Category: Literature

This wonderful novel was recommended to me by a friend so, as well as enjoying the story, I enjoyed imagining why she had so loved it. Because it is inventive and about so many things. I am late to this novel: it is already serialised on BBC2. But, in case you missed it, its narrative device is the many lives and stories of Ursula Todd. Whilst she is always born on 11 February 1910 at Fox Corner somewhere in south Bucks, she leads many different lives and has thus to die on many occasions.: Life after Life.

At the heart of the novel is the idea of progress towards a goal: her life is teleological. Her first few lives are about getting out of the womb alive since, during birth, the umbilical cord gets trapped around her neck, and, because of the heavy snow outside, neither Dr Fellowes, nor Mrs Haddock, the midwife, is able, in Ursula’s early incarnations, to attend the birth. Ursula is, however, finally born alive and begins further lives after lives. A life that ends too soon, drowning, for example, on a Cornish beach, precedes a life where a hobby painter from Birmingham, seeing her distress, rescues her from the sea.

And, Ursula begins to learn from her mistakes, In one very dismal life, she is raped by, Howard, one of her brother’s friends, becomes pregnant and has a backstreet abortion that engenders feeling of shame and failure that blight her life leading her into an abusive relationship with the dreadful Derek Oliphant who, after she flees him, tracks her down and bludgeons her to death, in front of her brother Teddy, in her aunt Izzie’s house, with her aunt’s heavy onyx ashtray. In a subsequent life, she sees off Howard and thus avoids Oliphant and that particularly brutal death.

What does her life progress to? While her early lives are about saving herself, learning to avoid the hazards that have seen off earlier versions of her, her later lives become about saving others, such as pushing their servant down the stairs so she doesn’t go to London for Armistice celebrations because in an earlier life she had caught Spanish Flu, brought it back to Fox Corner and caused the death of beloved family members. 

After learning how to save herself and then her loved ones from adversity, she progresses to trying to prevent World War II by killing Hitler before he comes to power. In this, she is partly trying to save her beloved younger brother Teddy who dies over Germany piloting a Halifax bomber, and whose death prompts her mother’s suicide. She is, mostly though, trying to spare England, and Europe, from the suffering of war. The longest and most compelling life is the one Ursula leads as an air raid warden, bearing witness to the appalling death, suffering and destruction of the Blitz. 

As the Author’s Notes confirm, if the book is about anything, it is about World War II and England’s place in it. Kate Atkinson grew up in the aftermath of the war born to a father whose own mother had, on the eve of war, persuaded him to leave the Merchant Navy and return to the mines. Growing up in the austere aftermath of war, she is divided about how she feels about it. One the one hand, she felt that the war years had been England at its best and so felt cheated to have missed it. On the other hand, she was grateful to have avoided war’s horror and wondered about “What if?” it might have been avoided.

What were my reflections? On the question of sex (as in identity, not the activity), I felt that male violence looms large. It obviously looms largest in war. But the life where she is raped by Howard and ends up with Oliphant is particularly bleak. The description of the rape is not too harrowing. Poor innocent Ursula doesn’t really know what is happening and is detached. But what follows becomes darker and darker culminating in the painful twist that she is brutally murdered just when you think she has escaped. And, earlier in her life, there is the paedophile who sexually assaults and then murders poor Nancy Shawcross. The treatment of this male violence was descriptive not judgmental. It was a thing that Ursula had to navigate and, where she could, pre-empt. 

With this, I thought the treatment of male and female characters was different. For me, besides Ursula, the two richest characters are her mother, Sylvie, and paternal aunt, Izzie. Both have attractive and unattractive traits. By contrast, the men tended to be good or bad. Her father Hugh is a saint, as too are her brothers Teddy and Jimmy. Her older brother, Maurice, by contrast, is simply dreadful along with the appalling Derek Oliphant. I felt I noticed most clearly the differing depth of the male and female characters when Ursula is staying at Hitler’s Berghof, Eva Braun gets more attention from the author, is more richly described and has more depth than Hitler, of whom the portrayal is rather flat, and what is portrayed is a boring windbag.

On the question of reincarnation, I was struck, rather against my will, by the video game dimension of Ursula’s repeated incarnations, and incarnations where she brings with her some of the learning of earlier lives. Ursula is the avatar in a multi-level video game. Every time she dies, she is respawned wiser. Each time she respawns she knows what she needs to do to get to the next level. As the novel nears the end, she knows clearly what she has to do. She has to get to Germany so that she can befriend Eva Braun, while she is still a shopgirl, so she is Eva’s friend when Hitler falls in love with her, allowing her to become part of his circle so that, with her father’s old service issue revolver, she can kill Hitler before he comes to power and destroys Europe.

On the topic of war in Europe, Atkinson does show empathy for German suffering, whether deserved or not. In one life, Ursula finds herself in Berlin as the war is ending, the widow of a German, with a young German daughter, awaiting the awful fate of the arrival of the Red Army. It is the only life that ends in suicide. Ursula takes her own life and that of her child in order to spare themselves what the Russians will bring.

All this said, I found it a hopeful story. It is about design, purpose and progress. While there is hardship and suffering, it is not nihilistic. I was left wondering what was Ursula’s best life and the author lets us know that we have not reached the end of Ursula’s story. In the penultimate chapter, during a VE celebration, Ursula, by chance in a pub in London, meets her beloved Teddy who, it turns out, did not die when his plane was hit. But there had still been a war. So had she managed to kill Hitler. And then the final chapter takes us back to 11 February 1910 when, presumably, Ursula is born again.

Is there a broader message? I was left reminded that, in life, you cannot move forward without leaving something behind. To be changed and transformed is not to be the person that you were before. Death and rebirth, albeit more metaphorical than actual, happens through our lives.

Sapiens is an excellent read just full of insight, and stuff for reflection and debate. His basic question is why are we where and what we are now? Or, how did homo sapiens come to dominate the planet in the fashion in which we did? He covers so much ground from an account of human evolution, an anthropological survey of early humans through to the scientific revolution and the question of what’s it all about: this life, the universe and everything.

His answer to this latter question is that, whatever it is, it is all in our heads. And, for me, this is his first big point. His basic thesis is that homo sapiens came to dominate, not just other early human species, but also all other species, because we have the most developed ability to create narratives, eventually including cosmic narratives, that hold together larger groups of individuals than any other species.

We were not stronger, quicker or even necessarily quicker thinking than other species, we just co-operated better with each other in larger numbers than the rest. And the root of this co-operation was an extraordinary ability to accept, believe, be motivated by things we had made up in our heads. This includes kingship, religion, empire, money, joint stock companies and all. None of these things start off in the real world. No, they start in our heads and then we create things in the real world based on what we’ve chosen to believe at that moment in time.

What I consider his second big point is the idea that possessing a successful genetic code does not necessarily, or even at all, make for a happier life. He illustrates this most graphically with farmed animals. The cow gene has been a roaring success. It hitched itself to the dominant homo sapiens gene and is now one of the top five most numerous animal species.

If the aim of a gene is to self-perpetuate, then the cow gene has made itself very robust. It is so numerous, so geographically widespread and so intertwined with the dominant human gene that it has far outgrown its fragile origins as one of many competing large animal genes. What gene is more likely to die out first – the tiger or the cow? But, despite its genetic robustness, the life of individual cows is ghastly. They do not live their natural lives: they are reared in factory conditions, separated from their mothers and have short lives. Which animal has a better life – the tiger or the cow?

He extends this to humans in his analysis of the agricultural revolution when thousands of years ago we went from hunter-gatherers to farmers. Whilst we became far more numerous and therefore our genes more likely to survive, he asserts that individual lives worsened. We were designed to be hunter-gatherers, both in body and social spirit, and were less happy after agriculture than before.

Amusingly and parenthetically, he couches the agricultural revolution as the moment when the human gene was captured by the wheat gene. The wheat gene was a fragile grass existing in the fertile crescent at risk of climate change or some such. So, it hitched itself to the human gene, became omnipresent and therefore robust, and literally shackled the human race to the plough where it has thereafter unhappily laboured.

His third big point is his account of how and why we went from the world of c.1500 to the world of today. What made the Europeans from c.1500 different to other cultures was their embrace of ignorance; their willingness to admit that that they did not know. Religions, cultures and Empires up to that point had had answers to everything. There was nothing that was not known. These omniscient narratives were effective, see earlier point one, in uniting large groups in common purposes. But the Europeans turned this on its head. They embraced the idea of the unknown, which drove their historically unusual and, in all senses, voracious explorations of the world, geographical and scientific.

The outcome of a few centuries of breakneck discovery and innovation is that homo sapiens stands at an unusual juncture. For example, the greatest risk to our species is ourselves whether you consider the power of nuclear weapons or the risk of environmental degradation. Or, that we are at the transition from evolution of the species by natural selection to evolution by intelligent design. Some amongst us will soon be able to choose to be amortal and enjoy superior powers: Wolverine without the adamantium.

All this leads to his fourth big point, the question of what’s it all been for. He considers and dismisses the supernatural and secular religions. These are our creations with no objective veracity. (Although if I had to bracket him, I sense a liberal humanist.) We have not pursued a consistent guiding purpose. Instead, we have dreamt up guiding purposes to do or justify the next thing that came our way. We have accumulated immense power, made immense achievements. He does concede that, in recent decades, the happiness of the individual, the only sensible criterion of success, has become more our guide even if we have not yet agreed what constitutes happiness. We have eliminated or reduced some objective bads. But he does not posit that we are necessarily going to keep doing so well.

Anyway, homo sapiens is nearing its end as we move to intelligent design. He says at the start of the book that he reckons that, after a run of seventy or so millennia, homo sapiens has, at best, got perhaps a thousand years left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

wonder what’s it all been for and

The Silk Roads was two books in one. One book was a fascinating re-writing of world history to anchor it at the centre of the world, essentially Persia and surrounding countries. The other was a diatribe against Western policy in the region during the twentieth century, and a bit beforehand. Besides finding the second part a little simplistic, I was more frustrated by the dissonance. I started with history and ended with a political polemic.

Starting with part one, Frankopan anchors history in the centre of the world by describing how it was at the epicentre of the great trade routes of history. He narrates the trades in silk, furs, horses, slaves, gold, silver, oil and wheat that have for millenia criss-crossed the centre of the world. It was also the route by which ideas, religions and technologies spread from East to West and vice versa.

Frankopan explains Britain’s involvement in the Entente Cordiale in the context of its struggle with Russia for the centre of the world. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, an expanding Russia was threatening British interests along the length of its southern Asian border from the Near East, through Persia and India, to China. Britain was faced with either entering a continental confrontation with Russia or allying with it. Choosing the latter path secured the Empire in Asia but lured Britain into the Franco-Russian confrontation with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

And it is the Great War that is something of the junction in the story where we go from history to polemic. The West’s involvement in the region, particularly Persia and, more recently, Iraq / Afghanistan is support for his contention that this is the centre of the world. But it is no longer narrated primarily to illustrate this. Instead, it is an attack, from the vantage point of the internationalist left, on Western policy. He wishes for the West to be held to account and craves that it be superseded. It might be right but the moralising was dissonant.

Staying with the present, Frankopan’s book resonates with the recent Chinese policy announcement of developing a silk road belt. But the Chinese also announced the creation of a maritime silk road, on which Frankopan touched less. It would intriguing to know, historically, where the balance lay between the maritime and road trades. An uninformed assumption would be that they inversely correlated. When the land route was dangerous and difficult, trade would revert to the sea and vice versa.

Finally, the book appeared before the Q4 2014 sell-off in oil and energy. Less than a couple of years on, we cannot know whether this is epochal or passing. In the former camp are those who say that US oil independence frees them from future intervention in the Gulf. I have always been a bit sceptical of this. After all, if oil prices do rise again, then regardless of US self-sufficiency, the US economy would be affected. Regardless, other, particularly Asian, powers are not self-sufficient so will presumably have to intervene.

This, for me, is the most influential book that I have read in years. It is a feelgood book for the English. It writes England’s history to show why we are as we are. And it does so in a sympathetic fashion reminding us of the things we did well, alongside those not done so well. For me, in the context of a looming referendum in the UK on continued membership of the Euro, it has an intriguing analysis of why we ended up with the EU membership we have.

There is so much that is wonderful in the book, particularly if you are English and like history. It is not chauvinistic about England in the context of the rest of the countries of the British Isles and Tombs is clear that no English history can be complete without lots of Welsh, Scottish and Irish history. He tries when possible, however, to tell the English story only straying into the history of our neighbours when you cannot tell ours without telling theirs.

It is broad and sweeping, starting with pre-Roman England and cantering through the centuries at a good pace. There are kings and queens, and wars and rebellions but Tombs is mostly concerned about the way we lived, how we thought about ourselves, and how we changed and evolved.

At the start, Tombs explores the origins of England and the English; the moment when we started to define ourselves in geographic, linguistic and cultural terms that are roughly coterminous with what we have now. Romans, Saxons and Vikings buffeted this early Englishness but there were consistent themes, amongst which were relatively well-organised government with local devolution, and a common and written language. This is the prelude to the three, or perhaps four, wrenching moments in our recorded history when there was rather more change than continuity.

The first, as Tombs makes clear, was the Norman invasion of 1066. The French newcomers did radically change the nature of the country, how it thought about itself, how it was governed and, clearly, the language spoken. Tombs is objective but I sensed a little regret at the Norman yoke and the loss of an effective co-operative, not coercive, system of government. The melding of Franco-Norman with Anglo-Saxon to create early modern England leads up the next great upheaval.

The Henrician Reformation and the hundred and fifty or so years of religious/political upheaval that followed was tumultuous to live through and led to what Tombs considers to be an enduring division between Anglican and Dissenter that has fed through to our current political geography. Anglicans dominate in the Eastern and Southern lowlands and Dissenters in the Western and Northern regions. Patterns of eighteenth and nineteenth century religious observance carry through to Conservative and Labour voting patterns.

Number three, on my list at least, was the industrialisation of England and the empire that accompanied it. While England had had avant-garde and exceptional components of its history to this point, which Tombs points out, the agricultural and industrial revolutions made England exceptional, creating a sense of ourselves that was new. Moreover, as well as growing at an historically unparalleled pace, we also exported millions of people who created the English speaking world of today. I had not realised that, despite American Independence, the majority of British emigrants went to the US.

This leads to Tombs’ intriguing and, for an Englishman, rather reassuring narrative of the twentieth century and the two wars. Tombs takes the line that Britain was pivotal in both, with the Royal Navy the most effective fighting force. He does not go down the path of Sleepwalkers in saying the first War was a terrible accident. We did the right thing. Nor does he wholly go down the Hastings path in saying that until 1916 it was all about the French. He reminds us how vital it was that the Navy kept the German navy in port and blockaded the country.

Likewise, he does not believe in the marginal contribution of Britain to the second war: the idea that the Soviet Union defeated Germany on the Eastern front and the Americans the Japanese in the Pacific. There is lots of good stuff. For a start, he questions the relative weakness of Britain in 1939. Britain out-produced Germany in lots of things. Again, the Navy was pivotal: keeping open the Atlantic, supplying the Russians, policing the Mediterranean and confronting the Japanese.

He also holds the view, putting aside the moral debate, that Bomber Harris was factually right and the revisionists factually wrong about the bombing of Germany. A great boon to the Russians was that the immensely effective German 88mm gun was largely deployed in Germany on aerial defence and not in Russia on tank-killing. On D-Day, Hollywood is wrong. It was largely an Imperial operation. Most of the troops landed were Empire troops, and far and away the majority of the shipping was British.

All of which leads seamlessly to Tombs’ narrative of declinism. He argues that, war-ravaged and indebted though it was, England was in, relatively, not bad shape in 1945. Moreover, through into the 1950s, we continued to be innovative and ahead in many technologies. Economic growth was fine. But we, somewhere between the mid-50s and mid-60s talked ourselves into believing we were in decline.

Part of the cause was relatively slow economic growth. But he points out that our European neighbours were engaging in catch-up growth. I am reminded of Thomas Piketty’s empirical observation that countries at the technological frontier (who can only grow by innovating not copying) have tended to grow at 1% a year or less. We should have been growing more slowly than Continental Europeans. But part was undoubtedly Suez. He doesn’t say it, although others have, that American unwillingness to forgive war loans was the reason we were running deficits that needed financing and therefore beholden to US approval for our foreign policy decisions. We paid for twice defeating the Germans and the US profited.

This sense of decline engendered, in turn, a desperation to join the Common Market and, when finally offered to us after de Gaulle’s departure, led us to accept a poor deal. We joined the Common Market at a low point of relative economic performance and national confidence, and so swallowed the deal available, not a good deal. So much of our relationship with the EU is not really so much about whether we should be in or out but about trying to negotiate ex post facto the deal we should have negotiated in the early 1970s.

So what of my possible fourth wrenching change? Tombs ends with where we are now. He shows how extraordinary have been the levels of immigration into the UK in the last couple of decades. He also, for me at least, has some very encouraging statistics on how quickly racial integration is occurring at its most literal level – intermarriage. Englishness is on the move.

Should I re-read “To Kill a Mockingbird”? I have the thought having just finished “Go, Set a Watchman”, Harper Lee’s sequel. I read Mockingbird almost thirty-five years’ ago as my O-level set text for English Lit. I hugely enjoyed it. It was a coming of age story. It was a fascinating window on the American South. And it was a happy story. Childhood innocence is challenged by adult wickedness but adult truth and justice defeat it. Atticus stands against racism in defending Tom, and Boo Radley unexpectedly defends Scout and Jem.

What follows contains many plot spoilers. Beware!

Go Set a Watchman sees Scout, aged 26, return to Maycomb from New York for her annual pilgrimage home and this is the year she finally grows up. By the end of the novel, she comes to see Atticus as a flawed adult, who loves her as she is, and only asks the same of her. She sees that he is neither saint, as at the start of the story, nor devil, as midway. Scout, in turn, finishes the novel more adult and less child.

If Tom’s trial is the central thread of her first novel, it is the collision between the Civil Rights’ Movement and the White Supremacy of the South in the second. The story is her witness of how this touches her family and friends, how it has changed them, how it changes her and her relationships with them.

The main event is when Scout surreptitiously attends a meeting of Maycomb’s Citizen’s Council, a white response to the NAACP, and Federal Government and Supreme Court interference in the South in support of Civil Rights. She sees Atticus, and possible husband Hank Clinton, calmly listening to an inflammatory racist demanding that African Americans be put back in their place. She suddenly sees the Council and Maycomb’s white folk, above all Atticus, as no better than Supremacists. She is horrified and feels rejected by her father and home town. How can the people and places she loves be so alien to her?

The whole incident, creeping in, looking down from the gallery and eavesdropping is a metaphor for a child listening in on an adult conversation and being disturbed and confused by content. Scout’s naivete shows itself in her both resenting, as a Southern girl, the relentless interference of the Yankees in other people’s business but also, colour blind as she is, railing against the injustice that African Americans can only be accepted if they don’t ask for too much. In short, she hankers after the past, her childhood, when all seemed OK. Everyone got on in their respective stations. If Atticus and Hank disappoint her, she is also heartbroken when she goes to see Calpurnia and is treated, not as a returning daughter, but another white oppressor.

Three characters from the first novel are unchanged by the second. Her brother Jem has died several years before of a heart attack, heart disease having killed their mother. Neighbour Dill remained in Europe after the war. Aunt Alexandra Finch now lives with Atticus but is unchanged; an irritating snob nonetheless trying to do the right thing for Scout, to help her fit in.

The novel ends happily at a personal level although disturbingly at a moral one. While Scout rejects Hank Clinton as a lover, condemned ever to be a friend, she comes to a peace of sorts with Maycomb and, above, she is reconciled to Atticus. He is humane and gentle. But he is a Southerner and is not ready for full emancipation of African Americans. Atticus tells Scout that he believes that desegregation and reform should happen steadily giving time for African Americans to civilise themselves. His guiding principle, it turns out, is not fairness and justice, as we had thought, but legality and due process. Atticus the moral being is compromised. His defence of electoral restrictions for African Americans leaves him on the wrong side. He would be a baddie in Selma.

I did find some bits clumsy. Some of the dialogue was more vehicle for rather formal expositions on the political evolution of the South than conversation between adults. I found it hard to believe that Jack would hit his niece.

But, overall, I loved the story and re-meeting the characters. I felt the trust and comfort of re-meeting, as an adult, a childhood friend now grown up. Atticus, at the end of the second novel, is a more plausible human being. The second novel feels much more about segregation than my memory of the first novel recalls.It is perhaps uncanny that the novel is published as there is, to my British eye, renewed debate about the reality of African American life decades after desegregation. It turns out I read, pretty much simultaneously, an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic describing America’s penal system as a continuation of segregation and oppression of African Americans. Indeed, I started Go Set a Watchman thinking about Scout and Atticus but ended up mostly thinking about the tragedy of slavery, segregation and racism.

So, should I re-read Mockingbird? I am keen to see whether there were hints of Atticus’s position. I would like to be reminded about Hank Clinton. How much of what is in the second novel is prefigured in the first? But I probably won’t. I am happy with the innocent memory of the first.