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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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Categories: Book review


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.

 

Rejection notes – no.33 in a series

4 January 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Rejection Notes

It made the short list, but still comes the big No.

Dear Edoardo,

Thank you for submitting “The First King of All the Earth” to […]. Unfortunately, we have decided not to accept it for publication.  It’s a well written tale.  The plot was intriguing (is this a retelling of the Tower of Babel?), but there were a lot of really good submissions, and some of the other stories were a better fit for the overall anthology.  Best of luck placing it elsewhere.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Neuromancer by William Gibson

2 January 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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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Categories: Book review

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.

Adventures in Bookland: Essays in the Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson

28 December 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

This slim little volume of 150 odd pages tells me a number of things. Firstly, that I will probably never be as good a writer as Robert Louis Stevenson. Secondly, that much of the craft he practised on his writing sails far above my head, so I still have a great deal to learn before I’m even able to sit on his footstool. And, thirdly, that it’s pretty difficult to write a really entertaining book about writing. Stephen King managed it, quite brilliantly, in On Writing, but did so by virtue of melding autobiography with style manual. This collection of essays, written for disparate markets and different reasons, doesn’t manage the unity that King achieved in his book, but it is very interesting for telling us Stevenson’s views on various contemporary writers.

Adventures in Bookland: Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

27 December 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

In the 10th century, an Arab traveller named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan went, as part of an embassy, from Baghdad into the far north, to visit the newly Muslim king of the Bulghars who lived on the Volga River where it flows into the Caspian Sea. On his return, he wrote an account of his journey that is remarkable for its precision, dispassion and curiosity. Ibn Fadlan was genuinely interested in the peoples and customs he encountered along the way, and went out of his way to find out more about them. The most obvious example of this is how he set out to learn more about the burial customs of the pagan Rus (Vikings originally from Sweden), going to visit one of their settlements when he learned that one of the leaders there had died recently. His account of the burial is both remarkable and deeply troubling – and should give modern-day pagan fantasists pause. There is a tendency nowadays to ascribe a purer, simpler, more noble or more spiritual culture to pre-Christian pagan societies, such as Neil Young’s idealisation of Moctezuma, king of the Aztecs, in Cortez the Killer. Ibn Fadlan’s chilling description of the ritual sacrifice of one of the dead man’s slave girls should be enough to make anyone rethink idealising pagan cultures.

Going on, the book also contains extracts from other Arab travellers. While none are as interesting as Ibn Fadlan, their varied testimonies add to a patchwork quilt of impressions of which, for me, the chief was the realisation of just how large a part the slave trade played in linking the economies of Asia, and in particular the links between the Caliphate and the pagan cultures of the steppes. Much of war was, in fact, slave taking expeditions, with a huge market waiting for the captured slaves in the Islamic world and among the shot lived kingdoms of the steppes. But what is particularly eye opening for the modern reader is how women and girls were such a significant part of this trade. Slaving expeditions would raid neighbouring tribes, capturing young women and girls, and these would be sold on as concubines to rich and powerful men in the Islamic world. One of the other writers in the book, Abu Hamid, notes in passing how he buys two slave girls, ages 8 and 15, and gives them various jobs before saying that one of them had a child but it died.

To put it bluntly, in this world, women were currency: they were bought and sold and became the trophies that accompanied the worldly success of rich and powerful men. Modern-day feminists have little use for Christianity, but that religion’s refusal to countenance concubinage contributed more to the decline of the trafficking of women than any of other factor.