"Of human bondage" by Somerset Maugham

This autobiographical novel was rated by Robert McCrum as 44th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time and by a BBC poll as the 77th best novel ever.

It starts with the death of Philip's mother, when Philip is nine and already fatherless, so that he has to go to his uncle the vicar of Blackstable to live with this shallow, selfish man and his doting, childless wife. Thence Philip, who has a club foot, goes to Tercanbury School, then to study in Heidelberg, to try his hand at accountancy in London, thence to study art in Paris and finally back to London to study medicine. Through all of this he is sustained by his very small inheritance and cheap living is the norm with poverty never far away but being in receipt of a private income he never actually has to work (until it all goes wrong).

This is a long book: 700 pages cover Philip's life from age 9 to age 30. It is wonderfully realistic, especially when Maugham gives up the rather transparent attempts to disguise Canterbury and Whitstable (Maugham's uncle was vicar of Whitstable). It goes into the prices of things in detail and trains and cabs and hop-picking and diseases and streets. But it's real joy lies in the characters.

Maugham spares nobody. Philip, his hero, is a rather weak and quixotic man. He repeatedly throws up opportunities because he is upset with someone or because he wishes to pursue unrealistic dreams. Above all, he is governed by love. Love makes him do bad or foolish things. Even at school, when he has a crush on another boy, rejection means that he cannot work and he turns against the school and so he must forgo the scholarship that would take him to Oxford; instead he drifts off to Heidelberg. When he returns he has a one-night stand with an older lady, despite the fact that he doesn't much fancy her; indeed he spends much time worrying about how ridiculous he will appear (shyness and the fear of humiliation, especially connected to his club foot, are repeated themes). As a result he treats the lady appallingly badly. Later, in London, in a tempestuous relationship with Mildred, it is his turn to suffer. Nevertheless, he doesn't learn and he goes on to treat another woman very badly. He is rather an unpleasant hero (there is one bit where, to ease his money troubles, he becomes obsessed with the death of his uncle and how much inheritance he will gain) and it is to Maugham's credit that I was rooting for Philip so strongly at the end, even though near-ruin didn't seem to make him any nicer.

The other characters are also flawed. For example (and this is nowhere near an exhaustive list!):

• Mildred is a liar who will do her best to take advantage of any man (and is taken advantage of in her turn); she has the snobbishness of a waitress and her favourite cry is that Philip is "a gentleman in every sense of the word". 
• Philip's uncle the vicar has arranged his life around himself and everyone else must fit in with this. He exploits his devoted wife (why she loves him is a mystery which Maugham does not try to analyse but explains simply as that mysterious bondage of love to which almost every character is in thrall). When Philip is on his beam ends the vicar refuses to lend him any money (his attitude is summed up by 'I told you so') and when Philip is summoned to his deathbed and has to leave paid employment to attend the vicar never enquires how Philip managed to survive in the intervening period. Despite preaching heaven he is terribly afraid of death.
• Hayward is one of a number of artistic temperaments who preach beauty but can never get around to doing the spade work that will lead them to create. When confronted by a scholar who questions some of his prejudices by Socratic dialectic he responds: "Of course the man's a pedant. He has no real feeling for beauty. Accuracy is the virtue of clerks."
• In contrast there is Miss Price who tries and tries and tries to paint but has no talent and cannot recognise the fact that she ought to just give up. She is a wonderfully rude woman.

This book teems with wonderful characters who are drawn with all their faults and weaknesses, their snobbishnesses, their touchinesses, their generosities and their rudenesses.  It is a masterpiece.

Selected quotes:

• "The summer came upon the country like a conqueror"
• "I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense."
• "Accuracy is the virtue of clerks."
• "Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. The only thing is to peg away."

This is a must-read, for all its size. March 2015; 700 pages

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

Novels and short-story collections (designated SS) by William Somerset Maugham

• Liza of Lambeth (1897)
• The Making of a Saint (1898)
• Orientations (SS, 1899)
• The Hero (1901)
• Mrs Craddock (1902)
• The Merry-Go-Round (1904)
• The Bishop's Apron (1906)
• The Explorer (1908)
• The Magician (1908)
• Of Human Bondage (1915)
• The Moon and Sixpence (1919)
• The Trembling of a Leaf (SS, 1921)
• The Painted Veil (1925)
• The Casuarina Tree (SS, 1926)
• Ashenden (SS, 1928)
• Cakes and Ale (1930)
• Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (SS, 1931)
• The Book Bag (SS, 1932)
• The Narrow Corner (1932)
• Ah King (SS, 1933)
• The Judgement Seat (SS, 1934)
• Cosmopolitans (SS, 1936)
• Theatre (1937)
• Christmas Holiday (1939)
• Princess September and the Nightingale (SS, 1939)
• The Mixture as Before (SS, 1940)
• Up at the Villa (1941)
• The Hour Before the Dawn (1942)
• The Unconquered (SS, 1944)
• The Razor's Edge (1944)
• Then and How (1946)
• Creatures of Circumstance (SS, 1947)
• Catalina (1948)
• Quartet (SS, 1948)
• Trio (SS, 1950)
• Encore (SS, 1951)

"Fuzzy thinking" by Bart Kosko

This book starts from the premise that things are rarely black and white; often they are shades of grey. Fifty? Therefore the logic that we use should reflect this. We have a logic based on bi-valence: true or false, yes or no, one or zero. Instead, Kosko proposes a multivalent logic in which truth could hold any value between zero and one. He insists that this is not a probabilistic view: he points out that a car parked 70% in one space and 30% in another does not have a 70% chance of being all in one space.

These are important ideas and this is an important book. What lets it down somewhat is the anger that Kosko feels for mathematicians and scientists and indeed anyone who disagrees with him and the insults he hurls at them. He treats maths and science as if they are not only wrong but, worse, run by incompetent charlatans who are well aware of the frauds they are perpetrating on the public. He is also rather too full of himself; he is an immodest messiah. He proposes a number of applications of fuzzy logic that he himself has developed; since this is an introduction to the subject they are not detailed and I would have appreciated a little more explanation here but then I am not a general reader (indeed, I was considering these issues in 1986 when working at Brunel University in Artificial Intelligence but at that time I did not know enough to be able to move forward past the problems). Unfortunately, many of his applications seem to involve digital computers which seem to give the last laugh to the world of bi-valence.

Despite these weaknesses, this book has many really critical ideas which I cannot do justice to in a review meant for a general reader. I shall be studying Fuzzy Thinking more carefully in a second reading. It was certainly an entertaining read and very well written and I am looking forward to understanding more of this field.

March 2015; 285 pages

"Elizabeth is missing" by Emma Healey

Maud is old and losing her memory. She lives alone with a carer to look after her in the mornings and a long-suffering (this is not how Maud sees it!) daughter Helen in the afternoons. Maud becomes convinced that her friend Elizabeth is missing. So Maud decides to investigate. But her investigation gets confused with her memories of when her sister Sukey went missing just after WWII, when Maud was still a child. So we have one investigation in which unreliable memories of long ago are mingled with the misunderstandings of a child and another in which the increasingly unreliable memories of the present colour the understandings of this old person.

It was beautifully written. It was highly evocative of the difficult times just after the second world war. Food and clothes rationing prevent a weary people having the good time they crave. People are damaged by death and prisoner of war camps and hasty marriages are regretted.

The slow progress of the disease wasting Maud's memory is also hauntingly chronicled. There are terrible moments when she wets herself and when she gets angry with her daughter and when she cannot remember her daughter's name. These mingle with moments of comedy: the care worker who is always telling her about old people being mugged and attacked and the wonderful moment when she tells her daughter about the dreadful woman who works for her and is so untidy (it is actually her own granddaughter but she has forgotten Katy). And there are the heart-warming moments such as when Katy finds her in the street and takes her out of the rain (Maud has an umbrella but can neither remember what it is called no what to do with it) into a coffee bar but Maud can't manage the big cup so Katy gets an espresso cup and pours the coffee into that a bit at a time making Maud feel not clumsy but that her hands are too delicate for the big cup.

Both stories are woven together carefully. A lot of the extraneous characters are stripped away. We learn almost nothing about Maud's husband Patrick who is dead and we never find out at all about Katy's father, presumably the husband that Maud's daughter Helen had at one time. But those who are important to the story are lovingly created.

This is a terrible book if, like me, you have an elderly relative who is becoming increasingly forgetful and therefore increasingly vulnerable. But it is winderfully written.

March 2015; 275 pages

"Octavia; Daughter of God" by Jane Shaw

Shortly after the First World War, Mabel Barltrop, the widow of a vicar, who had already spent two periods in lunatic asylums because of her mental illness, discovered the writings of eighteenth century prophetess Joanna Southcott. She set up the Panacea Society in Albany Road in Bedford, UK. Quickly, the Society decided that Mabel was Octavia, daughter of God, and that Bedford was the site of the Garden of Eden. Octavia spoke with God every evening and passed on God's messages at the Society's evening worship. Another member who went into trances began to speak as the Divine Mother and it was discovered that Mabel's dead husband had been Jesus, come back to Earth. The practices of the community involved confessing one's sins (this gave the Divine Mother a significant psychological hold over members), and 'overcoming' the self; the reward was literal immortality. Octavia began to breath on small squares of linen. When these were infused in water, the water could heal every disease (hence Panacea) and water sprinkled around a building would protect it, even from bomb damage. The community grew to house seventy resident members, more who were 'sealed' (who would form the nucleus of the 144,000 who would survive the end of times) and the linen squares were requested by over 130,000 people world wide (especially in countries where healthcare was expensive). It survived the death of many members (so much for immortality) including Octavia herself, but has probably died out now. Nevertheless, the buildings still remain, including Octavia's own house where her bedroom is preserved for the return of her body (from Uranus), the Ark which has a cradle ready for the return of Jesus himself, and Castleside (which was once a Bedford School boarding house) which was fitted out so that the 24 Bishops of the Church of England could gather for the opening of Joanna Southcott's sealed Box of prophecies.

Incredible nonsense! It is difficult to understand how so many people could be so needy and gullible as to believe such rubbish and to submit themselves to total obedience to a pair of women who were either mad or charlatans.

This book focuses on the activities of the Society in its heyday, from origination to the death of Octavia. Even in this short time (1919 - 1934) a lot happened. Some of it is rather tedious: lengthy theological disputes motivated essentially by Octavia's right wing politics and Edwardian snobbishness. Some of it is racy: the introduction of Edgar Peissart in 1922 led to the development of a gay sex ring amongst some of the male resident members (in a community devoted to chastity); when this was discovered and one member of the community was forced to kneel and confess he noticed a knife and "thought he was about to be sacrificed"! The community also tried to persuade non-resident members (usually post-menopausal women) to give up 'sex-relations'.

There are some very sad stories. Dilys, Octavia's daughter, tried to break away but ended up, after some periods of mental illness, living, unmarried, in the community for the rest of her life, often lonely because most of the residents were older women. Poor people were only allowed to become residents if they worked for the community, usually as exploited domestic servants. Olivia's two surviving boys kept as far away from Bedford as possible, mostly living abroad, embarrassed by their mother and her claim that they were the sons of Jesus. And there is a sense of sadness about the whole thing: most of the residents were lonely or vulnerable in some way.

The book was compelling to me because I live in Bedford, a few streets away from The Ark, and Castleside, and the other Panacea properties. The idea that Bedford might be the New Jerusalem is both bizarre and (given the millennia of strife over the old Jerusalem) scary. The idea that people might imbue everyday ordinary Bedford with such daft beliefs is staggeringly weird.

In the end, I don't think I really understood why anybody believed in Octavia (let alone the Divine Mother!) They were promised immortality of the body but people still died. If they were old and lonely the community was a sort of rest home. But they were expected to give up very natural human things like sex and to deny themselves and to be totally obedient to two women whom they lived with everyday. Charisma can only take you so far. I just cannot imagine accepting some of these outlandish beliefs: Mabel is a prophetess, her dead husband was Jesus, Bedford is the Garden of Eden, Jesus will return to Earth here.

A usually interesting read. March 2015; 334 pages

"The Symposium" by Plato

This is a tale within a tale within a tale. Appolodorus tells his unnamed friend about a drinking party attended by Socrates; Applodorus wasn't at it but he has been told the tale by someone else.

It is a group of Athenian friends (including Aristophanes). After the banquet they send the flute girl away and entertain one another, at the insistence of Phaedrus, by talking about love. This being Athens they are mainly chatting about the love of an older man for a beautiful boy.

This being a drinking party, inevitably one of them gets hiccoughs and several offer remedies (sniffing snuff and sneezing was a new one to me!

Socrates weighs in last, pretending to be intimidated by the wonderful rhetoric that he has heard. He is an old fraud. He always pretends to be so humble and then demolishes the arguments of his friends. But he the sort of Cartesian philosopher who smashes down every assertion made by someone else until you are convinced that everything they have said is wrong. He then proposes his own solution and it is just as opinionated and just as ridiculous as the arguments he has destroyed but by this time everyone is reeling from his attack so no one is able to say: hang on a bit there Socrates. They call it Socratic dialogue but just like the dialogues of Galileo, the author tilts the scales.

Then Alcibiades gatecrashes the party, already drunk. He too talks of love. He says how much he loves Socrates, despite Socrates being so ugly. Alcibiades was famous as a beautiful youth and he recounts a situation in which he tried to tempt Socrates into having sex with him by manipulating things so that they slept together. But Socrates had more self control and this has rather piqued the formerly irresistible Alcibiades.

So the book ends as a hymn of praise to Socrates. Plato was besotted with this bloke, wasn't he!

Then another guest gatecrashes and everyone gets drunk.

Hiccoughs, drunkenness and gay love; not really what I expected from Plato.

March 2015; 114 pages

"The Ancient Paths" by Graham Robb

This is one of those books that uncovers ancient mysteries .

Before the Romans came the Celts. They were a migratory people who lived in tribes. Their heartland was Gaul although there were lots of them in Britain and Spain and Northern Italy and Eastern Europe but they definitely weren't the Germanic tribes. The Romans portray the Celts as being barbaric (and the human sacrifice bit of their religions is a little uncomfortable) but they had roads and chariots and metalwork and jewellery and clearly a reasonably coherent society.

So far so good.

They built long roads that were aligned with lines of longitude and latitude and along the directions of the summer and winter solstices. These roads were immensely long but incredibly precise. They built sacred centres, many of which later became centres of population all along these roads but particularly where two roads crossed. These crossings had such sacred significance that when they came to do battle with the Romans they insisted on battling them on sacred sites despite sacrificing many advantages. Presumably they thought that the immense advantage of having god on your side would do the trick. They were wrong. They lost heavily and were conquered; tens of thousands were massacred and sold into slavery.

Lots of maps accompany this fascinating thesis and the straight lines join many historic sites. One line, for example, goes from the site of the last Celtic resistance in Gaul through Milan to Delphi. Another, parallel to this one, goes through three towns named Mediolanum (also the original name of Milan), Bratislava, Budapest and Ankara.

But there are a lot of these lines and you might expect that some would travel through a few cities. After all, you can draw an infinity of lines that travel from south west to north east along the solstice line, or north-south for longitude or east-west for latitude.

A key east-west meridian is that which passes through a French town once called, you guessed it, Mediolanum. This is at a latitude that has a longest day length of 15 hours and 54 minutes. This is exactly one hour longer than the longest day at the latitude of Delphi. Delphi was believed to be the centre of the Greek world therefore this Gallic town is the centre of the Celtic world. Robb is asking me to believe not only that the druids could measure in minutes, which he explicitly suggests they couldn't, but also that 15h54m is somehow significant.

This is a reasonably well written book and Robb does his best to put real science and real archaeology into it and to keep mystics, hippies and ley line hunters out of it. But in the end it doesn't quite convince.

March 2015; 298 pages

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

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

I first read this book, which was published in 1962, when I was studying the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge in 1987-8. It was a revolutionary thesis. This is the third edition (1996) which adds a postscript to respond to some of the issues that its original publication raised.

Science, Kuhn suggests, does not make steady progress closer and closer to the truth. Rather, it is oscillates between a 'normal' phase during which scientists solve problems and a 'revolutionary' phase when scientific certainties are thrown out of the window and a radically different understanding is born.

He calls the framework within which normal science is done a 'paradigm' and the revolution a 'paradigm shift'. There are many similarities between the way science develops during a paradigm shift and the way students learn if we assume the 'threshold concepts' theory of learning.

For example, In the 1880s physicists were complacently expecting that soon their classical models would be able to explain all that needed to be explained. They were refining them and making them a little more accurate. There were a few clouds on the horizon. Maxwell's equations suggested that light was an electromagnetic wave but no one could detect the 'aether', the postulated medium through which the e-m waves must ripple. The 'ultra-violet catastrophe' was the theoretical model of the atom which predicted that when you heated something up it should glow purple before it glowed red and at some stage it would radiate infinite amounts of energy in the ultra-violet part of the spectrum. And the photo-electric effect was an experiment which suggested that the energy of the electrons emitted from a surface when light was shone on it was not linked to the brightness of the incoming light. But these were blips and no-one seriously doubted that classical physics would soon be able to solve these problems.

In fact the failure to detect the aether was explained once Einstein had discovered his theory of Special Relativity with its bizarre claims that the speed of light was the fastest possible speed, the simultaneity was relative, that time slowed down as you got faster and that mass and energy were inter-convertible. The ultra-violet catastrophe gave rise to the weird world of Quantum Physics and the photoelectric effect was the key evidence for wave-particle duality which shortly led to de Broglie's claims that particles could behave like waves.

In some ways this makes Science a little like the pile of sand as explained in the book Ubiquity. As grain after grain is added to the pile it becomes more and more unstable. Sometimes there are slight slips; at other times there are near-catastrophic landslides.  Or science is like the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution as described in John Gribbin's brilliant Deep Simplicity. Most of the time evolution just contributes a little variation which make organisms marginally better adapted to their evolutionary niches. But when there is a major ecological catastrophe, evolution goes wild to fill the new ecological niches that have been created.

Kuhn writes with elegance and power. This is a very convincing thesis that had a major impact on the history and the philosophy of Science.

March 2015; 210 pages

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt" by Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins was a significant Labour politician who served as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Harold Wilson before founding the Social Democratic Party in an attempt to prevent Labour's leftward drift. This was the last book he wrote and the last few pages were finished by Richard Neustadt.

FDR was the only US President to serve four terms (although the last one lasted only a few months before he died and was succeeded by Harry Truman); he saved the US from depression with his New Deal, a superb example of Keynesian economics before Keynes had published his theories; he saved Britain during World War II with equipment and by protecting shipping while the US was still neutral, by joining the war after Pearl Harbour but insisting that the European war took precedence over the Pacific war, by supporting Stalin's Soviet Russia, and by funding a bankrupt UK in the closing year of the war. He was disabled, having contracted Polio, and spent a lot of time in a wheelchair. In short he was a towering figure in American politics whose achievements are so much more than Churchill's.

Nevertheless, this book bucks the trends of modern biographies in its brevity. It is a model of narrative and clarity, except for the occasional use of obscure words: why say eleemosynary when you could say charitable?

No doubt a lot has been missed out. But this is a most readable book which would serve as a brilliant introduction to its subject for the general reader. March 2015; 170 pages

"Redirect" by Timothy D Wilson

This is a book about the social sciences. It starts off by giving a number of examples where treatments for social and educational ills have been implemented, sometimes at the cost of billions of dollars, without being subjected to careful scientific testing. It shows which of these treatments are ineffective or, worse, counter-productive; the author compares these to the blistering and blood-letting treatments of quack doctors which were either unpleasant and useless or dangerous.

Some of the treatments are:

• Critical Incidence Stress Debriefing which results in a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder
• Self Help books which suggest that positive thinking will get you want you want (implying that "if you are poor, or if, God forbid, you contract a serious illness - well, it's your own damn fault")
• Bribing kids to read which might work for kids that don't read but actually turns kids who do read off reading
• Just say no to drugs or underage sex; a better way of preventing these is to encourage kids to volunteer
• Getting convicts to scare kids off crime which increases the chance that they will commit crime
• Diversity training

The author's panacea (OK so I was getting a little cynical by this time) for all these is to encourage people to rewrite their inner monologues so that they saw themselves as empowered.

He also emphasises the need for randomised control tests for all such programmes before the politicians spend vast amounts of money on them.

A very readable book which demolishes a lot of shibboleths. Not sure if his message on rescripting lives was quite as clear.

March 2015; 240 pages

"The Botticelli Secret" by Marina Fiorato

Luciana Vetra, "part time model and full time whore" poses for Flora in Botticelli's Primavera. Little does she know when she purloins an unfinished sketch of the masterpiece that she is unleashing a trail of murder and treachery. For the painting holds a secret that her and novice monk Brother Guido must unravel if they are to stay one step ahead of the killers.

This is a brilliant romp through renaissance Italy visiting Florence, Pisa, Naples, Rome, Venice, Bolzano, Milan and Genoa.  The heroine is a fabulously feisty strumpet with a wonderful line in earthy epithets; the monk gives the unlikely-to-be-requited love interest and the book learning; the whores mother is a brilliantly complex character in whom the political and the maternal instincts are often at war.

There are points when it was disturbingly similar to the book that I am writing with its themes of secrets hidden within a painting, a child whose noble birth has been concealed, priests and churches and betrayal. But Fiorato has provided me with a lesson in how to write with verve and vigour and never to get bogged down in over-complicating character, scenery or plot.

And it is so much better written than the da Vinci code! March 2015; 548 pages

"Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem ..." writes Steinbeck as the very first line of this bijou book and he makes this tale of the poor people by the sea where the fishing boats bring their catch to be canned into a haunting, elegiac, beautiful symphony.

It starts by describing the key inhabitants of this town; in the words of the author his technique is simply to "open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves." There is Lee Chong who owns a grocery store that stocks everything, despite its seeming lack of space, a sort of Hilbert Hotel of capitalism. There is Mack and the boys who only work when they need to and who rent (rent-free) the Palace Flophouse and Grill which they have furnished with bits and pieces they have picked up in the street. There is Dora, the madam of the whore house, and her girls. And there is Doc who collects marine specimens and sells them to scientific institutions and collectors and who reads books and poetry and drinks beer for breakfast and listens to classical music on his gramophone and who entertains ladies when he can and who looks after all the assorted half-wits and ne'er-do-wells on the strip.

There are also a whole set of minor characters, each fully rounded, each with a contribution to make to the mystery of what it is to be human. As Steinbeck sees it, from one perspective we are ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches’ while from another angle we are ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men’ (Prologue). Cannery Row is the universe.

The story, such as it is, and it evolves slowly and gently, is about the party that Mack and the boys give for Doc, because Doc is one hell of a nice guy. Being Mack and the boys they have to earn money first so they can buy the whiskey that the party will need. To earn money they have to catch frogs that Doc will buy from them to sell on. To catch the frogs they have to borrow a pick up from Lee Chong and fill it with petrol and travel to the frog pond. But Mack and the boys are deeply flawed human beings, as are we all, and their best laid plans gang aft agley (to quote the poem which Steinbeck quotes in Of Mice and Men).

And Steinbeck combines both comedy and tragedy with his deep compassion and understanding of humanity.

It has been pointed out to me that this is a view of humanity seen through rose-tinted glasses. The whores have hearts of gold. Mack might be lawless but he isn't threatening. As such, it is unrealistic. Steinbeck admits this in the first paragraph, saying that the inhabitants of Cannery Row are "as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches’, by he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men’." Steinbeck has chosen to look through the second peephole. This is deliberate. Schreiber (1965, 85) in An Introduction to Literary Criticism suggests that comedy is a matter of the head rather than the heart. Thus we recognise the “errors of sense” (eg vanity, pedantry, self-deception) in the characters. We don’t actually empathise, he says, with eg Malvolio (because if we did we’d see his treatment as shabby). It is only possible to have comedy in which we empathise with the characters if the setting is “an artificial world ... the real world with the evil left out.” This last line seems to describe Cannery Row to a T.

Steinbeck's prose is beautiful. Poetic.

 The prologue starts with the paragraph:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories, and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches’, by he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men’, and he would have meant the same thing.”
It ends by asking:
“How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and to let stories crawl in by themselves.”

Another 'poem' almost exactly half way through celebrates sunrise over the Row:
“Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row. In the gray time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light. The street lights go out, and the weeds are a brilliant green. The corrugated iron of the canneries glows with the pearly lucence of platinum or old pewter. No automobiles are running then. The street is silent of progress and business. And the rush and drag of the waves can be heard as they splash in among the piles of the canneries. It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era of rest. Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. Silent early morning dogs parade majestically picking and choosing judiciously whereon to pee. The sea gulls come flooding in to sit on the cannery roofs to await the day of refuse. They sit on the roof peaks shoulder to shoulder. From the rocks near the Hopkins Marine Station comes the barking of sea lions like the baying of hounds. The air is cool and fresh. In the back garden the gophers push up the morning mounds of fresh damp earth and they creep out and drag flowers into their holes. Few people are about, just enough to make it seem more deserted than it is. One of Dora’s girls comes home from a call on a patron too wealthy or too sick to visit the Bear Flag. her makeup is a little sticky and her feet are tired. Lee Chong brings the garbage cans out and stands them on the curb. The old Chinaman comes out of the sea and flap-flaps across the street and up past the Palace. The cannery watchmen look out and blink at the morning light. The bouncer at the Bear Flag steps out on the porch in his shirt-sleeves and stretches and yawns and scratches his stomach. The snores of Mr Malloy’s tenants in the pipes have a deep tunnelly quality. It is the hour of the pearl - the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.” (Ch 14)

Characters:

The main characters (apart from Doc, the compassionate God of all he surveys, perhaps a self-portrait of the author - after all, authors are gods to their characters) are Mac and his fellow bums. Doc sees them as philosophers who have the answers to the meanings of life:
“Mack and his friends approached contentment casually, quietly, and absorbed it gently.” (Ch 1) They have a hunter-gatherer lifestyle:

• “A hardware store supplied a can of red paint not reluctantly because it never knew about it.” (Ch 1)
• “There was one nice thing about Model T’s. The parts were not only interchangeable, they were unidentifiable.” (Ch 13)
• “A dusty Rhode Island red rooster who had wandered too far from his own farmyard crossed the road and Eddy hit him without running too far off the road.” (Ch 13)

There are many other wonderful observations of character:

• Hazel likes to keep a conversation going by asking questions. He isn't really interested in the answers. And he hates being asked questions because that means he has to answer them. "It meant casting about in his mind for an answer and casting about in Hazel's mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum. Hazel's mind was choked with uncatalogued exhibits." (Ch 6)
• “He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.” (Ch 5)
• “She was tired and rundown ... from trying to feed and clothe seven children and their father. She had tried every possible way of making money - paper flowers, mushrooms at home, rabbits for meat and fur - while her husband from a canvas chair gave her every help his advice and reasoning and criticism on offer.” (Ch 6)
• “He looked up a little nervously as Mack entered. It was not that trouble always came in with Mack but something always entered with him.” (Ch 9)
• “Jones talked too much then because he knew he had made a social blunder and he wasn't able to stop.” (Ch 13)
• “Doc still loved true things but he knew it was not a general love and it could be a very dangerous mistress.” (Ch 17)
• “From the first she was a precocious bitch. She slept on the bed of the man who had given her the last bribe.” (Ch 20)
• “It don't do no good to say I'm sorry. I been sorry all my life. This ain't no new thing. It's always like this ... I was glad when you hit me ... I thought to myself - ‘Maybe this will teach me. Maybe I'll remember this’. But, hell, I won't remember nothin’. I won't learn nothin’.” (Ch 21) Perhaps the saddest moment in the book, when Mac apologises to Doc.
• “It is not known whether Henri was a good painter or not for he threw himself so violently into movements that he had very little time for painting of any kind.” (Ch 22)

Descriptions:

There are some pitch-perfect descriptions:

• "Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. Silent early morning dogs parade majestically picking and choosing judiciously whereon to pee." (Ch 14) Shudderingly accurate.
• “The girls ... wore printed rayon party dresses, wrinkled now and clinging to their convexities.” (Ch 14)
• “The tide goes out imperceptibly. ... On the bottoms lie the incredible refuse of the sea, shells broken and chipped and bits of skeleton, claws, the whole sea bottom a fantastic cemetery on which the living scamper and scramble.” (Ch 18)
• “Music sounded in Doc’s ears, a high thin piercingly sweet flute carrying a melody he could never remember, and against this, a pounding surf-like wood-wind section.” (Ch 18)

Philosophy:
Steinbeck gives us a guidebook for living in this world:

• "The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product." (Ch 30)
• “The grocery opened at dawn and did not close until the last wandering vagrant dime had been spent or retired for the night.” (Ch 1)
• “It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary.” (Ch 1)
• “Most men in their search for contentment destroy themselves and fall wearily short of their targets.” (Ch 1)
• “Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums.” (Ch 2)
• This is the way to find happiness: “What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals?” (Ch 2)
• The whorehouse madam “Is hated by the twisted and lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the home but don't like it very much.” (Ch 3)
• “He had observed that a man got just as drunk on half a glass as on a whole one, that is, if he was in the mood to get drunk at all.” (Ch 7)
• “‘I guess everything that comes out of the human mouth is poison,’ said Doc warningfully.” (Ch 9)
• “There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works. Indeed there are men near whom a car runs better.” (Ch 11)
• “Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans know more about the Ford coil than the clitoris ... with the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them.” (Ch 11)
• “There were philosophical implications in flag-pole skating that no one had touched.” (Ch 17)
• “Henri had many friends whom he loosely classified as those who could feed him and those whom he had to feed.” (Ch 22) 
• “Doc said, ‘Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think ... that Mack and the boys ... survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed'.” (Ch 23)
• “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.” (Ch 23)
• “Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?” (Ch 23)
• “There are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier, or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. This last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.” (Ch 23)

There are even jokes:

• “‘Just because he doesn't run no dame naked through the streets in the daytime you think Doc’s celebrate’. 
• ‘What’s celebrate?’ ... 
• ‘That's when you can't get no dame’ ... 
• ‘I thought it was a kind of party’.” (Ch 7)
• “Reform schools are supposed to teach viciousness and criminality but Hazel didn't pay enough attention.” (Ch 6)
• “The cops reported their own car stolen and found it later on the beach.” (Ch 30)

A truly wonderful book. It's sequel is Sweet Thursday.

Other works which try to encapsulate a community by means of their stories include:

• Miguel Street by V S Naipaul
• Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

I first read this book in February 2015, then again, updating this review, in April 2025. My copy had 148 pages

First published in 1945 by Viking in the USA and Heinemann in the UK.

My edition issued by Penguin Classics in 2000

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

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here

Steinbeck’s Novels and Novellas

• Cup of Gold (1929)
• To a God Unknown (1933)
• Tortilla Falt (1935)
• In Dubious Battle (1936)
• The Red Pony (1937)
• Of Mice and Men (1937)
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
• The Moon is Down (1942)
• Cannery Row (1945)
• The Pearl (1947)
• The Wayward Bus (1947)
• Burning Bright (1950)
• East of Eden (1952)
• Sweet Thursday (1954)
• The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957)
• The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
• The Acts of King Arthur ... (unfinished, published 1976)

In real life:

• In 1957, Ocean View Drive in Monterey, the location for the book, changed its name to Cannery Row. By then most of the canneries were closed, thanks to over-fishing. The last, which canned squid, closed in 1973.
• Dora Flood was based on a real-life Madam called Flora Woods who ran a brothel called the Lone Star Cafe
• Doc was a marine biologist friend of Steinbeck’s named Ed Ricketts.
• Lee Chong’s grocery was the Wing Chong (‘Glorious Prospect’) run by J H Yee and C M Sam.
• Mack’s real name was Gabe: he told Steinbeck that “a lot of feelings had been hurt on CR. The ones you left out.”
• Frankie was “a pathetically needy boy”.

Chapter by chapter: This section may contain spoilers

‘Cannery Row’: a prologue

1. Lee Chong’s grocery: Horace sells Lee the lot on which the Palace Flophouse stands and then commits suicide. Mack and the boys move in, never paying the rent of five dollars a week.
2. A eulogy to Mack and the boys “the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces”.
3. Dora Flood and the Bear Flag Restaurant: William the lonely bouncer kills himself.
4. The flap-flapping Chinaman
5. Doc and Western Biological
6. Doc and Hazel talk about Gay, the new resident of the Flophouse and why Henri the painter never finishes his boat.
7. Mack and the boys decide that Doc needs cheering up: they’ll throw him a party.
8. Sam and Mrs Molloy move into the Pipes: she wants curtains.
9. Mack proposes to collect frogs for Doc.
10. Frankie, the needy boy, helps Doc, love Doc; his disaster as waiter.
11. Gay mends Lee Chong’s Model T Ford, Mack fails to con cash from the garage; the frog party begin their drive; Gay ends up in jail.
12. The famous writer who died in Monterey ... and whose innards were thrown into the ditch.
13. Mack and the boys plan the party for Doc. They camp out on the beach and meet the captain and his dog.
14. The soldiers and the girls on Cannery Row beach.
15. Mack and the boys get drunk with the captain. They collect the frogs. They burn the curtains. They take a dog.
16. Dora and the girls help Doc during the flu outbreak.
17. Doc drives to Salinas. He has a beer milk shake.
18. Doc, collecting specimens on the beach, finds the dead girl.
19. The pole skater at Holman’s and the key question: how does he go to the toilet?
20. The boys fail to house-train Darling, the bitch. The party goes disastrously wrong.
21. Doc comes home to the trashed laboratory. Mack takes his punishment. Doc tells Mack why he won’t pay for the damage.
22. Henri, his chicken feathers and his nutshells, and the girls who won’t live for long on his boat.
23. Doc and Richard Frost discuss Mack and the boys: life’s philosophers. Dora has to close the brothel during a moral crusade. Darling gets sick and Doc cures her. Dora suggests that Mack and the boys give Doc a party that he does get to.
24. Mary Talbot gives parties ... to cats.
25. Mack asks Doc when his birthday is.
26. Joey and Willard: Joey’s dad killed himself with rat poison and Willard teases him about it.
27. Doc prepares for his surprise party.
28. Frankie steals and gets put away.
29. Preparing for the party.
30. The party.
31. The lonely gopher
32. Doc: the party’s aftermath.

"Blazing star" by Alexander Larman

This is the biography of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who was a courtier at the court of Charles II during the restoration and famous for being a libertine, a rake, a wit, and the writer of some incredibly rude poetry. He died of tertiary syphilis at the age of 33.

OK. I am not very good at appreciating poetry. Rochester wrote mostly in couplets and I find it hard to get beyond that poetic form into true emotion. As a result, although I can often appreciate the wit in his verse I can rarely understand what Larman claims, which is that some special quality puts Rochester above anyone else writing usually bawdy ballads. Certainly his work doesn't touch Donne (whose brilliant biography by John Stubbs I reviewed here). The only two bits of poetry I remembered after closing the book are the witty ones:

• firstly the one in which he coins the phrase 'Merry Monarch' to refers to Charles II. But in the original it is rather less complimentary than it sounds: "Restless, he rolls about from whore to whore/ A merry Monarch, scandalous and poor."
• secondly (and this is ascribed to him) the spontaneous couplet "We have a pretty witty king/ Whose  word no man relies on./ He never said a foolish thing/ Nor never did a wise one."

As for his supposedly far-sighted libertarian (as opposed to libertine) views; there was not much instance of these in the book. He mostly toadied to King Charles except when he got drunk and then vandalised royal property or got a soldier killed. In any case, the politics were not carefully explained. It mentions the CABAL of five ministers without saying who they were. And I never really understood how there could be such flipping to and fro between the Roman Catholicism of court, the Test Act and the possible Exclusion Act and the 'Popish plot' witch hunts of Titus Oates.

He was a wit. He was a scandalous rake. He was probably bisexual (he seems to have pimped out his footman who was nicknamed Beautiful Buttocks). But thirty three years is not a long time for a full length biography and there are times, especially towards the end where he spent a long time dying, where the momentum of the story gets a little lost.

Larman dissects the court of Charles II, pointing out both the good (the reintroduction of theatre) and the bad (the extravagance and waste and the lack of care for the common weal). This is the job of the historian; on the one hand, on the other hand; letting the reader make up his own mind; faithfully chronicling the complexities of a world where no one is all good or all bad. Given how well Larman does this it is a little disappointing that he does not also apply this to the previous regime, the Cromwellian. Cromwell is 'the old hypocrite',  his thought is 'straightforwardly brutish', sympathisers are 'toadying' and his court is 'pompous and grandiose'. This is the use of rhetoric rather than argument and (because I am an awkward bugger) it makes me presume that Cromwell must have been better than perhaps he was.

I suppose I am an old Puritan who disapproves of Rochester and his antics. Perhaps he was a remarkable man but if he had such gifts it is a shame he didn't use them for more than his ultimately self-destructive pursuit of pleasure. Perhaps it is this that makes him so fascinating a figure to biographers.

It is difficult to leave such a compelling central character to one side and write a fair comment on the book. It was clearly well researched and, apart from the little niggles I have mentioned above, the story was well told. I saw the film about Rochester starring Johnny Depp and I was glad I had read the book.

February 2015; 363 pages

"Deep Time" by Henry Gee

This is a book about palaeontology, the study of fossils. That makes it sound very dry and dusty. By Henry Gee knows how to tell a good story and every chapter is full of reminiscences, such as when he was hunting for human remains with the Leakeys, his student work experience classifying fish fossils in the Natural History Museum or and who went to which pub during the disputes that introduced cladistics to palaeontology.

I also adored his chapter headings which show evidence of a wide range of reading far beyond I would have expected from a fossil hunter. But I guess you need a decent stash of books for the long dark desert nights:

• Chapter 1 is called Nothing Besides Remains, quoting Ozymandias but adding a nice double meaning
• Chapter Two: Hunting Unicorns, refers to a essay by Jorge Luis Borges about Kafka
• Chapter 3: There are More Things, quotes Hamlet's remark to Horatio
• And Chapter 7: Are We Not Men? is from a work by H.G.Wells

Gee's main thrust is to consider palaeontology as a science. He points out that fossils represent a few brief glimpses of bones out of millions of years of evolution. He reminds us that evolution is not purposeful nor is it a progression and that if we try to understand evolution from the point of view of creating adaptations that we see in the modern world we are assuming that the environmental conditions millions of years ago that led to the creation of a species were the same as now. So, for example, feathered birds might have had an evolutionary advantage millions of years ago for reasons we cannot now guess and it might have been entirely an accident that they are also useful skin coverings for an animal that flies.

From Gee's point of view the brilliant thing about cladistics is that it doesn't assume any heritage or ancestral linkages. It simply groups fossils by their features into 'sister-groups' and uses the Principle of Parsimony to derive the best possible tree diagram summarising relationships between the individuals.

Gee makes his arguments thoroughly; sometimes I thought points were repeated more than they needed to be. He also explains cladistics on a very simple level and I would like to have known a little more about these techniques, especially since cladistics can be used to explore the relationships (and thus possibly infer the ancestry) of Chaucerian manuscripts and of languages.

But on the whole this was a thoroughly enjoyable Science book about an area of Science I had not previously believed could be so much fun.