Review: Paul Beatty, The Sellout

I bought this book from the Waterstone's table of novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, read it during a week working in Germany, and by the time I got home it had won the Prize.

Novels deal with things at least some of which we will not be familiar with and sometimes will be completely ignorant of. But we manage, sometimes only partially. I don't think I understood everything in Paul Beatty's book and though I often smiled or occasionally laughed I am certain I did not get all the gags. So I am not a good judge of the book. That said, I have doubts about it which relate to other aspects than the gags I didn't get.

I felt the author was trying too hard, like a stand-up comedian on a bad night. I felt the book lacked structure, trying to do too many things and not always sure what those things were even though all the reviewers who are all over my copy are completely sure.* I felt that as it progresses it actually runs out of steam - the Supreme Court is not a climax but just a continuation. At just one point (page 266) did the book really move me in a short passage I felt could have owed something to Brecht.

I concede that this is a Minority Report. Time will tell. Go through the back list of Booker Prize winners and there are plenty there you will struggle to recognise - Was that the book about ...?  - and, if you try to read those forgotten books, you will struggle.

* It amused me that The Guardian was there on the  cover. If Paul Beatty had submitted an extract from this book for publication to that Sunday School newspaper, I am 100% sure it would have either not replied or would have set one of its endless supply of dire columnists onto him.

Review: Graeme Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project

Waterstones had a table with Booker Prize Shortlist books and I bought this one for no other reason than that it has achieved publicity because it was brought out by a small publisher based in Scotland rather than thwacked on the table under some imprint of an international conglomerate media company - the sort of company which reckons it ought to be able to stitch up the Booker any time (look at some of the past winners!) 

I read the 280 pages in a day, mostly without difficulty once I had got past the opening difficulty. Within a minute of beginning to read, I was thinking Pierre Riviere - the real-life 19th century French rural murderer who wrote a Memoir of his own deeds (I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother ...  and wishing to make known the motives etc). It's true that Burnet briefly acknowledges the book at the end of a list (p 281), but the debt to Michel Foucault's work goes quite deep since the structure of this book in effect mirrors Foucault's presentation of the dossier on the Riviere case. I think that may cause a problem for the Booker jury. Macrae has had a lot of his work done for him.

But I got past this. The best part of the book is undoubtedly The Account of Roderick Macrae which takes up 137 pages of the 280 - so, a half. Here the demand on the author is that he proceed confidently in his narrator's voice and avoid the main pitfalls of such writing, which are anachronism and pastiche. Burnet opts for a fairly neutral prose which does not constantly try to evoke 19th century rural Scotland - he makes do with a small specialised vocabulary to give period flavour and provides a Glossary to it - and he avoids obvious anachronism. Once he uses "hobby" where I would have thought "pastime" and no doubt there are others like that but nothing dreadful.

The main problem (and this one also for the Booker jury) is that he does not quite bring off the uncertainty he creates around Macrae's motivation, nor does that uncertainty map straightforwardly onto the official theme of criminal insanity. In brief, Macrae committed three murders, one of them also involving a violent sexual assault - the medical evidence at pages 156 - 57 - on a girl (or the body of a dead girl) who has spurned him. That is nowhere mentioned in his own Account, which is to that extent either dishonest or obscured by an insane degree of denial. Nor does this possible motivation drive the narrative of the Trial until one witness alights on the possibility. There is a more complex narrative implied than the surface one but though it is fairly constantly hinted at it doesn't really get structured enough to give us a chance to engage with it.

Review: John le Carre, The Pigeon Tunnel

I started into this three hundred page book of thirty eight mainly short chapters just as I was finalising a book of twenty six short chapters which will take up a couple of hundred pages, next year with any luck. I am glad I did not read it earlier. The author knows how to tell a good story and tell it splendidly. Some of the stories are tragic, some are hilarious. Some of the stories exude a sense of “I’m old. Why not? Who cares? They're dead. So here goes …”  If I had read them sooner, I would have succumbed to last-minute influence.

My twenty six chapters don’t include a narrative of the only occasion (to my knowledge) when anyone tried to recruit me to British Intelligence. In 1972 I had found myself a job teaching Liberal Studies to day release apprentices – bricklayers, plumbers, panel beaters – in Devon. I was bent on subversion but in reality was simply making a mess of it and I knew I had to try to give some better direction to my life. I was twenty five now. So as a long shot, I booked in to talk to the Careers Adviser at the University of Exeter. I don’t know how I blagged that, since I had not studied there. But anyway, he interviewed me at some length, appeared to think for a bit, and then asked me if I had time to take an IQ test – he may have called it something else but to me he was just asking me to re-sit the 11+. I had no qualms about doing that and happily filled in the test papers behind a closed door, emerging to hand them over to my interviewer. He scored them at his desk and then drew out from a drawer a little brochure for GCHQ. Did I know what it was? Would I perhaps like to read it and think about it?

I was embarrassed; I felt sorry for him. Though I most definitely over-rated the non-existent threat I posed to National Security, I was probably not far off in thinking that it was as if he was proposing a police career to an amateur criminal, not the career kind of criminal for whom it would be appropriate. I was painfully reminded of the girlfriend who desperately wanted to be a real spy and who regarded me as one of the main liabilities to her chances of success; so she lied me out of existence, replacing me with the Double (who she was also sleeping with). And that was four years ago, since when some of my unsuitable friends had become even more unsuitable. I would have been curious to find out more about GCHQ but felt they would surely turn me away on first profiling and this decent man who had taken time out to interview me would be made to look a bit of a fool. So I politely declined.

Now if you liked that little bit of story you will surely like John le Carré’s book a whole lot more because it is full of much stranger encounters with much larger-than-life characters, most of them famous in their own right. He meets them all, if we are to believe him and I’m not sure I do, in the course of doing “research” for his next novel. But he does take a lot of personal risks, does do an awful lot of research, and why would you be doing that unless you were a spy? And don’t tell me it’s all about spying for your novels.

What I like a lot about le Carré is his politics, which are not easy to pigeon-hole. He is part humanist, part socialist and part what is (or was) occasionally called Tory Anarchist, an expression you will understand if you align it with Manic Depressive or as we are now supposed to call it, Bi-polar.

This is a splendid book, very easy to read, and full of surprises and strong feelings. (And I will let you into a secret: I don’t usually write sentences like that on this Blog).

*

In chapter 35, Carre tells a story dated to 1967 in which he helps to secure "leave to remain" in the UK for a famous Czech actor who has left Czechoslovakia legally but who wishes not to return and equally not to defect or claim political asylum, which would result in retaliation against the friends and family he has left behind. Carre taps a few friends for help and has soon got a polite letter into the hands of the Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins,  and the rest is a history which Carre is able to narrate.

In the summer of 1967, aged nineteen, I was Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club once a purely party outfit but now less so - my own Labour Party membership, acquired at the age of 16 had lapsed in 1966. In my capacity as Chairman (I think) I was asked to a house in north Oxford and introduced to a Czech student, a boy I guess around my own age, living in a cupboard-sized room with a girl who may or may not have been Czech but who does not figure in the rest of the story. I forget who asked me to visit or what was said, but  I was asked to help the boy stay in the UK and if I had to say now why he wanted to stay then I am prompted to say that he had done something political back home which put him at risk if he returned. But really I have forgotten, and maybe he just wanted to stay with the girl. Whether he had come out on a visa or clandestinely, I do not know. My effort to help consisted in setting up a Sunday morning meeting at the home of a Labour MP who lived locally, Robert Maxwell then resident in Headington Hall on the estate which housed his Pergamon Press publishing company. How I achieved this, I don't now know - this is of course before mobile phones and emails.Nor was I one of Maxwell's constituents - the voting age was still 21 and Maxwell was in any case MP for Buckingham.

We went along and I recall a grand reception hall with a harp on display. Then we were taken into a dining room with a vast and beautifully polished table. The boy sat on one side, me on the other, and Robert Maxwell at the top of the table. The boy's English was not very good and Maxwell soon turned to Czech and appeared to question him quite forcefully and at some length. At the end, Maxwell turned to me and explained that he had publishing contracts in Czechoslovakia and that he was afraid that the boy might be a provocateur, hence the questioning. Whether any promises were made, I don't recall and as to what happened next, I don't recall that either. That's the problem with trying to remember things fifty years later, at least for me it is.

Review: Helen Rappaport, Caught in the Revolution, Petrograd 1917

Living capital cities are always full of foreigners and always have been. Occasionally, a sclerotic regime has tried to keep them out – of Lhasa, for example – but most regimes need them as diplomats, bankers, businessmen, engineers, skilled technicians, doctors, translators, chefs, nannies, tutors, entertainers …

St Petersburg and Petrograd (as it was from 1914) was full of foreigners – indeed, bringing in foreigners had been government policy from the time of Peter the Great. All that the outbreak of World War One did was to empty the city of Germans (except for the spies) and replenish their ranks with additional Allied personnel. So when Petrograd led Russia into Revolution, not just once but twice in 1917, there were plenty of foreigners around to observe what went on and Helen Rappaport bases herself on the records left by a relatively small cast of American, British and French foreigners in Petrograd. She has produced a highly readable book though rather unbalanced. Foreigners from neutral countries – and there were many in the First World War including Russia’s near- neighbours Denmark and Sweden – were well-represented in Russia working for Red Cross or similar relief organisations and they may have had a different perspective on events in Russia to those involved in the Allied cause. There were also at least some more working class foreigners than those to be found here. Rappaport offers a view from the middle and upper classes.

She has researched thoroughly and I think that her narrative of the February Revolution which brought down the unloved and unmourned Romanovs is very strong. For those at the time this was the Revolution and what came after in October was a coup.

But her lack of sympathy for the Bolsheviks does lead to some carelessness. She produces “property is theft” as a “favourite Marxist dictum” (page 308) when of course it is the catch-phrase of a nineteenth century French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Lenin in 1917 did not speak of property as theft but urged the expropriation of the expropriators using the more striking phrase “Loot the looters!” In an economy and administration which had literally ground to a halt, the call to loot the looters was about the only means available to the government to bring about any kind of redistribution of wealth, whether from landlord to peasant or private owner to state. Even then, it could not solve the problem of hunger which bulks large in Rappaport’s narrative. The Romanovs could not feed Petrograd, the Provisional Government could not, nor could the Bolsheviks. Many starved and between 1917 – 21 the population plunged as those who could, left.

Again, she makes another small slip, saying that the Bolsheviks finally adopted the Western calendar on 13 February 1918, instantly adding 13 days (page 326). In fact, in Bolshevik controlled areas, 31 January 1918 was followed by 14 February which would otherwise have been 1 February. I have a postcard from a Danish traveller in Siberia writing home on the 14th to say cheerfully that for the first time it’s the same date in both Russia and Denmark.

I do think there is more material around than Rappaport has discovered and she recognises this in soliciting access to fresh sources (page 340). There is, for example, material written on the back of postcards  since Russia’s postal service did function right through 1917 almost without interruption – even in Petrograd and even if unreliable. Lots of mail did not arrive at its destination and  lots was delayed. Between the collapse of Imperial mail censorship and the imposition of Bolshevik censorship, there was a space in which people probably felt much freer to write about what they saw and what they were thinking, though the legacy of censorship probably still cast its shadow

Review: Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

The Female Eunuch was published in 1970 when Germaine Greer was thirty or thirty one. I forget whether I read it at the time, though I was reading other Second Wave feminist work, and I decided to (re-?) read it now partly because she is someone who quite a lot of people now hate and want to No Platform.

The book starts a bit uncertainly as Greer tries to behave like a proper scientist, adducing and evaluating evidence. Some of this discussion seems a bit quaint because science has moved on – for example, DNA testing did not exist in 1970. But it also feels quaint when it engages the literature which the Discovery of Sex in the 1960s spawned, a literature in which it is very easy to get lost as it searches, sometimes blindly, for the location of the female orgasm. Greer has a Queen Victoria moment when she writes of female ejaculation that it is “utterly fanciful” (page  44). Then the book moves into sections where I felt that the text was probably being eked out with material from Greer’s Cambridge doctoral researches. Finally, Greer finds her own voice in the last hundred pages and lets rip.

A few things struck me. This is a book about relations between men and women. Lesbians get a few mentions and gay men barely any (and the ones I noticed were not sympathetic). It’s not Greer’s scene and she isn’t really very interested. You could say that the whole book is about Greer’s own dilemmas. She is a heterosexual woman who wants to relate to men (and probably in the plural rather than the singular) but where the ways available for doing so are profoundly unattractive, unlike individual men. She is beautiful, clever, loud and likes relationships and sex - none of which taken singly may sound particularly off-putting but which offered as a package seem to have nowhere to go. Beautiful on its own allows you to be some man’s trophy. Clever on its own allows you to be a blue stocking but after the experience of Cambridge, No Thank You. Loud is more difficult thanks to polite society and likewise sex, which doesn’t seem to go with being someone’s wife and having children. In the last hundred pages, Greer decides that marriage is the main enemy and comprehensively trashes it. On all fronts, she does not want to be a eunuch and, to a greater or lesser extent, that is the deal she feels she is being offered. Why would anyone want to be a eunuch?

You can see where this might later lead her and I was looking out for signs of attitudes which have made her the focus of so much anger and it was there in the odd cutting remark.

In 1968-70 I was a graduate student in London and hung out with second wave feminists who gravitated into things like the London Women’s Liberation Workshops. They appear at page 349:

When these worthy ladies appeared at the Miss World Contest with their banners saying “We are not sexual objects” (a proposition that no one seemed inclined to deny) they were horrified to find that girls from the Warwick University movement were chanting and dancing around the police…

The parenthesis did make me smile, for a moment, but immediately it's obvious that it manages to be both a masculine unchivalrous remark and an unsisterly aside, the offence compounded by the acid contrast of “worthy ladies” and “girls”. But behind the cutting remark there is a coherent and worthy intellectual position: Greer is quite clear that for her feminism is not an Anti-Sex League and that sexual desire when not corrupted by patriarchy and capitalist advertising is indeed prompted and sustained by individuals in all their individuality and not by persons as objects – something she acknowledges in a very nice, single sentence about a truck driver and his wife:

I remember a truck driver telling me once about his wife, how sexy and clever and loving she was, and how beautiful. He showed me a photograph of her and I blushed for guilt because I had expected something plastic and I saw a woman by trendy standards plain, fat and ill-clad. (page 162)

So you might say she lands herself in hot water unnecessarily, carried away by irritation and frustration. But if we made that a No Platform offence, we would not need any platforms at all.

Review: Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

This is a lovely book written by a thirty year old woman who has returned to her native Orkney to recover having written off the best part of ten years in London – most of the time spent in becoming an alcoholic and staying that way. The book has a natural honesty, though I would avoid phrases like “searingly honest” since that conventional trope tends to make the honesty a smaller thing than it is.

A large part of the book’s interest lies in the way Amy Liptrot uses her habitat in Orkney – the sea, the rocks, the birds, the wind – as a thing to think with about her predicament. Occasionally, she seems to be trying too hard at the metaphor or at creating what I suppose T S Eliot might have called the “Objective Correlative” of her feelings. But most of the time it does not feel forced and most of the time it is disciplined – the book does not wander off at tangents but sticks to the twin themes of alcoholism and the exploration and inventorying of the natural world to which she has removed herself.

This discipline also helps the book to come across as an act of reparation. She is repairing herself in writing it, making good wasted time by doing something with her life, and also making some kind of gift to other people including those she has alienated along the alcoholic way. That surely is one reason way the reader ends up wanting to wish her well.

Review: Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think

In 1958, aged ten, my father took me on a day trip from Folkestone to Boulogne aboard the Royal Daffodil, one of the ancient ferries which British Railways used for the Channel crossings. You didn’t need a proper passport – a disposable day passport was available cheaply and easily. I found a terrific toy car – a Citroën DS – in a Boulogne shop and on the way back through British Customs kept my hand clamped over it in my raincoat pocket in the belief that it might be an illegal import. It probably was.

Now as someone whose way out of England is still through the Channel crossings, I read the News a bit anxiously as the border between England and France gets harder each day, wondering who will close it first. It was the English who inevitably opted out of Schengen – the word “British” is inaccurate in these matters – but I believe it will be the French who, one way or another, will shut the border completely. They would, wouldn’t they?

There will be lots of people buying Hazareesingh’s book. We would all like to know how the French think because we know that they do think and that this is one of the reasons why they are so difficult to live with unlike the English who don’t think, just get on with life as we have always lived it and intend to continue. We don’t, for example, have to worry about heads of our Ruritanian state – we have them already neatly lined up, hair parted, for the next one hundred years – and increasingly we don’t have to worry about elections: we presently have a government which simply installed itself, promptly telling Parliament that it is now a consultative body like the old Russian Duma.

Hazareesingh’s quite long book is very readable and often amusing. It has two weaknesses. It’s panorama of French thought is quite often not much more than a series of thumbnails. It reminded me in this of Bernard Wasserstein’s On The Eve which I reviewed here a while back. Thumbnails are all right if you are looking for a background briefing but I don’t belong to the class of people who need background briefings on how to deal with the French. The second weakness is its Oxford Common Room geniality. The author has been holed up in Balliol since 1990 and that does not bode well for anyone. At worst, he lets the French off scot-free which may be one reason they have awarded his book one of their big prizes, always a relief to have a foreigner who doesn't trash us.

Hazareesingh’s approach is broadly narrative chronological and it is perhaps this approach which allows the author to avoid anything which you might think of as a confrontation or contestation except in chapter 10 which is more decisive in this respect. What I would like to have seen is more use of the possibilities inherent in the contrast of history and structure – thank you, Lévi-Strauss and Sartre – trying to tease out how the structural awfulness of France today is the product of a history, including an intellectual history. How come the French end up with the paralysed figure of Hollande, who you could see as a sort of tribute act to Brezhnev? How come they end up with so little liberty, so little equality, so little fraternity? Why is it a police state? ( The author never mentions the CRS). Why do the French hate each other so much? Why are they always attracted to authoritarian solutions, left or right? How do they put up with having their lives micromanaged by the state, things closed when you want them open or not allowed to sell what you want, so that the only way to get a plastic bottle of Evian in Paris is to buy it from an illegal street trader? 

Why is the history so grubby and still unacknowledged as such – something on which Hazareesingh might have said more than he does. There is a marked contrast with Germany here. Fanon – a fine thinker and writer - gets in, but that’s about it. Why do they still go around denouncing each other? What is this childish rentreé into the trade union strike season all about? Why have they been  so incredibly conservative about everything down to smoking themselves to death, not learning English, being the slowest to adopt modern communications technology and media, thinking it part of les droits du chien to shit everywhere, and so on and so forth? And one which surely ought to have interested the author more, Why do so few – even none – of their universities figure in World Rankings?

I have a suggestion. The author is incredibly well-read to the point where his book sometimes reads like short book reviews strung together. He should take a deep breath, put all that aside, sit down and write an essay setting out just what he thinks about France. He could title it How I think about the French, even write it in French and put it out, a hundred pages long, no more, through a Parisian publisher. He's done the spade-work already.