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Book review

Don’t Believe a Word, by David Shariatmadari, 2019

Don’t Believe a Word is subtitled “From Myths to Misunderstandings – How Language Really Works” which is a pretty bold claim, and one I suspect Shariatmadari would probably disavow. Because this is much more a summary of the current state of research into some of the larger issues around language acquisition and use than anything approaching a comprehensive final set of answers to some of the difficult questions about this issue.

Because language is profoundly mysterious. How we as a species came to uniquely acquire the power of language is endlessly fascinating, and I was hoping for something that attempted to described the processes whereby we went from the simple sounds required to warn of predators or communicate during a hunt to the infinitely more complex process I am using to write these sentences, however inelegantly. Unfortunately the author really only skims these issues for the safer, more familiar ground of why language is not ‘going to the dogs’ or the differences between languages, dialects and ideolects.

The structure for the book is that each chapter is intended to expose a common myth about language. Demonstrating that standards of English are not declining, and never have, is done easily enough, by quoting the same complaint made across the centuries. Older people will always feel alienated from the language of the young who are much more innovative in their use of language, and will use their positions of authority that come with age to define standard English and try to shame younger people into conformity. Which means I can look forward to hopefully one day hearing the incessant use of the word ‘like’ as a meaningless filler to become the ‘correct’ way of expressing oneself, and youngsters chastised for not using it appropriately.

Each generation will think of itself as exceptional, and find reasons why the language they are using is different from that of their predecessors. Much of this is down to the rapid spread of technology which introduces words and ideas simply not required before. I am grateful to the author for bringing to my attention this brilliant summary of the issue from the wonderful Douglas Adams (from The Salmon of Doubt):

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Another ‘myth’ Shariatmadari addresses is the idea that foreign languages have untranslatable words. Is that really a language myth that needs to be challenged, or just a bit of fun on the internet that no-one takes particularly seriously? Yes it makes other cultures sound sound quaint or bizarre. and can contribute to the ‘othering’ of foreigners. But other cultures are often profoundly different from our own (not better or worse, just different) so it would be surprising if they didn’t have words for things we use phrases or sentences to describe.

There’s a thoughtful discussion of whether our languages shape how we think, rather than the other way round. Those of us exposed to George Orwell’s thesis (in 1984) that we need a language of nuance and expression to articulate concepts such as democracy will be open to the idea that we need words to explain ideas before those ideas can exist. But mentioning Orwell brings me to a minor quibble with this book. In the chapter on whether language is deteriorating, the author cites Orwell as “clearly wrong when he imagined that language would become decadent and ‘share in the general collapse’ of civilisation unless hard work was done to repair it.” The text Shariatmadari is quoting here is not cited, but the internet being the wonderful thing it is I easily found it in Politics and the English Language. Now you won’t find a better. more powerfully argued essay in favour of clear writing in politics that this. Shariatmadari unfairly dismisses it because Orwell opens with the deliberately contentious argument that:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.

Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

To break one of Orwell’s prime rules (‘never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print’) this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. All Orwell is arguing is that bad writing about politics is often bad for specific reasons: “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Which is surely a more important point than the one he is being discredited with?

Later, Shariatmadari gives a respectful, if sceptical account of Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar theory. The idea that humans are born with an innate language ability far in advance of any other skill or ability in life (compare the struggles we have to walk or feed ourselves) has yet to be proven beyond all doubt, but the alternative, that language is “a medium that is formed as it is used … a road that is paved at the same time as we walk it” seems inadequate when contrasted with the other clumsy abilities we develop as children. If you want a primer on Universal Grammar and the current research on the theory this is not a bad place to start.

Overall this is an entertaining, accessible and well-evidenced summary of the state of linguistics as it is currently understood. As with the book I recently read on genetics, I left this with the impression that there is still a lot of research to be done on this subject, and that our understanding of ‘how language really works’ is as elusive as ever.

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Book review

In a German Pension, by Katherine Mansfield, 1911

In a German Pension joins that small subset of books that the author didn’t want to see republished. It was Katherine Mansfield’s first published collection, although most of the stories had been previously published in various magazines. Because of the war and problems with the publisher (it went into liquidation) the book was quickly forgotten, and when the idea of republishing it was later floated by her then husband, John Middleton Murry, Mansfield refused. She considered the stories juvenalia and feared, I am sure rightly, that they would contribute to post-war anti-German sentiment.

In a German Pension: 13 Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Have the stories weathered the passage of the following century, or should Mansfield’s wishes have been respected? I would strongly argue the former – the tone of the collection might be uneven, and some of the portraits are caricatures, but overall this is a powerful group of stories in which the focus is not so much the German residents of the pension (a boarding house) with which the earlier stories are concerned, but the role of women in German and European society in the later stories which emerges as a more dominant theme.

The stories were written after her stay in a German spa before the first world war broke out. Mansfield was there to recuperate after a miscarriage. The collection is formed of thirteen stories, some only a few pages long, with the whole collection barely a hundred pages in total. The early stories are slightly whimsical observations of the characters in the pension, observed by a narrator who captures the chatter of the residents with the minimum of commentary. The Germans are boorish and judgmental towards the English narrator, although already the themes of maternity and women’s role in society are beginning to emerge:

“Is it true,” asked the Widow, picking her teeth with a hairpin as she spoke, “that you are a vegetarian?”

“Why, yes; I have not eaten meat for three years.”

“Im—possible! Have you any family?”

“No.”

“There now, you see, that’s what you’re coming to! Who ever heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible. But you never have large families in England now; I suppose you are too busy with your suffragetting. Now I have had nine children, and they are all alive, thank God. Fine, healthy babies—though after the first one was born I had to—”

“How wonderful!” I cried.

“Wonderful,” said the Widow contemptuously, replacing the hairpin in the knob which was balanced on the top of her head. “Not at all! A friend of mine had four at the same time. Her husband was so pleased he gave a supper-party and had them placed on the table. Of course she was very proud.”

This is carefully nuanced writing. What is not said is as important as what is, and the reader is able to gain a picture of the narrator’s situation without it ever being made explicit. After a few more short stories in which German attitudes to class are lightly mocked, the collection takes a more serious turn. Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding is a chilling portrait of an abusive marriage. Herr Brechenmacher is a bully who orders his wife around. She has five children under the age of nine, but is looking forward to a night off attending a wedding celebration. This is how the author closes the story:

“They walked home in silence. Herr Brechenmacher strode ahead, she stumbled after him. White and forsaken lay the road from the railway station to their house—a cold rush of wind blew her hood from her face, and suddenly she remembered how they had come home together the first night. Now they had five babies and twice as much money; but—

“Na, what is it all for?” she muttered, and not until she had reached home, and prepared a little supper of meat and bread for her man did she stop asking herself that silly question.

Herr Brechenmacher broke the bread into his plate, smeared it round with his fork and chewed greedily.

“Good?” she asked, leaning her arms on the table and pillowing her breast against them.

“But fine!”

He took a piece of the crumb, wiped it round his plate edge, and held it up to her mouth. She shook her head.

“Not hungry,” she said.

“But it is one of the best pieces, and full of the fat.”

He cleared the plate; then pulled off his boots and flung them into a corner.

“Not much of a wedding,” he said, stretching out his feet and wriggling his toes in the worsted socks.

“N—no,” she replied, taking up the discarded boots and placing them on the oven to dry.

Herr Brechenmacher yawned and stretched himself, and then looked up at her, grinning.

“Remember the night that we came home? You were an innocent one, you were.”

“Get along! Such a time ago I forget.” Well she remembered.

“Such a clout on the ear as you gave me…. But I soon taught you.”

“Oh, don’t start talking. You’ve too much beer. Come to bed.”

He tilted back in his chair, chuckling with laughter.

“That’s not what you said to me that night. God, the trouble you gave me!”

But the little Frau seized the candle and went into the next room. The children were all soundly sleeping. She stripped the mattress off the baby’s bed to see if he was still dry, then began unfastening her blouse and skirt.

“Always the same,” she said—“all over the world the same; but, God in heaven—but stupid.”

Then even the memory of the wedding faded quite. She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.”

That last line is like a punch in the face – “She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt”. The narrative is now much darker. Women are cursed with eternal pregnancies which are dangerous and potentially fatal (“my insides are all twisted up with having children too quickly” on character observes) and children are a burden not a joy. The stories are often told from the perspective of servants who are also oppressed, a situation which finds its apotheosis in The Child Who Was Tired, in which an exhausted child is expected to be the principal carer for her younger siblings, and finds the burden too much:

“I don’t believe Holy Mary could keep him quiet,” she murmured. “Did Jesus cry like this when He was little? If I was not so tired perhaps I could do it; but the baby just knows that I want to go to sleep. And there is going to be another one.”

She flung the baby on the bed, and stood looking at him with terror.

From the next room there came the jingle of glasses and the warm sound of laughter.

And she suddenly had a beautiful marvellous idea.

She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands.

“Ts—ts—ts!” she said, “lie there, silly one; you will go to sleep. You’ll not cry any more or wake up in the night. Funny, little, ugly baby.”

He opened his eyes, and shrieked loudly at the sight of the Child-Who-Was-Tired. From the next room she heard the Frau call out to her.

“One moment—he is almost asleep,” she cried.

And then gently, smiling, on tiptoe, she brought the pink bolster from the Frau’s bed and covered the baby’s face with it, pressed with all her might as he struggled, “like a duck with its head off, wriggling”, she thought.

She heaved a long sigh, then fell back on to the floor, and was walking along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all—nobody at all.”

Powerful, distressing stuff. Mansfield may have wanted to forget this collection when she moved on to later work, but I am glad these stories remain in print. The anti-German sentiment has faded and we can now see these stories as a very personal and rather touching narrative.

The collection can be read online for free here.

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Book review

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, 1891

I am not sure why my feelings towards the novels of Thomas Hardy are so ambivalent. It could be the fairly turgid poetry I was force-fed at school, dating from the period of his life when he gave up writing novels (apparently because of the hostile popular reaction to Tess and 1895’s Jude the Obscure). It could also be because Hardy is so often the “go-to” writer for film and television adaptations, so I have a pretty good understanding of what happens in his novels, meaning that they can feel over-familiar.

Despite these reservations I am slowly coming round to the uncontroversial view that Hardy is a wonderful writer. I have many more of his novels to read, but thus far Tess is to my mind his most successful novel – in fact one of the best Victorian novels ever written, up there with Dickens at his finest.

Set in rural Wessex at the end of the nineteenth century, as technology slowly transforms country life, Tess is the tragic tale of a young country woman who has the misfortune to have an ancient family name, Durbeyfield. Her parents believe this to be a corruption of “d’Urberville”, the surname of a noble Norman family. This seemingly unimportant discovery is the spark for Tess’s tragedy .

We first see her at a village May Dance, a traditional ritual to welcome the spring. The dance is joined by Angel Clare, on a walking tour with his brothers – he notices Tess but doesn’t speak to her and the incident is soon forgotten. Meanwhile, Tess’s parents hatch a plan to recover their family fortunes. They send her to visit Mrs D’Urberville, a rich widow in the nearby town of Trantridge, to “claim kin”. There Tess meets Mrs D’Urberville’s son Alec, who persuades his mother to offer her a job as a poultry keeper. Alec’s interest in Tess is apparent. Her parents are well aware they are exposing the young and vulnerable Tess to risk in sending her to work at Trantridge, but they openly encourage the idea that Alec might marry her.

Late one night, walking home from town Alec offers Tess a ride home. They reach a grove in a forest where he drugs and rapes her. The attack is only implied, but there’s very little ambiguity in terms of what happens. What happens immediately after the attack is less clear. The narrator fast forwards several months to a new section of the text, entitled “Maid no More”. Tess is returning home, pregnant, angry and ashamed. This is a novel of silences and ambiguity, not least here. Was Tess living with Alec as his lover, perhaps with a promise of marriage? The text gives only hints and we are left to fill most of the gaps . Tess’s mother Joan hints she was aware all was not well: “After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here” (81) and Tess is even more ambiguous, telling Alec “I made up my mind (to leave) as soon as I saw – what I ought to have seen sooner” – presumably that Alec had no serious intention of marrying her.

Tess has a complex publication history – it first appeared in serial publication in a magazine, and the publisher required Hardy to make a number of changes to the text to make it more palatable to late-Victorian mores. This gave Hardy the opportunity to test public reaction and make changes when the text appeared in novel form a couple of years later. The chapters in which Tess is “seduced” (as it might have been seen at the time) or more rightly attacked, were fine-tuned by the author to leave sufficient ambiguity as to the precise relationship – and degree of immorality – between Tess and Alec. Hardy wants us to be on Tess’s ‘side’. He portrays her as a victim of male depravity and the judgmental social attitudes of the time. The novel’s defiant sub-title “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented” emphasises Hardy’s close identification with his heroine.

Once she has left Trantridge, Tess gives birth to a sickly infant son, who only lives a few weeks. Just before he dies she baptises him herself with the name Sorrow, and then buries him in a “shabby corner” of the churchyard reserved for unbaptised infants under a homemade cross. These are some of the most heart-breaking moments of the novel, but more is to come.

Two years pass, and a wiser, sadder Tess finds a job as a milkmaid at a dairy, far enough away from her home village so her reputation as a ‘fallen woman’ can be left behind. There she meets Angel Clare again, now an apprentice farmer learning dairy management. Angel has rejected his father’s suggestion that, like his two brothers, he becomes a clergyman, although their theological differences seem obscure. In this bucolic paradise, Angel and Tess fall in love. At one point they wander into a wild party of the farm’s garden, a nascent Eden, and the author makes the comparison explicit:

“The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years”…”This spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light, which pervaded the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve”.

122-130

For a while they enjoy an innocent courtship, but Angel’s proposal of marriage puts Tess in a difficult situation – would he still want to marry her if he knew of her former ‘relationship’ with Alec? Tess chooses the worst possible option – she tells him after they marry. Unable to overcome the Victorian concept that brides must be virgins (“maids”) , Angel is appalled, and rejects Tess, although seems unable to decide what to do next. In a doom-laden scene he carries Tess while sleep-walking (sleep carrying?) to a nearby church, and places her in a tomb. Foreshadowing anyone? To bring an end to the torture of indecision Tess suggests they separate, saying she will return to her parents. Rather melodramatically Angel leaves the country and goes to Brazil to seek his fortune. Things accelerate from this point. Alec reappears in Tess’s life, and further misfortune dogs her. The novel’s famous ending scene finally comes almost as a relief to the tortured Tess.

This is a rich, rewardingly complex novel. It is awash with symbolism and foreshadowing. As early as page 35 we are told that Tess’s “face was dry and pale, as though she regarded herself in the light of a murderess”. The novel is suffused with religious references, as well as a multitude of direct and indirect quotes from nineteenth century and earlier poets, and of course Shakespeare. The novel opens with an epigram from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and thereafter includes mentions from Much Ado, Lear, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, As You Like It, The Rape of Lucrece, and of course, Romeo and Juliet, to mention the few I spotted (one of which, “He suited the action to the word” (page 62), a reference to Hamlet, Act 3 scene 2, was not spotted by the otherwise exhaustively detailed footnotes provided in the Penguin Classic edition!)

While some critics have found the male leads in the novel to be two-dimensional, Tess is in many ways a modern heroine. She is strong-willed and does more than anyone could ever humanly expect to avoid her fate. If she makes mistakes it is hardly surprising given the lack of role models and support she has in her life. When there is finally no escape she takes matters into her own hands – even the pious Angel seems to accept without judgement her decision to end her relationship with Alec in the way she does.

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Book review

Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood, 1972

Surfacing, Atwood’s second novel, is an elusive narrative. Ostensibly it is a simple story – after a long absence an unnamed narrator returns to her childhood home in the remote Canadian countryside to try and find her missing father. Her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David, complete the group. The homecoming is uneasy – despite being familiar the setting feels alien and disturbing. On arrival at the family home there is no obvious sign of her father. The group agrees to stay for a week and turn the visit into a short, back to nature holiday. Tensions between each couple slowly emerge – David belittles Anna, who tells the narrator that he is a philanderer who objectifies women – for example he insists that she always wears makeup. The narrators relationship with Joe is equally strained.

Time is whiled away in fairly banal tasks – they go blueberry-picking, fishing and swimming, weed the vegetable patch and play board games. The women do the bulk of the domestic tasks. The narrator’s mental state slowly deteriorates and the narrative begins to fragmented. Sentences become short and disjointed, and eventually incoherent. The narrator is haunted by memories of her marriage, her child, and the abortion she was pushed into having. Her increasing sense of paranoia is fuelled by David’s constant references to an impending American invasion of Canada, which she treats entirely seriously. She sees hidden messages from her parents in every day objects around the house, and cannot decide if he is really alive or dead. Meanwhile David and Joe are making a modernist film, Random Samples, which is really just a collage of miscellaneous scenes. This again emphasises the narrator’s sense of alienation, making her feel like a performer rather than a real person with her own identity.

The novel draws to a climax when both men attempt unsuccessfully to pressurise the narrator into having sex with them – when rebuffed they sulk. This may have been the final trigger for the narrator’s descent into a full blown psychotic episode. She destroys David’s film and escapes in a canoe, hiding in the forest until the others leave the island. She trashes everything in the cabin, and runs around naked, eating unwashed plants, and living outside. I found these quite disturbing scenes, and although the end of the novel suggests a return to some form of normality it was something of a relief. This will probably sound patronising, but this felt like an early sketch for a novel – lots of themes and ideas are laid out for consideration, but the narrative was erratic and very difficult to engage with. There’s little here to suggest the impressive prose and strong ideas that Atwood was to develop in her later work.

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Book review

Monstrous Regiment (Discworld 31) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2003

Did I mention that Terry Pratchett was, amongst many other things, a brave writer? In his novels he tackles some of the most difficult subjects, and the fantasy settings can only provide so much “it’s only a story about vampires and trolls” cover. In Monstrous Regiment he addresses some seriously weighty issues – war, the status of women in the military and wider society, and fundamentalist religion.

Dueling Book Clubs Review Monstrous Regiment - The Fandomentals

For much of the time he is on a tightrope, balanced finely between being preachy while also avoiding being insensitive – these are not laughing matters. Amazingly he pulls it off – there’s never a point in this novel where I felt spoken down to or where the material wasn’t treated with the respect it deserved, while all the time making a series of serious points about the issues discussed. It’s mature writing of the highest order, Pratchett at the peak of his powers.

Which begs the question – what’s the novel about? Monstrous Regiment is set in Borogravia, a deeply traditional country not far from Uberwald, and therefore a long way from anywhere else. Its people are followers of Nuggan, a weirdly strict deity who rules through his representative on earth, or in the part of it that is Borogravia, the Duchess, the country’s monarch, who is almost certainly long-dead. There is strong middle-European feel to this country, not least to its constant border disputes with its neighbours over who owes a particular field or tree.

The current war with Zlobenia is going badly for Borogravia, and we join the novel with recruiters scouring the countryside for anyone who can hold a gun. The narrator follows Polly Perks, who joins up to try and find her missing in action brother Paul. (This is not just sisterly love – if Paul cannot be traced the family pub will pass to her drunken cousin when her father dies. It is one thing to recognise the unfairness to women of inheritance law, and another to include such reference in a fantasy novel). Joining a long tradition of women in the military, Polly disguises herself as a man. Much fun is had with her attempts to adopt a male swagger, to occupy space, and to fart and belch convincingly. Other recruits sign up – Maladict, a vampire, a troll called Carborundum, an Igor, and Tonker, Shufti, Wazzer and Lofty. Without wanting to spoil the reveal, this unlikely bunch of recruits are not what you might expect of a group of young men and persons joining the army.

They set off for the front, led by Sergeant Jackrum, a corpulent and highly experienced recruiting officer and their commanding officer, Lieutenant Blouse. Their first encounter with an arrogant troupe of Zlobenian cavalry is surprisingly successful. even more so when their unlikely victory is reported on by war correspondent William de Worde, he of The Truth. They quickly become popular figures of interest followed back home, and elsewhere by Commander Vimes, sent from Ankh-Morpork to try to broker a peace and protect Ankh-Morpork interests. Vimes sees that a straightforward Zlobenian victory will lead to an imbalance of power in the area, so he wonders whether the small band of plucky recruits working their way to the war might prove more useful than just cannon fodder. Sergeant Angua keeps track of the recruits as they make their way to the front, occasionally providing help, such as an unexpected package of coffee when Maladict, a black ribboner, (a vampire who has foresworn blood) begins to suffer withdrawal symptoms. On their journey the links between the unlikely recruits grow stronger, and their various backstories and secrets slowly emerge.

When they reach the front the recruits realise that the war is at a stalemate – Borogravian troops are pinned down and unable to break out of a small area of land; Zlobenian and alliance troops holding the area’s principal fortress but are unable to press their advantage. Control of the castle is key, and in a highly risky plan (which is therefore guaranteed success) they decide to infiltrate the Keep disguised (of course) as washerwomen, free the prisoners, and end the war.

I can’t tell you much more without revealing some important plot points, and for once I don’t intend to do so. As always with Pratchett the plot is really secondary to the character development anyway, and the outcome is not really that much of a surprise.

This is one of my favourite later Discworld novels – it’s set in largely new territory with only a brief appearance of regular characters, but remains unquestionably Discworld in feel throughout. The sensitivity with which the material and issues are handled is impressive, and although the jokes as always are pretty basic, the central characters are fully rounded and utterly believable. There are no bad starting places in the series, but if you have preconceptions about fantasy novels as being full of dwarves and dragons, there are worse places to put you straight than this.

P.S. I am sure you will have spotted it, but just in case, the title is an ironic reference to this 16th century misogynist pamphlet against women in positions of authority.

P.P.S. Towards the end of the novel, Pratchett uses the haunting refrain “the world turned upside down” several times. You might recognise this phrase from the musical ‘Hamilton‘. But Wikipedia tells me that the phrase derives from a pamphlet published in the 1640s “as a protest against the policies of Parliament relating to the celebration of Christmas” and has an even earlier origin in Scripture:

“These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also; Whom Jason hath received: and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus‘.” Acts 17:5-7

The Hamilton reference derives from a legend that the British army marched to this tune when they surrendered after the Siege of Yorktown. The British army would apparently have played an American or French tune in tribute to the victors, but General Washington refused them the honours of war and insisted that they play “a British or German march.” Like most good stories of this kind it is probably apocryphal – it first appears in the historical record a century after the surrender!

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Book review

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (Discworld 28) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2001

My lock-down guilty pleasures Discworld series reread continues with another novel I have not read before.

Let me explain. I discussed at length in my previous post the fact that The Last Hero and Maurice were not originally considered part of the Discworld series of novels. The change, from them being Discworld stories to becoming part of the series happened around 2009 or thereabouts. The Amazing Maurice has even weaker claims to be part of the series than Hero – apart from the setting (Uberwald, although it really could be anywhere vaguely middle-European), a mention of the Unseen University, and a brief appearance by Death and the Death of Rats, this is very much a stand-alone novel. So although I religiously bought each Discworld novel as they were published, from as early as The Colour of Magic, I missed some of the Discworld stories, including, obviously, this one.

The Amazing Maurice is marketed as a children’s or younger reader’s novel. I don’t want to argue with that because what makes a children’s novel is a matter of authorial and publisher’s judgment that I am not in a position to question, But there are dark elements to the story that I will come back to later which could easily upset a younger audience.

The Amazing Maurice is a cat who has acquired the ability to talk. He did this by eating a rat who had the same ability, having lived on a rubbish dump outside the Unseen University, where lots of background magic had accumulated. Maurice works with a troupe of talking rats with the same powers, and their human, Keith, a piper. They travel around from town to town embezzling communities by a minor variation on the Pied Piper scam – the rats make a nuisance of themselves, and then for a modest fee Keith pipes them out of town. We join them as they arrive at a town in Uberwald called Bad Blintz. This, they promise themselves, is going to be their last heist before retirement, the set up line for so many unsuccessful adventures (and bad movies). Maurice is the brains of the operation, keeping the fairly gormless Keith out of trouble as best he can.

Bad Blintz turns out to be a troubled place. Rats have already impoverished the town, and while food continues to disappear there don’t seem to be many surviving rats left. Keith meets the mayor’s daughter Malicia who is obsessed with story-telling, and has a thin grasp on the difference between reality and fiction. For example, when she is searching the town’s rat-catchers’ hut for clues she keeps leaning casually on walls hoping false walls will open. The fact that they do find a hidden trapdoor, leading to a network of cellars full of stolen food and caged rats, naturally encourages this fantasy. Malicia learns about Maurice and the rats ability to talk but is unfazed by it – it’s the sort of things that happens in stories.

At the heart of the novel is the quest to work out what is happening in Bad Blintz – where all the food is going, and what has happened to the rats? In the course of that quest we are introduced to many of the rats in the ‘clan’ – their aging leader Hamnpork, Dangerous Beans a spiritual rat, his assistant Peaches, and Darktan, the trap expert, to name a few. In the nightmarish cellars of the town they meet and confront the sinister Rat King, Spider, who is able to control rats, cats and even humans with the powers of his mind.

Some of the scenes with the rats, caged and cannibalistic, are vivid and scary, and I can only imagine how a pre-teen reader would react to them. There are also some character deaths, not all of which are temporary, and while the happy-ever-after ending is well constructed and satisfactory, the scares and genuine sense of threat along the way contribute to that sense of darkness I mentioned earlier. Pratchett has learned from Roald Dahl and others that stories for children can be nasty.

Pratchett was a wonderfully thoughtful writer, always with something interesting and original to say about the big issues of life, so I should not have been surprised to read such insight and compassion in a children’s story about talking rats. Along with the ability to speak the rats (and Maurice) have developed consciousness, and dare I say it souls. They develop concepts such as the self, an awareness of evil, and debate moral issues such as whether to eat non-talking rats, and what happens to them after they die. The rats are not overly anthropomorphised, certainly not sentimentally. They still widdle on everything, can’t wear clothes because they get in the way, and take their names from the sides of tin cans. In case we miss the point the contrast is emphasised by the snippets from a children’s story which the rats carry around in a manner akin to a holy book. This gave Maurice and the rats a depth of character that you just don’t expect in a story about talking animals, and for a brief moment my lifelong aversion to rats was abated.

Storytelling is an important theme in the novel. Malicia think life is just a story, the kind in which there is always a happy ending. Speaking of endings, I think Maurice has one of the most satisfying and effective endings in the series. The rats work out a purpose in life, which isn’t to run away and live on an island, but to use the power of narrative force to shape their destinies;

“If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.”
“And what if your story doesn’t work?”
“You keep changing it until you find one that does.”

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

Maurice is an important link in the Discworld chain because it kept the franchise alive and fresh, introducing a whole new group of readers to Discworld, who would of course go on to read the ‘main’ series. It was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 2002. This was Pratchett’s first major award, and in acceptance he gave this wonderful quote reflecting on his ambivalent about the fantasy genre:

“Stick in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer’

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Book review

“The presumption that what is male is universal is a direct consequence of the gender data gap. Whiteness and maleness can only go without saying because most other identities never get said at all. But male universality is also a cause of the gender data gap: because women aren’t seen and aren’t remembered, because male data makes up the majority of what we know, what is male comes to be seen as universal. It leads to the positioning of women, half the global population, as a minority. With a niche identity and subjective point of view. In such a framing, women are set up to be forgettable. Ignorable. Dispensable – from culture, from history, and from data. And so, women become invisible.”

It is difficult to read this book without succumbing to a sense of both rage and frustration. Rage at the endemic discrimination against women which seems hard baked into all areas of society, all deriving from the often-unacknowledged assumption that women are the

deviation from the male norm. And frustration at the speed of change in a society which has known about many of these issues for a long time but seems to have made little progress in addressing them.

“The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience–that of half the global population, after all–is seen as, well, niche.”

The depth and range of research that went into this book is breath-taking. The author’s examples touch on almost every area of life, and consistently return to the same conclusion: women just haven’t been thought about when it comes to the design of the constructed world we live in. It is hard to pick representative examples from the book, but here goes: at Google, which likes to think of itself as a progressive company, they hadn’t realised that parking spaces for pregnant women shouldn’t be at the back of the car park until the Chief Operating Officer fell pregnant; when first launched the Apple Health app didn’t include a menstrual cycle tracker; car crash dummies are 1.7m tall, the size of the average man, leading directly to women being 47% more likely to be seriously injured if they are in a collision; the average smartphone is 5.5 inches long and is too big for most women’s hands; speech-recognition software is trained on recordings of male voices and therefore much more likely to understand men. I could go on – this is not a book short on evidence or examples.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. This is not just a collection of evidence, powerful though that would be on its own. It is a manifesto, a rallying call for change. It is not enough to just witness this inequality; we should not accept women being treated as an anomalous version of masculinity and data collection should recognise sex and always consider how men and women are impacted differently.

“Closing the gender data gap is only step one. The next, and crucial step, is for governments and organisations to actually use that data to shape policy around it. This isn’t happening.

(page 120)

I am well aware that it is going to seem churlish of me to write about one of the very few passages in this book that I disagree with, but I think the issue is sufficiently important to address. In Chapter 12 ‘A Costless Resource to Exploit‘, the author writes about the post-2010 General Election austerity policies of public sector cuts. She describes how these cuts fell on women particularly hard (although you could add people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Northerners and the working class to that list) and observes that by comparison “men in the richest 50% of households actually gained from tax and benefit changes since July 2015”. So, an ideologically hard-Right Government cuts benefits, attacks the poor and gives tax breaks to the middle classes – Criado Perez rightly asks “So why is the UK Government enacting policy that is so manifestly unjust?” Her answer I have to say made me splutter:

“The answer is simple: they aren’t looking at the data”!!

Really? So it is not that there is a gender-gap in the data, which has been the central thesis of the book thus far, but that the Government and the thousands of civil servants that advise it have either chosen or forgotten to look at the data forecasting the impact of their cuts before implementing them. I can imagine George Osborne sitting in his office at the Evening Standard reading this chapter and saying “If only someone had told me that closing all those children’s centres, shutting down Sure Start, cutting funding to local Government, imposing the bedroom tax etc would have been damaging to working people and women in particular. If I had known that of course I wouldn’t have cut public spending and given tax breaks to the rich.”

This is important, because if we accept Criado-Perez’s idea that the problem is the data gap (which unquestionably exists in many areas) then the obvious remedy is to gather more data. That would no doubt help, but I struggle to believe that it would address the injustices in society on its own. Because there are plenty of situations where we have more than enough data, we just have politicians and people in power who choose not to use that data. Equal pay is an obvious example – we have a vast amount of data about how much people are paid, not least through the income tax system, yet the pay gap between men and women remains shamefully high. Do we need more data as to why that is, or do we just need to do something about it, and if so what? (Incidentally the Office for National Statistics has got a wonderfully detailed report on the gender pay gap on its website.)

Perhaps I am being unfair. Elsewhere the author is much more direct about the issue of whether the problem is missing data, or the willingness to use the data to confront inequality. It’s clearly both, and the motivations ascribed to the Government when imposing austerity were hyperbole.

The only other critical observation I would make is that Criado-Perez is inconsistent in her treatment of unpaid work. In Chapter 12 she points out that it is a political choice to exclude unpaid work, done largely by women, from measurements of national wealth and economic activity, usually expressed as GDP (gross domestic product). She illustrates how much GDP would increase in various countries if unpaid work was included in the measurement. But later she argues that

“Increasing the amount of unpaid work women have to do (by closing children’s centres, for example) lowers their participation rate in the paid labour force. And women’s paid labour-force participation rate has a significant impact on GDP.”

Invisible Women, pages 245-6

Enabling women to undertake paid work by providing adequate childcare would only raise GDP if we exclude the economic value of unpaid work from that measurement? Otherwise women would just be swapping unpaid work in the home for paid work outside of it. The actual value generated would be neutral.

These points might seem like nit-picking, but there is a far more serious issue that goes unaddressed here. The author treats data as if it is neutral, objective, the elusive source of answers to any question if it is collected correctly or if just enough data is gathered. But it’s not. It is possible to frame or interpret data in many ways. It isn’t passive – the exact same data set can be read to mean entirely different things (we’ve all seen those drawings – is it a duck or a rabbit?). Data can be twisted to make difference seem less drastic, false correlations can be drawn, how data is collected and presented can make huge differences to what it appears to tell us, and of course numbers can be manipulated depending on the question asked. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science has some fascinating evidence on this, showing how it is possible to manipulate the results of supposedly double-blind trials simply by how you select your participants. We have seen during the recent Covid 19 epidemic that it is possible to the collect and present data to show how successful the UK Government’s handling has been despite it being seen by the rest of the world as an unmitigated disaster. Data is political.

Criado-Perez doesn’t directly address transgenderism, but it is an underlying topic in many sections of the book. A book called Invisible Women needs a working definition of ‘women’ for starters. One of the structural responses to the public discussion of transgender issues has been the introduction of gender-neutral toilets in public spaces. Criado-Perez is not sure that this is the correct approach. Not only does it reduce the availability of toilets for women (because they need to use stalls) but:

“We have learned from so many mistakes in the past that women are at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence if they don’t have separate bathrooms” (quoting an Amnesty International official).

Page 303

And on the topic of transwomen competing in women’s sport, the author provides the following significant evidence (I have removed the half a dozen or so footnotes from this quote, which provide evidence for each of the statistics quoted, but they are there to be checked if required) :

“Upper-body mass is approximately 75% greater in men because women’s lean body mass tends to be less concentrated in their upper body, and, as a result, men’s upper body strength is on average between 40-60% higher than women’s (compared to lower-body strength which is on average only 25% higher in men). Women also have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men, and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger hand grip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman. It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away: a study which compared ‘highly trained female athletes’ to men who were ‘untrained or not specifically trained’ found that their grip strength ‘rarely’ surpassed the fiftieth percentile of male subjects. Overall, 90% of the women (this time including untrained women) in the study had a weaker grip than 95% of their male counterparts.

Food for thought.

This is not a book to be rushed, but one once read to keep on the shelf for reference. It should be compulsory reading for anyone in a position of authority whether in Government or private enterprise. It’s a landmark study that will be looked back on in decades to come, hopefully as a record of how we got things wrong in the bad old days.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, 2019

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Book review

Decline and Fall, (Diaries 2005-2010) by Chris Mullin 2010

These diaries cover the long slow death of the New Labour experiment from Blair’s comfortable third win in 2005 to Labour’s election defeat in May 2010. The diaries were published later that year, which suggests either that Mullin used his self-imposed retirement productively or that he was actively preparing them for publication while still writing them. Is this different from keeping a diary and one day getting round to editing it for publication? I think so, although I recognise the distinction is a narrow one. Mullin’s earlier edition of his diaries A View From the Foothills was published during the period covered by this book, so you have the slightly surreal occurrence of a diary recording the publication of and reaction to a diary. He was later to go on to publish a third edition of his diaries A Walk on Part covering the period 1995 to 1997.

Decline & Fall: Diaries 2005-2010 (Mullin Diaires 2): Amazon.co.uk ...

It goes without saying that on the course of a politician’s day-to-day life they will have lots of conversations about politics. It must be so tempting to just publish those conversations that appear prescient, making one look a wise political forecaster, and edit out any instances where one gets it spectacularly wrong. To be fair to Mullin he studiously avoids this temptation; these diaries book is full of forecasts that make him look like he really didn’t know what was going on. He confidently predicts David Davis will win the contest for leadership of the Conservatives (David Cameron won) for example, and that Gordon Brown will not lead Labour into the 2010 general election (he did). Sometimes he does get it right of course, such as this entry November 2005, only a few months after Blair’s third election victory:

“I think we will lose the next election. The Tories will come to some sort of understanding with the Lib Dems”.

In 2005 that wouldn’t have been an obvious outcome, but I can see why that conversation would have seemed important when editing the diaries in 2010, because of course that is precisely what did happen. This sense of foreboding about Labour’s prospects suffuses almost every entry. Labour seemed to Mullin, and to most people he spoke to, to be in irreversible decline, and he often refers to the inevitability of the party not just losing the 2010 general election but being displaced from power (or office) for good, and it losing its ‘historic purpose’.

The Labour Government of 2005-2010 had a secure majority of over 60, not that much smaller than the current administration. This was the third consecutive Labour Government, and the malaise of all long-term administrations is clearly articulated in these entries. Large numbers of disaffected former Ministers now on the back-benches led to lots of resentment against whips and party leaders. In the early years plotting over the succession to Blair gripped the Parliamentary party. Incompetence ruled – if it could go wrong it did, and the atmosphere was suffused with decay and corruption. This was also the period of the huge expenses scandal, with hundreds of MPs over-claiming their expenses, and several eventually going to prison.

It is hard to see from these diaries whether this administration achieved anything much at all. If it did Mullin didn’t seem to notice, and the best he can say about the Government is that it is not as bad as the Tories. It was obsessed with the idea that to build on the successes of the previous Blair Governments it had to be as right-wing as possible. New Labour as an ideology still gripped the party. The diary is full of daft right-wing proposals that Mullin feels compelled to vote against. The Government tries time and again, expending huge amounts of political capital, to extend the period of detention without charge for terror suspects, without anyone other than Ministers thinking it a good idea. I had forgotten that it was a New Labour idea to privatise the probation service, an idea that the Tories subsequently pushed through and have just had to unpick because it was so stupid. It is almost as if the party had a death-wish, recognising the need for a period in opposition to cleanse itself of New Labour and to put the calumny of the Iraq War behind it. (Incidentally, Ed Miliband features very little – when the surname Miliband is used it almsot always refers to David, always seen as the more senior figure.)

Much of the headline stories of this period are familiar, and Mullin’s observations are more in the way of reminders rather than new insights. This in part is because he was by this time a peripheral figure – he does not appear in any of the extensive memoirs of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson or Alastair Campbell. This sense of being an observer was partly what drove his decision to stand down at the 2010 election. Revisiting this period does bring home the tragic mismanagement of the opportunities a 60+ majority brings. Mullin records in detail the period when Gordon Brown took over from Blair (in 2007) and flirted with the idea of calling a snap election. At the time it seemed another daft idea, with three years left to run on the Government and a secure majority, but no-one foresaw the banking collapse of 2008 which was to inflict such damage on the Government’s reputation for fiscal rectitude.

With maybe one or two honourable exceptions it is hard to over-state just how catastrophically bad this Government was. Initially the pressure on Blair to stand aside for Brown was hugely damaging, but that is only one small part of the problem. Politically the party was bankrupt; financially things were equally disastrous, with membership in freefall. If a mistake was there to be made the Government embraced it enthusiastically, from the expenses scandal to cash for questions. If bringing Peter Mandelson back into Government was the right answer then you have to wonder what the question was. The sense of decay is compounded by the regular visits by the grim reaper as various Labour figures met their maker – Robin Cook, Michael Foot, and Mo Mowlam to name a few.

For anyone supportive of the Labour Party this is sad but instructive read. The Party was captured by a right-wing faction that was very good at what it set out to achieve – to win elections – but missing many of the other qualities needed to form a successful reformist Government. Lessons for today are there for the taking.

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Book review

The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902

Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead of a heart attack, his corpse disfigured by an expression of horror. Next to the corpse the footprints of a gigantic hound are found. There is a sinister curse on the Baskerville family dating back to the brutal abduction of a local girl by one of Sir Charles’ ancestors. The girl died escaping from Baskerville Hall and her abductor was killed by a demon hound which has haunted the family ever since. The curse has now returned to the Baskervilles once more. Can Sherlock Holmes work out what’s going on and save Sir Charles’s heir from the curse?

The Hound of the Baskervilles - Wikipedia

Thus begins the atmospheric classic The Hound of the Baskervilles, the third of Conan Doyle’s four full-length Holmes novels. The formula that Conan Doyle used to construct his detective short stories was well honed by this point, but did not lend itself comfortably to being adapted to novel length. This in part explains why structurally the novel is a mess. But I really don’t want to write a review explaining why The Hound of the Baskervilles is a flawed mystery story, not least because that kind of deconstruction of the novel has been done before. Instead I wanted to focus on at least one of the reasons why the novel works in spite of its plotting weaknesses. Much of its undeniable impact is down to the strong evocation of place created by Watson’s descriptions of Baskerville Hall and the moor.

Watson and Sir Henry, Sir Charles’s successor, newly arrived in the country, travel down to his estate on Dartmoor. They have good reason to feel apprehensive about what they will find. This is Sir Henry’s first visit to Baskerville Hall. He is aware of the family curse, and has been troubled by mysterious events while staying in London which add to the sense of foreboding.

We first see the moor from Watson’s train carriage window:

“Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream. “

The formal squares of the rural landscape break down into jagged, vague shapes as the train progresses from the farmed countryside to the dream-like moors. The other-worldly quality of the landscape is something Watson returns to time and again.

Our first sight of Baskerville Hall, ancestral home of the Baskerville family, is soon upon us. The point of view narration as Watson provides an almost minute-by-minute account of his journey gives an immediacy to the narrative:

The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the grey boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir…. a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation—sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.

This is fine descriptive writing of a quality not often found in the short stories, where there is rarely the room for Watson to be expansive about landscape or place (although to be fair some of the descriptions of foggy London streets are very evocative). Again the emphasis is on the melancholy atmosphere of the countryside, in which the dying vegetation provides a suitable setting for the scenes that are to follow.

The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into a cuplike depression, patched with stunted oaks and firs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm. Two high, narrow towers rose over the trees. The driver pointed with his whip.

“Baskerville Hall”

(One might reasonably expect a crash of thunder at this point, but sadly, no.) Patched, twisted, stunted, bent – this landscape is described using the language of sickness or illness, and stands in stark contrast to the ordered, productive fields which had come before.

Inside, Baskerville Hall is equally striking, a fine setting for a murder-mystery:

It was a fine apartment in which we found ourselves, large, lofty, and heavily raftered with huge baulks of age-blackened oak. In the great old-fashioned fireplace behind the high iron dogs a log-fire crackled and snapped. Sir Henry and I held out our hands to it, for we were numb from our long drive. Then we gazed round us at the high, thin window of old stained glass, the oak panelling, the stags’ heads, the coats of arms upon the walls, all dim and sombre in the subdued light of the central lamp...the dining-room which opened out of the hall was a place of shadow and gloom. It was a long chamber with a step separating the dais where the family sat from the lower portion reserved for their dependents. At one end a minstrel’s gallery overlooked it. Black beams shot across above our heads, with a smoke-darkened ceiling beyond them. .. A dim line of ancestors, in every variety of dress, from the Elizabethan knight to the buck of the Regency, stared down upon us and daunted us by their silent company.

Again this is impressive descriptive writing. Unusually Watson is not now writing for the magazine readers who follow his accounts of Holmes’s achievements but for Holmes himself, stranded back in London dealing with a tricky blackmail case (or so we are told). So attention to detail, even if it is not immediately clear whether it is relevant to the case or not, is key, and Watson completes his commission diligently. The detailed layout of the Hall is to prove an important aspect of the mystery.

The setting of The Hound of the Baskervilles is a key element of its enduring success as a novel. Holmes fades into the background for much of the narrative, allowing Watson more time to expand his observations and at least start to unpick the mystery.

P.S. On re-reading this post in draft I am conscious that it is mainly extracts from the novel, with little by way of commentary or analysis. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t think I can call it a review. I will however let it stand, because the extracts are fine writing, and if they prompt anyone to go on and read the novel itself (free online, or otherwise) then that can’t be a bad thing.

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Book review

Talking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell, 2019

Another ‘popular science’ read. I had previously bought but was unable to read Gladwell’s highly successful Blink, a study of what he termed the ‘adaptive unconscious’. It’s not that I didn’t finish it – it just never got to the top of my to-be-read pile, and is probably still lurking at the back of a bookcase somewhere. So my selection of Talking to Strangers was in part a strange form of apology – I may not have read your earlier book, but I will make up for it with this one. Another reason for this choice was that the title was encouraging – the ability to talk to strangers is a important skill that comes easily to some but causes angst and distress to others, and it would be good to know more about it.

I shouldn’t have worried because the title is misleading – the book is not a how-to guide on speaking to unfamiliar people, but about what happens when people talk to one another for the first time, the different assumptions and mistakes people make when dealing with those that they don’t know. Obviously the mistakes continue even when we know the people quite well – but I suppose “Talking to People” wouldn’t have made as interesting a title. Gladwell has a relaxed anecdotal style. He draws examples from all over the place (although with admittedly an American emphasis) – Cuban spies, dodgy sports trainers, Adolf Hitler, Bernie Madoff, and Amanda Knox, to name just a few. Whether these anecdotes cohere into an overall narrative or line of argument is debatable. My impression at the time was that they were just interesting stories stitched thinly together without a consistent thread. That’s not to say the stories and the analysis aren’t interesting, just that at the end of the book we really can’t say we know that much more about how to talk to strangers. Often the points made are unremarkable – of course we aren’t as good at telling when people are lying as we think we are; of course some people are better liars than others, and of course social norms are important when assessing behaviour.

The book opens and closes with an analysis of the case of a young American woman, Sandra Bland, stopped by the police for a minor traffic violation. Gladwell tries to work out why this routine stop went so badly wrong that it ended up with Bland being arrested and jailed, where three days later she tragically ended her life.

One of Gladwell’s main themes is the ‘default to truth’, our tendency to assume the person we are speaking to is being honest. There are obviously good evolutionary reasons why we trust more than we are suspicious, not least the need to cooperate with one another for common, social enterprises. Gladwell isn’t suggesting the default to truth is a bad thing – just that we need to be aware it happens. Sadly in the Sandra Bland case it did not. The officer did not assume she was telling the truth – quite the opposite in fact. Gladwell argues that the reason this routine traffic stop went the way it did was because the officer had been trained to a) aggressively stop everyone he possibly could, because criminals drive cars, and b) to interpret normal behaviours such as irritation and nervousness as indicators of guilt – guilt about what isn’t clear. But what is almost completely missing in Gladwell’s analysis is any recognition of the role of racism in the Bland case, because almost inevitably Sandra Bland was black. I say almost because the idea that she was treated differently because of her skin colour is raised only to be quickly discounted. It is hard to look back at that traffic stop now since the murder of George Floyd and not make the case for the arrest of Sarah Bland as being part of the systematic attack upon African-American citizens by the state.

This is a book designed to make the reader feel well-informed without learning much other than a series of anecdotes. Here’s an example of the level of analysis in the book:

“The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

That’s a distillation of some of the central concepts in the book – “we do not understand the context in which the stranger is operating”. Really? That’s it?

There is an excellent demolition of the book in the Atlantic if you want to read more along these lines. One of the very perceptive points made in this article is that readers come to consider Gladwell’s books as:

“the high-journalism version of Bond or Bourne movies, breakneck adventures that take us on a tour of exotic intellectual locales. He introduces us to historical oddities, revisionist interpretations of the past, the frontiers of social science, the backstories behind recent headlines, all strung together along a single provocative thesis.”

This is the approach used in Talking to Strangers – with the difference here that the provocative thesis goes missing, leaving us with a disjointed series of anecdotes. It’s an easy read, but not one of those popular science books that is going to change the way I look at the world in the way that the best of the genre can do.

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