“The Tesseract” by Alex Garland

In a seedy hotel room in the least salubrious part of Manila, Sean waits for a meeting with Don Pepe, a gangster who will probably kill him. In the pretty suburbs, Rosa puts her children to bed and talks to her mother. Street urchin Cente talks to psychology researcher Alfredo before meeting Totoy. These lives collide.

This is not just an exciting thriller. Garland, author of ‘The Beach’ draws vivid and realistic characters and treats them with understanding and compassion.

August 2011; 336 pages

"Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

“If you’re going to be naked, you better be buff.” (p293)

A fascinating book although a little out of date despite being “fully revised and updated for paperback”. The pace of internet change is such that 2008 is long ago. Thus it recognises that facebook is growing and on the horizon but doesn’t realise quite how massive it will be by 2011. It applauds del.icio.us although that service has been effectively closed down by Yahoo. Twitter isn’t mentioned.

My biggest reservation is that although I could understand the many reasons for going open and sharing and collaborating etc that companies demonstrated and although I understood that all these things helped massively cut costs and improve rapidity and market responsiveness they failed in their ultimate promise in that I failed to understand how these things could be used to make money (rather than just saving on the costs front). Google is basically an ad company. Amazon sells books. eBay is a traditional auction house taking a cu of the selling price. But how else do you make money? Ask Twitter.

August 2011; 315 pages

"Our Fathers" by Andrew O'Hagan

Hugh ‘Mr Housing’ Bawn lies dying on the 18^th floor of one of the tower blocks in Ayrshire which, as Municipal Planner, he helped to build. His grandson Jamie who demolishes tower blocks in England, is with him for his final months. Jamie’s alcoholic, wife-beating father Robert, has disappeared.

This book, written in crisp and original elegiac prose, explores the relationship between Jamie, Robert and Hugh and their women. It explores modern Scotland and the lives blighted by poverty, unemployment, alcohol and the built environment. It seeks to redeem the heroes of the sixties who built this urban landscape in the name of progress and with the vision of escaping from worse poverty and the worse housing of the Glasgow tenement slums. If there is a poetry of the assembly line this book describes it. If there is nobility lurking within the wife-beating drunk, this book finds it. The images of girls in hair nets at superstore checkouts beside roads from an auld village centre to nowhere are haunting. Drunks quote poetry (alright, it is Burns so it is mostly doggerel) in the working men’s club. History is just beneath the surface whether it is the bell tower of the church mentioned in Tam O’Shanter or the monastery where Robert Bruce murdered Red Comyn (now a supermarket) or the housing estate all of whose Drives are named for a forgotten Scottish Socialist.

And there is comedy. Jamie meets his mum’s mates and they try to chat him up. He watches Gaelic breakfast TV with his Gran (the only people in the world who watch it, he believes) and questions the credibility of the item on swimwear fashion in Uist.

A remarkable book, full of the romance and dignity of everyday poverty.

July 2011; 282 pages

"The Angel's Game" by Carlos Luis Zafon

This book is tangentially a prequel to ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ in that it uses some of the same characters and it has the same obsession with the dark side of Barcelona as a backdrop to sinister and labyrinthine plots. This book adds a substantial supernatural element.

It is pure melodrama, despite damning Grand Guignol very early: GG “does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it’s downhill all the way.” But it does GG very well indeed. There is a mysterious house with locked rooms and secret chambers and a secret. There is the charming old gentleman who is quite literally the devil in disguise and who manipulates the narrator into a murky and devious world. There is the Inspector of Police who always just prevents his two thugs from torturing the narrator. There are the women: Cristina whom the narrator adores from afar (very Pip and Estella) and Isabella the narrator’s competent and wise-cracking Dr Watson (a wonderful character: the dialogue between narrator and Isabella is brilliant, robust and full of humour). There are mysterious buildings that are one moment brothels, surgeries or mansions and the next are burnt out ruins; libraries; a newspaper office that once housed a sulphuric acid factory; graveyards including the Cemetery of Forgotten Books: nothing and no-one are what they seem except perhaps the saintly old bookseller with his shy son.  The atmosphere is dark and derelict.

On the first page I wondered whether there was a connection to Stendahl’s ‘The Red and the Black’ when the Barcelona skyline was described (in an image that occurred later in the book) as “a perpetual twilight of scarlet and black”. But there wasn’t. There were references to other book’s such as ‘Great Expectations’ but somehow all these were just there to set the scene. There is repeated reference to Angels, to Mausoleums, to Spiders and their Webs, to Death, but these seem to just be ways of painting the picture. In the end the reader is led into a labyrinth of clues and motives and false trails and then abandoned. There is no consistent ‘solution’ to the mysteries. The ‘boss’ is the devil but much of the evil is perpetrated by the last man whose soul the devil stole.

In the final analysis this is a wonderfully atmospheric book with a convoluted plot but in the end it failed to deliver the satisfaction it promised.

July 2011; 504 pages

"The Red and the Black" by 'Stendahl'

This overlong and over-violet romantic novel overanalyses the thoughts and feelings of protagonist Julian Sorel and he agonises and soliloquises over how to find his fortune. Starting as the pretty book-loving son of a carpenter (religious theme?) in a small town he becomes the tutor to the Mayor’s children and seduces his wife. Then he makes his way to Paris, becomes secretary to a Marquis and seduces his daughter.

What makes this book special is the character of Julien. He is driven by the ambition to be someone special although he has no clear picture of whether that special someone will be a cardinal, a general, a rich merchant or a lover. Agonisingly, although to succeed he has to worm his way into rich households he has a massive chip on his shoulder and hates both the society he is desperate to join and himself. He is a social climbing peasant who wants to start a revolution. There is a lot of suppressed hatred (which is perhaps why seduction is his route to the top). He has to do a lot of dissembling and equivocation. Stendahl makes this, which he calls hypocrisy, a central theme of the novel, although it does seem unjust to describe Julien as a hypocrite; he is simply trying to win a game when the cards are marked against him.

Magic moments include the scene in chapter five when he is about to enter the gates of the Mayor’s house for the first time. As in a fairy tale when the hero is about to embark upon a path that will lead to his eventual damnation (as if these are the gates of hell) he is warned. He discovers a torn newspaper cutting which reports the fate of a man whose name is Louis Jenrel, an anagram of Julien Sorel. He does not realises the importance of the warning and so he is damned.

In chapter 23: “The traveller who has just climbed a steep mountain sits down on the summit, and finds a perfect pleasure in resting. Would he be happy if he were forced to rest always?”

In chapter 34: “One can lean only on what resists” says the Marquis to himself when debating whether to employ the sullen and obstinate Julien.

In chapter 39 “The end justifies the means ….I would hang three men to save the lives of four.”

In chapter 72: “Man has two different beings inside him … What devil thought of that malicious touch?”

Improvements I would make to the translation:

• More comprehensive end notes which I would put as foot notes so you don’t have to keep on flicking backwards and forwards
• Some sense to be made of the money which includes (forever unexplained as to their values relative one to the other) sols, francs, crowns, livres, and louis d’or.

Could be abridged and definitely of its time but the originality of the character of the  hero redeems the book.

Other books by French authors which have been reviewed in this blog can be found here.

July 2011; 511 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Dice Man" by Luke Rhinehart

New York Psychoanalyst Luke Rhinehart is seeking to escape the numbing tedium of his ordinary life.  So he begins to subject himself to the laws of probability. Because of the throw of a dice he rapes his partner's wife (more to her satisfaction than his). His life becomes increasingly irrational as everything he does including the roles he plays are dictated by dice. At first justifying his actions in terms of cod psychology (a search for the self) he later becomes high priest of the religion of the Die.

I suppose it is meant to be satire, lampooning psychoanalysis, religion, conservative America and the hippy movement at the same time. It is utterly of its period with plenty of drugs and graphic sex all washed down with a naive and heavy-handed philosophy: Timothy Leary meets the Valley of the Dolls without the pace, the humour and the characterisation of the latter.

Even the premise doesn't work. It is all very well choosing what you do by throwing dice but you have chosen the options. It really isn't a rediscovery of free will.

A brilliant concept ruined by elephantine prose and intrusive cod philosophy.

July 2011; 541 pages

"The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho

This short novel is the story of an Andalusian shepherd boy who seeks treasure in the Pyramids of Egypt. On his way there he encounters an Alchemist and learns the secrets of the Soul of the World. The book is essentially an extended parable, told in a simple poetic style, to encourage you to 'follow your heart'.

A pretty story but it is more concerned with the message than the characters.

July 2011; 177 pages

"God's Philosophers" by James Hannam

The Scotsman says this book "makes enjoyable reading out of some seriously dusty history". Yes! The reading is wonderfully enjoyable but No! the history is not in the least bit dusty.

Hannam's thesis is that the philosophers of the misnamed "dark" ages laid the foundations for modern science. Contrary to received opinion the church did not repress their ideas. On the contrary, by an early decision that natural philosophers should not stray into theology the church protected natural philosophers. The monasteries and universities (sponsored mainly by the church) were fertile grounds for new ideas to breed. Although the official philosophy was Aristotle's, and this was such an integrated system that it was difficult to create an alternative because all parts had to be replaced, the natural philosophers were free to chip away at Aristotelian beliefs. This was difficult because, at least in mechanics, Aristotle's ideas are intuitive and seem to conform to observation. Until a society has the resources and technology to make systematic detailed observations it cannot really progress beyond everyday beliefs. Thus the Earth seems not to move and if it did move one should be able to observe parallax effects with the stars. But the stars are so far away that you can't observe parallax without a telescope and therefore the Earth does not move.

Despite these handicaps the mediaeval philosophers made substantial progress chipping away at the corners of Aristotelianism and developing new logical and mathematical tools.  Progress was further slowed until the printing press was invented. Shortly after that the fashion for humanism (clearly the boo-hiss villain in Hannam's eyes) meant that Aristotle was valued far beyond the mediaeval ideas purely because it was older. But the new scientists Galileo and Kepler owed a tremendous (often unacknowledged) debt to mediaeval philosophers many of whose ideas they quoted verbatim and unattributed.

Wonderful things I learned from this book:

• Aristotle considered that all things eg sheep have two categories of properties:
• substance: those properties without which they cannot be sheep (eg being an animal)
• accident: those properties which are not essential (such as whiteness)
• Archbishop Lanfranc (yes, that one, Anselm's teacher too!) used these properties to explain how the bread and wine could become Christ's body and blood in the mass despite appearing to still be bread and wine. He said the accidental properties were retained but the substantial ones altered; hence transubstantiation!
• Philosophers who believed that the concept sheep can exist independently are realists. Those who believe that  categorical concepts have no separate reality but that there are only lots and lots of individual sheep are called nominalists. William of Ockham used his razor to suggest that adding concepts was wrong, hence he was a nominalist. Science is impossible if you can't believe in concepts such as the Law of Gravity; scientists are relaists. Ockham's razor has been much misused to cut in a completely different way from that intended.
• Throughout the middle ages everyone knew that parts of the Bible were not to be taken literally. Despite the Bible suggesting that the Moon produces its own illumination Pope Innocent III (died 1216) knew it shone by reflected light.
• There was loads of scepticism about both alchemy and astrology for the simple reason that they did not appear to work. Nevertheless, both acids and alcohol were isolated by Christian mediaeval scientists in the thirteenth century and misattributed to earlier Arabic scientists.
• Thomas Bradwardine (c1290-1349), one of the 'Mertonian Calculators' used proto logarithms in his study of motion 250 years before they were 'invented' by Napier.
• Jean Buridan developed the idea of impetus. With the Mertonian analyses he more or less solved the problems of motion before 1360, at least 200 years before Galileo.
• Albert of Saxony (c1316-1390) drew the first picture of a curved trajectory, even though it is straight in its first part.
• Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference to be between 24,000 and 30,000 miles (it is actually 24,900). This was known through Pliny the Elder's work. Ptolemy miscalculated it to be between 17,000 and 22,000 miles. Ptolemy, translated in 1406, became popular so Columbus used it to 'lose' 10,000 miles from his sea trip from Spain to the Indies.
• Paper was affordable compared to parchment. The first recorded paper mill in Italy was 1276 and France in 1348.
• Printing had the edge in the West because, unlike China and Japan, we have an alphabet which means it is far quicker to typeset a page.
• The mediaeval people invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the blast furnace and the windmill all by themselves.

Two very minor criticisms. First there is a feel that the book is one long list of very short potted biographies of some very interesting people. Second, I was disappointed that more was not made of the inventions.

This was a wonderful book.

July 2011; 342 pages

"The Three Emperors" by Miranda Carter

George V looked so like
 Tsar Nicholas II of Russia
that they were
sometimes confused.

This book considers the three cousins who became Nicholas II tsar of Russia, George V, King and Emperor, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. All three had similar childhoods, isolated from normal people (although George, as second son, served in the Navy for ten years and so at least met sailors) and brought up to believe that they were special. They were clearly lonely. Able to understand only royalty, their family formed a sort of pan-Europe business with the belief that family loyalties would trump national interests and ensure peace.

But their world was changing. Each empire needed to grow and there were inevitable tensions as their colonists and merchants clashed in various parts of the world. More particularly, the industrial revolution had created a working class that increasingly demanded a share in power. With their educations, isolated by privilege, they were unable to understand and were all fundamentally reactionary.

At least George was powerless. The British constitution ensured that he understood that he had to work with parliament and obey 'his' prime minister. Nicholas and Wilhelm were autocrats. They believed in personal rule (Nicholas was the only man in Russia who could authorise divorces and name changes) and attempted to enforce their will on 'their' people.

Not only was it fundamentally absurd that a single person could possibly rule complex modernising countries such as Germany and Russia but their isolation from the governed both because of the layers of courtiers through whom all information was filtered and distorted and because of the conceptual gaps between emperor and plebeian meant that autocracy was doomed.

In the end they didn't want the first world war. The Russian defeat by the Japanese in 1905 had sparked revolution and the Russian ministers were well aware that another war risked revolution (although Nicholas seems not to have had any idea that he could possibly be deposed). Wilhelm, for all his aggressive posturing, was frightened of war and tried at the last minute to back out of it as he had done several times before. But the Austrian's aggressive response to the Serbians abject apologies after the assassination at Sarajevo tipped the balance. War was inevitable. The colonial clashes and the militarisation of German society (which had been encouraged by Wilhelm) had led to several crises in the previous few years in which last-minute diplomacy had just averted war. At some point the tipping point would be reached.

The war destroyed the idea of empire. Although George V clung on the Tsar had abdicated and been assassinated before the armistice. Kaiser Bill abdicated on armistice day as did the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Also in 1917 the 'tsar' of Bulgaria and the king of Greece both abdicated. The last Ottoman Sultan was deposed in 1922.

A beautifully written book about a fascinating period in history.

June 2011; 500 pages

"Tulku" by Peter Dickinson

13 year old Theodore flees from his father's mission as Boxer rebels burn it. Rescued by a colourful ex-music hall actress turned botanist, Mrs Jones, he travels with her and Chinese Lung to Tibet. There an old Lama decides they bear the secret to the reincarnated Tulku.

A fast-paced adventure story with three-dimensional characters, real human relationships and brilliant descriptions of beautiful landscapes with a little bit of mystery.

June 2011; 301 pages

"1599" by James Shapiro

In this fascinating book Shapiro (who also wrote Contested Will) chronicles a year of Shakespeare's life during which he wrote Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. He shows how circumstances changed the way Shakespeare wrote. For example, Will Kemp, the clown who had played Falstaff, left the company (to Morris Dance to Norwich). So Henry V has no Falstaff, despite having promised Falstaff to the audience at the end of Henry IV part II. The clown parts in the subsequent plays are more subtle, matching the skills of the new comedian.

 Another important event was the popularity of Montaigne's Essays. Suddenly it became fashionable to consider oneself the subject of writing. Shapiro believes that this encouraged Shakespeare to develop the soliloquies that characterise Hamlet.

This was an excellent book which translates Shakespeare from a myth into a real flesh and blood writer.

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

June 2011; 373 pages

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

"The History of Mr Polly" by H G Wells

This anatomy of a mid-life crisis was ranked 39th by Robert McCrum in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. 

Alfred Polly was an only child who was sent to school by 'his parents' (although his mother died three years before), then apprenticed in a department store when significantly lacking in mathematical ability but extraordinarily well read with a massive imagination; a superb salesman with an ability to charm others with his nonsensical mispronunciations of words. He goes through a number of jobs before a legacy from his father enables him to set up shop in a place called either Foxbourne or (later) Fishbourne. He marries at the same time and then spends 15 years regretting a loveless marriage and slowly going bankrupt (in common with almost all the other shop-keepers). So he sets his shop on fire for the insurance and becomes a hero in the ensuing blaze; then he abandons his wife and ends up working at a country inn.

It is an amusing little story enlivened by acerbic wit:

• "Outside the regions devastated by the school curriculum he was still intensely curious." (p15)
• "On the whole he preferred business to school: the hours were longer but the tension was not nearly so great." (p17)

Any word play: "if, indeed, one may speak of a recent meal as a circumstance - seeing that Mr Polly was circum" (p9)

June 2011; 234 pages

Other novels by H G Wells reviewed in this blog include:

• The War of the Worlds
• The Time Machine
• Tono-Bungay
• Love and Mr Lewisham
• The History of Mr Polly
• Kipps
• The First Men in the Moon

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

• H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
• H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot

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

'Smart Swarm' by Peter Miller

This book analyses animal behaviour and tries to learn lessons for they way humans do things (especially in the business world). He considers ants, bees, termites, birds, fish and locusts. Some of his lessons seem contradictory but I suppose one wouldn't expect behaviours that have evolved would necessarily be the same in species that fill different ecological niches. Thus the haphazard way in which ants pass communicate and therefore manage the nest is very different from the way honeybees do.

Foraging ants wander randomly to find food and then scuttle straight back to the nest, laying down a pheromone trail as they do so. Other ants follow the pheromones, laying their own. Soon the best trails are those most strongly marked with pheromones so the ant paths become marked. I have experienced this; if you disrupt an ant trail using an obstacle such as your foot which they have to go around and you leave that long enough then remove it the ants will continue to loop around the now non-existent obstacle, blindly following the pheromones. That might suggest parallels with business!


Instead of relying on a priori algorithms to lay down procedures top-down, just trying something and scoring how well it succeeds can quickly transform routing problems through complex networks (such as the travelling salesman problem) whether geographical or virtual.

Honey bee scouts search for great places for the swarm to hive and then return home and communicate with the others using dance. Lots of scouts do this, many checking out the places suggested by their rivals and then (maybe) and the hive then decides. They have a sort of distributed democratic decision making procedure. First the scouts possess diversity of knowledge, second the hive only swarms once there are sufficient scouts agreeing on the best place to go (a sort of Tipping Point concept).

Miller explains the Wisdom of Crowds idea in terms of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 'Ask the Audience' strategy. Imagine you have to choose which person was NOT a member of the Monkees (A, B, C or D) and you asked 100 random people. Suppose only 7% know the right answer but 10% can narrow down the answer to a 50:50 guess and another 15% can eliminate one wrong answer leaving the remaining 68% to make a pure guess. So the right answer gets 7+5(half of 10%)+5(one third of 15%)+17(one quarter of 68%)=34%. The other options will share the remaining 66% giving 22% each. So there will be a clear majority for the right answer even though 93% of the sample guessed (to some extent)!

But the key to true wisdom is to ensure a useful diversity of knowledge and that this is expressed. There are lots of irrationalities to which humans are prey when making decisions such as anchoring (eg when a salesman suggests an initial figure for the cost of a product so that all other prices are compared to this 'anchor'). Other decision traps include preferring the status quo and the 'sunk-cost' trap. Miller diverts to talk about the Beer Game ( from Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline) and then explains how town meetings in Vermont are run according to Robert's Rules of Order (whose best rule is that everyone who wants to should have the chance to speak before anyone may speak twice).

Miller next compares the way termites repair a damaged hill with the chaos that ensues when a highly connected system such as a power network fails and a small initial failure cascades through the system (which made me think of what happens when a person dies). Termite hills apparently are designed to regulate the environment inside the nest (which is actually below ground) by using resonating air columns to catch and tame turbulent winds. Miller suggests we should develop buildings where the walls are porous and thus able to regulate the internal environments of the buildings without using energy eg for air-conditioning.

Termites work using stigmergy,  a form of positive feedback in which the action that one agent performs makes it more likely that the same or other agents will perform the same action, such as when you get an intrinsic reward from the performance of a task. Stigmergy involves indirect collaboration which, Miller implies, could solve failures of highly connected networks, although he never really suggests how. It seems to be connected to wikipedia.

Miller then compares two forms of networks: small world and scale free (which is one in which a proportion of nodes are many times more connected than other nodes in a 1/r way). Random failures affect small world networks most but scale free networks are very vulnerable to hub failures (if one airport in the world closes then air travel is unlikely to be affected because most airports handle a few planes to weird places but if that airport is Heathrow then there is big trouble). In scale free democracies a small group of well connected individuals are able to impose their will on everyone else. Later Miller shows that informed individuals can also effect big changes on inter-connected systems as the Wisdom of Crowds meets Tipping Point meets Critical Mass.

Generally "it doesn't make much sense to discuss the properties of network structures ... without also discussing what it is that you want them to do." (p149)

He also explains about the power of mimicry in social animals when discussing the flocking of birds or fish. He discovers that starlings use a sort of small worlds network in which they pay attention to 7 other starlings (presumably because they cannot cope with the amount of information processing that paying attention to more than 7 implies). This creates swirling behaviour and also the sort of phase transition discussed by Philip Ball in Critical Mass. In schools of fish communication seems to travel in a wave that moves up to 15 times faster than any single fish. Because this form of communication means that not every animal needs to be on high alert against predators, all animals can spend more time feeding and therefore each animal is more likely to survive. The phase transitions seen between one sort of shoal formation and another are classic threshold situations: Critical Mass meets Tipping Point.

Society "consists of institutional arrangements to overcome those divergences between perceived individual interest and some larger collective bargain." (pp265-266)

I learnt the expression 'ground-truth' which means to apply a theory or simulation to the real situation to see whether it works in practice.

Other great books in this area include:

• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts
• sync by Steven Strogatz
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman about fitness landscapes
• How Nature Works by Per Bak about sandpiles and self organized criticality; an excellent explanation of complexity science
• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is a brilliant introduction to this whole field
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

Fascinating although a lot of what is said are points better made elsewhere.

May 2011; 269 pages