Book 20 - Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds

Now here’s an interesting question: when reading something written in a different era how do you adjust to the social attitudes? I have remarked before about the charm of suddenly being made aware of period details, for examples the different skills required to drive a car in the 1940s: little descriptions that make you aware of how much the world has changed . But what do you do with the honking klaxon that sounds for attitudes that are now beyond the pale.

“her voice, a jews’ harp with a Croydon accent, came as a shock to some of them” Not nearly as much of a shock as the obvious anti-semitism in the description was to me. I lifted my head from the page and couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. The character in question was a model whose only redeeming feature was her looks, so this phrase was part of a put-down and cannot be redeemed (I will leave aside the slur against Croydon, the place my mother’s family comes from,). But after thinking about it for a short while I thought it useful to be reminded how antisemitism was in the inter war years. How it was a strain in very many polite middle class attitudes. How there was quite a lot of support for Hitler in upper class circles in the 30s. In many cases it might have been more of a distaste rather than hatred but the War to show where hatred led and so the public expression of anti-semitism became much more unacceptable.

We shouldn’t try to clean things up. We should read what was written at the time and know what was of its time. You have to take your authors worts and all.

But that phrase was a detail in the book. There was something else that caused far more intellectual turmoil.  Throughout the book there is a strand about the role of women and proscriptive passages about what is masculine and what is feminine. An underlying theory is that men women have been bred and trained for certain thought patterns for centuries and that these are hard wired. After fifty years of the women’s movement this idea comes as a shock.

Now we should not be so naive as to assume that opinions voiced by a character have any necessary relationship to the views of the author but in this case things there doesn’t seem to be much distance.  Anyway some things are explanatory description e.g. “She was a clever woman who would not or could not relinquish her femininity, and femininity unpossessed is femininity unprotected from itself, a weakness and not a charm”

But it was the capitulation of Albert Campion’s sister, a highly successful career woman, that was particularly disturbing. How else can you look the acceptance of this proposal as anything other than surrender?

I love you, Val. Will you marry me and give up to me your independence, the enthusiasm which you give your career, your time and your thought? That’s my proposition. It’s not a very good one, is it? I realise that I’ve made a fine old exhibition of myself with Georgia Wells, which has
hardly enhanced my immediate value in the market, but I can’t honestly say that I regret the experience. That woman has maturing properties. However, that is the offer. In return – and you probably won’t like this either – in return, mind you (I consider it an obligation), I should assume full responsibility for you. I would pay your bills to any amount which my income might afford. I would make all decisions which were not your province, although on the other hand I would like to feel that I might discuss everything with you if I wanted to; but only because I wanted to, mind you; not as your right. And until I died you would be the only woman. You would be my care, my mate as in plumber, my possession if you like. If you wanted your own way in everything you’d have to cheat it out of me, not demand it. Our immediate trouble is serious, but not so serious as this. It means the other half of my life to me, but the whole of yours to you. Will you do it?

But as I said: that was then and this is now. When you read the book you have to take them on their own terms. You can then enjoy the tight plotting and very sharp character description. Reading Margery might be an awkward pleasure but it is a pleasure nevertheless.

First published
1939

Link to last book
Obviously the same author but I read it because I wanted to read one of her straight forward detective novels.

Book 19 - Margery Allingham, Traitor's Purse

There is no need to write anything more about this book as this piece from A.S. Byatt says all I could and more. It is a brilliant appreciation and is well worth your time.

First published
1941

Link to Last Book
Simples. The last book was an example of current detective fiction so this time I thought I would go back to one of the writers from the 'golden age of crime'

Book 18 - Peter May, Extraordinary People

“Paris St Germain or PSG as they are affectionately known to their fans” Affectionately! That word really bothered me - it is so sloppy. Paris St Germain are known as PSG in the same way that the Scottish Nationalist Party is known as the SNP - it is not an affectionate name it is a more convenient name. Not only that affection is a pretty feeble way of describing the relationship between a fans and their teams - the emotion is more intense than that. I know that one word in a book is statistically insignificant and no basis on which to make a judgement (I could not throw that stone as I, in common with most people, have often written words that are not quite right) but sometimes such things can bring me up short and make me wonder if what I’m reading was written in too much haste. Maybe it was or maybe it something else that happens in some thrillers - a tendency to over-explain background details.

This might be a weakness it can also be a strength . Thrillers can often deal with current issues and use them them as a frame for stories of wrong doing and corruption. In so doing they have a duty to explain what is happening and the forces guiding peoples actions. As such they can be vehicles for state of the nation novels hiding under the guise of formula fiction (in so doing they can tackle bigger themes than more lauded literary novels but that is a debate for another time). But you have to be skilled at digesting your research and knowing how many ’T's to cross and ‘I’s to dot to make the story sing. Sometimes that doesn’t happen and describing what is current at a particular time can leave the book dated. I mean that in a precise sense - not old fashioned, as such, just something that can be precisely dated.

‘Extraordinary People’ was written ten years ago and the plot revolves around a lot of internet searching. Now ten years equals several generations in computer lifetimes. What we now take for granted was not so then. Google for example still had slightly cult status (I do not want to press this too hard and suggest it was hardly known - it was of course widely used in 2005 but it was still a thing of wonder. Remember that kids: Google was once new and exciting. The algorithm that allowed it to rank hits according to relevance - something far superior to anything that went before - was indeed revolutionary. It is thus perfectly plausible for someone to ask in 2005:  “What search engine do you use?” “Google” “Good. The same as me” Nevertheless reading this in 2015 gives you a bit of a jolt as you realise how much of our mental world has changed in a relatively short time. Google is now so much part of the modern world, you don’t even think about it. Today you would not spend much time describing searching on the internet but in this book that happens. As I say things can be dated.

That is not a criticism by the way, I actually like things to be rooted in a particular time and place. At the moment I’m reading ‘Traitors Purse’ by Margery Allingham where there is this short passage “She drove very well, with confidence and with unusual sympathy for the machine. He appreciated that. So many people approach the petrol engine as if it were something vindictive, to be mastered with a firm hand.” That, of course, bears no relation to driving today instead it is a small reminder of how things were 80 years ago. Those details in the fabric of a text are just as revealing as signposts that say 2005 or 1940. However, comparing the two texts, I think that describing cars and driving rather more interesting than trying to explain what  happens in a Google search.

Be that as it may i get the feeling Peter May has done his research and has firmly rooted it, with a sense of place. The central character, Enzo Macleod, is a Scottish forensic scientist who gave up his career for love and relocated to France. Peter May is also a Scotsman living in France and that congruence gives me faith in the way he describes the place. I must also declare a personal interest: for years I have holidayed near Cognac and have a love of the countryside of Southwest France. When reading the book I could picture the places, the town streets, and the heat. Nevertheless there is still the hint of undigested research. The first two sentences of the book are: “The Rues des Deus Ponts cuts across the centre of the Îles St. Louis, from the Pont Marie straddling the Seine on the north side, to the Pont de la Tournelle on the south. The island is no more than two hundred metres across and, side by side with the Île de la Cite, stands at the very heart of old Paris”. It could almost have come from a guide book.However these are details, mere quibbles. 

It is nevertheless it is remarkable that I have written this many words yet mentioned nothing about the plot or the action that animates it. My bad.

The central conceit is a bet made by Enzo Macleod that he could  solve some open historical cases because of advances in forensic science. This is actually quite a neat devise because it sets up a framework for a series but also offers the possibility of playing one period of time against another (though this does not happen to any great extent in this story). 

The first case (this book) is that of a high ranking public official, turned media personality who disappeared. There was no proof proof that he was dead let alone murdered There is no proof that he was dead let alone murdered but as this is a detective story we all know it was foul play. After some rather improbable guesswork bloodstains are found seeped into the some flagstones in a church. DNA, the big forensic advance since the original investigation,  identified the blood as that of the missing person. After some more  guesswork  part of the body is found, in a cask with cryptic clues about where other parts of the body could be found and one of the people responsible. Lots of Googling to interpret the clues and a whiteboard to draw the links and the chase is on and the set-up is repeated a couple more times. That is all I am going to say because I don’t want to give away anymore of that actual plot, except to say it ends with an inevitable showdown with the psychopathic killer.

You will note from the brief description that it is a high-concept novel and also that it is a slightly false prospectus. Apart from DNA to identify the body the investigation owed little to advances in forensics. it was basically Hercule Poirot solving crossword clues.

So the question is did I enjoy it? Yes I did. I read it quite quickly. Did I think it was good? Hmm. Not so sure. That is a totally different question. Some of the action is preposterous and the characters are rather sketchy, i.e. outlined with a broad brush. But that is the interesting thing about detective series there is scope for the central character to evolve as more details are added to the back story. So I will have to reserve judgement until I have read some more.

First published

2006

Link to Last Book

The last book was a psychiatrist unearthing the stories his patients, discovering what was important and what was bothering them. Acting a bit like a detective. So I though I would read some genre detective fiction.

Book 17 - Stephan Grosz, The Examined Life

Some books are both fast and slow.

It is terribly easy to gallop through these short vignettes, wanting to know what happened, find out about a person’s troubles and the lessons we could learn. It is easy because they are short and you can read them in those small gaps in life, such as waiting for a bus, or for a meeting,on the other hand you can stretch out for an evening. So you don’t have to put aside long stretches of time but if you do the cumulative effect of the stories becomes more compelling.  In the end I read this as a couple of snacks and two longer meals. Then it was gone.

Now it has actually been some time since I finished it (my idea of writing one of these posts a week fell by the wayside a long time ago) and so coming back to it I had to remember what I had read. With one exception I had forgotten most of the details. I could remember various incidents and some of the conclusions, but the details were gone. This meant I had to reread but this time I didn’t rush. I thought more about each encounter, tried to align what I was reading with my own experiences and therefore paused and thought. It was a more considered experience and so the book was both fast and slow.

Doing this I remembered something I learnt at school. It is an odd thing that the main lessons I have taken from school have nothing to do with the subjects but were little things that came out of conversations between teachers and the class. It was always slightly to the side of the curriculum, when they talked about their own experiences, passed on a bit of wisdom, or just something they found amusing.  In one such session an english teacher said that the way he got inside a book was to read it quickly, first, as an overview, to get out of the way the question of what happens next. Then comes the main, careful read, paying attention to what had been missed. Afterwards there is a final flick through, picking out random passages, remembering how they fitted in and the incidents surrounding them. Now this is not unusual advice (in fact it’s pretty standard) but it has stayed with me because I believed he was passing on something from his own experience.

And this is what this book is about - the passing on of experience. A therapist extracting enough information from people so they could make sense of their stories. The chapters are short, just a few pages, so that they can focus on a single story with a clear lesson or theme. With 30 stories there are many lessons but only, of course, if you remember them and as I found out it is quite easy for them to merge.

But this brings me back to the chapter I remembered most clearly when I first read the book. It was unusual in not being based on a therapy, instead it was more abstract about the use of praise or criticism in childhood development. But like every other chapter it is anchored by stories of people’s behaviour. It starts with Grosz remembering a nursery assistant giving too much, unwarranted praise to his child and him being at a loss as to how to explain that he would prefer it if she didn’t praise so much. This is at odds with the current climate, which seems to demand the scattering of praise, thinking it makes a child feel good about themselves and is therefore encouraging. But if it is given without thought empty praise, like thoughtless criticism, is an expression of indifference. This point is illustrated with the observation of an 80 year old remedial teacher. 

“I once watched Charlotte with a four year old boy, who was drawing. When he stopped and looked up at her - perhaps expecting praise - she smiled and said, ‘There’s a lot of blue in your picture.’ He replied ‘It’s a pond near my grandmother’s house - there is a bridge.’ He picked up a brown crayon and said ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ Unhurried she talked to the child, but more importantly she observed and listened. She was present.

Being present builds a child’s confidence because it lets the child know that she is worth thinking about. Without this, a child might come to believe that her activity is just a means to gain praise, rather than an end in itself. How can we expect a child to be attentive if we have no been attentive to her?”

Who knows why I remembered this particular passage out of all the others but it is a good example of the virtues of the book and the way it moves from the personal to the general, from observation to context and finishes with an insight. All in a very gentle way. Just like Charlotte Stiglitz, the remedial teacher the book is the result of a lifetime spent paying attention.

First Published

2013

Link to Last Book

Most of the stories are about recovering memories and then making sense of them.

Book 16 - The Medieval Craft of Memory: an anthology of texts and pictures, Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (eds)

This from Hugh of St Victor was from one of the essays:

Child, knowledge is a treasury and your heart its strongbox. As you study all of knowledge store up for yourself good treasures, immortal treasures, incorruptible treasures, which never decay or lose the beauty of their brightness. In the treasure house of knowledge there are various sorts of wealth, and many filing places in the storehouse of your heart. in one place is put gold, in another silver, in another precious jewels. Their orderly arrangement is clarity of knowledge. Dispose and separate each single thing into its own place so you may know what has been placed here and what there. Confusion is the mother of ignorance and forgetfulness, but orderly arrangement illuminates the intelligence and secures memory.

I have nothing to add the quotation is complete in itself.

Publication Date

2003, University of Pennsylvania Press

Link to last Book

The Memory Chalet was the application of medieval memory techniques

Book 15 pt 2 - Tony Judt, The memory Chalet

It was one of those stories that for a few days was everywhere. Young backpackers, for the dare, for the experience, for the memories, for the excitement, for the anecdote, strip off on top of a sacred mountain in Malaysia. Thoughtless of anything except the fun of being socially free whilst enjoying the hit of cold air on bare flesh, there would have seemed little danger of consequence. Instead after the picture was posted on Facebook  there was an earthquake. They were blamed for upsetting the gods with their act of disrespect and they certainly outraged the sensibilities of the locals. Like many thoughtless youngsters they paid no heed to the opinion or feelings of others. They were not malicious. It just didn’t cross their minds. It could have happened to anyone but fate singled them out and they were arrested, spent time in prison and were deported.

On a personal level I am sympathetic as I know we all do stupid things and being thoughtless does not make us morally deficient. I am sure they are good kids. But it does illustrate a wider point of cultural imperialism and how we in the economically favoured West can see the rest of the world as our playground and that we are entitled to arrive with our own values and beliefs and carry on as normal, without heed of local sensitivities.

This chimes with an anecdote in ‘The Memory Chalet’ dating from the late 70s, when as associate dean at King’s College Cambridge, Tony Judt had to a mediate between students who had cavorted naked on the college lawns and a bedder who had been offended by their immodesty. The bedder was upset not only be the nakedness but  because there were girls in the group, they had made no effort to pretend or cover up, and they had laughed at her discomfort. She thus felt humiliated.

This was a breakdown of social understanding. The students unused to the idea servants and service (the antecedent of the Cambridge system of bedders) thought of her as a paid employee and misunderstood the requirement for forbearance and respect. They thought that in an age of equality the institution was a throwback to indentured servitude. She ought to have been better paid and in return not have the right to call-out their bad behaviour. The purely commercial transaction would  release them from the obligation of consideration.

“But, as I think back, it was the bedder who showed a more subtle grasp of the core truth of human exchange. The students, unbeknownst to themselves, were parroting a reduced and impoverished capitalist vision: the ideal of monadic productive units maximising private advantage and indifferent to community or convention. Their bedder knew otherwise. Semiliterate and poorly educated she might have been, but her instincts bought her unerringly to an understanding of social intercourse, the unwritten rules that sustain it, and a priori interpersonal ethics on which it rests. She had certainly never heard of Adam Smith but the author of ‘A Theory of Moral Sentiments” would surely have applauded.”

That was well over 30 years ago and since then the hold of that economic reductionism has increased and understanding everything in terms of self interest has become so embedded it is not even noticeable. So of course you can go to a sacred mountain and take your clothes off.

Book 15 - Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet

I’m reading this on the 758 Greenline bus from Hemel Hempstead to London. This would be inconsequential except for the fact that I’m reading about the young Tony Judt riding the Greenline buses to school. He describes the difference between them and the normal red buses and how, because they served the outer areas, they were slightly more middle class, and how class differences were still quite marked in the 50s. Their routes crossed London from one side to another, with limited stops so they were like long distance coaches and so they had a little extra glamour. I can remember those buses from my childhood and how they felt, in some strange way a little more exotic than the normal double decker. Any romance is long gone and all that remains is a service, now run by Arriva, which merely retains the name. There are a few routes from outlying towns into Victoria and I’m lucky that one serves my town. I can get into London easily but don’t really think much more about it. Nevertheless it is an immediate connection with what I am reading but not the only one. I’m only a few years younger than the author and share his sense of the times, even if our life experiences are different.

This is a strange little book, written near the end of Tony Judt’s life, full of discrete memories, each 8-10 pages in length. (Feuilletons he calls them - I had to look the word up. Apparently it comes from the section in French political papers set aside for lighter articles of gossip or reviews). Physically small it feels bigger in the mind because I frequently pause and relate what I have read to what I might know.

The circumstances of its writing make it heroic. He was reaching the end stages of a degenerative disease, ALS, which had rendered him quadriplegic. He described the progress of first losing the physical ability to write, then the voice and then being condemned to long hours of silent immobility - but with a clear mind. For someone, whose life had been built on the ability to communicate, I cannot begin to understand the frustration and despair. Yet his life up to that point had stocked his mind full and this book is the result of sifting through that store, through the sleepless nights. He ends the introductory chapter by saying he is grateful that his life had left him with such a rich seam to mine and that despite the illness he still considered himself lucky. “It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck.”

It is here I pause and wonder how I would cope with such incapacity. I find it hard to imagine how I would cope with being so trapped, so incapacitated. So here I am just a few pages into the book and in the space of a few, economical words, stumped and staring into space, trying to think how I would maintain a sense of self and what I would value. As I said earlier my progress through the book is frequently interrupted.

I am not yet beyond the introductory chapter. Take this about feelings of frustration with unproductive nights:

“ To be sure, you can say to yourself, come now: you should be proud of the fact that you have kept your sanity - where is it written that you should be productive as well? And yet I feel a certain guilt at having submitted to fate so readily. Who could do better in the circumstances? The answer, of course, is a “better me” and it is surprising how often we ask that we be better versions of our present self - in the full knowledge of just how difficult it was getting this far.”

He transferred these feelings into a character: the alm-uncle, who glowers from beneath furrowed brow and is not a happy man. A perennially dissatisfied alter-ego, who “sits there smoking a Gitanes, cradling a glass of whisky, turning the pages of a newspaper” “Damn” I thought “apart from the smoking that’s me pretty much nailed down”. I think I need to take stock.

And that is what this book is about: taking stock. What I like best about it is that it is sticky, like burrs that attach to you clothing during a country walk.


P.S.
The idea of a memory chalet follows the mnemonic technique of early ages where events could not easily be recorded on paper. He mentions the work of Frances Yeats and Jonathan Spence describing how people from medieval times would create memory palaces whereby thoughts and images were placed in different places in the envisioned rooms so that the person could close their eyes and walk through their story. Judt did not choose a palace, instead he fixed upon a particular chalet, a small pensione, in the village of Chesières, Switzerland, home to some fond childhood memories. As he explains “In order for the memory palace to work as a storehouse of infinitely reorganised and regrouped recollections, it needs to be a building of extraordinary appeal.”

I have heard of this technique before but have never tried to use it. Instinctively it feels a difficult skill to master but Judt sees it as the easiest of devices, almost too mechanical. Perhaps I need to find out more.

Link to the last book

Both CLR James and Tony Judt are famous scholars who have written semi-memoirs. James organised his around cricket, particularly West Indian cricket but a lot of it is about his own story. Judt has no great organising theme (apart from his chalet) but to my mind there is a link.

Publication date
2010

Book 14 - Beyond a Boundary pt 2

Beyond a Boundary is a work of recollection, an oldish man looking back at his obsession with cricket: integrating his own memories with things he learnt from other sources. He started it at some point in the 1950s but when it was published in 1963 he was 62, so the  descriptions of single strokes seen when he was a young boy, the cut of Arthur Jones for example, are images that had been with him for decades. I find this remarkable and can only wish my memory was so vivid and I had such clarity but the book makes clear can only happen with early and rigorous training. Cricket filled his mind and tested his body from a young age.  “I was reading cricket and looking at it so critically so early that casual experiences which would have passed unnoticed stayed with me and I worked on them as if on some historical problem” (p47).

He played the game to a high standard and although he played with some of the great players he described in the book he had the awareness to know he was not quite good enough. “ By the time I left school at the age of eighteen I was a good defensive bat and could have held my own at any English public school side. I could bowl fast-medium with a high action, swing the ball late from leg and break it with shoulder and finger action from off”(p45). “I had bowing gifts and they could have been developed but the pace, the length, the command, the stamina, the concentration, I did not have and never had. Now and then even I could bring it off for an over or two. The great gain was that it taught me how to watch.” (p47). This is the reason the book is so good. He understands what he sees on a cricket pitch, can work out the subtleties of the ebb and flow of fortune, can see the angles and know what is being attempted yet knows that the game is mostly in the mind  and as such also reveals character. In the same way that the best football managers were often not the best players, the most insightful writers on sport need not have played at the highest level.  They just need to have played enough to recognise what is going on and have an obsessive curiosity about what they are watching.

One of the great pleasure of the book is the analytical description of West Indian cricketers from a bygone era. As I read some of the names meant something: Learie Constantine and Frank Worrell. George Headley rang a bell but Wilton St Hill and George John were completely unknown. About all of them though there was personal insight. Constantine was obviously a man of virtue as well as a great cricketer and was of great help to James in building his career and so we learn of his character as well as his prowess. George Headley though is talked about purely in terms of his greatness as a batsman and what it was that set him apart:

Great batsmen are the same, they are not like you or me. An experience is automatically registered and henceforth functions as a permanent part of the organism.
Similarly with placing. For George, to make a stroke was to hit the ball (he had loud scorn for ‘the pushers’) and to hit it precisely in a certain place.. He couldn’t think of a stroke without thinking of exactly where it was going. Whenever he scored a century and runs were not urgent he practised different strokes at the same ball, so as to be sure to command the placing of the ball where there was no fiejdsman… This placing to a shifting field must also be to a substantial degree automatic. Having taken glance round and sized up what the bowler is trying to do, the great batsman puts the ball away more by reflex than conscious action (p188)

But that reflex took a lot of conscious effort. The night before a Test Headley would rarely sleep more than an hour or two. he spent the time visualising how he would play his innings and mentally rehearse his shots. A lot of modern sports psychology extols the benefits of pre-visualisation but it is not a new discovery. It is one of the pleasures of reading older books to discover that it is not a new thing.  This book shows, above everything else, how hard people have always thought about the game and who everyone James wrote about had their own profound insights.

Book 14 - C L R James, Beyond a Boundary

The weeks in this blog have stretched longer and longer until I will be lucky to do a book a month. I half expected this to happen as things get in the way. This time it was being away in Scotland, visiting distilleries and mostly reading about whisky and birds, none of that reading will feature here. Instead my follow-on book from the cricket humour of Peter Tinniswood, is something that is not only referred to as one of the best cricket books but also has a claim to be one of the best books on sport ever written. This is because it is about more than a game. It is part memoir, part portraits of cricketers who were significant personalities, part social history and the evolution of attitudes to race, and part aesthetic theory.

C L R James could write this because not only was he a social theorist, historian and essayist, with a role in the public life of the West Indies, he was also someone who had been obsessed by cricket from a young age and played the game to a very high standard. High enough to be offered a place in a Lancashire League team (and know he didn’t have the personality to bear that responsibility) But he was also marked out at an early age as an intellectual. One of the shocking revelations (shocking in the sense that it made me sit up and blink, not that it was terrible)  was that his favourite book from the age of eight was Vanity Fair and that he reread it so many times he could challenge people to read out a random passage and he would complete it. But alongside this he stored and filed clippings about cricket happening in England, devoured and organised the stats, and learnt about great figures from the past, as well as being outside playing thee game. From early ages are habits formed!

This book is so rich I am going to blog about it in two parts. in the second I will talk about some of his observations about cricket and cricketers but in this I will talk about a tiny little detail, almost an aside, that resonated with me because of the election Ed Miliband has just lost.

it was in a section where James was describing how many of his his values were actually formed on the cricket pitch and how as a black, scholarship boy in a colonial school he imbibed the attitudes of Thomas Arnold and the Nineteenth Century public school ethos.

“But as soon as we stepped on to the cricket or football field, all was changed. We were a motley crew. The children of some white officials and white business men, middle class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys, some of whose parents still spoke broken English,  Indian boys, some of whose parents could speak no English at all, and some poor black boys who had one exhibitions or whose parents had has starved or toiled on plots of agricultural land and were spending their hard-earned money  on giving their their eldest son an education. Yet we rapidly learnt to obey the umpire’s decision without question, however irrational it was. We learnt to play with the team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip in that we did not complain about ill fortune. We did not denounce failures, but  ‘Well tried’ or Hard luck’ came easily to our lips. We were generous to  our opponents and congratulated them on victories, even when we knew they did not deserve it… We did not obey every rule. But the majority of boys did. the best and most respected boys were precisely the ones who always kept them.”

The idea of playing by the rules, of not being bumptious in victory or churlish in defeat, of being honest and straightforward, seep into the bones if taught early and consistently enough. (I recognise them, they were also part of my education even if I only went to a grammar school. They are still deep within me). For James they are at his moral core.

“One afternoon in 1956, being at that time deep in this book, I sat in a hall in Manchester, listening to Mr. Aneurin Bevan. Mr Bevan had been under much criticism for not playing with the team and had answered his critics. He devoted them  and bought his audience to a pitch of high receptivity and continuous laughter by turning inside out and timing holes in such concepts as ‘playing with the team’, ‘keeping a stiff upper lip’, ‘playing with a straight bat’ and the rest of them. I to had had my fun with them on the public platform often enough but by 1956 I was involved in a more respectful re-examination and I believe I was the solitary person among the those many hundreds who was not going the whole way with Mr Bevan. perhaps there was one other.  When Mr Bevan had enough of it he tossed the ball lightly to his fellow speaker, Mr Michael Foot. ‘Michael is an old public schoolboy and knows more about these things than I.’ Mr Foot smiled, but if I’m not mistaken the smile was cryptic.
I smiled too but not whole heartedly. In the midst of the fireworks Mr Bevan had dropped a single sentence that had tolled like a bell. ‘I did not join the Labour Party, I was bought up in it.’ And I had been brought up in the public school code."

It was the reference to Michael Foot that caught me.I remembered the early 1980s and him doing his best to hold the Labour party together - a party riven by deep personal and ideological differences. He was the only person respected enough by both wings to have any chance of doing such a thing but he could not win and in the end was badly defeated in the 83 election. He was of course traduced and maligned in the press at the time.  But all I could see was an honourable man trying to do his best for the team, in other words trying to uphold his public school code (that code by the way doesn’t stop you being marxist, anarchist, libertarian, high tory, liberal, christian fundamentalist, or anything else. It is just a code about how you conduct yourself with your beliefs). Politics is known as being a dirty trade with a relativistic relationship to the truth but there there are still many good people trying to do the right thing. Michael Foot always struck me as being one of those, as does Ed Miliband. They both lost, of course, so I don’t know what that says about the use of the old code of values. Perhaps that times ohave changed (or more likely) they were always more honoured in the breach.

Miliband didn’t go to a public school though. His opponent David Cameron did and either standards have slipped and the ethos is no longer taught or Cameron is more Flashman than Tom Brown.  There was a small but indicative example of him 'not playing the game' in the use of the Liam Byrne note . When labour lost the 2010 election Liam Byrne as the outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury left a jokey note for his successor ‘Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam’. it was a little private joke within a Westminster tradition (in 1964 Reginald Maudling left a similar note ’Good luck, old cock ... Sorry to leave it in such a mess’). Making it public trampled on tthe convention and was bad form. Definitely not ‘playing the game’, yet David Cameron waived the piece of paper around on the campaign trail, piously proclaiming that it was no joke.

To me it not only felt like the breaking of a confidence (it was definitely meant to be a private communication) but it was also used dishonest because it was repeatedly misquoted.  ‘I’m afraid there is no money left.’ was the phrase used in speeches. That ‘left’ might seem like a small, unimportant, detail but it actually changes the meaning. It it implies that there was a pot that has all been spent (i.e. implying profligacy), instead of there being no money because of the state of the economy after a banking collapse.

You can say this is a small incident that means nothing in itself. Politics is a form of warfare where anything is acceptable if it helps you win. But to me it’s the small details that reveal character.

This is one of the times of ‘Beyond a Boundary’ where James will, for example, dwell lovingly on a single stroke. More of that though when I talk about the cricket.



First published
1963

Link with last book
Cricket

Book 13 - Peter Tinniswood, Tales From A Long Room

Bill Bryson is an amusing writer who occasionally makes you laugh but I don’t think of him as primarily a humorist. Instead he is someone who can make droll observations. So for this weeks book I turned to someone I consider a great comic stylist, someone who could mix absurdity, exaggeration, puns, particularly on names, with beautiful descriptive phrases. Just as much a stylist as Wodehouse - and you can’t raise the bar much higher than that. Unlike Wodehouse, most of his output was for television or radio; scripts rather than novels but he did write some books. Although they all seem to be out of print at the moment they are quite widely available second hand.

Tales from a Long Room was first published in 1981 and most of the jokes and references are based on the golden eras of pre and post war cricket, mixed with cultural and entertainment figures. I am not sure it matters much if you know who the people were as their names are used as absurdist colour rather than being comments on the real person. The tone can be gauged from the introduction

I was born in winter
I love summer
My friend the Brigadier was born in Arlott St Johns.
He loves fine wine, Vimto, quails in season, barrage balloons, blotting paper, E.W. Swanton and his sister Gloria.
He recounted these tales to me during the course of a long convivial summer spent in his favourite corner of a long room ‘somewhere in England’.

Sometimes though it does help to have, at least, a passing knowledge of the people being referred to:

There is a regrettable tendency these days for what I call ‘public nosey parkering.
Fed by the unceasing efforts of journalists, broadcasters and similar scum, the British public have developed an insatiable appetite for tittle-tattle of the most trivial nature concerning people, who for one reason or another, happen to be in the ‘limelight’
What possible interest can it be to know that E. W. Swanton wears maroon corduroy underpants and has in his study a complete collection of the records of Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas?
Is the world a better place for knowing that despite all the evidence to the contrary Mr Robin Marlar is a thoroughly nice man?
Are we uplifted in soul and spirit by the knowledge, that despite his constant protestations, Mr Ned Sherrin did indeed once play rugby league football for Rochdale Hornets? - the match in which Miss Caryl Brahms was sent for an early bath for butting an opponent.

To anybody who has heard the plummy, pompous tones of E. W. Swanton dispensing his lofty judgement of the days play, the idea of a secret passion for one of the Merseybeat groups is wonderfully nonsensical. As is the thought of the wit, bon viveur, impresario and lover of musicals, Ned Sherrin, playing rugby league. Perhaps as knowledge of these people fades the humour dates. But I hope not. I hope people will still appreciate the glory of prose such as this:

Why on earth did I ever marry her?
Certainly there was a physical attraction. That I cannot deny
I remember to this day the surge of emotion that coursed through my veins when I first caught sight of her.
The rose garden of dear old Castle Arlott slumbering with honey-laden bees.
The summer breeze lisping through the timid tracery of the delicate Frindall tree.
The Benaud bush aflame in scarlet bloom. The phlox Lakerensis flowering hazily, lazily, benignly blue.
And into my sight she glided; a tall, slim, sylph like figure dressed in purest white.
My heart missed a beat.
Sap rose in my loins.
Dear God, she was the spitting image of Herbert Sutcliffe.

Link to Last Book
Humour

Date first published 
1981

P.S.
Apologies for the photo but the cover of my copy has faded somewhat, over time.

Book 12 - Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods

The last book was a memoir of personal recovery and how a hike along the Pacific Crest Trail enabled a young girl reconnect with who she had once been and find the strength to grow into who she wanted to become. This book couldn’t be more different in tone and intent, even if it is about a similarly long through-hike of the East Coast equivalent: the Appalachian Trail. Bill Bryson started his adventure from the place Cheryl Strayed wanted to arrive. He was already a successful author, and settled in his life. As far as we know he had no great demons to face down in the wild, no need for a long physical challenge in order to find his centre. One of the walks was a slightly desperate throw of the dice, the other more of a whim, probably with a book in mind. You might not find much personal redemption in Bryson but there is more humour and information about his surroundings.

I honestly do not know what I can write here that will add anything to what is already known about Bill Bryson and his books. He is an institution. An author used a a reference point in the quotes on the cover of other books; someone who defines his own category. He writes about places or things with humour and although he seems to place himself in the centre of the story, deep down it is not really about him. The narrative might be about his actions and reactions but he doesn’t go deep in his own psyche. He is more interested in what he sees (which is as it should be). I find it confusing when he is described as a humorist; yes he can be funny but he also does his research and is informative. It’s a neat trick: as a reader you learn stuff whilst being amused. It’s what keeps you going and what sets him apart. He has great skill in presenting information, which in other hands could be dry, and make it come alive. Take for example this about trees:

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper thin layers of tissue, the phloem, xylem, and cambium, just beneath the bark, which together form a moist sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves. These diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do this is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in the forest lifts massive volumes of water - several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day - from its roots to its leaves. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water to that of a single tree. And lifting water is just one of the many jobs that phloem, xylem, and cambium perform

I will never look at trees in the same way again.

But Bryson can also be a bit spiky. His contempt for the National Park Service, which maintains the trail, is a recurring theme.

Here in the Smokies, not far from where Katz and I now trod, the Park Service in 1957 decided to ‘reclaim’ Abrams Creek, a tributary of the Little Tennessee River, for rainbow trout. To that end, biologists dumped extravagant quantities of a poison called rotenone into 15 miles of creek. Within hours, tens of thousands of dead fish were floating on the surface like autumn leaves - what a proud moment that must be for a trained naturalist. Among the 31 species of Abrams Creek fish that were wiped out was one called smoky madam, which scientists had never seen before. Thus the Park Service biologists managed the wonderfully unusual accomplishment of discovering and eradicating a new species of fish in the same instant.

The payoff at the end might be wonderfully ironic but it is the “what a proud moment that must be for a trained naturalist” that is really cutting (especially with the substitution of naturalist for biologist).

I came away from this book with an increased appreciation of the skill with which Bryson puts his books together and the craftsmanship of his writing. It makes an interesting comparison with Wild, in the one I was deeply impressed by the story, in the other by the way the story was told.

Date of first publication
1997

Link to last book

This is pretty obvious. The Appalachian Trail is the east coast equivalent of the Pacific Crest Trail so the two books make an interesting comparison, especially as both the walks must have happened at roughly the same time. Although Wild was published only a couple of years ago and A Walk in the Woods dates from 1997, Strayed started her walk in 1995.

Book 11 - Cheryl Strayed, Wild:a journey from lost to found

Wild starts dramatically when, 38 days into her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed knocks one of her boots down a steep mountain slope into the forest canopy below. In shock and anger she throws the other one after it. “What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing. It is useless, an orphan forevermore and I could take no mercy on it.”

At that point, only a couple of paragraphs in, I worried. “Orphan?” You cannot call the remaining boot an orphan - it makes no sense. Things did not look good; could I trust the writer not to over write? But breathe in - relax - let go of hasty judgements - don’t let the grumpy old man out of his box. All you have to do is read one word after another to see how far you will get - just like going for a walk. In the end I was glad I did as I finished the book with enthusiasm. I’m a sucker for stories of redemption and this is good because it focusses on one event: a journey of courage and endurance; a period of withdrawal from normal life, which allowed wounds to heal and a life to be reset.

When she made the journey Strayed was 26 and it had been 4 years since her mother died. The use of orphan to describe the boot was a link to herself. After her mother died she had drifted around, useless, unable to keep the remaining family (two siblings and a step dad) together, pushing away her husband so they divorced, falling into using heroin. It had become unbearable. By chance she saw a book on the Pacific Crest Trail, something she was unaware of, and something grabbed her imagination. Her subconscious was telling her what she needed. Without ever having backpacked before (as opposed to day hikes) she decided this was something she had to do. It might have seemed remarkably foolhardy but from where she was what was there to lose?

The story of her preparedness, is nuanced. It is easy to get the impression she was clueless but this is not the case, it is just that before doing it she did not know all of what would be involved. She was not an urban softie who thought it sounded like a neat idea she could do on a whim. She had been bought up in the countryside and knew the outdoors. She also had the guide to the trail and thoroughly planned her route and what would be involved, to the extent that she prepared supply boxes and gave them to a friend to post to various pick-up points along the way. It was not a matter of waking up one summer morning and wandering off - if nothing else she had to work hard to save money from her waitressing job. It was a thought out plan. On the other hand she had not been on a backpacking trip where you have to carry everything with you and what that would mean in terms of strength and speed. The book is about how she coped with that and learnt to know what she was doing. Just by carrying on she became more able to carry on.

It is not a book about how to walk a long distance trail, though you will learn quite a lot from it (especially the need to pack as light as possible!). It is really about how it is possible to do something because you feel you have no alternative and that you simply must, even though it might be overwhelming. In the motel, at the very beginning of the walk, she packed her bag for the very first time and found that she could not lift it to sling it over her shoulders; she had to crawl into it and lever herself upright. She then wondered how she was going to walk for a hundred days with that load but that did not stop her. She walked out of the room and began - because there was no other way.Once you are in the wilderness there is no other way. You have to go on. You have only your own physical reserves and the pace you can walk. There are on other aids and if you are alone there is none else you can turn to in tight moments. You must find extra resources from within. This she did and the reward at the end was knowing she had those resources.

One of the reasons I like the book is that it is not overwritten (as I thought it might be at the beginning). It is well written and it doesn’t make too many claims for the transformative effects of what happened (though the transformations are there). She does not say she became a new person, or was reborn, instead it is more about finding the person she was before she became lost after her mother’s death. I was worried that it might be a bit New Agey but it is not,  though there are a couple of New Agey encounters. This is good, I like my literature to keep in touch with the earth even if the subject is essentially emotional. It may overtly be about walking but really it is about walking as a way into emotional truth. As she said to one of the people she met:

“Thank you for all your help with lightening my pack” I said to Albert when we had a moment alone before he departed. He looked wanly up at me from his bed on the tarp. “I couldn’t have done it myself.”
He gave me a weak smile and nodded [Albert was suffering with a stomach bug during this encounter]  “By the way” I said “I wanted to tell you - about why I decided to hike the PCT? I got divorced, and also about four years ago my mom died - she was only 45  and she got cancer suddenly and died. It’s been a hard time in my life and I’ve sort of gotten off track. So I …” He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. “I thought it would help me to find my centre, to come out here.” I made a crumpled gesture with my hans, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.
“Well, you've got your bearings now, haven’t you? he said, and sat up, his face lighting up despite his nausea.

That is also something that should be mentioned about this story. It is not just about her being alone and finding herself. She met many wonderful people who offered help and support. It is a story about decency.

But back to the beginning and that boot. The scene is true and a tease. True because it happened and she had to walk for a stretch in tapped up sandals but also a tease because the boot loss was not absolute. The boots were had been too small and messed up her feet. Other people had told  her her they were too small but her thinking was that she couldn’t do anything about it because she didn’t have the money, until someone told her that the shop she bought them from, REI, had a total satisfaction guarantee, and if the boot were wrong they would change them. They actually mailed her, free of charge,  a new pair, a size bigger, which she picked up later. A little amazing story, within the bigger amazing story and a reason, perhaps, why the boots deserved to become a character in their own right.

Date first published
2012

Link to last book

Professional cycling, among other things, is about long distance endurance and the will to carry on. This is another take on that spirit from someone who is not an exceptional athlete.

Book 10 - Ellis Bacon & Lionel Birnie (eds), The Cycling Anthology vol. 5

I have a good local reason for reading The Cycling Anthology: editor Lionel Birnie lives a few miles up the road, in Harpenden. A combination of cycling and localism is irresistible.

The idea is simple: allow cycling journalists to wander the byways of the sport rather than being restricted to the main highways of race reports, big names and doping. It pays off because there are so many rarely told stories both from cycling’s history and amongst today’s peloton (there might be a limited number of winners, who are the focus of our attention, but there are so many other stories).  Also I believe that, in the English speaking countries at least, in a golden age of cycling writing. As the sport has moved from an obsession for slightly cranky enthusiasts to something more widely recognised, there has been a chance to explain to a new audience the current workings of the sport and the glories of past heroes. It’s as if members of an underground clique have emerged, blinking, into the daylight to find that people are ready to listen to what they have to say. Now any self respecting bookshop has a shelf of good book. Cycling is cool, cycling is increasingly middle class, to be cool you have tone informed, and so there is a demand for literature

This book, or should I say these books as we are at number five in the series, are probably aimed at the enthusiast. In the beginning they were sold through cycling shops and were a bit outside the mainstream but they have obviously crossed over, as they are now published by Random House. So what do you get?  In the current edition there are ten articles, half of which are related to the Tour de France and of the rest most are historical: cycling in World War One, the search for a past rider, the history of an old team. Eight of the authors are British, one is French and one American. As with any collection, there are hits and misses. I don’t want to dwell on pieces I didn’t like so well. (Oh OK then - I wasn’t that impressed by a piece on panache that where the writer was not really sure what it meant but whatever it was it could never apply to Thomas Voeckler - that just seemed a bit mean). Instead I will mention a couple of the stories that really caught my eye. The first was about the Linda McCartney cycling team from the 1990s who talked a good match, promised to challenge at the highest level and wore the badges of big money sponsors, but collapse when the talk was shown for what it was - just talk. There was no big money, the team was run by a fraudster and sponsor’s names had been used without agreement. There were good riders and but no infrastructure to support them. Promises and dreams, promises and dreams and many of us sporting romantics are prone to fall for them. The interesting thing though, is that only a few years later many of the same promises were made by British Cycling when they formed Team Sky but this time it was organised, managed and funded, and it succeeded.  Reading the story Linda McCartney just hammers home the message that to succeed you need the right structure and proper management. You can’t wing it and hope things work out in the end, or rather you probably can for a short time but eventually things will fall apart. Going back to the previously mentioned article, it could be said that Linda McCartney had a certain amount of panache because they had victories in spite of their flakiness but Sky don’t have panache because they are more calculating. Doing things properly sometimes means you lose the love.

The other article I particularly liked is about Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet who was in charge of the Tour de France for just one year. What a weird story it is. From 1903 to 1986 only three people had run the race: the first was Henri Desgrange, the founder, after the war it was taken over by his deputy Jacques Goddet, who was joined in 1962 by Félix Lévitan, who looked after the financial side. When they left, after some scandal about the cross subsidising of a failed Tour of America, it was thought a fresher, more businesslike approach was needed and, for whatever reason, they appointed Naquet-Radiguet, who had no previous connection with the sport. The outsider, coming into a set-up that had been running in its own way for decades, with his own ideas, is a classic recipe for jealousies, politicking and turmoil (think only of the succession of long term football managers like Alex Fergusson or Matt Busby). And so it was, Naquet-Radiguet lasted only one year. But, and to my mind this is a very big but, he should be given the credit for setting up the most exciting finish in the race’s history. He didn’t like the tradition of the last day being a procession and thought it should be raced until the end. he shook things up with a final time trial on the Champs Elysées. As it so happened, in 1989 the two leaders were close enough for this to matter and for there to be an outside chance it might change the result. Laurence Fignon led Greg LeMond by 50 seconds, which should have been enough but you never know, especially as Fignon did not seem to be as focussed on the disciplines of time trailing as LeMond. His pony tail flapped out behind him, causing an increase in drag (LeMond wore an aero helmet), he was  on the drops (LeMond had aero bars). Small things matter and LeMond won by 8 seconds - the smallest margin there has ever been, and probably ever will be. Brilliant. If that was Naquet-Radiguet legacy than that would have been enough but he saw that the race needed to adapt to the modern media and sharpen its image. Something his successors have been successful in doing ever since.

The Cycling Anthology doesn't have a theme and one article doesn't lead into another; they all stand alone. But these two essays are linked in that they both deal with times of transition. Linda McCartney happened at a time when British cycling was emerging from its old isolationist, amateurish ways and embracing the sport with a new attitude. A transformation which would eventually lead to the development of champions. Naque-Radiguet was about a change from the old guard and some of its old ways. Times of transition are hard on the people involved but usually throw up good stories. The cusp is an interesting place to be.

P.S. By coincidence the pieces I have highlighted were written by two of the three hosts of The Cycling Podcast, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe (the other host is Richard Moore). If anyone has the slightest interest in professional cycling I would thoroughly recommend it.

Date of publication
2014

Book consequences

At first sight there might seem little connection between this week and last: cycling and a polemic about the virtues of working with your hands but there is a clear link. The bike is wonderful because it is one of the few remaining machines where all the working parts are in clear view and you know how it is meant to work. It is something you can take apart and put back together again, something you can understand. It is the exactly what Matt Crawford was talking about

Book 9 - Matthew Crawford, The Case For Working With Your Hands

“He picked up a chunk of wood and, putting it to the lathe, worked a foot pedal and held a sharp, bent knife to the rapidly revolving wood. With surprising speed he cut the outer shape of the bowl; then, taking a different knife, he cut out the inside as you might cut the inside of a turnip. The bowl was roughly finished.
‘It wants titivating up of course,’ he explained, ‘and the inside will make another smaller bowl.’
The alder sapling sprang back, vibrating: a clumsy, primitive, marvellously efficient invention, and in it - and many more now lost to us - the secrets of those beautiful handcrafts of antiquity which remain to astonish us and to confound our modern machinists.
‘Boys won’t learn this now,’ he said ‘It’s not as easy as it looks, and unless you learn when you’re a lad you can never catch the knack of it.’

That was H.V. Morton, in last week’s book, describing the work someone he described as the last bowl turner in England. Using a lathe and methods dating back to Anglo Saxon times it seemed like the end of a line, but sometimes things die off only to be revived slightly differently.  There is now a growing interest in recovering ancient crafts both out of curiosity, an attempt to reconnect with history, and as an antidote to the modern sedentary/virtual world.  Rediscovering the feeling of making something by hand is an experience to be valued. Here is an example of a bowl making course you can go on to be part of the tradition.

This leads directly on to this week’s book in which Matthew Crawford examines why he has found more satisfaction and even mental stimulus in manual labour than knowledge work. As someone with a PhD who has earned a high salary at a think tank and given it up to open a motorcycle repair shop, he is placed to make this comparison like few others. It is not about the mysticism of high end craftsmanship but is instead about everyday trades like an electrician or a motor mechanic. However many of the satisfactions of a craftsman and tradesman are shared, such as: control over what you yourself are doing, an objective standard to know if you have done a good job, and the feeling of doing something useful.

His thesis is that modern knowledge work is as alienating as the labour described by Marx, whereas skilled manual worker (i.e. outside the factory) actually has more autonomy. They make their own judgements of the physical world, using the evidence of hand and eyes, guided by knowledge and experience. It is same sort of encounter with the natural world as gave rise to natural science. The carpenter for example learns the characteristics of types of wood and their fitness for different tasks, he also learns the general skills of angles, what is plumb, load baring and stability. This is aside from his ingrained physical skill in executing the task. In early Western tradition sophia (wisdom) meant skill and you can see the connection. But we have now lost the concrete sense of the original and put more of our eggs into the theoretical basket.

If we accept this how should we see work? Not only should we value the practical, we need to  look again at offices and see what a person has to do to be connected to a task in a way that makes them feel useful. Directly useful, not as part of an amorphous team effort. It is about individual agency. But this is not happening,  the social river is rushing in the opposite direction. Higher academic qualifications are increasingly being demanded just to get on the the ladder and checklist, plans and inspections constrain the practice of professionals. Personal qualities are emphasised rather than specific skills. This book raises its skinny fist at that trend.

But is this trend new or has it just grown bigger and more rigid? This quote from Aristotle (On Generation and Corruption) suggests our ways of thought don’t change much.

“Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussion has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatise on the basis of a few observations”

I think that describes the problem with most of what I read on social media!

But this quote goes to the heart Crawford’s argument about skill and why it needs to be celebrated: skill = the ability to see. More than once the author says that a more experience mechanic has often pointed out something that was right in front of his face but which he lacked the knowledge to see. The raw sensual data is the same but without a framework of meaning features become invisible.

“The cognitive psychologist speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate … in the real world problems do not present themselves unambiguously. Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you might be mistaken. this is an ethical virtue.
Iris Murdoch writes that to respond to the world justly, you first have to perceive it clearly and this requires a kind of unslelfing. “Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue”  … This attempt is never fully successful because we are preoccupied with our own concerns. But getting outside her head is the task the artist sets herself, and this is the mechanics task too. Both, if they are good, use their imagination “not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.” This is the exhilaration the mechanic gets when he finds the underlying cause of a problem…
Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility .. our vision is improved by acting, as this brings any defect in our perception to vivid awareness.”

I can nod along with this and lament the conditions of the modern workplace but the theoretical passages are not what is most vivid about this book. For me it comes to life when it describes his own practical experiences. I loved the way he described the problems he had fixing an old Honda and felt it fitting that a book that extols the virtues of the practical is actually at its best when directly describing it.

Date of publication
2009

Link to last book

The description of a disappearing craft leads naturally to a book that propounds the virtues of trade work.

Book 8 - H V Morton, In Search of England

I chose this book because I thought it would tell me about England between the wars and be a link with the descriptions of the Dorest countryside in ‘Rogue Male’.  It might have been written a decade earlier but there would still be similarities. That was the idea and it seemed good at the time. But I picked it up, read a few pages, put it down and thought I would have to write a post on why I couldn’t finish it.

There is nothing wrong with not finishing a book. It is a strange sense of duty that tells you to struggle on, when you are getting nether enjoyment or edification. It does you no good and it certainly doesn’t accumulate you any celestial points. (Tim Parks dealt with this eloquently in ‘Where I’m Reading From’  where he recounts a letter of appreciation from a fellow author who finished by saying that it hadn’t read the last fifty pages because at that point the novel seemed satisfactorily over). But this book was not satisfactorily over, it had not satisfactorily begun. I didn’t want to continue because I had taken against the narrator. I didn’t like the blustering, breezy tone, the patronising way he described others, his attitude to women and the alarm bells that rang in my head when a sentence in the introduction talked of an average city family disappearing into ‘racial anaemia’. A travel book is a trip and if you need to like, or at least trust your companion. So I put it down.

But it seemed a bit week to give up so easily, I thought I ought to try again, just to be sure. and the second time, for whatever reason, I found it more amusing than irritating and was happy to continue. Instead of thinking of the author as some golf club boor, I saw him as a mixture of Mr Pooter and Mr Cholmondley-Warner - in other words a comic creation.

I took out the binoculars and saw a gallows standing up there, a mark for several counties, firm and unmistakable, as if ready for a hanging.
A gibbet!
Before climbing up the steep road I thought that I would ask a few questions. I stopped a labourer on a bicycle.
‘What is that on the hill?’
‘Gallows’ he said suspiciously.
‘Who was hanged there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘When was it last used?’
‘Dunno.’
Have you ever heard any story about it?’
‘No.’

Before I had thought this a piece of nonsense. Now I found it funny. And the breeziness of the prose which before seemed bluff I now saw as narrative drive. Now I am half convinced that some of the humour is intentional:

[another casual conversation, this time on Plymouth Hoe about Drake and the Armada]
‘I would rather have lived in that age than any other,’ said my companion. He was a frill-looking man, as frail looking almost as Nelson.
‘The world must have seemed such a big place then. If one could have gone with Drake in 1577 in the Golden Hind!’
‘Ah! Now the Mauritania is due tomorrow!’
‘Yes’ he sighed.
‘How,’ I said ‘would you like to have burnt up Vera Cruz, to have sacked the churches, and driven the natives below the hatches, and the held a church parade?’
‘Splendid!’ He whispered ‘That was the spirit of the time … Well, I must be going home.’
He said good night and I watched his lank, dyspeptic, blood-thirsty figure fade into the distance.

As I read on I became more aware of other virtues. There are interesting anecdotes from the past and myths associated with some of the ancient buildings. Morton also has a good eye and can write fine descriptive prose:

A curious characteristic of English scenery is its ability to change itself in a distance of a few miles. Towards Devon the rugged Cornish rocks give way to a smoother, more comfortable countryside, a holier, less disturbing vista of green and red fields.
‘In England once again!’ I whispered as I saw a real Devon man ploughing a field, the colour of red ochre where the earth was newly turned and of cocoa where the sun had dried it. A different country.

I like that detail of the colour of the soil.

But the book is not a report of the nation in 1927. Instead it is a romance - a longing for the tales of the past, of King Arthur and Saxons. It is infused with a particular myth of rural Englishness that has all but died out now (except in the collective imagination of UKIP). Perhaps the myths have a particular potency because of the time the book was written,  only a decade after the end of the Great War. After all the destruction, keeping hold of a picture of what was worth fighting for would have been a pressing concern.

So in the end the book was worth reading but I know that whatever the ironical distance I maintained I still found the underlying attitudes of the author uncongenial. It cannot be shrugged off by saying he was a product of his time and our attitudes have moved on and he must be cut some slack. There is still something a bit off, especially when he talks about women. Nevertheless it shouldn’t obscure the fact that there is still quite a lot of fun to be had

Date of first publication
1927

Link to last book

Rogue Male contained good descriptions of the English countryside between the wars. This follows on.

Book 7 - Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

In last week’s book Tim Parks asked the question whether we read to be of our time or to know more of the past or other places. It is rhetorical question as we all read different things for different reasons but it made me think that this week’s book should be something from the past and that I should read to notice some changes in attitudes from a previous era.

Rogue Male was published in 1939 and is the first person account of an accomplished, aristocratic, English huntsman,  who seemingly on a whim, decides to stalk a European leader (Hitler). The question of whether he actually means to assassinate him is left slightly ambiguous at first (though we later learn that he had good reason for wanting to do so) but the point is moot as he is discovered before he could fire and is captured. He is interrogated and tortured quite badly before being thrown over the side of a cliff to make it look as if he died accidentally. But he survived the fall and, using the cunning he had as a huntsman, managed to hide whilst they searched for his body and then escape on a boat down river. Once back in England, though,  he was not safe as agents were still in active pursuit. He was unable to escape unnoticed and was forced to kill one of them, which meant that he was being hunted by both the police and the foreign secret service. But it was an agent who tracked down his hideout in Dorset. He the huntsman became the hunted by someone who was as skilled as himself. He is cornered and trapped in an underground lair and although things seem to be totally hopeless he manages to fashion a weapon with which he can kill his pursuer. After that he escapes and is able to travel abroad and start a new life with a new identity, in South America.

As you can tell from the synopsis, it it a neat tight plot and the thing clips along at a good pace - there is after all a reason why it is seen as a classic thriller - but it is much more cunning than that. There are all sorts of ellipsis where you have to go back to work out exactly what happened and there are all sorts of themes about cover, hiding, concealment, man as animal, instincts and knowing yourself. It is interesting, for example, that our hero only really gets to consciously understand his motive towards the end, after being questioned by his pursuer.

But I am partly reading this for the attitudes of its time and it is rich in examples. In the foreground there is the premise of a huntsman. The whole practice of stalking big game, as a skilful, solitary pursuit that engages all the senses and a deep knowledge of the natural world, is something from a past era. We know engage with the wild in a different, more limited way. We have to find other ways to get in touch with our animal self. For our huntsman hero, he had that knowledge because of what he did, who he was.

“ This was the reasoning of a hunted beast, or rather, it was no reasoning at all. I don’t know if a sedentary townsman’s mind would have worked in the same way. I think it would if he had been badly enough hurt.  You must be hurt badly to reach the stage of extinction where you stop thinking what you ought to do and merely do it.”

But merely doing it was also a model of how one behaved.”like most Englishmen, I am not accustomed to enquire very deeply into motives. I dislike and and disbelieve in cold blooded planning, whether it be suggested of me or of anybody else.” This is part of the national character myth of the English gentleman that was potent until the latter part of the Twentieth Century. A myth that had us believe there was an innate superiority that would always enable us to triumph in the end through instinctive knowledge and basic judgement. We were proud to be empirical and not think too much but underlying it there was a form of stoicism. The famous stiff upper lip, that can rarely be seen anywhere in contemporary society. Of his initial interrogation by the security forces our hero says: “I had, of course, been knocked about very considerably. My nails are growing back but my left eye is still pretty useless” What wonderful understatement! Other details of the interrogation are dribbled out later on but there are no descriptions. As a buttoned up English gentleman of the time he takes it on the chin:

“I hold no brief for the pre-war Spartan training of the English upper class - or middle class as it is now the fashion to call it, leaving the upper to the angels - since in the ordinary affairs of a conventional life it is not of the slightest value to anyone: but it is of use on the admittedly rare occasions when one needs a high degree of physical endurance … We torture a boy’s spirit rather than his body, but all torture is, in the end, directed at the spirit. I was conditioned to endure without making an ass of myself. That is all I mean by detachment.”

I must admit that I am attached to this idea of the English gentleman hero. I was bought up on in all the books I read as a child, Biggles stories and the like. Reading Rogue Male was in some ways comforting because it reminded me of the pleasures I had with those stories when younger, when everything seemed bigger, bolder and brighter. But I can only now read it as my older self and now I get the pleasure from other details  in the writing and the way themes are slipped in. Like, for example, the earlier quote about ‘the reasoning of a hunted beast’  there is the phrase about reaching ‘the stage of extinction’ and it is something to bear in mind when you read a story of covering up and trying to disappear.

Date of first publication
1939

Link to last book

I am going to abandon the idea of the randomness for the moment and play a game of consequences, just to see where it leads. I read this book because of a question in the previous book about reading to find out about the past