The Worm Ouroboros: A User’s Guide

The Worm Ouroboros

by E.R.Eddison

1972, Pan/Ballantine, 520 pages.

This book is so much better than it ought to be. Its faults are many. It opens with an almost pointless ‘induction’ and virtually admits itself as nothing but a dream. It apparently takes place on Mercury, though the venue bears no relationship to the planet we know, or that was known in 1926, which is when the copyright page suggests the book first appeared. Even once we get to Mercury, the story seems to take forever to gather momentum. It relates a battle between ‘Demons’, ‘Witches’, ‘Imps’ and the like, which sounds like a nursery rhyme, especially given the cartoonish names (people and places) like Fax Fay Faz, Melikaphkhaz, Eshgrar Ogo and Spitfire. The heroes are elitist war-mongers. The plot is weighted down by the author’s liking for lengthy descriptions of architecture, and is told in an idiosyncratic prose that smacks of some time past (a bibliography in the back gives sources for the verses and songs scattered through the text, and most come from within a few years of 1600, which probably offers a useful guide).

Obligatory cover scan.

Yet I would without hesitation rate it as one of the handful of greatest fantasy stories I have ever read, and probably the greatest fantasy adventure, for adventure it is. The obvious comparison is with The Lord of the Rings, but the books are very different. Eddison is not interested in little people, and relatively uninterested in mythology. His baddies are not evil, in the way that Morgoth and Sauron come to embody evil, so much as naughty and callous. War is simply how one gets what one wants, be it money, power, land, women or glory. Eddison’s villains are the better. His language is richer and stranger — and more demanding.

So, be warned, there are a couple of simple rules you need to follow to appreciate this book, if you can be bothered. A hint is given in the dedication, where the author states:

“It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake.”

It is also a story written for its own sake. Eddison makes no allowances for the commercial realities of publishing. He had a vision, one apparently born in his mind’s eye when he was a boy, and embellished it for years. The book is therefore uncompromising, as much so as Ulysses or The Unnameable.

So the rules are:
(1) Be patient and keep reading. Get at least past ‘Conjuring in the Iron Tower’ before yelling ‘Aww nuts’ and throwing the book across the room.
(2) Even though the story moves a little slowly at first, don’t read too quickly until you have a good ear for the language. Here is a literally random sample — a relatively plain passage, as it turns out: ‘For four days they journeyed through deep woods carpeted with the leaves of a thousand autumns, where at midmost noon twilight dwelt among hushed woodland noises, and solemn eyeballs glared nightly between the tree-trunks, gazing on the Demons as they marched or took their rest.’ Dialogue tends to be more flowery. A random sample: ‘”Madam, I am a soldier. Truly mine affection standeth not upon compliment. That I am impatient, put the wite on thy beauty not on me. Pray you, be seated.”‘
(3) There is a mindset you might need to coax yourself into. These heroes are not modern in conception. They are more like Achilles and Hector than Harry Potter and Thomas Covenant. Forget about egalitarianism and equality and self-doubt. These heroes are not mere men. They are blessed by high birth and godly physique — and are favoured by the Gods. They are anointed by destiny to live larger than the rest of us, and they pay us no mind; even, perhaps especially, the heroes of the book are not terribly likeable the way a protagonist of a modern piece of commercial fiction would be expected to be. The world consists of them and cannon fodder. I found this quite hard to get used to.
(4) Demons. Witches. Imps. Goblins. They are just nations or kingdoms, and the names imply nothing about their physical appearance — there might be a couple of references to horns on the demons, but that’s about it. Again, you may have to train yourself to look past the terms. They do get in the way.
(5) If you like such things, there are some maps of the world Eddison created, deduced from the text by keen readers, and available for a cheap websearch.
(6) Maybe read it again a year or two later. I enjoyed the second reading more than the first.

Now, I generally avoid plot summaries, and I’m not going to give one here. But to try to indicate the spirit of the book… well… this is a mighty tussle between warriors, men who live for battle, relish a fight, love a beautiful woman wherever they find her, and count a day wasted if their lives were not imperiled. The villains are gloriously villainous, the heroes gloriously dashing, though arrogant, and every women is beautiful and brilliant, though they are kept in their place. The set pieces, particularly the Ascent of Koshtra Belorn and the Battle of Krothering Side, remain vivid long after the book is put down. The rank and file soldiers fall and die unheeded, merely there to help our heroes and their enemies manifest their prowess.

There are feats of magic and of strength; great battles won and lost; powerful men brought low; trusts betrayed; and women loved, lost and discarded — and avenged.

Eddison grasps, I suspect intuitively, one of the most important rules for writing epic nonsense: You must have great heroes, but even greater villains. While the King of Witchland, Gorice, is the ultimate force behind the baddies, in closer focus are Corund, Corsus and Corinius, of whom the latter two are magnificently unpleasant and the former oddly likeable and sympathetic. And in the middle of it all is Lord Gro, the traitor, and perhaps the realest figure in the book. He is worth meeting.

As I read it I could not help but think of the The Lord of the Rings movies. The book as it stands is unfilmable — every line of dialogue would have to be rewritten, half the characters and all the nations would need their names altered so that the audience does not laugh inappropriately, massive cuts would be needed near the start. But the story cries out for the same dramatic scenery, the same expansive treatment and swooping cameras we saw in LOTR. I want to see Koshtra Belorn in IMAX 3D or whatever the most vertigo-inducing technology going around might be. And by God it would entertain. And it’s so old there would be no bickering about rights — I’m pretty sure it’s in the public domain. I think you can find it on Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

This is a book unlike any other. That gets said often but in this case it is true. I struggled through the first 100 pages the first time I read it. But if you can buy into its world view and get into the rhythms of the prose — as noted in the introduction by James Stephens, it is the only language that could do justice to such a tale — it will entertain like few others.

Eddison also wrote a trilogy, the Zimiamvian Trilogy. It shares some qualities with this book but is also quite different. I suggest reading around the trilogy before you (decide not to) take the plunge; it is even more of an acquired taste and, to be honest, I fear I have failed to acquire it.

(Oh, and you can get The Worm Ouroboros for free here and here and many other places. My paperback has two introductions, a bibliography, and a chronology (‘Argument: with Dates’). It is also littered with illustrations and other decorations, so paper versions have their benefits.)

What is Europe Anyway? A review of Europe: A History by Norman Davies

Europe: A History

by Norman Davies

Pimlico, 1997. 1365 pages

This is probably the single biggest volume I have ever read. It has many fans, and rightly so. European history is rather like translations of Homer and films of Shakespeare; each generation needs to have its own. I have read a handful of histories of Europe, and each time a new one comes along it allows itself to believe it has shaken off a few more shibboleths, seen a little more clearly, and perhaps approached nearer to some kind of truth, or at least accuracy. This book, getting on for 20 years old now, is still I think the best recent European history; well, the best one widely available in English in Australia…

First, we have to ask ‘what is Europe?’ Davies is inclusive, and a great strength of the book is the relative prominence it gives to the Eastern half of the promontory (Europe is not a continent, it is a great big promontory of Asia — more than any other continent, Europe is a cultural rather than geographic entity). We even get a textbox on the Khazars. There is no reason why France should get more pages than Poland in a European history, yet many books hardly go east of Vienna. I suppose few European histories written by authors from east of the Rhine, let alone the Vistula get translated into English… Davies has written extensively on Eastern Europe, and is the perfect author to give the east its due.

As I’ve noted before, I have an interest in the empire referred to as Byzantine, simply because I find it fascinating. Old European histories would say how the Roman Empire fell in 476, and I still recall being surprised when I found out that that simply was not true, just an artefact of a reprehensibly skewed view of the past. The Eastern Roman Empire persisted until (at least) 1453, a direct, if many-times transformed, descendant of the Republic of 500BC. It truly was a bulwark against Islam — and I make no judgement on whether a Christian Europe is a better or worse thing than an Islamic one, I simply note that Europe most likely would be Islamic had the Byzantines crumbled sooner — and for that alone needs to be properly integrated into a European history. Davies does this. Russia, Poland, the Ottomans, they all are given reasonable weight. It is a good book, a good popular history. It is very long, but repays the time taken to read it — a task assisted by the author’s direct, unaffected prose which is a model of clarity. I hardly ever noticed Davies’s words, which I think is, in a book like this, a high compliment.

And, though I live in Australia, it is a large chunk of my history. I am a ‘white’ Australian. My antecedents, at least over the last few centuries, come equally from the British Isles and the Continent (and of course not ‘The Continent’ of Australia). I work as a scientist in the tradition of ‘Western’ science, built up by Europeans from Socrates to Newton and on to today. I am aware that crucial contributions came from elsewhere — our system of numerals is essentially from India, our words algorithm, algebra and others illustrate the role of scholars from the Islamic world. I work in a University of an essentially European model, in a country governed using the ‘Westminster‘ system, writing in English.

Europe: A History gives me a broader, deeper view than any other book I have read that claims the same territory. Were I to construct a top 10 list of my favourite books, it would be in there, probably with a dozen other books.

Hmm…

The Art and Science of the Thriller Part II: A review of The Icon Thief

The Icon Thief

by Alec Nevala-Lee

Signet, 407 pages, 2012

A bricklayer tours the acropolis at Athens.  He walks up to the Parthenon, looks at it for a few seconds, turns his back and says: “I see they never got past post and lintel construction.”

Well, perhaps yes; but surely that is not the point.

A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, I don’t know for sure.  I do know that it can be damned inconvenient.  I am not a writer.  I have published a few things, but that does not make me a writer.  I have read books on writing, and Strunk and White (pdf here, go get it now) but that does not make me a writer.  What it does is give me enough knowledge to get in my own way.  I read once that in fiction one should avoid the passive voice.  This means my stories are full of ‘The man loomed above him’ rather than ‘The man was tall’ on the grounds that ‘was’ is passive.  I am not sure ‘loomed’ is an improvement.  It also means that when I read fiction my eyeballs trip up on the word ‘was’.  Seeing as ‘was’ is only a little less common than ‘the’ or ‘said’ in the average novel, this can get in the way of a good read.  I still enjoy reading, but a little spy inside my head keeps looking to see how the book works, and inhibits my getting swept up in the story.  For example, I was (was) recently listening to an audio book of Ulysses (James Joyce, not Homer).  I was listening because I have tried to read the damned thing three or four times and I invariably lose interest.  Anyway, I listened and I quickly became aware that the opening scene, with Stephen and Buck Mulligan and so on, hardly uses the word ‘was’.  I think it appears only in dialogue.  So what did I do?  I listened to the story but I mainly listened for passive sentences.  The result: I was distanced from the story itself.  A little knowledge can be damned inconvenient.

And I’m not a writer.  I can only imagine what someone with finely tuned auctorial sensibilities must make of much of the writing around them.  This blog would probably give them nausea.

In recent post I reviewed The Icon Thief by Alec Nevala-Lee.  Or I tried to.  Alec said some nice things (This may be the most thoughtful review my work has ever received. From @DarrenGoossens: http://t.co/ZXTxmTjwIL— Alec Nevala-Lee (@nevalalee) October 24, 2013) about my review.  But I wonder to what extent I was reviewing his blog rather than the novel.  Alec put together a lengthy series of blog posts on the book.  I did not read the series since I intended to read the book itself.  I still have not decided whether I will read these posts, since I intend to (eventually) read the rest of The Icon Thief trilogy.  (Note, I am not sure if the trilogy has a name as a trilogy.  The Scythian Trilogy?  Wolfe?  I guess we’ll wait for the omnibus edition.)

Why have I not read these posts?

Well, I’ve read plenty of his other posts.  I’ve read his 10 rules for writing, in particular, and his quotes of the day, many of which pertain to writing or other story-telling activities — usually movie-making.

So, like it or not, when I sat down to read The Icon Thief a bit of my brain was whispering to the bit that was doing the reading:
–Is he jumping from middle to middle to middle?
–How much back-story is he giving us?
–Are his minor characters ‘types’ so that we are not distracted by unnecessary complexity

and

–Isn’t he using ‘was’ rather a lot?

(The last one does not grow out of his blog posts.)

Further, character names started to swirl in my thoughts.  In a novel where art is important, he has a minor character called Kandinsky.  (Coincidentally, one of my better stories is called ‘Kandinsky’s Mistakes‘, so I know the name.)  I know from his website he likes movies.  I hear the character name Powell and I wait for someone called Pressburger to show up, because of Alec’s comments on movies.  A character is called Wolfe.  For Thomas?  Reynard is a name with a literary pedigree.  Maddy Blume — is it a re-spelling of Bloom?  If so, Harold, Leopold or Molly?  Someone is called Onegina.  Eugene Onegin?

It’s all foolishness on my part, but it all made it harder for me to forget that the novel was a thing constructed for a purpose.  Now, all novels are lies.  They are long and careful lies, told with craft and artistry.  The big trick is to make these lies matter even though they are lies and we know they are lies.  They can matter for many reasons.  The literal stories may be fiction but they embody truths.  The story may be a delightful puzzle that challenges and entertains, like a locked-room mystery.  Though fictions, stories may explore a skilfully depicted world we are interested in (a period of history, a possible future, the world of espionage or fine art, anything).  And if I, as the audience, am too busy watching the valves open and close and the hammers go up and down, I might fail to appreciate that the trumpets and the piano are combining to play a lovely tune.

I might appreciate the craft of what I am seeing, but miss what it is all actually about.

Reading Alec’s blog is fun.  I make comments wherein I attempt to seem erudite and clever (this is not easy).  I read lots of interesting material.  It is one of the things the interweb is good for, the two way dialogue and the pleasure of serendipity.  Meeting people on the other side of the world via interests rather than random acts of geography.

Yet I can’t help wonder.  I liked The Icon Thief.  I read it in a couple of weeks, which for me these days is very fast (I read Stand on Zanzibar earlier this year.  Roughly from February to June).  Yet I can’t help wonder whether I would have liked it more if I knew less about it.  I would not have been looking to see the pieces meshing — I would not have thought to look nor been able to see.  I would not have been wondering how the author’s personal interests manifest in the story.  I might have been more immersed in the story itself.  I very much doubt I would be perceptive enough to make out these ‘mechanical’ aspects of the book without the heads-up his blog provides.  He kindly described my review as thoughtful, yet is that thoughtfulness really reflecting the fact that I was looking for things because of foreknowledge?

Can there be too much communication?  Is it better to make a book stand on its own, to give the reader the fewest preconceptions possible?  I think these are reasonable questions for an author to ask themselves.

I suspect that in pragmatic terms engaging with the audience sells books.  I bought one; I’ll buy more.  I hope it has rewards for the author beyond that.  It clearly does for the reader, and perhaps that is the answer.  Maybe knowing too much does take something away (certainly makes it harder to write an objective review), but hopefully it gives more than it takes.

I may have found The Icon Thief a few percent more ‘entertaining’ if I had not read its author’s blog.  But I would have got less out of reading the book in isolation than I have got out of reading the book and the blog.  Against my instincts, I guess I conclude that the new way is for the best.

Never thought I’d say that…

The Art and Science of the Thriller Part I: A review of The Icon Thief

The Icon Thief

by Alec Nevala-Lee

Signet, 407 pages, 2012

There are two topics I need to cover here. Whether they make one post or two depends on to what extent I waffle on — so most likely it will be two (and it is). The first is a review of the book, a reasonably objective look at its strengths and weaknesses (if any!) as far as I am able. The second is a few thoughts about the ‘as far as I am able’ clause, relating to the relationship between author and audience in the age of the internet.

First, the book. In dust-jacket parlance, it is a page-turner. I’m glad I read it. It is skilfully constructed and intrinsically interesting, so that I found myself reading ‘just one more’ chapter, then another, then another; then it was midnight. Rarely do I sit up late reading, but I did with this book. The undoubted depth of research is worn lightly, used to add telling touches but not to show off — characteristic of the author’s discipline. The prose is clear and functional and gets out of the way of the story — appropriate in a thriller, if perhaps not as consistently evocative as in some of the author’s shorter fiction. The characters are portrayed believably and economically, and the author never falls back on the laziness of having a character who is merely sadistic or ‘evil’ or anything as childish as that. Everyone has their reasons for what they feel must be done.  This leads to one of the book’s most interesting qualities — a sort of intimacy. The are no large-scale histrionics. The world is not going to meet with nuclear cataclysm. We are not in cartoonish James Bond territory. Life is not cheap, and people matter to each other. The body count is, on reflection, not insignificant, but they are made to signify. Killers tend to know their victims and kill them face to face, not gun down bystanders or nameless blue-uniformed cannon fodder at a distance. This solidity makes the violence, when it comes, very effective.

I came to Alec Nevala-Lee through his short fiction in Analog, and I suspect that means I come to the novel with different expectations from those of a thriller reader picking the book up in an airport (it would make great reading on a plane or an interstate coach). The work of his I first encountered was ‘Kawataro‘, followed up by the acclaimed (hey, it’s in Dozois’s bible!) ‘The Boneless One’, (though I like ‘Kawataro’ better), and on through other more recent appearances. Both these stories have in common a strong sense of menace, and palpable atmosphere, and an underlying credibility, all things that work in the context of a thriller. And indeed I would say one of the great strengths of The Icon Thief is that it is hard to tell where the author’s research stops and his imagination begins.

This book is an absolute entertainment machine. It hooked me in within a few chapters, it made me worry about people, it made me wonder what was going to happen and what the secret might be, and at the end it satisfied the questions it raised and left me wondering what some of the characters — Blume, Powell and ‘The Scythian’ — would do next; and, in the case of the latter two, what they had done before. The book brings together Russian mafia, the American art world, a cast of interesting characters with pasts that have shaped them but don’t get in the way, and a plot whose (almost) every twist and turn seems natural and yet which is still capable of surprising. This is a very assured first (published) novel, and I suspect I’ll be reading its follow-ups, City of Exiles and Eternal Empire. I can’t help but wonder, though, if we might see something more…major?…after these three books. Nevala-Lee knows how to put together a thriller — this is no formulaic book, but I used the word ‘machine’ on purpose — and this is where part II of this review comes in. Some artists benefit from strictures. Circumventing them, finding new territory within them and new ways to look at old territory, is a highly creative process and it gives somewhere to start in a way that a blank page and a lack of limits does not. This novel works within the thriller conventions. I think Nevala-Lee is good enough to allow himself a wider canvas, a broader, more human story, less driven by the needs of plot and genre and more by the people in it. Perhaps I am thinking of his science fiction, which I think pulls at the limits of SF whereas the The Icon Thief does not subvert the thriller genre; on the other hand, short fiction can afford to be more ambitious and less commercial. I do await a more personal work from this author. Personal, but I doubt self-indulgent; his work shows too much discipline for that. The Icon Thief is carefully constructed, intellectually constructed — almost scientifically constructed — and that is a great strength, and perhaps its only real weakness; there is a sense that it perhaps does not hit as hard as it might. But this is where part II comes in — am I only perceiving a weakness because I have read Nevala-Lee’s blog, where he quotes rules for writing, and talks about beats and construction of plots? Has he made me conscious of these aspects of writing? Has the author of this novel educated me such that I can (at least vaguely) glimpse the machinery behind the story, where once I would have been carried along, oblivious? Am I the reader who knew too much? This all relates to the new relationships between creator and consumer that the interweb allows, and that is the subject of part II.

And now I must stop writing this and fight the urge to spend hours reading about Marcel Duchamp when I should be working…fascinating.

 

Real Fictional Dreams: A review of Dictionary of the Khazars

Dictionary of the Khazars (the Male Edition)

by

Milorad Pavić

(Penguin, 1989)

I heard of this book on Alec Nevala-Lee’s blog. I bought a copy (the ‘male’ edition) because I saw it when I was looking for something else (this turns out to be quite apposite) and Alec had intrigued me. I read it partly in order — I read the prefatory material first and the Appendices last — and partly out of order, at first by following cross-references, later by looking for sections I had not yet read (I marked the margin when I read a section). Several sections I reread to refresh my memory — it took me some months to get through, as do all books in these days of limited discretionary time. I once read typically a hundred novels in a year, now I would estimate an order of magnitude fewer.

The book — should I describe it? It calls itself a dictionary, but it is really three parallel encyclopaedias, each a collection of material related to the Khazars, a people from between the seas, Caspian and Black. One book relates ‘Christian Sources on the Khazar Question’, one Islamic and one Hebrew. Entries cross-reference each other. As they are read, they flesh out a picture of the (mythological) Khazars and the people who have studied them. Pavić’s Khazars are not the historical ones. They are a suitably elusive framework to support a body of myths, fables, tales, biographies, and prose poems.

My reaction to the book is extremely ambivalent. Some of the entries are quite brilliant; streams of allusive, elusive metaphor, extremely effective evocations of place and person, and fascinating incidents and actions. The overarching puzzle of what happened to the Khazars sustains interest on the large scale, while the separate entries are fascinating in themselves. There are numerous subsidiary puzzles. Each religion’s account believes that the Khazars were converted to its cause. Figures with two thumbs on each hand recur through time, actions are repeated across time.  One must enjoy puzzles to enjoy this book, I think. The rate of invention is breathtaking, from a striking metaphor to tale after tale after tale, to powerful insights about the fundamentals of life, religion, the universe and everything. I liked the references to Constantinople and the Byzantines, a part of history I find particularly fascinating. The breadth of Pavić’s imagination, erudition and insight is overwhelming. The formal inventiveness of the book and its ambition are equally daunting. And it meets the challenges it sets itself. It is a book that is worth reading. I’m very glad I read it, and it reminds me of how the internet allows people to connect easily based solely on interests and irrespective of geography. I read Analog, I read a story by Alec Nevala-Lee, I found his blog, I saw his comments on this book, and now I’ve read a book that enriches my life. Which may make my next comments seem incongruous; but if any text invites a multi-faceted and possibly self-contradictory approach to a review, it is this one. So…

Any reading experience is an asymmetric collaboration between author and reader. Some books ask little of the reader and lay out a clear, driving plot of Brave Men at Sea, or something. This books says much, leaves yet more unsaid or implied, and asks the reader to make many connections, and I am left with the feeling that I failed to make enough of them. I suspect I am of too literal a turn of mind to fully enter into the world of the book. I tried to meet it on its own terms, unsuccessfully. In the book’s attempts to grapple with big themes meaning seems to elude me. I mean, “I decided that nothing happens in the flow of time, that the world does not change through the years but inside itself and through space simultaneously…” and “time is the part of eternity that runs late” — these phrases (and quite a few others) mean nothing that I can discern. My logic kicks in, pulls a face and says “Well, that’s just high-sounding nonsense.”

Dreams are important in the book, since we are often told that everyone’s dreams are the substance of someone else’s life, and the Khazars were famous for their dream hunters, who could follow figures from dream to dream and dreamer to dreamer. Perhaps the whole book is a dream. It certainly makes oblique connections redolent of dream logic.

And, a deeply personal reaction, I felt stupid on finishing the book, a paradox since I also felt richer for reading it.  I seem to have missed so much, really a measure of the richness of the book but nagging nonetheless. The last note in the book tells me that when I compare versions ‘the book will fit together as a whole’. I did that and it does not, for me. On finishing it I spent quite a while flipping through the book looking for something I had missed. I reread sections, I read the appendices again. I have figured out the key points of the Khazar story as the author lays it out, I think, but much of the book means less to me than plainly it should. I have a sense of frustration.  I seem to have failed to understand what I am being told. I am pleased therefore to see the word ‘bewildering’ in the quoted reviews.

It’s a marvellous book. You should read it. So should I.

On Reading History for Entertainment

This was going to be a discussion of the three volume history of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich¹ but the introduction got out of hand, so now it is just a personal essay.  I’ll get around to the review some other time.

So….

What’s your favourite book?  Chances are the answer is “depends” or “what kind of book?”

And it’s a fair answer.  What you want to read to be challenged, informed and/or made to think is different from what you want to read for relaxation at the end of a long day.  For the latter I often turn to the pulpy fiction of J.E.MacDonnell, who will no doubt be the subject of a future post.  Clearly, some works can be both, and maybe I ought to be spending my limited reading time on those kinds of books.  Sometimes, I do.  Occasionally the book is fiction — I recently looked at Chinaman, a novel that covers enough bases to fall into both categories — but I find that often it’s history.

Reading well-written history, popular or more specific and detailed, is one of life’s great pleasures.  The reasons are many, and probably idiosyncratic.

(1) It is not a guilty pleasure, just a pleasure.  I put the book down feeling like I’ve done something worthwhile (I’ve learned something), rather than that I should have been doing something worthwhile.  (My life is a continual battle between (a) laziness and (b) feeling like I should be doing something useful).

(2) I am not a professional historian, so I don’t get annoyed by an author’s errors or biases the way a professional probably would.  As a scientist (mostly Physics) I find it very hard to read popular science that is close to my area of expertise, because I often disagree with what is said, or how it it said, or what is deemed important.  I (sometimes make the mistake of thinking that I) know enough to be critical.  In history, well, not so much.  I don’t sit there taking issue with the author’s explanation for the sudden disappearance of the Minoan civilisation at the end of the bronze age, for example.  I just think it’s cool that they found all those frescos.

(3) I don’t read history with an agenda.  In science, I mostly read technical papers to determine quite specific information, or more broadly but still with a definite mind-set of interrogating the work looking for ideas.  I have a need to find things out so my work can progress, so much of the reading is impatient or critical.  Reading history, I feel like I can just say, “Hey, Carthage.  Don’t know much about that.  And it’s got a cool cover picture.  Let’s try that!”  The pressure is off and I can relax with the book.

(4) Not being an expert, I can read happily read popular history, which tends to be easier going than the more focussed, specialist books that I read for work.

(5) History, especially popular history, is mostly about people.  Political history is often about battles, court intrigues, heroism and stupidity, and so hits many of the button pushed by fiction.  I meet people that I can like or dislike, identify with or hate — sometimes all four at once, and in the same person.  Most of us like stories about people, and people enter into everything.  The laws of Physics or the theorems of Mathematics may not belong to history, but the story of their discovery does and is a wonderful drama full of egos and errors and tragic genius (Evariste Galois, Niels Henrik Abell) or triumph over adversity (George Boole) or just dry wit (Lagrange).  Dinosaurs might be prehistory but Owen versus Marsh is history.

Next installment: Something else.

————————————————————————————————

¹ John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries, Knopf, New York, 1996; Byzantium: The Apogee, Penguin, 1993; Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, Penguin, 1996.

Postmodernist novels about cricket #1 Chinaman — a review

Chinaman

by Shehan Karunatilaka

(Vintage, 2012, 397p)

The novel aims high.  It dissects Sri Lankan society, it dissects fame, and professional sport, and the mind of its author/protagonist.  At its centre is the search by narrator W. G. Karunasena for the mysterious spin bowling genius Pradeep Mathew.  The picaresque search lets  Karunatilaka expound on everything from the art of spin bowling to the political history of Sri Lanka and the boorish behaviour of Australians.  The protagonist is retired sports journalist, and the book is predominantly his story of how the book came to be written.  Whether the involuted structure is more than a conceit, I am not sure.  Whether it adds to the great deal to what the book has to say, I am not sure.

What I can say for sure is that this book is massively entertaining.  I remember the era of cricket it is talking about, and there is no doubt there were some ‘a ha!’ moments while I read it that a non-cricketophile would not pick up.  And about a third of the way in the energy and novelty does flag for a little while — but I assure you both pick up again.

Oh, and it’s damned funny.  “There I am, asleep under the bo tree, about to be woken up by the rain.  Two millennia ago a man, just like me, abandoned his wife, son and responsibilities to go sit under a bo tree.  Unlike me, that man wasn’t drunk after a cricket match.  And so he ended up becoming the Buddha.”

You don’t need to be a cricket fan to enjoy this novel.  You don’t need to be fascinated by the subcontinent.  You just need to be able to appreciate insight, rounded characters, a riveting story and the tales of a drunkard and a liar.

Tomorrow Through the Past: Stand on Zanzibar

Stand on Zanzibar

by John Brunner

(Arrow, 1971, 576p)

Stand on Zanzibar is probably John Brunner’s most famous single work.  SF often claims to investigate possible futures.  In the late 60s Brunner took it upon himself to undertake something that SF has done surprisingly rarely–explore probable futures, and unflinchingly (or as unflinchingly as Brunner’s innate need for a driving pulp SF plot would allow).  Brunner’s ‘big four’ novels of this period together form one of the most sustained efforts of disciplined imagination the field has seen.  They are Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up and The Shockwave Rider.  They all share strengths and flaws.  Here I’m taking a look at Stand on Zanzibar, the first of them and winner of Brunner’s sole ‘Hugo’.

Its title, related to how much space the (human) population of Earth would need if standing shoulder to shoulder, suggests it is an overpopulation story, which to some extent it is; but it conflates that with racial tensions, eugenics, and a dozen other extrapolations, and embeds it in a story of espionage and politics.  The core of the book is the twin narrative of Donald Hogan and Norman House as they become central figures in important events, and this narrative (the sections labelled ‘Continuity’ in the book, as distinct from ‘Tracking with Closeups’, ‘Context’ and ‘The Happening World’) could be extracted and published as a pretty good novel–indeed, when I go back to read the book I think I’ll read these sections only and see how it comes together.  That may well benefit the book, since the other sections occasionally explain overmuch.  The other sections do, though, broaden the view of the early 21C world Brunner imagines, illustrating it through vignettes or adverts or lists or essays (by renegade sociologist Chad C. Mulligan), all of which are carefully linked in some way to the main narrative and serve to flesh it out, view it from a different angle, or establish back-story for a figure who is to appear only briefly in the main story.  Most of the minor characters sketched out in these sections have their own complete arcs, illustrating some aspect of the horribleness of the future.  Most of them end in death or at least misfortune.  The structure is apparently inspired by Dos Passos’s books, particularly the U.S.A. trilogy.

Unusually for a book of this length, it makes a good case for being of this length.  A shorter book would not have let Brunner explore his world in enough detail to give the central narrative its significance-through-context.

Having said all that, I have to mention Brunner’s neologisms.  A couple work pretty well.  Yaginol, one of his recreational drugs of the future, sounds OK (skullbustium, though?  Really?).  Shaggable girls become ‘shiggies’ and guys on the make ‘codders’.  A bit dodgy–maybe these terms sounded more likely in 1968 than they do now.  The standard curse is ‘sheeting hole’ which does not sound quite as bad in context but still sounds unconvincing.  And then there’s satellite broadcaster Engrelay Satelserv.  Brunner simply cannot have ever said that out loud.  Can I make a suggestion to authors coining neologisms?  Read the scene out loud.  Record it.  Play it back.  Listen to it.  Then listen to it again.  Listen to it as many times as the phrase appears in the story.  Then ask yourself if it still sounds cool and futuristic, or if it just sounds naff or clunky.

In summary, the book can trip up your eyeballs while you read, leave you wondering how the author can have thought that that phrase or invention was a good idea, and at times seem gloomy.  On the other hand, the core narrative is a page turner, Brunner has taken real pains to embed it in a plausible future, and he has thought hard about sociology as well as technology, lending the book many strengths that too few SF novels can boast.  Indeed, if you can look past the anachronisms inevitably resulting from incorrect technological predictions, the book has a lot to say to us now.  That says much about the depth and thoroughness  of Brunner’s vision and thinking. This is serious SF, and at the same time it is seriously entertaining.  **Recommended**

Inexplicable Fascinations #1

We all have things that make us feel better but make no sense.  I am a huge fan of test cricket.  Any game that can go for 5 days and be a draw has to reflect life more fully than a neat little package of entertainment that is over in two hours and always delivers a result.  Test cricket is to most sports what a novel is to a short story.

As a result, I recently got myself a copy of Jack Hobbs: Profile of ‘The Master’ by John Arlott (Penguin, 1982, 144p).

I knew little of Hobbs besides his amazing career statistics when I picked up this book.  His total of 199 (or 197, depending on the authority) first class hundreds is as remarkable a statistic as Bradman’s test average of 99.94.  His career that stretched from 1905 to 1935 and linked W.G.Grace with Bradman. He scored a test century at the age of forty-six and first class hundreds at fifty-one.  It all seems impossible.

The book is labelled a profile, yet it borders on the panegyric.  Clearly Hobbs was one of the handful of greatest cricketers ever — one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Century — and Arlott uses clear and elegant prose to paint him as generous, humble, professional, essentially without human flaw.  It is a case where a few minor detractions here and there would have leant the  book just enough sense of balance that the appreciations would have held more weight. Perhaps, though, that is a shadow cast by a ‘modern’ cynicism.

Tellingly, the more important the game the higher Hobbs’s scores. It perhaps says something about the competitiveness of many of the teams in county cricket at the time that Hobbs was said to allow himself to be dismissed once he made his hundred (it also makes you wonder what his average would have been had he had the run gathering ruthlessness of Bradman or a modern great like Tendulkar or Kallis).  It says more about Hobbs that his test average was rather higher than his first class average, and that the tougher the conditions the higher he stood above his contemporaries.

I read the book virtually at a sitting.  Hobbs’s self-made journey from poverty to affluence, from obscurity to the pinnacle of sporting fame — the first English professional to be knighted — and the remarkably level-headed manner with which he dealt with his fame, is a genuine ‘feel-good’ story.  It puts flesh on the statistical bones of a remarkable — no, astounding — career, and left me thinking that here was the epitome of batsmen.

He began his career perhaps too keen to try every stroke in his repertoire, something still common in young batsmen, and this phase of his career peaked as World War I approached — he probably lost his best five years to the war.  After the war, as age and injuries took their toll, he remodelled his game and the runs came even more regularly.  He felt his pre-war batsmanship superior (his post-war runs were ‘all made off the back foot’, he would modestly abjure), but he scored 98 (98!) hundreds after he turned forty, several of them in tests.  He was the best of his time; was he the best of all time?  That is not worth arguing over.  The greatest?  Well, that is a matter of definitions. Best relates to ability, greatness to achievements.  The best batsman ever may be someone none of us have ever heard of.  In my time, amongst Australian batsmen, I would say Ricky Ponting was better but Border greater.  And for entertainment I’d rather watch Brian Lara than any other contemporary player, except maybe Ganguly at his peak.

This book opens up the world of the golden age of cricket, before the war of 1914.  It is a glimpse of another era, and of one of its central figures.  As I said, Hobbs comes across as almost too perfect; yet at the same time the book made me feel such a respect for the man and what he did that I don’t want to find out anything negative.

Perhaps the subtitle should have been ‘A celebration of ‘The Master”.  Regardless, it comes recommended.  Particularly if you are a cricket tragic. Some of the current generation of professional sports-people might benefit from it also.  David Warner, I’m looking at you.