(2010)
Xenophon:
The Persian Expedition
Mathew Lyons:
Impossible Journeys
Greg Mortenson and David
Oliver Relin:
Three Cups of Tea
William Golding:
The Scorpion God
Nick Hornby:
Slam
Andromeda Romano-Lax:
The Spanish Bow
Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle:
Sherlock Holmes
Kate Grenville:
The Lieutenant
Kazuo Ishiguro:
An Artist of the
Floating World
A Pale View of Hills
William Trevor:
Beyond the Pale &
Other Stories
Ford Madox Ford:
The Good Soldier
Carlos Ruiz Zafón:
The Shadow of the
Wind
Nadine Gordimer:
Jump
Bruce Chatwin:
The Songlines
Markus Zusak:
The Book Thief
Jeannette Walls:
The Glass Castle
Daniel Everett:
Don't Sleep, there are Snakes
Irene Pepperberg:
Alex and Me
Patricia Duncker:
The Strange Case of
the Composer and his Judge
William Boyd:
Ordinary
Thunderstorms
John Tyndall:
Hours of Exercise in
the Alps
Poets of the First World
War:
Anthem for
Doomed Youth
Richard Price:
Lush Life
Annie Proulx:
The Shipping News
E.L. Doctorow:
Homer and Langley
The situation in the Middle East in the year 401BC
was the following. Artaxerxes II was the Emperor of Persia - that is to say
all of what is now Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and
Egypt. His younger brother, Cyrus, was the Governor of the Turkish part of
all that. Communication in those days was considerably slower than it is
nowadays, and so a certain misunderstanding developed between the brothers.
Therefore Cyrus decided to take matters into his own hands, march over to
Babylon - near present-day Baghdad - and kill his brother, thus performing
that miraculous act which has been eternally hoped for down through the ages
(and indeed into our present epoch), namely regime
change in the Middle East. However, unfortunately for Cyrus, and
for Xenophon, the author of the present book, Artaxerxes II was able to kill
Cyrus first, so that the regime did not change and Xenophon was forced to
get out!
Xenophon's motive for joining Cyrus in the first place was not
of a military nature. He was an educated, upper-class citizen of Athens,
hoping to obtain a favorable position under Cyrus in Western Turkey, which
in those days was largely Greek. Before setting off on this adventure, he
asked the advice of his mentor, Socrates, who didn't think it was such a
wonderful idea. But despite this, Xenophon set of to Sardis, which was
located in Lydia, and joined up there with Cyrus, who seemed to be in the
process of organizing an expedition into Pisidia for the purpose of getting
those unruly Pisidians back under Persian control. He had a largish army,
together with about 10,000 Greek mercenaries, both heavily armed hoplites
and the lighter, more agile peltasts. Both of these types were infantry
soldiers, mainly from Greece proper (not the Greek cities such as Pergamon
or Miletus along the western coast of present-day Turkey). In 401BC, Sparta
had emerged victorious from the Peloponnesian war and was thus the
dominating force in Greece. They contributed a contingent of about 1,000
soldiers to Cyrus' army, under the command of the Spartan general,
Clearchus. So all together, the Greeks in Cyrus' army - The 10,000 - were a hardened, brutal, cohesive body of
seasoned warriors.
At first they were somewhat put off by the fact that
Cyrus kept them moving past Pisida and Lycaonia and on into Cilicia. It was
obvious that Cyrus had tricked them into this war of fratricide. Arriving
finally at the abundant, fruitful country, full of canals where the Median
Wall joined the Tigris and the Euphrates just north of Babylon, we have the
battle of Cunaxa. According to Xenophon, Cyrus' forces were far outnumbered
by those of Artaxerxes, yet the Greek divisions, and particularly the
powerful hoplites, swept easily through the Persian ranks which crumbled
before them. And yet, despite the fact that they had won the battle, Cyrus
had been so rash as to put himself in danger, and he was stabbed with a
spear.
There followed a confusing few days. Should they take up
Artaxerxes' offer to join his army? Or should they ask him to let them
travel peacefully back to Greece? In the end, despite solemn agreements
before the gods, the Persian general Tissaphernes lured the Greek generals
into their camp where, in the middle of a banquet, they were suddenly taken
and murdered. Thus the Greeks were left without their leaders in hostile
territory, a thousand or more miles from safety, with Artaxerxes determined
to exterminate them in order to discourage any similar incursions on his
realm. They marched north along the Tigris, easily defeating Tissapherenes'
forces. Suddenly they encountered the mountains of the Carduchi. That must
be the people who are the present-day Kurds. They tried to tell them that
they just wanted to travel peacefully through their country, but of course
the Carduchi were having none of that. So they fought their way through, and
then through the country of the Armenians, and then the Chalybes. Brutal
fighting, deceiving the enemy on high mountain passes, seizing supplies,
ravaging the countryside. For mobility they had left their tents behind, and
they wore the light clothes of ancient Greece: sandals, short tunics. Thus
they withstood the subzero mountain nights, sinking into six feet of snow,
suffering from frostbite and snow blindness. This is a toughness beyond
anything which the modern mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, living in
their comfortable fortified bases, could imagine.
Eventually they reached the Black Sea and the few Greek
settlements along the coast. But what were they then to do? Who was to feed
them? The Greek towns were afraid of this force of rough, powerful
mercenaries which suddenly appeared from nowhere. They lived off the land,
pillaging the surrounding, non-Greek population. After more adventures they
arrived at Byzantium where the Spartan governor quickly banished them
outside the city wall. Xenophon, who had taken a commanding role in the
whole business by then, got into an agreement with some prince or other of
Thrace, who used the army in order to bring himself to power. Yet he failed
to keep his half of the agreement, withholding the soldier's pay, thus
causing much further trouble. Finally the Spartans decided to ship them back
across the Hellespont into Asia, from where they had originally started, and
Xenophon left them.
The true March of the
Ten Thousand is described in only about 60 pages, but then all the
messy details of what to do with them once they arrive back in Greek
territory goes on for over 100 pages, which was a bit tedious. Nevertheless
it is a clearly related account of what it was like, what the people were
thinking and saying, what the tribes they fought against were like. No
boring, irrelevant philosophical speculations. But it was interesting to
read that before any actions were taken, they always sacrificed a sheep, or
whatever, examining the inner organs in the belief that this was the way the
gods would tell them whether or not the situation was auspicious. Often they
stayed for days in a bad position, waiting for positive signs from the gods.
This reminded me of reading years ago of similar rituals in ancient Japan,
where travelers would wait for days before setting out, then travel in the
opposite direction from that which was intended in order to pacify the gods.
How ridiculous!
The one reviewer of this book at Amazon was not
very impressed. However the Folio Society published an edition of it this
year, and from their description it sounded interesting, so I ordered it.
The book consists of 24 "Tales", such as "The Walker's Tale", "The
Drunkard's Tale", "The Cannibal's Tale", and so on. I suppose we are meant
to think of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales". But unlike those, the "Tales" in
this book are all very much the same and deal with a subject which at first
is amusing, but by the time one reaches the 15th or 20th "Tale", the novelty
and amusement has worn thin.
Most of the stories are concerned with European explorers
of the 16th century, setting off in their little ships and discovering parts
of the Americas, or searching for possible North-West, or North-East
Passages to the Pacific. In contrast to the modern-day surfer of the
Internet, scrolling about in GoogleEarth, they were in ignorance of the
details of the Earth's geography. And yet it is a weakness of human nature
that people wish to appear competent, sometimes filling in the gaps of
knowledge with invented stories. The modern reader in the Age of Information
smiles with amusement at the failings of those people of the past. But after
all, surely the stories of these explorers are worthy of admiration and
wonder rather than merely laughing about them in a book such as this.
The adventurer of today, wind-surfing across the
Atlantic, or paddling a canoe across the Pacific, or walking across
Antarctica, or whatever else they do, cannot be compared with the explorers
of the 16th century. Today's adventurers are in constant contact with
civilization via satellite telephones; they know precisely where they are
using GPS; the people they generally encounter also have televisions and are
familiar with the same "news" about the state of the world which fills the
mind of the modern traveler. If, despite this, misunderstandings develop,
then the local diplomatic representatives can be expected to be called on
for help.
I thought the last two stories in the book were the most
interesting. As with all of the "Tales", they were frustratingly short. But
these last two stories are somewhat longer - 29 pages together - and they
deal with the travels of Sir
Walter Raleigh in the year 1595, in his search for the lost city of El
Dorado, somewhere around the Orinoco
River in modern-day Venezuela. Raleigh is considered to be one of the
great poets of the Age of Shakespeare. His dealings with the Indians of
South America were fair, and he lacked the brutality which characterized the
early Spanish conquistadors. Yet after the death of Queen Elizabeth, he was
dealt with harshly by James the 1st, spending 13 years locked away in a cell
in the Tower of London. James then released him, sending him on another
hopeless expedition to the imaginary El Dorado. On his return, he was
summarily beheaded.
Three
Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
What a wonderful (true) story! Greg Mortenson was a
mountain climber in a group trying to climb K2, which is the second highest
mountain in the world, in the Karakorum Mountains of Northern Pakistan. One
of the group, a Frenchman, got himself into trouble and had to be rescued by
Mortenson. The rescue was so difficult that he himself was barely able to
make it back down to thicker air. Stumbling down, he took a wrong path and
ended up in the tiny mountain village of Korphe, above the Braidu River,
which is a tributary of the Indus. The people there nursed him back to
health, and after living with them, learning the rudiments of the local
language, he determined to return and build a school for the children of
Korphe. This was in the year 1993.
It's a long and involved story, totally to be
recommended. In the end what happened is that a character named Jean
Hoerni - a Swiss living in the U.S.A. who invented the integrated
circuit; the basis of all of today's computer technology - gave him $12,000
to build the school. When it was finished, Hoernli, in his testament,
founded the Central Asia Institute, or CAI, with a million dollars, in order
to allow Mortenson to continue establishing many further new schools in the
Karakorum.
Greg Mortenson's work is devoted to bringing education to
the children - and very particularly to the girls
- in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The education of women is
the key to a better society. In village after village, everybody realizes
this truth. There is a beautiful photo in the book of the men of Korphe
carrying the heavy wooden beams for the roof of the new school on their
backs, and leading the procession (of 18 miles) is the mullah of Korphe, a
man in a comparable position to say the Catholic priest in a mountain
village in Spain, an old man, yet carrying his load proudly, thinking of the
future of the girls of his village! And the book ends with Greg Mortenson
traveling from Kabul northwards, through the rugged mountains into the
valley of Faizabad. He is unsure of his reception by the local "warlord",
Sadhar Kahn. But when Kahn discovers that it is "Dr. Greg" who has come, he
embraces him and immediately asks eagerly about Mortenson's possible plans
for further schools for girls in his province.
This book consists of three longish short stories -
or perhaps one could say short novellas. But they are really too short and
lacking in substance to be called that. I was disappointed, since most
things by William Golding are so very good. In these stories he imagines
what life might have been like for (a) an Egyptian Pharaoh, (b) a
prehistoric tribeswoman - and man, somewhere in the African savanna, and (c)
a Roman Emperor. The stories (a) and (b) were first published in 1971, when
Golding was 60 years old, and (c) was first published in 1956. Thus they
cannot be dismissed as the obscure and aberrant scribblings of the Young
Author.
The Egyptian pharaoh story seemed to me to be extremely
far-fetched. Of course we have no real idea about the day-to-day life of
those pharaohs. Was it exclusively concerned with public sexual couplings
between the pharaoh and his various children, or between the children
amongst themselves, to the exclusion of all else? Certainly the subject of
incest within the ancient Egyptian nobility does provide the author with a
welcome opportunity to explore obscure and titillating themes. Nevertheless,
the fact is that there was a whole string of dynasties down through the
history of ancient Egypt. And so it is obvious that if one pharaoh let
himself go into such a degenerate state of depravity as in this story, then
there were many usurpers waiting in the wings, all too eager to violently
depose the old dynasty and start a more vigorous new one. Were the pharaohs
warrior kings, leading their armies into the field, and thus fulfilling the
traditional role of a king? This seems to me to be a more plausible scenario
than the other possibility which is exemplified by the emperors of Japan. As
living gods, secluded from life in the real world, I am sure the Japanese
emperors lived their lives in great sobriety, and thus they were not subject
to the envy of common mortals. As a result, there has been an unbroken
dynasty of over 2500 years in Japan.
The story of the prehistoric tribes-people depicts them
as being very childish. Perhaps William Golding was imagining the
australopithecus phase of human prehistory here. On the other hand, the men
in the story wear loincloths, and the women grass skirts. Surely this would
be beyond the capacity of an australopithecus. He emphasizes the role of the
women in the tribe, reflecting the newly resurgent feeling of Women's
Liberation which was sweeping through the tribe of English people, to which
he belonged in 1971.
Finally the Roman emperor story does not attempt to
identify the protagonist with any one individual in that long list of
quickly deposed of figures who gained that position in the ancient world.
Instead, the story seems to have been motivated by Golding's experiences in
World War 2, with all of its mechanized, mass murders. The Roman emperor
gets to know a Greek genius in the field of "natural philosophy", who
constructs a paddle-wheel ship, propelled by a piston steam engine, and
armed with cannon, firing bombs filled with gunpowder. It's all a bit like
Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court - far-fetched, but without the humor of Mark Twain.
William Golding's emperor then asks the Captain of his soldiers whether or
not he thinks these weapons of mass destruction would be a good thing to
have. But the Captain answers - somewhat implausibly - that he would prefer
not to have them, since if they were employed, he would then lose his job.
I suppose all of this was meant to fall into the category
of satire. But it seems to me that William Golding required a book-length
story to really warm to such a subject. As far as satire is concerned, his
novel The Paper Men is a
masterpiece! In contrast, this book is surprisingly childish.
Slam,
by Nick Hornby
A very funny book. I just had to laugh. The
protagonist is Sam, a 16 year old teenager in London who spends his time
skateboarding about on all of the concrete of the big city while thinking
about his hero, Tony Hawk, a person
I had never heard of before reading this book. But it seems that this is the
Great Figure in the skateboarding scene. Sam introduces Tony Hawk to the
reader in the first few pages, but then we are told that from now on, he
will be referred to as "TH". I would recommend that you click around a few
of the Tony Hawk web sites on the Internet, looking at some of the videos. I
was impressed with what he can do. But as with ice skating (a subject which
Sam looks upon with disdain), watching an endless collection of people on
television during the Winter Olympics, jumping in the air, rotating about
themselves 2 1/2, or 3, or 3 1/2 times, or whatever it is, and then falling
down, then getting up to try it once more, etcetera, does become rather
tedious.
Sam admits that he is not such an expert at
skateboarding. He tells us that the various members of his family have
distinguished themselves by having children when they themselves were
children. Thus, for example, at the time Sam is 16 years old, his mother is
only 32 years old. To some of Sam's friends, his mother is sufficiently
young and attractive for them to ask him if she is available! But still, he
gets along with her very well. His father, also in his early 30s, has, of
course, progressed to other things, and he lives somewhere else in London
with his "real" family. Because of all the disruptions caused by having a
baby at the age of 16, both his mother and his father have, if anything,
descended downwards in the hierarchy of society. Thus Sam tells himself -
and also he tells the poster of TH hanging on his bedroom wall - that he
will definitely not follow this family tradition, ruining his life by having
a baby before he grows up.
Of course things turn out differently. His mother
introduces him to the daughter of a friend of hers; they fall madly in love;
there are problems with all these condoms and things and she becomes
pregnant, to the horror of Sam. But the girlfriend, Alicia, definitely wants
the baby. So Nick Hornby leads us through all the various scenes this
involves - through the eyes of the 16 year old Sam. The parents of the
parents are on the whole supportive. Sam's mother, who becomes a grandmother
at the age of 32 or 33 (and who will probably become a great-grandmother at
the age of 48, or so!) herself becomes pregnant. Thus Sam's little boy is
older than his newly-born little aunt. And so it goes. An nice story with a
happy ending.
There is a very nice picture of the author, an
attractive young woman with an unusual, astronomical name, both inside the
back cover of this paperback, and also the same picture is found on her
web-page, which I've linked to here. She is an amateur cellist who lives in
Alaska. The extremes of humidity of that arctic climate have led her to play
a cello built not of wood, but rather of a carbon-fiber, composite material.
This book concentrates on a fictional Spanish character who we are supposed
to think of as being the real-life, famous cellist, Pablo Casals. And then
much is made of the life of this fictional character being shaped by the
cello bow which his father gave him as a small boy. The bow of the book is
presumably made of wood, I suppose of the South American, tropical variety.
Whether or not Andromeda Romano-Lax's cello bow is also made of carbon-fiber
composite, or perhaps titanium, or more mundanely, Alaskan spruce, or
whatever else grows there, is a question which is left floating in the air
for the reader to decide for himself.
In any case, I know from personal experience that
traditional cello bows, which seem to me to be simple pieces of carved wood
which a practiced workman could fashion from a raw plank in a couple of
hours, cost more than I can possibly imagine that they are worth. Why is it
that the bow we bought years ago - a good quality one, but hardly the most
expensive cello bow on offer - cost more than each of the baroque flutes
which I have bought from Rudolf Tutz, the most famous modern maker of
baroque woodwind instruments? Such a flute, having only one key, might at
first appear to be a simple instrument, but thinking about it, I count at
least 16 different parts which must fit perfectly together. Then the
embouchure must be carefully and individually carved out of the headpiece,
and each of the finger holes must also be carefully shaped, and the whole
thing exhaustively tuned with further fine adjustments of carving. String
players, who are traditionally thought to be "highly strung", may continue
to say that the ridiculous prices they pay for their bows are worth it. But
I know that Rudolf Tutz, who is a genius with wood, and is in addition a
magnificent specimen of all that is great in the Austrian character,
produces works of true and lasting art at a fair price!
But to progress from the subject of over-priced cello
bows to the contents of this book, I did enjoy reading through most of it,
but then at the end, I must admit that I lost interest and gave up. The
character of this imagined Pablo Casals was somewhat overly romanticized. As
with Mozart, the real-life Casals had an overbearing, dominating father who
forced the poor little Pablo to devote his life to tedious mechanical
exercises, away from the healthy open air and play which a normal young boy
is allowed to enjoy. In the book, the more human but less believable,
romanticized Pablo - whose name is "Feliu" - joins up with a somewhat older
character who was also a wonder-child, characterized as "The Spanish
Mozart". Together they tour around Spain and the rest of Europe in the first
part of the 20th century. This Spanish Mozart is given the name "Justo
Al-Cerraz". Somehow, this Justo seemed to me to be a more believable
character. A hard-drinking party-goer from whom the music just flows,
equally on the concert stage or in a night-club or at a private dinner
party. But as far as Pablo is concerned, years ago we got a CD with a
collection of some of Casals' "Early Recordings" from the 1920s. They are
all short pieces with piano accompaniment. Now it is certainly true that
musical fashion has changed much in the 90 years between then and now. But
still, what I hear on this CD is a metronome-like, plodding style, perhaps
dragged along by the uninspired piano, with a huge, mechanical vibrato. This
is a world away from the wonderful playing of a Jacqueline du Pré, who moved
me to tears, along with so many other people back then in the 1960s.
Whenever I see that great character, Danial Barenboim, I think of how she
and he played together all those years ago. What greater things are there in
the world? They are the people who inspired me during those psychedelic
1960s.
Anyway, as the book progresses, Feliu, the hero, becomes
a kind of Forrest Gump of Spain in the age of dictators. He is present at
all the great historical moments of King Alfonso XIII and Queen Ena, telling
them what to do in life. He is ever present at the various defining moments
of Franco's life, travels over to Washington to tell FDR what to do, then
back to Europe. At this point, I gave up on the book. But I do see that he
also had great dealings with Hitler and Mussolini, and I suppose Churchill
and whichever other characters of that tragic epoch of Earth's history which
came into the mind of Andromeda. On the other hand, I will admit that she
did motivate me to google many of the details of Spanish history of that
time, and so I did gain something from this book.
The retina in my right eye again detached itself!
Another operation, this time somewhat more severe than last time. Not a good
thing. From now on I will try to be most careful with the eyes. They are not
as robust as one thinks, particularly as we get older.
So I have been unable - or at least it has been an
unpleasant exercise to try - to read for the past few weeks. In order to
pass the time, I decided to try listening to some audio books. The Project
Gutenberg people have a collection, some of which are read by computer, and
some by people.
In fact, I remember that my first Apple Macintosh
computer, which I got 25 years ago, back in 1985, had a program which read
out loud any text which you clicked on. A nice gimmick, which I showed to
people who had gotten themselves the old IBM-PC, with its 8088 processor.
Their computers couldn't speak!
Still, the voice of the old Macintosh was not something
you would want to listen to for hours on end. Judging from the offerings at
Project Gutenberg, I find that zero progress has been made in the last 25
years in the direction of getting computers to speak in a more human way.
Thus I would recommend avoiding such things, and instead it is best to look
for audio books read by real people.
Most of the ones at Gutenberg start every chapter with a
standard announcement, in which the reader says that "This is an audio
recording from 'Librivox.org',
etc. etc." Then the reader goes on to read that chapter. Well, this Librivox
thing is, like Wikepedia, made by people just clicking themselves in and
contributing what they can. Fair enough.
Unfortunately though, almost all of the readers have
unpleasant voices. But I suppose this is understandable. Imagine a similar
project in the realm of music, where, let us say, the goal is to have a
complete set of audio recordings of all of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cantatas.
We could establish a web-domain, say with the name "bachcanvox.org". Then we
would start it off by stating the purpose of this great project, and ask
interested readers for help, in that they could send in mp3 files of their
recordings of whatever they might be able to contribute. In order to avoid
unnecessary repetition, we could include a list in bachcanvox.org of the
various movements, individual vocal numbers and what have you, which are
still missing from the whole collection.
And what would be the result of our "bachcanvox.org"
project? It would be a horrible mess! Every frustrated housewife, or
businessman in a midlife crisis, would suddenly discover that if only the
world could hear their voice, as it really
sounds, then true happiness and fulfillment must surely follow. Any innocent
seeker of "www" surfing pleasures, happening to click into bachcanvox.org,
and onto one of its mp3 offerings with the expectation of sublime
entertainment, would be shocked to discover a hodge-podge of halting,
dissonant, disagreeable voices. Such a seeker would click out into something
else as quickly as possible! Good riddance. In reality, there is a site,
called "http://www.bach-cantatas.com", which gives lots of information about
the subject, and also describes various sensible recordings of the music by
truly competent people.
Perhaps I am being unfair to librivox.org in writing all
this. Most of their readers are Americans. Despite George W. Bush, I am not
basically against things which are American. After all, I also have a
more-or-less American accent. My friends in our reading circle are all
Americans, and I find their voices pleasant, and I always look forward to
hearing what they say about one thing and another. But perhaps there is
something in the American character which encourages a person with no
aptitude for a given thing to do it anyway, and then to applaud him, despite
the fact that the performance is substandard. At least I know that my voice
is so dreadful that it would be an unforgivable bit of hubris for me to
presume to read the chapter of some book or other and then submit it to
librivox.org.
For some reason, the German readers who have presumed to
sent their offerings to librivox.org generally do have very pleasant voices.
I have listened to large parts of "Ein
Sommer in London", by Theodor Fontane. Most of it is read by a
fellow with a really great voice. But then it is interrupted by the odd
chapter read by somebody with the most dreadful voice imaginable.
Gutenberg does also have some recordings by a group
within the website "http://literalsystems.org/abooks/index.php". The readers
are people with sensible voices: actors, and whatever. They have placed
their work in the public domain. But unfortunately they have only recorded a
very few, very short things which are hardly worth listening to. And they
seem to only bother to contribute very sporadically.
However I was able to find a good collection of audio
books at Project Gutenberg! This is its collection of Sherlock Holmes
stories. I have now listened to all of The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, His
Last Bow, The Return of Sherlock
Holmes, A Study in Scarlet,
and The Valley of Fear. All of
these, and this is certainly not the whole extent of the collection, are
read by an English reader who is obviously a professional actor. Very
dramatic. Well worth listening to. (But note that it is important to click
on the files which have been encoded at 32 kbits/sec, rather than those at
only 16 kbits/sec. The later are librivox.org offerings, read by amateur
Americans.)
Anyway, these Sherlock Holmes recordings come from a
website called "audiobooksforfree.com". Thus I clicked into that, thinking
that it must be the solution to all this seeking after sensible audio books.
And it looks as if it's free!
But no. If you actually click in there, you will discover
that it is not free. They are simply being dishonest when they use that
name. But what can you expect with all these internet things? At least you
can rely on my website being
totally free! In reality, audiobooksforfree.com costs US$100 to have them
send a set of DVDs with everything that they have. The only reason they put
the Sherlock Holmes books into Project Gutenberg is to get people familiar
with what they have, in the hope that they will pay for the rest of their
books.
But this is sensible. One hundred American dollars is
little for the performances of many hours of a varied collection of
professional actors. After all, they have to live too. And to purchase a
collection of CDs which includes all of Bach's Cantatas, performed by real
musicians, would cost many times that price indeed.
This is a novel which is based on the experiences
of William Dawes, who was an officer of the marines in the First Fleet which
founded the colony of New South Wales in Australia. I enjoyed reading it,
and I read it almost in one go. Yet despite this, for me it was not up to
the standard Kate Grenville set in her earlier novel, The
Secret River. It is more one-sided, restricting the fictional version
of Dawes, to whom she gives the name Daniel Rooke, to a lonely, extremely
"politically correct" version of his life. The English settlers - or
invaders - of this new (yet of course geologically and ethnologically stable
and old) continent are nothing but evil, and the native Australians are
depicted as pure, angelic figures. They are the noble savages of 18th
century fantasy, or 21st century eco-politics.
But surely the reality back then in 1788 when the First
Fleet arrived in Sydney Harbor was more complex and interesting. The First
Fleet was not composed of a group of religious zealots, in the style of the
Mayflower, landing in Massachusetts in 1620, or an army of conquistadors, as
led by Cortés in his conquest of Mexico in 1518. Instead, the situation was
that England had just lost its American colonies in their War of
Independence (or Revolutionary War, as it is termed in the U.S.A.). The
English had found it to be convenient to ship off its criminal classes to
work on the plantations of the colonies as virtual slaves. Yet suddenly this
solution was no longer viable. On the other hand, the ships holding the
convicts to be shipped away as far as possible from England were gradually
overflowing, waiting to go somewhere. Therefore the moneyed classes of
England, those dukes or earls of this or that province of little England,
whose wealth was derived from the torment of African slaves in the West
Indies, or the southern colonies of North America, decided to ship them to
the opposite end of the world, the eastern coast of Australia which had just
been mapped by Captain Cook.
This thankless task was given to Arthur
Phillip, a naval commander. Undoubtedly the aristocracy of England
would have been just as happy if the First Fleet were to sink in a storm, or
at least if the colony in New South Wales were to fail. Then, at least, they
would save themselves from further expense. Yet Phillip was not the man they
had reckoned with. While still in England, organizing the Fleet, he asked to
have mostly convicts familiar with farm work to be those at first sent to
the new colony. Of course the arrogant aristocrats rejected this out of
hand. His ships were filled with convicts from the slums of London. Funds
for the purchase of farming equipment to get the colony started were held to
the absolute minimum.
Upon arrival at Sydney Cove, he did everything to ensure
the survival of his people. The convicts who, according to English law, were
without civil rights, were given as much freedom and justice as practicable.
But discipline was necessary. In particular, Phillip realized that it would
be essential for their survival to avoid conflicts with the native
populations. Thus he gave clear orders to his people that anyone who killed
a native would be hanged. And of course, given the people he had, desperate
convicts and disgruntled soldiers, it is obvious that a certain degree of
discipline would have to be enforced. The soil at Sydney is not very
fertile. So the colonists nearly died of starvation before their English
masters got around to shipping out the Second Fleet, with its store of
provisions.
It is certainly true that in the years of English
settlement in Australia after Governor Phillip had left, the early 1800s,
many of the convicts were horribly tortured, especially in the penal
settlements in Tasmania and Norfolk Island. And of course the native peoples
of Australia were conquered not only by disease, but also by brutal violence
and alcohol. (This is something Grenville dealt with in her earlier, very
moving novel.) Nevertheless, Arthur Phillip goes down in history as an
enlightened, sensible man. The founder of modern Australia. Therefore it is
difficult for me to sympathize with Grenville's treatment of the character
of Arthur Phillip.
To begin with, perhaps since she realizes how out of
character her portrayal of the first Governor of New South Wales is, she
gives him a fantasy name, namely "James Gilbert". But how can you write an
historical novel by changing the names of the main characters? For example,
many people have written novels about Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of
Scots. How strange it would be if someone were to write another novel within
this familiar genre, but the protagonists were now, let us say, Queen
"Rebecca" (sic) of England and "Julia" (sic) Queen of Scots. Yet all the
other characters had their original names. Surely that would be absurd. The
only way to transport such an absurdity into a reasonable fiction would be
to alter the rest of the setting as well. For example Queen Rebecca would
now be the queen of some fantasy island, and the rest of the characters
would have to be changed as well.
In Grenville's fantasy version of Sydney Cove, her James
Gilbert gives a starving convict who steals a few potatoes a horribly brutal
and unnecessary punishment. But in reality, her hero, the real-life William
Dawes, bought the rations of a convict - in effect "stealing" the food
of a starving man - thus violating a clear order which Arthur Phillip had
established pertaining to all members of the colony, both the convicts and
the marines who were guarding them. Of course Phillip did not punish Dawes
with a sickening display of public torture. Yet he did consider it to be an
action unbecoming an officer such as Dawes.
As with Phillip himself, Dawes was interested in
understanding the native peoples of Australia. Phillip befriended Bennelong
who, as in the book, was at first captured as a means to establish some
contact with the very reserved local Eora tribe. The Sydney Opera House is
built on a projection of land into the Harbor, called "Bennelong Point".
Similarly, Dawes befriended a young girl, whose name was Patyegarang. The
snippets of language he was able to acquire from her are recorded in his
notebooks, which were the basis of Grenville's novel, and they can be read
on-line here. Unlike Grenville's
character, the real-life Dawes was not a recluse. Rather he was one of the
most active officers in the colony.
Despite the best efforts of Phillip, conflicts between
the native people and the English were inevitable. Obviously the Aborigines
felt that they had to do something about the insults they had received from
these intruders. Indeed, Phillip himself received a spear in the shoulder,
thrown by an Aborigine at Manly Beach. But on that occasion he ordered his
men not to retaliate. Eventually
however, things came to a head, and a punitive expedition was sent out into
the bush to bring back "dead or alive" a number of members of the tribe
which had killed some of the English. Dawes was ordered to take part. At
first he refused, but then he was persuaded to go. It was really just an
empty show; they failed to kill or capture anyone. But Dawes then told
Phillip that he would really refuse to take part in any similar expeditions
in the future. Unlike the story of the book, such insubordination by an
officer was not dealt with by hanging, or any of the other fantastic
punishments Grenville imagines. Phillip simply considered it to be a
personal insult by a fellow officer, challenging his authority in a
dangerous way.
After a couple of years, Dawes had the choice of staying
on in Sydney or returning to England. He thought it would be nice to
establish himself on a farm in Australia, but in order to secure his
financial future, it would also be nice to have at least a half-income as an
ex-officer of the colony. He petitioned Phillip to allow him this favor, and
indeed Phillip was agreeable, but on the condition that Dawes apologize to
him for the two times he had not behaved as an English officer was expected
to behave. All of this is distorted completely in Grenville's account.
Dawes, proud as he was, refused, and returned to England without the threat
of any court-martial.
Daniel Rooke, the fictional character Grenville assigns
to the character of Dawes, is depicted as a recluse and mathematical genius.
His boyhood mathematical accomplishments rival those of the great Karl
Friedrich Gauss. In fact, as a wonder-child he puts Gauss to shame! The
Astronomer-Royal of England invites Rooke, the boy-genius, to live with him
at Greenwich and learn all the secrets of mathematics and the universe.
(Gauss himself had to wait until he grew up in order to have an astronomical
observatory for himself.) But unlike Gauss, for whom we have concrete
anecdotes of the fruits of his childhood genius, Kate Grenville, not being
familiar with many details of the world of mathematics, can only describe
the achievements of her wonder-child in terms of vague generalizations. And
here we see again - as with music - that the subject of mathematics is a
thing which almost all novelists seem incapable of describing sensibly. For
example she goes on and on about the wonderful discoveries in geometry which
her character finds in Euclid's Elements. Euclid comes up again and again in
the book.
The interested reader may enjoy having a look at an
on-line version of Euclid, with animated, java-script drawings, to be found
here.
In reality, Euclid's text is filled with errors and logical gaps. For
example Proposition 1 in Book 1, the very first thing Euclid "proves",
namely that an equilateral triangle exists, contains at least two or three
gaping logical errors. This was recognized by numbers of people even in the
ancient world. Any mathematically interested young person, forced to learn
Euclid by rote, would soon learn to hate mathematics! In fact, just this
last semester I lectured to a group of students studying to become teachers.
The subject of the lectures was "Euclidean Geometry", first of all showing
what nonsense Euclid is, but then going on to describe the truly beautiful
and elegant system which David Hilbert developed, and which can be freely
downloaded here.
A beautiful novel. This one made a much greater
impression on me than his more well-known Remains
of the Day, or Never Let Me
Go. Unlike those books, this is not something which could be made into
a movie. We don't imagine a magnificent period drama, staring Emma Thompson
and Anthony Hopkins. Instead, this book is a subtle Japanese story, seeming
to say very little, yet actually saying very much.
Ishiguro was born in Japan - in Nagasaki in 1954 - moving
to England with his family when he was six years old. The story of the book
takes place in Tokyo in 1948-50. The narrator is Masuji Ono, an old man
living in an imposing, once elegant house which dominates its surroundings
on a tree-lined hill. But along with much else, the house has suffered
extensive bomb damage during the war. In fact the last bomb also killed
Ono's wife. His son was a soldier who was killed in the war somewhere in
Manchuria. But he does have two daughters, the elder, married daughter is
Setsuko, and the younger daughter is Noriko, who remains with him. She is
already 26 years old, still unmarried, and Ono's problem is to see that she
also achieves marriage. We learn about the complicated business of
traditional Japanese marriage negotiations. It doesn't seem to be a business
of how much money one family pays to the other, as in India. Rather the
question is whether or not the other family occupies a suitable social
position in relation to one's own family. Are there any dark, hidden secrets
the other family might be hiding which might reflect badly on the position
of one's own family? In order to discover such possible secrets, detectives
are employed to delve into the past, to make inquiries amongst the friends
and relatives of the other family.
Ono himself has had a distinguished career as an artist.
He occupied a very respectable position in society and had a large circle of
students for whom he was the master. Gradually, as we read on through the
book, we learn more about his career. Was there something dark and hidden
which is creating difficulties in the marriage negotiations for Noriko?
As a young artist, Ono was a member of a colony of
students whose master, Mori-san, was concerned with "modernizing"
traditional Japanese art. That is to say, all those pictures of geishas,
with their stylized kimonos, contemplating Mt. Fuji, or whatever. They are
painted with a feeling of flatness, emphasizing abstract textures. So
Mori-san's idea was to paint such pictures in the "western" style, I suppose
somewhat like Degas' ballet dancers. Ono became Mori-san's favorite pupil,
his protégé. Mori-san explains to Ono that the world of entertainment, of
drinking and good cheer and available women is the true subject of serious
art. This is the floating world. Many young men feel at first a certain
guilt when entering this floating world, but they soon come to learn that
this is the true world of experience and emotion.
But then Ono meets Matsuda, who shows him that this is
not the reality of the world. He leads him through the slums of Tokyo,
showing him the squalor and brutality of life. What is the cause of this
squalor? What is Ono doing, squandering his life on these meaningless
pictures of gieshas? Can't he see the degeneration which is overwhelming
Japan? The businessmen with all their corruption and immorality, poisoning
everything. The politicians, caught up in this corruption, increasing and
embracing it. In order to lead society back to a higher, more just path, a
movement should be started in which the traditional moral values are again
held in esteem. Japan should join the other great colonial powers of the
world: England, France, Holland, the U.S.A., and establish a system of
overseas colonies for the advancement of the nation.
Thus Ono begins painting scenes whose purpose is to show
the nobility of Japanese tradition and to illustrate the paths ahead into
the future. He leaves Mori-san, and as time develops through the 1930s,
Mori-san's reputation diminishes as Ono's increases.
But now the war is finished. It is 1948, Ono is an old
man, and he looks back on his life, wondering if it was worthwhile. Other
artists, singers of patriotic songs, have committed suicide to atone for
what they feel was the guilt of their actions. But Ono's thoughts are far
from suicide. He takes satisfaction from the thought that he was not one of
Mori-san's mediocre pupils, simply continuing on in a meaningless way. He
has had the courage to strike out in a new direction. In the end, this
direction led to tragedy. Still, he followed this path with a pure and
honest heart.
Much of this parallels the developments in Germany in the
1930s. The push to the East to conquer "Lebensraum" in Poland and Russia was
similar to Japan's push to the West into Manchuria and further South into
the Pacific in the direction of Australia. But thankfully Germany and Japan
lost the war, and also the traditional European colonial powers have "lost"
their colonies. Has the world thus become a place where people can live
peacefully in a sensible system, free of glaring injustice? How pleasant
that would be!
Unfortunately we must see how corruption has again become
the order of the day. The bankers of Wall Street flaunt the law, happily
gorging themselves on their ill-earned billions, controlling a political
class which cannot be bothered to even pretend to hide the corruption. And
correspondingly, the under-class is slipping back into squalor. Is the world
now returning to the condition it was in a hundred years ago, dominated by
the robber barons whose corruption provoked war?
According to the link, Ishiguro was born in
Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, and then he came to England with his family in
1960 when his father took up a position with the English National Institute
of Oceanography. Thus he grew up as an Englishman, with his father immersed
in the pursuit of the science of the ocean. After all, Japan is an oceanic
country, as is England, and while the British Royals are not known for their
scientific accomplishments, the recent Japanese Emperors have published
their discoveries on marine organisms in the scientific literature.
Nagasaki is certainly a very noteworthy city. Of course
it was hit by the second
atomic bomb which was dropped by the Americans on Japan, ending the
War in the Pacific. Nagasaki was not the primary target of the B-29 bomber,
named "Bockscar", on August 9, 1945. The target was the ancient city of
Kokura. But on that morning, Kokura was covered by a thick layer of clouds
so that the secondary target, Nagasaki, was chosen. It is thus apparently
the case that in Japan, people associate Kokura with luck and happiness, and
I suppose Nagasaki is associated with the opposite of that. Rather than
being dropped on the harbor, which was the true target, the bomb was dropped
through a gap in the clouds above the Mitsubishi factory. Since Nagasaki is
relatively hilly, large portions of the city were spared, being behind
various hills.
Both the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had
similar yields, although they functioned according to different principles.
The Hiroshima bomb, using uranium-235, had a much simpler mechanism. One can
say that uranium-235 is to the plutonium of the Nagasaki bomb as is high
octane gasoline compared to low octane, "normal" gasoline. Plutonium suffers
from "pre-ignition", tending to explode suddenly, as soon as the critical
mass is reached, blowing everything apart before things get properly
started. The solution was to assemble a spherical configuration of shaped
charges around a hollow sphere of plutonium. All together, this gave a very
massive bomb, called the "Fat Man".
Who would have thought in 1945 that the world would live
on for another 65 years to the present day, in 2010, without suffering any
further mass murders through atomic bombs? We seem to have forgotten all
about them. Yet both Russia and the U.S.A. still have thousands of bombs,
mounted on rockets, waiting to go, and each of those bombs has a yield many,
many times greater than that of the the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. And this
is not to mention all the atomic bombs held by England, France, China,
India, Pakistan, Israel, and who knows which further countries as well? I
wonder if the world will be lucky enough to exist for a further 65 years
without atomic bombs destroying cities.
As with high versus low octane gasoline, uranium-235 is
very difficult to produce. It must be separated from the much more common
238 isotope, whereas plutonium is produced simply as a waste product in
atomic power stations. How strange it is that people who used to be
concerned about the advancement of peace and goodwill have now become
carried away in a wave of hysteria whose focal point is that ubiquitous
element carbon, which is the basis of life on the earth. The ultimate
purpose of this carbon phobia (and as geologists know, there has been little
correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature
throughout geological time) seems to be to force through the construction of
myriads of new atomic power stations, therefore furthering the cause of
future atomic war. Is this hysteria excused by pure ignorance, or are these
supposed "peace-activists" secretly driven by a lust for destruction?
Nagasaki
has had a long history of interaction between Japanese and Western culture.
In the 16th century it was a center of Portuguese trading and missionary
activity. For many years it was the only Japanese port open to contact with
western civilization. And perhaps before the atomic bomb, Nagasaki might
have been best known to Europeans and Americans, owing to the fact that it
is the city of the heroine of Puccini's Madam Butterfly. In fact, looking
these things up via the Internet, I see that Madam Butterfly is today the
most-performed opera in the United States. Somehow, I doubt if it is the
most popular (western) opera performed in Japan!
So all of this brings us to the subject of this book,
Ishiguro's first novel. The narrator is Etsuko, a Japanese woman living
alone in England. She is being visited by her daughter Niki. Etsuko's first
daughter, Keiko, was born of a Japanese father in Nagasaki, but for some
unexplained reason, Etsuko moved to England and married a native Englishman,
who was the father of Niki. Keiko left the family, moving to Manchester (if
I recall correctly) where she lived alone, committing suicide by hanging
herself in her apartment. During the time Keiko was living at home, growing
up, she hated her English step-father and all the rest of everything,
locking herself in her room the whole day, allowing nobody in. Apparently
Etsuko's English husband has also died, or at least separated from Etsuko.
But this is not the real story. Instead it takes place
during Etsuko's former life in Nagasaki. It is just a few years after the
Bomb. She is married to her first husband, Jiro. Jiro's father visits them
from his retirement home in Fukuoka, spewing unpleasant thoughts about how
it is good for a husband to beat a wife when he discovers that the wife
plans to vote for a different candidate in an election than the candidate
the husband had thought about. We suspect that he is a source of suppressed
violence which may lash out unexpectedly at some stage of the story. But
thankfully, he departs towards the end before any damage is done.
The main story concerns a strange woman named Sachiko,
who Etsuko discovers in a derelict hut, across an expanse of mud from the
newly-built apartment house where she is living. Sachiko has an even
stranger young daughter, Mariko. Etsuko becomes friendly with Sachiko,
helping her out in various ways. Sachiko is the Madam Butterfly of the
story. But unlike the Pinkerton of Puccini's story, Sachiko's Frank does not
pretend to marry Sachiko. In fact, Frank is quite clearly just a degenerate
alcoholic American soldier, looking for whatever he can get in the way of
female satisfaction in the bars of post-war Japan. Unlike Pinkerton, Frank
does not bother giving Sachiko any money. It's just lots of empty words. And
we learn about all of this through the memories Etsuko tells us about, years
in the future, in England.
It was an interesting, absorbing story. Things seemed to
be becoming more and more interesting. I was reading on into the night. What
will happen to Sachiko and Mariko? Sachiko brutally drowns the poor little
kittens of Mariko, which were the only things she had in this cruel world,
thus easing Sachiko's imagined move with Frank to the dream-land of America.
(Somehow Puccini's tender solos for Madam Butterfly are difficult to imagine
in this scene.) But then, suddenly, I was aware of the fact that the book
was rapidly running out of pages! There are only 183 of them.
Ishiguro surprises the reader in the final pages by
having Etsuko speak to the shattered Mariko as if she herself were Sachiko.
And there the book ends. How disappointing it is that Ishiguro has resorted
to the simple trick of converting everything into a surreal drama with this
confusion of the two main characters. Is Etsuko really Sachiko? Was Frank
the father of Niki? Who knows? Who cares? I was very disappointed. But I
suppose such things are to be expected in a first novel. At least I just
borrowed the book from the library, rather than actually buying it. Ishiguro
has delved further into the depths of surrealism in his When
We Were Orphans, which I read some time ago. And I see that The Unconsoled, which I haven't read, is even more so.
It's not that I am totally closed to the idea of surrealism. But if you are
going to do it, then it should be done properly, for example in the style of
Murakami.
As the title says, this is a book of short stories.
William Trevor grew up in Ireland where his real name was William Trevor
Cox. Many of the stories in the book are concerned with things in Ireland.
His father worked for a bank, so that the family was moved about within
Ireland from place to place. But when he grew up and became a young man in
his twenties, William Trevor settled in England where he has stayed until
now. I suppose the Cox family had lived for generations in Ireland. They
were Protestant English people, rather than native Irish Catholics.
Therefore many of these stories are told from the point of view of English
visitors to Ireland. This is particularly so in the story which gives the
title to the book, "Beyond the Pale".
But more generally, the stories are about people trapped
in some situation. A man borrows money to buy the neighboring field for his
farm from a local storekeeper, and in return, his daughter must toil
endlessly as a maid for the unpleasant wife of the storekeeper; she has
become a slave serving her family virtually for life, just for the sake of
this field.
Or two people in London in the story "Lovers of Their
Time": a man and a woman who are hopelessly in love with one another. The
man works in a travel agents, the woman in a shop. But the man is married to
another woman, and he and his wife are unable to have children. His wife is
very sexually active, not only with the man, but with other men as well. Yet
this cannot lead to the children the man longs for. He doesn't earn enough
money to divorce his wife and start a family with the woman he loves. It is
the 1950s, and the music of Elvis Presley fills the air. Time passes into
the 1960s. Carnaby Street becomes all the rage. The Beatles. The Stones. The
man and the woman take to meeting awkwardly in the bathtub of a bathroom in
a hotel near one of the train stations of London. They have discovered that
it is possible to sneak into the bathtub without being discovered. What a
life! They take the step of having him divorce the wife, but they can then
only afford to move in to the house of the mother of the woman. The mother
hates him. She makes life intolerable for both of them. There is simply not
enough money for them to exist like this in London. In the end they
separate, he returns to his wife and the woman marries someone else. How
sad. A number of the stories deal with similar couples in similar
situations.
In the story "The Hill Bachelors", we have the situation
of young men inheriting farms in Ireland, living at the bare level of
existence. They would like to marry, there are numbers of young women in the
district, but these women are all keen to escape from poverty to the freedom
of towns and cities. And so the bachelors gradually become lonely, eccentric
old men. "The Ballroom Romance" is the same story, but this time it is a
young woman who becomes trapped on the lonely farm into her old age.
The stories are sad, poignant. But I must admit that now
that I have finished the book, I have forgotten the details of many of them.
Somehow my mind rebells against all of this sadness and fatalism. It refuses
to record it into memory, keeping those memory cells - or at least the
energy for building new synapses - free for happier thoughts.
Googling the internet to find an interesting link
to Ford's Good Soldier, I found
this one which appeared in the Guardian a couple of years ago. It was
written by somebody called Jane Smiley who apparently has written a book
called 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. She says that this one is
considered by many to be "one of the few stylistically perfect works in any
language". Then she continues on to say that the fact that "it is a
masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to
readers who have read it before". So there you are! From the tone of her
review, it is unclear to me whether or not she was smiling when she wrote
that. Certainly I am just now smiling when writing this. (And here is a
little "smiley" for you: (:-))
The book was written in the years before the First World
War. Ford Madox Ford,
whose real name was Ford Madox Hueffer, was over 40 years old when the war
started, yet he volunteered for military duty. He had originally planed to
have the book titled "The Saddest Story". But his publishers thought that
that would sound a bit strange in the midst of a war since, for most people,
the reality of war was much sadder than the trivial philanderings of the
hero of this book. Thus the title was changed to "The Good Soldier". But
really, that was also a rather cynical deception, wasn't it? I wonder how
many mothers of the dead soldiers of Flanders saw this book in the bookshop
and bought it, hoping for some words of redemption? What a bitter
disappointment it would have been!
In any case, the author survived the war and then in 1919
decided to change his surname from the Germanic Hueffer to the more
automotive sounding Ford. (His father, Francis Hueffer, was a German
musicologist. He immigrated to England where he was the music critic of the
Times newspaper.) Ford's fascination with the Ford name, leading to this
strange symmetry, is certainly interesting. Did he own a Model-T back in
those days? For whatever it is worth, I see that of the Big Three in
Detroit, only Ford seems to have survived the recent panic in the automobile
industry relatively unscathed.
But to get down to the book, the plot is a bit
complicated, so I will not try to summarize it. If anybody reads this with
the hope of obtaining such a summary, then let me refer you to the
appropriate link here
in the Wikipedia.
The story is concerned with the problems rich people have
with one another. Thus the central theme is money, and the problems the rich
have when it comes to finding someone to love. I always enjoy reading the
short snippets relating to such problems which appear every day in our local
newspaper on the back page of the first section. How is Madonna's divorce
getting along? Sandra Bullock is also having divorce problems too, at least
according to today's paper. Next to each such snippet, there is a picture of
the suffering celebrity. The problem is that if you have a couple of hundred
million dollars or so, then everybody says they love you. But of course they
don't. They only love your money. And so life becomes consumed by an endless
search for that unattainable thing called "love".
Similarly, the "good soldier" of this book, Edward
Ashburnham, is a typical member of the English landed gentry of a hundred
years ago. His "old income" from his family estates amounts to £5,000 per
year. Of course for the modern reader, living in this age of inflation where
increases in the supply of paper money (and imaginary money, making its way
from the computer in one bank to the next over the telephone wires or
through optical cables, inflating itself at each juncture) are considered to
be a part of the natural order of things, it is difficult to imagine a time
when the value of money was more or less stable over time. In fact it is
almost a shock - a revolutionary thought - to think that the Age of
Inflation has only been with us for 80 or 90 years now. Before that, back
when this book was first published, £5,000 per year was a fixed idea which
would equally have made sense to Admiral Nelson in 1800, or to Samuel Pepys,
in 1670. Using the inflation
calculator, we find that the £5,000 of 1910 would be worth the
equivalent of about £375,000 of today's money, using the retail price index.
Thus Edward Ashburnham was certainly comfortably well off, but even he would
find it to be difficult to lead anything like an extravagant life in the
high society of London. So we can understand his modesty, his empathy with
people beneath his station. His wealth is well below the level which would
be necessary in order for him to secure a place in the gossip columns of the
daily newspapers.
On the other hand, the narrator of the book, John Dowell,
who has inherited sizable wealth from his Philadelphia family, does not tell
us precisely how much money he has. He comes across as a coy, deceptive
figure, coldly observing nothing while pretending that he experiences
imaginary and inappropriate emotions on almost every page. But he does go on
for a couple of pages, telling us in detail the fact that he has inherited
$2,000,000 or something from the death of his wife Florence, and the fact
that he is willing to put $1,000,000 of that into establishing a heart
clinic back in Connecticut, or wherever, despite the fact that Florence only
pretended to have a heart condition in order to prevent Dowell from ever
consummating their marriage. In the end, he says that it is all absolutely
of no interest to him what they do with the money - let them make a lung
clinic out of it, or whatever - and he gives them $1,500,000 in order to be
done with the whole business so that he can return quickly to Europe and all
of the pseudo-emotional adventures he might find there. Therefore we imagine
that his wealth is something on the order of $5,000,000 or so. Again,
converting this into today's money, we find that it comes to perhaps
$100,000,000. For ordinary mortals, this seems to be a lot. Given a 5%
return on capital - a reasonable figure back in 1910, before the banks
reduced the rate of interest to zero - we see that he was very much
wealthier than Edward Ashburnham.
I had at first thought that a book which was so much
concerned with money, and with the fact that wealthy people continuously
seek that happy state which is denied them - namely having a loving partner
to accompany them through the twists and turns of life - would be a boring
read. In fact I have only read it because it is the next book for our little
reading circle; and indeed, the meeting is scheduled to take place next time
in our garden. So hopefully it will turn out to be a warm, sunny summer's
day for our discussion.
But no! The book was not at all boring. I have just read
it in two or three days, and I enjoyed all the drama with Florence and
Leonora and Nancy and John and "Ted". It is not written in the heavy-handed,
earnest style which is usual in these kinds of books, exemplified in
particular by the various tomes of Henry James. On the contrary, I think
that it is a funny satire on all of that. It is written in a kind of
"stream-of-consciousness" style, as if you are listening to a very long
story, told to you by a friend in a pub, or something, rambling on back and
forth with all sorts of loose ends which get picked up from time to time.
The characters are so ridiculously unbelievable that you often have to
laugh. So it turned out to be an enjoyable read.
This is a translation of the original Spanish novel
into English by Lucia Graves, who is the daughter of Robert Graves. I
suppose one could say that it is a kind of Gothic novel. Horror, torture,
decaying mansions, love, hatred, and so forth. A complicated story. The
coincidences needed to carry the plot are often ridiculous. Nevertheless, I
much enjoyed reading it, gradually coming to the end of the whole story
where we meet the shadowy characters which until then had seemed unreal. It
would be nonsense to try to summarize the plot here. Suffice it to say that
it begins with the 10-year-old Danial being initiated into the secrets of
the second-hand book trade by his father. He brings him to the gloomy
caverns of the "Cemetery of Forgotten Books" in Barcelona. It is a maze of
passages, stairs, shelves, covered with thousands of obscure and forgotten
books, hidden in one of those vast, ancient Spanish buildings which we
associate with the Spanish Inquisition. Danial is told that he may choose at
random one of the forgotten books from amongst the dust and cobwebs. He
happens to choose "The Shadow of the Wind", by Julián Carax. And as he finds
out more about the life of the author, he becomes involved in this whole
Gothic adventure.
In a way, the book resembles "The
Spanish Bow", which I just read a month or two ago. But unlike
Andromeda Romano-Lax, with her seemingly extravagant Latino name, Carlos
Ruiz Zafón really is a Spaniard. Therefore his outpourings on the beauty and
mystery of Barcelona are somewhat more convincing than those of Andromeda.
But to be honest, I am not especially attracted to Spain.
The only time I have been to Barcelona was in the summer
of 1980, or thereabouts. It was a conference on something which I thought
might be interesting. When registering for the conference, the application
form asked which category of hotel was required. So I just ticked the square
for middle-class hotels. After all, on the one hand the expense of a luxury
hotel seemed unnecessary and on the other hand, who knows what the cheapest
category might offer? Maybe something approaching the dreadful level of
squalor which some of the characters in this book were forced to endure!
So I arrived with a planeload of other people, landing at
the Barcelona airport in the bright Spanish sun. The passengers filed past
the customs officer who barely looked at their passports or identity cards.
But upon seeing my Australian passport, he gave me an unfriendly look and
told me to stand aside, so that he could wave the remaining passengers
through. When I was left alone standing at the gate he examined my passport
minutely, seeming to discover some sort of problem. Unfortunately he was
incapable of speaking English, so he led me to a small, windowless room and
signaled for me to wait. After some time another officer, who seemed to be
slightly more educated than the first one, came into the room and spoke to
me in English. He informed me that my passport failed to contain a visa for
Spain. The fact that this was necessary was news to me! After all, millions
of tourists just drive there every year for their holidays. I suppose the
problem was Gibraltar and the traditional hatred the Spanish have for the
English, and thus the derived hatred for the British Commonwealth, of which
Australia is a member. The officer was very suspicious of my motives for
visiting Spain. But I did happen to have brought with me a letter which the
organizers of the conference wrote, giving the details of where the meetings
were to be held, and so forth. The officer fingered the letter with
distaste, sensing that it would no longer be possible to deport me from the
country so easily. But he did go to the trouble of dialing a telephone
number which he found in the letter, and having a talk with some professor
or other in the organization committee of the conference. Admitting defeat
with little grace, he kept my passport and instructed me to go to the
cigarette kiosk of the airport and buy so many pesetas worth of coupons
which I then gave him in return for a visa. It was quite expensive. I
suppose the equivalent of 50 euros or so, and the visa was only valid for a
stay of 4 days, or whatever the length of the conference was.
And thus I entered Barcelona, having an inkling of the
feeling Julián Carax of this book must have felt on similar occasions. It
was a Spanish heat-wave. A century of heat (100°F, or even more!). In those
days, the sewage system of Barcelona didn't seem to be working properly.
Since I haven't returned since then, I don't know if it has been repaired in
the meantime. All I can say is that the whole city stank disgracefully of
sewage. My middle-class hotel was clean and civilized, if hardly luxurious.
The conference was in the rooms of some sort of ancient palace which had
seen more luxurious times in past centuries. I got into conversation with a
Swedish professor who told me that he was staying in a youth-hostel, where
he was sleeping in his sleeping-bag. He was very happy to have saved himself
the expense of all that hotel money by organizing these private
arrangements.
The first talk got off with an introduction to the
subject of the conference. And it was explained that the thing which I was
interested in, and which I had thought was to be the subject of the
conference, did not belong here. After the morning session, people gathered
together to discuss what had been said during the first talks. I wanted to
ask a few questions too, but gradually it became clear that the Invited
Speakers, whose hotel bills in hotels of the luxury category were being paid
for by the conference, were waiting for the non-Invited Speakers to drift
away so that they could retire together to a restaurant of the luxury
category, paid for by the conference. Neither I nor the Swedish professor
happened to be Invited Speakers, so we walked out into the hot, foul air of
Barcelona and looked for some cheap place to eat.
Obviously I was fed up with the whole business, so I
sought out the offices of Lufthansa to change my return ticket to the next
available flight. But I think I was forced to stay on for a day or two,
which I spent exploring the sights of Barcelona on foot. Walking up and down
the famous "La Rambla" innumerable times. (My hotel was directly on the
Rambla.) Both this book, and also that of Andromeda, dwell again and again
on the fascination of that boulevard. I was not impressed. I was disgusted
by the peddlers of small song-birds, who had huge numbers of tiny cages,
each containing a single bird, stacked into high columns of pathetic tweets.
At regular intervals groups of Guardia-Civil police were lounging about with
their stupid-looking hats. They looked dangerous. Leering at young women,
perhaps with a wolf-whistle, laughing and knowing that everybody was afraid
of them. The evil of the Fumero of the book obviously still existed - if
perhaps only to a weakened degree - in the Barcelona of 1980, despite the
fact that Franco was long dead by that time.
I walked around the harbor, looking at the statue of
Christopher Columbus. It is hardly the place for a romantic rendezvous, as
described in this book. I was surprised to see that it is not a natural
harbor, rather just an artificial breakwater, despite the fact that it has
been a center of maritime commerce for millennia. Also I climbed up the
towers of Gaudi's Sagrada
Família, which had been completed then. In contrast to traditional
cathedrals, where an ancient church was gradually expanded and then in the
middle ages converted into a massive stone monument, crowned at the end with
soaring towers, the Sagrada Família consisted of just the towers and nothing
else. A couple of desultory workmen stood around a small cement mixer,
perhaps beginning to think about organizing a church to go with the towers.
Finally I was able to check out of the hotel and get over
to the airport before my visa expired. At the hotel reception I asked for
the bill, only to be told with a generous smile that there was nothing to
pay. The Spanish Government had graciously taken it upon itself to treat us
to free accommodation! And thus the poor Swedish professor, huddling in his
sleeping bag in a room full of snoring youth-hostel inhabitants, turned out
to have had the most expensive arrangement of all.
Jump,
by Nadine Gordimer
This is a book of short stories, first published in
1991. The author is a white South African. She was born near Johannesburg in
1923, her parents having immigrated from Europe a short time before. She was
very much part of the anti-apartheid movement, and it is said that when he
was finally released from prison, she was one of the first people Nelson
Mandela wanted to see.
The stories are different from what we are used to
reading when we think of the short story. The main character in Gordimer's
stories is Africa, and the fact that people of European ancestry - even
those whose ancestors have lived in Africa for many generations - are
strangers who do not really belong. So these white South Africans, while
being the subjects of the stories, have no particular characteristics to
make them interesting in themselves. Instead it is always Africa, the main
character, which is being described.
For example the story "Keeping Fit" describes a white
urban executive setting out for an early-morning run, I suppose on a Sunday
morning, along the roads somewhere. His run takes him away from his safe,
protected, wealthy suburb, and he continues past various shanty-towns where
the poor blacks are crowded together in an unpleasant chaos of poverty and
squalor. Suddenly a large mob of people emerge from one of these
shanty-towns onto the road, enveloping the runner. He is frightened. Will
they attack him? But no. They are running after another black man who is
running for his life. The mob catches its prey and kills the man with
knives, kicking him brutally when he is down. The frightened runner tries to
run away from the mob and suddenly a woman grabs him and pulls him indoors
into her hovel, away from the danger of the mob. Gradually he sees the rest
of the family and tries to thank them, but there is no basis for
communication. They live in different worlds. When the danger is past, he
runs home.
Just now, as I write this, South Africa is hosting the
World Cup of Football. This evening (it is June 13, 2010) Germany will play
Australia in the newly built football stadium in Durban. A magnificent
architectural achievement which may be an inspiration for future generations
to transcend these old conflicts of the past and instead to work together to
build a better society. (As far as the outcome of this evening's game is
concerned, I will be happy if either team wins. Hopefully it will turn out
to be a better match than the uninspiring and destructive pairing of France
vs. Uruguay in Capetown which we saw on Friday evening.)
But despite all the changes in the last 20 years, I am
sure that much of what Gordimer writes in these stories is just as true
today as it was back in the days of apartheid.
In North and South America, we think of the European
settlement of those continents as being a matter of waves of aggressive
colonists overrunning the original native population. And yet the first
people to reach the Americas only came there 12 or 15 thousand years ago. Or
perhaps, according to other theories which are pursued by excited theorists,
the original settlement of the Americas might have taken place 20 or 30
thousand years ago. Australia was first settled 40 thousand years ago - or
perhaps even earlier. So we think of the Aborigines of Australia as the
great, ancient, People of the Earth. But of course all of this does not
compare with Africa! That huge continent where everything began.
The Europeans emerged as a tribe from Africa many tens of
thousands of years ago. And while we may imagine a longing to return to that
ancient center of life, with all its excesses in the middle of the most
magnificent landscapes of the world, still, the "white" people of the world
- the people of European ancestry - remain strangers to Africa.
Bruce
Chatwin had a short life, dying of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 49,
poisoning himself with massive doses of AZT. This is the last book which he
published in his lifetime. Perhaps he wanted to use this book to have his
final say about things.
Of course his books were concerned with travel. I had
read his In Patagonia before
reading this one. He had a beautiful style of writing. We can imagine the
cold, windswept open spaces of South America. He also published books of his
own photography, dwelling particularly on the bright colors of Africa. He
seems to have been continuously traveling, amassing tremendous numbers of
facts and thoughts, reflections on all that he had seen and all of the
people he met. Everything was written down in his travel notebooks, and in
fact he has been responsible for the revival of a kind of stylish French
notebook called the Moleskine.
The Songlines is concerned with a trip he made to
Australia in 1983. He was interested in learning about the Aborigines of
Australia, and so he hitched up with a person named Anatoly Sawenko, who was
an expert on Aboriginal culture, having intimate contacts with the
tribes-people around Alice Springs. Sawenko introduces Bruce Chatwin to
various characters, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. Thus the book
becomes a long narrative of Chatwin's relationship with Sawenko, together
with a host of other people during his stay in Australia.
Anatoly Sawenko is given a fictional name, namely
"Arkady", in the book. When the book was published, Chatwin said that it was
a novel, although it describes in much personal detail the actual characters
he was writing about. In the Introduction to the book, it is said that the
real-life Anatoly Sawenko was shocked to see that much of his private life,
and that of his friends, was exposed to public view - often in a very
unflattering, even libelous manner.
Be that as it may, the idea which fascinates Chatwin is
concerned with what Aborigines do when they go "walkabout". Apparently they
follow lines through the landscape, going from place to place, each of which
is identified with some animal, or object of the Dreamtime of the ancestors
long ago. Each of these sacred sites is part of a vast song, giving a kind
of map of Australia. The wanderer sings the song and thus brings to life the
landscape itself. I suppose this can be compared with Plato's idea of forms.
The word, describing the ideal form of the thing, is reality, and the
countless imperfect examples of the form are the stuff of the lower life of
the Earth. Thus, according to Chatwin, if an Aborigine forgets his song, his
Dreaming, then in a sense he dies, and along with it even the landscape, his
Songline, disappears. These Songlines are recorded as drawings on stones, or
pieces of wood, called Tjuringas
(or Churingas). If an Aborigine loses his tjuringa, then in a sense he has
lost his soul.
But of course in the modern world, as with the icons of
Russia, these Tjuringas can simply be bought over the Internet, to hang on
your wall as an amusing example of primitive art. For example here
is an Internet site offering various Tjuringas for prices between $500 and
$1000.
It is difficult to know how seriously we are to take
Bruce Chatwin's observations. On the one hand he describes the cynical
exploitation of the Aborigines by certain people dealing with them. For
example, these days much money is to be made from Aboriginal dot-paintings.
(And Chatwin - in an earlier life - was himself a leading art expert for the
London auction house Sotheby's.) An overbearing woman arrives at an
Aboriginal camp, shouting at the people, and offering to buy a large canvas
for $400 or so. Yet she will sell it in her tourist shop in Sydney or
Adelaide for $7,000!
Then on the other hand, Chatwin goes on about his
conversations with Aborigines as if they are opening themselves to him, the
great traveler, telling him their most intimate secrets. But why should they
be doing that? Who is this English writer who drifts casually into and out
of their lives, imagining that he knows everything? Surely they tell him as
much nonsense as they tell the unpleasant woman driving around from camp to
camp, buying their canvases for a pittance.
He describes the rough, aggressive atmosphere in the bars
of Alice Springs. The contempt many Aborigines openly display towards the
white people, and the primitive racialism of many of the white farmers. Out
in the bush, away from Alice Springs, a group of Aborigines offers to take
him on a hunting expedition. But this turns into a sickening round of
senseless cruelty, with the group driving wildly through the bush, colliding
with a kangaroo and its young, ramming it many times before finally running
over it with the car to mutilate it sufficiently to bring about its horrible
death. I suppose they were simply trying to humiliate Chatwin, and
everything he stood for.
Towards the end, the book becomes filled with long
passages of linked jottings from his travel notebooks, especially those he
wrote in Africa, in Arabia, South America. Philosophizing about the forces
which contributed to human evolution. And about the difference between
wandering peoples - nomads - and sedentary peoples who farm the land or live
in cities. He sees goodness in the wanderer, and evil in the stick-at-home.
There are many interesting, erudite ideas here, away from the harsh reality
of life in the Far Outback of Australia.
The author is an Australian whose mother is German. The idea of
the book is that the narrator is "death" itself. Thus Death tells us the
story of Liesel Meminger, whose parents were communists in the Germany of
the 1930s. As a result, they were "disappeared" under the Nazi regime,
leaving Liesel alone in the world to be brought up in a poverty-stricken
foster family. We imagine that such a story might enable us to gain some
insights into the way things really were during the second world war - as an
alternative to all of those countless Hollywood movies on the subject.
Unfortunately though, Markus Zusak makes many obvious
mistakes. For example, one character, when spewing his Nazi nonsense, refers
to the "motherland" in the book. Yet surely everybody knows - not least from
the questionable knowledge imparted upon us by Hollywood - that in the
German language, the appropriate word is "fatherland", not motherland.
Perhaps Markus Zusak was confused in his thoughts here, juxtaposing Hitler
with the unfortunate character of Sadam Hussian, who famously described the
first Gulf War as the "mother" of all battles.
Liesel's foster mother, while not being a basically evil
character, nevertheless is continuously swearing at people. Her favorite
expression is "Saumensch", occasionally varied to "Saukerl" when referring
to her husband. Although I have been living here in Germany for the past 35
years, I have never heard these combinations uttered as actual words. Of
course I must also say that I have not had a great deal of intercourse with
people who might be imagined to utter such epithets. Perhaps these words
were in general usage 70 or 80 years ago and have now become antiquated. Or
perhaps they are still used amongst the bucolic population of southern
Germany, around Munich, which is the setting for the story.
The word "Sau" in the German language refers to a female
pig. (In English, the word is the same, merely spelled differently - "sow".)
A male pig is called an "Eber" (in English it is "boar"). In common
language, the word "Sau" appears more often than "Eber". It is used as a
kind of exaggerated substitute for the word "very". Thus if something is
very good, then the ruder sections of society would say that the thing is
"sau gut". On the other hand, for example if they are feeling rather sick,
then such people might say that they feel "sau schlecht".
It is tedious to dwell on such things, but in the book
the two words "Saumensch" and "Saukerl" are repeated literally hundreds of
times! So - unfortunately - it is impossible to ignore them.
This, and the fact that the book is written as a naïve
children's story, put me off. But continuing on, it did turn out to be good
read. Nevertheless, other things beyond these language problems also struck
me as false.
As I think I wrote somewhere else in these book reviews,
up until the era of George W. Bush, I saw no reason to doubt the usual
Hollywood version of the second world war. But in the last few years, I have
often tried to imagine what it was like here in Germany 70 years ago.
Clearly death was very much in the air. In old films we can see the huge
military spectacles which the Nazis put on. Thousands of soldiers standing
in geometric patterns, creating a wide, empty avenue for Hitler to walk
alone in silent solemnity into some sort of temple. The Temple of Death,
presumably to worship the God of Death who is the narrator of this book.
What did the people think when seeing such spectacles?
But this whole orgy of death began well before Hitler.
Stalin killed untold millions in the 1930s, and the Japanese invasion of
Manchuria also increased things considerably. I am sure that many people in
Germany were afraid of the Russians and of the huge waves of death which
they were causing. And of course the perceived wrongs following from the Versailles
agreements, following the first world war, contributed much to all of
this.
Just near here, south of Bielefeld in the town of
Stuckenbrock, was the site of Stalag VI-K. This was just one of many
prisoner of war camps throughout Germany. I have found this website
describing them. It is horrible to read. It is thought that around 65,000
Russian POWs died in Stalag VI-K alone. (It is estimated that about 60% of
the Russian POWs died in captivity. And after the end of the war, a large
percentage of the survivors were then directly killed on Stalin's orders, or
else sent to further concentration camps in Siberia. - Contrast this with
the experiences of the American and British POWs, where only 3.6% died!
After liberation, they returned to write their jolly little books about
their interesting war experiences.)
How much of all this was seen by the "normal" people of
Germany, such as the Liesel and her foster parents of the story? Certainly
the Russian prisoners were made to labor in the factories and farms of
Germany, so they must have been visible. But as I understand it, the Jewish
people were sent by train to the concentration camps, and the Nazis created
the illusion that they were being sent to a new homeland, somewhere to the
east. Thus it seems unlikely that they would be paraded through the streets
in recurring death marches as described in the book.
In total, it is thought that 60 million people died as a
result of the war. Of course it is our fate that we will all die, just as we
have all been born. So I have no real sympathy with the idea of creating a
God of Death, to celebrate the whole business. Surely a God of Birth should
then also be created, and it should be as much celebrated or feared as the
God of Death. But more important is the time we live, between birth and
death. It is terrible if this time is dominated by the horrible things that
occurred during the 1930s and 40s.
This is the true story of the childhood of the author,
Jeannette Walls. Now, or at least until a few years ago, she was a gossip
columnist, revealing the private lives of the celebrities of New York to the
cold glare of public exposure. Apparently one of her most successful forays
was the "outing" of Drudge, the conservative blogger, as a homosexual,
despite the fact that he would have preferred to have this aspect of his
life remain his own private business. In order to obtain such information on
the private lives of well-known people, Jeannette Walls continuously
attended cocktail parties, dinners, art shows, and so on, eavesdropping on
the latest gossip. All of this seems to me to be a most disagreeable
profession to follow. In this
link, you can see a video of Jeannette Walls, talking about her book. She
has a rapid, nervous way of speaking. But perhaps the success of this book
has lead her into a new way of life, away from gossip. And I see that she
has recently published a novel.
But the present book is the story of her life as a child,
the daughter of rootless, hippie-like people of the 1960s. Her father was a
drunk, totally dependent upon a large consumption of whiskey. She relates
how he once tried to become "dry", but this was only achieved after many
days of horrible withdrawal symptoms: delirium tremens. Her mother was a
qualified teacher who imagined herself to be an artist. Rather than doing
something useful in life, she wasted her time painting pictures which nobody
wanted.
Thus the two degenerate parents and their four children
lurched from one place to another in California, Arizona, and what have you,
looking through the garbage of others for things to eat, sleeping in one or
another old jalopy which they happened to have obtained somewhere.
Eventually they ended up in Welch, West Virgina, which was the hometown of
the drunken father. Although Welch is considered to be one of the worst
examples of back-of-the-woods, hillbilly poverty, the Walls family lived in
a state of squalor which even there was thought to be revolting. The parents
were too "proud" to accept any financial help. The few dollars which somehow
trickled into the family were quickly stolen by the father, who then
disappeared for days on end, wasting it in drunken orgies at the local bars.
The mother, when not painting, hid what little food she had from her
children, eating it herself, leaving them to scavenge in the garbage cans of
the neighboring hillbillies.
What a depressing thing to read! And yet the book was on
the best-selling list of the New York Times for 100 weeks, or something. But
what is so special about this story? The unfortunate reality is that recent
developments in the U.S.A. - perhaps especially starting with the
catastrophic "Reagenomics" of the 1980s - has lead to millions of people
becoming homeless, living rough on the street. Thus this story is a
commonplace. It is not just the traditional hillbilly "white trash" which
lives like this. Even middle-class suburban Americans can imagine being
dragged down to the state of living off the garbage of others.
The thing that lifts this story above the majority of
such tales of squalor is the fact that the three older children were able to
escape from the situation. They managed to do well at school, and they
formed a plan to escape to New York. Each of them spent long hours doing odd
jobs in the town, putting the few dollars they earned into a secret hiding
place away from the parents, the idea being that that would enable the
oldest sister, Lori, to get started on a better life when she graduated from
high school. Then the others could come afterward on the basis of the
existence she would establish. But in one of the most depressing scenes of
the book, the father finds the money, representing the dreams of his
children, and takes it for his own drunken debauchery.
Despite this, the three of them have become successful in
their various endeavors. Unfortunately, the youngest daughter was not able
to follow them, and instead, from the description at the end of the book, it
seems that she has succumbed to the usual fate of children who have the
misfortune to be born into such a family.
At the end of the book, Jeannette Walls is shocked to
discover that her mother had long ago inherited land in Texas which was
valued at a million dollars! The reader can only speculate on the reasons
such a woman could have to justify her abominable behavior.
This is again a true story, not a novel. The author was a
christian missionary in 1977, and he was assigned the task of learning the
language of an obscure tribe of Indians in the Amazon, the Pirahã. The
Pirahã are not to be confused with the Piranha - those nasty little fish of
the Amazon which, according to common lore, will tear into the flesh of
anybody who is silly enough to actually go swimming in the Amazon, reducing
things to the bare skeleton in a matter of seconds. The author, and all the
members of the Pirahã tribe regularly swam in the river, thus falsifying
this fantasy of modern western civilization.
The reason Daniel Everett was supposed to learn the
language of the Pirahã was in order to translate the New Testament of the
Bible into their language. One or two of the missionaries before him, who
had attempted the task, had been unable to make sense of the language. And
thus our intrepid missionary, the author, was dropped into the jungle in a
small bush airplane, later to be joined by his wife and their two or three
small children - barely out of the toddler stage of life.
He has stayed there, on and off, for the last 30 years,
becoming a controversial figure in the field of linguistics. During his time
back in the U.S.A., between jungle sojourns, he has forged an extremely
successful academic career, where he has become Professor and Head of
Department of Linguistics at various universities.
This is not to say that life in the jungle is a wonderful
thing. One is constantly being bitten by swarms of mosquitoes and those
horrible biting flies whose bite is much more painful than that of the
mosquito. The body is ravaged by malaria, yellow fever, and all those other
tropical sicknesses. Worm-like parasites penetrate the outer defenses of the
body, causing further sickness. Yet, at least at the beginning, Daniel
Everett was driven by the thought that he should expose himself and his
family to all of these hardships in order to "save" these obscure
tribes-people by "converting" them into becoming believers in Jesus.
The problem was that the Pirahã were quite happy with
life as it is. For the past 300 years or more they have been approached from
time to time by these missionaries, and it has never made the slightest
impression upon them. They go through life smiling and laughing, delighted
with the day-to-day functioning of the world. Unlike almost all other Indian
tribes of South America, they have not lost themselves in a hopeless envy of
the "advantages" of modern civilization; going "native" by forgetting their
own language and speaking only the Portuguese of the Brazilians; living off
the things which more "fortunate" people have chosen to discard, or donated
with a sense of religious charity. No! The Pirahã know
that they are happy, living in a paradise - a utopia which is far more
profound than that questionable "Utopia" of religious fanatics envisioned by
Sir Thomas Moore back in 1516. The Pirahã have no concept of sin, or guilt.
They are happy, and they would like others to be happy with them.
Daniel Everett soon realized that his own religion was
nonsense, and he discarded it. Unfortunately though, his wife and children
remained devoted to their beliefs, and so he refrained from telling them of
his conversion to reality for many years, only doing so just before writing
this book. And thus his wife, upon learning that he was no longer a believer
in Jesus, divorced him, and at least from what we can gather from his entry
in the Wikipedia, she still remains stubbornly estranged. Thus, as Lucretius
wrote over 2000 years ago, such is the weight of Superstition, producing
terror and gloom in the mind of the believer.
As Everett gradually came to realize, the life and
philosophy (or rather lack of philosophy) of the Pirahã is largely
determined by their language. Their sentences are extremely simple. In a
number of places, typical stories are quoted, both in the original language
and in a literal translation into English. For example, here is the story of
how somebody killed a panther.
1. Here the jaguar
pounced upon my dog, killing him.
2. There the jaguar pounced on my dog, killing him. It happened with
respect to me.
3. There the jaguar killed the dog by pouncing on it.
4. With respect to it, the jaguar pounced on the dog. I thought I saw it.
5. Then I, thus the panther, pounced on my dog.
6. Then the panther pounced on my dog.
... etc. etc. etc. gradually getting to the point ...
22. It wanted to pounce on the dog. It really wanted to.
23. Then I was talking, then Kaapási, he, animal, he ...,
24. Don't shoot from far away. Be shooting down on it.
... etc. etc. ... finally ...
39. Now the Pirahãs have just now shot a jaguar, right now.
40. Then the Pirahãs are intensely afraid of panthers. OK, I'm done.
During the telling of this story, the listeners think it is wonderful. They
are laughing, enjoying the words, hardly restraining themselves from adding
in their own comments. In the background are other groups of people, telling
similar stories, going on and on like this for hours on end. Even right
through the night the village is filled with endless chatter and laughter
(the Pirahãs don't believe in sleep; thus the title of the book).
Of course a cynical, sophisticated member of the modern
world might say that the reason for the laughter of the Pirahãs is that they
are laughing at the astonishing inability of the speaker to express himself
in anything more than the most primitive, basic forms imaginable. But no!
The listeners are thoroughly enjoying the story, just as they enjoy real
life, for they know that this is not a collection of meaningless thoughts.
Instead it is what really happened to the speaker. And they know exactly
what it feels like to be in just that sort of life and death situation in
the jungle.
The Pirahã are only concerned with immediate
experience. They have no words to describe abstract things, stories
about imaginary situations. Thus they have no words for numbers, or colors.
Also there is no word to describe family relations going beyond
grandparents, since jungle life precludes further trans-generational
experience. They have no creation myths of the kind which consume the
thoughts of the Australian Aborigines, or the believers in Christianity (or
indeed, modern physicists). For them, the world simply exists, and they have
no way of worrying about what would happen if it did not exist.
All of this contradicts the basic tenants of linguistic
theory. As Everett describes it, in the old days, say the 1930s or so, if
you wanted to become a professor of linguistics, then you had to go out into
the "field" - say the Amazon, or New Guinea, or whatever - and learn some
strange, previously unknown language. But then along came Noam
Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics. His theory - the modern way
of looking at language - is that language is something which distinguishes
people from animals. The compulsion to speak is part of human genetics, an
instinct, and this instinct is reflected in the common structures which all
human languages share. Chomsky's theory has developed into a full-blown
academic structure, with a language all its own. For example these linguists
speak of "recursion" in a language, meaning apparently the fact that
sentences may contain sub-sentences. (Recursion in mathematics or computer
science is something totally different from this.) If you take the trouble
to click into Noam Chomsky's homepage, then you will be confronted with his
prodigious output of books, papers, debates, etc., etc. So many thoughts. So
many abstractions. The knowledge we have of this "Universal Grammar" of
Chomsky is obtained through deep philosophical speculation - presumably
thinking about the English language - sitting comfortably in the ivory tower
of MIT (and Everett tells us that for a time, his office at MIT was just
across the hall from that of Chomsky), rather than wasting time in the
uncomfortable "field".
A few years ago I had a phase of listening to the daily
Internet program "Democracy Now",
with Amy Goodman. A frequent guest was Noam Chomsky, not speaking about his
Universal Grammar, but rather about the various failings and outrages which
have taken place recently in the United States. He has a droning, monotonous
voice. Unlike the Pirahã Indians, I can hardly imagine anybody laughing, or
even smiling when listening to the long-winded pronouncements of Chomsky.
His arguments are meticulously founded upon facts, and for each of those
facts, he provides the listener with a reference from the literature. Yet,
in the end, I have the feeling he has said nothing. He has smothered us with
words concerning the so-called "War on Terror", replete with hundreds of
references from the literature. But this is just talking about what other
people are talking about, who are themselves talking about what other people
are talking about, and so on, and so forth. This is a true state of
"recursion" which, in this instance, seems to be built upon nothing. Why are
we in this fictitious "War on Terror"? Who is responsible? How do we get out
of it? Chomsky is not interested in such questions.
And, of course, the Pirahã language falsifies Chomsky's
linguistics. It does not contain many of structures which are supposed to be
part of the Universal Grammar. It also falsifies many of the theories of
anthropologists, who maintain that every human society must have a creation
myth. But it seems to me that it also demonstrates the fact that we cannot
say that humans have a language instinct, whereas all other animals do not
have this instinct. If you sit on the porch of a house in Australia then you
will often see a number of Kookaburras sitting on a branch looking at you,
and it is easy to imagine that they are discussing what all these crazy
humans are doing. Who knows what they are able to communicate amongst
themselves? Some kinds of crows and magpies have been shown to exhibit
remarkable intelligence. Orangutans are known to have solved puzzles which
have defied the abilities of human university students.
Philosophers down through the ages have maintained that
the purpose of philosophy is to free the mind from needless worry. To learn
to live in the present and to accept with stoicism life as it is. Yet the
Pirahã have attained this state without philosophy! Their language is simply
incapable of expressing philosophical ideas.
I was interested to read that at one stage of Everett's
stay, they expressed the ambition to learn about numbers, since they had the
feeling that the Brazilian traders who occasionally came up the river to
trade were cheating them. Thus Everett and his wife conducted a seminar each
afternoon for months on end which was enthusiastically attended by many of
the villagers, with the purpose of teaching them numbers. But he says that
after all that time, they just gave up, still being unable to comprehend the
difference between 1, 2, and 3.
How is this possible? Were the Everetts wildly
incompetent teachers?
In fact mathematics itself is nothing more than the
process of following logical rules of deduction, based upon abstract,
imaginary structures whose meaning is given by the context in which the
structures are used. A few semesters ago I had a lecture on set theory, and
to start things off I said that the words we use do not describe specific
things, but rather they describe sets
of things.
For example, in the title of the present book, "Don't
sleep, there are snakes", the word "snakes" does not refer to a specific
thing - one particular snake which may, or may not be lurking in the jungle.
Rather it refers to a large set of possible things, namely all the dangerous
snakes in the neighborhood. Similarly the words "computer", or "car", and so
forth, are in each case a description of a set of things. (The "form" of the
thing in Plato's terminology.) The computer which I am typing into at this
moment is a particular instance of the form of a "computer". It is a
specific element within the set of all computers. All of this seems so
natural and obvious that we do not even think about it in these terms. Then
numbers represent a further stage of abstraction; they are really sets of
sets.
So what is the moral of this book about the Pirahã
Indians? Is it that happiness is to be attained by reducing language to the
bare necessities, leaving out all possibilities for formulating abstract
thoughts which might trouble the mind? While this may be true, it is still
something which is repulsive to my mind. Daniel Everett tells us that he has
devoted his life to understanding the language and the thinking of the
Pirahãs. And for my part, I have followed the example of the ancient Greeks,
believing that the true nature of the world is to be discovered using words
and the rules of logic, devoting my life to what I understand to be truth.
In the Tales of the Brothers Grimm, there are many animals
which speak, letting people participate in their words of wisdom. Rudyard
Kipling's Jungle Book is filled
with animals speaking with one another. But modern people, living in their
cities behind layers of concrete and glass, have lost contact with the rest
of the animal kingdom. Animals generally don't speak English, and even the
few parrots who have managed to pick up a smattering of English words don't
seem to tell us anything of a profound nature. Thus the idea developed that
animals are nothing but robots, machines which respond to given stimuli with
pre-programmed responses. This is the idea of modern "science". According to
this idea, "scientific" description of animal behavior can only be carried
out using experiments modeled upon the plan of the usual experiments in say
chemistry, or physics. Namely, the results must be reproducible. If you
chain a monkey into a standard position in the lab, and apply an electrical
shock, then given that the monkey is a mere robot, its response, namely a
shriek of pain, should be the same after each application. Such is the state
of "scientific" discourse in the realms of animal behavior today.
But anyone who is prepared to open his eyes to reality
knows that this cruel, horrible, "scientific" vision of life is pure
nonsense. Anyone who has lived in Australia and watched the flocks of
parrots moving about, chattering amongst themselves, sees a whole world of
life which is beyond our understanding. And not only the parrots, the crows
and all the other kinds of birds are an ever-present part of life in
Australia.
It seems that of all the different kinds of parrots in
the world, the African Grey Parrot is most able to reproduce the sounds
humans make when they speak with one another. Thus they are a favorite kind
of "pet" for people to have around the house, perhaps picking up the
occasional sound-bite, such as "Polly want a cracker", and so forth. But
surely it is also a cruel thing to keep such a bird as a "pet". The only
reason they pick up such sounds is that they are desperately lonely, being
confined in their cages for years on end. They are meant to fly about,
chattering constantly with all their friends in the flock, being part of the
ever-changing patterns of nature, the colors and sounds of the open air.
What a poor, sad thing it is for some lonely person to buy such a parrot in
a pet shop and then confine it in the closed, lifeless air of a room in a
house. Does that lonely person really imagine that the poor, imprisoned bird
is a true "friend"? It would be better if such lonely people get themselves
dogs. At least the dog has been part of a symbiotic relationship with humans
for many thousands of years, losing the "call of the wild" of the wolf, and
I suppose much of the intelligence of the wolf as well.
But even dogs, as any dog owner knows well, are able to
express themselves with great eloquence - "speaking", if one wants to call
it that. A dog has hundreds of things it can say, starting from the sentence
"I am hungry", to "Let's go for a walk", and most importantly, the sentence
"I love you!". It doesn't say them using English words, and it definitely
does not say them in a reproducible "scientific" manner.
Irene Pepperberg's idea was to go down to the local pet
shop and buy some African Grey Parrot at random, and then spend the next 30
years intensively training it to say English words. This was Alex. He was
trained for 8 to 10 hours each day by Pepperberg, together with a long
succession of devoted students at the various universities with which she
was associated. At the end of all this time, it seems that Alex developed
hardening of the arteries and then he died of a heart attack. But he was
able to speak some hundred English words, using them in the proper context.
Pepperberg's goal was apparently to "prove" that parrots were not robots,
even when that "proof" adhered to the principles of modern "scientific"
investigation. Of course that goal was hardly worthwhile. How can one prove
that nonsense is nonsense using nonsense?
Thus her real goal was to falsify the various modern
theories of language, especially those associated with the figure of Noam
Chomsky (and in this connection, see the review of the book "Don't sleep,
there are snakes", which I have just read before reading this one). But why
does a poor little bird have to go through with all this simply in order to
falsify Chomsky? It seems to me that if we let Chomsky carry on with his
voluminous pronouncements, then the various contradictions and
qualifications which emerge will gradually suffice in the eyes of the world
to produce a self-falsification of Chomsky.
Even after all those 30 years of training, Alex was
unable to say very much in English. We feel sorry for him. It was not his
natural language. I am reminded of a quote which Boswell attributed to Dr.
Johnson. In this modern world it is an extremely politically incorrect
quotation! Namely, as with the present-day Catholic Church, with its supreme
leader, the pope, he was opposed to the ordination of women as priests. He
said, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind
legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at
all."
And so this whole story of Alex made me sad. I am afraid
it will encourage hoards of lonely people to go to their local pet shops and
buy themselves African Grey Parrots. But at least the majority of birds in
the world are still free to pursue their lives in the wideness of nature,
not imprisoned by selfish humanity.
This is a novel about esoteric sects. People going off into the
snowy woods in the mountains of France during a New Year's night (which, of
course is not the moment when the
northern hemisphere of the Earth is tilted furthest from the Sun - that is
on the 21st or 22nd of December), lying face upwards to the stars, drinking
some fatal potion, and imagining in the moments before the final plunge into
oblivion, the exitus from this level of existence, that the spirit will
travel upwards into the "next level", rather than that disappointing "game
over" which has frustrated countless computer-players over the years.
The heroine of the book, Dominique Carpentier, is the
kind of judge within the French legal system who doesn't sit on the legal
bench; rather it is her responsibility to gather sufficient information
regarding a crime to enable a sensible prosecution to be made. In the
present case, one of the group of corpses lying in the French forest has a
bullet in the brain, yet there is no firearm present at the scene. Therefore
it must be murder. Reference is made to a previous "departure" of this sort
in Switzerland some 5 years before the present mass suicide (the story takes
place around the year 2000). Whether intended or not, we are reminded of the
true story of the Swiss suicide sect of 1994, who named themselves the "Order
of the Solar Temple".
It seems to be the case that not all of these Swiss Solar
Templers were totally convinced that the transition from this level to the
next would be a good thing. Therefore, in contrast with the spiritual
travelers of Duncker's novel, the real life (or death) corpses of the Swiss
travelers were a bit of a mess, most of them shot with guns, or violently
suffocated, and what have you. Hardly very celestial. And then there were
all those people who were murdered in "Jonestown"
in Guyana. They were followers of their great guru, Jones. Clicking about in
the Internet, one finds various exposés, particularly in YouTube, showing
that Jones, or whatever, was concerned with advancing the knowledge of human
fallibilities, as an extension to the MK-Ultra program of torture and
mind-control which the CIA had developed, or something. But I must admit
that I clicked out of that YouTube offering before it ended, since the
disgusting details were making me feel sick.
So, in contrast with these unpleasantly true stories of
suicide sects, Patricia Duncker has built her novel around a higher class of
esoterics. The guru is Friedrich Grosz, an overbearing German conductor and
composer of music. There are some nice descriptions of music in the book.
Yes, when we sit for hours in a concert or an opera, perhaps with young
singers who are trying with everything they have, truly with heart and soul,
to convey the beauty and meaning of the music, then we are carried away into
another world. A wonderful world of innocence and truth. It is a kind of
mass hypnosis. And this, together with much of the action taking place in
the wine fields and chateaus of Southern France, made for an absorbing
story. Patricia Duncker writes beautifully. Will the diminutive figure of
the judge, Dominique Carpentier, succeed in proving that Herr Grosz is the
murderer, or will the conductor entrap the judge in his art and in Truth?
As with a murder mystery, I read on into the small hours
of the morning in order to find out what happens. But in the end, I had the
feeling that the book was slightly disappointing. It would have improved if
the author had seen fit to increase the level of humor, not taking the whole
thing so seriously. After all, Christianity itself is a kind of death cult,
whose message is that in the transition from this level to the next, the
number of points won or lost (sin results in losing points, good deeds
result in gaining points) determine the conditions of the next level.
The sect, or Faith,
in the book is said to be very ancient. It is based upon the observation
that the star Epsilon
Aurigae, which is found in the constellation Auriga, exhibits a very
interesting behavior. Every 27 years its apparent visual magnitude drops
from +2.92 to +3.83. The astonishing thing is that this dimming of the star
lasts for approximately 700 days. For the ancient Egyptians - at least
according to the story of the book - the fact that a reasonably bright star
seemingly disappears for two years was an example, or even the basic
expression, of the Dark Powers of the Universe.
Even modern astronomers are unclear about the mechanism
which accounts for this dimming of Epsilon Aurigae. (Although I suspect that
few would be prepared to defend the theory that it is due to the Powers of
the Devil.) Interestingly enough, just at the time I am writing this,
Epsilon Aurigae is in one of its periods of eclipse. The most reasonable
theory is that it is orbited by a dim companion star which is surrounded by
a huge revolving cloud of dust, or rubble, which obscures our view of the
main star. This idea has been supported by the observations of the Spitzer
Space Telescope, which observed the onset of the eclipse in 2009. Last
night, before reading the book to the end, I noticed that, unusually, the
night sky over Germany had become clear, and the stars were visible. Thus,
after struggling with finding the German name for the Auriga constellation
(it is called "Fuhrmann" in German), and confusing the main star, Capella,
with the Death Star, Epsilon Aurigae; consulting a star chart we had gotten
many years ago, and using binoculars, I was able to identify the dim,
eclipsed remains of Epsilon Aurigae, despite all the problems I have had
with my eyes recently. But I am afraid that this vision was neither
apocalyptic, nor in any way esoteric.
The fact of the matter is that modern astronomers are far
more interested in reality than were the ancient priests of Egypt. We know
of many strange, unimaginably apocalyptical phenomena in the universe which
are so extreme as to dwarf into total insignificance anything that Epsilon
Aurigae can produce. And there are reasonable, logical explanations for
these things. Why is it that these esoterical people devote themselves to
demonstrably false theories regarding well-known phenomena in the physical
world? Wouldn't they do better to follow the practice of the established
churches and confine their theories to assertions about an imagined
spiritual world which could never be proved or refuted by direct physical
observation
A deadly game of hide and seek in modern London. The "good guy"
is Adam Kindred, who is supposed to be a climatologist. The "bad guy", who
is trying to kill Adam, is a horrible British returned soldier from
Afghanistan, a "squaddy" who learned the art of torture, maiming, terror,
doing his part to transform that country into the hell which it is today.
The name of this ugly killer is JonJo, or at least that is the name his
fellow killers in the British Army knew him by. During this game of hide and
seek, we encounter the violence and brutality which, at least according to
the book, has now descended upon London.
I have only very seldom visited England. The last time
was two years ago, just for a weekend to meet relatives. Somehow - thank
goodness - the neighborhood of Primrose Hill does not allow the casual
visitor to observe the goings on in "The Shaft", which is apparently a
fictional high-rise housing estate of the 1950s, as described in the book.
But I can well imagine that such things do exist in real life.
Is it true that there exist secretive, private security
firms which hire those specialist ex-soldiers to work as contract killers?
Perhaps.
Looking at the good guy, Adam Kindred, it is said that he
was an Englishman who had attained full tenure at an American College where
he was responsible for the largest "cloud chamber" in the world. I had
always thought that cloud chambers are used in high-energy physics. But
Adam's cloud chamber is a large, empty building, many stories high, into
which is blown lots of water in order to make enclosed clouds which can be
studied, as in meteorology. Not climatology.
William Boyd seems to have confused things here since,
whereas meteorologists are vitally concerned with clouds, modern
climatologists wish that all those complicated, chaotic clouds would simply
go away. As has been shown by the "ClimateGate"
scandal, they are prepared to involve themselves in glaringly unethical
behavior in order to keep the millions and millions of dollars flowing in
from the industries making atomic energy, windmills, solar cells, corn to be
burned rather than used as food, light bulbs filled with poisonous mercury
vapor, and all the hundreds of other wasteful and highly polluting
industries which have jumped onto the ClimateGate gravy train. None of these
industries are viable by themselves. Instead they exist on the basis of
billions, even trillions of
dollars of subventions, gained through massive corruption and a mystical,
semi-religious belief in a return to the imagined Garden of Eden of the
Bible. In reality, clouds must play a determining role when it comes to
climate, but they cannot be sensibly understood by way of computer
simulations. For example, it has been shown that cosmic rays have much to do
with cloud formation, and the intensity of the cosmic rays meeting the earth
is influenced by the activity of the sun. There is no money in that, so
climatologists assert that the sun and the clouds play no particular role in
determining the changing climate.
But getting back to the book, the story is that Adam
Kindred is a rather over-sexed man who, acting on a sudden urge in his cloud
chamber, spontaneously and torridly coupled with one of his female students
up above the cloud. (William Boyd lost the oppertunity here to give her the
most appropriate name in this situation, namely Eve. Instead she has a very
American name: Fairfield.) Unfortunately, Fairfield subsequently sent him
numbers of emails and other public expressions of her love and admiration
for his sexual prowess. Adam, who was married to the daughter of the
principle benefactor of the private college, thus immediately lost his job,
despite tenure. Therefore his return to London and a job interview at the
Imperial College where, from the tenor of the rest of the book, we presume
that such sexual adventures will be treated more magnanimously.
After the interview, a somewhat drained Adam sits alone
in an Italian restaurant in Chelsea and gets into conversation with another
lone diner. It turns out that this is Phillip Wang, a professor of
immunology, or something. He leaves an envelope in the restaurant, seemingly
by mistake, and so Adam calls him on his mobile, and agrees to bring it over
to him in his hotel room. There he finds Wang, stabbed, with the knife stuck
into his side, gasping for Adam to pull it out. Adam does this, producing a
gush of blood, Wang expires, and Adam finds himself with his fingerprints
all over the knife and Wang's blood all over his clothes. Thus he decides to
go into hiding - going "underground". And the killer of Wang, that horrible
JonJo, is out to get Adam as well.
But why did JonJo's security firm get the contract to
kill Wang? And why do they want him to find and kill Adam? All of this leads
to a complicated story about the corruption in the pharmaceutical industry.
Do these drug companies hire killers in order to advance their profits into
the billions? Who knows. In any case, I found the plot of the book to be
somewhat illogical here.
Surely though, there is a great deal of corruption
involved in all of these dealings with drugs. Most basic research in
medicine is done in public-financed universities. Then, given that a new
drug is developed by honest researchers in such institutions, immediately
the pharmaceutical industry steps in, putting huge funding into making some
trivial change in the medicine in order to patent it - undoubtedly
accompanied by much bribery - then spending further huge amounts on
advertising and on lawyers whose purpose is to terrorize the competition and
to insure that the exorbitant prices charged are enforced. One of the worst
examples is described in this
link, comparing two drugs for the treatment of macular degeneration.
As I understand it, at least here in Germany, the use of the expensive drug
has been enforced. This alone must result in a drain on the economy of
hundreds of millions, if not billions of euros each year!
Another common scam involves the use of the so-called "orphan drugs". The
theory is that there exist obscure diseases which affect only a very few
people. Thus the pharmaceutical industry is justified in charging very high
prices for the few dosages which they might sell. The scam involves
pretending that a given drug is only relevant for some very obscure form of
cancer, but then gradually it is "discovered" that it is relevant for more
and more kinds of cancer. The combined effect of bribery, litigation,
advertising, and whatever else the company behind the scam can throw at us,
insures that the drug remains classified as an "orphan", thus commanding
extravagantly bloated prices despite the fact that it is then sold to a mass
market.
The link here is to an internet site which allows you to
download the entire book as a scanned pdf file (almost 25 megabytes), you
can also read it online in various other formats. John
Tyndall was Professor of Physics at the Royal Institution of Great
Britain in London from 1853 to 1887. During the 1860s he spent each summer
in the Alps during that golden period of alpine exploration. He, along with
his trusted guide, the great Bennen, was the first to climb The Weisshorn.
He nearly made a first ascent of the Matterhorn, but in the end that honor
was reserved for Edward Whymper in a climb that ended in tragedy.
I suppose modern climbers will smile at his description
of his climb up the back of the Eiger. With modern GoreTex mountaineering
boots and crampons it must be a trivial matter, no more difficult than
climbing say the stairs in the Eiffel Tower. But back in the 1860s, the
guide had to carefully cut steps with his ice axe all the way up. In the
modern world, when we think of the Eiger, we think of the North Face, that
absurdly difficult and deadly perpendicular expanse of rock; all the rest is
insignificant. (For our even indescribably more insignificant and trivial
walks about the Alps two weeks ago, we got a new rucksack made by the "North
Face" company. A very superior rucksack, but a further example of the
trivialization of the extraordinary.)
But the great thing about a book like this is the pure
joy the author experiences when looking at the sky, or the snow, or the
magnificence of the mountains. Tyndall devotes many pages to his
observations on the properties and the motions of glaciers. He is always
curious. Always experimenting. For example, during one ascent, he tells us
that the light and colors of the sky are of the most extraordinarily
beautiful quality, more so than he has ever seen before. And this leads him
into a dissertation on the reason the sky is blue. It is especially most
beautifully deep blue in the direction away from the sun. He tells us that
this is due to the reflection, or deflection, of light by small particles in
the air. (The language of the Victorian physicist is filled with flowery and
complicated words to describe such things.) I had thought that the blueness
of the sky was due to the absorption spectrum of nitrogen or oxygen, or
something, giving a quantum mechanical effect. However, looking the thing up
in the Wikipedia, I see that it is explained by the more classical Rayleigh
effect. There is also the Tyndall
effect, which is perhaps more relevant for explaining the different
colors of sea water.
The book ends with a description of his trip to Algeria
in December, 1870, for the purpose of observing an eclipse of the sun. Of
course these days you can easily find out what the sun is doing, for example
at this site on the internet, which
gives you various pictures of the state of the sun right now. You can have a
look at the corona, the sun spots, the intensity of the radiation in
different frequencies, in particular the x-ray emissions, and you can also
see what the sun looks like some way around the back, and further around the
front, as observed by the STEREO satellites which are orbiting the sun at
the L4 and L5 Lagrange points with respect to the Sun-Earth system.
But back in 1870, the only way to get a clear view of the
corona was to get a hurried look through a telescope, and various optical
instruments, during the two minutes or so of a total solar eclipse. Tyndall
traveled together with a number of other English scientists on a ship down
to Algeria. During the trip, the ship is assaulted by a massive winter storm
in the Bay of Biscay, nearly bringing it to grief. This prompts Tyndall to
make various scientific observations on the motion of ships in a storm.
Arriving in Algeria, he selects a suitable site for his instruments, and
with the assistance of various sailors or soldiers from the ship, he spends
days practicing for his hectic observations during the two minutes of
totality. But alas, the day of the eclipse turned out to be cloudy and
rainy, so he was only able to observe the general darkening of the clouds
beneath the eclipsed sun.
This is similar to our experience with the total eclipse
of the sun on August
11, 1999. Rather than spending a whole month to get to the thing and
return, as Tyndall was required to do in 1870, the moon was making things
more convenient for us, so that we only needed to drive a couple of hundred
kilometers south of here in order to reach the path of totality. We decided
that the weather might be generally better in France, and so we drove over
to Metz, more particularly around the neighborhood of Thionville, which
would be right in the center of the path of the shadow of the moon. This had
the attraction of a pleasant overnight stay in the town of Trier, with all
the interesting Roman ruins, and then a drive along the Mosel river. Near
Thionville, we scouted about for a good hill and parked the car, climbing
the hill and then enjoying a small picnic on a blanket spread on the grass.
We noticed that most of the adjoining hilltops were occupied with similar
groups waiting for the great event. Unfortunately it was a rather cloudy
day, but with the hope of occasional gaps in the clouds. I had noticed some
cooling towers of a power station near Thionville producing lots of water
vapor, but we were situated somewhat upwind of that. Nevertheless, as with
Tyndall's experience, I am afraid to say that the actual eclipse was only
experienced beneath a continuous layer of clouds. But even so, I agree with
Tyndall that even this was a wonderful experience of Nature. Unfortunately,
all the other people on all the other hilltops of France also got into their
cars at the same time as we did. Most of them were Dutch people, but the
motorway was blocked for hours so that the drive back took considerably
longer than planned. Afterwards I was told by some people who had simply
driven down to Heidelberg that at the moment the eclipse reached them, the
clouds parted and they had a magnificent and unobstructed view of the whole
thing.
I seldom read poetry. Poems are usually fragments of feelings
within some larger story which for us, as the readers of a poem, is largely
hidden. And so I would like to know more about the story. How does it begin,
how does it end? Yet with war poems, the story is clear. The poems all make
sense within a great collective tragedy.
The anthology of poems here was published a number of
years ago by the Folio Society. I have occasionally read one or two of them
when the mood struck me, but now I have simply read the whole lot in their
order in the book. It is arranged more or less chronologically. At first we
meet the young men, surprised to find themselves camping in tents, marching
about under the shouts of some dominating Sargent Major, wondering what it
will be like to join the real fight. Then we have their first impressions of
things. And then many, many poems describing the horrible reality of it all.
Finally, there are a few poems of the survivors, even written many years
later, still trying to understand the horror.
If I should die in some
old Flanders trench
Mid winter's slush or summer's vilest stench,...
So begins one of these many poems, this one by someone named A.V. Simpson.
At the end of the book is a list of the various authors, together with the
information about when they died. And so we see that A.V. Simpson lived on
until 1992, when he died at the age of 95 years. But when he wrote these
lines, he didn't know that.
Imagine going on for year after year in the trenches, in
the freezing cold of winter, or being drenched by cold rain. Explosions all
the time. Sniper's bullets whistling through the air around you like knives.
And out in the front are many dead bodies, or people who have been shot out
in the open and are screaming for somebody to shoot them in order to put an
end to the pain. All the bodies are gradually decomposing, producing, as he
says, the vilest stench.
This Folio volume also has many photographs of the war,
including pictures of some of the poets. I often looked at the picture of
Robert Graves, or of Sigfried Sassoon, both of whom survived the war. But
particularly the picture of Wilfred Owen, who was killed on the 4th of
November, 1918, aged 25, just days before the end of the war, has a
disquieting, incredibly sad aspect to it.
There is an interesting portrait of the author, Richard Price,
in the review of the book in the New York Times, which I have linked to
here. When reading the book, I had imagined him to be younger, more awake.
But the life he describes would certainly be extremely exhausting, draining,
hardly lush, and so we understand how he has acquired such a face. The
action takes place in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
I have only the most vicarious knowledge of New York, but
from what I read, I gather that the neighborhood used to be as dangerous as
William Boyd's "Shaft" in London, yet now it is in the process of becoming
"gentrified". That is to say, all those violent, drugged, gangs of criminal
youths with no money and long police records are being replaced by the much
worse criminals whose territory used to be confined to the immediate
vicinity of Wall Street. But now, in the process of regurgitating all of the
billions and trillions which they have stolen from the rest of us, some of
it has been spewed beyond the immediate vicinity of their crimes, so that
the properties of the Lower East Side are becoming too expensive for the
traditional gangs of New York. This must be the lushness referred to in the
title of the book.
At first, I found it difficult to get into this book. The
dialog was so filled with unfamiliar slang that much of it was
incomprehensible. However, after 50 or so pages, the story settled down to
being a fascinating murder mystery. A very absorbing read. It is the kind of
book where you read on from page to page, as if in a gripping movie.
I imagine that in earlier times, the odd random shooting
on the streets would be dismissed by the police as being nothing more than
the usual day to day routine of events in the Big City. But according to the
story of this book, the killer is one of the left-over youths of darker skin
color in the neighborhood, while the victim is a light-skinned, grown-up
child who imagines that he is in some way "artistic", and thus special.
Since the world of art can only accommodate a limited number of these
children of the more privileged, they exist by working as waiters in trendy
restaurants. For the members of the gentrification class, this murder of one
of their own is a tragedy of theatrical proportions, and so the police must
take it seriously.
The main characters are the policeman, Matt, and the
witness, Eric, who himself was both nearly a victim of the mugging, and also
a victim of random police incompetence. Eric is the head waiter at one of
those trendy restaurants, where the true victim was temporarily working.
Gradually we learn that all of the characters in the book - apart from the
degenerate, longer-term residents of the Lower East Side (those people "of
color") - are overworked and underpaid. They dream of "success", without
having any clear picture of what sort of success they seek. Is it artistic
success, or sexual success, or drug-induced success? The book ends with the
youthful, degenerate killer being consigned to years of a horrible existence
within the vast American prison-industrial system. The other characters
continue on with their meaningless lives, hoping, perhaps succeeding in
escaping from the Lower East Side.
We are left with the impression that the poor killer has
a greater degree of artistic talent than anyone else in the book.
Looking for something new to read at the bookshop in town, I
got this one. The woman at the cash register exclaimed that it is a
wonderful book; she had read it twice and had watched the movie as well! So
it must be good. Then, riding back home on my bicycle, I seemed to remember
a movie which was shown on television a while ago, where a crazy haunted
house was in the middle of things, mounted on wind-swept rocks, tied down
with steel cables which produced a disturbing humming or howling sound in
the gale winds coming off the frozen ocean.
And indeed, that was the movie corresponding to this
book. But now, having read the book, I can say that this was another
instance of the truism that the book is generally better than the movie.
In fact the haunted family house doesn't really play all
that much of a role in the book. It was the family house of the Quoyle
family in earlier times in the Canadian province of Newfoundland. We learn
that they were rather degenerate people. So the more recent generations of
the family escaped from the coldness of northern Canada to the United
States, where things were somewhat warmer - climate-wise - but even more
desolate from the emotional point of view. Thus the protagonist, referred to
throughout the book as simply Quoyle, retreats back to cold Newfoundland
with his aunt and two young daughters.
Unlike the movie, both Quoyle and his aunt establish
themselves as respected and productive members of society in Newfoundland,
such as it is. Rather than living in the silly haunted house strung onto the
rocks, perched above the cold Atlantic, they move sensibly into town. And so
the book becomes a description in various episodes of life as it is
experienced in Newfoundland.
I am writing this at the beginning of December, and the
weather here in Europe is freezing! There hasn't been such a cold spell as
this, so early in the winter, for many years. Everything is covered in ice
and snow. In order to escape the dark, cold, gray winter of Europe and North
America, a conference has been organized in the tropical resort of Cancun in
Mexico, where right now, thousands of rich people have traveled in order to
enjoy the warmth, sunbathing on the tropical beaches. And what is the
subject of their luxurious conference - which is being paid for by the rest
of us through our ever-increasing taxes? The subject of their conference is
the idea that the world is now too hot, and so all of humanity should try
and get together and do something - anything - in the hope that by some
means the world will become even colder than it is now! The absurdity of
this would be not so obvious if they had chosen to take their
all-expenses-paid holidays not in tropical Cancun, but rather in ice-bound
Newfoundland.
According to the review in the Guardian which I have linked to
here, the story of this book is based on a true story. The Collyer brothers
of New York became recluses, living alone in their Manhattan mansion,
gradually letting it deteriorate into a state of filthy dereliction,
gradually becoming filled with mountains of old newspapers, so that at the
end it was only possible for them to reach the small remaining spaces
through tunnels in the accumulated rubbish. Finally they died in 1947, when
they were found buried beneath the debris.
In Doctorow's story, the brothers live somewhat longer -
into the 1980s, when they themselves would have been in their eighties,
having been born around the turn of the century. Homer is the narrator. He
goes blind before the first world war. His passion is music, the piano. The
parents are well-to-do members of the New York high society, as it was in
those days, one hundred years ago. The father is a medical doctor,
specializing in woman's medicine. They live in a large, four story mansion
on Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park. One wonders how the family had so much
money in order to support such a lifestyle.
It is undoubtedly true that in earlier times, fashionable
medical doctors were even more rapacious than is the case with modern
medical doctors in the United States today. Nevertheless, I find it
difficult to imagine that such practitioners would have been able to amass a
sufficient wealth from their poor patients in order to live in such style.
It is said in the book that the ancestors of the Collyer family immigrated
from Europe at the beginning of the 19th century to the United States.
Perhaps they were members of that New York banking class who were even more
rapacious than those doctors of fashion. Or perhaps - more happily - they
had honorably and successfully established some industry in the dynamically
growing world of 19th century America.
Thus the blind Homer stayed at home, while his brother
Langley enlisted in the army to go "over there" in the First World War. He
returned with a bad case of mustard-gas poisoning, and a cynical view of the
world. The parents died of the Spanish flu, leaving the two brothers in
charge of the mansion, with a couple of old family servants to look after
things. (As explained here,
the excessive use of the drug aspirin may have caused the extremely high
mortality experienced during the influenza outbreak of 1918.)
At first they live it up, but soon realize that the money
is coming to an end. Homer has an affair with a younger servant who comes
into the house, but that ends abruptly. Langley starts reading all the
newspapers published in New York, accumulating them every day, with the idea
of showing that all the news - everything in life - can be boiled down to
some basic formula, or set of essential details. Perhaps in connection with
this idea, he accumulates junk. Thus does the house gradually become filled
with garbage. The old servants either die, or leave, and the brothers become
recluses, closing themselves in, boarding up the windows, and what have you.
A depressing story which, after finishing the book,
seemed to me to be a story of little value and less meaning. Perhaps
Doctorow was trying to give us some sort of a feeling of nostalgia for the
New York of bygone days. Back in the 1920s, and 30s and 40s. When the Empire
State Building was built, and it was hit by an airplane, but did
not fall down! Were those the good-old days? Maybe. For my part, I
find it difficult to understand why this book was short-listed for the
Mann-Booker prize.