JFDI BOOK 16: THE DAUGHTER OF TIME -Josephine They

 

The Daughter of Time

Josephine They

 

 

A detective story about the true history of Richard III

 

AMAZON

Chosen by Philip Maton

REVIEW OF EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS

TOM'S REVIEW

EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS

 by Robert Byron (1926)

EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS is Robert Byron’s account of his travels with two right Charlies, the reckless David and the melancholic Simon, across Europe in the summer of 1925. Robert may be an Eton graduate attending Merton College, Oxford, but he is also a 20 year-old on a road trip in an unreliable car experiencing a rite of passage we’ve all either been on, or wished we had, especially to the places Robert sees at a time when local character and old-world charm did still abide.

Not that Robert much appreciates either. He is quick to scoff at custom, keen to drink more than he can handle and happy to commit acts of petty vandalism. He and his mates are a mash-up of the Bullingdon Club and Dorothy Parker’s Vicious Circle. Robert has high praise for the Sitwell siblings—renowned for their literary, artistic and sexual iconoclasm—and disdain for conventional opinion about almost every city he visits, including Berlin, Munich, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Venice, Florence, Rome and Athens. Not surprisingly, he saves his highest praise for two places not on the traditional tourist map, Ferrara and Revenna. But he also has a precocious appreciation of art and architecture, and he heaps praise on the things he likes, including some that are iconic and time-honored.

Mixed with the Bullingdon Club and the Vicious Circle, though, is a good measure of Beavis and Butthead, namely in the chums’ acumen with routes, car mechanics and relations with locals. David is forever going off-piste onto single-track mountain roads and into dry river beds, where he blows out tires or clogs carburetor jets before receiving help from the local citizenry whom he later pisses off and whose wrath he barely escapes, usually by taking a single-track mountain road that ends in a dry river-bed. But he manages to outdo himself before the trip even begins when, without consulting the most basic travel resource, like a map, he decides that Patras should be the port of destination on the boat ride from Italy to Greece because it just sounds better than Piraeus. Patras in 1924 is a desolate backwater in westernmost Greece, while Piraeus is the port of Athens. Cue calamity: loading the car onto a boat barely bigger than the car in the Italian port of Brindisi; crossing the Ionian in an undersized boat with what must be balsa for ballast; offloading the car in a town with a stevedoring harness Archimedes would have sent to the dump; and discovering that there are no roads from Patras to, well, anywhere. Calamity is a time-honored source of comedy, but I have to draw the line when it’s the product of willful stupidity by Oxbridge Etonians who have the means and connections to avoid any serious consequences. 

While it’s tempting to dismiss this book as a mash-up of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR?, this book has stood the test of time, both as a prelude to Byron’s consensus classic THE ROAD TO OXIANA and as a travel book that manages to cross the path of history. For Robert Byron hits Italy during the budding of Fascism, which he dismisses as the post-WWI sour grapes of bitter aristos, thugs and cranks, while not actually condemning it outright. Indeed, he would later befriend the Mitfords and attend the 1938 Nuremberg rally with Unity just as her sister Nancy was hoping for a marriage proposal from Byron that was never going to come (and not because of their political differences). While he did not share the Mitford’s views on the merits of the Third Reich, you might conclude by the company he kept that his antipathy toward Fascism was as tepid in 1938 as it was in 1925. Ironic then that he died in 1941 on a ship torpedoed by a German U-Boat. Or karmic. 

3 stars

REVIEW OF HER PRIVATES WE

TOM'S REVIEW

Her Privates We 

by Frederic Manning

Frederic Manning was a professional poet most of his life and a volunteer soldier in His Majesty’s infantry from October 1915 to February 1918. In 1928, a literary colleague, citing the large public appetite for books about the Great War, urged him to write a novel about his wartime experience. The result was Her Privates We, a title (and the best pun I can remember) taken from dialogue in Hamlet that is the book’s epigram:

Guildenstern: On Fortune's cap we are not the very button.

Hamlet: Nor the soles of her shoe?

Rosencrantz: Neither, my lord.

Hamlet: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?

Guildenstern: Faith, her privates we.

Hamlet: In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true; she is a strumpet.

Each chapter then begins with a passage from Shakespeare, not the pithy aphorisms found in Bartlett’s Book of Quotations but obscure lines with difficult syntax that force the reader to study each word and still wonder at the precise meaning. The passages form perfect companion pieces to a literate memoir that describes war with lyrical dispassion. There is no plot, only an unfolding of events. There is abundant absurdity, but it is the opposite of funny. Death is not the least bit heroic, and there is no glory. 

Reading this book is often a slog, just like the war it describes. The narration can be pedestrian for pages on end, but then Manning will produce something that zeroes in on what makes the soldier’s life unique. Two examples stand out for me. The first appears midway through the book when the main character Bourne is home on leave and is asked if he has a friend among the men. He replies, “In some ways, good comradeship takes the place of friendship. It is different; it has its own loyalties and affections; and I am not so sure that it does not rise on occasion to an intensity of feeling which friendship never touches. It may be less in itself, I don’t know, but its opportunity is greater. Friendship implies rather more stable conditions, don’t you think? You have time to choose.” The second appears in the prefatory remarks that Manning wrote after he had finished the novel and should be inscribed on every war memorial everywhere. “War is waged by men; not by beasts or by gods. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” 

Perhaps the biggest revelation of Her Privates We, though, is the dialogue. Soldiers in 1914 sound just like men in 2014. They make liberal use of the F-word, the C-word and slang that is still alive. There is a school of literature that says an author should never attempt accented vernacular, but Manning has done it in a way that, if not exactly accurate, pinpoints his characters by class, region and temperament. 

Frederic Manning’s lone novel received an initial printing of 500 copies and was credited to “Private 19022.” Manning was not identified as the author until a second printing in 1943, eight years after his death from a respiratory ailment when he was just 52. The novel garnered high praise from Ezra Pound, T.E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom, it is presumed, read the first printing. Hemingway called it 'The finest and noblest book of men in war.' Make that finest, noblest and truest. 

Five stars

REVIEW: ORYX AND CRAKE

ERIC'S REVIEW

What the hell is Margaret thinking? We have been Atwooded. On her book tour to promote Oryx and Crake a few years back, she unveiled her Long Pen technology, which allowed remote writing by robots. She is head of a high tech company with the same aim called Syngrafii. She has written a book which will not be published until 2114, and which will require what she calls paleo-anthropologists to translate it. She maintains that she is not a science fiction writer, but a writer of  speculative fiction. Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen, she has said. Nonetheless the book O&C has monsters. Real monsters. We call them humans.

So what is Oryx and Crake, exactly? It is not a love story. None of the characters really provoke a reaction. It is not a story about life and death. It is a story of life and death. It asks the question: what is life?, and tells of the death of society, or man as a species.

And why? The usual suspects. Sex. Greed. Selfishness. Vanity. Hubris. There is love, of a fashion, but no passion. 

The story is about the dystopia the Earth has become because of the monkeying around with nature that man has been doing. Planet of the Apes-esque. The main character is Snowman, aka Jimmy, the lone (or is he?) human survivor of science gone mad. Crake is the evil genius behind the whole mess, but he is just an amped-up version of the way modern man is heading. GM foods. DNA engineering. Internet porn. Mind control. You know, just a typical day on the planet. Mixing animals has gone awry. Pigoons. Wolvogs. Snats. All very nasty. The best of the worst. Or is it the best of the wurst. Jimmy is reduced to living in the trees and surviving off of tins of Vienna sausages and the like. The earth is shite, and global warming has conspired with pandemics to make it pretty much uninhabitable. Picketty-style inequality had taken over completely anyway before the apocolypse, with bubbleland gated villages for the elite surrounded by pleeblands. In the end it is only the mutant Crakers who remain. And Jimmy. His love or should I say the object of his love, Oryx, is a vision, not a person. And when she cops it. Oh well, who cares?

All it takes, says Crake, is the elimination of one generation....Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it is game over. Forever. 

Game over. The earth is a mephitic mess (look it up! When man as a species dies, it is only words and art which remain).

The doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate, as Jimmy observes. Atwood is not a cheer leader for humanity. More like a Cassandra. Pay attention, she is saying. This could (will) happen to you. 

All too topical and depressing, really. But plausible. At the end, I was reminded of the lyrics to a country music song. I don't know whether to kill myself or go bowling. 

So I went bowling. Figuratively, that is. 

3.5 stars

JFDI BOOK 14 & 15: A TWOFER: EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS/HER PRIVATES WE

Chosen by Alistair.

 

Two travel books. Very different journeys.

 

6 November 6:30PM at the F&A

 

 

EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS

Robert Byron

 

Buy at Amazon

 

 

and/ or

 

 

HER PRIVATES WE

Frederic Manning

 

Buy at Amazon

JFDI BOOK NO. 13: ORYX AND CRAKE -Margaret Atwood

 

 

DYSTOPIA.  ARE WE ALREADY THERE?

 

Chosen by James

REVIEW: CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY Thomas Picketty

TOM'S REVIEW

Capital in the 21^st Century (2014):

I don’t read much non-fiction because:

·         It is usually not as well written as quality fiction

·         It is usually less truthful than quality fiction

·         It says everything it has to say in the first 50 pages

If ever there was a book that affirmed my bias, this is it. 

For whatever reasons that only media types know, this book was all the rage in the financial press the first half of 2014.  The buzz was that it was the DAS KAPITAL of the 21^st C.  I haven’t read DAS KAPITAL and so I cannot say whether this book is its equivalent.  But then, as I have since discovered, neither can the financial press reviewers of this book, who have likely never read Karl Marx and have even more likely not read much of this book.  I admit that I say this based on a limited sample of reviews and one very telling statistic—and this book if nothing else is all about statistics—from a survey of Kindle readers, which reports that this is the most unread big seller of all time.  Only 2% of readers have made it to the end.  I may not be among the 1%ers on which this book turns its innumerable charts and graphs, but by God I am one of the 2%ers who finished this bastard.   

CAPITAL makes a noble effort at exploring the timely issue of wealth and income inequality and its implications for current and future social order.  The 21^st C French economist with the oddly 19^th C English name of Thomas Picketty analyses the extreme wealth and income inequality of France and England from the time of the French Revolution to the end of the First World War, the relative wealth and income equality of the 20^th C through 1980, and the increased polarisation between the haves and have-nots in the wake of the 1980s economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher. While the book is not overtly political, it also does not attempt to mask its leanings. 

Give Picketty credit for trying to garner a wide audience with an intrinsically dry subject.  There are innumerable graphs for the economists, sociologists and academics.  There is a sop to humanities majors with repeated references to Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac. Picketty goes full-on populist by citing the social hierarchy in Titanic.  And he even offers a solution to the problem of wealth and income equality for all the dreamers and idealists.

The solution is of course unworkable in the minds of anyone but the most doctrinaire European Parliamentarian.  It calls for an annual tax of up to 1% on assets over a certain threshold—say $5 or $10 million—to be administered globally. Proceeds from the tax would be used to provide decent food, shelter, education and medicine to those who cannot afford them.  Picketty does not bother with questions of corruption and misappropriation of funds but chooses only to accentuate the positive--that a global asset tax would eliminate tax havens, increase transparency, improve data accuracy and address poverty.   You have to love his optimism.  Wish I could say the same for his book. 

Two stars

EDITOR'S NOTE

Tom deserves great accolades for this review for many reasons, not the least of which he was the ONLY person to read the entire tome.  Thus no one else has the right to say anything about this book in this forum, but generally the reception was the same, as people voted with their sloth:  Q.E.D.

PS: The boo birds were out for Joe, who chose the book, but had a forgetful moment and had another engagement such that he could not attend. 

Par contre, the pork pies were of their usual high quality.

REVIEW: THE SISTERS BROTHERS AND HARVEST

TOM'S REVIEW 

For the first time in JFDI’s short but stimulating history the assignment called for two books: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt; and Harvest by Jim Crice.  It did not mark the first time for a dual assignment, as the previous one had called for Season One of the TV series “Breaking Bad” and as many essays by Bertrand Russell as a man could stomach.  But ask any schoolboy which is weightier: two books: or a TV show plus an optionally-sized collection. We all know the answer to that one.

Like schoolboys, some of us finished the assignment, some of us came close to finishing it and some of us went online to see if we could find the videos.  I admit to the advantage of having read the books before I picked them.  I loved one and admired the other and thought I could finesse a comparative lit assignment even when my initial reaction was they had little in common. 

But they do:

--Both were short-listed for Booker Prizes. 

--Both are about days of yore that are core to the images we contemporary folk have about the respective countries in which the novels are set: America during the California Gold Rush; and England before the arrival of the dark, satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. 

--Both are filled with the kind of violent cruelty that seems acceptable for the setting and abhorrent to us when we read it in the news. 

 On first reading, The Sisters Brothers was the more enjoyable, not only for me but also for 80% of JFDI. The story is about two bounty hunters, Charlie and Eli Sisters, whom their boss the Commodore has sent to kill a former employee the Commodore has accused of stealing.  Charlie is very lean and very mean, especially when he’s drunk a bottle of brandy, which he does often.  Eli, relative to most people in his profession, is burdened with a surfeit of weight, conscience and self-awareness.  He is the narrator.

Soon after I read Sisters, I sent a short critique to friends saying, “It’s the novel Quentin Tarrantino would write.” But it isn’t. It’s the novel the Cohn Brothers would write. Eli’s narration is filled with unintended humour and irony that is the trademark of Cohn characters.  Example: Eli tells Charlie he’s through with killing after this latest assignment; Charlie reminds him that after they finish with this assignment, they will have to kill the Commodore; and then they will have to kill the Commodore’s men who will want revenge; to which Eli says, “I mean I’m through with this era of killing.”

That is not to say that Sisters is only an exercise in offbeat humour like Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski.  In the final chapters, it turns serious about themes like greed, fair play and the siren’s song of the outlaw’s life. That’s when the story deflates for me.  Whoever makes the movie version is going to have to juggle a Lebowski beginning with a No Country for Old Men ending.  Good luck with that one.

   

Harvest has no such juggling act. It starts somber and it ends somberer.  The initial JFDI sentiment was 4 to 1 in favour of Sisters. Only Alistair—The Quiet Beatle—stumped for Harvest.  The three Americans—Eric, Joe and I—thought Alistair’s POV said something about the difference between blind Yankee optimism and English resignation to the obviously inescapable outcome.  James, though, sided with the Yanks.  So then we had to tweak the theory by saying that Alistair is preternaturally British because he has Scottish roots and grew up in Cornwall while James works for Bank of America.

But the whole dynamic did say something about the 80-20 rule, which says that 80% of your customers are non-nutritive bulk while 20% are your quality, mate.  As Alistair stated his case for Harvest, the rest of us were sucked into an earnest discussion of the book’s core theme about the fragility of the social contract and how quickly it can unravel—in the case of Harvest, in less than a week, and that in an era we contemporary types like to think took its own sweet time. 

The basic plot of Harvest is that three outsiders come to a tight-knit village dependent on the largesse of a manor house which has been vandalized.  The three—an old man, a young man and a bewitching woman—are blamed for the vandalism and the two men are placed in stocks for seven days.  Being pilloried strikes us modern men as almost quaint, a source of fun at Ye Olde Renaissance Faires. Harvest shows that weeklong starvation in shackles is nothing less than the advanced form of interrogation of its day.  If we as a global community still need a lesson in how destructive torture can be to our collective soul, Harvest provides it.

The upshot is that Harvest spawned a much livelier discussion than The Sisters Brothers.  For the majority, it was less enjoyable but more thought-provoking--like 12 Years a Slave versus Argo.  And it also made the perfect transition to our next book, Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the 21^st Century, a non-fiction heads-up about the fragile social contract.  As some bright JFDI spark pointed out: “The three outsiders come to the village after being driven out of one transitioning from crop to sheep farming. The village they come to is about to experience the same.  Without knowing it, the villagers are looking at their own future.”

Just to keep things real, the meeting ended with the JFDI list of preferred stars of the female version of “The Expendables.” The main criterion was “former stars desperate for a paycheck.” Once again, Alistair nailed it: Sarah Ferguson.

It’s always the quiet ones.  

Four stars for both      

ERIC'S REVIEW

In life broadly speaking you have two options: you can go looking for trouble, or you can wait to have trouble come looking for you. The end of the voyage of discovery might mean going home; the consequence of staying put might mean your home going. Travelling, or unravelling. Your choice. In the old days the choice might mean you took work off the land you found; the alternative might be that the land you found yourself in worked you. Progress, either generated by exploring new worlds or transported into your own world by alien bearers of technology and greed might increase production or bring wealth but could bring destruction as well.

Two books, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, and Harvest, by Jim Crace, come at these questions from very different angles. The former is a story of two hired guns (the narrator Eli and his brother Charlie, last name Sisters thus the title) whose peripatetic life in search of their target (a killing ordered by the invisible Commodore) cuts a murderous swathe through the Wild West. The latter recounts a calamitous seven days in the life of a small bucolic village in England whose world is upended by visitors. The narrator, Walter Thirsk, is the only one it seems with a thirsk (sic) for life in a village paralysed by tradition. At the end of both, like the homecoming signalling the end of a journey or the harvest signalling the end of nature's circle of life, you are left with distant memories and empty fields. And not a lot else.

Just as someone said that America and England are two worlds separated by a common language, these books epitomise the different ethos and thoughts of the New World versus the Old. (One assumes they take place at more or less the same time). The two brothers are emblematic of manifest destiny (read aimless wandering) where society was mobile and one's place in it determined by aggression and the barrel of a gun. Wide open spaces. Murderous intentions. The rush after a glittering metal hiding stubbornly in the ground. Harvest's rural English village was ruled by feudal laws and the Lord of the Manor and was organised along strict lines of birth, law, and tradition. No one thought of leaving. To go where? To do what? England is after all an island, and a small one at that. They stayed until their choice was forced upon them by unwelcome visitors who exposed all of the prejudices and suppressed furies of a small village as they were quickly swallowed up by progress.

Without ruining either story, suffice it to say that the endings are somewhat anti-climactic and certainly  bleak. Like life at that time, one supposes. In both cases fire both literally and figuratively swallows up life's work.

The writing in the two books is markedly different; the easy flowing quickfire narrative of DeWitt and the dense and florid description of Crace where action happens at a glacial pace. Both are effective. There are glimpses of really fine writing in both, to wit: The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.(De Witt). Or: Their best riches are ignorance of wealth. Or: The man's a fool, but not the kind of fool to spit in his own hat. (Crace).

De Witt's language is easily accessible and spare. Crace's book has more unknown words than a small thesaurus, and thus one learns perhaps a bit more about flora and fauna.

They were both shortlisted for the Booker. Neither won.

But that doesn't mean they weren't worth something, whether your psyche is one that likes to travel or stay at home.

3 stars for the lot of them.    

JFDI BOOK 12: CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY: THOMAS PICKETTY

The new Marx, says The Economist. What happens when capitalism goes nuts and disparity widens. He is French (faites attention) but a professor at MIT.

AMAZON- It ain't cheap by the way.

 

 

Chosen by our resident Marxist: Herr Igoe