My Take: Let’s face it – the main appeal of historical fiction is the details of the alternative reality that the author creates and there’s a lot for history geeks to amuse themselves with in Robert Harris’ first work of fiction, “Fatherland”. A second major offensive through the Caucasus in 1942 allows Nazi Germany to defeat Stalin on the Eastern front in 1942. German counter-espionage enables the Nazi high command to first learn that the British have cracked the Enigma code and then lure the British fleet to its destruction. Cut off from the US, the United Kingdom is forced into an armistice in 1944 and a puppet government led by Edward the VIII is installed on the throne. Winston Churchill flees to Canada, where as he predicted, the remnants of the British Empire continue to resist. The German discovery of the nuclear bomb in 1946 leads to a cold war stalemate with Americans that continues until President Joseph Kennedy (Snr) initiates a détente between the two superpowers. The details of the Nazis’ Holocaust have been lost to the fog of war, but the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine is known around the world as “Stalin’s Holocaust”.

Harris uses this alternative historical context to create a reality just as rich as that put together by any science fiction or fantasy author. Like Orwell’s 1984, it’s the details of Harris’s Nazi society that are most the effective in creating the claustrophobia of the totalitarian state. Particularly amusing in this regard was the following passage preceding a discussion of the State sanctioned torture practiced by the state security apparatus:

“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.’

I quickly thumbed back to the publisher page of the book after reading this passage only to learn that the first edition of “Fatherland” was released in 1993, more than ten years before the Bush Administration sanctioned it’s very own program of “Enhanced Interrogation”. While the plot arc of “Fatherland” is nothing special and the prose is pretty ordinary, little gems of spot on historical imagination like this makes the book a worthwhile read.

Highlight: Wikipedia describes the landscape of the Nazi capital recreated by Harris in “Fatherland”:

Berlin has been extensively remodelled as Hitler’s “capital of capitals,” designed according to the wishes of Hitler and his top architect, Albert Speer. By 1964, the city boasts gargantuan Nazi monuments; the Great Hall holds over 160,000 people at the highest Nazi ceremonies; the enormous Arch of Triumph is inscribed with the names of German soldiers killed in the two World Wars, and straddles the Grand Avenue, an immense boulevard lined with captured Soviet artillery and towering statues of Nazi eagles. The Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate are dwarfed by the vast, severe, granite civil buildings which dominate Berlin’s city centre; the Grand Plaza, the sprawling Berlin railway station, Hitler’s mammoth palace, the headquarters of the German Army, and the parliament of the powerless European Community.

My Take: I knew I would love this book from the moment I opened Chapter One to see two columns containing separate lists for ‘Books Bought this month’ and for ‘Books Read this month’. It was the first of many moments of self-recognition for a fellow bibliophile. As Hornby rightly observes:

‘When I’m arguing with St Peter at the Pearly Gates, I’m going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. ‘This is Really who I am,’ I’ll tell him.

Like Hornby, I am also congenitally unable to control myself in a bookstore. Like Hornby, my wallet is bigger than my bedside table and I end up buying far more books than anyone could possibly get around to reading. And just like Hornby I have an addict’s gift for rationalisation and self-deception. I well recognised Hornby’s desperate justifications throughout ‘The Polysyllabic Spree’ for the amount of money he spent on books during the month:

‘I don’t want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it’s my money. And I’ll bet you do it too.’

I do Nick….

‘I read 55% of the books I bought this month – five and a half out of ten. Two of the unread books, however, are volumes of poetry, and, to my way of thinking, poetry books work more like books of reference: they go up on the shelves straightaway (as opposed to on the bedside table), to be taken down and dipped into every now and again…. So I’m taking the poetry out, and calling it five and a half out of eight – and the Heller I’ve read before, years ago, so that’s six and a half out of eight. I make that 81 ¼%! I am both erudite and financially prudent!’

As am I Nick, as am I. I’ve now limited myself to purchases from second-hand bookstores at half the price of the chains; which means I’m completely justified in buying twice as many books!

Even when Hornby is finally shamed into an admission of guilt (not something that I’ve ever owned up to) he hides it in small print in footnote at the bottom of the page:

‘I bought so many books this month it’s obscene, and I’m not owning up to them all: this is a selection. And to be honest, I’ve been economical with the truth for months now. I keep finding books that I bought, didn’t read and didn’t list’

Obsessive book buying was just one of many aspects of a booklover’s reading experience that Hornby insightfully and amusingly catalogues in “The Polysyllabic Spree”. Hornby totally eschews pretence when recounting his monthly reading – and as such conveys the true experience of reading brilliantly. This is not a book written to pose for the literati. Like the average reader, Hornby freely admits to a periodic lack of motivation for reading since:

‘Reading is a domestic activity and is therefore susceptible to any changes in the domestic environment.’

He similarly admits to struggling to stay interested in overlong books, getting a cheap feeling of satisfaction from knocking off the shorter classics (’Candide’ was a special favourite at less than 100 pages) and finding “writers’ writers” interminable. All things that I’m sure most readers would own up to if pushed, but wouldn’t want to advertise too widely in the literary community.

This is a book lover’s book written for book lovers. If you love the reading experience, do yourself a favour and pick up a copy.

Highlights:

On the process of knocking off an extra long book:

‘We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes – usually late at night, in bed – he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I got through twenty or thirty pages, it felt to me as though I’d socked him good, but it took a lot out of me, and I had to retire to my corner to wipe the blood and sweat off my reading glasses. Only in the last fifty-odd pages, after I’d landed several of these blows, did old Wilkie show any signs buckling under the assault.

On the natural superiority of books as a cultural form:

‘One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else…. Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it’s still, in any given four week period, way, way more likely you’ll find a great book that you haven’t read than a great movie you haven’t seen, or a great album you haven’t heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music… the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can’t get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began.’

My Take: Should be required reading for all high-school students. Clearly articulated, widely accessible and practically illustrated explanations of the fundamentals of economics.

Highlight: A great chapter highlighting the benefits of sweatshops as a transitional industry in countries like South Korea and India. They might be unappealing to Western minds, but in the short-term sweatshops are often the best of a bad set of choices in developing countries and in the long run a path out of poverty for those lucky enough to work in them:

Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means—hard as it is to believe—that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low, because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing reeking landfills in cities like Manila to find recyclable goods.

… [NYC's resolution banning sweatshop-made products] can only harm sweatshop laborers: they’ll be out of a job and—literally, for those in Manila—back on the trash heap. Of course, it will be good news for textile workers in rich countries, who’ll get the business instead….

We need to understand that narrowly focused initiatives on “fair trade coffee” or “sweatshop-free clothes” will never make a substantial improvement to the lives of millions. Some, like the campaign to prevent New York City from buying uniforms from poor countries, will actively cause damage. Others, like the numerous brands of fair trade coffee, are likely to improve the income of a few coffee producers without causing a great deal of harm. But they cannot fix the basic problem: too much coffee is being produced. At the slightest hint that coffee farming will become an attractive profession, it will always be swamped with desperate people who have no alternative. The truth of the matter is that only broad-based development of poor countries will ever lift the living standards of the very poor, increase coffee prices, and improve wages and labor standards in shoe factories.

My Take: Bitchiness like this can only come from personal experience and unsurprisingly this novel is apparently based on Waugh’s own experience as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail in the lead up to the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Similarly, the arrogant, abrasive and ignorant owner of the Daily Beast is allegedly (and plausibly) an amalgam of the infamous Lord Beaverbrook (the first of the media barons) and Lord Northcliffe (a contemporary rival).

Far be it from me to make comment on the media, but the jaded political hack in me enjoyed the satirical skewering of the fourth estate in ‘Scoop’. It’s worth remembering too that this withering account was penned in the 1930s – a period that would be viewed as something of a golden era of the press, especially when seen from today’s climate of plummeting newspaper audiences, even faster fallings revenues and resulting cost cutting. Unfortunately, a Scoop for the modern era would be more tragedy than farce.

Highlight:

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

They are all negros. And the Fascists won’t be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolsheviks want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But, of course, it’s really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain?

My Take: Ordinarily I steer clear of political biographies (diaries in particular!) but beore I moved to the UK I thought I needed a bit of a crash course in the who’s who of the Party in the UK so I picked this up at the hot new political book of the time. The fact that I’d be spending a year at the LSE learning from Mr Campbell may also have played a part in the decision

AC has been demonised as being the death knell of liberal democracy personified because of his alleged practice of the dark arts of political ’spin’. Far be it from me to have any public comment on the professionalism of contemporary journalists or their role in a functioning democracy, but AC really lines them up in this book (keep in mind he was a senior journalist for many years before moving into politics):

“For all its faults, our political process is a good one, and the means by which much meaningful change is made. That is not a very fashionable view to hold, but as someone who has operated at senior levels in journalism and politics, around a decade in each, it is my respect for the media that has shrunk, and my respect for politics that has grown.”

and

“I have no idea what people will make of this book. I am probably too close to it all, both the events and the process of publishing. I know some newspapers and commentators will come to it with minds made up, and look to find those parts that help confirm their prejudices. It is what is wrong with some of them in the first place, and why I have next to no respect for them, and no real interest in their views. Amid the enormous cuts I have made are many which relate to my dealings with a 24 hour media that has in my view changed for the worse not only political debate but politics itself, as the politicians have to devote so much time and energy to dealing with people who believe their role is not to impart information and fuel healthy debate, but to undermine where possible the actions, decisions and motives of politicians. It is a sad irony that we have more media coverage than ever, but less understanding or real debate.”

Say what you want about him, but AC has a way with words and an ability to zing those who get in his way (currently being perpetuated on his excellent blog). The book itself is a real tome (1000+ pages from memory) so is probably only worthwhile for real political obsessives, but is certainly an engaging account of a fantastically interesting period for UK labour politics.

“Some twat with a Trot poster came up to me on the way in and yelled ‘Butcher!’ Traitor!’ at me. I stopped and mustered as much visual contempt as I could, then assured him that if we win the general election then don’t worry, thanks to wankers like him, there will always be another Tory government along afterwards. These people make me vomit.

And on the left wing of the party in general:

“It is all about how the party sees them as they strut around the conference, and got fuck all to do with whether we ever actually get the power needed to do anything for the country.”

Quite!

My Take: For quite a short novella, “The Heart of Darkness” has certainly prompted a lot of meta-discussion. The subject of critical attention as a part of the Western cannon, as a flash point in post-colonial literary debates, as a semi-autobiographical account of Conrad’s own travels in colonial Congo, and as an infamous adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola, “The Heart of Darkness” has been looked at from every imaginable angle in the last fifty years. However, as with most seminal books, the novel itself is worth a read if only so that you can make up your own mind distinct from the analysis.

Strangely enough, the “Heart of Darkness” is written in the format of a sea-story being recounted to an unnamed narrator (a framed narrative for the pedants). While the deck of a ship berthed in the River Thames at first seems to be a strange place to open a story about madness in colonial Africa, this device instils the book with the characteristic of a ghost story being told on a dark and stormy night – a perfectly fitting atmosphere for the novel.

Marlow, a steam-boat captain, tells the story of his travels in the Congo, and his search for the mysterious ivory trader Kurtz, with a ferocious emotional intensity. Marlow recounts the horrors he saw during his time in Africa – the instinctive violence of the Europeans towards the Africans and the savagery the local (‘cannibal’) inhabitants – with a pervasive philosophical reflection. Despite everything that Marlow faces during his search for Kurtz, the real conflict in “The Heart of Darkness” is internal. The most engaging passages of the book are Marlow’s internal struggles with what he confronts, to wit:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were, — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.

Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend.

And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything — because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage — who can tell? — but truth — truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder — the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff — with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags — rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.

Marlow struggles to rationalise what he has encountered in the Congo, particularly the circumstances in which he finds Kurtz, and the flashes of self-recognition he saw as he peered into the abyss. This ultimately is the central philosophical question in “The Heart of Darkness” – what is it that separates man from savagery? The infamous ‘Horror’ of “The Heart of Darkness” is the conclusion that both Kurtz and Marlow reach that savagery is the natural state of the human condition and that the artificial moral constraints of civilised society are an unnatural, and impermanent illusion. Kurtz ultimately put the issue directly to Marlow, asking him to take his ‘choice of nightmares’ and live in a natural state of savagery and barbarity or an unnatural and repressed state of superficial moral constraint.

Probably the bleakest conclusion to a novel in the Western Cannon – but not one to be missed. Check it out for yourself.

Highlight:

I think the knowledge came to him at last — only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude — and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — ‘The horror! The horror!’

My Take: A great read. An interesting story, engagingly told.

I was struck while reading this book at the similarities between the compilation of the OED and the development of Wikipedia. An army of volunteer, amatuer enthusiasts collaborating on the production of a substantial work of reference beyond the scope of any one man. Except that the OED took 70 years to produce and Wikipedia has taken just on six years. And people question the productivity effects of Web 2.0!

Highlight: The meanining of autopeotomy. Ouch – that’s a word I never expected to use in a sentence.

My Take: I have mixed feelings about Graham Greene. One the one hand, he’s an extremely talented writer and a very sharp observer of the human condition. No one does world-weary cynicism as amusingly, or as insightfully as Greene. But on the other hand, his outlook on life is just too bleak for me to really embrace. I mean the guy is so curmudgeonly that he defamed Shirley Temple. Further, the source of a lot of Greene’s cynicism – Catholic guilt and the reaction against it – isn’t exactly a resonant theme to someone of my decidedly agnostic/protestant upbringing.  As a result, I find the experience of reading Grahame Greene to be almost equal parts head nodding and eye-rolling depending on the prevailing bitterness of his writing.

The End of the Affair is definitely one of the more misanthropic of Greene’s books. The story of the end of the relationship between the writer Maurice Benedrix and the married Sarah Miles has the kind of evocative bitterness that can only come from personal experience. In this regard, it’s interesting that the British edition of the novel is dedicated to ‘C’ and the American version to ‘Catherine’, dedications that are widely viewed as referring to Lady Catherine Walston, a married Catholic woman with whom Greene carried on a long-term affair. What Lady Walston felt about having a book dedicated to her that at times borders on the misogynistic in the strength of its hatred I have no idea – but it really gives Greene’s writing in this book a real intensity of emotion.

At this point, I’m sure lots of Greene fans are saying “You’re missing the point – the book wasn’t about hatred – it was about exploring the conflicts between love of another and love of God”. Well yes, I appreciate that. And the novel certainly succeeds in posing these philosophical questions in quite a challenging way. But it’s not a conflict that speaks to me. I don’t feel the presence of God intervening to bring me joy or sadness in any of my relationships. I’ve never blamed God for the rejection of a girl, thanked Him for the love of a woman or felt the need to choose between Him and another. I appreciate that it sounds shallow – but it all seems like pointless angst to me. If God can make you hate someone as much as Benedrix hated Sarah in this book, I know who I’d chose to end my relationship with.

Highlights:

“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.”

….

“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”

….

“Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?”

…

“I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”

My Take: As you may have guessed by now, I have a real peccadillo for Japanese fiction. I love the nuance and non-linearity of the story telling and the subtlety of the characterisation. I appreciate the lack of exposition and the fact that in general, readers are left to scrutinise the thoughts, feelings and motivations of the characters with less direction than in much ‘Western’ literature (sweeping generalisations I know). While  Ishiguro has lived in the UK since the age of 5 and claims not to have been influenced by Japanese literature, I do think these ‘Japanese’ characteristics are deeply infused in his work.

In particular, I think the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’ strongly underpins Ishiguro’s body of work. It’s a bit of a difficult concept to explain, so I’ll quote from Wikipedia at this point:

Mono no aware ( mono no aware^?, lit. “the pathos of things”), also translated as “an empathy toward things,” or “a sensitivity of ephemera,” is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing. The term was coined in the eighteenth century by the Edo-period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, and later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man’yōshū, becoming central to his philosophy of literature, and eventually to Japanese cultural tradition.

This melancholy ‘awareness of the transience of things’ is a feature of all of Ishiguro’s books to varying degrees. Ishiguro employs a first person retrospective approach in each of his books that allows him to subtly, but deeply, explore the attitudes, emotions and motivations of of his protagonist. In this way, the revelation and resolution of the protagonist’s self-deceptions and mental obstacles to ‘awareness’ become the driver of the story arcs of each of his novels. As Ishiguro has said:

“As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”

In this sense, little actually ‘happens’ in Ishiguro’s books outside the mind of the protagonist. In fact, often his protagonists don’t even reach full awareness by the end of his novels – leaving many carefully developed plot threads ultimately unresolved. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I love it.

All of these characteristics of Ishiguro’s writing are clearly present in ‘An Artist of the Floating World’ Ishiguro’s second novel. In my mind this is Ishiguro’s strongest work and it’s not hard to see why it won a Whitbread Prize and was shortlisted for a Booker Prize. Given that the real joy of Ishiguro’s writing is the process of revelation, I won’t write too much about the contents of the novel, but suffice it to say, the societal upheaval of post-war Japan is fertile ground for Ishiguro’s style of contemplative reminiscence.

Highlight: Everything – just read it.