I read ‘The Kite Runner’ several years ago and remember enjoying it a lot. Sadly, I never wrote anything about it so I can’t say why or compare it to this book. Certainly, ‘And The Mountains Echoed’ has much to recommend it. The prose is smooth and flowing. The sentences are short and evocative. The characters and settings are varied and rich. Details are well chosen and pithily expressed. However, it also had a sentimental quality most obvious in its extremely dramatic and shocking plot. Much of the dialogue also had this quality in a way that’s harder to pin down but permeated the whole text.
The story is woven together using nine perspectives, each contained in a chapter. These are: 1) A poor Afghan farmer (Saboor) taking his two children (Abdullah and Pari) to Kabul and telling them a story on the journey through the desert (1952) 2) The same farmer selling his daughter (Pari) to a wealthy, childless family (Wahdatis) where a relative (Nabi) works when they reach Kabul (1952) 3) Saboor’s second wife’s (Parwana) story of how she pushed her sister (Masooma) off a tree because she was jealous of her good looks and found out she was going to marry Saboor (1949) 4) Nabi’s story of working for Mr Wahdati and their long shared history 5) the story of two brothers (Idris and Timur) who are Afghans who emigrated to the US during the wars and used to live on the same street as Nabi and the Wahdatis. They come back to try and reclaim their property in Kabul (2003) 6) the story of Pari and Mrs Wahdati’s life in Paris after she leaves Mr Wahdati when he has a stroke (1974) 7) the story of a jihadi turned drug lord and his family who move to the village where Abdullah and Pari were born. The pair’s half brother attempts to reclaim his property from the gangster following time as a refugee in Pakistan (2009) 8) the story of the life of a Greek plastic surgeon (Markos) who lives in the Wahdati’s house when Nabi owns it (2010) 9) the story of Pari reconnecting with Abdullah in America and the relationship between her and Abdullah’s daughter (2010).
Some of the characters and the depth of emotional perception are really good. The brothers in chapter five, for example. However, I sometimes felt like the story was flitting around too much. The emphasis on the clever interconnections between the stories was too heavy and detracted from the quality of the individual stories themselves. For example, at the end of Chapter 5 the child who Idris agrees to help but then ends up ignoring seemingly thanks his brother, Timur, in the dedication to her book. This isn’t explored in any detail and is almost a throwaway whereas I felt it could have been interestingly expanded as another example of the brothers’ relationship, which was a highlight for me. Equally, Chapter 4, the story of Nabi, was really good partly because it didn’t have complicated interconnections that have to be worked out. In some ways I thought this aspect of the novel was overdone and not always successful. There are too many stories and they are too disparate. It’s like Hosseini is trying to do too much in one book. That said, the passing reference to ‘Abe’s Kabob House’ in Chapter 5, which is then explored in detail in Chapter 9, was really well done. I thought it spoke poignantly about the upheaval and change of migration and life as an immigrant and was very well handled.
Against the good writing, powerful characters and scenes, the book is somewhat overly dramatic. The whole thing is so stuffed full of tragedy and is so eventful it sometimes feels like watching a soap opera where something shocking has to happen every five minutes to keep the audience engaged. At times this felt facile, gratuitous and simplistic. Against this criticism, one of the main themes of the book is the turmoil and misery wrecked by the wars in Afghanistan so perhaps it is unfair to criticise the author’s attempts to place this in the foreground. Nonetheless, even the more domestic portions of the book that take place outside of Afghanistan can feel histrionic and overblown. The book is undoubtedly moving but sometimes it feels like the reader’s heartstrings are being pulled a little too hard a little too often!
This was an enjoyable, varied and readable book. I had a few issues with the structure and the intensity and frequency of its dramatic episodes but overall I would recommend it.
Sunday, 30 September 2018
Thursday, 13 September 2018
Ray Dalio - Principles: Life and Work
I was excited to read this book because of Dalio’s success with Bridgewater. His investment style could be broadly described as one of quantitative, macroeconomic trading, which is far from the long term, qualitative, bottom up, equities investment strategy I try to follow. I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn about how someone has had a lot of success with a very different style of investment to most of the books I read. In some senses this turned out to be true and in others rather less so! The publishers have done a good job in releasing this book, principles on ‘life and work’, before the second volume on ‘economics and investment’. Dalio is famous for his understanding of investment so most people would probably read the second volume over the first. That said, he’s sufficiently famous for his prowess as an investor that some punters, like me, will read this one anyway!
The book started quite well for me with an interesting overview of Dalio’s life and career. What becomes clear very early on is that he has a lot of ideas and a very high capacity for work. He is also an inveterate speculator, which I view as a positive. He writes in Chapter 3, titled ‘My Abyss’, about how he lost all his money early on in his career. I enjoyed this as many people might want to airbrush this from their career. Dalio is upfront about this mistake and, more generally, writes persuasively about the value of making mistakes in gaining experience and improving. Anyone with any experience trading knows the following is true, “I believe that anyone who has made money in trading has had to experience horrendous pain at some point. Trading is like working with electricity; you can get an electric shock” (p18 quoting from Jack Schwager Hedge Fund Market Wizards). Losing all your money is a sign of some naivety and excessive risk taking but it seems like Dalio definitely learned his lesson. That said, this is the only major mistake that Dalio mentions in the book and the rest of it is notably devoid of serious problems that he must have encountered in growing his firm. It is remarkable how many investors only focus on their successes, at least publicly. Although I suppose it could be viewed as good marketing. When it comes to the nitty gritty of running a company, the book is long on wishy washy management principles and very short on practical, painful examples. This is in spite of the fact that Dalio consistently refers to problems and mistakes as the lifeblood of evolution. I expected him to mention far more of them rather than just talk about their value in general terms and this was a disappointment.
As well as making clear that he is a bona fide speculator, the early chapters also demonstrate Dalio’s love of quantitative data and systems. To Dalio, everything is a machine that has rules and moving parts that can be understood and programmed to work more efficiently. The economy is a machine, so is a company, so is your brain. I’m not sure I agree with this assessment but this is how Dalio sees the world and operates within it. He states his quantitative approach definitively writing, “theoretically...if there was a computer that could hold all of the world’s facts and if it was perfectly programmed to mathematically express all of the relationships between all of the world’s parts, the future could be perfectly foretold” (p39-40). This reminded me of Keynes’ thoughts about the future and speculation and how contrary they seem to Dalio’s. Keynes writes, ‘“We have, as a rule, only the vaguest idea of any but the most direct consequences of our acts. Thus the fact that our knowledge of the future is fluctuating, vague and uncertain, renders wealth a peculiarly unsuitable subject for the methods of classical economic theory….By ‘uncertain knowledge’....I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable...The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European War is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth holders in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever’ (my italics). Whereas Dalio seems to have faith in the ability to model provided the computing power is of sufficient force. Leaving aside the theoretical and focusing on today’s imperfect computer models Dalio states, as anyone with any practical experience of uncertainty knows, that even the most powerful quantitative analysis can only produce a range of probabilities rather than one specific and definite outcome. Dalio writes, ‘Truth be known, forecasts aren’t worth very much, and most people who make them don’t make money in the markets….This is because nothing is certain and when one overlays the probabilities of all the various things that affect the future in order to make a forecast, one gets a wide array of possibilities with varying probabilities, not one highly probable outcome’. I thoroughly agree with him on this even if, ultimately, I’m probably closer to Keynes philosophically. Dalio’s skill is clearly not just modelling; it is also knowing when and how to bet. A lot of Dalio’s work seems to centre on the use of empirical logs and tools to eliminate human bias and errors. Having been thoroughly convinced about the faultiness of the human brain’s decision making by books like Thinking Fast and Slow I thought this was an area where Dalio is insightful and valuable. Especially given the advancements in AI and machine learning happening at the moment. Section 5.11 on algorithms, beginning p257, is very good on this and is something I need to learn more about and make use of.
In his early days as a commodity trader and consultant, he comes up with the idea of his ‘pure alpha’ fund through a combination of his love of speculation and his love of data. In researching his speculation he had come up with a huge number of strategies - ‘I had a large collection of uncorrelated return streams. In fact, I had something like a thousand of them’ (p58). He also had good, systematic data that recorded all of these systems and bets he had been trailing - ‘we had programmed and tested lots of fundamental trading rules’ (p58) in each asset class and they were trading lots of different asset classes. Combining this ability to come up with thousands of different types of trade, tracking and back testing them to see what was profitable, with his ‘eureka moment’ of realising that ‘having a few good uncorrelated return streams is better than having just one, and knowing how to combine return streams is even more effective than being able to choose good ones’ (p57) led to the creation of his fund management business.
On a less positive note, Dalio is seriously pleased with himself and never misses an opportunity for self-congratulation. A lot of this is dressed up in the most transparent form of false modesty, which makes it even worse. He makes a big song and dance about how relationships are the most important thing in the world before going on to list his wealth and influence according to Forbes and Time. He tells us about how much dating he was doing before he met his wife, compares his theory about uncorrelated income streams to Einstein’s theory of relativity and says he won’t talk much about his family before going on to boast about all of them at some length! He even states twice that Bridgewater is the most successful hedge fund ever and has made more money for his clients than anyone else in history. If this isn’t the writing of a very competitive and self satisfied person, then I don’t know what is. The whole concept for the book oozes self-importance!
Page 79 sees him talk about his ‘amazing achievements’ and about how most of what he does within the company ‘couldn’t be adequately delegated’. He feels like he is doing everything and needs help so sets up a management committee to monitor his performance. This all sounds fine and dandy until you learn later in the book that remuneration is very much Dalio’s domain and not the management committee’s. This sounds like getting a bunch of people who rely on your opinion of them to get rich to tell you how you’re doing. As I’ll try to explain later, this kind of duplicity applies to Dalio’s ideas of ‘radical transparency’ and ‘radical honesty’ in a similar way. It all sounds great and the ‘idea meritocracy’ sounds impressive until you realise it is, essentially, a Ray Dalio-ocracy where he makes the rules and chooses whether to enforce or suspend them at will.
Dalio thinks of himself as amongst history’s most incredible minds. For evidence of this, Dalio describes Bridgewater as ‘intellectual Navy SEALs; others describe it as going to a school of self-discovery run by someone like the Dalai Lama’ (p88). Not wanting to stop at comparing himself to the Dalai Lama, he also recounts a story where he meets the man himself. Apparently, he congratulated Dalio on his amazing understanding of humanity and asked him to join him in meeting but Dalio was too busy. The inference is very much that the Dalai Lama, too, has lots to learn from Dalio or that they are both ‘ninjas’ - a oddly fratty term Dalio uses to describe people who are very good at something. Pages 93-98, entitled ‘Learning what shapers are like’, are the most egregious example of his self satisfaction. Here he compares himself to just about any other great person you can think of. Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Einstein, Freud, Darwin, Muhammad, Jesus, Newton, Franklin - it’s almost impossible to believe he isn’t being sarcastic! He tries to mitigate this a bit on p111 by writing, ‘I want to be clear that I don’t believe that those who are ‘heroes’ or ‘shapers’ are either better people or are on better paths. It’s perfectly sensible to not have any desire to go on such a journey. I believe that what’s most important is to know one’s own nature and operate consistently with it’. However, the whole tone of the book and even his decision to write it indicate that Dalio most certainly sees himself as better than almost everyone else! Section ‘H’ on p230 where he talks more about ‘shapers’ is a good example of this.
The problem is, like many skillful market operators, Dalio takes his skill at navigating the market to indicate that he is an amazing thinker in all areas - not just markets. In Chapter 5 he describes himself as a impartial economic doctor in self-aggrandising section called ‘helping policy members’. Later on at p108, while boasting about his close relationship with Wang Qishan, he declares ‘I feel i get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe’ when the two of them talk!! Perhaps this level of self obsession is necessary to become as successful as Dalio. It certainly isn’t attractive and made me feel like Bridgewater is really a cult of personality rather than the utopian ‘idea meritocracy’ that Dalio would like us to believe that it is.
Alongside the infuriating smugness, I also found the book hard to read because it is quite badly written. Dalio is not a wonderful writer and most of the analogies he uses are related to baseball or skiing. He brands anything that doesn’t agree with his interpretation as ‘backward’, there is endless talk of ‘triangulation’ and ‘getting in sync’, which quickly becomes wearisome and repetitive. The book is presented as principles (e.g. 10) with sub-principles (10.1) and further details (10.1.A). This would appear to point to some kind of logical development and connection between the ideas being set out, as is the case with geometric presentations in philosophical books like Spinoza’s Ethics. This is definitely not the case with Dalio’s book! In spite of the appearance of logic and cohesion, these are really just vaguely connected statements or ramblings. Some of the sub points are just phrases like ‘show candidates your warts’, something he doesn’t really do in this book, with no examples or significant elaboration. By the latter stages of the book, I realised that I was just reading a list of poorly written general reflections that I would never be able to remember because they’re not cohesive, logical or supported by good examples. For this reason, I found the book a struggle to read and hard to follow.
Bridgewater definitely struck me as culty on the evidence of this book. Like Dalio’s arrogance and seeming perception of himself as some kind of hero, perhaps this is what’s necessary to have the kind of success that Bridgewater and Dalio have enjoyed. Nonetheless, I would like to call BS on a couple of the principles at Bridgewater. This is not to say the system doesn’t or can’t work; evidence would point to the contrary! More that the reality of the ‘idea meritocracy’ seems quite different from Dalio’s perception and presentation of it in this book. Section D on p159 is a good example of the difference I perceive. Here Dalio tell us, ‘the biggest mistake people make is to not see themselves and others objectively’. This sounds OK, but who is to say what is objective and who makes the rules about how these judgements are arrived at? For Dalio, there seems to be an idea that data can be completely objective but, the more I read about Bridgewater, it seemed that what Dalio means when he says ‘objective’ or ‘higher level thinking’ is ‘my belief in what is objective’ or ‘my thinking’! Further examples can be drawn from the ideas of ‘radical honesty’ and ‘radical transparency’, which are the key pillars of the ‘idea meritocracy’. In the idea meritocracy, the best ideas are supposed to be valued above the person who presents them’s rank in the hierarchy. However, when talking about the future, it’s sometimes hard to judge whose ideas are best as many outcomes are plausible and possible. When this happens, Dalio employs the idea of ‘believability’, which essentially means the person’s track record. As such, people with high believability will hold higher positions in the hierarchy meaning that the idea meritocracy essentially functions in a similar way to a traditional hierarchy! Dalio says he has never gone against the ‘believability weighted opinion’ when making decisions and this immediately made me think, ‘Dalio must have a very heavy believability weighting!’. Equally, radical transparency sounds interesting and good. All meetings are recorded and decisions about the company aren’t confined to a small management group. However, later on we learn that remuneration - probably the single most important and divisive issue in any company - is not subject to radical transparency (p334). Indeed, the only advice Dalio offers on pay is to ‘pay north of fair’ and ‘pay for time’. Given how important this issue is in running a company, I was disappointed that there was such little discussion of this. My conclusion is that Dalio makes most big decisions on pay in a radically non-transparent and individual manner! By the same token, talk of secret auditing (p513) and public executions (p514) seemed more akin to a dictatorship than a society governed by radical transparency!
I think Dalio’s principles are a bit like a religious text. It seems to provide an external, objective reference point for how things are decided and governed. However, inevitably, these principles can be interpreted and acted upon in a huge number of different ways so they end up being a tool to justify and vindicate the decisions of the leaders. Simply look at the incredibly disparate societies and communities the Bible has been used to support! Everything is in the interpretation and Dalio himself seems to recognise this in 6.4.B (p390), which in essence states that principles can mean lots of different things to different people but his interpretation of the principles is the correct one! So much for the idea meritocracy, unless everyone agrees that his ideas are the best - which they may well be when it comes to investment! On p391 Dalio argues that sometimes the idea meritocracy has to be suspended for the good of the organisation and, in the very next principle, that one should be wary of someone who seeks to suspend the idea meritocracy for the good of the organisation. This kind of contradictory thinking makes it seem like the principles are, like almost all principles, open to a large amount of interpretation and modification depending on what the most powerful people in a hierarchy want. In this way, Dalio’s way of operating sounds pretty much the same as most successful fund managers’; my way or the highway!
All this criticism might make it seem like I got nothing out of this book and that was not the case. He is very good on using algorithms to help investment and some parts of management and he writes persuasively about how the power and speed of the subconscious mind make it imperative to learn and analyse systematically before making decisions. His belief that people often get bogged down in details and his adherence to the 80:20 principle and general principles struck me as true. He also counsels that knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets to make (P253 5.6b), which I felt is important and true. In short, there is quite a lot of decent advice about investment in the book. Although little of it is ground breaking or particularly well exemplified. Unfortunately, what good stuff there is is wrapped up in a lot of self aggrandizing crap and meaningless waffle.
One thing Dalio definitely understands is the importance of matching your nature to what you do. I feel this is the single most important thing in becoming a good investor; trying to understand yourself and match your style to your strengths while making every effort to compensate for your weaknesses. Dalio understands this very deeply. He writes, ‘the happiest people discover their nature and match their life to it’ (p124) which I would wholeheartedly agree with. He also writes at length about the opportunity to learn from mistakes, which is also crucial. I think what Dalio has done in creating Bridgewater is to design a company that matches his nature extremely closely. This is a hard thing to do and I think he is exceptional in having done it to the extent he has. He also clearly has a gift for market speculation. However, rather than creating a new, broadly applicable way of thinking about managing a company, which is what Dalio thinks he has done, I’d say he has really just designed an environment that suits his nature very well. Lots of the book is couched in terms of, ‘I have had so much success, now my main goal is to pass it on to others’ but I would argue that very little of what he writes is easy to apply generally. The principles are vague, subject to modification and interpretation and are never fleshed out with really tricky practical examples. The problems he does talk about are largely trivial and the ones that people might really be interested in, for example the sexual harassment case brought against his CIO, are never mentioned. This is really disappointing given how much Dalio talks about learning from mistakes and difficult situations.
All in all, I didn’t get much from his book. The sections on Dalio’s life and career were probably the best bits as they’re not presented in the ‘principles’ style used later in the book. These sections also contained more factual information and fewer wishy washy aphorisms. As well as having a frustrating structure, the book isn’t well written and this made it a slog to read. However, given his track record, I’ll probably still read ‘Investment and Economic Principles’ when it comes out in the hope of getting more practical tips for making money! Hopefully with lots more concrete examples of his experiences in the markets.
The book started quite well for me with an interesting overview of Dalio’s life and career. What becomes clear very early on is that he has a lot of ideas and a very high capacity for work. He is also an inveterate speculator, which I view as a positive. He writes in Chapter 3, titled ‘My Abyss’, about how he lost all his money early on in his career. I enjoyed this as many people might want to airbrush this from their career. Dalio is upfront about this mistake and, more generally, writes persuasively about the value of making mistakes in gaining experience and improving. Anyone with any experience trading knows the following is true, “I believe that anyone who has made money in trading has had to experience horrendous pain at some point. Trading is like working with electricity; you can get an electric shock” (p18 quoting from Jack Schwager Hedge Fund Market Wizards). Losing all your money is a sign of some naivety and excessive risk taking but it seems like Dalio definitely learned his lesson. That said, this is the only major mistake that Dalio mentions in the book and the rest of it is notably devoid of serious problems that he must have encountered in growing his firm. It is remarkable how many investors only focus on their successes, at least publicly. Although I suppose it could be viewed as good marketing. When it comes to the nitty gritty of running a company, the book is long on wishy washy management principles and very short on practical, painful examples. This is in spite of the fact that Dalio consistently refers to problems and mistakes as the lifeblood of evolution. I expected him to mention far more of them rather than just talk about their value in general terms and this was a disappointment.
As well as making clear that he is a bona fide speculator, the early chapters also demonstrate Dalio’s love of quantitative data and systems. To Dalio, everything is a machine that has rules and moving parts that can be understood and programmed to work more efficiently. The economy is a machine, so is a company, so is your brain. I’m not sure I agree with this assessment but this is how Dalio sees the world and operates within it. He states his quantitative approach definitively writing, “theoretically...if there was a computer that could hold all of the world’s facts and if it was perfectly programmed to mathematically express all of the relationships between all of the world’s parts, the future could be perfectly foretold” (p39-40). This reminded me of Keynes’ thoughts about the future and speculation and how contrary they seem to Dalio’s. Keynes writes, ‘“We have, as a rule, only the vaguest idea of any but the most direct consequences of our acts. Thus the fact that our knowledge of the future is fluctuating, vague and uncertain, renders wealth a peculiarly unsuitable subject for the methods of classical economic theory….By ‘uncertain knowledge’....I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable...The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European War is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth holders in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever’ (my italics). Whereas Dalio seems to have faith in the ability to model provided the computing power is of sufficient force. Leaving aside the theoretical and focusing on today’s imperfect computer models Dalio states, as anyone with any practical experience of uncertainty knows, that even the most powerful quantitative analysis can only produce a range of probabilities rather than one specific and definite outcome. Dalio writes, ‘Truth be known, forecasts aren’t worth very much, and most people who make them don’t make money in the markets….This is because nothing is certain and when one overlays the probabilities of all the various things that affect the future in order to make a forecast, one gets a wide array of possibilities with varying probabilities, not one highly probable outcome’. I thoroughly agree with him on this even if, ultimately, I’m probably closer to Keynes philosophically. Dalio’s skill is clearly not just modelling; it is also knowing when and how to bet. A lot of Dalio’s work seems to centre on the use of empirical logs and tools to eliminate human bias and errors. Having been thoroughly convinced about the faultiness of the human brain’s decision making by books like Thinking Fast and Slow I thought this was an area where Dalio is insightful and valuable. Especially given the advancements in AI and machine learning happening at the moment. Section 5.11 on algorithms, beginning p257, is very good on this and is something I need to learn more about and make use of.
In his early days as a commodity trader and consultant, he comes up with the idea of his ‘pure alpha’ fund through a combination of his love of speculation and his love of data. In researching his speculation he had come up with a huge number of strategies - ‘I had a large collection of uncorrelated return streams. In fact, I had something like a thousand of them’ (p58). He also had good, systematic data that recorded all of these systems and bets he had been trailing - ‘we had programmed and tested lots of fundamental trading rules’ (p58) in each asset class and they were trading lots of different asset classes. Combining this ability to come up with thousands of different types of trade, tracking and back testing them to see what was profitable, with his ‘eureka moment’ of realising that ‘having a few good uncorrelated return streams is better than having just one, and knowing how to combine return streams is even more effective than being able to choose good ones’ (p57) led to the creation of his fund management business.
On a less positive note, Dalio is seriously pleased with himself and never misses an opportunity for self-congratulation. A lot of this is dressed up in the most transparent form of false modesty, which makes it even worse. He makes a big song and dance about how relationships are the most important thing in the world before going on to list his wealth and influence according to Forbes and Time. He tells us about how much dating he was doing before he met his wife, compares his theory about uncorrelated income streams to Einstein’s theory of relativity and says he won’t talk much about his family before going on to boast about all of them at some length! He even states twice that Bridgewater is the most successful hedge fund ever and has made more money for his clients than anyone else in history. If this isn’t the writing of a very competitive and self satisfied person, then I don’t know what is. The whole concept for the book oozes self-importance!
Page 79 sees him talk about his ‘amazing achievements’ and about how most of what he does within the company ‘couldn’t be adequately delegated’. He feels like he is doing everything and needs help so sets up a management committee to monitor his performance. This all sounds fine and dandy until you learn later in the book that remuneration is very much Dalio’s domain and not the management committee’s. This sounds like getting a bunch of people who rely on your opinion of them to get rich to tell you how you’re doing. As I’ll try to explain later, this kind of duplicity applies to Dalio’s ideas of ‘radical transparency’ and ‘radical honesty’ in a similar way. It all sounds great and the ‘idea meritocracy’ sounds impressive until you realise it is, essentially, a Ray Dalio-ocracy where he makes the rules and chooses whether to enforce or suspend them at will.
Dalio thinks of himself as amongst history’s most incredible minds. For evidence of this, Dalio describes Bridgewater as ‘intellectual Navy SEALs; others describe it as going to a school of self-discovery run by someone like the Dalai Lama’ (p88). Not wanting to stop at comparing himself to the Dalai Lama, he also recounts a story where he meets the man himself. Apparently, he congratulated Dalio on his amazing understanding of humanity and asked him to join him in meeting but Dalio was too busy. The inference is very much that the Dalai Lama, too, has lots to learn from Dalio or that they are both ‘ninjas’ - a oddly fratty term Dalio uses to describe people who are very good at something. Pages 93-98, entitled ‘Learning what shapers are like’, are the most egregious example of his self satisfaction. Here he compares himself to just about any other great person you can think of. Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Einstein, Freud, Darwin, Muhammad, Jesus, Newton, Franklin - it’s almost impossible to believe he isn’t being sarcastic! He tries to mitigate this a bit on p111 by writing, ‘I want to be clear that I don’t believe that those who are ‘heroes’ or ‘shapers’ are either better people or are on better paths. It’s perfectly sensible to not have any desire to go on such a journey. I believe that what’s most important is to know one’s own nature and operate consistently with it’. However, the whole tone of the book and even his decision to write it indicate that Dalio most certainly sees himself as better than almost everyone else! Section ‘H’ on p230 where he talks more about ‘shapers’ is a good example of this.
The problem is, like many skillful market operators, Dalio takes his skill at navigating the market to indicate that he is an amazing thinker in all areas - not just markets. In Chapter 5 he describes himself as a impartial economic doctor in self-aggrandising section called ‘helping policy members’. Later on at p108, while boasting about his close relationship with Wang Qishan, he declares ‘I feel i get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe’ when the two of them talk!! Perhaps this level of self obsession is necessary to become as successful as Dalio. It certainly isn’t attractive and made me feel like Bridgewater is really a cult of personality rather than the utopian ‘idea meritocracy’ that Dalio would like us to believe that it is.
Alongside the infuriating smugness, I also found the book hard to read because it is quite badly written. Dalio is not a wonderful writer and most of the analogies he uses are related to baseball or skiing. He brands anything that doesn’t agree with his interpretation as ‘backward’, there is endless talk of ‘triangulation’ and ‘getting in sync’, which quickly becomes wearisome and repetitive. The book is presented as principles (e.g. 10) with sub-principles (10.1) and further details (10.1.A). This would appear to point to some kind of logical development and connection between the ideas being set out, as is the case with geometric presentations in philosophical books like Spinoza’s Ethics. This is definitely not the case with Dalio’s book! In spite of the appearance of logic and cohesion, these are really just vaguely connected statements or ramblings. Some of the sub points are just phrases like ‘show candidates your warts’, something he doesn’t really do in this book, with no examples or significant elaboration. By the latter stages of the book, I realised that I was just reading a list of poorly written general reflections that I would never be able to remember because they’re not cohesive, logical or supported by good examples. For this reason, I found the book a struggle to read and hard to follow.
Bridgewater definitely struck me as culty on the evidence of this book. Like Dalio’s arrogance and seeming perception of himself as some kind of hero, perhaps this is what’s necessary to have the kind of success that Bridgewater and Dalio have enjoyed. Nonetheless, I would like to call BS on a couple of the principles at Bridgewater. This is not to say the system doesn’t or can’t work; evidence would point to the contrary! More that the reality of the ‘idea meritocracy’ seems quite different from Dalio’s perception and presentation of it in this book. Section D on p159 is a good example of the difference I perceive. Here Dalio tell us, ‘the biggest mistake people make is to not see themselves and others objectively’. This sounds OK, but who is to say what is objective and who makes the rules about how these judgements are arrived at? For Dalio, there seems to be an idea that data can be completely objective but, the more I read about Bridgewater, it seemed that what Dalio means when he says ‘objective’ or ‘higher level thinking’ is ‘my belief in what is objective’ or ‘my thinking’! Further examples can be drawn from the ideas of ‘radical honesty’ and ‘radical transparency’, which are the key pillars of the ‘idea meritocracy’. In the idea meritocracy, the best ideas are supposed to be valued above the person who presents them’s rank in the hierarchy. However, when talking about the future, it’s sometimes hard to judge whose ideas are best as many outcomes are plausible and possible. When this happens, Dalio employs the idea of ‘believability’, which essentially means the person’s track record. As such, people with high believability will hold higher positions in the hierarchy meaning that the idea meritocracy essentially functions in a similar way to a traditional hierarchy! Dalio says he has never gone against the ‘believability weighted opinion’ when making decisions and this immediately made me think, ‘Dalio must have a very heavy believability weighting!’. Equally, radical transparency sounds interesting and good. All meetings are recorded and decisions about the company aren’t confined to a small management group. However, later on we learn that remuneration - probably the single most important and divisive issue in any company - is not subject to radical transparency (p334). Indeed, the only advice Dalio offers on pay is to ‘pay north of fair’ and ‘pay for time’. Given how important this issue is in running a company, I was disappointed that there was such little discussion of this. My conclusion is that Dalio makes most big decisions on pay in a radically non-transparent and individual manner! By the same token, talk of secret auditing (p513) and public executions (p514) seemed more akin to a dictatorship than a society governed by radical transparency!
I think Dalio’s principles are a bit like a religious text. It seems to provide an external, objective reference point for how things are decided and governed. However, inevitably, these principles can be interpreted and acted upon in a huge number of different ways so they end up being a tool to justify and vindicate the decisions of the leaders. Simply look at the incredibly disparate societies and communities the Bible has been used to support! Everything is in the interpretation and Dalio himself seems to recognise this in 6.4.B (p390), which in essence states that principles can mean lots of different things to different people but his interpretation of the principles is the correct one! So much for the idea meritocracy, unless everyone agrees that his ideas are the best - which they may well be when it comes to investment! On p391 Dalio argues that sometimes the idea meritocracy has to be suspended for the good of the organisation and, in the very next principle, that one should be wary of someone who seeks to suspend the idea meritocracy for the good of the organisation. This kind of contradictory thinking makes it seem like the principles are, like almost all principles, open to a large amount of interpretation and modification depending on what the most powerful people in a hierarchy want. In this way, Dalio’s way of operating sounds pretty much the same as most successful fund managers’; my way or the highway!
All this criticism might make it seem like I got nothing out of this book and that was not the case. He is very good on using algorithms to help investment and some parts of management and he writes persuasively about how the power and speed of the subconscious mind make it imperative to learn and analyse systematically before making decisions. His belief that people often get bogged down in details and his adherence to the 80:20 principle and general principles struck me as true. He also counsels that knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets to make (P253 5.6b), which I felt is important and true. In short, there is quite a lot of decent advice about investment in the book. Although little of it is ground breaking or particularly well exemplified. Unfortunately, what good stuff there is is wrapped up in a lot of self aggrandizing crap and meaningless waffle.
One thing Dalio definitely understands is the importance of matching your nature to what you do. I feel this is the single most important thing in becoming a good investor; trying to understand yourself and match your style to your strengths while making every effort to compensate for your weaknesses. Dalio understands this very deeply. He writes, ‘the happiest people discover their nature and match their life to it’ (p124) which I would wholeheartedly agree with. He also writes at length about the opportunity to learn from mistakes, which is also crucial. I think what Dalio has done in creating Bridgewater is to design a company that matches his nature extremely closely. This is a hard thing to do and I think he is exceptional in having done it to the extent he has. He also clearly has a gift for market speculation. However, rather than creating a new, broadly applicable way of thinking about managing a company, which is what Dalio thinks he has done, I’d say he has really just designed an environment that suits his nature very well. Lots of the book is couched in terms of, ‘I have had so much success, now my main goal is to pass it on to others’ but I would argue that very little of what he writes is easy to apply generally. The principles are vague, subject to modification and interpretation and are never fleshed out with really tricky practical examples. The problems he does talk about are largely trivial and the ones that people might really be interested in, for example the sexual harassment case brought against his CIO, are never mentioned. This is really disappointing given how much Dalio talks about learning from mistakes and difficult situations.
All in all, I didn’t get much from his book. The sections on Dalio’s life and career were probably the best bits as they’re not presented in the ‘principles’ style used later in the book. These sections also contained more factual information and fewer wishy washy aphorisms. As well as having a frustrating structure, the book isn’t well written and this made it a slog to read. However, given his track record, I’ll probably still read ‘Investment and Economic Principles’ when it comes out in the hope of getting more practical tips for making money! Hopefully with lots more concrete examples of his experiences in the markets.
Saturday, 25 August 2018
Otessa Moshfegh - Eileen
Moshi mosh motherfeghers! Otessa? More like Grotessa! All bad jokes aside, this is a grotesque book. As with Homesick for Another World the author specialises in feelings of disgust. This takes many forms. Eileen, the protagonist and narrator, has many features that seem designed to make the reader feel discomfort. Physical things like her extreme malnutrition, her dirtiness, her habit of wearing her dead mother’s ill fitting clothes, her oceanic bowel movements and her propensity to vomit. Psychological disgust and repulsion are also front and centre. Eileen’s homelife is as depressing and squalid as the house itself. Her delusional, alcoholic father treats her like a slave and only speaks to abuse and denigrate her. Her work at a correctional facility for boys is mundane and repetitive. Her internal life is also sordid and degenerate. She fantasises about killing her father and plans to run away. In essence, everything is miserable and seems stage managed to make your stomach turn. It’s laid on very thickly and this can be a little much. However, it does serve to emphasise how mundane and unhappy Eileen’s life is both internally and externally.
There are two big turning points in the book. One - the arrival of Rebecca, a new educational consultant, at Eileen’s work and two - the subsequent happenings of their early friendship. The pace of the book is slow and drudging to begin with, which I enjoyed. Things suddenly explode into action later on. Rebecca appears in the book like a character from another world. She is beautiful, self-confident, educated and appears upper class and cosmopolitan. Eileen falls in love with her instantly and is disbelieving that Rebecca will even give her the time of day. It brings some meaning and enjoyment into her life beside her plans of running away, which she seems to lack the bravery to execute before Rebecca arrives. The shining ray of brilliant, almost implausible, sunshine that is Rebecca doesn’t last long before it is considerably dimmed and contorted by the novel’s monstrous filter. This was probably the best bit of the book for me. I loved the chaotic incongruity of what Eileen thinks is Rebecca’s house when she goes to visit. Eileen is expecting stylish decor, luxurious homeware and exotic alcohol served in refined glassware. When she arrives to discover a scene of poverty and disarray that Rebecca couldn’t possibly have curated in the few weeks since she moved to X-ville; it is obvious that something is up. Has Eileen imagined Rebecca’s sophistication at work? It is certainly possible given how deranged Eileen seems. Has Eileen invented Rebecca entirely? Will Rebecca turn out to be a murderous psychopath? I felt like it might be a caricatured plot twist like this but in the end it was so much better. Rebecca has had a chat with a, previously silent, inmate at the correctional facility. He tells her that the reason he killed his father is because his father used to rape him every night with the complicity of his mother who used to give him an enema after supper. If this seems quite heavy, it is a good example of the general tone of the novel; it is disgusting and repulsive in the extreme. In any case, it turns out that Rebecca has driven to the boy’s mother’s house and locked her up in the basement in order to extract a confession, to precisely what ends remains uncertain, and has called Eileen to assist her. This is a good plot twist and an excellent way of explaining the insane dissonance of Eileen’s view of Rebecca at work and what she encounters when she arrives.
Rather less good are the following scenes. The boy’s mother is threatened by Eileen with a gun and confesses. Apparently she permitted the rape of her son through a sense of spousal responsibility and obedience. She also says her husband’s raping of her son coincided with rejuvenation of her husband’s sexual desire for her, which she enjoyed enough to ignore the darker goings on surrounding it. Because the husband used to fuck her after sodomising his son, she gets vaginal infections and starts administering the enemas in an attempt to stop this. This all seems rather muddled, implausible and hastily flung together after the more considered pace of the earlier parts of the novel. Things continue in this vein when Rebecca drops the gun that Eileen happens to be carrying because her drunk father can’t be trusted with it anymore and, lo and behold, it accidently shoots the implausibly bound captive mother in the arm. It all feels a bit slapdash especially after the fantastic plot twist with Rebecca.
There are some excellent portions of dark humour in the book. Eileen’s awakening after a night of drinking with Rebecca on p152 is funny and accurately describes the disorderly aftermath of extreme intoxication. On p202 Eileen is perturbed by ‘Rebecca’s disregard for decorum, to put it lightly’ when, in the absence of a corkscrew, she smashes open the bottle of wine Eileen has brought on the countertop. Conversely, the scene where Eileen steals Jesus’s swaddling from the nativity scene to wrap up the bottle of wine seems a forced and clunky attempt at symbolism.
The book had some really great bits but wasn’t consistently good. It had an uneven, patchy pace and structure. With the exception of the scenes in Rebecca’s ‘house’ and the associated plot twist, I prefered the more quotidien sections. Everything I have read by Otessa Moshfegh is so militantly depraved and ugly, I wonder why she chooses to exclude more positive feelings and sentiments from her work so entirely. Perhaps it is something deep and philosophical relating to sin and moral corruption being more permanent facets of the human character than, for instance, joy, love and beauty. Whatever the case, I didn’t dislike this book for being dark. I did feel that it is overdone and poorly executed in some places. If it remains the sole focus of her work, would this end up making her a rather one dimensional author? It’s surely too early to tell but I think it would be a shame if such a good writer limited herself in this kind of way.
There are two big turning points in the book. One - the arrival of Rebecca, a new educational consultant, at Eileen’s work and two - the subsequent happenings of their early friendship. The pace of the book is slow and drudging to begin with, which I enjoyed. Things suddenly explode into action later on. Rebecca appears in the book like a character from another world. She is beautiful, self-confident, educated and appears upper class and cosmopolitan. Eileen falls in love with her instantly and is disbelieving that Rebecca will even give her the time of day. It brings some meaning and enjoyment into her life beside her plans of running away, which she seems to lack the bravery to execute before Rebecca arrives. The shining ray of brilliant, almost implausible, sunshine that is Rebecca doesn’t last long before it is considerably dimmed and contorted by the novel’s monstrous filter. This was probably the best bit of the book for me. I loved the chaotic incongruity of what Eileen thinks is Rebecca’s house when she goes to visit. Eileen is expecting stylish decor, luxurious homeware and exotic alcohol served in refined glassware. When she arrives to discover a scene of poverty and disarray that Rebecca couldn’t possibly have curated in the few weeks since she moved to X-ville; it is obvious that something is up. Has Eileen imagined Rebecca’s sophistication at work? It is certainly possible given how deranged Eileen seems. Has Eileen invented Rebecca entirely? Will Rebecca turn out to be a murderous psychopath? I felt like it might be a caricatured plot twist like this but in the end it was so much better. Rebecca has had a chat with a, previously silent, inmate at the correctional facility. He tells her that the reason he killed his father is because his father used to rape him every night with the complicity of his mother who used to give him an enema after supper. If this seems quite heavy, it is a good example of the general tone of the novel; it is disgusting and repulsive in the extreme. In any case, it turns out that Rebecca has driven to the boy’s mother’s house and locked her up in the basement in order to extract a confession, to precisely what ends remains uncertain, and has called Eileen to assist her. This is a good plot twist and an excellent way of explaining the insane dissonance of Eileen’s view of Rebecca at work and what she encounters when she arrives.
Rather less good are the following scenes. The boy’s mother is threatened by Eileen with a gun and confesses. Apparently she permitted the rape of her son through a sense of spousal responsibility and obedience. She also says her husband’s raping of her son coincided with rejuvenation of her husband’s sexual desire for her, which she enjoyed enough to ignore the darker goings on surrounding it. Because the husband used to fuck her after sodomising his son, she gets vaginal infections and starts administering the enemas in an attempt to stop this. This all seems rather muddled, implausible and hastily flung together after the more considered pace of the earlier parts of the novel. Things continue in this vein when Rebecca drops the gun that Eileen happens to be carrying because her drunk father can’t be trusted with it anymore and, lo and behold, it accidently shoots the implausibly bound captive mother in the arm. It all feels a bit slapdash especially after the fantastic plot twist with Rebecca.
There are some excellent portions of dark humour in the book. Eileen’s awakening after a night of drinking with Rebecca on p152 is funny and accurately describes the disorderly aftermath of extreme intoxication. On p202 Eileen is perturbed by ‘Rebecca’s disregard for decorum, to put it lightly’ when, in the absence of a corkscrew, she smashes open the bottle of wine Eileen has brought on the countertop. Conversely, the scene where Eileen steals Jesus’s swaddling from the nativity scene to wrap up the bottle of wine seems a forced and clunky attempt at symbolism.
The book had some really great bits but wasn’t consistently good. It had an uneven, patchy pace and structure. With the exception of the scenes in Rebecca’s ‘house’ and the associated plot twist, I prefered the more quotidien sections. Everything I have read by Otessa Moshfegh is so militantly depraved and ugly, I wonder why she chooses to exclude more positive feelings and sentiments from her work so entirely. Perhaps it is something deep and philosophical relating to sin and moral corruption being more permanent facets of the human character than, for instance, joy, love and beauty. Whatever the case, I didn’t dislike this book for being dark. I did feel that it is overdone and poorly executed in some places. If it remains the sole focus of her work, would this end up making her a rather one dimensional author? It’s surely too early to tell but I think it would be a shame if such a good writer limited herself in this kind of way.
Thursday, 16 August 2018
Otessa Moshfegh - Homesick For Another World
The prose is excellent and highly readable. It sounds casual and unrehearsed, like the author is simply writing down their internal monologue. However, there’s such a wide range of characters contained in this collection of short stories this can’t be the case. These, seemingly off hand, reflections also convey rich narratives of surprising depth even though the stories are rarely more than 20 pages of double spaced text. It’s impressive and very skillfully done. The language isn’t overly pretentious and the author does a good job of effacing her own style and personality from the writing. There’s the occasional glimpse of the writer behind the characters. For example, any beige substance is usually referred to as ‘dun’ coloured and body parts are often called by the physiological name for the bone within them - mandible, clavicle.
In spite of the broad variety of characters there’s a distinctive aesthetic to the stories. It’s a bit like Wes Anderson films. It’s identifiable and somewhat dreamlike but as opposed to being cute and quirky, it’s dark, nightmarish and misanthropic. Sometimes this goes a little far for my tastes. Everyone’s a dysfunctional drug addict or alcoholic. All marriages are empty and loveless. All sex involves extensive anal fingering or dildoing. The story that best exemplifies this is The Locked Room. It’s so outlandish but retains an ostensibly realistic setting unlike A Better Place, which is explicitly other worldly and much better for being so. The Locked Room felt self-consciously weird and disgusting and this made it cartoonish, shallow and meaningless. Malibu also falls into this category. As do Mr Wu, An Honest Woman and The Surrogate in less gratuitous and definitive ways. They all had a slightly inauthentic ring. This isn’t always the case by any means. The boyfriend in The Weirdos is odd and wonderfully unpleasant in an entirely believable and interesting way. The self-obsessed hipster in Dancing in the Moonlight is also brilliantly observed. Even if his abysmal negotiations in acquiring an ottoman are a bit of a stretch. Most of the other stories were engaging, credible and well written. Her younger characters have a richer texture than her older ones. A good example of this is An Honest Woman where the only thing less plausible than the narrative is the behaviour of the old man. I suppose that could be because the author is younger but some of her best characters are male and she’s not a man!
I really enjoyed reading this largely for the excellent prose. The narratives can be a little too self consciously gruesome or downright unlikely, which is also the case for a few of the characters. Nonetheless, the stories are rich and create a powerful ambience. When good characters and narrative combine it’s fantastic as the writing is of a uniformly high quality.
In spite of the broad variety of characters there’s a distinctive aesthetic to the stories. It’s a bit like Wes Anderson films. It’s identifiable and somewhat dreamlike but as opposed to being cute and quirky, it’s dark, nightmarish and misanthropic. Sometimes this goes a little far for my tastes. Everyone’s a dysfunctional drug addict or alcoholic. All marriages are empty and loveless. All sex involves extensive anal fingering or dildoing. The story that best exemplifies this is The Locked Room. It’s so outlandish but retains an ostensibly realistic setting unlike A Better Place, which is explicitly other worldly and much better for being so. The Locked Room felt self-consciously weird and disgusting and this made it cartoonish, shallow and meaningless. Malibu also falls into this category. As do Mr Wu, An Honest Woman and The Surrogate in less gratuitous and definitive ways. They all had a slightly inauthentic ring. This isn’t always the case by any means. The boyfriend in The Weirdos is odd and wonderfully unpleasant in an entirely believable and interesting way. The self-obsessed hipster in Dancing in the Moonlight is also brilliantly observed. Even if his abysmal negotiations in acquiring an ottoman are a bit of a stretch. Most of the other stories were engaging, credible and well written. Her younger characters have a richer texture than her older ones. A good example of this is An Honest Woman where the only thing less plausible than the narrative is the behaviour of the old man. I suppose that could be because the author is younger but some of her best characters are male and she’s not a man!
I really enjoyed reading this largely for the excellent prose. The narratives can be a little too self consciously gruesome or downright unlikely, which is also the case for a few of the characters. Nonetheless, the stories are rich and create a powerful ambience. When good characters and narrative combine it’s fantastic as the writing is of a uniformly high quality.
Tuesday, 7 August 2018
George Orwell - A Clergyman's Daughter
This is the worst Orwell book I’ve read so far. The book starts off well enough with a good description of a clergyman’s daughter’s life of drudgery. Her father is stuck up, lazy, distant and lives beyond his means, which makes her life all the more difficult. He squanders what savings he does have speculating on the stock market with disastrous consequences. This is very sad because they could be used to help his daughter’s desperate attempts to keep him in the style he has become accustomed. All of a sudden, she finds herself homeless and on the streets in London. This is where the trouble began for me!
From a narrative perspective, it feels a lot like Orwell has decided that he wants to write about something else or doesn’t know how to continue with the story and so attempts a clumsy segway into something else he has written. Dorothy's life on the street reads a lot like Down and Out in London and Paris and I had a suspicion that this was excess material from Orwell’s tramping trips that had been adapted to flesh out this novel. This suspicion was reinforced by the fact that Orwell makes no real attempt to explain how Dorothy came to experience such a dramatic change in circumstances. All that’s offered by way of an explanation is that she, ‘lost her memory.’ The newspaper articles that appear about her disappearance reproduce her nosy neighbour’s account that she eloped with the loose living Mr Warburton. However, this isn’t supported by the later stages of the book when Dorothy recovers from her amnesia. There’s no proper account of what happened to her and I found that deeply unsatisfactory.
Dorothy’s amnesia also seems to be a strange mixture of remembering some things while forgetting others. Usually, she forgets those things that would be most beneficial for the plot and this is an annoying and lazy characteristic of the book. She also fails to be prompted about her identity by photos of herself in the paper, the incongruity of her accent and education or any other of a thousand possible signs that might give her pause for thought. She dumbly accepts her circumstances and moves through periods of hop-picking, sleeping rough and begging until Orwell runs out of scenes of life ‘on the road’ and has her remember who she is all of a sudden. For me, this was a very weak narrative.
Once she does remember who she is, her father disowns her because of the scandal and she receives help from her aristocratic cousin who gets her a job as a school mistress. This period is just as disjointed as the other scenes of life on the road and reminded me of Bronte’s Villette, which I consider to be a terrible book! Eventually, she is given the sack by the abominable proprietress of the school. Luckily, it turns out that the slandering neighbour who gave the account of Dorothy’s elopement with Mr Warburton has herself been discredited and that Dorothy’s reputation is now clean. Again, this all struck me as rather too convenient and another example of Orwell’s lazy narrative construction in this book. Far from showing her horrible father any resentment for being tardy in helping her once she did eventually remember who she was, Dorothy seems delighted to return to her former life. This is implausible. For someone to show no anger or bitterness at having had such gruesome experiences of poverty and homelessness is frankly unbelievable. Indeed, Dorothy hardly seems to have undergone any changes whatsoever and moves seamlessly from her original condition to homelessness and complete amnesia to being a school mistress and back to her original condition! It’s all far too clumsy and facile to make a decent plot. The only substantial change that seems to have happened to her is that she is no longer religious. One might think that this loss of faith might have some impact on her choice of life but apparently she is just as happy to act as a church slave without belief as she was to act as one while she still believed! The book finishes with some trite, sentimental philosophising from Dorothy about the joy of duty and performing her plodding toil without complaint.
The prose in the book is good and this is its salvation. There are also some enjoyable portions like the opening chapters describing her life with her father and the ones about hop picking. However, the book as a whole had a very slapdash feel and an almost inconceivably weak narrative. It’s as if Orwell wrote three different stories; one about the domestic life of a clergyman’s daughter, one about life as a hop picker and vagrant and another about life as a schoolmistress in a bad school. It seems like he then tried to join the three parts together in five minutes while using as little of his creativity and intellect as possible! Both the plot and the psychology of Dorothy are unimaginable in the extreme and this really spoiled the book for me.
From a narrative perspective, it feels a lot like Orwell has decided that he wants to write about something else or doesn’t know how to continue with the story and so attempts a clumsy segway into something else he has written. Dorothy's life on the street reads a lot like Down and Out in London and Paris and I had a suspicion that this was excess material from Orwell’s tramping trips that had been adapted to flesh out this novel. This suspicion was reinforced by the fact that Orwell makes no real attempt to explain how Dorothy came to experience such a dramatic change in circumstances. All that’s offered by way of an explanation is that she, ‘lost her memory.’ The newspaper articles that appear about her disappearance reproduce her nosy neighbour’s account that she eloped with the loose living Mr Warburton. However, this isn’t supported by the later stages of the book when Dorothy recovers from her amnesia. There’s no proper account of what happened to her and I found that deeply unsatisfactory.
Dorothy’s amnesia also seems to be a strange mixture of remembering some things while forgetting others. Usually, she forgets those things that would be most beneficial for the plot and this is an annoying and lazy characteristic of the book. She also fails to be prompted about her identity by photos of herself in the paper, the incongruity of her accent and education or any other of a thousand possible signs that might give her pause for thought. She dumbly accepts her circumstances and moves through periods of hop-picking, sleeping rough and begging until Orwell runs out of scenes of life ‘on the road’ and has her remember who she is all of a sudden. For me, this was a very weak narrative.
Once she does remember who she is, her father disowns her because of the scandal and she receives help from her aristocratic cousin who gets her a job as a school mistress. This period is just as disjointed as the other scenes of life on the road and reminded me of Bronte’s Villette, which I consider to be a terrible book! Eventually, she is given the sack by the abominable proprietress of the school. Luckily, it turns out that the slandering neighbour who gave the account of Dorothy’s elopement with Mr Warburton has herself been discredited and that Dorothy’s reputation is now clean. Again, this all struck me as rather too convenient and another example of Orwell’s lazy narrative construction in this book. Far from showing her horrible father any resentment for being tardy in helping her once she did eventually remember who she was, Dorothy seems delighted to return to her former life. This is implausible. For someone to show no anger or bitterness at having had such gruesome experiences of poverty and homelessness is frankly unbelievable. Indeed, Dorothy hardly seems to have undergone any changes whatsoever and moves seamlessly from her original condition to homelessness and complete amnesia to being a school mistress and back to her original condition! It’s all far too clumsy and facile to make a decent plot. The only substantial change that seems to have happened to her is that she is no longer religious. One might think that this loss of faith might have some impact on her choice of life but apparently she is just as happy to act as a church slave without belief as she was to act as one while she still believed! The book finishes with some trite, sentimental philosophising from Dorothy about the joy of duty and performing her plodding toil without complaint.
The prose in the book is good and this is its salvation. There are also some enjoyable portions like the opening chapters describing her life with her father and the ones about hop picking. However, the book as a whole had a very slapdash feel and an almost inconceivably weak narrative. It’s as if Orwell wrote three different stories; one about the domestic life of a clergyman’s daughter, one about life as a hop picker and vagrant and another about life as a schoolmistress in a bad school. It seems like he then tried to join the three parts together in five minutes while using as little of his creativity and intellect as possible! Both the plot and the psychology of Dorothy are unimaginable in the extreme and this really spoiled the book for me.
Saturday, 4 August 2018
George Orwell - Burmese Days
The prose in this book was a bit more floral than what I’ve come across in Orwell before. The voice is more confident than that of Down and Out in Paris and London but also more verbose. I found it inferior to the more matter of fact tone of Down and Out in Paris and London. On the other hand, this book is more a through-going novel and so probably requires a slightly more expansive style. There is a lot more dialogue, which isn’t always a good thing. It’s not as lucid and pithy as his later books like 1984 and Animal Farm. Some of the description is a bit self-conscious and occasionally floral. I wouldn’t call it bad but it’s not as tight as the other Orwell I’ve read.
The characters and the subject matter are far better. The lonely, debauched figure of Flory is very well drawn. He is at once pitiable and detestable. His solitary existence amongst the boring, racist pukka sahibs of the club is excruciating. The inhospitable climate and the extreme isolation of his station complete the misery. His recourse to boozing and fornicating seem understandable and I was sympathetic to the self-loathing he experiences as a consequence. Against this, the spineless way he refuses to support his friend Dr Veraswami is horrible to read and really turned me against him.
The appearance of a young Elizabeth seems to be his salvation and no one seems to believe this more readily than Flory even though the two are a wildly unsuitable match. Elizabeth is a dyed in the wool racist and of the same species as the rest of the club bores. However, in his desperation to find something that he likes about himself and his life, Flory thinks she’s everything he needs to make his life complete. After an amorous shooting trip where Flory kills a leopard, which proves to be a strong aphrodisiac for Elizabeth, I thought he would propose. Flory wastes this opportunity and is then cast aside by Elizabeth when she learns Flory keeps a local mistress. Elizabeth has also been informed by her Aunt that a better prospect was arriving in their remote region of Myanmar. This part of the story is very good and the unrequited fawning of the locals on the newly arrived Military Police officer, his singular interest in a casual acquaintance with Elizabeth and his vanishing departure are all excellent. Rather less good is the way Flory wastes another chance at proposing to Elizabeth by being loquacious. I thought that after his first experience that he would not lose even a second in proposing to her when his fortunes had, unexpectedly, turned. I was also rather disappointed that Flory didn’t have more of an epiphany about Elizabeth’s suitability after being so unceremoniously dumped by her in favour of the dapper young Verrall. That he thinks he is still in love with her is probably only an indication of how dire his life is and how little he is prepared to do about it given his indolent nature.
Flory’s great moment of triumph is good scene. It’s nice to see him act decisively for once! In the aftermath of the riot I was also pleased to see that Dr Veraswami’s stock had risen and U Po Kyin’s machinations against him appear to have failed. The two plots of native, subordinate scheming and love story of a despairing colonial are skillfully intertwined. I also liked the way the book ended with evil eventually triumphing. This seems an appropriate outcome given the acerbic criticism of the colonial system that Orwell maintains throughout the book. Of course, it’s sad to see Flory, a not wholly unsympathetic character, commit suicide. Nonetheless, I felt it was in keeping with Orwell’s criticism of the colonial system that no good should come of it. The only issue I had with the final plot twist, where Flory’s mistress runs into the church to disgrace him in front of the whole congregation including Elizabeth, is that it is hardly new information. Elizabeth is already aware of Flory’s actions. First, through her Aunt and then through Flory’s letter to her admitting his sins but asking for forgiveness after she dumps him for the first time. I suppose it is plausible that the hypocritical, superficial colonial society, as Orwell paints it, would only be prepared to tolerate indiscretions if they were kept semi-private. For example, Elizabeth’s uncle’s furious womanising whenever he gets away from his wife. This phenomenon seems to be well known within colonial society but perhaps doesn’t draw the same disgrace because it isn’t as highly visible as Flory’s embarrassment. Nevertheless, even though the scene is dramatic enough, it felt a bit hasty and stretched from a narrative perspective. Flory’s suicide also seems an overreaction if it is taken as an isolated response to this incident. It makes more sense if, like me, you feel he is pretty close to suicide at the beginning of the book before Elizabeth turns up. The scheming, unctious U Po Kyin is a perfect representation of the kind of pond life that thrives under the rotten colonial system that Orwell attacks so violently. He is at once thoroughly unpleasant but strangely pleasing in his cunning. His eventual success, alongside Flory’s suicide, are the climatic damnation of colonial society and administration in Burma.
I liked this book even though the prose isn’t the finest example of Orwell’s writing. It is a scathing criticism of the colonial system. The plot is enjoyable but perhaps a little weak in the scene where Flory is disgraced in the church. The characters are excellent throughout.
The characters and the subject matter are far better. The lonely, debauched figure of Flory is very well drawn. He is at once pitiable and detestable. His solitary existence amongst the boring, racist pukka sahibs of the club is excruciating. The inhospitable climate and the extreme isolation of his station complete the misery. His recourse to boozing and fornicating seem understandable and I was sympathetic to the self-loathing he experiences as a consequence. Against this, the spineless way he refuses to support his friend Dr Veraswami is horrible to read and really turned me against him.
The appearance of a young Elizabeth seems to be his salvation and no one seems to believe this more readily than Flory even though the two are a wildly unsuitable match. Elizabeth is a dyed in the wool racist and of the same species as the rest of the club bores. However, in his desperation to find something that he likes about himself and his life, Flory thinks she’s everything he needs to make his life complete. After an amorous shooting trip where Flory kills a leopard, which proves to be a strong aphrodisiac for Elizabeth, I thought he would propose. Flory wastes this opportunity and is then cast aside by Elizabeth when she learns Flory keeps a local mistress. Elizabeth has also been informed by her Aunt that a better prospect was arriving in their remote region of Myanmar. This part of the story is very good and the unrequited fawning of the locals on the newly arrived Military Police officer, his singular interest in a casual acquaintance with Elizabeth and his vanishing departure are all excellent. Rather less good is the way Flory wastes another chance at proposing to Elizabeth by being loquacious. I thought that after his first experience that he would not lose even a second in proposing to her when his fortunes had, unexpectedly, turned. I was also rather disappointed that Flory didn’t have more of an epiphany about Elizabeth’s suitability after being so unceremoniously dumped by her in favour of the dapper young Verrall. That he thinks he is still in love with her is probably only an indication of how dire his life is and how little he is prepared to do about it given his indolent nature.
Flory’s great moment of triumph is good scene. It’s nice to see him act decisively for once! In the aftermath of the riot I was also pleased to see that Dr Veraswami’s stock had risen and U Po Kyin’s machinations against him appear to have failed. The two plots of native, subordinate scheming and love story of a despairing colonial are skillfully intertwined. I also liked the way the book ended with evil eventually triumphing. This seems an appropriate outcome given the acerbic criticism of the colonial system that Orwell maintains throughout the book. Of course, it’s sad to see Flory, a not wholly unsympathetic character, commit suicide. Nonetheless, I felt it was in keeping with Orwell’s criticism of the colonial system that no good should come of it. The only issue I had with the final plot twist, where Flory’s mistress runs into the church to disgrace him in front of the whole congregation including Elizabeth, is that it is hardly new information. Elizabeth is already aware of Flory’s actions. First, through her Aunt and then through Flory’s letter to her admitting his sins but asking for forgiveness after she dumps him for the first time. I suppose it is plausible that the hypocritical, superficial colonial society, as Orwell paints it, would only be prepared to tolerate indiscretions if they were kept semi-private. For example, Elizabeth’s uncle’s furious womanising whenever he gets away from his wife. This phenomenon seems to be well known within colonial society but perhaps doesn’t draw the same disgrace because it isn’t as highly visible as Flory’s embarrassment. Nevertheless, even though the scene is dramatic enough, it felt a bit hasty and stretched from a narrative perspective. Flory’s suicide also seems an overreaction if it is taken as an isolated response to this incident. It makes more sense if, like me, you feel he is pretty close to suicide at the beginning of the book before Elizabeth turns up. The scheming, unctious U Po Kyin is a perfect representation of the kind of pond life that thrives under the rotten colonial system that Orwell attacks so violently. He is at once thoroughly unpleasant but strangely pleasing in his cunning. His eventual success, alongside Flory’s suicide, are the climatic damnation of colonial society and administration in Burma.
I liked this book even though the prose isn’t the finest example of Orwell’s writing. It is a scathing criticism of the colonial system. The plot is enjoyable but perhaps a little weak in the scene where Flory is disgraced in the church. The characters are excellent throughout.
Saturday, 28 July 2018
George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
I really enjoyed this book. The prose is flowing and easy to read. It’s really impressive given that Orwell must have only been in his mid to late twenties when he wrote it. The characteristic clarity and economy is already there in abundance. One aspect of this book, which isn’t evident in the other Orwell books I’ve read, are the occasional justifications he offers for his writing. It’s as if he lacks confidence that what he is writing is sufficiently interesting or is worried that the purpose of his observations will be misunderstood; ‘for what they are worth...’, ‘I do this to...’, ‘These are only my own ideas...’, ‘I present them as a sample...’ etc. It’s unnecessary and a bit clunky. This is one of the weaker part of the book.
The characters are brilliant; Charlie, the shirker, rapist and bistro philosopher, Mario, the Italian expert cafetiere, Boris, the enthusiastic and overweight former Russian soldier, Paddy, the loquacious Irish moocher, Bozo, the stoic Screever. They are so well drawn I felt like I had an intimate knowledge of them. But Orwell never hammers out lengthy, self-conscious passages of description to achieve this. Rather, the idiosyncrasies are finely crafted into the general flow of the writing so I hardly noticed them as distinct. The book also contains street stories about more minor characters he has met or heard about. These too have an authentic feel. The swindles are probably my favourites. The couple selling pornographic postcards that turn out to be normal. The Serb who only takes day work, works hard and then tries to get sacked as soon after noon as possible so as to receive his day’s pay for the minimum amount of effort. The miser who buys fake cocaine didn’t quite ring true as, if he were the incorrigible miser he’s made out to be, then surely he would have inspected the goods he was purchasing more thoroughly.
The physical scenes that Orwell draws are excellent too. The chaos of the Hotel X, the squalor of the Russian restaurant and the filth of his various accommodations are all highly memorable. Like the characters, Orwell achieves this without too much laborious prose and it’s pleasurable reading throughout. The scene of drinking in the bistro in Paris during his day off was amusing and vivid. I did find myself incredulous at the extent of the dirt and the hardship that employed people suffered in the late 1920s. I thought perhaps that things had been exaggerated for dramatic effect. Even in a cheap hotel, the filthiness of the bedclothes and the magnitude of the insect infestation in Paris seem outrageous. It also seems astonishing that someone can work so many hours and be so abjectly poor. Later on, the hardships of ‘the spike’ and the dormitories in London seem equally unfathomable for a modern reader.
The book also contains interesting philosophical or sociological observations about poverty and different classes from Orwell, who’s experiences probably made him more informed on this subject than most. The freedom and relief of poverty is one counterintuitive aspect of this. He writes, ‘poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.’ And later on, ‘within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry….you have talked so often of going to the dogs–and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.’ Orwell also writes about the unwarranted fear rich people have of the poor. Perhaps this is because the rich know that the situation is so unfair! He writes, ‘Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ This passage is obviously also racist and there are several other examples of it in the book. It’s unpleasant to read but I suppose these sort of views were common for the time even among educated people like Orwell.
Orwell also offers an interesting justification of begging as a profession, ‘Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course–but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout–in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.’ Here it seems to me that Orwell is fundamentally correct. He is also insightful about the reasons people despise beggars, ‘I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue.’ If anything, money may have become an even more universal test of virtue today that it was then.
Chapter 22 is quite an interesting, if somewhat incomplete, reflection on the nature of employment. He asks why hard, unskilled work exists and why it must continue. He likens it to ‘slavery’ and asks if the ‘luxury’ it provides, or the end of ‘civilisation’ that it purportedly serves, are really so worthy after all. I would broadly agree with him on these points except for the fact that while Orwell seems to think there is something like ‘civilisation’ I see only people who want to do things and people who are willing to supply these desires. I don’t see an overarching aim or purpose to society’s various occupations save, perhaps, some broad species of self-interest. Equally, Orwell tell us ‘smartness’ simply means that the customer pays more and the staff work more and the only person who benefits is the proprietor. This also struck me as a slightly facile and naive understanding of the situation. A large hotel will employ many more staff than a cheap one and not simply make the same number of staff work harder. Equally, the staff there will earn more as Orwell himself describes when detailing the tips of the waiter. He also says nothing of the role of capital in the provision of a smart hotel experience. The hotel must operate in a building and in a capitalist system that cannot be had for nothing. He concludes that the system exists to keep the working class tired and servile. He goes on to speculate that most rich people would know this but want the status quo to remain for their own safety. This all struck me as a rather immature conspiracy theory without much genuine support or evidence. For me, he’s right to point out that lots of jobs are more or less pointless but to conclude that this indicates a grand, systematic subjugation of the poor by the rich is incorrect. The rich do benefit from many privileges the poor will never enjoy and this could be seen as unethical. However, to see the whole labour market as rigged is a step too far for me. This chapter was superficial and a bit naive.
The fact that being poor attracts the attention of many worthy types who wish to ‘help’ those less fortunate than themselves is well drawn in the book. Orwell writes, ‘It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.’ This strikes me as true and it easy to see examples of poor people been made the object of middle class people’s worthiness in many instances of charity. This may be a contributing factor in the scene described by Orwell in London where 100 or so homeless people jeer and mock a church service they have been forced to attend in exchange for some food. Orwell thinks that it may be a deeper human instinct, which I’m not totally convinced about. He writes, ‘a man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor–it is a fixed characteristic of human nature’.
I thoroughly enjoyed the prose, characters and scenes depicted in this book even though some of them may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. If none of them have been hyperbolised then I am glad that things have come so far in the last 80-odd years! Some of the reflections on how society operates struck me as grandiose, naive and superficial but even these sections contained valid points too. It’s not the best book I’ve read by Orwell but it is impressive to see how good his prose was even as a young writer and some of the characters and scenes are fantastic.
The characters are brilliant; Charlie, the shirker, rapist and bistro philosopher, Mario, the Italian expert cafetiere, Boris, the enthusiastic and overweight former Russian soldier, Paddy, the loquacious Irish moocher, Bozo, the stoic Screever. They are so well drawn I felt like I had an intimate knowledge of them. But Orwell never hammers out lengthy, self-conscious passages of description to achieve this. Rather, the idiosyncrasies are finely crafted into the general flow of the writing so I hardly noticed them as distinct. The book also contains street stories about more minor characters he has met or heard about. These too have an authentic feel. The swindles are probably my favourites. The couple selling pornographic postcards that turn out to be normal. The Serb who only takes day work, works hard and then tries to get sacked as soon after noon as possible so as to receive his day’s pay for the minimum amount of effort. The miser who buys fake cocaine didn’t quite ring true as, if he were the incorrigible miser he’s made out to be, then surely he would have inspected the goods he was purchasing more thoroughly.
The physical scenes that Orwell draws are excellent too. The chaos of the Hotel X, the squalor of the Russian restaurant and the filth of his various accommodations are all highly memorable. Like the characters, Orwell achieves this without too much laborious prose and it’s pleasurable reading throughout. The scene of drinking in the bistro in Paris during his day off was amusing and vivid. I did find myself incredulous at the extent of the dirt and the hardship that employed people suffered in the late 1920s. I thought perhaps that things had been exaggerated for dramatic effect. Even in a cheap hotel, the filthiness of the bedclothes and the magnitude of the insect infestation in Paris seem outrageous. It also seems astonishing that someone can work so many hours and be so abjectly poor. Later on, the hardships of ‘the spike’ and the dormitories in London seem equally unfathomable for a modern reader.
The book also contains interesting philosophical or sociological observations about poverty and different classes from Orwell, who’s experiences probably made him more informed on this subject than most. The freedom and relief of poverty is one counterintuitive aspect of this. He writes, ‘poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.’ And later on, ‘within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry….you have talked so often of going to the dogs–and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.’ Orwell also writes about the unwarranted fear rich people have of the poor. Perhaps this is because the rich know that the situation is so unfair! He writes, ‘Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ This passage is obviously also racist and there are several other examples of it in the book. It’s unpleasant to read but I suppose these sort of views were common for the time even among educated people like Orwell.
Orwell also offers an interesting justification of begging as a profession, ‘Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course–but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout–in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.’ Here it seems to me that Orwell is fundamentally correct. He is also insightful about the reasons people despise beggars, ‘I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue.’ If anything, money may have become an even more universal test of virtue today that it was then.
Chapter 22 is quite an interesting, if somewhat incomplete, reflection on the nature of employment. He asks why hard, unskilled work exists and why it must continue. He likens it to ‘slavery’ and asks if the ‘luxury’ it provides, or the end of ‘civilisation’ that it purportedly serves, are really so worthy after all. I would broadly agree with him on these points except for the fact that while Orwell seems to think there is something like ‘civilisation’ I see only people who want to do things and people who are willing to supply these desires. I don’t see an overarching aim or purpose to society’s various occupations save, perhaps, some broad species of self-interest. Equally, Orwell tell us ‘smartness’ simply means that the customer pays more and the staff work more and the only person who benefits is the proprietor. This also struck me as a slightly facile and naive understanding of the situation. A large hotel will employ many more staff than a cheap one and not simply make the same number of staff work harder. Equally, the staff there will earn more as Orwell himself describes when detailing the tips of the waiter. He also says nothing of the role of capital in the provision of a smart hotel experience. The hotel must operate in a building and in a capitalist system that cannot be had for nothing. He concludes that the system exists to keep the working class tired and servile. He goes on to speculate that most rich people would know this but want the status quo to remain for their own safety. This all struck me as a rather immature conspiracy theory without much genuine support or evidence. For me, he’s right to point out that lots of jobs are more or less pointless but to conclude that this indicates a grand, systematic subjugation of the poor by the rich is incorrect. The rich do benefit from many privileges the poor will never enjoy and this could be seen as unethical. However, to see the whole labour market as rigged is a step too far for me. This chapter was superficial and a bit naive.
The fact that being poor attracts the attention of many worthy types who wish to ‘help’ those less fortunate than themselves is well drawn in the book. Orwell writes, ‘It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.’ This strikes me as true and it easy to see examples of poor people been made the object of middle class people’s worthiness in many instances of charity. This may be a contributing factor in the scene described by Orwell in London where 100 or so homeless people jeer and mock a church service they have been forced to attend in exchange for some food. Orwell thinks that it may be a deeper human instinct, which I’m not totally convinced about. He writes, ‘a man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor–it is a fixed characteristic of human nature’.
I thoroughly enjoyed the prose, characters and scenes depicted in this book even though some of them may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. If none of them have been hyperbolised then I am glad that things have come so far in the last 80-odd years! Some of the reflections on how society operates struck me as grandiose, naive and superficial but even these sections contained valid points too. It’s not the best book I’ve read by Orwell but it is impressive to see how good his prose was even as a young writer and some of the characters and scenes are fantastic.
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