Tag Archives: History

Book review

The trouble began long before June 9, 1976, when I became aware of it, but June 9 is the day I remember. It was my twenty-sixth birthday. It was also the day I met Rufus – the day he called me to him for the first time.

Dana and Kevin have just moved into their new apartment in Los Angeles, California. Out of nowhere, Dana starts to feel dizzy and faint, and before she knows it…

“The house, the books, everything vanished. Suddenly I was outdoors kneeling on the ground beneath trees. I was in a green place. I was at the edge of a woods. Before me a was a wide tranquil river, and near the middle of that river was a child, splashing, screaming….Drowning!”

Dana has been transported to somewhere where she is needed, where she can save the life of the drowning child, whose name we later find out is Rufus. But the boy’s parents are not grateful – far from it, they seem to think Dana is responsible for his accident – the father aims a shotgun at her and angrily confronts her. She fears for her life, and in that moment she is transported back to her apartment, where a puzzled Kevin tells her that only moments have passed.

At first the reader thinks they are in a simple time travel novel, where the principal character is summoned into another time and place to intervene in the life of someone with whom they have some kind of connection. Yes and no, because in a moment of dreadful realisation Dana finds out something terrible about the challenge fate has presented her with – the time she is travelling back to is the 1820’s, in the South of the United States of America, and Dana is black. The young boy whose life she is fated to save – she is summoned from the present every time his life is at risk – is the son of a slave-owner. He lives on a plantation. Worse, Dana has no control over when she is summoned nor when she is returned. She works out that she will return to her own time – where time passes at a completely different rate from that in the 1820’s, so several months can pass in the past but only hours in the present – when her own life is threatened. She cannot choose when to return, and putting her own life deliberately at risk seems far too dangerous.

The only positive side to this appalling situation is that, unlike the form of time travel in the Time Traveller’s Wife (for example) she is able to take objects with her into the past, anything she happens to be touching at the time she is summoned, including her partner Kevin. She quickly assembles a small bag of useful items, including a knife and some painkillers, knowing she could be whisked back to the nineteenth century at any time. I would have been tempted to take a gun, preferably a rifle, but I am probably taking the time travel conventions a little too literally! On her subsequent journey to the 1820’s Kevin goes or is taken with her, and after she saves the young man’s life once again, the plantation owner assumes Dana is Kevin’s slave. Dana, recognising names from the family tree in her bible, quickly works out that Rufus is one of her distant relatives, and that she needs to keep him alive long enough for him to father one of her ancestors. But Rufus is white, and she is not, horrifyingly suggesting that the ancestor she is waiting to arrive is the product of an abusive relationship between slave-owner and enslaved.

Novels that attempt to portray the horrors of slavery are faced with an immediate challenge – how to convey the many terrible things that happened – the brutality of every day life, the appalling treatment of the enslaved, the families torn apart by slave-owners simply for monetary gain – without looking away or in any way softening the edges of the realities of the form of chattel slavery of this period, but at the same time not making the novel impossible to read, capturing the reality of what living through this period must really have been like. To take someone from the 1970’s and transplant them into this environment is a brilliant way of making the reader imagine what being in this time must have been like – these are no longer long-dead people who it is easy to think of as statistics, but real, living family members and friends.

Butler takes one step further than just presenting afresh the trauma of slavery, by asking the question – how does one accommodate oneself to living in that situation, living as an enslaved person? Dana is trapped in the nineteenth century for long periods, too far away from the Northern states where slavery was no longer practised or widespread (slavery in the Northern states of the USA ended gradually over several decades; Vermont banned slavery in 1777 and Massachusetts in 1783; other Northern states passed gradual emancipation laws that freed existing slaves slowly, meaning complete freedom for all enslaved people in the North took until the early-to-mid 1800s – and even then ‘runaways’ were subject to the punitive conditions of the Fugitive Slaves Act). Dana is forced to come to terms with the conditions and compromises of her enslavement. Her partner Kevin is trapped in this time period for several years when she is returned to the twentieth century unexpectedly and this experience changes him as well (Dana perceives) even though he commits himself to helping runaway and escaped slaves.

Quite early on Rufus learns of Dana’s origins – he can hardly find a natural explanation for her appearing out of thin air every time his life is at risk – and has to accept the undeniable supernatural element of her existence. Dana slowly comes to an understanding with Rufus – he depends on her to save his life, therefore he must treat her with respect and care for her, protecting her from the unstable temper of his father. But time and again Rufus’s contempt for black people resurfaces – he never gets out of the habit of using the n-word for example, even though he knows he needs Dana to save his regularly threatened life (Rufus is very accident-prone!).

Kindred has an incredibly strong narrative structure. The reader (or this one at least) cares for and wants to find out what happens to Dana, Kevin and even Rufus. I understand why the author included a prologue which effectively spoils the ending of the novel for the reader – we know some important details about the outcome of the novel through this short opening chapter – but personally I don’t think it added anything and removed much of the suspense from the novel’s ending and I would have not used it had I been the author. But even though this is a very strong story, that’s not the primary reason for this being such a ‘must read’ – that derives from its unblinking portrait of the horrors of American chattel slavery.

Kindred by Octavia Butler, 1979

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Book review

J by Howard Jacobson, 2014

J, shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize, is set in a dystopian(ish) future after a catastrophic event known only as ‘WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED’. Later in the novel different variants of this expression are used, such as WHAT HAPPENED (that is, without the qualifier) indicating the speaker’s distance from the orthodox view of this event. Precisely what ‘the event’ was is never made explicit, but enough is revealed towards the end of the novel to suggest that it was a mass killing of a minority in society in which ordinary citizens participated. Several decades have passed since this event, but society is still haunted by it, seeking ways of restoring balance to an increasingly violent and disordered world.

The central narrative of J is on the surface a traditional romance. Kevern, a woodworker, and Ailinn, an artist, begin a rather sweet love affair. Kevern is socially isolated and finds it hard to make friendships. He is rather neurotic and exhibits symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder – for example he repeatedly returns to his front door to make sure it is locked and that his hallway is arranged as he needs it to be. The reader comes to realise that he has been taught to do this by his parents as a way of ensuring that he can tell if his house has been broken into. In other words it is a security measure, although precisely who or what he needs to be worried about is initially unclear. Kevern was also taught by his father to place two fingers over his lips when using any word beginning with the letter J. This we can conclude was a way of training his son never to acknowledge his Jewish identity – the words Jew and Jewish are never used in the novel and illustrate how Jewishness has been effectively extinguished by WHAT HAPPENED. The letter J becomes in the novel a symbol of the near complete erasure of Jewish people in this society and also points to the hidden identity of any Jewish survivors. The novel’s true title is actually the letter “J” with two lines struck through it – this double-crossed “J” (see above) evokes the anti-Semitic trope of the “double-crossing Jew,” serving as a visual reminder of the deep-seated prejudice that exists even in a society that claims to have addressed this prejudice. Ironically the government has since WHAT HAPPENED forced all citizens to take Jewish-sounding surnames in a twisted attempt to illustrate that anti-Semitism no longer exists. But this attempt to rewrite history and deny the existence of anti-Semitism is not working – society remains violent and troubled. We eventually come to realise that Kevern and Ailinn’s relationship has been engineered as a social experiment to see if the reintroduction of Jews to society may help rebuild society by providing a scapegoat for society’s ills. When they find this out the impact on them is devastating.

Jews are not the only people who have seen their identity reduced to simplified markers in this society: “A compliant society meant that every section of it consented with gratitude – the gratitude of the providentially spared – to the principle of group aptitude. People of Afro-Caribbean origin were suited by temperament and physique to entertainment and athletics, and so they sang and sprinted. People originally from the Indian subcontinent, electronically gifted as though by nature, undertook to ensure no family was without a functioning utility phone. What was left of the Polish community plumbed, what was left of the Greek smashed plates.“

The publisher of J compared the novel to the dystopias written by Orwell and Huxley. So far there is no evidence that the comparison has stood the test of time – for example J has an average score on Goodreads of just under 3 (on a scale of 1-5). I understand the reservations many reviewers have expressed about J on this site and elsewhere. Jacobson really makes the reader work hard – the point of view narration from members of a society where forgetting WHAT HAPPENED is a national preoccupation means we are only given glimpses of the past and have to piece things together slowly. (The ending of the novel is also unforgivably bad, but we shouldn’t define a novel just by how it ends). This is a thought-provoking novel that I suspect will be read in years to come when other Booker prize shortlisted novels have long been forgotten. It is hard for me as a non-Jewish person to fully appreciate the issues Jacobson discusses, but I believe that this portrait of being Jewish in a society in which the whole concept of Judaism has been effectively eradicated will resonate with many Jewish people.

J by Howard Jacobson, 2014

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Book review

Essays by George Orwell

My deep dive into Orwell continues with the Penguin Modern Classics collection of his essays, edited by Bernard Crick, one of Orwell’s earlier biographers.

In the extremely unlikely event that someone asked me to edit a collection of the great man’s essays, the first task I would set myself would be to understand what is an essay? Which of the many articles Orwell wrote would qualify for inclusion, and which would be excluded? There is a simple textbook definition of the term ‘essay’, ‘a short piece of writing on a particular subject’ but that isn’t particularly helpful – a letter of complaint to the council would fit that bill. He published different collections during his lifetime, and since then they have been republished in multiple different formats. Some collections of Orwell’s essays have over 240 items (for example the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics edition – to get to this high a number they must have included the weekly columns that Orwell wrote for Tribune from 1943 to 1947). This Penguin Modern Classics edition has 41 essays, which tallies with the count in Orwell’s bibliography on Wikipedia.

The next thing I would do is try to decide how to group the essays? Would I present them chronologically? That would have the benefit of showing Orwell’s progression as a writer, although some of the essays were published long after they were written, such as his account of his days at his prep school, St Cyprians, Such, Such Were the Joys, which was considered so libellous that publication had to wait until the 1950’s when everyone mentioned was safely dead. I think I would instead group the essays thematically. Memoirs such as A Hanging, Shooting an Elephant, Marrakesh, Bookshop Memories and so on would form one category. Another would be literary analysis – Dickens, Kipling, Cervantes, etc. A third would be popular culture including Boy’s Weeklies and The Art of Donald McGill – and finally a politics section.

When Orwell initially wrote these essays they were published in a wide variety of magazines including: Tribune (which is still in print) where he was literary editor after he left the BBC, Horizon, a magazine edited by his old schoolfriend Cyril Connolly, the Evening Standard, for years the principal London evening paper, as well as a number of more obscure and short-lived publications, such as Polemic, which only managed eight issues and Gangrel which only ran to four, but published his seminal essay “Why I Write”. It is fairly obvious from this wide spread of magazines and papers that Orwell wasn’t enormously fussy (or couldn’t afford to be fussy) about where his work was published – although of course he would have had red lines in terms of pro-Communist and pro-fascist publications.

The reason why I have made this point at such length is that I have no idea why this collection was printed in this particular order. It’s not chronological, thematic, alphabetical, or any other structure or design that I can discern. Perhaps I am missing something but the random nature of the collection, if intentional, did not work at all. The changes in tone from whimsical to academically serious were often jarring. The editing of the text did not help either because the date of publication of each essay was only included as an endnote. The date of publication matters – something written in 1942 about what the world might look like after the end of the war lands completely differently from the same topic written in 1946. But you have to check the end of the essay to find this out, even though it is information needed up front. Crick’s introduction to the selection is also really rather strange. At times it seems that he doesn’t particularly like Orwell’s work. At one point he comes close to calling Orwell dishonest, claiming “One can tell lies or spin stories in monosyllables and simple sentences.” and later “Orwell himself seemed to believe that it is more difficult to lie in monosyllables than in polysyllables, but like many people he confused meaning with truth”. This is leading up to his suggestion that A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant are stories rather than essays, and therefore do not belong in this collection. Which begs the simple question, if Crick did not think these are essays, why include them?

Which is all a pity, because the essays themselves are (of course) outstanding. I have some personal favourites. The Burma essays, A Hanging (1931) and Shooting an Elephant (1936), are comparatively early but exceptional, very concise masterpieces that speak to the human condition and the impact of imperialism. In many ways they would be more impressive if they were entirely fictional. The Art of Donald McGill introduced me to the idea that popular culture (in this case, comedic holiday postcards) can be looked at seriously and tell us something about society. His essay Boys’ Weeklies had the same impact (criminally, this edition does not include the response to Orwell’s theory that the author of the Greyfriars stories must be a collective identity, which explained why the stories themselves were so heavily stylised; Frank Richards’ reply to Orwell can be found here, and it is a serious oversight that it was not included in this collection.) Orwell the man always shines through in his work but never more so when he is writing about the simple but very English pleasures of life such as what makes a great pub, how to make a cup of tea (neither of which are included in this collection) or his thoughts on the common toad. And of course Orwell’s political insight and perspective are a guide to both the politics of the period but more importantly provide us with tools to navigate our own troubled times.

This isn’t a book to be read from beginning to end straight through (although you could) but rather it is to be dipped into and referred back to as occasion demands.

Essays, by George Orwell

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Book review

The Orwell Tour, by Oliver Lewis, 2023

I must admit I am a little jealous of Oliver Lewis. I have pointed out in previous reviews of Orwell biographies that he was relentlessly nomadic, never living in the same place for more than a handful of years. I’ve also been to several of the places he lived – Marrakesh, Southwold, Paris, London, and nearby Wallington in Hertfordshire – but with the exception of the last location I have never made the effort to seek out the blue plaques recording where Orwell lived, however briefly. (Wallington is an exception to that rule, because apart from the Stores, Orwell’s house there, and the prototypes of Manor Farm, there is very little in the village at all). Lewis had the inspired idea of visiting as many of Orwell’s homes as possible, with the thought that they might individually or collectively tell us something about the man, his background, influences and experiences. I wish I had had the same idea.

Knowing where to draw the line in terms of the places Orwell ‘lived’ is not always straightforward. For example, did he ever live in Stockton-on-Tees? We know his wife Eileen’s family owned a house there and she and Richard (their adopted son) decamped there after they were bombed out of their London flat. But did Orwell visit or stay for any length of time? There are so far as I am aware no letters from him to anyone carrying this address. D J Taylor, author of one of the best biographies of Orwell, (Orwell, the New Life) says (page 432)

“The first of the V1 flying bombs, known as ‘doodlebugs’, had been launched across the channel on 13 June, a week after the Normandy landings. On 28 June one of them fell on Mortimer Crescent; no one was hurt, but the house was uninhabitable and would remain so for some time. Orwell and Eileen’s whereabouts for the next few months are far from certain. One temporary landlady may have been Inez Holden, at her new flat in George Street, Marylebone, although a note in Inez’s diary records their going to stay with the Dakins in Bristol. If so, this could only have been a short-term arrangement as Orwell was needed three days a week at Tribune. Eileen and Richard certainly spent some time at Greystone, the O’Shaughnessy family home twenty-five miles south of Newcastle, and there were short visits to Wallington…but the likelihood is that Orwell himself joined the vast floating population of displaced wartime Londoners with no fixed abode, moving on from one spare room or camp bed to another as the opportunity arose”.

I have quoted this at length to illustrate the point that the question of where Orwell ‘lived’ is often far from straightforward and until such times as letters from or to Orwell, or any other evidence emerges, will remain unclear. There is a similar issue with Orwell’s residence at the Stores in Wallington. He held the lease to this cottage from 1936 to 1947, but the plaque on the wall states he lived there from 1936 to 1940. Even during that period he spent six months in Spain, as recorded in Homage to Catalonia, six far less interesting months in a sanatorium in Kent and a further six months recuperating in Marrakesh. After 1940 he lived in various addresses in London and in 1946 he moved to Jura. The Stores were (from what I can tell) sub-let at various points, but the record also indicates he and Eileen, occasionally joined by friends, would spend some weekends at Wallington during the war. Does this mean he lived there then? (If so, the plaque would be far more complicated!) Probably not, but again the point is that the question of where this ultra-nomad lived at any one time is not straightforward, and eventually requires us to make judgment calls about these issues.

There are a few omissions from what is otherwise a comprehensive review of the many places Orwell lived. He attended Wellington College for a single term before going to Eton. St Cyprian’s School in Eastbourne, East Sussex where Orwell went to prep school for five years as a boarder, is mentioned but not visited, possibly because the building in which it was housed has since burned down, so there would be little to see. Having said that these were key formative years for Orwell, recorded in his essay Such, Such Were the Joys (which is a grimly ironic quote from Blake). Freys College, where he taught for a term in 1933, is also mentioned but not visited. Orwell seems to have spent quite a lot of time at his wife’s brother’s family home in Greenwich, which might have been worth visiting, and was certainly close enough. Any attempt to visit every location ever associated with Orwell is probably futile, but these all seemed easy enough locations to tick off and may have been worthwhile additions to this account.

There are a few errors here as well which are less forgivable. The chapter on the Blair’s early years back in the UK after India is entitled Henley-on-Thames, Berkshire, whereas Henley-on-Thames is in Oxfordshire, as the text makes clear. The error is important because it makes more sense of Orwell’s decision to be buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire – otherwise he had no particular association with this County, rather than it being the place of his early childhood. The description of Southwold as being “a small port clinging to the extremity of the East Anglian coastline” is technically correct, but misleading. Southwold is predominantly a Suffolk seaside town, pier and all, and the fact that as with all ports and seaside towns it is on the coast means the description of it ‘clinging’ to the coastline (rather than sloping gently down to the sea) is redundant.

I don’t think there is any doubt that we can learn more about an author by visiting the places where they lived. Orwell’s lack of interest in home comforts is summed-up vividly by the dilapidated cottage in Wallington, even if over the years it has been vastly improved, not least by the addition of a thatched roof and indoor plumbing and heating. Manor Farm just a short walk away conjures up images of the revolutionary animals of Animal Farm. I am sure the conditions in Burma could tell us a lot about Orwell’s time in the military police there. The wildness of Jura doesn’t seem to have changed a great deal since his time there in the 1940’s – anyone seeking out that remoteness and isolation must have wanted to escape something and will have paid little regard once again to the lack of home comforts.

Lewis makes some small but fascinating discoveries in the course of his journey: gravestones from the Limouzin family, Orwell’s mother’s side of the family, are found in a half-abandoned church in Burma; his measurements can still be seen in his tailor’s records in Southwold from when he ordered a suit almost 100 years ago; his name is still to be found in the visitors book in his neighbour’s house on Jura. Orwell left footprints everywhere, but at the same time he is elusive – famously, there is no known recording of his voice, which is extraordinary given that he worked in broadcasting for two years in the the 1940’s – and there are many small mysteries about his life which researchers are diligently chipping away at.

Lewis makes it clear in his introduction that this is not another biography, of which there are plenty, but it is not simply a travelogue either. It is a different way of looking at a remarkable life, and therefore a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship about the great man.

The Orwell Tour, by Oliver Lewis, 2023

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Book review

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford, 1951

England, 1939. Grace Allingham, a young, affluent Englishwoman is engaged to be married to Hughie. But when she meets Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, a French Air Force officer, she is swept off her feet, Hughie is dumped unceremoniously and Grace and Charles-Edouard quickly marry. After a brief honeymoon he returns to the war, leaving Grace pregnant but content to wait out the months and years of war for his return. Seven years pass, and when he finally returns to England it is to collect his wife, son and the family nanny and take them back to France, to finally begin married life.

Life in France is not without its challenges. The principal characters of the novel, with the exception of the nannies who look after the children before they are sent off to boarding school, are all upper class if not aristocratic, independently wealthy, who don’t have to work, have multiple houses, staff and spend their summers in Italy. But their relationships are a mess. The comedy of the novel derives largely from stereotypes about English and French aristocrats and their very different lifestyles. The main difference between the countries is their attitude towards infidelity. The French have a ‘laissez-faire’ approach, where affairs are seen as a private matter rather than a moral failure, and even accepted as part of long-term relationships. Charles-Edouard’s problem is that he is a enthusiastic adulterer who seems untroubled by being caught in the act. Eventually Grace realises he is never going to change. She returns to England and divorces him. He is remarkably untroubled by this, continuing with his long-term affairs, confident that his wife will sooner or later see sense and return to him.

As Charles-Edouard is a man-child driven by his libido above all else, it is hardly surprising that his son, Sigi, easily outwits him. Sigi likes his parents being separated – it means that all the potential new husbands and wives in their lives have to seek his approval, and approval means treats. He is spoilt rotten and frustrates Charles-Edouard’s lacklustre attempts to woo his wife into returning to France by simply not delivering his messages. Potential suitors for his mother’s newly available hand are equally easily disposed of given Sigi’s veto over their selection. Balls are attended, afternoon tea is drunk, French properties left unlooted by the Nazis are toured, and of course assignations are conducted more or less in the open. The comedy is dated, and I suspect it felt so even in the early 1950’s when the novel was first published, being more suited to the carefree times of the 20’s and 30’s. I even wonder whether this might have been a returned-to manuscript from the 30’s, updated with scant details of the slightly longer second world war?

The only indication we are in post-war Europe is a short discussion on homosexuality. Dexter, an obnoxious American, (it is almost a given that Americans in novels of this kind are obnoxious) is ranting about the link between homosexuality, which he calls ‘perversion’, and communism. Hughie, who by this point in the novel has overcome his break-up with Grace and is courting Albertine, who is one of Charles-Edouard’s mistresses. replies “But, old thing, they’re not sick. They just happen to like boys better than girls. You can’t blame them for that, it’s awfully inconvenient, and they’d give anything to be different if they could…I probably know more about them than you, having been at Eton and Oxford“. The revelation towards the end of the novel, that Dexter was a Russian spy and life-long communist, further undermines his credibility as a judge of public morality. Other than this brief defence of ‘perversion’ the social attitudes prevalent throughout the novel are those of earlier decades, when the Mitford’s had some relevance beyond historians of English class identities.

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford, 1951

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Book review

The Singapore Grip by J G Farrell, 1978

I finished J G Farrell’s The Singapore Grip with a sense of relief, which is not a good sign is it? At over 650 pages it was hard work. I had really enjoyed Farrell’s previous novel, Troubles, which was intelligent and entertaining. I had more mixed feelings about his Booker prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur, which completely erased the voices of the local residents and portrayed every incident from the perspective of the English settlers. The Singapore Grip suffers from a very similar problem – the story is told almost exclusively from the perspective of the English people living in Singapore, and (with only a couple of exceptions) the Malayans and Chinese residents of the peninsula are there for comic effect.

The novel is set in (as you may have guessed) Singapore, and portrays the final days of British government of the island and the Japanese invasion of 1942. The complacent colonial elite, solely interested in exploiting the land for its natural resources, principally rubber, are represented by Walter Blackett, an imperiously dense rubber merchant, and his daughter Joan and son Monty. Often described as a satirical novel, colonialism is a soft target for a novel written in the 1970s. The Blackett’s privileged lifestyle rests upon their attempting to recreate middle class English society as closely as possible, with tea parties and drinks before dinner, even while the society is collapsing all around them as the Japanese come ever closer. The novel’s conscience is embodied by Matthew Webb, son of Walter Blackett’s late business partner, newly arrived to the island (leaving behind a Europe at war) who has previously worked for the League of Nations. Matthew expresses doubts about the society he finds and believes a better world is possible. He symbolically rejects the colonialists by refusing to marry Joan, an arranged marriage that would have secured the future of the company, and instead pursues a relationship with an Asian woman.

There are a number of reasons why this novel was such hard work. The plot meanders and never surprises – we always know the Japanese are going to invade and conquer the island. Whether certain characters escape before the invasion is not a key plot point, as a reader might expect – some of them have chances to leave and let them pass. Walter in particular is focussed on rebuilding his commercial empire after the war, rather than how to survive it. The large cast of characters is not interesting or attractive enough for us to care greatly what happens to them. The critique of colonialism is heavy handed and repetitive – the absurdity of manipulating the supply of rubber to ensure profit from the estates is maximised is explained more than once. Worst of all, on-English voices are silent, with a few exceptions. The Frenchman, François Dupigny, is thrown in for some contrast, but his character is never really developed. After rejecting Joan, Matthew starts a relationship with Vera Chiang, reputed to be the daughter of a Russian princess and a Cantonese tea merchant. Despite this character’s potential she is largely a one dimensional caricature of a mysterious Eastern seductress, and I don’t think we ever are given an insight into her interests or thoughts, only seeing her through Matthew’s eyes.

There is one chapter that stands out from the parade of mildly inconvenient but still privileged things happening to the Europeans. This chapter is written from the perspective of the members of the invading Japanese force and shows them as reckless and driven by a profound sense of honour and determination. Although this is again a cliche it is at least a new voice and perspective from that of the European voices that dominate the rest of the novel. When we read on the final pages that any local people suspected of collaborating with the conquered English were massacred by the Japanese it is almost said as an afterthought, with no real sense of horror at the scale or brutality of the killings.

The novel’s title is a salacious joke, a single entendre, a reference to a sexual practice said to have originated in Singapore. Matthew is regularly teased by people he meets because he doesn’t understand the phrase, not that it really matters. Attempts to interpret the phrase as a reference to the control exerted by the island or its occupiers on society are well-meaning but redundant.

When the novel was adapted into a television series in 2020 by the BBC, critics complained that “Asian characters are merely heavily accented ciphers, silent chauffeurs, exotic dancers, giggly prostitutes, monosyllabic grunts and half-naked Yogis …. Asian womanhood is represented as lurid temptation and subservient availability.” That seems to me a fair representation of the novel as well. I am glad I finished it as I have a pathological aversion to investing time in a novel and not getting to the end (I’d rather not start in the first place) and the excellent Troubles had given me every reason to try again with Farrell. This was his last novel before a premature death in an accident and a disappointing way to finish.

The Singapore Grip by J G Farrell, 1978

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Book review

The Wager: a Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann, 2023

The Wager is everywhere at the moment. After President Obama listed it as one of his books of the year in 2023 it topped The New York Times best-seller list and stayed in the top ten for six months. The film rights were snapped up by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo di Caprio. It featured in many best books of 2023 lists: as usual I am coming very late to the party. Accordingly my expectations were sky-high and predictably I was a little disappointed – if it hadn’t had this much hype I would have been able to read and appreciate the book on its own terms. Oh well.

The book’s blurb and description on Amazon give this summary (I’ve tried to edit it because it is quite long, but in the end I decided to keep it full-length because the detail actually matters):

“On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death–for whomever the court found guilty could hang.“

To be fair, this is not just the publisher’s summary – in the book’s opening chapter this version of what it to come is largely the same: this is a story of a shipwreck that leads to mutiny, murder, and finally a form of retribution for the survivors. Except it is not.

For a start there was no real mutiny – no-one was tried for this incredibly serious charge. If the Admiralty had thought there was any risk of this offence being condoned they would have seen to it that people hanged, just in case anyone thought mutiny was acceptable in any circumstances. They took law and order extremely seriously. There was no question a dispute amongst the survivors about how to reach civilisation once the Wager had been shipwrecked on an isolated (but not completely deserted) island. The bulk of the survivors ignored the captain’s wishes to sail north to Chile and instead headed off in the opposite direction – but the Admiralty did not think this constituted mutiny. If the breakaway group had really thought they were committing mutiny they would almost certainly have destroyed the many paper records that they carried with them back to England and for that matter they would have avoided handing themselves in to the authorities by travelling back to England in the first place.

For an event that happened on the other side of the world almost three hundred years ago, there is a remarkable amount of documentary evidence about the wreck of the Wager and the subsequent ordeal of its crew. Many of the survivors wrote extensively about their adventures – the account by the leader of the expedition of which the Wager was a part, George Anson, is still in print – and in addition many of the contemporaneous records including log books and diaries survived and are available to historians (to be completely fair to Grann whether he is an academic historian or not (not) I nevertheless include him in this category; his account is very well researched and evidenced. It’s just not a new or untold story).

There was no trial, no-one was found innocent or guilty, and no-one was hanged. There was an investigation with a very limited scope, but that quickly found that no further action was required. This is all a bit of a damp squib after the long build-up in which the reader is explicitly lead to believe that a trial would decide who was telling the truth about the shipwreck. In fact the introduction suggests this is the whole point of the narrative. Surprisingly there were no significant differences between the survivors as to what happened; broadly speaking their accounts agreed, not least because of the extent of the written record. Whether the actions of the protagonists were justified was disputed, but what they actually did or did not do was not disputed.

So this is not the book we are led to believe it is going to be. It is instead a dramatic but as far as possible accurate retelling the story of the Wager. Much of the book is dedicated to the preparation for setting sail and then the journey to South America and beyond, the challenges of assembling a crew and then the privations once on board and under sail. The Wager was part of a wider expedition which in turn was part of the English campaign against the Spanish that in this period. usually described as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The shipwreck and the appalling conditions on the island that the survivors experienced (although ironically the diet of scavenged seaweed and sea celery help cure the ravages of scurvy all the men had faced) are brought to life and it is from this point, almost three-quarters of the way through the book, that the ‘slow-motion mutiny’ (as Wikipedia describes it) unfurls.

The Wager has some striking similarities with Batavia’s Graveyard, Mike Dash’s 2002 account of a shipwreck some 100 years earlier, in which the survivors faced a life and death struggle for survival, order quickly broke down and brutality engulfed the survivors. The crew of the Wager behaved in a relatively civilised fashion compared to their East Indian counterparts from the Batavia. To be fair their island was better equipped – they even had friendly natives on hand to bring them food (although the quickly scared them off with their behaviour). If you are looking for books with a similar theme and structure to The Wager, Batavia’s Graveyard is highly recommended.

When a book doesn’t live up to the hype it can be disappointing, but judged on its own merits The Wager was an enthralling read. The book’s epilogue, telling the story of the rest of the fleet which was slowly destroyed, leaving just one surviving ship, which in a ferocious sea battle captured a Spanish treasure ship and made its way home from halfway around the world , is told almost as an afterthought, but it is hard to resist the thought that this was the more compelling adventure.

The Wager: a Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann, 2023

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Book review

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, 2016

It’s been a very long time – I am struggling to remember the last time it happened – since a book has haunted me in the way that Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles did. By ‘haunted’ I don’t mean scared (although there is plenty that is scary here), but that the characters and their situation stayed with me when I was not reading the book. The feelings of nervousness and anxiety that it engendered hung over me, so that when I wasn’t thinking about the book I was feeling it. I wasn’t quite stock-piling toilet paper and checking my bank account every five minutes, but it was not far off!

For context, The Mandibles is set in the USA in 2029. The American economy is in the midst of an economic crisis of the kind it narrowly dodged in 2008. Unemployment and inflation soar, law and order begins to break down, and America reneges on its international debts. We experience this crisis through the eyes of an extended middle class American family, the Mandibles. Yes this is a strange name, and no I don’t know if it has any particular significance (it’s possible that the fact it is the only mobile bone in the human body is a reference to the family’s ability to be agile and keep one step ahead of the crisis, but that’s really stretching things!).

In 2029, America has already changed dramatically from the relatively stable economy and political landscape of the year of publication, 2016. In the real world of spring 2016, Trump had already announced his run for the White House and the UK’s Brexit referendum was looming, but it was hard to anticipate the political turmoil that was to follow months after this novel was published, let alone the lockdown and pandemic four years later. In Shriver’s 2029 America is already significantly diminished. Previously the country had temporarily lost access to the internet and as a result all financial transactions now take place either on paper or in hard cash. China is suspected as being behind the cyber-attack, as part of its wider ambitions to replace America and the dominant superpower. Things however are slowly beginning to return to normal when the crash hits. A new international reserve currency, the bancor, (which in real life had been proposed by Keynes in the 1930’s and remains an idea some economists support – for example it was called for as recently as 2009 by the Governor of the Bank of China) collapses the American economy. This is not just a depression or a recession but far worse – money loses most of its value, millions lose their jobs, savings are wiped out and prices go through the roof. The US Government’s disastrous response is to ban American’s from owning bancors (thereby closing down almost all international trade) and sequesters all gold owned by people and business.

Prior to the crash the four generations of the Mandible family are relatively well off and live in expectation of an inheritance from their very wealthy patriarch. His savings and investments are completely wiped out. One son-in-law is an economist who is sacked from his professorship, but who right until the end of the book continues to argue that the crash was avoidable and that he was right while everyone else was wrong. This satirical teasing of economists who are unable to understand the economy or predict its behaviour is one of the gentler aspects of the novel. As the crisis deepens the family move in together and adjust to their straitened circumstances, showering only once a week, stockpiling supplies, and generally having a miserable time. While the adults are to a greater or lesser extent in denial about how bad things are going to get, one of the younger family members, Willing, is the calm centre of both the family and the novel. Willing is able to tell that things are going to get a lot worse and plans accordingly, learning practical skills such as how to pick locks and developing a plan for the family that could see them escaping from the city and to safety.

Three quarters of the way through the novel, with the family homeless and at crisis point, the story jumps forward fifteen years. I can’t lie, I found that decision irritating. It seemed as if the novelist got tired of charting their struggles with the breakdown of society and hit the fast forward button. It might have been because this is quite familiar territory – dystopias in which society collapses aren’t exactly uncommon. The final quarter of the book acts almost like a postscript. Most of the characters have adapted and survived and society is slowly being rebuilt. The United States government has become extremely authoritarian, with everyone being compulsorily ‘chipped’ like pets. A small separatist enclave has been built in Nevada and the remaining family members, lead once again by Willing, set off to see if this new land of the free can be sustained.

The financial crisis of 2008 and the world’s subsequent turmoil have only served to underscore what I think most of us already knew – that civilisation is only skin deep. The American journalist  Alfred Henry Louis put it like this back in 1896:

Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen.

While the novel’s portrait of society’s collapse is chillingly believable, The Mandibles is a strangely optimistic dystopia. Shriver said of the novel that “My reading on what happened in 2008 is that we dodged a bullet. I feel as if that bullet is still whizzing around the planet” which is almost completely unarguable. Next time we might not be so lucky. But terrible though the collapse of the American economy may be, the rest of the world is surprisingly immune to its effects – the bancor is not just an attack on the dollar but it is also an insurance policy. Mexico becomes an economic super-power and has to build a wall to prevent American refugees from escaping into the country. As satire that might feel a bit obvious, but the main impact on America is a sense of humiliation rather than anything more punitive. The key point is that the country recovers from near-total collapse, the economy starts to rebuild, and as authoritarian dystopian Governments go this one is relatively benign.

I enjoyed The Mandibles. Shriver is an interesting, iconoclastic writer and I will look out for more opportunities to read her work.

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, 2016

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Book review

Goodbye, Mr Chips, by James Hilton, 1934

I knew ‘Goodbye, Mr Chips‘ from the faithful-to-the-book and gentle 1939 film version of the story, featuring Robert Donat. (A later film version, a musical no less, starring Peter O’Toole bears very little relation to Hilton’s story). It is a charmingly nostalgic portrait of a retired schoolmaster looking back over his life, but has some unexpected depths to its discussion of imperialism and jingoism.

Mr Chipping is a classics teacher (Latin and Greek) at Brookfield, ‘a good school of the second rank‘. Brookfield is a public (that is, fee-paying) boarding school set in the English countryside:

Across the road behind a rampart of ancient elms lay Brookfield, russet under its autumn mantle of creeper. A group of eighteenth-century buildings centred upon a quadrangle, and there were acres of playing fields beyond; then came the small dependent village and the open fen country.

Told in retrospect from his retirement and old age, Goodbye Mr Chips is his recollection of the years spent teaching generations of young boys. Cleverly it is also a commentary on the changing times that Mr Chips lives through, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early nineteen-thirties. A recurring feature is that many of his students go on to die in various imperial wars:

Dear me, I remember Collingwood very well. I once thrashed him—umph—for climbing on to the gymnasium roof—to get a ball out of the gutter. Might have—umph—broken his neck, the young fool. Do you remember him, Mrs. Wickett? He must have been in your time.” Mrs. Wickett, before she saved money, had been in charge of the linen room at the School. “Yes, I knew ‘im, sir. Cheeky, ‘e was to me, gener’ly. But we never ‘ad no bad words between us. Just cheeky-like. ‘E never meant no harm. That kind never does, sir. Wasn’t it ‘im that got the medal, sir?” “Yes, a D.S.O.” “Will you be wanting anything else, sir?” “Nothing more now—umph—till chapel time. He was killed —in Egypt, I think….”

At another time, reminiscing with his housekeeper, Chips remembers two other students:

“And that affair about the rat that Dunster put in the organ loft while old Ogilvie was taking choir practice. Ogilvie was dead and Dunster drowned at Jutland”

There is also a tragic scene where a student is worried his father has been lost on the Titanic – look at the sad final line. Chips chastises a child because his work that day is not up to scratch:

“Grayson, I don’t want to be—umph—severe, because you are generally pretty good—umph—in your work, but to-day— you don’t seem—umph—to have been trying at all. Is anything the matter?” “N-no, sir.” “Well—umph—we’ll say no more about it, but—umph —I shall expect better things next time.” Next morning it was noised around the School that Grayson’s father had sailed on the Titanic, and that no news had yet come through as to his fate. Grayson was excused lessons; for a whole day the School centred emotionally upon his anxieties. Then came news that his father had been among those rescued. Chips shook hands with the boy. “Well, umph—I’m delighted, Grayson. A happy ending. You must be feeling pretty pleased with life.” “Y-yes, sir.” A quiet, nervous boy. And it was Grayson Senior, not Junior, with whom Chips was destined later to condole.

Chips is a conservative man, resistant to change, and feels threatened by the phenomenon of women exploring increasing freedoms as the century comes to a close:

He did not, he would have said, care for women; he never felt at home or at ease with them; and that monstrous creature beginning to be talked about, the New Woman of the nineties, filled him with horror.

But he then meets a young woman who manages to change his mind and his life:

Her name was Katherine Bridges; she was twenty-five—young enough to be Chips’s daughter.

Chips is 48 at the time. The relationship is described largely from Chips’s perspective and he is untroubled by the age gap. There’s a suggestion that Katherine is aware that it is a little creepier than that – she explicitly compares their relationship to that of teacher and pupil:

On the night before the wedding, when Chips left the house to return to his hotel, she said, with mock gravity: “This is an occasion, you know— this last farewell of ours. I feel rather like a new boy beginning his first term with you. Not scared, mind you—but just, for once, in a thoroughly respectful mood. Shall I call you ‘sir’—or would ‘Mr. Chips’ be the right thing?

Sadly we see far too little of this bright and entertaining character, because Hilton has her die in childbirth soon after their wedding. This is a pity because Katherine brings new life to Chips and indeed to Brookfield itself and challenges many of his preconceptions and prejudices. An example of this is when an exchange visit in planned between Brookfield and a state school in the East End of London. The idea of the exchange is unpopular with the school authorities and underlying their objections is some fairly obvious class prejudice, but she argues passionately for the visit to go ahead, claiming:

“Chips,” she said, “they’re wrong, you know, and I’m right. I’m looking ahead to the future, they and you are looking back to the past. England isn’t always going to be divided into officers and ‘other ranks.’ And those Poplar boys are just as important—to England—as Brookfield is.

His brief relationship with Katherine, cut brutally short, makes Chips re-evaluate many of his ideas. He becomes something of a radical or free-thinker. During the Boer war he challenges the populist anti-Boer sentiment:

It was typical of him that he did not share the general jingo bitterness against the Boers. Not that he was a pro-Boer—he was far too traditional for that, and he disliked the kind of people who WERE pro-Boers; but still, it did cross his mind at times that the Boers were engaged in a struggle that had a curious similarity to those of certain English history-book heroes—Hereward the Wake, for instance, or Caractacus. He once tried to shock his fifth form by suggesting this, but they only thought it was one of his little jokes.

Although he is not an entirely reformed character and is caught making what we can infer is an Anti-Semitic jokes about one of his students:

Once Chips had got into trouble because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy named Isaacstein.

Later he outrages the school by expressing sadness at the news of the death of the school’s former German master on the Western Front, despite the fact that he is killed fighting for ‘the enemy’. Expressing sympathy for the loss of a former teacher who fought for his homeland was one step away from treachery, but by this time Chips is virtually irreplaceable at the school, the majority of masters of fighting age having joined up, so the indiscretion is overlooked. Hilton gives Chips a nobility that comes from old-age and having lived through tragedy. Slowly Chips becomes a sage-like observer of the breadth of English history, including the end of the Victorian era and the birth of a new century:

He had been left a vision that grew clearer with each year—of an England for which days of ease were nearly over, of a nation steering into channels where a hair’s breadth of error might be catastrophic. He remembered the Diamond Jubilee; there had been a whole holiday at Brookfield, and he had taken Kathie to London to see the procession. That old and legendary lady, sitting in her carriage like some crumbling wooden doll, had symbolized impressively so many things that, like herself, were nearing an end. Was it only the century, or was it an epoch?

After his retirement, Chips’ career has one last flourish. He returns to the school, never having really left, to return to teaching and eventually become acting Headmaster when the current head and most of the teaching staff volunteer or are conscripted for the Front. The years and the major historical events begin to speed past:

1915. Armies clenched in deadlock from the sea to Switzerland. The Dardanelles. Gallipoli. Military camps springing up quite near Brookfield; soldiers using the playing fields for sports and training; swift developments of Brookfield O.T.C. Most of the younger masters gone or in uniform. Every Sunday night, in the Chapel after evening service, Chatteris read out the names of old boys killed, together with short biographies. Very moving; but Chips, in the black pew under the gallery, thought: They are only names to him; he doesn’t see their faces as I do…1916… The Somme Battle. Twenty-three names read out one Sunday evening.

Goodbye Mr Chips is an enchanting portrait of that special brand of teacher that leaves a lasting impression on their students. It is warmly nostalgic for the pre-War years that are only hinted at in the story’s closing paragraphs – even in 1934 the storm clouds massing over Germany were hard to ignore. And while the story is nostalgic it is honest about cost of the first world and earlier wars and about the challenges the new century brought to many people.

Goodbye, Mr Chips, by James Hilton, 1934

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Book review

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, 2010

The premise of this book is that the extraordinary story of Henrietta Lacks – and more specifically, her cells which (for reasons I am still not clear about) continued to multiply after they were removed from her body, shortly before her death from cancer in 1951 – needs to be told. In other words, that this is the most

comprehensive account of Henrietta’s life, death, and subsequent ‘life’. But you don’t have to read very far into “The Immortal Life” to establish clearly that is an overstatement – in fact one of the complaints of Henrietta’s surviving family is that they are constantly being badgered for interviews by journalists and scientists. Skloot’s account may well be the most comprehensive but it is not a revelation of a lost story. Since 1996 the main School of Medicine in Atlanta has held an annual Women’s Health Conference in recognition of Henrietta and “the valuable contribution made by African Americans to medical research and clinical practice”. In 1996 the mayor of Atlanta declared a ‘Henrietta Lacks Day’. In 1997 U.S. Congressman Robert Ehrlich presented a congressional resolution recognizing Lacks and her contributions to medical science and research. Also in 1996 the BBC made a documentary about Henrietta’s story, ‘The Way of all Flesh’. Skloot writes that the documentary team “covered the Lacks family story in more detail than anyone ever had, filling dozens of hours of interviews”. In other words, hers is a very well known and comprehensively researched story and the suggestion that this account is anything other than a detailed retelling – albeit with some new elements relating to Henrietta’s family – is misleading. Which is a pity because this is a perfectly worthwhile retelling, as far as it goes, just not anything revolutionarily new. To be fair I have to accept that I can’t pin down a quote where this claim is made explicitly, but it is strongly implied throughout the text, as well as the presentation and marketing of the book.

Henrietta’s story is definitely worth retelling. She came from a literally dirt-poor African American family only two generations away from slavery. Brought up by her grandmother and married at 14 to a cousin, she grew up in an America where African Americans had few civil rights. She was only 31 years when she died in 1951 in a “coloured ward” in hospital in Baltimore. She left behind a husband and five children – and a slice of her tissue, cut from the cancer that went on to kill her. These cells duplicated and kept on duplicating despite being outside a host living organism. Scientists had known this was technically possible, and I am not sure if Henrietta’s cells were the first ever kept alive in this way, but they were undoubtedly the most prolific. The cells went on to be used across the world in numerous different laboratories and environments, including being sent into space. Their origins were largely forgotten. An industry developed around the production of these cells and it seems as if the question of compensating Henrietta’s family and heirs for her extraordinary, if entirely accidental contribution to medical research simply didn’t occur to anyone.

Henrietta’s family are as much a part of this story as her own short life. Her deaf daughter, Elsie, was committed to an institution despite there being any evidence of mental illness. The hospital she was committed to sounds an incredibly grim place. Henrietta’s other children grew up without much in the way of parenting and suffered horrible abuse from family members. Skloot invites us to pity this resilient family, suggesting that they struggled to understand the difference between their mother’s death and the survival of her cells – “Nobody round here ever understood how she dead and that thing still living. That’s where the mystery’s at” – which feels… improbable. Henrietta’s youngest son Joe served time for homicide and remains a menacing presence in this narrative, but the central role is taken by Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter, whose obsession with her mother’s legacy comes to dominate the final chapters of the book. Whether that would have been the case without Skloot’s intervention is unclear, but it’s no surprise that in the television film adaptation of this book it was this role that was taken by Oprah Winfrey rather than Henrietta herself. Skloot even goes so far as to suggest that Deborah believed her mother had been cloned and that she was suffering the pains of all the diseases that her cells had helped to cure, and links these delusions to the more understandable suspicions of African Americans of the medical establishment. Central to this belief was growing awareness of the brutal Tuskegee project in which black men were allowed to die from syphilis so that the progress of the disease could be studied. While the extent to which the medical establishment could abuse African American people is hard to over-state, the idea that Henrietta’s family thought she might still be suffering through her surviving cells feels far-fetched.

There are three main components to this book – Henrietta’s story, the discussion of the various medical ethics issues suggested by what was done to her, and the account of the writing of the book itself. The ethical issues chapters are some of the weaker elements of the book. At points Skloot conflates serious ethical scandals (such as the Tuskagee experiments mentioned earlier) with the taking of tissue samples without informed consent. It is hardly surprising that the paper trail for Henrietta’s consent (if any) to the procedures she underwent is impossible to trace and I struggle the idea that it is a scandal that someone didn’t obtain her informed consent to the tests that were done on her tissue samples and their eventual commercial exploration. She was in intense pain and dying of cancer – the last thing she would have needed is someone trying to explain what they were planning to do with her tissue after its removal. Such consent is not required even to this day, and the case for it being so is very weak.

It is the third element of the narrative, the diary-like description of the creation of the book itself, that comes to dominate the narrative, providing an element of drama, specifically whether Deborah will withdraw her support for the project. Henrietta’s story ends chapters earlier. The space Skloot devotes to her travels and time with Deborah feels self-indulgently ‘meta’ – a book about the writing of a book – and doesn’t contain anything of substance. I felt that at over 350 pages the book could easily have been 100 pages shorter without losing any of its impact. Arguably in the end the author eventually becomes the story herself, which is rarely a good thing, not least in a popular science book. Despite all these reservations, Henrietta’s story is worth retelling and stands on its own as a fascinating combination of science and ethics set against a backdrop of racism and the experience of black people in the period immediately before the civil rights movement.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, 2010

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