William Shakespeare - Richard II

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


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


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


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

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

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


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

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

And even more poetically:

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

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

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

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

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

Ibram X. Kendi - How To Be An Antiracist

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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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

James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room

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


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


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


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


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

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

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



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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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



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

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

Muriel Spark - A Far Cry From Kensington

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


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


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

Charles Dickens - Dombey & Son

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago 1918-56

This book was truly overwhelming to read. Not only is the subject matter dark and intimidating but the book’s structure is also dense and haphazard. The sheer variety of evidence and experience brought to bear is impressive and its emotional impact staggering. Solzhenitsyn himself comments on how the book was written in a piecemeal way and its a bit like that to read. Given that it must have been composed, at least in part, only in his mind while serving his time in the gulags this is understandable. Even once his personal experience had ended and the huge task of examining archives and the testimony of others had begun, this hardly renders the task of making sense of this brutal history any easier. The sheer volume of material suggests that Solzhenitsyn struggled to reduce the gargantuan scale of the archipelago and may have even found something therapeutic in the continual exploration of its myriad different faces and characters. It’s a work of true passion and reflection mixing unutterable anger with gut wrenching sadness, brutality and very deep reflection and introspection. That said, it is not a book that presents a tight, cohesive argument that the reader can easily follow; nor does it shy away from the contradictions and inconsistencies that inevitably arise from a deep enquiry into such a murky area.


There’s so much contained in this book it will be hard for me to say anything about it briefly without drastically misrepresenting the scope of the book and the responses it elicits. In an attempt to prevent this review from descending into an incomprehensible rant, I’ll try and group these observations together around a few themes. Equally, these themes are not distinct categories and are my creation rather than a reflection of the way the author presents the book. Necessarily, the categories are not as neat and delineated as my attempts to order them might suggest and I use them in order to help myself to try and make sense of what I’ve read rather than to suggest that this is the only way in which they could or should be read. The copy I read, of roughly 500 pages, was an abridged version. The original, I learn from Google, was three volumes rather than the one I read although I’m not sure if this means it was three times longer. In any case, the depth and scope of Solzhenitsyn’s work should not be underestimated and what follows will only scratch the surface of what it contains.


The first theme concerns the practical aspects of the archipelago and its necessity to the Communist system. The image of the archipelago, contained within the country but simultaneously completely detached and separate from it, as each island is from one another, is a powerful one. Solzhenitsyn suggests its existence was necessary for several reasons. One is to purge society of enemies and those deemed to be politically dangerous. Another is to provide free labour, which in turn supports the ever-rising production figures required for propaganda. This places those unfortunate enough to be trapped on one of the archipelago’s islands into an inextricable bind:

“Just as always in our well-thought-out social system, two different plans collided head on here too: the production plan, whose objective was to have the lowest possible expenditure for wages, and the MVD plan, whose objective was to extract the largest possible earnings from camp production. To an observer on the sidelines it seems strange: why set one’s own plans in conflict with one another? Oh, but there is a profound meaning in it! Conflicting plans flatten the human being. This is the principle which far transcends the barbed wire of the Archipelago.” (P218)

This situation, ironically, mirrors that of serfdom that Communism was supposed to bring an end to and replace with a more egalitarian and just form of social organisation:

“Serfs! This comparison occurred to many when they had the time to think about it, and not accidentally either. Not just individual features, but the whole central meaning of their existence was identical for serfdom and the Archipelago; they were forms of social organisation for the forced and pitiless exploitation of the unpaid labor of millions of slaves.” (P216)

The scale of this second society of human machinery is astonishing and incomprehensible. Of course, no official estimates are referenced - presumably because they do not exist. This touches on another important theme I’ll come to later: namely, the lack of recognition and reconciliation that took place internally or externally after this gigantic infrastructure of oppression was, at least partially, dismantled. Solzhenitsyn offers us this as a comment on the sheer scale of the archipelago in human terms:

“According to the estimates of emigre Professor of Statistics Kurganov, this “comparatively easy” internal repression cost us, from the beginning of the October Revolution up to 1959, a total of...sixty six million - 66,000,000 - lives. We, of course, cannot vouch for his figure, but we have none other that is official. And just as soon as the official figure is issued the specialists can make the necessary critical comparisons.” (P178)

This figure places it amongst the most deadly anthropogenic disasters in history. By comparison, WW1 is thought to have taken 25-40m lives and WW2 is thought to have cost between 60-120m lives. The Holocaust is estimated to have killed some 6m European Jews.


The second theme concerns morality and the various ways Solzhenitsyn’s experiences and research force a reevaluation of these ideas. It seems like this was one of the most profound parts of his experience and subsequent understanding of life on the archipelago:

“It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… An unuprooted small corner of evil.” (P312)

I was impressed with his nuanced understanding of morality and its inherently mixed and contextual character. Given his suffering, it might have been understandable, or even expected, that his memoir and history of the gulags might have had a more accusative tone and substance but his interpretation is far more circumspect:

“So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (P75)

It is absurd to me that many people don’t want to admit the possibility that they might have been a person now considered to be ‘evil’ if they had lived in a different time and place. For example, who thinks they would have worked as part of the machinery of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany or Aparthied in South Africa? The answer is probably very few because of the highly unpalatable interpretation of one’s own morality that such a question requires. However, the figures are indisputable; most Germans did not actively oppose the Nazis and most South Africans did not actively oppose Apartheid. The risk of personal and familial danger silences most would-be insurrectionists. Solzhenitsyn understands this perfectly, from first hand experience, and does not shy away from the conclusions we all must draw from it. While most of us hope we would be brave and moral in trying times, history shows us that almost all of us would prioritise self-interest and safety above the lofty morals we all like to claim we subscribe to when it doesn’t cost us anything to do so:

“And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”
It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.” (P73)

He also quotes Fastenko whose aphoristic phrase, “To stand up for the truth is nothing! For truth you have to sit in jail!” (p90), succinctly captures the spirit of this theme.

From the perspective of the camp’s architects, the purpose of the camp is to dehumanise and literally demoralise the inhabitants. Solzhenitsyn quotes Shalamov (1907-1982), a Russian writer and gulag survivor, as writing:

“In the camp situation human beings never remain human beings - the camps were created to this end.

All human emotions - love, friendship, envy, love of one’s fellows, mercy, thirst for fame, honesty - fell away from us along with the meat of our muscles… We had no pride, no vanity, and even jealousy and passion seemed to be Martian concepts… The only thing left was anger - the most enduring of human emotions. We came to understand that truth and falsehood were kin sisters.” (P314)

However, Solzhenitsyn displays very little of this anger in some parts of the book and prefers to interpret his fate and the fate of those who put him on the archipelago in moral terms:

“And what would one then have to say about our so evident torturers: Why does not fate punish them? Why do they prosper?
(And the only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but… in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine, they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view, punishment is inflicted on those whose development… holds out hope.)” (P310-11)

In some senses, this seems to conflict with the dehumanising and demoralising effects of the gulag mentioned in the previous quote. However, in cases of such extreme psychological and physical distress it is hardly surprising that the experience is a discombobulating and contradictory one. For me, it is entirely plausible that the experiences of the gulag could rob one of almost all moral orientation and simultaneously show one the fundamental truth and value of the same. When you’re free and prospering, it’s too easy to deceive yourself with sophistry but when you’ve been stripped of everything and reduced to the lowest imaginable condition, in some sense, you are able to judge unencumbered.

Solzhenitsyn traces the history and development of this horrific situation and, for me, finds essential evidence of its roots in two interlinked concepts; progress at all costs and ideological justification for the preferred interpretation of that progress. The ends justify the means and the ends are justified by ideology so, in practice, everything is permissible and just. The following passages trace the this metamorphosis and interrelation far better than I ever could:

“To such an extent has everyone been indoctrinated with and absorbed the slogan: “The result is what counts.”
Whence did this come to us?
If we look back at our history, maybe about 300 years ago - could anything of the kind have taken place in the Russia of Old Believers?
All this came to us from Peter I, from the glory of our banners and the so-called “honour of our Fatherland.” We were crushing our neighbours; we were expanding. And in our Fatherland it became well established that: The result is what counts.
And then from our Demidovs, Kabans and Tsybukins. They clambered up, without looking behind them to see whose ears they were smashing with their jackboots. And ever more firmly it became established among a once pious and open hearted people: The result is what counts.
And then - from all kinds of socialists, and most of all from the most modern, infallible, and intolerant Teaching, which consists of this one thing only: The result is what counts! It is important to forge a fighting Party! And to seize power! And to hold on to power! And to remove all enemies! And to conquer in pig iron and steel! And to launch rockets!
And though for this industry and for these rockets it was necessary to sacrifice the way of life, and the integrity of family, and the spiritual health of the people, and the very soul of our fields and forests and rivers - to hell with them! The result is what counts!!!
But that is a lie! Here we have been breaking our backs for years at All Union hard labour. Here in slow annual spirals we have been climbing up to an understanding of life - and from this height it can all be seen so clearly: It is not the result that counts! It is not the result - but the spirit! Not what - but how. Not what has been attained - but at what price.” (P307)

To me this captures the central pillar of the philosophy that operates on every level and unit of society from the individual right up to the global scale. The fixation with the external qualities of a person, or a country, or a movement are totemised to the exclusion of more qualitative, internal characteristics. It’s almost impossible for me to over emphasise the importance of this idea. This obsession with ‘the result’ finds its apotheosis when it is allowed to become totally unconstrained by a supportive ideology. This ideology could be almost anything but the important point is that the perceived value of the ideology is so great that anything is allowable in the name of its continuance or advancement. Solzhenitsyn skillfully contrasts this with ‘evildoing’ on a smaller scale operating without the unchallengeable ideas that are so unquestionably ‘good’ that everything may be sacrificed in their service:

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honours. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the 20th century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.” (P77-8)

The psychological power of these ideas, repeated and drummed into the people from all sides and at every opportunity can amount to the kind of ‘social condition’ or brainwashing encountered in Adlous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. Solzhenitsyn imagines a conversation between two orthodox Communists caught up in the archipelago’s conveyor belt of arrest, interrogation and detention. It would be almost comical where it not for the fact that thousands of conversations might actually have taken place between those who placed all their faith in Communism and may have paid a heavy price for it:

“It’s our duty to support Soviet interrogation. It’s a combat situation. We ourselves are to blame. We were too soft hearted; and now look at all the rot that has multiplied in the country. There is a vicious secret war going on. Even here we are surrounded by enemies. Just listen to what they are saying! The Party is not obliged to account for what it does to every single one of us - to explain the whys and the wherefores. If they ask us to, that means we should sign.”
And another orthodox Communist sidles up:
“I sign denunciations against thirty-five people, against all my acquaintances. And I advise you too: Drag along as many names as you can in your wake, as many as you can. That way it will become obvious that the whole thing is an absurdity and they’ll let everyone out!” (P62)


The next theme concerns the legacy of this awful and horrific system. Few parts of the book convey such a sense of shock, injustice and anger even though these sentiments make regular appearances in the pages of the book. The lack of recognition and reconciliation, both domestically and internationally, seem to incense, depress and worry Solzhenitsyn. The damage he feels has been done to the country by this silent acceptance of the past is clear in passages like this:

“But about the silent, treacherous Plague which starved 15m of our peasants to death, choosing its victims carefully and destroying the backbone and mainstay of the Russian people - about that Plague there are no books” (P424)

When contrasted with other countries whose dark histories have, at least, undergone some reflection and exposure to the antibacterial qualities of sunlight his derision is plain to see:

“Hitler was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.” (P429)

Even though the comment is tongue-in-cheek, the point he is making is of the severest gravity and he is clearly deeply worried about what the long term effects of all this brushing under the carpet and leaving the past in the past will have. The following comment could been seen as remarkably prescient given the history of Russia in the latter part of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st:

“Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.
It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!” (P81)

I was strongly reminded of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and the constant revisions and rewritings that take place at the Ministry of Truth so that the historical record always conforms to that which the state finds most expedient:

“Like all embarrassing events in our history - which means three-quarters of what really happened - these mutinies have been neatly cut out, and the gap hidden with an invisible join. Those who took part in them have been destroyed, and even remote witnesses frightened into silence; the reports of those who suppressed them have been burned or hidden in safes within safes within safes - so that the risings have already become a myth, although some of them happened only 15 and others only 10 years ago. (No wonder some say that there was no Christ, no Buddha, no Mohammed. There you’re dealing in thousands of years…)” (P386)

Foreigners also come in for a lot of criticism for their complicity in believing what the Communist government told them and their critical failure to distinguish truth from propaganda. Some of this bitterness may come from the belief that foreign powers could have done much more to halt what was happening, or that they willfully overlooked the evidence in the interests of convenience. For example:

“And oh, you well fed, devil-may-care, nearsighted, irresponsible foreigners with your notebooks and your ball-point pens - beginning with those correspondents who back in Kem asked the zeks questions in the presence of the camp chiefs - how much you have harmed us in your vain passion to shine with understanding in areas where you did not grasp a lousy thing!” (P215)

There also seems to be a portion of his outrage directed at Communist-supporting students and academics for their part in helping to perpetuate the problem:

“All you freedom-loving “left wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday - but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.” (P468)

Alongside those who could be said to indirectly condone Russia’s Communist government, he also pours scorn on those countries who yielded up PoW to the Communists, which he views as tantamount to murdering many of them. Of course, Russia’s status as an ally in WW2 complicates the situation but one can easily empathise with Solzhenitsyn’s feelings of outrage and abandonment by those who cast themselves as protectors of morality in relation to Nazi Germany:

“After having remained unmolested in British hands for two years, they had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and they were therefore taken completely by surprise...They did not realise they were being repatriated...They were mainly simple peasants with bitter personal grievances against the Bolsheviks.” The English authorities gave them the treatment “reserved in the case of every other nation for war criminals alone: that of being handed over against their will to captors who, incidentally, were not expected to give them a fair trial. They were all sent to destruction on the Archipelago. The American authorities did the same: in Bavaria as well as on the US territory, they delivered tens of thousands of Soviet citizens to a cruel fate, turning them over to the Soviets against their will.” (P34)

As in other parts of the book, Solzhenitsyn seems sceptical that people will be able to appreciate the depths of the depravity of the archipelago or learn from it without either experiencing it for themselves or through some form of disclosure and recognition of what happened there. Of course, in some sense, he is trying to achieve just this type of revelation in writing the book. But in certain passages he seems dubious that it will ever achieve this end in a Europe he seems to feel abandoned Russia and turned a blind eye to the archipelago:

“Europe, of course, won’t believe it. Not until Europe itself serves time will she believe it. Europe has believed our glossy magazines and can’t get anything else into her head” (P241)

One especially touching passage shows some former inhabitants of the archipelago attempt to find some meaning in their suffering and that of those who didn’t survive:

“In one household I am familiar with, where some former zeks live, the following ceremony takes place: On March 5, the day of the death of the Head Murderer, they spread out on the table all the photographs of those who were shot and those who died in camps that they have been able to collect - several dozens of them. And throughout the day solemnity reigns in the apartment - somewhat like that of a church, somewhat like that of a museum. There is funeral music. Friends come to visit, to look at the photographs, to keep silent, to listen, to talk softly together. And then leave without saying goodbye.
And that is how it ought to be everywhere. At least these deaths would have left a small scar on our hearts.
So that they should not have died in vain!” (P135)

It seems that the possibility that so many could have endured so much and yet have no recollection in the national or international consciousness is appalling to Solzhenitsyn. How could so much pain and destruction go unremembered? That life could go on without pause to reflect on the significance and import of such a colossal tragedy seem to be an abject failure of humanity in spite of his attempts to find some solace in these individual acts of remembrance. I feel strongly that this species of feeling helped motivate and sustain the immense task he has undertaken in this book. That something might be learned from it and it might not have all been in vain.


Another theme that emerged from my reading, was Solzhenitsyn’s apparent distaste for some of the major figures of 19th century Russian literature; namely, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He is clearly unimpressed by the ‘hard labour’ that Dostoevsky claims to have undergone and details in his book “The House Of The Dead”. He writes:

“As for Dostoevsky’s hard labor in Omsk, it is clear that in general they simply loafed about, as any reader can establish.” (P222)

Not having read the book in question, I’m not well equipped to comment but Solzhenitsyn’s distaste for Dostoevsky resurfaces in several passages and it’s clear that the former considered the latter a charlatan. His critique of Tolstoy is more philosophical. It revolves around the belief that morality was more important than political freedom. Solzhenitsyn seems to attribute this to a lack of experience of the realities of totalitarian government:

P351 “Such were the circumstances in which Tolstoi came to believe that only moral self-improvement was necessary, not political freedom
Of course, no one is in need of freedom if he already has it. We can agree with him that political freedom is not what matters in the end. The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom. Nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matters, of course, are the moral foundations of society. But that is in the long run: what about the beginning? What about the first step? Yasnaya Polyana in those days was an open club for thinkers. But if it had been blockaded as Akhmatova’s apartment was when every visitor was asked for his passport, if Tolstoi had been pressed as hard as we all were in Stalin’s time, when three men feared to come together under one roof, even he would have demanded political freedom.”


A theme that is discussed extensively and eloquently throughout the book is that of the psychology of jail and life on the archipelago. The centre piece of this is Part 4 of the book, “The Soul and Barbed Wire”, and within this, the first chapter, “The Ascent” is perhaps the most notable. It deals with the spiritual aspects of prison, how humans function within such a drastically different set of parameters, what it costs them and what it does to the consciousness and character. The following passage deals with the easily imagined vow to survive “at any price” and its observations are striking:

“This is simply a turn of phrase, a sort of habit of speech: “at any price”.
But then the words swell up with their full meaning, and an awesome vow takes shape: to survive at any price.
And whoever takes that vow, whoever does not blink before its crimson burst - allows his own misfortune to overshadow both the entire common misfortune and the whole world.
This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right - you lose your life, and if you go to the left - you lose your conscience.” (P302)

However, to assume that this was the vow that Solzhenitsyn took seems to be wide of the mark. “The Ascent” he talks about in the synonymous chapter refers to the internal transformation that takes place during incarceration. Quoting from that chapter:

“And as soon as you have renounced that aim of “surviving at any price,” and gone where the calm and simple people go - then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you.
And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings.
Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you - and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels - patience.
You are ascending…
Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness - and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength. And wish to possess it yourself.
The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending…
With the years, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capacity for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash with gladness over good tidings nor do they darken with grief.
For you still have to verify whether that’s how it is going to be. And you also have to work out - what is gladness and what is grief.
And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost.” (P308-9)

It’s as if the harsh and horrific circumstances of the gulag create an accelerated understanding of the world and themselves for the zeks. Who, for instance, would disagree with the rule of life expressed in the last sentence of the passage above? One question that does arise from the preceding couple of quotations is: If Solzhenitsyn refused to lose his consciousness in rejecting the “survive at any price” philosophy, how did he manage to keep his life when the quote from p302 on the previous page implies the two are mutually exclusive? Perhaps it was luck or perhaps Solzhenitsyn was forced to do things against his conscience to survive. I don’t remember him discussing these in any detail, although I may be mistaken, and in this sense the book seems to be missing something. I vividly remember a passage from Primo Levi’s “If This Is A Man” where an inmate steals another’s cap and the next day the capless inmate is shot. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn didn’t have any experiences like this, perhaps he doesn’t want to recall them, perhaps these experiences were so traumatic he can no longer recall them. Whatever the reason, it does seem slightly like Solzhenitsyn wants to simultaneously claim that it’s not possible to survive in jail with a conscience and that he did indeed survive with his conscience intact and possibly even enhanced by the experience. Is it plausible that he survived so long without doing wrong by anyone? The drastic change in circumstance and the reality of dying soon must have driven many people to all sorts of behaviour in the belief that their life was precarious and could end at any moment. For example, this section on the subject of fidelity while in jail:

“And what of it if you loved someone out in freedom and wanted to remain true to him? What profit is there in the fidelity of a female corpse? “When you get back to freedom - who is going to need you?” Those were the words which kept ringing eternally through the women’s barracks. You grow coarse and old and your last years as a woman are cheerless and empty. Isn’t it smarter to hurry up and grab something too, even from this savage life?” (P233)

Sometimes it is hard to square the experiences described by the author with the effects he claims these experiences had on him. For example, he writes about being freed from confinement:

“Only on the threshold of the guardhouse do you begin to feel that what you are leaving behind you is both your prison and your homeland. This was your spiritual birthplace, and a secret part of your soul will remain here forever - while your feet trudge on into the dumb and unwelcoming expanse of freedom.” (P446)

In some sense, this could be understood by invoking the almost limitless capacity humans have for adaptation. In another way, it’s also possible to hold highly contradictory ideas about the same experience and for them both to be true. In many ways, most demanding and extreme experiences have this duality of character. For instance, the prisoners on the archipelago probably all draw their most distressing memories from this period of their lives but may also have found something positive in the extremity of the experience they’ve undergone. Solzhenitsyn writes, “It is particularly in slavery that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine friendship!” (P309). I can imagine there is some truth in this. In a society stripped of manners, money, influence and pretentious people probably find out a lot more about each other a lot more quickly. When everyone is in a hopeless position, there can be little suspicion of being befriended simply for what you could do for someone else. In this sense, everybody is equal in their misery and many of the malign motivations for friendship have been removed. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to agree with, or imagine the universal truth of, a statement like, “They are used to the worst the world can do, and nothing can depress them.”(P448). While Solzhenitsyn seems eager to emphasise the unexpected benefits of prison life, perhaps because they are unexpected and largely unacknowledged, it would seem incomprehensible to me that there were not significant negatives arising from the experience as well. Perhaps this sentence is an attempt to defy these negatives but, for me, it rings hollow. The whole book is a testament to the damage done by the archipelago’s existence.


You really don’t need to look far for evidence of the corrosive influence of Stalinism and the prison system in society. One obvious, and much discussed, aspect is the system of denunciation. Unsurprisingly, this seems to have been mainly used as a tool of personal advancement. In some ways this mirrors the failings of Communism more generally. It’s a really beautiful idea except for the fact that humans act in their own interests and not those of the community regardless of how fervently you claim the opposite. Denunciations are used to remove people the denouncers don’t want around, in exactly the same way the gulags were used to remove people Stalin didn’t want around. Solzhenitsyn writes:

“In the conflicts between people and freedom, denunciations were the superweapon, the X rays: it was sufficient to direct an invisible little ray at your enemy - and he fell. And it always worked. I can affirm that I heard many stories in imprisonment about the use of denunciations in lovers’ quarrels: a man would remove an unwanted husband; a wife would dispose of a mistress, or a mistress would dispose of a wife; or a mistress would take her revenge on her lover because she had failed to separate him from his wife” (P241)

The negative side effects of the gulag hardly stopped there either. In a system that was designed to re-educate disruptive elements away from capitalist ideas and towards communist ones all that really happened was that almost everyone was re-educated to be a criminal. Solzhenitsyn recognises this and expresses it well:

“And now, when more than forty years have gone by, one can look around and begin to have doubts: Who re-educated whom? Did the Chekists re-educate the thieves, or the thieves the Chekists? The urka - the habitual thief - who adopted the Chekist faith became a bitch, and his fellow thieves would cut his throat. The Chekist who acquired the psychology of the thief was an energetic interrogator of the thirties and forties, or else a resolute camp chief - such men were appreciated. They got service promotions.
And the psychology of the urki was exceedingly simple and very easy to acquire:

I want to live and enjoy myself; and fuck the rest!
Whoever is the strongest, is right!
If they aren’t beating you, then don’t lie down and ask for it. (In other words: As long as they’re beating up someone else, don’t stick up for the ones being beaten. Wait your own turn.)

Beat up your submissive enemies one at a time! Somehow this is a very familiar law. It is what Hitler did. It is what Stalin did.” (P262)

The topsy turvy nature of this situation wasn’t lost on Solzhenitsyn either:

“And here is how it was worked out. Professional criminals can in no sense be equated with capitalist elements (i.e. engineers, students, agronomists, and “nuns”), for the latter are steadfastly hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat, while the former are only (!) politically unstable! (A professional murderer is only politically unstable!)” (P264)

Writing in 2020 it seems unbelievable that the desire to better oneself financially was considered more dangerous and disruptive to society than murder. However, these are exactly the kind of perverse conclusions that can be expected when ideas are taken to be infallible and worth defending at any cost. I suppose at the time Communism was considered a bold and innovative new way of organising society that could create a more equal, better world for those who adhered to it. Looking back on it now, it seems to run contrary to the most fundamental aspects of human nature and was destined for abuse and failure from the start. It strikes me that this has almost nothing to do with the idea itself and everything to do with its interpretation. For example, even a society where the infallible idea was ‘freedom’ could end up a totalitarian state depending on how it was interpreted.


The book contains some amazing stories and, while I won’t retell all of them here, I wanted to keep a note of the ones I enjoyed the most. Part V, Chapter 6 (P360ish) tells the story of “The Commited Escaper”, a man called Tenno who is entirely deserving of the chapter’s title! Equally, the story of Boris (PP309-313) is well worth revisiting. Possibly the most incredible, awful and dramatic story is that of “The Forty Days Of Kengir” told in Part V, Chapter 12. The story of Zina is the stuff of screenplays but ends on a chilling note of omnipresent state surveillance.

“And we have learned of the successful escape of Zinaida Yakovlevna Povalyayeva because in the end it fell through. She got her term because she had stayed on as a teacher in her school during the German occupation. But she was not immediately arrested when the Soviet armies arrived, and before her arrest she was married to a pilot. Then she was arrested and sent to Mine No. 8 at Vorkuta. Through some Chinese working in the kitchen she established communication with freedom and with her husband. He was employed in civil aviation and arranged a trip to Vorkuta for himself. On an appointed day Zina went to the bath in the work zone, where she shed her camp clothing and released her hair, which had been curled up the night before, from under her head scarf. Her husband was waiting for her in the work sector. There were security officers on duty at the river ferry, but they paid no attention to a girl with curly hair who was arm in arm with a flier. They flew out on a plane. Zina spent one year living on false papers. But she couldn’t resist the desire to see her mother again - and her mother was under surveillance. At her new interrogation she managed to convince them she had escaped in a coal car. And they never did find out about her husband’s participation.” (P256)


After everything I’ve said in praise of this book, I must confess to some confusion over certain parts. Reading some passages, the zeks are treated worse than animals and the matter of their life or death is one of trifling insignificance. However, in other stories told in the book, and in Solzhenitsyn’s own opinion of Dostoevsky’s incarceration, there seem to be yawning discrepancies! For example, how is it possible to square the following section with descriptions of prisoners undergoing back breaking manual labour in freezing conditions, clothed in rags, with little more than scraps to sustain them?

“However, that Sunday there was also a parcel from home - his mother’s blessing on his escape. Glucose tablets, macaroni, oatmeal - these they could carry in the briefcase.” (P376)

Obviously, different camps and individuals conducted themselves in different ways at different times but there are some jarring contrasts in the scenes that are described. For example, take this story of prison guards attempting to find murders, “They were using torture! Not the dog pack themselves - they probably had no authorization for it, and might run into trouble, so they had entrusted the stoolies with the job: find your murderers yourselves!” (P395) In other parts of the book, guards take female prisoners to sleep with them and kill them if they don’t consent, starve their prisoners to death and subject them to the most unimaginably cruel torture with seemingly absolutely no regard for what they were and were not authorised to do. These huge differences in the descriptions given make you wonder which parts are being exaggerated and make it hard for the reader to get a good idea of what the average prisoner’s experience was in the gulag. Was it hellish interrogation, hunger, manual labour and then death? Or did most prisoners make it out alive? I find it hard to criticise the book for wanting to give a variety of experiences, and it does an excellent job in doing this, but it did leave me wondering what a representative experience might look like; are Solzhenitsyn’s stories the worst of the worst or just an everyday collection of the type of suffering that took place on the archipelago? Some of the passages I’ve cited above made me think more in terms of the former than the latter. Whatever the case, such a gigantic system would have produced all manner of experiences so perhaps it is beside the point.

My final complaint concerns Solzhenitsyn’s propensity for questionable aphorisms in the same vein as, “they are used to the worst the world can do, and nothing can depress them.”(P448). For example, “since sooner or later the truth is told about all that has happened in history.” (P451) made me stop and think, ‘that can’t possibly be true and even if you thought it was how would you prove it!’. Solzhenitsyn himself contradicts the idea several times. For instance,

“We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.” (P120)

Later he undermines the idea even further, writing a chillingly pessimistic interpretation of history that I’ve already quoted on earlier in this piece when discussing the archipelago’s similarities to Orwell’s 1984. The quote comes from p386 in the book and I’ll repeat it here for ease of reading:

“Like all embarrassing events in our history - which means three-quarters of what really happened - these mutinies have been neatly cut out, and the gap hidden with an invisible join. Those who took part in them have been destroyed, and even remote witnesses frightened into silence; the reports of those who suppressed them have been burned or hidden in safes within safes within safes - so that the risings have already become a myth, although some of them happened only 15 and others only 10 years ago. (No wonder some say that there was no Christ, no Buddha, no Mohammed. There you’re dealing in thousands of years…)”

Against this, one could argue that Solzhenitsyn is bringing ‘the truth’ to light by writing this book but this interpretation seems to invoke a understanding of ‘truth’ that is far too simplistic for the standards of this book. The two passages I have just quoted seem far closer to an accurate, nuanced representation of reality than something as glib as “sooner or later the truth is told about all that has happened in history”. My interpretation is that the book contains all sorts of material and categorically does not have a structured narrative or a coherent point to make; how could it when the subject matter is so large and varied? As I mentioned in the introduction to this marathon review, the book is haphazard and was constructed in a piecemeal way. Given these characteristics it’s both appropriate and inevitable that it contains a variety of perspectives, some of which might end up being contradictory. This aspect of the book didn’t meaningfully change my enjoyment of the book or the effect it had but it did give me pause for thought.


This book is almost too much to process. It contains so much material, even in its abridged version, and presents it in such an indiscriminate way it’s hard not to find it overwhelming. But what’s the alternative? Where do you begin and where do you end with a topic like this? The way Solzhenitsyn has chosen to do it preserves the raw emotion, the contradiction, the confusion and the disbelief that must have all existed in the experiences of those who spent time on the Archipelago. When dealing with such an intimidating and complex subject it doesn’t seem possible to make it structured, ordered and easily consumable without losing the fundamental character of the subject itself. So even though this wasn’t an easy book to read, the sheer magnitude of what it represents, the understanding it contains, what it must have taken to write and its historical significance cement it as a classic in my eyes.


Miscellaneous Quotes

P247 “There is a visible life and there is an invisible life. The spiderwebs are stretched everywhere, and as we move we do not notice how they wind about us.”

P283 “Stupidity always follows on the heels of smugness.”

P287 “the universal law of the inverse ratio between social position and humaneness.”

P341 ‘Remember Lenin’s words: “An oppressed class which did not aspire to possess arms and learn how to handle them would deserve only to be treated as slaves.”

P445 “The hard times brace you, and the soft times drive you to drink.”