Tag Archives: Book review

Book review, Discworld, humour, Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic

The Colour of Magic (Discworld 1) by Terry Pratchett, 1983

Colour of magic

So this is where it all began. I returned to the original Discworld novel as a change of pace from Dickens and with one question at the front of my mind – would it stand the test of time? How well would it have aged, and how fully formed was Pratchett’s early vision of Discworld? Would the detail and complexity all be there, or would, as I assumed, the detail have developed and accrued over time, book by book? Which is a lot more than one question of course.

Remarkably the Discworld universe is almost completely fully developed in this first portrait. The cosmology or Astrozoology – with the Great A’tuin and his accompanying elephants – is all there, and Pratchett had obviously given a lot of thought to the practicalities of a flat world with its hub and the Rim. Ankh-Morpork is complete in virtually every detail (quote) with the pre-Sam Vimes Watch, the Patrician (not yet identified as Vetenari) and the Thieves and Assassins’ Guilds. The Unseen University with its complex hierarchy of wizards and ArchWizards is there, as is magic as a practical working concept. I really enjoyed the way Pratchett plays with the idea of science being a modern equivalent of magic – not a new idea of course, but one he has fun with, for example when Rincewind is trying to work out how Twoflower’s camera works.

“This is all wrong. When Twoflower said they’d got a better kind of magic in the Empire I thought – I thought…

The imp looked at him expectantly. Rincewind cursed to himself. “Well if you must know, I thought he didn’t mean magic. Not as such”

“What else is there, then?”

Rincewind began to feel really wretched. “I don’t know” he said. “A better way of doing things, I suppose. Something with a bit of sense in it. Harnessing – harnessing the lightening, or something”.

‘The Colour of Magic’ also features two of Pratchett’s most-loved ‘characters’ – Twoflower’s sapient pearwood Luggage, and Death. The Luggage is an indefatigable multi-legged terminator, while Death already speaks in his distinctive capitalised tone, and already has his habit of appearing when least expected, such as here when the landlord of the Broken Drum is trying to set fire to his cellar to claim on his recently agreed inn-sewer-ants polly sea:

“At the top of the cellar steps Broadman knelt down and fumbled in his tinderbox. It turned out to be damp.
‘I’ll kill that bloody cat,’ he muttered, and groped for the spare box that was normally on the ledge by the door. It was missing. Broadman said a bad word. A lighted taper appeared in mid-air, right beside him.
HERE, TAKE THIS.
‘Thanks,’ said Broadman.
DON’T MENTION IT.”

The other thing that struck me, and which may be controversial, is that over time Pratchett became a much better and funnier writer. That’s not to say ‘The Colour of Magic’ isn’t funny – it is – but I think his comic style matured and improved. His love of groanworthy puns is already evident here, but some of the jokes go beyond being bad dad jokes, and are just plain bad, for example:

“My name is immaterial,’ she said.
That’s a pretty name,’ said Rincewind”

There is a thin dividing line between using clever references to other writers and genres, and just being derivative. Pratchett tiptoes close to the line sometimes in this novel, and in particular I have always thought that his debt to Fritz Lieber, author of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series has been acknowledged but never fully appreciated. In later novels there is a lot more Pratchett and far fewer borrowings – references of course, but done in a way in which the original source is acknowledged without being simply reproduced.

Almost lastly, a bit of a moan about this edition. It is the Corgi edition shown above, with the original Josh Kirby illustration (which I always felt were a bit over the top tbh), published this year with a mention of Pratchett’s death in the frontispiece. The blurb includes a quote from the independent calling Pratchett “one of the funniest English authors alive”. Was this just a case of laziness by the publishers not bothering to update their copy, or just a bad joke?

Finally, a quiz question for you, which should be easy given the subject of this blog entry – who are Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen?

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21st century literature, American literature, Book review, Jonathan Safran Foer

Here I Am, by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2017

As I may have mentioned once or twice, I keep this blog as a record of what I read. If I don’t blog it’s probably because I haven’t been reading, but occasionally there are novels that really challenge my ability to say something interesting. ‘Here I Am’, Jonathan Safran Foer’s third novel, is a case in point. I read it a couple of months ago, but found it so underwhelming that when I finally found the time to write this review I had to look the title up. What is more remarkable is that it seems to have taken the author 10 years or more to write it!

‘Here I Am‘ is the story of the Blochs, a very familiar dysfunctional American family. Julia, an architect, and husband Jacob, a TV screenwriter, live in Washington DC with their three sons, Sam, Max and Benjy. Their marriage is falling apart for all the usual reasons – boredom, disrespect, mid-life crises, infidelity. An extended family provides supporting cast members including Jacob’s grandfather Isaac, planning to defer death until after Sam’s bar mitzvah; Jacob’s parents, Irv and Deborah, and others.

The Guardian’s review described “Here I Am” as

“a novel of diaspora, of the elasticity of its numerous possible meanings, and of the pain caused by both the presence and the absence of the homeland it invokes. It moves from the intimate dissection of a family that has ceased to become a home for its members to the question of what Israel means to American Jews, and what they might consider to be their duty in the face of its imperilment.”

Which is a useful thematic summary, but will also give you a strong flavour of the worthiness of the novel. Worthiness can be fatal to any attempt at comedy. Because despite the big themes, this is undoubtedly intended to be an albeit dark comic novel. Divided between writing a serious novel about the experience of being a Jewish American family (already very well-explored novelistic territory) and the more comic aspects of that experience (ditto) Safran delivers neither very well.

Part of the problem is that very little happens, and it takes a long time to not happen. Minor incidents become central plot elements. Sam leaves a list of “rude” words on his desk at school then denies doing so – it is not until near the end of the novel that we find out he did write the list, as a profoundly unrealistic exercise in intellectual curiosity. Jacob “loses” the secret mobile phone on which he and a producer have exchanged explicitly sexual texts, in a pretty pathetic attempt to make himself more interesting to his wife. As mid-life crises go this is mundane stuff.

The bulk of the narrative is conveyed through the family’s conversations. The repetitive dialogues and monologues may be realistic representations of the way families talk to one another, but it felt a bit like being harangued for 500 and more pages. Realising the novel needed something by way of incident or drama, Safran Foer goes “all-in”. An apocalyptic earthquake in the Middle East strikes Israel, gifting the surrounding states an opportunity to recover lost territories/invade, depending on your perspective. A domestic chronicle suddenly becomes a diary of this catastrophe, which ends with the Israeli prime minister’s absurdly unlikely call to the men of the Jewish diaspora to return “home”. As if a country struck by an earthquake needs an influx of untrained volunteers to defend it. Jacob’s half-hearted attempt to volunteer falls flat, being turned away at the airport due to him having nothing worthwhile to contribute. As a metaphor for the turbulence in the Bloch family the earthquake and ensuing crisis is clumsy in the extreme, and as a statement on the position in the Middle East it is at best irrelevant and worst tasteless.

And if you have found the preceding paragraphs an unsatisfactory account of this novel, well you can’t say I didn’t warn you!

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Book review

The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors by Dan Jones, 2017

tamplarsIt would be hard to write a boring history of the Knight’s Templars. They were a Christian military order originally founded during the early years of the Crusades to protect pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem and other holy sites in the very dangerous lands of the Middle East. The Order’s story is inextricably linked with that of the Crusades, and you accidentally learn a lot about the latter just by reading this account of the former. It is hardly surprising then that the Templars have had a strong grip on popular imagination, from the Da Vinci Code to Indiana Jones. They also had a flair for iconography and symbolism, such as the big red cross they wore on their cloaks.

Dan Jones’s “Templars” a fairly conventional chronological narrative, and after a while the procession of battles, slaughter, castles and cities captured and lost, becomes a bit of a blur. Masters of the Order come and go, opponent warlords do the same, victories and losses take their turn. This is a very Western oriented history – the infidel hordes are differentiated only by their leaders, and there is no attempt to understand why they had such apparently inexhaustible resources (clue – because this was/is their homeland) or why they were able to repeatedly defeat supposedly superior Western European armies. Jones resists the temptation to draw parallels with modern conflicts in the Middle East,  although these suggest themselves at times irresistibly.

 Authors of histories need to address the “Why am I writing this book?” question in a way fiction writers do not. Normally answers range from “I have uncovered new material” – no such claim is made here – “I have a different interpretation from previous authors” – ditto – or “this topic has not been written about recently” – another ditto. So why was this book written? Jones may have hoped for a TV adaptation from this book – the settings are very photogenic – and this may be behind his tendency to leave chapters hanging on a cliff-hanger in phrases such as “William was not quite ready to act on the evidence he was compiling. But he could and he would”; “He would never see Cyprus again”; or “This was the moment when darkness began to fall on the Templars”.

I make no claims of expertise in this field, but I got the impression that Jones has based his work primarily on the chronicles of the Templars and their opponents. I would have thought an archaeological approach might have been worth considering – what do the ruins of the temples, castles, houses and farms of the Order  tell us about their histories that the chronicles gloss over?

During my read of this text I came up with a theory about this category of book – serious but non-academic history. There’s a limit to how much information the brain can retain. This is a complex narrative spanning around two hundred years. The bibliography, glossary and appendices run to almost 100 pages. This condensation of such a vast amount of information in a non-academic work of history (I don’t mean Jones’s approach is non-academic, simply that the book is aimed at the general albeit studious reader, rather than historians or student) inevitably leads to the overwhelming weight of facts passing the reader by. It’s just not possible to retain all that information, unless you read the book as if you were going to be examined on it afterwards. So in the end you probably learn little more than if you were to read a few thousand words about the Templars on Wikipedia. I am not sure that is a problem or not – you can enjoy the book but use the internet if time is more pressing or you want to cover more ground.

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Book review

Jacob’s Room is full of books – Susan Hill, 2017

‘Jacob’s Room is full of books‘ is Susan Hill’s very readable if (I have to say) unsubstantial  follow up to ‘Howard’s End is on the Landing’. Simply, it is a reading diary, a year of reading as the subtitle puts it.  Each month Hill mentions the books she has been reading, and these booHIllks then go on to trigger what often seem quite random but nevertheless entirely natural thoughts – her personal acquaintance with the author, her impressions and judgments on their other works, what it is like to be a writer on GCSE reading lists, attending literature festivals, and so on. Interspersed with this well-informed stream of consciousness are many observations about nature, particularly birds, which if I was being cynical I would think of as padding to get the book over the 200 pages mark…

There is a structure of sorts to the book – it is divided into the twelve months of the year – but you could easily dip into it at any point and it wouldn’t make much difference. You certainly don’t end the book knowing much more about Hill or books or reading or writing than you do, say, half way, or indeed after having read ‘Howards End is on the Landing’. Which makes me wonder – is this anything other than a rather cynical cash-in, a stocking filler, something to appeal to Christmas shoppers with a reader in their lives to keep happy? I feel a bit ridiculous mentioning this, but the fact that Jacob’s Room isn’t mentioned at all in the book, other than to provide the mildly amusing title, niggled at me slightly. Because Hill’s struggles with her out-of-control personal collection of books, which she culls ruthlessly and often, but still can’t keep on top of, (“As fast as I get one out of the back door, two new ones come in through the front anyway”) was one of the more relate-able aspects of the book which I would have liked to have known more about.

The book shows signs of being a transcribed notebook – there is an immediacy to many of Hill’s observations and comments, such as those on wildlife spotted (that is seen, not spotted wildlife) or emails received – and the repetition at many points, such as her slightly contradictory accounts of being on the 2011 Booker prize jury, could have done with some friendly editing. There’s little artifice here – there must have been a temptation to edit or self censor to make the author appear a more careful and considered reader – but that doesn’t seem to have happened. I suspect I won’t be the only reader who snapped the book shut at her more outrageous criticisms of writers we have loved – Keats, for goodness sake, gets dismissed with a few words, and Jane Eyre goes proudly unread – but then cheered when she praises our favourites. I can forgive her almost everything for her comments on the brilliance of Raymond Chandler.

If I wanted to I could construct a narrative about this book being (underneath all the daily noise) about ageing. Hill is in her mid-70’s, and while full of life she still has some/much of the grumpiness of many of that age. She knows that her overstocked shelves are becoming a bit of a burden, and in trying to divest herself of them she is making tentative steps towards preparing for the later stages of her life. Whether I can convince even myself on this one is another matter.

This was the first and probably easiest/shortest of an extraordinary haul of books I accumulated over the recent festivities, which will dominate my reading across much of 2018. I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

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Book review

Goods Omen by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 1990

Why haven’t I read “Good Omens” before now? That’s not a rhetorical question – tell me why no-one has thrust this book into my hands and said “You love Terry Pratchett and you think Neil Gaiman is pretty good as well, so read this, now”? As you can tell I feel slightly narked at the fact that this wonderful book has not made it onto my reading list until now. Good omens

One reason might be that collaborations, especially on novels, have at best a patchy record. Name me a novel written by two people that is as good as any of the novels written by either of the co-authors? That one is a rhetorical question btw. “Good Omens” is the only co-authored novel on the BBC Big Read list of 100 best novels, if you needed any evidence on that point. But something about the way these two worked together, across different continents and time zones, just worked, producing something as good as if not better than their best solo work. It could easily have been written by Douglas Adams, and if you have been paying any attention to anything I have written in the last 5 years or so you will know that there is no higher compliment.

“Good Omens” started life as a Just William parody, and if I were to find a fault with the novel, the extended sections of the prepubescent schoolboys and schoolgirl getting up to no good in an essentially well behaved way are some of the weaker parts of the novel. But that doesn’t really matter, because the cornucopia of ideas and characters that fizz from every page of the rest of the novel more than compensate. Quite how a schoolboy story became a parable about the end of the world I am not sure, but it tells you something about Pratchett and Gaiman’s imaginations. There so much to enjoy here – utterly believable eccentric characters, such as the angel and demon working together to avoid Armageddon, Witchfinder General Shadwell and his assistant Newton Pulsifer, the witch Anathema Device (was/is there any author better at producing fantastic names for his characters than Terry Pratchett was – I give you Cut My Own Throat Dibbler in evidence), a breathless plotline that genuinely leaves it open to doubt whether the world is going to end or not, and on every page some of the best and at the same time wisest jokes you will find in any modern novel.

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

“An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.”
“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”
This is Pratchett at his very best, and whatever Neil Gaiman contributed to the process and outcome – the appendix at the end of this edition contains interviews with the authors that are frustratingly vague on this point, including the possibility that some of the text was written by neither of them – the combination just worked. I suspect it made Terry a better author in the long run, although I don’t think he ever wrote anything better.
Finally some good news – the novel is being adapted for television by the BBC, with two of Britain’s best actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, in the lead roles, and with a wonderful supporting cast. Should be (the light) fantastic.
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Book review

Citizen Clem – John Bew

This is a good time to return to the extraordinary story of Clement Attlee’s rise to the leadership of the Labour Party, his twenty-year long period as leader (1935-1955), Deputy Prime Minister (1940-1945) and Prime Minister (1945-1951).  Attlee won two General Elections, saved the Party from the electoral wipe-out of 1931, and governed during Labour’s almost mythical post-war period in office when the Welfare State was brought to fruition.

Attlee

It is timely because the legacy and spirit of the Labour Party is once again the focus for political debate in the UK. It is possible that the party’s much better than expected performance at the 2017 General Election will have quietened that debate for the time being, but few imagine that this will not break out time and again while Jeremy Corbyn remains leader.

Rigidly chronological in structure, this biography charts Attlee’s rise to senior positions within the Labour Party, without his ever really expressing much interest in doing so – he seems to have had an amazing knack of being in the right place at the right time, never more so when he became Deputy Leader after the whitewash of 1931, when the party was reduced to fewer than 50 MPs. After a careful narrative charting Attlee’s childhood, early military career, and his discovery of his social conscience, Bew focuses on the post-war Government which delivered such an amazing legacy of legislation and reform. while at the same time falling short of many of the aspirations generated by such a resounding win.

Despite having made my way through over 500 pages of this biography, Attlee remains something of any enigma. I can’t honestly say I know the man.  You could fill a short book alone with the collected insults offered to him. Nye Bevan is said to have called him ‘a desiccated calculating machine.’ Others compared him to ‘a little mouse’, ‘a poor little rabbit’, or as George Orwell put it, “a recently dead fish, before it has had time to stiffen’. American press said he was `the dullest man in English politics’. Churchill famously said that Attlee was not only a modest man with plenty to be modest about, but ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’. Even when people tried to say something supportive or positive about him, they almost always prefaced their comments with another veiled insult about his reserved nature, his modest talents, his poor grasp of economics, and so on.

Bew gives us little of Attlee’s personal life, leaving the reader to conclude that it was as dull as outer appearances suggest. He draws heavily on Attlee’s letters to his brother Tom which are referenced every few pages – as if they provide some unique and previously unknown insights into Attlee’s inner thoughts, when almost always they tell us what we already know and indeed have already been told.

This book won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2017. I have a sneaking suspicion that the author had half an eye on the prize when writing – the number of shoe-horned in references to Orwell’s work pile up, for example when comparing Attlee to Boxer, the shire horse eventually sent to the knackers’ yard. Boxer represents the ordinary Russian worker who continues to recite party slogans long after they lose all meaning, his faith in the Party unaffected by reality – in other words not at all like Attlee, who was a party faithful all his life but can hardly be described as a mindless functionary. The comparison just doesn’t work, and should have been cut – but the author obviously needed to keep every possible Orwell name-check to keep the book in the prize judges’ eyeline.

I can’t comment on whether this is the definitive Attlee biography, but I am glad I read it – I knew shockingly little about his background as a Major at Gallipoli and in France in World War one, for example, or the collapse of the second Labour Government 1929-1931, although his role in the second World War and the post war Government were naturally more familiar. I did have a couple of quibbles with the book that I can’t let slide.

First, it could have done with a closer edit. Over 500 pages there are always going to be mistakes, but this is not the first edition, and allowing sentences such as (page 144)

“For the moment, he shared the view that the obstacles to self government in India were, for the moment, insurmountable”

is unforgivable. Second, there are some moment of lazy writing. Can you spot what’s wrong with the following paragraph, for example?

(page 147) “The biggest challenge facing the second Labour Government was unemployment. Their task became extremely difficult because of events outside its control. In the last week of October (1929) the bottom fell out of the international economy, beginning with a monumental panic on the New York Stock Exchange that saw traders leap from windows in despair.“

Yes, it’s the cliched way of describing the Wall Street crash featuring those leaping traders. Five minutes on Google will tell you that it didn’t happen – suicides rates actually went down during the period of the crash. But even if they didn’t, and they did, why describe the crash in this way? Is the reader supposed to think “Oh that Wall Street crash in October 1929, the one which led directly to the rise of fascism and the resurgence of the National Socialist Party in Germany , I wasn’t sure which one you meant”. If the author can’t be relied on to get simple facts like this right, how reliable is the rest of his narrative?

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Book review, John Green, Turtles all the way down, Young adult

Turtles All the Way Down – John Green, 2017

Should one use the same criteria when judging young adult novels as one does when assessing full-grown adult fiction? I ask because if one were to do so, ‘Turtles’ would probably suffer by comparison, when judged on its own merits as a thoughtful novel for young adults, it is a success.

Turtles

The central character of John Green’s ‘Turtles All The Way Down’ (loving that title), Aza Holmes (‘Holmesy’) suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This makes her extremely anxious, and she self harms as part of her control rituals, opening a wound on her hand, then being terrified it will become infected. As her condition deteriorates she takes to drinking hand sanitizer, in a deluded attempt to purge her body of infection. (NB Do not do this!). She is also haunted by thoughts that she is a fictional creation (which of course she is, although Green does nothing with this paradox). Most of the time she remains in control of her obsessive behaviour, although her internal monologue tells us that she is tortured by harmful thoughts. Despite her condition Aza is in many ways a typical, relatable American teenager – she drives to school in her beloved truck Harold, eats pizza with friends, and watches television with her mum. Green doesn’t spell it out in so many words, but we are invited to conclude that Aza’s OCD was triggered following the sudden death of her father from a heart attack when she was seven.

A fledgling romance with a neighbour whose incredibly rich father has gone missing triggers a more serious episode, and she is eventually hospitalised. The parallels with the loss of her own father are quietly underlined, and form the basis of her relapse. She eventually recovers sufficiently to overcome her anxiety and in a strange conclusion to the novel attends an art exhibition in a sewer, where she comes close to solving the mystery of the missing billionaire. I probably shouldn’t focus on this detail, but I doubt whether many OCD suffers would be prepared to go into a sewer for any price, let alone wander around in the dark in one. This ending to the novel was for me its weakest part, and fails on any level, providing an unsatisfactory ending to the ‘mystery’ element of the novel, which had a lot of potential but which Green seemed to lose interest in.

What elements do you look for in an adult novel that we can forgive being missing from a YA novel? Characterisation? Obviously not, we need the characters to be fully fledged and believable. Green does reasonably well here – some of his characters are generic, off-the shelf quirky teenagers distinguishing themselves from one another by their choice of hair style or interest in music. I quite liked Daisy, the inevitable reliable best friend, but Davis, the missing billionaire’s son, who provides the only significant romantic interest in the novel, isn’t well developed – in fact his brother Noah, who is mourning the loss of his father, but hides his grief and distress in video games, was more believable. There’s a whole missing novel there in fact – the two brothers waiting for their father to return, unable to draw any solace from their preposterous riches.

Plot? The story line in ‘Turtles’ goes missing quite early on, and never resurfaces until the hurried and unconvincing conclusion. Green starts out writing a conventional if slightly Scooby Dooish mystery, but this element fizzles out early on, and the focus shifts instead to Aza’s illness and its impact on her life.

Quality of writing. Green does a good job, so far as I can tell, in representing the voice and thoughts of a teenage OCD sufferer. His writing is straightforward and extremely easy to read – this is the kind of novel that you can polish off in a few hours easily. There are no rhetorical flourishes or difficult passages.

Originality. It would be being harsh to say Green was on auto-pilot here, but there is a very familiar clichéd feel to this novel. Angsty teenagers have mild romantic entanglements to the backdrop of a high-school experience, something easy for US teenagers to identify with from real-life, (and other readers from anyone who has watched US television) the kind of high school where you pull up in front of the school and there is always a parking space waiting; where lessons take a few minutes and time is mainly spent being cool in the cafeteria, and pupils quote Shakespeare to one another in their texts. It was as believable as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but a bit less glamorous.

Ultimately, the answer to my opening question is a clear no. This isn’t a book that adults will be able to take much from, but younger readers (I really wouldn’t get hung up on the YA label; I would have thought pre-teens could enjoy this as well. There are some adult themes such as references to dick pics, but that is about as strong as it gets) will find it an interesting and comforting read – or in the words of the Guardian’s reviewer “It will resonate with, and comfort, anxious young minds everywhere” , which I think is spot on.

P.S. What a disappointing book cover by the way – we get it that depression is like a spiral (not that that image is in any way helpful or clear) but the missed opportunity for pictures of some turtles will hopefully be rectified in the paperback!!

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Book review

Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

When I use the term “challenging” to describe a book, this is usually a euphemism for “hard to read” – either because it is badly written, or just long-winded. ‘Moby Dick’ is a challenging novel, for example. So are ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Middlemarch’, and any other number of Victorian blockbusters (I know Ulysses isn’t Victorian!)  But I found ‘Mistakes Were Made’ challenging in a very different way – it challenged some of my deeply held beliefs. Which was unusual and very refreshing. I didn’t agree with everything the authors wrote or argued, but being shown a different perspective has to be a good thing.

‘Mistakes were made, but not by me’ is a book of popular (i.e accessible, rather than academic or textbook) psychology, exploring the concept of cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by us all when we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. Cognitive dissonance is a consequence of a person performing an action that contradicts personal beliefs, ideals, and values; and also occurs when confronted with new information that contradicts said beliefs, ideals, and values. So for example you believe the NHS I being under-funded, but when you look the statistics up you find that investment is going up above the rate of inflation. Instead of saying, how interesting, you tart to look for other statistics that will undermine this, and tell you what you really want to hear – that relative to other countries funding is down for example. This is an entirely natural response. When we experience CD we all have the impulse to minimise the uncomfortable feeling by refusing to accept the new information (“fake news”). On social media we are much more likely to be believe (and retweet or share) a post that endorses our ideas than one that challenges them. This is the reason for the so-called echo chamber phenomenon.

The authors go on to examine how cognitive dissonance causes mistakes to be made – we find it hard to accept our initial thoughts or conclusions are wrong, and seek out any number of ways to defend ourselves against the discomfort this causes, to the extent of denying or ignoring hard facts against us.

While this is a very accessible, readable account, the 40 pages of footnotes are clear evidence that this is also well-researched. Most of the examples are drawn from the United States, but that’s fine – the authors are American and write about the area they know best.

So why did I find it challenging? At the heart of the issue is the compelling section of the book about repressed memory. This really got me thinking, and reading other sources. I had accepted for a long time, without really thinking about it very much, that the repressed memory was a real thing. It’s a Freudian concept, and there is evidence (not discussed here) that the idea was not previously thought of before Freud. The authors make the familiar point that for most trauma, the challenge is forgetting the pain and distress, rather than remembering it. They also highlight research that shows how easy it is to implant false memories of childhood trauma – the so-called ‘Lost in the Mall’ experiment, where adults were easily persuaded that they had a childhood experience if being lost in a shopping centre, when they hadn’t.

So why am I still resisting the idea that repressed memory doesn’t exist? I think there are three main reasons: first, it sounds plausible. That’s obviously a cognitive dissonance coping strategy – ignore the evidence, and rather than presenting counter evidence just say that your original ideas are valid because they just are. Second, I think I have read about examples of repressed memory – but have I? Or were these fictional representations, in films or books? I have a sneaking suspicion they might have been. Lastly, while the concept of repressed memory is less widely supported than twenty years ago or so, the fact remains that large numbers of psychiatrists and psychologists still accept the concept. So I think the jury is still out, but the authors don’t have any doubts. They don’t hedge their position by referring to the evidence that suppressed memories exist – they would argue there is none. There’s obviously a baby/bathwater risk here – if all recovered repressed memories of childhood trauma or abuse are implanted or otherwise false, there is a risk that people take the wrong next step of concluding that all memories of such abuse are equally open to question or challenge? These are deep waters, and I still don’t know what I think about them – I certainly haven’t accepted the authors’ position unsceptically – but I am sure you can see why I found the book so thought-provoking.

If you are interested in how memory works, enjoy having your preconceptions challenged, and don’t mind revisiting some familiar psychological experiments, then ‘Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)’ is recommended. We can all benefit from acknowledging that we are as vulnerable to mis-remembering or making mistakes – we alone are unlikely to be infallible, while all around are prone to error – and that challenging our preconceptions (“I think I can remember that, but I might be wrong”) is a healthy reflex.

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Book review

The Candidate – Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power by Alex Nunns

CandidateFirst, I need to declare an interest – I know and have a huge amount of respect for the author, as well as a long term interest in the subject matter. I’d like to think this hasn’t affected my review, but that’s hard for me to judge.

’The Candidate’ is, as the subtitle explains, the story of Corbyn’s improbable, almost unbelievable, ascent to the top of the Labour Party. Or as John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, put it in endorsing the book “”This is a fascinating account of why—as well as how—Jeremy became leader of the Labour Party and transformed our politics. For anyone engaged in this movement, understanding precisely how we came to be where we are can only make us more effective as we go forward. That’s why Alex Nunns’ book is so important.”

Some events (political and otherwise) are so unlikely that no-one sees them coming, not even those closely involved. Few if any in the small group of MPs that constituted what remained of the Bennite Left in the Labour Party thought Jeremy Corbyn would be on the leadership ballot in 2015 following Ed Miliband’s resignation, let alone that he would win. His selection as a candidate was almost an afterthought, when several other potential (and with hindsight, far less suitable) candidates had been ruled out. Looking back at the events of the campaign it is easy to see Corbyn’s subsequent and almost effortless rise to power as inevitable, but Nunns’ forensic day by day, sometimes minute by minute, account, often using the present tense, makes it clear that the outcome was anything but a done deal. This is a definitive version of the extraordinary events of summer 2015, and the revolution that shook the Labour Party.

Nunns’ greatest strength is what I would characterise as myth-busting. Calmly he presents clear thoroughly researched evidence to destroy the various claims and distortions that surrounded Corbyn and his campaign, lies which continue to be recycled to this day. This is reflected in the author’s meticulous approach to research – how many other political narratives have 40 pages of footnotes?

This is not the book for you if you want to learn more about Corbyn’s Wiltshire childhood or his years on the back benches – Wikipedia covers this off pretty comprehensively. Some of the controversies that have been manufactured by his opponents – his close ‘association’ with Sinn Fein for example – are mentioned but do not form the focus of this book. Equally this is probably not the book for you if you are hostile to Corbyn, unless you are exceptionally open-minded – while Nunns is not unaware of Corbyn’s faults, or those of his campaign (for example, the initial failure to appoint any women to senior positions in the Shadow Cabinet is criticised), he doesn’t hesitate to make his allegiances clear. Nunns is particularly sharp in lancing the pomposity of the commentators, pundits and politicians who claimed Corbyn was a joke candidate who could never win, whilst simultaneously saying his victory would be a disaster for the party and the country.

I suspect that when the history of this period of the Labour Party comes to be written, ‘The Candidate’ will be considered an important reference work. Which makes the absence of an index more surprising (although I understand this was not the author’s choice). Similarly the blurb on the paperback edition, again nothing to do with the author, reads like a clumsy attempt to portray the book as a political thriller rather than a serious analysis. Minor quibbles aside, my only argument of any substance with the author would be in his treatment of the Parliamentary Labour Party. In this narrative, the PLP is characterised as monolithic and overwhelmingly Blairite, a product of an iron grip on selection in the Blair/Brown years. This overlooks the fact that Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate – Kendall rejected this label, but given her endorsements it’s unavoidable – received just 41 MP’s nominations for the leadership, only five more than Corbyn. This perspective distorts the treatment of the 2016 ‘coup’, where the co-ordinated mass resignations from the Shadow Cabinet are characterised simply as ‘the revenge of the Blairites’ (my term). My guess is that MP’s dissatisfaction with Corbyn’s leadership and their reasons for resigning were more complex than simply an attempt to reinstate the status quo. There was widespread dismay at the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum, and inevitably Corbyn was the focus of some of that anger. It was not just the PLP who had their doubts, particularly as Labour’s position in the polls deteriorated – even the Guardian’s Owen Jones wrote more than once questioning the wisdom of Corbyn’s retaining the leadership, (“not good enough – his (Corbyn’s) policies are right but his leadership is clearly failing”)

It turns out of course that just about everyone called this wrong, and Labour came agonisingly close to securing victory in the 2017 general election. That campaign, and its aftermath, are the subject of a revised edition of ‘The Candidate’ which is due out early next year. I can’t wait.

 

 

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Book review

Nutshell, by Ian McEwan

I am not going to review this novel. If you want to read an intelligent, thoughtful if slightly showy-offy review, try this or this even more florid review by Adam Mars Jones. This blog is a reading diary (hence the recent absence of content) where I record my impressions of the books I read. Usually these look at first glance quite similar to reviews, without the clarity of expression or depth of analysis you might otherwise expect.Nutshell

‘Nutshell’ is a curious, whimsical novel. In the last few years the Hogarth Press has been commissioning authors to write a series of novels re-imaging Shakespeare’s plays, and I thought at first that ‘Nutshell’ was a part of or inspired by this series. It appears not, it is a solo, voluntary effort.

In a nutshell, in ‘Nutshell’ McEwan takes the themes and ideas of Hamlet, and updates them to the present day. Hamlet is played by not a moody young prince, but an about to be born foetus. His mother and her brother in law lover are planning to murder his father. The unnamed and apparently unwanted baby is a passive observer of events, with much energy expended on maintaining the conceit that he can detect what is going on in the outside world through hearing, taste, and a fair amount of guesswork.

McEwan’s fierce dazzling intelligence shines through this short novel. It has an extraordinary breadth, ranging through many different genres, least successfully crime (the resolution whereby the lovers are caught by the dogged but uninspired police is appallingly clumsy). Contemporary politics, the Royal family, Brexit, Trump, are all referenced and swiftly disposed of for the more substantial feasts of philosophy, literary criticism, and absurd levels of sophistication in wine-appreciation (“No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I’m forced to make a guess, and hazard an Echézeaux Grand Cru. Put … a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggest that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot’s domaine in 2009”)

There is, inevitably, a ‘but’ coming. More precisely two. The first is something that seems to have only been an issue for me, and that is that the narrator character, an extraordinarily erudite and cultured baby, reminded me unavoidably of Stewie from ‘Family Guy’. Once that narrative voice got in my head that was it. Stewie, as I shall now call him, channels Jacob Rees Mogg in his social conservatism, (or is this McEwan letting loose his inner fogey?):

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. …A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. …I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.

The more serious issue is that McEwan is demonstrably better than this. For him to be writing a comedic novel about a ham(let)-fisted murder with a sub-Colombo style solution, constructed however cleverly around the scaffolding of the plot of Hamlet, seems such a waste of his energies and talents, almost like an academic exercise (“Rewrite Hamlet as a comic novel from the perspective of Hamlet as a foetus. No more than 200 pages, by Friday”). The jokes about the discomfort of a foetus being a few inches away from his uncle’s penis, for example, were obvious and clumsy. The novel’s anachronistic tone troubled reviewers (see for example the LRB review referenced earlier) but I think McEwan just about gets away with it, probably because the majority of his readers will share a generation with him, if not a world view.

At a shade under 200 pages, ‘Nutshell’ is an easy read with some jokes that make you chuckle, and some stunningly impressive prose. But it is not McEwan at his best, not by a long distance.

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