"The towers of Trebizond" by Rose Macauley

What a strange and delightful book, the winner of the James Tait Black memorial prize in 1956.

It is a novel though I thought it was a travel book and indeed it reads very much like one in that it meanders and there is no carefully constructed plot and there is no reason as far as I can tell why she first goes to Istanbul and then to Trabzon which is what the Turks call Trebizond which used to be the final outpost of the Byzantine Empire but is now a little fishing port and the citadel quite overgrown and then she travels deeper into Turkey near the Russian border and two of her companions cross the border ("crash the Curtain") so she is alone and running out of money so she goes down to Jerusalem and meets her mother (this is quite by chance) and then she comes to England once again and lives in London and then Oxford where she teaches a monkey to drive a car and then something awful happens and that is the end.

The whole thing is quite off the wall. Much of the travelling is done on camel-back. Aunt Dot is dotty and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg the highest of High Anglicans. There is a lot of religion in it. The narrator is a lapsed High Anglican ("the Church met its Waterloo ... when I took up with adultery") but she is obsessed by it and perhaps by her guilt at lapsing and her fear of Hell.

But the real beauty of the book is the interior monologue, which consists of long, meandering sentences. She chats of everything and anything that interests her (Circassian slaves are an obsession). And there are many nuggets of wisdom in her gushing thoughts:

• "I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one's country than one's county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one's continent, and best of all to love one's planet."
• "We all have our price ... but we don't all get it."
• Adultery is "a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of this meanness and this selfishness and this lying flow love and joy and peace, beyond anything that can be imagined."

Well I loved it. She rambles on about life and nothing really happens until the end and her sentences and long and her paragraphs longer but then that is the way with paragraphs and somehow you get a picture of beauty and a love of life: "After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times nobles and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again."

And you could say the same about this delightful book. 

Travelogue meets Tristram Shandy. October 2013; 222 pages

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

"A handful of dust" by Evelyn Waugh

Tony Last is the quintessential English squire. He lives for the family home, spending all he has to keep it going. He goes to church twice on Sundays and hosts the local hunt, although he does not ride himself. He enjoys his quiet life even though it bores his wife.

So Brenda starts an affair with the totally worthless John Beaver, a boy who lives with his mother and tries to persuade people to let him come to parties as an alternative to working; his mother arranges interior decorating  for her society friends for outrageous commissions. But Brenda becomes obsessed with Beaver.

Tony trusts her. When, in tragic circumstances, he discovers her betrayal (this is about the middle of the book), he seeks to arrange an honourable divorce but she tries to double-cross him seeking outrageous alimony and he decides instead to go abroad. He goes on an expedition into the Amazon jungle in search of a lost city (I was irresistibly reminded of the 'Lost city of Z' which chronicles the obsession with Amazon exploration between the wars). Will he return?

This was an odd sort of book. It started as a typical Waugh comedy, poking fun at the manners of the upper classes. Half way through it lurches into tragedy as Waugh explores the consequences of Brenda's casual infidelity. Even then, as Tony seeks a divorce, we enjoy farce. The last section, exploring in Brazil, is no longer funny. Although the situation, and the people, are absurd and ridiculous, it is a life and death struggle and too sinister for Waugh's normal superficial touch.

In many ways this makes the book. The comedy is witty but insubstantial but Waugh is able to handle the horror behind the clown's mask. His characterisation of a father reacting to the death of his son, whilst in one sense poking fun at the British stiff upper lip, is sensitive and beautifully drawn. There are some marvellous descriptions ("He was prematurely, unnaturally stout, and he carried his burden of flesh as though he were not yet used to it; as though it had been buckled on to him that morning for the first time and he were still experimenting for its better adjustment"). It is slightly marred by racism ("This place stinks of Yids, said Baby" and later descriptions of niggers). But generally this is a great and well-written story.

September 2013; 221 pages

"Stamboul Train" by Graham Greene

This is one of Greene's 'entertainments'; he did not consider it worthy of the title of novel.

It is based around a journey on the Orient Express from Ostend to Constantinople. Carleton Myatt is a Jew who trades in currants; he is travelling to explore a proposed takeover of another firm. He meets Coral Musker, a dancer. Also on the train is the mysterious Doctor John who, though a doctor, is not what he seems.

At Cologne the train is joined by lesbian reporter Mabel Warren and her 'companion' Janet Pardoe. Miss Warren recognises Doctor John for what he is. A criminal on the run joins in Vienna. As the train travels into the Balkans a rebellion erupts with tragic consequences.

These characters are thrown together by chance for the journey. The plot brilliantly shows how they weave together and then untangle, although a knot or two are left. For the most part things are unresolved as they are in life: we rarely know what happens to those people that we meet in the course of our life.

Is it a thriller? It has all the characteristics of one but the quality of the prose life it head, shoulders, chest and waist above the normal thriller. Greene creates real characters with hopes and fears and purpose and pointlessness. His settings are luxuriously described: "small flakes of snow were falling; they were blown against the windows like steam." Even the action scenes are vividly described; even the minor characters have quirks and peculiarities and, in particular, inconsistencies that put flesh on their bones. This is writing of the highest order.

At the outset, I was slightly alienated because it is so very clearly of its time. Like many writers of the period, Greene assumes that physical characteristics encapsulate character. One person has fingers that show no "sign of acute sensibility. They were short, blunt and thick." This leads Greene on to what would now be regarded as racism. When one character asks "'ow did you know I was English?" the other replies that he is "always thinking the best of people." More seriously, the character of the Jew is portrayed as extremely mercenary and cunning; the predatory lesbian is ugly, cruel and mannish. And yet, Greene seems fully aware of the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe that would, within months of publication, become a serous problem (the book was published in 1932; Nazi Germany's first laws persecuting Jews were enacted in 1933.) Myatt the Jew is a real human being whom we understand, though he is flawed. The lesbian report Miss Warren is more of a stock villain. In this, Greene reminds me of Shakespeare who could create the villain Shylock whilst still evoking sympathy for him.

This is a very good book indeed. September 2013; 216 pages

More Greene: if you liked Stamboul Train you will like The Ministry of Fear and you will love A Gun for Sale.

"Berlin" by Antony Beevor

This book recounts the final months of the Nazi regime. It starts in January 1945 when the Soviet forces invade Eastern Prussia and cross the Vistula to liberate the rest of Poland. It finishes when Berlin is captured and the Germans surrender.

It is compelling reading. Although I found it very difficult to keep track of which army was attacking where and who was defending against whom (and the maps at the front are frankly inadequate) one cannot miss the broad sweep of the narrative. Using individual and eye-witness accounts, Beevor touches the human horror of war and then multiplies it into an utterly shocking yet believable narrative. This we go from individual accounts of gang rape into the realisation that a staggering 100,000 German women are estimated to have been exposed to these awful experiences. He describes the confusion of troops attacking through forests and he emphasises the futility of sending scarcely pubescent boys into battle. There are scenes of hell as mis-thrown grenades blow a feet off and moments of utter weariness as shell-shocked and exhausted soldiers stumble through mud, falling in front of and being crushed by tanks. There are scarcely credible accounts of women queuing for water: when a shell kills some the others just close ranks a little closer to the front of the queue. There are also moments of pathos: the eighteen year old broadcaster announcing that the Fuhrer is dead in the last broadcast before the aerial is destroyed and others who tried to continue with normal life as bombs exploded around them.

Why did the Nazis fight on? They were massively outnumbered by an a]enemy whose equipment and supplies were better in every way. Often they had insufficient ammunition. They threw into the battle inexperienced and unfit soldiers, often armed with antiquated and useless weapons. They must have known that they were going to lose. At then end they were fighting from building to building and they were dying for no purpose. Why did they not surrender sooner?

Beevor believes that the Battle for Berlin reveals "the incompetence, the frenzied refusal to accept reality and the inhumanity of the Nazi regime." It is difficult to insert a cigarette paper between the inhumanity of Hitler and that of Stalin but these inhumanities often went right down the line to each general who attacked when he knew he would lose many, many men. What doomed the Nazis was probably their incompetence. It seems difficult to brand a regime that ran Germany so successfully for five peaceful years as incompetent but it is difficult to understand how any system that deliberately set up duplicate bureaucracies so that they could compete with one another can possibly be competent. The leadership fought one another at every opportunity, even while hiding in a bunker.

The Nazis were massively inefficient in almost every way. They were especially wasteful of human talent. But they never had anything like the resource potential of the USSR. Invading Soviet Russia and declaring war on the USA were mistakes born of monstrous vanity. And Beevor suggests that the tragedy of fighting to the bitter end had its genesis in Hitler's  own vanity. He had no future after the war and he refused to consider the possibility that other people might be better off without him. He delayed his suicide until Berlin was destroyed and Germany devastated.

The Nazi leadership would have been laughable if they had not been so wicked and if they had not caused so much suffering to so many people.

One of the refreshing things about Beevor's book is how he is able to step aside from the faux objectivity of the scholarly historian and condemn wickedness and stupidity when it occurs. He highlights the moral deficiencies of the Nazi regime and many of those who followed them, even if they claimed to be ordinary soldiers or civilians following orders. "The Third Reich, in its death throes, revealed its frenzied rage against both common sense and common humanity."

This is a terrible tale in many ways. At the same time it makes gripping reading. Beevor's narrative, though confusing at times, has moments of genius. In the end it reassures. The Third Reich could not have survived because hatred is doomed to destroy itself. To build you need cooperation, you need to share, and you need trust.

Harrowing but brilliant. September 2013; 431 pages.

Books about war in this blog can be found on this page.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"A canticle for Liebowitz" by Walter M Miller Jr

Another 'classic' sci fi novel but very different from The man in the high castle by Philip K Dick.

It follows the fortunes of a monastery devoted to preserving knowledge in the lattermath of a nuclear holocaust. It is divided into three periods, each several centuries apart. In the first, a fasting novice called Francis is guided by a mysterious desert wanderer to discover a fallout shelter which may contain relics of the life of the Blessed Liebowitz, an engineer before the holocaust to whom the novice's monastic order is dedicated. The knowledge in the world is similar to the scholaticism of our mediaeval period (although God's Philosophers might disputer this). In the second segment, which explores the moment when science's renaissance clashes with some in the church and when nation states begin to re-emerge, a brilliant scientist comes to the monastery and deplores the fact that the ancient texts are not more available. The abbot chats with the wanderer. The third segment is set as the world trembles upon the brink of a second nuclear war: will the princes be so foolish or so evil as to repeat Armageddon, especially as they cannot escape seeing the mutant inheritance of the first 'Flame Deluge'?

This was so much better written than the Dick book. Firstly, the author spent very little time explaining the basis for his imagined world: the necessary details emerged for the normal interactions of characters with the plot. Secondly, the plot was about the interactions of the characters and they interacted as humans always have and always will interact despite the strangeness of the setting. Thirdly, the characters were well drawn. The three abbots were all recognisable and recognisably different. Others range from a delightfully wimpish Brother Francis whom circumstances forged into well-tempered steel, a viciously iconoclastic Poet, and a Doctor who has to find a way to excuse euthanasia. There is a great deal of humour. The reader is allowed to puzzle through some of the mysteries at the start even though their solutions may occur centuries afterwards.

There is also a great deal of discussion of really profound issues:

"Wise fool!" mimicked the hermit. "But you always did specialise in paradox and mystery, didn't you, [abbot] Paulo? If a thing can't be in contradiction to itself, then it doesn't even interest you, does it? You have to find Threeness in Unity, life in death, wisdom in folly."

This was a light, enjoyable, fun read which restored my faith in science fiction. The best sci fi is real human interactions in an alien world.

September 2013; 356 pages.

"The man in the high castle" by Philip K Dick

Nazi Germany and Japan won the Second World War. The USA is divided into three: the west coast a puppet state controlled by the Japanese, the east coast a Nazi dominion and a central buffer zone. (One's first impression is that the buffer zone is poor and down at heel but later in the novel it appears quite affluent and it is difficult to understand why all the miserable people in the West don't move to it.) Most of the action takes place in San Francisco. The characters are all interconnected although Juliana never meets any of the others (she was once married to Frank).

A book has been published in this dystopian world which explores the what-if future had the Allies won WWII. This book is subversive (banned in Nazi controlled areas) but a cult classic. Perhaps one of the themes of this book is an exploration of what is reality (later another character is transported into a different reality San Francisco).

The Bible in San Francisco, however, is the I Ching. A number of the characters base the decisions they make in their lives on their interpretations of the commentaries on the patterns they obtain by throwing coins, or yarrow stalks. Again, Dick seems to be suggesting that there are multiple different future realities and they can be accessed by the random tossing of coins or yarrow stalks. Perhaps here he is exploring the Many Worlds hypothesis of quantum physics.

A third theme is racism. The Nazis have exterminated the Jews and most of the blacks in Africa. In San Francisco, the whites feel inadequate compared the the Japanese although they try to copy their behaviour and their I Ching and they even think like Japanese: their interior monologues are stilted and light on articles to sound more like Japanese speech: eg, "Stupid inability on their part to grasp alien tongue .... But such is way it goes." But this sometimes got in the way of the fluent reading of the book.

I was a bit ambivalent about the racism because I felt that Dick was not above racist stereotyping. There are times when you might feel his racism is ironic, such as when he describes Jews ("ugly. Large pores. Big nose.") and "drunken, dull-witted poles". But the Nazis are the baddies and there is no irony evident when "He felt, strongly, for a moment, the unbalanced quality, the psychotic streak, in the German mind." Not just Nazi mind but German mind.

I was not very happy with the use of interior monologue. There were a lot of occasions when you were told what the character was thinking, sometimes almost as in a rather stilted and jerky stream of consciousness, rather than deducing their thoughts from their dialogue and their actions. Perhaps because of this, I found many of the characters flat.

One of the problems with the genre is that Dick needs to spend a lot of time explaining the background. There are a lot of details; for example. we learn that Hitler went insane, that Roosevelt was assassinated, that Churchill lost power after the Nazis captured Malta. Many of these details are irrelevant. Had Dick sketched out a few broad outlines, the reader would have been happy filling the rest of the detail in themselves.

The plot bumps along but nothing is properly resolved. Presumably Dick was deliberately leaving the ending open so that every reader could consult the I Ching and construct their own version of the future.

I don't think this is written well. For it to be a Penguin Modern Classic astounds me. To call it "one of the very best science fiction novels ever published" is ridiculous: War of the Worlds, Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dhalgren, Never Let Me Go, Brave New World, 1984, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea are just a few of the books that knock Dick's into a cocked hat.

Unsatisfying. September 2013; 249 pages

Also written by Philip K Dick and reviewed in this blog:

• Minority Report (a collection of short stories)

Other books with Castle in the title include:

• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
• The Castle by Franz Kafka
• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• I'm the King of the Castle by Susan Hill
• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
• The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton
• Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgworth
• Hatter's Castle by A J Cronin
• In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner (literary criticism)

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

"Waiting for sunrise" by William Boyd

I have never read William Boyd before and somehow in my mind I had confused him with Wilbur Smith. This was unjust: Boyd is better.

Lysander Ulrich Rief is an English actor whose widowed mother married a lord; his dead father's brother is an explorer who has a VC. So he is an ordinary chap.  At the start of the novel he is waiting to see a psychoanalyst in Vienna in 1913. In the waiting room he meets a British diplomat who later recruits him as a spy and a drug addicted sculptress who later seduces him. An unlikely tale of espionage during the First World War unwinds.

My initial point of reference was Graham Greene who wrote thrillers (which he insisted were 'entertainments' rather than novels) such as Our Man in Havana) but I think that the psychological depth beneath Greene's entertainments is somewhat more profound than this work. I wondered whether it was like Robert Goddard but Goddard plots his historical thriller-mysteries much more tightly than this. Rather, this is a John Buchan-style book and Rief is a modern rewrite of a hero such as Richard Hannay.

It takes a long while to get going. For the first hundred pages, Rief consults his shrink, has a passionate affair, chats to a Slovene officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and wanders round Vienna (meeting Freud and, possibly, Hitler). The excitement starts on page 111; more than a quarter of the way through. Then it fizzles out again while Rief goes back to England, regenerates his acting career and meets some relatives. Another hundred pages pass before the spy story begins. It stops and starts and stops and starts. On the whole I felt the book would have benefited from some tight editing and I wondered whether Boyd's previous nine novels had persuaded his publishers rather to indulge him.

I also had a problem with the character. Apart from the fact that there is no-one normal, Why on earth would even the amateurish British intelligence of WWI ask Rief to spy for them? He can act, so he can go in disguise. He can speak German fairly fluently. He owes them (although they seem to have selected him and groomed him and put him into the position where he owes them). But as a spy he is pretty incompetent: one disguise offends his dress sense so he takes time off and goes out in different clothes; he tells his real name to the first real professional spy he meets; later he blurts out secret information.

At the end the story is resolved with lots of massive loose ends. I was expecting a really tight web of lies and deceit; in the end most of the possibilities were frittered away.

Boyd has a pleasant writing style. He swaps between narrators, starting and finishing the book in the second person, moving regularly from third person intimate to first person and breaking into play-script dialogue on a couple of occasions. He can draw a character with a few lines, although sometimes he does not go beyond this leaving a cartoon portrait. Some of his descriptions, particularly of colour, are good (though I don't think I have ever seen ox-blood). But these are not enough to lift the book into the literary fiction category.

In short, this fell for me between several stools. It didn't work as a thriller and it wasn't literary fiction. It was a pleasant story but it never rattled along and I found it difficult to suspend my doubts about the authenticity of the leading character. It entertained but it didn't excite, nor did it move me.

Light reading. September 2013; 429 pages

PS: Reading around the book:
Jill on GoodReads points out that Lysander is one of the mortal dupes in Midsummer Night's Dream and as such the "victim of misapplied magic". Possibly the whole book could be read as a comedy in which Lysander's true love is confused by his romantic liaison in the 'forest' of Vienna. But ultimately I think Tony Mac's review sums the book up.

William Boyd also wrote An Ice Cream War and Trio

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

"The Piano Tuner" by Daniel Mason

In 1887 Edgar Drake, a Londoner who tunes Erard grands, is recruited by the War Office to travel to the Burmese frontiers of the British Empire to tune a piano for Dr Anthony Carroll, a British Officer who commands a remote outpost.

Immediately one suspects parallels with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (the inspiration for the film Apocalypse Now). Is Carroll another Mr Kurtz, gone native and megalomaniac and perpetrating unspeakable evil on those he autocratically rules?

The journey to Burma is delightful. Drake, who has never left England before, travels by boat and train and pony, recording his impressions in letters to his much-loved wife. The descriptions are brilliant and bring an exotic flavour of the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the East. Drake loves Burma. He adores the hill-top village of Mae Lwin in the Shan Hills where the Doctor lives. The Doctor is very civilised and believes the music will bring peace to this troubled region; certainly the natives in the village are peaceful and happy and seem to adore the Doctor. Edgar falls in love with the people, the countryside, and especially Burman woman Khin Myo. He has tasted the lotus and stays longer than he should.

But there are darker undercurrents. The Shan princes have formed the Limbin Confederacy which may oppose British rule. Enigmatic dacoit warlord Twet Nga Lu lurks in the jungle, ready to pounce. Who attacked the village before Drake arrived? And where does the Doctor go on his many diplomatic missions?

This is a haunting and lyrical evocation of Burma. There are seductive descriptions of the beautiful sights of town and countryside. As a piano tuner, Drake is particularly sensitive to sound and the description of notes and tunes are wonderful and exotic. Mason uses a particularly interesting technique of reporting some dialogue as though it were stream of consciousness.

Beautiful magic. August 2013; 348 pages

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

"Spain 1469 - 1714" by Henry Kamen

Spain was unified under the joint monarchy of Ferdinand of Aragon and devout Isabel of Castille. Their rule was so unified that everything was officially done jointly, even if they were apart: one day it was reported that "the king and queen ... gave birth to a daughter". The secret of their monarchy was that they travelled ceaselessly: their mediaeval style of monarchy depended upon the visibility of the monarch(s). In their annus mirabilis of 1492 they completed the Christian reconquest of the peninsula by capturing Granada, they expelled the Jews, and Columbus discovered America on their behalf.

But their only surviving daughter, Juana, had married a Habsburg and was mentally unstable. On the death of her husband she went completely bonkers. So the throne passed to her 17 year old son Charles who was also Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Naples and the Netherlands. With Spanish America, Spain was now a super-power, although one whose empire was inherited rather than deserved. The heartland of Castille was simply not rich enough to sustain the imperial demands. Gold and Silver from the Americas helped Charles balance the books but a financial disaster was waiting to happen.

When Charles' son Philip (who had once been married to Mary of England) became king he immediately restructured his debts. Although he no longer ruled the Holy Roman Empire, which had been passed to Charles' brother, Philip still ruled the Netherlands which now revolted. The costs of fighting this rebellion spiralled. Despite adding Portugal to his realm (another dynastic inheritance although one he had t, briefly, fight for) Philip went bankrupt. More than once. The destruction of the Spanish Armada didn't help.

Financial instability continued under his heirs; the country continued to decline. The last Habsburg king was the victim of genetic in-breeding: his jaw protruded so much that he found it difficult to eat and he was probably infertile and possibly impotent. He had no legitimate heirs of his own body so he bequeathed the throne to the French Dauphin and so started the War of Spanish Succession. This ended with the loss of most of the rest of Spain's European possessions so the new Bourbon dynasty was able to concentrate on rebuilding the land.

Thus a patchwork of mediaeval states became an accidental empire which declined into a nation state. This fascinating tale rarely flags. There is so much of interest; much is relevant today. The concept of convivienza, for example, in which Spanish Moors and Jews coexisted with the Catholic population was replaced with the racist limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood); even converted Moslems and Jews were persecuted. The medieval monarchy was based upon personal rule but the Hapsburg Empire had to develop bureaucratic and ministerial rule. And a country receiving previously unheard of wealth from the New World plunged into debt and inflation.

A wonderful tale, well told. August 2013; 275 pages

"The Guardian" by Nicholas Sparks

Newly widowed Julie has to choose between sophisticated engineer Richard and late husband's best friend, grease monkey Mike. Singer, the dog bequeathed by the late husband, obviously prefers Mike to Richard and we all know dogs can't be wrong about things like that because they have instinct. Then on page 16 Julie thinks of Mike while showering: "Now there was a guy who would make some woman happy one day."

If you are going to use a cliché to signal your happy ending you might as well do it before too many pages have gone. You wouldn't want your readers to suffer suspense, would you?

Singer keeps growling at Richard and Julie begins to worry why she doesn't feel anything for him, despite his charm. Obviously he is bad news. Then on page 93 Richard asks Julie why she is not wearing a locket he has given her. He has a "plastic expression" but he suddenly "seemed to snap out of the spell he'd been under". He is clearly a classic weirdo.

Many authors would now play with your beliefs. They would offer alternative villains. They would suggest alternative reasons for Richard's behaviour. Richard might do something truly altruistic. Not Sparks. By page 140 Julie is in love with Mike (no surprises there), by page 177 we suspect Richard killed his father, on page 206 he beats up two kids with a baseball bat and then pretends they stabbed him so they go to jail instead of him.

The book then turns into a thriller powered by the fact that the police can't imagine that Richard might be using a false name or that he might have stolen a car.  One male police officer is so small town and stupid that he makes Amos from the Dukes of Hazard look like a Nobel Laureate.

To be fair, Sparks writes some great one liners and he has a nice turn with dialogue (when he skips the clichés). But the plot was unbelievably predictable and the characters either goodies or baddies with absolutely no shades of grey.

A light read. August 2013; 431 pages

"Thinking, fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman

This book is a sort of retrospective of the life's work of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics by replacing the rational agent of classical Economics with a real person.

It seeks to divide human thinking into two systems; there are three ways he does this. In part one he compares the fast, intuitive ways in which we think with the slow, effort-full, rational ways of thinking. Because rational thinking is hard work we lazt humans tend to default to intuition which makes us more gullible. In part two he compares the rational agent of Economics (the 'Econ') with Humans. Part three pits the present against the past and shows how what we remember about what we experienced is rarely the same as what we experience.

Kahneman recounts the hundreds of experiments he has conducted during his long career. Many of them offer profound insights into how humans operate. It is clear that if one wishes to improve communications, improve pedagogy, or manipulate people better, there are lessons to be learnt.

One little quibble: many of these experiments were conducted with someone called Amos. Because I had skipped the introduction (I often read introductions at the end because I believe that if a book is strong enough it should stand without the introduction) I did not know who he was talking about. It was Amos Tversky, a long time collaborator, now dead. In some ways this book is Kahneman's tribute to Mr Tversky.

One thing I loved was the evidence base. Many of these experiments prove counter-intuitive conclusions. This hammers home the fact that we are not who we think we are. This book has a massive evidence base for Kahneman's view of humans, in contrast to the scarcely visible evidence base of Roger Scruton's The Uses of Pessimism.

A lot of what Kahneman has to say I have encountered before, for example in Nudge which was written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunnstein, both former colleagues of Kahneman. For example, I knew about anchoring and that algorithms give better long-range forecasts than expert opinions. Nevertheless, this is a brilliant introduction to these ideas  if you are new to the topic and possibly the most comprehensive text I have encountered (but also try Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland). My only real quibble is that Kahneman does not go into sufficient detail about Bayes Theorem (for which you need The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver).

Not only is this a book full of fascinating ideas but it is also extrememly readable. August 2013; 418 pages.

"The uses of pessimism" by Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is a philosopher and a proponent of conservatism. Perhaps he is principally revered for his aesthetics: I can't comment on this. The present book is essentially philosophical and summarises some of the reasons why he so dislikes the opponents of conservatism.

This is the only Scruton book I have read so I can't generalise my comments but from my limited evidence it seems to me that this work is essentially reactive. He describes and attacks what he hates. He hates utopians and revolutionaries. Thus he attacks the French Revolutionaries and Mao.. In so doing it appears that he is guilty of the fallacy of the straw man. By attacking the worst excesses of his opponents, such as Hitler, terrorists and post-modern gobbledygookers, he seeks to undermine the moderates. But he doesn't seem to defend his own proposals.

However, my main concern with this book is that Scruton never provides any evidence for his assertions. He justifies nothing. For example, he supports 'free exchange' (free enterprise?) and the 'invisible hand' (Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market, one presumes) but he never defines these terms, he never provides any evidence as to why they are good (except that they are somehow opposed to what is bad and that they are 'traditional') and he certainly never explores the limitations of his ideas. He seems blind to the fact that the invisible hand of the markets does not always work perfectly, that theft and predation are a type of free enterprise; he seems blind to the fact that if 'America' does not enjoy global support there may be some reason other than the stupidity and wickedness of his opponents.

I came to Scruton from reading Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature and Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Both hammer home every point with evidence: Pinker usually uses 'real' statistical data and Kahneman usually employs evidence from psychological experiments. But Scruton's arguments against transhumanism, for example,  come from Huxley's Brave New World, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Capek's The Makropulos Case. These are all works of fiction. They may be dystopian visions but they are not hard evidence. Again, he suggests that we only need originality "when circumstances change" (p 21) but he gives no evidence for this assertion. I look at the evolving world and see that nature continually creates novelty even when circumstances stay the same. Evolution may be massively wasteful but at least it seems to work. I worry about a world where we can stagnate and yet believe we can turn on originality as needed. Please, Mr Scruton, give me some evidence for your point of view.

A lot of his arguments rest on rhetoric using boo-words to damn. He criticises "the worst kind of optimism" (p37); presumably the worst kind is necessarily bad just as the best kind of optimism is good. He criticises "unscrupulous optimists" (p38) (does he applaud scrupulous ones?) because they create "folly and wickedness" (p37) and fall into fallacies which leave them "forever in darkness". He certainly knows how to lay extreme language on thick. At the same time, apparently without the slightest concept that there might be a speck of wood in his own eye let alone a beam, he tells us that these unscrupulous optimists damn their critics as "not just mistaken ... but evil." (p38) Scruton, heal thyself!

On page 49 he contends, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, that "it is only in a society governed by the 'invisible hand' that true equality can be achieved: not an equality of property, influence or power, but an equality of recognition." Where is the evidence for the 'only'? Where is the evidence that 'equality of recognition' is the 'true equality'?

On page 50 he contends that we acquire freedom through "obedience" but he doesn't explain why or how and he doesn't explore whether it is possible to acquire freedom through any alternative method.

Again and again he builds a tower of conclusions, each one based on his own arguments and beliefs unsupported by external evidence. The result is a philosophical house of cards.

I was terribly disappointed by this book. Something is seriously wrong if this is the best philosophical justification that conservatism can muster. This book is little more than a list of unsupported assertions. The arguments lack evidence and lack depth. This book reads like the rant of a bar-room bigot seeking to convince by shouting reason down.

Embarrassingly weak. August 2013; 232 pages

"The Cleaner of Chartres" by Salley Vickers

I have already enjoyed Vickers' Miss Garnet's Angel (five out of five) and Mr Golightly's Holiday (4.5 out of 5); she is an excellent novelist with an unusually lyrical style and an interestingly religious perspective on the world.

In this book, Agnes cleans Chartres Cathedral and private homes for a variety of interesting characters. Her story is interwoven with flashbacks to her history: her foundling origin, her convent upbringing, her illegitimate child, her alleged crime and her stays in mental hospitals.

In the present a variety of individuals, from villainous Madame Beck to heroic Abbe Paul, interact with Agnes and with one another. The past haunts the present. The tragedy builds. Will the holy innocent become the sacrificial scapegoat?

If you have read Vickers before you will recognise themes and characters. As in Miss Garnet's Angel there is a good-looking young man on a scaffold restoring art. As in Mr Golightly's Holiday and Miss Garnett's Angel, religion is an important theme; people consider and reconsider the nature of their relationship with God. Organised religion gets a bad press: the convent probably does more harm than good and most of the priests and nuns question their vocation. Paganism comes out well: there was a Platonic school at Chartres and Agnes cleans the famous labyrinth.

Some characters develop and grow but others (the good Abbe and the villainous Madame Beck are the obvious) are stereotypes.

All in all, therefore, this book disappointed me a little; it seemed to be a reworking of ideas Vickers had already explored. Nevertheless, it is a good read; I finished it within a day. Most of all it retains flashes of the Vickers beauty: the luminous and numinous prose which makes one want to slow down to savour.

August 2013; 297 pages