Book review

I know my review of Jacobson’s The Finkler Question was probably a bit harsh, so I thought I would give him another try. I’ve had Redback on my book shelves, sitting unread and unloved for goodness knows how long, so it seemed an obvious supplemental read to Finkler.

Jacobson isn’t alone amongst novelists for mining his past for material in his early novels. Redback‘s central character, Karl Leon Forelock comes from the northern English town of Partington, the wettest spot in Europe (Jacobson grew up in Prestwich which is in Greater Manchester). Partington is the most depressing, crime ridden and deprived town in the universe – Jacobson obviously didn’t have particularly happy memories of Prestwich! Forelock somehow manages to gain a place at Cambridge, eventually graduating with a double starred first in Moral Decencies from Malapert college. (Jacobson went to Downing College where he studied English, and emerged with the slightly less impressive 2:2). After university Forelock secures funding from the CIA to go to Australia. It’s never clear what he is supposed to be doing for the CIA there – there’s no-one in particular to spy on, and all he seems to do is go to parties. The publisher’s summary of the novel says his role is to “teach the Australians how to live” which is meaningless surely? Anyway, it gives Jacobson a reason to take his character to Australia where Jacobson himself spent three years teaching, and this is where the majority of the events of the novel take place.

The novel’s descriptions of the Australian wildlife and way of life is tired and cliche-ridden – we know Australian abounds with dangerous and poisonous animals. Australians probably wouldn’t mind the novel’s portrayal of themselves as heavy drinkers and uncultured but again no cliche is left on the shelf. As the novel’s publisher puts it: “Leon quickly discovers that there are some natives who believe that they have an education to pass on in return. But it is at the hands of the women in Australia that Leon receives his most painful, and on occasions his most pleasurable, lessons.” Which sounds awful doesn’t it? They are trying to promote the novel as a sex comedy, and while there are element of ‘Carry On Down Under’ about the whole affair (Forelock has a prolonged menage a trois with a pair of enthusiastic Australian synchronised swimmers for example) the comedy has not aged well.
Throughout the novel the narrator (Forelock) refers every few pages to his having received a bite from a Redback spider that drastically changes his character and outlook on life (although sadly not his attitudes towards women):

“in a foul, dilapidated bush privy, way up in the Bogong high plains, the Redback sucks her teeth and waits her turn.“

This bite only comes at the very end of the novel, and it’s not clear why it changes his character, in what way, and why the reader should care. If this is symbolism for a traumatic and transformative experience then I am not sure what it stands for, but by this point I didn’t care either.

The blurb to the Bantam Press hardback edition of Redback claims that “the author is the most devastatingly funny novelist writing in English today” Not “one of the most devastatingly funny writers” but “the most devastating”, and not just of English writers but of those “writing in English”. That was a bold claim given that in 1987 when this novel was first published Douglas Adams was writing the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Terry Pratchett was writing The Colour of Magic, and Stella Gibbons, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Sue Townsend to name just a few were still active. Kingsley Amis to whom Jacobson owes the most obvious debt had just won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils. If that hyperbole wasn’t enough, the blurb back page also quotes the Sunday Times as describing Jacobson as “the most dangerously funny writer in the English language”, a quote that is still used on the book’s listing on Amazon and elsewhere to this day, although I wasn’t able to track it down to source. I know ‘quite amusing but not laugh out loud funny’ wouldn’t have sold as many books, but it would have been a lot more honest.

One of the principles of comic writing Jacobson outlined in his speech to the Royal Literary Society I referenced in my previous post was not to give your characters ‘funny’ names, because Dickens had used them all. This was obviously a lesson learnt from experience, because almost all the characters in Redback have unfunny funny names: Montserrat Tomlinsom, Vance Kelpie, Hartley Quibell, Ruddles Carmody, etc, etc. The comedy is also very crude at times, not least in the novel’s opening anecdote when undergraduate Forelock meets “a wholesome young Australian girl with powerful mandibles and an MA in fine art“. They hit it off, but in his rooms later that evening, “after a heavy supper of pasta and fish … the chemistry decides to play up” and the sex misfires. “He falls asleep on his back with a fart and sweats and snores“. He wakes in the morning, “relieved to discover that the girl has gone; but an odd feeling, an unaccustomed tingling of the skin, a sensation of discomfort and unease around the heart, causes him, still on his back, to cast an eye over his person, whereupon he finds that she has left a little memento of herself – a Freudian gift, hard, compact, warm, in its own way perfectly formed, a faecal offering smelling of fish and pasta (of tagliatelle marinara) – nestling amongst the soft hairs of his chest, only inches from his gaping mouth.”

If you find that funny, Redback might be the novel for you. But I found it entirely forgettable – I only finished a few days ago but in the course of writing this review had to go back and check how it ends (did I really finish it?) only to find that it doesn’t really end at all, it just peters out. Like this review.

Redback by Howard Jacobson, 1987

Book review

The Finkler Question was Howard Jacobson’s eleventh novel. He has continued to publish a new work every other year (or thereabouts) since his first book Coming from Behind came out in 1983. The choice of The Finkler Question as winner of the 2010 Booker Prize was not particularly controversial (compared to many previous awards) – the field was strong, including works by Peter Carey, Damon Galgut and Andrea Levy, but it had been well reviewed and strongly tipped to win. Reviewers compared it favourably to Philip Roth and even Lewis Carroll! It was however unusual amongst Booker winners in that it was – ostensibly – a comic novel, the first of its kind to win the Booker since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils in 1986.

I appreciate ‘comic novel’ is a fairly loose category. In a 2015 lecture Jacobson himself gave to the Royal Society of Literature he offered these tips on how to write (and therefore what constitutes) a comic novel:

“Don’t try to be funny. The best comedy arises out of an embarrassment of seriousness.

Don’t give characters funny names. (Dickens used them all up)

Underwear isn’t funny. Neither are exclamation marks.

Writing about sex altogether is tricky. But inexplicitness is best, except when it isn’t. Do remember, though, that it takes refinement to be gross. (Was Jacobson following his own advice in his book The Act of Love which preceded The Finkler Question? Publishers Weekly described it as a “naughtily erudite” novel in which he “explores the nature of the erotic” in which a character is found “letching after two underage girls while attending the funeral of a man whose wife he had seduced” and in which the main characters wife ’embraces the infidelity foisted on her with gusto, relishing her thrice-weekly assignations and, after much persuasion, titillating her curious husband with details of their intimacies.’? Doesn’t look like it.)

Don’t be upbeat or feel-good, and don’t invite your readers to find you or your characters incorrigible.

Assume you are writing a tragedy. If your novel is any good that’s precisely what it will turn out to be.

Don’t consent to be called a comic novelist. It’s a tautology.”

A lot of these pointers are things to avoid rather than to do, and Jacobson was almost certainly trying to be witty rather than offering a serious guide to writing a comic novel, but at the same time the tragic element of The Finkler Question is central to the narrative and one that I will return to.

The connection between Jacobson and Kingsley Amis is deeper than their both having won the Booker. In my view many of Jacobson’s works bear a strong resemblance to those of Amis senior. His leading male characters are generally irritable and world weary, with an internal monologue revealing someone kicking against the pricks. These characters frequently seem an avatar for the novelist themselves, revealing their frustrations with the modern world and women in particular, especially those who prove resistance to their late middle-aged charms. Amis was notoriously misogynistic, but there are similar traits in Jacobson’s work. In No More Mr Nice Guy for example, the wife of his central character writes “feministical-erotic novels” and in Redback, Jacobson’s third novel, misogyny is front and central. Both men also experimented with writing dystopian novels – The Alteration (Amis) and J (Jacobson).

What does it mean to be Jewish? More specifically what does it mean to be Jewish in the UK in this century? That is The Finkler Question.

Jacobson’s central character, Julian Treslove is mugged one night. He is convinced his attacker calls him a Jew during the attack. Though some of his friends are Jewish, Treslove is not. Following the attack he becomes increasingly obsessed with what being Jewish means, in this time and place. For Treslove this isn’t a religious quest but rather a cultural one. He wants to understand the intricacies and precise nature of British Jewish life.

One of Treslove’s friends Libor Sevcik, is an elderly widower who was once a teacher specializing in Czech history. Treslove and Sam Finkler, the third member of the group, were two of his students. All of the book’s characters have complex identities – Sevcik had a second improbable career as a Hollywood gossip columnist. Finkler is a successful television personality and author. Treslove is a casual anti-Semite – despite having Jewish friends he really has no understanding of Jewish culture and thinks ““Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew — small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes.”

Treslove turns the word “Finkler” into a private synonym for “Jew” and begins to anatomise what he thinks as ‘Finkler’ behaviours, traits and customs, wondering to what extent he shares these characteristics.

Jacobson writes passionately about the Middle East through his complex characters. The New York Times’s review of the novel claims that the novel “does a painful, bravura job of presenting a full spectrum of Jewish attitudes about the Middle East”. Perhaps, although I don’t think Jacobson makes any serious attempt to underplay his own views:

“By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others? Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity. Until then, the Jewish state’s offer of safety to Jews the world over yes, Jews first – while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be constructed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked representative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries…”

This is that difficult beast, a deadly serious comic novel. Wry smiles are probably the most you will get in the way of comedy or amusement and the main characters are hard to love, but the insights into Jewish life in 21st Century Britain are important and make the novel worth reading in themselves. I doubt if any minds will have been changed by the analysis of the ‘Finkler’ question but that obviously was never really the point. In trying to be both amusing and serious the novel runs the risk, like all others of the genre, of being neither. I think it will be obvious by now that I am still not sure whether it succeeds or not – but that indecision is OK, I don’t pretend these reviews are final judgments on what I read. The 2.8 (out of 5) score on Goodreads from the 2,000+ reviews suggest I’m not the only one with mixed or indecisive feelings about it!

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, 2010

Book review

Children’s novels read by adults often seem very different from one’s memories when you read them the first time around. Swallows and Amazons is no exception to this rule. In my memory the novel described a long summer spent messing around in boats – in fact it only lasts a little over a week. It features the four lively and imaginative Walker children – John, Susan, Titty and Roger. They camp out on a small island in a lake (the lake is never named but it is clearly based upon Lake Coniston, where Ransome once spent a summer teaching the children of some friends to sail) and have adventures. Later they are joined by the Blackett children, two girls (the Amazons) who they initially feud with but quickly befriend. Their island – Wild Cat Island – seems small to adult eyes – they can run from one end to the other in minutes – and is close to home. It is a tribute to the author’s ability to capture the children’s imaginative play so realistically that younger readers join in and are able to see the adventures through the children’s eyes.

Age and gender determines role of the crew of the Swallow – John is captain, Susan first mate (which seems mainly to involve cooking and washing up), Titty (renamed Tatty when the novel was dramatised for television recently) is able-seaman, and Roger is the ship’s boy. As the eldest John assumes a leadership role, and is stiff-upper-lipped even in moments of crisis. He gets upset when his integrity is challenged by an adult, but manages to suppress his emotions. A discrete word with his mother on one of her visits to the island helps him overcome this upsetting experience. Susan embraces the domestic role she is allocated, bossing the other children around and at one point declining to join in their play because she has too much tidying up to do. Titty is a stereotypical tom-boy, and it is no surprise that it is her adventurousness that helps the Swallows win their war. Roger the youngest is often told he is not allowed to do things (such as hold the matches) but he accepts these constraints without too many protests – he knows his place.

As is almost always the case in novels of this genre, parents are conspicuous by their absence. The Walker children’s father is in the Navy, in Malta on route to Hong Kong, although he remains in charge of the major decisions such as whether to allow the children to camp out on the island, answering in typically brusque fashion “Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown.” The Blackett children’s father is never mentioned. But they aren’t left to run as wild as they believe – their Australian mother (who obviously is quite relaxed about the risks they take sailing on the lake) drops in on them regularly, and the people at the local farm where they get milk every day report back to her on their activities.

The Swallows challenge the Amazons to a war to decide leadership of their group. This is quickly won by the Swallows, due to Titty’s bravery, and they then agree to join forces against a common enemy – the Blacketts’ uncle Jim who they call Captain Flint. Hostilities with Captain Flint have been declared because he won’t play with them, deciding instead to write his memoirs. The Amazons start the war by letting off a firework on his houseboat roof, although the Swallows end up getting the blame for this. This was a more innocent time when an adult playing pirates with children was not a cause for concern or comment.

There is a lot of nautical detail in the novel, with long sections devoted to the minutiae of sailing which I make no apologies for skipping occasionally. Does this make much sense to you?

Nancy took a length of rope from the stern and made a noose at one end of it. Then she and Peggy hove up the barrel till it rested on the gunwale in the bows. John and Susan held it there, while the Amazons came ashore with the rope and one of the oars. Nancy fixed the rope round one end of the barrel and made it fast so that it could not slip. Then she took two turns of the rope round the oar and brought the rope down and through the loop, then along the top of the barrel and round it, to make another noose at the end, then twice round the oar and down again, and made it fast.”

The structure of the novel is strongly reminiscent of the Famous Five/Secret Seven books by Enid Blyton – rosy-cheeked English children roam freely across the idyllic countryside eating unpleasant pre-war food and drinking ‘pop’, yearning for adventure and eventually stumbling across it. Class prejudice is not as obvious as in the Blyton books, but is implicit in the children’s attitude towards the locals, who they refer to as savages. Fortunately there is none of the casual racism that often mars Blyton’s stories. There is some sexual stereotyping, particularly as regards Susan’s domestic role-playing, but this is offset by Titty and the Blackett’s tomboyish approach to play.

I always start these blog posts with the novel’s title, the author’s name, and the date of publication. If I am not sure of the date I will pencil in a guess, then check it and correct as required. My first guess at when Swallows and Amazons was published was 1905, 25 years earlier than when it came out. Why so badly wrong? The simple explanation is that the novel has a distinctly almost overwhelmingly Edwardian atmosphere. The children are all irrepressibly middle class, incredibly well spoken and highly independent. Their families are clearly prosperous – the Walker children’s baby sister, Vicky, is looked after by a nurse (aka a nanny), and the Blackett children (the Amazons) have a cook. Domestic servants were fairly common in middle class families in the nineteenth century, but by 1930 they were increasingly rare. The First World War and alternative work opportunities thereafter for women in retail and clerical roles led to a dramatic fall in numbers of servants, although the interwar slump had started to reverse that trend before the outbreak of the second World War ended it for good. Overall there is an old-fashioned feel to the novel, suggesting that it is set in an earlier age when children could run wild and be trusted with sail-boats, matches and axes without social services being called to investigate. It’s possible the novel is set in the pre-War period although there are no time references to indicate that – which in turn gives it a nostalgic timelessness.

Ransome went on to write a whole series of Swallows and Amazons novel. This might be unfair but I suspect they are all very similar – why change a winning formula? I was expecting something more nuanced and interesting from someone who spied for Britain in revolutionary Russia and who met some of the key protagonists personally, but I don’t think this was just a matter of Ransome writing children’s stories to pay the bills – it seems as if Swallows and Amazons was the book he always wanted to write, and his obvious affection for sailing and the Lakes shines through.

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, 1930

Book review

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in what is now South Africa. His father died just four years later in 1896 and his mother not much longer after that in 1904. After university Tolkien served in the first World War in which he saw almost all his former school friends die. I rarely have much time for commentators who draw parallels between the personal experiences of authors and the events of their novels, but I am going to make an exception here. Orphaned at such an early age the appeal to him of fantasy worlds must have been compelling. I can picture Tolkien in the trenches of the First World War, covered in mud and lice, looking out at the devastation of no-man’s-land, and remembering spring back in England. This must surely have influenced this poignant scene in The Return of the King in which Sam and Frodo look over the wastes of Mordor and fondly remember the Shire.

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

The scenes as the hobbits return to the Shire after their adventures, changed physically and psychologically, and for Frodo never quite fully recovered, can also be seen as an allegory for challenges faced by the troops returning from the front after the war. All the hobbits survive the war, as do all their friends except Boromir and Theoden – in reality the cost of the Great War was far deadlier.

As with The Two Towers, The Return of the King consists of two separate books telling the parallel stories of Frodo’s journey into Mordor, and the battle of Minas Tirith, the principal city of Gondor, the kingdom of men in Middle Earth. These stories are told through the separate and diverging tales of the surviving members of the fellowship. Gandalf and Pippin travel to Minas Tirith to rally the defence of the city from the imminent storm from Mordor. The city is in chaos with Denethor the Steward having to all intents and purposes having abdicated his role, leaving it to Gandalf to rally the defence of the realm. Merry stays with Theoden while he raises the Rohirrim to ride to Gondor’s aid. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, accompanied by the Rangers of the North, take the ‘Paths of the Dead’ to recruit the ghosts of Dunharrow, bound by an ancient curse to fight for the King of Gondor, to fight on their side. By this route Aragorn slowly reclaims his throne – the Return of the King. The Army of the Dead defeat the Corsairs of Umbar, Sauron’s fleet, and uses their ships to sail to the relief of Minas Tirith. The arrival of both the Rohirrim and the Southern forces turn the tide of battle against Sauron’s forces, but the critical blow is struck by Éowyn, who having travelled to battle in disguise, kills the Lord of the Nazgûl. There is a short pause for the dead to be buried. Gandalf and Aragorn call a war council, and announce an audacious plan to march on Mordor, to distract Sauron and give Frodo and chance of finishing his quest. It is before the Black Gates that this breathless chapter of the story closes,

In the parallel Ringbearers plot-line, Sam rescues Frodo from Cirith Ungol, where he has been taken after being paralysed by Shelob. Their journey across the barren wastes of Mordor is arduous and exhausting, and they are tracked every step by Gollum. This is where the novel is probably the hardest to read – Tolkien does an astonishing job of conveying the physical difficulties of crossing this wasteland, leaving the reader exhausted. But their luck holds, and the attack on the Black Gates clears their way to Mount Doom, which astonishingly is unguarded. At the last, Frodo is unable to resist the Ring and claims it for himself. Gollum has followed Sam and Frodo all the way, and chooses this moment to bite off Frodo’s finger with the Ring still on it. Celebrating wildly, Gollum stumbles and falls into the volcano, taking the Ring with him. Sauron power is switched off like a light, and is kingdom crumbles. His armies collapse and are swept away by Aragorn’s forces.

Finally the two parallel storyline can combine. Sam and Frodo are rescued from Mordor by the ever reliable eagles, and in the days that follow Aragorn is crowned King. He weds Arwen, daughter of Elrond. Éomer is crowned King of Rohan and Éowyn marries Faramir, Prince of Ithilien. While this might all seem a little trite and convenient, Tolkien handles the material well and it doesn’t seemed forced. The journey back to the Shire is a procession via some of the locations visited on the outward journey, including spending time with a now aged Bilbo in Rivendell. But when the hobbits finally arrive back in the Shire they find it has been taken over by men. Sam had had a vision of this happening when he was in Lothlorien. The hobbits raise a rebellion and scour the Shire of men, who it turns out had been organised by a spiteful and vindictive Saruman. This reveal is a little in the spirit of Scooby Doo, but the damage done to the Shire is easily put right. These final scenes are when the novel is at its most allegorical. The construction of houses and factories, and the cutting down of trees across the Shire are a clear metaphor for the industrialisation of rural England. But the damage done derives not from just Saruman’s evil but by the new comers to the Shire, foreigners with alien ways. It’s hardly surprising that a Oxford professor born in the reign of Queen Victoria would have old-fashioned views on development and immigration, and to be fair to Tolkien there are plenty of other moments in the novel’s where he takes a more progressive stance. In the novel’s final chapters Frodo, Bilbo and Gandalf join the last of the elves to set sail from the Grey Havens across the sea in a metaphor for death.

The Lord of the Rings has come in for some criticism for its portrayal of the role of women. The Fellowship is indeed an all-male boy’s club. You could try and explain this by seeing the LoTR as a dramatisation of the First World War – there were very few women in the front line. But Tolkien appears to notice that the earlier novels are dominated by male characters, and responds by introducing several strong women. Of these Eowyn is the most significant. She subverts the expectations of her family and her people by refusing to accept the submissive role allocated to her by Théoden and later Aragorn:

“A time may come soon,” said he, “when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.”

She answered: “All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.”

“What do you fear, lady?” he asked.

“A cage,” she said. “To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”

This passionate refusal to accept her traditional gender role of care-giver is moving, and not at all undermined by her eventual choice to become Faramir’s wife – she has by then done great deeds, including riding to war against the direct orders of her king, and slaying the Witch King of Angmar:

“But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”

Eowyn is admittedly not the complete feminist role-model. She pines after Aragorn, and at times seems more interested in following him that going to war, the latter being the way of remaining by his side. But this is high fantasy from the 1950’s after all, and a big step forward compared to the female-free zone that is The Hobbit.

I mentioned in my review of The Two Towers that some of the most moving, powerful lines from the Peter Jackson films were taken directly from Tolkien. The same applies to The Return of the King. Sam and Eowyn’s lines quoted above have a huge impact, and Theoden’s speech to the Rohirrim is a genuinely hairs on the back of the neck moment:

“Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake, fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!”

It’s been a genuine pleasure to return to Middle Earth for a few weeks. I know the length of the novels (over 1500 pages) and the songs can be off-putting for some, but for anyone who has only seen the films the novels will be particularly worth the effort as whole new layers of depth are revealed.

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, by J R R Tolkien, 1955

Book review

The Two Towers, the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring, is in effect two shorter novels – The Treason of Isengard, which follows Aragorn and the remainder of the fellowship in the battle against the forces of Saruman, and The Journey of the Ringbearers/The Ring goes East following Sam and Frodo as they travel further into the badlands beyond Gondor. In the Peter Jackson film these two storylines are intertwined, with regular cutting between the two – Tolkien took the bold choice of keeping the two entirely separate. I doubt if an author writing today would make this choice: it requires patience on the part of the reader who has to wait several hundred pages before finding out what is happening to the Ringbearer.

In the past I have been a little confused about which were the two towers in question, but that seemed a bit slow of me. On a re-read it is completely clear: the towers are Orthanc, Saruman’s base, and Barad-dûr, Sauron’s tower in Mordor. Or so I thought. But the internet tells me I am wrong. Apparently Tolkien invented the novel’s title whilst under deadline pressure and wasn’t happy with it, recognising its ambiguity – there are a lot of towers in Middle Earth! Eventually he settled on them being Orthanc (Saruman’s tower) and Minas Morgul (in Mordor, but not Sauron’s principal base). This is genuinely puzzling – there are two main bad guys in LoTR, Saruman and Sauron. They even have contrasting colour emblems – the white hand of Isengard and the black everything of Barad-dur. One is defeated in The Two Towers, the second in The Return of the King. Rather than just being Saruman’s servant, as I had originally supposed, Saruman plans to take the One Ring for himself, and challenge him for control of Middle Earth. So the two towers are the twin centres of evil in Middle Earth, and both have to be defeated. There’s a structural symmetry in having the two towers represented by Saruman and Sauron’s bases which is lost with any other allocation. Of course the defeat of Saruman ends up as a surprisingly straightforward affair, a warm-up act for the much trickier task of bringing down Sauron in The Return of the King. This tower-related ambiguity doesn’t matter a great deal one way or another, but the anomaly is surprising – Tolkien devised his world with such extraordinary detail that for this fairly significant issue to be left unresolved grates a little.

The Treason of Isengard

The first book in The Two Towers follows Merry and Pippin, who you will recall had been captured by orcs and are being taken to Saruman’s fortress in Isengard. Gimli, Legolas and Aragorn are running after them. The orcs’ journey is intercepted by some of the Riders of Rohan, and in the battle that ensues Merry and Pippin escape into nearby Fangorn forest. Here they meet Treebeard, leader of the Ents. Ents are a cross between trees and trolls, and when roused to anger they can be particularly dangerous, as Saruman is about to find out. He has been chopping down lots of trees down to fuel his furnaces, and the Ents, prompted by Merry and Pippin, decide to do something about it.

Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas are told by the Riders that the orcs they were following have been wiped out in battle. Unable to quite believe this includes the hobbits, Aragorn tracks them into Fangorn. The stage is set for the big reveal: in the forest they meet a white wizard who they initially believe to be Saruman, but who is in fact (spoiler alert) Gandalf. He tells them of his struggle with the Balrog, which seems to have given him even more magical powers – he is now Gandalf the White (it is suggested that this gives him a position of supremacy over the other wizards in Middle Earth, not least Saruman). Tolkien leaves the resurrection of Gandalf a daringly long time, making the impact of his return all the more powerful.

Leaving the search for the hobbits – they are reassured they are in safe Entish hands – they ride to Edoras, capital of Rohan. Theoden, king of Rohan, has been magically enslaved by Grima Wormtongue, who we later found out has been working undercover for Saruman. Theoden is restored by Gandalf and calls his army to war. Rohan’s armies and people fall back to Helm’s Deep while Gandalf goes to seek reinforcements. (Peter Jackson takes some liberties with this part of the storyline, but retains the essential spirit of the narrative.) The scene is set for a siege of Saruman’s army of orcs; the city nearly falls until Gandalf returns with said reinforcements. The victorious army of Rohan and our surviving Fellowship members now travel to Isengard, where they are reunited with Merry and Pippin. Saruman’s fortress has been destroyed by the Ents, but Saruman himself is refusing to leave his Orthanc. Gandalf counsels that he be left to rot there. But the victory is tainted by an unfortunate incident with a palantíri, another Middle Earth maguffin. Palantirs are magical crystal balls that allow people to communicate over long distances (mobile phones in other words). Pippin takes a peep into the palantir and is locked onto by Sauron, who can read his mind. Gandalf takes Pippin urgently to Minas Tirith capital city of Gondor, to prepare for war, leaving the Riders of Rohan to follow on as soon as possible.

The Ring Goes East

Book 4 is the sequence is also subtitled The Ringbearers go East. Note the interesting use of the plural – at this stage only Frodo and Gollum are ringbearers, although in The Return of the King Sam also wears the ring briefly. The narrative picks up immediately from the end of the Fellowship. Sam and Frodo are trying to find their way out of the hills they are stuck in, but are hopelessly and dangerously lost until they discover Gollum has been stalking them. They capture him and persuade him to lead them to Mordor. In Ithilien, the land that borders Mordor to the East of the Great River, they are captured by Faramir, brother of Boromir. Faramir is leading a raiding party trying to find out more about Sauron’s invasion plans. Although Faramir finds out about their quest, he forgoes the temptation to take the ring back to Gondor – he is stronger than his brother in that respect. Gollum leads them safely into the mountains that surround and protect Mordor, but his cunning plan is finally revealed – he has been leading them all this time into the lair of ~~Aragog~~ sorry Shelob, a huge, ancient spider. She stings or bites Frodo apparently killing him. Sam fights her off. Faced with the awful choice of staying with Frodo’s unresponsive body or pushing on with the quest, he decides to take the Ring himself and try to reach Mount Doom. It is not long before he finds out that Frodo was only paralysed by Shelob – she likes her meat kept fresh – and the novel closes with Frodo taken prisoner by the orcs guarding the pass into Mordor, and Sam’s position seemingly hopeless. He does have the ring safe in his possession though.

I know I keep coming back to the Peter Jackson films, but what struck me on this reread was that the moments the films really have an emotional impact is when the language is drawn from Tolkien’s original lines in the novel. For example, Aragorn’s song about the Riders of the Mark:

Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning

are given to Theoden in the film before the battle at Helms Deep. Or when Sam and Frodo reminisce about the Shire, and wonder if one day their tale will be remembered:

“Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, of course, but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: “Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!” And they will say: “Yes, that’s one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn’t he, dad?” “Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that’s saying a lot.”
‘It’s saying a lot too much,’ said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. ‘Why, Sam,’ he said, ‘to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. “I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?”‘
‘Now, Mr. Frodo,’ said Sam, ‘you shouldn’t make fun. I was serious.’
‘So was I,’ said Frodo, ‘and so I am.

Which is played out almost verbatim in the scene early in the film between Sean Astin and Elijah Wood. The touching relationship between Sam and Frodo is at the heart of the second book of The Two Towers (and even more so in The Return of the King). Tolkien handles this comradeship sensitively and honestly, not afraid to show the love and affection between the two hobbits.

As the novel that bridges the opening and closing of the story of the One Ring, The Two Towers inevitably runs the risk of lagging. If as a reader you are engaged in Tolkien’s world-building and mythologising, the novel can’t be long enough. If you are not it will probably drag. Certainly there are new elements – this is not just travelling, being rescued, more travelling – although I can’t deny there’s plenty of both, as you would expect in any quest epic. We know following Boromir’s death at the end of The Fellowship that Tolkien’s character’s plot armour is not impenetrable, so Gandalf’s return will be a genuine surprise for many less cynical readers, and we will fear for Frodo after his encounter with Shelob – perhaps Sam is the hero of the story after all? There is less incessant poetry in this novel than the first (perhaps Tolkien’s editor had a quiet word with him?) which is certainly an improvement. It is important to remember that Lord of the Rings is just one very long novel that for the sake of convenience was originally published in three parts, so judging the Two Towers on its merits alone is pretty unfair. I think Tolkien does a good job of keeping the plot moving even after having torn up the original fellowship goes to Mordor script. This allows him to explore Middle Earth in more depth, and to develop storylines for all the hobbits, Merry and Pippin in particular, rather than just having them for light relief.

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, by J R R Tolkien, 1955

Book review

A while back I wrote a blog post about the different ways one can read a book, trying to answer the question – what does it actually mean to say that you have read a novel? I found ten different flavours of reading, but I missed number 11- possibly the best way of reading a novel is to do so collectively. I don’t mean with other people in a book club (I suppose that would be number 12), where you get together at the end, admit you didn’t finish it, and then drink some wine. Nor do I mean a group reading in a big circle, taking turns (13). No, I am thinking of reading a novel at the same time as your friends, meeting them the next day, and comparing notes. That’s the way I first read The Lord of the Rings many years ago and I recall it as a special experience. My friends had spotted things I had missed, they had read chapters I was yet to reach, they interpreted events differently from one another, and of course we all made wild guesses about what was going to happen. We enthused about Tolkien’s world-building, his characterisation, his descriptive powers, moaned about his poetry, and disagree fiercely about things such as how irritating Tom Bombadil was. There was a freshness and authenticity to our reactions that was precious to me (see what I did there?)

Chances are you are more familiar with the Peter Jackson films than the original Tolkien novels. The films are wonderful, respectful of their source material but at the same time making sensible changes so allow the films to run at a reasonable length. Certainly the film of Fellowship of the Ring is largely consistent with the novel, with the one significant change being the omission of any reference to the slightly creepy Tom Bombadil.

Lord of the Rings epic scale and themes ensure that it is often read as an allegory, but in the novel’s prologue Tolkien goes out of his way to dismiss the idea that it is anything other than a story. He specifically scotches the idea that the novel is about the Second World War, not least because it was conceived and largely written long before the war started.

A few things that struck me on this re-reading. First, it is quite striking just how often Gandalf goes missing. He flits in and out of the narrative time after time, usually for very long periods. He does exactly the same thing in The Hobbit of course, walking out on Bilbo and the dwarves just at the moment his presence is most needed, but here he is missing from the Shire while researching the origins of the ring for several years after Bilbo’s parting, missing again while the hobbits travel to Bree and beyond, only meeting up with them at Rivendell, then finally of course after that unfortunate incident with the Balrog in Moria.

The other thing that struck me, and this is probably because I have just finished re-reading the Harry Potter series, is how influential the Lord of the Rings seems to have been on J K Rowling. The Harry Potter novels borrow fairly relentlessly from a wide range of sources, and a series set in a school for wizards at first seems very dissimilar to an epic quest novel, but dig a bit deeper and the parallels begin to pile up. Dumbledore and Gandalf are almost interchangeable, the one ring seems a lot like Sauron’s one and only horcrux, Nazgul and Dementors look a lot alike, as do Dobby and Gollum.

In the unlikely event you are unfamiliar with the novel, Lord of the Rings is a three part quest novel set in a mythical Middle Earth peopled by Elves, dwarves, wizards, and halfling creatures of Tolkien’s own imagining, hobbits. It follows chronologically around sixty years after the events of The Hobbit. Bilbo has been enjoying the benefits of his comfortable wealth. He has never married, but he has adopted his nephew, Frodo, who now lives with him. On his 111th birthday he throws a party for the whole neighbourhood and announces he is leaving the Shire to go wandering. He leaves the invisibility ring to Frodo, completely unaware of the ring’s significance. Tolkien’s master-stroke is to take something that doesn’t play a major part in The Hobbit – it is a McGuffin to help Bilbo escape from Gollum and the goblin caves, but doesn’t play any significant role in the rest of teh story – and turn it into a powerful dark-magic object which can decide the fate of Middle Earth.

Gandalf eventually works out the ring’s significance, and tells Frodo he must take it away from the Shire. Gollum has revealed that the ring is in The Shire, being held by a hobbit named Baggins, and the Dark Lord ~~Voldemort~~ sorry Sauron has sent his ~~Dementors~~ sorry Nazgul to find it. Gandalf goes to consult the leader of his order, Saruman, leaving Frodo to set out in the company of his sidekick, friend and gardener Sam Gamgee, and his cousin Pippin Took. It is not long before they are intercepted by the Black Riders, but some passing Elves scare them off. Their journey is to be blessed with a series of such fortunate encounters. Meeting up with Merry Brandybuck they leave the Shire, taking a shortcut through the Old Forest, where they are again rescued, this time from the clutches of an aggressive Willow, by Tom Bombadil. In the net stage of their journey that get lost in a fog and caught by barrow-wights, but Tom is on hand to rescue them again.

In Bree they meet Strider who rescues them from the BlackRiders and takes them to Weathertop where they are again attacked by the persistent Black Riders. Although Frodo is wounded with a cursed blade, Strider fights off the Nazgûl, and after a series of close shaves which on the page aren’t repetitive but in summary certainly seem as such, they finally reach Rivendell, an elf-sanctuary and home of Elrond. Gandalf, having escaped the clutches of Saruman, is there to greet them. While Frodo recovers a Council is summoned to decide the fate of the Ring. We learn the history of Sauron and the Ring’s importance is confirmed. The Fellowship of the Ring is formed, nine walkers to mirror the nine Black Riders: Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Strider, now revealed as Aragorn, heir to the kingdom of Gondor, Gandalf, Gimli the Dwarf, Legolas the Elf, and Boromir, son of the Steward of Gondor.

This is an unusual quest – to destroy a found object, not to locate a treasure. Their first challenge is to cross the Misty Mountains. When they prove impassable they decide to go under the mountains, through the Mines of Moria. But these proves equally dangerous and orc-infested, with the added complication of a Balrog, a fire demon, which Gandalf tackles single-handedly. When I first read The Fellowship I was far less cynical than I am now – the usual rule of fiction, that unless you see someone die they aren’t dead, was not so well known in those days. Now I suspect few readers will think Gandalf is gone for good.

Next on the quest is a few days of refuge in the Elven forest of Lothlórien, where they meet the Lady Galadriel. Female characters in the trilogy are few and far between, but those who do appear are significant and powerful. Galadriel permits Frodo and Sam to look into her ~~pensieve~~ sorry fountain to see visions of the past, the present, and a possible future. They leave Lothlorien by river to the hills of Amon Hen. Here the Fellowship is sundered, setting in train the parallel storylines that are followed in the sequel, The Two Towers. It was a bold narrative choice Tolkien made here, having invested so much in creating the fellowship to then break it up before the quest is complete.

Tolkien’s absorption in his world is absolute, and this translates into a compellingly realistic fantasy (oxymoronic, I know) novel on the grandest of scales. His world-building is extraordinary. Some readers may not have the patience to invest so much time in the journey and I confess I often skipped the poems and songs that are such a persistent feature of the novel – does anyone enjoy these I wonder? Lord of the Rings came top of the poll conducted by the BBC in 2003 to find the UK’s most popular novel, helped I am sure by the popularity of Jackson’s trilogy of films. It requires a degree of commitment and the ability to suspend disbelief, but if you can get beyond those barriers Lord of the Rings deserves its place in that poll, and will leave you with memories of adventures in which the weak overcome evil, which after all is really all we ever want, isn’t it?

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, by J R R Tolkein, 1954

Book review

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce, 1890

Recently I came across this gem of a post on the ever-wonderful LitHub about the best short stories ever written and it prompted me to guiltily read more of this neglected (by me) genre (although this is a great list, there are some obvious omissions; Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder is missing for a start. A Sound of Thunder is the “butterfly effect” story in which time-travellers to the age of the dinosaurs inadvertently affect the future.) Most of the stories on this list can easily read in less than an hour and they are usually available for free on the internet.

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge eBook: Ambrose Bierce: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

I started with An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge for reasons of nostalgia. I have a vivid memory of being shown the film adaptation of this story in school one day – I have no idea in what lesson – and to this day it seems a very dark film to show schoolchildren.

An Occurrence is a/the near perfect short story. The title is carefully understated, but we soon learn the nature of the occurrence due to happen on the bridge – a man is to be hung. You probably are familiar with the story and its wonderfully executed (forgive me) twist, but just in case you aren’t I am going to avoid summarising the plot – with the whole story running to only a handful of pages any summary would be largely redundant anyway.

Kurt Vonnegut famously described An Occurrence as “that greatest American short story….a flawless example of American genius“. Without wanting to pick an argument with Mr Vonnegut there’s nothing uniquely American about the story nor its conception. Being just an American story would diminish it. Its universality lies in the use of point of view narration. The reader trusts the story we are being told by the captured (and clearly guilty) plantation owner about to be hung from the bridge because we have been taught to trust narrators. Why would someone about to die mislead us about what happens. His apparent escape from his fate is plausible simply because of the conventional understanding that he must have survived in order to tell his tale.

The narrative emphasises the mundane and everyday nature of what is happening. This is an occurrence, nothing more. A man is about to die, but this is something that in war happens all the time. The setting is just Owl Creek Bridge, an insignificant bridge over an insignificant stream. Everyone involved in the execution is calm and business-like, even the condemned man himself. Everything is ordered and well-prepared.

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners—two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as “support,” that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest—a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.

The execution is being carried out with military precision, so it is a shock when, remarkably, an opportunity to escape appears:

All at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!—the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface—knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable.

An Occurrence is much more than a commentary on war and what men will do for their country. It reminds us that life is short and sweet, and that our perception of time can be strangely distorted in the moment. It also teaches us that narrators and authors can be misleading, and that wishful thinking is a powerful thing. It is also an object lesson in the importance of close and careful reading. If you just engage with this text as an adventure story you will almost certainly miss the clear indications that there is more to this story than the narrator tells us. Bierce wrote about “bad readers—readers who, lacking the habit of analysis, lack also the faculty of discrimination, and take whatever is put before them”. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad reader, but we can all read more carefully and analytically, not taking at face value what we are told, whether it be a short story, a novel, or the news on our screens, and An Occurrence is an object lesson in why this an important skill.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce, 1890

Book review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(page 120)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invisible Women, pages 245-6

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

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

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

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

Page 303

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

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

Food for thought.

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

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

Book review

Part of the unwritten contract between authors and their readers is that we agree to suspend our scepticism for the duration of the novel. We know we are being told a story, that the events described didn’t ‘really’ happen and the characters never lived, but nevertheless we put our disbelief to the backs of our minds and go along with the idea that they did. In return the novelist will either take us somewhere we could never go in real life – to the Moon and Back, to the Centre of the Earth – or will portray a realistic scene that could, in theory, have happened. Realistic novels depend on a degree of authenticity. They don’t need to be hyper-real; we don’t really care if some of the fine detail of the recreation doesn’t stand up to academic scrutiny or for minor historical inaccuracies. The test is does it feel real. In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf discusses this issue, using the term ‘integrity’ to describe this aspect of writing:

‘What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. ..It is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition, which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible.’

Readers will have their own standards and criteria for deciding which authors achieve this standard, who have the ability to reveal to us the truth. But the opening paragraph of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels struck me as being particularly inauthentic, and I thought it might be useful to examine why. Inauthenticity in a realistic novel, when there is no suggestion that the author is deliberately breaking the literary equivalent of the fourth wall (for comic effect, for example, or to emphasise that this is, after all, just fiction) is for me a cardinal sin.

The Gate of Angels opens with this vivid, comedic description of a storm:

“How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.”

How, one might also ask, could an author get an opening paragraph so badly wrong, so profoundly inauthentic?

This paragraph is often quoted by reviewers, cited as either an example of Fitzgerald’s powers of descriptive writing, or her comedic genius, sometimes both. One online review describes it “as compressed as poetry—and funny, too”. But when I read it I was struck by its dishonesty, the obvious way that it has been constructed to make a fairly clumsy point.

In her biography of Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee claims that Fitzgerald’s inspiration for the opening of the novel came when she saw “through a Cambridge bus window some cows in ecstasy over willow branches that had been broken off by strong winds; she viewed this as an instance of reason giving way to imagination in ‘this orderly University city”. Ah yes, the good old struggle between reason and imagination. I have my doubts. There’s no question that the author is trying to contrast here the wild disordered weather with the serenity of the university, introducing the broader themes running through the novel of the opposition between reason and imagination, science and faith, and so on – strong, traditional themes no doubt, if laid on a bit thick. She is also trying to engage our attention, so we keep reading (not unreasonably) and entertain – the scene is deliberately comic and absurd. But the paragraph is so full of implausibilities and false similes that the point is completely undermined. Instead of contemplating how ridiculous academics can be when blown off course by the powers of imagination, I for one had a far less constructive reaction.

For a start, if the storm is sufficiently strong to blow branches off willow trees, the chances of any cyclists venturing out and about, let alone riding three abreast as they do in a paragraph or two, would be slim. Am I being too serious, too literal here? The simile comparing these distressed cyclists to sailors in peril is I would guess intended to conjure thoughts of the Tempest or Twelfth Night. But it doesn’t really work. Cyclists are not at all like sailors. Can you honestly say when you read that line you had a mental image of a storm-tossed ship? Using metaphor to describe something that is nothing like the thing being described can be effective – the evening in Eliot’s Prufrock is not literally “spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table” but we know what he means. But Fitzgerald isn’t T S Eliot. and this comparison just invites the comment “Well they wouldn’t, would they?”.

And then there are these mysterious horned cows and their strange behaviour. Cows can have horns of course. But in a storm would horned cows really toss broken-off branches into the air? The author suggests it is because the leaves (not the branches?) are “everywhere within reach…quite contrary to all their experience”. Now I am not sure if the author ever spent a moment looking at a willow tree, but their predominant feature is their “aspect” whereby their branches brush the ground – often cited as the origin of the “weeping” adjective. But the author needs some explanation for the cows’ behaviour, and this will do as good as any.

But there’s more. Because these disorientated cows get the branches stuck in their horns (somehow). The branches then obstruct their view, and not being able to see properly they trip and fall. Of course they do. The fallen cows then lie there munching idiotically, unable to get up. This is surely a case of an image being asked to do too much work. I suspect what happened here is that the author thought she needed an image of futility and stupidity. Cows with their legs in the air, stilling munching away, will do the job? But how to get the cows on their back? I know, they have tripped over, because they have got branches in their horns which blinded them. Which requires a tree and fallen branches. So working backwards you arrive at the image, rather than the image inspiring the idea.

At which point the author had lost my trust. I had been shown behind the facade to see the author typing away, constructing a laboured image to make a point, all realism and authenticity, all integrity, left behind. The question I was left with was this – was this deliberate? Did the author consciously create an implausible scene of cows and willows to remind the reader that they are reading a novel, an artificial construct in which neither the cows nor the willows, or anything else actually exist? I don’t think so – setting the novel is a real street in a real city, with characters who meet and talk about real historical people suggests otherwise. The author goes to great length to place her narrative in a realistic setting with believable characters. So we are left with what – just clumsy writing? Or worse, dishonest, inauthentic writing? I’m still not sure.

Supplemental: Authenticity in literature with reference to Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels

Book review

Life of Pi is that rare beast, a post-modernist novel of ideas that is also a wonderful adventure story. In this 2002 Booker prize winning novel Mantel plays with ideas about narrative and the nature of the novel while at the same time keeping the reader fully engaged with an exciting tale of a young man trapped on a lifeboat with only a tiger for company, adrift on the Indian Ocean for over 200 days. Life Of Pi by Yann Martel – Canongate Books

I am guessing you knew that already – the central concept of the novel would once have been a surprising plot twist about a third of the way through, but now the cover illustration, the blurb on the back of the book, and of course the successful film of the novel all means that most readers will know this already. Post-modern might be a label that puts some readers off, but certainly here it shouldn’t. Mantel experiments with form and content within some quite traditional boundaries. This is a novel about an epic journey that stays firmly within the traditions of the genre, a quest for survival where the tension between two antagonists keeps the book in balance. In many ways the novel therefore owes a debt to survival novels going back as far as Robinson Crusoe.

Mantel uses a framing device to open the novel, in which ‘the author’ explains how he exiled himself in India to write a novel about Portugal just before the second world war, and is side-tracked by a meeting with the character who goes on to narrate much of Life of Pi, Piscine Molitor Patel, named after a French swimming pool of all things. Pi grew up quite reasonably resenting his unusual name, and adopts the abbreviated form to avoid the inevitable mockery. He is raised as a Hindu but as a teenager also becomes a Christian and a Muslim, seeing no contradiction in following all three faiths. He is brought up in the family-owned zoo in Pondicherry, once part of a small French territory in coastal India. Seeing political and social problems ahead in India, his father decides to sell the zoo and emigrate to Canada.

Pi is an endearing narrator who tells his story in a very straightforward and engaging way. The chapters in which Pi tells his account of his upbringing are interspersed by descriptions of the author’s interviews with the older Pi, giving glimpses of his settled life in Canada, a world apart from the drama of his youth. Hints are given of what is to follow after what is a fairly happy, prosperous and trauma-free childhood. This reference frame does of course tell the reader that Pi survives being ship-wrecked, which means our interest is engaged in wondering not whether but how he survives. Pi is brought up around the animals of his father’s zoo, and is a quick and resourceful learner, key knowledge and skills that help him survive when the time comes.

The second section of the novel begins with the fateful journey to Canada on a freighter which is also carrying many of the animals from their zoo being sold to other zoos in north America. The ship sinks suddenly in a storm, and Pi escapes in a lifeboat along with some of the animals from their crates – a hyena, a zebra, and an orangutan. This is never going to end well, and inevitably the hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan. The hyena’s dominance doesn’t last long either, because from under the boat’s tarpaulin emerges another surprising survivor, ‘Richard Parker’, the zoo’s strangely named Bengal tiger. Richard Parker quickly dispatches the hyena, leaving him alone with Pi on the open and lonely seas.

How is Pi going to survive sharing a small life-boat with a tiger? Surprisingly easily, all things considered. He builds a small raft using oars and life jackets and ties it to the bow of the boat. He sneaks back to the lifeboat periodically to raid its plentiful stores (echoes there of how Crusoe uses the stores and equipment on his shipwrecked ship) and fishes for food, sharing the majority of it with Richard Parker. He has water filtration devices and rain catchers, flares, tinned water and food – even a survival guide. But he quickly realises that keeping a distance from Richard Parker will not be enough – sooner or later he will get peckish and take the short leap to the raft. So he decides to train the tiger as if he was back in the zoo, teaching him to be submissive, using food as a reward, seasickness as punishment, and a whistle for dominance. This seems to work, and Pi and Richard Parker settle down into a unique and bizarre arrangement where the sole aim is survival.

The novel maintains a strong sense of realism throughout these chapters. There is a focus on the messy practicalities of survival – some of the descriptions of butchering fish and turtles are hard to stomach. But the realism begins to ebb away at the end of this section of the novel. Pi encounters another blind castaway, who tries to kill him but doesn’t get past Richard Parker. Later, they find land, but it is a floating island inhabited by thousands of meerkats. This is a refuge of sorts, but any plans to remain on this island long term are abandoned when Pi discovers its secret – by night it becomes carnivorous, and the meerkats only survive by hiding in the trees. The end of the adventure comes suddenly and without fanfare. The lifeboat washes onto a Mexican beach and Richard Parker disappears into the jungle, leaving Pi to recover with the help of some bemused locals.

The third part of the novel is a form of epilogue. Officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport interview Pi as part of their investigation into the shipwreck. They query the veracity of his story. so he offers them an alternative account in which he is the animals on the lifeboat are replaced with the ship’s cook, a sailor with a broken leg, and his mother. The suggestion is that the principal story has been an allegory for this ‘real’ version of events, which Pi has invented to protect himself from accusations or the psychological burden of cannibalism and murder. This ending, in which the story we have just been told is thrown into doubt by an alternative account, reminded me of the ending of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, where the central story turns out to be fictitious, as if any parts of the novel had a stronger claim on reality than any other. As a device this effectively reminds the reader this is ‘just’ a story, and we choose which to believe. Pi explicitly calls out this choice, and suggests the same principle applies to religion – “And so it goes with God.”

This makes it sound as if Life of Pi is a pious book, but that wasn’t my reading of it. Neither the bizarre carnivorous island nor the “was it all a lie?” ending spoiled the integrity of the central narrative, which was a sustained feat of imaginative story-telling. Pi is a really enjoyable novel which pulls off the challenge of making the long castaway voyage of a teenage boy and a tiger seem believable, while at the same time having something interesting to say about narrative and religion. Recommended.

Life of Pi, by Yann Mantel, 2001

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The Reading Bug

A blog about reading, books, and language.

Asides

Redback by Howard Jacobson, 1987

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, 2010

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, 1930

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, by J R R Tolkien, 1955

The Treason of Isengard

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, by J R R Tolkien, 1955

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, by J R R Tolkein, 1954

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce, 1890

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

Supplemental: Authenticity in literature with reference to Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels

Life of Pi, by Yann Mantel, 2001