Tag Archives: Non-fiction

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

Aside
Book review

Orwell – the New Life by D J Taylor, 2023

It was a real pleasure to spend some more time getting to know the genial, flawed and very human genius that was George Orwell. I was broadly familiar with the structure of Orwell’s life – India, prep school, Eton, Burma and so on – but Taylor draws these events together into a coherent whole. So when I say this, it needs to be seen in that context: Orwell remains as much a mystery to me now as he ever was. This edition quotes John Sutherland on the dust-jacket as saying “He (Taylor) presents the ‘living’ Orwell as well as anyone will be able to”. That may be the case, but to me Orwell remains enigmatic, hidden, and incomplete. I’ll try and explain why.

There are so many aspects of Orwell’s life that remain puzzling to me. Some of the things we don’t really know about him include:

Why didn’t he go to university?

Why did he leave his post in the Burmese Imperial police, after more than five years of service?

Why didn’t he get a conventional job and write in his spare time?

What did he do for money – was he living off his parents, figures who also don’t really emerge into the light in this book.

Almost everything about his relationship with his first wife, Eileen

Let’s take those in order. The traditional explanation of his decision to join the Burmese Imperial Police instead of going to university is that his grades at Eton weren’t good enough. Certainly he wasn’t a star pupil and financial pressures to get a proper job, one following in the family traditions of Imperial service, would have been compelling. But that’s just speculation – we don’t really know for certain what led him to this decision. Having made it he stuck at the job for several years (five and a half) – this wasn’t just the equivalent of a brief period of national service – but on returning to the UK he made the key decision in his life – to become a writer. Where did that decision come from? Were there any signs prior to this that Orwell aspired to the life of an author? Had he been writing out in Burma? If so there’s no record of it. And what a strange way to start the life of a writer – instead of using the five years of experience in Burma (which he was later to use of course) he instead decides almost out of the blue to go tramping? Why? Even in the context of going ‘undercover in the under-classes’, something earlier writers had done, this still seems such a sudden and mysterious choice. Collecting material is something some writers feel compelled to do, but there seems few less promising areas to mine for content for a novel than tramps. Orwell did of course use this content, both in essays and in A Clergyman’s Daughter, but it still seems a very random choice.

When asked later in life about his decision to quit the Burmese police Orwell always cited his opposition to imperialism, and texts such as A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant certainly support that idea. I can’t suppress the suspicion that this was a simplification of his reasons (which is fair enough, most life decisions are complex and when explaining them to other people we often reduce them to one or two elements).

Orwell did have conventional jobs, lots of them. He worked in Parisian kitchens and hotels, he sold books, he was a tutor, briefly a headmaster (in a private school with a teaching staff of two, where his CV as an Old Etonian would have helped) and during the war he worked for the BBC. I think he never stayed in a job for much more than two years. Was this because he couldn’t settle at a job for any length of time, getting bored and disenchanted with the value of his work very quickly, or was it because work was always supplementary to his writing, something that paid the rent and kept the bailiffs away, always secondary to his ‘real’ work? Once again we simply don’t have any definitive evidence that explains this nomadic lifestyle which was reflected in his relentless moving from address to address, never staying in the same place for more than a year or two – a full list of Orwell’s residences would fill an address book.

Despite making a reasonable income from his journalism, his publishing, and his various jobs, I suspect Orwell often relied on his parents and wealthier friends for financial support. I admittedly have no real evidence for this, just another suspicion – he did keep going back to his parents’ house in Southwold when he first started out as a writer. Certainly he had that middle class carelessness with money, putting up with considerable hardship when necessary and always assuming that something would come up to help out. You really can only live that life if you know there is always some support available as a last resort – Orwell was never going to find himself homeless.

And finally there is the closed book that is his relationship with Eileen. They married in 1936 after a relatively brief courtship (their very modest wedding was held in Wallington, the hamlet where Orwell ran the village stores), she went with him to Spain to support him in the civil war, and she died in 1945 just after the end of the war in Europe, and very shortly after having adopted their son, Richard. Taylor speculates the marriage was reasonably happy although hints at affairs on both sides – other biographers have been much more categorical about their infidelities, and certainly Orwell left some deeply incriminating letters. Lots of people who knew the couple wrote about them, but none seem to have understood the real dynamic of the relationship, what attracted one to the other, what made them tick as a couple. Why did Eileen put up with being a junior partner in the relationship despite her many talents, indeed why did she put up with living in the cottage in Wallington for so long with its outdoor privy, no heating and cramped rooms.

What is all the more extraordinary about this mysteriousness of the real Orwell is that he was a journalist, was famous after Animal Farm, was interviewed many times and had many writers as friends who left memoirs. A surprising number of people he wrote to preserved his letters, even when he asked them not to. Yet no recording of his voice exists, and I believe there is no film of him either, despite his working for a year and half at the BBC!

Another point that comes across vividly in this text is the tragedy of Orwell’s early death. He published his first novel, Burmese Days, in 1934, and was dead less than sixteen years later. In that time he did an extraordinary amount of work, and living, for a man in such poor health. He published six novels and three full-length pieces of non-fiction, got married, fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked at the BBC, served in the Home Guard, wrote a prodigious amount of journalism, reviews, diaries and journals, essays, opinion pieces, and letters, finding the time somehow to adopt a child and then remarry in the final weeks of his life. Dying aged 46, it is striking just how incredibly truncated his life was – cramming all those novels and experiences into little more than a decade dominated by the rise of fascism and the second world war.

If you are not a fan of Orwell you probably won’t become one on reading this biography. Taylor is honest about Orwell’s shortcomings and flaws. What doesn’t emerge clearly from these pages is Orwell the politician. There’s no real account of Orwell’s personal political journey from Old Etonian and imperial policeman to avowed socialist. The Spanish Civil War was obviously a turning point, but the transition was much more complex than just changing his views after being shot at (and of course, shot). His membership of the Independent Labour Party, a left-wing off-shoot of the Labour Party, is barely mentioned, and although his friendships and acquaintances within the Attlee Government are referred to there is no sense of Orwell the political animal, which was such a central part of his identity.

The chronological narrative is broken up from time to time with short thematic chapters – Orwell on faces, rats, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and so on. These essays felt like a way of using left-over material (and many of them did appear in the original version of this biography) and felt strangely out of place. If I was editing this book I would have put a line through all of them and suggested they be sent to the Orwell Society for publication.

The attempt early on to draw comparisons with St Cyprians, Orwell’s prep school (a private, fee-paying school where the middle classes sent their children to prepare them for public school examinations) and Oceania are absurd. Similar ill-thought through comparisons could have easily been made between Oceania and the BBC or Eton or the Burmese Imperial Police Force – the idea that an author’s literary ideas must all have their origins in childhood experiences or institutions is as ridiculous as it is demeaning, undermining the ability of an author to – you know – make things up.

There were a couple of other things that bugged me about this book and should really be fixed in the next edition:

a) Eileen’s war-time job. See if you can spot why this paragraph irked me? Chapter 20 ‘The Melting Iceberg’ describes Orwell’s account to find a role in the overall war effort. On page 366 Taylor, quoting a letter from Orwell to his literary agent, tells us that

“The letter to Moore notes ‘my wife has already got a job in a government office’ as if Eileen’s rapid deployment were the most natural thing in the world. But it might be wondered just exactly how, in the paranoiac conditions that prevailed in Whitehall corridors circa 1939, the wife of a writer regarded as an ‘extremist’ by the India Office, suspected of importing contraband material and already on MI5’s radar, could have fetched up in such a sensitive part of the wartime bureaucracy”.

I reread this sentence several times thinking “What sensitive part of the wartime bureaucracy”? What was her job, and why was it such a matter of surprise that she was given it. It’s not until page 375 that we learn what it was – she worked in the Censorship Department. An editor should have caught this omission and made the minor changes required for the narrative to make sense. A similar thing happens in:

b) Chapter 26 ‘Pain in Side Very Bad’ is prefaced by two quotes dated 1948. The text itself then starts with this sentence:

“The Blair party left for Jura on the afternoon of 10 April, went by overnight train to Glasgow, and then flew on to Islay. By the evening of 11 April they were back in Barnhill.”

What year is this? We are in the closing years of Orwell’s life – every year matters. The previous chapter is one of the rather irritating filler essays – this one is on Orwell and anti-Semitism – so the reader can be forgiven for not knowing or remembering that Taylor is picking up where he left off the preceding chapter. It’s just unnecessary and irritating, when a year after the first reference to April would make everything clear.

These are minor, fixable points.

I opened this review with a comment on one of the observations from critics quoted on the book’s dust-jacket, so I am going to close with one as well. Hilary Spurling from the Daily Telegraph apparently wrote

“A persuasive and profoundly moving exploration of the ways in which Orwell’s work was constructed from the stones of a ruined life”.

I know he had health issues, died early, and lost his first wife, but despite all that I never thought of Orwell’s life as ruined. There are sad moments in his story but it is not a tragedy – he lived, wrote and achieved more in his 46 years than many of us manage in 70. And while his early works draw upon his life experiences, the idea that Animal Farm and 1984 are in any way autobiographical (or ‘constructed from the stones’ of his life) is preposterous. This instinct, to try and find the seeds of a writer’s creativity in their life stories, actually ends up diminishing their ability to tell stories and work with ideas. That’s one reason why Orwell was so dismissive of his early novels in later life, to the extent of not allowing them to be republished on the back of the popularity of Animal Farm in particular. What led to that late blooming of creativity and inventiveness remains yet another mystery about this extraordinary author.

Orwell – the New Life by D J Taylor, 2023

Aside
Book review

The Mind is Flat, by Nick Chater, 2018

The Mind is Flat, by Nick Chater, 2018

“almost everything we think we know about our own mind is a hoax, played on us by our own brains.”

The Mind is Flat is one of those disturbing books that makes you change the way you look at the world. It certainly did for me anyway. Whether that change will be permanent, or whether I will relapse into the comforting delusion of an inner life, remains to be seen.

This book asks the question you probably haven’t even asked yourself – do we as humans have a different level of consciousness from animals? (Chater doesn’t phrase it this way or even consider animals as an alternative to human consciousness, but the parallel works for me.) If you watch animals they live in the moment, responding to their environment and their needs and instincts, almost nothing more. If they want to kill something, they kill it – no hesitation or equivocation. (There might be hesitation about the best way to execute the hunt, but that’s just practicality not more ambivalence). We think of ourselves as existing on a higher plane – we have an inner life of values, thoughts, experience and principles, and respond to our world very differently. But do we? Chater’s thesis – and I have no idea to what extent this is original work or something that has been around for centuries – is that we construct our perception of the world as we go along. We have no beliefs, desires, fears, personality, or “inner life”. The brain makes everything up responding to the world as we experience it through our deeply flawed senses.

Chater focuses on sight in this book although I suspect similar analysis could be applied to our other senses, and shows how unreliable sight can be – how partial our view of the world is, how little we actually see, and how much the brain sketches in the rest of the field of vision. There are some fascinating studies referenced here (some of which quite obviously were intended for a colour version of the book, and which don’t work as well in the black and white paperback version). One is the Ninio experiment where the black dots on this image drop in and out of our sight as our eyes move across the screen or page. We can only see one or two of these at a time, even though our brain is telling us we can see the rest of the image – in reality we can’t, we are just better at filling in the grid than we are the dots. (People reading this will say “I can see all the dots”. They can’t – what is happening is that their eyes are making those micro-adjustments we make all the time but are barely aware of. 

Ninio, J. and Stevens, K. A. (2000) Variations on the Hermann grid: an extinction illusion. Perception, 29, 1209-1217

It might seem a big leap from ‘our eyes can play tricks on us’ to ‘consciousness is an illusion’, but Chater draws the lines between the two carefully and convincingly.

“The brain is such a compelling storyteller that we are fooled into thinking that it is not creating our thoughts ‘in the moment’ but fishing them from some deep inner sea of pre-formed colours, objects, memories, beliefs or preferences, of which our conscious thoughts are merely the shimmering surface. But that world is a… fiction created in the moment by our own brain. There are no pre-formed beliefs, desire, preferences, attitudes, even memories, hidden in the deep recesses of the mind. Indeed the mind has no deep recesses in which anything can hide. The mind is flat: the surface is all there is.”

This is all so profoundly counter-intuitive that the normal response is denial. ‘Your mind may be flat but mine is fully-rounded, with values, intelligence, principles and a whole lot of other stuff going on, most of which is going on in the background while I eat, sleep, walk etc’. Perhaps, but the case for this being just a story we tell ourselves to explain the world as we experience it is compelling.

Looking at the counter-argument for a bit, first we aren’t animals. We don’t just kill people when angry (not all of us anyway), steal when we want something, sleep with anyone at any time. But of course some people do. And perhaps the reason we don’t all respond that way is not because of some internal policeman, but because we have better memories than animals – we know that there are consequences from killing, stealing etc. If these consequences weren’t there, would we be so restrained? This is why we need laws, police, courts etc in the first place. Perhaps this also explains why a civilised society like Germany in the 1930’s could inflict the holocaust on the Jewish people (and the other minority groups involved) – remove the consequences and we will do pretty much anything, however barbaric and inhuman.

This theory also explains the feeling that many people have of being dead inside, meat robots, acting a part and waiting for their lives to start. We watch other people having their complex lives, their relationships and romances, adventures and achievements, and assume they are whole people rather than just acting out their parts in some bizarre version of the Truman Show.

If this is all feeling far too depressing, here’s some consolation, I hope. Firstly, we aren’t just responding to our environment moment by moment. We have instincts that dictate how we respond without even engaging our thoughts. Some of these instincts are primeval and we lose them as we grow older. Then there are the aspects of our behaviour and personality that are determined by our genes (which explains how twins separated at birth often develop along closely aligned pathways, unless of course that is an urban myth!). We still get to make choices about what we do, it’s just those are choices we make, not the person living secretly inside us. Once you accept that the mind is flat, that we don’t have a subconscious to which we can ascribe anything negative or unpleasant in our personalities, that is in a way liberating.

There are some pathways Chater could have gone down in this book, some avenues of exploration, which I wish he had. Firstly, how do people who are blind from birth and perhaps have restrictions in their other senses experience the world? How do they make things up moment to moment? Second, if we have no secret inner identity what are the implications for gender and sexuality? Perhaps even more significantly what does this mean for the study and practice of psychiatry, and even for religion – the idea that people have souls? These are deep waters I accept, and the author only had so many pages to play with, but it would have been interesting to read a discussion of these issues.

This was a challenging book that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in the mind – which is everyone surely? It may not be a comfortable read, and there were many moments where I had to stop and retrace my steps to ensure I had got what the author was trying to say (and I am not sure I succeeded at each point), but in the end it gave me a lot to think about, and some insights into many issues that I hadn’t even considered were issues before. I’d love to know what others thought about it (or think they think about it!)

Standard
Book review, Non-fiction, popular science, psychology, Tali Sharot

The Influential Mind, What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others, by Tali Sharot, 2017

As a break from the recent relentless Pratchettery I have managed to finish this book of popular science written by Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist who also wrote ‘The Optimism Bias’. This is timely because the paperback version comes out on 2 August in the UK, and I suspect you will see piles of this book in your local bookstores.

The author is a serious scientist: she is a Ted talker, director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and a Wellcome Trust Fellow and has been published on various topics including the neuroscience of optimism, emotional memories and cognitive dissonance in journals such as Nature. In other words this is more than just one of those light hearted copy and paste books on science that tell you little more than you will find on Wikipedia – this is a review of the literature and science of influence, albeit presented in an accessible fashion. Why influence? Well it’s key to understanding why people behave the way they do, and surely this world needs a bit more understanding and empathy at the moment.

‘The Influential Mind will make you gasp with surprise – and laugh with recognition. Many of our most cherished beliefs about how to influence others turn out to be wrong; Sharot sets them right. Packed with practical insights, this profound book will change your life. An instant classic’ Cass R. Sunstein, bestselling co-author of Nudge

 

No it won’t, no they aren’t, and no it isn’t.

It is understandable that the publishers chose this review to illustrate this book’s entry on their website and adorn the hardback edition’s front page. This is a classic case of log-rolling – two minutes on Google told me that Sunstein has co-authored papers with Sharot – but it is also an extreme example of hyperbole. The only way this book would change your life is if you tripped over it at the top of a stairwell. I have no recollection whatsoever of gasping as I read it – maybe the occasional slow nod of recognition at a point well made – and there are few if any laughs in here either. This is a serious book, and it really does it no favours to pretend it is life-changing or ground breaking – it is no more nor less than a thoughtful review of the existing research into this subject, presented in an accessible fashion. Popular science in other words, perhaps not at its finest but no worse than the rest of what is becoming a crowded field.

The most striking example the author cites when discussing the importance of understanding how influence works relates to the vexed topic of hand washing in hospitals. A study of how frequently doctors and nurses in US hospitals wash their hands found shocking failure rates, leading directly to infections. Monitoring the staff remotely via video had no impact – as long as they knew they weren’t going to face any punishment they simply did not change their behaviour. What had a dramatic impact however was publishing hand washing rates in real time on a screen in the staff restroom. Rates shot up. Sharot speculates that this was because positive feedback on performance was perceived by staff as a non-pecuniary reward. In other words, rewarding people can influence their behaviour. Who knew? So far as I know there were no similar punishment trials where people had a % of their salary deducted each time they failed to wash their hands, but I guess it would have had the same results.

 

Elsewhere this book hits more topical and predictable targets. Trump and his power to persuade based on emotion rather than logic, the anti-vaccine movement and how to counter it (don’t try to address the lies in the anti-vaxx case, just emphasise the positives of vaccination i.e. the avoidance of death) and the times when the wisdom of crowds can be misleading. This is all packaged in an engaging and relatively short book which you will find interesting if you are looking for an introduction to this topic.

Standard
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.

 

 

Standard
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.

Standard