REVIEW OF RED PLENTY Francis Spufford

 BY TOM WELLS

In the opening line of Red Plenty, Francis Spufford notes that the book is neither a novel nor a history but a fairytale, specifically a Russian fairytale.  I admit that my limited knowledge of fairy tales runs to those Disney has made into cartoons, but they seem to be of two types: (1) they lived happily ever after; and (2) don’t go into the woods. I don’t remember the one about the insular community that vainly thought it could create a world-beating economy through rigid state planning and enforced control of travel, creativity and critical thinking.  

Genre definition aside, Francis Spufford has succeeded in creating an exhaustively researched, superbly written historical fiction about the failed effort to escape the shackles of Tsarist enslavement and Stalinist paranoia to give its citizenry a standard of living that would make it the envy of Muncie and Peoria. Where he has not succeeded is in creating what a fairytale must surely have: archetypal characters you root for, fear for or fear.  

As a result, this is a novel more admirable than digestible. Open to just about any page, and you will find at least one fragment, sentence or paragraph that makes you wish you could write like that. Take page 190 (which I just randomly flipped to), for instance: 

“The supply system had moronically misclassified (the place)…as a college town, in need of the calorific intake required to lift pencils and wipe blackboards; but there were forty thousand people living and working in the industrial zone out by the tracks now, and between the students and the loco workers, a locust would have been hard put to find a spare crumb.”  

Or the description of one anxious toady on facing page 191 as “sweating with desperate amiability.”  

Verbal highlights aside, what most undermines the author’s genre claim is that the reader knows there is no fairytale ending to the Soviet experiment. No happily-ever-after or even axe-man-eviscerating-wolf. Just a slow creep toward another form of suppressive plutocracy.  

***½ 

#75 RED PLENTY Francis Spufford

 RED PLENTY

Francis Spufford

The USSR in the 1950s- when communism was still an alternative

 

REVIEW OF WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD BENJAMIN LABATUT

 BY TOM WELLS

When We Cease to Understand the World is a 2020 collection of five increasingly fictionalized short stories that became all the rage when Barack Obama included it in his Summer 2021 reading list. If there is a unifying theme it appears to be that the single-minded pursuit of scientific truth leads to individual madness and global destruction. Happy days. 

The first story—which Labatut notes is barely fictionalized—chronicles the yin and yang of scientific discovery. As one example, Labatut describes the discovery by Fritz Haber of the synthesis of ammonia from the nitrogen that makes up 78% of our air. This scientific leap led to the mass production of fertilizer that enabled crop output previously restrained by manure and guano availability. A few years later, Haber made a discovery of quite a different stripe when he invented the mustard gas that killed or crippled hundreds of thousands of World War I combatants. Meanwhile, over the course of the last 125 years, it has transpired that ready access to nitrogen may have provided a bulwark against famine but it has also—as the Night Gardener in the book’s final instalment points out--driven the Earth’s population to an unsustainable eight billion persons.  Yin and yang, indeed.  

By the fourth installment of the collection, the stories have become more fictionalized, the writing more fanciful and the destruction more palpable, as it dramatizes the intellectual battle between the quantum disciple Werner Heisenberg (he of the Uncertainty Principal) and the more classical Erwin Schrödinger (he of the Cat) with a mixture of argument, hallucination and icky suppuration. Heisenberg’s hypothesis about the immeasurable dual states of electrons—they can be both particle and wave--may have led to the modern computer age but it also, as Heisenberg himself sees in a frenzied vision, fostered the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

“Countless men and women with slanted eyes, their bodies sculpted of soot and ash, were stretching out their arms to try and touch him. They thronged around him…, humming like a cluster of bees caught in an invisible web.” 

Which, in the minds of Labatut and those who have praised this book, is a far more horrific reality than the fire-bombing of Tokyo and Osaka and countless other strategic Japanese cities that would have otherwise occurred. 

Without the scientific leaps of the 20^th century, the world would have certainly seen less mass death from chemical poison and nuclear fusion. Instead, it would have seen time-honored population control from those two stalwarts, famine and disease. I, for one, would have been dead from pleural pneumonia before I turned twenty-one. I may not understand the world, but I do understand where I’d be without 20^th C. scientific advancement.  

**½  

#74 WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD Benjamin Labatut

 

WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD

Benjamin Labatut

#73 REVIEW OF THE LAST SAMURAI

By TOM WELLS

The Last Samurai—Helen Dewitt 

This is a novel I had to immediately re-read—Books I and II, anyway—in order to make sense of what at first comes off as a showy, self-indulgent, brain dump. Helen Dewitt, as the preface says, had written portions of fifty novels before she finally finished this 600-page mental heptakaihexathon, and it seemed as if she’d taken random snippets from all fifty and ladled them into this novel. It’s only when I re-read to the point where her savant son Ludo takes over the narrative at Book III that what goes before is not just intellectual exhibitionism. And is LOL funny instead of WTF exasperating. 

American ex-pat Sibylla is a single mom living in London. She has a one-night stand with a married travel writer whose output she mocks by giving him the nickname “Liberace”. Nine months later, out comes Ludo, whom she determines when he reaches the age of two to spoon-feed one mental exercise per day in imitation of Yo-Yo Ma’s father. Ludo turns out to be an insatiably curious savant who by age three is reading The Odyssey in ancient Greek and, ironically, begging for more input than Sibylla has the time or patience for.  

Sibylla herself possesses a deep well of knowledge, especially of languages, some as arcane as Aramaic and Sanskrit. She eschews a decent job in publishing or academia, partly because of work-permit restrictions, but mostly because of her disdain for the values that publishing and academia tolerate and even promote. She instead barely ekes out a living transcribing such periodicals as Practical Caravanning and Pig Fancier’s Monthly from print to digital format. To save money on home heating, she spends the days riding the Circle Line with Ludo, who sits in a stroller stacked with books ranging from Hop on Pop to White Fang to The Iliad, the last of which is a persistent source of judgment by fellow commuters about age appropriateness.  

When she is not attending to Ludo or digitalizing “Have I Got News for You” guest periodicals, Sibylla escapes to her happy place, repeated viewings of The Seven Samurai. Akira Kurosawa’s cinematic masterpiece also serves as Ludo’s occasional baby-sitter and, to Sibylla’s way of thinking, paternal role model. She reasons that the film provides Ludo with not just one father figure but fifteen of them--the seven characters, the seven actors playing them and Kurosawa himself. Because Ludo’s relationship with The Seven Samurai is at best sporadic, Sibylla gains only the odd break from his unceasing barrage of questions, the most persistent of which is “Who is my father?” Like a mythological being, Sibylla sets Ludo a task before she will reveal the secret. He must, she says, “see what’s wrong with these things,” these things being Lord Leighton’s painting “Greek Girls Playing at Ball”, a cassette tape by the pianist Liberace and an unidentified magazine piece. 

Sibylla’s challenge sets the stage for Ludo’s quest to find his father. He actually tracks down the travel writer Val Peters, Sibylla’s “Liberace”, early on in his search. Not satisfied with a father of such artistic and moral mediocrity, Ludo continues his search and winds up confronting five others--a child savant like himself who becomes an Amazon explorer; a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer and Robert Donat lookalike; an avant-garde artist who gifts Ludo a signed (and therefore valuable) work he paints with Ludo’s blood; a champion bridge player who is also an inveterate lothario; and a war correspondent intent on suicide as the only means of erasing the horrors he’s seen—all of whom have reason to believe they might have fathered Ludo.  

Just at the point that Ludo ceases his search, he happens upon a seventh figure, the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto who, at a show Ludo in his early childhood saw with Sibylla, played “variations on variations on variations” for twelve hours before playing Brahms’s Ballade Op. No. 10 for seven-and-a-half hours, a reminder of Sibylla’s mother, who once played Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor forty-one times in a row as a protest of her father’s authority. Yamamoto has become a virtual recluse, making no recorded music because what he values he believes will never sell, reminiscent of Sibylla’s translation as an Oxford student of Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik, a work read by all of 49 people. Ludo persuades Yamamoto to cut a CD of the Brahms Ballade as a gift to the kind of person who rides the Circle Line every day, who believes everyone should want to see a Tamil syllabary, who thinks boredom a fate worse than death, who always wants things to be different. In exchange, Ludo offers to fund production of ten CDs with the sale of his art piece and teach Yamamoto to play “Straight No Chaser.” 

And the final word of The Last Samurai? “Done.”  

***** 

#73 THE LAST SAMURAI - Helen De Witt

 

THE LAST SAMURAI 

by 

Helen DeWitt

What happens when a polymath searches for love.

#72 REVIEW OF THE ISLAND OF THE MISSING TREES

TOM'S REVIEW

The Island of Missing Trees—Elif Shafak 

I suppose if I were an earnest, sensitive young adult--for example, one named James or Philip--I would love this book. But I’m a curmudgeonly 68-y-o Gruffalo and I can’t say I’m a fan. Too much explanation, not enough dramatization. Characters that are sketched, not painted. And, as with so many contemporary novels, the reliance on research as a cover for pedestrian prose and storytelling.  

And then there’s that polymath, multilingual fig tree. It not only knows (impressively) the history of Cyprus dating back to the Hittites, but also (weirdly) the full back story of a parrot named Chico. Add to that the languages of not only humans (Turkish, Greek and English at the very least), but also birds, bats, butterflies, mosquitos, ants and all forms of flora. A narrative device that puts the “t” in “twee” and has Walt Disney spinning in his anthropomorphic grave. 

The book takes place in two principal settings: 1960s-70s Cyprus, where the story centers on a pair of star-crossed lovers, the Greek science geek Kostas and the Turkish activist anthropologist Defne; and London, mostly nowadays. During the Cypriot Civil War of 1974, Kostas, in danger of his life, is sent by his family to the safety of the Big Smoke, but, as it transpires, not before he and Defne have consummated their love and—surprise! Well, actually no surprise at all, just one more in a series of predictable plotlines that add up to an above-average Hallmark/Lifetime movie.  

** ½