"White Gold" by Giles Milton

 This story of the (estimated) million slaves seized from European ships and coastal towns by Barbary corsairs and enslaved in Moslem North Africa between about 1550 and 1820 focuses on one man: Thomas Pellow from Cornwall, who was captured as a ten year old boy, forcibly converted to Islam, became a house servant of the bloodthirsty ruler of Morocco and later one one of the leading soldiers of one of his armies, was forcibly married and became a father, made several escape attempts, was saved while on the scaffold on one occasion, and finally escaped at the age of thirty-three. It's a brilliant story and it is told with the flair of the author of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Samurai William, and The Riddle and the Knight, amongst others. 

The Moroccan trade properly got going after 1610, when King Philip III "expelled all one million Spanish Moors from his land" (Ch 1) providing a pool of dispossessed people longing for revenge.

Strangely, the man who ended this trade by leading a British fleet to bombard Algiers, was Sir Edward Pellew who was related to Thomas Pellow.

Selected quotes:

• "The flags on their mainmasts depicted a human skull on a dark green background" (Ch 1)
• "His extraordinary story had just been published in one of the capital's newspapers. Pellow was surprised and asked to be shown the article. ... Almost every detail in the report was wrong." (Ch 12) The standards of accurate journalism are - probably - better nowadays.

October 2022; 280 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power" by Stephen Greenblatt

In this wonderful book, Greenblatt dissects some of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes (including Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus) and uses the depiction of the tyrants to draw lessons about the nature of tyranny, power politics and fraudulent populism. This book works both as literary criticism and a forensic examination of how people grab power and what this does to them and those around them.

Brilliant and acute.

Selected quotes:

• “Even those at the centre of the innermost circles of power very often have no idea what is about to happen.” (Ch 1)
• “Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth by great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of the underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable.” (Ch 3)
• “He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt.” (Ch 4)
• "Richard’s deformity - or, rather, his society's reaction to his deformity - is the root condition of his psychopathology ... a child unloved by his mother, ridiculed by his peers, and forced to regard himself as a monster will develop a certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of them both destructive and self-destructive.” (Ch 4)
• “The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing a latent or explicit sexual charge.” (Ch 7)
• “Societies, like individuals, generally protect themselves from sociopaths. We would not have been able to survive as a species had we not developed the skill to identify and deal with noxious threats from within as well as without. Communities are usually alert to the danger posed by certain people in their midst and contrive to isolate or expel them. That is why tyranny is not the norm of social organization.” (Ch 10)
• “The elite perceive the poor, and the urban poor in particular, as a mere drain upon the economy, a swarm of idle mouths demanding to be fed. After all, most of the land and what it produces, along with the houses, the factories, and almost everything else, belongs to the patricians. To them, looking down from the top of this mountain of possessions, the poor, who own virtually nothing, seem like parasites.” (Ch 10)
• “It is a perverse but familiar pattern: the party of privilege argues that it needs authoritarian power so that it can preserve order in the state. ... Then when the wealthy are proved wrong - when the state, rich and poor alike, turns out to thrive under a more democratic system - they long for the disorder they promised to quell.” (Ch 10)

October 2022; 189 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus

 I was underwhelmed. Yes, it is a fast-paced, often witty, crisply-written book. Yes, it is perfectly in tune with these PC times, being an expose of some of the dreadful customs practised by the patriarchy in the US (and probably elsewhere) in the 1960s (and other times): this is feminist history writ large. But in terms of characters, this is as simplistic as it gets. Of the women, there is one character who starts off bad but ends up good; all of the others are good and the lead woman, Elizabeth and her daughter Mad, are hugely talented to the point of genius (as is their male dog). There are some good men (though they are usually inadequate) but there are many who are wicked. There is only one character - already mentioned - who actually has a character arc. Not a single character has any mix of good or bad in them. And this, for me, made it a shallow read. I was unable to suspend my disbelief. It was superficial. 

It was an easy read and I read it quickly, but mostly because I was desperate to finish so that I could read something else that might have a little more challenge to it.

Looking through some of the other reviews on goodreads, I notice that a number of people don't like the main character because she makes the other female characters look so weak. There are also those who hate her militant atheism (the Roman Catholic church in particular comes off badly). One review suggested that the attitudes displayed were all cliched. I don't think that it is fair to critique a book because you don't like the main character, or the attitudes espoused (good fiction should challenge one's beliefs) but I did agree with the criticism that the main character was so amazingly clever and so stunningly attractive and so morally strong that she was unbelievable and as for the four year old who read books most of us read in out late teens or later and carried on utterly adult conversations with a priest; she was so ridiculously unbelievable that the book only be satire.

I have discovered that such a character is called a 'Mary Sue'. To quote wikipedia, a Mary Sue is "a character archetype in fiction, usually a young woman, who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, gifted with unique talents or powers, liked or respected by most other characters, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and/or generally lacking meaningful character flaws. Usually female and almost always the main character, a Mary Sue is often an author's idealized self-insertion, and may serve as a form of wish-fulfillment. Mary Sue stories are often written by adolescent authors. ... As a literary trope, the Mary Sue archetype is broadly associated with poor quality writing."

That seems to fit.

There is an AppleTV+ series based on the book. This is reviewed in New Scientist #3462. Unfortunately the reviewer bases her judgement on whether the show delivers the message that she wants to hear "Thankfully ... the version of Lessons in Chemistry I craved did eventually materialise." It seems to me that the book's popularity has been based on it providing a message which women want to be told, rather than any artistic merit. This seems to be increasingly common with reviews. Even the 2021 Nobel Prize was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah for “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” rather than for his ability to write. This makes me sad.

Selected quotes: 

• "He was like a dog who, after years of trying, catches a squirrel and then has absolutely no idea what to do with it." (Ch 3)
• "Six-Thirty was badly in need of a bath. Tall, gray, thin, and covered with barbed-wire-like fur that made him look as if he'd barely survived electrocution, he stood very still as they shampooed him." (Ch 7)
• "Because while stupid people may not know they're stupid because they're stupid, surely unattractive people must know they're unattractive because of mirrors." (Ch 18)
• "Harriet thought it was wrong not to believe in God. It lacked humility." (Ch 27)
• "Harriet believes if you blow on dice, you'll get better numbers at Yahtzee." (Ch 33) So did my granny!
• "Religion ... let's us off the hook ,,, it teaches us ... that ultimately, we're not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray." (Ch 37)

Somehow shortlisted for the 2022 Waterstones Book of the Year.

October 2022; 382 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

 After their plane crashes, a group of English schoolboys must find a way to survive on an uninhabited island. There's plenty of fruit and water and beautiful beaches. They organise themselves and hold disciplined assemblies and elect Ralph (the tall, good-looking one) as chief. Piggy (the fat, asthmatic, figure of fun who is nevertheless rather clever) is his wise counsellor and Jack, the leader of a group of choirboys, appoints him and his as hunters. But boys will be boys and, as the days go on, their civilisation slowly slips away, destroyed by rivalries between them and their irrational fears.

This absolute classic might seem somewhat dated now. (it was first published in 1954). There are no female characters, nor any from an ethnic minority; there is an colonialist presumption of British superiority, and there is one use of what has become an unacceptable derogatory insult. The title's reference to Beelzebub, a devil, is unlikely to be spotted nowadays. But the fundamental truth this book demonstrates is that humanity's flaws (tribalism and the instinct for violence) is likely to wreck any paradise. The final scene might be worthy of an ecothriller (indeed, the author was a friend of James Lovelock and is credited with suggesting the name of Greek goddess Gaia as the personification of the Earth).

The book has wonderful descriptions of the island but its impact comes from the way it chronicles the slow, relentless slide from civilisation to barbarism and the horrific happenings at the end.

The pacing is perfect. The first attempt to hunt a pig is at the 25% mark, the discovery of the 'Beast' is at the 50% mark and the first irredeemable sin is at the 75% mark.

There are references to other novels; Robinson Crusoe is obvious, but the key reference, mentioned several times, is to The Coral Island by R M Ballantyne, an 1857 novel still popular with children in the mid-1900s, which describes the adventures of Ralph (the narrator), Jack and Peterkin who have been shipwrecked on a desert island which provides both fruit and pigs.

This was the author's debut novel; he won the Nobel Prize in 1983.

Selected quotes:

• "The silence was so complete that they could hear the fetch and miss of Piggy's breathing." (Ch 2)
• "They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate." (Ch 3)
• "They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten." (Ch 4)
• "The darkness and desperate enterprise gave the night a kind of dentist's chair unreality." (Ch 7)
• "I'm not going to play any longer. Not with you." (Ch 8)
• "Dartmoor was wild and so were the ponies. But the attraction of wildness had gone." (Ch 10)
• "And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy." (Ch 12)

Brilliant writing. The novel at its best.

October 2022; 223 pages

Other books written by Nobel Laureates, and reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

Golding won the Booker Prize (for Rites of Passage) in 1980. Other Booker Prize winners can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide" by John Sutherland.

 I bought this expecting to learn how to improve my critical faculties and therefore make the reviews in this blog sharper, better informed, more useful, and perhaps even more entertaining. I didn't. This book is mistitled. It should be called "How to Choose which Novel you are Going to Read." He starts by noting the overwhelming avalanche of novels available to the modern reader. Then he suggests how to cut that number down by considering a wide variety of things such as the author's reputation, the bestseller lists, reviews, the blurb, the title and page 69 (among other things) and more or less concludes that none of these methods is foolproof. So you don't even get helpful advice towards what the title should have been.

Otherwise he is frequently informative, mostly entertaining and sometimes amusing.

Selected quotes:

• "Selecting one's reading matter is less important nowadays than deselecting it." (Ch 1)
• "It is not that life is too short to read carefully: the task is too great to be done attentively." (Ch 1)
• "Reading novels is not a spectator sport but a participatory activity." (Ch 1)
• "One reads, as one dreams, defecates and masturbates - alone." (Ch 3)
• "If, when you're buying a book, you feel a tender hand on your genitals, the other hand is probably feeling your wallet." (Ch 5)
• "Unlike baked beans, loaves of bread, or Fuji apples, books, once consumed, do not disappear. Despite political legend, they are extremely hard to burn." (Ch 6) 

October 2022; 246 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien

 A wonderful novel, a sort of cross between Ulysses by James Joyce and Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. The unnamed narrator, a disciple of a crackpot philosopher whose works are critiqued in a series of footnotes, murders a man in the first paragraph and seeks the box containing his money. He then meets the dead man, then the king of one-legged men, and finally a number of policemen who are obsessed with bicycles. 

The reader is swept along through this apparently ridiculous story (there is a rationale which is revealed in the final pages) by the most wonderfully lyrical prose.

I've been looking out for something different in the way of fiction and this is surrealism at its best.

Selected quotes: (I could have picked loads more!)

• "I was born a long time ago." (Ch 1)
• "It ... was known as 'The Wrastler'. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win." (Ch 1)
• "Something happened ... It was some change which came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in the instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye." (Ch 2)
• "Never before has I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had. I also knew that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare." (Ch 2)
• "The live right hand had gripped the pot of tea, raised it very awkwardly and slapped a filling into the empty cup." (Ch 2)
• "It is a curious enigma that so great a mind would question the most obvious realities and object even to things scientifically demonstrated ... while believing absolutely in his own fantastic explanations of the same phenomena." (Ch 4)
• "Nearly every sickness is from the teeth." (Ch 4)
• "Your talk ... is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand." (Ch 6)
• "You are as lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jog on top of a tombstone." (Ch 6)
• "Anything can be said in this place and it will be true and will have to be believed." (Ch 6)
• "It was a gloomy light and looked exactly as if there was a small area somewhere on the mangle and was merely devoid of darkness." (Ch 7)
• "Omnium is the business-end of everything. If you could find the right wave that results in a tree, you could make a small fortune out of timber for export." (Ch 7)
• "He is as crazy as bedamned, an incontestable character and a man of ungovernable exactitudes." (Ch 10)
• "It is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable." (Ch 10)
• "She now seemed to rest beneath my friendly eyes like a tame fowl which will crouch submissively, awaiting with out-hunched wings the caressing hand." (Ch 11)
• "'Is it about a bicycle?' he asked." (Ch 12)

October 2022; 206 pages

Other books by Irish authors reviewed in this blog can be found here. This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

A classic ghost novella. A never-named governess goes to an old house to take charge of a little girl, Flora, and her older brother Miles, who has been expelled from school though no-one is quite sure why. The governess then starts seeing apparitions which she decides are the ghosts of valet Peter Quint and his paramour, the last governess Miss Jessel, who were considered by housekeeper Mrs Grose to have had too much influence on the children. But are the ghosts real or is the hysterical governess hallucinating? Are the children naughty or in league with devils? Why was Miles expelled (the governess tells us that the school say was was "an injury to others"; what does this mean?)? And have the children been damaged by their experiences of the ghosts when they were still alive?

The book is brilliantly written. Narrated by the governess, a classic early example of an unreliable narrator, the book is full of ambiguities that are never resolved. How, for example, did Quint and Jessel die? Miss Jessel dies while on a holiday (reading between the lines she is pregnant by Quint and dies having his baby but this is never stated). As for her lover:  “Peter Quint was found ... stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained - superficially at least - by a visible wound to his head” and it is assumed he has, in liquor, slipped on the icy road but the words "superficially at least" allow the possibility that there is a more sinister interpretation

The governess is a hysterical character (although she is described as "a most charming person ... my sister’s governess ... the most agreeable person I’ve ever known in her position ... awfully clever and nice” in a frame narrative by someone who appears to have had a crush on her when he was a boy) who has immense mood swings. She is convinced that 'the master' has fallen in love with her at first sight, as she clearly has with him. One moment she believes that the children  are paragons of innocent perfection and the next that they are in league with the devil. When she explains her self it is in long, convoluted and complex sentences in which words are used in unusual contexts (I wasn't quite sure is this was just Henry James whose prose style is sometimes fiendishly complicated). She repeatedly jumps to conclusions: “He was looking for little Miles ... But how do you know? ... I know, I know, I know!” (Ch 5). In dialogue she repeatedly interrupts her interlocutor and finishes their sentences for them (for example when the housekeeper, meaning Miles, says “Surely you don’t accuse him -” but before she can say what Miles shouldn't be accused of the governess says “Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me?”), thus putting words into their mouth and so validating her own opinions, whilst leaving the reader uncertain as to what they wanted to say. (All dialogue is naturalistic, so that people rarely ever make definitive statements.) 

The book has provided opportunities for debate for generations of scholars and the discussion in the Eastbourne Central U3A English Novel group had a very stimulating discussion which covered a number of topics.

• One member insisted that James had been purposely ambiguous and so trying to work out what 'really' happened missed the point.
• One member felt sorry for the two children who had suffered repeated bereavements: they had been forced to leave India (where they might have been very close to the servants) on the death of their parents and had then suffered the death of their uncle; they were now living under the guardianship of another uncle who refused to have anything to do with them and had suffered the death of the two servants who had looked after them most closely: Quint and Jessel. Miles had then been sent to school. The children were therefore likely to be traumatised, which might explain all sorts of behaviours.
• There was the member who suggested that all these deaths was no more than a plot device so that the two children would be at the mercy of the mad governess and the single protective figure of the illiterate housekeeper, Mrs Grose.
• Several members saw this as in the tradition of gothic literature. The narrator refers to "Udolpho" (the Mysteries of Udolpho was perhaps the first work of gothic literature, written by Ann Radcliffe) and there is also reference to “an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement” which suggests either Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family by Sheridan Le Fanu. There was one member who felt the entire story was a sort of parody of Jane Eyre: there is a governess in love with the master and something sinister going on upstairs.
  Several members thought that the children had been sexually abused by Quint and Jessel and that this was the reason that Miles was sent home from school. Clearly, Henry James could not write openly about sexual abuse of children in the dying days of the nineteenth century when the book was written. But the way the governess set up the children (Flora is described by the narrator as the “most beautiful child”, and to possess “extraordinary charm”, and “without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants”; of Miles the narrator says: “To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgement.”; Ch 8) may be a sign that Henry James is critiquing the Victorian paradigm of childhood innocence. The idea that Miles is expelled for being "an injury to others" fits the interpretation that he has somehow morally subverted his schoolmates (he says he told his friends things and they told their friends ... ?). Mrs Grose hints at improper influence but gives it a class spin: “For a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together ... she liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.” (Ch 8) To support this theory it was pointed out that Henry James was the brother of William James the philosopher and psychologist and this may have given him an insight into children, although he never fathered any himself.
• Some members suggested that Miles in particular was just a little boy seeking the freedom to be a little boy and that he felt smothered by the governess.
• Some people hated the sudden ending and thought that the frame narrative should have been resumed to remove some of the perplexities of the story but most members thought the sudden ending was perfect. I myself have used sudden endings in my novels Motherdarling and Bally and Bro and the epilogue in The Kids of God is designed to challenge the reader. 
• But the biggest debate of all was: were the ghosts real?
• Immediately before her first sighting (of Peter Quint), the governess has been imagining meeting the master with whom she has fallen in love. “It would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone who would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that ... What arrested me on the spot ... was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!” (Ch 3) This seems to suggest that the governess has conjured the ghost out of her imagination.
• She says, talking of the children: “I walked in a world of their invention” (Ch 5). This suggests that she is susceptible to suggestion which in turn implies that the ghosts aren't real.
• “There was no ambiguity in anything: none whatever at least in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see” (Ch 6) and this is the point where she has her second sighting, this time of the other ghost.
• When, in chapter 20, the governess, accompanied by Flora and Mrs Grose, sees Mrs Jessel the others don't see anything. “What a dreadful turn, to be sure, Miss! Where on earth do you see anything?” says Mrs Grose (I love the word ‘turn’: another and another and another turn of the screw). This event leads to Mrs Grose taking charge of Flora (presumably at Flora's, frightened, request) and keeping her away from the governess.
• In the last few pages, Miles doesn't see the ghost either. The governess believes she has prevented this (so protecting him): “At last, by my success, his sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence but he knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know.” When Peter Quint appears, Miles asks “Is she here?” (presumably thinking about Miss Jessel. “His head made the movement of a baffled dog’s on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly" Even after Miles, in response to a leading question from the governess, says identifies Peter Quint "his face gave again, round the room, its confused supplication. ‘Where’?” Miles still can't see the ghost. He never will.

Selected quotes:

• “He seems to like us young and pretty!” says the governess, referring to the master who she has fallen in love with on first sight and whom she is never going to see again, and the housekeeper replies “Oh he did ... it was the way he liked everyone!” and this use of the past tense tells us that she is referring to Peter Quint and then she corrects herself “I mean that’s his way - the master’s” (Ch 2)
• "I was struck, throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage, with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she  asked, rang out and led me on.” (Ch 1)
• “I learnt something - at first certainly - that had not been one of the teachings of my small smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think of the morrow” (Ch 3)
• “And then there was consideration - and consideration was sweet.” (Ch 3)
• “An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred.” (Ch 3) I'm intrigued by 'privately bred'. Surely she means 'privately brought up'. Her thoughts seem to have been infiltrated by thoughts of sex.
• “I was in receipt in these days of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well.” (Ch 4)
• “The silence itself ... became the element into which I saw the figure disappear.” (Ch 10)
• “She was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination.” (Ch 11)
• “He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears.” (Ch 11)
• “I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I’m not. What I’ve seen would have made you do; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.” (Ch 12)
• “They’re not mine - they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers.” (Ch 12)
• “It revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad time - for there had been a worse even than this! - must have occurred.” (Ch 12)
• “Another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue” (Ch 22)
• "Peter Quint - you devil!" (Ch 24) But does the devil refer to the valet or the new governess?

A literary tour de force.

October 2022; 121 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Queens of the Wild" by Ronald Hutton

To what extent do iconic figures such as Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Lady of the Night, and the Green Man etc represent an unbroken pagan tradition that has existed underground in Western Europe through the long centuries of Christianity? In this impressively researched and scholarly book, Hutton reviews the evidence and concludes that this idea was invented by nineteenth century city-dwelling folklorists who believed that yokels living in rural areas were fundamentally ignorant and therefore pagan.

Hutton accepts that there are pagan survivals (for example, statues of pagan goddesses that have been rechristened as saints and "the use of candles, incense, wreaths and garlands, altars, images, formal liturgies, hymns, vestments, choral music and sermons” that the early Christians borrowed from the pagan world) and that there are “small gods” around the world worshipped by peoples who have had their “indigenous religions officially replaced by major religious systems”  which “embody mental consequences of the human experience of living in environments which seem to have their own independent, animating powers.” However he repeatedly demolishes the claims of those who seek unbroken traditions. For example:

• Green Man heads in churches seem to have first appeared as illustrations in mediaeval manuscripts and are thus unlikely to be pagan in origin; no written evidence before the nineteen hundreds suggests they are any more than decorative (Ch 1)
• Morris dancing "appeared in the fifteenth century as a fashionable new entertainment in the royal and ducal courts of France and Burgundy, and spread from them to the English ones. In the early sixteenth century it had begun to move out among the English populace, and it became a widespread craze in the second half of that century.” (Ch 1)
• “Early English medicine contained notable Greek, Roman and Arab elements, as well as the native tradition, so drew eclectically on all knowledge that seemed to be available.” (Ch 1)
• The Mother Earth of the Greeks and Romans was a very minor deity who was virtually shrineless. (Ch 2)
• A 'mother goddess' figurine found at the bottom of Grimes Graves in Norfolk “turned out to have been announced by the director of the excavation, without his having recorded it in the site notebook and after he had asked all other experienced archaeologists to leave the area.” (Ch 2)
• The interpretation of all images as representing a single goddess was at odds with the known pagan practice of having multiple goddesses and the reduction of the mother earth goddess to the single function of fertility seems restrictive given the known pagan goddesses who had functions in eg wisdom (Athena) etc. (Ch 2)
• While most European cultures have “woodland beings which could take the form of beautiful people, of either gender, and have sexual intercourse with the humans whom they encountered and seduced. These seem to have been equivalent to the Greek and Roman nymphs and satyrs” (Ch 3), fairies seem to have derived from the twelfth century romance literature and the King and Queen of the fairies are late additions which reached their apogee with Oberon and Titania in Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights' Dream. (Ch 3)
• Jack-in-the-Green “which had been taken as the supreme British example of a folk representation of an ancient vegetation deity, was essentially a nineteenth-century custom carried on by chimney sweeps in southern English towns to collect money against a summer season in which they would be largely unemployed.” (Epilogue)

Selected quotes:

• “An idea mooted by British scholars in the late nineteenth century and based on the then still new theory of evolution ... held that, as human bodies bore the same similarity across the planet, so human minds must do too, and that therefore basic notions had developed in the same way throughout the scattered branches of the human race. ... In reality, beliefs seem to develop in much more independent, capricious, contingent and opportunistic ways.” (Epilogue)
• "Illiterate people are often more willing and able to change ideas and habits than those who have preserved them in writing.” (Epilogue)
• “a sphinx without a riddle” (Epilogue)

Well-written, readable, and authoritative

October 2022; 197 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shakespeare: Richard II" by A R Humphreys

This slender monograph of literary criticism was published in 1967. It offers a commentary of Shakespeare's Richard II. Whilst there is interest in its enumeration of Shakespeare's sources, and in its description in the political atmosphere of the time (there was a contemporary debate between the concept of the Divine Right of Kings and that of Justice), its greatest failing is that there is no mention of the undoubted fact that Shakespeare wrote this play to be acted by actors upon a stage. It is as if the work is one of poetry (and Humphreys is excellent in describing how the style of the poetry varies both according to character and according to what is happening) and was never staged.

Selected quotes:

• “In structure and theme, as well as in certain phrases, there is considerable resemblance to Marlowe’s Edward II.” (p15)
• “It opposes the old ceremonies of courtly form (often a mask for misrule) to the strong and realistic exercise of power, as it opposes the histrionic fantasies of Richard to the practical cogency of Bolingbroke.” (p17)
• “The striking impact of Richard’s exchanges with Aumerle, Bagot, Greene, and Bushy in Act 1, scene iv, results from the sudden dropping of courtly pose in favour of a venomous realism.” (p18)

October 2022; 60 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Beyond Weird" by Philip Ball

This book is about quantum physics. It contains all the usual suspects: wave-particle duality, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger's Cat, the Many Worlds Interpretation. According to Ball these are fundamentally inadequate attempts to view the quantum world - which underpins (and is coherent with) the everyday world - in images that rely on everyday understandings. He throws in some of the modern research on entanglement, superposition, wavefunction collapse and decoherence. And, in the end, he concludes that possibly, quantum physics is a theory of information.

It is a comprehensive overview of the field and, so far as I can judge, it is fair to all the many different interpretations of what quantum physics means. It even asks whether the theory is ontic (dealing with reality) or epistemic (dealing with what we know). I found it tough going in places and there are some bits that I still don't understand (and I used to teach quantum physics at secondary school level). But there were other moments when Ball's explanations led me a significantly deeper understanding than I had before and for that I can only be grateful. And impressed. If he can deliver even a little greater understanding about this tough subject, it is a remarkable achievement.

Selected quotes:

• “Quantum theory ... is a theory about information. ... it asks what a theory of knowability can look like.” (p16)
• “What do we mean by ‘is’? ... As for what an electron ‘is’, all we can talk about for sure is what we can see and measure.” (p60)
• “Everything that seems strange about quantum mechanics comes down to measurement. If we take a look, the quantum system behaves one way. If we don’t, the system does something else.” (p78)
• “Niels Bohr ... wasn’t naturally gifted as a writer - he would draft and redraft endlessly without much obvious benefit to the prose.” (p104)
• "Whatever the question, the answer is ‘Yes’ (unless it’s ‘No’)" (chapter heading)
• “Quantum mechanics might seem ‘weird’, but it is not illogical. It’s just that it employed a new and unfamiliar logic ... with different customs and traditions and with its own beautiful internal consistency.” (p128)
• “It is not obvious why any of the properties that things have at the everyday scale should remain meaningful properties at the microscopic scale. Some don’t. Electrons don’t have a colour.” (p129)
• “No one fully understands how quantum computers work.” (p278)
• “In science ... it’s as worthwhile for an idea to be productive as it is for it to be ‘right’.” (p285)
• “Might it be that non-locality is simply in the nature of things, and relativity is the only thing that limits its influence?” (p309)
• “There’s no guarantee that the world’s innermost workings will fit a language developed mostly to conduct trade, courtship and banter.” (p324)

October 2022; 354 pages

Other books reviewed in this blog about science and scientists can be found here. 

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I Could Be You" by Sheila Bugler

 A murder mystery set in my home town of Eastbourne. When Dee, a retired journalist, discovers the body of a woman, killed in a hit and run, she thinks it is her next-door neighbour and begins to investigate. But nothing is quite what it seems.

Typical of the genre. Structured with repeated flashbacks which made such puzzles as were posed even easier to guess. I found it a little difficult to believe in the credibility and motivations of some of the characters. Except for the knight in shining armour policeman, most of the male characters were either wicked or useless or both.

Selected quotes:

• "If my life was a high-school rom com, Shane would be the guy I ended up with. The jock with a heart clever enough to see through the artifice of the shallow world we live in." (Ch 3)
• "Louise's husband was a pilot ... 'He's good ... Has his ups and downs'" (Ch 5) I'm not sure if that was meant to be a joke.

October 2022; 376 pages

There are, so far, three sequels but I don't think I'll bother.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Poisonous Solicitor" by Stephen Bates

 A step-by-step account of the true crime when solicitor Herbert Armstrong from Hay-on-Wye was accused of poisoning his wife using arsenic; a box of poisoned chocolates was also discovered. The wife certainly died from arsenic: sufficient to kill her was found in her corpse exhumed ten months later. There was certainly arsenic in the chocolates though no-one ever discovered who sent them. Armstrong was convicted, in a trial in which the judge rode roughshod over the rules, and hanged. 

This book covers all the details in chronological order but comes to no new conclusions; indeed, the author seems determined to avoid speculation. This makes the narrative rather pedestrian.

Selected quotes:

• "They also found two used condoms in a drawer under the washstand and several unused packets in other parts of the house" (Ch 8)

October 2022; 299 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressell

 Set in 'Mugsborough' between 1908 (the author died in 1911; the book mentions a polyphone which was a sort of multiple disc music box which was first distributed in England in 1908) and the First World War, this book chronicles the lives of a group of working men - mostly decorators - as they renovate a house for a local building firm. They are lucky to get the job: many other skilled workmen are unemployed. They work for starvation wages, are immediately dismissed if caught slacking, and are made redundant at the drop of a hat as soon as the contract is finished. With no social security system and no real possibility of saving money when they are employed, they then have to pawn or sell their possessions and exist of tea and bread and margarine. Meanwhile their employers make fat profits, steal from their clients (in part by condoning shoddy workmanship which is deliberately below the priced specifications; in part by removing possessions from the renovated houses) and corruptly conspire to use their places on the local council to benefit themselves.

It's more of a parable than a novel. One of the workmen gives lectures on Socialism (this is pre-Russian revolution) in the lunch breaks and the arguments are quite simplistic (the Money Trick is the Marxist theory of surplus value, the idea that the workmen add value to a product which is greater than the money paid to them by the boss and that this extra value which by rights belongs to them is 'stolen' by the boss). In addition, the criminal schemes of the bosses (who have names such as Starvem and Grinder) are rather transparent and the scenes in church (where the rich are portrayed as hypocrites who have perverted the message of Christ) are caricatures rather than at all realistic. This is less a novel than a tract, preaching it message of socialism.

Selected quotes:

• "People who enjoyed abundance of the things that are made by work, were the people who did Nothing" (Ch 1)
• "Some of you seem to think ... that it was a great mistake on God's part to make so many foreigners." (Ch 1)
• "What is the cause of the life-long poverty of the majority of those who are not drunkards and who do work?" (Ch 1) I enjoyed this point: even today many people suggest that the poor are poor because they are lazy or shiftless and while this may be true for some, there are a huge number who are poor despite working all hours and doing all the things that they 'should' while many of the rich drink vast amounts of alcohol.
• "We do our full share of the work, therefore we should have a full share of the things that are made by work." (Ch 1)
• "All his life it had been the same: incessant work under similar more or less humiliating conditions, and with no more result than being just able to avoid starvation." (Ch 2)
• "Those who worked were looked upon with contempt, and subjected to every possible indignity." (Ch 2)
• "It's not possible for anyone to become rich without cheating other people." (Ch 6)
• "This is an even more unusually dull and uninteresting chapter." (Ch 20)
• "The doctors at the Hospital  made a practice of using the free patients to make experiments upon." (Ch 22)
• "Suppose there was some kind of a God? If there were, it wasn't unreasonable to think that the Being who was capable of creating such a world as this and who seemed so callously indifferent to the unhappiness of His creatures, would also be capable of desiring and creating the other Hell that most people believed in." (Ch 23)
• "The workman scores over both the horse and the slave, inasmuch as he enjoys the priceless blessing of Freedom. If he does not like the hirer's conditions he need not to accept them. He can refuse to work, and he can go and starve. ... He has the right to choose freely which he will do - Submit or Starve." (Ch 25)
• "The producing class ... are supposed to be paid for their work. Their wages are supposed to be equal in value to their work. But it's not so. If it were, by spending all their wages, the producing class would be able to buy back All they had produced." (Ch 25)
• "Thousands of people lacked the necessaries of life. The necessaries of life are all produced by work. The people who lacked begged to be allowed to work and create those things of which they stood in need. But the System prevented them from so doing." (Ch 40)
• "A place that is not fit for the presence of a woman or a child is not fit to exist at all." (Ch 43)
• "They talked vaguely about Re-Afforestation, and Reclaiming of Foreshores, and Sea Walls; but of course there was the question of Cost! that was a difficulty." (Ch 45)
• "It will be necessary to reduce the hours of our workers to four or five hours a day." (Ch 45)

It's rather simplistic but it has some good storylines. It's not as brilliantly written as Hard Times by Charles Dickens, nor as vivid as Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood. The best book in this genre is the non-fiction Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell. And it is immensely long. But nevertheless, I enjoyed it. 

October 2022; 742 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God