Review: Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights

This is a 2015 re-issue of a 1994 novel with an Introduction by Philip Pullman.

It's a Quest, Grail and Chase thriller. The hero, Johnny Porter has to get from A to a very inaccessible B; then he has to Meet the person who will give him what he has come for - in this case, Information; then he has to get back from B to A. Over 478 pages, it's an extended anxiety dream from which you cannot escape. In other words, it's a thriller.

I suspect the author got caught out a bit by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is notionally set in post-1991 Russia; but really it's set in the Soviet Union, even though the Siberian weather - which plays quite a large part in the narrative - didn't change with the regime.

I found the main character, Johnny Porter, actually a bit of a cipher. For all his multiple talents, he's not very interesting. All the interest is in the narrative which supports him.

This narrative makes rich use of detail - rather like Martin Cruz Smith's 1981 Gorky Park. So much so, that the author felt we needed a couple of maps to help us. Unfortunately, at least one and probably several editors at Faber and Faber, the book's upmarket London publishers, failed to notice that the maps on pages 158 and 417 have been transposed so that the first one, when encountered, is merely baffling and the second one too, until you realise that this is not part of the plot but a publisher's mistake.  

Review: Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans

I wanted to read this book and did so, cover to cover, but I found it rather disappointing. It's very much a conventional military history of battles fought, seen from our side and theirs (as one would nowadays expect). There are lots of these battles, mostly involving the Brits and their colonial troops, taking place and taking their toll from Gallipoli in the West to the Hijaz in the East. The slaughter is not so massive as on the Western Front, though there is plenty of casual cruelty running alongside. And on a much larger and more horrific scale, there is the Armenian genocide, which Rogan explains in terms of the Turks' image of the Armenians as a Russian Fifth Column in the Anatolian heartland. Rogan is interesting when he points out that the main details of the genocide have been in the public domain since 1919 when the new Turkish government tried and condemned its main instigators.

When he moves outside military history, Rogan paints a sorry tale of the callousness and perfidy of the Allies in their pursuit of Imperial ambitions, secretly carving up Ottoman territory between themselves (Sykes-Picot and so on), making promises to the Zionists (the Balfour Declaration) and misleading Arab nationalists about their true intentions as they enlisted them as expendable temporary allies.

I would have welcomed more on the emergence of Turkish identity as the successor to Ottoman identity - after all the period he writes about was dominated by the "Young Turks" not the Sultan and Caliph. Rogan portrays the Ottomans as pursuing an essentially defensive policy - which they were, surrounded as they were by sharks - but there must have been some in Constantinople thinking beyond that.

Review: Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man, The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes

Back on 13 January 2013 I enthusiastically reviewed Richard Davenport-Hines' An English Affair, a history of the Profumo scandal. So when I saw his new book on the Waterstone's table, I bought it.

Unfortunately, it lacks the structure and the passionate sense of injustices done which drove the previous book. A lot of this new book reads like cut and paste ( a frequent problem with modern books which are never written out from start to finish) and the attempt to impose structure through chunking Keynes' life into seven compartments doesn't eradicate or even disguise this weakness. As a result, the book isn't very readable - something which surprised me.

It does contain a lot of information, sometimes elegantly dispensed, and it does deal with things - notably Keynes' sex life - which previous biographies have pussy-footed around. Keynes wasn't coy about his sex life and regarded it as very important  - important enough to chronicle and then archive -  so the lurid details are fully justified.

Keynes' success owed itself to three things: his intellectual brilliance, his capacity for very hard work, and - despite his sharp-tongued willingness to cause offence - a superb ability to make use of the many Old Boys' (and Young Boys' ) networks in which he was enmeshed. That last is one reason the Establishment to which he whole-heartedly belonged never persecuted him in the way that it persecuted Alan Turing. Good luck is another.

Review: Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel Germany and Austria-Hungary at War 1914 - 1918

This is a good book. 566 pages of text and 220 of apparatus. I discovered an enormous amount which I did not know, simply because Watson writes his history as if from the capitals of the losers, something which is rarely done. History belongs to the winners.

But in addition to what I learnt about Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria-Hungary (Ottoman Turkey, the other main loser is omitted), I also read a very measured assessment of the criminality and destructiveness of the First World War, a war without any moral merit in which leaders simply chose to murder and starve millions of their own citizens in pursuit of - sometimes vague - Imperial ambitions - or, in Austria-Hungary's case, Imperial vanity. On the Allied side, Tsarist Russia approached the war in the same spirit, lusting after Austrian and Ottoman territory, pursuing its recurrent delusion that the way to protect its very long borders was to make them even longer. 

There is also an important thread through the book which shows us that the other face of military discipline is military indiscipline. Soldiers do not do as they are told: they loot, burn, rape and kill women and children; they desert, mutiny and surrender. Watson documents this and gives the figures.

Nowadays, unreliable soldiers are replaced by missiles: we do not put boots on the ground. They always become boots in someone's face and soon there are no hearts and minds, except those of criminal elites, on your side. Trouble is, the missiles seem to hit the ground in such a way that they have pretty much the same effect.

Review: Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios

First published in 1939 this remains a remarkably fresh detective novel. Plus ça change - here we have not just murderers (who are always with us) but drug dealers, people traffickers, shady nightclub owners, assassins and, perhaps best of all, a dodgy bank registered in Monaco so that it does not have to publish anything or pay taxes.

The third-person narrative casts a writer of detective novels as its lead character who sets out in search of the history of a recently deceased criminal only to discover him, eventually, alive. The fiction writer, described as a prig by one of the underworld characters with whom he gets involved, is led on - as we all are - by fascination with the Other: those on the other side who make their living, and their lives, by breaking laws or moral taboos rather than enforcing them. Ambler explores this fascination at some length by setting up a working relationship between the writer Latimer and the crook Mr Peters. Just sometimes one feels that Ambler has Latimer protest too much, just in case the reader is tempted to conclude that he has been seduced by the other side - and this is perhaps the only aspect of the novel which feels a little dated. A modern writer might have fewer moral scruples or worry less about moral ambiguity.

It's a very good read. Ambler makes quite generous assumptions about his readers' general knowledge and willingness to add to it. It is quite a pleasant change to read someone who does not assume you are ignorant or determined to remain so.

The Origin of Books: Writing and Desire

Some years ago, I wandered around the Tropical Greenhouses of Hamburg's Botanical Gardens. On the way out I bought a book, Die Goldene Äpfel, a history of citrus fruits edited by Carsten Schirarend and Marina Heilmeyer.

I discovered that books had been written about citrus fruits as far back as 1178 when the Governor of Wenchou City in China, Han Yen-Chih, published Chü Lu. His preface about the Origins (Entstehung) of his book is translated in my German botanical publication. I was touched by it, and tried to render it (freely) into English. Here is what I wrote, followed by the German I was using.

The Origin of Books

Ich bin ein Mann aus dem Norden - I am a man from the North
He wrote. Und mein ganzes Leben lang - And my whole life long
I had never seen a land where the Orange Trees blossom

Strolling in our Northern markets I would always buy the fruit
But it was never of the best kind which comes from Ni-Shan -
- I already knew though barely able to imagine

Last year it was my luck to be made Governor of Wenchou
I travelled South - yes - to the land where the orange trees bloom
I slowed my journey - gazed like a lover - tasted the fruit

*

The Governor must not leave his City - that is our firm Rule
Not even to walk among Ni-Shan's fragrant orange groves
Where others drink wine among the trees of which I must dream

A friend brings me their fruit, tells me about scholars' studies of
the Li-Chee, the Mu-tan, the Shao-yao - though none of my fruit
Gently he jokes that the Orange Tree has waited for me

Also schrieb Ich das Buch - And so I came to write this book

________________________

German text (page 46 of Die Goldene Äpfel):

Ich bin ein Mann aus dem Norden, und mein ganzes Leben lang habe ich es bedauert, nie ein blühenden Orangenbaum gesehen zu haben. Immer wieder habe ich auf dem Markt Orangen gekauft, aber nie waren es die besonders wertvollen, sog. Ni-shan-Orangen. Letzten Herbst kam ich als Gouverneur hierher (nach Wenchou), und ich hatte das grosse Glück, endlich Orangenbaüme blühen zu sehen und auch ihfre Früchte zu essen. Da es dem Gouverneur nicht erlaubt ist, sich von der Stadt zu entfernen, war es mir leider nicht möglich, mit meinen Gästen zu den duftenden Orangenhainen von Ni-shan zu gehen und mit ihnen dort Wein zu trinken. Deshalb hat ein Freund die Früchte zu mir gebracht und mir gesagt: "Die köstliche Qualität der Chü-Orange ist nicht geringer als die der Litchi-Frucht. Jetzt gibt es ein Buch über die Litchi, ebenso wie über die mu tan und die shao-yao. Nür über den Orangenbaum, den Du so liebst, gibt es kein solches Werk! Ist es nicht so, als hätten die Orangen auf Dich gewartet?"
Also shrieb ich das Buch ...

Reblogged from www.trevorpatemanblog.com where it was published on 5 February 2012

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) .