"News From Tartary" by Peter Fleming

 In 1935, Peter Fleming, Old Etonian (and brother of the later-to-become-more-famous Ian, author of the James Bond books), at the time a seasoned traveller and a Times correspondent attempted to travel 3,500 miles, with a French female companion called Kini, from Beijing to Kashmir, across parts of China which were remote, restricted and where there were rebellions and infiltration by both White and Red Russians. For a significant part of the journey they had no motorised transport - they spent three months without seeing any wheeled vehicle - and relied on horses, camels and donkeys. This beautifully written book is an account of their journey.

It is of its time. It speaks of racial differences when it means cultural differences. There is a definite feeling of European (and especially British Imperial) superiority (for example: "The Chinese garrison of the province was a garish and Gilbertian force, existing largely on paper and opium."; 6.1). The indigenous peoples are almost invariably represented as poor, backward, culturally bereft, dishonest, lazy, cruel to their animals (and sometimes one another) and incompetent. Fleming-the-sahib often has to bully them into doing what he wants of them. And, although he professes admiration for Kini, she is the one who cooks and sews and is in charge of the medicine.

My edition had no illustrations and I particularly missed a map.

But it is stuffed with incident (even an outbreak of plague!) and it possesses the vivid descriptions which is the hallmark of  great travel writing:

• "There was something forced and unnatural about the landscape. The little hummocks, the naked branches, looked - against the too bright, too picturesque background of sky and mountains - like the synthetic scenery which surrounds stuffed wild animals in a glass case." (4.1)
• "The sun beat down and mirage waterishly streaked the periphery of our field of vision." (5.1) I love 'waterishly'!
• "We spent five days there, lodged on a wilderness of carpets which had something of the decorative impermanence of a film set." (6.5)
• "He wore a black three-cornered hat and a rusty bottle-green coat tied around the waist with a scarf which might have been a dirty tricolour; thus clad, he looked, as he slouched along, like a minor and unsympathetic character in a play about the French Revolution." (6.6)

Selected quotes:

• "The slow train dragged itself wearily into the station - a long string of trucks ... from which the doors ... had been removed." (1.6)
• "We walked behind the lorries over a precarious bridge whose architecture seemed to be an affair of mud and mass-hypnotism." (1.8)
• "As we arrived at the inn, the building next to it - an eating-house where we had breakfasted - quietly and rather sadly collapsed, crumbling into rubble in a cloud of dust." (1.9)
• "The first day we were there a boy attached to the gold-seekers went off into the tamarisk and never came back. Search poarties ranged by day, huge bonfires blazed by night, and the lamas put in some fairly intensive clairvoyance, chanting and throwing dice to establish his geographical position. ... But the boy was never found; he must have died of hunger and thirst, perhaps only a little way away." (4.1)
• "Then there was the Lost City. We christened it in the Fawcett tradition; but I know that it is not a city and I cannot be sure that it is really lost." (4.1) Percy Fawcett was a well-known explorer of the inter-war period whose travels in the South American rain forests to locate a lost city are chronicled in The Lost City of Z by David Grann, a brilliant book (later made into a movie) which put me off exploration forever.
• "It occurs to me that there is too much grumbling in this book." (4.4)
• "We were never short of food; but, with the exception of perhaps an hour after the evening meal, there was no single moment in the day when we would not have eaten, and eaten with the greatest relish, anything that appeared remotely edible." (4.4)
• "Nobody in England now walks without putting on fancy dress to do it." (4.4)
• "Travelling Blind" (4.5, chapter heading) I include this because I have long been intending to write a novel with this title.
• "the sudden bursts of harsh song with which he emphasized rather than relieved the monotony of the march." (4.6)
• "It is a strange and terrible thing that lady novelists are right, that young men in deserts do dwell with a banal wistfulness on sentimentalized, given-away-with-the-Christmas-number pictures of their native land, forgetting the by-passes, the cloudbursts, the sheaves of bluebells lashed to motor-cycle pillions, the bungalows and the banana-skins and the bowler hats." (5.5)
• "Although we know that all men are brothers and that the peoples of the modern world are knit together in a great web of sympathy and understanding, we still find it impossible to be deeply stirred by things that happen to those fellow-beings whose skin is of a different colour to our own." (6.1)
• "The donkey, though perhaps on some beach of your childhood it provided an adventure which made you as breathless as your nurse, is a sublunary mount for the adult." (6.8) The 'nurse' tells you the social stratem for whom Fleming is writing!
• "You felt, in short, that you were at the end of the dead desert, which had swallowed - but showed no signs of having digested - the outposts of more than one civilization." (7.1)
• "You never know what may happen at a banquet in Kashgar, and each of our official hosts had brought his own bodyguard. Turki and Chinese soldiers lounged everywhere; automatic rifles and executioners' swords were much in evidence, and the Mauser pistols of the waiters knocked ominously against the back of your chair as they leant over you with the dishes." (7.2)

Peter Fleming also wrote Invasion 1940, a very amusing book about Britain's chaotic preparations at the start on the Second World War.

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

August 2022; 389 pages

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

"Vurt" by Jeff Noon

 This is a brilliant and hugely original urban fantasy with hints of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney.

The narrator/ protagonist Scribble and his mates Beetle, new girl Mandy, shadowgirl Bridget and The Thing-from-Outer-Space are the Stash Riders; they buy and use feathers which provide shared hallucinogenic experiences akin to playing computer games. Pink feathers are pornovurts, blue feathers offer safe desires, black are bootleg vurts, "one sliver beyond the law" and yellow feathers are the most extreme, offering experiences you can't jerk out of: "if you die in a yellow dream, you die in real life." Scribble is searching for his sister Desdemona, who got left behind in the vurtual (sic) world; he needs to find the right feather and re-enter the world to bring her back. 

So the story is a classic hero's adventure in which Scribble, a superbly flawed hero, aided by his friends, must enter another realm, presided over by Game Cat, perform tasks, build up knowledge, win things of value, rescue the princess and return to the real world. Perhaps there is a bit of Orpheus going down to the underworld to rescue Eurydice. It's a story of heroism and sacrifice. There are twists. (To be honest, I got a little bit lost in the middle of the book: it;s a complicated plot.)

The world-building is gradual and brilliant. The streets of Manchester form a real backdrop to a world people by 'pure's and hybrids between humans and shadows and robots and dogs and vurts. There's a lot of action. There are cops and robocops and shadowcops, there is sex and there are drugs and there is rock'n'roll, there are car chases and shoot-outs and The Thing-from-Outer-Space. There is 'dripfeed' (state benefits) and 'droidlocks' (dreadlocks on a robocrusty) and The Haunting (a sort of deja-vu which muddles rality with vurt) and Cortex Jammers and pedheads (pedestrians) and jerkouts and Karmachanics.  It is a vivid combination of the real and the surreal, the everyday and the fantastic. It works superbly.

Selected quotes:

• "You know how a fly flies? At the top speed always, and yet dodging obstacles instantaneously? That was how The Beetle drove." (1, Stash Riders)
• "I can hardly breathe. Let me tell you: hardly is enough." (1, Sleepless)
• "My bed is warm and wide ... and life is short." (1, Jam Mode)
• "Sometimes ... life is just a wet kiss on glass." (1, Jam Mode)
• "I knew that The Beetle had the gift of seeing beauty in ugliness. It's just that I'm more used to ugliness than he is, seeing it every day in cruel mirrors, and in the mirrors of women's eyes." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "The men had that death warmed-up look so popular with the younger robogoth: all plastic bones shining proudly through tight, pale skin." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "Real life, like yellow feathers, has no jerkout facility." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "The flowers were pollen-heavy, and so was I." (2, Heavy Losses)
• "Then I slipped inside of her ... feeling the walled garden close in the caress my penis, until the sap rose to the top, and the garden was flooded. The air was heavy with pollen; the whole world was copying itself, over and over, through the act of sex. And we were enfolded in the system, sucking where the bee sucks." (2, Heavy Losses)
• "The van skidded on a wet bend and I could feel paintwork being peeled off, as the struts of a fence clawed into us." (3, Ashes to Ashes, Hair to Hair)
• "Dozens of boats were tied up along the bank; the floating families selling off stuff, just to make a small life. Some were selling food from barbecue boats. Some were selling love, the downmarket version; cheap sluts and rabid studs on deck." (3, Gun Stroke (suffering from))
• "To be pure is good, it leads to a good life. But who wants a good life? Only the lonely." (3, Game Cat)

August 2022; 325 pages

Also reviewed in this blog by Jeff Noon:

• A Man of Shadows

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

"The Venetian Empire" by Jan Morris

Morris travels through the places colonised by the Venetians and provides a history as she does so. This book thus forms a sort of sequel to her Venice.

She has used this combination of travelogue and history before, such as in the brilliant Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and I'm not sure why this book wearied me. Certainly there were plenty of fascinating facts and vivid characters, from the war over the ownership of a donkey to the narrow channel that experiences fourteen tides a day, from the original of Othello, surnamed Moro, which is probably why Shakespeare assumed him to be a Moor to the dreadful Uskoks of Dalmatia: “The Uskoks were originally Christian refugees from the eastern side of the mountains, who had escaped from the Turks by guile and violence, and set themselves up to prosper by similar means on the Dalmatian shore. They were epic villains. ... Uskoks liked to nail the turbans of Turkish prisoners to their heads and sometimes cut out the hearts of their still living captives (we read of a Venetian commander whose heart, in fact, was the piece-de-resistance of a celebratory banquet.)” (Adriatica). I learned a lot: we get our word 'argosy' from the fact that Dubrovnik, once called Ragusa, was famous for its merchants and the word 'syncretize' is derived from Crete.

But the glory of a Jan Morris book is her way with words. Her descriptions are stunning:

• “The tumult of it all (fragrance of frying fish from the floating restaurant by Galata Bridge, tinkle of brass bell from the water-seller outside the Egyptian Bazaar, swoop of dingy pigeons around the mosque of Yeni Cami)” (O City, City!)
• “Humped and speckled, lush or rocky, hefty or insubstantial, littering the waters between the Dardanelles and the Sea of Crete are the islands of the Aegean Sea.” (Aegeanics)
• “During the bitter winter it [Crete] can be magnificently awful. Then the clouds which hang so often round the mountain summits spread over the whole island, swirling above the passes in mists and rainstorms, and sometimes then, when the driven vapours are tinged with southern sunshine too, the place looks all afire. Crimson clouds scud by! The winds rush up those valleys like jets, and if it thunders the crash of it sounds among the highlands as though caves are there and then being split in the rocks.” (The Great Island)

Other selected quotes:
“Going home weary after the making of the world, God took with him a sack of unused stones, but the sack burst on his way across the skies, and so Montenegro was made.” (Adriatica)

August 2022; 187 pages

Other Jan Morris books reviewed in this blog include Coronation Everest.

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

"Do Not Say We Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien

Shortlisted for the 2017 Women's Prize for fiction. 

I found this a curiously muddled novel. The frame story, which I found distracting and, to some extent, redundant, involves Marie Jiang, a Canadian of Chinese descent trying to discover what has happened to her missing dad with the help of Ai-ming, an illegal immigrant from China who is staying with her family. The main narrative concerns the history of how Marie's father, Jiang Kai, once a renowned concert pianist was involved with Sparrow, a composer, the father of the immigrant, and Sparrow's extended family: his uncle Wen the Dreamer and Wen's daughter, violin student Zhuli, Sparrow's mother, Big Mother, and father, long marcher Ba Lute, and others. This is mostly their history, focusing on how the events of the cultural revolution affected Jiang Kai, Sparrow and Zhuli, and how the student protests in Tienanmen Square affected Sparrow and Ai-ming.

The PoV head hops between the principal characters; we are able to hear the thoughts of Saprro and Zhuli, of Marie and Ai-ming and Wen the dreamer, and to a certain extent of the other characters. Given the complex nature of the story, and the revolving cast, such that there is no single character who can narrate the entire story, this way of telling the story is probably inevitable. 

Perhaps it is a sort of Doctor Zhivago for China. It reminded me also of Wild Swans by Jung Chang.

There's also another story, that of the apocryphal and fragmentary Book of Records, incomplete and copied by hand and curated mostly by Wen the Dreamer, who uses the repeated copies to encode hints as to what happened to him and others during the purges of the cultural revolution. This Book, and Sparrow's music, symbolise both the fragility and endurance of art.

There's also a theme about systems of coding (primarily linguistic and musical, but also mathematical) and their ambiguities (Chinese characters can, it seems,  be interpreted in a number of ways). It's about recording histories in the face of the destruction of records and the distortions of truth implemented by governments.

It is a complicated novel and quite long-winded; I had to break it into small chunks and read it over an extended period of time to manage it. The principal characters (Swallow, Zhuli, and Jiang Kai) are complex and real; others such as Big Mother and Ba Lute are Dickensian in that they are larger than life but quite one-dimensional. It paints a compelling picture of a very alien society and its upheaval. But it's hard work and a more straightforward narrative with a simpler structure and a smaller cast would have been more entertaining. Nevertheless, I suspect that poor Swallow and conflicted Jiang Kai will stay with me long after characters from lesser novels are forgotten.

Selected quotes:

• "Quiet became another person living inside our house. It slept in the closet with my father's shirts, trousers and shoes, it guarded his Beethoven, Prokofiev and Shostakovich scores, his hats, armchair and special cup. Quiet moved into our minds and stormed like an ocean inside my mother and me." (1.1)
• "The peaceful Sparrow was weightless because he had no baggage to carry and no messages to deliver." (1.1)
• "The melting ice made a sound like all the bones in China cracking." (1.1)
• "Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life." (1.2)
• "In general, anything universally praised is usually preposterous rubbish." (1.2)
• "The candlelight grazed all the objects of the room." (1.3)
• "Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu!" (1.5)
• "The glazed expression of someone who had withstood hours of adoration." (1.5)
• "The beauty queen would never be a great violinist ... She hid the moon and shamed the flowers, as the poets said, but she played Beethoven as if he had never been alive." (1.5)
• "When I remember my past, I see myself as if from the outside, I perceive myself as another person might." (1.6)
• "In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up and we fall asleep and we sink into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake up is to cross a border towards consciousness and to faint is to go back. Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is 'the year above' and next year is 'the year below'. The day before yesterday is the day 'in front' and the day after tomorrow is the day 'behind'. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind. Therefore. to look into the future one must turn around." (1.7)
• "Pride and mastery, victory and sorrow, the orchestral language had given Sparrow a deep repertoire of feeling. But scorn, degradation, disgust, loathing, what about these emotions? What composer had written a language for them?" (1.8)
• "What was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?" (2.5)
• "Her father had been categorized as a criminal element, but with a diary this dull, there was no way he could be a hooligan." (2.5)
• "It was very modern and deeply Western to listen to music that no one else could hear. Private music led to private thoughts. Private thoughts led to private desires. to private fulfillments or private hungers, to a whole private universe away from parents, family and society." (2.5)

This novel was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2016; other short-listed novels in this and other years can be found here. 

August 2022; 463 pages

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

"The Ruined Boys" by Roy Fuller

 It's a school story, set in a mediocre and failing boys' boarding school between the world wars; a context which must be increasingly difficult for readers to empathise with. Jennings, or Harry Potter, it isn't.

This is a classic coming-of-age story. Following the separation of his parents, Gerald, the hero, is desperate to conform (a hugely important motivation in humans that is not often seen in novels). He is intelligent but naive; he can be verbally very cruel and bullying; he is also bullied. 

Most of the time we see things from the perspective of Gerald, the only character whose thoughts are shared with the reader, although the reader is usually one step ahead of the protagonist. It is told in the past tense as a series of short episodes, without any huge revelations of major excitements. As such, it is hugely true to life. 

The author was known for memoirs, poems and novels and was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1968 to 1973. The poet in him is clear from his descriptions (eg "The moon threw shining oblongs on the concrete floor."; 1.1) and his use of some interesting words, for example: "He was conscious that his respectful reply, neutral glance ... hid an inchoate, potential, amazing commerce between them."(1.6) It's a great line, but, given that the story is essentially told from within the consciousness of the protagonist, would he use the words 'inchoate' and 'commerce'? He's clever, yes, and articulate, and it is written about a time nearly a hundred years ago, but ...

Selected quotes:

• "It was courageous of the otherwise foolish Matley to pray regularly and publicly, whereas he himself prayed merely when life become cruel and then in secret, under the bedclothes or in the lavatory." (1.7)
• "A young girl who is given the trappings of womanhood - a husband, a kitchen, a shopping basket - immediately evolves an appropriate and quite different character." (1.10) An interesting line from the point of view of how gender stereotyping has evolved but also an acute psychological observation about how our characters - or at least our masks - adapt to our circumstances.
• "Life was a continual struggle to achieve security from terrible moments of insecurity." (1.12)
• "Perhaps the main function of reading was not to pass the time by giving entertainment but to confront the reader with a task - a task measured grossly by one's gradual and toilsome reduction of the number of unread pages." (2.8)
• "He became aware of the noises of summer - of insects, larks, leaves - that provide the normally unidentified ostinato that nevertheless enriches the obvious themes of colour, sun and cloud." (2.9)
• "Though he could recognize truth he seemed incapable of initiating it." (2.10)

August 2022; 248 pages

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

"Raising the Dead" by Andy Dougan

A history focused on the medics and scientists who tried to reanimate dead people using electricity, both before and after the publication of Frankenstein. This book focuses particularly on the work of Andrew Ure, a Glaswegian anatomist, who experimented on the newly-hanged cadaver of condemned murdered Matthew Clydesdale in November 1819, months after the publication of Mary Shelley's novel, but it also looks at previous work, for example by Galvani and his nephew Aldini, both of whom believed in 'animal electricity', and by Mary Shelley's husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was an amateur electrical experimenter and a believer in Paracelsus and a follower of the work of Humphrey Davy, who invented electrolysis. Gruesome as it was, this work has led to the invention of the defibrillator.

For me there was too much emphasis on the Ure-Clydesdale experiment (we have a full description of the murder and the trial) and not enough on the science, but the later chapters contained plenty of interest.

Selected quotes:

• “Graham would deliver lectures on sexual satisfaction as his Goddesses of Youth and Health, a succession of barely-clad, nubile young things, worked the crowd encouraging them to part with their cash.” (Ch 7)
• “Shelley continued to read Humphrey Davy and ... remained convinced that ‘electrical fluid’ was the all-animating force of life and could hold all of its secrets. He referred to the human body as a lump of electrified clay.” (Ch 7)
• “Positive electricity made vision sharper and red-hued while negative electricity made it blurred and bluish.” (Ch 9)

August 2022; 201 pages

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes also considers the scientists who might have inspired Frankenstein but he settles for Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776 - 1810)

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

"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

Kya, also known as Marsh Girl, is an outsider in the remote North Carolina swamp town, so, when a local sporting hero is found dead, she gets the blame.

It's a romantic novel (girl meets her first love, he breaks her heart, she takes up with the bad boy, he abuses her and she has to find herself in time for the final reel) mingled with a murder mystery culminating in a classic courtroom battle mingled with a biology text.

This is a book which has been adored by many readers. I didn't hate it. There are moments of well-crafted and even lyrical prose: "Kya stood and walked into the night, into the creamy light of a three-quarter moon. The marsh's soft air fell silklike around her shoulders. The moonlight chose an unexpected path through the pines, laying shadows about it in rhymes. She strolled like a sleepwalker as the moon pulled herself naked from the waters ..." (Ch 23)

But I couldn't believe in the motivations of the characters and I found the dialogue clunky.

I think the fundamental problem with this book is that the plot drives the characters rather than the characters driving the plot:

• In order to be suspected (without evidence) of the murder of Chase, so setting up a 'To Kill a Mockingbird' type courtroom battle, the protagonist has to be an outsider: the character of 'Marsh Girl' is evocative and mythic. She is, in effect, an updated Tarzan. 
• And just as Burroughs made Tarzan an aristocrat to avoid the 'primitive' stereotyping, so 'Marsh Girl' must be hugely intelligent: she starts to learn to read from Biology textbooks in less than a year; her first sentence, puzzled out on the day she learns A, B, C, is: "There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot." Yeah, right. Credible. 
• Of course, like Tarzan, Kya is perfectly at one with nature. She also spends large parts of her wandering around the marshes quoting poetry.
• To be a properly mythic outsider, she also needs to be fundamentally alone: which is why she is deserted by her Mother and no less than four siblings ("What she wondered was why no one took her with them" thinks Kya in Chapter 2; even her adored brother Jodie leaves her, abandoning his adored little sister to an abusive father because ... well, because the story needs this to happen) and her father (who disappears, presumably dead). When her boyfriend, the ever-loving Tate, leaves her without a word, the whole abandonment thing becomes utterly unbelievable.

The dialogue is clunky. Although some of the ignorant characters speak in dialect (Pa, the lawmen, the black citizens), Kia herself, as befits an autodidact who hardly ever talks to anyone, mostly speaks in standard American English, well punctuated and grammatically correct. Her spoken prose is invariably well formed and sometimes sounds as if she is quoting from the textbooks with which she learned to read: 

• "In nature - out yonder where the crawdads sing - these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother's number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn't be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail." (Ch 34) One might argue that she is merely quoting from an academic text when she says this.
• But not this: "I can't tell you how much I wanted to see you again. This is one of the happiest and yet saddest days of my life." (Ch 34) You can't exactly hear the whooping excitement, or the bitter sorrow in these carefully constructed sentences. 
• And, in a moment of high tension: "I will never live like that - a life wondering when and where the next fist will fall." (Ch 41)

Fundamentally, Kya is one of the current crop of too-good-to-be-true protagonists.

Unusually for me, I saw the film before I read the book. The film is very faithful to the book, the principal difference being that Kya's arrest happens almost at the start of the film and that more of the sheriff's investigation is presented as evidence during the courtroom scenes, which take centre place. The sub-plot about the land tax is given as a motivation for getting published. Beautiful cinematography took the place of the lyrical descriptions. The acting was excellent. But I noted after watching the film that I had doubts about the motivations of the characters; that they were  subservient to the plot, in particular to the creation of the 'Marsh Girl' myth. 

Selected quotes: 

• "Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks." (Ch 1)
• "He had two settings: silence and shouting." (Ch 1)
• "Useless as tits on a boar hawg." (Ch 2)
• "Mostly, the village seemed tired of arguing with the elements and simply sagged." (Ch 2)
• "Barkley Cove served its religion hard-boiled and deep-fried." (Ch 10)
• "Autumn leaves don't fall, they fly." (Ch 17)
• "Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different lights." (Ch 20)
• "Only time male mammals hover is when they're in the rut." (Ch 23)
• "Kya knew it wasn't so much that the herd would be incomplete without one of its deer, but that each deer would be incomplete without her herd." (Ch 41)

Tarzan for millennials.

August 2022; 368 pages

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

"A Pelican at Blandings" by P G Wodehouse

Another Blandings novel. Once more Galahad, the younger brother of Lord Emsworth, must reunite  sundered lovers. Once more the antagonists are Lady Constance and the truly awful Alaric, Duke of Dunstable. Once more there are imposters. And if no-one has any plans to kidnap the Empress of Blandings, there are plans afoot to steal a painting of a nude lady that looks a bit like the fat pig herself.

So the plot and the characters are the same as all the other Blandings novels. Never mind! What makes Wodehouse adorable is the way he twists our common language into absurdity:

• "A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of experiencing at least that number of very hard winters." (6.1)
• "Something had told Lord Emsworth that this interview might prove to be a difficult one, and it was plain to him that something had known what it was talking about." (7.3)
• "'I wouldn't marry him if he were the last man on earth.' 'Well, he isn't, so the question does not arise.'" (9.2)

One of the other joys of this book is the way he teases his fellow authors:

• "A stylist like Gustave Flaubert, with his flair for the mot juste, would have described her as being as mad as a wet hen." (8.1)
• "Thomas Hardy would have seen in the whole affair one more of life's little ironies and on having it drawn to his attention would have got twenty thousand words of a novel out of it." (10.2)
• "Like all authors, she knew that her output was above criticism." (13.1)

And one of the characters is called Abercrombie Fitch!

Selected quotes:

• "She belonged to the school of thought that holds that a nice glass of hot milk, while not baffling the death angel altogether, can at least postpone the inevitable." (6.1)
• "He switched on the torch. When he did so, he instantly became the centre of attraction to a rowdy mob of those gnats, moths and beetles which collect in gangs and stay up late in the rural districts." (7.2)
• "A stare that would have aroused the respectful envy of a basilisk." (8.1)

Other P G Wodehouse novels reviewed in this blog may be found here.

August 2022; 249 pages

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

"The Anarchy" by William Dalrymple

A history of the destruction of the Mughal Empire at the hands of the East India Company, an act which led to the foundation of the British Raj. It is a story of repeated crimes against humanity committed by the British (and others).

The book seems to have as its thesis the concept, formulated by the first Baron Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor during the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and quoted in the frontispiece of this book, that "Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like." But it is a difficult argument to make. Certainly most Companymen sought to enrich themselves as fast as possible, without any concern for ethics or from the poor people they were stealing or plundering from, sometimes even killing people to get what they wanted. As Dalrymple points out in the Introduction, “One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.” Even Warren Hastings, who was one of the best leaders of the company and a Hindophile, presided during the Bengal famine when a previously fertile and prosperous country starved, during which profiteering was rife; Hastings also refused to abide by the Treaty obligation of funding the Mughal Emperor, arguing that such money shouldn't be exported to Bengal, while conniving at the export of much more money to England by Companymen. However, the behaviour of the absolute monarchs in the little principalities, was perhaps as greedy and frequently bordered on the psychopathic. It is difficult to see anyone emerging from this history with credit, except the powerless. So the idea that corporate governance is uniquely rotten seems to fail the test of the evidence adduced.

Nevertheless, the book clearly demonstrates that the acquisition of India by the British involved dreadful crimes: looting and thievery (see above), creating famine (see above), the introduction of racist legislation so that the children of mixed Anglo-Indian marriages became virtually unemployable, massacring defeated troops and the even-in-its-day notorious climax to the siege of Srirangapatnam by troops commanded by the man who would later become the first Duke of Wellington: “That night the city of Srirangapatnam, home to 100,000 people; was given over to an unrestrained orgy of rape, looting and kidding.” This infamous looting inspired the scene at the start of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. In the novel, the Moonstone is eventually returned to India “something that has yet to happen with the real loot of Srirangapatnam.” (353)

I was surprised and disappointed to discover that, following the battle for Srirangapatnam, a medal was issued as well as prize money. There is no mention of war crimes in the wikipedia biography of the Duke of Wellington, not in the wikipedia article on the battle which doesn't mention the looting except under 'depictions in literature'.

I'm not one who believes that we should apologise for the crimes of our ancestors but I think we should stop honouring them. Perhaps we should tear down the statues of the Duke of Wellington and rename those places named after him, or at least remember that he would now be judged guilty of terrible war crimes. As for Clive of India, he should be infamous as a thug and a bully, a gangster and a thief.

The book also resonates with our present concerns in other ways:

• “As with all such corporations, then as now, the EIC was answerable only to its shareholders. With no stake in the just governance of the region, or its long-term well-being, the Company's rule quickly turned into the straightforward pillage of Bengal.” (Introduction)
• England going Protestant and establishing the Church of England is made to sound a little like Brexit: “In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its widest minds an act of wilful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so turning themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result ... the English were forced to scour the globe for new Markets.” (Ch 1) This is an avowed aim of the Brexiteers; let us hope that this modern trade-seeking does not lead to rape, looting and wholesale murder.
• "Tax collectors and farmers of revenue plundered the peasantry to raise funds from the land, and no one felt in the least bit responsible for the well-being of the ordinary cultivator. Merchants and weavers were forced to work for the Company at far below market rates.” (Ch 5)

Much of the book was a powerful indictment of undemocratic rule. But there were times when it became boring. There is only so much repetition of battlers and lootings and negotiations and treaties that one can take. Sometimes it seemed that a large part of the narrative consisted of yet another casus belli, yet another battle, yet more looting, yet another puppet government. These were moments when I started to lose interest and I found it difficult to pay attention. The names and titles of the Indian monarchs and viziers seemed to merge into one another. I drifted away.

The book is also, in part, a family history. Dalrymple repeatedly tells us of the exploits (or sufferings, one died in the Black Hole of Calcutta) of other Dalrymples, presumable his ancestors, although he never makes this explicit.

But let me celebrate some stylisticl issues with the book that made it easier to read. There are some very useful maps at the front and also a great Cast List. There is a glossary of (most of) the Indian words used in the text. The page numbers are easy to find and the chapter is identified at the top of every odd-numbered page. Why can't all books be helpful to the reader like this?

Selected quotes:

• “The strappado - the Inquisition's answer to bungee jumping" (Ch 1)
• “Not for nothing are so many English words connected with weaving - chintz, calico, shawl, pyjamas, khaki, dungarees, cummerbund, taffeta - of Indian origin.” (Ch 1)
• “Meekness, benevolence and patience remained qualities which eluded Clive throughout his life. Instead, soon after hitting puberty, he had turned village delinquent. running protection rackets around Market Drayton.” (Ch 2)

August 2022; 397 pages

William Dalrymple has written a number of other brilliant books. 

• From the Holy Mountain is reviewed in this blog.
• I have also read (pre blog)
• In Xanadu, a great travel book
• City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi: a quirky collection of stories which mix the present and past of Delhi

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

"A Man of Shadows" by Jeff Noon

 Set in a world which is divided into Dayzone (permanently light), Nocturna (permanently dark) and Dusk, and in which different places and institutions and even people have their own timelines, necessitating a constant readjustment of watches, this science fiction thriller follows a somewhat hapless stereotypical private investigator as he tracks down and repeatedly loses a teenager who may or may not be linked with Quicksilver, a serial killer who kills unseen despite being in full view.

The plot is straightforward thriller and the characters are straight from the thriller stockroom. The narrative and the prose are straightforward; it is easy to read. But since this is science fiction, there is a huge emphasis on world-building and this is where the book has some claim to originality. In particular, the idea that we all dwell within our individual time frames, an idea perhaps derived from the 'frames of reference' of Einstein's Theory of Special relativity which catty the consequence that time travels at different speeds for different observers: "It was like being on your own personal timeline, one that no one else can ever travel on ... Time is still passing for you, and you can act within it, but you're outside of other people's time frame." (Part Two)

Selected Quotes:

• "He was hot sweaty and uncomfortable. His shirt was clinging to him like a second layer of skin." (Part One) This is a great image ... but as an ex-scientist I had a niggle. Skin is already multi-layered. The sentence works better as 'another layer of skin' or 'a second skin'.
• "The naked bulb burned brightly for a second and then dimmed once more, setting itself into a slow irregular pattern like the work of a drowsy Morse code operator" (Part One)
• "Eyes that were already lost to daylight." (Part One)
• "The walls stank of all the sweat they had collected over the decades." (Part One)
• "The future pulling him forwards, forwards, forwards ... dragging him along a straight and narrow track as surely as a locomotive moves to its next destination." (Part Two)

July 2022; 377 pages

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

"Neuromancer" by William Gibson

The novel that introduced the word 'cyberspace' and is credited with launching the cyberpunk genre.

It's science fiction and does a phenomenal job of world-building, creating a dystopian future in which the characters move between the Sprawl, a mega-city-sized red light district on Earth, and a multiple-zone orbiting space station. But the hero character, Case, also moves through cyberspace, using electrodes to log his consciousness into a variety of different computer systems (and other consciousnesses in an IT mediated form of telepathy), experiencing their information processing as sensory data and as thoughts, and holding conversations with other entities (who manifest themselves as people, some being people he knows or knew) travelling through this Matrix.

In many ways this is a thriller of the old order in which a washed-up lowlife, usually an ex-cop or a down-on-his-luck private eye but in this case a cowboy computer hacker, is recruited by a mysterious and potentially treacherous boss (in this case a rehabilitated soldier with a bad case of PTSD thast threatens to send him mad) to carry out a mission whose purpose he doesn't fully understand. On the way he picks upo companions: a female assassin whose mind he can enter and with whom he has sex (this too is described in information technology terms, considering DNA as a line of code: "Then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message."; Ch 20); a dead hacker whose consciousness exists on a ROM (a modern uptake on a spirit guide, or the voice of a ghost); a cliched Rastafarian; and an illusion-creating magician. At least one of these will betray the mission. This novel is Raymond Chandler updated for the internet generation.

The plot itself is a classic action plot, consisting mostly of a number of exciting fight sequences interspersed with moments of relaxation.  In essence, it's a heist. Predictably, the true reason why Case has been recruited doesn't emerge till later in the story.

Needless to say, there is no character development and the back stories did not make three-dimensional credible characters.

On the positive side, Gibson has a gift of original description:

• "Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." (Ch 1)
• "Her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight." (Ch 1)
• "Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach." (Ch 2)
• "She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill." (Ch 4)
• "The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone." (Ch 7)

In one way, this is an unusual book in that the hero doesn't risk life and limb, others do that for him. There were moments when I needed why Case was important to the team: his role seemed to be mostly that of observer. But I'm not sure. I found some of the writing so confusing that (a) I wasn't sure what was going on and (b) I didn't really care what was going on.  I was surprised, when I read the wikipedia plot summary afterwards, that I had actually known what was happening.

I think the reason why I found some of the writing difficult was that Gibson is a purist when it comes to world-building: he doesn't stop and explain what he is talking about, he describes things using terms that the characters would use and assumes the reader will come to understand in time (a bit like the slang language invented for A Clockwork Orange). For example: "Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input." (Ch 4) These two sentences contain six words that have particular meanings within the novel (cowboys, simstim, meat, trodes, cyberspace, matrix) and their arrival so early in the book means that one hasn't yet had time to understand them. This makes for slow reading. Nevertheless, one cannot deny to incredible power of the world Gibson has built, which spawned the cyberpunk genre.

Gibson's world reminded me of the world's built by William Burroughs in his works such as Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, and The Soft Machine.

Selected Quotes:

• "the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." (Ch 1)
• "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators" (Ch 3)
• "The music that pulsed continually through the cluster ... was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalised pop." (Ch 8)
• "The multinationals that shaped the course of human history had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality." (Ch 17)

July 2022; 297 pages

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