Book review

Adventures in Bookland: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

16 December 2015
Edoardo
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Well, I knew it was rude, but I didn’t know it was this rude. And, yes, I know there’s all sorts of other literary and historical significances to The Decameron: the foundation of Italian vernacular literature, the introduction of a new, earthy style of writing, a witness to the social dislocation produced by the Plague, the emergence of an urban, mercantile class. But, really, I challenge anyone reading this to come away with any other first impression than that it is astoundingly, jaw-droppingly rude.

You want to know how rude? I don’t think I can tell you without blushing. Oh, all right then. How about this then. A priest, Dom Gianni, convinces his rather dim friend, Pietro, that he can turn Pietro’s wife, Gemmata, into a mare and back again. Very useful for getting to market. Pietro and Gemmata agree, but Dom Gianni warns them that, when making the spell, they must not speak or the magic will not work. Suffice to say, the spell involves Gemmata naked and on all fours and a most unusual tail.

Throughout the book, priests, monks, friars and nuns are rampant, women demand their conjugal rights, and seek satisfaction elsewhere if left unsatisfied; craft and cunning is rewarded, stupidity gulled.

I don’t think I will ever see the Middle Ages in quite the same light again.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Brain’s Way of Healing by Norman Doidge

25 November 2015
Edoardo
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To review this book, I have to tell you about my grandmother.

When I bought my house, I was thirty years old and single – with little apparent prospect of that changing (not that I hadn’t tried to get married, but all the women I’d asked to marry me – some of whom I even knew – had refused). However, my grandmother, my little Italian Nonna, was living with my parents, ten minutes walk away. It was, as the marketing men say, a no brainer: I asked her to move in with me.

May I say that there is no more cushy or comfortable life, for a thirtysomething single male, than having your Italian grandmother living with you. Washing, cooking, cleaning, dusting, ironing, sewing – it was all done. Just so you don’t get too jealous of the tempting, mouth watering delights that must have been served up to me each night, I must say that the one area in which Nonna was not all Italian was cooking: she was terrible. Well, maybe that’s slightly too strong a word: her risotto and lasagne were good, but out of her two dish comfort zone, things tended to get, well, slabby: I still remember with a slight shudder the thick slices of deep fried polenta, quivering like vulcanised yellow rubber, that she served up at least once a week. But in all other respects, it was a wonderfully cushy life – and it meant I really got to know my Nonna (particularly as she had only recently moved to England).

It was a glorious interlude, and one that lasted four years. But then, I got married (I sprang the proposal on my wife so completely out of the blue that she didn’t have time to dodge). Nonna moved out. Wife moved in.

Nonna went back to my parents, taking over many of the housekeeping duties there, while always, whatever the weather, taking a daily constitutional through the park.

Then she had a stroke. A little one. Some weakness in her left arm, a limp, soon recovered from, and half an aspirin daily.

It didn’t work. The second stroke was a major one. Hospital, beeping machines, then relief. She would live. It was the left side again, but this time, worse. No movement in her left leg or arm, face pulled down on that side – at least, being the left side, there was no language loss. But she couldn’t walk.

Out of danger, they moved Nonna from the general hospital to Finchley Memorial Hospital, which was then devoted to recuperation and physiotherapy. And the physios set about her: exercise, effort, every day for five, six weeks.

By the end of that time, there was a little improvement, but not that much, and we assembled to meet the doctor to hear what the plan was for her continuing treatment.

There wasn’t one. They’d done all they could. The first six weeks after stroke were crucial – after that window, there wouldn’t be any further improvement. Nonna didn’t speak English. The doctor told us to tell Nonna she would never walk again. As he got up to leave, he told us to set about arranging moving her into a nursing home. And that was it.

For a year, Nonna sat in the lounge in the nursing home, watching television she didn’t understand, and I’d visit her each day and talk to her – the despairing small talk of family and friends and weather that substituted for hope. According to the doctors, there wasn’t any.

I think it was anger, the slowly nurtured anger at helplessness and fate and God, that did it. The doctors might not want to do anything, but anything was better than this waiting room of death (the staff were lovely and caring, but that is what the place was).

So what if the doctors said they wouldn’t do anything. We would. We found a physiotherapist who spoke Italian, and paid for her to visit Nonna and work with her. And, you know, there was something – some small improvement. Nonna began to be able to move her left hand, and then her arm.

And then the cavalry arrived, in the small, squashy shape of our first child, Theo – Nonna’s great grandson.

Nonna loved Theo. She brightened, she cooed, she came alive when we brought him to see her. And, when I held him, dangling, just out of reach as the physio worked on her standing and posture, Nonna pushed herself up, unthinking, focused on him and not on what she could not do, and she began, she began to stand.

Nonna was going to be the first resident of the nursing home to walk out of there on her own two feet, rather than being carried out in a box.

I still remember her chuckling laugh as she reached out to chaff Theo’s cheek, standing and not even realising it, and wishing we had started this so much earlier.

Then Nonna had a third stroke. She was reduced to a pair of wandering eyes, rolling without control, in a shell of flesh without any movement at all. She didn’t walk out of the nursing home. Six months later, she went out in the box.

I wish I’d read this book then, before all this happened. But it hadn’t been written. Back then, the six weeks window was all there was. The brain was a hard-wired thinking machine: break it, and it stayed broke.

This is the mistake of metaphor. We’ve learned to understand the body and the mind through our inventions: clocks and hydraulics, circuits and computers. Mechanical, fixed things. But the brain is alive; it’s not caught by these metaphors. And what we see in this remarkable book is the dawning realisation among researchers and doctors that brain and body, mind and effort are all intimately, and directly, connected. Unlike an electronic circuit, the brain can find new connections, fresh ways of doing things, particularly when reinforcing the new connections with physical learning.

It’s an insight that some people seem uncomfortable with. A quite remarkable (in all the wrong ways) review, by Jonathan Ree,  of The Brain’s Way of Healing in The Guardian concludes thus:

The publicity tells us that The Brain’s Way of Healing will provide new hope for millions of unlucky sufferers. Hope is a tricky commodity however, and while some of us may find it heartening, for others it could be another turn of the fatal screw. The neuroplastic revolution is part of a contemporary stampede towards the moralisation of medicine: patients are encouraged to blame themselves for their sufferings, and to think that their chances of recovery depend not on random tricks of fate, or the luck or good judgment of their doctors, but on their own willpower and moral fibre. Sick people need to be cared for, but they also have a right to be left in peace.

This is the judgement that condemned Nonna after six weeks; this is the end of hope and the acceptance of the TV lounge; this is morally stupid and intellectually offensive. Why should hope and effort be placed in opposition to care and medicine? Only in the judgement of the reviewer. For myself, I wish this book had been written then. Maybe Nonna would still have left the nursing home in a box, but the stay would have been a battle, and not a defeat.

Hope emerged last from Pandora’s box. After all else is gone, hope remains.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan

19 November 2015
Edoardo
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First, a tip. If you’re doing the Goodreads reading challenge, or any other reading challenge, and you’ve fallen behind schedule, this is a really, really good book to read. It has, let me see, yes… 104 words. That’s right, 104 words. So, it won’t take long to read and you can tick it right off your ‘to read’ list: another one down.

Unfortunately, you’re not so likely to leave it behind in thought.

What is it all about?

Search me.

So, let’s search the book instead.

First, the title. Hm, ‘Rules of Summer’. Very interesting. So, it suggests, it’s about rules and about summer. So, holidays, and things you shouldn’t do (and some you should).

Big brother and (protagonist) little brother. In a strange, sub-urban, half-futuristic, semi-mythological world: maybe similar to the world an imaginative and perceptive six year old lives in. (I suspect, when they see monsters under the bed, or in the closet, or behind a fence [as in rule 1: Never leave a red sock on the clothesline] that they are seeing and we are blind.)

Don’t think it’s a very nice world: rule 2: never eat the last olive at a party. Come on, someone has to – best it’s a six year old.

Rule 3: Never drop your jar. Agreed, particularly when it’s got a star in it.

Rule 4: Never leave the back door open overnight. Because you’ll get plants, molluscs and lizards in your living room. Not sure I get this one.

Rule 5: Never step on a snail. He’s right.

Rule 6: Never be late for a parade. Ditto.

Rule 7: Never ruin a perfect plan. Can’t be perfect if you can ruin it.

Rule 8: Never argue with an umpire. Particularly if he’s your elder brother. Not going to listen to you.

Rule 9: Never give your keys to a stranger. Unless he’s a human-sized cat.

Rule 10: Never forget the password. Errr.

Rule 11: Never ask for a reason. Why not?

Rule 12: Never lose a fight. And if you do, definitely, definitely don’t get on the large, scary black train to oblivion.

Oh, no! You did.

No!

This is really, really scary. Down, down, down into the dark, followed by a murder of crows.

Phew.

Double, treble phew! Big brother’s come to save me – I mean him. Him, yes, the character in the book. I’m not getting carried away, definitely not, not me.

He brought his bike! Yay. (A bit scary here, what with the skulls and the crashed planes, but I’m on my brother’s bike so I feel safe.)

Back in time for the last day of summer.

Hooray!

What’s it all about?

The Rules of Summer.

 

Adventures in Bookland: A Space Traveller’s Guide to the Solar System by Mark Thompson

18 November 2015
Edoardo
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I don’t know about you, but I always open a book with the intention to like it (there might have been a slight exception with The Da Vinci Code, but that’s the exception that proves only literary incompetence tied to astonishing success will break my general bibliphilic disposition). And I really wanted to like this one: I’ve read a couple of other, similarly themed but historical books, such as Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, and really enjoyed them, so I was hoping for something similar from Mark Thompson. What’s more, while I read widely about astronomy, planetary and stellar, when I was younger, I’ve not looked at it much recently, so I expected there to be a huge range of exciting new findings from all the space probes that have visited the solar system’s planets and satellites over the last 10-15 years. And there probably is – but I’m afraid, my eyes glazed over and my attention wondered.

This book is dull. Dull, dull, dull. At best, I’d call the prose workmanlike and clear. As a positive, I now understand the mechanics of using the gravity slingshot to accelerate a spaceship to the outer reaches of the solar system much better. But the rest of it is all so dreary.

Look, here’s a telling example. Venus, we’ve found out, rather than being the planet of love is as near hell as you can get this side of death: crushing surface pressure, hot enough to melt lead, sulphuric acid clouds: anyone on the surface would be crushed, cooked and corroded in seconds.

But if that wasn’t enough, there is now evidence that the entire planetary surface, every half billion years or so, dissolves into a molten magma lake. This is because Venus has no volcanoes, so there is no mechanism for the heat at the planetary core to escape, so it builds up and builds up and builds up until, in a truly apocalyptic scene, the whole surface of the planet melts, allowing the pent up heat of 500 million years to escape. Then, slowly, it cools and solidifies, and the whole cycle repeats.

So, something pretty juicy for a science writer to get his words into, you’d think? Think again. Here’s Mark Thompson’s description of Venerean apocalypse:

Like all the rocky objects in the Solar System, Venus displays thousands of craters, and the majority of them are still in excellent condition. This suggests that there has been minimal erosion of surface detail. More interestingly, it implies that the surface underwent some kind of global restructuring event around 600 million years ago…In a global event that lasted perhaps up to 100 million years, the entire crust weakened and yielded to the mantle, in effect recycling itself.

There, you see? Thompson takes the most cataclysmic event imaginable and turns it into a bloody Bob the Builder episode (for those who don’t have toddlers and thus are unaware, Bob is clean and green, and committed to the three ‘Rs’: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle).

But if dullness was the only objection, I’d give the book three stars: it’s at least reasonably clear; good, stolid sciencey stuff. But why, oh why, oh why do science writers, who would be appalled (justifiably) if someone accused them of mixing their neutrons with their neutrinos, not feel the same obligation to check their historical facts as they do about checking their scientific facts? Thompson, in the laziest way imaginable, rehashes the old, old Galileo Affair story as a conflict between obscurantist Churchmen, wedded to outdated and unobservable models of the universe, and brave, bold Galileo, speaking truth to power come hell or house imprisonment. I mean, this version of events went out fifty years ago: even Wikipedia has caught up with what actual historians think about what happened. For a proper review of the myths and realities of the Galileo Affair, see this article by historian Tim O’Neill (and lest I be accused of special pleading, note that O’Neill is an atheist and a sceptic).

The consistency with which science writers regurgitate these old lies makes me wonder, in my more paranoid moments, whether there really is a hidden agenda. But no. It’s far more likely to be the lazy assumptions of unexamined prejudice – something as prevalent among scientists and science writers as any other section of the population. So, for this egregious lapse, I’m knocking an extra star off: two out of five stars for A Space Traveller’s Guide to the Solar System. Try reading some of Patrick Moore’s books about the solar system instead – at least he can write.

Adventures in Bookland: Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

1 November 2015
Edoardo
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Trigger Warning
Trigger Warning

I wonder if the book might have been better if Gaiman had dropped the first ‘r’ in the title: Tigger Warning – if nothing else, I’d say it suggests the contents a little better. There’s the usual Gaiman excellence and the usual Gaiman frustrations: his talent runs over and doesn’t really, in the end, seem to know where to go. There’s a comparison to be made with the work of Alan Garner: the seem commitment to the imagination, the same deep, gnawing fear that, underneath everything, these are all just imaginings, phantasms of words and thoughts, sounds and furies signifying nothing. Gaiman is at his best when he adds a lightness of touch, a sense of humour to his stories – Garner doesn’t do jokes. There’s not many funny stories in here – most are dark and creepy – but they’re effective; I’d be hard put to say they are anything else.

Adventures in Bookland: Flashman at the Charge by George MacDonald Fraser

26 October 2015
Edoardo
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Flashman at the Charge
Flashman at the Charge

It was PG Wodehouse who likened his first reading of Flashman to Keats’ experience of reading Homer in Chapman’s translation, although I can safely say that Flashy is unlikely to ever hold his silence, even on a peak in Darien – he’d be looking for a likely woman or an escape route. The whole point of Flashman is that, despite his being a cad, a bounder, a coward and a cheat, yet, in the madness of the Crimean War, his cowardice takes on a certain honesty. Indeed, given the fact that Flashman contrives to take part in the charges of both the Heavy and the Light brigades – the latter with his bowels erupting in a fanfare of farts – there is a case for calling him the bravest man there: one who knows fear and yet still carries on. Thankfully, just when it seems like Flashy might be turning into a proper hero, he does something truly appalling and the reader breaths a huge sigh of relief.

Adventures in Bookland: The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff

22 October 2015
Edoardo
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The Story of Babar
The Story of Babar

This is a review written by two people, or rather, the same one, separated by so many years that he is, to all intents and purposes, two different people. The first is me, now, age 52, married, with three sons; a home owner, a writer, a man set in the tramlines of a life that has barely moved six miles north on the Piccadilly Line through those years.

The second is me, age 6: a child, a boy who loved reading above all other pleasures, a mixed-race child in a ’60s London that was not, at least where we were living, in the least swinging or happening; a boy whose physical boundaries were circumscribed by being a shy child but whose mental scope had widened immeasurably when he discovered, first, reading and then, the local library.

This young me read Babar, all the Babar stories, and loved them. This young me could not see why there should be this barrier of wordlessness between us and animals – why shouldn’t they speak? And, for that matter, why shouldn’t Babar wear a bowler hat and take tea outside a cafe in an unnamed city that bore a striking resemblance to Paris. Nor did it seem odd to me that Babar should be able to get to Paris on foot, when running away from the horrible hunters who had killed his mother. If, God forbid, hunters killed my mother, I’d want to run away too, and preferably to somewhere where a nice, rich old lady would take me in, give me cake, dress me up nicely and teach me to speak properly.

The old me, getting the book from the library to rediscover his childhood, discovered rather how far away that childhood was. The faith in story – even though I am a writer – is not strong enough now to carry me over what seem to adult eyes the glaring gaps in the story. I think my adult eyes are wrong. Why shouldn’t animals talk? They were obviously meant to. Would I really be surprised if, one day, my cat looked up at me, sniffed, and said, ‘You really are an insufferable bore?’ before sitting on a newspaper to absorb the latest news.

No, I wouldn’t be surprised. In some deep sense, I’d think this the return of a natural order, somehow unaccountably lost along the way. But, for my young self, that lost natural order seemed so much closer and the leap, in book form, hardly any leap at all.

There are many reviews from old people decrying Babar for all sorts of reasons. Don’t believe them. They read with old eyes and older minds. Those for whom Babar was written see him, see story, with different eyes and clean minds. We old people bring the accretion of decades to him, when Babar needs to be read fresh, by a child still barely touched by the world. They will read him, and they will love him, and they will be right to do so.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L Sayers

20 October 2015
Edoardo
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Clouds of Witness
Clouds of Witness

A while back I read The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers and loved it: its mix of no-nonsense theology and creative analysis provided me with the best, and most personal, account of the Trinity I have ever read. In the dim past, Sayers’ translation of Dante’s Commedia was the first version of the work I read, and her determination to include Dante’s terza rima scheme gave me some first pale idea of the power of the original. But, of course, nowadays (and indeed during her life), Sayers is best known for her detective novels starring Lord Peter Wimsey, so I thought I would give one of these a go.

Case solved. It’s not for me. Not for any lack of ingenuity or paucity of literary skill – quite the opposite. The book gives a terrifically acerbic account of upper-class country house life just after the Great War. The mystery is ingenious and the plotting as thorough as any of the other great ladies of detective fiction.

No, it’s the language. Where Sayers’ brusque, almost staccato use of language worked to bracing effect in The Mind Of the Maker, here I found it like listening to pebbles being fired at a corrugated iron wall – one after another after another. This is purely a personal taste and I’m sure other people will find the style as invigorating as I found it exhausting. I do wonder if the style is specific to this particular book, or continues through the series. I will probably dip into another Lord Peter Wimsey to see how it reads in comparison to Clouds of Witness. But, for now, that’s enough – I feel like I’ve been sandblasted!

Adventures in Bookland: Hornblower and the Atropos

14 October 2015
Edoardo
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Hornblower and the Atropos
Hornblower and the Atropos

Has anyone remarked on the double entendre in our hero’s name? No. Then I won’t either.

Right. The book. Yes. I know I had all sorts of interesting things to say about it, but I finished reading it a month ago and the interesting things have slipped away into the place all those bon mots and lightning quick quips go when you actually want to use them, to be replaced by leaden, frankly rather dull, words. Words like episodic, entertaining and edifying: they all apply but really, if you’ve read any Hornblower, you’ll know that already.

What did I have to say that was interesting? Ah, was it this: this is story as single-person drama. While it’s not written in the first person, it’s absolutely Hornblower’s story – something evinced by the relatively small amount of dialogue. It’s all action and Hornblower planning on, or reflecting on, action. As such, it’s a peculiarly solipsistic book. Not bad for that, but I think having read four Hornblowers I need to take a break for a while. It might have helped if Hornblower had a sense of humour, but he’s as devoid of that as he is of musicality. Music is a bit hard to do in a book; humour is almost as hard.

Adventures in Bookland: Knights of the Hawk by James Aitcheson

9 October 2015
Edoardo
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Knights of the Hawk
Knights of the Hawk

It’s fascinating, sometimes, to step behind a story and into the intentions of the writer. Now, James Aitcheson is a skilled writer and this is an excellent book – it fully deserves the glowing reviews it has received on Amazon and Good Reads and elsewhere. So let’s just take those reviews as read, and move into the swampy mire that is the mind of the writer at work.

Now, I thought I had this book worked out. Laconic hero – from the Norman side although a Breton so, I suppose, a double enemy of the Anglo-Saxons – faces English folk hero in Hereward, who proves to be as ruthless and determined a killer as, well, William. Nice set up of Hereward as the adversary, the assault on the Isle of Ely, Hereward’s escape around the half way point of the book, and I’m expecting it all to continue through further encounters and skirmishes until a final denouement 150 pages later.

Only, it doesn’t. James does a story swerve on the reader, and completely dumps his expectations in the fen fastness into which Hereward’s legend disappears.

That’s when I started thinking about what James is doing here and in the previous books about Tancred, and I kept on thinking, following trails and suggestions, through to the end of the book. There’s a clue, I think, in the title of the first: Sworn Sword. Many of the warrior societies of the early and high Middle Ages were held together by oaths, by the pledging of service and loyalty and arms through the giving of word upon the sacred. With limited recourse to law or recompense from human society, a surer, although post-mortem sanction was required to hold men in check, and the giving of oaths before and to God provided that, for failure to uphold an oath meant sure and eternal punishment in the afterlife. Or did it?

That is what James Aitcheson is doing in these novels, I think. He is working through the implications and understandings of an oath-bound society, using his hero to investigate the consequences of this within an imaginative recreation of a historical society. And it’s quite, quite fascinating.

Knights of the Hawk ends with Tancred largely cut free from his previous oaths and obligations, to kings and lords and even the woman he had loved. Now, it will be fascinating to see where James takes the story, for both literally and metaphorically, Tancred ends the story at sea – and the sea can take you anywhere.