The Waves" by Virginia Woolf

This book was rated by the BBC as 16th in their list of best novels of all time. 

"The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it." But the waves is the whole damn point.

Six characters, three boys and girls, are revealed to us using the formula of a direct quotation and then 'said Bernard' or 'said Susan'. Always 'said' although these are their thoughts. Their very first statements are descriptions of what they see and hear: rings, slabs of yellow; these are soon turned into objects perceived. Shortly Louis hides from his friends and Jinny finds him and kisses him and Susan sees and is angry. Bernard begins to tell stories; Rhoda wants to be Jinny or Susan; Neville (I wonder whether Mr Neville in Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac is named after him?) becomes religious, Bernard develops a crush on another boy; Susan hates boarding school and counts the days until she is allowed home.

This is poetry dressed up as prose. It is very hard to read. I need to spend many more days reading it very slowly: there are some books which are meant to be read fast and loose and dome which you are meant to study line by line. But I read this book fast and loose for a first impression and, despite the density of the imagery and the difficulty I found on getting a good grip on the individual life stories, I gained a surprising amount. This is like glancing at an impressionist painting: you see the sea and the sky and the trees, you feel the moving of the wind, yet you know that a careful scrutiny will yield dividends. But on a first, furious reading I got an impression of every character and how they developed differently from the others. I understood some (I doubt all) of the things they did and the things that happened to them: who got married, what their jobs were (still no idea about Neville), who had children. Almost the best bit of the book was Perceval. They (at least some of them) had been at school with Perceval. He is the sort that everyone admires. As they approach 25 they hold a dinner to which he comes (late) to celebrate his departure for India. Shortly after, they hear the shocking news of his death. This affects each one of them in different ways; they remember him for the rest of their lives; it is a bit like remembering the day when Kennedy/ Elvis/ John Lennon/ David Bowie (choose your generation) died. In many ways the book is about Perceval and yet he is the one who doesn't appear on stage.

Some moments of liminality: "we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures."

Some moments of unintended self-parody: "The only people in the streets are poor people hurrying."

I was overwhelmed by the brilliance of Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The Waves is a stunningly good book but, being so much more difficult to read, cannot have had as much impact. But I must read it again.

July 2016; 256 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Hotel du Lac" by Anita Brookner

The book starts with the protagonist, a romantic novelist called Edith Hope, staring out of the window of her room in the eponymous Swiss hotel on a world of greyness, shrouded in mist. She has been 'sent' to the end-of-season hotel as some sort of penance for the exposure of her long adulterous relationship with a married man called David.

In its early stages the book is full of beautiful observations about the predominantly female guests: the woman  who feeds her meal to her badly behaved dog, the greedy woman and daughter combination who love spending their money and who take Edith under their wing (ostensibly because she is alone but actually so they can talk at her and patronise her), the Comtesse who his in the hotel as a sort of retirement home having been put their by her son acting under the orders of his wife.

Into this grey world comes Mr Neville, a man dressed in grey. Disconcertingly, he knows Edith as her nom de plume. Later he seems to be able to read her mind and to know her better than she knows herself. Already slightly sinister, at the half way point of the story he reveals his moral code: "You cannot live someone else's life. You can only live your own. And remember, there are no punishments. Whatever they told you about unselfishness being good and wickedness being bad was entirely inaccurate. It is a lesson for serfs and it leads to resignation. And my policy, you may be surprised to hear, will ensure you any number of friends. People feel at home with low moral standards. It is scruples that put them off." (p 96) This is a man who lives up to the evil in the middle of his name (which makes me wonder about Miss HOPE and the very HotELduLac).

Following this very frank courtship, Edith goes on the last silent boat across the grey lake. This is a chapter reeking in mythic metaphor, to the extent of describing Mr Neville as a "curiously mythological personage". When Edith regrets joining Neville on the boat ("Ships, she knew, were often used by painters as symbols of the soul, sometimes of the soul departing for unknown shores. Of death, in fact. Or, if not of death, not of anything very hopeful.") she reflects on the inappropriateness of the adage that the devil finds work for idle hands: "One cannot even rely on Satan to fulfil his obligations." Mr Neville tells her that "as to vice, there is plenty to be found if you know where to look" and when she replies that she never seems to find it he suggests "that is because you do not give yourself over wholeheartedly to the pursuit. But ... we are going to change all that." And then he proposes. And as they prepare to disembark he says in two beautiful double entendres: "We must get off, Edith. Give me your hand." This, the penultimate chapter, is beautifully written.

The whole book is beautiful. A gentle comedy of manners, well observed, has become a wonderfully Mephistophelean temptation.

Other brilliant lines:

• "everything that Mrs Pusey had said so far was of the utmost triviality. Clearly there were depths here that deserved her prolonged attention." (p 40)
• "The beautiful day had within it the seeds of its own fragility: it was the last day of summer." (p 67)
• "There is something quite heartening about ... simple greed." (p 96)
• "Do me a favour ...I do not have any plans. I never have any plans. I should have thought that was fairly obvious by now. I thought you were supposed to be a writer. Aren't you supposed to be good at observing human nature, or something?  I only ask because you sometimes strike me as being a bit thick." (p 144)

This novel won the Booker Prize in 1984. Other prize winners can be found on this page. 

A fabulous book. July 2016; 184 pages

A detailed review of this book can be found here: https://www.thearticle.com/a-study-of-anita-brookners-hotel-du-lac

Anita Brookner has also written

• Brief Lives, a beautifully written devastatingly sad memoir narrated by a childless widow growing old
• Family and Friends

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

"Black Mischief" by Evelyn Waugh

I'm reading this because a few days ago the BBC described Waugh as one of our greatest novelists.

This is a mildly amusing comic novel which is set in an African coastal nation ruled over by an Emperor (the grandson of an adventurer) who has just won a civil war against his father; the soldiers are mostly 'ignorant savages' of different tribes. The book attempts to make you laugh by lampooning the racial stereotypes of the various people in the Empire. To a modern eye it is entirely tasteless. It casually uses a number of words that are offensive today.

The question is: does one attempt to judge this book by the standards of its own time, when such things were unremarkable, or by the standards of today? After all, Huck Finn has the character Jim, a runaway slave, who is referred to using a word that is unacceptable these days. Othello is racially abused, as is Shylock. If Shakespeare and Mark Twain can get away with it, why can't Evelyn Waugh? Does it depend on how good the art is?

Waugh pokes fun at everyone from dinner partying socialites in England to poor black women. But he doesn't really construct characters. Shakespeare's Shylock is a rounded character and has strengths and weaknesses: Shakespeare is both presenting a racial stereotype and questioning it. But Waugh seems to accept the stereotypes he presents. This is lazy humour, cheap humour, and casts doubt on Waugh's status as a great novelist, let alone one of the greatest.

There are moments of witty humour eg "Basil came in, so unlike the barrister of her dream that it required an effort to recognize him." This reminded me of the light comedy of Oscar Wilde in the Portrait of Dorian Gray. But it isn't as clever as Wilde. It certainly isn't nearly as funny as P G Wodehouse.

Waugh has written better stuff. A Handful of Dust is slightly racist and also full of insubstantial wit but there are serious, even black, undertones which are well-handled. The Loved One is mostly superficial and meaningless but inoffensive.

July 2016; 221 pages

"The Decipherment of Linear B" by John Chadwick

This is the classic story of how in 1952 an architect, Michael Ventris, working part-time, deciphered the inscriptions on some clay tablets found in Crete, and later in mainland Greece, to show that they were written in a syllabic script based on a pre-classical Greece. It is thus a mix of archaeology, philology,and code-breaking. The triumph was all the greater because, as Chadwick points out, a cryptanalyst at least knows what language the code was written in whilst the prevailing view at the time was that these tablets were written in almost any language rather than Greek!

The book details how Ventris worked on the code, how he overcame doubt and triumphed. The story is telescoped into a few short years because Ventris was killed in a road traffic accident on the A1 in 1956. The author collaborated with Ventris immediately after Ventris had made the first breakthrough so this is, as much as any book can be, an insider's point of view. And what makes it wonderful is that it is written in the beautifully understated style of the 1950s, grey, academic and bloodless.

And yet, something of the excitement of dry, grey, bloodless, academic research can be seen. The first words are: "The urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature" (p 1). The story of the breaking of the code is likened to nuclear fission: "finally there comes a point when the experimenter feels solid ground beneath his feet: his hypotheses cohere, and fragments of sense emerge from their camouflage. The code 'breaks'. Perhaps this is best defined as the point where the likely leads appear faster than they can be followed up. It is like the initiation of a chain-reaction in atomic physics; once the critical threshold is passed, the reaction propagates itself. Only in the simplest experiments or codes does it complete itself with explosive violence." (p 67)

An interesting story about the emergence of ideas from liminality.

July 2016; 157 pages

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

"Consilience" by Edward O Wilson

This far-ranging and brilliantly written book pleads the cause that science should be united with the social sciences, and the humanities, and the arts, and even ethics and religion, on the basis of the scientific method. The thesis is that biology, which accepts that is is linked to chemistry and physics, is the basis for psychology through the evolution by natural selection within the human brain of epigenetic rules, and that scientific psychology is (or should be) the basis for sociology, anthropology and economics. Wilson is predominantly a socio-biologist and presents compelling evidence for his point of view. This book thus complements, supports and is supported by Steven Pinker's brilliant book The Blank Slate.

He starts by celebrating the power of science:  "The idea of the unity of science ... has been tested in acid baths of experiment and logic and enjoyed repeated vindication. It has suffered no decisive defeats. At least not yet." (p 3). To those who fear the 'mad scientist', variously mythologised as Frankenstein, the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden, and Icarus, the ultimate in hubris, Wilson responds: "Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings." (p 5)

He believes that the romantics led the reaction against the Enlightenment ideal of consilience, the unit of knowledge, when  Rousseau "invented the deadly abstraction of the 'general will' ... the rule of justice agreed upon by assemblies of free people whose interest is only to serve the welfare of the society and of each person in it ... Those who do not conform to the general will ... are deviants subject to necessary force by the assembly. There is no other way to achieve a truly egalitarian democracy." (p 14) but he points out that  "The Enlightenment ... was less a determined swift river than a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels" (p 21) and reminds us that "What counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment." (p 22) "Reductionism, given its unbroken strong of successes ... may seem today the obvious best way to have constructed knowledge of the physical world." (p 31) "The cutting edge of science is reductionism ... It is the research strategy employed to find points of entry into otherwise impenetrably complex systems." (p 58) The present situation is one in which the "natural sciences have expanded to reach the borders of the social sciences and humanities" (p 71)

Wilson is at one with Dennett is his claims that "Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imaginations of sensory impressions." (p 119) and that "Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of" networks of neurons. These "create scenarios that flow back and forth through time. The scenarios are a virtual reality." (p 120) He thus denies the Cartesian theatre: "Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. ... There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. ... The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity." (p 120)

I think therefore I am? Wilson questions the identity of the Self, seeing it as an actor improvising: "The self, an actor in a perpetually changing drama, lacks full command of its actions." (p 131) Free will is an illusion: "We make decisions for reasons we can sense only vaguely, and seldom if ever understand fully. Ignorance of this kind is conceived by the conscious mind as uncertainty to be resolved; hence freedom of choice is ensured. An omniscient mind with total commitment to pure reason and fixed goals would lack free will." (p 131): this implies that an omniscient God could not have free will; this is a fascinating theological restriction on God that I need to think about.

He revisits the nature-nurture debate, accepting that culture affects us but claiming that culture is an amalgam of the evolution of epigenetic rules which are prescribed by genes. "We know that virtually all of human behaviour is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact." (p 138) "Culture is reconstructed each generation collectively in the minds of individuals ... culture can grow indefinitely large ... But the fundamental biasing influence of the epigenetic rules, being genetic and ineradicable, stays constant." (p 139). This creates an unchangeable human nature. He has a great example showing how nature and nurture interact in the arrowleaf plant which has arrowhead leaves on land, lily-pad leaves in shallow water, grass-like ribbon leaves in deep water. Similarly, humans genetically predisposed to be fat can be thin with a significant dieting regime and "Later-borns, who identify least with the roles and beliefs of their parents, tend to become more innovative and accepting of political and scientific revolutions than do first-borns. As a result they have, on average, contributed more than first-borns have to cultural change throughout history." (p 152)

Culture itself evolves and Wilson suggests that this is because cultural evolution can facilitate survival faster than genetic evolution, thus enabling faster adaptation to environmental change and potentially explaining the success of our species. "The more successful epigenetic rules have spread through the population along with the genes that prescribe the rules. As a consequence the human species has evolved genetically by natural selection in behaviour. ... Certain cultural norms also survive and reproduce better than competing norms ... Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely tuned adaptations." (p 140) Culture exists in other species: "Wild chimps regularly invent and use tools. And the particular kinds of artifacts they invent, just as in human culture, are often limited to local populations." (p 145). 

He casts a new light on rationality itself! "I suggest that rational choice is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules." (p 199) But epigenetic rules ("rules of thumb that allow organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment") (p 213) are "typically emotion driven" (p 214) so "Rational calculation is based on surges of competing emotions." (p 227)#

He is fascinating on a wide range of topics including pre-verbal communication which is probably "our primate heritage" and includes:

• "a male pheromone concentrated in perspiration and fresh urine. Perceived variously as musk or sandalwood, it changes sexual attraction and warmth of mood during social contacts." (p 174)
• Touching: strangers: arms only; other parts of body for more familiar acquaintances; more familiarity with opposite sex (p 174)
• "Dilation of the pupils": greater in women (p 174)
• "Pushing the tongue out and spitting are aggressive displays of rejection; flicking the tongue around the lips is a social invitation, used most commonly during flirtation" (p 174)
• Close eyes & wrinkle nose: rejection (p 174)
• "Opening the mouth while pulling down the corners of the mouth to expose the lower teeth is to threaten with contempt." (p 175)

"The optimum sexual instinct of men ... is to be assertive and ruttish, while that of women is to be coy and selective. Men are expected to be more drawn than women to pornography and prostitution. And in courtship, men are expected to stress exclusive sexual access and guarantees of paternity, while women consistently emphasize commitment of resources and material security." (p 187)

The theory of the family: "The basic assumption is evolution by natural selection" (p 214)
"Families are basically unstable, but the least so in those controlling high-quality resources. Dynasties ... arise in territories permanently rich in resources." (p 215)
"The closer the genetic relationships of the family members .. the higher the degree of cooperation." (p 215)
"The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, the lower the frequency of sexual conflict." (p 215)
"Breeding males invest less in offspring when paternity is uncertain. If the family consists of a single conjugal pair, and one of the parents is lost, the opposite-sex offspring compete with the surviving parent for breeder status. When the father dies, for example, a still fecund mother is likely to enter into conflict with a son over the status of a mate he may newly acquire, and a son is likely to discourage his mother from establishing a new sexual relationship." (p 215)
"Stepfamilies are less stable than biologically intact families." (p 215)
"Reproduction within a family ... is increasingly shared when there is an improvement in the alternative option for subordinate members to disperse and start families of their own. Such forbearance is greatest of all when the members are genetically very close and when the cooperating individuals are siblings rather than parents and offspring." (p 215)

Economists tend to use "folk psychology" (p 223) Their "principle of rational choice" assumes "narrow self-interest" but people are also "variously altruistic, loyal, spiteful, and masochistic." (p 224)

"The arts are not solely shaped by errant genius out of historical circumstances and idiosyncratic personal experience. The roots of that inspiration date back in deep history to the genetic origins of the human brain, and are permanent." (p 242)

"Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions." (p 265) But if ethical rules "increased the survival and reproductive success of those who conformed" then epigenetic ethical rules could have evolved. (p 275)

"Rarely do you see an argument that opens with the simple statement: This is my starting point and it could be wrong." (p 268)

Pascal's wager: I might as well believe: if I am right I get eternity in heaven, if I am wrong I lose nothing. This could be turned around: "If fear and hope and reason dictate that you must accept the faith, do so, but treat this world as if there is none other." (p 274)

The naturalistic fallacy (to go from is to ought) is itself a fallacy: "To translate is into ought makes sense if we attend to the objective meaning of ethical precepts ... they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates, the behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are willing to accept themselves for the common good." (p 278)

"One hunter considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on his own. If successful he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide ... But he knows from experience that his chances of success alone are very low ... In addition ... he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their own prospects." (p 281) therefore those humans who cooperate have greater reproductive success and cooperation evolves. Therefore the prisoner's dilemma can be solved if "Honor does exist among thieves" (p 281)

"I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago." (p 4)

At then end he offers two warnings. 

First: we are destroying our environment. "At best an environmental bottleneck is coming in the twenty-first century." (p 320) "Economic miracles ... occur most often when countries consume not only their own material resources, including oil, timber, water, and agricultural produce, but those of other countries as well." (p 325) Life is becoming increasingly fragile:
"The more knowledge people acquire, the more they are able to increase their numbers and to alter the environment, whereupon the more they need new knowledge just to stay alive." (p 302)
"Greed demands an explanation." (p 302)

Secondly, we are about to become in charge of our own evolution.
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. ... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become. Our childhood having ended, we will hear the true voice of Mephistopheles." (p 309)

This is an amazing book. July 2016; 333 pages 

"The Red Tent" by Anita Diamant

The is the story of Dinah, the only girl born to Jacob who also fathered Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Isaachar, Zebulun, Joseph (of the coat of many colours, yes, it gets a mention) and later Benjamin, the twelve tribes, by his two wives (sisters) and their slave-girls. When she grows up, Dinah falls for a handsome Hivite prince call Shechem and they sleep together. Simeon and Levi demand that all the Hivites be circumcised, which they agree to, and then "two days later, while they were still in great pain" Simeon and Levi massacre the Hivites, including Shechem, and take Dinah back. That seems to be the last of Dinah in the Biblical account but in this book she curses her family and flees with her husband's mother to Egypt where she has her husband's child and more adventures until she dies. All in all it is not a flattering portrait of the start of the chosen people.

There are bits of this book which are a bit blockbuster-like: there is a large cast, many of whom cannot be fully characterised, and a lot of action. Dinah becomes a midwife, like her aunty Rachel, and there is a lot of menstruation and childbirth; there is a strong femininist perspective about this book. It was well written but there were parts where I struggled to stay interested.

July 2016; 384 pages

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

"Coleridge: Early Visions" by Richard Holmes

This is the first of a two-volume biography of the 'father of romanticism' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of classic poetry such as Xanadu, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Christabel. It covers his life from his birth in 1772 in St Mary Ottery in Devon and childhood as one of many brothers, growing up in a rural parsonage, and his subsequent schooling at Christ's Hospital and Cambridge after his father had died, to 1804 when he travelled to Sicily during the Napoleonic Wars.

It is an extremely well-written book, easy to read (the chapters aren't very long and they are further divided into beautifully short sections), and comprehensive without being exhaustive. There is a very good cast list at the back ("Coleridge's Circle"). I particularly liked the fact that Holmes touched upon literary theory although in my opinion he did not go far enough. It seems to me, from what Holmes does say, that Coleridge was an avant garde young Turk rebelling against the literary establishment which means that he presumably had ideas about what was good and what was bad; Holmes tells us that Coleridge reinvented the traditional ballad form but I wanted to know the details of this. (This is one of those moments when I acknowledge that my tastes are probably as far from mainstream as you can get; despite this cavil the biography is still a damn fine book).

Coleridge knew everyone, including the young poet and chemist Humphrey Davy, who appears in The Age of Wonder, an even more brilliant book by Richard Holmes

He was a 'bit of a lad' at Cambridge, getting drunk and whoring and getting into debt; he left by joining the army but was discharged 'insane' (he must have been totally unsuited to military life; he could not even ride a horse without repeatedly falling off); it sounds as if he was manic-depressive. He then became a political radical (he and Wordsworth were tracked by a government spy (brilliantly called Nozy!) who was very concerned that the notes the poets were making about the countryside were designed to be sold to Napoleon). He made several plans to start artistic communities in the wilderness, believing implicitly in Rousseau's 'Noble Savage'. He was an avidly read and very astute political journalist. He adored long (often 20 miles or more each day for several days) country walks and began both Kubla Khan and Ancient Mariner whilst walking in Devon (I have just spent a week in Watchet where they claim that Ancient Mariner was inspired by a visit to their harbour).

There were so many quotable moments in the book (mostly by Coleridge but still quite a few by Holmes):
Holmes:

• In literary life "'success' and respectability are delusive concepts" (Ch 1.4) - I love 'delusive'!!!
• Coleridge was "uncertain whether he was the Benjamin or a black sheep" (Ch 1.4)
• Coleridge developed a "plain style, expressing emotion in run-on lines, musical alliterations, and bold monosyllabic statements of personal feeling" (Ch 2.6)
• Coleridge used "suspended rhythmic devices with brilliant effect in his ballads" (Ch 6.6)
• Xanadu is a "myth of creativity" (Ch 7.10)
• Coleridge "plunged like a Red Indian ... into the woods" (Ch 8.10)
• Coleridge in Germany was delighted that kids got presents from "a mysterious forerunner of the modern Father Christmas" (and that older kids kept the secret from their younger siblings) (Ch 9.4)
• "No animal but man appears ever to be struck by wonder" (Ch 9.9, quoting Carlyon)
• "With his fatal genius for being all things to all men, for trying to please everyone at once, and for trying to fulfil expectations on every hand, he fell into a pattern of prevarication and fragmentation in much of his work. He dreamed more than he planned, he planned more than he could execute, leaping from one brilliant conception to the next, never still or concentrated for more than a few weeks at a time." (Ch 10.3)
• He laid out political debate in two columns "so that the closed, mirror-thinking of both sides was effectively demonstrated" (Ch 10.8)

Coleridge:

• "Chasing chance-started friendships" (Ch 1.2)
• "Love is a local Anguish" (Ch 4.4)
• "When a Man is unhappy, he writes damn bad Poetry, I find." (Ch 4.8)
• "soul-gelding Ugliness" (Ch 5.8)
• He was unable to write when he was depressed below the "writing-point in the thermometer of mind" (Ch 5.11)
• He described the habit of philosophers of demanding that every concept be exactly defined as "Barricading the road to truth ... setting up a turn-pike at every step we took". (Ch 8.4)
• A fisherman explained why he and others had risked their lives in a vain attempt to rescue a drowning boy as "we have a nature towards one another." (Ch 8.10)
• "No one can leap over his Shadow" (Ch 12.8)

"And the Devil thought of his old Friend

Death in the Revelations" (Ch 10.1)

A beautifully written book. I just wanted more! (Yes, I am aware there is a second volume. I will get it.)

June 2016; 371 pages

"A Sicilian Romance" by Ann Radcliffe

This is a classic Gothic novel. There is a castle in Sicily; figures are seen in the closed and ruined southern part; strange sounds come from it. There is a secret which a dying man confides to a confessor. There is an evil stepmother, the Marchioness, who wants to be unfaithful to her husband with a young cavalier but he, in his turn, repudiates her advances for the love of her daughter which causes her to lay wicked plans to achieve revenge. People are imprisoned in dungeons. There are locked and bolted doors leading onto subterranean passages and spiral staircases where the steps crumble away. There are bandit gangs living in monstrous caverns. There is a monastery and a strange abbot, and a monk who is in love with a nun. There are mountains and forests and the pursuit of evil counts. There are tempests and shipwrecks. In short, this has everything.

Sources presumably include Shakespeare's Hamlet, and The Winter's Tale, also set partially in Sicily and involving a young heroine escaping from a cruel father who has allegedly killed his wife (lots of characters appear lifeless only to be revived much later, a bit like in Candide). Other obvious sources are The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole and The Monk by Matthew Lewis. There are hints of Cinderella and Snow White. But there is also the thought that this story may have helped to influence details in The Count of Monte Cristo and that spiral staircase reminded me of a scene in Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stephenson.

The first half is tight but the second half feels a bit padded as the characters are moved onto the stage in a variety of combinations and the action flits from scene to scene with no obvious plot development.

There are some great lines:

• "Joy is as restless as anxiety or sorrow." (Ch II)
• "in order to have due command of our passions it is necessary to subject them to early obedience." (Ch II)
• "A young Italian cavalier ... who possessed too much of the spirit of gallantry to permit a lady to languish in vain." (Ch VI)
• "When once we enter on the labyrinth of vice, we can seldom return, but are led on, through correspondent mazes, to destruction." (Ch XV)

A really enjoyable Gothic romp with lots and lots of liminality.

June 2016; 199 pages

"A Man Called Ove" by Fredrik Backman

I wasn't that impressed by the last quirky little novel from a Swede, The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out of a Window and Disappeared. I adored Ove.

Ove is a grumpy old git. He is a practical man. He has a routine. He used to be head of the Residents Association until the coup d'etat after which he fell out with his best friend. Ove is the Swedish Victor Meldrew. Everyone, and everything, conspires to annoy Ove: the pregnant Iranian woman with the DIY-challenged Lanky husband and their two girls, seven and three; the enormously fat jogger who lives next door; his ex-best friend Rune and his wife Anita; Blonde Weed and her mutt; the stray cat; the illiterate postman and his eyeshadow wearing friend ...

In between Ove rants we discover Ove's back story. He was orphaned at 16. He fell in love with and married Sonja but she died six months ago. Yesterday he was made redundant.  We learn why Ove wants to fix that hook and why, if he does it at night, no one knows when the lights will be turned off. We learn the sources of Ove's anger. And we discover the real Ove.

Right from the first page, the writing was amusing and original. The following is a very scant selection of brilliant epigrams:

• The iPad box is "a highly dubious box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit trousers and just called Ove 'my friend' before offering to sell him a watch."
• Ove knows that the kitchen chairs in the attic "didn't creak at all. Ove knows very well it was just an excuse, because his wife wanted to get some new ones. As if that was all life was about. Buying kitchen chairs and eating in restaurants and carrying on."
• Of Ove and his wife: "He was a man of black and white. And she was colour. All the colour he had."
• His wife's laughter made him feel "as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast."
• "It was always like that with women. They couldn't stick to a plan if you glued them to it."
• "They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on."
• Anita is "determinedly driving sorrow out of the house with a broom."
• Jimmy the fat jogger wears "a fiercely green tracksuit that's so tight around his body that Ove wonders at first if it's in fact a garment or a body painting."

But this book is so much more that a list of clever witticisms. There are 40 chapters. On chapter 5 I write 'Wow! What a tearjerker." On chapter eight I wrote "Wow". Chapter 22 had me laughing out loud, chapter 23 had me in tears. I read the last ten chapters in exquisite agony, trying to laugh with a really big lump in my throat, pretending my hayfever was so bad that I had to keep stopping to blow my nose. I knew what was going to happen. The plot is as transparent as a window that has just been cleaned. There were a couple of little surprises on the way but I was ready for the grand finale. But I can't even reread the damn thing without getting tears in my eyes.

This is a book about today, about growing old, about doing the right thing, about love. It is very funny but at the same time it is incredibly poignant. READ IT!

June 2016; 294 pages

"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood

Set in a near future after Christian fundamentalists have taken over a large part of the US and imposed a totalitarian patriarchal hierocracy, Offred (her name means Of Fred) is a 'handmaid', the scarlet and white clothed mistress of one of the powerful commanders. Her job is to provide lustless sex so that the commander can breed children because the birth rate has crashed, many women (never men according to the dogma of the patriarchy) are infertile and many children who are born are deformed and destroyed.

Atwood writes in a simple but lyrical style, delicately dropping breadcrumbs of information, never telling us more than we need for a moment, allowing us slowly to explore the parameters of the strange new world. The back story is always a problem in science fiction; the events that shape the dystopia must (?) be described but this can mean the narrative interrupts; Atwood solves this by doling out the information in tiny nibbles, waiting until over half way through before giving a larger chunk.

Her prose is beautiful, blemished only by those infantile neologisms which American commercial practice imposes on the world, thus there are BirthMobiles and Soul Scrolls and Compubanks and Pornomarts and Feels on Wheels vans and Bun-Dle Buggies.

The Commander's wife, Serena Joy, is an old lady, barren, trapped in a marriage, having achieved what she worked for but possibly not enjoying it now that it has arrived: "her face is sinking in upon itself, and I think of those towns built on underground rivers, where houses and whole streets disappear overnight."

What is beautiful about her writing is the way she can convey peace and despair and hopelessness in sentences of such pure simplicity. It is the way she uses words and very short sentences to comunicate. Simple. Stark. Elegant. Much better than this rubbish that praises her.

Some other gems:

• "A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women"; a point reinforced by mitochondrial DNA.
• "Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
• "at that time men and women tried each other on causally, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit"
• "July, its breathless days and sauna nights, hard to sleep"
• "Better never means better for everyone ... It always means worse, for some."
• "I am a blank here, between parentheses."

This book was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1986

A joy to read.

June 2016; 324 pages if you include the 'Historical Notes' which add nothing to a gem of a story and which I would recommend you not to read.

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

I am not a usual reader of science fiction but technically this classifies, and as a dystopian vision. Other dystopian books I would recommend in this blog include:

• Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel although the big unanswered question is why the survivors of the plague would be so keen to preserve Beethoven and Shakespeare and so cavalier about preserving engineering and pysics; perhaps the virus attacked scientists preferentially
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: book one is great, book two OK but book three is a real let down; don't bother
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick is said to be great by everyone but I was underwhelmed
• and of course Oryx and Crake, another brilliant novel from Atwood, post-apocalyptic rather than dystopian perhaps.

Books by Margaret Atwood reviewed in this blog:

• The Heart Goes Last: a homeless couple enter a utopian community
• Bodily Harm: A wonderful Graham Greenesque excursion to a Caribbean island where no one is who they seem to be
• Oryx and Crake: adventures in a world post climate change
• Hag-Seed: a brilliant retelling of the Tempest, re enacted in a prison
• The Handmaid's Tale: the one that everyone raves about ... but not her best.
• The Blind Assassin: a regretful memoir from an old lady, recalling her sister

"The Devil's Doctor" by Philip Ball

Philip Ball is the author of the brilliant Critical Mass which is about phase transitions. This is a very different book. This is a biography of Paracelsus,a renaissance doctor and alchemist who was half-way between a scientist and a magician.

His real name was Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim and I has assumed that the word 'bombastic' derived from his boastful style of writing (Ball calls it "verbose, undisciplined and ungrammatical", it contains many neologisms, at least one undefined, as with other alchemical writings sometimes it seems to seek to conceal more than it reveals, and it was argumentative, frequently insulting, libellous and vituperative). But Ball tells us that 'bombast' was cotton padding "and it is from this origin that the connotation of 'puffed up' derives." (p 18)

His mum died young so he was brought up by his dad, a (probably unqualified) country doctor; they were poor and Paracelsus suffered from rickets in his youth. He was knocking around at the same sort of time as Agricola, who studied metals and mining, and Agrippa, who was an out and out magician and someone very like Paracelsus: "it is clearly unrealistic to demand too much coherence from a character as contrary as Agrippa of Nettesheim. He was apt to say whatever came into his head, and if it was not the same thing as he said the day before, it was nevertheless equally likely to offend someone." (p 87)

Ball suggests that aspects of the life of Paracelsus may have contributed to the legend of Faust and he tells the story of Johann Faust who, according to Adrien de Jonghe in Batavia, worked for Coster, the inventor of printing, but stole the secrets and sold them to Gutenberg (the reality is probably that ne of Gutenberg's backers was called Johann Fust). I must check this against Ruickbie's biography of Faustus. Furthermore, Ball points out that Simon Magus, the gnostic magician who sought to purchase church office (hence the sin of simony) and challenged St Peter to a miracle battle, had a companion called Helen of Tyre, not a million miles from the Helen of Try who appears in  Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.

Ball follows Paracelsus on his travels from North Africa to Scandinavia including a spell in Russia when he is captured by the Mongol hordes, and follows the travails of his thought through his extensive writing. It was, like all times seem to be, a very interesting time; Paracelsus met Erasmus and Zwingli of the Protestant Reformation; Osiander refused to publish a book by Paracelsus and went on to publish De Revolutionibus by Copernicus.

But there is sometimes too much detail. Detail can easily transmute the surface glitter of alchemy into base metal, though here Ball comes up with perhaps the best line of the book: "if you want men to leave no stone unturned in their enquiry into nature, say that there is gold to be found under one of them." This is the only way to make sense of the thousands of men who devoted their lives to the noxious, laborious and fruitless art of alchemy: it wasn't even as if popular opinion held alchemists in high esteem or egged them on in the societal belief that their efforts would one day be rewarded. Alchemists were hated, feared and mocked. Among the more famous and successful alchemists Ball describes is the Londoner Simon Forman who appears in The Lodger by Charles Nicholl. It struck me that the principle of The Philosopher's Stone was catalysis and that enzymes, biological catalysts are very much like The Stone in their dual ability to facilitate chemical reactions and to create life.

First and foremost, Paracelsus was a doctor and he wrote a book describing the ideal doctor (doesn't sound much like him!) who "must not be married to a bigot, should not be a runaway monk, should not practise self-abuse" and "must not have a red beard". (p 209)

But he was a rough bird who admitted "I do not wash to the satisfaction of everyone." (p 340)

But Paracelsus still dabbled in the occult. He believed that he could make a homunculus by sealing sperm into a glass vessel and heating it in horse manure for forty days. (p 344)

Unusually for a biographer, Ball continues well beyond the death of Paracelsus in Salzburg. There are two chapters devoted to tracing his legacy in detail.

Ball points out that the word 'disaster' literally means 'bad star'. "To most, astrology was just the way the world worked. But the philosopher needed a reason why - a mechanism."

There were a lot of interesting things in this book but, perhaps like the writings of Paracelsus himself, there was too much and I sometimes lost my way.

June 2016, 398 pages

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

"Against Method" by Paul Feyerabend

Feyerabend is a firebrand, an iconoclast, whose purpose is to demolish any theory that seeks to systematise the processes of scientific discovery. He starts with the statement that "anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemology, and for the philosophy of science" (p 1). The history of science is "complex, chaotic, full of mistakes, and entertaining." (p 3) And he continues to challenge throughout the book. Don't be misled by the italics, which he peppers with the abandon of a Caribbean chef. This is not the work of an obsessed dilettante. He is thoroughly immersed in the history of science and proceeds to provide extensive evidence from the Copernican revolution.

Although it is a little worrying, given his tendency to make broad-brush statements such as "There is not a single interesting theory that agrees with all the known facts in its domain" (p 14; my emphasis), that the evidence he cites comes exclusively from the Copernican revolution (with a little bit added in about Newton but he rarely strays into biology or chemistry or even quantum physics).

His essential thesis is that scientists are mavericks who don't assess theories in terms of the facts they can explain (and certainly, despite Popperianism, don't reject theories because they are falsified by inconvenient facts). Nor do scientists neatly construct methodologies. Indeed, in Feyerabend's eyes, the process of scientific discovery is an essentially ad hoc muddle of methodological innovation, new philosophical insights and perspectives, and facts. In order for science to make progress it is necessary, from time to time, to flout the rules of scientific methodology. (p 7) "Inventing theories and contemplating them in a relaxed and 'artistic' fashion, scientists often make moves that are forbidden by methodological rules." (p 150)

This is an interesting book and contains many insights into the work of Galileo in particular. He can get carried away: "his natural sense of humour and not the inbred and always rather nasty kind of jocularity one finds in specialized professions" combines yet another of his italicisings with the naturalistic fallacy with a sweeping generalisation ('always') and bitchiness. But on the whole it is well written, with reams of footnotes (some pages have more footnote than text) and tons of well-argued evidence.

I often do not read the Appendices of books. Hence, having reached Appendix One, I put the book down and wrote the blog post above. Then, for some reason, I took the book back up and discovered that there were five more chapters after Appendix One (including, interspersed, Appendix Two). And a Post Script. That really is it. So below is the rest of the blog post.

The remaining chapters investigate the processes involved when two inconsistent ideas interact, which is where he differs from Thomas Kuhn who his classic Structure of Scientific Revolutions has suggested that paradigms can be so different as to be incommensurable with no possibility of interaction. Feyerabend believes that "Incommensurability depends on covert classifications." (p 171) and he defines "Covert classifications are sensed rather than comprehended." (p 170) This means that when, for example,an iconoclastic young Turk in, say, theatre despairs of the theatre of his time and, by searching outside the box, promotes a revolution in drama, his new revolutionary school can and does interact with the old school which may "lead to a slight modification of the original practice, it may eliminate it, it may result in a tradition that barely resembles either of the interacting elements." (p 224) This is a very common-sense view.

But his overall argument, summed up in his title Against Method, is that "all rules have their limits" although "I do not argue that we should proceed without rules and standards" (p 242). He uses a nice analogy which will even work in the sat nav era: "The wanderer uses the map to find his way but he also corrects it as he proceeds ... Using the map no matter what will soon get him into trouble. But it is better to have maps than to proceed without them." (p 233)

But one of the reasons why a single uniform method should not be imposed is that we are always seeking to explore hitherto unmapped regions. "We don't know the region, we cannot say what will work in it." Fair point, although one suspects that the human reaction will be to try to apply whatever has worked so far.

He's right of course. Scientists don't follow their own rules. Who does? Exploration must always involve a great deal of making-it-up-as-you-go-along. We should not try to discern, still less impose, a single Method on research. That is just common sense. But Feyerabend's gift for communication sometimes makes him seem more like a prophet than a philosopher, more of an iconoclast than an academic, and ever so slightly a crank. When he seems to suggest that physics as a way of discovering the universe is not as good as mysticism, it is easy to see why his opponents should accuse him of an 'anything goes' platform when actually his 'anarchy' is merely a plea against totalitarianism.

June 2016; 287 pages

"The Soft Machine" by William Burroughs

I think I have figured out a rationale for the William Burroughs technique. Because any fool can write gay porn and cut it up and reassemble the pieces randomly.

Think of the Burroughs style as a symphony. Early in the book (but also at intervals elsewhere) he plays a theme. This theme has to be a crystal clear image, as vivid and as unforgettable as a line in a poem. The elaborate around the theme. Bring in other themes. Experiment with variations (but never so varied that you cannot spot the theme). Use different tempos, vary the volume and the style. A Burroughs book is like a symphony.

What makes a theme is its ability to set an idea down in a few brilliantly-chosen words.

I noticed in The Wild Boys, also by Burroughs, that "there are lots of colours in this book; they are almost his favourite adjectives. Yet his palette isn't terribly extensive and the same colours are repeated again and again." This is an example of his use of themes.

Some of the themes are also found in other Burroughs books. He does seem to be fixated on the early sexual experiences of 'Johnny' and 'Kiki'. Early in this book "he threw himself across the wash basin pressing his stomach against the cool porcelain. I draped myself over his body laughing. His shorts dissolved in rectal mucous ans carbolic soap." We will meet with dissolving shorts, rectal mucous and carbolic soap later in the book. Other repeated themes include boys being hanged and the urban myth that as they die their penises become erect and they ejaculate. It sounds as if Burroughs experimented with autoerotic asphyxia (which allegedly causes a semi-hallucinogenic rush) as well as gay sex and heroin.

There are an awful lots of mentions of molluscs and crustaceans: these often inhabit the bodies of young boys. He also likes lists. Carl (another character found in other cooks) paddles his canoe into a "lagoon infested with" a whole aquarium of exotic life including and "aquatic panther and other noxious creatures dreamed up by the lying explorers who infest bars marginal to the area." Note that 'infest' is used twice in the same sentence; Burroughs didn't seem to believe in editing.

Burroughs is wonderful at one-liners that are perfect images like sparkling little diamonds of prose:

• His eyes flickered the question
• Trace a line of goose pimples up the thin young arm.
• The sick dawn flutes of Ramadan
• My time was running out its last black grains
• Dead young flesh in stale underwear vending sex
• Plaintive ghost in the turnstile
• I'm Johnny Yen, a friend of - Well, just about everybody
• You're dead nada walking around visible
• caustic erogenous slime
• 'Salt Chunk Mary' had all the 'nos' and none of them ever meant 'yes'.

In the end I found it difficult to read. He runs out of fresh new images and peddles the old ones time and again. There are a lot of gay sexual encounters although many of them seem to be the same encounter told again and again. I guess that is like life. But without the erotic angle this book might be unreadable. I applaud what he is trying to do but perhaps the form needs to be briefer, a short story rather than a novella.

June 2016; 129 pages

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

The theme of ejaculation by hanging also appears in Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded