This year (2025)
Previous years: 2024; 2023;
2022; 2021;
2020; 2019;
2018; 2017;
2016; 2015;
2014; 2013;
2012; 2011;
2010; 2009;
2008; 2007;
2006; 2005
Rachel Kushner:
Creation
Lake
Liz Moore:
The
God of the Woods
Futaro Yamada:
The
Meiji
Guillotine Murders
Yael Van Der Wouden:
The
Safe Keep
The heroine, or shall we say protagonist of this
book is an agent provocateur. Her job is to ingratiate herself into
environmental protection groups which the Powers That Be would like to
eliminate, provoking them to do something illegal, providing the evidence,
and then seeing that they are thrown into jail to serve long sentences,
safely put away from normal society. For the purpose of this novel she has
assumed the name Sadie Smith. She is middle 30s, fit, still beautiful, and
so she uses sex. Her present assignment is in the south of France. Water is
to be diverted from its natural courses and into a large artificial
reservoir in order to irrigate the endless fields of corn (or maize) which
is to replace traditional agriculture. Thus it is part of all the pollution
caused by modern Green politics. The traditional farmers of the area are
protesting. According to the narrative of the legacy media, they are thus
part of the "extreme right". There is also a commune of hippy-like people;
perhaps they should be referred to as elements of the "extreme left", led by
a guru whose name is Pascal, and they join in with the protests. They have
given up on the idea of revolution, instead withdrawing into
self-sufficiency by subsistence farming, aided by the occasional addition of
funds by the wealthy parents of one or another member. They also produce
reams of philosophical literature. The annual agricultural fair is soon to
take place and an obscure politician named Plato is to make an appearance.
Sadie's mission is to infiltrate the commune and get them to assassinate
Plato.
The story unfolds gradually; Sadie tells us lots of
things about herself. It is an enjoyable read from one character to the next
with excursions into one thing and another. Rachel Kushner writes well, much
irony and fun. In particular Sadie is constantly reading the emails of Bruno
Lacombe. He is an old man who has progressed from living in a farmhouse with
family, to living alone in the barn, to living in an ancient stone hut, to
finally living in a limestone cave, an entrance to which is on his property.
We have long meditations about the Neanderthals. Cave
men. Two or three percent of non-African human genomes are attributed to
Neanderthals while Africans have only a one percent or less contribution. It
used to be thought that Neanderthals were ape-like brutes with their thick,
muscular chests and short limbs. Too stupid to understand bows and arrows or
thrown spears, they lunged at large animals with their primitive wooden
lances, grappling, killing them with bare hands. The bones of Neanderthals
are said to exhibit at least as many breakages as with modern-day rodeo
cowboys. And yet the Neanderthals had huge brains: an average of 1640 cubic
centimeters for males and 1460 for females. This compares with 1362 and 1201
for the average modern European brain. And so people imagine a different
picture of the Neanderthal. Were they gentle, caring, unimaginably
intelligent people, living in perfect harmony with nature? Like Pascal's
commune, but infinitely sustainable. A mythical, perfect human existence,
brought to a tragic end by the invasion of cruel, evil modern man. Bruno
tells us of such things in his emails and tells us how the enduring echos of
those lost times of 50 or 100 thousand years ago can be felt in the darkness
of his cave. Perhaps he imagines himself to be a kind of spiritual
Neanderthal.
Indeed, all of this is very interesting. When reading the
book I decided to look up a "comparison of neanderthal and human brains"
using duckduckgo.com. (Not Google. Heaven forbid!) This led me to a recent paper on the subject. There it is said that
modern humans have a mutation to the TKTL1 gene, changing just a single pair
on the sequence. All other hominoids lack this mutation. It has the effect
of dramatically increasing the number of neurons with all their connections,
especially in the frontal lobe. Therefore the fact that our brains are
smaller than those of the Neanderthals does not mean that we are more stupid
than they were. On the contrary, we return to the picture of Neanderthals as
stupid, grunting brutes, perhaps with IQs in the sub-50s or less, fighting
with their primitive neurons to survive in harsh Ice Age Europe. The
examples of birds with high intelligence: parrots, kookaburras and the like,
with their small brains, show that brain volume is not necessarily the
decisive factor. There is some evidence that our genomes contain almost no
Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA, seeming to imply that almost all sexual
encounters between a Neanderthal and a human involved a male Neanderthal and
a female human. That is to imagine that the women were raped.
Despite enjoying the story of the book, it seemed to me
to be strangely naīve. It is placed in modern times with emails, mobile
telephones and all the rest. Sadie tells us about her first case in which
she framed a young man who was protesting the cruelty of animal experiments
in some horrible laboratory. She induced him to buy tons of nitrogen based
fertilizer which could be used to make a bomb. And so he was sentenced to
years in prison. He is now free, having a lawyer investigating the exact
circumstances of his case. Yet Sadie has disappeared into thin air and has
gone on to successfully frame numbers of further such people. This might
have been possible, say, in the 1970s, but in our real world of today
everybody is constantly taking pictures, selfies, videos with their mobile
telephones. The world is filled with surveillance cameras, recording things.
There are countless images stored away in the vastness of both government
and private "cloud" memories. Emails, certainly those of Bruno, are
generally not encrypted, and people accessing other people's emails can be
identified. So I imagine that such an agent provocateur would have only one
chance, after which she would be useless, having to hide, perhaps in some
cave in the south of France, for the rest of her life.
And then of course we have the circumstance which I
cannot understand, that the Green political movement has mutated from being
representative of the kinds of people Sadie is ruining, people with just
environmental causes, to being the shrillest voices for war, mass murder and
all the rest. For some reason these people embrace electricity almost as a
kind of fetish. Everything is to be based on electricity. Laws have been
passed, specifying that in the future only electrical battery cars will be
allowed. Houses will only be allowed to be heated with electricity. Huge
windmills are being built everywhere for generating intermittent
electricity, polluting vast swathes of natural forest, decimating the birds
and the bats, relying on obscure minerals for their functioning which are
mined at the expense of extreme, deadly pollution, sometimes using
child labor, in countries out of sight of Green voters. For the last year
teams of construction workers have been going through the streets here,
digging up the sidewalks and laying cables. But these are glass fiber
cables, not new, robust electrical cables. How will the old cables which
were laid down under the streets, up to 100 years ago, cope in the middle of
a cold, windless winter night with every single house drawing perhaps 10 or
15 kilowatts or more of electricity, continuously, for heating and car
charging? Where will all this electricity come from, given that the system
is now almost at its limit, despite the fact that only few houses are heated
with electricity and few battery cars are on the roads?
But this was not really part of the story of the book,
except that we imagine that Sadie's unknown employer might very reasonably
have been an obscure Green-funded NGO. After all, the farmers were
protesting all of this infrastructure for transforming their land into a
corn mono-culture for the production of ethanol to be burned in the engines
of cars (which are to be banned in the future).
A rich banking family have a mansion on a hill in
the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. There is a lake down below and
a summer camp for the children of rich parents. Everything is surrounded by
dense woodlands. In the spring there is an invasion of irritating black
flies, but they disappear in mid-summer, and to celebrate this event the
banking family invites a select group of people to their mansion for a party
which lasts for a week. Meanwhile down at the lake, the summer camp of
children - most of whom are not children of parents taking part in the
celebrations up at the mansion - goes on in a highly organized, almost
military style. The party for the grownups consists of a few old friends of
the family, and then possible future customers of the bank together with
their spouses, and finally a collection of young and attractive men and
women from Hollywood or whatever to make things look more attractive and
perhaps to provide sexual diversions for one or another of the guests. As
with the summer camp for children, the party for the grownups is highly
organized with competitive games and sporting events, points being awarded
and added up to determine the winners and losers at the end of the week.
All of this seems to me to be extremely unpleasant, and I
find it difficult to believe that a potential customer of the family bank
would afterwards want to have anything more to do with such a family. But
what do I know about the lives of the rich?
In the book, all of the rich people are portrayed as
being dreadful, and all of the non-rich people - the workers at the summer
camp for children, the ordinary people in the small town nearby - are
wonderful. The one exception is the simple-minded wife of the present head
of the family bank who drowns her feelings in alcohol and pills prescribed
by the family doctor. Her depression was particularly due to the mysterious
disappearance of her beloved young son into the depths of the wood, never to
return. Was he murdered, abducted, the victim of an accident? Despite
extensive searches lasting days, weeks, by everybody in the surrounding
villages, the police and everybody else, his body has never been found. And
now, at the time of the present story, the young daughter has also
disappeared. Again, everybody is searching without success. Where is she?
Was she murdered or abducted or something?
We read eagerly on. The good people are falsely accused
while those arrogant rich people make halfhearted attempts to continue their
party, on to the end of the week. My theory was that the family lawyer whose
degenerate son was set to take over the bank was the perpetrator. After all,
he had a motive in both cases. For anybody who might happen to click in here
(and I expect that there is nobody except me who would do that) I will not
spoil the story by revealing how things are resolved at the end. At least
the New York Times took the book seriously enough to give it a review.
This is also a crime story, but of a completely
different character to the last book. The author was of an earlier generation and he based
his story on the situation in Japan in 1869, during the time of the Boshin War. In 1854, the United States Navy Commodore
Perry sailed his fleet of Black Ships into Tokyo Harbor to open up trade
between Japan and the outside world. Earlier, during the 1630s, the rulers
of Japan decided to isolate the country from divisive outside influences,
particularly those of the Portuguese and Spanish which had reached Japan in
the years before that. Japan refused to allow itself to be colonized, either
by force or else by the subversive influence of the Catholic missionaries
with their Christian religion. Yet at the end of this "Sakoku" period, the isolation was ended. Such events
are bound to lead to conflicts, with those people who were dominant in the
old system - the Samurai class - losing out.
The book begins with chapters describing lots of blatant
corruption in the chaos of the time. Roaming bands of police extract money
from everybody they can see. They come from the old ronin class of wandering, itinerant samurai of bygone
days. We are overwhelmed with all the complicated Japanese names of so many
different characters, most of whom seem to play no particular role in the
story. Perhaps the internet might tell us that they are actually famous
historical figures from that period. The narration seems to be going
nowhere, but gradually we do converge upon two characters with similar
appearing names who are both somewhat higher up in this newly established
police department. And then finally, a chapter does appear with a murder
mystery.
Somebody - was he also with the police, or was he a
politician? - was killed with the sword of another character who was also
either police or politician despite the fact that the apparent killer was up
in a tower with windows all around and observed constantly by various other
policemen. And there can have been no other assassin at the scene. What a
mystery! The mystery is solved by a young French woman who is the girlfriend
of one of the two main characters. She is described as being indescribably
beautiful and clothed in indescribably beautiful clothes. She enters a state
of trance and communes with the deceased in a seance who, speaking through
the French woman, explains what happened. It is a rather far-fetched
explanation. The other policeman, or perhaps somebody else, is constantly
saying that the French woman should be deported along with all other
foreigners.
Then the next chapter is another short story explaining
another murder mystery. It has snowed and there are the tracks of a rickshaw
leading down to a canal where the victim drowned, yet no footprints in the
snow of the coolie who must have been pulling the rickshaw. Again the French
woman makes an appearance and in a seance explains what happened. There are
a number of further chapters seemingly written in the same style, but I gave
up.
The text is interspersed with the occasional obscure
Japanese word which the translator has conveniently placed in italic type,
but which is nowhere explained in the book. I certainly do not have a
Japanese-English dictionary. We do have GoogleTranslate, but I couldn't be
bothered. Undoubtedly the Japanese readers of the original which appeared in
1979 could make more sense out of all this than I could.
Before beginning this book we know that it is
concerned with a young woman living alone in a rural house in Holland in
1960. She is extremely uptight, an unpleasant, brittle person insisting that
everything should be kept in its place. Both her parents have passed away.
Her uncle owns the house and gives her an allowance, but when he dies the
house is to go to the older brother. The book was shortlisted for the Booker
Prize of 2024 and it is the debut novel of the author. This is the information we gather from the
blurb, and so I started reading.
We soon learn that Isabel, or Isa for short also has a
younger brother, Hendrik, who is homosexual and lives with his exotic
partner somewhere else, far enough away - was it Amsterdam, or Den Haag -
I've forgotten which. Isa's house is in the east of the country near Zwolle.
The elder brother, Louis, is already about 30 years old and has one
girlfriend after another. The present one is named Eva. They all have a
get-together at a restaurant and Isa is very rude to Eve who seems not to
notice. A bit later Isa receives an unpleasant telephone call from Louis to
tell her that he is to go over to England on business for a month, and Eva
should stay at the house with Isa for the time.
And so Eve comes to stay, bringing disruption, disorder.
What is more, Louis has put her in their mother's bedroom which, for Isa is
a kind of shrine; she was alone with the mother for her last breaths into
death. Isa shouts at Eva. She is rude; she counts the days till the month is
finally finished so that Louis will take her away. But then, at the climax
of these towering emotions, Eva moves closer, holds Isa, kisses her. And
suddenly the novel becomes a celebration of female homosexuality, explained
in page after page of vivid, graphic, trembling detail. If, as is sometimes
said, Queen Victoria could not imagine what female homosexuals could
possibly be doing, then she would certainly have found this book to be
instructive. I have not read any homo-erotic novels; Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar was unpleasant enough without
reaching such levels of detail, and anyway, the female is a more pleasant
subject than the male.
But then the whole story takes on a whole new twist.
According the Guardian review of the book, in order not to spoil it for
their readers they refrained from revealing what it was. But since
practically nobody reads what I am writing here, I can just write whatever I
want.
It is a Holocaust story. All that lesbian stuff was just
more of the eternal suffering of the poor Jewish Eva. The house had belonged
to her family. Her father was sent to a concentration camp and was killed.
Therefore the mortgage on the house was not paid, and so the surviving
family was evicted. Isa's uncle later bought the house. Meanwhile, unlike
Anna Frank who hid together with her family in Amsterdam, the young Eva was
sent by her mother to various farms in Holland, paying the people to hide
her in attics or barns, sleeping alone, cold, on rough straw, kicked out
when the money didn't come.
Is this really the picture we have? Those cold-hearted,
money-grubbing Dutch people, seeing the opportunity of making a few gulden
out of the suffering of the Jews, throwing out the poor little Anna Franks
of the world as soon as the money runs out. Well, undoubtedly there are
unpleasant people in Holland. The Dutch East India Company was just as cruel
as the English in their colonies. The Belgians in the Congo were perhaps
even worse. I can only say that the Dutch people I have known over the years
are so different from all of this as to render it absurd. And anyway, even
if there was such a horrible farmer, would it have been worth a few gulden
to hide a young Jewish girl? If there was a market for such things then such
farmers would be known in wider circles, and soon the GESTAPO would come and
take them away. And if such a farmer were to evict such a young girl for
want of money then the parents might anonymously let it be known to the
GESTAPO. So the danger would not be worth the money at all. In fact it would
be the money itself which would produce such an impossible level of danger
for such an imaginary farmer. This part of the story is clearly
nonsense, absurd.
And then we have Eva living homeless, destitute in the
Amsterdam of 1960, wanting her old house back. Why is she destitute? This
wasn't explained in the story. Surely there was much sensible employment to
be had in the Holland of those days. We can understand the lazy Isa sitting
around doing nothing, stewing in her own juice, but this doesn't apply to
Eva. Of course it would be nice to live in the old family home, but such is
the tragedy of many, many people. All of the countless wars in the world. Is
it improper to think of the many Palestinian families who lost their homes
in the Nakba of so many years ago and who, we are told, still treasure the
keys to those long-lost houses?
