Review: Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From

Tim Parks is a prolific writer across a variety of genres and in two languages – and that may be three reasons why he is less appreciated than he should be. I encountered his work first in two excellent novels (Europa, Destiny) and then in fun non-fiction treatments of life in Italy (Italian Neighbours – there are more in the same genre). 

I picked up this new book of 37 short essays, originally contributed to the New York Review of Books - of which I am only an occasional reader – expecting to enjoy his reflections on what might be thumbnailed as “Literature Today”. And I did. 

They are fluently written in unpretentious prose (Parks has little patience for modern academic literary criticism) and range over many topics though returning to a few core themes, notably the tension between literature as something (necessarily) rooted in a particular place and time – its cultural and linguistic context – and literature as something which we are told should be accessible to all in a global marketplace of fictions.

Some of the essays are expressions of emotions not recollected in tranquillity. Parks wears his irritations on his sleeve, though they are the irritations which any writer will experience when dealing with the apparatchiks of modern literary production. Thus, at pages 202 – 205 he has to deal with the inevitably American copy-editor who wants to dumb down his new book about Italy so that it doesn’t appear – well, Italian. Most Americans don’t possess a passport and  believe that when in Rome the Romans do as Americans do in America. Mr Parks must not be allowed to disabuse them.

But Parks does not tell us the end of this story of writer’s woe. Did he give in to the copy-editor in the interests of American publication and money or did he say to this functionary, in his best English voice, “Sorry, but I feel you are just too stupid to copy edit my book – I think I’ll publish it myself on line”?

[Note added 25 March 2015: American editors are not a new problem. When Eric Ambler's 1938 spy fiction novel Cause for Alarm was published in the USA it was minus the whole of chapter 17 which not only has a Latin title "Reductio ad Absurdum" but is a portrait of an Italian mathematician who has lost his mind - that's to say, three things against his palatibility! A modern editor of the novel, John Preston, says that, arguably, chapter 17 is the "moral crux of the whole book"]

Tim Parks is obviously a writer who has worked very hard and read very widely – he deploys a remarkable range of literary references and clearly has a memory which allows him to call up an apt quotation or summary. One thing he does not do is set out his own stall for what he thinks writing (the novel) is about by asking us to contrast it with the views of other writers who have written about writing – from his near-contemporaries, for example, Milan Kundera (reviewed on this Blog, 5 November 2014) . 

Review: Stephen Kotkin - Stalin, Paradoxes of Power 1878 - 1928

Nowadays, I find the decision whether to buy a 949 hardback tome a weighty one: Will it be worth the effort of reading in a semi-reclining position which allows the two or three kilos to be propped up on my stomach? I can see that Kindle is not far off.

I bought it and read the 739 pages of text - the footnotes are in too small print for me. As a youth, I would have read them.

It's a good book. Very long history books can be very dull but Kotkin divides his into chapterettes and cleverly splices a history of Russia into his history of Stalin - of which this is the first of three volumes. Additionally, he is very selective and often chooses to foreground lesser-known episodes from the 1878 - 1928 period he is dealing with. So though I have read the other big books - Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes, Sebastian Montefiore - I frequently had the sense of reading things I didn't already know.

A lot of the text is devoted to stories of the leading Bolsheviks fighting like ferrets in a sack which - as Stalin perhaps realised - is no way to run a country (or even a world revolution). Stalin actually emerges as no worse and sometimes better than some of the others, with a clear grasp of central strategic questions. Some lesser known figures, like Sokolnikov, also understood central issues. But there were many at the top who could not get beyond speechifying and plotting and Kotkin lets you see that.

Kotkin raises, in forensic detail,  interesting questions about the authenticity of Lenin's "Testament" which dogged the Bolsheviks after Lenin's death - maybe I had read all this somewhere else but I don't think so. The finger points to Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, putting together things Lenin may have said to her privately before he was incapacitated but which he certainly didn't dictate from his death bed.

What is perhaps more interesting is the way in which the Bolsheviks continued to look to Lenin, like some spiritual leader or Pope, even when he was too ill to lead and when he should have been ignored. They would have done better to look at the country they supposedly led.

The prose does not quite have the verve of Orlando Figes but it's decently written and my interest was sustained all the way through.

Review: Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine

This is an unsatisfactory book. Described by the publishers as "The Authoritative Account of the Ukrainian Conflict" it is no such thing. It is a review of news reports and academic discussions, informed by a perspective sympathetic to Russia. The author has made no visits, conducted no interviews and throws no new light on disputed topics like the shooting down of MH 117. There is a lack of detail - generalisations are frequently repeated but few concrete situations are described in a way which would allow one to say "Ah ha!" and see what the Ukrainian conflict means on the ground in Ukraine. 

In some areas, it deepened the understanding I had gleaned from reading newspapers. Sakwa does have interesting things to say about the weakness and corruption of the Ukrainian state apparatus which since 1991 has simply failed to deliver a better future for Ukrainians. He does bring out the continuing role of Ukraine's oligarchs - unlike those in Russia, the power they acquired in the free-for-all of the 1990s has not been curbed by the state. President Poroshenko is himself one of the oligarchs ("The Chocolate King"). And Sakwa draws justified attention to the dark side of Ukrainian nationalism with its roots in the racism and fascism of the 1920s and 1930s.

Having no future, and scarred by the past, too many Ukrainians look back - the heroes, the myths, the banners - all of which are simply unhelpful in solving any actual problems which Ukraine faces. They are not alone - in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Austria .... there are plenty of people living in the past and dreaming of an unpleasant future for their neighbours.

The United States, perhaps unduly influenced by the Ukrainian diaspora, simply doesn't see - or doesn't care about - the dark side of the people it has promoted to power. Not for the first time, the US has been fooled by people who know that if you say "Freedom and Democracy" or "NATO" then America will not enquire too closely into your credentials. It happened in Iraq and it is happening in Ukraine.

On the language question, Sakwa adopts the right position against the language nationalists and language purists who want to impose Ukrainian everywhere but has little detail on how Ukrainians actually communicate with each other. It's compressed into half a page on page 10. At the very least, there should have been more discussion of the role of Surzhyk (a Russian - Ukrainian language mix) and whether it has any future as a lingua franca - I don't know the answer to that question and I would like someone to tell me. The imposition of state languages on sometimes reluctant populations has sometimes worked (France, Israel) but often fails (Republic of Ireland with its Gaelic fantasies, Wales with a resistant population which eventually forced the British state into acceptance of bi-lingualism)

In Ukraine, the language conflict is caught up with economic and political issues. In 1991, the Donbas (and even Crimea) voted for Ukrainian independence. The Donbas is now in revolt because the Ukrainian state, in over 20 years of corrupt existence, has not delivered a future to its population.

Review: Ben Fergusson, The Spring of Kasper Meier

I had just read Joseph Kanon's, The Good German (see previous review) so I was curious to see how this book, also set in the ruins of post-War Berlin, compared. There are similarities: the evocation of life in a destroyed city, black markets and rackets, the legacy of the Russian mass rapes. But whereas Kanon's main characters are members of the occupying forces, Fergusson's are German. And his main character, Kasper Meier, is homosexual (or possibly bi-sexual) - a man who before the war ran a gay bar and whose lover was killed by the Nazis. 

Fergusson's plot is much less oriented towards possible movie scenes and, I think it's fair to say, less mainstream. Kasper Meier is singled out for blackmail, but the blackmail is rather unusual, and when he goes in search of the blackmailer, he enters a world which one could thumbnail as Kafkaesque. It's very well done. As eventually becomes clear, the supposed blackmail scheme is a front for another, worse scheme. Eventually, Kasper penetrates to the truth and - after several escapes in which he is implausibly bullet-proof - secures a happy ending for himself and the original emissary of the blackmail scheme, Eva.

Both Kasper and Eva are built up as many-faceted, interesting characters. They are not super-sleuths who populate most thrillers, but emerge through the story as interesting human beings.

There are a few proof reading slips and one howler, "St Petersburg" for "Leningrad" on page 325. This novel is set in 1946! It always amazes me when authors who acknowledge so much help from others have failed to find just one reader who could save them from a gross mistake.

Review: Jospeh Kanon, The Good German

This is a readable book, but even at 500+ pages, it tries to do too much.

It is most satisfactory as a credible recreation of life in Berlin immediately after the end of the war, a city in ruins, recently terrorised by Russian troops licensed to rape, and now coming back to some kind of life – occupying forces, arrests, tension, black markets, prostitution, and places for the troops to drink and dance. I get the feeling that Joseph Kanon has read all the history books.

It is also good in recreating the rapid political shifts which soon consigned the Nazis to the last war, and made Russia into America’s Number One Enemy. That meant, among other things, deciding to ignore the Nazi pasts of individuals deemed useful to the USA – Kanon picks on von Braun’s rocket scientists and makes one of them central to his novel.

The novel is unsatisfactory when it hands us the chases and shoot outs and hand to hand combat deemed essential to a good thriller. These have the feel of those pitiful trailers for violent American movies, featuring bullet- and bomb-proof heroes, which make a visit to a mainstream cinema such an unpleasant experience. When you write a novel you may indeed hope that someone will make a film of it, but you spoil the novel if you start writing a film script instead.

Likewise, the one long Sex Scene doesn’t belong here. I like sex but the sex scene isn’t sexy and, actually, isn’t appropriate to what is being worked out between Jake and Lena. It’s a stand alone scene which is out of place.

To end more positively, the exploration of moral dilemmas and moral compromises under totalitarian regimes is good and rarely heavy-handed. There isn't always a simple answer to the question, Who are the bad guys? - even in the world of the Holocaust. There are complex cases presented and pursued in an interesting fashion – Gunther, Professor Brandt, for example

Review: Nicholas Shakespeare, Priscilla

This is a remarkably interesting book. But rather than being the story of a War Heroine - as one might imagine from the cover - it’s the story of a vulnerable and flawed individual – the author’s English aunt – who finds herself stranded in France at the outbreak of the second world war and then – in effect – decides to stay and make shift as best she can right through the German occupation. That “best she can” involves a great deal of sleeping with the enemy.

It’s also a story of the peculiar kinds of neglect which the English upper middle classes were – and probably still are – capable of inflicting on their children. The children are not abused in the usual ways, so that it is harder for them to pin point exactly what is wrong with their upbringing, but they are neglected to an extent and in ways which leaves them with lifelong handicaps and often enough with leanings towards promiscuity, alcoholism and suicide. It’s all here in Nicholas Shakespeare’s book. One should never underestimate the capacity for obtuse selfishness in educated, polite, gregarious and worldly parents.

Along the way, we learn a lot about some remarkable people. I never knew, for example, that Bunuel's Belle de Jour was based on a novel published way back in 1928, nor that the author - Joseph Kessel - was the quite extraordinary figure who appears in these pages. 

A successful novelist and biographer, Shakespeare has started out with the various writings which his aunt left behind at her death and then excavated the historical truth in public archives and in interviews with the few who still survive. The concluding and entirely unexpected “Afterword” is a brilliant coup de théâtre and brought tears to my eyes.

Review: Jane Austen

A year or so ago, the publisher Carmen Callil resigned as a judge for the Man Booker International prize, which was shortly thereafter awarded to Philip Roth. She complained that all his books were the same. I wonder what she would say about Jane Austen.

I've just read three: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, in that order. I've bought Emma so no doubt I will read that too and, of course, a couple more and then I will have read all of mature / completed Jane Austen. I'll soon be an expert. Much easier than Shakespeare.

Jane Austen is, I understand, best known in England as the inventor of romantic country house costume dramas for television. I don't watch television but I can imagine that it's great fun for the Costumes department and hard work for the Props department, oiling all those doors to permit the constant Entries stage right and Exits stage left. Anyway, it's enough to get Jane Austen's portrait onto English banknotes. I do hope Caroline Herschel and Ada Lovelace are in the queue, even though they didn't write romantic novels.

Jane Austen got onto University reading lists probably thanks to F.R.Leavis, who didn't think she wrote romantic novels but was instead a writer inspired by Serious Moral Purpose, unlike people like Charles Dickens ("an entertainer") and Laurence Sterne ("a trifler") - see Leavis's moralising tract The Great Tradition for the epithets.

Anyway, I am not entirely convinced my Miss Austen's novels. I thought Sense and Sensibility plodding and, as a result of reading editorial Introductions, discover that this is a common enough view. And in Persuasion, where you pretty soon figure out what has to happen and wish she would get on with it, there is an awful chapter IX in volume II where Mrs Smith is allowed a very long monologue (pages of it) to trash the character of Mr William Elliot and knock him out of any possible contention, leaving the way clear for the return of the gallant Captain Wentworth. It is laying it on with a trowel. I guess they have to abridge these things on TV.

That leaves Pride and Prejudice as the best of the three, with some very funny moments and a livelier style. But all three novels are weighed down by a cast of minor characters who no doubt fill up the background on TV but who contribute very little to the narrative, yet whose names must be remembered.

I am not saying I Rest My Case. I will proceed to Emma and think some more. But I now have an explanation for something which puzzled me. A few Blogs ago I reviewed Milan Kundera's L'Art du Roman. I was surprised by the virtual absence of English writers from his history of the European novel. He has good words for Fielding and Sterne and that's about it. He doesn't mention Jane Austen. Now I think I can see why. I think it is the illustrative moralising which sticks in his throat.

Postscript 8 December 2014: I have now read Emma and even though I had 'flu while reading it, I think it is the best so far. The outcome of the story isn't so obvious, though you can still guess  it as you go along. More importantly, there is more subtle character development. It's still terribly judgemental - or, at least, peopled by characters who spend their lives Judging - but there is more psychological insight. I haven't read the critics but it occurs to me to doubt that many of them will dwell on Mr Knightley as the Good Father figure who has loved Emma, faults and all, since she was, er, 13 and who is loved in return precisely because of that willingness to love her, faults and all.

Postscript 18 December 2014: It gets worse. In Mansfield Park, where amateur theatricals are condemned but living off the labour of slaves is not, Edmund Bartram marries his first cousin Fanny, who he has loved, guided and protected  "since her being ten years old" (page 436).