What I read last month. Of special interest politically, you'll find Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Millenium, Thucydides on the Pelopponesian war, and a surprisingly politically relevant autobiography by Graham Greene. Plus more of the usual for this year--more Aristotle, more Jim Butcher, more Swallows and Amazons, more Nicholas Blake, and...well, more.
My monthly bookposts are apparently going to have a regular slot in Readers & Book Lovers on the first Friday of the month for a while. We'll see how that works out. Meanwhile, thanks again for the chance to share my thoughts on my massive reading list with others.
Foreign Correspondent: Ways of Escape, by Graham Greene
When the revolt came, it was to the English colonist like a revolt of the domestic staff. The Kikuyu were not savage; they made good clerks and stewards. It was as though Jeeves had taken to the jungle. Even worse, Jeeves had been seen crawling through an arch to drink on his knees from a banana trough of blood. Jeeves had transfixed a sheep’s eye with seven kie-apple thorns. Jeeves had had sexual connection with a goat. Jeeves had sworn, however unwillingly, to kill Bertie Wooster “or this oath will kill me and all my seed will die.”
Part autobiography, part travel journal, part musing on the art of writing, this one has something for many people.
Graham Greene wrote many novels running the gamut from artsy to trash, and he spends a lot of time reminiscing about where he got the ideas for all of them. If you haven't read the books, these sections won't mean all that much, and if you have, you run the risk of having Greene tell you that one you liked was, in his opinion, a piece of shit.
Greene was also a film critic who got sued for libel by Shirley Temple's handlers, and a foreign correspondent who seems to have been everywhere at a newsworthy time. He was in London for the WWII bombings; in North Africa during the Allied invasion; in Prague when it fell to the Soviets (the first time, not 1967); in Viet Nam when the French pulled out; in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising; in Cuba during the last days of Batiste, and in Israel during the 6-day war. These parts were the most exciting to me, although I admit to a twinge in that part of me that feels I have a book of my own to write, somewhere in me. Historically significant and very readable.
Bier Vat: There’s Trouble Brewing, by Nicholas Blake
”Oh, you’re there. You know, I just can’t get used to waking up and finding a woman in the room.”
“It’s a damn sight better than waking up and finding a fer-de-lance in the room, and that’s what happened when I—“
“Spare us the reminiscences, please. Keep them for Three Thousand Miles Through the Bush on a Tricycle, or whatever you’re going to call your travel book.”
“You’re sweet. I’m glad I married you,” said Georgia.
The plot gimmick is pretty easy here, but the characterization and atmosphere are maybe the best of the Nigel Strangeways books I've read to date. The site is a brewery in a small town where the brewer is an Edward Arnold type villain who prides himself on hiring mostly married men so that he can force them to let him have his way with their wives. If the story has a flaw, it's that, when the police are looking for his murderer, you may be rooting for the killer to get away with it. If it has another flaw, it has to do with the detective's constant jolly bantering. Murder, What Fun!
And yes, the corpse is discovered in a vat. Blake is real big on dramatic corpse discoveries. Probably used the resulting brew as pesticide and weed killer. High recommendations.
You just don’t argue any more: Herself, Surprised, by Joyce Cary
But though all seemed peace and comfort, and I found myself singing over my pots, delighted every day to be back in my own home, I knew very well that I had given myself up to a bad, uneasy life. It was no good telling myself that Gulley had learnt his lesson and would never strike me again. I had seen and felt his cruelty, and I knew he would always beat his women. He had beaten Nina, gentle as she was, and he had beaten me.
A beaten woman that goes back to be beaten again can never know the same happiness or hold up the head of her soul. She feels a disgust at herself that works into her flesh. I was a worse woman for going back to Gulley. But who knows if I had gone to Rozzie I might have taken to her way of life and thinking, which would have destroyed me altogether. For I was not made of that battering stuff. I never had Rozzie’s art not to care for anything and to keep myself going on, like a horse, without any kind of happiness or hope or proper object in life.
This one made me very sad. According to the cover blurb, the main character, who goes from servant woman to lady of the manor and back and beyond, is comparable to the likes of Mistress Quickly and the Wife of Bath. The blurb is accurate only if you think of those two characters as middle aged women with at least some gumption to them. It's hard to see Chaucer's and Shakespeare's heroines putting up with what Sarah Monday does.
Monday starts off submitting to the attentions of the son of her employer, marrying him, and letting him ruin the household, then letting her children go off to make their own way while she does without. She then takes up with an obnoxious little rat of an artist who she knows is the worst kind of grasshopper (poor, dissolute, turning down work, squandering what little he has, and abusive to boot); knowing all this, she takes up with him apparently to stop his stalking behavior, and then, although she's bigger and stronger than the artist, she lets him beat her. She has further adventures involving an elderly gentleman whom she works for, who also wants something for nothing. The story ends with Monday going off to serve a long jail sentence (not a spoiler; the story also begins here, as she starts to reminisce about her life so far and the events that brought her here). As with all of the bad things that happen to her, her attitude is that she must have done something to deserve it. She tried to rise above her station.
Most frustrating of all, she's actually quite intelligent and practical, most of the time. She has a spine; she simply decides not to use it. One friend I described this story to said it sounded like Pamela gone horribly, horribly wrong; actually, it's more like the prequel (wrong time period, but work with me here) of the life of that horrible woman Jewkes who keeps Pamela locked up; if she served her sentence, came out old and bitter and then signed on at Squire B's manor, yes it could have taken up from there.
This is apparently book one of a trilogy, with the other two volumes told from the point of view of the old man from the later part of the book, and the ratty little artist. The old man has at least some redeeming qualities; the artist appears to have none at all. I'm curious.
The War of the Words: The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
He survived the outbreak of war by two years and six months, and after his death his foresight with regard to the war became even more evident. For Pericles had said that Athens would be victorious if she bided her time and took care of her navy; if she avoided trying to add to the empire during the course of the war, and if she did nothing to risk the safety of the city itself. But his successors did the exact opposite, and in other matters which apparently had no connection with the war private ambition and private profit led to policies which were bad both for the Athenians themselves and for their allies. Such policies, when successful, only brought credit and advantage to individuals, and when they failed, the whole war potential of the state was impaired.
If you've been reading my bookposts, you've noticed I've reread a lot of ancient Greek classics this year, mostly for enlightenment and the rethinking of ideas than for pleasure. Plato and Aristotle, Homer, Herodotus and Archimedes are part of the foundations of western civilization, and huge amounts of western philosophy, history and literature ultimately flow back to these sources, and so even the outdated parts are worth a look. But it can be very dry going.
Thucydides alone among the Greeks is the author whose work still gives me actual pleasure to read. The Rex Warner translation is as readable as a novel and every bit as exciting. The outbreak of war between Athens and Sparta (interestingly traced to when Athens, the champion of Democracy, makes a decision to side with the aristocratic party of Corcyra over the Democrats of Spartan-allied Corinth); Pericles' funeral oration; the plague, the battles of Pylos, the Melian dialogue and the disastrous expedition to Sicily, are among the great moments of ancient history, all of them. The funeral oration, in particular, is one of the finest homages to citizenship in a free society ever written or spoken.
In fact, the best parts of Thucydides, and an innovation I don't recall seeing repeated any time since, are the dialogues. Thucydides claims to be penning the dialogues from memory, or at least providing the essence of what was said. but it's hard to imagine diplomats speaking as perfectly as those in Thucydides do. At key points in the long, drawn out suicide of Greece, certain of the Athenians, Spartans, or their allies are weighing a choice of actions, and partisans speak to the decisionmakers urging the right or strategic advantage on both sides. A decision is made, and then history happens. And if the decision results in disaster, the rulers and generals cannot say that they were led to the wrong decision for want of a worthy devil's advocate. Almost always, both sides speak compellingly, and there is much to be said on either side. In an age when we have to put up with pundits, politicians and other media figures who can't even aspire to the level of platitudes and who, like Samson, end up slaying thousands using only the jawbones of asses, one can find oneself longing for diplomats as wise as the ones in Thucydides. Highest recommendations.
Jeeves in the Offing: The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Miss Kenton seemed to ponder this for a moment, then said:
“It occurs to me you must be a well-contented man, Mr. Stevens. Here you are, after all, at the top of your profession, every aspect of your domain well under control. I really cannot imagine what more you might wish for in life.”
I could think of no immediate response to this. In the slightly awkward silence that ensued, Miss Kenton turned her gaze down into the depths of her cocoa cup as if she had become engrossed by something she had noticed there. In the end, after some consideration, I said:
“As far as I am concerned, Miss Kenton, my vocation will not be fulfilled until I have done all I can to see his lordship through the great tasks he has set himself. The day his lordship’s work is complete, the day he is able to rest on his laurels, content in the knowledge that he has done all anyone could reasonably ask of him, only on that day, Miss Kenton, will I be able to call myself, as you put it, a well-contented man.”
She may have been a little puzzled by my words; or perhaps it was that they had for some reason displeased her. In any case, her mood seemed to change at that point, and our conversation rapidly lost the rather personal tone it had begun to adopt.
Blurbs on the book jacket tell me that this book is both funny and sad. I found it to be merely sad, with a slight undercurrent of the kind of bitter, ironic humor that sometimes rises as a defense mechanism when watching someone you slightly care about create lasting Fail.
It may be that I have trouble reacting to butler humor. I laugh less at PG Wodehouse's Jeeves stories than anyone I know. I can't quite get past the cruel undercurrent in the way the manservant constantly chooses to get the foppish master out of jams in ways that unfairly make the master look even more stupid than he really is (which you'd think would take some work, but it happens again and again).
The Remains of the Dayis the story of Stevens, a very different butler from Jeeves. It involves a very un-foppish master with a much higher position than Bertie Wooster, who makes some great errors in judgment. Stevens, whose entire sense of self-worth hinges on the quality of service he performs for his master, never once intervenes as the master errs, but defers to the masters "wisdom" every time, and continues buttling. Meanwhile, Stevens' oblivious relations with the head housekeeper may be the single most heartbreaking road-not-taken tragedy I've seen in modern literature. A good deal of the so-called humor is rooted in dramatic irony and the way Stevens misses verbal cues and hides his own feelings from himself. The result to Stevens, however, is sad enough that I can no more laugh at it than I could laugh at the sight of a man slipping on a banana peel and dying from the fall.
Or maybe it's my inability to relate to more than a certain degree of work ethic. I know many Americans who, like Stevens, seem to identify their self-worth by the things they do for a living. I have just enough work ethic to do the things that need to be done, and feel worth or the lack of it by the combination of the many roles I play with family, work, various communities, and in who I am to myself. Stevens sees only his employment, and misses almost every other aspect of a human life that it is possible to have.
Ishiguro's genius is his ability to communicate volumes to the reader with the things that are not said. Because the narrator is either oblivious or hiding things from himself so often, he doesn't directly say what he's missing. If I had not seen the wonderful movie version with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, it might have taken me well into the book before I realized what was happening, it is so subtle. But the overall effect has to be experienced to be understood. Very high recommendations.
CalvinMapping: Secret Water, by Arthur Ransome
”Bridget’s not going to be a sacrifice,” said Susan hurreidly.
“She’d make a perfect beauty,” said the boy. “She’s much smaller than Daisy and much...well, you know what I mean. Some people can’t help being thin. It doesn’t matter generally, but savages stuff their victims like anything. And of course if we were a different tribe it wouldn’t matter...with Herons, for instance, scragginess would be all right...but the Eels’ victim ought to be fat. Of course I should have to ask the others, but I don’t believe Daisy would mind. The savages would come charging down on the explorers’ camp, pick the plumpest...”
“Oh no, you can’t have Bridget,” said Roger.
“If you did want one of us for a victim,” said Susan”, “you’d better take me or John.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Roger.
“Anybody but Bridget,” said Titty. “All right, Bridget, don’t go and cry. Nobody’s going to make you a human sacrifice.”
“I think you’re beasts,” said Bridget. “You always make out I’m too young for everything. And now Daddy and Mummy have let me come. They think I’m old enough. And you won’t let me be a human sacrifice when somebody wants me...”
Swallows and Amazons Forever, at their exuberant best! Yes, they’re kids’ books, and yes they enchant me completely. In this volume, the original Swallows and Amazons have been dropped off (marooned) by their father with instructions to survey and map some islands in a salt marsh somewhere around the southeast shores of England.
As with all previous adventures, there are actual lessons in the outdoor arts specific to this book. Also as always, the childrens’ imaginations produce an adventure on a whole different level from their actual activities.
The kids are growing up as the series progresses, and now the Swallows’ little sister Bridget is brought in to play the Cousin Oliver role. Or is is Sailorman Spiff? I can’t decide...
Harry? It sucks. Blood Rites, by Jim Butcher
I heard myself scream, not in fear or challenge, but in agony. I extended my right hand and the black magic flowed out of it in an invisible torrent, fastening onto the vampire as it gained its feet again and reached out to grab me. The vampire’s expression didn’t even flicker, so I was sure it did not feel the curse coming.
Which made it a complete surprise when something slammed into the vampire from directly overhead, too quickly to be seen. There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard.
It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed.
By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder.
The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached terminal velocity, and was still as hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire’s crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil.
The vampire gasped and writhed a little more.
The timer popped out of the turkey.
Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain’t something you see twice.
“For my next trick,” I panted into the startled silence, “anvils.”
And then the fight was on again.
It’s getting a little hard to comment on Dresden books without risking spoilers by now; the arc of the big story is getting more important with every book that passes, and various things have happened that must change the relationships between the main characters for the remainder of the series. Knowing it’s coming while you’re still reading the first few books can completely change how you experience them.
So I’ll suffice to mention that this one involves Chicago’s only practicing wizard taking on the task of guarding the production team at an adult film, where people have been dying in strange ways, WHILE he plots revenge against a nest of black vampires and attempts to come up with a large sum of money before his creditor kills him. There are demons who throw flaming monkey poo. There are lustful sex vampires. And there are puppies. There’s a lot more to it than that, and there is some serious angst, but from me you get the ridiculous synopsis.
And there are endless descriptions of female eyes, legs, cleavage and other assorted parts, and philosophical navel-gazing about whether the porn industry is degrading or empowering. If that pisses you off, this one is not for you, but then again, if this one isn’t for you, you probably stopped reading Dresden much earlier in the series. I still find more to like than to hate about it, but Blood Rites, it seemed to me, was several steps down from the earlier books, which were fairly slummy to begin with.
The One True Way to Skin a Cat: Poetics, and The Athenian Constitution, by Aristotle
A perfect tragedy should, as we have seen, be arranged not on the simple but on the complex plan. It should, moreover, imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation. It follows plainly, in the first place, that the change, of fortune presented must not be the spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity: for this moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us. Nor, again, that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity: for nothing can be more alien to the spirit of Tragedy; it possesses no single tragic quality; it neither satisfies the moral sense nor calls forth pity or fear. Nor, again, should the downfall of the utter villain be exhibited. A plot of this kind would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear; for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. There remains, then, the character between these two extremes,--that of a man who is not eminently good and just,-yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous,--a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families.
My high school English teacher had read this, and I had not, and so she had me at a disadvantage during one of those unfortunate school episodes we put up with. We read Oedipus Rex. The teacher taught us that protagonists in tragedies all have a tragic flaw which leads to their downfall, and that Oedipus fell due to hubris, or pride, and everyone should please write an essay on Oedipus’s Tragic Flaw. I wasn’t quite sold on the idea of tragic flaws to begin with, but decided to play along and wrote what I thought was a tolerable suggestion that Oedipus suffered from blindness, metaphorical and then literal, such that his inability to “see” what others, including the sightless prophet, were warning him about, led inexorably to the moment when Jocasta came in, saying, “I can’t find my brooches anywhere...oh, there they are [pluck!]...”
Nasty English teacher wouldn’t even read the thing. “Bad Miles! You didn’t pay attention to anything I said! Oedipus’ tragic flaw was pride! Go back and do it over, explaining how his tragic flaw was pride!”
In my emo teens, I imagined myself a latter day Galileo, forced to recant in the face of punishing authority that considered truth to be heresy. In fact, Aristotle’s science (see last month’s bookpost on his lesser physical tracts) had a big influence on church doctrines that limited scientific development for centuries, and his equally rigid theories as to what must constitute an acceptable epic or tragedy may have had a similar stultifying effect on imaginative literature. I’ve seen tragedies involving the downfall of the virtuous, the triumph of evil, and the downfall of villains; not to mention tragedies with no hint of “tragic flaws”. Nothing wrong with them.
The Athenian Constitution is a very brief history of the various overthrows of ancient Greek governments, with a summary of their laws. Not the criminal or civil codes, mind you, so much as the structure of government. Much space is given to the long and tedious process by which juries are selected; not much to the types of cases they tried. Compared to Thucydides, whose Peloponnesian war gets a chapter or two here, this is like sawdust without butter.
The Path of the Frosted Mini-Wheat: To Be a Pilgrim, by Joyce Cary
Love is a delusion to the old, for who can love an old man? He is a nuisance, he has no place in the world. The old are surrounded by treachery, for no one tells them the truth. Either it is thought necessary to deceive them, for their own good, or nobody can take trouble to give explanation or understanding to those who will carry both so soon into the grave. They must not complain of what is inevitable; they must not think evil. It is unjust to blame the rock for its hardness, the stream for its inconstancy and its flight, or the young for the strength and the jewel brightness of their passage. An old man’s loneliness is nobody’s fault. He is like an old-fashioned hat which seems absurd and incomprehensible to the young, who never admired and wore such a hat.
This is the second volume in the trilogy that began with Herself, Surprised, above. Like the first book, it has a touch of charm and a double helping of human sorrow, and involves a protagonist who fails to live up to the potential offered by life.
It is the story of Tom Wilcher, the rich old man who employs Sara and sleeps with her in the first book. After reading both books, it's hard to tell whether Sara is a fortune hunter who gets her hooks into a half senile old man's money with her feminine wiles, or whether Tom is a rich predator who abuses his position by perving it up with the financially dependent housekeeper, or whether the two of them are lost souls who just might have made something beautiful and brought out the best in each other, if only they had been left alone. A case can be made, I think for all three, and since both narrators are unreliable and tend to bullshit themselves, you can't really be sure.
The events Sara describes in the first book never appear through Tom's eyes at all; Tom's narrative begins soon after Sara is taken off to jail over his protests for allegedly stealing attic junk from his old Havisham-esque manor house. Tom then has a niece appointed guardian over him and becomes a half-prisoner at home, alternately watching the niece's romantic dallyings and reminiscing about his youth. He has brothers and a sister who know what they want, leap for it, and mostly fail; Tom himself stays in the background, holding onto the family money and running the gamut of political opinions from liberal to conservative as he grows older, dreaming like a grasshopper, struggling like an ant, and finally filling his mind and soul with religious longings while his body, seemingly, beyond his control, takes to committing acts of sexual harassment in public parks. Time and again, his flashbacks from the past are contrasted with the way, years later, he describes these events to his young relatives, claiming to have loved periods of his life that in fact made him miserable, and venerating deceased relatives as role models when they were really awful.
I found To Be a Pilgrim all the more disturbing as it seemed to challenge my own values. I have always tried to adopt the best part of attitudes that seemed to be opposite and contradictory, working like an ant and playing like a grasshopper, being financially responsible and socially creative, combining dry scholarly wisdom with frivolity and joy, like the immortal Rabelais. Tom tries to do these things as well, and fails utterly, for lack of focus, for lack of a true moral compass, and for bullshitting himself. His end, senile, out of control, his ancestral home decaying around him, unable to enjoy his wealth, restrained and dependent on relatives who don't much care for him other than the inheritance prospects...that's pretty much my idea of Hell on earth.
The final volume is apparently from the perspective of Sara's other lover, the destructive "genius" artist who plays the ultimate grasshopper to Tom's ant. I expect I'll get to that one next month.
Wax Fruit for a Starving World: The Great Derangement, by Matt Taibbi
Decades after Watergate, Vietnam and the Kennedy assassination, Americans were forced to rummage for objective reality in a sea of the most confusing and diabolical web of bullshit ever created by human minds--a false media tableau created mainly as a medium to sell products, a medium in which even the content of the "news" was affected by commercial considerations. I'll leave it to someone else to break down all the different species of lies that by the early twenty-first century Americans swallowed as a matter of routine--the preposterous laugh tracks in sitcoms, the parade of perfect looking models used to sell products to the obese, the endless soap operas about the rich and beautiful cruising the OC in Testarossas, marketed to a country in which 10 percent of the population lacks enough to eat.
It all got to be too much. Our political campaigns were reduced to an absurd joke, hollow image contests in which adult political commentators worried publicly about which candidate broke a sweat or looked at his watch during debates. In the late Clinton years government ground to a halt for over two years in an utterly ridiculous and interminable national debate over a blowjob. The national press then stood by and did nothing while the country elected to the most powerful office on earth a man barely capable of reading--and if you ask me it was that set of circumstances, the outrageous presidential election of 2000 between a dingbat and a bore that was sold to the American people as a heroic clash of serious and qualified ideological opposites, that more than anything trained the population to dismiss as unserious anything the national media subsequently had to say about 9/11.
I was somewhat disappointed, I know Taibbi mainly as a blogger with whom I usually disagree. I believe President Obama is too weak to stand up to Republicans and their big corporate owners; Taibbi believes Obama never intended to stand up to Republicans and their big corporate owners. I was expecting more of the same, and I got a little of it. The parts about watching Congress, under the control of either party, continue to produce the same old garbage, were the most relevant. The rest of the book consists of following various everyday lunatic movements around and reporting smugly about how crazy they are.
Biggest problem: Taibbi jumps right into the “both sides are equally to blame fiction” that I expect from mainstream media mouths, not from Taibbi. Taibbi compares an evangelical church movement in Texas, the kind that takes average confused people with wrecked lives and goes Tony Robbins Deluxe on them until they vote Republican for Jesus, with a group of “truthers”, fringe leftists who believe that George W. Bush was behind 9/11 as though those two groups are equally influential and equally representative of the left and right in America. Fuck you, Matt.
“Truthers” represent “the left” about as much as do UFO theorists. In a decade of being contentious on political blogs, I’ve met exactly one “truther”. The intensely partisan Daily Kos has banned “truthers” from its site. If somehow a member of Congress from the most fringe-left part of America believes in “truthism”, that member dares not say so in public for fear of being run out of Congress faster than Cynthia McKinney. There are few of them and they have no political power. Meanwhile, Dominionist Christianity, while not universal among the GOP, is unquestionably a major player. Many Republicans proudly claim extreme religious right identification to get votes. As I write this, a Dominionist from Texas has been elected and multiply re-elected Governor of the second most populous state and is the leading GOP contender for President. Is that equal?
More comparable to “truthers” are “birthers”, who believe the equally crackpot theory that President Obama was born in Kenya and faked his birth certificate. Among the Republican Party, it is actually political poison NOT to be a “birther”. Several GOP members of Congress openly express doubts about Obama’s citizenship, and almost all of the others get dodgy and waffle when asked about it. I know of three members (Rep. Istook of SC, Rep. Hoekstra of MI, and Sen. Bennett of UT) who were brave enough to say that the “birthers” were flat out wrong, and two of those were primaried in 2010 and lost. Think about that when you say that the left and right in America are equally crazy.
The second problem is that the book, written in 2008, is already dated in 2011. George W. Bush, a man no one in Washington DC admits ever existed, is still President in the book. And the third problem is that it’s disjointed, jumping around from the Texas church to some soldiers in Iraq to the “truthers” to Congress without really making a case for why these scenes of modern life are related. He may be trying to say that everyone feels powerless and is grasping at straws in search of meaning, but that’s not what comes out. Taibbi is at his best when exposing Congress as a monolithically conservative handmaiden to big business interests, that shifts from Republican to Democratic control without changing anything, but that’s just two chapters out of thirteen. We needed more of that part.
Bond, Jane Bond: The Smiler with the Knife, by Nicholas Blake
“Well, thank goodness,” said Georgia. “I thought at first it was another bit of trouble on the way.”
And so it was, though neither of them could possibly have foreseen it. It was not, after all, reasonable to suppose that a notice from a Rural District Council could cause anyone much trouble—let alone alter the course of history, or that england might be saved by the cutting of a hedge. Yet so it turned out. Looking back on it all afterwards, Georgia seemed to see those enormous events, like the angels of the Schoolmen standing on pinpoints, balanced upon a few and tiny precarious ifs. If we had taken a cottage in any other county in England, we shouldn’t have had to pare the hedge ourselve, for Devonshire is the only county where landowners still have to cut their own hedges on the road side. If the sun had not come out that morning, I’d probably have left the hedge for the gardener to do. If anyone else had cut it, he’d probably not have noticed the locket—Nigel always said I have eyes like a hawk—poor darling, he’s so short-sighted himself; and even if it had been found, only a person of Nigel’s inquisitiveness would have bothered to give it more than one glance. And, talking of inquisitiveness, what about the magpie?—it must have been a magpie that started the whole thing. Yes, if that anonymous magpie hadn’t had an attack of kleptomania, the locket would never have got into the hedge. Which only goes to show that crime does sometimes pay...”
I may be putting Nicholas Blake aside for a while. His books are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. The Smiler with the Knife is about Strangeways’s wife Georgia, on a spy adventure involving a secret society bent on bringing fascism to England. The 20 chapters encompass five or six distinct episodes in the pattern of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books or Agatha Christie’s attempts at international intrigue (my least favorite of the Christie mysteries), or maybe a Hitchcock spy movie in print. There’s no whodunnit here, or even much of a problem for the reader to solve. We just follow Georgia on her adventures. It’s done pretty well, and the fact that it was written shortly before WWII makes the mentions of Hitler, and how various government officials are undecided about whether he means harm or not, chilling.
A Flash in the Pan: Millenium, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
To the galactic museum-keepers, events commonly invested with world-shattering importance--such as the English and American civil wars, the European wars of religion, the French and Russian revolutions--will look parochial. As the trends of our millenium are reassessed and the picture modified by the chance survivals and suppressions of evidence, encounters at Runnymede or Canossa will be eclipsed by hitherto undervalued happenings in Makassar or Timbuktu. In this book--where there seems little point in tiring the reader with what is conventionally important and therefore necessarily well-known--I pull the unfamiliar into the front window while returning some favourite historical stock-in-trade to storage. There is little in what follows, for instance, on the Investiture Contest or the Hundred Years War. The Renaissance is contemplated more from the perspective of Hungary than Tuscany, socialism from that of the United States rather than Russia. There is more about the Morocco of al-Mansur than the England of Elizabeth I. Louis XIV appears only to beg to be excused. This is the only mention of Frederick the Great. Bismarck's claims to inclusion have been urged on me by a friend but represent a Eurocentric temptation. I dwell instead on Okubo Toshimichi, who did a similar job and seems, in some ways, a comparable figure. I give no summary of the thought of Descartes, pay no tribute to the achievement of Goethe, say, or--rather more to my regret--of Mozart or Michelangelo. Omissions like these in favour of more obscure examples are not made for reasons of political correctness, and I had better say at once that I am a committed advocate of the traditional humanist curriculum for teaching history in the schools and universities. But there is no place for "core content" here, where basic knowledge is assumed and where I aim to delight the reader with surprises.
This one was my big tome of the month. 737 pages of goofy stuff from a thousand years of world history, in assertion of the thesis that, in the big scheme of things, the galactic museum keepers a thousand years or more from now will have grounds to believe that the era of Western Empires was pretty much a blip on the radar.
As evidence, Fernandez-Armesto points out that, in 1000 AD, the advanced civilizations in the world were China, Japan and an Islamic empire running from South Spain across Africa and Asia Minor to India. Meanwhile, Europe was midway through a roughly thousand year empty period between Constantine and Dante when barbarians and churches ruled over tribes of pig-wallowing peasants, and didn't really start getting civilized again until the Italian Renaissance. Further, as of the 1995 publishing date of Millenium, the real cutting edge of science, philosophy and culture has passed over the Atlantic and is in the hands of California, Australia, Vancouver, and (once again) China and Japan. Yeah, some things happened in the intervening period, but in geologic time, the Spanish, French, British, German, Russian and American hay-days didn't last all that long.
Well, yeah, phrased that way. If you expand time far enough out, the entire history of the human race is reduced to a few minutes at the end of the last day of the Cosmic Year. but then, it's kind of hard to be persuasive when you take pride in leaving out or de-emphasizing all the parts of western history that westerners consider important enough to teach people in school, and instead focus on important but underreported episodes in Siberia, Celebes and Brazil. I'm in favor of histories that teach the things the schools leave out, about world cultures that have not been deemed by white professors to be the center of the world, but it seems to me going a bit far to suggest that western culture isn't really important or hasn't had an impact for good or ill on the world. It also seems to me a bit of a stretch to suggest, e.g., that California is more of an Asian state than an American one on the grounds that a higher proportion of Californians than other Americans have eschewed European religion for new age woo-woo spirituality.
The real joy of Millenium is ignoring the central thesis and going where Fernandez-Armesto goes, looking at things that were happening while Europe was doing its thing. Here we have the Turks, Tatars, Russians, Mongols and Chinese who broke Rule #1 and really DID get involved in land wars in Asia. Here's what happened when Mayans and Zulus were attempting to form their own empires at about the time when barbarians from the Darkest North/East were invading. Here's what happened in South America while everything US history tells us about the 13 colonies was going on. Here's what it was like in Dunedin, New Zealand, at the farthest edge of the inhabitable world.
And it's entertaining. Fernandez-Armesto is no Sara Vowell; in fact he's a lot like reading a world history by Rupert Giles without any disturbing references to real demons (although mythological demons are abundant, including comparisons of a Goya painting of the God of War with Hollywood images of King Kong and Rambo), and he can definitely be conservative and fuddy-duddy when he has an axe to grind (be prepared for the assertion that liberal abortion laws are a precursor to eugenics and death camps),but there are also some wonderful juxtapositions of the ancient and familiar. He really does cite They Might Be Giants when discussing why Constantinople got the works. He explains why WWII happened with a cartoon of colonel Blimp declaring that "It's only fair we should give the Germans a good start this war. After all, we won the last time, y'know." And he discourses on "the Era of Elvis", Bob Marley, and '80s Hollywood movies (asserted, unfortunately, as proof of western decadence and failure, but entertaining nonetheless, like the sting of the critic who hates everything).
In the end, Fernandez-Armesto predicts that the future will bring stable population growth, a rise of totalitarian right wing governments (because liberals are too tolerant and decadent to oppose authoritarians who act out of moral certainty), the further fragmentation of big Western governments (remember, this was written in 1995, before anyone had heard of Rick Perry much less contemplated nominating a secessionist for President), and the withering of big cities across the globe as people head out to the country. I don't agree with everything he says, and neither will you, but it's an important historical work that fills in many gaps left out of other important histories. Highly recommended.