bandit may also represent unyielding dissent to the central authority, which other rural peasants would like to enact themselves were it not for circumstance, resources or disposition. In these regions, topographical knowledge may allow the bandit to elude capture, indulge in effective ambushes, kidnapping and highwaymanship and otherwise operate undetected. In turn, the local population may help to support the bandit in various ways. They may mislead the authorities, offer sanctuary or provide sustenance in times of need. Hobsbawm does debate how voluntary much of this assistance may be, given that it is probably quite hard to refuse the demands of a group of armed criminals!
The reality of the social bandit is evasive. Hobsbawm points out that the source material he is using, which largely consists of ballads, chapbooks and oral tradition, is poor. It is perhaps illustrative of the sub-culture as a whole that the existence of its most famous and enduring son, Robin Hood, has proved impossible to establish in spite of the huge amount of interest his figure has attracted over the centuries. The more modern examples that Hobsbawm examines shows there is often a good deal of common criminality mixed in with the supposed just practice that is celebrated by the community in songs and literature. Indeed, he notes that sometimes totally inappropriate characters are co-opted into the role of ‘social bandit’ just to give the community a figurehead through which to glorify opposition to outside authority. All told, it seems there is a good deal less reality to the ‘ideal social bandit myth’ than certain sources would imply and that these sources themselves are of dubious provenance. This begs the question as to why this type of myth is so universal and, in some cases, enduring when it has so little foundation in reality? For me, a salient point in this regard is the romanticism of the concept. The bandit is a quintessential underdog, a member of a poor, landless minority oppressed by external forces far greater than his own. Against all this, he stands up for himself and his community fighting against the injustice and attempting to improve the lot of his fellow community members by stealing from those who have to give to those who do not. The existence of this kind of symbol could be of huge importance to a community that is otherwise downtrodden and with little hope of alleviating or improving their circumstances. One of the most resonant passages, for me, was the following:
“Man has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels against a social order which denies it to him, and whatever the world he lives in, he accuses either that social order or the entire material universe of injustice. Man is filled with a strange, stubborn urge to remember, to think things out and to change things; and in addition he carries within himself the wish to have what he cannot have - if only in the form of a fairy tale. That is perhaps the basis for the heroic sagas of all ages, all religions, all peoples and all classes.” p145, (taken from, I Olbracht ‘Der Rauber Nikola Schuhaj’ pp76-7).
Furthermore, the very existence of such a well known example as Robin Hood shows the broad appeal of such a figure in a world where many feel hard done by the cruelty of those in power or the heartlessness of anonymous, external bureaucracy. Indeed, most examples of the social bandit fail to gain much renown outside of their home region, which is necessarily limited by the geographical factors examined in the fourth paragraph. So it is striking that one example does transcend the natural tendency towards parochialism, which speaks to it wide and abiding appeal. How the myth attained such a status and whether or not he really existed are besides the point.
The book itself showed me how fun and romantic it is to read about these brave, principled outsiders fighting against an evil, oppressive authority. The stories and characters it contained really lit up an otherwise fairly dry work of academic history. In reality there’s probably a fair amount of artistic license taken in their creation. Nonetheless, their power as a symbol is undeniable. It was also very enjoyable to be able to benefit from academic quality footnotes, bibliographies and lists of further reading when something in the book piqued my interest, which goes against my allegation that the book is dry! There were some great postscripts to the text examining criticisms that have been made against Hobsbawm’s arguments and this detailed analysis made a nice change to sensationalist journalism and fake news. It was an enjoyable read and made an interesting argument.
What are the constituent parts of the ‘ideal social bandit myth’, as opposed to the common criminal? A few key attributes stand out as important but what follows will be by no means exhaustive given the extensive and nuanced account given of the dozen odd bandits in the book. Equally, each proclaimed proponent of social banditry may not display all the key attributes mentioned and, in some cases, none of them at all. First, the social bandit may be initially wronged by unjust authorities or the victim of exploitation; unfair taxes may be levied, excessive punishment meted out or a relative may be killed or raped by a nobleman or another figure above justice. The bandit will often refuse to bend to the greater power of the authority figure and, as such, may be seen as morally justified in his conflict. This moral justification may lend him, or very occasionally her, the help and support of the local community either implicitly or explicitly. Alongside these facets of the bandit’s origin, the bandit may have other ethical or moral advantages on his side. They may use violence and murder sparingly and only direct them against ‘fair’ targets rather than terrorising and otherwise abusing the general population. Indeed, in some cases they may even act as a protector of the local population. Equally, they may only steal from outsiders or other targets outwith the community they come from. As in the case of Robin Hood, they may distribute the spoils of their criminality amongst other members of their oppressed class. For Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, this class is almost always oppressed peasants and landless labourers or cattle herders. Thus, there is a broad image of the social bandit as justified in his grievance, pursuing this greivance fairly or, at least, with some ethical considerations as to who his victims are and philanthropically distributing some of the spoils of his criminality with the general population.
For Hobsbawm, it’s hard for this type of figure to emerge before the idea of an external authority. Before the advent of the state, almost all power is wielded by groups of armed men very similar to bandit gangs. The existence of laws or externally imposed rules is negligible or weak meaning there is little scope for the social bandit to be abused and consequently react against. ‘Laws’, per se, are not so much broken as feuds between rival factions are inaugurated. Banditry “cannot...exist outside socio-economic and political orders” (p7). Indeed, the original meaning of the Italian ‘bandito’ is ‘one placed outside the law’. Equally, according to Hobsbawm, the modern capitalist state also largely excludes the possibility of social brigandage because the apparatus of the state is more ever present reducing the geographical homelands of the bandit. Secondly, the poor are rarely as hungry as in earlier forms of government. Hobsbawm links famines and other outbreaks of hunger closely with explosions of brigandage. As one would expect of a Marxist, for Hobsbawm bandits are the poor, the assetless, the hungry, living far from the seat of power, unrepresented and oppressed. They ‘resist the encroaching power of outside authority and capital’ (p9). Nonetheless, social bandits are rarely true revolutionaries although they can be incorporated into revolutionary causes. Their concerns are ordinarily less wide ranging than the revolutionary’s and, while they usually want to act outside of the existing laws for whatever reason, they rarely have plans of overthrowing the existing government and ruling themselves.
As alluded to in the previous paragraph, geography can play an important role in the birth and development of social banditry. Far flung, mountainous regions are often poor, removed from the seat of central power, suspicious of outsiders and devoid of much power in the political process. As such, the bandit may function as an alternative to absent law enforcement or the apparatus of the judiciary, if such a thing exists. The bandit may also represent unyielding dissent to the central authority, which other rural peasants would like to enact themselves were it not for circumstance, resources or disposition. In these regions, topographical knowledge may allow the bandit to elude capture, indulge in effective ambushes, kidnapping and highwaymanship and otherwise operate undetected. In turn, the local population may help to support the bandit in various ways. They may mislead the authorities, offer sanctuary or provide sustenance in times of need. Hobsbawm does debate how voluntary much of this assistance may be, given that it is probably quite hard to refuse the demands of a group of armed criminals!
The reality of the social bandit is evasive. Hobsbawm points out that the source material he is using, which largely consists of ballads, chapbooks and oral tradition, is poor. It is perhaps illustrative of the sub-culture as a whole that the existence of its most famous and enduring son, Robin Hood, has proved impossible to establish in spite of the huge amount of interest his figure has attracted over the centuries. The more modern examples that Hobsbawm examines shows there is often a good deal of common criminality mixed in with the supposed just practice that is celebrated by the community in songs and literature. Indeed, he notes that sometimes totally inappropriate characters are co-opted into the role of ‘social bandit’ just to give the community a figurehead through which to glorify opposition to outside authority. All told, it seems there is a good deal less reality to the ‘ideal social bandit myth’ than certain sources would imply and that these sources themselves are of dubious provenance. This begs the question as to why this type of myth is so universal and, in some cases, enduring when it has so little foundation in reality? For me, a salient point in this regard is the romanticism of the concept. The bandit is a quintessential underdog, a member of a poor, landless minority oppressed by external forces far greater than his own. Against all this, he stands up for himself and his community fighting against the injustice and attempting to improve the lot of his fellow community members by stealing from those who have to give to those who do not. The existence of this kind of symbol could be of huge importance to a community that is otherwise downtrodden and with little hope of alleviating or improving their circumstances. One of the most resonant passages, for me, was the following:
“Man has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels against a social order which denies it to him, and whatever the world he lives in, he accuses either that social order or the entire material universe of injustice. Man is filled with a strange, stubborn urge to remember, to think things out and to change things; and in addition he carries within himself the wish to have what he cannot have - if only in the form of a fairy tale. That is perhaps the basis for the heroic sagas of all ages, all religions, all peoples and all classes.” p145, (taken from, I Olbracht ‘Der Rauber Nikola Schuhaj’ pp76-7).
Furthermore, the very existence of such a well known example as Robin Hood shows the broad appeal of such a figure in a world where many feel hard done by the cruelty of those in power or the heartlessness of anonymous, external bureaucracy. Indeed, most examples of the social bandit fail to gain much renown outside of their home region, which is necessarily limited by the geographical factors examined in the fourth paragraph. So it is striking that one example does transcend the natural tendency towards parochialism, which speaks to it wide and abiding appeal. How the myth attained such a status and whether or not he really existed are besides the point.
The book itself showed me how fun and romantic it is to read about these brave, principled outsiders fighting against an evil, oppressive authority. The stories and characters it contained really lit up an otherwise fairly dry work of academic history. In reality there’s probably a fair amount of artistic license taken in their creation. Nonetheless, their power as a symbol is undeniable. It was also very enjoyable to be able to benefit from academic quality footnotes, bibliographies and lists of further reading when something in the book piqued my interest, which goes against my allegation that the book is dry! There were some great postscripts to the text examining criticisms that have been made against Hobsbawm’s arguments and this detailed analysis made a nice change to sensationalist journalism and fake news. It was an enjoyable read and made an interesting argument.
Monday 14 October 2019
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
The beginning of the book was very engaging and immersive. The sterile, scientifically advanced, super communal, social hierarchy Huxley envisages has some remarkably prescient features. Unlike 1984, where the state largely oppresses the population into submission, here the population are complicit in their own subjugation albeit with the aid of extensive social conditioning. Of course, there are still characters like Mustapha Mond and the other members of the ‘World Controller’ class but the fact that the vast majority of the oppressed believe themselves to be happier than ever struck me as probable and cleverly observed. Through a combination of genetic engineering, social conditioning and drug addiction the population are effectively controlled and prevented from rising up against the established order. Several aspects of this bear more than a passing resemblance to the world of 2019: obsession with economic growth and producing more, consumption as the greatest aim of the individual with an attendant abhorrence of thrift, addiction to drugs, an estrangement from the natural world and an obsession with superficiality. For example, John the savage’s mother is considered too ugly and horrific to be seen in society even though she is an example of the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood that almost all current societies hold sacred. I was really impressed at how Huxley had taken the existing order of society and reimagined it so completely. One theme that Huxley failed to anticipate was climate change and the ability of the planet to continue to support an ever larger human burden.
Things that I felt were a bit less skillfully handled included the sex life of the Brave New World (BNW) inhabitants. They’re divorced, both physically and psychologically, from the idea of reproduction as desirable or even attainable in the case of the freemartins. However, they appear to retain a similar obsession with sex to Old Worlders! I wondered if this would really be the case. First, wouldn’t BNW citizens be bored of sex having been exposed to ever since they were toddlers? In one sense, I can see how the pleasure of sexual sensation is entirely in keeping with the BNW ambience of feelies and soma induced euphoria. Secondly, I wondered how fully the sexual urge could be separated from the egotistical desire to reproduce one's own genes, which is entirely out of sync with the BNW attitude that places the needs of society in front of the needs of the individual. For example, I was surprised to find Bernard Marx using his newfound status to make sexual conquests and boasting about them to his friends. I would have thought that sexual relationships would have ceased to be of such all-consuming interest once divorced from egotistical desires to reproduce or monogamous concerns about coupling. Nonetheless, the desire to be attractive and desirable could also be seen as entirely of a piece with the BNW’s obsession with aesthetics.
John, the quasi savage, was also a slightly problematic character for me. Rejected by the society of the savages for his light colouring and strange, promiscuous mother he finds solace in Shakespeare and develops a highly principled and improbable personality. He seems devoid of sexual desire in and of itself and is only interested in sex as an expression of monogamous love. Later on in the book it becomes clear that he is, in some senses, a character like Jesus in the New Testament or Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ insofar as he is there to show the depravity of the world through his other worldliness. Through his character he shows the BNW to be cruel and heartless and the world of the savages to be superior in spite of its primitive science and status as a forgotten ‘badlands’ from the perspective of the BNW. Nonetheless, the savage world is also depicted as cruel and heartless in its rejection of John so he really is a special case. I found his refusal to sleep with the object of his desires, Lenina, and his rejection of her as an ‘impudent strumpet’ because of her attempts to have sex with him weird in the extreme. My conclusion was that John is supposed to be a God like figure or a sacrificial lamb, as his death also implies, who’s function within the story is to show the soullessness of the BNW. However, he also, less understandably, shows the failings of the of the savage world order too so I couldn’t see him as a straightforward representation of the superiority of the old world over the new.
The fact that John is allowed to stay in the BNW even after he has rejected it seemed unlikely to me given that he is an adherent to ‘banned’ knowledge like Shakespeare. Clearly, the point is to have him rail against the nature of the world he finds himself in and eventually kill himself in the face of its unfeeling brutality. For me, this wasn’t a very successful part of the book. I found the chapters where John tries to define and justify his position against the world to be boring, preachy and condescending. It felt to me like the author is trying to cover too much ground and what results is a rather long, unstructured and unclear lecture on the nature of man. Of course, John’s passion for freedom, his belief in true love and his grief at the death of his mother go to the core of what current humans feel humanity is. However, I felt like the world of the savages also has unappealing characteristics, like rape, alchoholism, racism and violence; but these are conveniently edited out of John’s character so he can appear perfect. This perfection really robs him of his humanity. Just because the BNW is a pretty horrible and weird place doesn’t mean that there is a Christ-like figure of goodness somewhere. This seems facile and needlessly one sided. More interesting to me is the tension between the BNW and the world of the savages. It’s true that the BNW has dispensed with eternal, ephemeral concepts like love, loyalty and the family unit but it has also brought the end of wars, blood feuds, honour killings and the like that seem to go on unabated in the world of the savages. In this sense, I felt like this book wasn’t really addressing the extremely interesting problem it raises: would society be better off if the most powerful and potent human desires were neutered or otherwise managed? The book seems to answer that both the world of the savages and the BNW are bad and the only way to be good is to read Shakespeare and exist outside of both societies, which ends up being impossible and leads those who try to kill themselves. However, to me both the BNW and the zones controlled by savages are expressions of humanity, albeit extreme ones, which the author seems to caricature and then reject. This struck me as a bit condescending and also fantastical.
In conclusion, I loved the world that Huxley creates and enjoyed the narrative of Bernard Marx’s rise and fall. When compared with John, who is presumably the ‘hero’ of this bookThe character of John and the tension between the BNW and the world of the savages was less well handled. In the end, I felt like the book span off into a grandiose attempt to explain the entirety of human nature and history. I would have preferred it if it had had a more nuanced, less ostentatious ending.
Things that I felt were a bit less skillfully handled included the sex life of the Brave New World (BNW) inhabitants. They’re divorced, both physically and psychologically, from the idea of reproduction as desirable or even attainable in the case of the freemartins. However, they appear to retain a similar obsession with sex to Old Worlders! I wondered if this would really be the case. First, wouldn’t BNW citizens be bored of sex having been exposed to ever since they were toddlers? In one sense, I can see how the pleasure of sexual sensation is entirely in keeping with the BNW ambience of feelies and soma induced euphoria. Secondly, I wondered how fully the sexual urge could be separated from the egotistical desire to reproduce one's own genes, which is entirely out of sync with the BNW attitude that places the needs of society in front of the needs of the individual. For example, I was surprised to find Bernard Marx using his newfound status to make sexual conquests and boasting about them to his friends. I would have thought that sexual relationships would have ceased to be of such all-consuming interest once divorced from egotistical desires to reproduce or monogamous concerns about coupling. Nonetheless, the desire to be attractive and desirable could also be seen as entirely of a piece with the BNW’s obsession with aesthetics.
John, the quasi savage, was also a slightly problematic character for me. Rejected by the society of the savages for his light colouring and strange, promiscuous mother he finds solace in Shakespeare and develops a highly principled and improbable personality. He seems devoid of sexual desire in and of itself and is only interested in sex as an expression of monogamous love. Later on in the book it becomes clear that he is, in some senses, a character like Jesus in the New Testament or Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ insofar as he is there to show the depravity of the world through his other worldliness. Through his character he shows the BNW to be cruel and heartless and the world of the savages to be superior in spite of its primitive science and status as a forgotten ‘badlands’ from the perspective of the BNW. Nonetheless, the savage world is also depicted as cruel and heartless in its rejection of John so he really is a special case. I found his refusal to sleep with the object of his desires, Lenina, and his rejection of her as an ‘impudent strumpet’ because of her attempts to have sex with him weird in the extreme. My conclusion was that John is supposed to be a God like figure or a sacrificial lamb, as his death also implies, who’s function within the story is to show the soullessness of the BNW. However, he also, less understandably, shows the failings of the of the savage world order too so I couldn’t see him as a straightforward representation of the superiority of the old world over the new.
The fact that John is allowed to stay in the BNW even after he has rejected it seemed unlikely to me given that he is an adherent to ‘banned’ knowledge like Shakespeare. Clearly, the point is to have him rail against the nature of the world he finds himself in and eventually kill himself in the face of its unfeeling brutality. For me, this wasn’t a very successful part of the book. I found the chapters where John tries to define and justify his position against the world to be boring, preachy and condescending. It felt to me like the author is trying to cover too much ground and what results is a rather long, unstructured and unclear lecture on the nature of man. Of course, John’s passion for freedom, his belief in true love and his grief at the death of his mother go to the core of what current humans feel humanity is. However, I felt like the world of the savages also has unappealing characteristics, like rape, alchoholism, racism and violence; but these are conveniently edited out of John’s character so he can appear perfect. This perfection really robs him of his humanity. Just because the BNW is a pretty horrible and weird place doesn’t mean that there is a Christ-like figure of goodness somewhere. This seems facile and needlessly one sided. More interesting to me is the tension between the BNW and the world of the savages. It’s true that the BNW has dispensed with eternal, ephemeral concepts like love, loyalty and the family unit but it has also brought the end of wars, blood feuds, honour killings and the like that seem to go on unabated in the world of the savages. In this sense, I felt like this book wasn’t really addressing the extremely interesting problem it raises: would society be better off if the most powerful and potent human desires were neutered or otherwise managed? The book seems to answer that both the world of the savages and the BNW are bad and the only way to be good is to read Shakespeare and exist outside of both societies, which ends up being impossible and leads those who try to kill themselves. However, to me both the BNW and the zones controlled by savages are expressions of humanity, albeit extreme ones, which the author seems to caricature and then reject. This struck me as a bit condescending and also fantastical.
In conclusion, I loved the world that Huxley creates and enjoyed the narrative of Bernard Marx’s rise and fall. When compared with John, who is presumably the ‘hero’ of this bookThe character of John and the tension between the BNW and the world of the savages was less well handled. In the end, I felt like the book span off into a grandiose attempt to explain the entirety of human nature and history. I would have preferred it if it had had a more nuanced, less ostentatious ending.
Tuesday 8 October 2019
G.K.Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday
I really enjoyed this book’s wonderfully light, frolicking, playful language. It drew me into the narrative and I thought the tone and pace were spot on for a novella of this type where the author is continually playing with the nature of reality and its perception. There were some very atmospheric scenes in the anarchists’ lair and I really loved the part where they enter through the tunnel for the first time. Equally well drawn were the descriptions of London, especially Leicester Square, which I had never thought of in the terms the author describes but it immediately struck me as true. The prose was generally of a high quality and out shone the narrative.
The whole book had an otherworldly feel and many aspects of it felt inverted or topsy turvy, which lead me to question what was going on. For example, time passes very quickly and mercurially during the course of the narrative. At night they go to the pub, then suddenly it is morning after only a quick meeting, then breakfast turns to lunch almost immediately. By the same token, it snows in London, meaning winter, but the night seems so short. The plot had an ethereal quality like a dream or the experience of taking hallucinogens and this was pleasing. In some senses, this topsy turvy-ness extends to the characters as well: the anarchy hating policeman gives the best and most impassioned anarchist speech, the anarchist obeys his oath and doesn’t shoot the policeman when oaths should have no sway over an anarchist. The paradoxical nature of so much the author shows us had me questioning everything. I began to think that the two poets could be a fantasy or different versions of the same fundamental character or idea because both are intoxicated by hate, absorbed by secret orders and disguised as poets.
Perhaps it was because of the perpetual paradoxes and inversions that I felt especially alert to plot twists or sudden changes of course. For this reason, around p72 when the Professor turns out to be a policeman too, I got the impression all the anarchists would eventually be revealed to be policeman as this would be the last thing you’d expect! I also felt like either Sunday or the man who would have been Thursday would be the policeman in the dark room or vice versa. Owing to this, I felt like the book’s major plot twist was telegraphed by the nature of the preceding content and this was a bit disappointing.
All told, this was a fun novella with great prose and some memorable scenes and atmospheres that was a bit let down by the narrative.
Wednesday 2 October 2019
Chris McQueer - Hings Short Stories 'N That
I really enjoyed the ambience of these stories. It’s lovely to read Scottish words and pronunciations in a longer form than tweets or memes and some of the phrases in the book are absolute belters! There are a lot of characters that I feel familiar with but rarely encounter in most of the books I read. In this sense, the book has a distinctive voice but also a recognisable one. The characters are archetypes of people everyone who lives in Scotland would have encountered but might not come across in many novels. The scenes of drinking and drug taking, office drudgery and youthful high jinx are well observed and often very funny. The book takes stories and people you might meet at the pub or the football and gives them a place and voice in literature, which I thought was great.
The longest story, ‘Bowls’, was one of the most successful for me as it allowed the characters space to develop. The narrative also had more time to expand and the results of this were a bit mixed for me as some aspects of it felt overblown and lurid. I felt it might have been more successful if the storyline had stayed recognisable and quotidian, like the characters, rather than straying into the sensational. Nonetheless, the scenes from the bowling club, the larger than life Angie and the dour, conniving, misogynistic bully Phillip are all fantastic.
I really liked the surrealist aspects of the book too. The club that opens in someone’s shed for three nights in ‘Alan’s Shed’, the office workers in ‘The Universe Factory’ and the writing bird in ‘Budgie’ all mixed the everyday with the fantastical in pleasing proportions. The ideas are inventive and witty, giving the stories satisfying new perspectives. More everyday stories like ‘Top Boy’, ‘Sammy’s Bag of Whelks’ and ‘Pat’ are equally good even though the twists they contain are more prosaic. ‘Pat’ might have been my favourite along with ‘Bowls’ because it points beyond itself to a wider issue. In the case of ‘Pat’, the relationship between unemployment, drugs and mental illness, and in ‘Bowls’ the issue of domestic abuse.
Along with the tendency for some of the plots to get a bit extravagant, I felt that some of the stories and prose would have benefited from tighter editing. In ‘Is it Art?’ the posh guy’s wallet gets stolen twice, once by the son and once by the father, in a confusing and nonsensical twist. Equally, punching someone as the title suggests in ‘A Fistful of Coppers’ might result in breaking your own hand as well as hurting the victim. There were also a fair number of typos, which should have been picked up.
Overall, I found this collection fun and witty. In some places the narrative was a bit fancy. Several of the stories had rough edges or were quite limited in their scope. The best stories pointed beyond themselves and allowed the characters to develop. I would be very interested to see if these positive aspects could be enhanced in a longer format with more complexity and depth.
Monday 30 September 2019
Richard P Feynman - Surely you're joking Mr Feynman! Adventures of a curious character.
Curious is an apt word to describe both the contents of this book and the character of 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Richard Feynman it describes. It is a collection of stories told to his drumming partner Ralph Leighton, the son of another Caltech physicist. Several things are obvious from the tales the book contains, some positive and some less so. Feynman was a formidable intellect with an extraordinary capacity for work. Equally he’s a formidable bore with an extraordinary capacity for smugness!
As someone who is famous for his popularisation of complex theoretical physics and other esoteric ideas, a lot of the scientific explanations were arcane and impenetrable to the layperson. Whether this was a fault of Feynman’s stories or Leighton’s account of them is hard to tell from reading the book but I would probably go for the latter. The stories chosen give a strange and lopsided view of Feynman. For example, a long series of recollections about working on developing nuclear weapons at Los Alamos as a young man focus mainly on how to pick locks and break into filing cabinets, which is about as interesting as it sounds. There’s also a lot of pervy material on how to talk to girls in bars, how to ‘befriend’ showgirls in Vegas and his appreciation for strip clubs.
Taken as a whole, the book was boring and reminded me of listening to a loquacious person with a very high opinion of themselves drone on about their various exploits. A lot of these exploits are couched in transparent false modesty, which compounds the problem of their tediousness. Of course, Feynman lived an extraordinary life in terms of his intellectual achievements but this is no guarantee of his brilliance as a raconteur. On the evidence of this book he is definitely not someone I’d like to share a few drinks with!
There were some admirable aspects of his character that shone through the monotony of the anecdotes. He was interested in anything and everything, always found things out for himself and never trusted received opinion and worked with an almost maniacal fervour. He obviously considered himself a leading authority on pretty much anything he studied, perhaps quite accurately, but this makes his claims of modesty ring all the more hollow. His opinions about the rigours of the scientific method contained in the final chapter (‘Cargo Cult Science, adapted from a Caltech commencement speech given in 1974) was by far the best chapter in the book. This gave me the idea that maybe it was the compiler of this collection that was the major problem and that Feynman would be better encountered in his own words.
Feynman’s attitude to winning the Nobel Prize was very pleasing to me. He thought it was more hassle than it was worth because it made him a celebrity when all he really wanted was to be a physicist. This rang true to me for some reason but also made me reflect that: if he hadn’t have won this famous prize then no one would have written a book like this about him, which is ironic!
This was a boring book, full of bad stories but I’m intrigued to read more of Feynman in his own words or listen to his famous lectures on physics because I have a strong suspicion that this collection does not do him justice!
As someone who is famous for his popularisation of complex theoretical physics and other esoteric ideas, a lot of the scientific explanations were arcane and impenetrable to the layperson. Whether this was a fault of Feynman’s stories or Leighton’s account of them is hard to tell from reading the book but I would probably go for the latter. The stories chosen give a strange and lopsided view of Feynman. For example, a long series of recollections about working on developing nuclear weapons at Los Alamos as a young man focus mainly on how to pick locks and break into filing cabinets, which is about as interesting as it sounds. There’s also a lot of pervy material on how to talk to girls in bars, how to ‘befriend’ showgirls in Vegas and his appreciation for strip clubs.
Taken as a whole, the book was boring and reminded me of listening to a loquacious person with a very high opinion of themselves drone on about their various exploits. A lot of these exploits are couched in transparent false modesty, which compounds the problem of their tediousness. Of course, Feynman lived an extraordinary life in terms of his intellectual achievements but this is no guarantee of his brilliance as a raconteur. On the evidence of this book he is definitely not someone I’d like to share a few drinks with!
There were some admirable aspects of his character that shone through the monotony of the anecdotes. He was interested in anything and everything, always found things out for himself and never trusted received opinion and worked with an almost maniacal fervour. He obviously considered himself a leading authority on pretty much anything he studied, perhaps quite accurately, but this makes his claims of modesty ring all the more hollow. His opinions about the rigours of the scientific method contained in the final chapter (‘Cargo Cult Science, adapted from a Caltech commencement speech given in 1974) was by far the best chapter in the book. This gave me the idea that maybe it was the compiler of this collection that was the major problem and that Feynman would be better encountered in his own words.
Feynman’s attitude to winning the Nobel Prize was very pleasing to me. He thought it was more hassle than it was worth because it made him a celebrity when all he really wanted was to be a physicist. This rang true to me for some reason but also made me reflect that: if he hadn’t have won this famous prize then no one would have written a book like this about him, which is ironic!
This was a boring book, full of bad stories but I’m intrigued to read more of Feynman in his own words or listen to his famous lectures on physics because I have a strong suspicion that this collection does not do him justice!
Thursday 12 September 2019
The Bhagavad Gita - Introduced and Translated by Eknath Easwaran
One thought I had on finishing this book was that humans are very fond of tradition and will countenance ideas they would otherwise reject, simply because they are old and venerated. As social animals, this kind of conformity is not exactly unexpected but religious texts do seem to show its extent in startling terms. Equally, humans are so afraid, or ashamed, of some aspects of their character that they will believe in almost anything that promises them salvation from themselves or the pain of the world. To my mind, these promises are empty and specious because what does it mean to be a human if not to struggle with the duality of one’s nature? Desires to be freed from ‘evil’, a very slippery and subjective concept itself, and suffering amount to little more than a desire to be special, to be chosen, to be superior to one’s peers. This desire strikes me as cruel, elitist and at variance with most religious texts professed teleos; in Hinduism, oneness, or in Christianity love and forgiveness. The Bhagavad Gita contains a very good passages on how shitty we are as humans (16:12 - 16). But I was left confused as to how this cycle of shittiness is ever going to be broken if the omnipotent Krishna insists on not saving those with ‘demonic tendencies’ who are abandoned to ‘fall lower still’ (16:19-20). As with almost all religious texts I’ve read, I start to wonder, ‘what kind of God is this?!’; more on this later. Another major problem that follows is, ‘how did these ancients have such a personal relationship with the divine and why are they so conspicuously absent from life today?’ Of course, the language and narratives can be read metaphorically but the problem still remains as to whether they contain any more valuable knowledge than say, a Shakespeare play or a George Eliot novel. Perhaps it’s just because of my cultural background and impoverished knowledge of Vedic traditions and texts but my opinion is that they contain a good deal less wisdom and are much less enjoyable to read. For a start, what modern author would be taken seriously if they went about purporting to have intimate knowledge of the divine and the nature of the universe? This is the stuff of charlatans and snake oil salespeople and does not correspond with my experience of the human condition at all.
With reference to the format of this edition in particular, I disliked the introduction and ‘explanations’ that preceded each chapter. I would have preferred the material here to focus on the textual history of the Bhagavad Gita, it’s earliest known version (15th century, apparently), how it changed over the years, how it has been used by the communities that have preserved it etc. Instead, what you get is someone telling you what it means, which begs the obvious question of why the text can’t speak for itself concerning meaning? Clearly, a glossary of some of the terms that may be unfamiliar to the Western audience this book is aimed at is helpful. But given that each reader will, and should, have an individual response to any book I found it annoying that someone was trying to preface my interpretation and tell me what to think. I stopped reading them after the first couple of chapters.
Much of what is contained in the book I would describe as wishful non-thinking or fantasy. For example, 6:22 states of enlightened people, “they desire nothing, and cannot be shaken by the heaviest of burden of sorrow”. I wonder if anyone has ever attained this state and, even if they had, is it even desirable? What kind of person would be left unaffected by the death of a loved one? It seems to me that this level of detachment would rob the practitioner of the rich variety of life. Is it possible to love without the pain of loss? Here the text seems to gloss over the fundamental duality of human experience in a rather glib and unconvincing way.
Another issue, which I alluded to earlier, is the idea that there can be a hierarchy of human souls while simultaneously claiming that everything is one and that the ego is an illusion. For example, 12:6-7: “But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with single-hearted devotion, these will I swiftly rescue from the fragment’s cycle of birth and death, for their consciousness has entered into me.” Not only does this strike me as contradictory given the claim that everything is one and depends on the creator, it also seems very petty and human in its conception. At its centre are the desires to be different from one’s peers and to be part of a special elite that will receive better treatment. 7:17-18, 9:22 and 9:33 would all serve equally well as an examples. What kind of omnipotent, all loving creator would indulge in such childish ‘them and us’ thinking? But Krishna goes even further than this in 16:19-20 saying, “Life after life I cast those who are malicious, hateful, cruel, and degraded into the wombs of those with similar demonic natures. Birth after birth they find themselves with demonic tendencies.” What kind of creator would do this to people? Certainly not one that I would dedicate myself to. Why can’t he save these people too? They seem more in need of salvation than the kind of emotionless sycophant that Krishna seems to want for devotees. To me, all humans are simultaneously the saved and the damned in varying degrees. Here I would quote Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago when he writes, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (p75). To me, there is more wisdom and understanding of humanity in this than the whole Bhagavad Gita.
Furthermore, it seems highly plausible to me that, like all important, powerful texts, this one has been created by a ruling elite or, at least, heavily redacted by one. “Devote everything to me”, it says, but of course there are no Gods on earth so this equates to, “give everything to this institution, which happens to be run by some humans”! I’d rather work the world out from my own experience and the experience of other humans rather than rely on make believe stories and imagined Gods. As an example, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave me a far more moving and nuanced account of humanity without appeal to fanciful ideas and transparent attempts to control the thoughts and actions of the readership. For a document purporting to be divine, the Bhagavad Gita struck me as laughably human in its conception and aims. A good example of this is Krishna’s proud claim that the caste system came from him (4:13). This is a system that most people would now see as racist and abhorrent.
Another contradiction I found in the book was the idea that no one is responsible for their actions because it is all controlled by ‘gunas’ (3:27-28). Nonetheless, the whole book is peppered with calls to certain types of action for example only a few lines later (3:31-35). How is this possible if it is all controlled by ‘gunas’? Surely, humans either have agency and can be expected to act and discriminate or they do not. It is not immediately obvious to me how both can simultaneously be true. Again, these calls to a certain type of action or behaviour have the strong scent of humans who want to put themselves above other humans and to have privileged access to some kind of special knowledge. For example, “I will give you the secret of action, with which you can free yourself from bondage” (4:16). To me, life is not bondage and no one has the secret to free anyone from it except perhaps death, which no living person would be able to comment on. This kind of thinking belongs in the realm of fantasy. Examples are myriad, the end of fear with all action devoted to the holy class (6:14), the end of sorrow through meditation (6:17), attaining perfection (7:3). The contradictions are just as numerous. Later in the same chapter that introduces the fantasy of a life without sorrow we are told, “When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union” (6:32). If someone has moved beyond sorrow, how can they treat someone else’s as their own? This seems problematic for many reasons. First, Spinoza tells us that self-interest is the most powerful force in the universe. Second, from my own experience, I don’t believe there can be a life without sorrow nor that it would be desirable. Third, the text seems to be contradicting what it said only a few lines earlier. It simultaneously says, ‘you can get beyond sorrow and this is the highest aim’ and ‘experiencing sorrow is the highest aim’. Compared to the volumes of the thoughtful, coherent prose that one can read on the human condition, the Bhagavad Gita reads like confused gobbledy-gook!
The second aspect of the book I mentioned in the introduction - that people are afraid of their nature and want to be saved from it - is eloquently expressed in this book, especially chapter 16. Krishna gives a description of the two paths - the ‘good’ path of unity with him and the ‘bad’ path of rebirth. He says if we want to be good we should, amongst other things, not harm any living creature even though he has told Arjuna he is free to kill his enemies because he is only an instrument (11:33). However, the ‘bad’ path, to me, is really just a description of what it means to be a human. For example, “hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, anger, cruelty, ignorance” (16:4) are listed as things that make a human more ‘inhuman’; but which human doesn’t have these qualities in some form? I would argue these are the very characteristics that make us human, even though that may be an unpleasant truth. What the Bhagavad Gita attempts to do in this chapter is to describe some of the less attractive aspects of humanity, 16:13-16 is another great example, and hold out the totally false idea that a person could escape being like this if they would only dedicate themselves to Krishna. To me, this is totally erroneous and misplaced. Humans must come to terms with the good and evil that run through all of us and I cannot see how it can be helpful to fantasise about attaining perfection when it has no basis in reality. The understanding of ‘evil’ presented is facil in the extreme. I prefer the nuance and acknowledgment of limitation described in works of literature like Shakespeare, “there is nothing good nor bad, lest thinking makes it so” (Hamlet), or Tolstoy, “it's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong” (War & Peace). The highly simplistic presentation in the Bhagavad Gita is, to me, a marketing trick to make people feel bad about themselves in the hope they will then join the cult. This kind of understanding of the human condition is absurdly basic and lies firmly in the realm of fantasy.
My final complaint are the unsubstantiated, petty claims the book makes about things humans could never know anything about. These struck me as little better than tarot card readings or astrology. 8:6 tells us that whatever we think about when we are dying determines “the destination of the dying”. Not only did I think this was silly and arbitrary, it also seems to contradict 2:20 when Krishna tells, “you will never die”. Not to mention the fact that I don’t believe that any human has any knowledge about what happens when you die. Chapter 14 splits everyone on earth into three types and claims you can identify them based on what kind of food they eat, I thought I may as well be reading a fucking horoscope! For me, there is such an abundance of good literature out there it’s a waste of time to bother with stuff like this except from a historical or anthropological perspective where I would agree it could be seen as a fascinating text.
With reference to the format of this edition in particular, I disliked the introduction and ‘explanations’ that preceded each chapter. I would have preferred the material here to focus on the textual history of the Bhagavad Gita, it’s earliest known version (15th century, apparently), how it changed over the years, how it has been used by the communities that have preserved it etc. Instead, what you get is someone telling you what it means, which begs the obvious question of why the text can’t speak for itself concerning meaning? Clearly, a glossary of some of the terms that may be unfamiliar to the Western audience this book is aimed at is helpful. But given that each reader will, and should, have an individual response to any book I found it annoying that someone was trying to preface my interpretation and tell me what to think. I stopped reading them after the first couple of chapters.
Much of what is contained in the book I would describe as wishful non-thinking or fantasy. For example, 6:22 states of enlightened people, “they desire nothing, and cannot be shaken by the heaviest of burden of sorrow”. I wonder if anyone has ever attained this state and, even if they had, is it even desirable? What kind of person would be left unaffected by the death of a loved one? It seems to me that this level of detachment would rob the practitioner of the rich variety of life. Is it possible to love without the pain of loss? Here the text seems to gloss over the fundamental duality of human experience in a rather glib and unconvincing way.
Another issue, which I alluded to earlier, is the idea that there can be a hierarchy of human souls while simultaneously claiming that everything is one and that the ego is an illusion. For example, 12:6-7: “But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with single-hearted devotion, these will I swiftly rescue from the fragment’s cycle of birth and death, for their consciousness has entered into me.” Not only does this strike me as contradictory given the claim that everything is one and depends on the creator, it also seems very petty and human in its conception. At its centre are the desires to be different from one’s peers and to be part of a special elite that will receive better treatment. 7:17-18, 9:22 and 9:33 would all serve equally well as an examples. What kind of omnipotent, all loving creator would indulge in such childish ‘them and us’ thinking? But Krishna goes even further than this in 16:19-20 saying, “Life after life I cast those who are malicious, hateful, cruel, and degraded into the wombs of those with similar demonic natures. Birth after birth they find themselves with demonic tendencies.” What kind of creator would do this to people? Certainly not one that I would dedicate myself to. Why can’t he save these people too? They seem more in need of salvation than the kind of emotionless sycophant that Krishna seems to want for devotees. To me, all humans are simultaneously the saved and the damned in varying degrees. Here I would quote Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago when he writes, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (p75). To me, there is more wisdom and understanding of humanity in this than the whole Bhagavad Gita.
Furthermore, it seems highly plausible to me that, like all important, powerful texts, this one has been created by a ruling elite or, at least, heavily redacted by one. “Devote everything to me”, it says, but of course there are no Gods on earth so this equates to, “give everything to this institution, which happens to be run by some humans”! I’d rather work the world out from my own experience and the experience of other humans rather than rely on make believe stories and imagined Gods. As an example, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave me a far more moving and nuanced account of humanity without appeal to fanciful ideas and transparent attempts to control the thoughts and actions of the readership. For a document purporting to be divine, the Bhagavad Gita struck me as laughably human in its conception and aims. A good example of this is Krishna’s proud claim that the caste system came from him (4:13). This is a system that most people would now see as racist and abhorrent.
Another contradiction I found in the book was the idea that no one is responsible for their actions because it is all controlled by ‘gunas’ (3:27-28). Nonetheless, the whole book is peppered with calls to certain types of action for example only a few lines later (3:31-35). How is this possible if it is all controlled by ‘gunas’? Surely, humans either have agency and can be expected to act and discriminate or they do not. It is not immediately obvious to me how both can simultaneously be true. Again, these calls to a certain type of action or behaviour have the strong scent of humans who want to put themselves above other humans and to have privileged access to some kind of special knowledge. For example, “I will give you the secret of action, with which you can free yourself from bondage” (4:16). To me, life is not bondage and no one has the secret to free anyone from it except perhaps death, which no living person would be able to comment on. This kind of thinking belongs in the realm of fantasy. Examples are myriad, the end of fear with all action devoted to the holy class (6:14), the end of sorrow through meditation (6:17), attaining perfection (7:3). The contradictions are just as numerous. Later in the same chapter that introduces the fantasy of a life without sorrow we are told, “When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union” (6:32). If someone has moved beyond sorrow, how can they treat someone else’s as their own? This seems problematic for many reasons. First, Spinoza tells us that self-interest is the most powerful force in the universe. Second, from my own experience, I don’t believe there can be a life without sorrow nor that it would be desirable. Third, the text seems to be contradicting what it said only a few lines earlier. It simultaneously says, ‘you can get beyond sorrow and this is the highest aim’ and ‘experiencing sorrow is the highest aim’. Compared to the volumes of the thoughtful, coherent prose that one can read on the human condition, the Bhagavad Gita reads like confused gobbledy-gook!
The second aspect of the book I mentioned in the introduction - that people are afraid of their nature and want to be saved from it - is eloquently expressed in this book, especially chapter 16. Krishna gives a description of the two paths - the ‘good’ path of unity with him and the ‘bad’ path of rebirth. He says if we want to be good we should, amongst other things, not harm any living creature even though he has told Arjuna he is free to kill his enemies because he is only an instrument (11:33). However, the ‘bad’ path, to me, is really just a description of what it means to be a human. For example, “hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, anger, cruelty, ignorance” (16:4) are listed as things that make a human more ‘inhuman’; but which human doesn’t have these qualities in some form? I would argue these are the very characteristics that make us human, even though that may be an unpleasant truth. What the Bhagavad Gita attempts to do in this chapter is to describe some of the less attractive aspects of humanity, 16:13-16 is another great example, and hold out the totally false idea that a person could escape being like this if they would only dedicate themselves to Krishna. To me, this is totally erroneous and misplaced. Humans must come to terms with the good and evil that run through all of us and I cannot see how it can be helpful to fantasise about attaining perfection when it has no basis in reality. The understanding of ‘evil’ presented is facil in the extreme. I prefer the nuance and acknowledgment of limitation described in works of literature like Shakespeare, “there is nothing good nor bad, lest thinking makes it so” (Hamlet), or Tolstoy, “it's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong” (War & Peace). The highly simplistic presentation in the Bhagavad Gita is, to me, a marketing trick to make people feel bad about themselves in the hope they will then join the cult. This kind of understanding of the human condition is absurdly basic and lies firmly in the realm of fantasy.
My final complaint are the unsubstantiated, petty claims the book makes about things humans could never know anything about. These struck me as little better than tarot card readings or astrology. 8:6 tells us that whatever we think about when we are dying determines “the destination of the dying”. Not only did I think this was silly and arbitrary, it also seems to contradict 2:20 when Krishna tells, “you will never die”. Not to mention the fact that I don’t believe that any human has any knowledge about what happens when you die. Chapter 14 splits everyone on earth into three types and claims you can identify them based on what kind of food they eat, I thought I may as well be reading a fucking horoscope! For me, there is such an abundance of good literature out there it’s a waste of time to bother with stuff like this except from a historical or anthropological perspective where I would agree it could be seen as a fascinating text.
Sunday 1 September 2019
Denis Johnson - The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden
This collection of short stories was overwhelming in more ways than one. Both the prose and the narratives have the feeling of an overflowing plate where delicacies have been heaped upon each other to a detrimental extent. Stuff gets buried as the food piles up and what might have been delightful and delicious on its own becomes indistinguishable or invisible amid the glut. This is by no means to say that all the stories are bad or unenjoyable. Most of them I found confusing and forgettable and I would put ‘The Starlight On Idaho’, ‘Strangler Bob’ and ‘Triumph Over The Grave’ in this category.
I really liked ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’. In this instance, I found the complexity of the narrative to be perfectly judged. It was intricate and had many excellent kinks and contortions but was still easy to follow. I loved the way the story took place over a long period of time but was detailed sparsely using a few key encounters to populate the landscape. It was nonetheless vivid and the characters were adroitly drawn. The way the story moved from an mid-life crisis rant about Elvis to a compelling conspiracy theory about lost twins and swapped identities before climaxing to a revelation about the narrator’s own identity was masterful. It’s hard to know what to make of the various stages of the plot’s development and while I would say my overall attitude remained sceptical, like that of the protagonist, it's impossible not to entertain the elaborate, enticing theories at some level. After this story, the final one in the collection, I could begin to understand what all the gushing praise from famous authors littered across the covers and first pages was on about. As opposed to obscuring one another, the ideas came together and catalysed each other. It was a wonderful symphony of ideas, characters, places, prose and dialogue. The only part that felt extraneous was the random account of the 9/11 attacks in New York. It felt like it had been added in as an afterthought or should have been edited out as it bore no relation to the rest of the story and was out of place.
The opposite of this fantastic story was the first one in the book called ‘Silence’. The first 25-odd pages of the story are discombobulating. There are almost as many characters introduced as there are pages and a mind boggling array of events occurs. A man asks a woman to kiss the stump of his amputated leg at a dinner party then starts crying. A different man burns some expensive art after a drunken evening. A man speaks to his ex-wife for the first time in 40 years and learns she is dying; this one later turns out to be the protagonist. Another man commits suicide. A friend of the protagonist interviews someone on death row and then meets his widow, who turns out to be a sex worker, and regrets not trying to sleep with her. Yet another man finds a phone on the street belonging to someone who has been killed in a car crash and then goes to meet his widow who has been calling the phone every 30 mins since his death. This man then commits suicide. It’s frantic, shouty and feels like the author has tried to squeeze every idea he has had for a story into as few pages as possible. The protagonist even gets propositioned in a bathroom stall via a message scrawled on some toilet paper, which leads nowhere, like large swathes of this book. From there on the story sets a more manageable pace and some semblance of a single plot emerges rather than the clamour and screech of 20 different plots all competing to be more scandalous than the last. The main character, Bill Whitman, is not really likeable, twice divorced because of his lies and infidelities. He comes across as a vacuous ad man who’s saving grace is his ability to recognise own mediocrity and propensity to say the wrong thing. He seems detached from his family, worn, jaded and loveless. The main thrust of the story seemed to be how mundane Whitman’s life has become but this is oddly juxtaposed to the absolute explosion of characters and events at the story’s beginning. Perhaps the idea is that Whitman is looking back over his life comparing the eventful with the quotidien. I found it a bit overwhelming and felt that it was overflowing with content and this made it somewhat grotesque because so much was crammed into so few pages. I wanted the various narratives to be more fully developed and finished the story with the sensation of reading the first few pages of about 10 different short stories!
The person who gave me this book said they had to read it twice before the stories really sank in. I’m not sure I liked it enough to do this and there is so much more to read but ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’ definitely piqued my interest in this author in a way none of the other stories did and ‘Silence’ actively did not.
I really liked ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’. In this instance, I found the complexity of the narrative to be perfectly judged. It was intricate and had many excellent kinks and contortions but was still easy to follow. I loved the way the story took place over a long period of time but was detailed sparsely using a few key encounters to populate the landscape. It was nonetheless vivid and the characters were adroitly drawn. The way the story moved from an mid-life crisis rant about Elvis to a compelling conspiracy theory about lost twins and swapped identities before climaxing to a revelation about the narrator’s own identity was masterful. It’s hard to know what to make of the various stages of the plot’s development and while I would say my overall attitude remained sceptical, like that of the protagonist, it's impossible not to entertain the elaborate, enticing theories at some level. After this story, the final one in the collection, I could begin to understand what all the gushing praise from famous authors littered across the covers and first pages was on about. As opposed to obscuring one another, the ideas came together and catalysed each other. It was a wonderful symphony of ideas, characters, places, prose and dialogue. The only part that felt extraneous was the random account of the 9/11 attacks in New York. It felt like it had been added in as an afterthought or should have been edited out as it bore no relation to the rest of the story and was out of place.
The opposite of this fantastic story was the first one in the book called ‘Silence’. The first 25-odd pages of the story are discombobulating. There are almost as many characters introduced as there are pages and a mind boggling array of events occurs. A man asks a woman to kiss the stump of his amputated leg at a dinner party then starts crying. A different man burns some expensive art after a drunken evening. A man speaks to his ex-wife for the first time in 40 years and learns she is dying; this one later turns out to be the protagonist. Another man commits suicide. A friend of the protagonist interviews someone on death row and then meets his widow, who turns out to be a sex worker, and regrets not trying to sleep with her. Yet another man finds a phone on the street belonging to someone who has been killed in a car crash and then goes to meet his widow who has been calling the phone every 30 mins since his death. This man then commits suicide. It’s frantic, shouty and feels like the author has tried to squeeze every idea he has had for a story into as few pages as possible. The protagonist even gets propositioned in a bathroom stall via a message scrawled on some toilet paper, which leads nowhere, like large swathes of this book. From there on the story sets a more manageable pace and some semblance of a single plot emerges rather than the clamour and screech of 20 different plots all competing to be more scandalous than the last. The main character, Bill Whitman, is not really likeable, twice divorced because of his lies and infidelities. He comes across as a vacuous ad man who’s saving grace is his ability to recognise own mediocrity and propensity to say the wrong thing. He seems detached from his family, worn, jaded and loveless. The main thrust of the story seemed to be how mundane Whitman’s life has become but this is oddly juxtaposed to the absolute explosion of characters and events at the story’s beginning. Perhaps the idea is that Whitman is looking back over his life comparing the eventful with the quotidien. I found it a bit overwhelming and felt that it was overflowing with content and this made it somewhat grotesque because so much was crammed into so few pages. I wanted the various narratives to be more fully developed and finished the story with the sensation of reading the first few pages of about 10 different short stories!
The person who gave me this book said they had to read it twice before the stories really sank in. I’m not sure I liked it enough to do this and there is so much more to read but ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’ definitely piqued my interest in this author in a way none of the other stories did and ‘Silence’ actively did not.
Sunday 18 August 2019
Lunch With The FT - 52 Classic Interviews. Edited by Lionel Barber.
As a big fan of the “Lunch With the FT” feature, I was always likely to enjoy an anthology like this. The writing is of a high quality, the guests are famous or impressive or both and the muddling of career summaries and contemporary opinions with quotidian observations about their culinary choices, manner of consumption, dress sense and social style is pleasing.
Some of the interviews alerted me to extraordinary individuals that I had no idea about and these were amongst the most enjoyable as they served as an appealing introduction to find out more. I would place Anatoly Chubais and Bao Tong in this category. Others gave insight into people I knew of and whose work I had enjoyed such as Yu Hua, Imran Khan and Zaha Hadid.
In other cases, the interviews are interesting to look back on from today's perspective: a 32 year old Marco Pierre White in 1994, Angela Merkel in 2003 before she was Chancellor, Jeff Bezo in 2002 when Amazon had recently made its first profit and its share price was less than $20 and Martin McGuiness in 1997 before the Good Friday Agreement.
‘Lunch with the FT’ also does a good line in sending up rich or famous people who are laughably out of touch with reality! In these cases, most of the credit must go to the journalist. Courtney Weaver does a wonderful job of exposing Ksenia Sobchak as a vacuous arsehole. Lucy Kellaway does a similarly great job in exposing Jacques Attali as a pretentious narcissist. Simon Kuper’s magnificent sketch of Prince Alwaleed reminded me of what an insightful and interesting journalist he used to be before he decided to focus solely on slagging off people who voted for Brexit. Roula Khalaf and Matthew Garrahan give a good impression of how ludicrously otherworldly Saif Gaddaffi and Angelina Jolie are, respectively.
Interviewees can end up being caricatures of themselves like the late Lord Hanson, of the erstwhile, eponymous conglomerate, or Micheal O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair. The Hanson interview reminded me of Henry Mance’s more recent, excellent lunches with Nigel Farage and Dermot Desmond. If Mance is my current favourite, then the queen of this era (mid 90s to 2012ish) is Lucy Kellaway, who does a splendid job with all four of her interviews included in the book. In second place numerically is Nigel Spivey with three, including the excellent Lord Hanson one, several journalists have two and most only one.
Some interviewees are interesting because of the place the interviewee has occupied in history; such as Paul Kagame, Donald Rumsfeld, Jimmy Carter and F.W. de Klerk.
The least enjoyable interviews for me were the economists who all, rather predictably, make hilariously inaccurate prognostications about the future. Infuriatingly, like all soothsayers, they continually claim that they’ve been right about everything but I suppose this is to be expected given the nature of their job. For example, Nouriel Roubini is catapulted to fame (and Lunch with the FT!) for predicting the financial crisis, which he got spectacularly right. Since then he has been making erroneous bearish predictions for a decade while the US stock market enjoys the longest bull market in history. As Benjamin Graham wrote in Part 1 of “Security Analysis”, ‘In the purely speculative field the objection to paying for advice is that if the adviser knew whereof he spoke he would not need to bother with a consultant's duties’. Applied to this case, if they understand how the global economy works so well why are they consultants and not billionaire hedge fund managers? The answer seems to me that they don’t believe their own spiel! One could argue fund managers are much the same but at least some of them put their money where their mouths are and have externally validated track records. Roubini struck me as a good deal more interesting than Krugman although this could be down to Martin Wolf’s inelegant writing, whose popularity is very puzzling to me. Gillian Tett, on the other hand, is a pleasure to read and manages to make Roubini’s insufferable smugness bearable.
This was a very enjoyable read but I found it was best in short bursts of one or two lunches at a time. Consuming larger quantities in one sitting left me longing for a longer format. The interviews are necessarily quite brief and in this sense I believe newspapers can be seen as a forerunner of social media insofar as they are short form, quite addictive, satisfy a superficial urge but are not ultimately very nourishing!
Some of the interviews alerted me to extraordinary individuals that I had no idea about and these were amongst the most enjoyable as they served as an appealing introduction to find out more. I would place Anatoly Chubais and Bao Tong in this category. Others gave insight into people I knew of and whose work I had enjoyed such as Yu Hua, Imran Khan and Zaha Hadid.
In other cases, the interviews are interesting to look back on from today's perspective: a 32 year old Marco Pierre White in 1994, Angela Merkel in 2003 before she was Chancellor, Jeff Bezo in 2002 when Amazon had recently made its first profit and its share price was less than $20 and Martin McGuiness in 1997 before the Good Friday Agreement.
‘Lunch with the FT’ also does a good line in sending up rich or famous people who are laughably out of touch with reality! In these cases, most of the credit must go to the journalist. Courtney Weaver does a wonderful job of exposing Ksenia Sobchak as a vacuous arsehole. Lucy Kellaway does a similarly great job in exposing Jacques Attali as a pretentious narcissist. Simon Kuper’s magnificent sketch of Prince Alwaleed reminded me of what an insightful and interesting journalist he used to be before he decided to focus solely on slagging off people who voted for Brexit. Roula Khalaf and Matthew Garrahan give a good impression of how ludicrously otherworldly Saif Gaddaffi and Angelina Jolie are, respectively.
Interviewees can end up being caricatures of themselves like the late Lord Hanson, of the erstwhile, eponymous conglomerate, or Micheal O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair. The Hanson interview reminded me of Henry Mance’s more recent, excellent lunches with Nigel Farage and Dermot Desmond. If Mance is my current favourite, then the queen of this era (mid 90s to 2012ish) is Lucy Kellaway, who does a splendid job with all four of her interviews included in the book. In second place numerically is Nigel Spivey with three, including the excellent Lord Hanson one, several journalists have two and most only one.
Some interviewees are interesting because of the place the interviewee has occupied in history; such as Paul Kagame, Donald Rumsfeld, Jimmy Carter and F.W. de Klerk.
The least enjoyable interviews for me were the economists who all, rather predictably, make hilariously inaccurate prognostications about the future. Infuriatingly, like all soothsayers, they continually claim that they’ve been right about everything but I suppose this is to be expected given the nature of their job. For example, Nouriel Roubini is catapulted to fame (and Lunch with the FT!) for predicting the financial crisis, which he got spectacularly right. Since then he has been making erroneous bearish predictions for a decade while the US stock market enjoys the longest bull market in history. As Benjamin Graham wrote in Part 1 of “Security Analysis”, ‘In the purely speculative field the objection to paying for advice is that if the adviser knew whereof he spoke he would not need to bother with a consultant's duties’. Applied to this case, if they understand how the global economy works so well why are they consultants and not billionaire hedge fund managers? The answer seems to me that they don’t believe their own spiel! One could argue fund managers are much the same but at least some of them put their money where their mouths are and have externally validated track records. Roubini struck me as a good deal more interesting than Krugman although this could be down to Martin Wolf’s inelegant writing, whose popularity is very puzzling to me. Gillian Tett, on the other hand, is a pleasure to read and manages to make Roubini’s insufferable smugness bearable.
This was a very enjoyable read but I found it was best in short bursts of one or two lunches at a time. Consuming larger quantities in one sitting left me longing for a longer format. The interviews are necessarily quite brief and in this sense I believe newspapers can be seen as a forerunner of social media insofar as they are short form, quite addictive, satisfy a superficial urge but are not ultimately very nourishing!
Monday 29 July 2019
Dolly Alderton - Everything I Know About yadayadayada, Love
This is a bad book. It is readable enough and has a fairly distinctive voice. There’s even the odd funny moment too. It also has some very annoying habits. One of which is that the book has no discernable structure other than that all the material relates to the author! As such, she takes us on a random meander through the her life ages 0-30. The first 150 pages followed a strange narrative where we seem to cover childhood - school - uni - early work life on a kind of 50 page loop. Appended to this freestyle chronology are lists, recipes and imagined invitations to weddings, baby showers, hen do’s etc. Lord only knows who thought this was a good idea; it reads like someone has spliced a 14 year old’s journal with a cookbook, a therapy diary and a dating column. It comes as no surprise to learn the author cut her literary teeth as a blogger. The book reads like a series of blogs.
The constituent parts of this dog’s dinner are probably as good a place as any to start describing what I don’t like about this book. The lists aren’t funny and mostly have a combragging element or are designed to showcase the author’s amazing taste, sexual prowess or ‘outrageous’ behaviour. The recipes are downright Nigella-level posturing. A recipe for ‘Can’t be arsed ice cream?’ is a ludicrously contradictory concept. To any normal person not trying to market themselves as a lifestyle brand, ‘can’t be arsed ice cream’ is bought in a tub from a shop or, in extreme cases, a McFlurry ordered from UberEats. ‘PISS OFF’, I shouted at the offending page when I uncovered it. To compound the problem, the author not only wants to play the lifestyle guru dispensing tips from her fabulous life but also wants to convince you that her life is totally normal and she is the quintessential everywoman. This is obviously attractive from a commercial perspective but didn’t ring true to me. The same is true of her depiction of her love life. The imagined invitations weren’t funny either. They function as marketing pieces for the aspirational lifestyle she leads - baby showers, hen nights, holidays and countryside weddings - while simultaneously attempting to mock it and thus distance herself from it. This was yet another instance of the infuriating combragging that saturates the book. The most gratuitous example of this was the mock hen do invite detailing all the woes of the overblown and expensive farce they have become. This was followed, with no detectable irony, by a description of a hen do she herself organised for her darling BFF involving renting out the whole top floor of a hotel and recording a video message from their local MP. If this sounds like the hen do she arranged is actually far more OTT and ridiculous than the one she made up in a spoof; that’s because it is!! I concluded that the author is probably the very worst example of the type of people she pretends to mock while secretly being very much in thrall to the sort of absurd socialising she claims to be so weary of!
This final trait is very much in evidence when it comes to topics like money, class or priviledge. To be fair, the author does admit to going to posh boarding school but seems to describe this as almost a sort of accident that doesn’t reflect who she really is. She inexplicably claims she doesn’t identify with posh people and defines herself as ‘feeling on the outside of their club’ (p100) when her entire life screams, ‘public school!’ like a braying Etonian after a few Pimms. How else could you explain all of her flatmates donning wellies when they discover a mouse in their house in central London? She goes to Exeter uni, works in LK Bennett, has an international life, friends in high places and exotic men to date. One of the most gratuitous examples of this is her New York trip where she arrives and finds she has no money. Any normal person would just call their parents and ask for some money but Dolly goes through many convoluted explanations to make it quite clear that she struggled through on her own. The whole book has a suspicious whiff of clandestine financial backing. The non-stop drinking at uni while not having a job, the fancy dress parties and long taxi journeys despite being apparently penniless. Money just seems to miraculously appear in her life. Or she is given a really good deal. Or has a friend who will let her use her apartment. But never a single penny from the bank of M&D. I found it all a bit disingenuous and that was my problem with the whole book. It sort of seems to say, ‘anyone can do anything with a bit of derring-do’ but in reality you can only have a life like hers when you’re rich and she should probably acknowledge this.
The book certainly purports to be open and straightforward. ‘I’m going to tell you the truth with no embellishment or spin’ might be a decent approximation of the tone. My problem is that the author’s presentation of herself is stage managed to within an inch of its life and the ‘deeper’ parts of the book feel one dimensional and prepackaged. When I found out that the author wrote a blog about ‘Made In Chelsea’ and then did some work on the show developing the characters or the plot I suddenly thought, ‘That’s it!’. The book is a literary version of ‘Made In Chelsea’. It might feel a bit like reality at first but it’s actually a scripted presentation. Are the relationships and ‘narrative arcs’ of ‘Made In Chelsea’ real? There might be an element of truth in the story, if you’re lucky, but it is shaped, adjusted and sometimes invented to pique the most interest or cause the most controversy. In the same way, I felt like this book presented itself to be a kind of ‘warts n all’ confessional but was actually a fairly serious piece of marketing. A lot of what the book is doing is identical to reality TV. The author is trying to interest you in her life and those of a small-ish cast of friends and boyfriends. You hear of their drinking antics, their sexual conquests and their heartbreaks. But do you ever hear anything about their families or hear them say anything in an unscripted and genuinely candid environment? Of course not! Both are performative and want to give the impression of reality in order to commercialise it.
As it happens, the best bit of the book was one of the ‘deeper’ parts. Her description of her experience of anorexia was well articulated and spoke with real poignancy about how often society can unwittingly reward or reinforce unhealthy and obsessive behaviour. I feel it was a shame that so much of the rest of the book was scenes from a scripted reality show. ‘Dolly has a big night out with the girls’, ‘Dolly has a one night stand’, ‘Dolly consoles a friend on the tragic loss of a family member’. I felt the last one was in pretty poor taste and I would have been hopping mad if a friend tried to write about me losing a close family member while writing absolutely nothing about her own family life. The ‘narrative arc’ that ran through the whole book was the best friend vs best friend’s boyfriend plot, which must surely have been used hundreds of times already on reality TV shows. In this sense, lots of the book’s major themes felt a bit tired, shallow and simplified for ease of consumption.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the book was the author’s incredibly high opinion of herself. You may say that this should be taken as a given when someone is writing a book of advice before reaching 30 but I was still taken back at the sheer scale! The first inklings come when Ms Alderton describes her experiences upon leaving the warm embraces of boarding school and Exeter Uni, which sounds like boarding school anyway: ‘I even used to get a thrill sitting in the GP’s waiting room, knowing I registered and got myself there without the help of anyone else’ (p107). Wow. Stunning. Who paid for the GP? Oh? Everyone who pays tax? Would you consider that to be the ‘help of anyone else’? There is a gag-inducingly high level of self-congratulation throughout. Such seems to be the extent of the suburban mollycoddling, the author thinks of herself as unbelievably grown up for doing pretty much anything for herself.
The ‘look at me I’m so grown up’ soon turns into a David Brent-esque screech of, ‘look at me I’M MENTAL’ when the drinking and drug taking of uni and her early twenties set in. There is a serious excess of pretty tame beer stories told in a self-satisfied way that makes it clear she obviously considers herself a world class hellraiser, which she categorically is not. Most of these ‘wild’ stories involve having a drink with middle aged men, doing a can-can or taking an expensive taxi late at night.
Another telling indication of the author’s optimistic assessment of her own chat are the absolutely groan inducing jokes. For example, “The plan is that everyone will fancy him as they get drunker and realize he’s the best of a bad bunch. A bit like how we all felt about Nick Clegg in the 2010 election” (p124) ba-BOOM! I don’t read ‘The Sunday Times Magazine’ but imagine if it’s all this good?! She also sees fit to reproduce text message conversations with her friends or random boys verbatim. A surer symptom of narcissism has not yet been discovered.
There’s also lots of com-bragging about her exes terrible behaviour and / or high social standing (PhD boffin, good looking but wild city boy, musician, entrepreneur, guru) and implied boasting about her sexual prowess. It all adds to the very definite sense throughout the book that things are being manipulated to make more engaging / aspirational / relatable content!
Another example of the sort of posturing the author indulges in relates to her intelligence. When describing the punishments for drinking at boarding school she sort of pretends to be stupid. ‘Rustication, whatever that means’ (p108), she writes dismissively so as not to appear stuffy and posh. However later on she is quite happy to talk about her love of literature and brag about her intelligence. She even uses the word ‘lugubriously’! She quite plainly is interested in words and writing so why pretend otherwise? It’s a pathetic sham.
Other parts are shameless, schmaltzy self-promotion. I would direct those looking for supporting evidence to p251 where you will find gratuitous boasting about how she is the world’s best ever mate. The vomit inducing sentimentality crescendos to a final, almighty wretch of, ‘it takes a village to mend a broken heart’. This in spite of the fact she has spent the last few pages describing how really what you need to get over a broken heart is an amazing mate like her. Just look how she was woefully abandoned by her BFF in favour of a man but, nevertheless, appears by her side, steadfast and dependable, in her hour of need.
Some of my dislike for this book must simply be my dislike for the author as she has presented herself. In my mind, she is the kind of posh girl who refuses to admit they’re posh despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To make matters worse, as opposed to broadening her horizons after public school, she has then taken herself off to a god awful quasi-public school of a university: Exeter. It seems to be a less academic version of Durham from her descriptions; if such a horror can even be imagined! One thing the author does seem to enjoy fairly consistently is attention. Attention from men, attention from friends, attention from anyone really. Testament to this are the elaborately planned parties and abundance of fancy dress. I mean, whom, other than a bona fide attention seeker, would organise a fancy dress pub crawl to celebrate moving out of a flat? The whole book beseeches the reader to think of her as talented, entertaining, wild, interesting, funny and cool.
However, she also has a mixed relationship to her concept of coolness. She often claims not to be interested in it. A good example of this happens when she extols the virtues of living in Camden because it’s not cool only to then say the best bit about it is being able to do a drunken cancan in a bar and ‘comfortably still be the coolest people in the entire bar’ (p113). It seems perverse, and self-defeating, to claim to like living somewhere because no one cares about being cool while simultaneously claiming you’re cooler than everyone else! For me, Dolly is very obviously preoccupied with being cool. This whole book is a testimony to that fact and documentary evidence of it. Nonetheless, she is self-aware enough to realise that she must claim to be uncool or at least uninterested in the concept in order to be considered cool. The whole thing is an uneasy mixture of insecurity about being a loser and entitled belief that she’s the best thing since sliced bread.
Given that my assessment of this book has been pretty scathing, I feel like I should try to appreciate the books merits briefly before we conclude. First, this is a book by a young woman about what life is like as a young woman. This alone makes the book far less common than insufferably self-satisfied renditions of the antics of youth written by men; of which there are many! In this sense, I am, perhaps, not the target audience for this book because I am a man. In another sense, a really good book should offer something to every reader but that’s for another day. Looking at this book in the best possible light, it is an entertaining and honest look at a young, female life when an overwhelming majority of literature aimed at this demographic simply reinforces stereotypes rather than challenges them. I don’t feel like the author has been that honest or is that entertaining but that is a subjective matter and I’ve covered the reasons why at length.
As I try to think of concluding comments about this book I’m reminded of the author’s friend who tells her she must choose between being “the woman who parties harder than anyone else or the woman who works harder than anyone else” (p118). This friend obviously didn’t have a very wide social circle. Like her beer stories, and the whole book, it’s all vacuous, overblown nonsense and outlandishly self-important fantasy.
The constituent parts of this dog’s dinner are probably as good a place as any to start describing what I don’t like about this book. The lists aren’t funny and mostly have a combragging element or are designed to showcase the author’s amazing taste, sexual prowess or ‘outrageous’ behaviour. The recipes are downright Nigella-level posturing. A recipe for ‘Can’t be arsed ice cream?’ is a ludicrously contradictory concept. To any normal person not trying to market themselves as a lifestyle brand, ‘can’t be arsed ice cream’ is bought in a tub from a shop or, in extreme cases, a McFlurry ordered from UberEats. ‘PISS OFF’, I shouted at the offending page when I uncovered it. To compound the problem, the author not only wants to play the lifestyle guru dispensing tips from her fabulous life but also wants to convince you that her life is totally normal and she is the quintessential everywoman. This is obviously attractive from a commercial perspective but didn’t ring true to me. The same is true of her depiction of her love life. The imagined invitations weren’t funny either. They function as marketing pieces for the aspirational lifestyle she leads - baby showers, hen nights, holidays and countryside weddings - while simultaneously attempting to mock it and thus distance herself from it. This was yet another instance of the infuriating combragging that saturates the book. The most gratuitous example of this was the mock hen do invite detailing all the woes of the overblown and expensive farce they have become. This was followed, with no detectable irony, by a description of a hen do she herself organised for her darling BFF involving renting out the whole top floor of a hotel and recording a video message from their local MP. If this sounds like the hen do she arranged is actually far more OTT and ridiculous than the one she made up in a spoof; that’s because it is!! I concluded that the author is probably the very worst example of the type of people she pretends to mock while secretly being very much in thrall to the sort of absurd socialising she claims to be so weary of!
This final trait is very much in evidence when it comes to topics like money, class or priviledge. To be fair, the author does admit to going to posh boarding school but seems to describe this as almost a sort of accident that doesn’t reflect who she really is. She inexplicably claims she doesn’t identify with posh people and defines herself as ‘feeling on the outside of their club’ (p100) when her entire life screams, ‘public school!’ like a braying Etonian after a few Pimms. How else could you explain all of her flatmates donning wellies when they discover a mouse in their house in central London? She goes to Exeter uni, works in LK Bennett, has an international life, friends in high places and exotic men to date. One of the most gratuitous examples of this is her New York trip where she arrives and finds she has no money. Any normal person would just call their parents and ask for some money but Dolly goes through many convoluted explanations to make it quite clear that she struggled through on her own. The whole book has a suspicious whiff of clandestine financial backing. The non-stop drinking at uni while not having a job, the fancy dress parties and long taxi journeys despite being apparently penniless. Money just seems to miraculously appear in her life. Or she is given a really good deal. Or has a friend who will let her use her apartment. But never a single penny from the bank of M&D. I found it all a bit disingenuous and that was my problem with the whole book. It sort of seems to say, ‘anyone can do anything with a bit of derring-do’ but in reality you can only have a life like hers when you’re rich and she should probably acknowledge this.
The book certainly purports to be open and straightforward. ‘I’m going to tell you the truth with no embellishment or spin’ might be a decent approximation of the tone. My problem is that the author’s presentation of herself is stage managed to within an inch of its life and the ‘deeper’ parts of the book feel one dimensional and prepackaged. When I found out that the author wrote a blog about ‘Made In Chelsea’ and then did some work on the show developing the characters or the plot I suddenly thought, ‘That’s it!’. The book is a literary version of ‘Made In Chelsea’. It might feel a bit like reality at first but it’s actually a scripted presentation. Are the relationships and ‘narrative arcs’ of ‘Made In Chelsea’ real? There might be an element of truth in the story, if you’re lucky, but it is shaped, adjusted and sometimes invented to pique the most interest or cause the most controversy. In the same way, I felt like this book presented itself to be a kind of ‘warts n all’ confessional but was actually a fairly serious piece of marketing. A lot of what the book is doing is identical to reality TV. The author is trying to interest you in her life and those of a small-ish cast of friends and boyfriends. You hear of their drinking antics, their sexual conquests and their heartbreaks. But do you ever hear anything about their families or hear them say anything in an unscripted and genuinely candid environment? Of course not! Both are performative and want to give the impression of reality in order to commercialise it.
As it happens, the best bit of the book was one of the ‘deeper’ parts. Her description of her experience of anorexia was well articulated and spoke with real poignancy about how often society can unwittingly reward or reinforce unhealthy and obsessive behaviour. I feel it was a shame that so much of the rest of the book was scenes from a scripted reality show. ‘Dolly has a big night out with the girls’, ‘Dolly has a one night stand’, ‘Dolly consoles a friend on the tragic loss of a family member’. I felt the last one was in pretty poor taste and I would have been hopping mad if a friend tried to write about me losing a close family member while writing absolutely nothing about her own family life. The ‘narrative arc’ that ran through the whole book was the best friend vs best friend’s boyfriend plot, which must surely have been used hundreds of times already on reality TV shows. In this sense, lots of the book’s major themes felt a bit tired, shallow and simplified for ease of consumption.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the book was the author’s incredibly high opinion of herself. You may say that this should be taken as a given when someone is writing a book of advice before reaching 30 but I was still taken back at the sheer scale! The first inklings come when Ms Alderton describes her experiences upon leaving the warm embraces of boarding school and Exeter Uni, which sounds like boarding school anyway: ‘I even used to get a thrill sitting in the GP’s waiting room, knowing I registered and got myself there without the help of anyone else’ (p107). Wow. Stunning. Who paid for the GP? Oh? Everyone who pays tax? Would you consider that to be the ‘help of anyone else’? There is a gag-inducingly high level of self-congratulation throughout. Such seems to be the extent of the suburban mollycoddling, the author thinks of herself as unbelievably grown up for doing pretty much anything for herself.
The ‘look at me I’m so grown up’ soon turns into a David Brent-esque screech of, ‘look at me I’M MENTAL’ when the drinking and drug taking of uni and her early twenties set in. There is a serious excess of pretty tame beer stories told in a self-satisfied way that makes it clear she obviously considers herself a world class hellraiser, which she categorically is not. Most of these ‘wild’ stories involve having a drink with middle aged men, doing a can-can or taking an expensive taxi late at night.
Another telling indication of the author’s optimistic assessment of her own chat are the absolutely groan inducing jokes. For example, “The plan is that everyone will fancy him as they get drunker and realize he’s the best of a bad bunch. A bit like how we all felt about Nick Clegg in the 2010 election” (p124) ba-BOOM! I don’t read ‘The Sunday Times Magazine’ but imagine if it’s all this good?! She also sees fit to reproduce text message conversations with her friends or random boys verbatim. A surer symptom of narcissism has not yet been discovered.
There’s also lots of com-bragging about her exes terrible behaviour and / or high social standing (PhD boffin, good looking but wild city boy, musician, entrepreneur, guru) and implied boasting about her sexual prowess. It all adds to the very definite sense throughout the book that things are being manipulated to make more engaging / aspirational / relatable content!
Another example of the sort of posturing the author indulges in relates to her intelligence. When describing the punishments for drinking at boarding school she sort of pretends to be stupid. ‘Rustication, whatever that means’ (p108), she writes dismissively so as not to appear stuffy and posh. However later on she is quite happy to talk about her love of literature and brag about her intelligence. She even uses the word ‘lugubriously’! She quite plainly is interested in words and writing so why pretend otherwise? It’s a pathetic sham.
Other parts are shameless, schmaltzy self-promotion. I would direct those looking for supporting evidence to p251 where you will find gratuitous boasting about how she is the world’s best ever mate. The vomit inducing sentimentality crescendos to a final, almighty wretch of, ‘it takes a village to mend a broken heart’. This in spite of the fact she has spent the last few pages describing how really what you need to get over a broken heart is an amazing mate like her. Just look how she was woefully abandoned by her BFF in favour of a man but, nevertheless, appears by her side, steadfast and dependable, in her hour of need.
Some of my dislike for this book must simply be my dislike for the author as she has presented herself. In my mind, she is the kind of posh girl who refuses to admit they’re posh despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To make matters worse, as opposed to broadening her horizons after public school, she has then taken herself off to a god awful quasi-public school of a university: Exeter. It seems to be a less academic version of Durham from her descriptions; if such a horror can even be imagined! One thing the author does seem to enjoy fairly consistently is attention. Attention from men, attention from friends, attention from anyone really. Testament to this are the elaborately planned parties and abundance of fancy dress. I mean, whom, other than a bona fide attention seeker, would organise a fancy dress pub crawl to celebrate moving out of a flat? The whole book beseeches the reader to think of her as talented, entertaining, wild, interesting, funny and cool.
However, she also has a mixed relationship to her concept of coolness. She often claims not to be interested in it. A good example of this happens when she extols the virtues of living in Camden because it’s not cool only to then say the best bit about it is being able to do a drunken cancan in a bar and ‘comfortably still be the coolest people in the entire bar’ (p113). It seems perverse, and self-defeating, to claim to like living somewhere because no one cares about being cool while simultaneously claiming you’re cooler than everyone else! For me, Dolly is very obviously preoccupied with being cool. This whole book is a testimony to that fact and documentary evidence of it. Nonetheless, she is self-aware enough to realise that she must claim to be uncool or at least uninterested in the concept in order to be considered cool. The whole thing is an uneasy mixture of insecurity about being a loser and entitled belief that she’s the best thing since sliced bread.
Given that my assessment of this book has been pretty scathing, I feel like I should try to appreciate the books merits briefly before we conclude. First, this is a book by a young woman about what life is like as a young woman. This alone makes the book far less common than insufferably self-satisfied renditions of the antics of youth written by men; of which there are many! In this sense, I am, perhaps, not the target audience for this book because I am a man. In another sense, a really good book should offer something to every reader but that’s for another day. Looking at this book in the best possible light, it is an entertaining and honest look at a young, female life when an overwhelming majority of literature aimed at this demographic simply reinforces stereotypes rather than challenges them. I don’t feel like the author has been that honest or is that entertaining but that is a subjective matter and I’ve covered the reasons why at length.
As I try to think of concluding comments about this book I’m reminded of the author’s friend who tells her she must choose between being “the woman who parties harder than anyone else or the woman who works harder than anyone else” (p118). This friend obviously didn’t have a very wide social circle. Like her beer stories, and the whole book, it’s all vacuous, overblown nonsense and outlandishly self-important fantasy.
Sunday 28 July 2019
Jack Kerouac - Dharma Bums
I had a very negative reaction to some of this book and a very positive reaction to other parts of it. It’s an original, infuriating, engaging and arrogant mixture of half-baked philosophical insights interspersed with some profound sagacity. I suppose I can hardly call it a bad book with all the sensations and sentiments it aroused in me.
Let’s start with a paragraph on what you can know about this somewhat scattered narrative. Ray Smith, an older than college age man but probably no older than 40, used to be a ‘lionized’ young author but now lives as a ‘dharma bum’. He rolls around hitchhiking, jumping trains, getting drunk, fraternising with a literary bohemian crowd, thinks about Buddhism, writes poetry and prays. He seems to have been involved in an academic institution at one stage as he makes reference to his stipend or scholarship money. The prose and narrative rattle along in such an uneven and helter skelter way that it’s hard to recall every precise detail. In the course of the book, he goes to visit his friend / crush Japhy who appears to be an academic at Berkeley. I think Smith meets Japhy in the course of the book but becomes so infatuated with him and eulogises about him at such length it feels like he is a much older friend. Smith thinks Japhy is cooler than a polar bear's toenails and looks up to him as some kind of mentor or role model. The relentless commentary on just how great Japhy is could be read as repressed homoeroticism, especially when he talks about how Japhy is ‘a real man’, but, in the main, I just found it boring, a bit ridiculous and then faintly nauseating. Anyway, the pair pass a while together living in Japhy’s shack in a larger property’s garden and take a hike up a mountain before Smith goes hitchhiking home to visit his family. He returns, spends more time with Japhy, they take another hike, Japhy goes to Japan on some project or other. Smith goes to live on top of a mountain as a forest fire lookout in Washington state; a job that Japhy did the year before him but can’t repeat because of his Japanese voyage.
So what is there to like and dislike? Let’s start with the good stuff and finish off with some scathing criticisms! First, and most importantly, the idea of spontaneity and immediacy in writing. This was especially relevant to me as I am struggling to complete several longer book reviews while I was reading this book. The repeated appeals to these values struck a chord with me and made me feel that I may be guilty of overvaluing comprehensiveness and complexity in my reactions over authenticity and speed! As someone who is always going off on tangents, I felt like this was a really valuable point. Ordinarily, I would probably look up some things about the author and the places mentioned in the book before I start writing but I resolved to write something as soon after finishing as I could and I’m writing this no more than an hour or so after completing the book.
Something else I really loved and admired was the overflowing enthusiasm and love the author has for nature and the outdoors. His descriptions of the euphoria of being in nature and the sheer joy of hard physical exertion, a feeling of self-sufficiency, having minimal material things but being well equipped for your environment, freedom and independence are all spot on. He’s also brilliant in his acerbic reflections on society and mainstream life as he seems it, for example:
“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what?” (p166)
I also couldn’t help myself from liking his wild enthusiasm and belief in what he is doing. Simultaneously, the arrogance could be grating but the feelings it evoked were wonderful. A sort of, “who-gives-a-fuck, we know better than everyone and are experiencing things those idiots couldn’t even imagine”. Obnoxious stuff, to be sure, but also enchanting in the way they want to do something different, throw two fingers up at conventional knowledge and are totally committed to that cause. The self-belief and self-satisfaction are almost regal in their splendour; they see themselves divinely anointed! I found all this very appealing and in some passages intoxicating.
However, these good things come at a cost. While the arrogance and religious fervour have their moments most of the time it’s just annoying, conceited nonsense. As with all religions, I find the need to express such certainty is laughable when compared to my own experience. Some might make an appeal to faith and perhaps that is what it boils down to. But why do most religions claim that they know everything when it is so blatantly obvious that humans know nothing? Oh, it may be lost, mystical knowledge, you say, which of course I couldn’t disprove any more than you could prove it! Humans are perennially groping about in the dark when it comes to the fundamental questions, in my opinion, and twas ever thus! Viewed from this perspective, most religions’ claims amount to crude advertising: Click here to understand the meaning of life and be eternally saved (watch out for fakes and frauds! Come to us for the one true religion, all others are wrong!!). Why do they all make such absurdly concrete claims when human experience is so decidedly uncertain? It all strikes me as tall tales to pacify the pretty terrifying reality that no one has even the slightest idea what is going on! I know such a pitiful amount about Buddhism, and perhaps the ideas in this book are an esoteric expression of this religion, but I struggled to see how everything could be nothingness and the void (an excellent and fascinating idea) but, nonetheless, Smith could be enthused about reaching nirvana through prayer or gaining some other kind of reward for is behaviour. Like the saved and the damned in Christianity, such a petty, decidedly human hierarchy seems to me to have nothing to do with the fundamental transcendental nature of the universe and everything to do with making silly, insecure, little humans feel special about themselves. Oh, look at me! I’m a special monk! Bah! Religions! Even if you ignore the philosophical inconsistencies, and my own philosophy is full of them so who am I to critcise, there was plenty more to annoy me!
The way Smith is always rattling on about Japan or China and Buddhist monks in a rambling and disjointed way is pretentious in the extreme. He is also very pleased with himself in describing his drunken exploits, sexual orgies, meditations, meals; pretty much everything in fact! Thankfully, this was leavened by a couple of incidents of humility and stories where he isn’t an absolute hero who is on the verge of saving the whole planet. Before I got to the first one of these I was thinking about abandoning the book just for it’s sheer self-satisfaction. The first incident was when he’s too scared to make it to the top of the mountain on the first hike with Japhy and the second is his stilted performance in the orgy although, even here, he intimates he got it sorted out in the end and then later on portrays himself as above sexual desire - a dubious assertion!!
Smith’s journey home was an interesting example of the duality I found in this book. Smith goes home and takes a lot of shit from his family for being unconventional and I felt sympathetic towards him. He is a searcher for higher meaning, an adventurer, albeit a pretentious one. His brother, especially, seems to find his Buddhism annoying and tests him about it. I suppose I would probably find his eccentricities annoying if I was his brother as we’re always looking for the worst in our siblings. If my brother got wasted all the time and started spouting off about meditation and eastern scholarship all the time, while interestingly never seeming to read anything apart from magazines, maybe I would get pissed off with him too. But at the same time, his desire to be amongst nature is harmless and I admired him for the originality of his thought. I felt he was somewhat harshly treated by his overly conventional family. Then all this sympathetic feeling was ruined by Smith’s ridiculous claim that he performed a miracle on his mother’s cough after having a vision in a dream! This sort of tosh reminded me of Paolo Coehlo’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ and that is in no way meant as a compliment. Sadly, this wasn’t the only pseudo-miraculous episode in the book and they’re all as ridiculous as each other. This passage is exemplary:
“During this vision and this action I knew perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilising physical opportunities to punish themselves because their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha nature, or Allah nature, or any name you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This was my first and last ‘miracle’ because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared too, of all the responsibility.” (p125)
Other highlights of the genre include:
“A great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it’ll be guys like us that can start the thing.” (p170)
“We’ve dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings and when we’re strong enough we’ll really be able to do it, too, like the old saints.” (p175)
The fact remains that while passages like this make me deeply irritated it is probably this kind of thinking that contributes to the books more appealing points about spontaneity, philosophy and life. Smith, or Kerouac, or whoever is narrating is swept up in a wave of euphoria for his new ‘knowledge’ however fleeting or superficial it may be.
I imagine the prose style used in this book was considered sensational in the 1950s. It still felt original to me but not especially beautiful. It has a furious immediacy which I admired more for it’s philosophy than the actual final product of the style. He seems to be saying, ‘Come on! Now! Let’s write something! Anything! Let’s have some ideas! Let the universe flow through us! But we must act!’. I loved this idea and it made me sit down and write immediately, which I’m grateful for. In this sense, I wholeheartedly think of this as a good book. The prose itself was much more so-so. I felt it was pretty unclear, a bit jarring, confusing in places and was neither pleasant nor easy to read. Equally, it would be folly to say the author couldn’t write. There are occasional flashes of brilliance that make some of the slog worthwhile. It’s a bit like Nabokov but without the ornamentation upon adornment upon decoration; a minimalist, spontaneous, hobo Nabokov! Just now I have a vision of Kerouac as a hobo and Nabokov as a Tsarist era aristocrat - both with the same character: they talk incessantly and some of what they say is amazing and makes the most spectacular impression, in part because of their elaborate outfits and personalities, but the more time you spend with them the more you realise they talk a lot of rubbish besides and are really far too eager to impress upon you how clever and wonderful they are. They’re both too shouty in very different ways but with a surprisingly similar outcome. In the case of Nabokov, where I have read about four of his books, I feel better qualified to make this comment than with Kerouac where this is my first. A quick example of a passage I loved, the earlier quotations can serve as examples of what I didn’t like:
“Poor Raymond boy, his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it’s such a haunted and pitiful thing to have to live’ and on this I’d go to sleep like a lamb. Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing IS nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?” (p199)
As I mentioned at the beginning, I have no idea of the background of this book or Kerouac further than to say it is set in the 1950s and, I think, was written then too. At some points I thought the whole thing was a sham and quite a poorly constructed one too. How could someone who hoboed around on the railways not have equipment like a sleeping bag or backpack? Why does he have to buy these when he meets up with Japhy? Money and food mysteriously appear out of nowhere and there are almost too many mundane reference to mundane places included in the text. Some parts felt more authentic than others but the narrative in general had the feel of a tall tale or, at least, a heavily embellished one! Some bits about Smith being a poet and his reference to being a young author made me think it might be autobiographical, although that’s a slippery concept when it comes to novels because, at some level, of course it is! How could it be otherwise?
This book has the infectious enthusiasm of someone who truly believes that they have discovered the key to life; with this comes unbearable arrogance and pretension! But the enthusiasm is sometimes a joy to behold and the book has some good ideas about spontaneity, communing with nature, self-sufficiency and being unconventional and a lot of half-baked rot too but thankfully it’s not that long! So all in all, this book had a couple of great ideas and a few great passages but was also irritating and a bit jarring to read at points. However, I definitely enjoyed the overall experience of reading it and would recommend it.
Let’s start with a paragraph on what you can know about this somewhat scattered narrative. Ray Smith, an older than college age man but probably no older than 40, used to be a ‘lionized’ young author but now lives as a ‘dharma bum’. He rolls around hitchhiking, jumping trains, getting drunk, fraternising with a literary bohemian crowd, thinks about Buddhism, writes poetry and prays. He seems to have been involved in an academic institution at one stage as he makes reference to his stipend or scholarship money. The prose and narrative rattle along in such an uneven and helter skelter way that it’s hard to recall every precise detail. In the course of the book, he goes to visit his friend / crush Japhy who appears to be an academic at Berkeley. I think Smith meets Japhy in the course of the book but becomes so infatuated with him and eulogises about him at such length it feels like he is a much older friend. Smith thinks Japhy is cooler than a polar bear's toenails and looks up to him as some kind of mentor or role model. The relentless commentary on just how great Japhy is could be read as repressed homoeroticism, especially when he talks about how Japhy is ‘a real man’, but, in the main, I just found it boring, a bit ridiculous and then faintly nauseating. Anyway, the pair pass a while together living in Japhy’s shack in a larger property’s garden and take a hike up a mountain before Smith goes hitchhiking home to visit his family. He returns, spends more time with Japhy, they take another hike, Japhy goes to Japan on some project or other. Smith goes to live on top of a mountain as a forest fire lookout in Washington state; a job that Japhy did the year before him but can’t repeat because of his Japanese voyage.
So what is there to like and dislike? Let’s start with the good stuff and finish off with some scathing criticisms! First, and most importantly, the idea of spontaneity and immediacy in writing. This was especially relevant to me as I am struggling to complete several longer book reviews while I was reading this book. The repeated appeals to these values struck a chord with me and made me feel that I may be guilty of overvaluing comprehensiveness and complexity in my reactions over authenticity and speed! As someone who is always going off on tangents, I felt like this was a really valuable point. Ordinarily, I would probably look up some things about the author and the places mentioned in the book before I start writing but I resolved to write something as soon after finishing as I could and I’m writing this no more than an hour or so after completing the book.
Something else I really loved and admired was the overflowing enthusiasm and love the author has for nature and the outdoors. His descriptions of the euphoria of being in nature and the sheer joy of hard physical exertion, a feeling of self-sufficiency, having minimal material things but being well equipped for your environment, freedom and independence are all spot on. He’s also brilliant in his acerbic reflections on society and mainstream life as he seems it, for example:
“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what?” (p166)
I also couldn’t help myself from liking his wild enthusiasm and belief in what he is doing. Simultaneously, the arrogance could be grating but the feelings it evoked were wonderful. A sort of, “who-gives-a-fuck, we know better than everyone and are experiencing things those idiots couldn’t even imagine”. Obnoxious stuff, to be sure, but also enchanting in the way they want to do something different, throw two fingers up at conventional knowledge and are totally committed to that cause. The self-belief and self-satisfaction are almost regal in their splendour; they see themselves divinely anointed! I found all this very appealing and in some passages intoxicating.
However, these good things come at a cost. While the arrogance and religious fervour have their moments most of the time it’s just annoying, conceited nonsense. As with all religions, I find the need to express such certainty is laughable when compared to my own experience. Some might make an appeal to faith and perhaps that is what it boils down to. But why do most religions claim that they know everything when it is so blatantly obvious that humans know nothing? Oh, it may be lost, mystical knowledge, you say, which of course I couldn’t disprove any more than you could prove it! Humans are perennially groping about in the dark when it comes to the fundamental questions, in my opinion, and twas ever thus! Viewed from this perspective, most religions’ claims amount to crude advertising: Click here to understand the meaning of life and be eternally saved (watch out for fakes and frauds! Come to us for the one true religion, all others are wrong!!). Why do they all make such absurdly concrete claims when human experience is so decidedly uncertain? It all strikes me as tall tales to pacify the pretty terrifying reality that no one has even the slightest idea what is going on! I know such a pitiful amount about Buddhism, and perhaps the ideas in this book are an esoteric expression of this religion, but I struggled to see how everything could be nothingness and the void (an excellent and fascinating idea) but, nonetheless, Smith could be enthused about reaching nirvana through prayer or gaining some other kind of reward for is behaviour. Like the saved and the damned in Christianity, such a petty, decidedly human hierarchy seems to me to have nothing to do with the fundamental transcendental nature of the universe and everything to do with making silly, insecure, little humans feel special about themselves. Oh, look at me! I’m a special monk! Bah! Religions! Even if you ignore the philosophical inconsistencies, and my own philosophy is full of them so who am I to critcise, there was plenty more to annoy me!
The way Smith is always rattling on about Japan or China and Buddhist monks in a rambling and disjointed way is pretentious in the extreme. He is also very pleased with himself in describing his drunken exploits, sexual orgies, meditations, meals; pretty much everything in fact! Thankfully, this was leavened by a couple of incidents of humility and stories where he isn’t an absolute hero who is on the verge of saving the whole planet. Before I got to the first one of these I was thinking about abandoning the book just for it’s sheer self-satisfaction. The first incident was when he’s too scared to make it to the top of the mountain on the first hike with Japhy and the second is his stilted performance in the orgy although, even here, he intimates he got it sorted out in the end and then later on portrays himself as above sexual desire - a dubious assertion!!
Smith’s journey home was an interesting example of the duality I found in this book. Smith goes home and takes a lot of shit from his family for being unconventional and I felt sympathetic towards him. He is a searcher for higher meaning, an adventurer, albeit a pretentious one. His brother, especially, seems to find his Buddhism annoying and tests him about it. I suppose I would probably find his eccentricities annoying if I was his brother as we’re always looking for the worst in our siblings. If my brother got wasted all the time and started spouting off about meditation and eastern scholarship all the time, while interestingly never seeming to read anything apart from magazines, maybe I would get pissed off with him too. But at the same time, his desire to be amongst nature is harmless and I admired him for the originality of his thought. I felt he was somewhat harshly treated by his overly conventional family. Then all this sympathetic feeling was ruined by Smith’s ridiculous claim that he performed a miracle on his mother’s cough after having a vision in a dream! This sort of tosh reminded me of Paolo Coehlo’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ and that is in no way meant as a compliment. Sadly, this wasn’t the only pseudo-miraculous episode in the book and they’re all as ridiculous as each other. This passage is exemplary:
“During this vision and this action I knew perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilising physical opportunities to punish themselves because their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha nature, or Allah nature, or any name you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This was my first and last ‘miracle’ because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared too, of all the responsibility.” (p125)
Other highlights of the genre include:
“A great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it’ll be guys like us that can start the thing.” (p170)
“We’ve dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings and when we’re strong enough we’ll really be able to do it, too, like the old saints.” (p175)
The fact remains that while passages like this make me deeply irritated it is probably this kind of thinking that contributes to the books more appealing points about spontaneity, philosophy and life. Smith, or Kerouac, or whoever is narrating is swept up in a wave of euphoria for his new ‘knowledge’ however fleeting or superficial it may be.
I imagine the prose style used in this book was considered sensational in the 1950s. It still felt original to me but not especially beautiful. It has a furious immediacy which I admired more for it’s philosophy than the actual final product of the style. He seems to be saying, ‘Come on! Now! Let’s write something! Anything! Let’s have some ideas! Let the universe flow through us! But we must act!’. I loved this idea and it made me sit down and write immediately, which I’m grateful for. In this sense, I wholeheartedly think of this as a good book. The prose itself was much more so-so. I felt it was pretty unclear, a bit jarring, confusing in places and was neither pleasant nor easy to read. Equally, it would be folly to say the author couldn’t write. There are occasional flashes of brilliance that make some of the slog worthwhile. It’s a bit like Nabokov but without the ornamentation upon adornment upon decoration; a minimalist, spontaneous, hobo Nabokov! Just now I have a vision of Kerouac as a hobo and Nabokov as a Tsarist era aristocrat - both with the same character: they talk incessantly and some of what they say is amazing and makes the most spectacular impression, in part because of their elaborate outfits and personalities, but the more time you spend with them the more you realise they talk a lot of rubbish besides and are really far too eager to impress upon you how clever and wonderful they are. They’re both too shouty in very different ways but with a surprisingly similar outcome. In the case of Nabokov, where I have read about four of his books, I feel better qualified to make this comment than with Kerouac where this is my first. A quick example of a passage I loved, the earlier quotations can serve as examples of what I didn’t like:
“Poor Raymond boy, his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it’s such a haunted and pitiful thing to have to live’ and on this I’d go to sleep like a lamb. Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing IS nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?” (p199)
As I mentioned at the beginning, I have no idea of the background of this book or Kerouac further than to say it is set in the 1950s and, I think, was written then too. At some points I thought the whole thing was a sham and quite a poorly constructed one too. How could someone who hoboed around on the railways not have equipment like a sleeping bag or backpack? Why does he have to buy these when he meets up with Japhy? Money and food mysteriously appear out of nowhere and there are almost too many mundane reference to mundane places included in the text. Some parts felt more authentic than others but the narrative in general had the feel of a tall tale or, at least, a heavily embellished one! Some bits about Smith being a poet and his reference to being a young author made me think it might be autobiographical, although that’s a slippery concept when it comes to novels because, at some level, of course it is! How could it be otherwise?
This book has the infectious enthusiasm of someone who truly believes that they have discovered the key to life; with this comes unbearable arrogance and pretension! But the enthusiasm is sometimes a joy to behold and the book has some good ideas about spontaneity, communing with nature, self-sufficiency and being unconventional and a lot of half-baked rot too but thankfully it’s not that long! So all in all, this book had a couple of great ideas and a few great passages but was also irritating and a bit jarring to read at points. However, I definitely enjoyed the overall experience of reading it and would recommend it.
Tuesday 18 June 2019
William Boyd - Any Human Heart
This book began very readably and I enjoyed the schooldays section of Logan’s life. Boyd captures the know it all nature of late youth, the burning desire to enter the adult world and be serious and the way naive new ideas and values are taken up with fervour, tried on and then discarded for something else. There are some funny incidents too during this era.
As we follow young Logan Mountstuart up to Oxford the portrait remains intriguing. However, as far as I remember, it is also during our hero’s university days that the author introduces the practice of name dropping. It is a very boring and a cheap, pretentious trick. The Garsington Manor incident, if not the first, is certainly the most gratuitous. It felt strange to be reading caricatures of famous people, wheeled in to perform their party trick, in the midst of what had been a fairly engaging story. It felt like the author didn’t think his characters were sufficiently interesting, which they were, or couldn’t be bothered to think of more material for them so instead resorted to the introduction of a bizarre array of cultural celebrities replete with hackneyed cameos. Sadly, it continued throughout the book. I felt it added nothing and sullied the whole story with a kind of autograph hunting, celebrity obsessed, gossip column ambience.
The character of Logan also suffers from a dip in quality around this time too. While at university he starts fucking his best friend’s girlfriend. Things continue in this vein when he begins an affair immediately after his wife has given birth and continues to live a dual life with his mistress in London until he is discovered. All this gives me the impression that Logan is a deeply selfish and extraordinarily self-satisfied. There’s plenty of evidence for this later on in the book. The worst is perhaps totally ignoring his son from his first marriage after his divorce for about a decade! Against this, he is faithful to his former mistress, Freya, and seems dedicated to her and his daughter until they are both tragically killed in the war. Just because he is pretty detestable individual doesn’t necessarily make Logan a bad character. But coupled with the thin stories and name dropping, it began to grate a bit. His career also seems to be conveniently designed for name dropping because he is an author in London 30s and then an art dealer in NY in the 60s allowing the author to mention even more famous people. If you chuck in Logan’s time as a spy, recruited by Ian Fleming of course, during the war then you can begin to develop some sense for the overblown nature of the narrative. Logan’s war was surprisingly forgettable given it ostensibly contains so much action. This is perhaps less surprising when I consider that the author would have had no direct experience of this environment, making it much harder for him to render it effectively to the reader. From reading his brief biography, it is clear he has first hand experience of minor British public schools and Oxford University and these sections are correspondingly more vivid. The African section of Logan’s life wasn’t especially good in spite of the author’s upbringing in Ghana. Equally, the scenes of old age are well drawn and he was only 50 when wrote them although it is conceivable he had experiences with more elderly family members or friends. It seems that this theory has its limitations but in general I felt he is stronger on familiar ground and seeks to include as much of it as possible.
There were some good bits as the book progressed. There was some excellent criticism of boring toffs (mainly his first wife’s family) but it lacked teeth coming from someone as unprincipled as Logan. His later years in London were, on the whole, more engaging and had some vivid scenes of Logan’s own, geriatric Down and Out in Paris and London style experiences. I kept wondering how he had managed to squander so much of his money. Then I began to wonder why he didn’t just sell his flat and live somewhere cheaper and stop eating dog food. In this sense, I didn’t think there was a lot of narrative logic or justification for this era of his life but it was better than the New York years and the interminable name-dropping! Mountstuart’s retirement in France is decently drawn, especially the landscape and light, but this section also contains a half baked story about a war criminal’s daughter returning to the region. The section where Mountstuart nurses his dying friend Gloria is also poignant.
Two other minor gripes I had with the book were that there were too many peripheral characters and it was hard to keep track of them when they only pop up once every hundred pages. His first cousin who he kisses as a teenager and then appears about three times in the next 70 years is a good example. There will be plenty more that I can’t even remember now. The second is that, although Logan speaks Spanish, there is barely a word of it and instead book is full of untranslated French, which is a pet hate of mine! In a Victorian novel I might forgive the assumption of French knowledge but not in a book from 2002. I can’t comprehend this decision and it really annoys me! The Spanish is translated though, which is at least something!
On the whole I found this a pretty superficial book. It was easy to read but left little lasting impression on me. The narrative felt a bit disjointed and lots of the material was thin. That having been said, there were certainly some good sections and it was not badly written in terms of style. I suspect my extreme hatred of the celebrity cameo tipped my bias against this book! It is definitely a fairly disparate collection of material, too much so in my opinion, but it could be argued accurately mimics some lives. However, I found I didn’t like or empathise with the main character and thought the narrative was patchy and inexpertly assembled.
As we follow young Logan Mountstuart up to Oxford the portrait remains intriguing. However, as far as I remember, it is also during our hero’s university days that the author introduces the practice of name dropping. It is a very boring and a cheap, pretentious trick. The Garsington Manor incident, if not the first, is certainly the most gratuitous. It felt strange to be reading caricatures of famous people, wheeled in to perform their party trick, in the midst of what had been a fairly engaging story. It felt like the author didn’t think his characters were sufficiently interesting, which they were, or couldn’t be bothered to think of more material for them so instead resorted to the introduction of a bizarre array of cultural celebrities replete with hackneyed cameos. Sadly, it continued throughout the book. I felt it added nothing and sullied the whole story with a kind of autograph hunting, celebrity obsessed, gossip column ambience.
The character of Logan also suffers from a dip in quality around this time too. While at university he starts fucking his best friend’s girlfriend. Things continue in this vein when he begins an affair immediately after his wife has given birth and continues to live a dual life with his mistress in London until he is discovered. All this gives me the impression that Logan is a deeply selfish and extraordinarily self-satisfied. There’s plenty of evidence for this later on in the book. The worst is perhaps totally ignoring his son from his first marriage after his divorce for about a decade! Against this, he is faithful to his former mistress, Freya, and seems dedicated to her and his daughter until they are both tragically killed in the war. Just because he is pretty detestable individual doesn’t necessarily make Logan a bad character. But coupled with the thin stories and name dropping, it began to grate a bit. His career also seems to be conveniently designed for name dropping because he is an author in London 30s and then an art dealer in NY in the 60s allowing the author to mention even more famous people. If you chuck in Logan’s time as a spy, recruited by Ian Fleming of course, during the war then you can begin to develop some sense for the overblown nature of the narrative. Logan’s war was surprisingly forgettable given it ostensibly contains so much action. This is perhaps less surprising when I consider that the author would have had no direct experience of this environment, making it much harder for him to render it effectively to the reader. From reading his brief biography, it is clear he has first hand experience of minor British public schools and Oxford University and these sections are correspondingly more vivid. The African section of Logan’s life wasn’t especially good in spite of the author’s upbringing in Ghana. Equally, the scenes of old age are well drawn and he was only 50 when wrote them although it is conceivable he had experiences with more elderly family members or friends. It seems that this theory has its limitations but in general I felt he is stronger on familiar ground and seeks to include as much of it as possible.
There were some good bits as the book progressed. There was some excellent criticism of boring toffs (mainly his first wife’s family) but it lacked teeth coming from someone as unprincipled as Logan. His later years in London were, on the whole, more engaging and had some vivid scenes of Logan’s own, geriatric Down and Out in Paris and London style experiences. I kept wondering how he had managed to squander so much of his money. Then I began to wonder why he didn’t just sell his flat and live somewhere cheaper and stop eating dog food. In this sense, I didn’t think there was a lot of narrative logic or justification for this era of his life but it was better than the New York years and the interminable name-dropping! Mountstuart’s retirement in France is decently drawn, especially the landscape and light, but this section also contains a half baked story about a war criminal’s daughter returning to the region. The section where Mountstuart nurses his dying friend Gloria is also poignant.
Two other minor gripes I had with the book were that there were too many peripheral characters and it was hard to keep track of them when they only pop up once every hundred pages. His first cousin who he kisses as a teenager and then appears about three times in the next 70 years is a good example. There will be plenty more that I can’t even remember now. The second is that, although Logan speaks Spanish, there is barely a word of it and instead book is full of untranslated French, which is a pet hate of mine! In a Victorian novel I might forgive the assumption of French knowledge but not in a book from 2002. I can’t comprehend this decision and it really annoys me! The Spanish is translated though, which is at least something!
On the whole I found this a pretty superficial book. It was easy to read but left little lasting impression on me. The narrative felt a bit disjointed and lots of the material was thin. That having been said, there were certainly some good sections and it was not badly written in terms of style. I suspect my extreme hatred of the celebrity cameo tipped my bias against this book! It is definitely a fairly disparate collection of material, too much so in my opinion, but it could be argued accurately mimics some lives. However, I found I didn’t like or empathise with the main character and thought the narrative was patchy and inexpertly assembled.
Thursday 14 February 2019
Min Jin Lee - Pachinko
This is a good book but my enjoyment of it progressed quite patchily. Initially, it was a little stilted and it took me a while to engage with the characters in the boarding house in Korea. Reasonably quickly, the book became more vivid and engaging as the characters and the narrative developed. It remained this way for majority of the book but I felt like my connection to the book began to unravel around two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through. As the book moves through the 100 odd years of history it covers, the generations inevitably multiply until I felt like I didn’t really have any connection or interest in the new characters that were being introduced. This reminded me of ‘100 Years Of Solitude’ a bit but the proliferation of characters and subsequent confusion aren’t as extreme as they are in Gabo’s classic. However, the quality of some of these characters did deteriorate later on in the book and this is not something I remember thinking about ‘100 Years Of Solitude’. Unlike the core characters whose personalities are build up slowly and at an enjoyable pace, the later characters feel rushed and haphazard. They’re less skillfully drawn and didn’t live up to the high standard I had come to expect from the book’s earlier passages. In this sense I feel the book is too long and that the latter sections aren’t as good as those in the middle. I thought I’d come up with a witty analogy for this book insofar as it is a tiny bit slow to get started, then really good and then becomes a bit of slog by the end. Unhelpfully, I have since forgotten the analogue! Was it going for a really long run? Was it the trajectory of enthusiasm for a new hobby or such like? Who knows? Who cares?
Besides the deterioration in quality as the book progresses, one of my biggest gripes about this book was the author’s use of dialogue as a vehicle for narrative. I’m generally of the opinion that dialogue is so hard to get right that less is usually more. More specifically, if there has to be dialogue it should definitely not be used to convey pieces of narrative to the reader. This almost always results in the dialogue becoming very clunky and I struggle to remember examples where it’s been done well. In a film or play, where options are limited, I can understand the need to have characters revealing parts of their backstory or narrative via dialogue but in a book I don’t see why the narrative can’t be kept in the prose, which avoids almost unbelievably clunky phrases like, “You’re leaving me in ten minutes to meet him. You do this on the first of the month.” I use this example from quite late on in the book as I happened to have highlighted it but the book’s opening passages has many other examples. Given that it always sounds so bad, I don’t see the reason or benefit of using dialogue in this way.
Sunja’s story is the best part of the book in my opinion. Her love affair with Hansu, her pregnancy with Noa, her marriage to Isak, their journey to Japan, their subsequent lives as Christian Korean immigrants and the birth of her second child are all engaging and well portrayed. This section of the book deals skillfully with a whole heap of interesting topics like marriage and infidelity, immigrant life, the Second World War, poverty, illness, religion and identity. The relationship between the half brothers Noa and Mosazu is another high point and is an interesting commentary on life as native born sons of immigrants. In spite of this richness, it never feels heavy handed and the story continues with admirable fluidity and pacing. The fact that Hansu remains an important part of the family’s life even after Sunja has rejected his offer to be his mistress adds a lot of complexity and interest. Whether or not this is ultimately beneficial for her and her family is debatable and seemed one of the central questions of the novel. In one practical sense, Hansu saves them from almost certain death by moving them to the countryside during the bombing of Osaka. On the other hand, it is the existence of this secret, illicit father and benefactor that seems to precipitate Noa’s suicide. Sunja appears to reconcile herself to these facts with reference to Christianity saying, “In the moments before her death, her mother had said that this man had ruined her life, but had he? He had given her Noa; unless she had been pregnant, she wouldn’t have married Isak, and without Isak, she wouldn’t have had Mozasu and now her grandson Solomon. She didn’t want to hate him anymore. What did Joseph say to his brothers who had sold him into slavery when he saw them again? “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” This was something Isak had taught her when she’d asked him about the evil of this world.” There are a lot of Christian characters in this book and while it is true that most of them are portrayed as good and kind, with the possible exception of Yacob in the later stages of his life, I wouldn’t say it was an overtly Christian novel. As with most of the themes, it’s handled sensitively enough not to encroach on the story although Christianity is given a benign treatment overall.
I was left a bit confused by Noa’s decision to kill himself rather than be reunited with his family. It seemed to me to be quite out of character for the scholarly and talented lover of literature who I would have expected to have a more nuanced understanding of identity, honour and status. Furthermore, he appears to love his mother and brother earlier in the book and has a family of his own when he commits suicide. The only conclusion I could draw was that he must have been utterly devastated by the discovery that he was illegitimate child to the point that this feeling overwhelmed all competing and contrary sentiments. I also felt perhaps someone else might have noticed the similarities between them earlier or found out about the story another way. I would probably locate Noa’s later life alongside the later characters in terms of their quality. By the time Noa kills himself, I felt like the book had already started to unravel in terms of narrative structure and character development.
Alongside Noa’s suicide, there are increasingly outrageous and hastily sketched plot developments. A character whose identity I can’t recall has a sexual awakening in a cemetery and, for good measure, also finds her husband there sodomising a male prostitute! I think it is Mosazu’s school friend the policeman’s wife. This school friend hardly plays a role up to this point and doesn’t feature after it either. Whoever it is, the scene feels rushed and disconnected from the rest of the book. Equally, the characters of Solomon, Mosazu’s son, and his girlfriend’s daughter, Hana, have the same feeling of an afterthought. When I compare them to the earlier parts of the book where Isak, Sunja, Kyunghee and Yoseb struggle with poverty and racism while attempting to raise children and remain faithful to their religion it feels like a different book altogether. The characters feel so hastily thrown together and the narratives that surround them feel like they have been cooked up by someone running out of ideas but still wanting those ideas to carry maximum shock value. The earlier parts of the book are nowhere near as attention seeking and gaudy. The earlier characters are painstakingly built up over long stretches. The later ones feel like they have been crammed into as few pages as possible with half baked, lurid plots to match.
Solomon is probably the best example of this. There isn’t much information about him until it is time for him to take part in two equally bad parts of the plot. First, he sleeps with his father’s girlfriend’s daughter Hana - shock, horror, taboo - and the daughter then proceeds to go off the rails and become a hostess / prostitute in Tokyo and die young - shock, horror, taboo. Secondly, he is involved in a really badly drawn investment banking storyline that serves no real purpose except to reinforce ideas about racism which are made far more poignantly and skillfully in other places. For instance, Isak’s imprisonment or Isak and Mosazu’s experiences growing up. The scenes from high finance never really ring true and seem to me to be well outside of the author’s area of expertise. The clunkiest part is probably the poker game he plays with his colleagues. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author had never played poker. The rules are set out but then ignored as Solomon hits a full house by discarding two cards and receiving two unwanted ones from his neighbour. Nevermind that the author has, only a page or so earlier, told us that next each player must give away a further card! The fact that the rules are mentioned only then to be completely ignored was really sloppy. This section also suffered from the, not unusual but completely false, presentation of poker as a game that a skillful player can win or lose at will. To anyone who has played even a small amount of cards, this is a ludicrous and wholly inaccurate simplification. I really wonder why this section was in the book at all as it is so badly done.
There is a tension between worldly characters, like Hansu and Mosazu, and more idealistic, often religious, characters like Isak, Noa and Yoseb. Both are presented in positive and negative lights and this even handed treatment is one of the book’s stronger points. I found myself quite drawn to the misanthropic, somewhat nihilistic and highly individualistic philosophy espoused by Hansu. This is probably best summarised by a passage of dialogue he delivers, “I’m a businessman. And I want you to be a businessman. And whenever you go to these meetings, I want you to think for yourself, and I want you to think about promoting your own interests no matter what. All these people—both the Japanese and the Koreans—are fucked because they keep thinking about the group. But here’s the truth: There’s no such thing as a benevolent leader. I protect you because you work for me. If you act like a fool and go against my interests, then I can’t protect you. As for these Korean groups, you have to remember that no matter what, the men who are in charge are just men—so they’re not much smarter than pigs. And we eat pigs. You lived with that farmer Tamaguchi who sold sweet potatoes for obscene prices to starving Japanese during a time of war. He violated wartime regulations, and I helped him, because he wanted money and I do, too. He probably thinks he’s a decent, respectable Japanese, or some kind of proud nationalist—don’t they all? He’s a terrible Japanese, but a smart businessman. I’m not a good Korean, and I’m not a Japanese. I’m very good at making money. This country would fall apart if everyone believed in some samurai crap. The Emperor does not give a fuck about anyone, either. So I’m not going to tell you not to go to any meetings or not to join any group. But know this: Those communists don’t care about you. They don’t care about anybody. You’re crazy if you think they care about Korea.” I found it hard not to agree with most of what he says. However, at the same time, there is a sense in which Hansu is responsible for suffering because he doesn’t spend enough time thinking about other people’s interests or ‘the group’ as he puts it. Alternatively, Noa and Isak both suffer for their principles and beliefs in a way that seems absurd to a pragmatist like Hansu. However, these same principles seem to lead them to a more disciplined and happier personal relationships. The ultimate cost of Hansu’s ruthless self-interest may be Noa’s suicide and all the misery that goes with it. The book itself appears to reserve judgement and, if anything, probably suggests that such judgements are beyond the scope of human understanding; as expressed in Sunja’s concluding thoughts quoted above.
Some of this book is really excellent but I feel like it overstretched itself in terms of length, historical scope, number of characters and storylines. The core story of Sunja, her family before her and her sons after her, are well paced and well written. The narrative functions independently as a good story with good characters and also as an example of far larger forces like war, race and poverty. Later on, the story becomes too lurid with too many hurried characters. These characters aren’t much good as stories on their own and nor do they add much to the general themes that are already extensively covered in other parts of the book. If I was the editor I would have tried to cut a good portion of the last couple of hundred pages as I think it clouds and confuses an otherwise excellent narrative and set of characters.
Besides the deterioration in quality as the book progresses, one of my biggest gripes about this book was the author’s use of dialogue as a vehicle for narrative. I’m generally of the opinion that dialogue is so hard to get right that less is usually more. More specifically, if there has to be dialogue it should definitely not be used to convey pieces of narrative to the reader. This almost always results in the dialogue becoming very clunky and I struggle to remember examples where it’s been done well. In a film or play, where options are limited, I can understand the need to have characters revealing parts of their backstory or narrative via dialogue but in a book I don’t see why the narrative can’t be kept in the prose, which avoids almost unbelievably clunky phrases like, “You’re leaving me in ten minutes to meet him. You do this on the first of the month.” I use this example from quite late on in the book as I happened to have highlighted it but the book’s opening passages has many other examples. Given that it always sounds so bad, I don’t see the reason or benefit of using dialogue in this way.
Sunja’s story is the best part of the book in my opinion. Her love affair with Hansu, her pregnancy with Noa, her marriage to Isak, their journey to Japan, their subsequent lives as Christian Korean immigrants and the birth of her second child are all engaging and well portrayed. This section of the book deals skillfully with a whole heap of interesting topics like marriage and infidelity, immigrant life, the Second World War, poverty, illness, religion and identity. The relationship between the half brothers Noa and Mosazu is another high point and is an interesting commentary on life as native born sons of immigrants. In spite of this richness, it never feels heavy handed and the story continues with admirable fluidity and pacing. The fact that Hansu remains an important part of the family’s life even after Sunja has rejected his offer to be his mistress adds a lot of complexity and interest. Whether or not this is ultimately beneficial for her and her family is debatable and seemed one of the central questions of the novel. In one practical sense, Hansu saves them from almost certain death by moving them to the countryside during the bombing of Osaka. On the other hand, it is the existence of this secret, illicit father and benefactor that seems to precipitate Noa’s suicide. Sunja appears to reconcile herself to these facts with reference to Christianity saying, “In the moments before her death, her mother had said that this man had ruined her life, but had he? He had given her Noa; unless she had been pregnant, she wouldn’t have married Isak, and without Isak, she wouldn’t have had Mozasu and now her grandson Solomon. She didn’t want to hate him anymore. What did Joseph say to his brothers who had sold him into slavery when he saw them again? “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” This was something Isak had taught her when she’d asked him about the evil of this world.” There are a lot of Christian characters in this book and while it is true that most of them are portrayed as good and kind, with the possible exception of Yacob in the later stages of his life, I wouldn’t say it was an overtly Christian novel. As with most of the themes, it’s handled sensitively enough not to encroach on the story although Christianity is given a benign treatment overall.
I was left a bit confused by Noa’s decision to kill himself rather than be reunited with his family. It seemed to me to be quite out of character for the scholarly and talented lover of literature who I would have expected to have a more nuanced understanding of identity, honour and status. Furthermore, he appears to love his mother and brother earlier in the book and has a family of his own when he commits suicide. The only conclusion I could draw was that he must have been utterly devastated by the discovery that he was illegitimate child to the point that this feeling overwhelmed all competing and contrary sentiments. I also felt perhaps someone else might have noticed the similarities between them earlier or found out about the story another way. I would probably locate Noa’s later life alongside the later characters in terms of their quality. By the time Noa kills himself, I felt like the book had already started to unravel in terms of narrative structure and character development.
Alongside Noa’s suicide, there are increasingly outrageous and hastily sketched plot developments. A character whose identity I can’t recall has a sexual awakening in a cemetery and, for good measure, also finds her husband there sodomising a male prostitute! I think it is Mosazu’s school friend the policeman’s wife. This school friend hardly plays a role up to this point and doesn’t feature after it either. Whoever it is, the scene feels rushed and disconnected from the rest of the book. Equally, the characters of Solomon, Mosazu’s son, and his girlfriend’s daughter, Hana, have the same feeling of an afterthought. When I compare them to the earlier parts of the book where Isak, Sunja, Kyunghee and Yoseb struggle with poverty and racism while attempting to raise children and remain faithful to their religion it feels like a different book altogether. The characters feel so hastily thrown together and the narratives that surround them feel like they have been cooked up by someone running out of ideas but still wanting those ideas to carry maximum shock value. The earlier parts of the book are nowhere near as attention seeking and gaudy. The earlier characters are painstakingly built up over long stretches. The later ones feel like they have been crammed into as few pages as possible with half baked, lurid plots to match.
Solomon is probably the best example of this. There isn’t much information about him until it is time for him to take part in two equally bad parts of the plot. First, he sleeps with his father’s girlfriend’s daughter Hana - shock, horror, taboo - and the daughter then proceeds to go off the rails and become a hostess / prostitute in Tokyo and die young - shock, horror, taboo. Secondly, he is involved in a really badly drawn investment banking storyline that serves no real purpose except to reinforce ideas about racism which are made far more poignantly and skillfully in other places. For instance, Isak’s imprisonment or Isak and Mosazu’s experiences growing up. The scenes from high finance never really ring true and seem to me to be well outside of the author’s area of expertise. The clunkiest part is probably the poker game he plays with his colleagues. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author had never played poker. The rules are set out but then ignored as Solomon hits a full house by discarding two cards and receiving two unwanted ones from his neighbour. Nevermind that the author has, only a page or so earlier, told us that next each player must give away a further card! The fact that the rules are mentioned only then to be completely ignored was really sloppy. This section also suffered from the, not unusual but completely false, presentation of poker as a game that a skillful player can win or lose at will. To anyone who has played even a small amount of cards, this is a ludicrous and wholly inaccurate simplification. I really wonder why this section was in the book at all as it is so badly done.
There is a tension between worldly characters, like Hansu and Mosazu, and more idealistic, often religious, characters like Isak, Noa and Yoseb. Both are presented in positive and negative lights and this even handed treatment is one of the book’s stronger points. I found myself quite drawn to the misanthropic, somewhat nihilistic and highly individualistic philosophy espoused by Hansu. This is probably best summarised by a passage of dialogue he delivers, “I’m a businessman. And I want you to be a businessman. And whenever you go to these meetings, I want you to think for yourself, and I want you to think about promoting your own interests no matter what. All these people—both the Japanese and the Koreans—are fucked because they keep thinking about the group. But here’s the truth: There’s no such thing as a benevolent leader. I protect you because you work for me. If you act like a fool and go against my interests, then I can’t protect you. As for these Korean groups, you have to remember that no matter what, the men who are in charge are just men—so they’re not much smarter than pigs. And we eat pigs. You lived with that farmer Tamaguchi who sold sweet potatoes for obscene prices to starving Japanese during a time of war. He violated wartime regulations, and I helped him, because he wanted money and I do, too. He probably thinks he’s a decent, respectable Japanese, or some kind of proud nationalist—don’t they all? He’s a terrible Japanese, but a smart businessman. I’m not a good Korean, and I’m not a Japanese. I’m very good at making money. This country would fall apart if everyone believed in some samurai crap. The Emperor does not give a fuck about anyone, either. So I’m not going to tell you not to go to any meetings or not to join any group. But know this: Those communists don’t care about you. They don’t care about anybody. You’re crazy if you think they care about Korea.” I found it hard not to agree with most of what he says. However, at the same time, there is a sense in which Hansu is responsible for suffering because he doesn’t spend enough time thinking about other people’s interests or ‘the group’ as he puts it. Alternatively, Noa and Isak both suffer for their principles and beliefs in a way that seems absurd to a pragmatist like Hansu. However, these same principles seem to lead them to a more disciplined and happier personal relationships. The ultimate cost of Hansu’s ruthless self-interest may be Noa’s suicide and all the misery that goes with it. The book itself appears to reserve judgement and, if anything, probably suggests that such judgements are beyond the scope of human understanding; as expressed in Sunja’s concluding thoughts quoted above.
Some of this book is really excellent but I feel like it overstretched itself in terms of length, historical scope, number of characters and storylines. The core story of Sunja, her family before her and her sons after her, are well paced and well written. The narrative functions independently as a good story with good characters and also as an example of far larger forces like war, race and poverty. Later on, the story becomes too lurid with too many hurried characters. These characters aren’t much good as stories on their own and nor do they add much to the general themes that are already extensively covered in other parts of the book. If I was the editor I would have tried to cut a good portion of the last couple of hundred pages as I think it clouds and confuses an otherwise excellent narrative and set of characters.
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