Robert Louis Stevenson - Kidnapped

 I can’t say if it was the content of the book itself, a change in my mindset while reading it or a combination of the two but I felt a real difference between the first and second half of the book.  I would’ve been much happier if the book finished after David Balfour’s eventual return to the mainland from Erraid.  

I think it is fair to say that both halves are action packed, both contain caricatures more than characters and both, at times, stretch the reader’s credulity.  All of this seems appropriate for a children’s adventure novel.  However, for whatever reason, I found the first half to be engaging and the second to be sloppily constructed and overwrought.  The tale of David’s journey to Cramond and his subsequent dealings with his curmudgeonly uncle were great and I found the young nephew’s suspicions to be an excellent starting point for the plot.  Of course, things take a turn for the more fanciful once the adventure begins in earnest and David is kidnapped.  That said, the ignoble crew and the inevitable mishaps were well drawn and of a piece.  The appearance of Alan Breck Stewart provides a good catalyst for David’s eventual escape and the fight scene would have made for a perfect, action packed crescendo - or so I thought at least!  I didn’t have much objection to the self-imposed stranding on Erraid either.  It provided a good foil of ignorance and incapacity to the all too capable performance of Alan and David during the fight!

After that, I felt like the book took a turn for the worse.  Perhaps I thought that after such an ordeal, David would stop at nothing to get back to his uncle as quickly as possible.  Perhaps the somewhat ridiculous Alan Breck began to wear a bit thin as he took up more narrative and dialogue.  I’m not usually a fan of historical characters appearing in novels.  I feel it’s a bit uninventive and usually results in the repetition of a few hackneyed character traits.  This was certainly the case for the highly romanticized chieftain in hiding, Cluny, and Alan Breck Stewart. 

The second half of the book also struck me as far more haphazard and unnecessarily flamboyant.  While the incidents of the first half hung together nicely, I felt the author was scrambling for material in the second.  David meets extraordinary guides, unwittingly becomes an accessory to the murder of the king’s agent, embarks on lengthy clandestine journey through Scotland, which is made to sound more like Hollywood Lord of the Rings set than anything like the real Highlands, without shelter and witnesses a farcical piping competition between ABS and another legendary clansman.  The tone and quality of the dialogue also seemed to deteriorate until I had the sensation that one cliche was being piled on top of another until the whole edifice keeled over.  

The denouement was reasonably satisfactory, with the exception of some highly floral and badly drawn interactions between David Balfour and his uncle’s lawyer back in Cramond but I felt like the book had already been spoiled by the journey from Erraid.  I would recommend this book because, at its best, it’s highly enjoyable but I would have preferred a shorter, edited version.   

Ursula K Le Guin - Earthsea

He stood tall and proud as the mighty oak whilst the wind whipped his mysterious and scarred visage and lightning broke the dark, stormy sky behind him.  He wore simple tweed britches, hand sewn leathern booties and the shaggy fleece of the flippitytoot, from his native lands of Giveashit, for warmth against the harsh winter.  He carried a staff of Baobab, palladian shod.  They called him Pidge but his true name, in the ancient, primordial tongue of the Snifftyflob, was MageLord 3000. 

I should preface these ramshackle reflections by saying I am not usually a reader of the ‘fantasy genre’, depending on how it’s defined.  First, it strikes me that a lot of fantasy books are about a fairly narrow cast of wizards, dragons, witches and ogres.  That’s not to say there is anything wrong with those types of characters.  They don’t pique my interest much.  On the whole, I tend to think to myself, rightly or wrongly, ‘humanity is interesting and varied enough for me I’ll probably leave the fantasy for another day’.  

The prose in the book wasn’t much to my liking and I found it meandering, facil and cliched.  It was never pithy or concise and was often confusing and verbose.  I found a lot of the characters and scenes to be overwritten and full of romantic nostalgia for the world she’s created for them.  ‘What do you expect from a fantasy novel?’, you might ask.  

I got more enjoyment out of the themes in the book, for example, the idea in the first book of Ged battling against the darkness, which he has created, to save his life and identity.  At other points, I felt like it was too much of a mish mash of borrowed ideas, for example, light and darkness (Bible), a young man going on a journey to establish his own identity (Greek epic, Jung).  One theme I thought a bit ridiculous was the desperate attempt to establish a positive female perspective in the fourth book.  In the preceding three books women are depicted as crafty seductresses (Ged in garden, Book 1) or evil devil worshippers and child sacrificers (Order of Preistesses, Book 2).  However, in the fourth book there is an abrupt change from men, mage lords and mighty staff wielding wizardry to a focus on mothering, nurture and the importance of domesticity and anything relating to women while men are scolded instead.  

Book 2 was an impressive piece of writing and struck me as the most creative perhaps because it wasn’t full of ‘fantasy’ characters from central casting.  In fairness to Le Guin, it’s possible that I find some of her characters and style hackneyed because so many people have copied it.  I have read that some people consider her incredibly influential and innovative but I am not really in a position to comment.  

This wasn’t a book that I enjoyed or would recommend because it is too long, the prose is bad and there aren’t enough good themes or characters to make it worthwhile.  Books 1 & 2 are certainly better than 3 & 4 and would be enough to get a taste of her style.  That said my favourite character was from Book 3, so there you go.  It was Sopli.

Will Ashon - Chamber Music: About the Wu (In 36 Pieces)

This book is a work of great passion and obvious obsession with the subject matter. It self-consciously takes a magpie approach to the selection and presentation of material. This is both a good and a bad thing. A precursory glance at the books I’ve rambled about on this blog will show I employ a similar strategy with my reading so, in some ways, I admire it. On the other hand, I’m not writing a book!


Beginning with the good stuff, Ashon knows what he is talking about when it comes to making music, listening to music, selling music and pretty much anything else to do with music. His explanations of sampling techniques and equipment are great. His knowledge of its history and the genealogy of influences are deep and detailed. He breaks down how a track makes its way from an artist’s bedroom to a studio album, or at least how that happened in the mid 90s when ‘36 Chambers’ was released. He knows how record deals work and where to look for the split of royalties between group members. All in all, he’s very strong on music, how music is made and how the music industry works. He has also analysed the subject matter, and seemingly almost any material connected to it, forensically.


On the other hand, the same magpie approach yields some less shiny objects to adorn the nest. Ashon covers huge swathes of non-musical history, anthropology, sociology, economics and geography in a manner that’s much less clear than the stuff on music. He achieves the considerable feat of being simultaneously superficial and rambling on subjects like race, slavery and economics. He references some great books in his chapter length summaries of these gargantuan subjects but, on the whole, there are much better authors to read on these complex topics. Sometimes, the chapters read more like a stream of consciousness and it’s hard to work out what he’s even on about. The chapter about weed would definitely fall into this category and I wasn’t even stoned when I read it! The overall effect is to diminish the quality of the book and make it too long. Occasionally, a nice connection is made or an interesting tangent described but I would have much preferred it if he got rid of about ten chapters and wrote at greater length on the stuff he is really good at writing about (see para 2), which is often too short and left me wanting more. Maybe I should blame the editor, maybe he got carried away with the idea of having 36 chapters or maybe it’s just me who’s irritated by this sort of thing. One of the chapters contains hundred-odd word summaries of a selection of Shaw Brothers films which influenced the group’s members, which struck me as utterly pointless. I would imagine that Ashon has watched them all, which is what makes him such an expert on this topic, but it brings little insight or enjoyment to the reader to read skeletal plots one after another. Similarly, each chapter has a tiny, black and white photo of what I assume are scenes from Staten Island. Again, it’s evident from the book that he has been there and visited all the central locations in the creation of the album and this results in interesting and valuable prose sections. But why try to crow bar in a bunch of average snaps of suburban NY, which are neither interesting nor valuable? Selection of material and knowing what to focus on and what to leave out are the weakest points of this book.


The style of the prose is mixed too. Sometimes it’s like reading a music magazine with puns and pop culture references. Other times it’s all high falutin Granta / Oxbridge stuff with a religious use of ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ (though he does acknowledge the absurdity of this in a note) and words like ‘impedimenta’ and ‘praxis’ bandied around just so you know he is REALLY VERY CLEVER! The prose certainly wasn’t the highlight of the book even though it was good in places.


The book finishes on a high note with a brilliant conspiracy theory about how Ghostface Killah might have been the real architect of the group’s structure and success, which is normally attributed to the RZA. Only a true aficionado would even be able to construct a theory like this and it showcases all Ashon’s undoubted knowledge and immersion in the subject in a very flattering light.


At its best the book is informative, well written and fascinating. However, too often it strays into vague tangents and attempts to cover way too much ground given its scope. It would have benefitted from tighter focus on the areas where Ashon is a real expert and omission of his ill-fated attempts to explain slavery, capitalism etc. etc. in one chapter.

Helen Garner - Monkey Grip

The prose in this book is generally good. It’s pithy and has the odd memorable observation or phrase. A ‘fingernail moon’, feeling ‘like an old scoured out frying pan’ and the feeling of smack being like ‘warm lead running through your veins’. Unfortunately this is married to some rather less good pretensions. First, what I would call cheesy ejaculations. These are one sentence paragraphs, usually a decent warning for grandiose rubbish, that are seemingly selected for their profundity. If only. A few of the worst offences were:

“A person might not be ashamed to wish for love.” (p9)

“I was afraid of his moods.
I was afraid of my own.
I was afraid of being afraid.” (p32) - why is this italicised? Is it a poem?

“There was a life to be made.” (p75)

“Fear of being loved; fear of not being loved.” (p139)

“I would like to love and yet not to love.” (p203)

As if this kind of thing wasn’t vomit inducing enough, the protagonist is also fond of quoting the I Ching. Of course, this is entirely in keeping with what a bohemian Aussie from the 1970s might well have been like. That still didn’t stop me groaning everytime she attempted to use it to reflect on her life. I thought, ‘have you ever considered the deep and universal truth that a junkie who treats you like shit is a bad choice of lover!?’.


This brings me to my fundamental issue with the book. I did not like Nora and could not empathise with her at all. Her self involvement is truly staggering. The whole book is essentially a stream of consciousness with only one topic covered: her unhealthy and inexplicable obsession with Javo. Other characters never develop much and even central aspects of her own are washed away in the deluge of narcissism. For example, she hardly ever talks about her kids to the point where I spent a hundred odd pages wondering how many she had. It turns out she only has one but doesn’t even mention what she does with her when she goes to Tasmania with Javo. I found it hard to like a character who spent all their time worrying about what an uncaring junkie wants rather than what’s best for their child.


Simultaneously, the self-obsession is mixed with an almost total lack of self-respect. Why have a junkie round your children? Why let him treat you like shit and ignore you in public? She’s not even on smack herself! Love is the excuse given. Either that or the hypnotic nature of Javo’s blue eyes, a fact that’s infuriatingly repeated every 10 pages. While being addicted to heroin is near universally acknowledged to be bad for you, people tend to have a much more positive view of being in love. In this case, the two seem to be as bad as each other!


In spite of not liking the protagonist one bit, this book seems an accurate representation of a deeply troubled woman with very little self-esteem. I wouldn’t recommend it and nor would I say I learned anything much from it because I already knew addicts are emotional black holes and people use love as a justification for incredible stupidity. That said, the prose is good and the presentation feels authentic albeit deeply depressing.

Robert A. Monroe - Journey Out Of The Body

Many people dismiss the idea of out of body experiences (OOBE) as, at best, hallucinations and, at worst, fabrications or a sign of insanity. The only OOBE I’ve ever had was when I took too much ketamine. Testimony like this may be behind a lot of the scepticism people express about this subject. The witnesses are under the influence of drugs or exhibit other external distortions of their perception that harm their credibility. Equally, some accounts of OOBEs are made alongside such extraordinarily bizarre claims it’s hard not to dismiss them as delusions or blatant self-interest.


It’s hard to put Robert Monroe in this category of dubious testimony. He was a successful businessman and ran a radio production company.  He was not a cult leader or a drug addict. Indeed, talking about his OOBEs and publicising them was probably more of a risk to his career than a potential boon to it. He doesn’t make any dogmatic claims about what his OOBEs signify and doesn’t link them to a larger schema of beliefs. He simply reports what he has experienced. Furthermore, he was also involved in scientific research. He conducted research into the effects of sound wave forms on human behaviour and had several patents in the field. As such, he tries to be as empirical as possible in his experimentations with OOBEs and reporting of them. He also explicitly recognises their limitations as data points in the scientific method. He makes no wild claims and he seems to be a demonstrably reasonable and scientific person.

The book explains how he started to have OOBEs and details a representative selection of these experiences taken from his extensive notes. He also makes efforts to corroborate his experiences by attempting to visit people he knows and connect with them both psychologically and physically. He collects and collates a large amount of data and even goes as far as to try to have the experiences under various laboratory conditions. He categorises these experiences into three broad groups. First, moving around the physical world we know detached from his physical body (Locale 1). Second, existing in an entirely psychological realm totally distinct from the physical world, which includes contact with people who are dead in the physical world (Locale 2). Third, is a world ostensibly physical world very similar to our own but with significant differences in technology and societal development (Locale 3). The last realm causes him to posit a universe of parallel worlds. So far, so fantastical! However, the manner in which the book is written and the total absence of self-serving claims about the significance of what he has experienced make his account far more persuasive and interesting than anything I have read on the subject before, which admittedly isn’t much.


It’s possible to argue that some of Monroe’s businesses made it in his interests to promote these ideas. The ‘hemi sync’ machine he invented produces altered states of consciousness; a subject this book really piques the reader’s interest in. It could also be argued that his career as a media producer gave him skills in presenting information persuasively. Against this, The Monroe Institute he founded to further exploration of human consciousness is a non-profit organisation. There again, so are scams like the Donald Trump foundation and the CFA institute! I don’t know enough about the man or his institute to comment meaningfully on this but it would be foolish not to think critically about his motivations.


The book encourages readers to try and have OOBEs themselves using various techniques most easily described as akin to meditation. It doesn’t try to get you to join a cult or give all your worldly possessions to The Monroe Institute! In this way, his aims seem to be benign and motivated by curiosity.

Erich Kastner - Going To The Dogs

I read this book quickly and enjoyed the limpid, unpretentious style. There’s the odd brilliant phrase like the woman laughing so hard the narrator expects her ‘to lay an egg’! The characters and the narrative weren’t so good.


Fabian is an unengaging and deeply annoying protagonist. He hardly seems to know what he wants or even likes most of the time. Alongside this infuriating lack of conviction he is also presented as a morally perfect letting homeless people live in his room and slipping tips to prostitutes who he hasn’t slept with. He isn’t believable or relatable in any way. It’s clear that at some level Fabian stands for decency but the conception is narrow and, frankly, not very enticing. The book has Fabian saying to Labude, ‘when you’ve got your Utopia the people there will still be punching each other on the nose!’ (p38) but neglects to show Fabian’s own character as anything other than pure and good. It’s as if the author recognises the problems inherent to the human condition but then merrily goes on to construct the wholly unlikely and unlikeable Fabian as a paradigm of ‘goodness’ who’s also a paradigm of weakness and indecision! To me, this is simplistic and silly moralising that can’t convey anything meaningful about life.


The book had a consistently prudish tone that I would also consign to the rubbish dump of silly moralising. Later on, Fabian declares, “I look on and wait. I wait for the triumph of decency; when it comes, I can place myself at the world’s disposal.’ (p74) Why? Because he is so inherently decent? If that’s the case why can’t he do something more concrete for himself or the others around him? His excuse is because the world is so depraved. But if he is a human, and not some character like Dostoevsky’s idiot, then he’s exactly the same as the world around him and is simply making childish excuses for his own shortcomings. His excuses are also grandiose and delusional; isn’t he inevitably at the world’s disposal all along? The whole juxtaposition of decency (Fabian) set against its opposite (the World) struck me as self-congratulatory, sanctimonious and, most importantly, totally wrong. How is it possible to see the world as one thing and yourself as something else completely distinct from it? It’s all nonsense to me.


I’m pretty ignorant of 20th century German history so I’m sure a lot of the book’s historical significance is lost on me. Even though I had very little idea about the authors, places and events described in this book it is very obviously written to be some form of allegory or metaphor for its contemporary environment. Of itself, this isn’t a problem. However, I found that the author’s style is too heavy handed in this regard. To be effective, I feel like an allegory has to be a good story first and foremost. This book might be the most wonderful description of, or allegory for, the pre-WW2 Berlin but it comes across poorly as a book! It’s been suggested to me that the book’s status as a classic is as a historical document or source rather than as a novel, which would be in keeping with my reading. Events and characters are clunkily bashed around in a manner that might perfectly describe the ambience of Berlin before 1933 but made for very little enjoyment of the text as a pure story.


One section I did particularly enjoy was this section:

“Labude had stood on solid ground; he had tried to march forward and stumbled. He, Fabian, was floating in the air, because he lacked weight and substance; yet he was still alive. Why did he go on living, when he did not know what he was living for? Why was his friend dead, when he had known why he lived? Life and death still came to the wrong people.” (p155)

To me, this captured the contradiction and incomprehensible nature of life as experienced by humans. Very little can be known, even less understood. This quote clashes violently with my interpretation of the rest of the book where both Fabian and the author seem to share the delusion that they know what is ‘right’, ‘decent’ or ‘moral’ and can instruct others on the subject or absent themselves from action until everyone else conforms with their conception of it. Silly sausages!!


In conclusion, this is a bad book written in good prose. It is probably a much more fulfilling read if you’re an expert in early 20th century German culture but I found a lot of its symbolism heavy handed.

Anand Giridharadas - Winners Take All

In America, since 1980, the average income of the top 1% has tripled and the top 0.001% has multiplied by seven times. At the same time, the average income for the bottom half of the income distribution has increased from $16k to $16.2 - a huge fall in real terms when adjusted for inflation. Since the 1970s, one hundred and seventeen million people have been cut off from economic growth - “a generation’s worth of mind-bending innovation had delivered scant progress for half of Americans” (p16). As anyone aware of Thomas Picketty knows, inequality is rampant and ever increasing around the world, so presumably it’s a good thing that the wealthy are giving away their money? Not so fast!


While billionaires and elites make a big song and dance of their philanthropy and their foundation’s efforts to save humanity and solve its problems, the book argues that these are in fact, “lite facsimiles of change” (p122). Problems must be couched in market and business friendly terms and must never attack the foundations of elite privilege or identify them as part of the problem. The book quotes Ford Foundation president Darren Walker saying, “Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem” (p155).


The book also highlights the problem of philanthropy as a PR tool that can cover up the original origins of the givers' wealth. Didn’t Bill Gates and Microsoft indulge in anti-competitive practices? Didn’t Mark Zuckerburg and Facebook illegally sell their customers’ private data? Didn’t banks cause the financial crisis? Don’t Coke or McDonald's sell products that are bad for their customers' health? Didn’t the Sacklers get rich using aggressive marketing techniques and false claims about their product to turn doctors into legalised heroin dealers? According to this account, “generosity entitles the winners to exemption from questions like these” (p165). I feel he's right about this and the phenomenon is undeniable.


Another issue that is referred to obliquely in the book is that the same people making donations with one hand are often using the other to avoid their responsibilities to society at a corporate or personal level. The rich are the greatest tax dodgers as well as the greatest givers. But while you won’t be invited to view and applaud their convoluted tax structures or aggressive business practices, you will definitely be exposed to nauseating PR about how they’re some form of capitalist Mother Teresa. As any decent defender will tell you, when faced with a tricky opponent “watch the ball, not the feet”. In this case, while the ball is being sheltered in an anonymous shell corporation in the BVI, the feet are performing a dazzling array of stepovers to indicate that the person in question is selfless and altruistic. The hypocrisy, double-think and self-delusion is extreme and Girdharadas does a good job of skewering it. The best is an account of a VC guru called Pishevar attending Summit at Sea and giving a seminar on his investment in Uber, railing against the taxi industry it was disrupting. “He had the audacity to board an expensive, exclusive, invitation-only cruise-ship conference full of entrepreneurs, and yet claim it was the taxi drivers who constituted the unjust cartel.” (p68) You couldn’t make it up.  Again quoting Walker, the book encourages us “to openly acknowledge and confront the tension inherent in a system that perpetuates vast differences in privilege and then tasks the privileged with improving the system.” (p171)


Giridharadas calls this elite bubble of ‘doing well while doing good’, ‘social enterprises’ and ‘win wins’ MarketWorld because of the elites’ love of free market principles. There is no place for the government to solve problems or regulate; business and competition must be unfettered by regulation. It must be private corporations and capital, with their profit motives and drive to ever-increasing efficiency, that provide solutions to the world’s problems. He mocks the absurdity and contradiction inherent in a group of greedy capitalists flying round the world in private jets to meet up in five star hotels and discuss solving the world’s problems without ever mentioning the inequalities and unjust structures that facilitate and perpetuate the very same problems.


The book argues that governments and public institutions are a far better way to address society's problems because they are governed in transparent and democratic ways. This means initiatives do not rely on the whims of billionaires or flounder on the conflicts their corporate interests create. I found this idea to be a bit utopian. To be sure, we should not expect vested interests to change the system. Billionaire philanthropist Laurie Tisch puts it very nicely when she says, “the people who get to take advantage of the system, why would they really want to change it? They’ll maybe give more money away, but they don’t want to radically change it” (p195). However, Giridharadas seems to think that the 117m mentioned at the book's outset should want to change the system. Predictably, the turkeys will vote against Christmas; but what about the chickens, or maybe sheep, who should be voting for it but don’t?  Why are Trump and tax cuts for the rich what democracy has chosen rather than Bernie Sanders?  I would broadly agree with Giridharadas that more progressive taxation and a bigger government would help the average American, but the average American doesn’t seem to agree.  Why is this?  This isn’t really addressed in the book even though it is a serious practical problem for his vision.  One explanation is put forward by Tisch in the same interview: that being rich is aspirational.  Poor people want tax cuts because they think they might be rich one day, or so the theory goes.  This is dismissed by Giridharadas as self-interest, which it is in Tisch’s case, but the fact that poor people are voting for Trump is not evidence of elite self-interest.  It is a popular endorsement of radically different ideas to the ones he proposes and this isn’t tackled in any meaningful way.


Writing about a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative, the author criticises global elites for assuming that ordinary voters are gullible idiots who have been tricked into voting for populism.  While the same elites continue ignoring the fact the populist vote is a rejection of the system they have presided over and thrived under.  By the same token, the author doesn’t do enough to explain why people are choosing a radically different solution to the same problem he identifies.  Maybe he feels the voting populus have been duped or brainwashed by MarketWorld, which sounds pretty close to the elite view he criticises.  I would have liked it if the author addressed the issue of populism, and how it relates to his ideas, more explicitly.  He writes a lot in praise of democracy and democratic institutions but doesn’t talk about a situation where democracy is voting to dismantle its institutions and cede more and more ground to the private sector.


Personally, I think it is because most people have a far more positive view of capitalism than Giriharadas does and a far less positive view of government.  I’m not able to comment on if this is right or wrong but it seems a majority of voters in America feel this way.  Most people would probably link their job, the success of America and much human progress to capitalism and an idea like Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand.’  At one point, the book quotes the founder of B corporations as saying, “we’re not going to change everybody. We’re not changing human greed. Businesses act badly.” (p251).  But individuals also act ‘badly’ when they buy the cheapest product rather than the most ethical one and half of Americans have no choice in that because they are so poor. People see government as bureaucratic and nepotistic while capitalism is seen as meritocratic, lowering costs through competition and giving people the freedom of choice.  These ideas might not be entirely true and may only be in vogue because of elites manipulating politics and the narrative around capitalism.  Nevertheless, it seemed odd to me that the author can endorse big government and regulation so uncritically when he’s written a book about the Indian economy where big government seems to largely result in big corruption.


It’s probably unfair to ask this book to be too specific on details when its scope is broad ideas.  However, I do think that it should have addressed the question of why people think capitalism is great even though it excludes them from economic progress (the legacy of Cold War propaganda?) and offered a more even-handed view of the strengths and weaknesses of both capitalism and big government.  The book uses an Upton Sinclair quote - “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it” (p87) - to illustrate how elites don’t want to change the inequalities they benefit from.  Could it also be that many poor people think the same way?  That they feel their salary depends on capitalism and free markets?  Giridharadas would probably think this is foolish, and I would agree, but isn’t this what Americans are doing when they choose Trump over Bernie Sanders?


The author is very well-read and, on the basis of the interviewees, very well connected. The book adopts what I would call a Michael Lewis-esque approach where potentially dry topics are made more accessible and appealing via the introduction of individual’s stories.  Each chapter introduces us to a character or two and through their experiences and lives we examine a general concept in more depth. S ome of these work better than others.  The chapters about how academic Amy Cuddy has to tone down her research on sexism to get acceptance from MarketWorld or how Darren Walker has to adjust his message to his audience were fascinating and instructive.  The chapter about a lady who started Portfolios With Purpose seemed unfairly critical of her for not focussing on investment bank bond trading practices instead and felt like a bit of a stretch.  I suspect Giridharadas will not be on her Christmas card list and she’s probably not the only interviewee upset with their presentation in the book.  This is no bad thing.  The writing is generally good and I enjoyed reading it, although the author has an unusual propensity to hyphenate anything that moves (cruise-ship, high-level, net-positive).


The book can be a bit sanctimonious at times.  Giridharadas likes to cast his role as “to speak truth to power” (p266), which is pretty grandiose in itself.  Sometimes these truths seem to be of a particular, liberal, elite brand that not everyone would necessarily concur with.  A career woman at Hooters is looked down upon by Giriharadas because the business she works for commodifies women’s breasts; sugary drinks and snack makers are pushing addictive substances to children and the whole women’s beauty industry is criticised for perpetuating sexism (p230-231).  These ideas probably wouldn’t meet much resistance in academic, liberal circles.  However, just like disadvantaged people voting for Trump, it’s not clear that everyone believes in the same truths as this book. Given that he often appeals to the strength of democratic institutions, I felt there was too little analysis of how the current situation is a product of democracy.


I also felt there may be an inherent contradiction in the book's advice. Is it an example of exactly what it is criticising? If what the world needs is less plans from elites to make the world better, isn’t this just another plan from a member of the elite to make the world better? If you look at Anand Giridharadas’s CV, he is undoubtedly a member of the elite he is criticising. Harvard, McKinsey, The Aspen Institute, the list goes on.


One of the major themes of the book is “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” a quote attributed to Audre Lorde (p129).  But Giridharadas never thinks to apply it to himself.  It is referred to several times and used as the opening quotation for a chapter entitled ‘Arsonists Make The Best Firefighters’.  Alongside it is a Donald Trump quote, “no one knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it’ (p129).  The Trump quote is used ironically to show the absurdity of someone who has profited so much from an unjust system purporting to help fix it.  Given it is being used as an example of how current problems should not be fixed by insiders, I was amazed to find Giridharadas writing in the acknowledgements, seemingly without any hint of irony, that his status as an elite didn’t represent a problem because “the best way to know about a problem is to be part of it” (p267)!  Isn’t this more or less what Trump is saying?  It’s fair to point out that the ideas in this book are anti-elite, but they are also indisputably coming from a member of the elite, which is exactly what he is telling readers to reject!  I don’t think it’s fatal to everything he says that there is some contradiction.  His ideas aren’t invalid just because he happens to be privileged and being an insider does help to elucidate the inner workings of the problem.  I just thought it was a bit glib of him to mock Trump for saying it and then say it himself. It hints at a tendency to play to the crowd much like a politician or a fundraiser. At the end of the book, I still felt the niggling gripe of:  If the world needs fewer ideas on how to improve it from privileged elites, why are his privileged ideas an exception to his own rule?

In a similar vein, Giridharadas describes a distinction between “public intellectuals”, who pose a genuine threat to winners, and “thought leaders”, who promote the winners’ values.  The author seems to place himself in the public intellectuals category and I would agree that the contents of his book seem unappealing to global elites.  Except that they all seem to love it!  Presumably the book has been mainly read by elites, so what does all this praise from elites mean?  I was reminded of the famous Orwell declaration that ‘“journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”  The closer you look, the more it seems that Giridharadas also has at least some of the attributes of a thought leader, as defined by himself.  The book is praised in gushing terms by Bill Gates on the back cover, even though he could be seen as the personification of everything that is criticised in the book.  It is a Financial Times book of the year.  An Economist book of the year.  It is recommended by the NY Times.  He gives TED talks, Google talks, has more than 650k Twitter followers and is an editor at large of Time magazine.  It made me wonder about his status in MarketWorld.  Is Giridharadas like a MarketWorld sanctioned court jester?  Is he permitted to criticise, within limits, because he’s seen to be amusing or helpful in some other way?  The juxtaposition of a book criticizing elite billionaires while they praise it for doing so is weird.  I suspect it is a situation, mentioned in Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, where everyone thinks they are an exception to the general rule.  Giridharadas thinks he’s an exception to his own rule about ideas from elites being unhelpful.  Bill Gates probably thinks the book is about other philanthropists, not him.


Leaving aside the internal contradiction I am struggling with, this was a good book.  The author is well informed and has worked hard to pull together lots of great material in a readable format accessible to the layperson like me.  It posed lots of interesting questions and made me think about all sorts of new ideas.  I would definitely recommend it but wished it was a little bit more self-aware!

William Shakespeare - Richard II

This play is a great example of how important self-interest is in human affairs and the primacy of realpolitik. Bullingbrooke is upset about being disinherited while he is in exile but comes back to disinherit Richard of his crown. All the play’s characters talk about the importance of honour (e.g. ‘mine honor is my life, both grow in one, / take honour from me, and my life is done,” Mowbray, I.i.183-4) but are very quick to change sides depending which way the wind is blowing. They also seem to spend a lot of time plotting behind each other’s backs in spite of their professed love of truth! To me, this perfectly illustrates how ordinarily people do what’s in their best interest and then justify their actions with high sounding principles after the fact. No more so than during a time of uncertainty and insurrection.


York is entrusted the kingdom when Richard goes to Ireland but yields to Bullingbrooke without a fight. In practical terms, it seems he has no choice as everyone is on Bullingbrooke’s side by then anyway, he is old and infirm and King Richard is presumed dead in Ireland. As York summarises pragmatically, ‘things past redress are now with me past care’ (II.iii.171). It is odd, however, when he finds his son the Duke of Aumerle plotting to overthrow Henry IV (formerly Bullingbrooke) he condemns him to the king and pushes for his execution (V.iii). This could be interpreted as yet more pragmatism, cementing his position with the new king by proving he’s willing to sacrifice his own son to demonstrate his loyalty. On the other hand, I also wondered if the self-interested solution for most fathers in his situation would have been to save their sons? I found it confusing to see York so relaxed about Bullingbrooke’s insurrection while being so officious about the one his own son is involved in. He even goes as far as say, “Mine honour lives when his dishonour dies, / Or my sham’d life in his dishonour lies: / Thou kill’st me in his life; giving him breath, / The traitor lives, the true man’s put to death.” (V.iii.70-73). This seems almost recklessly hypocritical given he has just betrayed King Richard! It also shows how quickly circumstances could change and how rapidly the concept of ‘honour’ could be reinterpreted. Gaunt may be seen as an exception to this general rule of realpolitik and also an example of the dangers of acting counter to it. He criticises the king on his deathbed and when he dies the King summarily seizes all his assets.


Richard is by far the most vividly depicted character psychologically with numerous speeches and soliloquies on his internal state. His mood is wildly volatile depending on the circumstances and these change rapidly during this period of civil unrest, insurrection and a foreign war in Ireland. He is depicted as a bad king. He is a vain and capricious ruler, subject to flattery, taxes his people excessively, pronounces arbitrary judgement upon them and generally manages the country irresponsibly and selfishy. Gaunt’s deathbed speech (II.i) and the conversation between the gardners (III.iv) give ample evidence of this. In this sense, Richard’s rule can be seen as an example of realpolitik too; his fate can be seen as the fruits of bad and arbitrary government.


There is an echo of this theme of consequences for unjust acts and an ominous prediction about the new Henry IV’s rule in the speech of the Bishop of Carlisle:

I speak to subjects, and a subject speaks,
Stirr’d up by God, thus boldly for his king.
My Lord Herford here, whom you call king,
Is a foul traitor to proud Herford’s king,
And if you crown him, let me prophesy,
The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future ages groan for this foul act.
Peace shall go to sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound.
Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call’d
The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child’s children, cry against you “woe!”
(IV.i.132-148)

The fact that he is arrested immediately after this speech for capital treason also reinforces the point about realpolitik made by Gaunt’s criticism of the king: telling the truth will be unpleasant and costly if it goes against authority.


Besides plainly being a poor king, Richard is also extremely eloquent and some of the plays' most beautiful lines and striking speeches are found on his lips. When in good spirits, he can be a gloriously proud personification of the divine right of kings. For example, proclaiming “not all the water in the rough, rude sea / can wash the balm off from an anointed king” (III.ii.54-55). On the other hand, he is given to bouts of depression of the opposite extremity. For instance, in the same scene, he capitulates and says, “for God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / and tell sad stories of the death of kings” (III.ii.155-156). Later in the same speech he movingly disavows his divine status and stresses his humanity, “For you have mistook me all this while. / I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king?” (III.ii.174-177). These wild swings give support to the idea that he is a mercurial leader but also show how tumultuous the country is during the insurrection. In the end, having had a dim view of Richard’s character and reign, he becomes a sympathetic character not least because of the poetry and lyricism of his words. He yields to Bullingbrooke almost as if it is a relief to him too, “Discharge my followers, let them hence away, / From Richard’s night to Bullingbrooke’s fair day.” (III.ii.217-218), and from then on reflects on himself with both insight and poetry. For example, the simile about a well and two buckets he uses to describe his situation relative to his cousin Bullingbrooke:

Here, cousin,
On this side my hand, on that side thine,
Now is this golden crown like deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water:
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high
(IV.i.182-189)

And even more poetically:

Yours cares set up do not pluck my cares
down:
My loss is loss of care, by old care done,
Your care is gain of care, by new care won;
The cares I give I have, though given away,
They tend the crown, yet still with me they stay
(IV.i.194-199)

While on the throne, Richard seems an arrogant and ineffective ruler but once he is deposed his sensitive and articulate poetry turn him into a markedly different proposition for the reader. His final soliloquy in prison recognises his folly and contains my favourite line of the play:

Ha, ha, keep time! How sour sweet music is
When time is broke, and no proportion kept!
So it is in the music of men’s lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now time doth waste me;
(V.v.43-49)

I love the way his deposition and incarceration seem to clear his mind and give him lucidity. He sees the problems that plagued his rule anew, recognises his faults and admits his inability to do so before. His fall and subsequent confession of his crimes in jail seem to totally transform him as a person. He’s no longer indecisive and his psychology no longer swings so wildly between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. This metamorphosis culminates in his fight against the men who come to kill him. Reinvigorated but unarmed, he kills two of them and even impresses his murderer by the valor of his royal blood.

I really enjoyed reading this play and the rhythm of the narrative. The focus on self-interest rings true to me. The transformation of Richard’s character once he has recognised his folly when he was king is a great metamorphosis. He is an extremely varied character, speaks with great poetry and is ultimately highly sympathetic by the end.

Ibram X. Kendi - How To Be An Antiracist

I bought this book after watching the author speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2019. He was clear, calm and concise. I was thrilled to hear someone talk about racism the way he did. I wanted to ask questions and stay behind to get my book signed. Sadly, my raised hand wasn’t chosen and I had another event immediately after. In the end, it didn’t matter because I got the book and it answers a lot of questions I had!


As a white person, I wanted nothing to do with racism for much of my life. ‘Racism’ was a word I didn’t want to associate with and didn’t really want to discuss. Of course I would never discriminate against anyone based on their race. That went without saying and was something only bad, evil people did. Racism was something I had no personal experience of. I thought, or hoped, had ceased to exist. Simultaneously, I held lots of racist ideas and undoubtedly treated people in racist ways. To me, the world was full of injustices and racism was probably one of them but it was rare, like religious extremism, and disappearing. If someone called me a racist, I would have been very upset and defended myself against the slanderous attack. ‘Racist’ was a scary word for me and more often than not I would simply shut down if someone talked about it. This book helped me to confront some of these contradictions and think about racism in a more structured and less emotional way.


Kendi gets it absolutely bang on when he writes that the word ‘racist’ has lost all meaning. The word has become too emotive and the concept too vilified. Even the most racist people claim they’re not racist. The problem demonstrably exists, but no one is prepared to be called a racist and therefore no one is responsible. In its place he introduces the concept of ‘antiracism,’ defined as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea” (p13). To me, this transforms the subject in a couple of ways. It takes away some of the stigma and taboo attached to being called a racist. Being racist isn’t a permanent condition, like your blood type; it is something an individual can be or not be, depending on their actions. It makes the word less of a terrifying stamp that will brand you forever and turns it into something that can be recognised without the perpetrator becoming the devil incarnate. To be able to discuss the topic in a slightly more sane manner seems better than the insane situation whereby racism exists but there are no racist people or racist actions.


One powerful perspective I got from the book is this: statistically speaking, huge disparities exist between racial groups in the US and UK. This extends to huge swathes of life and includes almost everything. Including, it appears, being more likely to contract and die from the current covid-19 pandemic. The explanation for this situation can be one of two broad choices according to Kendi. Either, A - people of different races have different experiences of life, on average, because there are fundamental differences between their abilities, or, B - it’s because of racism. As Kendi puts it:

“Either racist policies or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier and more powerful than Black people today.” (p117)

The idea that different races could be fundamentally different is genetically and experientially absurd to me, so I must choose that it is down to racism. But is it all down to racism? For Kendi, the answer is yes. I feel like this explanation is undoubtedly important but could become tricky as a theory when examining other types of inequality. Disparities exist between all sorts of groups of people for all sorts of reasons and, unlike Kendi, I can’t see this as all coming from one source. In a seemingly random world of genetic mutations and natural selection, naked luck plays a large part. To use an example I read in a Coleman Hughes review of the book, what explains the difference between earnings of different nationalities of the same race in America? Whereas it seems Kendi would argue it is racist policy, or in this case discriminatory policies of some kind, I feel it is at least partly cultural and associated with values of the society they’ve emigrated from. That is not to judge one culture as “better” than the other, an idea Kendi identifies as culturally racist and rightly rejects, but to observe that they are different and that some can be more suitable to certain circumstances than others, which is observable statistically.


Against this, immigration policy has clearly racial aspects and America’s role in global history could also explain some of these differences. The topic is a complex one and I’m sure Kendi has thought about it more than me! However, his vision is a radical one and I found it more useful as a tool for thinking about what racism really means than a rigorous, all encompassing philosophical schema. Kendi doesn’t really address this question of difference or inequality without discriminatory policy as a cause. I was left wondering if, in a reductio ad absurdum, an antiracist world was one with absolutely no differences between people and how that could work. The idea of all arbitrary groups having statistically the same opportunities struck me as fair and appealing but I wondered how it would work in practice. If income is an example then how do you determine how much of a given disparity is down to discriminatory policy and how much is down to free choice to earn less than they could if one group’s culture prioritises earning money more than another’s? For example, different nationalities of immigrants to the US. Thinking about disparate cultures and people and their choices through narrow statistical lenses could also prove to be problematic.


It’s fair to critique Kendi’s invention as simplistic but I think it brings more clarity to the subject than simply denying its existence. The book isn’t long on specific proposals either but, as an introduction to the subject, it’s not fair to demand too much of it in this respect. The antiracist formulation is black and white and it seems it would be possible to find actions and policies that could not be conclusively proved to be racist or antiracist. For example, the US grant of $1,200 to all Americans earning under $70k during coronavirus doesn’t seem either to me. Although perhaps that makes it antiracist? Or racist because white people have more money on average? The concept isn’t as straightforward to apply as it is to state. Despite these issues with the antiracist concept, I feel it is a good starting point for talking about the problem and understanding it. Given how racist America is, policymakers should definitely be thinking more about this and Kendi is right about this.


Kendi is also keen to dismantle the race as a meaningful grouping. The idea of race as a social construct is not a new one. However, many people, including myself, continue to use unbelievably broad groups like race, nationality and gender to generalise. I liked the way Kendi wants to individualise behaviour and proposes, “to be antiracist is to deracialize behaviour, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behaviour is something humans do, not races.” (p105)


So given that the concept of race has such poor rational underpinnings, why does the concept surround us everywhere we go and why is society suffused with its assumptions? This is a huge question and Kendi does an admirable job of describing a potted history of colonialism, the slave trade and racial stereotyping that I won’t attempt to precis here. One idea he presents when trying to understand the origins of racism, which of course must be various, is: “racist power produces racist policies out of self-interest and then produces racist ideas to justify those policies” (pp129-130). Like Spinoza, I am convinced that self-interest is the governing force in human behaviour so this theory really struck a chord. It feels intuitively correct but also made me worry that racism is, in some sense, a natural human proclivity. When humans encounter something different or new that looks and behaves differently from them, I feel like the normal reaction is fear, a desire to see oneself as superior and negative discrimination. When you add a eurocentric interpretation of progress to this natural fear of what is unknown or different, I feel like racism is a very easy, convenient and, crucially, self-interested idea to arrive at. Is there any way to stop self-interest? Or to stop it from turning into discrimination? The fact that generalisations about the behaviour of people based on such broad categories is so pervasive makes me nervous.


Kendi is disarmingly honest about his own personal experiences with race and admits to being an assimilationist, racist towards black people and racist towards white people at various stages of his life. His honesty and experiences are crucial to the power of the book and really help a white person like me with no experience of racism. His journey from a disengaged teenager to a leading race scholar is hugely educational because he covers all the mistaken ideas he had to abandon along the way, as opposed to just pretending he knew it all from the outset. The book is at its best explaining the interconnections between race, society and personal experience.


Kendi shares a lot of his personal history in the book and, as I mentioned above, this can be really enlightening. It can also be a bit boring and formulaic. The books chapters discuss race as it intersects with various other areas like biology, ethnicity or culture. By the end of the book, I felt like the structure of each chapter was too formulaic and that Kendi overuses his personal experiences in his writing. Sometimes they’re really illustrative but sometimes they’re too tangential. It also doesn’t help that Kendi is loquacious in his writing style. By the end of the book, it feels like talking to a friend who always has a half hour story full of irrelevant details that he has to tell you to demonstrate a fairly straightforward point. I have a pet theory that Kendi picked this up from his proximity to sermons as a child, being the son of a preacher. Just like a sermon, every chapter starts with an intriguing story from the speaker’s life to get the punters interested before we turn to the serious content of God or, in this case, racism. Sometimes it’s illustrative and other times it’s extraneous and I felt it should have been used more sparingly as a technique. One of the stories about how Kendi showed one his students the folly of his ways is nauseatingly self-congratulatory and trite (pp 64-66).


Another criticism I have is the sheer number of times Kendi will repeat the same point. Sometimes a whole paragraph will be filled with multiple examples of the same point when the point is perfectly clear from the first example. Sometimes it might be justified on grounds of clarity but usually it just feels like Kendi has a long-winded style.


More annoyingly, while some concepts are explained half to death, others are tossed in with hardly any justification or explanation whatsoever. For example, while Kendi spends 250 odd pages painstakingly explaining the nuances of racism, he dismisses capitalism in 4 short pages without any of the care and attention to detail he shows in the rest of the book. It’s not so much that I disagree with his conclusion but that I’d like him to explain what he means in more detail. He uses a vague analogy about racism and capitalism being conjoined twins and only really gives the most precursory sketches of a theory itself based on skimming vast swathes of history. For example,

“the conjoined twins entered adulthood through Native and Black and Asian and White slavery and forced labor in the Americas, which powered industrial revolutions from Boston to London that financed still greater empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. The hot and cold wars in the twentieth century over resources and markets, rights and powers, weakened the conjoined twins - but eventually they would grow stronger under the guidance of the US, the EU, China and the satellite nations beholden to them, colonies in everything but name.” (p157)

It’s impossible to deny that capitalism's history is inextricably intertwined with a lot of injustice and inequality. But there’s no mention of capitalism’s more positive aspects or, crucially, analysis of the relative merits of alternative systems. At its best the book is thorough, methodical and lucid. The quote above gives some flavour of how it is anything but on the subject of capitalism. Ideas are piled willy-nilly on top of each other without any of care or detail I’d come to expect from it. The subject is so vast, I feel it would have been better to leave it out than to try and deal with it in a few hundred one-sided words that make it feel like he is trying to gloss over it. The juxtaposition of carefully argued, over-exemplified points followed by sweeping, unsupported assertion is certainly jarring to read.


This book was a strange mixture. Part of it is intensely personal reflection. Part of it is a textbook or primer on the subject of racism. The latter was, in the main, much better than the former. Kendi has obviously read widely on the subject and the book provides many interesting areas for further reading for a non-specialist like me. It is beautifully footnoted and indexed, which makes it easy for the reader to find out more. In this sense, the book had an academic quality. The inclusion of the more folksy, autobiographical material may be there to help break up the denser sections. I felt it was overused, formulaic and didn’t always bring much to the chapter. For me, Kendi is not an especially talented writer and he writes too much. However, Kendi should definitely be admired for trying to make this book accessible. Some academic literature I have read on inequality is actually incomprensible to the layperson. Equally, I had a lot of admiration for his desire to be an active agent of change and not limit himself to just writing about it. He presents himself as relentlessly self-critical and in search of new ideas and understanding, which is something I have nothing but respect for.

James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room

This is a gem of a book and I loved almost all of it. It’s well paced and beautifully structured so the reader knows the very end of the story from the outset but retains a sense of suspense and anticipation nonetheless. Baldwin nimbly flits backwards and forwards along the chronology of events but never in a confusing, pretentious or overly complicated way. The characters and scenes seem immediately identifiable and familiar. The prose is mostly excellent, although occasionally the dialogue is over wrought. The book touches on heavy, complicated themes with incredible poignancy and insight. Baldwin achieves all this in scarcely 150 pages with an almost unbelievable ease of style. The writer’s artful hand is hardly glanced by the reader.


In short, ‘Giovanni’s Room’ is about David, an American man in his late twenties, living in Paris during the 1950s. He is somewhat lost in life and has been living in Paris with his American girlfriend, Hella, without a job. He proposes to Hella, who says she wants to travel to Spain alone to think about it for a few weeks. During this time, David runs out of money and is about to be kicked out of his hotel, so he calls up his friend Jacques. Jacques is an aging ‘fairy’ who covets a sexual relationship with David and lends him money. A flashback reveals that David had a homosexual experience as an adolescent but that he was so terrified of its consequences he stopped being friends with the other boy, Joey, and subsequently bullied him. It’s established that David has strong homosexual urges but is afraid of their consequences and has repressed them. Jacques and David go to a bar owned by Jacques' friend, Guillaume, also an aging fairy. It turns out the bar has a new Italian barman, Giovanni, who is very attractive. Jacques tells David he wants to try to seduce him. Instead, David ends up flirting with Giovanni while Guillaume talks to Jacques. The quartet continue drinking all night and David goes home with Giovanni. David then falls inexorably in love with Giovanni and the two spend all their time together in Giovanni’s tiny maid’s room in suburban Paris for a few weeks.


During this cohabitation, Giovanni gets sacked from the bar for refusing Guillaume’s sexual advances. To make matters worse, Guillaume humiliates Giovanni in front of all the customers by falsely accusing him of stealing and making a show of his dismissal. Giovanni is distraught and David comforts him but without his income, the pair now have money problems. David has some money back home in New York and he tells Giovanni he is going to get his father to send it. However, when he goes to the American embassy to collect his mail he discovers his Dad refuses to send it until he tells him what he’s up to and when he is going to come home. He also receives a letter from Hella saying that she will marry him and is coming back to Paris soon. David finds himself in turmoil but doesn’t mention her return to Giovanni. Although Giovanni is aware of her existence he doesn’t see her as a threat and thinks David will stay in Paris and continue to have a relationship with him. David struggles with his love for Giovanni and tries to master his urge to be with him. He sleeps with a woman he faintly knows as part of his effort to convince himself he is straight before Hella arrives back.


When Hella arrives back, David simply leaves Giovanni without saying a word or moving any of his things from his room. This is repulsively cowardly. He then lives with Hella in her hotel and they begin to make plans for married life. He writes to his father to tell him he is getting married and to send him money, now sure that he will do so because he is announcing a straight marriage to an American woman rather than a gay one with an Italian. Hella and David bump into Jacques and Giovanni who are apparently some kind of couple now. Jacques tells David out of Hella’s hearing that Giovanni had called him after David had abandoned him alone and penniless and terrified that David was dead. Jacques insists they all go for a drink, but Hella dislikes Jacques' mannerisms and says she is tired and needs to sleep after her journey. David walks her back to her hotel and passes off Giovanni's upset looks as those of a dramatic former roommate, rather than a jilted lover. He then goes to Giovanni’s room to talk to him. Giovanni is deeply upset and asks David why he has treated him so badly and no longer wants to have a relationship with him. David says he must be with a woman if he wants to be a man and that things can never work between them. Over the next few weeks, he sees Giovanni around and thinks he is adopting ‘fairy’ mannerisms. He also learns from a mutual acquaintance that he is no longer with Jacques and may have got his old job back at Guillaume’s bar. The next thing David learns about Giovanni is that Guillaume has been murdered and that Giovanni is the prime suspect. David imagines that Giovanni went back to Guillaume in desperation, in spite of his earlier humiliation, and even agreed to sleep with him to get his job back. But then Guillaume had refused to give it to him, insulted him and Giovanni had flown into a rage and killed him. A manhunt for Giovanni ensues and he is eventually found and sentenced to death. David tells Hella he wants to leave Paris immediately and to move to the south of France and get married and take their honeymoon there. While Giovanni awaits the guillotine, David and Hella discuss gender roles and Hella expresses the opinion that a woman can only be a woman once she is with a man. Haunted by his memories and wracked with guilt, David runs away from Hella and goes to Nice for a few days, which he spends fucking a male sailor on leave. But Hella follows him and discovers his bisexuality. She is upset with David, refuses to marry him and returns to America. The book ends with David imagining the scenes of Giovanni’s final minutes and his execution by guillotine, while leaving the rented house in the south of France.


The prose was beautiful and unobtrusive while at the same time being aphoristic and poetic. For example, at the book’s very beginning, a drunk David reflects:

“But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” p4-5

This is an interesting idea to think about even as it is presented with little or no context. The tone is wise and experienced but I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘is that true? Don’t we have slightly more agency over those relationships than our parental ones?’ As the story progresses it takes on darker significance. David leaves Giovanni in a brutal manner, which he knows upset him and made him want to die, and then Giovanni murders someone and is executed for it. This determinist philosophy could be seen to suit him very nicely, as it exculpates him from his gruesome parting with Giovanni. But who could begrudge David these paltry efforts at philosophy when he’s carrying such a burden of guilt about it? By the end of the book, we understand that David is talking about himself when he speaks about the difficulty saying Yes to life. His life lies in a precarious state as he leaves the house in the south of France alone. Giovanni’s death serves as a grim prediction. Is David too selfish a character, too well practiced in repressing his emotions to end up dead like Giovanni? Or is the loss of his relationship with Giovanni, and then Giovanni himself, dragging him towards death? Baldwin writes his character as a selfish one and one accustomed to repressing his feelings. He also writes him as someone who was deeply in love with Giovanni but was trying to deny it, which only makes his current circumstances worse. The story ends at a moment that continues that finely balanced ambiguity and it left me wondering and wanting to know more.



Given the bare facts of the story it seems hard to believe that the reader might have sympathy for David’s character. Prima facie, David is a selfish arsehole. He treats Giovanni like shit because he is afraid of his feelings for him, spurns love because he is a coward, tries to marry someone he doesn’t love before running off to cheat on her with a sailor in Nice. However, David is an eloquent, contemplative and intelligent narrator who exposes the mechanics and confusion of his tumultuous emotions. He’s willing to recognise mistakes he’s made and this helps to soften his character and make him more likeable. Baldwin gives David considerable complexity as a character and the story is narrated in a way that meant I found him likeable and relatable.


Baldwin seems to suggest the real culprit is 1950s American society and its attitudes to homosexuality, which was then still illegal. It’s David’s belief that he can’t have a life with Giovanni, or any man, back at home. Even in the relatively liberal Paris, David seems to find the lives of older homosexuals unappealing. Before he met Giovanni, he was planning on returning and settling down with Hella to have a family. So his feelings for Giovanni come as an inconvenient and, in some sense, unwanted surprise. Of course, with hindsight it is easy to say that David should have left Hella to be with Giovanni, because Hella subsequently leaves him anyway. Arguably, this might not have happened if Giovanni had stayed alive. There are too many alternatives to ponder meaningfully. But no reader could fail to sympathise with David as he struggles with the intensity of his newfound homosexual relationship and the limitations it would place on his life. Staying with Giovanni was a choice that meant staying in France, probably without money and continuing to be estranged from his family until he came out, which could result in him being disowned by his jock, womanising father. Most would struggle to take a gamble like that. Given David seems to be bisexual, who can blame him for trying to choose a heterosexual relationship when it would make his life so much easier? As he justifies himself to Giovanni, ‘“I can have a life with her” (p126). Even though he is also devastatingly indifferent towards her, as an example, I need only cite the wonderfully self-defeating, “I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was.” (p106)


The tragedy of the book is that the love affair with Giovanni is portrayed as so blissful and David’s parting is so agonising that it seems like he should have tried to stay with him, however difficult it would have been. When Giovanni dies, it changes everything. Their relationship is finished ultimately and finally and they’ll never know if it might have worked. David can never reverse his decision and also feels deeply responsible for his death. They had a perfect love affair that David ruined by breaking it off cruelly and now it will always be preserved in perfection in David’s memory. Forever coupled with Giovanni’s tragic death.


I’m not convinced that David would have managed to live a happy life with Hella if Giovanni had remained alive and otherwise unknown to David. David’s sexual awakening at high school suggests something fundamental or, at least, longstanding. There is also the intensity of his affair with Giovanni to consider. When it becomes clear to David that the two are going to have to stop living together when Hella comes back to Paris, he experiences near total turmoil. A charitable interpretation would blame this for his heartless abandonment of Giovanni. Overwhelmed, he simply walks away from a problem too difficult to contemplate. Even though it’s Giovanni that ends up dead, it felt very much like David kills a part of himself when he leaves Giovanni. In the same way David goes on to bully Joey during his repression of his first homosexual encounter, he destroys the relationship he has built with Giovanni via an act of violence. Just like bullying Joey, it’s also an act of violence towards himself and a denial of himself. But while his relationship with Joey amounts to little more than pubescent fumbling, his relationship with Giovanni is adult, mature and meaningful. The violence and destruction required by its repression are always going to be far more painful, even before Giovanni’s death makes it almost unbearable.


There is also David’s situation and context to consider. Baldwin captures the feeling of being in a foreign country excellently. There’s an atmosphere of freedom, full of possible adventure away from the rigid stays of home life. But with this freedom there’s also necessarily loneliness, vulnerability, and an unsupported, somewhat disoriented feeling, like your position is almost precarious. Having run out of money, David seems torn between his enjoyment of this freedom in France and the suspicion that it’s impossible to sustain and can only ever be a dalliance before he returns to home, family life and conformity.


Baldwin paints very vividly the oppressive nature of being gay in 1950s America and the social isolation it entailed. He might have experienced this type of bigoted discrimination himself as an African American. This helps the reader to understand the claustrophobia and costs that went along with being in a gay relationship at that time. David’s fears seem more reasonable in this light and Baldwin does a great job of putting them in context and expressing them through David’s words and feelings. David feels a homosexual relationship denies him the safe, steady normality of marriage and children. “A life,” as he so memorably calls it in his final parting with Giovanni. Guillaume and Jacques are portrayed as terrifyingly lonely, lifeless figures and David thinks them sad and despicable. This is in Paris too, not America. They’re a personification of everything David thinks unsustainable about his homosexuality and he’s afraid they’re what he’ll end up like if he pursues his love with Giovanni. He wants to live the life of normality he grew up aspiring to, but knows that this is impossible with Giovanni. These are fears that David ultimately feels more strongly than his love for Giovanni, at least thinks he does in that moment. There’s an excellent juxtaposition throughout the book between the warmth and love between David and Giovanni and the terror and turmoil David feels about the relationship internally. Doubtless some of this is because of the danger and impracticality of being in a homsexual relationship during the 50s, especially in America. But David’s fear seems more multifaceted than that. He seems distrustful of his emotions towards Giovanni, afraid of the messy consequences pursuing a relationship with him would mean, and scared of sacrificing his own masculinity, identity and possibly family for a fling his head tells him can never work. In this sense, the book is a parable about the dangers of trying to rule your heart with your head. It is not a simple counsel to let your heart rule your head either - there’s far too much nuance, subtlety and contradiction for such a simple reading.


The violence of their separation is rammed home with memorable intensity in the final scene of reckoning between David and Giovanni. David must face up to his cowardly and cruel treatment of Giovanni and finally deny that he loves him even though everything in the book speaks to the contrary. Giovanni grabs David and screams:

“You want to leave GIovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you - you are IMMORAL. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, LOOK what you’ve done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is THIS what you should do to love?”(p125)

David tries to deny he feels anything and to persuade Giovanni that nothing can ever happen between them but Giovanni, rightly, accuses David of breaking up with him precisely because he knows something can happen and, with terrible foresight, tells him one day he will regret it (p127). David leaves as quickly as possible and tries to distract himself with the fantasy of his marriage with Hella. The way David thinks getting out of Paris will save him from himself is well drawn and as recognisable as it is futile. As the truth of his situation begins to dawn on David he expresses his fear eloquently:

“I think that I have never been more frightened in my life. When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a very high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my fingers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly contracting, crawling furiously upward against that long fall.” (p140)



I had wanted to take issue with the book for having overblown, unlikely dialogue in places. I think it’s a supportable criticism. For example, when Giovanni and David first meet in the bar and again during parts of their final bust up. The more I wrote about the book and considered it the less I felt justified in complaining about it. It now seems a bit like complaining that characters at the theatre don’t um and er like normal people do when they speak. If the play’s content reveals new perspectives to you and makes you think new things then surely it’s a bit churlish to complain. There is a poetic character to Baldwin’s prose that doesn’t necessarily translate that well into dialogue. This book might occasionally be a bit too mannered to be believable, but it had so many other good aspects it seems wrong to dwell on this minor flaw.

Ultimately, the final outcome of David’s relationship with Giovanni makes us pity him more than any other single factor. Any reasonable, and reasonably mature, person will admit to making mistakes and acting in a cowardly or selfish way, especially when it comes to relationships. The fact that David is forced to live with his mistakes in such a brutal way struck me as unfair and desperately sad. Even if you felt like David should be punished for his treatment of Giovanni, surely the sentence he receives is too harsh. Baldwin recognises a fundamental truth in the character of David, that there is a full spectrum of good and bad in all of us and that we must puzzle our way through our moral lives constantly making mistakes. This tragic story shows that the messy, painful face of love can be as beautiful as the happy, smiling one - perhaps even more so. The book is a love story but it is also a poignant comment on so many things - gender, trust, honesty, identity, what it means to conform, to be a foreigner, to be an outsider and to try to be yourself. There are no heroes and villains in this subtle and sad story, which was moving, thought provoking and said so much in such a short space. An amazing read!

Muriel Spark - A Far Cry From Kensington

I liked this book in a not especially passionate way. Its scenes are pleasingly quotidian and feel like an authentic representation of literary life in London during the 1950s. The plot strikes a good balance between the mundane realities of day to day life and the necessity to include some events of a more exceptional character to drive the narrative. These events were well chosen and not overly far-fetched or ostentatious. Almost all of them relate to a character called Hector Bartlett, the boyfriend / hanger on of a more famous writer, who tries to persuade the protagonist, Nancy Hawkins, who works at a publisher, to accept his essays or make introduction to otherwise further his career. Nancy dislikes Hector immensely and calls him a ‘pissuer de copie’ on two occassions, both of which cause her to lose her job. In fact, the first time she loses her job it might be because the publisher went bust. I can’t remember. However, she definitely uses the insult twice and it causes much consternation in both cases hence my confusion. After this, when Nancy is working at her third job of the novel, one of her fellow inmates from their rooming house in South Kensington commits suicide. After going through the deceased woman’s effect and ruminating on the subject with the rooming house owner, Nancy discovers that Hector may have had some part in this suicide by seducing the woman in question and persuading her to operate a ‘box’ used in the psuedoscience of radionics. The woman was chosen because of her proximity to Nancy because Hector wants to use the box to adversely affect her. Hector later corroborates this in an article he writes about the experience for a radionics journal. Nothing much comes of this as none of her evidence is conclusive and I like the way the author avoided the temptation to make the book into a hunt to bring him to justice. After these excitements, Nancy sleeps with another fellow inmate from the rooming house, starts dating him and then they both move out and get married.


As I mentioned before, I liked the tone of the narrative and felt like it struck a good balance between plausibility and intrigue while avoiding the temptation to use the narrative to make the book more sensational. I also liked some of the bits and pieces that were used to construct the book, especially the radionics and the centrality to the plot of the excellent phrase ‘pissuer de copie’. Taken as a whole, the book is a blatant piece of self-promotion by the protagonist and there was a pleasing uncertainty lingering around the credibility of the account, which I enjoyed. I didn’t feel like the characters were really strong and none of them left a strong impression after I finished the book. Perhaps this is because the book is only 180 pages or so and it’s harder to develop characters in this format versus, say, an 800 page Dickens book spanning a decade or two. I also wasn’t wild about the setting for the book. I feel like I read a disproportionate number of books about the literary world, maybe for obvious reasons, and because of this the genre feels a bit overused to me. By the same token, perhaps it is a little churlish to praise a book for its ambience of reality and then criticise the author for writing about a subject they are familiar with. The prose was one of the best aspects of the book. It was clear and concise with occasional flourishes but not of a floral or pretentious kind. I enjoyed reading it and felt it was well paced and skillfully constructed.


Overall this wasn’t a book I would rave about or necessarily recommend widely. However, it was an enjoyable and well crafted novel that was a pleasure to read. It did make me want to read more Muriel Spark so perhaps I’m undervaluing it!

Charles Dickens - Dombey & Son

This is the first Dickens book I’ve read since I was a child and I’m not sure why I chose it beyond the facts that it was on my shelf and I’ve been meaning to read some Dickens for a while. I’ve forgotten where I bought the book but I have vague recollections of being recommended it and writing the name down on one of my many lists of books. The copy I acquired is a 1995 Wordsworth Classics edition with yellowed pages so my suggestions from the previous sentence might be a fabrication and I might have simply bought it at a second hand book shop on a whim. Was it a worthwhile whim? Read on to find out!


Attempting to summarise the plot of Dombey & Son is a daunting prospect. Not least because the book is 769 pages of closely printed, single spaced text. Dombey is the fabulously wealthy principle of a venerated trading house in the city of London much enthrall to dynastic ideas and the concept of primogeniture. He is married and his wife has born him a daughter whom he overlooks in expectations of a son whom he can interest in his true passions of business, money and succession in the Dombey dynasty. A son is born, but his wife dies in the process and the two children are mainly brought up by servants while Dombey Snr. remains distant and concerns himself with business.


Another strand of the story, running parallel to this narrative, has its epicentre in a small navigational instrument shop near the docklands in London. This establishment, with an exceptionally snug back parlour, is occupied by Sol Gills and his nephew Walter and often attended by Captain Cuttle, an old friend of the family and former sailor. Young Walter has just begun working as a lowly junior at the House of Dombey thus providing a tenuous link between the two seemingly disparate worlds. The link is strengthened when Dombey’s daughter, Florence, goes out with her maid, gets lost and is robbed by an old beggar woman. Running through the streets crying in the docklands near the offices of Dombey & Son, Florence is found by Walter who takes her back to his uncle’s shop before finding out who she is and taking her back home. Meanwhile, Dombey’s son Paul is in poor health and moves to Brighton for school taking his sister with him. The two develop a strong bond but Paul eventually dies prematurely and Florence returns to live in mourning at her gloomy father’s house in London.


During this time, Walter has been sent to the Caribbean by Dombey & Sons, which breaks his Uncle Sol’s heart. It generally feels like Dombey has done him a disservice after Walter helped rescue his daughter. Furthermore, Dombey’s dead son Paul asked him to look after Walter on his deathbed, which by sending him on a dangerous voyage to the Caribbean he has failed to do. Dombey is portrayed up to this point as a deeply proud man with little time or consideration for other people.


In the aftermath of his son’s death, Dombey goes travelling around with his friend Major Bagstock, a wonderful, blustering, retired colonial military man with bulging eyes and a red face. The character of Bagstock is the comic highlight of the book and is a classic, braying military bore! He specialises in professions of his own toughness, a dazzling array of self-appointed nicknames and looking like a lobster. While in Leamington Spa, Dombey meets an equally proud and haughty widow being chaperoned by her mother, Mrs Skewton, who is an old flame of Major Bagstock’s but now a somewhat wilted rose. There are some excellent scenes between Bagstock and ‘his Cleopatra’ but sadly her filial relationship is far frostier.


After a passionless courtship, Dombey and Edith are engaged to be married but there is no love between them. Edith feels like her mother has ruined her life by making the sole purpose of her life attracting a rich husband and that she has now suffered the final insult by essentially assenting to be sold in a transaction. Relations between her and Dombey start badly and deteriorate quickly. Edith does, however, fall completely in love with Florence and this is a happy period in her sad history of neglect at the hands of her father. Dombey tells his new wife that he is unhappy with her aloof behaviour and does want her to show affection for Florence while showing none towards him lest it should reflect poorly on him. Edith gets very upset about this and is further insulted when Dombey chooses to communicate with her only through his trusted lieutenant from the trading house, the feline Mr. Carker. Carker uses this position, and Edith’s fury about it, to gain her confidence, or so he thinks, and the two plan to elope. However, Mr. Carker is shown to be a cruel and selfish man through a side plot concerning the treatment of his brother and it turns out that he has other enemies from his past actions. These include a mother and daughter combo, Mrs Brown and Alice, not dissimilar to Edith and her mother, but at the opposite end of the social spectrum. While Edith and her faded society belle mother are well-to-do, albeit with limited means, the woman and her daughter are a beggar and a ex-convict recently returned from Australia. For all that, both mothers are obsessed with money and are despised by their daughters for it because they hold loftier principles. It turns out Alice, the daughter, was once a lover of Carker’s and was very badly treated by him. Carker involved her in an unnamed criminal enterprise and subsequently hung her out to dry when the conspiracy went awry resulting in her trip to Australia. Her sole aim in life now seems to be revenging herself on him.


In a rather convoluted, but pretty plausible, arrangement of affairs this couple obtain information from the wayward son of a former domestic worker in the Dombey household. This unfortunate lad, or ‘cove’ as he is wont to refer to himself, is the subject of Mr Dombey’s largesse when he receives a private education from him but fails academically and is bullied at school for being poor and by his old friends for his ridiculous school uniform. He leaves school and goes off the rails for a while before approaching Mr Carker for a job. Mr Carker sends him to be a spy with Captain Cuttle at the compass shop after Walter has been sent to the Caribbean and Uncle Sol has run away in his pursuit after hearing news that his ship was wrecked somewhere in the Caribbean. After completing this assignment he becomes Carker’s personal assistant and thus has knowledge of his elopement to France with Edith. Mrs Brown blackmails him to reveal the information while Dombey is hidden and Dombey uses this to pursue Carker. In the meantime, Edith turns on Carker while they are on the run in Dijon, reveals she really hates him and has used him and then disappears leaving Carker to flee, hotly pursued by Dombey. Carker leads a harried chase back to England but ends up getting run over by a train while physically running away from Dombey, who has finally caught up with him.


At this point the book becomes hurried, sentimental and pretty bad. Having proceeded at a very leisurely pace up to this point, including lengthy meanderings on topics like Paul’s schoolmates in Brighton to little narrative end, suddenly everything happens at once. Florence approaches her father to console him after Edith elopes with Carker but he reacts badly and hits her in the belief that she is siding with her stepmother. Florence is very badly shaken and runs away, ending up lodging with Captain Cuttle at the instrument shop while she recovers from the episode. Events then begin to take on the character of a children’s book where everything must have a happy and satisfactory ending. Florence and Walter are married, a prospect touted since their very first meeting, and have a child. Florence’s old servants return to dote on her once they have found her. As if one happy marriage is insufficient for the conclusion of the book, Dickens also marries Florence's maid, Susan, to a half-witted former schoolmate of Paul’s from Brighton on the basis that both of them are obsessed with Florence. The firm of Dombey & Sons goes bust once it has been revealed that Carker has been cooking the books and Dombey has to sell everything and grieve for the loss of his daughter. In another unlikely turn, Carker’s ill gotten inheritance goes to his siblings, who he treated very badly, who then return it to Dombey surreptitiously. After the passage of about a year or so, Dombey is reconciled with Florence and Walter, who now have two children, and goes to live with them and coo over his grandchildren; his character reformed and pride completely cured. The family is tended to by Susan, now Mrs Toots, both couples have children and all parties concerned are excessively happy. Edith too finds happiness as a recluse with her cousin and everybody is reconciled to everyone else. Even the dying Alice is nursed by Carker’s sister so that all loose ends are tied up in the fastest, most saccharine manner possible. I can also add that Alice is revealed to be Edith’s illegitimate cousin, which gives an accurate flavour of the book’s conclusion. It’s a really disappointing end to a book that promised much in its best sections and I ended up feeling a bit fed up and short changed by such a sloppy, facile denouement.


For me there were some great highlights of a remarkable variety. The half witted Mr Toots, his pugnacious sidekick ‘the game chicken’ and Major Bagstock are good comic characters. Carker’s flight from Dombey after Edith has left him is a wonderful description of an awful, heart pounding blur of fear and paranoia. There are several relationships that are skillfully described and developed, for example, Edith and her mother, Edith and Dombey, Florence and her father, Edith and Carker. Indeed, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book was the diversity and intensity of these dysfunctional family relationships. There is also a good deal of narrative mystery relating to Walter’s shipwreck, Carker’s schemes, Carker’s siblings living in poverty and Alice’s return from Australia. However, in the end, perhaps the book was too varied and contained too many different strands forcing the hasty and shoddy ‘happily ever after’ at the end.


I think I would have preferred it if there wasn’t such a drastic change in pace at the end and that it wasn’t so universally happy and naive. It almost felt like a betrayal of the complexity that preceded it. It had the feeling of an author who’s tired of the characters and narratives they’d painstakingly created and decided to bring it all to a close as quickly and easily as possible.


This was an enjoyable read for the most part with some good narratives and great characters. However, the uneven pacing and the absurdly saccharine ending ruined it for me and drastically reduced the quality of the book when taken as a whole. I’m encouraged to read more Dickens but I hope all his endings aren’t so simplistic.