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

Book 6 - Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From

I picked this up in the LRB Bookshop and was hooked by the short introduction which seemed to speak directly to my concerns about  what I am doing here:

“And what does it mean to read? Do I want to read the things other people are reading, so I can talk to them? Which other people? Why do I want to talk to them? So that I can be of my time? Or so that I can know other times and other places? Do I read things to confirm my vision the world or challenge it?”

These are questions I ask but I have no real answers. I cannot tell you precisely why I am writing this blog apart from a general idea that it is important to pay attention and the best way to pay attention to  know that when you are finished you will have to recollect enough to be able to write something (no matter how short or trivial). Am I any nearer finding answers to questions about why and how we read after reading the book? Not really.  Perhaps they are questions without definitive answers. Nevertheless the questions are worth raising, the style is engaging,  and the insights show you things you hadn’t noticed before or help you extend thoughts you might previously have had. (Damn I’ve just broken one of the rules of the blog and made some sort of reviewerly judgement. I will let that pass for the moment but with instructions not to let it happen too often).

The book is a collection of columns written for the New York Review of books and so the essays are discrete, although linked by his concerns as a writer, translator, teacher. They are loosely grouped under four headings: the world around the book,the book in the world,the writer’s world, and writing across worlds but there are a number of common threads and throughout there is an attention to the use of language.  How that might resonate differently in different cultures is one of common themes. More works than ever are being translated and literature is increasingly globalised. This might seem to be straightforwardly a good thing to open knowledge of the wider world, but it comes at a cost. Culturally specific, idiosyncratic writing that can only be fully appreciated if you get the references can be marginalised. Writers might go wider rather than deeper and style will suffer in a broader market, where less can be taken for granted and more has to be explained. A flatter world.  Rudyard Kipling wrote differently when his audience was confined to English people living in India, who knew the local culture, to when his fame was widespread. Also expectations can be come rigid and works outside the style can be neglected. South America has been strongly associated with magical realism but it is a big continent and others write in a different way and but it is more difficult for them to get a hearing.

These are interesting points about commercial pressures and the business of writing, that have escaped me as an outsider. But what I really like in these essays are the details and the way he looks at the mechanics of a text, for example the weight of particular words and why translation is so difficult.

“Lawrence comments: ‘They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts the were frightened.’ A recent Italian edition the book offers a version that, translated back into English, would give, ‘They both burst out laughing, looking at each other. But deep in their hearts they were afraid’. Experimenting over the years I’ve realised that if I ask a class of student to translate this into Italian about half will introduce that ‘but’. It appears to be received wisdom that pone doesn’t laugh when one is afraid. Lawrence on the other hand suggests that nothing is more common than laughing and being afraid; one laughs because afraid, in order to deny fear.”

I took the point about the ‘but’ but the thing that really interested me was the difference in weight between being frightened and being afraid: the degrees and types of fear and how you can be frightened of or by something but you can only be afraid of. But the bigger thing was the introduction of ‘burst out’ into ‘They both laughed’.  If you burst out laughing it tends to be spontaneous and carefree and so that ‘but’ in the passage becomes necessary.

I love chewing on these details when they are pointed out to me but I must admit if I had been reading the text by myself it would have all slipped by. That is the thing: mostly when I read it is like a stream. But sometimes you need a reminder to pause to look more closely at the details and there can be as much pleasure in unravelling a sentence, a word, a tone, as there is in enjoying a well worked plot. This weeks book has been a good reminder.

Date of publication
2014

Randomness factor

None really, except that I only came across it because it was displayed in a bookshop. It is though relevant to the act of reading and hence this blog

Book 5: Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

After two books written 80 and 50 years ago I thought I ought to try something more recent, so off I went to the library to choose something from the ‘Hot Picks’ table. Hot Picks are current, popular books, only available for one week, with no renewal (most libraries do this but the name might vary; in Hampshire it’s called ‘Fast Back’, which sounds more like a car). Once I saw these short stories by Hilary Mantel on the table it was an easy choice because I knew what I would write about, even before I opened the cover.

I would start with the outrage its publication caused in most of the press. How offended they were at the the very idea that not everybody venerated the ex Prime Minister, whose status of heroine saviour they assumed to be universally acknowledged. Saying this was not so and even contemplating an assassination was somehow extra disrespectful because she had recently died. One Thatcher’s old advisors, Tim Bell ( a man of such moral nicety he has been prepared to represent the brutal regime in Uzbekistan) made some barmpot suggestion that the police ought to look into the fantasy murder. The flurry of outrage would have rewarded a little examination. But perhaps the funniest thing was that the Daily Telegraph bought the rights for the book, pre publication, presumably without knowing what the title story was about. They dropped it and it was then taken up by the Guardian.

Then I would haved linked to a previous controversy stoked in the same papers about something Mantle wrote, or rather said, in a lecture, entitled ‘Royal Bodies’ . It is actually an interesting and thoughtful piece abut how we look at monarchy, especially the women,  both at present and in Tudor times. However it was read only as an attack on Kate Middleton rather than the expectations of her role:

Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture.

Such extracts were highlighted to provide fodder for the papers, phone-ins and politicians who could proclaim how disgraceful it was that someone could say such things when everyone knew Kate was perfection itself.How, with this fake controversy only a year old could the Daily Telegraph think that the next Mantel book would necessarily be safe for their readers? That must just have assumed that she was still stuck in Tudor times.

Anyway I picked up the book expecting to expand on the theme but a book of short stories is an unpredictable thing. Here there are ten different tales just like some old  LPs and just like an album you might not like the title track best. Here the story that interested me most was the opening one (again think how many albums open with the strongest song).

It is called ‘Sorry to Disturb’ and the reference at the back says it was first published  as ‘Sorry to Disturb: a memoir’ in the London Review of Books in 2009. However the LRB archive gives it the title ‘Someone to Disturb’, which is actually a more interesting title as it has a slight ambiguity:  it could refer to the person who was disturbing or the person vulnerable to disruption, which is apt as the story is about vulnerability. However we have lost the subtitle and we are now no longer sure whether it is a memoir, fictionalised memoir, or fiction.

We know it is about someone who was living in Saudi Arabia, trapped at home whilst her husband was out at work. Someone who was muzzy with drugs that also cause psychotic incidents, and someone who wrote a novel and had it accepted for publication during the course of the story. These things are all part of Hilary Mantel’s biography. Whether the visit and subsequent contact with Muhammed Ijaz happened - who knows. It doesn’t matter. It’s a story. What it shows is the effect of being trapped inside a house, with activity overlooked, and severe restraints on the way a woman is meant to behave.  Such constraints lead to a debilitated of a sense of self and in the end she is incapable of cutting herself free from the attentions of the unwanted visitor and has to rely on her husband to write a letter.

It is a creepy, sad tale that has the feeling of unreality, as if it doesn’t quite make sense.  This is acknowledge near the end:

“Even after all this time it is hard to grasp exactly what happened. I try to write it as it occurred but I find myself changing the names to protect the guilty. I wonder if Jeddah left me forever off kilter in some way, tilted from the vertical and condemned to see life skewed.”

It was this story that got me thinking the most.

Date of publication
2014


Random Factor:
Library ‘Hot Pick’

Book 4 - Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil

Last week I saw a docu/drama about the televising of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem ( The Eichmann Show). It was both fascinating and haunting. Haunting because it contained documentary footage from the concentration camps and fascination because it had a slightly oblique take on the question of whether or not Eichmann was a monster. The director of the 1961 television broadcasts, Leo Hurwitz, was convinced that everybody has a spark of humanity in them and that at some point Eichmann would recognise the horror of what had happened and what he was responsible for. He kept on looking, focusing on the face, wanting to see something - but there was nothing. Apart from the occasional twitch or pulling his mouth up to one side, Eichmann was blank. There was nothing.

The play did not deal directly with evil; the story was mainly about how the trial was televised (something truly remarkable, especially when you consider that even today no cameras are allowed in British courts). Nevertheless it raised the question and the documentary footage was a hammer blow to the solar plexus. For a more considered assessment of what the evidence showed and what the trial meant you need to look elsewhere. That place is the famous account by political philosopher Hannah Arendt.

Her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem:a report on the banality of evil” is the result of an assignment to cover the trial for the New Yorker magazine. It caused a storm when it was published because she did not flinch from writing about Jewish leaders who acquiesced to the process of expulsion and were unable to challenge force of the laws. You can see why that would caused offence: isn’t it enough that the the Jewish race was victim to an unprecedented, unimaginable, monstrous crime? why blame people faced by overwhelming of circumstances? why blame the victim? But Hannah Arendt had a steely hard intellect and would always follow the evidence and her own conclusions no matter where it took her and no matter how uncomfortable that place might be. The acquiescence of the Jewish leaders was part of the story she had to tell  because they shared a mentality with all the other Germans who thought Nazi ideology could not be confronted only ameliorated. By not challenging the idea of what was happening everybody allowed the process to become just that: a matter of process not of morality. For her the shocking thing  was that Eichmann, who was not a stupid man, did what he did unthinkingly. He had no personal animosity to Jews, their elimination was not ideological as such; it was a matter of him doing what was required to progress inside the organisation. What was expected. One of the key parts of his defence was that he was never challenged about what was being done - it just seemed to be accepted.

This is what Hurwitz struggles with in the play. He cannot understand how Eichmann cannot recognise the horror of what he did, the consequence of his administrative actions. The dramatic climax is the moment when Eichmann is forced to watch, in court,  film from the concentration camps of the emaciated bodies being bulldozed into mass graves, of the inhumanity of the conditions and what was done. Hurwitz was convinced that when Eichmann saw, with his own eyes, the eventual consequence of his actions he would break down. But he doesn’t flinch, does not connect what he sees to what he did. It was that disconnect that enabled evil to happen.This was the meaning of the phrase ‘banality of evil’, it was not that Eichmann was banal (though he probably was) but that everything was done organisationally, according to directives and done unthinkingly. The “strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” or “remoteness from reality” showed itself more capable of wreaking “more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together”.

This week I didn’t read the whole book, instead I read the lengthy extract in ‘The Portable Hannah Arendt”, edited by Peter Baehr, who also provides the introduction. In it he says:

“Already in the late 1940s, Arendt had recognised that among the elite of the Nazi movement, as distinct from its rank and file membership, ideology had played only a limited role. What characterised the thinking of the upper echelon’s members was neither a cognitive straightjacket centred on fundamental premises nor a belief they had found the key to history. The elite mentality evinced instead a view that the distinction between truth and falsehood as a mere construct to be fabricated as expedience dictated and a mercurial capacity to translate “every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.” For instance when elite members of the Nazi movement heard the statement “Jews are inferior” they understood by that expression that all Jews were to be exterminated. Elite thinking promoted cynicism rather than dogmatism: for while the latter frame of mind might, in its rigidity, have impeded the movements progress, cynicism allowed it to proceed on the assumption that “everything is possible”.

I read that paragraph with chills because the mixture of cynicism and managerialism seems rather too close to the atmosphere of present day politics.

Date of publication
2000 (but the extracts date back many decades and Eichmann in Jerusalem dates from 1963)


Randomness factor
Holocaust Memorial Day was January 27th

Book 3 - Robert H Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking

During the Scottish Independence referendum the Scots Nats became very irritated with the reporting of the BBC’s political correspondent Nick Robinson. They thought he was biased in favour of the No vote and that his reports were slanted. One event they complained about was a report of press conference when questions were raised about RBS moving its HQ and some business leaders warning of bad economic consequences in the event of independence.

The BBC Editorial Complaints Unit has recently adjudicated on this complaint and concluded that although the impression the report gave was inaccurate there were no grounds for believing the inaccuracy was intentional.

Here are two videos (admittedly put up by partisan sources so you have to be aware that the full news bulletin is not shown, only the contentious bit ). Nevertheless you can compare the report with the actual question and answer







We cannot not tell if the news bulletin in the first clip was more balanced in totality (as this is only a short excerpt) but you can this part was misleading when you compare it to the full answer in the second clip. Firstly Robinson decided, after the event, that the key question was one of trust,  and made it look as if he put a simple question which was ignored. The “He didn’t answer but he did attack the reporting” line at the end suggest Alex Salmond ducked it by attacking the messenger (always a desparate tactic). However  it was not like that. Nick Robinson didn’t ask one question but two, the first of which was answered at some length. That is the way things usually go: you ask your most important question first and it gets answered, subsequent questions can get lost, especially if they seem a little snide. The second question certainly had a bit of an edge and reminded me of when Sir Robin Day asked the the then Minister of Defence, Sir John Nott "why we should believe you, a here today, gone tomorrow politician", and John Nott stormed out of the studio. In comparison Alex Salmond was quite calm. The problem for Nick Robinson was that it was a press conference and not an interview so he couldn't follow up about the economic warnings.

Alex Salmond didn’t really address the second question (he brushed it aside saying  old news) so Nick Robinson’s report is not an outright lie but you do not have to lie to be misleading. All you have to do is impose a narrative and edit a report to fit.  It is one of the most common traits of modern media and is one of a main cause of distortions in our understanding. A commentator thus has the power to shape information and be dishonest without being literally dishonest.

However it is the BBC's  finding that although it was misleading it was done unintentional  that piqued my interest. How can it be unintentional when the whole act of writing and editing is a conscious activity? One has to recall what happened, select the wheat from the chaff and then compress it for a bulletin. At every stage you must be thinking what you are doing. But they didn’t mean he was doing his job in a trance, they meant that there was no evidence of a malicious motive or wilful propagandising. If that was the case (and it probably was) it means Nick Robinson was making no effort to step outside his habitual thought patterns and was actually working on semi-automatic pilot. He therefore didn’t notice what he was doing was a distortion. My guess is that he felt rebuffed by the way he was treated and that emotion guided his hand.

This is a small but interesting example of how we need to look carefully at what we are told and how we have to make judgements. It brought me back to a book that has been on my shelves since the mid 70s: “Straight and Crooked Thinking”, which I can thoroughly recommend. In the words of the author:

The intention of the book is primarily practical. Its main purpose is not to stimulate intellectual curiosity but to increase awareness of the process of crooked thinking and crooked communication and to provide safeguards against these. It would not have succeeded in its object if it merely led its readers to study books about logic. The test of its success is rather whether it makes it less easy for one of its readers to be persuaded by a salesman …and less easy for a politician to influence his way of voting by such irrational means as the use of emotional language or confident affirmation.  More importantly I hope it will make it less easy for the reader to hate the enemy … with that blind lack of understanding that comes from various forms of crooked thinking about him.

It was first published in 1930 but seems more relevant now than ever. Look at the current state of political/social debate, where an emotional storm can be generated in 140 characters, all politicians are well trained in the art of evading of questions whilst making sure they they repeat their pre-prepared ‘talking points’, newspapers bend all news stories to illustrate their world view,  broadcasters see interviews as a form of hostile interrogation, and an unthinking cynicism exists that distrusts anything a politician says because “they are all the same and only in it for themselves”. Public discourse is pretty sticky at the moment and expanding media and outlets for opinion causes more confusion. A guide to help you pick your way through a thicket of words is timely even if it was written over 80 years ago.Not only does it act as a refresher in the ways one should examine the way people promote their cause and carry their argument, it you guard against failings in your own thought processes. After all we all have our own prejudices and bad habits.

It is timely because the principles of logic, debate, and the sifting of evidence are fundamental and unchanging, as are the tricks that can be played. However my copy has a slightly dated feel. It was revised in 1974 and uses examples from contemporary issues for of that time for illustration (as well as examples from earlier editions). Even more interesting though is the style and the way a modern book with the same aim would be more punchy with a more broken up layout to emphasise points. here the prose is measured and clear but it is that of an academic born in 1894. I actually like his style and enjoy the calmness but there again but my age may play a part in that.

When I started to write this I didn’t know whether the book would still be in print but I am really pleased to find a new edition is available, updated by Robert Thouless’ grandson. It would be interesting to see how the prose changes with the generations and what new examples are used, especially as the background of the younger Thouless is ecology and animal behaviour rather than psychology.

P.S. I'm glad the new edition has a new cover. My one looks like it was knocked up, in a hury, when the art director was away.

Date of first publication
1930, revised edition 1974

Randomness Factor:

Reminded of the book whilst reading the news

Book 2 - Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

The cover is simple: a posed photo of Christopher Hitchens, near the end of his life, seated, gazing at you with heavy eyes. The tonal range is limited, dark, mostly brown, and the face emerges from the background rather than being highlighted against it. It is like an old Dutch painting (it actuall looks darker on the book than it does in this photo). You can see the diminished strength of the body but the eye is still searching. It is compelling and you want to look at it to read into the face what you know of the man and his situation. From what you read in the book you know this is the look of someone facing his fate full on.

This is a short book, his last work and not quite finished, as it ends with scraps and notes that would have been filled out if there had been time. Nevertheless it is affecting; not in a sentimental way - he would have hated that - but because he is unbowed, still prepared to carry on his battles. To his core he was a polemicist and, whether you agreed with him or not, you always want a warrior to be carried out on his shield. Right to the end he wrote fluently and well (not necessarily  the same thing) but you would expect that as it was how he defined himself and his wish was to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense.

The ironies of his illness was where it struck - a cancer of the throat. Speaking and good conversation were amongst the things he loved the most (his writing style was only found when he was told something he had written was a bit dull and he should write more like the way he talked. He tells writing classes that anybody who could talk could also write but adds the kicker: how many people do you know who can really talk? Well Christopher `Hitchens could certainly talk and was a formidable debater. As he says:

“The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favourite authors and see if that is not one of the things that engages you, often at first without you noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realising that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear its only recorder … All the best recollections of wisdom and friendship, from Plato’s “Apology” for Socrates to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, resound with the spoken, unscripted moments of interplay and reason and speculation. It’s in engagement like this, in competition and comparison with others, that one can hope to hit upon the elusive, magical mot juste. For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”

Let that be an epitaph for someone whose life was of the mind but also social.

Date of publication
2012

Randomness factor:

I selected this from some just returned books in the library

Book 1 - Richard Powers, Orfeo

A socially isolated composer/retired university lecturer (Peter Els) is privately conducting biological experiments, trying to create new strands of DNA, for artistic reasons. This comes to the attention of the the security services who think it can only be  terrorism or at the least dangerously threatening. They draw parallels with the personality of the Unabomber. The house is raided, the experiments seized but they miss Els, who goes on the run. This sounds like a good set up for a conventional thriller with scope for the excitement of the chase. It is the outline of Orfeo but the book is nothing like a thriller and the set-up is only a Macguffin to allow the real subject (art music and the cultural ideas which shaped it in the last half of the Twentieth Century) to be discussed. There is no real peril, no twists and turns, no thrill of the chase but there is enough reason for Els to move out of his quiet life, remember his past and visit some people who were significant to him. As structure it also works mythically: you know that if Els is captured he will enter the dark underworld that is state security and might never re-emerge.But it is not too fanciful and it reminds me in some ways of Christopher Jeffries, the man vilified by the press for being a bit weird after his tenant was murdered. There was a tv play about him that was very good in showing how an innocent man (in both senses) could be pulled underground by the misunderstanding or lack of comprehension by law enforcement officers.

This though is a book of ideas and it shows how good the novel can be for taking disparate ideas, ramming them together, and making connections. Here there is science and the world described in "Biopunk: solving biotech biggest problems in kitchens and garages" by Marcus Wohlsen, which is about the amateur tinkering with genetics being done in home labs,  side by side with “The Rest is Noise”, the wonderful survey of Twentieth Century music by Alex Ross, which is chock full of anecdotes from composers’ lives. They are mixed together in the character of Els offer interesting parallels between art and science, structures and the act of creation. The book isn’t didactic and overly ernest (it is after all a novel) nevertheless at its heart there is the story of music and its creation in the second half of the last century. Perhaps, even more ambitiously, it also tries to describe how music feels subjectively, how it creates sensations, and how it works. Some of these abstract passages might seem pretentious and/or obscure but if they don’t connect they can be slid over. However they could only have been written by someone with a deep musical knowledge and they feel as if the author is writing about something he cares about, and you trust him.

I am a little younger than Els, but not by so many years. The times being remembered are my times. Perhaps this is why I can relate to the content because I recognise the hopes, assumptions and discussions that took place back then. I know the arts were seen as something to aspire to as part of the project to discard the old and stultifying, and discover the new. For sure that lead to many dead ends and the dreams and talk can now appear ridiculously idealistic or naive but when things came together there could be magic. Sometimes performances or works could fly with a joyful seriousness.

But back to the book.

Things I enjoyed:

The structure - There are no chapters, instead the text is divided by boxed quotes or phrases. These quotes are not part of the narrative but comment on it and add something from the outside the narrative often in the voice of Peter Els: “I’d been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste change so little” or “a grammar but no dictionary, sense but no meaning, urgency without need: music and chemistry of cells.” The sort of half formed thoughts that can bubble into the consciousness before floating away. It is a neat way of giving the narrative another layer.

Stories of composers - This might be a backhanded compliment for a novel but I enjoyed the historical anecdotes. One of the most gripping sections was the description of how Messian’s “Quartet for the End of Time” was created and performed in a prisoner of war camp. This though is not just a Wikipedia entry it is a re imagining: “The audience crowds together on the benches, wrapped in grey-black coats. Clouds of frozen breath fill the room, whiffs of rotting guts exuded by malnourished men in oil stained rags. What heat the barrack manages on this bone numbing night comes only from these wasted bodies. Infirm men from the hospital block are borne in on stretchers. The music loving German soldiers take their reserved seats in the front rows.” It puts you there.

It is well researched; you can trust the information.

it is a book about art, though the art in question is music. “He’d learn the truth from Thomas Mann later that semester. Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.” I like books that struggle with the compulsion for art, its value and ultimate utility.

What’s not so good:

It is more or less within the head of Peter Els. The other characters are sketchy. But in a book of ideas that is not that much of a big deal.

Date of publication
2014

References:

Wikipedia
Guardian Review by Steven Poole

Randomness factor:

It was selected from the Booker Mann 2014 longlist. So not very random as it had been pre-selected as a good novel. (I don't know why it didn't make the final but neverheless it had a good cup run).