Book review

Adventures in Bookland: Mike by Andrew Norriss

8 April 2018
Edoardo
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Long-time readers will know that I am a bit of a fan of Andrew Norriss: you can read my reviews of his previous books here. So I was delighted to receive his new book – or I would have been, if my wife hadn’t grabbed it off me and declared her intention to read it first. Luckily, one feature of his writing is its narrative zip: you pick up the story, intending to read the first chapter, and two hours later you realise you’re past half way and you really rather wouldn’t stop now so, sometime around 3am, you finish the book and promise yourself that you really won’t do that the next time. Only you do. My wife did it first, which at least meant that I didn’t have to wait too long to get my hands on Mike, and then, despite my every resolution, I did it too. So, it’s your fault, Andrew, that I had a sleep-sore head for the next two days!

Andrew Norriss is unusual, possibly unique, among writers in writing dramas of the good. In his books, there are almost always no bad people, just decent folk trying to do what is right. So where’s the story in that? Stories require conflict, right? Well, yes, but conflict can come from conflicting ideas, between good and honourable people, of what actually is the right course, and this is the dramatic seam that Norriss has been mining in his recent books. In Mike, a deceptively simple book, he goes even further in his exploration as to what constitutes the good. The story is straightforward. Floyd, a teenage tennis prodigy, realises that he simply doesn’t want to play tennis any longer. His parents, tennis professionals, want him to succeed at the sport to which he’s devoted most of his young life – but they are not the coaching monsters of news headlines, but decent parents wanting to do what’s best for their son. Floyd, for his part, is desperate not to let down his parents. That is the seed of the story, but from that sprouts surprisingly deep roots, for in his desperation to find a solution to his situation, Floyd meets a friend, Mike. But no one else can see Mike. And Mike isn’t going to let Floyd play tennis any longer, taking increasingly direct action to stop Floyd when he gets on the tennis court. To try to get to the bottom of this, Floyd sees a psychologist (the one character in the book I didn’t like, since he bore far too close a resemblance to the most irritating character in history, Counsellor Deanna Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation, to whose face of simpering empathy the natural human response is a swift slap).

At this point, I must admit, I was getting a little worried. Mike was beginning to seem like a personification of the sort of ‘be-kind-to-yourself’ self sentimentalisation that bedevils us today: a reification of the self and its desires into a good in and of itself. That advertising slogan, ‘Because you’re worth it,’ sums up the attitude: no, you’re not – and neither am I. Was Mike going to slip into a platitudinous hymn to finding yourself in some nebulous satisfaction of selfish desires?

I should have known better.

Norriss knows his Aristotle far too well to fall into this modern-day trap. Mike is, in fact, an examination of what is good as lived in daily life. As Aristotle said, and Thomas Aquinas amplified, all men act for the good – the evil supervillain announcing his evil masterplan to destroy the world is a fantasy of simplication. Even history’s most notorious monsters acted towards ends they considered good – the evil lay in the ends they had convinced themselves were good. To that end, the good life consists in that which makes each of us most completely what we are: for we are born as sketches, and painted through time to our completion. But in our lives, we can either complete the picture, or deface it. Mike is about the making of the human picture, and the right discernment of that which makes our pictures complete.

All this in a story about tennis and fish.

Adventures in Bookland: The Four Men by Hilaire Belloc

6 March 2018
Edoardo
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The book is subtitled ‘A Farrago’ and, it is. The OED defines ‘farrago’ as a ‘confused mixture’ and that’s as accurate a one-word description of this book as I could come up with. No wonder then that Belloc, a better writer than I’ll ever be, came up with the description himself. But I still don’t understand what he was trying to do with this book: part hymn to home (in Belloc’s case, the county of Sussex), part debate in four voices, part knockabout philosophy and theological knockabout, part travelogue; trying to shoehorn all these elements, and more, between the covers of a single book has, pretty well inevitably, produced the advertised farrago. Belloc’s facility with words and the sheer energy he infuses into them dragged me through to the end – and I particularly enjoyed the delightful line drawings that enriched my edition (I couldn’t tell if they were by Belloc himself) – but I can’t say I’d recommend The Four Men to anyone other than a real Belloc completist.

Adventures in Bookland: Night Terrors by EF Benson

1 March 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

This book might well qualify as the perfect bedtime read: the stories are all around 10 to 15 pages, so ideal for a twenty-minute read, then lights out, lie down and suddenly jerk awake as the house creaks and some presence enters the room… So, maybe not ideal bedtime reading, if you’re prone to nightmares. I, though, am not, so I really did take this as my nightly read for a couple of months, working my way through these morbidly satisfying stories. EF Benson is a rare beast: a writer whose work survives him in two wholly different genres: these tales of the supernatural but also with his stories of Mapp and Lucia, comedies of middle-class snobbery. Reading up on the author, it turns out that Benson was a member of an extraordinary family: his father, Edward White Benson, was the Archbishop of Canterbury who devised the festival of Nine Carols and Readings now said throughout the world before Christmas, and his siblings included Arthur Benson, master of Magdalen College and author of the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and Robert Benson, Catholic convert and priest who wrote the early dystopian novel Lord of the World.

None of Edward Benson’s children married and, indeed, the typical protagonist of these tales is an unmarried male in his middle-age, comfortably off in the peculiarly comfortable manner that seems to have been possible for the English upper middle classes in the early 20th century, where it appears to have been normal practice to take a three-month break in the summer at some rural getaway (having dispatched one’s servants there the day before to make everything shipshape). Having fetched up at some idyllic country retreat – Benson’s descriptions of the English rural idyll are a delight and underwrite the deep vein of nature mysticism that threads through English patriotism – some incongruous detail begins to hint that behind the perfect appearance something strange and sinister might be lurking. By the end of the story, the strange has crept forward into the twilight, and the idyll has been lost, although usually our bachelor hero escapes relatively unscathed. So, yes, you could say the stories tend towards the fomulaic, but Benson spins enough variations to keep the reader interested, as well as every so often changing the formula entirely, for particularly effective results.

So, highly recommended for readers of supernatural fiction and, unusually, fans of English country fiction.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins

3 February 2018
Edoardo
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Thoroughly enjoyable counterblast to the Peter Brown school of studies of late antiquity: Ward-Perkins argues forcefully that, in the Western Roman Empire, civilization, at least as represented by decent pottery, good food and tiled roofs that kept out the rain, really did end. As such, it provides a welcome corrective to the Brown school of civilizational continuity and transition. In the end, it seems clear that both views are correct: late antiquity was a time of both continuity and collapse, in part dependent on where in the Empire you lived, but this reminds us that, for the people living through this, things really had changed.

Speaking as a reader of history, I must also note how fortunate we are to have this dispute argued out between two such wonderfully fluent historians. Reading Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Brown is one of the great literary pleasures available today: long may they dispute!

Adventures in Bookland: In the Land of Giants by Max Adams

3 February 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

There’s a new genre of writing that is currently struggling towards birth – and a proper name. It’s a combination of memoir, history and travel writing – let’s call it the autogeschicte – and, as I know only too well, it’s not easy to do well. I tried to write something along these lines in my London: A Spiritual History, and discovered how difficult it is to hold these disparate elements, that are all too often pulling in different directions, together. Max Adams tries to get under the surface of the Dark Ages by walking the landscapes of its history, mixing memoir with the daily discomforts and joys of walking in our wet climate, all leavened with bits of history along the way. I loved his The King in the North, so I had high hopes for this book, but it proved slightly disappointing. The travel elements were reasonable, but one wet walk ends up resembling another; the memoir was all very well but not sufficiently remarkable to engage much interest; and the history seemed superfluous. In the end, this seemed like a book that helped justify some walks Adams had long wanted to make (together with boat and motorcycle trips) rather than a work that existed in its own right.

Adventures in Bookland: Bilbo’s Last Song by JRR Tolkien

18 January 2018
Edoardo
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Death stalked JRR Tolkien through his childhood and his youth. Nowadays, we are most of us blessed with parents who live on to our own middle age, and friends who grow up alongside us. In Tolkien’s case, his father died when he was four and his mother when he was 12; enlisting in the army as a young man, as he remarks in the preface to The Lord of the Rings, by 1918 when he was 26, all but one of his closest friends were dead, killed in the First World War. So, yes, Tolkien knew death, personally and all too intimately.

This is a poem about death as indeed much of The Lord of the Rings is too. But where does that ship take us?

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

That’s how Philip Larkin describes it. But Tolkien, it seems, keeps faith with his characters, when faced with that final, definitive choice: “let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!”

Is death catastrophe or Eucatastrophe? Believing, hoping, despite all the evidence of his life, the latter, Tolkien produced The Lord of the Rings and all the wide realms of Middle-earth. Pascal’s Wager and Puddleglum’s vow hold true: better to live as a Narnian, even if there is no Narnia, for the black-sailed ship has no waters in its wake.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Neuromancer by William Gibson

2 January 2018
Edoardo
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The single most remarkable thing about this book is its date of publication: 1984. Think back to the world then. In Britain, we had only recently seen a fourth television channel – Channel 4, natch – computers still kept their memory on floppy discs and the most electronic thing in the average household would have been the radio, tuned to FM stations.

In this, almost pre-modern world, William Gibson’s Neuromancer appeared like an avatar of an incredible future. But as the years have rolled past, the connected, datarich world that Gibson posited has come closer and closer: if the measure of a science fiction novel is how clearly it looks into the future, then Neuromancer is an extraordinary success.

But prognostication alone does not a great book make: for that you need language. And it is here that Gibson’s book exceeds its prophetic function, for in Neuromancer Gibson invented the language of a future that did not yet exist and, by doing so, made it credible and possible. For without a language, without names, the pregnant future cannot come to birth. By inventing the language of the future, Gibson made it credible – then all it required was the scientists to engineer it. And they did, and here we are, in the future that Gibson named.

So Neuromancer may be the most important novel of the last fifty years. Next to that, the actual story hardly matters, which is probably just as well, as the plot is standard noir, where everyone and everything double-crosses each other, but without the moral core that Philip Marlowe provides in the Raymond Chandler novels that are, stylistically, the progenitors of Gibson’s work. Case, the hero, is as much a cipher as the virtual reality which is the only place where he actually comes alive, and the other characters are so alienated as to be, for all intents and purposes, actual aliens in human skins. The AIs don’t rise to the status of characters either. But this all beside the point: Gibson imagined our future and, for byter or worse, we seem set on bringing it about.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Warrior Queen by Joanna Arman

30 December 2017
Edoardo
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Does any nation make less of its extraordinary, heroic founders than England does of Alfred and his children, Edward and Æthelflæd, and his grandson, Æthelstan? Of the dynasty, only Alfred is widely known, and then mostly for burning some cakes. His children, who carried on the struggle against the Viking invaders, and his grandson, who completed the creation of England pretty well within its present-day boundaries, are now all but forgotten.

Thankfully, interest is growing in the children of Alfred, helped by Bernard Cornwell’s series of books on Uhtred (although these do no favours to Alfred), and The Last Kingdom TV series. But the portrayal of Æthelflæd in these works is thoroughly modern: in this excellent attempt to find the real woman in the meagre historical sources, Joanna Arman drills through modern romance to the nuggets of knowledge that lie deep in the historical record. As Arman shows, Æthelflæd must have been an extraordinary woman, for she was freely chosen by her people to lead them through war and terror, and she lead them to the brink of victory. What is also clear is that she was not the sword-wielding warrior queen of modern fantasy, but a woman anchored in her own society and culture; one who, understanding the warrior and spiritual ethos that underlay it, could lead and persuade her people to follow her strategy against the Vikings that had carved out kingdoms in the land. This is proper history: sober and factual, but carrying the deep excitement that must underlay any serious engagement with such an extraordinary subject. The one caveat is that the publisher was sloppy with the editing and proofreading: there are far too many typos in the present edition. I hope that a new edition will correct these, so that The Warrior Queen may become the definitive book on Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians.

Adventures in Bookland: God’s Battalions by Rodney Stark

30 December 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

So, were the Crusades an early exercise in Western imperialism, a pilgrimage of greed and violence visited upon the peaceful and civilised peoples of the Middle East, as the modern understanding of them suggests? This useful revisionist overview of the most recent scholarship argues strongly that they were not. Rodney Stark’s main targets are the popular historians and the film makers and writers who have filtered this view of the Crusades into everyday consciousness and done so so successfully that that great medieval hero, Richard the Lion Heart, is now regularly traduced as a psychopathic killer and, in the word’s of one popular historian, ‘the worst king in England’s history’.

As anyone giving the matter a little thought would surely recognise, the current view is as partial as the high Victorian view of the Crusaders as exemplars of Christian martial piety. The truth is more mixed, and more interesting, than that – but the Victorians were closer than the moderns. Most notably, the Crusades were not imperialist adventures, nor land grabs by the landless by blows, the younger sons of noble families, but rather serious enterprises by a network of interconnected families who committed their money and their blood to the retaking and the defence of the Holy Land. Careful work by historians on wills, charters and the other deep sources of history confirm this: the Crusaders were, indeed, what they said they were: pilgrims for Christ, sacrificing wealth and, often, health and life, for the sake of reclaiming and protecting the holy places in the Holy Land. As to the reputation for chivalry of their Muslim enemies, it is clear that they were no more chivalrous than the Crusaders, and just as frequently they waded through blood and bodies.

In the end, the Crusades failed because the European nations that had supported them became unwilling to fund the vast expenditure, in money and men, required to maintain Outremer. But reading this fascinating account of the whole enterprise, one can only be impressed, sometimes appalled, but never less than respectful of the men and women who committed their lives and resources to the enterprise. A crusade is something we should all commit ourselves to.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Conquerors by Roger Crowley

28 December 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

The book is subtitled ‘How Portugal forged the first global empire’ and that gives an accurate summary of its contents. What it doesn’t convey is the sheer, breathtaking excitement of it all. Over the space of a few decades, a group of Portuguese navigators transformed the whole idea of the world, opening it up in a way that had never been achieved, even in the antiquity that Renaissance humanists so revered. They had outdone the ancients. Roger Crowley, one of my favourite historians, tells the tale with all the excitement and verve these extraordinary men deserve. Few things can match the raw courage of the Portuguese turn into the empty ocean that took them round the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. For, to make the journey possible, Portuguese navigators realised that it was no good to hug the African coast all the way south. Instead, you had to sail west, into the empty ocean, far far from any land, and then catch the trade winds south and east, past the Cape of Good Hope and into the ocean of wealth. For the Indian Ocean, and the trade it carried, was the richest in the world at the time, and the Portuguese arrived determined to grab this trade for themselves. For the Muslim traders who dominated the seas, their arrival was a rude shock (as indeed it was for the Venetians, who suddenly foresaw their domination of trade with the east undercut). The story of these conquerors, and in particular of Afonso du Albuquerque, the Duke of Goa and the man who founded the long enduring Portuguese enclave there, is extraordinary. Highly recommended.