Modern education
I just received an e-mail from amazon.com, advertising Frankenstein: A Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classic, Second Edition. I guess this would be an annotated version of the book, designed to help people with their SAT scores.
Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler.
According to Zdzisław Najder, a biographer, Arrow of Gold is “Conrad’s weakest novel”. It starts well enough, with exciting things happening to a young hero in Marseilles, and even seems to hold onto its nerve when a mysterious woman appears. There’s smuggling and intrigue and all looks well, even if it’s never entirely clear where Conrad wants our attention to lie.
At last came the day when everything slipped from my grasp. The little vessel, broken and gone like the only toy of a lonely child, the sea itself, which had swallowed it, throwing me on shore after a shipwreck that instead of a fair fight left in me the memory of a suicide. It took away all that was in me of independent life, but just failed to take me out of the world.... The lurid swiftness of it all was like a stunning thunderclap—and, one evening, I found myself weary, heartsore, my brain still dazed and with awe in my heart, entering Marseilles by way of the railway station, after many adventures, one more disagreeable than another, involving privations, great exertions, a lot of difficulties with all sorts of people who looked upon me evidently more as a discreditable vagabond deserving the attentions of gendarmes than a respectable (if crazy) young gentleman attended by a guardian angel of his own.
The title of the book refers to a piece of jewelry worn by the mysterious woman, so perhaps it is fair enough that the emphasis of the novel shifts to focus on the relationship between Doña Rita and the book’s cast of male characters. Certainly, she remains a mysterious object more than she is ever a human being. In some sense she is most like a MacGuffin that pushes the plot onwards, and quite unreal.
This seems to me to be consistent with the off-hand way in the novel concludes (in a strange final section called “Second Note”). Here the novel is perhaps revealed to be all about the hero’s development and coming of age, and not really the arrow of gold at all.
Alkan, Motifs for piano, Op. 63, No. 5 (Les Initiés)
This is a very good novel set during World War I in a Scottish hospital for shell-shocked soldiers. Central to the story are two real people, Siegfried Sassoon, there as a patient, and W. H. R. Rivers, a leading doctor at the hospital. This encounter really did happen, so Barker is presenting a fictionalised account of what might have happened. She does a very good job of it.
Sassoon is in the hospital because he has publicly condemned the conduct of the war and refused to return to it, and because the authorities (and Sassoon’s friends) wish to put him in a hospital as a head-case rather than in prison as a conscientious objector. Once there, he encounters the enlightened Rivers, as well as a number of other seriously disturbed soldiers. While there he also meets Wilfrid Owens. Owens is the author of Anthem for Doomed Youth, which begins
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
Sassoon, already an established poet at this point, helps Owens get his opening lines into just this shape, in what is an effective, if inevitably speculative scene.
Owens and Sassoon both eventually go back to war (it’s not easy to understand Sassoon’s motives, though their complexity is conveyed well), but the book is as much about Rivers’s career, and there’s quite a bit of theorising on just what the right thing to do is in a situation where patients are disturbed in novel ways, and where if made well, they are likely to be put right back into the situation that made them ill in the first place.
Regeneration is the first book of a trilogy; one that I look forward to completing.
Alkan, J'étais dormie, mais mon coeur veillait, 13th of his 25 preludes for piano, Op. 31.
This issue of Granta contains more non-fiction than fiction, much of it being biographical accounts of authors’ mothers. This makes for interesting reading, if only because other people are often quite interesting, particularly, if one is reading a professional writer’s account.
For example, Martha Gessen describes her relationship with her mother, the way that her mother died of breast cancer, and how she herself has learnt that she has a single genetic mutation that means she is much more likely to get breast or ovarian cancer herself. Now she has a young daughter herself, and there is a chance that she may have passed on the same mutation.
In another piece, Alexandra Fuller describes being pregnant and giving birth in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Her story has a happy ending, and you can’t really ask for more. It’s a good collection.
Mrs. Robinson, Simon & Garfunkel.
This is not an easy read, but it’s a valuable one. The topic is “free will”, one of the core philosophical concepts if ever there was one. I think the best part of the book comes quite soon, where the implications of living in a deterministic world are explored. In particular, Dennett convincingly argues that
Our everyday thinking about possibility, necessity, and causation seems to conflict with determinism, but this is an illusion. Determinism doesn’t imply that whatever we do, we could not have done otherwise, that every event has a cause, or that our natures are fixed.
The “could have” argument is fascinating in itself. Some say that the very fact that we can meaningfully claim “I could have done X differently” proves that the world can not be deterministic. Alternatively, the claim is that if the world were deterministic, then it would be meaningless to say “I could have done it differently”. But in the real world, how do we determine whether such a claim is reasonable, leaving aside the determinism issue entirely? To make the example concrete, say that X is making the right (non-losing, say) move in a game of chess.
So the claim I make is “At move 23, I could have figured out that I had to castle (and thereby save the game).” How do we assess this claim? We look at my chess-playing history, and we get me to play a whole bunch of games to provide more data. We might ask if I had at least considered the move in question, and how I came to reject it. Then, if it all the evidence seems to support the view that I had it in me to make the right move, we agree that yes, I could have made the move.
Importantly, this assessment makes sense and conveys information regardless of whether or not the world is deterministic. It’s a statement about my capabilities as a chess player, a statement that it is or is not plausible that in the particular situation that arose I might have made the right move. It is thus an examination of possible worlds and my possible behaviours in them. In this way, and with a rich set of examples and thought experiments, Dennett is convincing that determinism is actually irrelevant.
Later Dennett is also good on the question of free will and morality, the question as to how the sense of how we can also be free to make moral decisions, how this may have come about, and why it is a specially human characteristic. It’s all very good, and re-reading chunks of it for the purpose of writing this review has only made me want to return to it again.
Cecilia, by Simon & Garfunkel.
This is an entertaining science-fiction novel. It is not a Culture novel, unlike most of Banks’s other sci-fi. Nor can it even be set in the same universe as the Culture because faster-than-light travel is not possible in this one. This difference is very significant: just about all inter-stellar travel is mediated by worm-hole pairs, and these connected pairs have to be carefully established. First the pair is created in one location, and then one of the two is slowly transported (at close to the speed of light, but this is slow at interstellar scales) to the desired destination.
This is an interesting set-up, and Banks explores some of the ramifications in convincing detail. Better, the almost inevitable Ancient Knowledge held by Mysterious Old Ones is actually a real piece of information, the import of which the reader can really appreciate. The Old Ones are also quite engaging—though mysterious, they are superficially a bit on the ridiculous side too.
There’s a villain too, a evil and merciless imperialist very much in the Banksian mold. He comes to a bad end, so all is well on that front. These are all good aspects of the main plot-line. It’s unfortunate that the central good guys are so feeble, and that the drama around them at the personal level is so uninspiring. I also suspect that the big secret is flawed by the fact that a graph whose nodes all have degree one can never form an interesting network. Still, it’s a good read.
Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet suite.
This is an entertaining collection of columns that Stewart wrote for Scientific American magazine. They are “recreational mathematics”, which means they simultaneously aim to convey some mathematical idea and to keep the reader interested. I’m happy to report that Stewart succeeds in all of these columns. My particular favourites were the two on analysing Monopoly using probabilistic methods, two on agent-reasoning (“because he knows that I know that X, I should do Y”), and on how to play the children’s game “dots-and-boxes” well. (The latter is highly non-trivial!)
Mikhail Pletnev playing Beethoven “variations and bagatelles”. (Deutsche Grammophon 457 493-2.)
When I bought this rather fat book (it’s an omnibus of three novels, Fifth Element, The Manticore, and World of Wonders), I hoped that it would be as good as Davies’s Cornish Trilogy. Unfortunately, it’s nothing like as successful, in my opinion. Of the three constituent novels, the first is definitely the best. The last is little more than a series of conversations that are supposed to be taking place as the main characters make a film about one of their number. This character, the film’s subject, has a reasonably interesting story to tell, but is an arrogant tosser, who seems to be in the novel mainly to serve as contrast with the terribly provincial Canadians. The other significant character is the earnest Canadian intellectual, aware of his desperate disconnect with all that is deeply meaningful, and willing to sit at the knee of the liberated soul.
That the guru is actually a stage magician just seems like willful perversity on the part of the author. The first novel is not so bad because it tells the story of how these people grow up, escaping their small village upbringing and because it introduces the one great drama that defines the trilogy. For all that this might be proof of their basic unworthiness, Davies definitely entertains with his descriptions of his characters’ origins. Their childhoods are well done, and the stories of the characters’ early adult careers are interesting too. In particular, this stage of things includes a third character. He’s interesting, though even worse off on the possession-of-soul front, eventually growing up to become a dirty capitalist and all-round fixer.
There are occasional flashes of humour, but most of it is earnestly serious:
... Eisengrim directed him to look towards the ceiling, from which his handkerchief fluttered down into his hands. He borrowed a lady’s handbag, and from it produced a package that swelled and grew until he revealed a girl under the covering; he caused this girl to rise in the air, float out over the orchestra pit, return to the table, and, when covered, to dwindle once again to a package, which, when returned to the lady’s purse, proved to be a box of bon-bons. All old tricks. All beautifully done. And all offered without any of the facetiousness that usually makes magic shows so restless and tawdry.
This is well-written, elegant even, but this tone dominates the 700 pages, and grows wearying. And basically, not enough really happens.
Richard Strauss, Four last songs, no. 4: Im Abendrot (“At sunset”), sung by Anne Schwanewilms, with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder.
This is an interesting biography of Stalin, focussing on the period from 1932 (when Stalin’s wife, Nadya shot herself) to 1953 (when he died). His earlier career (i.e., 54 years) is summed up in about 100 pages, and then the remaining 570 pages go over 21 years in great detail.
In 1932, Stalin is the Soviet Union’s top politician and leader, but he is not yet the all-powerful Great Dictator. This transformation happens in the early ’30s, and is a fascinating process. It’s also a horrifyingly bloody one. Stalin was paranoid and quite willing to see anyone killed if he thought they were a threat. Given the stranglehold he had on power, it’s hard to imagine how he could think anyone might be any sort of threat. But he’d got that far by being ruthless, so when he had the werewithal to be even more ruthless, he was.
And he is operating in an environment that really is quite court-like, making the book’s sub-title quite appropriate. He is top dog, but he works with a Politburo full of ambitious revolutionaries and politicians. None of them can afford to offend him, but he does rely on them in the formulation and implementation of policy. Most of them end badly, but at least one, Molotov, demonstrated that it was possible to start and finish your career with Stalin. The courtiers’ stories are very interesting, not least the consternation that envelops them when Stalin goes into a coma and eventually dies.
Finally, this is a very interesting period of global history. Stalin concludes evil deals with Hitler (partitioning Poland, for example), but has to go with war with him just a few years later. During the war he holds summit meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt. Then he drops his “Iron Curtain” over Europe and avidly pursues atomic weapons for the USSR. This book’s basic angle on this, centred on Stalin’s life as an individual, is fresh and engaging, but I imagine readers might best come to it with a basic grasp of those global events.
Béla Fleck, Sinister Minister.
This novel is one of only two of Ransome’s novels that don’t feature the Walker family (John, Susan, Titty and Roger). Instead, Dick and Dot, who we met in Winter Holiday, are central, along with a new character, Tom Dudgeon. The only other character to earn any real definition is a Mrs. Barrable, a grown-up no less. The rest of the “gang” is three working class boys (boat-builders’ sons), and two twin girls (a lawyer’s daughters). The class signals are quite obvious, but these five don’t otherwise get to become real people.
The setting is different too: instead of being set in the Lake District, the book is set in the Norfolk Broads. It still features lots of messing about in boats. There is one important plot-arc to Coot Club: Tom casts a cruiser full of Hullabaloos loose because it’s moored on top of a coot’s nest, and the rest of the book centres on escaping them, and going on a big sailing expedition.
The drama of being chased by unpleasant and uncomprehending grown-ups moves the book along very effectively, all the way to an exciting finale. Dick and Dot are fun company, and all the characters get important and interesting things to do, even William, Mrs. Barrable’s pug dog.
Mozart, piano concerto no. 20 in D minor, K.466. Kathryn Stott (piano), and the Manchester Camerata conducted by Douglas Boyd.
This is a very entertaining comic novel, set in 1985, but on an Earth with an alternative history. The main character is a detective called Thursday Next. Just this name suggests that the novel is not going to be taking itself entirely seriously. Plenty of details in the alternative history support this: Wales is a rigid socialist republic in the vein of North Korea, and England and Russia have been fighting the Crimean War for over a century.
Perhaps more importantly, the metaphysics of the setup allows people (or at least, Thursday’s father) to travel in time, and to move in and out of fiction. Thus, this book is the Eyre Affair because it features a villain who messes about with the novel Jane Eyre, as well as conducting all of his other nefarious plots. One of the many amusing touches is that when Thursday enters the novel to catch the bad guy, she ends up altering the ending so that it ends the way the way it does in “our world”. Up until that point, everyone in Thursday Next’s world agreed that Jane Eyre ended rather insipidly.
It’s all very clever, and amusing with it. What’s not to like?
Yes it is, by the Beatles. Somewhat drone-y, I have to say.
This Folio Society edition of Conrad short stories collects seven stories that originally appeared in two volumes, ’Twixt Land and Sea, and Tales of Hearsay. I definitely liked the first two stories, A Harbour Story and The Secret Sharer. The first is dark and tropically decadent. It’s mainly set on an island where the narrator has come to harbour. He gets entangled in a local merchant’s affairs, and with the merchant’s daughter.
In the second story, the narrator is another ship’s captain, who happens to pick up a man lost at sea and shelters him in his cabin. The castaway is from a nearby ship, and jumped because he had accidentally killed another member of the crew. The narrator keeps his presence a secret, making him the secret sharer of the captain’s cabin. There are two episodes of drama, as the fugitive is hidden from his original ship, and then helped to freedom. It’s all quite effective.
The third story is Freya of the Seven Isles, a romantic tragedy, featuring a loathsome Dutch lieutenant and a doomed love. It’s rather tedious really.
Fourth, The Warrior’s Soul is better again, being set during the Napoleonic Wars and about the discharging of an honourable debt between two soldiers on opposing sides (France and Russia). It’s formally neat, and a little bit vicious. Condensed it might have more impact, but Conrad’s typical psychologizing works quite well too.
Of the remaining stories, The Black Mate is cute and about as comic as Conrad ever gets. It reads a bit like a camp-fire story with an amusing twist. The Tale is another impressive and nasty story about a naval captain interrogating a merchant captain who may actually be a spy. Finally, Prince Roman is a so-so story about family loyalty and honour, set in nineteenth century Poland.
Barber, Summer music (music for wind quintet), played by the Galliard Ensemble.
I just received an e-mail from amazon.com, advertising Frankenstein: A Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classic, Second Edition. I guess this would be an annotated version of the book, designed to help people with their SAT scores.
Billy Eckstine, No one but you. Awfully schlocky.
Lingard repeated it all to Mrs Travers. Her courage, her intelligence, the quickness of her apprehension, the colour of her eyes, and the intrepidity of her glance evoked in him an admiring enthusiasm. She stood by his side! Every moment that fatal illusion clung closer to his side—like a garment of light—like an armour of fire.
This is another of Conrad’s novels set in an obscure corner of the islands of south-east Asia, featuring a European getting messed up in native affairs, and coming to a bad end. This time, the hero is a man called Lingard, who has achieved a strong position in this obscure corner (called “The King of the Sea”, even), and is attempting to restore a Malay prince to power.
But things are suddenly complicated when a yacht carrying some urbane but unworldy Europeans is stranded smack in the middle of the coast where Lingard is hatching his plot. All sorts of complications ensue. Not least among them is Lingard and the wife of the yacht’s owner falling for each other. Conradian romance is almost always rhetorically overblown to my ears, and this is not much of an exception. Nonetheless, the plot steams along, and I was keen to see how it was all going to finish.
Suzanne Vega, My favourite plum.
This is Austen’s last novel, and was published posthumously. It’s not as long a novel as Pride and prejudice, and comparatively little happens in terms of plot. On the other hand, the story is quite heartfelt. In essence it is: Anne Elliot is approaching middle age, and is resigned to never marrying, having earlier been persuaded to reject the suit of her young love, Captain Wentworth. But then, after some years (seven or eight, I think) Wentworth re-appears. Anne is very composed about it all, and even accepts that he might be about to court another member of her social circle.
A further romantic complication appears in the form of a cousin who stands to inherit from Anne’s father. Eventually however, the right thing happens, almost against the odds it feels. So, on the one hand, Austen seems to be saying “Never give up”. But simultaneously, what with so much resignation and uncertainty (about what will happen, and about how Anne feels and what she thinks she should do) in the novel, the happy ending is a little subdued. It’s very beautiful.
Cole Porter’s Always true to you in my fashion, sung by Ella Fitzgerald.
This edition of the Granta celebrates its 25th anniversary by being slightly fatter than normal, with a rich collection of new pieces by some of the writers who helped makes[sic] its reputation
.
Grammar on its back cover notwithstanding, there is some good stuff in it too.
The first piece is a miniature biography of a strange guy called Benjamin Pell, who has made a career of rooting through celebrities’ rubbish, finding interesting stuff and selling it to newspapers. Pell has had to fight a number of court cases as a result, and has a nerdish obsession with his cause, and the court system in general. He (or Tim Adams’s portrayal of him) rather reminded me of the unhinged Miss Flite from Bleak House.
I also liked Early one morning by Helen Simpson, which is a short story about a mother driving her nine-year old son to school, also picking up some of his friends on the way. Not knowing anything about it for sure, it still comes across as a very genuine-sounding reflection of modern parenthood. Nothing really happens, but it is an affecting window onto a world, that though fictional, feels quite real.
The photo essay charts the progress of the Granta river from spring to sea, passing through Cambridge on the way, through territory that’s pretty familiar to me. The final piece is also one of my favourites: by Graham Swift, it reflects on Swift’s father’s life, from birth in the 1920s, to being a pilot in WW2 and beyond.
Honeysuckle Rose played by Fats Waller.
This is children’s fiction from 1948, and a very enjoyable read. It’s also clearly a book for girls, being all about two twin sisters who start at a girls’ secondary school, following four other, older sisters. This means that the canonical school activities are netball and guiding. No doubt this would have been enough to totally put me off the book (and its many sequels featuring the Marlow family) as a teenager, but hey, there have got to be some advantages in being a grown-up.
The central character is Nicola Marlow (her twin sister is Lawrie), who arrives at school with all sorts of grand ambitions, mainly relating to the way in which she will surpass the sisters who have gone before her. Her grand ideas take a variety of knocks over the course of the story, and she has to revise her opinions about some of the other school-girls too. The novel builds to a grand climax involving the production of a dramatised version of Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. It’s all very satisfying, and I’m looking forward to reading some of the sequels (some of which also have a more central rôle for the brothers, apparently).
Simply the best, by Tina Turner.
This book is an enjoyable memoir about the life of an Australian who grew up in the fifties, got the sci-fi reading bug, emigrated to the UK, and became a book collector. It makes for a fascinating mix. On the one hand, Baxter has lots to say about the sometimes seedy, and usually rather nerdy habits of book collectors. This is interesting enough in itself, but Baxter also has another string to his bow: an Australian autobiographical slant that reads a little like Clive James’s Unreliable memoirs.
The book collecting leads Baxter into personal contact with authors as well as other collectors. He meets Kingsley Amis at one point, for example. This is interesting enough, but I think the discussion of how one might get oneself a collecting “angle” is more interesting. You don’t want to collect a big author like Graham Greene, as Baxter did, but you could, for example, collect first editions of Booker Prize winners.
Recommended.
Valley of the Dolls, sung by Dionne Warwick.
This interesting book is essentially a biography of Shostakovich, refracted through the prism of his relationship with Stalin. Shostakovich lived for over 20 years after Stalin died, which means that there’s less for Volkov to say about this stage of Shostakovich’s life. Nonetheless, he can comment on the way in which Shostakovich’s composing continued to be affected by his experience of the Stalinist period.
Volkov is famous for the book Testimony, which was published just a few years after Shostakovich’s death. This purported to be Shostakovich’s posthumous message to the world (Volkov claimed that Shostakovich saw and approved his manuscript), explaining how he was always a dissident, and how he encoded his hatred and contempt for the Soviet regime, and particularly Stalin, in his music. This made for a great story, and struck many people as much the best way to explain aspects of the music. On the other hand, there were all sorts of discrepancies in Volkov’s explanations of how the book came to be written, and how much of it Shostakovich may or may not have seen. This prompted an ongoing controversy, one that I don’t know to be entirely resolved one way or the other.
Given all this, one has to read this book of Volkov’s knowing that he is pushing a barrow that seems plausible, but which is not necessarily as well supported by the facts as he might like you to think. Anyway, it’s still an interesting, and pretty well-written account. Volkov draws a parallel between Stalin and Shostakovich on the one hand, and Nicholas I and Pushkin on the other. In both cases, the dictator wields the power of life and death, but indulges the artist. I don’t think Shostakovich would have ever been allowed to “speak truth to power” in prose, but music was a safer medium. (And Stalin did intervene personally in other cases to save some poets and artists. Capriciously saving a few lives, while callously causing the deaths of millions is no moral redemption of course.)
Volkov covers the important stuff well: the furore over the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich’s response to being accused of muddle instead of music (the fifth symphony), his appropriation as a wartime propaganda tool, and finally his second condemnation in 1948 (along with Prokofiev and others), as part of the cultural purge called the Zhdanovschina. It’s a fascinating story, and well-told. Volkov may be taking liberties with personal motivations, but his is still a plausible line, and his book is definitely worth reading.
ABBA, When all is said and done.
This single volume history of New Zealand is very well-written and a great introduction to the subject. I did a little of the subject at secondary school, but the “modules” I did then focussed on quite specific areas (economic development and social welfare I think, done in comparison to Japan and the USA). More recently, I read James Belich’s Making peoples, and thought it very good. It stops in the late nineteenth century though, and for more recent history you need the second part, Paradise reforged, which I don’t have. So, I was very interested to see how King might treat the same, earlier, material (in less space), and then go on to describe the 20th century.
King is certainly very good on New Zealand’s prehistory, with what sems a convincing command of the various strands of archaeological and anthropological research. I find it all quite fascinating: to think, the Maori discovered this empty country just 800–1000 years ago, even as scads of well-recorded European history was underway. (King also blows the totally unsupported and typically anti-Maori myths about the Mori-ori out of the water.)
New Zealand’s early history of contact between the Maori and the Pakeha is well done too. It’s very easy to root for the Maori throughout this story: they were initially in a very strong position (so much so that there was never any idea of sending convicts to NZ; it would have been too dangerous). But, at a step further back, there could never have been fair competition between the world's biggest economic power, and tribes bound to subsistence farming for their support. The Maori get shafted.
New Zealand's history becomes more and more Europeanised. Soldiers (Maori and Pakeha) from New Zealand fight in the 20th century's European wars. With the development of refrigerated shipping, New Zealand ties itself into the imperial economy. King's coverage of this century can hardly do anything other than become quite political: New Zealanders have to try to figure out the right way to deal with varying economic circumstances, and how to resolve Maori-Pakeha tensions. All this is the domain of the politician.
King also explains the changing social picture: after WW2, for example, large numbers of Maori leave the countryside and move to the cities, upsetting what had been a de facto separation of two cultures. About the only thing I missed was much discussion of New Zealand’s relations with its neighbours, particularly Australia (now that I live here, I find this more interesting), and the Pacific island countries. But still a very interesting read.
Prokofiev, symphony no. 6. Seiji Ozawa conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.
This novel is by Banks in his non-science fiction guise, and there is thus a chunk of it set in modern London. However, in a sci-fi like way, another significant chunk of it is set in a mysterious castle, on a planet that otherwise seems to be completely deserted. The castle seems to be set up entirely as a very elaborate prison for two people who are forced to play seemingly meaningless board-games with each other in order to win the right to find an answer to a question. If they get the right answer they will win their freedom. This castle story is all quite intriguing, and the setting is rather reminiscent of Gormenghast (which fact the story explicitly acknowledges at one point). So I definitely liked this bit.
The modern setting has two almost entirely separate narrative threads: one features a nutter who thinks he’s secretly an intergalatic warrior, and another features a lovelorn young student. This latter thread of the plot shares the honours with the castle for emotional heft, but is wrapped up in a rather brutal way. This is not horrific, but simply made me think Feh
. The nutter and castle threads eventually come to parallel one another in a rather intriguing way, so there is a bit more connection there, even though I eventually decided it didn’t really make sense. (The love-story thread isn’t really connected to the rest of the novel at all.)
Not a glorious success then, but some cute ideas. Ultimately, only one of the threads (the castle) has a story-arc I found dramatically convincing, so the other two have to be regarded as padding, with one of them an opportunity for Banks to draw an incoherent parallel.
Louis Armstrong, Sweet little Papa.
This is a cute history of the royal menagerie that was housed in the Tower of London. The menagerie probably began in 1235, when Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, gave Henry III three lions because he, Frederick was marrying Henry’s sister, Isabella. It’s an interesting comment on the zoological knowledge of the time that these animals were actually called “leopards”.
So, yes, this is a very specialised story, but it’s also an interesting one. Hahn has found a number of references to the menagerie in various histories, and is able to tell all sorts of curious stories around and about the menagerie’s evolution through the centuries. For example, the menagerie seems to have been a real tourist attraction for much of its history, allowing people without access to nature programmes on TV to see real live lions. (The lions of the Tower were apparently the biggest draw, in keeping with their role as royal symbols, but there were other animals kept there as royalty received various gifts from overseas.)
People’s attitudes to the keeping of wild animals evolved over this period, and the more humane environment of the modern zoo was eventually seen as more appropriate. The Tower Menagerie, always cramped in its castle setting, was ultimately merged into the Regents Park zoo in the nineteenth century.
This is an enjoyable read about an obscure, but easily appreciated corner of English history.
Beethoven, symphony no. 6 “Pastoral”. The Royal Philharmonia conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy.
This book is a collection of 31 essays, originally published in the Natural History magazine in what was Gould’s regular column, This view of life. Each essay is self-contained, and each is an interesting reflection on some topic in natural history, very broadly construed. For example, one of the essays starts off by talking about a contemporary observer of Mozart the child prodigy when visiting London. This gracefully leads on to a discussion of the way in which evolution works in a “modular” way, on systems or body components that can evolve independently of each other. (Gould cites the example of infant gulls and the way they “learn” to induce their parents to feed them.) Without such separability, evolution by natural selection would have a very hard time of introducing any kind of adaptation into organisms.
Another essay is an extended meditation induced by a visit to a quaint village in Iowa, one of the Amana colonies. These were founded in the early 19th century by a German religious minority, and now survive, at least in part, by selling tourists a vision of bucolic charm. Gould is a little cynical about this, but still admits to feeling charmed by the pleasant village environment. That is, until he finds the village graveyard, full of the gravestones of infant children. This he calls the Great Reminder, quoting Gilbert & Sullivan, of
the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own
Gould is equally lyrical on the needless extinction of snails in Tahiti; the unnecessary mocking of Archbishop Ussher (the man who dated God's creation in Genesis 1 to 23 October, 4004 B.C.); and how it is that land vertebrates all share a body-plan involving five digits at the end of each limb. It’s all good stuff: thoughtful and entertaining.
Blossom Dearie, On Broadway, a live performance from Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London.
This is a ho-hum issue of the literary magazine. The theme is all there, and perhaps that’s the problem. Writing about film is a great excuse for pretentiousness it seems, and many of the pieces in this issue seem to prove the claim.
But let’s accentuate the positive, and talk about what I did like. Ian Jack, the editor, has a reasonably interesting nostalgia piece about the Lancashire cinemas he frequented as a kid in the ’30s and ’40s. Maarten ’t Haart is also interesting on providing lots of live rats to be part of Werner Herzog’s film, Nosferatu. This sort of thing does interest me; I can watch the credits of films and wonder at the enormous legions of people who seem to be required to make them. They must all have useful things to do, and pieces like ’t Haart’s go some way towards illuminating back-stage.
Thomas Keneally has a neat piece on how he came to meet a bag-maker in Hollywood who provided him with the story about Oskar Schindler. It was this encounter that led to his book, and ultimately the film Schindler’s List.
Finally, Andrew O’Hagan is good on the experience of being a film critic for two years (he rants about the perfidiousness of Miramax); and Adam Mars-Jones has an entertaining little rant of his own about bad soundtrack music.
The sound of World of Warcraft in the background: crashes, bangs, and the wails of virtual creatures as they are brutally taken to bits by a troll rogue. (Nerf rogues!)
Intriguing title notwithstanding, this issue of Granta doesn’t really seem to have any particular theme. There’s still some good writing to be enjoyed though. Among the collection, there was lots of good non-fiction. I particularly liked Diana Athill’s memoir of an unexpected pregnancy in the 1940s or ’50s; Giles Foden on the historical events that inspired The African Queen (a German warship on Lake Tanganyika, and the British response); Geoffrey Beattie on growing up poor in Northern Ireland; Brian Cathcart tracking down the fate of a guy (like him, also from Northern Ireland) with the same name; Daniel Smith on surgical “cures” for obsessive-compulsive disorders; and Jennie Erdal: very amusing on being a ghost-writer for an incredibly vain wannabe novelist with no real talent.
Of the fiction, I liked J. Robert Lennon’s Eight pieces for the left hand, eight cute miniature stories all set in a small country town in the US, and Jonathan Tel’s Put not thy trust in chariots. The latter, set in modern Israel, is simultaneously intense and inconsequential. It does a great job of conveying the humdrum realities of lives led under a combination of normal everyday pressures and the thought that innocuous Arab colleagues might really be terrorists.
Shostakovich, Six romances on words by Japanese poets, Op. 21. Sung by Vladimir Kasatschuk, with the Koln Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jurowski.
Being such a Ransome fan, I was very happy to take this opportunity to get to know him a bit better. I read a biography a while ago (it might have been Brogan’s), but not much of it stuck. (Now that I have this ’log, I can record my thoughts for all posterity, and need never be in that horrible position ever again!) Reading writers’ letters is a classic literary activity. All the best authors get their correspondence collected: as I said about Jane Austen last month, it’s a great opportunity to eavesdrop on a person as they talk to friends, family and others. These days people don’t put so much into their letters, but they do write web-logs instead, so perhaps there’s some law of conservation of written evidence at work here.
Anyway. Ransome had a fascinating career. Well before his career as a children’s author, he was a well-regarded foreign correspondent for first the Daily News and then the Manchester Guardian (now just The Guardian). He got to provide coverage of the Russian Revolution, and was able to interview significant players. He met his second wife in Russia; she was Trotsky’s secretary.
Meeting a second wife while still married unfortunately meant that his relationship with his first wife, already bad, became completely awful. This also affected his relationship with his daughter, who later claimed that her mother had ceaselessly tried to turn her against him. This worked all too well, and the most depressing and sad letters in the collection are some of those between Ransome and his daughter Tabitha.
Ransome never wanted to make a career of journalism: he’d known from a young age that he wanted to be a proper writer. In 1930 he finally chucked in the Guardian (and the requirement to go to places like China and Egypt), and began his career as a full-time writer. When Swallows and Amazons and its immediate sequels came out, and were so successful, he was set for life.
There’s lots else that is interesting in Ransome’s correspondence: he exchanged a couple of letters with Tolkien; he’s constantly plotting sea voyages in the various yachts he owned and renovated; or he’s writing to his publisher in fits of anxiety about whether or not his latest is up to it, or (during the war) whether or not they had paper to print it on. All in all, a very worthwhile read.
Bach, partita no. 4 in D major, BWV 828.
This is a nineteenth century classic, and sufficiently good that I’ve now come back to it for a second time. It centres on two young women characters: Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley. Becky is an opportunistic woman of dubious parentage, with a real desire to get ahead. Amelia is more bourgeois in background, and much less worldly-wise than her friend. The contrasts between the two characters mean that there’s lots of interesting variety in how we see scenes and other characters. I’d say Thackeray was much fonder of Becky: her cynicism matches that of the narrator quite often, while Amelia comes across as a tedious sap rather too often.
To steal a line from Blackadder, this is a real roller-coaster of a novel, with lots of neat twists and turns, and piles of interesting minor characters. In comparison with novels by Dickens, Vanity Fair doesn’t seem as carefully plotted, and some of it seems a bit episodic rather than clearly moving the plot along. On the other hand, Thackeray definitely wins over Dickens because none of his characters are perfect. Amelia’s sappiness is something that Thackeray is perfectly aware of and comments on. The nearest thing to a saint is Captain Dobbin, but even he comes across as a bit dim at times.
In form, Vanity Fair is ultimately a romance: loving hearts are united, and all that, though Thackeray gets lots of twists out of this, and lots of opportunity for that amusing cynicism. In addition, Becky has to better herself too, and her attitude to romance is more that a man is a route to power and money rather than love and happiness. In this way, Thackeray manages to combine two sorts of stories at once. His novel is perhaps too long, with a slightly unsatisfying ending, but there’s lots to admire and enjoy on the way. (The drama leading up to and around the Battle of Waterloo is particularly effective.)
Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter’s Easy to love.
I’m going through a bit of an “Austen-kick” at the moment. I expect to have knocked off all the novels in the not too distant future (all but Northanger Abbey will be re-reads, but you will be relieved to know that the List’s rules allow this), have recently watched DVDs of the BBC’s recent Pride and Prejudice adaptation, and also have Claire Tomalin’s biography to come. The letters are just another symptom of the wider interest.
What with my reviewing backlog, it’s now a little while since I finished the letters, and I can comment on the overall impression that they left with me more accurately than I can describe the details. I do recall that reading the letters totally submerged me in amazing levels of detail, some of which was near incomprehensible, even with the notes (yes, more endnotes) to refer to. I suppose if someone attempted to plough their way through all the e-mails I have written in the 15 years I have had access to e-mail, they might find it pretty bewildering if they didn’t know me. Austen’s letters cover a similar period (perhaps more like 20 years), and even if letters weren’t quite as easy to send (they cost money on a per-letter basis for one thing), it’s clear that letters were to Austen as e-mail is to me, at least to a first approximation.
To make things worse for the person not intimately familiar with my activities, if they were to have to read my e-mail in the way that I read Austen’s letters, they would only be given roughly 10% of them. It’s estimated that Austen probably wrote about 2000 letters in her life-time; less than 170 survive. Much of this is due to the efforts of Austen’s biggest correspondent, her sister Cassandra, who destroyed most of their letters. What a biographer would do to go back in time and get their hands on that stash!
Nonetheless, with a little effort, and with the help of the notes and appendices, I did find it possible to keep track of most of the family’s names and inter-relationships. The broad impression is of a very foreign world. Women of Austen’s standing tend not to go anywhere beyond their village or town of residence unless accompanied by a man. A significant portion of women’s lives is dominated by the hunt for material to make new clothes.
In addition to her circumstances, Austen’s character (or 10% of it!) does also come through. She seems to have been witty, understanding, kindly and intelligent. It’s interesting, for example, to read her letters to her niece about whether or not the niece should marry a possible suitor.
The letters are not an easy read, because their paucity makes for disjointed narratives, and because there is so much trivial detail to them. On the other hand, there’s no other way of getting as close to conversing with a famous, long-dead author.
Bach, French suite no. 5 in G, BWV 816. Played by Gustav Leonhardt.
Another kids’ book this one, but with quite a different setting and feel. This story has just a single character as its focus, and is definitely in the fantasy/sci-fi genre. And I use the slash advisedly. Jones’s book is quite a successful meld of science-fiction elements and fantasy. Even at the end of the story, when much of the “magic” is revealed to have science-y explanations (Arthur C. Clarke’s law and all that), there are still elements that are decidedly magical in character.
The young protagonist opens the book as an ordinary human kid, one who gets caught up in events of interstellar significance that are playing out next door in a bit of abandoned land, in the wood of the title. Even as she slowly investigates the weird goings on, we are shown another narrative thread in which some (but not all) of them are explained. This thread is resolutely sci-fi, and actually feels very Iain M. Banks-ian, with its intrigue and dark politics.
There are all sorts of twists and turns, and it’s all very entertaining. I think I even forgive the author for the relatively late appearance of the Arthurian mythos. A good read.
Schubert, sonata for arpeggione in A minor, D.821.
Along with Winter holiday, this is definitely one of my all-time favourite Ransome books. It doesn’t feature any sailing, but it does feature all the Swallows, Amazons and the two D’s. The story is set in the Lake District, but instead of being on the lake of the previous stories, it’s centred on the hills that overlook it.
The adventure this time is based on the search for gold, and features all the technical accoutrements of mining, along with a grown-up rival (memorably called Squashy Hat), and environmental challenges in the form of drought conditions.
The book’s title comes from the neat way the children communicate with their “friendly natives”: they use three homing pigeons to carry messages. The coolness of this device is somehow typical of the whole story; there’s just so much neat stuff that happens.
The story also features a “neat” logical fallacy. Dick reads that
∀x. x = gold ⇒ D(x)
where D is an important property of gold that comes up in the story.
But Dick converts what he reads into the false
∀x. D(x) ⇒ x = gold
and thinks that he has a good test with which to identify gold. This is not really that central to the story, and the error is brushed off quickly when it’s recognised (more important things are afoot). Nonetheless it somehow seems typical that the adventure should require straight thinking.
An absolute children’s classic.
Bach, Komm, heiliger Geist, BWV 651, one of the “Eighteen” chorales.
This book is an impressive collection of diary entries by a large variety of authors. It’s arranged in a clever way: sorted by date within the year, so that every day of the year has two or three entries by that many different authors. For example, on 11 June, there are entries by Violet Jacob (1897), Siegfried Sassoon (1922), Naomi Mitchison (1940) and Harold Nicolson (1942).
I’d heard of many of the diarists. They range from Pepys and Evelyn in the 17th century to Anne Frank and Andy Warhol in the 20th. But there are also a number in the book that I’d never heard of. Whether famous or not, the editors did a good job of picking the diarists. I was little disappointed to see that, apart from Katherine Mansfield, there weren’t any from Australia or New Zealand. Indeed, the only entries that were written in the Southern Hemisphere were by Darwin, and by members of Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic. On the other hand, I was pleased to see entries from non-English speaking diarists: among these were the brothers Goncourt, Goebbels and the Tolstoys.
Some authors are only represented by one or two entries (Darwin has four), but others keep cropping up through the course of the book’s year, and it’s pleasant to be dipping into the various diarists’ stories. Most of the entries are of the 20th century, and the two World Wars are loom large amongst these, but with the great variety in authors, I felt that there was always something new to look forward to as I progressed through the year.
A very enjoyable read.
Summertime, performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Definitely one of the best performances of this standard I’ve ever heard. Fitzgerald and Armstrong bring out a beautiful melancholy in the song.
This is a finely written, compelling novel about four disparate characters in 1970s Bombay. Mistry unfolds quite a saga, drawing the characters together, and gradually making friends of them. This makes for a satisfying read, and there are plenty of obstacles to be overcome as they get there.
Some of the obstacles are within the characters, but a significant number are caused by the deprivation, poverty and exploitation that are unavoidable parts of life in ’70s Bombay. Not having any experience of the time or place, I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but the depiction in this novel makes it seem very real, and quite fascinating. (Yes, a horrid fascination in some ways, but a fascination nonetheless.)
I read this novel with my heart often in my mouth, worried that the author was not going to let his characters have a happy ending. This is a sign of good writing, and it is a good novel. However, I finished it feeling annoyed that Mistry did eventually dispose of his characters in what seemed a rather callous and capricious manner.
Schubert, piano sonata in C minor, D.958, played by Alfred Brendel.
This is an interesting book about modern China, from one journalist’s perspective. Hutcheon doesn’t try to generalise (probably a good thing), and sticks to the particulars of her experiences in China (definitely a good thing). She was there for a number of years as a journalist working for the ABC, and this means she has plenty of material. She also introduces her own background, including an interesting Hong Kong childhood.
While this book won’t necessarily give a total novice a very rounded picture of modern China, it definitely succeeds at conveying a substantial impression. Impressions of rural poverty and political dissidence combine with impressions of the riches and excitement of places like Shanghai. A good read.
Handel, Concerto Grosso, op. 6, no. 12 in B minor.
This is an engaging biography of the famous 17th century diarist. Pepys provides the modern world with eye-witness accounts of the plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of London in 1666, but also provides a revealing window onto his innermost foibles and thoughts. This is quite a contrast with other diarists of the day, such as Pepys’s friend John Evelyn. This additional information about Pepys’s inner life means that his modern biographer can paint a much more rounded picture.
Even in the absence of his diary, Pepys would be an interesting historical personage to observe from afar. He was a great example of a self-made man: he pulled himself into a prominent position, exploiting connections with the high and mighty, but advancing because they valued his administrative skills. For all that nepotism got him a number of his positions initially, his success in the jobs he won makes Pepys an interesting example of an early civil servant. Pepys’s career soon came to centre around the Royal Navy, and the administration of its dockyards and provisioning arrangements. This makes for interesting reading in itself: Pepys was in the heart of things when England fought three successive naval wars against the Dutch. For example, it’s interesting to read about the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667. This coup for the Dutch saw them sail up the Thames, burn a number of ships, and capture the Royal Charles. Pepys was part of the civil service responsible for the Navy, and he had to take care that blame for the disaster did not attach to him.
Earlier in his life, Pepys had to negotiate the tricky waters of the Restoration, when Cromwell’s Protectorate was on the way out, and Charles II needed to be winkled into the nation’s top job. This called for some rather delicate judgement: it was important to time one’s jump into the King’s camp carefully. Too early and the existing government would have you up for treachery; too late and the new government would see you as part of the old regime and to be purged. Pepys was lucky in his benefactors here, and Tomalin describes this part of his career very well.
Tomalin’s biography is also very good on Pepys’s personal life: his relations with his parents, cousins, wife and servants. Pepys comes alive, and I felt I knew and liked him. That’s not to say that he was a saint, but the impression is that he was basically a fairly good-hearted man. When the story of his life comes to an end, and Tomalin describes his deathbed, I felt quite sad about the whole business. That’s surely the sign of a successful biography.
Stan Getz & Dizzy Gillespie, Dark eyes.
This is an interesting narrative history of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. It starts with some introductory material on the world’s earlier dictionaries (Johnson’s was probably the first real dictionary in a modern sense, but it had predecessors going back to even the seventeenth century), before moving onto the long story of the OED.
It was a long story (70–80 years) because no-one seemed to appreciate quite what a massive task it was they were signing themselves up for. Moreover, the initial choices of staff weren’t ideal as far as getting people capable of keeping things organised. It was only when the project started to attract and appoint suitably geeky obsessives that things really got going. Obsessive is good for staying the course, and geeky is good for keeping things in reasonably organised piles. Both are bad for the tendency to perfectionism, and Winchester is amusing on the various ways in which these tendencies manifested themselves.
In addition to the main, central staff (who only moved to Oxford relatively late in the piece), the OED was built on the labour of many distributed contributors, from all walks of life. Winchester provides little biographies of many of these people. Indeed he came to write The meaning of everything because of his earlier book The surgeon of Crawthorne, which is all about one of the contributors (a particularly exotic one).
A diverting read, and it even has a little cameo by Tolkien, who apparently got to do lots of tricky ‘W’ words, including “walrus”.
The more alert among my readers (making the bold assumption that I have any), will have noticed that I have not been as regular with these entries as when I first began this whole web-log business. I offer no excuses (sheer laziness is basically as good as it gets), but do think I may increase entry-frequency a little over the next few months.
Perhaps holding your breath wouldn’t be advisable.
Handel, The Messiah (in a version re-orchestrated by Mozart).
In popular non-fiction, publishers seem to prefer end-notes to footnotes. When they want that little bit of scholarly sheen, they put footnote-worthy material into endnotes. This makes reading the books in question a big pain in the rear. I end up maintaining two bookmarks: one for where I’m up to in the main text, and another for the corresponding position in the end-notes.
I suppose the publishers feel that footnotes either look ugly on the page, or that they make a book look too off-putting when browsed. Either way, I wish they wouldn’t do it.
Part, Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten.
This volume is an impressive collection of 11 “long stories”. In an entertaining introduction, the editor, Richard Ford, explains why he chose this term rather than novella, which is what one might otherwise call this sort of story. The introduction then closes:
And so enough. More than enough, I’m sure. You have the book in hand now. It’s finally got quiet. You can read.
And there’s lots of good stuff to read. All but one of the stories is excellent, and the one that isn’t excellent is simply weird. This odd story, The making of Ashenden by Stanley Elkin, features a self-centred dandy looking for his true love (a love who must meet all sorts of exacting criteria), but who ends up having wild sex with a bear. Yes, it must be a spoof of something; in fact, it’s probably a spoof of a few things, but it makes for a strange reading experience.
On the simply excellent front, I particularly enjoyed June recital by Eudora Welty, The long march by William Styron (which felt a little like a MASH-precursor or influence; it has the right sort of dates), A long day in November by Ernest J. Gaines, The old forest by Peter Taylor, Rosa by Cynthia Ozick, The age of grief by Jane Smiley, and Caroline’s wedding by Edwidge Danticat.
One interesting aspect of many of these stories is that they feature realistic children. In the stories by Welty and Gaines, the children are central, appealing and believable. In The age of grief, Smiley tells a story about a middle-aged couple who happen to have three children, and the children do come across as real, albeit minor, characters. Getting a story to read about well-adjusted adults, in a modern setting that seems fairly normal, is interesting in itself.
The other stories are good too; the whole collection is definitely one I recommend.
Simon Winchester, The meaning of everything.
Nothing; everyone else in the house seems to be asleep even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. This is what being on holiday does to you.
This issue of the literary magzine is a follow-up to Granta 77, which was subtitled What we think of America, and contained lots of comment about America’s place in the world after 11 September, 2001. The new issue turns the first issue’s question on its head, and asks a variety of Americans about how they see the rest of the world.
This issue is better than the first because the political tinge to the writing is reduced. Instead, the writers give a variety of different accounts about leaving the embrace of America and exposing themselves to the world beyond America’s borders. For some this came as a blessed release. Others found that it made them appreciate what they had in America all the more. I also liked these short pieces because of the varying time periods discussed. Some authors chose to describe formative contact with the rest of the world that happened 30 or more years ago.
In the rest of the issue, I particularly liked James Buchan’s piece This is Centerville about a small town in the US, Julian Barnes’s story Knowing French, and Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s story Farangs, featuring a cute pet pig. Weakest in the issue was Man walks into a bar, an excerpt from a novel by James Kelman.
Buddy Greco, The lady is a tramp. Idiosyncratic, but very entertaining.
I really enjoyed this installment of the ongoing Aubrey-Maturin saga. It begins with the dynamic duo in the Pacific, heading east towards South America where Maturin has a mission to foment rebellion against the Spanish. On the way there’s quite a bit of naval excitement, though not much in the way of conventional combat. Instead, there’s an exploding sea-volcano.
Things are good too when the main characters split up, with Aubrey still at sea, and Maturin is plying his trade on shore in Peru. He gets to replenish his supply of coca leaves, see lots of exotic wildlife, and hob-nob with various politicians. It’s well written, and though you miss the interaction between Aubrey and Maturin, their respective situations are both interesting enough, and sufficiently well-described, that you willingly go along with it all.
Schubert, symphony no. 8 in B minor, “Unfinished”, D.759. Played by the Dresden Staatskapelle, conducted by Otmar Suitner.
This is a famous scientific classic. It describes Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle in the mid 1830s. The journey was a circumnavigation of the world, but most of the time was spent to-ing and fro-ing around South America. Darwin famously made it to the Galapagos Islands, but also visited the Cape Verde islands, the Falklands, New Zealand, and Australia. To use the Kiwi jargon, it was the OE to end all OEs.
Darwin’s job on the journey was to be a geologist who knew something about biology. His book is something akin to his official report, so there’s lots of geology and biology in there. For example, one not insubstantial chapter is an extended discussion of how coral atolls came to be formed. (His theory is that the coral originally ringed an island, and that as the island subsided, the coral naturally grew upwards within the increased height of water above it. If the subsidence went on for too long, the coral would die because the lower parts of the organism couldn’t survive at that depth of water. I don’t know if this theory is now considered correct, but it seems pretty convincing.)
Darwin’s biology is also interesting. He was apparently one of the first zoologists to make a point of describing animal behaviour in addition to animal bodies and structures. At this point in his life, he hadn’t realised that all of the variety and similarities he observed could be explained by evolution and natural selection, but there are occasional hints that he is on this path. I find it quite fascinating to see what is to come foreshadowed in his comments. It’s also worth pointing out that he revised the book a few times in the years between returning from the journey and publishing The origin of species, so some of the musing is not necessarily true to what he felt while actually abroad.
A book full of just this material would probably make fairly dry reading. It must be said that Darwin is so enthusiastic about his material that I could even cope with the geology, about which I know very little. But in addition to the science, Darwin also describes the people he meets, from South American generals, to gauchos that acted as his guides in modern-day Argentina, to the miserable people from Tierra del Fuego, to New Zealanders (pakeha and Maori) and Australians (aborigines, convicts and other colonists). It sounds as if he was happy to talk to any and everyone, and he is almost always sympathetic. On a couple of occasions, he vividly describes his encounters with slavery and its hideousness.
If you’re going to follow someone ’round the world, it helps if they’re not only intellectually stimulating, but friendly and engaging as well. Even if you occasionally find Darwin’s 19th century English a little hard-going, this is just what The voyage of the Beagle provides: a fascinating journey with a great guide and companion.
Patrick O’Brian, The wine-dark sea.
Bach, partita no. 4 in D major, BWV 828, played by Wolf Harden.
Two books that I read on planes while travelling recently:
This is the book that made McCall Smith’s name. It’s an enjoyable novel about a middle-aged woman, Precious Ramotswe, and her adventures once she sets up the detective agency of the title. The setting of the novel in Botswana lends it a great deal of interest and charm. There’s simple novelty value here, but McCall Smith also writes appealingly about a country and culture that I knew next to nothing about.
The two books by McCall Smith that I read earlier (Heavenly date and other flirtations and Portuguese irregular verbs) were both effectively collections of short stories. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is similar because it’s naturally structured around the series of cases that Precious investigates and solves. Nonetheless, it does a little better than the other books because Precious has a richer character (in fact we get quite a bit of interesting background on her childhood and father before the agency cases begin), and because there is a little novel-length plotting too. The latter has two dimensions, Precious’s romance with Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, and a longer running case that is rather more sinister than the others.
This is a charming and enjoyable novel. I read it in a single sitting. I’m sure I will read at least one of its many sequels.
I read this short novel on the return journey from Utah. It is a little bundle of ’60s weirdness from someone I believe to be one of America’s prominent novelists. This is the first book of Pynchon’s that I’ve read, but I’ve often seen other novels of his in the “serious” sections of various bookshops. (These novels include Gravity’s rainbow and Mason & Dixon.)
Superficially, The crying of Lot 49 is the story of a woman, Oedipa Maas, who is summoned to be the executor of an ex-lover’s will. As she bums around with the lawyer also attached to the case, she discovers what seems to be an ancient conspiracy to do with postal systems. She investigates and finds all sorts of interesting evidence pointing in this direction, including the possibly doctored text of an Elizabethan play.
It’s impossible to take any of this too seriously. For example, the big company in the town where the lover (Pierce Inverarity) died is called Yoyodyne, and has a “company song” featuring the verses:
High above the L.A. freeways,
And the traffic’s whine,
Stands the well-known Galactronics
Branch of Yoyodyne.
...
Convair boosts the satellite
Into orbits round;
Boeing builds the Minuteman,
We stay on the ground.
Yoyodyne, Yoyodyne,
Contracts flee thee yet.
DOD has shafted thee,
Out of spite, I’ll bet.
The Elizabethan play also has a plot that is clearly an OTT piss-take of the genre. Even as people around Oedipa go bonkers and/or disappear, she never really figures it out. Then it all finishes on a cliff-hanger with the central question quite unresolved.
Weird, and short enough (130pp) to be entertaining.
Charles Darwin, The voyage of the Beagle.
Handel, Concerto grosso in G major, op. 3, no. 3. Played by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, led by Neville Marriner.
Windows XP Service Pack 2. The little green progress bar is only halfway across the “Preparing to download” space. Goodness knows how long the actual download will take.
This is a famous cultural history, first published in the 1920s. It conveys a vivid impression of life in the late Middle Ages, focussing on France and the Netherlands, and describing that period’s art, literature, religion and general beliefs. The first chapter is The violent tenor of life and begins:
To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The constrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All the experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life.
Huizinga describes an incredibly foreign world, one that comes across as dominated by hysteria and delusions. An important part of Huizinga’s thesis is that the Middle Ages didn’t just imperceptibly meld into the Renaissance. Rather, the Middle Ages had its own distinct way of doing things, and of thinking about things. Huizinga describes these patterns of thought and behaviour in rich detail.
For example, a simple characterisation of late medieval art and literature is that it is dominated by sterile allegory. Medieval thought became increasingly detached from the real world, and instead consumed itself in the invention of increasingly baroque symbolism. Nothing was worthy of examination in itself, but had to instead be related to other symbols. Intellectual activity built ever more complicated towers of inter-relationships without ever really considering the true nature of the world: everything was subsumed into symbolism.
Huizinga is interesting on the survival of painting as opposed to literature from this period. It turns out that there’s lots of awful medieval writing still extant, and very few paintings. Moreover, many of the paintings are actually quite appealing. Was there some sort of disconnect between the two fields? Probably not. The histories indicate that the painters we know about were just as willing to do (presumably artistically uninteresting) costume design and scene painting for regal festivities and events. We just don't have so many examples of their bad stuff. It’s easy to see how texts might survive with little effort on the part of their owners. Paintings, on the other hand, are much more likely to be subject to pruning by owners, both at the time of creation, and subsequently. Thus, the paintings that we have from the medieval period may be totally unrepresentative, and provide rather more insight into the attitudes of later periods.
Huizinga also discusses chivalry, love and religion over a number of chapters. For example, he characterises chivalry as a myth the medieval world told itself to make sense of a political and historical situation that it couldn’t otherwise understand. All of these topics are fascinating, and Huizinga’s book does a great job of describing an alien world.
Charles Darwin, The voyage of the Beagle.
Pink Floyd, Don’t leave me now, a song from The Wall.
(I actually read this in an edition that was re-titled as The duel and other tales.) This is a collection of 6 short stories. The first is Gaspar Ruiz: a tale of romance. This story about a South American soldier is set during the period of the wars of liberation, when Spain lost control of its colonies. The setting has some similarities with that of Nostromo, and both stories also centre on characters that are “heroes” and thus subject to a certain degree of Conradian cynicism. Unfortunately, the climax of GR is hard to take very seriously, though the development of the story up to this point is definitely interesting.
Then there’s The informer, which shares its setting with The secret agent, and is about a band of anarchists in turn of the century London. The narrator does a half-way reasonable job of introducing the characters and setting, but the story then fizzles: the climax is quite underwhelming.
Better is The brute, which begins by stylishly leading the reader “up the garden path”. Then, after the twist when everything one has been reading needs to be re-evaluated, I found a certain black humour in what becomes a more conventional sea story. I also enjoyed The anarchist, which tells the story of a French convict. As often happens in Conrad, the convict’s story is framed by another character’s story: the narrator visiting a boring South American island that is redeemed only by a beautiful species of butterfly.
The fifth story is by far the longest. This is The duel, about a pair of French officers who fight a series of duels during the Napoleonic wars. This is an atmospheric yarn, with a happy ending. Definitely enjoyable. Finally, there is the muted story Il conde, about a European aristocrat’s brush with crime in Naples. After finishing, I read my edition’s introduction (by Giles Foden), where I was impressed with the theory that Il conde is actually a disguised story of gay cruising gone wrong. I certainly had to think the story through once more.
Bach, The well-tempered clavier, Book 1. This
recording is played by Angela Hewitt on the piano, and is published by
Hyperion (serial number CDA67301/2). I bought this
recording just a fortnight ago, and I definitely like it. My other
recording has Bob van Asperen on the harpsichord. What with the
Naxos recordings of Scarlatti’s sonatas, which are all on the piano
too, and a version of the Goldberg variations on piano, my music
collection is losing its ideologically pure cast.
Particularly with Bach, one can’t afford to be too precious about this: Bach clearly intended lots of his keyboard music to be played on whatever instrument was available, and towards the end of his life, was even approached to try out new-fangled forte-piano instruments that were being developed at the time. In any case, the criterion for judgement has to be whether or not one finds the music beautiful. With Hewitt there’s no doubt: I’ve had the CDs on many times in the past two weeks.
This big fat book covers the given period in detail, but without often managing to convey much of a unifying theme. If there’s a big, simple story to tell to summarise this period, Mundy doesn’t come out and give it to the reader explicitly. Instead, the reader has to construct it themselves. Given that I read the book over too long a period, I didn’t often feel that I had enough detail in my head to allow such a synthesis.
Here’s my best attempt: this period is characterised by the growth in power of the states, particularly France, the miniature states of northern Italy, and also England. Simultaneously, the German empire is collapsing. In the religious sphere, the papacy asserts its dominance over local ecclesiastical hierarchies, but otherwise loses influence over the states.
This story is very much behind the scenes in Mundy’s book. Instead, his pages are dominated by descriptions of various aspects of medieval life in this period. For example, he talks about various social classes, many aspects of the Church (monasteries, itinerant orders, cathedrals), and the economy. I was particularly fascinated to hear that in this period, various states started issuing tradable debt. In other words, you could buy (and trade in) the equivalent of national bonds. Mundy is very good on how this activity interacted with the Church’s prohibition of usury. In an earlier section, he also discusses how Jews fared in performing this activity themselves.
Hinted at, but never explicitly dealt with because they come after his time period, are the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. Mundy gives the impression that these are going to completely devastate a continent that is otherwise developing in a variety of fascinating ways. Sometimes it seems the best efforts of humanity count as naught in the face of random environmental hostility. (No doubt they brought the war on themselves, but the Black Death doesn't seem fair to inflict on anyone.)
All this good stuff is tied together in a way that is rather bitty (again, not helped by my reading it over such a long stretch of time). Mundy also has a writing style that is quite dry, and that occasionally results in sentences that have to be read twice in order to figure out what they mean.
Joseph Conrad, The duel and other tales.
Beethoven, Cello sonata no. 3 in A major, op. 69. Played by Sviatoslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich.
This, the umpteenth volume in the 20-book series, is quite a good read, though perhaps a little slow-moving. It has Aubrey and Maturin back in Polynesia for the first time since The far side of the world, and features lots of ship-life: the ways in which a cloistered, and rigidly hierarchical society reacts to changing circumstances. In this book, the changing circumstances are mainly brought about by the unexpected presence of a woman, Clarissa Oakes, on board. The series’ familiar characters react to her in a variety of ways, and she’s an interesting character in her own right.
All in all, this volume’s focus is definitely the study of character. O’Brian does this well, but the plot is pretty low-key. A dastardly French scheme is eventually dealt with in the later sections of the book, but there’s not a great deal of “action” otherwise. Moreover, this scheme’s defeat has something of a “tacked-on” feel, though it’s not as bad as in The Ionian mission. There are no dramatic sea-battles at all, and the one violent conflict in the whole novel happens very much off-screen.
Charpentier, Messe de minuit.
This is the third novel in Colfer's series about Artemis Fowl. I thought the first was neat, but was a little cooler about the second. I thought this one as good as the first, and found it very entertaining. The usual cast of good guys features, and they have some interesting bad guy problems to sort out. Though the fairies and criminal master-mind Artemis Fowl are co-operating again (something I held against book 2, The Arctic incident), they are up against a more interesting opponent than they were before. The eventful plot is laced with typical humour, and I raced through it, enjoying it all.
Ella Fitzgerald, Ev’ry time we say good-bye.
This is an enjoyable collection of short stories on a variety of romantic themes. Most of them are quirky in appealing ways. There’s just one, set in southern Africa and about a new marriage, that packs much emotional punch. The punch is definite and effective, the story is memorable, but even here there’s an unexpected twist. The other stories tend to produce smiles, as the reader responds appreciatively to the dry and effective wit with which McCall Smith presents his often rather odd situations. For example, there's the Australian woman who goes on a blind date in Queensland, and is thoroughly sick of her man by the time they reach a crocodile farm. Then there's the date between the two people of “larger stature” and its amusing finale.
The title story comes last, and is different again: it has an impressive hushed tone to it, one that also conveys a sense of being slightly high on a hallucinatory drug. It’s an impressive finish to an entertaining read.
Beethoven, Lenora overture #3. The Philharmonia conducted by Vladimir Ashkenzay. (Decca 400 060-2)
This is the fourteenth book of the series. Like many of its predecessors, it’s not very novel-like in its construction. Instead of a story-arc with a beginning, development, climax and denouement, we’re dropped into the company of a couple of 19th century heroes and get to spend an extended period of time with them as they go about their business. In a multi-volume series such as O’Brian’s this is fair enough, and it works well because the characters are appealing, and because they get to do cool stuff.
At the end of the previous book, Aubrey, Maturin and the crew were castaways on a desert island in south-east Asia. This next instalment sees them eventually escape this island, chase down a French enemy and then journey to New South Wales. Maturin takes a back seat in much of this action, but is always on hand to comment and describe things from his own perspective. Correspondingly, Aubrey acts, but we hear his voice less.
This volume ends with less of a cliff-hanger than the previous one, but I’m sure any number of exciting adventures are still to come.
Bach, Goldberg variations, played by Chen Pi-Hsien, on Naxos 8.550078.
This book is a combination of four novels that originally came out as separate volumes. The first is clearly a children’s book, and is the story of King Arthur’s childhood, right up until the moment when he pulls the sword from the stone. Disney made a cartoon film version that is apparently reasonably faithful to the book; I think I may have seen it. The book features a Merlyn who sends Arthur off on various magical adventures, turning him into various species of animal along the way.
The tone is rather odd. It’s a bit like Wodehouse in the Middle Ages, and though it generally works quite well (is amusing), it can be disconcerting to read something that takes itself with so little seriousness. Harry Potter has funny-ridiculous bits in it, but doesn’t feature Pellinore’s Questing Beast moping itself to death because Pellinore has stopped pursuing it.
In the remaining three books, the story gets considerably
more serious and adult, though things are still leavened by
occasional flashes of (rather silly) wit. For example, Lancelot
is described as the best knight in the world, the Bradman
of the knighting world, top of the battling averages
.
(And if you don’t get that joke, all four novels may well leave
you rather cold.)
But the tone in these three is much darker. This is a national myth with a tragic ending, and all the ingredients are there: the love triangle between Guinevere, Lancelot and Arthur; Mordred the result of an incestuous coupling between Arthur and Morgause, and the gradual descent of an idealistic institution into rivalry and war. Even individual scenes can stand alone as seriously creepy: a cat being killed for a spell, hunting and killing a unicorn, and an unhinged and dangerous Mordred confronting Guinevere. It’s somewhat off-putting to have such dramatic material leavened with silliness, and you will definitely be disappointed if all you expect is four volumes of jolly romp. On the other hand, the central characters are all drawn sympathetically (particularly Lancelot), and their development over 20 or more years is pictured rather well. If you can cope with the variability in tone, you will find much to admire and enjoy here.
Schubert, symphony no. 5 in D flat major, D485. The Staatskapelle Dresden, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, recorded in 1967. (Philips 446 539-2, another cheap 2CD set.)
This book is an interesting and well-written successor to the two earlier books on the Middle Ages (The birth of the Middle Ages, and The crucible of Europe), covering the 11th and 12th centuries, finishing with the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Though Southern provides a good narrative description of that crusade, most of his book avoids high-level political and military stories. Instead, he talks about Church politics (the Popes began to get a firmer grip of the European church in this period), politics at the local level (the counts of Anjou are an interesting case study), social history (the development of the institution of serfdom is particularly fascinating) and intellectual history.
The latter provides lots of interesting material. It was in this period that European intellectuals came out of their shells and felt that they were once more part of a wider community. Students from all over Europe journeyed to France (Paris and Reims are mentioned in particular) just to study logic. New monastic orders, such as the Cistercians, played a part in this, as they tended to allow their monks more time away from the full day's rites of the Benedictines. But, knowledge was still seriously limited. I was particularly struck by Southern’s story about two top French scholars of the day arguing over what was meant by “internal angles” in Boethius’ claim that “the internal angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles”. They still had an incredible amount to learn, and their access to original sources (Aristotle in Greek, rather than limited Aristotle via Boethius) was still poor.
It makes me quite appreciative of the enormous distance education and knowledge have come in the last 900 years.
Andrew March, Marine—à travers les arbres. Winner of the Masterprize 1998 competition.
This is Conrad’s second novel, and a prequel to his first, Almayer’s folly. It tells the story of the downfall of Willems, a Dutch clerk in the South-East Asian town of Macassar. Willems fancies himself quite rotten, but is actually without any real virtues. Given the chance to redeem himself, he always takes some other option. It’s pretty obvious from the outset that this is going to be the case, so the novel is really about watching how his gradual descent messes up the lives of the people around him. Standard Conradian good cheer, then.
The setting for most of the novel is the same as the setting for Almayer’s folly, an obscure Malaysian village, on an isolated river. Willems ends up there after his downfall begins in the colonial world of Macassar. He is supposed to be sitting things out before his benefactor and patron, Lingard, sorts things out for him. Unfortunately, Lingard’s return is delayed, and Willems goes a bit haywire. He is getting on badly with Lingard’s agent in the village, Almayer, and is exploited by a disaffected faction within the Malay political structure. All sorts of disruptive change ensues.
I liked the political intrigue side of things, and the lush writing about the jungle and its oppressiveness is also very effective. The love interest is reasonably sympathetic, but the woman’s character is not entirely believable. The love affair at the heart of Almayer’s folly, is more believable, more engaging, and more important to the overall plot. Here it’s just another opportunity for Willems to mess up someone else’s life.
Not top drawer Conrad, but flashes of great writing, and a reasonably engaging story.
Bach, Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147. A cantata written for performance on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 20 December 1716. (Naxos 8.554042)
This short and readable book is another in my current history bout. It takes up where Moss’s The birth of the Middle Ages left off, with the reign of Charlemagne. It concentrates on the ninth and tenth centuries, and follows the fortunes of those areas that were a part of Charlemagne’s empire: France, Germany and northern Italy. Barraclough also includes one brief chapter on England.
First, Barraclough explains how the great Carolingian Empire collapsed into a multitude of statelets over a relatively short period. It’s easy to imagine that the death of a great leader should prompt the undoing of his achievements, but Charlemagne’s empire was stretched even before his death. It was an ongoing military enterprise that depended on continuing expansion for its health. When it stopped expanding as its own ability to govern what it had taken declined, it started to collapse in on itself. Then there were also significant external pressures leading to downfall. Attacking from the North, the Vikings represented a serious, ongoing danger, one that the Franks had no real answer to. In the East, Slavs and Magyars threatened the borders, and places like Saxony, nominally within the Empire were restive. In the South, Saracen pirates threatened the Mediterranean coasts.
In relatively settled, but rural France, political unity was quickly lost, and political power devolved to the county, a level at which self-defence could be organised. On these units French feudalism was to gradually emerge. In Germany, the pressures of life on the frontiers of Christendom meant that a strong central state had a real raison d'être. Much larger political units, duchies, were the rule, and later, under Otto I, Germany was the most significant power in Western Europe. It controlled chunks of Italy, and manipulated the Church up to the level of the Pope. In Italy, life was relatively settled, as in France, and the cities and towns remained significant centres. Feudalism in the French style, centred on the county, did not arise. Instead, cities and bishops came to dominate the political scene.
Barraclough’s chapter on England is a strange little interlude. He quickly tells the story of how Alfred grew the kingdom of Wessex into the dominant force on the island, eventually managing to expel the Danish invaders. Barraclough describes the administrative arrangements in England, and contrasts them with what was happening in the other areas of interest.
I read this book in a single sitting, and appreciated its interesting mix of narrative history with comparative analyses of political and administrative systems.