"Solar" by Ian McEwan

For me, McEwan is a man who writes tight dramas with a single motif: a moment when something happens and the implications of that moment ripple across the lives of the participants. Thus, Saturday, his Ulysses, which celebrates London as Joyce did Dublin, is set within the framework of a single day. Atonement traces the consequences of a single misunderstanding on an evening. Chesil Beach deals exhaustively with the effects of a premature ejaculation.

But Solar rambles. It is a sort of picaresque, a Don Quijote, except that its hero, Michael Beard, is a man who can't restrain his appetite for either sex or food and whose life is in essence messy.

Which is strange because he is a physicist whose moment of Nobelian glory came with a few sparse equations; who celebrates the economy and beauty of the succinct form of the Dirac equation. In terms of thought here is a man who has trained his mind to be amongst the sharpest in the world. But he is a fat glutton and a lecher.

He reminds me of the hero of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Perhaps he was created to encompass every single one of the seven deadly sins. As a result he is a mesmerising though comic creation. He is also fat: in a cosmological joke his belly is described as The Expanding Universe. But more properly he represents fallen mankind whose weaknesses are propelling us, headlong and blind, into the disaster of global warming.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the trip that Beard makes to Spitzbergen. On a ship frozen into the ice he confronts those obsessed with global warming. But in the Boot Room they cannot even organise their own clothes; when they lose a glove they steal someone else's. How can such flawed humans prevent ecological catastrophe?

Not to mention the fact that Beard, who becomes a prophet of the greenhouse disaster, travels everywhere by plane and reaches Spitzbergen on a petrol guzzling skimobile. His very fatness is a metaphor for the Earth: greed leading to destruction.

Other funny scenes include the irony of the climate scientist who dies after slipping on a polar bear rug; the true traveller's tale which Beard recounts only to be told he has stolen the anecdote from an urban myth; and the denunciation of Beard by feminists and relativists who claim that genes are "in the strongest sense, socially constructed" and who condemn science as 'hegemonic' (how a dominant power seeks to preserve its dominance) and 'reductionist' (something that tries to explain a system in terms of its simpler parts, which is of course the essence of science).

McEwan pokes fun at a lot of arty types and social scientists. Beard as an undergraduate at Oxford notes that arts graduates are lazier than scientists (this anti-laziness doesn't seem to last him into later life) and that, for example, English literature is not difficult (compared to Physics): he spends a week learning about Milton to impress a girlfriend and carries off the deception so well she later marries him (as the first of his five wives).

I read it quickly, though not avidly. A fun book but I think I prefer McEwan in his control freak mode.

The Guardian reviews it here.

The Telegraph reviews it here.

May 2010; 283 pages

Other McEwan novels I have read and enjoyed (with links to those that are reviewed in this blog) include:

• Atonement
• Amsterdam
• The Child in Time
• Saturday
• On Chesil Beach
• Nutshell
• Enduring Love

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

"The Path to the Spiders' Nests" by Italo Calvino

This is the story of Pin, an urchin whose sister is a whore, during the Second World War when Italy was occupied by the Germans and communist partisans fought in the hills.

It is a strange book, with curiously mannered and slightly stilted prose (which could be due to the translation) about this odd little boy who wants so much to be part of the adult world and who can't be a part of the world of children. His adventures are magical, like the adventures in a fairy tale: he meets Red Wolf, a hero of the resistance, in prison; he falls in with a partisan brigade containing the oddest misfits in Italy; his compulsively bad behaviour leads him to the sort of self-destruction worthy of a greek hero. And yet curiously nothing really happens.

Strange but fun

May 2010; 185 pages

"50 Physics Ideas you really need to know" by Joanne Baker

Since I am a Physics teacher I am perhaps not the expected audience for this book.

There were some sections which I felt were rather poorly explained such as the Ideal Gas Law. And the section on Hooke's Law seemed to muddle other ideas in with it. And the book opens with Mach's principle which I have always understood to be essentially about the strange equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass whereas Baker is linking it to frames of reference.

So I was disappointed at the start.

But when it got into quantum theory and strong theory and cosmology I was much more interested and I believe I started learning things I hadn't know before. Now I was frustrated that there wasn't more detail in the explanations.

You can't win!

May 2010; 203 pages

"The Road to Oxiana" by Robert Byron

This is a delightful travel book in which Byron travels in 1933-34 through Persia and Afghanistan towards (but never actually reaching) the Oxus river. He is intensely (and sometimes boringly) interested in Mohammedan architecture and its influences. His intended companions are The Charcoal Burners (who are driving an experimental charcoal powered car to India) but they let him down; eventually he meets up with Christopher who accompanies him for many miles. Nowhere is his relationship with Christopher stated; Byron was gay but Christopher Sykes later got married and had children.

The writing is lyrical and enormously beautiful in places. His descriptions of place are superb. His characterisations of some of the strange and eccentric characters he meets (such as the man who speaks pianissimo, then mezzo forte, then fortissimo, then piano etc) is sometimes hilarious.

Interesting bits.

He suggests that Shiraz in Persia from whence derives red wine may be the originator of Sherry rather than Xeres in Spain.

He meets Jews expelled from Russia. He is aware of the problem with Jews and Germany and of the increasing fascism of Germany. Persia itself is under the despotic rule of the Shah whom he calls Marjoribanks.

He meets fire altars and the tomb of Zoroaster near Persepolis.

He hears (pp184-5) a story of a donkey who wears a 'loin' skin which sounds extraordinarily like the model for the donkey in the lion skin from The Last Battle by C S Lewis.

He plays a game using "a high net over which any number of people divided into two sides, can fist a soft football" (p 252) in the Russian Embassy in Afghanistan. Although Volleyball was invented in 1895 and an Olympic sport in 1924 (Paris), Byron seems not to recognise it.

He sees the two giant Buddhas in Shibar that were later destroyed by the Taliban but he is by no means impressed with them as works of art.

Links to Byron's photographs here.

A lyrical travelogue.

May 2010; 276 pages

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

Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.

"Hamlet, Revenge" by Michael Innes

Written and set in the 1930s this book is a mixture of whodunnit and spy thriller. The country house is no less than a ducal palace; the guests have assembled to stage an amateur production of Hamlet. The Lord Chancellor (playing Polonius) is the victim.

The mixture of highest society and academia (there are an awful lot of literary references betokening an England in which all aristocrats were superbly read in the classics; even the duchess frequents the Reading Room of the British Museum) makes for rather dated dialogue. The denouement was not exactly open to being guessed. As per usual the sidekick (a don who pseudonymously writes mystery novels as a sideline just like Michael Innes himself!) lays out the solution to the assembled company and gets it wrong; the sleuth (a Scotland Yard inspector called John Appleby) gets it right at the very end.

The most delightful moment came when one of the guests/ suspects tries to persuade the Duke to call in a detective: a rather odd but superbly successful foreign gentlemen who must be Hercule Poirot.

Dated potboiler

May 2010

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

"Delta of Venus" by Anais Nin

This is a Penguin Modern Classic. The blurb calls it a "glittering cascade of sexual encounters .... Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning." It is a dirty book. The short stories cover more or less every conceivable sort of sex including necrophilia, lesbianism, homosexuality, fetishism, voyeurism, bestiality ... Basically it is pornography. I certainly didn't get a feel for character or "a world where only love has meaning". Mostly it was a boring list of bits and who did what to whom; it was rarely arousing. Sometimes there was pretentiousness: "the famous Parisian chic" that gives a "Parisian woman a trimness, an audacity, that far surpasses the seductiveness of other women."

Perhaps it was shocking and groundbreaking when it came out, revealing that women had naughty thoughts on a par with those of men, but today it is a slightly boring dirty book.

Hard to finish. April 2010; 225 pages

Other books by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Great Wave" by David Hackett Fischer

You wouldn't have thought that a book subtitled Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History would be a great read but I really enjoyed this. His thesis is that economics goes through periods of stability, when prices reamin stable, and periods of voltatility when prices rise. The four price revolutions are the Mediaeval (around Black death time and the Peasants' Revolt) in which prices rose by 0.5% pa, the 16th Century (English Civil war; Thirty Years war etc) when they rose by 1% pa, the 18th Century (French revolution, Napoleonic Wars etc) when they rose by 2% and the Twentieth Century (WWI, WWII etc) when they rose by 4%. These were interspersed by the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Victorian period and ... we haven't got there yet. You will have noticed that periods of inflation are marked by wars and revolutions; H-F believes that they start when populations rise and commodities run short  and food and fuel prices start to rise and wages fall and rents rise so that inequalities in socieities get worse and that is why it ends with revolutions. Meantime the periods of stability are times when there are great advances in learning.

Except that the time at present when there is high inflation and lots of wars but learning has improved dramatically but so has the population. Are we presently having a price revolution or are we in a period of stability? H-F believes that the fall of the communist world suggests the end of this price revolution; perhaps we have then enjoyed twenty years of stability but clearly food and fuel prices are whizzing up at the moment so perhaps another revolution is about to start. Or maybe if you look at the misery elsewhere in the world we are still in a long revolution.

Interesting points:

The monetarists are wrong. Price revolutions are not started by increases in the money supply. The post renaissance revolution is oftem blamed on the Spanish importation of Gold and Silver from the Americas but it started thirty years before the first shipments and before the discovery of the silver mountain of Potosi.

On page 84 I discover that Nicolaus Copernicus invented a monetarist model!

On page 135 the Seven Years War starts nine years before it ends when George Washington is defeated (did he ever win a battle) by the French in a scrap in western Pennsylvania.

On page 252 "the laisser-faire prescription, 'let the free market take its course' has in the past eight hundred years created human suffering on a scale that is unacceptable. It is also unnecessary.  .... In economic history, equilibrium is the exception rather than the rule. A free market restores equilibrium only to break it down again .... In the full span of modern history, most free markets have been in profound disequilibrium most of the time."

On page 255 he quotes from the New York Times (Oct 4th 1995) "if government does not know what it is doing it will be tempted to meddle less with private industry .... More likely, it will still meddle, only less wisely."

Great book

April 2010, 258 pages

"The World According to Garp" by John Irving

Not quite sure why there is so much hype about this novel!

This is a family saga about Jenny Fields, a nurse who wants a child without a man; she straddles a dying airman and has a son whom she brings up at a posh New England boarding school. She writes a best selling autobiography and becomes a hero of the new feminist movement; her son, Garp, becomes a minor novelist kept by his wife, and a very anxious father. He and his wife love one another and their sons but they have infidelities which (er) climax in death and mutilation. Convalescence, rehabilitation and a best-selling novel lead to a further wave of deaths and mutilations.

A book about anxieties in which your worst fears really do come through; a book about feminism, rape, mutilation and death. Lots of horror and occasional humour.

April 2010; 570 pages

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

"Summer of Blood" by Dan Jones

This is the history of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Richard II was the son of the Black Prince and only a boy when his grandfather Edward III dies and he came to the throne. The country was facing bankruptcy as the Hundred Years War dragged on (the French were raiding the South coast and the Scots were raiding the north of England) and government was haphazard and dominated by John of Gaunt, the young king's uncle. The social order had been seriously weakened by the Black Death; labour was scarce but the law forbade labourers from charging too much for their services whilst compelling them to work. During a parliament in Northampton (when King Richard stayed at a manor in nearby Moulton) a poll tax was declared: even the poorest labourers had to pay. The scene was set for rebellion.

The revolt seems to have started in Essex around Brentwood or possibly Fobbing where poll tax collectors were said to have looked up a young girl's skirts to see if she was a virgin (and thus exempt from paying). But the unrest soon spread to Kent; Abel Ker lead the rioters to sieze Rochester Castle and march on Maidstone; at Maidstone Wat Tyler took charge. Inspired by the Lollard preacher John Ball the Kentishmen marched on London. H

ere they confronted the boy King Richard on three separate occasions: first at Rotherhithe where he refused to get out of his barge. After this the rebels stormed across London Bridge (the Londoners let the drawbridge down), destroyed the Savoy Palace and beseiged the Tower.

Then Richard rode to Mile End where the Essex rebels had encamped to talk to them in the hope of providing a diversion so that the most hated people in the Tower could escape. This failed but at Mile End he was presented with a charter requesting that all men should become free (ie not bound serfs), that there should be a land rent limit and that no one should be required to work. He granted this, and then said they could catch and punish traitors.

They spilled across London "catching traitors". They entered the Tower (some one let the drawbridge down) and killed the Treasurer and the Archbishop of Canterbury; Henry of Derby, later Henry IV, was saved by being hidden by a guard. One man was dragged from sanctuary at Westminster Abbey and killed. There was rioting and looting.

Finally Richard met the rebels at Smithfield. Wat Tyler rode out to meet him; the Mayor of London accused Wat of insulting the King by his coarse manners and stabbed him. The boy King then took charge, riding out to the stunned commoners and leading them away from Smithfield while the Mayor and his men found enough armed men to force the Kentishmen to leave London.

The rebellion continued across Britain for a fortnight, largely in the South East (including Cambridge, St Albans and Huntingdon) but as far afield as Bridgwater and York. John Ball fled north, writing letters as he went, until he was captured at Coventry. One of his letters mentions Piers the Plowman!

This book was an absolutely gripping read.

April 2010; 211 pages

"The Decisive Moment" by Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer is a neuroscientist who wrote Proust was a neuroscientist. He also writes a blog called The Frontal Cortext. 

His essential thesis in this book is that we are not the rational beings that we like to think we are, nor can we be. Our emotions are essential to us being able to make decisions and to make the right decisions. Many micro decisions are made faster than we can think (for example a batsman hitting a cricket ball that was bowled at a speed that makes it impossible to react by thinking. These decisions are made by our subconscious which has learnt how to make the right decisions based on long practise. He gives the example of a radar operator during the Gulf War who spotted a blip on his screen moving towards an aircraft carrier. The blip was moving in the same place and at the same speed as a friendly plane; nevertheless he took the decision to shoot it down. Later it was found to have ben a missile. No analysis of the tapes could provide evidence of why his hunch had been correct; his decision was made essentially on his gut feeling. But later it was realised that the blip had first appeared 3 sweeps of the radar later than a normal plane and it had been this (and the hours of staring at radar screens) that had aroused the fearful feelings in his subconscious.

But Lehrer also provides examples of situations where rationality has conquered emotions (thank goodness), for example the firefighter who, realising that he couldn't outrun a fire, decided to set the hillside in front of him alight and then lie down on the smouldering remains, thereby creating his own firebreak. Then there was the pilot whose plane lost all hydraulic control to ailerons, flaps, undercarriage, everything. The only way he could steer the plane was to fire the two engines at differential rates. He worked this out by a process of careful rational thought while the plane was falling through the air.

Things I learned and linked with:

• The Dweck experiments in which students praised for their intelligence on a first test chose easier subsequent tests and scored worse on a final test than matched students praised for the efforts on the first test who chose harder intervening tests and therefore challenged themselves and learned faster. (p5-57)
• A quote from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics: "Anyone can become angry, that is easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy." (p107)
• ADHD as a manifestion of the retarded development of the pre-frontal cortex which renders the sufferer unable to resist the temptation for immediate gratification. During adolescence the pre-frontal cortex of an ADHD sufferer can be 3.5 years behind 'normal'; however they usually catch up by the end of adolesence. Teenagers find it hard to resist temptation if the consequences are delayed; the solution may be to make the consequences immediate. "When West Virginia revoked driving permits for for students who were under the age of 18 and who dropped out of school, the dropout rate fell by one-third in the first year." p113
• 'Choking' happens when you start to think about an action that has moved into the unconscious competence arena, like a golf player who starts thinking about the swing that has become natural to him. Moving something back from unconscious competence into conscious competence means that the rational mind starts to interfere with processes that have been filed away into the subconscious; this causes mistakes. p135
• Too much information can distract and confuse experts who have learned to act using instinct. "College counselors were given a vast array of information about a group of high school students. The counselors were then asked to predict the grades of these kids during their freshmen year in college. The counselors had access to high school transcripts, test scores, the results of personality and vocational tests and application essays from the students. They were even granted personal interviews .... The counselors were competing against a rudimentary mathematical formula composed of only two variables: the high school grade point average of the student and his or her score on a single standardized test .... the predictions made by the formula were far more accurate than the predictions made by the counselors .... While the extra information considered by the counselors made them extremely confident, it actually led to worse predictions." p155 This makes me think of our sixth form interviews!
• "Being certain means that you aren't worried about being wrong." p202
• There are two types of thinkers: hedgehogs and foxes (there is a Greek saying that the fox knows many thinfs but the hedgehog knows one big thing). Hedgehogs are certain. They ignore contrary information. "The fox relies on the solvent of doubt. He is skeptical of grand strategies and unifying theories." p231
• CRM (Cockpit Resource Management) is the training programme that tries to convince air cockpit crew to dissent from the view of the pilot. p242-3. Using it during cardiac surgery at Nebraska Medical Centre has raised the percentage of 'uneventful' surgeries from 21% to 62%.

A fascinating book, not as magisterial as Irrationality but a quick light read through the mechanisms of decision.

April 2010; 247 pages

"Fifty Mathematical Ideas you really need to know" by Tony Crilly

This book starts simple and interesting with stuff about zero and prime numbers and rapidly becomes challenging (Bayes theory) and then incomprehensible (the Riemann hypothesis). It left me with an appreciation of G. H. Hardy, the more or less utterly unknown mathematician who features in "The Indian Clerk" as the bloke who invited the fantastic mathematician Rananujan to England. In fact Hardy was a tremendous mathematician who work went from primes to genetics.

But the book was a disappointment. I suppose the problem was that the ideas, presented in their four page format, were either too easy or, if they were interesting and challenging, contained too little information for me to truly appreciate what they were about. It sort of skimmed the surface and left me either confused or wanted much more.

March 2010; 203 pages

"Found Wanting" by Robert Goddard

I love Robert Goddard books. I think I have read them all. His classic story revolves around a man whose life is somehow in crisis who is thrust into a mystery which harks back into the past and who finds a new life through the adventures he experiences on his quest. I love the historical aspect and his heroes are classic examples of shabby disenchantment.

But I was the disenchanted one with this book.

His hero is a foreign office bureaucrat who is neither convincingly shabby and fed up with life nor has he any particular FO skills or connections. He agrees to take a locked briefcase to Amsterdam to meet an old friend who used to be a drug dealer (without thinking of looking in the briefcase). From this unconvincing start he gradually becomes more and more the thriller hero, rescuing people, shooting guns, risking his life because he is too dogged to give up, and falling in love at first sight.

The mystery itself alternates between the obvious (the bloke who bleeds to death is obviously a haemophiliac and therefore descended from the last Tsar of Russia) and the downright stupid: why on Earth is the bloke in charge of a massively profitable organisation prepared to spend millions and kill many to retrieve some letters??? The explanation is far from satisfactory.

Cardboard characters and a formulaic plot: this is decidedly not one of Goddard's best. However, his best is very, very good and even this carries you along.

March 2010; 474 pages

"A most wanted man" by John le Carre

This book reminded me of another le Carre book The Mission Song because it so humanises the characters. Some of his Smiley books are games and the characters are pompous public school chessmasters. Yet in this book, with its background of the war against terror, the main protagonists all seem to be decent people. Even the spies have ideals and are trying to gently persuade people to cooperate with them whilst setting up their target. The cynicism of the old le Carre books seems to have disappeared. All the characters are human from the lawyer Annabel to the banker Tommy to the mysterious Christ figure Issa.

An easy read; probably not one of le Carre's best.

March 2010; 416 pages