Review: Tim Butcher, The Trigger

This is a beautifully crafted and very readable book. The author retraced - literally, as a hiker - the steps which took Gavrilo Princip from his home village in Austro-Hungarian Bosnia to Sarajevo and the intellectual and emotional steps which turned him into the assassin  of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Narrating his journey, he at the same time writes the biography of Princip and compares and contrasts the Balkans in the 1910s with the Balkans in the 1990s, where he worked as a news reporter. There is some original archival research done on the way. In total, it's a very good book.

Tim Butcher presents Princip as a South Slav nationalist - a Yugo-slav nationalist - rather than a Serbian nationalist. He wanted to free all those who were colonial subjects of the Austro-Hungarian empire regardless of their language or religion. Princip was actually (it seems) little interested in how they would then organise themselves.

These claims are important because the rhetorical positioning of the great powers in the run-up to their  First World War cast Princip as a Serb Nationalist in pursuit of what later came to be called Greater Serbia. That positioning allowed Austria-Hungary to point the finger of blame for the assassination at independent (but weak) Serbia and pushed Russia into the role of defender of Serbia, a country populated by fellow Orthodox Christian Slavs.

This is once again one of those fine books which though not written by an academic will force the academics to re-think. 

Criticisms occurred to me at just a couple of points. Butcher makes rather heavy weather of the language issue - is it Serbo-Croat, or Serbian and Croat? - and strangely makes no mention at all of the fact that the south Slavs use two alphabets. Serbians / Orthodox Christians use Cyrillic; the others use Roman. Yugoslavia, when it existed, was obliged to use both. 

Butcher's narrative is about Serbs, Croats and Bosnians (and Herzgovinans - Princip was one). The Slovenes, the Macedonians, the quasi-independent Montenegrins, the Kosovar Albanians, the Jews, the Hungarians, the Roma don't figure. What united them all was merely the fact that for centuries they had been ruled as colonial subjects either of the Ottomans or the Habsburgs. Princip did in fact succeed in freeing all of them from the yoke of those Imperialisms. The brutal conflicts of the 1990s were (at least partly) about freeing themselves from the yoke of a demented Greater Serb nationalism.

Review: Ferdinand von Schirach, The Girl Who Wasn't There

I didn’t find this a gripping novel in the way that the author’s previous book The Collini Case is gripping: I read that book in a single sitting (see my Review 16 March 2014). With this one, I struggled.

Roland Barthes back in the early 1950s developed the concept of a “Degree Zero” of unmarked prose in modern writing; he had in mind works like Camus’ L’Etranger – the original English translator of that novel found its plainness so unacceptable that he or she simply padded out the Spartan text with invented flourishes. Von Schirach adopts a Spartan style reminiscent of Camus. For well over a 100 pages everything is described in flat prose, short sentences resisting emotional charge or effect. I don’t think this is the translator getting it wrong.

For example, though there are clear similarities between this book and some of Houellebecq’s writings (notably La carte et le territoire reviewed here 1 August 2012), von Schirach – unlike Houellebecq who is very good at it - does not try to write erotically charged and arousing prose; he just narrates sexual scenes as he might narrate having a shower.

I was on the point of giving up (even though the book is very short) when the murder mystery section opens – at page 115 of the 215 page book - and the writing becomes more lively, more open and even funny. The first joke appears as late as page 142 (top line) and I found it inordinately funny – that’s what emotional starvation does to you.

Alternatively, you could say that it shows good crafting, good pacing. I don’t think so. I think the pace – or if you like, the tone – is unchanged for too long (115 pages say) and then the murder mystery is compressed and underdeveloped.

Like Houellebecq in La carte et le territoire von Schirach imagines himself into the work of a modern artist of conceptual orientation (actually a photographer) and is thus able to create a complete work – a project, an installation – for his character just using words. The reader can enter fully into this totally imaginary art work. This perhaps illustrates the weakness of conceptual art, which is often no more than a narrative illustrated with a few props. But von Schirach has done his background reading and some of the more interesting passages in the second half of the book are those which give the background to his photographer’s disappearing trick.

There is a happy ending which is so brief and abrupt that it could be called trite.

My advice: in his next novel, von Schirach should give himself another 50 or 100 pages and he should change the pace, the emotional tone, more often. Trite but possibly true.

Review: Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

Basically,No. It’s a pity that Harper Lee was prevailed upon to release this novel written half a century ago and before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.

The book is poorly structured and paced - it doesn’t have either the narrative drive or the emotional drive that you get in Mockingbird. The dialogue is – to use an appropriate cliché – wooden: it’s not so much dialogue as a collection of set-piece speeches. Some things are embarrassingly bad: notably when Uncle Jack morphs into Dr Freud in One Easy Lesson in order to make things at least half-right again between Jean-Louise and Atticus.

As for the content, my guess is that it does not stand the test of time and won’t be helpful in addressing America’s contemporary race issues which now are just as much a Northern as a Southern question.

At worst, there are going to be Reading Groups where someone will suggest that if it’s OK for Atticus Finch to be some kind of qualified racist then it must be OK for all of us.

The book has the overall sentimental feel of the work which followed it.But it would have been best for To Kill a Mockingbird to have remained the one-off, stand-alone achievement which it has been since it was published.

Review: Suzanne O'Sullivan, It's All in Your Head

This is another book picked up by chance in Waterstone's and a most unusual one too. It's quite easy to find books which narrate the case histories of patients seen by private psychotherapists (Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life is a recent example, reviewed on this site 3 February 2014) or, in the case of Adam Phillips, by a former NHS child psychologist. But this book is by a consultant neurologist with a special interest in epilepsy who in the course of her work (both NHS and, I assume, private) encounters patients whose symptoms have no identifiable organic base and are thus, sooner or later, classified as psychological in origin.

The symptoms are major and disabling - seizures, convulsions, paralysis, blindness. They are symptoms which have led to ambulances being called, A and E working flat out, consultants being telephoned, provisional diagnoses and medication being prescribed - and to no avail. 

For the most part, they are symptoms which if not organically caused, would once have been assigned to the category of hysteria. Dr O'Sullivan devotes some pages to the history of hysteria within modern clinical medicine, starting with Charcot and Janet and continuing to Breuer and Freud. But - perhaps on editorial advice - she gives no bibliographic references at all, not even a Further Reading list. This is a pity since part of the interest of this book lies in the fact that it is written from the perspective of a neurologist with an orthodox medical training and wide experience of conventional clinical practice in Ireland and the UK. It thus gives an unusual insight into what hospital neurologists nowadays know and think about psychosomatic or psychogenic disorders.

But the book uses case histories rather than theoretical argument or research review to guide our understanding. One of the first things to strike me about these case histories was the prominent position of the patient's parents, partners and other carers. Of course, if you are confined to a wheelchair you are going to have carers. But the carers are often present in the kinds of unhelpful way which R D Laing and A Esterson flagged up many years ago now in Sanity, Madness and the Family: the carers present themselves as authoritative in regard to the medical history and current feelings of the patient. They also have strong views on what will count as an acceptable diagnosis. O'Sullivan does not really engage with the facts she extensively reports and the patient is always referred as an individual to a psychiatrist and never everyone involved to family or marital therapy.

She frequently makes the point that the psychogenic illnesses she encounters are found in people who often have no conscious awareness of being anxious, depressed or stressed and who indeed often enough proclaim themselves happy and worry-free. You could say, this is why they have ended up in A and E rather than in the armchair of a private psychotherapist. At one point she remarks, "Perhaps those who deny stress do so because they do not feel stress, having converted it to something else" (p 243) - that "something else" being a somatic symptom. But this is not an incidental "Perhaps" feature. It seems to be the heart of the matter - the patients she is seeing suffer from conversion disorders in which the body expresses (in a terrifying manner) what the conscious mind, the tongue cannot.

This is a very interesting, quite brave book. It is consistently humane, even towards the occasional malingerer who makes it all the way to the neurologist's telemetry suite - in the final chapter, there is a charming, warm portrait of just such a person. We know a lot about the world of those who can be articulate on the analyst's couch, much less about those whose body takes the brunt of their illness.

Essay: Portnoy's Complaint meets the Creative Writing Class

It was Carmen Callil who made me go out and buy a Philip Roth. When she resigned as a judge for the Man Booker International Prize, just awarded to Philip Roth, she complained that all his books were the same. Well, I thought, then I only have to read one.

I bought The Human Stain, on table display locally, and thereby plugged a gap in my reading. I had now read all of Philip Roth. I could see Carmen Callil's real issue. He's an all-American Male Writer. He's not doing polite fiction, he's doing a bar room brawl.

Unfortunately, I did enjoy the book, even when it punched me in the gut: there's a scene where, as part of his rehab, a traumatised Vietnam veteran - one of the principal characters - is taken to a Chinese restaurant to sit down and eat a meal. It's a long, drawn-out passage and reading it is like watching a horror movie. In a Creative Writing class you could use it as a model of craftsmanship.

I went out and bought another Roth, Portnoy's Complaint, a book I could have read at any time in the past forty years but hadn't.

In the second half of my University career, I drifted into teaching Creative Writing. There was a demand for it, people would pay (if you gave them an MA), and I could do it well enough. The basic formula is that you sit around and people read excerpts from their work in progress - or they pre-circulate it - and everyone joins in to comment. It was certainly easier than the foundations of linguistics.

The main source of anxiety in the Creative Writing class is that some (male) student will produce his equivalent of Portnoy's Complaint. And though I can sit and laugh heartily here at home, my toes would curl if someone did it (as they occasionally did) in a CW class. The atmosphere is just too polite, too politically correct and too feminine. At worst, it's Sunday School.

Maybe it was me. Maybe I didn't know how to make the setting into one which could accommodate masculine (or maybe male) rampage, masculine (or maybe male) tirade. Blogger can't accommodate it either, it seems - it refused to autosave the first draft of this Blog the moment I started to quote Roth Fucking and Cunting (I wouldn't even dare quote him Jewing).

But I don't think it was just me. Portnoy's Complaint could not come out of a nice CW class and that, I think, is probably Carmen Callil's problem with Roth. But if so, I think it is the CW class which has to go, not Roth or Roth's genre of writing.

Reblogged from www.trevorpatemanblog.com where it first appeared on 29 June 2011

Review: Andrew Morton, 17 Carnations: the Windsors, the Nazis and the Cover-Up

This is what you end up with if you place at the heart of your country’s constitution a struggling dysfunctional family, often enough just not up to the job or any job. There are plenty of occasions reading Andrew Morton’s book when I thought “Just like Prince Charles!” and “Just like Prince Harry”. The Windsors ( and their previous incarnation, the Saxe Coburg Gothas whose name they dropped in 1917 ) have only ever had much luck when their women have been in charge: Victoria, George VI’s wife Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the Queen Mother), Elizabeth II.

Unfortunately, this is not a good book. I find it hard to believe that the author read it cover to cover before signing it off:  two thirds of the way through, it is as if another (and inferior) writer takes over in Chapter 13 who then goes on to re-tell from a different perspective what has already been told in the first dozen chapters (and already more than once). So though I began reading with interest I ended up more than ready to put the book down.

It is not original research and in offering many quotations from a fair number of historians who have already written about Edward VIIIs sympathy for Hitler (and his own German aristocratic relatives who rallied to Hitler’s cause) it ends up without a clear verdict on the nature of his disloyalty to his country and his country’s various governments in the 1930s and 1940s. Morton has at least one excuse: though many important incriminating documents survive, others have surely been destroyed and more would have been if the House of Windsor and the Governments of the 1940s had had their way. (Just as nowadays, it is the Government which is fighting to keep Prince Charles' indiscreet political letters from becoming public)

The man who briefly became Edward VIII before abdicating to marry an American divorcee combined popular charisma with a deeply unpleasant private personality, his wife likewise. There are many examples in the book to make you think, “These people are complete shits”.

Like Prince Charles, Edward believed in an “active” monarchy which would not restrict itself to the constitutional duties of advising, encouraging and warning. But it’s unclear on what Edward felt his right to intervene to be based: he doesn’t appear to have studied much, read much or spent much time talking to anyone who wasn’t a crony or a crook – or a flatterer and spy. Perhaps then just Divine Right gave him the authority he assumed, after the Abdication, to conduct protracted freelance diplomacy with the Nazis and their allies.

Deeply self-centred and often childish, he had no notion of discretion and his careless talk in France in 1940 – where he had an active duty military posting - may have cost lives. On that Morton is reasonably decisive.That may have been one reason he was then posted to the Bahamas where he was made to sit out the war as Governor. Primarily, he was exiled from Europe to keep him a long way away from his Nazi chums.

The insecure George VI and the vindictive Queen Mary (George V's widow and Edward's mother) and Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother ensured that after the war, there was no place for him in Britain. But in perpetuating the family feud as dysfunctional families are supposed to do, they may have done some good. Edward VIII got away with actions which in the case of lesser mortals might have led to war-time internment. He does not even appear to have been questioned under caution. After the war, he had little or no scope for any action. 

Review: Suki KIm, Without You, There is No Us

You couldn’t make it up. North Korea boasts one private university, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). It teaches  - in English and for free -  a couple of hundred male children of the North Korean elite, picked by the regime. The University is funded mainly by American Evangelical Christian groups and the teaching staff are mostly  Christian missionaries, who are however forbidden to proselytise. Go to Wikipedia to find out more about PUST (which you can do, unless you are in North Korea where Internet access is restricted to a very small group with usage monitored by guards).

Suki Kim, a Korean American born in Seoul, got herself a job at the University in 2011, shortly after it opened and at which time it was no more than a glorified English language school with its own new campus. She had her own agenda: not as a Christian, but as an investigative journalist and writer. This book is the product of teaching at PUST for two semesters. Her website contains a page defending the ethics of what she did.

This book is her strange diary of teaching in a strange land among strange teachers: the kind of fundamentalist teachers who won’t enter a Buddhist temple (page 211) or entertain the idea of letting students watch Harry Potter. (“filth” page 275).

Presumably, the North Korean authorities feel that they have something in common with American evangelical Christians and I guess they do: “mad” comes to mind quite frequently as you read this book. Both groups are intellectually isolated. Google to find out how many Americans believe that the sun goes round the earth or that human beings are the product of special creation.

North Korea is a country where over ninety percent of the population is kept hidden from outside eyes. They are impoverished, hungry,sick and afraid. They are at permanent risk of brutal punishment. They are –  Suki Kim uses the word – slaves. They do not appear in photographs.

What outsiders are allowed to see is a theatre – Potemkin churches (“Freedom of Religion”), Potemkin farms, Potemkin crowds – against a stage set of endless monuments to the Kim dynasty and endless socialist realist exhortations.

What Suki Kim encounters is a small group of elite students who know next to nothing about the world outside Pyongyang, but who are clever enough to know that they don’t know. They are naïve, sexually frustrated, and very very fearful. They operate exclusively in groups (though that is common enough among young men – think English football fans). They look alike and act alike. They are at least half mad.

It is difficult to see how North Korea can change. Except for the blanket of ideology which stifles everything, the relationship of the capital to the rest of the country is not so different to that found in mineral-rich African states, where the capital city’s wealth stands in total contrast to rural impoverishment. Except that North Korea has little by way of natural resources. The regime is propped up by the proceeds of crime, the proceeds of slave labour, foreign aid, and - as I now discover - Christian missionaries. There is no economy to speak of. What money there is goes into the military programme.

This is a troubling, very emotional (and probably flawed) book. It contains very little to comfort and a lot to disturb.