A strange elderly gentleman rents a run-down holiday cottage in the Dartmoor village of Great Calne so he can adapt his one-time best-seller into a soap opera. There ensues an intricate comedy of characters very much in the Ambridge mould. As some people fall in love and some fall out of love, and as one harbours an escaped convict, the plot folds and refolds until everything has to come together in a single climax.
Mr Golightly agonises about the tragic death of his son and tries to make sense of what is happening. At the same time he himself is able to soothe the many sadnesses around. Gradually, you begin to realise that he is not all he seems. Then, once you have discovered who he is, everything starts to happen.
Vickers, who wrote the wonderful Miss Garnet's Angel, illuminates scene and characters with a warming glow. She writes with love and empathy. She weaves the mystical in with the everyday: Mr Golightly receives odd emails and Ellen Thomas thinks the sheep on the hillside look like runes which she tries to decipher. At the same time a father tries to persuade his daughter to eat prawns with the shells on because these are cheaper than shells-off and Sam Noble names his dog after his wife's still-born twin sister. This is a celebration of the magic that is within our mundane, sometimes frenzied, existences.
"This notion that a creator had influence over the objects of his creation - where on earth did that idea come from? A parent, even a raven parent could tell you it was nonsense."
A fabulous, feel-good read. July 2013; 345 pages
Also by Vickers read The Cleaner of Chartres
Monday, 15 July 2013
Friday, 12 July 2013
"Barnado boy" by John Clarke
John Clarke's mother gave birth to twins out of wedlock. Being only allowed to keep one, she chose the girl; John was taken into care by Barnado's. He spent his first seventeen years with them and was then apprenticed to the in-house printer at the Grosvenor Hotel.
This is the extraordinary rags-to-riches story of a remarkable man. There are a host of wonderful characters, from his mother, who can't resist an attractive man, to his step-father, a brilliant engineer who drinks. His life encompasses soldiering, running and losing his own printing firm, and a battle with mental disease.
The character of the narrator is also interesting. He is highly intelligent though rather diffident and a bit of a goody-goody. . He hates the unions! He is deeply religious, has a wonderful wife and fabulous children and he has an irritating habit of forgiving everyone (including the unions).
This is a classic story. It is slightly spoilt by the rather pompous dialogue which does not aspire to naturalism: it is made of grammatically perfect (including the use of 'whom' on one occasion) set speeches. It is definitely spoilt by the occasional spelling mistakes ('past-time' for pastime is repeated) which might be forgiven in anyone but a man who spent five years as a proof reader.
This fascinating life would make a great basis for a novel but it would need significant scaffolding and a much more fluid prose style.
July 2013; 310 pages
Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog can be found here.
Saturday, 6 July 2013
"The seven basic plots" by Christopher Booker
Christopher Booker believes that there are seven archetypal plots: overcoming the monster (eg Perseus and the Gorgon), rags to riches (eg the Ugly Duckling), the quest (eg the Odyssey), voyage and return (eg Robinson Crusoe), comedy (eg the Marriage of Figaro), tragedy (eg Macbeth) and rebierth (eg a Christmas Carol). This is because, he thinks, they reflect deep patterns within our collective unconscious. So fundamental are these patterns that stories that flout these rules, in particular the necessity of 'happily ever after', are in some way failed stories.
His literary criticism that leads him to the seven plots (and later to the two extra ones of rebellion against the one (eg 1984) and mystery (any Poirot) is brilliant and wonderful. When I was half way through the book I was ready to agree even with Michael Gove that this was a 'masterpiece'. He had analysed myth, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Peer Gynt, the Bible, even James Bond, and shown the fundamental structure underlying each. Although it was clear that a storyteller could offer variations around a theme, such as changing the hero for a heroine or intermingling the plots (seen from one point of view Romeo and Juliet is a comedy).
But then he got carried away. Stories that he felt did not conform were "insubstantial"; this was usually due to the personal inadequacies of their creators. He started to rubbish what others consider to be great literature. Whilst Watership Down is "one of the most haunting and successful of recent Quest stories" (p391), Orwell's Coming Up For Air is a "spiritually shrunken world" (p390). This is because it projects "the Quest archetype out into the external world" (p390); but that is what Watership Down does and so does the Odyssey and almost every story projects an internal psychological drama into the external world because that is what storytellers do!
Basically he rubbishes most stories from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Stendahl's hero Julien Sorel on The Scarlet and the Black is a "cardboard creation" (p 350) because he never undergoes an inner transformation, he is as nasty at the end as at the start; this is apparently because Stendahl was sexually inadequate. Chekhov has a "limited perspective" (p432). Proust is "a classic case of the 'boy hero who cannot grow up'" (p433); his masterpiece is "the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of story-telling." (p438). Joyce's Ulysses is "meandering" and Leopold Bloom is a "little hero" (p464). Lady Chatterley's Lover has a plot which creaks (p469).
Clearly, many twentieth century stories are pot-boilers with cardboard characters. Here he falls prey to the 'cathedral fallacy'. Some people believe, on the evidence of cathedrals, that builders in the middle ages were much more skilful and much more artistic than they are today. They point to the office blocks and suburban housing developments that suggest modern builders have little soul. But they are not comparing like with like. Most of the buildings from the middle ages fell down or burned down or were pulled down. There is rubbish in every age but the rubbish from old times gets cleared away. Similarly, the only stories to have survived from ancient times are the ones that people have continued to tell. We don't have 'Beowulf meets Godzilla' because that particular pot-boiler wasn't reprinted. Similarly, we might be able to point to the sexual inadequacies of modern authors because we know their biographies. We don't know about Plautus although one would suspect from his fixation on dirty old men that he might have rather fancied young girls in his old age.
It seems that Booker hates modern books partly because they depict sex and partly because they are amoral. Often there is no happy ever after. Often the baddy wins or the hero loses. So he rubbishes the writing. He calls the characters two-dimensional, as if any characters are less rounded that the Ugly Sisters. What modern writers try to do is to re-interpret archetypal stories within real life. Booker hates this and he rubbishes it.
And if the whole of twentieth century literature fails to fit his archetypes then surely his theory must necessarily be wrong.
But not for Booker. Obsessed with his theme, he enters the nightmare stage. He believes that Jung's understanding of the unconscious "was one of the greatest intuitive discoveries of the twentieth century, ranking alongside those of Einstein and other nuclear physicists, or Watson and Crick's double helix" (p554). He starts to reinterpret human psychology and human history through his theory: dark fathers, anima, light heroes and all. Clearly, in Booker's view, industrialisation has been a disaster for the human psyche, divorcing us from an appreciation the the One. Perhaps my biggest concern was the dogmatic way in which Booker wrote, as if a person who understands story structure therefore must be an authority on psychology and history (and Einstein and Watson and Crick). At this point hubris overwhelms Booker and his thesis, like Icarus, tumbles from the air.
The first half of this book is absolutely brilliant. Read it. Then don't read the rest.
His literary criticism that leads him to the seven plots (and later to the two extra ones of rebellion against the one (eg 1984) and mystery (any Poirot) is brilliant and wonderful. When I was half way through the book I was ready to agree even with Michael Gove that this was a 'masterpiece'. He had analysed myth, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Peer Gynt, the Bible, even James Bond, and shown the fundamental structure underlying each. Although it was clear that a storyteller could offer variations around a theme, such as changing the hero for a heroine or intermingling the plots (seen from one point of view Romeo and Juliet is a comedy).
But then he got carried away. Stories that he felt did not conform were "insubstantial"; this was usually due to the personal inadequacies of their creators. He started to rubbish what others consider to be great literature. Whilst Watership Down is "one of the most haunting and successful of recent Quest stories" (p391), Orwell's Coming Up For Air is a "spiritually shrunken world" (p390). This is because it projects "the Quest archetype out into the external world" (p390); but that is what Watership Down does and so does the Odyssey and almost every story projects an internal psychological drama into the external world because that is what storytellers do!
Basically he rubbishes most stories from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Stendahl's hero Julien Sorel on The Scarlet and the Black is a "cardboard creation" (p 350) because he never undergoes an inner transformation, he is as nasty at the end as at the start; this is apparently because Stendahl was sexually inadequate. Chekhov has a "limited perspective" (p432). Proust is "a classic case of the 'boy hero who cannot grow up'" (p433); his masterpiece is "the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of story-telling." (p438). Joyce's Ulysses is "meandering" and Leopold Bloom is a "little hero" (p464). Lady Chatterley's Lover has a plot which creaks (p469).
Clearly, many twentieth century stories are pot-boilers with cardboard characters. Here he falls prey to the 'cathedral fallacy'. Some people believe, on the evidence of cathedrals, that builders in the middle ages were much more skilful and much more artistic than they are today. They point to the office blocks and suburban housing developments that suggest modern builders have little soul. But they are not comparing like with like. Most of the buildings from the middle ages fell down or burned down or were pulled down. There is rubbish in every age but the rubbish from old times gets cleared away. Similarly, the only stories to have survived from ancient times are the ones that people have continued to tell. We don't have 'Beowulf meets Godzilla' because that particular pot-boiler wasn't reprinted. Similarly, we might be able to point to the sexual inadequacies of modern authors because we know their biographies. We don't know about Plautus although one would suspect from his fixation on dirty old men that he might have rather fancied young girls in his old age.
It seems that Booker hates modern books partly because they depict sex and partly because they are amoral. Often there is no happy ever after. Often the baddy wins or the hero loses. So he rubbishes the writing. He calls the characters two-dimensional, as if any characters are less rounded that the Ugly Sisters. What modern writers try to do is to re-interpret archetypal stories within real life. Booker hates this and he rubbishes it.
And if the whole of twentieth century literature fails to fit his archetypes then surely his theory must necessarily be wrong.
But not for Booker. Obsessed with his theme, he enters the nightmare stage. He believes that Jung's understanding of the unconscious "was one of the greatest intuitive discoveries of the twentieth century, ranking alongside those of Einstein and other nuclear physicists, or Watson and Crick's double helix" (p554). He starts to reinterpret human psychology and human history through his theory: dark fathers, anima, light heroes and all. Clearly, in Booker's view, industrialisation has been a disaster for the human psyche, divorcing us from an appreciation the the One. Perhaps my biggest concern was the dogmatic way in which Booker wrote, as if a person who understands story structure therefore must be an authority on psychology and history (and Einstein and Watson and Crick). At this point hubris overwhelms Booker and his thesis, like Icarus, tumbles from the air.
The first half of this book is absolutely brilliant. Read it. Then don't read the rest.
July 2013; 702 pages
Thursday, 20 June 2013
"How I won the yellow jumper" by Ned Boulting
Boulting is an ITV sports' commentator who has specialised in the Tour De France since 2003. When he started he knew nothing about cycling racing which is more or less the position I am in now. Desoite having read his book. He writes for the army of sports fans, and cycling fans. It is a little sad that the bookwas published before Bradley Wiggins shot to national prominence by actually winning the TdF for Britain and before Lance Armstrong admitted using drugs; this makes the book outdated already.
Most of the book is a good-natured romp through France. He celebrates the courage of riders who fall off their bikes into barbed wire fences and then get back on again, still bleeding, to race eighty miles. He celebrates the dogged endurance of those who toil up mountains. He celebrates the madness of the army that follows the tour: the caterers and organisers, the lorry drivers, the journalists, the fans. He chronicles the difficulties of finding accommodation when an army has come to town, of getting your laundry done, and of holding TV interviews in multiple languages. A lot of this is wry humour and most of it is enjoyable although it got somewhat tedious towards the end. There is only so much you can brag about the life of a sports reporter. But mostly I enjoyed it.
My main problem with the book is that he seemed to assume that I, the reader, would have a similar level of knowledge to him. I suppose this is fair in a book aimed at the fans. I imagine his face and name are known to a lot of people. But I thought it was a little strange given (a) that he knew nothing about the TdF when he started and (b) his job is to communicate.
For example, it was cute to find that he comes from Bedford which Is where I live. But he talks about Stanley Street and Tavistock Street as though the whole world will know what he is talking about. Again, he regularly talks about the peloton ; this is something to do with the how the cyclists group together on the race, I think, but he never explains it and I don't really know what it is. A classic statement is "No Bastille Day! No Richard Virenque!" I know what Bastille Day is but I have no idea who Richard Virenque is. Time and again I was left in the dark; I think by the end I realised how little I cared.
His lack of explanation is all the more ironic when I think of the things I know (Wiggins winning and Armstrong doping) that he doesn't at the time of writing. So there is a curious, unsettling mismatch between what he knows and what I know.
The classic example is when he laughs at himself for saying in his very first TdF commentary that a certain rider has "kissed goodbye to his chance of winning the yellow jumper." He recalls this moment with shame. It took me another fifty pages before I realised what his mistake had been: apparently maillot jaune should be translated as yellow jersey.
At which point I realised that I didn't really care. I'm just not a fan.
Mildly amusing. June 2013; 376 pages
Friday, 14 June 2013
"Mud, sweat and gears" by Ellie Bennett
My favourite travel book of 2013!
Ellie and her mate Mick cycle from Land's End to John O' Groats. But unlike my stepson Simon who, with his friend Josh, cycled the 'official' way in 13 days, Mick and Ellie go the pretty route over 23 days and via as many real ale pubs as they can possibly fit in.
MS&G is one of the funniest travel books I have read since Round Ireland with a fridge by Tony Hawks. I raced through reading it. It has a delightful combination of self-deprecating wry humour with close observation of the foibles of others that make Bennett a natural comedian. For a first book it is brilliant.
Fabulous fun. June 2013; 291 pages
Ellie and her mate Mick cycle from Land's End to John O' Groats. But unlike my stepson Simon who, with his friend Josh, cycled the 'official' way in 13 days, Mick and Ellie go the pretty route over 23 days and via as many real ale pubs as they can possibly fit in.
MS&G is one of the funniest travel books I have read since Round Ireland with a fridge by Tony Hawks. I raced through reading it. It has a delightful combination of self-deprecating wry humour with close observation of the foibles of others that make Bennett a natural comedian. For a first book it is brilliant.
Fabulous fun. June 2013; 291 pages
Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.
Thursday, 13 June 2013
"Lost at sea" by Jon Ronson
This is another selection of Jon Ronson's articles about weird people. Ronson talks to robots, investigates attempted high-school shootings in an Alaskan town obsessed with Christmas, goes to a UFO convention with Robbie Williams, investigates mysterious deaths and suicides (there is a shocking piece about people who 'fall overboard' from cruise liners) and Jonathan King's conviction for sex crimes.
The brilliance of Ronson is the way he writes about extraordinary people and events in humdrum and banal terms. When he is with a group of Real Life Super Heroes confronting drug dealers he uses very short sentences to describe an incredibly exciting moment. He points out that he is wearing only a cardigan. After the event he tells the vigilantes that he is going to bed. The juxtaposition of the special with the everyday makes Ronson's writing fascinating, exciting and funny.
I was a little concerned that he repeats the story of Kitty Genovese who was killed in 1964; he states that "at least thirty-eight bystanders saw her lying there and did nothing." This repeats an urban legend started by the New York Times. Closer investigation, for example in Superfreakonomics or even wikipedia suggests that there were about a dozen witnesses of the attack, most of whom heard something (they certainly didn't see her lying there') but only two were aware that it was more than a quarrel. Even Ronson doesn't always get it right.
But
I'd read many of the stories in previous Ronson collections. Of the 26 stories I have read at least 7. That is more than 25%. The purchase price was £8.99 so I reckon that Ronson owes me at least £2.25.
I mean, what did he gain? 26 stories are a lot; he could have published a book with only 19 stories in it and I would still have been willing to pay £9 and enjoyed the 19 new stories. But now I feel cheated.
There is some small print on the title versa page which acknowledges that "portions of this book have appeared previously, in slightly different forms, in Out of the ordinary, What I do..." both of which I have read. So I can't say he didn't warn me. But he himself contains about the small print used by credit card companies which he calls the "tiniest of letters .... infinitesimal print." Perhaps someone who crusades on behalf of the weak and the gullible will be concerned with the reactions of one of his readers: I felt cheated.
I've now bought 5 of his books. Perhaps I won't buy any more.
June 2013; 471 pages but you don't have to read all of them if you've read some before.
The brilliance of Ronson is the way he writes about extraordinary people and events in humdrum and banal terms. When he is with a group of Real Life Super Heroes confronting drug dealers he uses very short sentences to describe an incredibly exciting moment. He points out that he is wearing only a cardigan. After the event he tells the vigilantes that he is going to bed. The juxtaposition of the special with the everyday makes Ronson's writing fascinating, exciting and funny.
I was a little concerned that he repeats the story of Kitty Genovese who was killed in 1964; he states that "at least thirty-eight bystanders saw her lying there and did nothing." This repeats an urban legend started by the New York Times. Closer investigation, for example in Superfreakonomics or even wikipedia suggests that there were about a dozen witnesses of the attack, most of whom heard something (they certainly didn't see her lying there') but only two were aware that it was more than a quarrel. Even Ronson doesn't always get it right.
But
I'd read many of the stories in previous Ronson collections. Of the 26 stories I have read at least 7. That is more than 25%. The purchase price was £8.99 so I reckon that Ronson owes me at least £2.25.
I mean, what did he gain? 26 stories are a lot; he could have published a book with only 19 stories in it and I would still have been willing to pay £9 and enjoyed the 19 new stories. But now I feel cheated.
There is some small print on the title versa page which acknowledges that "portions of this book have appeared previously, in slightly different forms, in Out of the ordinary, What I do..." both of which I have read. So I can't say he didn't warn me. But he himself contains about the small print used by credit card companies which he calls the "tiniest of letters .... infinitesimal print." Perhaps someone who crusades on behalf of the weak and the gullible will be concerned with the reactions of one of his readers: I felt cheated.
I've now bought 5 of his books. Perhaps I won't buy any more.
June 2013; 471 pages but you don't have to read all of them if you've read some before.
Sunday, 9 June 2013
"The house of Doctor Dee" by Peter Ackroyd
Twenty years ago I read my first Peter Ackroyd novel: Hawksmoor. It flitted between now and the seventeenth century when architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, somewhat in the shadow of Christopher Wren, was building some London churches and incorporating some rather odd occult features. The seventeenth century portions of the book were written in a brilliant pastiche of the then style. I thought it was a wonderful book.
The House of Doctor Dee bears many resemblances. Matthew inherits a strange house in Clerkenwell. With his friend Daniel, a transvestite who has some strange connection with his dead father, Matthew discovers that the house was once owned by famous Elizabethan magician and alchemist Dr John Dee. The narrative jumps back and forth between the sixteenth century doings of the strange doctor and the increasingly haunted Matthew.
But it just didn't work for me. The ramblings of Dr Dee are so interleaved with his occult imaginings that I found it hard to read. There are dream sequences that are not much different from day reality. Matthew also has dreams and it is difficult to decipher whether the ghosts are in his head or real. The story seems to have little structure and there are a lot of events that just don't seem to fit: why does Matthew defecate in his own garden and who is the tramp with the dog who seems to defy time?
Perhaps it was just a little too weird for me. June 2013; 277 pages
Books by Peter Ackroyd reviewed in this blog:
Historical fiction
Biography
The House of Doctor Dee bears many resemblances. Matthew inherits a strange house in Clerkenwell. With his friend Daniel, a transvestite who has some strange connection with his dead father, Matthew discovers that the house was once owned by famous Elizabethan magician and alchemist Dr John Dee. The narrative jumps back and forth between the sixteenth century doings of the strange doctor and the increasingly haunted Matthew.
But it just didn't work for me. The ramblings of Dr Dee are so interleaved with his occult imaginings that I found it hard to read. There are dream sequences that are not much different from day reality. Matthew also has dreams and it is difficult to decipher whether the ghosts are in his head or real. The story seems to have little structure and there are a lot of events that just don't seem to fit: why does Matthew defecate in his own garden and who is the tramp with the dog who seems to defy time?
Perhaps it was just a little too weird for me. June 2013; 277 pages
Books by Peter Ackroyd reviewed in this blog:
Historical fiction
- The Clerkenwell Tales
- Chatterton
- The House of Doctor Dee
- The Lambs of London
- Milton in America
- The Fall of Troy
Biography
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
"Convoy" by Caroline Davies
This is a book of poems about the battles around Malta in the second World War. It is written from the points of view of some of the combatants. Some of them are on Royal and Merchant Naval ships in a convoy trying to bring essential supplies to the besieged Maltese; some poems are written as if by fighter pilots struggling to keep the German and Italian bombers from bombing the island into submission.
As a history of this part of the war it has its interests and I was certainly keen to find out whether ships (and people) survived or not.
But it isn't my sort of poetry. I am an old-fashioned unsophisticated sort of chap when it comes to poetry. I like scansion. I like rhyme. In short, I like structure. If a poem doesn't have structure it has to be remarkably good to qualify as a poem. The difference between prose and this sort of poem, for me, is in the language. Poems can use words to convey feelings and ideas as precisely (although in an entirely different way) as a cryptic crossword. Thus 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' works as a line of poetry because of the alliteration; when Wilfred Owen rhymes nervous with knives us and war with wire it is the use of the false rhymes that put us on edge; when Rudyard Kipling talks about 'Boots, boots, boots, boots' it is the monotony of that rhythmic tread that defines the poem. Poems use the music of words.
There are moments in this book when that works. On page 38, in 'Don't...' we are told that 'The sky holds splattered smudges of ack-ack' which works (and I especially like the word 'hold') up until the 'ack-ack'. But a lot of the poems use dry unemotional words. To be charitable, one might assume that this is a deliberate attempt by the author to represent the stiff-upper-lips of the boys. But I don't understand why this is a book of poems.
Interesting as history with occasional moments of poetry.
As a history of this part of the war it has its interests and I was certainly keen to find out whether ships (and people) survived or not.
But it isn't my sort of poetry. I am an old-fashioned unsophisticated sort of chap when it comes to poetry. I like scansion. I like rhyme. In short, I like structure. If a poem doesn't have structure it has to be remarkably good to qualify as a poem. The difference between prose and this sort of poem, for me, is in the language. Poems can use words to convey feelings and ideas as precisely (although in an entirely different way) as a cryptic crossword. Thus 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' works as a line of poetry because of the alliteration; when Wilfred Owen rhymes nervous with knives us and war with wire it is the use of the false rhymes that put us on edge; when Rudyard Kipling talks about 'Boots, boots, boots, boots' it is the monotony of that rhythmic tread that defines the poem. Poems use the music of words.
There are moments in this book when that works. On page 38, in 'Don't...' we are told that 'The sky holds splattered smudges of ack-ack' which works (and I especially like the word 'hold') up until the 'ack-ack'. But a lot of the poems use dry unemotional words. To be charitable, one might assume that this is a deliberate attempt by the author to represent the stiff-upper-lips of the boys. But I don't understand why this is a book of poems.
Interesting as history with occasional moments of poetry.
June 2013; 95 pages
Monday, 3 June 2013
"The philosophical breakfast club" by Laura J Snyder
This is a 'group biography' of four young Cambridge men who started eating breakfast together and embarked upon a project to reform natural philosophy. In so doing they coined the term 'scientist' and re-established Baconian induction as a technique: there had been worrying recent moves to assert the primacy of deduction in Science which would have led to sterility. More specifically, these four were:
It is especially nice how the biography brings out the different personalities of these four men. Jones was often ill and prone to depression. Babbage was very irascible (in his later life he became obsessed with the noise that organ grinders made with the result that street urchins teased him by banging kettles whenever they saw him); he fought with everyone; his perfectionism meant that neither of the computers he designed were ever built. Whewell learned to use his fists as a poor boy at grammar school; later he rode horses 'hard' and was eventually killed by a truculent steed. Herschel was sweet-natured.
The insistence on induction (or rather, like Bacon, they believed that science should proceed not like a spider, who in an analogy with deduction, spins webs from a single thread, nor like an inductive any who piles up leaves, but like a honey bee who gathers nectar and then transform it to honey) led them to react against Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in which he tries to devise Economics from first principles, like Cartesian science or Euclidean geometry. They also recommended, following Bacon again, that scientists should seek out "crucial experiments that could definitively decide between two rival theories" (p114). Jones's analysis of Economics also refuted the population trap of Malthus.
A lot of what they did prepared the ground for Darwinian evolution (Whewell was very worried by the possibility that evolution would damage religion but when the Origin of Species was published he recognised the strength of its arguments and kept quiet unlike many less cautious contemporaries). For example, Babbage used a feedback mechanism on a working model of his Difference Engine to show to an audience that included Darwin how a mathematical rule could be automatically modified by the machine. He then suggested that by analogy the Creator could have designed the world such that species evolved rather than having to intervene whenever he wanted a new species.
Whewell also dabbled in architecture, explaining that the crucial feature of the Gothic style was not the pointed arch which had been suggested a priori but, through an inductive look at the evidence, that churches aimed for vertical spaces rather than horizontal spaces thus requiring mechanisms such as the pointed arch.
Whewell also introduced the concept of consilience. For Whewell, what made Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation so strong was not just that it had predictive ability (for example in predicting the existence of Neptune), although that was important, but that it unified a number of diverse fields, in Newton's terms terrestrial dynamics and celestial dynamics. After Whewell's death one of his students, a lad called James Clerk Maxwell, unified Optics and Electromagnetism in an even greater act of consilience. This section leads to a bit of a howler when Snyder states that Maxwell calculated the speed of electromagnetic radiation to be 310,740,000 miles per second when she means metres per second!
This review gives a small flavour of the many fields that these great but rather too little known scientists illuminated.
This is a fantastic book, incredibly readable and so interesting. June 2013; 368 pages
- William Whewell, a carpenter's son who become Master of Trinity, originated the natural Sciences tripos (in the process inventing the subject of History and Philosophy of Science), and founded the British Association
- Richard Jones, who did pioneering work in Economics
- Charles Babbage who invented the computer
- John Herschel who followed his father William as an astronomer, discovering nebulae, and worked with Fox Talbot on the invention of photography.
It is especially nice how the biography brings out the different personalities of these four men. Jones was often ill and prone to depression. Babbage was very irascible (in his later life he became obsessed with the noise that organ grinders made with the result that street urchins teased him by banging kettles whenever they saw him); he fought with everyone; his perfectionism meant that neither of the computers he designed were ever built. Whewell learned to use his fists as a poor boy at grammar school; later he rode horses 'hard' and was eventually killed by a truculent steed. Herschel was sweet-natured.
The insistence on induction (or rather, like Bacon, they believed that science should proceed not like a spider, who in an analogy with deduction, spins webs from a single thread, nor like an inductive any who piles up leaves, but like a honey bee who gathers nectar and then transform it to honey) led them to react against Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in which he tries to devise Economics from first principles, like Cartesian science or Euclidean geometry. They also recommended, following Bacon again, that scientists should seek out "crucial experiments that could definitively decide between two rival theories" (p114). Jones's analysis of Economics also refuted the population trap of Malthus.
A lot of what they did prepared the ground for Darwinian evolution (Whewell was very worried by the possibility that evolution would damage religion but when the Origin of Species was published he recognised the strength of its arguments and kept quiet unlike many less cautious contemporaries). For example, Babbage used a feedback mechanism on a working model of his Difference Engine to show to an audience that included Darwin how a mathematical rule could be automatically modified by the machine. He then suggested that by analogy the Creator could have designed the world such that species evolved rather than having to intervene whenever he wanted a new species.
Whewell also dabbled in architecture, explaining that the crucial feature of the Gothic style was not the pointed arch which had been suggested a priori but, through an inductive look at the evidence, that churches aimed for vertical spaces rather than horizontal spaces thus requiring mechanisms such as the pointed arch.
Whewell also introduced the concept of consilience. For Whewell, what made Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation so strong was not just that it had predictive ability (for example in predicting the existence of Neptune), although that was important, but that it unified a number of diverse fields, in Newton's terms terrestrial dynamics and celestial dynamics. After Whewell's death one of his students, a lad called James Clerk Maxwell, unified Optics and Electromagnetism in an even greater act of consilience. This section leads to a bit of a howler when Snyder states that Maxwell calculated the speed of electromagnetic radiation to be 310,740,000 miles per second when she means metres per second!
This review gives a small flavour of the many fields that these great but rather too little known scientists illuminated.
This is a fantastic book, incredibly readable and so interesting. June 2013; 368 pages
More works on the history of science and scientific biographies can be found here.
Tuesday, 28 May 2013
"The Deer Park" by Norman Mailer
Mailer's best known work is The Naked and the Dead; he writes in the American tradition of macho Hemingway but without Hemingway's concise brutality.
In the Southern California resort town on Desert D'Or a crowd of Hollywood actors and actresses, directors, producers and other assorted hangers-on gather to party, do business, back-bite and swap partners. Film director Charles Eitel's career is on hold: he has been blacklisted for refusing to testify to the Committee for Subversive Activities. Ex-USAF fighter pilot and wannabe writer Sergius is determinedly blowing the $14,000 he won in a poker game. Eitel is having an affair with Elena, Producer Collie's ex-mistress, while Sergius is sleeping with Lulu, starlet and Eitel's ex-wife, who secretly marries Tony despite the fact that the Studio want her to marry gay co-star Teddy. Marion Faye, pimp, crops up from time to time.
When it was published in 1957 the slightly coy descriptions of sex (and the endless permutations of who slept with whom) led to the book being branded as shocking, filthy, degrading and perverted. Nearly sixty years later that aspect has no more power to shock. Without it the book is a somewhat rambling account of a set of rather selfish and self-justifying characters, most of whom have the leisure to sit around analysing themselves all day and party all night because they don't need to work, interspersed with some long speeches containing cod philosophy. And, because it is really difficult to care about these characters, it is difficult to commit oneself to the novel.
"When The Deer Park was first published," the blurb on the back says, "it was both hailed as a work of genius and condemned as depraved." Seen from the perspective of time it is neither. May 2013; 363 pages
In the Southern California resort town on Desert D'Or a crowd of Hollywood actors and actresses, directors, producers and other assorted hangers-on gather to party, do business, back-bite and swap partners. Film director Charles Eitel's career is on hold: he has been blacklisted for refusing to testify to the Committee for Subversive Activities. Ex-USAF fighter pilot and wannabe writer Sergius is determinedly blowing the $14,000 he won in a poker game. Eitel is having an affair with Elena, Producer Collie's ex-mistress, while Sergius is sleeping with Lulu, starlet and Eitel's ex-wife, who secretly marries Tony despite the fact that the Studio want her to marry gay co-star Teddy. Marion Faye, pimp, crops up from time to time.
When it was published in 1957 the slightly coy descriptions of sex (and the endless permutations of who slept with whom) led to the book being branded as shocking, filthy, degrading and perverted. Nearly sixty years later that aspect has no more power to shock. Without it the book is a somewhat rambling account of a set of rather selfish and self-justifying characters, most of whom have the leisure to sit around analysing themselves all day and party all night because they don't need to work, interspersed with some long speeches containing cod philosophy. And, because it is really difficult to care about these characters, it is difficult to commit oneself to the novel.
"When The Deer Park was first published," the blurb on the back says, "it was both hailed as a work of genius and condemned as depraved." Seen from the perspective of time it is neither. May 2013; 363 pages
Wednesday, 22 May 2013
"Charles Dickens, a life" by Claire Tomalin
This is a full scale biography of Dickens, warts and all. As well as the traditional story of his rise from rags to riches, from working in the blacking factory with a father imprisoned for debt, ashamed, his intelligence and ambition seemingly frustrated, to national institution, Tomalin shows how his boundless drive led him to dominate his family, to destroy his marriage and tempted him into bitter enmities with those he once had loved.
It is also the story of his books. He published serials, often writing the next installment only days before the deadline, sometimes writing two at once. Because of this he could not reflect upon the work and revise it. He was stuck with where he'd got to. Perhaps because of this, each book is flawed. His plots are (necessarily because of the need to keep people purchasing the next installment) very complicated and usually flawed. Most of them veer close to melodrama. When he is sentimental he can go over the top, certainly by the standards of today but even for some of the contemporary critics.His characters are often caricatures. But his energy is overpowering and the wonderful grotesques and the sense of place and the comic dialogue and the rampant fight for the common man. As Tomalin points out, he writes about ordinary people as if they are important. Dwarfs and cripples are not always villains; villains are often villains for a reason. Although no book is unflawed and his heroines are often soppy, every book has moments of brilliance.
Unlike many of his contemporary authors, such as Wilkie Collins who kept two mistresses by one of whom he fathered children but who never married, Dickens attempted respectability. It was only after his poor wife, never really loved and grown enormous after ten pregnancies, was ditched in favour of Ellen Ternan that Dickens flouted convention and even then he kept Nelly hidden and secret and was never open about her. Even in the famous railway disaster when he was travelling with Nelly and her mum (back from the continent where Nelly had given birth to and lost his child) Dickens ensured that they were away from the scene before rendering the help for which he took a hero's credit.
But Dickens was remarkable simply because of his industry. A monthly novel required him to write 7,500 words each month. Some novels, such as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, overlapped so he was writing 15,000 words per month then. He also did journalism, edited magazines and read aloud on public tours. He worked because he was so afraid of poverty: these were the days before and social welfare safety net. Later, when he had enough money for himself, he wrote because he needed to pay for an ever-larger army of dependents, from his extravagant father to his feckless sons, his unmarried daughters, his brothers and sisters and their broods once orphaned, his mistress and her family etc. At the same time he organised charitable funds for friends and acquaintances who had fallen upon hard times. He was a driven whirlwind.
This book pays a remarkable tribute to a remarkable man. May 2013; 417 pages.
It is also the story of his books. He published serials, often writing the next installment only days before the deadline, sometimes writing two at once. Because of this he could not reflect upon the work and revise it. He was stuck with where he'd got to. Perhaps because of this, each book is flawed. His plots are (necessarily because of the need to keep people purchasing the next installment) very complicated and usually flawed. Most of them veer close to melodrama. When he is sentimental he can go over the top, certainly by the standards of today but even for some of the contemporary critics.His characters are often caricatures. But his energy is overpowering and the wonderful grotesques and the sense of place and the comic dialogue and the rampant fight for the common man. As Tomalin points out, he writes about ordinary people as if they are important. Dwarfs and cripples are not always villains; villains are often villains for a reason. Although no book is unflawed and his heroines are often soppy, every book has moments of brilliance.
Unlike many of his contemporary authors, such as Wilkie Collins who kept two mistresses by one of whom he fathered children but who never married, Dickens attempted respectability. It was only after his poor wife, never really loved and grown enormous after ten pregnancies, was ditched in favour of Ellen Ternan that Dickens flouted convention and even then he kept Nelly hidden and secret and was never open about her. Even in the famous railway disaster when he was travelling with Nelly and her mum (back from the continent where Nelly had given birth to and lost his child) Dickens ensured that they were away from the scene before rendering the help for which he took a hero's credit.
But Dickens was remarkable simply because of his industry. A monthly novel required him to write 7,500 words each month. Some novels, such as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, overlapped so he was writing 15,000 words per month then. He also did journalism, edited magazines and read aloud on public tours. He worked because he was so afraid of poverty: these were the days before and social welfare safety net. Later, when he had enough money for himself, he wrote because he needed to pay for an ever-larger army of dependents, from his extravagant father to his feckless sons, his unmarried daughters, his brothers and sisters and their broods once orphaned, his mistress and her family etc. At the same time he organised charitable funds for friends and acquaintances who had fallen upon hard times. He was a driven whirlwind.
This book pays a remarkable tribute to a remarkable man. May 2013; 417 pages.
Thursday, 16 May 2013
"The secret rooms" by Catherine Bailey
In 1940, John, 9th Duke of Rutland, died alone in a draughty room off the servants' quarters of Belvoir Castle, a room in which he had lived and worked alone, more or less continuously, for two years. The rooms were then sealed for sixty years.
When Catherine Bailey gained access to them, to work on a history of the First World War, she discovered that John had been assembling, or perhaps dissembling, the family archives. Here were copies of all their letters. Except there were three missing periods within the records. From the evidence of the butterfly clips that held packets of letters together, the evidence for these periods had been removed by John, while he was compiling the archives.
The first relates to a time when John was eight and his elder brother died.
The second relates to 1909, when John was a reluctant diplomat in Rome.
The third relates to a period between July and December 1915 when John was in the British Army during the First World War. The third missing period corresponds exactly to the time when John's war diary suddenly goes blank.
What were the secrets hidden by the missing evidence? Were they all linked?
The start of this book reads like the most exciting thriller, perhaps a classic Robert Goddard such as Long time coming or Blood count. I am a fan of this genre. Bailey adds neat touches: she jumps around in time between the story of John and the story of her researches; her prose is sparse and matter-of-fact as if the mystery is quite the opposite; there is the wonderful moment when she leaves the allegedly haunted room in which the Duke died in search of a coffee, only to be surprised by a woman "in her early seventies and dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century parlour maid."
I could scarcely read this book fast enough. However, as we approach the end the story is marred by the endless quotations from family letters. Most of these letters help to add a little extra to the puzzle but they also contain many trivial details that are not necessary. In short, she could have shortened it.
And in the end, not all the details are resolved. Thus is real life unlike a thriller but it is unsatisfactory although it gives one the sense of enduring mystery and the hope that someone one day might resolve the remaining puzzles.
Nevertheless, this was a cracking read. May 2013; 425 pages
When Catherine Bailey gained access to them, to work on a history of the First World War, she discovered that John had been assembling, or perhaps dissembling, the family archives. Here were copies of all their letters. Except there were three missing periods within the records. From the evidence of the butterfly clips that held packets of letters together, the evidence for these periods had been removed by John, while he was compiling the archives.
The first relates to a time when John was eight and his elder brother died.
The second relates to 1909, when John was a reluctant diplomat in Rome.
The third relates to a period between July and December 1915 when John was in the British Army during the First World War. The third missing period corresponds exactly to the time when John's war diary suddenly goes blank.
What were the secrets hidden by the missing evidence? Were they all linked?
The start of this book reads like the most exciting thriller, perhaps a classic Robert Goddard such as Long time coming or Blood count. I am a fan of this genre. Bailey adds neat touches: she jumps around in time between the story of John and the story of her researches; her prose is sparse and matter-of-fact as if the mystery is quite the opposite; there is the wonderful moment when she leaves the allegedly haunted room in which the Duke died in search of a coffee, only to be surprised by a woman "in her early seventies and dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century parlour maid."
I could scarcely read this book fast enough. However, as we approach the end the story is marred by the endless quotations from family letters. Most of these letters help to add a little extra to the puzzle but they also contain many trivial details that are not necessary. In short, she could have shortened it.
And in the end, not all the details are resolved. Thus is real life unlike a thriller but it is unsatisfactory although it gives one the sense of enduring mystery and the hope that someone one day might resolve the remaining puzzles.
Nevertheless, this was a cracking read. May 2013; 425 pages
Monday, 13 May 2013
"Wilkie Collins" by Peter Ackroyd
A brilliant bijou biography of the man who wrote The Moonstone and The Woman in White.
The brilliant and prolific Ackroyd charts the life of a man who should be better known. Wilkie Collins was the son of the painter William Collins and knew John Millais and Holman Hunt. Later he came to know and work with Charles Dickens. Short and ugly he nevertheless enjoyed the love of a good woman, or a bad woman if possible. Although he never married he kept two mistresses (they seem to have got on with one another), by one of whom he had three children. This was in perfect defiance of all the laws of Victorian society. He suffered throughout his life from gout or maybe rheumatism or maybe both.
He adored sensational and labyrinthine plots; his work is full of mistaken and assumed identities, murders and suicides, mysterious goings on and strong-minded women. In The Moonstone he more or less assembled all the classic elements of detective fiction for the first time: a country house; a list of suspects, all of whom are considered; a clever detective and an inefficient and bumbling local force; the crime solved by an amateur in a "dramatic reconstruction of the events of the fatal night". The novel also tells the story from a multiple first-person perspective.
If he is not so popular now it is because of his love for melodrama. This showed particularly in his work for the stage. His melodramas must have been strong even for the time: two of his works were laughed off the stage.
He was typical work horse of a Victorian novelist. He wrote for serials and had to keep up with the demands of the printer. He then adapted his work into full novels and as plays. The insufficient protection of copyright mean he had to keep going.
This is a brief introduction to an author who should enjoy wider fame. Ackroyd's spare narrative rather undermine the verbose stories of his subject. Nevertheless it is fun.
Easy to read and very interesting. May 2013; 183 pages.
Books by Peter Ackroyd reviewed in this blog:
Historical fiction
Biography
The brilliant and prolific Ackroyd charts the life of a man who should be better known. Wilkie Collins was the son of the painter William Collins and knew John Millais and Holman Hunt. Later he came to know and work with Charles Dickens. Short and ugly he nevertheless enjoyed the love of a good woman, or a bad woman if possible. Although he never married he kept two mistresses (they seem to have got on with one another), by one of whom he had three children. This was in perfect defiance of all the laws of Victorian society. He suffered throughout his life from gout or maybe rheumatism or maybe both.
He adored sensational and labyrinthine plots; his work is full of mistaken and assumed identities, murders and suicides, mysterious goings on and strong-minded women. In The Moonstone he more or less assembled all the classic elements of detective fiction for the first time: a country house; a list of suspects, all of whom are considered; a clever detective and an inefficient and bumbling local force; the crime solved by an amateur in a "dramatic reconstruction of the events of the fatal night". The novel also tells the story from a multiple first-person perspective.
If he is not so popular now it is because of his love for melodrama. This showed particularly in his work for the stage. His melodramas must have been strong even for the time: two of his works were laughed off the stage.
He was typical work horse of a Victorian novelist. He wrote for serials and had to keep up with the demands of the printer. He then adapted his work into full novels and as plays. The insufficient protection of copyright mean he had to keep going.
This is a brief introduction to an author who should enjoy wider fame. Ackroyd's spare narrative rather undermine the verbose stories of his subject. Nevertheless it is fun.
Easy to read and very interesting. May 2013; 183 pages.
Books by Peter Ackroyd reviewed in this blog:
Historical fiction
- The Clerkenwell Tales
- Chatterton
- The House of Doctor Dee
- The Lambs of London
- Milton in America
- The Fall of Troy
Biography
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