Robert Louis Stevenson - Master Of Ballantrae

 This was a shoddy book that didn’t have much to recommend it to me.  Much of it gave the impression that RLS was making it up as he went along or, at least, changing his mind about what kind of novel it was during its composition.  The book starts out with the premise that its contents represent a collection of found documents. However, in the end it only seemed to consist of the reflections of ‘Mackellar’ - the exasperating narrator - and an excerpt from an Irish General.  I wondered why RLS would bother setting up this ‘found documents’ situation when it brings nothing to the plot and the story is effectively told as a plain narrative.  It also made me compare it very unfavourably with ‘The Confessions Of A Justified Sinner’ By James Hogg, which uses the same device a lot better.  Perhaps RLS was going to invent a greater diversity of documents but changed his mind!

The story itself is facile, long winded and supposes the credulity of a children’s adventure book or a James Bond film.  It’s all told in a loquacious and high falutin style, which is entirely appropriate to the character of Mackellar but was still annoying and boring to read.  Mackellar is forever protesting his lowly nature but then recounts how his wise counsel solves all the family problems.  This simultaneous grovelling and boasting made me detest the character and treat his testimony with a good deal of suspicion.  Apart from his eternal devotion to his masters we learn very little about his history or personal life.

This question of who Mackellar is and for whom he is producing these documents was the most interesting part of the book.  However, the question is never really fleshed out or thrown into relief because there aren’t any other perspectives to contrast with his.  Someone suggested to me that the Master of Ballantrae and Mackellar are the same person and this made me more excited about the book than at any point during reading it.  Sadly, looking back on it, I don’t think there’s enough evidence to support this.  I also don’t believe RLS was doing anything as clever in this mish mash of a book.

When the book starts it feels like it will be a historical novel because there is a lot of context about The Jacobite Rising and Bonnie Prince Charlie but this ultimately proves to be of minor importance.  All of a sudden it is a species of pirate story, seemingly one of RLS’s favourite themes, then in exile, then back in Scotland for some duelling, then off to India, then back to Scotland again, then to NY, then off into the wilderness for a prospectors vs. natives treasure hunt.   Most of the major narrative events consist of a change of place for the master and/or the rest of the cast or the master dying and then turning out not to have been dead after all.  None of the scenes are especially well drawn and none of the characters are developed very deeply.  It all had the feel of a confused and overly complex children’s adventure.

I wouldn’t recommend this book and thought it was worse than ‘Kidnapped’ but I’m hopeful that ‘Treasure Island’ or ‘The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ will be better!

Robert Louis Stevenson - Kidnapped

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

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

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

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

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

Ursula K Le Guin - Earthsea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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

Helen Garner - Monkey Grip

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

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

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

“There was a life to be made.” (p75)

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

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

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


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


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


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

Robert A. Monroe - Journey Out Of The Body

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


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

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


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


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

Erich Kastner - Going To The Dogs

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


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


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


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


One section I did particularly enjoy was this section:

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

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


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