"His Illegal Self" by Peter Carey

This novel follows an 8 year old boy, Che,  and is written partly from his perspective and partly from the perspective of his ex-nanny Dial.

Che lives with his wealthy but bohemian grandmother in New York. His parents are American urban guerrillas, outlawed and in hiding. His mother arranges for Dial (who also has a radical past) to take Che from his grandmother for a single hour of agreed contact, but the plans change and Dial takes Che to Philapelphia where Che's mother is killed by the bomb she is making. The grandmother thereupon accuses Dial of kidnapping Che and they go on the run together, ending up in a Hippy-run township in the Australian bush.

The interplay between the 8 year old misunderstanding everything and the framed Dial who resents the way she has been manipulated away from the cushy bourgeois lifestyle she was about to enjoy into the desperate existence of a fugitive in the bush is excellent. Other notable characters include Trevor who rips them off and steals their money and looks after them and tolerates Che's thefts and gives them their money back because after all he is a Hippy who likes to go naked and used to be a Barnados boy who was shipped out to Australia and lived with priests. The hippy lawyer worships Jazz musicians. The head of the hippy neighbourhood hates cats because they kill birds.

And the prose is wonderful. And the ending a surprise in the penultimate paragraph.

So why didn't I want to turn every page?

I think it was just a little too weird. April 2012; 272 pages

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

"Winter King" by Thomas Penn

This fascinating biography of Henry VII focuses on the years between 1500 and his death in 1509. This was the time when Henry, having fought his way to the throne and married Elizabeth of York to legitimise his issue, suffered the twin succession crises of losing his first born and his queen leaving a very young Henry VIII (still only 17 when he ascended in 1509) as heir at a time when father to son succession had not occurred for nearly a century and with the Plantagenet pretender de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, waiting abroad.

And Henry VII became the richest monarch in Europe through tax avoidance (he smuggled Venetian alum to circumvent the papal monopoly) and extortion (by accusing almost anyone of trumped up crimes and then either fining them or binding them over in excessive sums).

A fascinating and compelling portrait of one of England's lesser known (and least charismatic) kings. 

But I so wanted to lerarn about the first half of the reign. After the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, Henry had to reunite the country still reeling from the divisive Wars of the Roses. His own claim on the throne was marginal (Henry V's widow, ex Princess of France, had married her household steward). So how did he persuade everyone to follow him? This story deserves to be told.

Quotes: 

• John Skelton exhorted us to "Love poets: athletes are two a penny but patrons of the arts are rare."
• Henry VIII's tutor Lord Mountjoy lived near Greenwich Palace at Sayes Court (later lived in my John Evelyne, Admiral Benbow and briefly Czar Peter the Great)
• Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, lived at Collyweston Palace near Kettering
• Henry VII confiscated Ampthill from the Earl of Kent because Kent was in debt here there and everywhere and mismanaging his lands
• Another compulsory purchase was Hanworth which he made into a palace. 
• Catherine of Aragon's wedding procession (to Henry VIII) went [ast the Cardinal's Hat Tavern near where the Globe now is.

A wonderful, beautifully written book. April 2012; 378 pages

"Herd" by Mark Earls

his is a UK take on a US-style marketing management through popular psychology book. Mark Earls works in marketing, worships Rugby and sings in a ska group. He writes well (which kept me going because I soon discovered that I wasn't really interested in marketing) but I suspect the shallowness of his research (despite lots of references he is prone to relying too much on a few academic authors and bulking this out with websites and newspapers). He is well described in the blurb as Malcolm Gladwell on speed.

His essential thesis is that we are 'super-social' animals and that therefore classical economics, marketing and management with their attempts to understand the group as the aggregate of the individuals are wrong. Rather, you need to understand the interactions in the complex organism-ations.

Most market people seek to develop one way channels of communication in an attempt to persuade people to buy their products. They fail to realise that the best marketing is done by peer-to-peer networks of word of mouth. The only way to market in the future is through developing trust by having sincere beliefs and being truly interested in other people.

On the way I learned that the Broken Windows approach to fighting crime in NY was to always mend broken windows and clean up graffiti because by taking care of the details we can persuade people that they want to live better lives and so they will start to behave in line with our aspirations. Or maybe just copy us (super-social apes imitate one another a lot) by mending their own windows and cleaning up their own graffiti. Perhaps this would also work when trying to persuade pupils to do homework.

Interesting but not overwhelmingly so. April 2012; 370 pages

"Peyton Place" by Grace Metalious

Peyton Place was the 'Desperate Housewives' of its day. India Knight's introduction tells me that it sold 60,000 copies in its first ten days; the TV series had an audience of 60 million. It scandalised America.

I found it almost unreadable. Even allowing for the fact that the sexual mores seem desperately outdated, I found it really badly written. Most novelists know the detailed back story of each or their characters and, using hints, make the reader interested in the characters whilst wanting to read more to understand the mysteries that the author has not yet set out in full. Metalious  introduces you to each of the characters in turn by explaining their back story. In full. Perhaps on the theory that in a small town there are no secrets. Except that her thesis is that Peyton Place is a small town run on the secrets that everybody hides or at least tries to hide from everyone else. There are a lot of characters. By page 100 I was bored. And the focus was on this silly spoilt little girl who was growing up.

The pace varies widely. Sometimes the book jumps a couple of years. Some critical episodes are described in a few pages; trivia is given as much space. Allison and Norman go on a picnic and discuss which sandwiches they prefer which has absolutely no bearing on either plot or character development; this just wastes words.

Characters don't really develop. Like robots in a Greek tragedy they follow their predestined dooms, wearing masks, except that they don't even discover their fatal flaws because every aspect of their personalities has been laid bare by Metalious. She doesn't believe in 'show, don't tell'. She explains everything.

The very worst bit is where Tom explains his view of sexuality to Constance. This is like an essay entitled 'what I have learned from the Kinsey report'. It should have a box around it and the words 'author's message' in bold above.

Yes, shocking things happen. But I did not care enough about any of the characters to really care. In any case, the wicked eventually got their just deserts and the good triumphed. This book is more like an extended morality play than a novel.

A dreadful potboiler. April 2012; 475 pages

"The Last Day of a Condemned Man" and "Claude Gueux" by Victor Hugo

A novella and a short story in a slim volume.

"Le dernier jour d'un condamnee" is a plea for the abolition of the death penalty purportedly written by the condemned man himself. He sits in his cell reflecting upon his trial (although we never learn the exact nature of his crime) and his six weeks awaiting his appeal. Following the rejection of the appeal events move swiftly. In the single day he is transported to another prison, dreaming up pathetic escape strategies. He meets his daughter who is too young to remember him and has indeed been told that her father is already dead. Various priests try to comfort him but he is unable to imagine his fate, let alone reconcile himself to it. At the end he begs for five more minutes in the hope that a reprieve may come.

Given that this was written in the era of sentimental romanticism it could have been dreadful. But Hugo keeps the melodrama at bay and produces a powerful and eloquent plea for abolition. It is a clear precursor of Les Miserables; it mentions the yellow passport which means that a released convict cannot find honest work and so soon returns to a life of crime.

Claude Gueux continues the theme that noble characters might, because of the circumstances and social classes into which they were born, thieve by necessity and be relegated to the dregs of society but can still retain nobility whilst their captors can be brutal.

Beautifully written, powerful and short. April 2012; 130 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

"Mary Boleyn" by Alison Weir

This book is subtitled 'The Great and Infamous Whore'; Mary Boleyn, wife of the more famous Anne,  was said to have slept with both Francois I of France and Henry VIII of England.

The problem with the book is that there is very little information about Mary Boleyn but a great deal of speculation. Alison Weir spends an awful lot of this book debunking the rumours and ending with the statement that 'we just don't know'. Thus we don't know whether Mary slept with Francois I but Weir assumes she did but not for very long. We don't know whether Mary slept with Henry VIII but Weir assumes she did, for some years. We don't know whether Katherine Carey was Henry's daughter (but Weir assumes she was) or Henry Carey was Henry VIII's son (but Weir assumes not). We don't know whether Mary spent years in Calais or when she was born or whether she was older or younger than Anne.

All of which makes this book somewhat unsatisfying. It reads more like an academic trying to score points off the other scholars who have gone before her rather than a popular history book. There are large sections when we sift through other people's comments and the endless Henrys and Katherines and Marys, most of whom change their surnames as they marry or as they come into yet another temporary title.

Not exactly a ripping read.

April 2012; 256 pages

"Lyttelton's Britain" by Iain Pattinson

Pattinson is the man who wrote Humphrey Lyttelton's scripts for I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and this book is a compilation of the descriptions of towns with which Lyttelton would introduce the programme.

Humph was a master of the double entendre and this book has a great selection of those. It also slags off every town. But somehow, reading the same basic joke time and again just gets boring. As a minute long introduction to a weekly programme this humour is often laugh aloud but in a book it gets a little boring.

Disappointing.

March 2012; 221 pages

"Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel

I have read Mantel's Beyond Black and thoroughly enjoyed it but Wolf Hall is such a doorstep of a book that I thought I would find it tedious.

For at least the first hundred pages it was a historical bio-epic of no especial literary merit.  I was interested by the character of Thomas Cromwell, depicted sympathetically rather than the black-garbed devil of historical propaganda. I was slightly annoyed by the first person narrative in the third person: Cromwell refers to himself as 'he' but it is written entirely from his point of view and you think his thoughts.

Then I began to seriously identify with his character. As Deputy  to a larger than life Headteacher I have been the fixer, the manager, the creator of possibilities and sometimes the hitman, always surviving within and by the favour of my boss. And yesterday at a meeting I started thinking to myself: 'What would Cromwell do in this situation'.

I was also desperate to find out what happened to him and why the novel is named Wolf Hall.

When a character in a book grabs you so completely then you have to admit that somehow the novelist has become a magician and you are enchanted by her spells. And that is why it was shortlisted for the Costa Award in 2009, the Women's Prize for fiction in 2010 and won the Booker Prize (2009) and the inaugural Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2010.

Page turner.

March 2012; 650 pages

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

"Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War" by John Stubbs

It wasn't what I was expecting!

I thought in terms of straight history explaining the Cavalier but this was more a multiple biography, meandering from character to character.

It starts during the civil war when Captain Chudleigh, a messenger from the Royalist army at York, meets Davenant, Jermyn and Suckling in London.

We then reverse to the days of James I to someone called Carew, a young man who finds it difficult to settle into a career but enjoys writing poetry (and who during the Civil War rests in Wrest Park). We learn about Prince Charles trip to Spain to woo the Infanta da Castille (unsuccessfully) in the company of three other friends including the soon-to-be Duke of Buckingham. And we learn of Buckingham's subsequent career and assassination. Someone called Herrick who later becomes a country parson is working for the Duke. And so we start discovering that all these characters are known to the future because of their literary connections.

The two key characters are aristocratic gambler and petty poet Sir John Suckling (who is a known coward but soldier and cavalier and roue about town) and William Davenant, son of an Oxford innkeeper (and sometime Mayor) but godson (and illegitimate son?) of William Shakespeare who became a friend of Ben Jonson, a poet and playwright, a cavalier and courtier, famed for inhaling Mercury as a cure for syphilis which caused his nose to drop off, a fixer and smuggler during the Civil War, a failed coloniser of New Jersey, and the man who restored the Theatre during the restoration. But these two weave in and out of a huge cast. As well as Herrick we meet Milton, Marvell and Dryden, we meet Aubrey and Lovelace ("Stone Walls do not a Prison make nor Iron Bars a Cage") and Archbishop Usher of Armagh who calculated the age of the Earth, Izaak Walton (who as well as being a keen angler was part of the chain who smuggled Charles II's father's garter medal away from the failed Battle of Worcester, when Charles had to hide in the Oak, back to London to be reunited with its owner in exile abroad).

We find out about the English Olympics on Cotswold Hill and about Edward King who drowned on the way to Ireland and is famous for nothing else than the fact this his tragedy inspired Milton's Lycidas. We discover that near the start of the Civil War Queen Henrietta Marie spends a night with Shakespeare's daughter at New Place in Stratford. We learn about the great Viscount Falkland, England's first atheist, whose philosophical circle at Great Tew was destroyed by the Civil War; and how his legacy lived on when the Earl of Newcastle, a Cavendish, married a philosophical lady whose tutor was Thomas Hobbes and who spawned the scientific Cavendishes.

One whom I was ashamed never to have heard of was a neurotic Calvinist in Edinburgh named Archibald Johnston who practised law and, through chance as much as anything, became a co-author of the Scottish Covenant and thus one of the Scots whose interventions tipped the crown from Charles' head.

In short this is a ragbag of a book, full of strange characters. It reminded me of God's Philosophers.  It hangs together through an extraordinary narrative. People come and go, they wander in and out, like some chaotic play. And in the final analysis they gave birth to so much English poetry and so much of the modern world.

March 2012; 470 pages

"Notes from Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This slender Dostoevsky is a book of two halves. The first half is a philosophical tract written by a disillusioned embittered man who lives like a mouse under the floorboards hidden from the society that rejects him without even noticing him, plotting his revenge. But he is so full of introspection that he cannot act.

The second half is a fragment of a memoir about how he meets up with some old school friends whom he dislikes, how he acts the bitter rude boor, how he follows them to a brothel (but they give him the slip) and talks to a young fresh girl, how she subsequently comes to his flat whilst he is in a dispute with his servant, and how he (apparently) rapes her. Thus he spoils what his philosophical arguments tell him should not be spoiled. Thus he rejects any hand of friendship, compassion or love. And presumably thus he dooms himself to eternal punishment in his own private hell under the floorboards for the rest of his life.

The first half I found nearly unreadable; the second almost disappointingly short.

March 2012; 115 pages

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

"Nudge" by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

This 'hugely influential' book is really rather limited and boring.

These are the big ideas. None are original.

• Human beings are not as rational as the ideal consumer portrayed by Economists.
• Therefore, humans make choices based on rules of thumb such as 
• Anchoring (based on the latest information you have; they demonstrate this by asking you to add 200 to the last 3 digits of your telephone number and guess whether Attila the Hun sacked Europe before or after this date; strangely for me the right answer was exactly equal to the last three digits of my telephone number added to 200!); 
• Availability (we choose based on the evidence most readily available to us such as the horrendous aeroplane crash in the tabloids), 
• Conforming to others, 
• Overconfidence, 
• the fact that we would rather avoid Losses than make Gains, 
• seeking false patterns in random data, 
• and sticking to the Status Quo. 
• (All of these ideas are much better covered in Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality.)
• A choice architect designs the way we are presented with a choice. There is no such thing as a neutral choice.
• A choice architect can therefore influence our choice by manipulating the choice architecture in line with the rules of thumb. This is a nudge.
• This is morally acceptable within the framework of libertarian paternalism if the nudges influence us to make choices that are in our own best interests. Our best interests can be demonstrated: no one ever makes a New Year's resolution to start smoking or exercise less. 

They need to spend some time defending libertarian paternalism from the American right. They argue that it is better that government should nudge us to do what is in our own best interest rather than to force us to do this. They suggest that not all government officials are necessarily incompetent or corrupt. (I think they could go quite a way further here and suggest that it is more likely that a civil servant will try to influence your choice in a way that is good and positive than that a capitalist seeking to maximise the profit of himself or his shareholders will. They do say: "One the face of it, it is odd to say that the public [choice] architects are always more dangerous than the private ones. After all, managers in the public sector have to answer to voters, and managers in the private sector have as their mandate the job of maximizing profits and share prices, not consumer welfare. Indeed, some of those who are most suspicious of governments think that the only responsibility of private managers is to maximise share prices." (p238) )

So far the book has been interesting though not revolutionary. The test of the pudding as always is in the eating. Here they apply their theories to a variety of spheres (health care, pensions, sub-prime mortgages etc; mostly from a US perspective). What do they come up with in terms of practical advice?

• Default options are important but especially so when it becomes difficult to choose. Madly (because of fears of being sued) the default prescription option for seniors under the Bush health care legislation was to pick a plan at random even though in healthcare the past is a pretty good indicator of the future.
• Transparency is good. They recommend that for investment plans etc banks are required to send annual statements detailing all charges to prompt people to consider whether they really made a good choice before. Generally information is good although when the choice becomes complex it becomes critical as to what information you present and how your present it. This too is part of choice architecture.
• Escalators are good. People are more likely to save for their pensions if they are asked to set aside a small amount now with a commitment to an automatic increase every time they get a pay rise.

To keep choice architects on the side of the angels they suggest the slightly novel moral principle (they credit it to the moral philosopher John Rawls) that you should only do what you would not be embarrassed about. If you place mirrors into restaurants to nudge people into eating less you might be happy for this idea to be publicised; you might be less happy if you had used subliminal advertising to achieve the same end.

So overall this was an interesting book although I had encountered most of its ideas before and the practical applications do seem rather limited. I hope there is more potential for the essential idea.

March 2012; 260 pages

"The Admiral Benbow" by Sam Willis

The Admiral Benbow is the name of the pub owned by Jim Hawkins and his mother where Billy Bones comes to stay before being found by Blind Pew in Treasure Island. John Benbow was also a naval legend.

Born around 1652 during the Commonwealth, there is little of certainty about John Benbow's early life. He may have worked on merchant boats on the Severn. He certainly saw some service in the Navy, fighting the corsairs of Algiers and defending the English colony of Tangiers (with Bombay, part of the dowry of Charles II's queen) becoming a skilled pilot. He may have been on of the unnamed pilots who guided William of Orange's invasion fleet through the Straits of Dover to land at Torbay at the start of the last successful naval invasion of England. Certainly his first patron, under whom he had served in the Navy, was Admiral Herbert who carried the letter signed by the seven conspirators inviting William to England.

Benbow's subsequent career was as a fighting captain who aggressively raided the French coast in 1693 and 1694 during the Nine Years' War before the Treaty of Ryswick of . He was also a skilled manager of both the Chatham dockyard and subsequently the Deptford dockyard. While at Deptford he leased John Evelyn's house at Sayes Court for three years during which period he was persuaded to sub-let it to Czar Peter the Great of Russia who was studying British dockyards as part of his grand tour of Europe. Also at this time Benbow was fast-tracked to become an Elder Brethren of Trinity House and served on the committee overseeing the construction of the great Naval Hospital at Greenwich by Christopher Wren; Newton was also on the committee and the bricks were supplied by factory owner Daniel Foe who later became famous for writing the great maritime romance of Robinson Crusoe.

Later he was sent on a reconnoitring voyage of the inadequately charted West Indies. On the outbound voyage he escorted Edmund Halley  who was himself mapping magnetic variations. Whilst cruising the Caribbean he searched for pirate Captain Kidd who was subsequently apprehended in New York and negotiated with the colonists of the doomed Scottish colony of Darien which bankrupted that country, forcing it into union with England so the Bank of England would pay their debts. (Strange how history repeats itself differently; the Scots banks have now again done their best to bankrupt England and they want their independence on the back of it!). Finally Benbow received mortal injuries in the first naval engagement of the Anglo-French War of Spanish Succession whilst his captains mutinied. The subsequent court martial became the first naval trial to be published in the newspapers, appearing a few months after the launch of the first English language regular newspaper the Daily Courant.

This was a rattling good yarn despite the frankly speculative nature of Benbow's early life and presents the story of a consummate sailor who was one of the first of a great tradition. It also mentions Hawke House in Sunbury-on-Thames!

March 2012; 318 pages

"The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson

The story of serial killer H. H. Holmes is interleaved with that of the creation, life and destruction of the Chicago World Fair of 1893; the 'Castle' of Holmes with its basement torture room, its crematorium kiln and its sealed gas chamber was a few blocks from the Fair.

The story is full of characters. The main protagonists are murderer Holmes, architect Burnham (the first architect of skyscrapers which began in Chicago and also the architect of New York's Flatiron building) and Landscape Gardener Olmsted (who also designed Central Park). 'Also starring' are Buffalo Bill whose Wild West Show was set up opposite the Fair and drew bigger crowds; Ferris who invented his wheel to be the Fair's answer to Eiffel's Tower; Frank Lloyd Wright, a young architect in a rival to Burnham's Chicago firm who was fired by his boss Louis Sullivan; and Patrick Prendergast, a mad Irishman who assassinated Chicago's mayor just before the closing of the Fair. Walk on parts include incandescent bulbs powered by ac, Juicy Fruit chewing gum, Elias Disney, the father of Walt, who worked on the Fair; Shredded Wheat and even the Titanic.

But the reason I read this big book in two obsessive days is the power of the writing. The author weaves his story magnificently, dropping little hins about the triumphs and tragedies to come. And he has some wonderfully purple moments:

• "Daylight faded to thin broth." (p30) 
• "For this buttoned-up age .... it was a letter that could have steamed itself open." (p257)

And some great quotes:

• "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." Daniel H Burnham
• "Damn your preambles! Get down to facts." Richard M Hunt

A brilliantly written book that contrasts the light and the dark at every turn.

February 2012; 442 pages