corrigan1

The Shelbourne Ultimatum - by Ross O'Carroll Kelly (AKA Paul Howard)

corrigan1 — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 12:52:26 GMT

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.
Edmund Burke

As the Celtic Tiger recedes into history, leaving behind the materialistic dregs which are at all times the only things neo-Liberalism ever delivers, one man stands like a Colossus above the wreckage of post-boom and now completely busted Ireland, and his name is Ross O'Carroll Kelly. Where others, like his appalling, fluffy bunny wife, construct trickle-down theories of social cohesion designed ultimately for no other purpose than to convince themselves that they are actually “good people”, but which – curiously – never involve any real sacrifice on their part, Ross is having none of this hypocritical old claptrap. He's a greedy, lascivious, unprincipled, underhanded little rat and the only man in the whole show with the integrity to admit it to himself. These are the voyages of the star who is The Rossmeister General, his continuing mission to sate his apatites, to lay more women, to boldly screw what no man has screwed before.

Of course, in Ireland today, screwing a virgin almost inevitably means doing time as a paedophile, so Ross makes do with what he can get. In this one, he is recovering from a brief encounter with a sixty-something cougar, her fruitcake daughter and a couple of criminal skangers whom he used to live next door to until he made a big mistake and nailed one of their girlfriends. Being Ross, he emerges sort of intact, but somewhat the worse for wear. He is, however, in the happy position of having the goods on Regina, his amorous pensioner and, always being up for a new experience, goes into the blackmail business.

This thread of the story, however, is on the back burner through most of the book, as Ross, recovering from his earlier adventures, happily farms the milking of Regina out to Hennessy, his father's scumbag solicitor, a walking exemplar of everything that is wrong with what is left of the country and one of the creepiest characters in literature since Uriah Heep. It is a testament to Howard's ability as an author that he can actually get away with writing something like this

I come downstairs for breakfast to find Hennessy in the kitchen – get this - having a casual root through the laundry basket, basically inspecting Sorcha's underwear. He doesn't even have the decency to stop when I walk in on him

then have the protagonists conduct a business-like conversation involving Hennessy promising to put Ross in the hospital and concluding with

...he goes out the door and up the path before I've said another word, a pair of Sorcha's blue plaid cotton ruched-back hiphuggers hanging form his pocket.

Before all of this reaches a head, however, Ross still has to deal with Ronan, his chip-off-the-old-block son, 14 years old and following in the master's sexual footsteps, Honor, his six year old total wagon of a daughter and a major league bully, now empowered by being cast as the child star of a movie being filmed in Ireland and based on the best-selling novel written by the mother he despises (“I think you're the reason God gave me these babies”, flicking his two middle fingers in her direction), and Kenneth, the father of Ro's girlfriend, and known to the insurance industry as “Edward Scissorhands” for his habit of cutting off his own fingers to bolster dubious compensation claims. Through it all there is also the ongoing sub-plot concerning the wedding of Erika, Ross's total bitch of a half-sister, and Fionn, his friend and a thoroughly decent guy. Maybe I'm over-analyzing here, but Ross's Cassandra-like stance as the only character who can see that this wedding is never going to happen – especially after Fabrizio, Erika's polo playing, Argentinian ex shows up (“one player recognizes another”) - could stand as a metaphor for the wilderness voices during the Tiger years warning it would all end in tears; good can't lie down with bad.

The Ross books have been becoming progressively darker as Howard has got older, but never so dark that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. By the end, there is a nice little pay-back for Hennessy when he inevitably double-crosses Ross (I'm not really giving anything away with that; you always kind of knew it was going to happen) and Ross, for once, takes care of business using his head instead of his dick. Ross's entanglement with a Welsh shop-lifter on Fionn's stag weekend is perhaps one of the most hilarious episodes I've read in a Ross novel, and is alone worth the price of the book, and Howard's effortless and pin-point accurate depiction of the shallowness of those who control Irish society would be terrifying if it weren't so funny.

Highly recommended, but with the usual rider: it's written in South Dublinese, so try to imagine it being narrated by Bob Geldolf.

The

Pacific Crucible: war at sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 - by Ian Toll

corrigan1 — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 19:45:45 GMT

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Carrier warfare is a little like a gunfight: the guy who clears the holster fastest walks away. That’s why the US got creamed at Pearl Harbor, and why the Japanese got hammered at Midway. The side that has its planes in the air first wins, and it really is that simple. Carrier warfare is not a sophisticated science, and the battle is won or lost without either flagship ever seeing the other. These are the lessons which come across most strikingly from Ian Toll’s excellent history of the Pacific conflict in the crucial seven months between December 1941 and June 1942, but the book is much more than amateur strategy for the armchair admiral.

A considerable portion of the early part is devoted to events in Japan in the 1920s and 30s leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and for me, this finally settled the age-old question of what, if any, responsibility Emperor Hirohito bore for the excesses of his military. Although Toll does not explicitly address this question, it is apparent from his work that history has been much kinder to the Tenno than perhaps it ought to have been. We in the west are used to thinking of Japan as an ancient, tradition-bound country whose internal relations are settled and have remained stable for centuries, if not millennia. Add to that the western habit of thinking of hereditary monarchs as constitutional figureheads, out of the loop of power, and it’s easy to understand why people might consider Hirohito as merely an irrelevance studying biology in his palace while the real decisions were taken by Tojo and Yamamoto. That, however, would be to seriously misunderstand the Japanese situation between the wars.

Japan may have been culturally and linguistically a homogenous entity, but politically it was a very different story. Barely seventy years had elapsed since Commodore Perry had broken the country out of its two century isolation, and the Japanese were still not entirely sure which way to go. It was felt that the country had been treated badly by its western allies after the First World War, and matters came particularly to a head over the so-called 5:5:3 agreement, the naval treaty which limited Japan to three battleships for every five built by The UK and America. The treaty was entirely logical from an economic and strategic viewpoint, in that it took the financial pressure of a naval race off Japan at a time when its economy was struggling, while still guaranteeing her hegemony in the eastern Pacific, but the ultranationalist right didn’t see things that way. To them, a liberal, westernized government had betrayed the honour of Japan and a chain reaction was set in motion.

In a strongly established democratic tradition like the US or Britain, that might have been contained, but there was no such tradition in Japan, and representative democracy was still considered a foreign concept with no roots in the soil. In short, there was a vacuum; Japan could have gone one way, or it could have gone the other, and the one person who had the moral authority to choose that direction was Hirohito. In a situation like that, doing nothing is not an option; the militarists were claiming to act in the name of the Emperor, and the Emperor wasn’t disabusing them.

Bear in mind also that in the 1920s and early 30s at least, the militarists were not the government, but the middle and even junior ranks of the navy and particularly the army; the invasion of Manchuria was not done on orders from the Japanese government but from the local Japanese commanders invoking an ancient tradition called gekokujo, a samurai concept whereby subordinate officers, from a fatalistic sense of honour, precipitate war with neighbouring states without the leave or their authorities. The more victories the militarists brought to Japan, the more powerful they became until they effectively ran the country, and so long as they were bringing victory, Hirohito made no objection to them invoking his name. At the very least, he is guilty by omission.

After Pearl Harbor, the US was at a grave disadvantage. Her battleship capacity had been seriously compromised, and naval doctrine of the time leaned heavily on the battleship as the showstopper in any war. The period was a transitional time in tactical theory, however, with the more radical naval strategists forecasting the rise of the aircraft carrier as a game changer. This was heavily disputed by the traditionalists, as the carrier was an untested quantity. Certainly, airplane design was still somewhat haphazard, and it was not at all clear if carrier-borne aircraft were even capable of delivering the kind of punch that the big guns of the battleships were. After Pearl Harbor, however, the US just had to suck it and see, since carriers were about all that were left.

In early ‘42, the US was a year or so from bringing her industrial capacity fully to bear. In the meantime, there were four carrier groups in the Pacific. The US commander, Admiral Nimitz, knew he had to use these vessels in a defensive role until American industry could kick in, but he also knew that defensive strategy must be aggressive, otherwise there is a real danger of demoralization and perimeter collapse. It was a delicate balancing act, but he had just the man for the job, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.

Halsey certainly had the aggression needed, but he also had rather a good idea. His notion was to use the carrier groups as a kind of naval cavalry, streaking out of Pearl Harbor at high speed, disappearing into the Pacific wilderness, popping up at the last spot on the map the Japanese would expect, levelling the place and then legging it back to Pearl before the enemy knew what had hit them. The strategy was so successful that they were forced to withdraw two of their carrier groups back into home waters to defend against a strike on Japan itself, and Halsey’s group, in recognition of the speed they moved, was known as “The Haul Ass Club”

Ranged against Nimitz and Halsey, however, was one of the greatest naval strategists of the age, Isoroku Yamamoto. Yamamoto has the rare distinction of being one of the few commanders in history to be admired by the enemy even as they fought, and today most people think of him as the civilized and far-sighted leader portrayed by Sô
Yamamura in the 1970 movie Tora! Tora! Tora! He was certainly that, but Toll also portrays a colourful, eccentric and mischievous man who would occasionally imitate the Charlie Chaplin walk and was known to perform handstands in the street after an evening with his geisha lover. These little pen portraits, Yamamoto, Nimitz, Halsey and others are one of the great strengths of the book, humanizing historical figures. But Toll also goes into great and fascinating detail describing the conditions on a carrier, the politics of Hypo, the American code-breaking station on Hawaii, the manoeuvres of combat aircraft in battle and a thousand other details which build up into a thrilling story that reads like a novel.

The Hypo story is of particular relevance, since it was their intercepts of Japanese radio traffic which allowed the Americans to lay in wait at Midway Island and get their planes in the air first in June of ‘42. That was the turning point in the Pacific war, with three Japanese carriers going to the bottom within minutes and the hitherto invincible empire suddenly becoming, well, vincible.

A recommended read for the naval anoraks, but the rest will probably enjoy it too.

Midnight in Peking - by Paul French

corrigan1 — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 17:47:23 GMT

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not
Galileo

On the morning of January 8th 1937, an old man named Chang Pao-chen was taking his songbird for a walk (apparently, a Chinese custom) along the Tarter Wall of Peking, the ancient Chinese capital which we today, with scrupulous correctness, know as Beijing. On reaching the Fox Tower, a watch tower built as part of the wall, he came across two rickshaw pullers pointing excitedly at the rubbish-strewn base of the tower, where a horribly mutilated body lay. In Peking in 1937, with the Nationalists and Communists at daggers drawn and the Japanese at the gates, life was cheap, but this body was different; this was a laowai, a European woman, and when Chang reported her to the authorities, the circus swung into action, for this was no ordinary laowai; her name was Pamela Werner, and she was the daughter of the former British Consul in Peking.

In the 1930s, there were a surprisingly high number of Europeans living in China. Most of them were White Russians chased out by the Bolsheviks and ending up pimping, whoring, slinging drinks in dingy bars or selling their muscle to Chinese warlords; they were a forgotten people doing whatever they had to do to get by, and it wasn’t uncommon to find one of them face down in a midden with no mourners at their funeral, but the daughter of one of His Majesty’s diplomats was another story. Although the body was found in Chinese territory (as opposed to the city’s Legation Quarter, where Chinese law did not run) and therefore officially the responsibility of the Chinese police, when it came to a body which actually mattered, there was no question of allowing the Chinese to work the case unaccompanied. Richard Dennis, a chief inspector of detectives from the British controlled treaty port of Tientsin was brought in to “assist”.

Thereafter, the investigation, while publicly conducted in an exemplary manner, turned and twisted up a series of blind alleys until it was quietly parked. Although Dennis himself was a straight arrow, he was informed - in that very British and consular manner in which nothing that is said can actually be ascribed to a particular source - that this case was going to remain unsolved. The reason was face, a very Chinese concept to be sure, but one which the imperial powers in Asia had taken to with a vengeance. The killer was almost certainly a white man, and in the imperial mind, white men had to be seen as godlike figures; it wouldn’t do to hang one for such an unspeakable crime.

Paul French, a historian and resident of China for a decade or so, has done an excellent job recreating the no-mans-land of Peking as it was in 1937, ostensibly under the control of the Nationalists, but now secondary to the acting capital of Nanking, and, with the Japanese pressing ever closer, about to change forever. He peels back the layers of history to show us who killed Pamela Werner, and why he was allowed to go free, but really, this is the touching and poignant story of Pamela’s father, Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner.

Old Man Werner was of that kidney which only existed in the days of Empire. Loyal servants of some mother-country which they hardly ever stepped foot in from one end of their lives to the other, they were tough as old boot leather, completely self-reliant and relentless in their causes. When the investigation was sidelined, Werner - familiar with the machinations of the British Foreign Office - realized there was a cover-up in progress and launched his own probe, and no better man for the job. A renowned Sinologist, he had spent decades in China, spoke several dialects like a native, was intimately familiar with the country, its history and customs, and knew exactly where to send his agents to look. It didn’t take him long to find the identity of the culprit, but getting past the British authorities was a far harder labour than getting past the Tarter Wall ever was. Decades after Werner’s death, French ran across Werner’s reports in the archives of the Metropolitan Police in London, where they had been sent by the Foreign Office, presumably after being stamped “read and ignored”.

Werner’s story is a sad one, but not without a certain beauty and poignancy . Half Prussian (the name would be pronounced Verner), he was born in New Zealand, and, except for his school years, hardly spent a day in England, even after he retired. A solitary, prickly man, he was not popular in the greasy-pole climbing world of British diplomacy, but still managed to progress further than any of his year’s intake into the foreign service. A lonely figure, in his forties he met and somehow won Gladys Nina Ravenshaw, an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, almost twenty years his junior, far wealthier and gifted and talented to boot. How a relatively obscure diplomat managed to pull a peach like this was a mystery to his fellow colonials, yet the accounts of them sailing together into a British clubhouse and smashing the place up with riding crops speaks of that real, magical spark that sometimes crackles between two people.

Unfortunately, as was all too often the case in those days, Gladys died very young. They never had any children of their own, but had adopted Pamela from a Catholic orphanage. Pamela’s history is unknown, but she believed (and was probably correct in doing so) that she was White Russian. Her photograph shows a willowy and not particularly pretty young woman, but her eyes are quite attractive, and certainly she must have had some kind of charisma, as her boyfriend was quite a handsome athletic type. In any event, Werner was not about to let her death be just another statistic, and he hunted down her killer with a determination sadly absent from the official investigation.

Unfortunately, he lingered too long in Peking, and got scooped up by the Japanese when the finally advanced into the city. Sent off to internment, a lesser man might have buckled under the weight of a Japanese prison camp, especially when, in a final irony, the man who killed Pamela was sent to the same camp. Not ETC Werner, though. Vinegary old colonial that he was, he survived everything the Japanese threw at him and walked to freedom when the liberation finally came. He returned to Peking, where his servants, still wonderfully loyal to him, had kept up his old house, but by the 1950s had been forced out by the Communists. When he returned to England, he hadn’t been “home” since 1917, and there he died at eighty-four years of age a couple of years later. I think the saddest line in the book is when French reveals that Pamela now lies beneath the Beijing ring-road, which was built over the British cemetery in Peking.

Still, Werner outlived the man who killed his daughter, and it must have been some comfort to the old boy that he died at a relatively young age. Perhaps now, Werner’s story finally told, there is a measure of justice for him. French speculates on the final moments of Pamela’s life, but he does so not from prurience but to remind us that she was a real, living, breathing young woman whose life was ended by murder; his account, while disturbing, is not salacious or needlessly offensive. If you’re in the market for pulp murder, this is not the book for you, but if you’re interested in a sad, forgotten story of an annihilated family who might have been much more, this is recommended.

Update 24/8/12 - apparently, the film rights have been sold and the story is to be made into a mini-series. May be worth watching out for.

Bitter Water - by Gordon Ferris

corrigan1 — Sun, 20 May 2012 16:57:40 GMT

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Shakespeare

Gordon Ferris’s last outing with his post-WWII Glasgow journalist protagonist, Douglas Brodie, went viral over at Kindle, and for good reason. An interesting character in an interesting place, tackling interesting ideas, Ferris proved he was more than just a by-the-numbers hack cranking out the tartan noir formula. He showed himself a writer capable of smoothly examining themes a literary author would struggle with, and carrying his readers along with him without a hint of “worthiness”. He tries the same tack with this new outing for Brodie, but while the talent still shows through, I didn’t find it as fulfilling as the previous effort.

In this one, set some months after the events of The Hanging Shed, ex-soldier and former police officer Brodie is back permanently in his native Glasgow, employed as junior crime reporter on the Glasgow Gazette, the kind of scummy crusader which the yellow press doesn’t produce anymore. Understudying old Glasgow crime hand Wullie McAllister, Brodie is called out to a derelict warehouse where the local constabulary have discovered the body of Councillor Alec Morton, a big wheel in the city’s post-war regeneration project, who is discovered hanging upside down with his head encased in a bucket of hardened cement.

It’s a promising start for a crime story, but Brodie doesn’t have much time to ponder Morton’s demise before the city is engulfed in the activities of the Glasgow Marshalls, a troop of vigilantes with a downer on the city’s corruption and vice, and also, for some reason, an interest in Brodie. With Wullie following the Morton investigation, Brodie is left to concentrate of the Marshalls, who are building up quite a following in a city tired of crime and official corruption. When the investigation points to nefarious dealings in the council chamber, the Marshalls appear red-hot favourites for Morton’s shampoo and set, but as ever with a good crime story (and it is actually quite good) it’s not that simple.

If there is one quality which distinguishes Tartan Noir from the more plot-driven efforts of English crime writers, it’s the thematic nature of the Scottish genre. In the last Brodie novel, the themes ware character and war. World War Two was the last act of a three act play that began in 1870 and was not finally and definitively over until 1945. At the end, a new Europe rose from the ashes, something that should have happened in 1918, but for whatever reason, did not, and it took a whole new generation - Brodie’s generation - to birth the new. That war was the seminal conflict not just of Brodie’s generation, but of every generation which has come after, and it continues to fascinate us today.

World War II changed an entire nation, an entire generation. But what if you missed it? Whole countries, joined in the kind of unified effort seen only once a millennium, producing men like Brodie, heroes who find themselves capable of feats they never would have considered possible before the necessities of war intervened, entire continents changed forever and their people with them, and you weren’t there? How would the world seem to you afterward?

And there was an entire group who did miss it, through no fault of their own, but one who nevertheless were outsiders in Britain after the war, who, although not exactly ostracised, were at least sidelined in the new order, who did not receive the hero’s welcome that the Brodies of the Second World War received. To reveal more would be to reveal too much of the plot, but Ferris dusts off their forgotten story and contrasts it to strong effect with that of Brodie and his ilk.

How war, struggle, conflict and danger affect people is another theme of the book, and the events of The Hanging Shed, while history to a hard-bitten ex-soldier like Brodie, still sit heavily on the mind of his sometime girlfriend, Advocate Samantha Campbell, back again in a disappointingly underdeveloped three-corner scenario between her, Brodie, and Brodie’s young admirer, Morag the Gazette’s receptionist.

All in all, it should work better than it does, but it’s unsatisfying because thematically driven stories need to grow organically from those themes, and this one doesn’t. It’s forced, possibly due to the unexpected success of the first book. This one has an intrusive, staccato, chapter structure, indicative of books designed to be read on the bus to work or in your lunch hour. That kind of formulaic design doesn’t do a book like this any favours and I would seriously advise Ferris to get himself a new editor. Worse was the stunted nature of the plot, as though an over-eager publisher was pushing Ferris to crank out another Brodie while the welcome was still warm. Simply put, it was written too fast, and the result is a denouement in a Scots Baronial castle which read more like something out of Alistair McLean or Desmond Bagley than a writer with a serious gift for characterization, social milieu and theme.

That said, the body of the book is a page turner and Ferris's depiction of a 1940s newspaper room, together with its tyranical editor, ruthlessly blue-pencilling sub and the drinking sessions in smoke-fugged pubs is terrifically well constructed. As in the last book, Ferris takes the easy road of casual religion-bashing in places, but since that little piece of fashionism is not hugely intrusive we can forgive it (just don't make a habit of it, Gordon).

All in all, it’s still better than most of the pulp on the publishers’ lists, but not as good as it could, or should, have been. Ferris needs to take his time with the next one and develop his themes more gracefully. If you are going to read this one, you should read The Hanging Shed first, as much of the plot is predicated on the events of that novel.

Could do better.

The Lost German Slave Girl - by John Bailey

corrigan1 — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:39:34 GMT

A house divided against itself cannot stand
Abraham Lincoln

In a somewhat crappy 1957 movie called Band of Angels, Yvonne De Carlo played a southern belle, heiress to a plantation in Old Dixie, who discovers when her father dies that: a) the estate is bankrupt, b) it and all the property attached - slaves included - is to be sold off to pay the creditors, and c) the mother she never met was actually her late father’s slave mistress (somebody probably should have given her the heads-up on that one), which means that she herself is a slave, which means down the river she goes with the rest of the goods and chattels. Based on a Robert Penn Warren potboiler, this kind of salacious, sub-soft porn was about as far as mainstream Hollywood ever went in the service of its kinkier patrons, but since Yvonne had the good fortune to be bought by Clark Gable, you just knew it would all come right in the end. In reality, however, when things like that happened (and actually, yes, they did happen), not everyone was as lucky as Yvonne De Carlo.

One such less than lucky person was a slave girl named Sally Miller of Louisiana. Or maybe she was Bridget Wilson from Alabama. Possibly her name was Sally Brigger (her owners had changed it arbitrarily). Or maybe, just perhaps, she was actually Salomé Müller, an Alsatian German from the village of Langensoultzbach in the Lower Rhine. Nobody’s really sure, for the last person who could swear to having seen Salomé was her aunt, Eva Kropp when she (Salomé) was five years old. Then she just vanished.

Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century was not a place you wanted to be. The Napoleonic wars had laid it waste, and climatic conditions had gone into one of their periodic nosedives, resulting in crop failure and famine. In 1817, the Müllers, along with hundreds of other German families, made the trek to Amsterdam and there took ship (actually, a flotilla of rotten old scows) to the New World. Like many before and since, their start was not auspicious. Arriving in New Orleans, those who had survived the crossing were sold as “Redemptioners”, indentured servants, little better than white slaves. Still, unlike their black counterparts, they retained some rights in their service, which, in any event, was only for a limited period. Most were sold in New Orleans, but Salomé, her brother, sister and father were sold up country, and the last Eva Kropp saw of her niece was when she bid her goodbye.

Twenty-five years later, on a New Orleans street, Madame Carl Rouff, former redemptioner and pillar of a now prosperous German community, saw someone she never expected to see again; Dorothea Müller, mother of Salomé. Two problems: Dorothea had died on the voyage over, and anyway, this woman didn’t seem to have aged a day in twenty-five years. There was only one answer - this wasn’t Dorothea, it was her daughter, the lost German child, Salomé.

The woman Madame Carl saw, however, had no memory of Dorothea, spoke no German and introduced herself as Sally Miller, a slave belonging to a Mr Louis Belmonti. Thereafter, there followed a series of trials and appeals though the Louisiana courts which rocked the state for five years and which had repercussions thoughout the ante-bellum US. Were one to go looking for material for a blockbuster movie, one couldn’t find better than this. It had everything, slavery, racism, mystery, the American Dream, trial and appeal lurching first one way and then back the other, it was all there. And yet, curiously, the case was almost completely forgotten, perhaps subsumed into the war which followed on after, until Bailey ran across it while researching some related issues.

After Madame Carl found Sally (or was she Salomé?), the German community rallied to the colours. Salomé’s cousin and godmother, Eva Schuber, became Sally’s rock and champion, coaxing short Teutonic arms ever deeper into cavernous pockets to pay for Sally’s lawyer, and generally keeping her case before the public.

Once battle was joined across the floors of the Louisiana courts, the deepest and ugliest scars of American history were exposed - not merely slavery itself, but the assumptions which underlay the institution, and in the dry, detached and yet hypnotic manner of a skilful lawyer building his case point by point, Bailey lets the facts speak for themselves. Reading this story, you begin to understand why Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield speech electrified America. He was quite right; the differences between North and South were just too huge to be papered over for much longer, and what lay at the heart of this case was the reason why. For Sally Miller (or was she Salomé Müller?) was as white as a button mushroom, a fact which nobody denied, and which nobody in the South found in the least odd or disconcerting.

The law which guided the sale and control of slaves in pre-Civil War America was an ancient legal maxim called Partus Sequitur Ventrem, an old English common law principle which was actually developed to adjudicate disputes between animal breeders as to who owned the offspring of a breeding pair. Roughly translated, it means that the issue follows the womb, or more generally, the owner of the female parent also owns the child. Fine when you’re talking about cows and horses, a little problematical (not to mention chilling) when the livestock in question is human. In practice, what it meant was that a child’s father was of no relevance; status was decided solely on who the mother was. If she was a slave, so was the child. If, as was generally the case, a white slave-owner chose a lighter skinned slave woman as his “lover”, it tended to follow that successive generations of slaves became lighter skinned. That, however, made no differnce to their status, for the issue followed the womb.

This pernicious line of legal reasoning had devasting effects across generations. In one notorious case, the grandson of an emancipated slave was dragged back into slavery because his own mother had been born while his grandmother was still a slave. His mother was therefore also born a slave, notwithstanding her mother’s subsequent emancipation, and therefore her issue would also be born into slavery. This law was enforced quite relentlessly, as contract and property law tends to be to this day. The reason, ironically, is because in civil matters (and slaves being “property”, their ownership is a civil, not a criminal, matter) it is held that the worst that can happen is that you lose some money - nobody loses their liberty.

After the legal proceedings started, Belmonti dropped out of the picture. He never even showed up in court, and there is some evidence that he had genuine feelings for Sally (or was she Salomé?), notwithstanding that he held her in slavery. It appears that he may not have been particularly upset at her gaining her liberty, but “liberty” in the case of an emancipated slave is a relative concept. The reason the Germans funded a court battle, rather than simply using the money to buy Sally from Belmonti was because the rights of a “free person of colour” were severly constrained. Had the law recognized her only as a freed slave, she would have had to leave the state within thriry days unless she got special permission to stay, and even had she secured that, she would have been hedged in by a forest of petty regulations designed to keep such dangerous beings as emancipated slaves under control. It was necessary that the courts recognize Sally as white.

Which brings us to the second principal in the case - John Fitz Miller, the man who sold Sally to Belmonti. Belmonti may have been open to Sally’s emancipation, but Miller was a horse (if you’ll pardon the pun) of an entirely different colour. He considered the implication that he was responsible for enslaving a white child a slur on his honour and presented a parade of highly respectable citizens of Louisiana to testify that Sally Miller was a slave, had always been a slave and they had never seen her in any office other than that of a slave.

How Sally’s lawyer, Wheelock Samuel Upton (what a wonder name) answered this strategy cut straight to the heart of the question of slavery. It was quite simple and quite clever, and also devastatingly effective. Possibly, more effective than Upton might have liked. Something of a shyster, he had planned to use this case to launch his career, but his zealous defence of his client got him marked out as an abolitionist, which, in the Old South, was not the way to win friends and influence people; as well as pissing off a lot of powerful interests, Upton’s defence caused Cletus and Eula-May down in the bayou to think, and that’s always a dangerous game.

In all of this, of course, there remained the central mystery of who, exactly, was Sally Miller (or was she Salomé Müller?). They say everyone has a twin somewhere, and John Fitz Miller’s argument was that Sally was Salomé’s, that she was “merely” a clever octoroon taking advantage of a chance likeness. What followed was a classic legal battle involving missing witnesses, legal technicalities, birthmarks, medical opinions, birth certificates and baptismal registers. By the time it was all over, it hardly mattered whether Sally was black or white, since the effect of the trials was to leave everyone wondering exactly where the line between the two lay. In the hands of an unsentimental writer like Bailey, the effect (as I presume he intended) is to obliterate that line.

Bailey’s style veers from the coldly (and sometimes warmly) factual when he is writing of the Old South and New Orleans culture, to a kind of soft non-fiction novel when examining individual scenes which he imagines must have happened. The overall effect is a page turning narrative which keeps the reader guessing to the end, and which neither “dumbs down” nor patronizes him. It is a remarkable exploration of a by-gone culture and the assumptions upon which it was built, and opens up a seam of American life which is still having racial implications to this day.

Recommended.

The Sense of an Ending - by Julian Barnes

corrigan1 — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:16:03 GMT

Every man’s memory is his private literature
Aldous Huxley

The recent fraying of the United Kingdom under nationalist pressure from Scotland has had the effect of creating a renaissance within Scottish culture. In music, literature and the arts, things Scottish have been coming very much into vogue in British public life, but it's often forgotten that there is also a positive benefit in this for England as well. Until recently, writers like Melvyn Bragg, while reasonably successful, have been held somewhat at arms length by the commentariat of such organs as the BBC and the other London-based cultural outlets, mainly due to their “middle-class, middle-aged, straight white guy” mentalities. Middle-class, middle-aged, straight white guys can’t write about the black experience, the youth experience, the gay, Asian or female experience, so consequently, they don’t count.

To an extent, this was understandable in the context of the last fifty or so years of British social development. Britain as a unit was never an organic entity in the way its component nations were. Essentially, it was an imperial construct, the extension of “Englishness” to the less fortunate Celtic fringe, the Empire’s attempt at “inclusivity”, and with the receding of that empire into the seas of history, the nations of Britain began to reassert their individual identities. For a while, this entailed sidelining things “British” (for which we read “English”), but in the wake of the new Scottish enlightenment, there appears to be something stirring within English sensibilities as well.

Julian Barnes is about as English as they come, middle-aged (actually, he’s in his late sixties, but “middle-aged” is a concept which tends to roll back as you approach it), straight, white and writes in complete sentences. He also writes about reasonable people who don’t make a scene when you cut in front of them in a queue, who live in one room flats and who send a monthly donation to Oxfam. Ordinary people. Average people. Boring people.

Somehow, however, he isn’t a boring writer. Maybe that’s a product of experience, for this novel (really a novella) is cut right down to the bone and then shaved to the marrow, yet somehow it doesn’t read like Elmore Leonard. It’s graceful, literate and even uses the occasional adverb. It’s narrator has a story to tell, and he tells it in a very English way, with minimum verbiage, but complete candour. He calls a spade a spade; by which I mean, he doesn’t call it a manual excavation implement, and neither does he call it a bloody shovel. It’s a spade, and he uses the word. Good for him.

Tony Webster is an average, sixty-something Englishman. Father of one child, amicably divorced, still on friendly terms with the ex, he’s one of millions. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about him, which is rather the point of the story.

The receipt of a small bequest from a woman he last saw forty-odd years previously is his catalyst. The woman, the mother of an ex-girlfriend with whom he had broken in the 1960s, had only met Tony once, and has left him £500 and a diary. The money bequest is weird enough, but the diary is that of an old school friend, Adrian Finn. Adrian was the brightest of the group to whom Tony had belonged at School, the one of whom most had been expected. But Adrian had committed suicide at 22, having first “taken up with” Veronica, Tony’s ex-girlfriend and daughter of his benefactress. All of that was four decades previously, and in the meantime, Tony has had his life. An average life. A pretty boring life. All in all, a thoroughly English life.

The problem is that Veronica now has the diary, and is very reluctant to return it. The rest of the story revolves around his efforts to retrieve it. However, this is not a mystery tale, its not a thriller or an adventure and there is no heart-stopping action or breathless excitement. Its just a good, interesting story.

The diary, of course, is a MacGuffin. In the end, it's what Tony discovers pursuing it that is of far more universal application than anything it may contain, and the kernel of the story is the way we construct our own pasts, the way history is not only written by the victors, but subject to, as one character puts it, the lies and self-delusions of the defeated.

How Barnes takes us through such a monumentally huge theme in so short a work is remarkable and, although I haven’t read any of the competitors, the Man Booker prize the book won was well deserved. The skill with which Barnes re-writes Tony’s history before his eyes is amazing, and not a little disturbing, for Tony is not mad, deluded, the subject of some freakish mind-control experiment or any of the myriad other devices or plotlines one might find in a science fiction or mystery novel.

Because, of course, it isn’t a science fiction or mystery novel. It’s the very ordinary story of a very ordinary man being subjected to the very ordinary forces at work on very ordinary lives. Lives like yours and mine. And somehow, the sum of all this ordinariness is not in the least ordinary, and when it’s over, Tony’s private literature is blue-pencilled and the characters redrawn.

It’s a short book which can be read in a couple of sittings and I suggest you do it that way. And then read it again. Highly recommended.

An Edwardian Guide To Life - by Cornelia Dobbs

corrigan1 — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:11:46 GMT

I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat
King Edward VII

There’s a philosophy within Gaelic football which says, “look after the points and the goals will look after themselves”. It’s an old-fashioned kind of a view which encourages one to attend to the small things and by so doing, guaranteeing the success of the large. Fundamentally, it’s about standards, and you don’t see a lot of it about these days.

Standards, of course, become such by general consent, which in turn implies a collective will. Such a thing is hard to imagine in our atomised times, but was unquestioned in the Edwardian period. You went along to get along, and to help you get along there was a slew of written material produced by one’s “betters” for the elevation of the lower orders. One of my own favourites was a perennial best seller (mercifully forgotten today) modestly entitled Enquire Within Upon Everything, and “everything” was right. The industrious parvenu would, within its many double-columned pages, be made aware of the “distinction with respect to clerks and servants of a superior class”, that piquet is “too long and tiresome for modern card players” and (of vital importance) the detailed instructions necessary to rid oneself to the debilitating Irish or Scots accent.

Useful as such information undoubtedly was, it was rather a sad arriviste who would commit it all to memory. No, far better to concentrate upon the essentials, since the true gentleperson would not be unduly perturbed by the occasional slip, form too perfectly maintained being the trademark of the Johnnie-come-lately, don’t you know, rather like those foreign chappies with slightly too much pomade in their hair and just a tad too much starch in their shirts.

Enter for the purpose, Miss Cornelia Dobbs. We feel justified in styling her “Miss Dobbs”, archaic though the form assuredly is, since a lady of such breeding would, it is certain, suffer the pangs of mortification should her womanhood ever go unacknowledged by submergence within the semi-androgynous “Ms”. In less than 100 elegant pages, Miss Dobbs educates us on such topics as table manners (Offering an occasional ‘thanks’ to the parlourmaid or manservant would not go amiss but it must be said in a manner that will not encourage familiarity); social etiquette (the hostess may now open her garden to estimable doctor neighbours, while the intimacy of the drawing room remains closed); the gentleman’s club (A man is not a gentleman if he removes his coat or sits in his shirtsleeves in any of the public rooms. An allowance, however, is made in the billiard room); and fashion and deportment (Brown boots may be worn at Ascot, but certainly never in town).

The book is so wonderfully well done that I found myself falling slightly in love with Miss Dobbs, but one did suspect a certain protuberance in the cheek, with such advice as: Should you, whilst walking with your friend, meet an acquaintance, never introduce them. Young men in particular may think nothing of introducing a young lady of lower class to their mother or sister, little realizing what mortification may be induced by forced acquaintanceship with a milliner’s assistant.

The light, of course, began to dawn at the end of the volume when the author noted, among her “resources”, the aforementioned Enquire Within upon Everything, and other publications, some as recent as 2008. I did think it rather naughty of Miss Dobbs to date her forward 1908; on the strength of that, I was fooled right up until the end. Standards are just not what they used to be, tut, tut. Still, I’ll forgive her and recommend this delightful little volume. Enjoy.

The Great Heresies - by Hilaire Belloc

corrigan1 — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:48:32 GMT

Religion requires certainty
James Lovelock

Not for the first time, Lovelock was wrong, although if he’d read Belloc, it’d be an easy mistake to make. Best remembered today (and quite rightly so) as the poet laureate of light verse, he was also one half of “The Chesterbelloc”, that formidable tag-team of Catholic apologists, through which he, together with his close ally GK Chesterton, struck terror into the hearts of atheists everywhere. As is often the case in these matters, the respective styles of the two were strikingly different, yet in some strange, symbiotic way, complementary. Chesterton, the more avuncular of the two, would seek to persuade the sceptic with his wonderfully unique logic, as imaginative as it was original; and if that didn’t succeed, Belloc would duff them up.

An abrasive and ferociously prolific author, the strength of Belloc’s intellect is staggering, though it is of a much more volatile and obsessive nature than Chesterton’s. Covering subjects as diverse as Louis XIV, political economy and the newspaper industry, he took the Catholic doctrine that “error has no rights” and turned it into a war-cry. The clarity of his vision was simultaneously his strength and his weakness. Once, when HG Wells wrote a book unfavourable to Christianity, and to the Catholic Church in particular, Belloc accused him of “being ignorant that he is ignorant”, a charge which, while quite probably true, would have been levelled in a somewhat more charitable manner by Chesterton.

In this 1938 offering, Belloc takes us through what he considers five of the greatest heresies against Catholicism. His vision in this is somewhat debatable and, depending on your view, either novel or an exhibition in mental gymnastics. For one thing, he classes Islam as a heresy of Catholic doctrine. In fact, this view, while it may seem incredible to us today, was actually the accepted wisdom in Europe right up until at least the Reformation. Belloc compares it with the earlier heresy of Arianism. Both appealed to the elite of their respective societies. Arianism in particular was a religion of the patrician class in the late Roman/early Byzantine empire, and while Islam of course had a more general appeal, initially at least the most important converts were the powerful warrior castes of Arabia and Asia. Unlike Arianism, however, Islam did not collapse, paradoxically, because it was born outside of Christendom, and, unlike Arianism, there was no orthodoxy for the people to return to.

It is (to me, at least) questionable whether the Albigensians were actually heretical. Their creed - that the world is inherently evil - is certainly hostile to Christianity, but its origins in the Gnostic mystery cults of the ancient world would suggest essentially a different religion entirely. In any event, Belloc’s wry commentary regarding the all too temporal considerations which were involved in the calculations of various French nobility and aristocracy to become involved on either side certainly gives the lie to the notion of the Albigensian Crusade being a religious conflict.

The section on Protestantism is perhaps the most interesting, and Belloc’s views on the German religious wars of the seventeenth century gels pretty much with those of David Bentley Hart. By no means can these conflicts truly be termed religious in nature, not when we consider that one of the biggest backers of the “Protestant” cause in Germany was none other than d’Artagnan’s old nemesis, Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu may have been a prince of the Church, but sticking it to the Hapsburgs definitely comes under the heading, “Taking Care Of Business”.

Perhaps nowhere more than in this section do we understand the relevance of Belloc’s definition of heresy: the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. Whatever else Catholicism may be, it is “complete and self-supporting”. It should be after 2000 years. In Protestantism, we have something (particularly in its higher, Anglican, manifestations) which looks like Catholicism, but introduces the notion of every man being his own priest, so to speak. Initially, that led to an explosion of literacy (necessary to read your Bible, of course) and the development of a sceptical turn of mind (necessary to interpret same), both conditions good for the expansion of science and industry. Ultimately, however, that scepticism became corrosive to the very structure of society as the capitalism which grew out of Protestantism ate away the social fabric of the Protestant societies, undermining the ancient rights of peasants and dislocating social orders which had existed for hundreds of years.

Belloc’s opinions on this seem to presage more recent work, notably Alister McGrath’s hugely accessible Twilight of Atheism and Mark Lilla’s stunning history of political theology, The Stillborn God. Both books develop the themes Belloc raises in the Protestantism section, with McGrath’s honing in on the effects on Protestant society of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and Lilla’s exploring the devastating effect the development of textual analysis had on Protestant culture when its techniques were applied to scripture.

Belloc’s final “heresy” is modernism, and if I use inverted commas it is because, like Albigensianism, it is questionably whether or not it actually is a heresy. In the sense that the moral values of most modernists could actually be considered a kind of heavily diluted Christianity, then I suppose modernism is heretical; another way to look at it, however, would be as a return to the kind of personal freedom (or perhaps “licence” would be a better word) practiced in the Roman Empire. Whether the way we live today is an improvement on Rome or a degeneration of Christianity is a question for the individual, but Belloc is in no doubt - he very rarely was.

Belloc was a buzz-saw of a man, and you got on his wrong side at your peril, as one unfortunate academic who had the temerity to criticize Chesterton found to his cost. As towering as his intellect was, it didn’t have the completeness of Chesterton, and there were points where his writing became downright ugly, as, for instance, his casual references to such things as “Jewish communism”. Chesterton might have recognized that Jews were represented within Bolshevism out of all proportion to their numbers, but he would also realize that, considering what they’d suffered under the Tsar, that would hardly be surprising.

Despite his shortcomings, however, Belloc’s overall vision holds up surprisingly well. The book, however, comes with a somewhat patronizing health warning from the modern publishers: This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. It appears to be lost on the modern mind that, actually, it does. However, I’m forced to admit that it’s not really in Chesterton’s class, and perhaps one should read it as an addendum to GK and with his charitable outlook.

Test of Wills - by Charles Todd

corrigan1 — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:26:18 GMT

I like men who have a future and women who have a past
Oscar Wilde

Unfortunately, I don’t think Ian Rutledge, protagonist of Charles Todd’s detective series, has a particularly bright future with me. This is not to say that the book is badly written or in any way illiterate, but it just didn’t engage me enough to make me want to pull it up on my smart phone app at every opportunity, which is always a bad sign with a detective story. After I’d finished, I was kind of glad it had been so cheap on Kindle, which is an even worse one.

The story is set in 1919, in rural Warwickshire, England. When Colonel Charles Harris, local squire, gentleman and pillar of the proverbial establishment doesn’t return after his morning ride (but the horse does), Laurence Roystone, the colonel’s man of business, orders out the search parties, only to find the colonel dead in a field, minus half his head courtesy of a shotgun blast. Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard is ordered in to investigate. There is an appropriately wide field of suspects, but the problem for Rutledge is that all the evidence is pointing straight at Captain Mark Wilton. Wilton is the fiancé of Lettice Wood, the colonel’s ward. Wilton had been involved in a violent argument with Harris the previous night and was seen in the area where he was killed the following morning. Rutledge’s problem is that Wilton, dashing veteran of the Royal Flying Corps, is a hugely popular war hero, complete with Victoria Cross and a standing invitation to Buckingham Palace. Dropping somebody like that through a scaffold trap could be a real career breaker, as Rutledge’s superior, Superintendent Bowles, is aware. Therefore the shell-shocked and suitably expendable Rutledge (himself a veteran of the trenches) is dispatched.

On paper, it looks like an interesting story with a good setting and an enjoyable puzzle. Rutledge can’t find anybody to speak a word against the colonel, so motive is a question mark. The locals are all trying to point Rutledge towards Bert Mavers, the resident rabble-rouser and agitator, but Mavers has a cast iron alibi. All in all, it isn’t looking good for Captain Wilton - or for Rutledge’s career.

But Rutledge has other problems to contend with. The war and its carnage has destroyed his nose for justice. Eagerness to do right by the dead tends to dissipate when you’ve seen so many of them. When one of them won’t lie down, you might have an interesting movie; unfortunately, what is a genuinely intriguing idea which would work spectacularly well on film is just not handled very well in the book. This is the constant presence of Corporal Hamish McLeod, executed by Rutledge during the war for refusing to go over the top, but now back as a voice in Rutledge’s head, the manifestation of his shell-shock, commenting on witnesses, suspects and other officers. However, what could have been an interesting investigatory ‘double-act’ unfortunately reads like an add-on, as though Todd doesn’t quite know what to do with Hamish.

Charles Todd is actually a pseudonym for the mother and son writing team, Charles and Caroline Todd. A mother and son writing team is unusual enough, but one writing so far out of their own milieu is even more so. They are actually American, but on their Amazon page profess a deep interest in British history. Unfortunately, it didn’t show in the mix. The book is not exactly littered with cultural and historical mistakes, but there are enough of them to break the spell of what otherwise is a reasonably well-written detective story. The constant use of American spelling; words like ‘mail’ and ‘drapes’ instead of ‘post’ and ‘curtains’; references to the Second Boer War in which, apparently, the Boers used muskets, all of this makes for annoying intrusion into what is in any event only a good - not a great - story. There are, unfortunately, a lot of little things like this in the book, including - amazingly - the protagonist's name. 'Ian' was a very uncommon name in Britain at that time, and even in Scotland it was rare outside of Gaelic speaking areas. And there is nothing in the book to even suggest Rutledge is actually Scottish. This is just lazy, and authors who profess an interest in a particular culture should be able to do a lot better.

Initially reminiscent of River Of Darkness, previously reviewed on this blog, it never comes near Rennie Airth’s brilliant post WWI story, and although it’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, I have to say I was disappointed by its failure to measure up.

So-so.

Goodbye, Good Men - by Michael Rose

corrigan1 — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 19:40:31 GMT

If you build it, they will come
Field of Dreams

In 1938, James Cagney made a movie called Angels with Dirty Faces. This was a real old-fashioned two-fisted gangster epic, full of big hats and ‘let ‘em have it’ dialogue. Cagney’s co-star was Pat O’Brien, ‘Hollywood’s Irishman in residence’, playing Father Jerry Connolly, Cagney’s boyhood friend, now parish priest of their old neighbourhood. Connolly is engaged with Cagney’s character, Rocky Sullivan, in a struggle for the souls of the Dead End Kids. For our purposes, one scene in particular illustrates the point of Michael Rose’s book: Father Jerry follows the Kids into a bar and fails to get them to leave. When a barfly accosts him, asking ‘what’s the matter, can’t you get them go to heaven with you?’, Connolly decks the wino with a single punch and walks out.

Now, if you’re a Catholic of a certain age, you’ll be familiar with priests like Father Jerry. Indeed, I’ve known a few who could go the distance with Mike Tyson (and when he could still fight), but although O’Brien’s portrayal was accurate for 1938, men like Jerry Connolly are a thing of the past in Roman Catholic seminaries today. Or are they?

That question is very much the theme of Rose’s book. He is not, of course, advocating the kind of muscular Christianity demonstrated by Pat O’Brien in the movie, but he does wonder where all the manly priests of yesteryear have gone. His answer is that they’re still out there, they just can’t get in the gates of the seminary because of the liberal freak show which has taken over the Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II. Now, the word ‘liberal’ is little more than a term of abuse in the US these days, and for that reason, I was wary about the book initially, especially considering its subtitle - How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church. Too often today, when we talk about ‘liberalism’, we tend to mean some vague, woolly doctrine with no underpinning philosophy, but with plenty of words like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ (which I’m not even certain is a word.) Probably, we call it ‘liberalism’ for want of a better term, and I think it’s indicative of that outlook that no proper name has ever attached itself to it. ‘Political Correctness’ is about as near as it ever came, but even that’s a clumsy moniker.

What is clear, however, is that a worldview like that injected into an organization like the Roman Catholic Church is poison. Rome doesn’t do compromise. With Rome, as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be etc, etc; That’s why they call it ‘The Eternal City’. The Catholic Church is not a denomination; all the other churches are, but Rome is the Church - it’s why we always spell it with a capitol C. The rest, like Latin nouns, decline away from that which is perfect. You may or may not believe all of this, but the point is that the Church does, and it stops being the Church when it starts worrying about stuff like ‘inclusivity’. It already is inclusive, in that anyone is free to sign up and join the club; but the club is what it is, and you’re not going to change it. It isn’t Canterbury and it doesn’t share communion with heretics.

Now, I’m not saying all of this to pick a fight with non-Catholics. I’m simply describing what the Roman Catholic Church actually is. It is magnificent, glorious, maddeningly inflexible, obnoxious, inhuman, completely out of step with the world and, at any given moment (according to its critics), about to disappear into history. It never quite does, of course, and the reasons for that are arguable, but what even atheists can agree about is what we might call the brand recognition of the Church. There is nothing else like it. Even the Orthodox doesn’t match the 2000 year old imperial grandeur of Rome, so either you get with the programme or you hit the bricks - there’s always room for one more in Canterbury.

Rose doesn’t put the case in such terms, of course, but rather concentrates on the calamitous collapse in vocations over the past forty or so years. The ‘liberal’ analysis would have it that this is due to the out-of-touch nature of the magisterium, most particularly the prohibition on homosexuality, female priests and married clergy. In an attempt to counteract this decline - if Rose is correct - what has happened is a kind of asymmetric warfare between imperial Rome and the liberal elite out on the frontiers of the Church. This has taken the form of what Rose calls the ‘Gatekeeper Phenomenon’, whereby liberals in favour of gay, married and women priests have inveigled themselves into positions of administrative authority within the dioceses and religious orders and have been systematically blocking the admission to seminaries of any man who believes himself to have a vocation, but who upholds the magisterium.

In fact, it is surprising how little scholastic research has been done in this area, and by necessity much of the book is anecdotal in nature, but if what is recorded here is even half true, the situation is shocking. Seminarians marked out as too ‘rigid’ or ‘inflexible’ - and thus unsuitable of ordination - because they have been seen praying the Rosary, or attending Benediction, or for having knelt at the consecration. This last was seen as an over-devotion to the ‘Real Presence’, the Catholic doctrine that Christ is physically present in the Eucharist. Again, whether you believe He is or not, the Catholic position is that He is, and in the presence of God Almighty, you kneel.

Some seminaries were virtually off limits to straight men, so packed were they with homosexuals. And bear in mind, we’re not talking here about men with a gay orientation who nevertheless uphold the magisterium, but rather, predatory homosexuals who see no reason to give up the life just because they have undertaken holy orders. It actually wasn’t safe among these people. One professor of philosophy tells how she was physically attacked and spat on by a ‘liberal’ priest for quoting Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is to Catholicism what Thomas Jefferson is to America; spitting on him is like spitting on the Declaration of Independence.

What is most disgusting about these people is their propensity for joining up, doing their damage and then leaving the Church after they have wrought a trail of vocational destruction. This is the major theme of the book. If Rose is correct, the vocational crisis is almost entirely a product of liberal theology. There are large numbers of orthodox men out there with true vocations who are being beaten back at the gates of the seminaries because they are perceived by the liberal diocesan vocations directors as too conservative. Many of these gatekeepers are actually nuns who joined up under the delusion that it was only a matter of time before Rome caved in on the demand to ordain women. If they get a sniff of orthodoxy off a prospective candidate, it’s goodnight Vienna.

The theology of the Catholic Church has been refined and developed over 2000 years. It doesn’t buckle under the vagaries of the day, and it’s message is unchanging. It is a massive mistake to think of it as being something that needs to be adjusted to the imperatives of a given age; the idea is to change the world, not the Church. Liberals don’t seem to get that, which is perhaps why so many of them abandon their vows (after doing their damage, of course).

Most of the names used in the book have been changed to protect those priests and seminarians who spoke to Rose from liberal reprisal. One of the few who spoke openly to Rose was Father John Trigilio. His story is perhaps most indicative of the sickness infecting the Church. It took him fourteen years to achieve ordination. Usually, it takes seven (except for Jesuits), but in his case he had to fight tooth and nail at every turn to advance. Fortunately, he had the strength to do so, for unlike many of us today, he received an excellent grounding in Catholic theology at his high school, one of the few left at the time which also functioned as a feeder for seminary. As a result, he was in a position to challenge the unorthodox and (in some cases) downright heretical practices of some liberal priests. That stance cost him seven extra years, in one instance losing his place at one seminary when the bishop who had sponsored him retired and the dean who was acting as locum until a new bishop was appointed took it into his own hands not to renew Fr Trigilio’s place.

If Rose is correct, there is no shortage of committed vocations out there. There is a shortage of the kind of vocations which the liberal gatekeepers are trying to encourage, however. What’s more, the sex scandals which have rocked the Church these last twenty or so years seem to be broadly (although it has to be admitted, not exclusively) dating from the period of liberalization post-Vatican II. The scenario seems to be something like, ‘ok, you’re gay: why not be a priest, since you’re supposed to be celibate anyway?’ The subtext seems to be that the Church is changing and you’ll soon be able to bring your boyfriend into the presbytery. But, of course, the magnificent thing about the Catholic Church is that it doesn’t change, not like that anyway, and those who come in under the delusion that it will, end up crashing and burning when the reality of the ministry becomes too much for them. Remember, about 90% of abuse allegations come from boys, not girls; they weren’t being abused by priests, they were being abused by homosexual priests.

Meanwhile, ‘Father Jerry’ types with genuine vocations and the manhood to carry them though life are being stopped at the doors of the seminaries by nuns who want to be priests and liberals who have a problem with the magisterium. That is what’s causing the shortage of vocations, and the evidence seems to back Rose up. Those dioceses which stand firm on the magisterium, which will not tolerate a loose or even heretical liturgical practice seem to be the ones who are increasing their vocations. The liberal dioceses are dying. This should not come as a surprise. The whole ethos of the Catholic Church is that it does not trim and tack with every breeze that blows. It’s not about bringing the gospel to the world; it’s about bringing the world to the gospel.

This book is some ten years old. Even at the time of writing, there was evidence coming through that younger priests were rejecting the ‘aging hippy’ outlook of the reformers and returning to the orthodox line. That seems to have accelerated in the last decade or so. I would be interested in some serious academic study being done on this question. For the present, this is all I can find.

Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer - by Wesley Stace

corrigan1 — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:16:42 GMT

…But Rico went a bit too far and Tony sailed across the bar
And then the punches flew and chairs were smashed in two,
There was blood and a single gunshot but just who shot who?
Barry Manilow

Probably, the admirers of this book would not thank me for taking the opening quotation from such a cheesy song, and in fairness I have to put my hands up here to a certain amount of aqueous extraction. Stace’s novel is well written, the main characters are complete, and the premise is as original as any I have ever read. It verges on brilliant, but I’m afraid it’s a long way short of genius. It could have used an editor with a sense of humour, or an author with a sense of proportion.

For those of a musical bent, Wesley Stace is the birth name of the British-born musician and singer, John Wesley Harding. This is his third novel, and although it’s amazingly innovative, I can’t really say I’m moved to go out and buy the other two.

Stace’s basic approach is intriguing. He’s actually marrying two art forms, attempting to write an opera in prose, using musical techniques on paper to tell what is essentially a very grubby story (like all operas). The most obvious musical trick (at least to those without formal music training) is the variation on a theme, as the narrator, Leslie Shepherd, tells the story several times over the course of thirty or so years, each time a little differently, until the truth finally comes out in the last variation.

Or is it the truth? For of course, with several different versions from the same mouth, we have an unreliable narrator, and while such a character may be emblematic of ‘literary’ fiction, it does tend to piss the reader right off. This is not helped by the fact that Shepherd’s is an unsympathetic voice. You really don’t care for the man all that much, especially in the last variation, and it can be a little tedious listening to him expound.

Nevertheless, the story, though overwrought and not the work of genius it might at first appear, is worth reading for its originality alone. Beginning in 1910, and continuing to its bloody conclusion in 1923, it tells of the relationship between Shepherd, a music critic for a major newspaper, and the eponymous Jessold, a brilliant young composer whom he discovers one evening at an Edwardian music salon. Seeing the spark of genius, Shepherd takes Jessold under his wing, and begins by telling him the story of his near namesake, Carlo Gesualdo.

Gesualdo was a real person, a sixteenth century Italian nobleman and a composer of brilliance who was also a murderer who killed his wife and her lover when he caught them at it one day. Back then, noblemen could do that sort of thing and get away with it. He even took another wife afterward (bet she was a model of constancy). Like the overture to the opera, we may immediately infer where this story is going, although that in itself is not really a problem: we always know where operas are going, we just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Opera is the overriding musical motif of the book. In the Edwardian era there was something of a resurgence in British music, led by Edward Elgar, but it was a symphonic resurgence; opera was still considered the musical art form, and the British hadn’t produced a decent opera since Purcell. Gilbert and Sullivan, brilliant though they were, didn’t count (far too humorous) and the Germans and Italians were streets ahead. In a nationalistic age, this was troublesome for a country which thought that to be born British was to win the lottery of life.

From the first meeting, Shepherd realizes that Jessold could be the man to change all that, but first he has to pay his dues. Shepherd begins to guide Jessold through the murky waters of high musical art, but from a distance so as not to be too openly associated with him; it won’t do to be identified as a client of a powerful critic. The two begin by collecting English folk songs (apparently, a growth area in the Edwardian period), which Jessold turns into an oratorio, bringing himself to public notice for the first time.

On one of their collecting sallies into the English countryside, they come upon The Ballad of Little Musgrave, an old folk song telling the tale of a lord who kills his lady and her lover having caught them, like Gesualdo, in the act. This song forms the basis of Jessold’s long awaited British opera. Again, the repetition of a theme throughout an opera is symbolic of the form, as if we needed reminding where this story is going. In fact, the blurb on the book tells us: on the night before the opera’s premiere, Jessold kills his wife and her lover and takes his own life. The Great British Opera never sees the light of day and it’s decades more before Britain finally produces a work to rival the continental composers - Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes.

That’s the story, but this book isn’t really about story. If it’s about anything, it’s about art; it’s about opera; it’s about why the fans of Maria Callas threatened to wreck La Scala when they resurrected Carmen with another diva; it’s about why Nellie Melba would not allow another performer to take a bow beside her. These are weird people. They’re not like you and me, and those who inhabit this world seem to take a very perverse pride in being - at least in their own mind - different.

Thus, as the variations are gone through, the theme of muse appears. The thing which was inspiring Jessold from the beginning, not made apparent in the early variations, only becomes clear at the end, and Shepherd’s understanding of what was driving Jessold, and his willingness to acquiesce to Jessold’s needs is thematic of the opera mindset.

The trouble is, Stace is unfocused. As the variations are performed, he seems to be losing his own muse, and by the end it’s all becoming like an opera looking for a note to finish on, but can’t quite find it. At different times we wonder if he is being critical of the attitudes of pre-Beatles England and its button-down hierarchical conventions, or if the story is actually about the barbarous atonality of composers like Schoenberg (who comes in for a serious kicking from Shepherd) or what. It isn’t clear, which probably means that Stace isn’t exactly sure himself, so by the time we finally find out the events resulting in three deaths, we're past caring. In the end, the whole thing reads like an etude, a technical composition by a student aimed at honing style and method, not meant to be enjoyed as a piece in itself.

I don’t know if Stace can develop this marriage of music and literature, but it’s certainly an intriguing attempt at something different. If he continues in this genre, he'll need to give some thought to his secondary characters. In a novel, there is no chorus. Minor characters are not interchangable and where one appears, we need to find him memorable enough to recognize him when he pops up again; many of Stace's are not.

No recommendation on this one; it's a curiosity which may or may not go somewhere.

Nama Mia - by Ross O'Carroll Kelly (aka Paul Howard)

corrigan1 — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:07:49 GMT

It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman
Alexandre Dumas

Paul Howard is never going to be nominated for a Booker. His style is too fluid, his plotlines too smooth and his prose altogether too immediate for consideration beside the likes of Emma Donoghue or John Banville or Anne Enright. That and the fact that every skanger with a literate finger grabs the latest Ross adventure as quick as the author can crank them out will keep him forever out of consideration as a ‘serious’ writer. Pity, because that’s exactly what he is.

He’s also screamingly funny, throbbingly sensual and utterly politically incorrect, and I think it’s a dreadful shame that, unless Ireland replaces America as the cultural epicentre of the world, only about four million or so people will ever be able to fully appreciate just how good this guy really is. Writing phonetically in the vernacular of Dublin, and specifically south Dublin, Howard’s protagonist and alter-ego, Ross O’Carroll Kelly, is the hard living, skirt chasing, work dodging scion of highly questionable ‘new money’ made during the ‘wild west’ phase of the Celtic Tiger.

Like the Robber Barons of America, Charles, Ross’s equally thick-skinned but far more shrewd father, made his money in ways that may not bear the kind of close scrutiny which has become de rigour in the post-Tiger EU protectorate which is Ireland after the bubble has burst. Charles’s musings on the hypocrisy of a society which celebrated him and his kind while the champagne was flowing but which turned on them like sharks in the water when they smelt the blood is Howard’s little dig at his readers, but he saves the big guns for the caste of vulgarians which inhabits south Dublin and continues, sovereign debt crisis or no, to warm themselves by burning the timbers of the very ship of state which is carrying them.

Chief amongst them is, of course, the Rossmeister General himself, just turned thirty in this one and still whoring like a hornier version of Rasputin. This is what Ross (and, vicariously, Howard) has been doing for the past thirteen or fourteen years, and it should be getting well past old by now, but what stands Ross out from the crowd he runs with is his perverse honesty. While all around him are bewailing the spiritual vacuum of post-Tiger Ireland, Ross (and Howard) is having none of this bull. He knows that, given a sniff of a euro in the air, these people would be back partying like the last days of Rome, which is essentially what the Tiger years were like in this country. It was Babylon on the Liffey and Ross never made the slightest apology for living it and loving it.

Sorcha, his appallingly right-on soon to be ex-wife, of course, is chasing every ‘spiritual’ fad that comes down the road, and, on the advice of her Tai-Chi counsellor, serves him with divorce papers while taking him out to a restaurant as a thirtieth birthday treat. What makes the whole scene so hysterically funny is that she does this without a hint of malice; in her perverted world, behaviour like this is actually considered mature. Apparently, this is how grown-ups are supposed to act.

Meanwhile, one friend is mooning after the daughter of a Russian mafia don while another, who once owned a business worth €70 million, is living back with his parents and walking other people’s dogs for a living. Ross himself is doing all right thanks to his father’s shady business, Shred Focking Everything, a document destruction service calculated to, ahem, ‘dispose’ of those embarrassing paper trails that lead back to the ‘light touch regulation’ years of the Tiger.

However, being Ross, you just know the junior member is going to screw it up for him, and this time he does it in royal style. Cheating on your wife is one thing; cheating on the criminal heavyweight who lives next door is quite another, and the second half of the book finds Ross holed up in the semi-rural fortress of an extremely rich cougar while the heat dies down and the business goes to rack and ruin because its chief executive cannot put his nose outside the electric gates for fear of getting it shot off.

Of course, that’s not the part of him that the cuckolded gangster would like to shoot off, and the comment from his friend Oisin (pronounced USH-een) that Ross would ‘stick it anywhere there’s moisture’ is not only tautological but thematic. What makes Ross lovable, of course, is his breathtaking honesty about the whole thing, and he makes no apology for taking people as they present themselves, and not as they would really like to be perceived. Therefore, if women present themselves as equal participants in a materialistic world making informed choices about no-strings sex, Ross is the very man to give the respect that position deserves. He is thus amazed when an angry discard phones to inform him that his technique was akin to ‘having a focking wardrobe fall on top of you with the key still in the door.’

‘This is what they’re like’, he tells son Ronan, a young man who should, consequently, have no qualms about ‘getting off with’ the all the leading ladies in his school production of ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’, just like the old man did back in the day. Ro, of course, wants to grow up to be just like dad, and Ross is elated that the torch has been passed to a new generation (makes you feel good when you set a kid on the right road, doesn’t it?). Unfortunately, Ro doesn’t come off any better from the seven-fold encounter than Ross did; hopefully, he’ll learn something about treating women badly that still seems to be eluding his father.

Not that we would ever want Ross to change, and his adventures with Regina, the merry widow thirty years older but still going like a train, are a hoot. His encounter with her sexagenarian friends at the dinner party is alone worth the price of the book, and Howard’s facility for lightning sketches of minor characters is awesome. The pompous journalist Maurice, for instance, is almost made physically present simply by his habit of prefacing every statement with the word ‘sidebar’.

As previously noted, Howard is much less diffident these days to the caste he writes about, and his stories are all the better for it. Perhaps he’s just getting older, and it is a feature of the books that however unchanging Ross himself might be, he still ages in real time, just like the rest of us. And just as we tend to have decreasing patience for bad behaviour as we grow older, so does Howard. Thus, we really don’t feel too bad about Ross’s outrageous revenge on McGahy, his old head master and one of his many Nemeses when the latter makes a move on Ronan’s mother. Especially when the final reel of the movie plays out, because this is a much darker Ross than the previous stories and its ending is a very stark intrusion of the real world into Ross’s surreal existence.

If you can follow the strangulated vowels of south Dublin and vocal gymnastics of Regina’s north of Ireland accent then this book is a howl. Recommended.

Anonymous - by Roland Emmerich

corrigan1 — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:44:49 GMT

Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.
GK Chesterton

I don’t normally review movies. In fact, I don’t review them at all, but since more people watch movies than read books, I thought, what the hell. This new one by German-born director Roland Emmerich kind of puts me in mind of the old joke about the German baby adopted by the American couple. The kid turned two, then three, then four, and no matter what the parents did, the little ankle-biter refused to talk. He wouldn’t say ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy’ or even cry in a tantrum. They tried everything, including sending him to a child psychologist, and nothing worked. Eventually, on his fifth birthday, they stuck a cake in front of him, he took a bite and said, ‘Zis cake is stale’. Mom and dad said, ‘Ludwig, you can talk! Why haven’t you said anything until now?’. ‘Because’, said Ludwig, ‘unzil now, everyzing has been satisfactory’.

Yeah, ok, it’s not a very good joke, but then, this isn’t a very good movie. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve seen a lot worse, and if Emmerich had just come up with a film about an Elizabethan nobleman who wanted to write plays but couldn’t because it would have been beneath his standing so he hires a professional playwright to front for him, who in turn brings a hack actor into the circle, but who (are you following this?), in a fit of despair, betrays the nobleman and ends up getting his (the nobleman’s) illegitimate son sentenced to death for treason and…well you’ll have to watch the movie to see how this all turns out. The point is that if Emmerich had come up with such a movie, cast it as pure fiction and just created a lot of fictional characters to populate it then a) no sod in Hollywood would have funded it and b) it probably would have made a reasonably good, thought probably forgettable film.

And, as a movie, this is reasonably good, though probably forgettable; they only thing that makes it in any way noteworthy is the fact that it revolves aroud the whole, ridiculous Shakespeare authorship question. The production values are excellent, and, like a good meal, not so lush as to overpower. Elizabethan London is beautifully realized - the dirt, the intrigue, the brutishness - and just enough to the fore to give a real sense of place without the cinematography becoming the movie. Emmerich is no David Lean and his film is all the better for it.

The actors are surprisingly good. The lead, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, is played by the Welsh actor, Rhys Ifans, perhaps best remembered as Spike, Hugh Grant’s (oh, and congratulations, Hugh) grungy flatmate in the film Notting Hill. In this one, he shows an incredible range and really convinces as a troubled aristocrat. In fact, it’s difficult to believe it’s the same man. Relative newcomer Rafe Spall as Shakespeare is a revelation, managing to move between the buffoonish and the chillingly dangerous with an effortlessness which will surely guarantee him a string of baddie roles in the future. Emmerich has also cleverly cast Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter Joely Richardson as Queen Elizabeth I at various times in her reign.

The plotline isn’t too bad either, and scrip writer John Orloff knocks together quite a decent story from the crackpot Shakespeare authorship controversy. So what’s wrong with it? I think the giveaway here is the word ‘crackpot’. Let’s be quite upfront: people who believe that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare (like Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, Roland Emmerich and the other various and assorted luvvies who fill out the cast and crew of this movie) are just being snobs. The Earl of Oxford did not write Shakespeare; neither did Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or Uncle Tom Cobley. Shakespeare was written by a glover’s son from Stratford Upon Avon named (brace yourselves) William Shakespeare. Yes, he had a lot of help with the words; yes, he collaborated with others on many more of the plays than is often acknowledged; yes, sometimes he outright ripped off other authors’ work, but by and large, what is named as Shakespeare’s work is actually Shakespeare’s work.

That’s the reason why ultimately this movie fails - you simply cannot suspend your disbelief enough to make it work in your own head. It’s nonsense not just by the usual brainless standards of Hollywood, but is even internally inconsistent. Why does Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) write a glowing eulogy in the First Folio for the Shakespeare he knows to be an illiterate fraud, blackmailer and murderer? When he saves the bulk of what the film claims to be Oxford’s plays after the supposedly real author’s death, why does he continue to allow a man (Shakespeare) whom, in the movie, he hates and despises to continue to publish them under his own name? And how does he get those plays produced anyway when, according to the movie, he only dodged the torturers rack by swearing up and down that the plays had been destroyed in a fire? There are no answers to these questions in the movie because there are no answers in reality. Because it never happened this way. See how that works?

Clearly, for Roland Emmerich, and the rest of the conspiracy theorists, history is not satisfactory. That’s probably why the movie isn’t either.

Captivated: JM Barrie, Daphne Du Maurier and the Dark Side of Neverland - by Piers Dudgeon

corrigan1 — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:45:24 GMT

Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die.
DH Lawrence

Voyager was never my favourite Star Trek franchise, although it improved immeasurably after Janeway cut her hair and Seven of Nine arrived. One of the more intriguing episodes was The Voyager Conspiracy, when Seven, having hooked herself up to the ship's computer in order to more effectively utilize her Borg implants, finds she cannot properly assess the mass of data running through her all too human brain. The result is that, from an unvarying set of raw and innocuous facts, she constructs one conspiracy after another involving the disparate elements of the ship's crew until civil war almost ensues. The disturbing aspect, of course, lies in the notion that these unadorned facts will support any of the various conspiracies, depending on how you dress them. A bit like this book, really.

That JM Barrie was a weird little man is a raw fact. Then there was the fact of his impotence (according to his wife); the fact that he was most at home with children (skies starting to cloud); the fact that he was rather a morbid person with a fascination with death ('an awfully big adventure', to quote Peter Pan); the fact that of his five 'adopted' sons, one at least, and almost certainly two, committed suicide. These are all facts, but what do they mean?

Piers Dudgeon is in no doubt, and he delivers his verdict in strong and coherent language in this psychological portrait, not just of Barrie but of the Llewlyn Davies and Du Maurier families for whose destructions Dudgeon holds him responsible. It's a powerfully argued and cogent theory of psychological oppression and domination, a mental force so potently maintained that it was still taking its toll thirty years after Barrie's death, when Peter Llewelyn Davies threw himself under a train (if Dudgeon is correct) having finally realized the malevolent hold 'Uncle Jim' had had, not just on him, but on his parents, his uncle (the actor Gerald Du Maurier) and his cousin, the novelist Daphne Du Maurier.

Intriguing as the theory is, however, one can't entirely get past the view that it's Dudgeon's command of language, rather than the solidity of the theory itself, which is holding this one together. While you read the book, it all hangs logically, but when you stop and look coldly at his facts, you realize that facts are all they are, and nothing here would hang Barrie in a court of law. There is certainly no smoking gun, and if one (to use the lawyer's metaphor) attempts to braid the various circumstantial elements into a noose, you're back on Voyager with Seven of Nine.

The basis of Dudgeon's theory lies in the death of Barrie's older brother, David. David died in an ice skating accident after a collision with 'a younger child'. We do not know who this 'younger child' was (he was never named) but Dudgeon's speculation (without any supporting evidence) is that it was Barrie himself. There are also some pointers in Barrie's writing that his mother, Margaret Ogilvy, was distant and unloving towards him. From these thin premises, Dudgeon extrapolates that Margaret rejected James after David's death, then goes on to invoke the Jungian theory that where a child is rejected by his mother, he will suffer a massive sense of inferiority which he will attempt to overcome by controlling those around him.

From this point onwards, we're really into speculation mode. Barrie, we are told, used his writing (what Dudgeon refers to as his 'alchemical texts') in the same way as a voodoo practitioner uses a doll, to control the person whom it represents. Quite how he did this is psychologically long and involved, and is rooted in hypnotic suggestion. To this end, a goodly part of the first half of the book is taken up with the history of the Du Maurier family, particularly George 'Kickey' Du Maurier, the Llewelyn Davies boys' maternal grandfather and author of the sensational Victorian best seller, Trilby, which was predicated on the power of hypnosis. In fact, George was a noted practitioner of hypnosis in his bohemian youth, and probably did use self-hypnotic techniques to aid his writing, but this is the major flaw in Dudgeon's argument: all hypnosis is ultimately self-hypnosis. Thus, while it is possible that Barrie had a very malevolent effect on the minds of the young and impressionable Llewelyn Davis boys, when Dudgeon expands his theory to include their fully grown uncle, Gerald Du Maurier, and his daughter, Daphne, we're really straining the boundaries. When he stretches it further to include no less a worthy than Scott of the Antarctic, we're definitely in Neverland.

Scott was certainly a close friend of Barrie, and even invited him to accompany him to the Antarctic, but to imply that Barrie was somehow responsible for Scott's death is laughable. Scott died because he was an idiot who insisted on taking the ill-suited Oates and Evans for the final assault on the Pole, over the much more experienced and far stronger Tom Crean. The polar party died 11 miles short of One Ton Base, a supply dump with enough rations, fuel and shelter to keep them alive until the Spring thaw. With Crean in the party instead of dead-weight like Oates and Evens, they might have made it to the base, but Crean was only a petty officer, not a gentleman like Oates and Evens, and Scott was too much of a snob to share the glory with his kind. Barrie is not to blame for that.

Nor is he to blame for the death of Arthur Llewelyn Davies, the boys father, who died from cancer. Cancer can have many causes, but resentment is not one of them, although there is certainly a case that Davies had cause for resentment. Within a few years of his marriage to Sylvia Du Maurier, the couple were taking separate holidays, Sylvia usually with Barrie and his wife, Mary Ansell. Moreover, Barrie had managed to inveigle himself into Sylvia's affections through the boys and had taken up a semi-permenent lodging at the Davies home. It couldn't have been easy for Arthur to come home every night to find Barrie ensconced in his living room, charming his wife and children, and while such a scenario may weaken a sick man's resolve to fight his illness, it couldn't cause it.

Still, Barrie was not quite the innocent portrayed by Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland. He conned Mary Ansell into marrying him, despite his impotence, by feigning fatal illness and then making a miraculous recovery. When Sylvia died a few years after Arthur, he essentially appropriated the Llewelyn Davies boys without any legal standing to do so, and Dudgeon does make quite a good case that he psychologically 'raped' (although Dudgeon doesn't use that word) the boys for the material with which he filled his books and plays. Where he sticks to the damage done to vulnerable orphans, the portrait is a strong one, but it weakens when he tries to expand the spider's web out to include Gerald Du Maurier, and then on to Daphne. Many of Daphne's stories, particularly from her later phase, do include a figure who could be interpreted as portraits of a rather sinister JM Barrie, if you believe Barrie actually was sinister, but they could be representations of any number of people. Daphne was no nun herself, and it stretches credulity, I think, to blame her selfish and promiscuous lifestyle on her cousins' boyhood guardian.

That said, however, there remains a problem with JM Barrie. There is definitely something not quite right about him, and Dudgeon nails it when he points out that Barrie was about empty sentiment where there should have been real human emotion. It is a paradox that the Edwardians were so given to sentiment, and perhaps Barrie would not have been nearly so successful in other, more cynical times. Dudgeon's portrait of Barrie is a disturbing one, and has caused much controversy at Amazon. Dudgeon's theory is certainly beyond confirming at this remove, and even if the principals were still alive, I doubt if any single action taken by any of them could not be interpreted half a dozen ways. In that sense, the accusation of mere sensationalism on Dudgeon's part must be given some weight. However, one charge which simply cannot be sustained is that the book is badly written. In fact, it is the strength of the writing which holds the whole chimera together. It is gripping, and had it been a novel instead of biographical history it would have sold in the millions. For that reason, and that reason alone, I would recommend it. Just bring your sceptic's hat.

When William Came - by Saki (HH Munro)

corrigan1 — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:55:16 GMT

Men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony
Niccolo Machiavelli

Hector Hugh Monro was a queer man - in every sense. Sometimes remembered as a sort of English Oscar Wilde, he certainly had Wilde’s wit and jaundiced eye, as well as his sexual proclivities, but there was in Wilde’s writing a certain desperation, as though he had just learned to fly and was afraid - terrified would be a better word - to look down. He crammed every sentence with such sparkling ingenuity that the first time I picked up The Picture of Dorian Gray I wanted to throw it across the room before I’d read three pages; he read like the consummate smartarse bestowing his bon mots on the adoring audience, kind of like head boy at Eton, just before going up to Oxford, and all the juniors hanging on his words. I’m glad I stuck with it, because it’s one of the most perfect little novels I ever read, morally, story-wise and as a piece of writing. It’s a tragedy he never wrote another novel - or maybe not; perhaps this was the one novel he had in him.

Saki, on the other hand, was very much a prose writer (although he also wrote plays) and is primarily remembered today as a master of the short story. Frank O’Connor once said that the British short story was not a true art form as the American and Irish were; perhaps he’d never read Saki. Before I took up this small novel, I can’t honestly say I’d read him either. One short story, The Lumber Room, which was required as part of my school English course when I was fifteen, but it stuck with me through thirty years when many of the others had fallen away, so when I came across this 1913 effort, Monro already had a tiny foothold in my mind.

The eponymous William is Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom we have previously met in this blog. The book is an addition to the invasion literature which was popular in Britain for about fifty or so years before the First World War. A sub-genre of military fiction, it’s rise was co-incident with foundation of the Second Reich and accelerated with the accession of Wilhelm to the throne of Germany and his subsequent creation and expansion of the German navy. As a rule, the British liked to stand aloof from the machinations of European diplomacy, and for as long as nobody was threatening the sea lanes to their empire they were happy enough. However, the decision of the strongest land power on the continent to build a fleet, ostensibly to defend their almost landlocked country, was a cause of alarm, and as that fleet grew, so did British concerns; there was nobody strong enough to challenge Germany on land, so the High Seas Fleet was a weapon with only one target in mind.

Politically-themed fiction is a graveyard of authors. The scenarios are usually too period-specific for any but the greatest writers to have a snowball’s chance of making them eternal, and when (as here) we know the central premise never came about, the whole thing looks desperately dated. Antiquated, even. I’ve previously claimed that only Orwell and Shaw had ever succeeded with this genre, and I suppose you could add Homer to the list. Saki comes close; he doesn’t quite make it, but close. Set in the period we today call ‘Edwardian’, Murrey Yeovil is a wealthy Englishman with a suitable wife, Cicely, with whom he appears to be on good terms, possibly due to the fact that he spends very little time with her in England, preferring exploration and travel. She, in her turn, is no anchoress and I suppose the two might be taken to form opposite poles of reaction to invasion, the one (Murrey) the seeker, the romantic always searching for some El Dorado, Cicely, the practical one, making accommodation with the situation as it presents itself.

When, after a great sea battle, the Royal Navy is dispatched to the bottom of the North Sea, Britain is occupied by the Germans and annexed to the Reich. Monro uses the device of having Murrey absent in deepest Siberia at the time, and then falling sick for several months, so that when he returns home, the ‘Fait Accompli’, as it is termed in the book, is a done deal. The king has fled to India where he has set up a new imperial court; most of the senior government and aristocratic figures have gone with him, and what is left behind is the lower ranks of the peerage, the wealthier parvenus and a few, like Murrey, who were caught out by the rapidity of the upheaval.

Oh, and the Jews.

Munro may have shared something of Wilde’s style, but he was light-years removed in temperament. An arch-Conservative, he was not (unlike Wilde) the kind of man who accepted things the way they were. Wilde, for all the poking and teasing he did of them, actually liked the people he wrote about. He was right at home in fashionable London and loved the little hypocrisies that make up his storylines. Saki didn’t like them at all, and although he can be as bitingly funny as Wilde, there’s a nastiness present in his writing that you’ll search in vain for in Wilde. He had an almost mystical vision of country which, at its best, shows itself in his descriptions of the English countryside, the fox-hunts, the hedgerows, the local customs and uniquely English villages. However, he was also a vicious anti-Semite, and it went deeper than the casual racism of the period. In this book, the Jews are at ease under the new order because, well, they’re not really British are they, old chap? So of course they’re happy to serve the Germans (if only he’d lived another few decades).

Munro has form for this kind of thing, and one of his more famous short stories, The Unrest-Cure involves Clovis - Saki’s recurring hero and rather a nasty piece of goods - apparently arranging for the mass assassination of the Jews in a particular neighbourhood (although times do change; when the BBC, God bless them, dramatized the story for the radio some years ago, they decided it was too inflammatory to kill Jews, so they killed Catholics instead, since nobody could possibly object to that).

All that aside, however, where Munro scores heavily is in his waspish depiction of London society in Edwardian times, but using a putative invasion as a mirror held up to the venality of his supposed ‘betters’. The parties and soirees where assorted British lower aristocracy mingle happily with Prussian officers; the degraded young men who should have been making up the British officer corps and leading the resistance; Murrey’s own wife, who, when not dallying with her boyfriend (the earliest use I have ever come across of that word to indicate an adulterous liaison, particularly of the upper class) simply accepts the Fait Accompli as, well, a fait accompli and carries on as though all that had happened was a normal succession from one king to the next.

Invasion literature tended to be blood-soaked offerings, but Saki is (despite the anti-Semitism) far too good a writer for that. He simply imagines a Britain reacting to invasion and his imaginings are surprisingly good. We follow Murrey’s mental processes as he arrives back, months after the invasion, initially contemptuous of those who have accepted the Fait Accompli, but slowly becoming a citizen of the Reich as the reality of occupation imposes itself. Perhaps the most poignant moment is when, having got lost miles from his country house, a German officer gives him a lift home and, for hospitality’s sake, Murrey is obliged to invite him in and they end up chatting like a couple of normal people, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to be occupied. That you can get used to anything makes this, perhaps, the most frightening of the invasion novels.

The German menace, and what was perceived at the time as the moral degeneracy of an increasingly intermingled - and consequently unmanly - British population were major social themes in Edwardian Britain. There is no doubt which side of the debate Saki came down on, and he didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk. When war finally came in 1914, Munro, although over service age, blagged his way into the army, refused a commission and died an ordinary soldier at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Before that, however, his writings on the natural world (always one of his favourite themes, even before the war) as it existed at the front won many admirers, particularly his commentary on how the birds seemed unaffected by the carnage going on around them.

This is not the book that will keep Munro's memory alive, but I would recommend it for his Wildean social commentary alone. At his best, his wit is a match for Oscar, and his insights, although marred by a visceral aversion to the people he writes about, are spot on.

The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One - by Miranda Carter

corrigan1 — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 08:13:58 GMT

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet
Winston Churchill

It is said that the only joke Kaiser Wilhelm II ever made was when his cousin, George V of England, changed his family name to Windsor; Wilhelm offered no comment, saying he had a performance of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to attend. The story is, no doubt, apocryphal, for if one thing comes across from Miranda Carter’s book, it’s that whatever else Wilhelm was, he was never boring. He was bumptious, overbearing, loud, crass, narcissistic, chippy, spoilt, a bit thick and certainly a loose cannon, but one thing nobody could ever call him was boring, so when people say he only ever made one joke, they probably mean he only made one that others found funny.

Wilhelm - Kaiser Bill, to the British - is often reviled as the man who sparked off World War I. Certainly, he received less than extended shrift from Robert K Massie in his masterwork, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War. Sparks, however, are only dangerous in tinderboxes, and if Wilhelm failed to use the immense power he wielded to the greater good, he did not create the conditions which allowed one man to ignite an inferno. There were at least two other emperors in the mix (George of England and Nicholas of Russia), and all three come under the microscope in this book.

The subtitle is, in fact, a little misleading. After the initial simultaneous boyhood biographies of the three cousins, George doesn’t get much of a look-in. There are two reasons for this. The first is that because by the mid-nineteenth century, Britain was a relatively advanced parliamentary democracy where the big decisions rested with the politicians, not in the court. Frankly, whatever happened, George had no say in the matter. Although his father, Edward VII, did wield a great deal of influence in public affairs, this was almost entirely due to the respect he personally commanded, not to his position, and George never came within an ass’s roar of matching his father’s charisma . Edward is usually remembered as a rake and libertine (which he certainly was) but Carter reminds us that he was also a very shrewd and well connected observer of the international situation, a tactful diplomat and (vitally important) he knew his place: the days of kings as executive rulers were fast coming to an end, and Edward knew better than to try to buck that trend.

The other reason for George’s extended absence from the central section of the book is probably the fact that he was such a boring bastard. In fact, his entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica reads, “see under ‘Boring Bastards’”. With Edward, there was a public façade of royal probity, but that was for the benefit of the middle classes only; among his own set, it was ‘let the good times roll’. If good times were in the bed, George would sleep on the floor. A monoglot in an extended international family which switched languages the way Elizabeth Taylor switched husbands (and none too garrulous in the one tongue he did speak), he was defined almost entirely by his sense of duty. He married Princess May of Teck, fiancée of his elder brother Prince Albert Victor, after the latter had died; he kind of inherited her with the succession. Fortunately, May was one of those aristocrats to whom husbands were interchangeable and it seems to have been a successful marriage, if not exactly a blissful one.

The union of Nicholas and Alexandra, on the other hand, turned into a true love match, albeit one which initially looked doomed (and who knew it would all end so well, eh?). One of Queen Victoria’s multitudinous grandchildren, ‘Alicky’, as she was known, turned down Nicholas’s first proposal and only relented when the Kaiser broke out the shotguns. He later claimed that he had played Cupid, but I don’t remember Cupid being armed with a double-ought. The wedding was something of a doom-laden affair, taking place a bare week or so after the long, rambling and extended funeral of Nicholas’s father, and (Alicky later said) it felt like a continuation of the funeral mass, but dressed in white instead of black.

The mood never really lightened. Carter paints a picture of the most moribund government in Europe. Everything went through the Tsar, came from the Tsar or stopped with the Tsar. Nothing in the Russian Empire happened without his good leave, and even such matters as an individual divorce or a change of name had to be personally sanctioned by him. Sometimes a question would make it through the concentric rings of courtiers and bureaucracy for him to make a decision; most times it would not, which meant nothing ever happened. Everything was circumscribed by rank, privilege and tradition. Even the glittering winter balls of St Petersburg were mainly spent standing in different rooms (a separate one for each tier of society, and God help anyone who entered the wrong room). Nicholas considered himself knowledgeable on the lives of his people because he was intimately acquainted with his servants, never apparently realizing that they were the descendants of generations of imperial servants and now as far removed from a genuine Russian peasant as he was himself. Reform of any kind was unthinkable, and consequently revolution was inevitable.

At some visceral level he was probably aware of this, which would account for the inveterate Russian empire-building in the far east as a kind of national distraction. While it worked, the lid just about stayed on, but in 1905 the clock of war and revolution started ticking down when the Russians were kicked out of Asia by the Japanese, a national disaster (for the Russians, at any rate) resulting in protests in St Petersburg which led to such repression that loyalty to the Tsar died on its feet. Now it was only a question of time, and Nicholas’s efforts to restore national pride by getting involved in the Balkans only made matters worse, bringing him into conflict with that other great autocrat, Wilhelm.

I would venture to suggest that Carter has a bit of a soft spot for Wilhelm. His personality certainly dominates the book, pretty much the way it did the Europe of his day. In some ways, you kind of have to have a certain sympathy for the poor bastard. The famous stunted left arm was a result of an appalling birth during which both he and his mother, Princess Victoria of England, nearly died. Like her infamously prudish mother, Vicky (as she was known) was too ignorant of obstetrics to understand that her baby was in the breech position and too embarrassed to ask anyone about it. Only by the muscular intervention of an expert doctor did they survive, but the price was high. The attending midwife was obliged to slap Wilhelm around pretty good to clear his lungs, and there is a suspicion that those first few vital minutes without oxygen resulted in brain damage. Moreover, Wilhelm’s arm, severely mangled by the manipulation necessary to bring him into the world, was never going to be fixed.

That, however, didn’t stop the family from trying. From the age of six months he was subjected to some ridiculous and indeed barbaric treatments. ‘Animal baths’, in which the damaged arm was placed inside the entrails of a freshly killed hare; tying the good arm to the body in toddler-hood to force the weak one to function, giving him no balance as he tried to walk; painful electric shock treatment to the arm from fourteen months old; being ‘stretched’ on a rack-like device from the age of four. This treatment is only understandable in the context of a Germany where martial prowess and physical perfection were expected as basic attributes. Indeed, the cliché of the monocle-wearing German general had its birth at Wilhelm’s own court, where spectacles were forbidden as a sign of weakness.

As he grew, Wilhelm’s relationship with his mother’s homeland became a personal and political nightmare. Vicky was, by German standards, a very difficult woman to live with. Well educated, liberal (in royal terms), opinionated and intelligent, she went over with the Germans like pork knuckles at a Jewish wedding, and the Germans, in their usual tactful manner, were not slow about letting her see it. She, in her turn, saw no reason to hide her distaste of the beastly Hun which must have left Wilhelm in rather a schizophrenic place. Wilhelm’s whole life subsequently seems to have been a reaction to this Anglo-German proxy war. Like a bully who’s fascinated by the one person who can stand up to him, Wilhelm spent his life alternately parading around in the uniforms he adored, rattling his sabre and making blood-curdling speeches, and then turning around and declaring his love for England and his desire only to be its friend and ally.

Basically, he was a fruitcake, but for a while he was a popular one, and amazingly, the place he was popular for longest was England. The eldest grandson of Victoria, she actually died in his arms (or arm, as Carter mischievously says) and his behaviour during her passing was appreciated by the British. His bravura public appearances in England were always popular and his trademark bristling moustache became almost as celebrated as its owner. But as soon as he got back to the Fatherland it was all ‘perfidious Albion’, a condition exacerbated by his almost unreasoning hatred of his uncle, now king and emperor, Edward VII.

Quite what he had against Edward in particular is hard to fathom, but whatever it was it had always been present, and in fairness it must be said that Edward was prepared to take it on the chin if the British national interest called for it. In Dreadnought, Massie describes how, in the years before Edward had ascended the throne, Wilhelm would routinely humiliate his uncle at state events by always insisting on his own precedence as a reigning monarch. When Edward returned the compliment at a British function by giving precedence to the King of Hawaii over the German crown prince, Wilhelm went ballistic. Everything was a personal insult; every act taken or not taken by the British government was aimed at humiliating Germany.

There is, however, a darker thread to this, as Carter notes: if Wilhelm presented himself as the Supreme Warlord, it was an image the Germans took to heart. Germany, only newly united, was an adolescent nation, and like all adolescents, it was truculent, dismissive of its elders and raging with hormones. Wilhelm was being what his people expected him to be. But he was also half English. It is no secret that at some level he admired his mother’s people. He seems to have desperately wanted their approval, and his genuine popularity in that country was a source of great pleasure to him. The result was a kind of ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ complex, whereby he would rattle the sabre to the point of war, then veer away on the course of peace.

Unfortunately, the result was that by 1911, when he visited Britain for the unveiling of the Victoria Memorial, he was greeted with standing ovations, but no British politician approached him regarding trade or military relations. The truth was that he had changed horses so many times that those in power felt war was inevitable, and nothing he had to say about peace and friendship was worth listening to. In Germany too, events were taking their own course, and for the opposite reason: he’d threatened war too often and backed away too many times for the army to heed his opinions - war was coming and they intended to win it, with or without him.

George was a mediocrity and Nicholas a martyr (he was declared a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000), but in some ways, Kaiser Bill was the most human of the three cousins. Those interested in the period are well advised to read Carter’s book together with Dreadnought. Both are massive reads (Dreadnought is almost 900 pages) but both are beautifully written and hugely readable. Regard them as almost like two eyes on the period - one gives you a view, but both together gives you depth perception.

Greatly recommended.

The Broken Compass: how British politics lost its way - by Peter Hitchens

corrigan1 — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 15:20:13 GMT

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith
J William Fulbright

If you are fortunate enough to receive the BBC, you may have watched a current affairs programme called Question Time. This is a standard question-and-answer forum where the usual suspects - pompous journalists and narcissistic politicians - sit around a table and give their opinions on topics of the day tossed at them by a studio audience made up of members of the public. Because the BBC is as achingly liberal and as chronically ‘right-on’ as it’s possible to get without sewing elbow patches onto your jacket, they usually use these kind of programmes to propagate the approved doctrines of egalitarianism and ever closer European union. However, because they are a publicly funded body, they are obliged to occasionally include some wing-nut from outside the centrist consensus, such as UKIP, the BNP or even (gasp) the Scottish National Party. Since the all-ticket audience can be trusted to throw fish to the seals on demand, these people are essentially there to be used as whipping boys. One of the regular Aunt Sallys is Peter Hitchens, younger brother of that raffish Englishman abroad, Christopher, and as different in outlook as Cain was from Abel.

Christopher is no Adonis, to be sure, but he could at least pass for ordinary. Unfortunately, Peter is no so lucky. Bug-eyed and weak chinned, he looks like his face is about to explode, an image exacerbated by a fighting disposition and a humourless demeanour which seems more informed by John Calvin than the Anglicanism to which (after a spell as an atheist and Trotskyite) he now adheres. I suspect the BBC have him on because he looks like a bloody lunatic; if they do, it shows how full of it they are.

In fact, he is a formidable intellect, an acute social observer and a hugely articulate advocate of conservative, old-fashioned values. While he trawls in the same waters as his brother, he brings in a significantly different catch and processes it in an altogether different manner. Whereas Christopher tends to be tightly focused on the particular object of his investigation, Peter casts a very broad net and theorises from the general to the specific.

Paradoxically, the weakness of such an approach is that it often tells you as much about the author as it does about his subject, and while this book is an extremely powerful polemic against the dangers of Whig history and the determinist world view, a great deal of it is essentially autobiographical, explaining how Hitchens moved from a form of doctrinaire communism to a position where he has to look left to see the Tory Party. This would be more palatable if he were a more sympathetic man; however, he is what he is, and what he is is actually an interesting and indeed arresting commentator not afraid to speak as he finds and stand a lonely guard defending positions from which, like the boy on the burning deck, all but he have fled.

To spare him embarrassment, we will lightly pass over the fact that the boy in the poem was actually French, for the European Union is one of his many bugbears. In this book, however, he concentrates on the drifting lassitude of the British state (a perennial topic with him, in fact) and tackles his subject through what he perceives as the collapse of traditional British institutions. His strongest attacks come where he focuses closely on specific aspects of these institutional collapses. In the newspaper industry, for instance, he explains how politics has been relentlessly degraded by its expansion into a form of entertainment news, and how that entertainment is actually a type of blood sport. This is not only distasteful, but distorting of the truth. John Major’s government, for instance, was marked by a relentless tide of sleaze, or so the received perception has it; in reality, it was no more sleazy than the labour government which followed it, but Blair had something Major didn’t - Alastair Campbell, surely the model for Malcolm Tucker and who, as a government press officer, was to politics what The Hays Code was to Hollywood.

By far the most disturbing aspect of the book is Hitchens survey of the British educational system, or rather the English system, since, like its rather liverish author, the book does not range beyond Hadrian’s Wall. One figure will suffice to illustrate the core of his case. At the outbreak of the Second World War, about 70% of Oxbridge undergraduates came from the public schools which, to the eternal confusion of Americans, are actually extremely exclusive private schools like Harrow and Eton where, if you know how much money you’ve got, you haven’t got enough. It was quite a surprise to me to find that 30% were from the state sector that far back. By 1970, those figures had more or less reversed, with about 65% coming from the state sector.

The problem, however (at least as far as the left was concerned) was that most of that 65% were coming from the grammar schools, those state schools which were allowed to select the brightest children at the age of 11. This was clearly problematical, especially since the spread of grammar schools around England was patchy at best and left a lot of bright kids in badly served areas at a severe disadvantage. Nevertheless, these schools, though far from perfect, were having a seriously positive effect lifting very large numbers of poor kids up the educational ladder. It wasn’t tokenism, it was real, practical progress. Naturally, it couldn’t be allowed to continue.

In the 1960s, the Labour government more or less declared war on these schools in the name of egalitarianism. The result was a levelling down of educational standards across the board, as the end of streaming and setting (putting children of similar abilities in the same classes) drove the system right into the sand. At the same time, the insistence that ever greater numbers go on to university - as though mere numbers were indicative of anything - undermined the quite necessary exclusivity of these institutions as they became swamped with sub-standard students.

The really shocking aspect is that despite all the egalitarian banner-waving, the ratio of public/state school pupils attending Oxford and Cambridge has begun to reverse back in favour of the exclusive public schools again. This should not come as a surprise since the quality of education an English child now receives is predicated exclusively on the income of his parents. Can they afford to move into the catchment area of a ‘good’ school? Can they get him into a faith-based school, which are generally of better quality (and therefore often more expensive) than state schools? Faith-based schools are allowed to interview prospective pupils, ostensibly to ensure they actually are of the requisite faith, but that process also allows them to test the intelligence of the child.

On the negative side, there is a certain humourlessness in Hitchens demeanour which serves to make him look small, such as his insistence on constantly referring to Tony Blair as ‘Anthony Blair’. He also has a whiff of the conspiracy nut about him. When he describes the funeral of Donald Dewar, for instance, he seems to find it suspicious that the Labour Party worthies present all hummed along to the tune of The Internationale. Personally, I’d have found it suspicious if they’d actually known the words. The overall lack of focus lends to the effect, and his apparent belief that Israel was just minding its own beeswax until millions of mad Arabs decided to attack it for no reason undermines his vision of himself as a lone voice of sanity in a crazy world. (I mean, we do all know that I’m the lone voice, don’t we?)

Still, it’s easy to find books which will tell you whatever you want to hear. Hitchens won’t do that (unless you’re Colonel Blimp) and for that reason I can recommend this one to get you out of your comfort zone.

Superfreakonomics - by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner

corrigan1 — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 15:50:31 GMT

Old statisticians never die - they just get broken down by age and sex
Source Unknown

Did you know that street level drug dealers in Chicago will not make any more money peddling drugs for eight hours than they would flipping burgers at MacDonald’s? In fact, some of them actually have second jobs doing just that in order to make ends meet. You might, therefore, ask why they don’t just pull double shifts at Mac’s instead of perishing their nuts off on a cold corner of the Windy City, dodging the cops and setting themselves up for a stay at the hotel with no windows. The answer is because as a drug dealer, you have prospects; at MacDonald’s, you have fries.

The guys at Corporate were somewhat miffed when Levitt and Dubner revealed this organisational flaw in their previous book of maverick economics, entitled Freakonomics. It was nothing to the rage which ensued when, in another chapter, they revealed that there was a direct correlation between falling crime rates and the legalization of abortion across various American states. Of course, one does not have to be a pro-lifer to be disturbed at the thought of crime control by abortion (it is a little Aldous Huxley) but the authors are of the opinion that beans are beans, and they’re just counting them; how you cook them is up to you.

That book was such a surprise smash that they’re back with a second volume, this time a little less academic, a little more mainstream. They don’t go quite as far into interpretive mode in this one, and include a lot more interesting facts, and I think that it’s probably all the better for it. They’re also less concerned this time about stepping on toes, and as a result, you will probably discern a bit of a neo-liberal bias, especially when you tackle the section on Ultimatum and Dictator games. That said, they’ve managed to (mostly) avoid the snarling triumphalism we associate with our beloved neos and you will find that you can read this one on the beach.

Many of the points raised will be uncomfortable, and some will be difficult to square. The effect of the sexual revolution on prostitution, for instance, was, according to the authors, disastrous. Before, it being nearly impossible to get a ‘respectable’ girl to come across, a guy was prepared to pay a hefty fee to a professional, who, as a result, really did have something akin to a profession. Contrast this with the street-walker of today.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the only other professions open to a woman were nursing and teaching. Many women went into them because they would not have had any kind of working life otherwise, but the feminist overthrow of the old order had a deleterious effect on teaching. Because all professions are now open to women, the status of teaching has gone right into a bucket. In 1960, 40% of female American teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ, with only 8% at the bottom; by 1980, that ratio was down to about 20/20. That doesn’t mean there aren’t great teachers, but it does mean that the average IQ in the profession is falling radically.

Here’s another interesting fact: the spike in crime rates across comparable American cities in the 1950s corresponds almost eerily with the role out of television. Bear in mind that we’re not talking about ‘sewer in your living-room’ TV, sex-and-violence-as-standard TV, but TV where all families had a mom and a dad, the children were apple-cheeked and the cops always caught the bad guy. Quite why this happened is still a very open question. It clearly wasn’t the content of the shows which was corrupting society and the authors don’t pretend to have an answer. They have posited a couple of speculations - eg, that children plonked in front of a TV are not outside being socialized as earlier generations, or parents just find it easier to plonk them than to actually parent - but your guess is as good as theirs.

The section on global warming, however, is quite fascinating. It’s way too complex to go into in a simple review, but consider this: in the course of the last century, carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere has increased from 280 to 380 parts per million. That sounds bad until you realize that the ‘acceptable’ level of carbon dioxide in a modern office building is actually 1000 parts per million. Moreover, the carbon record shows that millions of years before man even evolved, that 1000 parts per million was occurring naturally in the planet’s atmosphere. It also shows that carbon increases in the atmosphere have always followed a period of warming, not preceded it. Levitt and Dubner are much less pessimistic about solutions to the problem as well. Apparently, the answer is to release about 100,000 tonnes of sulphur into the atmosphere over the poles. Sound crazy? Read the book; in there, it doesn’t sound crazy at all.

Recommended.

The Religion Virus: why we believe in God - by Craig A James

corrigan1 — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:07:11 GMT

The clever men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed,
But none of them know one half as much
As intelligent Mr Toad
Kenneth Graham

I don’t mind an atheist, even an evangelical one, but what I really can’t abide is being reminded of Lenny. I hadn’t thought about Lenny in years, and were I to go to my grave without another thought of Lenny I would die a happy man. But Craig James has deprived me of the promise serene death, and this I do not forgive.

Lenny was a kid in my class when I was ten years old. Lenny wasn’t the brightest kid in the world; in fact, he wasn’t even the brightest kid in the class, and although he wasn’t stupid, neither was he noticeably smarter than anybody else. But for whatever reason, Lenny had a pathological need to think he was the cleverest little boy in the whole wide world and he’d get really angry with anybody who beat him to an answer or put up a problem he couldn’t solve. It followed that ‘angry’ was pretty much Lenny’s default setting, and he complained bitterly when he didn’t feel he was getting his intellectual due. In hindsight, I suppose we should have told him that he was. He’s probably a New Atheist now.

Craig A James kind of reminds me of Lenny. He’s got that whole 'ok, we’ll take it from here' thing going, like history had just been waiting for his arrival, and you get the feeling that his idea of reasonable discourse is that he talks and you listen. Craig strikes me as the sort who gets excited by new ideas, especially when they reinforce his own. We may surmise that Craig read about meme theory somewhere and knew it had to be true because it was telling him what he wanted to hear.

Thus, Craig can, without the blush of irony, write a paragraph putting Richard Dawkins on the same scientific level as Albert Einstein and Michael Faraday, and make statements as staggeringly WTF as ‘Darwin showed that God did not create man’. That Darwin did nothing of the sort and never claimed to have done is neither here nor there; it’s apparent to Craig so it must be true.

So we are clear what he is talking about, a meme is defined by Wikipedia, that source of all knowledge, as 'an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. While genes transmit biological information, memes are said to transmit ideas and belief information'. You will, of course, have immediately noticed the qualifying elephant in the middle of that particular room: the three words, 'are said to'. This will put you one up on our Craig, who speaks about the existence of memes the way Descartes spoke about his own. The fact that nobody has ever seen a meme, measured a meme, weighed, poked or examined a meme goes unaddressed by the author; we know they must be there because they explain all those stupid people who believe in God.

What’s more, we can even tell exactly what kinds of memes there must be out there. We have a monotheism meme, an intolerance meme, an abstract-God meme, and a Godly-origin-of-morals meme; there’s the kindness meme, the guilt meme, the heaven-and-hell meme and the ignorance-is-bliss meme. Since all right-thinking people know that religion is hostile to reason, we of course have the anti-rationalism meme, the inerrancy meme, the one-nation-under-God meme and the martyrdom meme.

At a certain point you begin to wonder if there is anything that isn’t actually a meme, or any conceivable behaviour, opinion or thought which doesn’t validate the theory; when you come across a statement as callow and unexamined as ‘memetic evolution theory predicts exactly what we find in today’s religions’ you groan that the answer, unfortunately, is no. Somebody really should have introduced this guy to Karl Popper.

Essentially, we are told, memes are the evolution of evolution itself. It takes generations - perhaps thousands of years - for biological natural selection to ‘improve’ a species; meme theoreticians posit the notion that evolution itself is evolving into a more efficient process by the much more rapid mutation of thought. What natural selection would take a thousand generations to improve, memes can improve in ten or twenty. It’s an interesting idea (for about a second and a half), but unfortunately it’s the only such in this book.

Moreover, he reads like yet another unblinking graduate of the Dawkins school of determinism, where every possible act, event and process in every conceivable field of science, nature and the private realm is the inevitable outcome of natural selection. Whether it be the mutation of a germ, a single horny thought by an adolescent schoolboy or whatever it is that goes on in a black hole, all of it, one way or another, somehow or other, is always explicable in evolutionary terms. There is nothing, no matter how big or small, no matter in which field of science, the arts or philosophy, which is not part of the ongoing process of evolution.

Don’t believe me about evolution explaining astrophysics? Check out The God Delusion and read Dawkins speculating about the formation of new universes inside black holes and attempting to link this to the evolutionary process (assuming it happens at all, that is; nobody has the first idea what goes on inside a black hole). Well, our Craig reads like he is of that kidney, and if he’s not, he really should have done a better job making that fact more explicit. As you may have gathered, I’m not a huge fan of 'The Big Theory’ theory, the single idea that explains everything about everything. It didn’t work for Freud, it didn’t work for the communists and it ain’t working for this guy. Natural selection explains natural selection; it doesn’t explain anything else.

Watching James painstakingly explain the way memes reinforce each other (and stating this as if it were established fact) is somewhat akin to pressing your tongue against a sore tooth; you know it’s going to hurt, but you just have to do it anyway. At no point does it seem to occur to the man that what he’s actually describing is the human thought process. Presumably, to do so would be to credit religious believers with, well, human thought. No, far better to present a complex-sounding theory without a scintilla of objective evidence to back it up, give it a pseudo-scientific name to make it sound inevitable and profound (think communism and its ‘dialectical materialism’), and then congratulate yourself for being an intellectually fulfilled atheist in a world full of believers subject to these ruthlessly replicating memes. Quite why Craig and a select few are not subject to them is a question far beyond the limited intellect of this benighted believer, and Craig chooses not to enlighten us. Perhaps we would not be able to take it in. Or perhaps some Christian smart-hole would uncharitably point out that since memes are pure speculation, maybe it’s atheism that’s the meme, not belief. Or perhaps Craig is just not as bright as he thinks he is.

A little learning, so the man said, is a dangerous thing. Shallow draughts of it really do intoxicate the brain and you ain't going to drink deep at this particular well. Nevertheless, I’m still going to recommend it as it’s clearly written and explains the whole meme thing in a nutshell (an appropriate container). If you’re interested in meme theory this is as good a place to start as any.

Just nobody tell Lenny.

The Palace Tiger - by Barbara Cleverly

corrigan1 — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 19:57:59 GMT

Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent
William Shakespeare

Patrick O’Brien made a bad mistake when he started writing his Aubrey-Maturin novels: he jumped the books forward in time too quickly, with the result that before the series was half written, the Napoleonic Wars were nearly over. He finished up squeezing more and more adventures into a shorter and shorter period in order to get twenty books out of his heroes before Waterloo created the Pax Britannica. Barbara Cleverly was obviously determined not to make that mistake. In this, fourth, instalment of the Joe Sandilands mysteries, it is May of 1922, a bare three months after Joe’s first appearance in The Last Kashmiri Rose. Since the Raj lasted until 1948, Joe may reasonably fear copper’s burn-out, especially considering - if you've been following the series - that he's already been to England and back since March. For the present, however, his upper lip remains suitably stiff and he’s still bothering to dress for dinner (sound chap, what!).

The hot weather finds Joe back down from the Northwest Frontier, scene of his last outing, The Damascened Blade, and sharing a chummery (bachelor quarters) with some fast and louche remittance men headed up by the unregenerate Edgar Troop, part-time intelligencer, silent partner in Simla’s most exclusive cat-house and a thoroughly bad hat, last seen in Ragtime in Simla, the second Sandilands mystery. Edgar and Joe are summoned by Sir George Jardine, eminence grise and imperial puppet-master, and dispatched post-haste to the princely state of Ranipur, where the maharajah, Udai Singh, appears to be having a slight problem with the succession. His eldest son, Bishan, with all the eccentricity one expects of aristocracy, Asian or European, was in the habit of wrestling with a panther by way of a spot of morning exercise. I say ‘was’, because Bishan, Commodus-like, had previously had the beast de-clawed and his jaws sewn up. This was working out pretty well for Bishan until some japester switched the animal with a fully armed and very angry lookalike. For some strange reason, Sir George smells a rat in this and Joe and Edgar are duly dispatched.

Fortunately, Udai Singh still has a couple of sons in reserve - that is until Prithvi, the second heir, ‘goes to Delhi’, to use a Raj colloquialism, leaving only one twelve year old princeling in the succession stakes. Cleverly draws a picture of a teeming palace with intriguers at every corner. There’s First Her Highness, the senior wife of Udai Singh and mother of Bishan, confined to the zenana (harem) but still pulling the stings through her faithful eunuch, Zafira; Third Her Highness, Udai Singh’s much younger, coolly aristocratic, British educated third wife; Second Her Highness doesn’t seem to get about much, but there’s Lal Bai, Udai Singh’s favourite concubine and mother of the one heir left standing, an illiterate peasant but one who can scheme with the best of them. And we mustn’t forget Udai’s brother, the prime minister of Ranipur, himself a possible successor and well equipped for intrigue and dirty dealings.

Then there’s the white contingent. Prithvi had married an American wife, Madeleine, headstrong and independent, who is not at all popular with the home team and whose children would not be acceptable heirs to the royal blood. Along with her comes her brother, Stuart, barnstorming pilot and late of the Layfayette Escadrille. And is the British resident (ambassador) quite the pukka chap he appears? He is, after all, of the ‘Heaven Born’, and as such cut from the same bolt of cloth as Sir George. And why is his wife so curt with our Joe?

All of this is well wrapped up in the heat and dust of imperial India by Cleverly, whose command of her backdrop seems to be getting better as the series goes on. This one is a return to previous form after the slight stylistic departure of The Damascened Blade, and is all the stronger for it. Joe is very much front and centre throughout and the intrigues of an Indian palace are well drawn for us as the author has her detective stumble around finding his feet.

Once again, Cleverly quite rightly distains the convention of dropping twenty-first century characters into historical settings and Joe (and certainly Edgar) get to show a bit of the cad as they feel their way to a Byzantine solution which is very much appropriate to the anthill of intrigue which is Udai Singh’s palace. An enjoyable read, and just the thing for a summer break. Recommended.

Long Time Coming - by Robert Goddard

corrigan1 — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 22:28:01 GMT

Behind every great fortune is a crime
Balzac

I don’t think I’ve ever read an author who can stretch a storyline thinner than Robert Goddard; this guy makes bubblegum look like boilerplate. The strange thing is that as thin as it stretches, it never quite breaks. It should, but it doesn’t. Exactly what this is down to is hard to say. Maybe it’s the quaint, old-fashioned, quintessentially English manner of story-telling, almost like Famous Five for grown-ups; perhaps it’s his facility for creating very ordinary protagonists, invested with the same workaday weariness which daily life visits on all of us, then facing them with Byzantine puzzles; or maybe it’s that he’s developed the trick of writing just enough to evoke an atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue to draw the reader in without drowning him in blood.

Whatever the reason, Goddard has built up a large and loyal fan base, a feat all the more admirable as he’s never really been picked up by the TV and movie industry. There was a brief attempt at a vehicle for the late John Thaw based on his Harry Barnett series back in the 1990’s, but it came to nothing and Goddard’s fame (such as it is) rests entirely on his pen. In terms of mainstream British crime writing, he is completely out of step with the current tartan noir vogue as exemplified by art house darlings like Ian Rankin. You’ll never see this guy being asked his opinions on the BBC, possibly because he writes about boring people who speak with bland accents, wash their cars on Sunday and think an interest in politics is vaguely foreign. English people, in other words.

It’s served him well, however, and he’s been cranking out the formula, honed and polished over the years, for more than three decades now. Usually, there’s an incident from the past, often a genuine footnote of history, which has come back, many years later, to drag some hapless home counties dweeb into a mystery in which, although he doesn’t exactly triumph, he usually ends up settling down with a nice girl. It’s usually the same dweeb under different names, and pretty much the same girl, but the remarkable thing is that somehow, someway, you always finish the book. He’s that kind of writer.

It is 1976, and the dweeb in this book is Stephen Swan, a geologist recently unemployed and broken up with his fiancée. Returning to his family home, a guesthouse on the south coast of England (you can almost feel the drizzle) he is shocked to find his uncle, Eldritch Swan, whom he had thought killed in the London Blitz in 1940, alive, well, and partaking of the full English breakfast. In fact, Eldritch has just been released after spending thirty-six years in an Irish prison for a crime which, under the terms of his release, he is not allowed to talk about. Before his imprisonment, Eldritch had been employed by a Jewish diamond merchant in Brussels named Meridor who had been killed while fleeing the Nazis. Somewhere along the way, Meridor’s priceless collection of Picassos have vanished, only to reappear years later in the possession of another collector named Brownlow. When a lawsuit by Meridor’s family fails, Eldritch is hired by a solicitor, on behalf of an anonymous client, to prove that the Merior Picassos had, indeed, been stolen in 1940. This shouldn’t be a problem, since Eldritch was the villain who half-inched them, but of course, then you wouldn’t have a story.

Actually, the story you do have is wafer-thin, but Goddard is like one of those boring people who make model cathedrals out of matchsticks and, despite wondering why, you do kind of find yourself admiring the craftsmanship. And this one does take a deal of craftsmanship to hold it together, because, despite Goddard’s reputation for fiendishly convoluted plots, once you crack the central trope revolving around Irish neutrality in the Second World War (or ‘The Emergency’ as we preferred to call it), everything else is padding.

Still, it’s comfortable padding. It slides silkily over the skin and stretches luxuriantly, albeit just a little bit too elastically; there are moments when the plot fits together with such precision as is only found in a novel. Eldritch’s mystery employer, for instance, seems to be pressed into service only because Goddard has used up all the other characters, and the villain’s final comeuppance is a bit Raymond Chandler (‘when in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand’). All the same, you can’t beat that three decades of experience, and Goddard manages to have explanations of varying credibility for all of these co-incidences. A little pat, perhaps, but he’s not redefining the genre here, he’s writing a pleasant, unpretentious little mystery and he succeeds quite well.

Perhaps Goddard’s preoccupation with the past is indicative of a man out of his time, and the most arresting character in a book of otherwise stock figures is Eldritch himself. Coolly resplendent in pinstripe suit and pencil moustache in the 1940 sections of the book, and stoically manly in a bygone kind of way in the 1976 part, Eldritch is also a man out of his time, and he lifts this one above the purely formulaic. I could have done with Goddard wrapping it up a little earlier, and a little more emphasis could have been put on the fact that Meridor's possession of the Picassos was as morally dubious as Brownlow's. The Irish sections of the book were not particularly convincing either, at least not to me, but then I'm in a position to judge harshly. All that notwithstanding, however, it’s a bit different and not a bad effort. Cautiously recommended.

The Damascened Blade - by Barbara Cleverly

corrigan1 — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:26:02 GMT

If any mischief follow, thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound and stripe for stripe.
Exodus 21, 23-25

Barbara Cleverly certainly can’t be accused of writing the same book over and over. In the first two Joe Sandilands mysteries, we essentially had a traditional English 'cosy' transplanted to the British Raj, with a spiffing hero and a couple of suitably satisfying plotlines. In this one, while our hero still spiffs for England, Cleverly tries for something a bit more epic. If I were a cynic, I might suspect an eye to film rights, but she obviously worked so hard for a change of pace in this one that who could begrudge her?

It’s still 1922 (clearly, a hell of a year for our Joe, a British bobby on secondment to the Indian police), but this time, the action moves up off the plains to that most romantic corner of Empire, the Northwest Frontier. Joe is visiting his old Army chum, Major James Lindsey, now commanding a dusty fort on the Afghan border, just below the Khyber Pass (sorry, but you surely knew I was going to get that in somewhere, didn’t you?). Naturally, this is just the moment an assortment of notables descend on the fort, including a slightly redundant airman determined to forge a new role for the RAF on the frontier after WWI; a senior civil servant, one of the so-called ‘heaven-born’, equally determined to withdraw the Empire back to the more manageable defensive line of the Indus; a shady businessman with ambitions across the border and a philanthropic lady doctor on her way to the court of the Amir of Afghanistan.

Of most immediate concern to Joe, however, is one Miss Lily Coblenz, the sassy daughter of an American millionaire who has unabashedly used her father’s influence to muscle her way up to the tribal territories, an area normally forbidden to women, in order to see ‘the real India’. Joe’s problem is that responsibility for Lily’s wellbeing has been thrust upon him by Sir George Jardine, officially provincial governor, unofficially political/intelligence ‘fixer’ and eminence grise. This problem is infinitely exacerbated by the arrival at the fort of a squadron of Afghan cavalry charged with escorting the good doctor to the Amir’s court. Need we inform the reader that the Pathan officer commanding this detachment is British educated, completely enigmatic, utterly ruthless and (swoon) handsome as Lucifer?

The remarkable thing about Cleverly’s writing (as previously noted) is her ability to take such stock characters and lift them above the level of caricature. You really do enjoy reading about these people, and when our handsome Pathan duly bites the Indian dust - leaving Joe with a mystery and the Raj with a potential war on its hands - we have a puzzle stretching back a dozen years and wrapped up in the code of vengeance and reprisal which has ruled the frontier since time immemorial.

It sounds like a great read, and it isn’t bad, providing you approach it with a different mindset than might have been suggested by the first two books. In this one, Joe himself takes something of a back seat. He is to the fore through much less of the book than has been normal in the previous outings. There is something of a ‘loose baggy monster’ feel as the story ranges, Dickens-like, from one character’s point of view to another and the sights, sounds and smells of India are made more prominent. The trouble is, Cleverly has not really got full control of this style of writing, at least not in this book. She makes a manful effort, and her depictions of such things as a Pathan caravan coming down the Khyber Pass are pretty impressive, but all in all there is just too much story and not enough drive. This is a pity, because when we finally get around to solving the mystery there is a very slight sense of ‘phew, I’ve finally finished’, and that despite a very satisfactory denouement and ultimate ending revolving around blood feuds, the military sense of honour and the enigmatic Pathan worldview.

Not bad, but I would hope that if the author is in the process of changing her style, she tighten it up a little more for the next one.

The Psychopath Test: a journey through the madness industry - by Jon Ronson

corrigan1 — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:03:17 GMT

One out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, it's you.
Rita Mae Brown

I’ve got a theory. My theory is that the world is insane, but I’m ok. I think Jon Ronson shares my theory, except that he’s written me off and he’s not quite sure about himself. After reading this book, I’m not entirely sure about myself either, but don’t let that put you off; this is a stunningly good read, and just a little terrifying, and the really scary thing about it is that it isn’t fiction; the nature of madness and sanity is disturbing enough when it is discussed in dry, philosophical prose, but when it’s turned over in the hands of a hardnosed hack like Ronson, it’s time to get a snow shovel to clean out your pants.

The enquiry begins with a call for help from a neurologist named Deborah Talmi. A few years ago, Talmi, and dozens of other academics and scientists around the world, began receiving a book though the post. It was a self published book, beautifully produced, containing gorgeous illustrations, cryptic prose and a covering letter referring to the Pulitzer prize winning writer and professor of cognitive psychology, Douglas Hofstadter. There were no other clues to the identity of the author.

The contents of the book made no sense. It was a puzzle, a mystery, and the academics who received a copy quickly formed themselves into a community, an internet forum, dedicated to cracking the key to the book. What did it all mean? What is it we’re all missing here? What’s the secret? Having failed to crack the case, they called in Ronson, a journalist and author, and asked him to use the skills of his profession to run the mysterious fox to earth.

Ronson asked Hofstadter (known as something of a joker) if it was him. Hofstadter said no. Ronson asked him if he knew what the key to the mystery was, the thing that all these brilliant academic minds were missing. Hofstadter said yes. Ronson asked him what it was. Hofstadter said that the missing piece was that the mysterious author was as mad as a box of frogs. Oh, said Ronson. Hofstadter explained. Most people think everybody else is pretty much like them, and consequently operates with method of some kind, no matter how mad it may seem on first glance. Bad mistake; some people are just nutters. The academics were looking for sense where none existed. There was no solution to the mystery because it was set by a whack-job.

When Ronson finally ran his quarry to ground, it turned out to be a Norwegian academic who was, as Hofstadter had predicted, as mad as a box of frogs. Oh, said Talmi. That’s it? ‘Fraid so, said Ronson. It did, however, spark off an inquiry on Ronson’s part regarding the nature of madness, sanity, and the labels which tell us who is one or the other. The results were quite shocking and a little bit surreal.

The title of the book is The Psychopath Test, and for most of it Ronson concentrates on that one aspect of madness. In fact, (realization number one) psychopaths are not mad. There is no law that says you can’t be a psychopath, but once you’re labelled one, you could find yourself pretty deep in the brown stuff. Enter Tony. Tony was twenty-nine years old when Ronson met him. He’d been banged up for twelve years having committed grievous bodily harm when he was seventeen. This is unusual, since in Britain, at the time Tony committed his offence, the maximum term for GBH was seven years. But Tony made a mistake; thinking he could beat the system by pretending to be mad, he ended up in Broadmoor secure mental hospital, a place considerably easier to get into than get out of. In jail, they have to release you at the end of your sentence; in Broadmoor, they don’t.

Ronson first became acquainted with Tony through the church of Scientology. They Scientologists (among their other quirks and foibles) hate psychologists, psychiatrists and the entire mental health industry and have been waging a guerrilla war against it for some time. Neither Ronson nor Tony are Scientologists, but in the valley of the shadow, you take your allies were you find them. Especially if you’re in year twelve of a seven year sentence. Tony’s doctors admitted they have long known he was faking his mental illness to avoid doing time with the hard guys. That doesn’t matter, they said; while he was here, we realized he is actually a psychopath. By the way, did I mention that’s there’s no actual law against being a psychopath? Ah, but Tony’s a danger to the public, they say - he’s scored thirty on the psychopath checklist.

Now this is where it gets really interesting, and the creation and ramifications of the list is what takes up the body of the book. The psychopath checklist was formulated by Bob Hare, a prison psychologist working in Canada in the 1970s. Hare was reacting (with some justification, it has to be allowed) against the theories of one Elliot Barker. Now Barker is regarded by his friends as one of the sweetest men you could ever meet, and perhaps he is, but one does wonder what such an individual hoped to achieve in the hardened environment of a high security prison. Barker started from an assumption - that psychopaths can be cured. And, it being the 1960s, the cure was peace, love and LSD. Barker took large groups of diagnosed psychopaths, placed them in sealed rooms, fed them acid and let them formulate their own therapy. The idea was that they would teach each other empathy. I’m pretty sure you can see the flaw in the logic, but it appeared to work. At least initially. Later surveys showed that the Barker boys went on to re-offend at the rate of 80%. The norm is 60.

Hare was having none of this nonsense. He knew psychopaths could never be cured, only recognized. The problem was, how do you recognize one? That’s where the list came in. Hare developed and refined it over many years, and today it is the gold standard, the one most shrinks go by when deciding when somebody is a psychopath - like Tony. Today, Hare travels all over the world teaching the use of the list, but the real breakthrough came for him when it was accepted by Robert Sptizer, the editor of DSM-III, for inclusion. Spitzer loved checklists, and wasn’t overly enamoured of what he considered the arbitrary judgements of the psychiatric profession. With a checklist, who needs a shrink’s opinion? Uniform criteria and no psychiatrist-as-God handing down random decisions, right?

Well, in theory, but take a look at the list:

Glibness/superficial charm (everyone in politics, PR, the professions or the media)
Grandiose sense of self-worth (see above)
Pathological lying (see above again)
Cunning and manipulative (still with politics)
Lack of realistic long term goals (half the world)
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions (the other half)
Many short term marital relationships (welcome to liberal democracy)
Promiscuous sexual behaviour (oh come on…)

And so the list continues. After DSM-III was published, it sold like the Bible. Pretty soon, everyone was self-diagnosing themselves with some disorder or other, and it’s a fair bet that the explosion in psychiatric maladies is not unconnected with the checklist culture. Autism, for instance, was once incredibly rare (diagnoses, at least); today it’s almost compulsory, possibly because it has become increasingly melded with Asperger Syndrome, which itself slides into sheer, old-fashioned soddishness at some point. The result is that behaviour which throughout most of history would have earned the doer a remedial boot in the scrotum is having the absolute crap diagnosed out of it as some new mental disorder. All of which, of course, is playing right into the hands of the pharmaceutical companies who are ever ready with a family of drugs for each new disorder identified. It’s hog-heaven for the drug reps and zombie time for the rest of us.

Ronson writes about all of this in spare, comprehensible and immediate prose. It’s not an academic treatise or some detached sociological paper laden down with jargon and intended for presentation at some symposium. It’s a very visual book where we follow Ronson through interviews with real psychopaths like Emmanuel ‘Toto’ Constant, the former leader of a Haitian death-squad, and we begin to wonder how people like Tony get lumped in as an equal menace on the back of an assault, albeit a pretty vicious one, as a teenager. We watch Ronson, newly armed with the psychopath checklist, go around trying to decide who is and is not a psychopath (the waiter, the porter, the upstairs maid?) on the basis of a turn of phrase, or an item of body language, which is actually how the checklist works. We watch him speak to corporate titans wondering if they are actually psychopaths, as some would hold, or if the whole psychopath thing is just the latest psychiatric craze. By the end of the book, it has all become just a little ridiculous, and also quite alarming.

It’s a short book, but Ronson has a capacity to say more in a page than most writers could in a volume. Recommended.

God's Philosophers: how the medieval world laid the foundations of modern science - by James Hannam

corrigan1 — Sat, 21 May 2011 14:30:28 GMT

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did “history” become a bad word?
John Guare

In retrospect, it was probably a mistake for the Nobel Committee to award the 1949 prize in medicine to a lobotomist, but in their defence, lobotomy was considered the new black in 1949. It’s all very well for us today to question the efficacy of shoving an ice-pick up somebody’s nose and severing the prefrontal cortex, but I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Still, times change, and every scientific text becomes obsolete within three years; the one constant is the certainty that this time, it’s different.

It rarely is, of course, which is why I have little liking for the Whig view of history. What really gets up my nose (apart from ice-picks) is the knowledge that scientists who today scoff at the ignorance of the lobotomists will, in their turn, be distained for their own crudity in a few years time by the students they are currently training. Science is a kind of geeks support group, with each successive generation of geeks straining to out-scoff the one that went before. And while all of this is highly amusing to those of us on the outside, it does have serious consequences. Science does not advance with the smooth fluidity its more evangelical disciples would have us believe, but rather by ‘paradigm shifts’, which may seem like an esoteric distinction to us non-initiates, but actually leaves us constantly struggling with the fallout from whatever is the prevailing scientific orthodoxy - like lobotomy, for instance.

This is a problem which has only grown since the nineteenth century with the relentless compartmentalisation of scientific speciality and the advent of the expert in the field (whatever the field might be). But if science has atomized, it is only mirroring society, and in a disjointed society, it is natural that the isolated individual has come more and more to seek after the certainty that science seems to provide. There is a consequent hubris-dependency loop created which is not always positive, and in such an atmosphere of deference, assumptions become rather too rigid.

One such assumption, which comes under considerable fire from Hannam in this book, is the Enlightenment view of the Middle Ages as a barbarous period of ignorant superstition, repression of learning and of technological regression. It is a view which one can trace back to the likes of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, who, among other things, were determined that the Roman Catholic Church should have no credit of any kind assigned to it. The logic was carried forward by Voltaire in France, who had his own arguments with the Church and was given apparent (though only apparent) intellectual heft by the support of people like Andrew Dickson White and, latterly, by the late (and extremely overrated) Carl Sagan.

Hannam’s initial assault on the Whiggish outlook goes well enough to evoke curiosity, but unfortunately he is unable to sustain the reader’s interest. Equally unfortunately, this is more to do with Hannam’s writing style than the material he is working with. After the first few chapters, the book becomes a recitation rather than an essay. All of the relevant points which a defender of medieval culture might invoke are present - the myth of the flat Earth (the medievals never believed this for a second), agricultural improvements which led to a population explosion, the Condemnations of 1277 which, despite their terrifying name, allowed science to thrive apart from theology - but they are thrown together in such a disjointed way as to allow no unifying theme to properly develop. It’s just a list.

What is most annoying is Hannam’s failure to comprehensively show the folly of Whiggery despite an excellent start with his section on the development of the plough. This may seem a topic for anoraks, but is important in that it develops a theme. When we today think of the medieval world, we may think of some sturdy peasant turning over the lord’s field with a bullock plough; then we’ll snigger at such a lack of sophistication and, like good Whigs, congratulate ourselves at having the foresight to live in the third Christian millennium. What we fail to grasp is that the medieval plough was actually a revolutionary development which almost alone gives the lie to the Whig view of the dark and fearful Middle Ages. Anybody dismissive of such technologies - and, indeed, of the wider culture from which they arise - is showing the truest ignorance it’s possible to display, and it’s an ignorance which grows from a wilful blindness designed to protect the assumptions of the Whig: we know the Middle Ages were dread-filled and laden with backward superstition, therefore we may assume that any technology in use was ancient and primitive and its users lived in terror of the Inquisition.

All utter garbage, of course, but Hannam’s is not the book which is going to tear down this edifice. Not alone is the structure of the book disjoined, but there are times when one almost feels he’s writing for children or young adults. If he were, then I might recommend the book as a useful jumping-off point for deeper study, and for that purpose it might suit somebody who was completely clueless about the medieval world (like our Whig friends) and was willing to approach it with an open mind (unlike our Whig friends). If you have any knowledge of the period, however, I wouldn’t bother with this one. Try David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions instead. If you don’t agree with the premise, you’ll at least enjoy reading well-written prose.

The Magnificent Spilsbury and the case of the Brides in the Bath - by Jane Robins

corrigan1 — Wed, 04 May 2011 21:00:59 GMT

Murder is always a mistake - one should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner
Oscar Wilde

In Britain, between 1900 and 1914, 259 people where executed by hanging. That’s approximately one every three weeks. It’s impossible to conceive of such a robustly definitive criminal justice system being accepted anywhere in the western world today, and when we study the Edwardians now, there is nowhere - not in their casual racism, not even in their imperial assumptions - that we understand the distinction between their times and ours more completely than in this figure. Capital punishment is theatre, and theatre never works unless the audience accepts its conventions; the Edwardians did, and in this is the whole key to understanding the difference between them and us. Paradoxically, for all their social upheavals, trade union unrest and suffragette agitation, the Edwardians were a much more collective society than ours could ever hope to be. They sang from the same hymn sheet - often literally.

Our conventions, inasmuch as we have any today, are very different, and we tend to regard murder as a rather sordid business, almost a matter of bad taste rather than morality. To the Edwardians, however, right and wrong were powerfully immanent presences and when one did wrong, there was a price to be paid, and that price was paid to the whole of society. Whether it was the ostracising of a non-conforming socialite, the resignation of a misbehaving government minister or the hanging of a murderer, it was everybody’s business, and everybody took a very public interest. Possibly for this reason, murders from that era come down to us with a strangely Agatha Christie-esque glow to them. They stay with us in a way that the grubby cut-purse killings of the Georgian period do not, and we don’t usually attempt to explain - much less justify - them in psychological and sociological terms as we often do with the killings of our own time. It’s as though we long for the clarity of Edwardian murder.

The most famous murders of the period were, of course, the Crippen case and the slightly earlier Lizzie Borden murders. It’s hard to say why these particular killings caught the public imagination so completely as to pass almost into folklore in a way that, say, the murder of Caroline Luard did not, but if there is another murder from the period which the amateur criminologist of today would list with those celebrated crimes, it’s the infamous ‘Brides in the Bath’ case.

For a seven year period, between about 1908 and 1915, a slightly knock-kneed, droopy-moustached second-hand furniture dealer and general trader named George Joseph Smith moved beneath the teeming waters of Edwardian England like an amatory shark, breaking surface only long enough to meet, marry, defraud and (if they were lucky) abandon a series of unfortunate women before disappearing back into the anonymous sea of imperial England. In three cases, they were not lucky; these were the three ‘Brides in the Bath’ and taking them for their life savings was not enough. Under a series of different names, Smith not only married these women and inherited from them, but also insured their lives for hefty sums before their unfortunate demise which always followed shortly after marriage. Almost certainly, he is the origin of the TV movie psychopath, long before anybody had thought of TV or movies - or, indeed, psychopaths. The model of the ambulatory predator, charming and exotic, arriving in town with murderous intent is one which has served to excellent effect in many a good thriller, but it was a great novelty in 1915, when the law finally caught up with him, and was a sensation so striking as to rival the news of war in the yellow press of the day and indelibly imprint the case on the collective memory.

Coincident with the arrival of the psychopath was the elevation to the status of semi-deity of the expert witness. In fact, as Robins shows, the expert witness had been around for half a century or so before Smith, but juries had tended to distrust them - with good reason - ever since the trial of Dr Thomas Smethurst in 1859 for the murder by arsenic of Isabella Bankes. That situation was about to change, however, for the chief expert for the presecution was the leading light in a new generation of expert witnesses, the doyen of modern forensics, Bernard Spilsbury, whose career was founded upon his performance in this case.

If the Crown was to be believed, Smith had contrived to murder by drowning in a bathtub his three brides, Margaret Lofty, Alice Burnham and Bessie Mundy. Moreover, he somehow managed to do it each time in a lodging house with other people in the building and without his victim making a sound. In all three cases, the subsequent inquest found no evidence of foul play. It was only when Alice Burnham’s father noticed a very strange similarity between his daughter’s death and that of Margaret Lofty, which he had read about in a newspaper, that the hue-and-cry went up. Spilsbury, in conjunction with Inspector Arthur Neil, finally managed to crack the secret of Smith’s method. By suddenly and violently pulling the feet of his victims upwards, Smith drew their heads under the water with such violence that the inrush of liquid through their noses and mouths rendered them almost immediately unconscious. Then it was only a matter of waiting.

How Smith first happened upon this method one can only speculate upon, and he was volunteering nothing. Perhaps of more interest is how such a mediocrity managed to attract and persuade into marriage these three women. All of them were, by our standards, women of independent means; had they not been, of course, there would have been no point in killing them. It is, perhaps, indicative of the mores of the times that they would even consider marrying such a non-entity, it being held back then that no greater tragedy could befall a woman than to remain single. Certainly, in the cases of Margaret Lofty and Bessie Mundy, there was an edge of desperation, particularly Bessie Mundy who had gone back to Smith after he had initially dumped her by letter in which he accused her of giving him a sexually transmitted disease.

Alice Burnham, however, was a much more troubling case. Considerably younger than the others (and than Smith) she was very much of the new breed of woman emerging at the time. From a strong, loving family, she had initially trained as a teacher before qualifying as a nurse, then as now a profession which gave its practitioners opportunity, independence and worldliness. She certainly didn’t need the likes of George Joseph Smith. On the other hand, she was described by at least two contemporary sources as ‘very fat’. The Edwardians had an eye for a womanly figure, so if they were describing her in these terms, she must have been a moose. Her photograph shows a very beautiful face, so the suspicion of comfort eating and an underlying sense of worthlessness must loom.

Smith was the very man to take advantage of any vulnerability. Robins speculates that he met all the criteria for what would later become known as a psychopath, and if he lacked empathy, he was certainly criminally versatile. He seems to have had an amazing gift for presenting himself to his victims in exactly the pose which would attract them: just high enough on the social scale to be interesting, even perhaps a little exotic, but not so far beyond them as to appear out of reach. He tuned his performance for each victim, but only with Alice does Robins manage to give any real sense of the utter tragedy he inflicted on these women; Alice had suffered from gonorrhoea, which means she was not a virgin upon marriage (she hadn’t caught it from Smith) but if she had been naïve enough to trust him with this information, there can be no doubt how he would have used it to strengthen his hold over her.

For all his versatility, however, Smith was no match for the forensic skills of Spilsbury, or the majesty of the Edwardian courts. He might still have gotten away with it had his barrister, the legendary Edward Marshall Hall - the model of all those cranky English advocates with crooked wigs and comical mannerisms we see in the old black and white movies - managed to have similarity evidence regarding the deaths of Alice and Margaret excluded at Smith’s trial for the murder of Bessie. At that time, a defendant could only be tried for one murder at a time, and individually, any one of these killings could have been an accident; it was only the staggering odds against one man having three wives die in the bath which sent Smith to the gallows - that and Spilsbury’s performance.

Still, as fascinating as the story is, Robins somehow fails to fan it into a roaring flame. She does, however, offer some interesting thoughts on Smith’s nature: why, for instance, he did not harm Caroline Thornhill, his only legal wife, or why, between his murderous extended excursions, he kept coming back to Edith Pegler, who thought herself his only legal wife. It’s a sterling effort and a fascinating insight on a bygone age, but I can’t really give it more than three out of five. Still, a good holiday read for the classic crime enthusiast.