25/7/2013 “BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS" by KATHERINE BOO

The book was “Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" by Katherine Boo (2012). The proposer had recently become a trustee of a charity operating in India. This book had been recommended as a good introduction to the realities of Indian life.

Katherine Boo, who had recently appeared at the Edinburgh Book Festival, was a distinguished American journalist. She had worked for the Washington Post from 1993 to 2003, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service by exposing neglect and abuse in homes for the mentally retarded, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She had joined the staff of the New Yorker in 2003, winning the National Magazine Award in 2004. One of her themes was the contrast between extreme wealth and extreme poverty in American cities.

Following her marriage to an Indian husband, she had turned her attention to India, and specifically to the Annawadi slum in Mumbai next to the airport. She tracked the fortunes of a number of the slum residents for a period of over three years. Although her ability to interact directly with most of the slum residents was limited by language, she was very tenacious, and had gone to great efforts to get things right by employing Indian translators and assistants. She had used freedom of information to obtain access to over 3,000 public records. Her book had won the National Book Award in the non-fiction category.

The book was described as “narrative non-fiction”, but it read like a novel. The proposer found it fast-paced, witty, grisly, and compelling.  He had found it impossible to put down. It was a revelation as it illuminated the scale of poverty, of bureaucratic nightmare, and multi-layered corruption. Extreme poverty is obvious in India, but this showed how people are kept in that state and willing to accept their lot. Yet Boo’s journalistic style, and her ability to conjure up situations perfectly with one well-chosen phrase, made it a quick read.

Everyone found the book extremely readable, even including one who dreaded what calamity was next when picking it up again. Boo was undeniably effective in delivering a crisp and striking narrative, although some found the “journalistic” prose style a little irritating. But even these readers admitted she had a fine turn of witty phrase. She started with gentle irony, for example:

“Annawadi sat two hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new India and old India collided and made new India late”

 “Now the hut… had a high-status, if non-functioning, refrigerator.”

This became a more mordant wit as the book progressed:

“That job had been to clean public toilets and falsify the time sheets of his benefactor and other sanitation workers…”

“Then a doctor entered with the results…Abdul was seventeen years old if he paid two thousand rupees, and twenty years old if he did not.”

But humour and wit were not qualities often associated with this type of book. Nor was her welcome lack of sentimentality. Only in her insistence that children told the truth, while adults lied, did she perhaps lapse into romanticizing.

The format of the book – “narrative non-fiction” – was unusual. Most of us had assumed it was a novel, based on research. It therefore came as a considerable surprise to read in the afterword that it was based on real people whose names had not been changed. This required some substantial revision of the reader’s perspective.

This shock at the end certainly gave the book and its issues more impact. But it also raised concern. Why had the writer not used the usual convention of saying that the people were real but the names changed? There might be a good reason for this, but we were not clear what it was. Was it that the web of corruption was so extensive that one or two examples of graft amongst slum-dwellers would not be pursued? That nobody in the slum would read the book – but could you be sure? We worried that heavy-handed retribution might fall on the heads of some of the people whose lives had been dissected.

And what about the feelings of individuals? How might Axa feel about her alleged scams being revealed by someone she had trusted? Or her sex life being broadcast world-wide? Or to work out that much of the information might have come from her English-speaking daughter? We could not answer these questions without knowing the author’s defence, but we did hope that the author had not become another who exploited the slum-dwellers for their own ends.

Most of our discussion, however, focussed on the issues raised by the book, and we benefited from having some extensive knowledge of India within our group. Extreme poverty and hunger were poignantly revealed as the slum-dwellers fought to gather bits and pieces of everyday waste to sell to the recyclers for a rupee or two to keep them fed for another day. And the ghastly environment of the shanty-town with its lake of sewage – but cheek by jowl with the airport and its glittering luxury hotels - was unflinchingly recorded. However, powerful as this was, most of us were well aware, from visits, television or reading, that there was still appalling poverty in India on a giant scale.

What came as a more of a shock for most of us was the extraordinary scale of corruption permeating all levels of society. This was most brutally exposed in the saga of Abdul and his incarceration and torture for a crime he did not commit, with the constant refrain of someone offering to solve the problem if only his impoverished parents could offer them a big enough bribe. Every fine-sounding Indian government initiative to help the poor was subverted by local politicians for their own financial gain. The anti-poverty business was a good one to be in because of the sums of money that could be creamed off. In one of her many bons mots, Boo yokes “politics and corruption” together as one of three possible routes out of poverty (and the one most likely to work).

Occasionally the representatives of western governments and charities flit across the background, depicted as universally naïve and easily gulled into hearing what they want to hear. And, ludicrously, a western-inspired animal rights organisation intervenes in the slum to insist on the prosecution of an owner of horses. But the horses are better fed than the slum-dwellers, who consider the horses the most lovingly tended creatures in the slum. Meanwhile India had said it was now a rich country and did not need any aid from the West.

Equally shocking was the despair. The level of suicide – from self-immolation, rat poison or hanging – was harrowing. She quotes an “ode to low expectations”, a particularly sad Marathi song: “What you don’t want is always going to be with you/What you want is never going to be with you…”

She notes that “for every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge.”

And in a particularly hard-hitting and radical conclusion she talks about the lack of mutual support and the narrowing of moral imagination in the slum. “Hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional…. The poor took one another down, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.”

However………did we accept that her bleak and angry portrayal of slum-life was accurate, and her hard-hitting conclusions fair? Here we were in difficulty in making a judgement. Based on the facts she presented, her conclusions seemed solid to most of us. But we were in the author’s hands in terms of what she chose to show us of the slum-world. Certainly a recently created and large urban slum, with the population constantly changing, and with different religions and different backgrounds, might be less mutually supporting than a rural village or even a South African township. And extreme poverty might challenge most people’s feeling for their fellow human-beings.

But some wondered if Boo had in certain areas overstated her case. Were the slum-dwellers quite as mutually unsupportive as she concluded? Even on the evidence of the book there was not a lot of inter-slum theft or violence. Most of the witnesses in the Fatima case told the truth. And, as she herself acknowledged, there was less religious discrimination within the slum than might have been expected.

And the economy of the slum did function at a certain level, and did support the wider economy of Mumbai. The alternative of giving up and returning to the poverty of the countryside seemed, for most residents, to be even less attractive.

And there was some evidence of Indian government initiatives making progress. For example, the initiative to give the Dahlits priority in university entrance must have had some success to judge from the protests made by other caste groups.

And was the legal system quite as bad as Boo implied? “The Indian criminal system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.” But the fast track system, which she ridiculed mercilessly, had at least reached the right verdict. And many of the faults she depicted – the length of time to reach a verdict, the lack of understanding of what is said in dialect, maltreatment of suspects by the police – could be found in older legal systems much closer to home. And although various intermediaries in search of bribes asserted that lawyers or judges might be bribed, she presented no evidence of any such corruption.

So what hope for the future? One of us with much background in India had put to an Indian think-tank expert the view that corruption was India’s number one problem. The expert agreed, but, depressingly, said he could envisage no circumstances in which it might be tackled. One of the problems was that governments were generally coalitions between a major party (of which there were two), and smaller parties with only a regional or sectional rather than a national agenda. It was common to denounce corruption, but that was the corruption of your political opponents rather than systemic corruption in India.

But was our concern – and Boo’s concern – about corruption just another example of people in the west ignorantly trying to impose our value judgments on a foreign country? Well, that was always a danger, but we remembered the analysis in the “The Undercover Economist” by Tim Harford  (discussed 30/1/08) of how a country like Cameroon failed in economic growth compared to China.  It was not because of lack of entrepreneurial spirit, but because of corruption.

Perhaps we could only console ourselves by taking the longer view. It had taken Britain a couple of centuries to come to terms with the growth of urban slums associated with our agrarian and industrial revolutions. It was 1942 before the Beveridge Report proposed the developed welfare state along the lines we now know. As for corruption, it was 1853 before the Northcote Trevelyan report recommended that merit rather than “patronage, preferment or purchase” should be the basis for recruitment and promotion in the Civil Service.  We still had plenty of sink estates where life could be very unpleasant. In many respects India was now undergoing its own agrarian and industrial revolutions, and it would be naïve to expect them to be able solve the consequent problems overnight.

27/6/13 “COCHRANE THE DAUNTLESS” by DAVID CORDINGLY

The host for the evening introduced “Cochrane the Dauntless” by David Cordingly (2007) by explaining the reasons for his choice. He had first heard of Admiral Cochrane when visiting the famous M.V. Gardyloo in the company of a Government Minister. The Gardyloo was a sewage boat which sailed from Leith and deposited its cargo in the Firth of Forth. During this trip the Captain of the vessel enthused about the life and adventures of Cochrane, and insisted on giving two books from his extensive library to the Minister, who was himself a fan of Cochrane.

More recently the National Museum of Scotland, in partnership with the National Records of Scotland, featured an exhibition about Cochrane’s life and times. That exhibition,  between October 2011 and February 2012, also promoted the book by Cordingly. 

The decision to recommend the book was encouraged by the view that Cochrane was a Scot who had led a quite remarkable life. He had fought highly dramatic battles in Napoleonic times, becoming much celebrated, but had also been accused of conspiracy and fraud. He had recovered to have a whole new and highly celebrated naval career in South America. His life as so exciting that he was the inspiration for much naval fiction, including the work of Captain Marryat who served under him, C.S.Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, and more recently Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey. The Government of Chile was still so grateful to Cochrane that they held an annual memorial service to him in Westminster Abbey. Yet Cochrane was little known to most Scots, and little celebrated in Scotland.

The purpose of the recommendation was therefore to promote Cochrane rather than the book per se. However, the book had the merit of being a serious and properly referenced work of history, rather than the sort of sensationalist work that Cochrane often attracted.

With a number of members on holiday and others committed elsewhere, several of those unable to attend helpfully submitted their views on the book and these helped to stimulate the discussion.

The Group agreed that the most impressive features of the book were the quality and thoroughness of the research. 

However, for some, this was also a negative feature reducing the book’s fictional feel. The lack of speculation about “the why and wherefores” of the action or the absence of “embroidery” around the interpretation of decisions or events was considered by them to have robbed the reader of a better appreciation of the man. One of our absent colleagues commented that he felt that “the man disappeared behind the detail”, while another by contrast suggested that Cordingly might have sacrificed insight in order to achieve an easy read.

The opposing view was that it was a merit of the book that it did not project the author’s own speculations on to his subject, as more populist biographers like to do, but instead recorded what was actually known, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. This group felt that a very clear picture emerged of Cochrane’s strengths and weaknesses.

The initial discussion centred on the reasons for Cochrane’s successes. We identified as important his positive attitude, his innovative and creative approach to problem solving, and his determination to master all of the practical skills/crafts associated with the maintenance and sailing of ships. In addition, his fearlessness and his desire to lead from the front in naval battles were important. He was greatly respected by those who served under him, both because his ships suffered relatively few casualties and because his crew shared in the prize money won through his lucrative actions.  These factors, together with his indefatigable spirit, were considered to be the features that made the greatest contribution to his successes. One described him as an extraordinary polymath, moving from state sanctioned pirate to politician to inventor with varying degrees of success.

The importance of the navy in the war with the French had not been fully appreciated by the group before, but the “piratical” nature of the warfare clearly suited Cochrane’s maverick nature. The Admiralty made the most of this, appreciating his seamanship and his worth to the service, and cleverly deploying Cochrane’s potent mix of assets. It ensured his promotion and marked him out as “one to be watched”. The Admiralty was shrewd, and generally tolerant, in their deployment of Cochrane. They supported him when it suited, but finally closed ranks against him when his challenge to the establishment got out of hand.

We noted that patronage was a major factor affecting progress within the navy, and Cochrane benefited from family - and friends of family - interventions to secure positions at critical points in his career.

Some of our group considered Cochrane a flawed man, impulsive and reckless in both his deeds and in his total disregard for the establishment and authority. He was motivated by money to an excessive degree, no doubt reflecting his financially insecure upbringing. He also displayed a degree of paranoia on many occasions.

But we all marvelled at Cochrane’s resilience, deeply hurt by the stock exchange scandal. His move to South America, where he helped to liberate Chile, Peru and Brazil from their colonial masters, salvaged his pride and cemented his reputation as a great naval commander.

The group debated the reasons for British naval advantage at this time. Factors such as the design of ships and the quality of their build, the standard of equipment, the quality of training and tactics were all suggested as contributing factors. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, superiority came from the organisation and control exercised by the Admiralty itself. A combination of a skilled workforce, documented rules, slick processes and effective communication systems were developed, managed and deployed to great advantage.

Moreover, the financial model, which was built on the proceeds of the capture and disposal of enemy assets, was able to sustain the necessary scale and quality of the shipbuilding and ship repair industries to support the British fleet.

The conversation drifted into a discussion about other notable Scottish persons who, like Cochrane, had not been given credit for their achievements in Scotland. Adam Smith and James Clerk Maxwell were the first to be identified, but a virtual tsunami of names followed and the discussion lost coherence as differences of view emerged.

In order to remain united we returned to Cochrane and confirmed that with only one exception the entire group enjoyed the book. All were impressed by Cordingly’s research, but many wanted to learn more about the man and his relationships.

One member observed that it was a good idea to introduce a book about someone everyone knows a little about but not enough. Having read and discussed the book, I suspect most of our group would agree that they now know a little bit more about Cochrane, but not yet enough.

30/5/13 “BRING UP THE BODIES” by HILARY MANTEL

He – the Cardinal, at his suburban Palace – introduces the book to the Council of Lords. It is “Bring up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel (2012), the second instalment of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. He has read both it and its predecessor “Wolf Hall” twice, enjoying them enormously, and finding them compelling despite their length. Mantel is one of the very small group of writers to win the Booker twice.

He hands round for our delectation some delicious salmon and bread rounds prepared in the famous Palace kitchens.

He – the Cardinal – is interested in the technicalities of how she writes and develops her narrative. He asks how we got on with the constant use of the present tense? Some commentators such as Philip Pullman are critical of the vogue for its use, arguing that present-tense narrative has a limited range of expressive use. He – Pullman - concedes that even writers such as Bronte and Dickens have used present-tense narrative, but in these cases it gains its effect by contrast with past-tense narrative.

We are happy with the present tense in this book. Perhaps the problem is that a success such as "Wolf Hall" breeds many imitators. In this case we love the immediacy and freshness of the book, her skill in judging pace, and the intensity of the drama.

He – the Archbishop of Brighton, resplendent in a tabard emblazoned with Brighton colours – wonders why the Cardinal chose the second and not the first book. “Has the Council found it difficult to start with the second?” He –we – maintain that this is not a problem. For “Bring up the Bodies” contains sufficient summaries of the previous plot to be self-standing. Indeed some of us are now reading “Wolf Hall” second, and without difficulty. “We shall therefore soon have both a trilogy and three separate books” the Archbishop concludes, with the finality of a dungeon door closing.

He – the Earl of Lancaster – now raises a quizzical eyebrow. “Does it matter if the history is inaccurate?” This question, a fox in the henyard, sets the Council aflutter. “We are judging the book as literature not history. Shakespeare’s histories are riddled with inaccuracy, but we think no less of them” is one response, which attracts some nods. But he – Lancaster - continues to chase the hens: “So what if the novel is about an entirely fictional set of characters? Would it be as good?” ….. “Ahhh ……well maybe not …part of the pleasure of the books is the sense of her trying to turn the bare bones of historical events into real life, into thinking and feeling people with their motivations….it gives it more resonance”… “Okay I agree...if just invented, the characters would be less complex.”

He – we – the Council - like the hypnotic, meditative rhythm of the book. It is a sort of stream of consciousness technique, but much more disciplined than earlier examples. The narrative and characters emerge clearly from what is revealed of Cromwell’s mind, and not a word seems wasted (although not all say the same of “Wolf Hall”, which some feel is the lesser book).

Mantel’s force of historical imagination is remarkable as she conjures up a complete sixteenth century world. She has immersed herself in an enormous amount of research, yet the narrative never flags or becomes weighed down by excessive detail. And we are fascinated by the way the thread of international politics is woven into the narrative.

Her Tudor world is tangible in all its sights and smells. We love the poetic language, the observation of the natural world, the evocation of the changing seasons, the mists off the Thames in the morning. “When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it." And it is a remarkable tribute to Mantel’s force of imagination that she only uses imagery – similes and metaphors – which draw on the actual world of the sixteenth century. "Sampson laughs; it is a clerical laugh, like the creak of a vestment chest”.

 So a magnificent tour de force….but, hark, are there dissenters knocking at the door? Some are irritated by all the qualifying of who “he” denotes. “Why not just say Cromwell rather than ‘he – Cromwell’?”  “Ah well” intones a defender of the Blessed Hilary – “ but if she just said ‘Cromwell’ you would lose the sense of being inside his head.” In “Wolf Hall” there was said to be too much ambiguity as to who ‘he’ was, hence the clumsy device of qualifying “he” in the second book.

“Hmmmmm……”

“Any more dissent?”

He - le Seigneur de la rue de Pâques - confesses he finds the character of Cromwell less than coherent, despite the endless detail. It is a bold attempt to give a more sympathetic take on Cromwell. But somehow this thoroughly decent Cromwell with whose thoughts we engage, with his twenty first century consciousness and hand-wringing liberalism, does not square with the ruthless vindictiveness of the man who brings Anne and sundry courtiers to the scaffold. Yes, the emphasis on the brutality of his childhood is an attempt to construct a character comfortable with brutality, but it does not really hold together. One possibility is that the author is showing Cromwell’s self-deception, but that does not cohere either.

Other members of the Council bang their goblets down and rise to dispute this stain on the reputation of the embookered Mantel. He - Lord Shyberry Excelsior – sees Cromwell as the classic Machiavellian. Thus – taking into account Wolf Hall – he manipulates Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall to serve himself, Henry, and to revenge himself. Does it not make it more enjoyable to read when he is given a twenty first century consciousness? And do not even the worst monsters such as Hitler show sentimentality towards their family and pets? Perhaps he was not sadistic as such, but not at all concerned by procuring executions if they helped Thomas Cromwell achieve his objectives.

He - the Cardinal - points out how much space is given to Cromwell’s redeeming features. He may be cold-blooded, but he is sorry for Mary, and pleasant to Jane Seymour for no reason other than sympathy. And he was very loyal to he – the other Cardinal. Cromwell is fine as long as you are the right side of him. There is also a mystery about what went on in Europe - about how Cromwell  makes the transition from abused child to the man who returned from Europe with such a wide range of skills and knowledge as to seem almost superhuman.

He - his emissary il Marquesa di Val Porcino from Lazio – takes a more charitable view. Cromwell is a man who has risen from nothing by means of his wits, and needs to protect his back in the wolf-eat-wolf world of the court, where whether your neck stays attached to your head depends on the latest whim of Henry. Cromwell’s behaviour is determined simply by an attempt to give Henry what he wanted – he was not a cruel man as such. If you do not give the King what he wants, or if his whim changes, your neck ceases to be attached to your head. And even the King’s erratic behaviour can be partly defended by the power of contemporary religious belief, and the King’s view that his failure to produce a son must mean that God disapproves of his marriage.

He – the Marquess of Lothian – feels Cromwell is intelligent, highly manipulative, and completely immoral in pursuing his ends.  The fact that he has a caring side makes his ruthlessness even starker. Cromwell is a very damaged character, whose traumatic childhood led him to behave in such a sinister way. He is cruel psychologically – he puts people through great stress. And he succeeds only too well in ridding Henry of his wife and generating vast sums of money for the king and for himself. Moreover, given the limited amount of known historical fact, the portrait of Cromwell rightly leaves quite a bit to the reader’s conjecture.

The King’s Apothecary  puts his finger on a passage which he feels sums up Cromwell well:

“How [he] has achieved such his present eminence is a question all Europe asks…No one knows where he has been and who he has met…He never spares himself in the king’s service,...and makes sure of his reward...He has a way of getting his way, he has a method; he will charm a man or bribe him, coax him or threaten him…he will introduce [him] to aspects of himself he didn’t know existed. He is not in the habit of explaining himself….Whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on wood...”

What he  - the Archbishop of Brighton - sees is a multi-faceted portrait of Cromwell built up from snippets of his past, and a Cromwell who can only take decisions on the basis of what will help him survive. But he – Brighton – also draws attention to the Cromwell who is the “founder of the modern state”. He gives Parliament a constitutional role in the break with Rome, and modernises religion with a bible in English and the dissolution of the monasteries. At the same time he shows humanity with pensions for monks and the first introduction of poor relief.

So despite living inside Cromwell’s mind for hundreds of pages there are many different Cromwells who populate the minds of the Council. (Rather too many Cromwells methinks for your indefatigable scribe to follow). One of the reasons for the ambiguity is that Mantel shows very little of his reflections before he launches into action. In “Wolf Hall” she describes him as inscrutable, and even has him suggest that he does not understand his own motivations. And what historical evidence there is suggests a man of exceptional ability, and a man of great contradiction and complexity. Perhaps the third volume will clarify matters.

But the Council uniformly approves of the portraits of Henry and Anne. Anne is shown as shrill, manipulative and ambitious; she only achieves dignity in the lead up to her execution. Henry is shown as someone who wants to do manly things, and, sometimes, to do the right thing, but whose good intentions are easily over-ridden by self-deception. By the end of the book his powers are clearly waning, and he appears a weak bully.

And the Council of Lords are unanimous that “Bring up the Bodies” is a relative rarity amongst Booker winners in being completely deserving of the highest accolade.

He – the King’s Apothecary – then shares with us a few medical secrets from the King’s bedchamber about his virility or lack thereof, and some choice medical details about the scaffold. He – she, Mantel – is not reticent about scaffold gore either. As Margaret Atwood puts it: “Mantel generally answers the same kind of question that interest readers of court reports of murder trials or coverage of royal weddings.”

He – me, your scribe – finds all this talk of the scaffold unsettling. Idly fingering the back of my neck, I reach out for another salmon delicacy to distract me. Looking at it with relish, I then notice how cleanly severed the bread is. And the pink and white tracery reminds me only too clearly of Anne Boleyn’s final morning….

Then the drawbridge is lowered and the Lords thunder off back to the city.

25/4/13 “LEAVING ALEXANDRIA” by RICHARD HOLLOWAY

“Leaving Alexandria: a Memoir of Faith and Doubt” by Richard Holloway, was published in 2012 by Canongate. Richard Holloway was the Bishop of Edinburgh from 1986 to 2000, and therefore this book was of special interest to our Edinburgh-based book group. Indeed, several of our members had encountered him either socially or professionally, and one had been a member of his congregation.

For any Sassenach reading this, I should explain that Richard Holloway was a Bishop in the Scottish Episcopal Church. This is a completely different church from the Church of Scotland, which is protestant (Presbyterian) and does not have any Bishops at all. Neither of these churches is the same as the Church of England. And although the Episcopal Church has some of the ‘bells and smells’ associated with Catholicism, it is not the same as the Roman Catholic Church, which by the way is also alive and well in Scotland. The Scottish Episcopal Church believes, however, as the Roman Catholic Church also believes, in the doctrine of apostolic succession, whereby the Bishops are in a direct line of succession from the apostles.

It is useful to know the religious background of Scotland before tackling the book, as much of Holloway’s memoir is about the author’s struggle to reconcile religious doctrine with his own observations of people and society. As somebody said, religion in Scotland can get you into trouble from childhood onwards. One member recalled his own childhood.  If you are an Episcopalian, Protestants think you are a Catholic and beat you up, and Catholics think you are a Protestant and beat you up. You can’t win.

Yes, religion is complicated in Scotland, and the Scots take it seriously; they attend church more than the English and they have more denominations of Christianity. Visitors to this part of Edinburgh are surprised to see that in one location, a crossroads known as ‘Holy Corner’, four denominations of Christianity are represented by a church on each corner.

The member introducing the book said it was about ‘Richard Holloway and his soul’, and the work of a great spiritual intellect, yet written in a gentle and engaging style. We nodded in agreement. He pointed out that the author had insisted the book is not an autobiography, but a ‘memoir’.  He went on to say that the book was controversial, but one of our group took issue with that. Well, Holloway himself had obviously been a controversial character, as his frequently-expressed views were not always orthodox, but the book did not seek to be controversial. It merely wrote down the author’s thoughts and experiences on religion, God and people.

This man had, after all, been thinking and writing about Christian doctrine for nearly 50 years. He held strong positions on such matters as the ordination of women and marriage of homosexuals, in fact all the issues which have been tearing churches apart for the last few decades.  For much of his life Holloway had championed these ‘progressive’ causes, and had thus run up against hostility from his parishioners and some of his fellow clerics.

But to begin at the beginning. Holloway was a working class boy, brought up in the small Scottish town of Alexandria, near to Loch Lomond. It is an unremarkable town, with only one notable building - a magnificent Victorian edifice that was once Scotland’s first motor car factory. The building was later converted into a torpedo factory, and is now rather ignominiously converted into a series of cut-price shops. His childhood was unremarkable, going to the cinema, trips to Glasgow, learning about sexual matters the hard way, walking in the hills.

Although his parents were not religious, he sang in the local church choir. He says it was not the ‘wee church’ that he fell in love with, but what it pointed towards (the idea of an ‘elsewhere’). He became an altar boy, and from there at the tender age of 14 he left Alexandria (hence the book’s title) and went to Kelham Theological College to train for the priesthood. He describes the regime of cold showers, with the frequent taking of mass and the long periods of quiet contemplation and prayer.

During the holidays he goes home and helps with the harvest, encountering Brenda the Land Girl from Glasgow, and has a sexual awakening. He writes touchingly about such things, and is often extremely funny when speaking of intimate human encounters. Later, back at Kelham he talks to the beloved Father Peter about the biology of sex; Peter gives him the impression that God himself regarded the whole business of sex as regrettable and wished that he’d invented a less troublesome way of guaranteeing the continuance of the species. Holloway becomes rather interested in sexual matters, as any enquiring lad does at that age (but most of us don’t write it down in a book, and we especially might not write it down if we were connected with the church in some way).

One way to read this book was to take its main theme to be ‘does God exist?’. But this was too simplistic; the real theme was ‘how does a man of God (or any man) deal with his doubts about the existence of God?’. Or, more broadly, he was trying to find out who he was.  Many of us know that struggle. The author points out that theists and atheists have more in common with each other than they do with agnostics; the analogy is with the chess board being black and white, never grey. We were reminded of previous book we had read: Chris Mullin’s A View From the Foothills (2009). Mullin was an extremely able Member of Parliament who did not quite fit the role he had been given. We also recalled Bishop of Woolwich’s Honest to God (1963), and the preaching of David Jenkins, the Bishop of Durham.

Someone once told him, ‘Richard, the trouble with you is that you publish every thought you have’. Why did people write such books (he’s written 28)? Was it narcissism? Not in this case. Was it a way to apologize to those people he offended? No, at least not entirely. It was mostly to help him set his thoughts in order, a well-known path to self-knowledge. One conclusion was ‘being who we were, we were bound to act the way we did.’

Perhaps writing a book like this is cathartic, like a Confessional. He stands naked before his readership, just as Alan Ginsberg the American poet of the 1950s is said to have stood naked before his audience. But does he reveal everything? There were large areas where he did not go: his family, his experiences in Africa for example.

We found it hard to understand why he accepted the post of Bishop when he was so unsure of his beliefs. He should have stepped back from the opportunity. Parishioners entrusted their spiritual welfare to him, and he may have let them down. Was he too self-indulgent? He was certainly politically naive. But wasn’t Jesus like that? Both Holloway and Jesus felt their place was with the poor, the sick, the outcasts who could not help themselves.

What does it mean to be a Christian and did Holloway even qualify? Simply to behave like Jesus and to follow Jesus’s teaching is only a part of being a Christian. You can follow Jesus’s teaching as summarized in the beatitudes by becoming a socialist or a social worker, yet not be a Christian.

It seems to me that to qualify, under the doctrines of all Christian denominations, you have to believe that Christ was the son of God, and that he was crucified to save mankind, and that he resurrected and ascended into heaven. But isn’t it too much to ask modern people to believe? Isn’t that like believing in fairies and Santa Claus, and do Christians today really believe in all that?  On page 156-158 he explains how he struggled with one of the centrepieces of Christian doctrine, the Resurrection, and how he felt on the first occasion he had to present an Easter sermon.  For him, Jesus did not physically rise from the dead and ascend into heaven. It was impossible. Rather, the Resurrection was a metaphor for the possibility of change and renewal.

Then he moves on (page 159) to ask what happened before the Big Bang. Of course, science cannot tell us. Some Christians say it proves that science has somehow failed in this crucial area where Christianity provides an explanation, i.e. God. Holloway does not say that, simply that we have to learn to live with uncertainty, it is a part of the state of being. I love this stuff.

At this stage in the evening my thoughts were disturbed by a dreadful rasping noise, which I first took to be the heating system about to explode.   But no-one else seemed concerned. Then I realized the dog was in the room, and considered that the sound must be the beast’s snoring. But no; our host stood up, and walked across to that dark part of the room. ‘Anyone for coffee?’. The rasping had only been the coffee machine.

Yes, the book has humour, lots of it. For me, the funniest part was his experimental talking in tongues to a complete stranger, a young woman of Chinese appearance, at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. She fled.

The writing was sometimes poetic and profound:

‘Religion’s insecurity makes it shout not whisper, strike with the fist in the face not tug gently with the fingers on the sleeve. Yet, beneath the shouting and the striking, the whisper can sometimes be heard. And from a great way off the tiny figure of Jesus can be seen on the seashore, kindling the fire’.

The final chapter ‘Epilogue’ includes his thoughts during a walk in the Pentland Hills to the south of Edinburgh.  He raises massive issues for all religious people:

‘Was religion a lie? Not necessarily, but it was a mistake. Lies are just lies, but mistakes can be corrected and lessons can be learned from them. The mistake was to think religion was more than human. I was less sure whether God was also just a human invention, a work of art – an opera – and could be appreciated as such. The real issue was whether it should be given more authority over us than any other work of art, especially if it is the kind of authority that overrides our own better judgements’. 

The book was certainly thought-provoking. We admired the fluency with which the author expressed his deepest feelings. You do not have to be a Christian to be moved by this book; it is surely one of the most engaging books to have been written in 2012.

28/3/13 “THE CITADEL” by A. J. CRONIN

The host for the evening and the proposer of A. J. Cronin's “The Citadel” (1937) was a retired General Practitioner. He opened proceedings by explaining the reasons for his choice of book and detailing the author’s background.

He explained that he first became aware of A. J. Cronin  (“AJ”) when his family watched Dr Finlay’s Casebook. BBC TV broadcast the series between 1962 and 1971 and, while he did not admit to watching all 191 episodes, the programme had undoubtedly influenced his subsequent career choice. He was smitten by the writings of “A.J” after reading “Hatters Castle”, and subsequently sought out most of Cronin’s other books. He first read "The Citadel" in the 1970’s.

“The Citadel” was published in 1937 and was a global best seller. It sold 100,000 copies in the first three months of becoming available and was reprinted at a rate of 10,000 per week. It established Cronin as one of the most popular novelists of the 1930’s. By today’s standards the novel elevated Cronin to multi-millionaire status. In common with a number of his books it was turned into a successful film in 1938, winning four Oscar nominations and grossing $2.5 million.

Cronin was born in Cardross in Dumbartonshire in 1896. His father was an Irish Catholic and his mother was from a staunchly Protestant family.  They lived in Cardross for six years, but his father’s deteriorating health forced them to move to Helensburgh. There he died suddenly from pulmonary T.B. when Cronin was only seven years old. His mother then took “AJ” to stay with her parents in Dumbarton. She later moved to Glasgow where she obtained employment as a sanitary inspector.

“AJ” was an all rounder. He was gifted academically, and also excelled in athletics and football. He moved from St Aloysius College to Glasgow University having won a Carnegie Scholarship to study medicine. After a short spell in the Royal Navy, he returned to Medical School, graduating in 1919 with honours. He met his future wife, May, also a medical student about this time. He went on to obtain the additional higher medical degrees of MRCP and MD, as well as the Diploma in Public Health.

After graduating he worked in various hospitals in Glasgow and Dublin. Whilst employed as medical superintendant in Lightburn Hospital near Glasgow, a post for an unmarried doctor, he was pressured into marrying May as she had announced that she was pregnant. Following a quiet wedding in Glasgow, they moved to the Welsh mining town of Treherbert where he was briefly employed as a GP assistant. He moved again to a GP post in the larger nearby mining town of Tredegar where in 1924 May gave birth to their first son Vincent. 

In the same year they moved to London, where “AJ” took up an appointment as the Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain.

While in this post he published reports linking coal dust exposure to pulmonary disease. In 1926 he bought a medical practice in the City. His second son, Patrick was born in the same year. He successfully built up his practice, but he suffered from a chronic gastric ulcer.  This, together with significant profits from investments made by an Investment Group to which “AJ” had been introduced to by a grateful patient, influenced his decision to leave medicine.  In 1930 he put down the stethoscope and picked up the pen, thereby fulfilling a longstanding ambition.

AJ’s third son, Andrew was born in 1937 by which time he had become a successful author. In 1939 he moved to the USA where his reputation was already established. “The Citadel” won the National Book Award in the USA in 1937 and in a Gallup poll in 1939 it was voted the most interesting book that readers had read.

He was in great demand and moved around the country promoting his work. The family never stayed more than a year in any one house until he eventually purchased a house in Connecticut in1947. He remained there until moving to Switzerland in 1955. By this time he was a very wealthy man, and his move was probably motivated by his tax situation.  He died in 1981.

Some members of our group had experienced difficulty in acquiring a copy of the book and there was a concern that there would be differences between the various editions read. This concern proved unfounded. More amusingly, kindle editions of Cronin’s novels, including “The Citadel”, had newly become available on the day of our meeting. Some thought that the demand created by our members and followers had forced Amazon’s hand. Others suggested that this simply confirmed a growing interest in Cronin’s writings as a result of the publication of the second biography of his life (“The man who created Dr Finlay” by Alan Davies, 2011). This publication, and a discussion paper published in the journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh on the possible influence that “The Citadel had on the formation of the NHS, seem to have stimulated renewed interest in Cronin’s work.  Whatever the truth, the coincidence, if that is what it was, proved a source of great frustration to all of those who had had difficulty obtaining a copy.

There was a unanimous view that the book was an “easy” read. It was a “good yarn” written in what one of our group described as “stage direction “ style. It was agreed that the strength of the book came partly from AJ being able to draw on his own experiences, both personal and professional. While the autobiographical basis of the novel successfully captured the nature of the challenges encountered by Dr Andrew Manson, it was also extremely controversial, as a number of people threatened to sue Cronin over his depiction of them in his characters.

The group spent some time trying to understand the reasons for their generally positive view of the book. It was described as a polemic, challenging the social conventions of the time and dealing with the exploitative nature of parts of the medical profession in the 1930’s. The crusading theme of the novel was a major factor in its popularity. The book was dedicated to uncovering systematically the unsatisfactory practices of significant sections of the medical profession, and to confirming the view that money was indeed the root of all evil. The book was shocking, and it generated controversy and moral outrage. It uncovered the practices of a profession which hid behind the mysteries of medical science. This sensational content was an important factor in the group’s enjoyment of the novel.

We discussed the wider impact of the book. Its popularity both here in the UK and in the USA focussed attention on medical services and the way they were organised. The criticisms of the medical profession delivered through the eyes of those working within the service, and from the perspective of those on the receiving end, had undoubtedly had an influence on the debate that eventually led to the creation of the NHS in 1948. Indeed some suggested that the book had a profound affect on these deliberations. Nye Bevan, one of the architects of the NHS, probably knew Cronin when Bevan served on the Tredegar Hospital Committee, and may well have been influenced by the book.

Many of our Group considered that at least part of their enjoyment of the book could be attributed to their familiarity with the social conventions of the time. All were anxious to point out that they were too young to be directly involved but they were all able to relate to the experiences of their parents!

Other factors contributing to our enjoyment were AJ’s persuasive narrative skills, his acute observations, graphic descriptions and his impressive characterisations. Other compelling features were the idealistic nature of the plot, combined with the “feel good” factor, and the triumph of right over wrong.

On the negative side some thought that the novel was “wordy” and that the writing was “pedestrian” particularly when compared with other notable authors. One member questioned the pace of the novel. He pointed out that the first part of the book, describing Manson’s life in Wales, occupied some 56% of the book, his period in London 36% and the passages dealing with his wife’s death, his selling up and the “trial”only 8%. He suggested that one explanation was that the earlier passages were autobiographical while the rest was not. This raised a question about the writing process adopted by “AJ” and speculation over whether or not he planned the structure of the novel or simply allowed it to emerge as he wrote.

One member pointed to apparent contradictions in the book, such as investigations into lung disease but the acceptance of heavy smoking, and the toleration of the unhygienic practices of his dentist friend, Boland, while being very critical of poor hygienic standards elsewhere.

The discussion moved on to consider whether or not the characteristics associated with the provision of medical practice, as described by “AJ”, still exist today. The increasing importance of private practice and the presence of more and more competition were cited as examples of factors that have remained features common to medical service delivery, both pre and post NHS. It was, however, accepted that such a comparison had little meaning. The NHS, having brought structure to the previously unstructured organisation of medical services, had had to meet the challenges of rapid medical advances and growing individual expectations, and these factors ruled out any serious attempt at comparison.

Our host encouraged us to read more of “AJ’s” work and some of the group seemed motivated to do so. However, no one anticipated a profound career changing impact as a consequence.

28/2/13 “ROB ROY” by SIR WALTER SCOTT

The proposer said he had been hugely influenced by Scott in stimulating his interest in history when he had read “Tales of a Grandfather” (written for Scott’s 6 year old grandson) at the age of 7 or 8. This was history as gripping and entertaining story superbly well told but also critically. For example Scott tells the Macbeth story as in Shakespeare but then explains in his notes where it is historically wrong.  As part of his history degree, he had written a dissertation on Scott as a historian through both his novels and histories.  Only recently he had discovered he was Scott’s 2^nd cousin, nine times removed.  

Scott was both a historian and novelist. He needed to be seen in the context of the historiographical background of the C18th Scottish Enlightenment. He was greatly influenced by the “conjectural” history propounded by Adam Smith and, most notably, Adam Ferguson, author of the “Essay on Civil Society” and the father of Scott’s best friend and now seen as one of the founders of sociology.

The conjectural historians saw history as the progress of society from hunter/gatherers, to shepherds/herdsmen, to farmers and finally to the latest age of commerce. Ferguson as a Highlander was acutely aware of these stages; he had experienced them all. There were other C18th historical schools. Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire were writing traditional political narrative history. In his novels Scott was writing in the new philosophical, sociological analytical tradition.

Scott’s own views on the writing of history were interesting. He was very critical of inaccurate history; praised the use of original source material though he was less of a researcher than a reader and listener; and had a prodigious memory for what he had read or heard. He regarded history as a reservoir of material for his novels and consciously took liberties with facts and chronologies in his novels. When criticised  he responded:

“ My violation of the truth of history gave offence to Mr Mills, the author of the History of the Crusades who was not, it may be presumed, aware that romantic fiction includes the power of invention, which is indeed one of the requisites of the art” (introduction to The Talisman, 1832).

Scott was often seen as an ultra- romantic novelist but this was a misreading. David Daiches had said “Scott’s best and characteristic novels might with justice be called anti-romantic. They attempt to show that heroic action is, in the last analysis, neither heroic nor useful”. Daiches argued that Scott’s real interest as a novelist was “in the ways in which the past impinged on the present and in the effects of that impact on human character, in the relations between tradition and progress”. These themes were best realised in the novels dealing with the Scotland of the not too distant past of the C17th and C18th, ie Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, Redgauntlet and Chronicles of the Canongate.

Many people had criticised Scott for carelessness in composition, weak plots, and wooden lifeless heroes. Indeed Scott himself made these criticisms in an anonymous review in the Quarterly Review in 1817. But Scott also said “ My aim was to throw the force of my narrative upon the character and passions of the actors; those passions common to men in all stages of society”. They were character and manners novels in the Fielding and Smollet tradition but also within the framework of history.

Scott was a “passionate Scot but a prudent Briton” and this tension was worked out in the Scottish novels. Underlying them was a sense of the inevitability of progress, in accordance with conjectural history principles, and a sense of the impotence of traditional heroism. Scott himself in his 1829 Introduction put forward this idea of historical conflict at the heart of the Waverley novels, in particular in the Scottish novels Cavalier v Roundhead, Episcopalian v Covenanter, Jacobite v Hanoverian,  and Highlander v Lowlander.

Looking at the novels in this way, a discernible conjectural model of a pilgrim’s progress could be described. An Englishman or Lowland Scot wandered into the Highlands, or an equivalent, from civilised to barbarian society and became involved with passionate partisans, often Jacobites for example in Waverley, Rob Roy and Redguantlet. The “heroes” ( Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy) were essentially dull, insipid, amiable  young men who were disinterested, passive observers of the historical forces in conflict. Activity therefore depended upon other sources of energy - “dark heroes” (Rob Roy in Rob Roy) - whose intentions were good but mistaken. These contrasting pairs represented passion against reason, romantic emotion against sober judgement, the “passionate Scot versus prudent Briton”. Often the passive heroes became involved with the forces of barbaric society but they retained personal links with both sides and eventually put heroic ideas behind them and returned to civil society.

Scott was also the first great writer to be interested in the common people as well as the great. His “low life” characters were often the most real and best drawn, not least because he was able to use Scots idiom and dialogue in a dramatic way. This interest had been appreciated by many commentators, eg the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs in “ The Historical Novel”.

Scott’s personal attitude to what he was writing was important. He was wary of taking sides too obviously but his passive heroes committed to the superiority of civil society win in the end. Scott saw the inevitability of this in accordance with conjectural history principles. For example. Scott recognised the great changes brought about in the Highlands by economic development. He saw the breakdown of the clan system, of the master servant relationship on feudal lines, as brought about by the increase in division of labour and private property rights. He saw the chiefs using their increased monetary wealth on their own wants and luxuries. He saw Jacobitism as artificially preserving a system which was already decaying. But while he might accept this conjectural and modern historical analysis his feelings were more complex and ambivalent. He saw the victory of “progress” as both inevitable and desirable but he also saw that something of value was lost by the passing of the old feudal world. He did not sigh for the past but he gloried in it. It is interesting that the most sympathetically treated characters were those who manage to make themselves at home in the new world without altogether repudiating the old, eg Bailie Nicol Jarvie in Rob Roy.

The intentions and achievements of Scott have been misunderstood because of the effects of his work. The image that Scotland presented and still presents to the world, the emphasis on the Highlands and “tartanry” owes much to Scott (cf George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822).  However, it was not Scott’s fault if readers were enchanted by the picturesque and romantic rather than the anti- romantic and realism, the rejection of the past and acceptance of the economically inevitable present (cf Mark Twain on Scott causing the American Civil War).

Turning now briefly and specifically to Rob Roy, it was the most clear articulation in any of his novels of the economic basis of conjectural history. Economic theory was central to the novel.  The influence of Adam Smith’s ideas are obvious. Baillie Nicol Jarvie was a brilliant illustration of Smith’s idea that the selfishness of the individual pursuit of wealth can be reconciled with social obligations to one’s fellow men and country. Scott showed considerable awareness of the technical aspects of the regulation of trade and of banking and credit.  The plot barely touched on the armed struggle of the ‘15 but centred on whether the Jacobites can use financial means to destabilise the British Government. Frank told us on his return to London that:

 “ We immediately associated with those bankers and eminent merchants who agreed to support the credit of the government, and to meet that run on the Funds, on which the conspirators had greatly founded their hope of furthering their undertaking, by rendering the government bankrupt”.

The ability of the British Government to fight wars was based on its ability to finance them. The development of an efficient national finance system and London as a financial centre allowed the government to borrow what it needed. This was a major advantage not just in 1715 and 1745 but also in the series of wars against the French in the C18th.

In Rob Roy Scott was comparing an advanced commercial society alongside a traditional patriarchy. Readers were invited to conclude that the Hanoverian state offered new opportunities and that life in Northumberland and the Trossachs was nasty brutish and short. This was a Scott Hanoverian not Jacobite novel.

DISCUSSION

There was a smaller attendance than usual but the group benefited from comments from some of those not able to attend.

In general there was a warm and positive response to Rob Roy. The majority described the novel as an enjoyable yarn, gripping, exciting and humorous. It was a coming of age novel. There was a mystery, an engaging love interest, great characters and much stravaigin about in the Borders, Glasgow and the Highlands.      

Others were less enthusiastic, seeing the novel as slow to start, though picking up as the action progressed. Some saw the characters as mere caricatures. The language caused problems for some, not just the prolix nature of novels of the early C19th but the fairly extensive use of broad C18th Scots. This was a particular problem for the English members of the group. It was acknowledged though that the use of the Scots language gave a rich historical context to the novel. In using dialect for the low life characters Scott was following in Shakespeare’s footsteps. There was an interesting discussion as to whether the use of dialect had been a problem for the original readers of Scott’s novels, an issue none of those present could elucidate.

One very late-comer had now read Rob Roy for the third time. He had first read it on the recommendation of the proposer following a discussion in the school library at the age of 15 or 16. At that time he had much enjoyed it as an adventure story. The second time he had read it was ten years ago, when he was intrigued by the tension Scott explored between Unionist logic and Scottish romanticism. On that occasion he had been irked by the extended use of dialect and by the character of Andrew Fairweather, and taken aback by the callous execution of Morris. However, he had thoroughly enjoyed his third reading. What particularly struck him this time was the way in which Scott had not just invented the historical novel, but had set a template for the great nineteenth century novels that were to follow.

There was no direct example amongst the English novels to date that he could model himself on – the epistolary novels such as Richardson; the comic picaresque novels of Fielding and Smollett; the gothic novels such as those of Mrs Radcliffe; and the novel of manners emerging with Jane Austen. Scott produced a new synthesis that took some elements from other novelists but drew most heavily on Shakespearean drama. He offered a serious exploration of social, economic and historic themes. He combined this with an exploration of character, with adventure, with humour, and with an early example of evocative writing about the natural world. And he had little truck with sentimentality in this novel – no sooner is the happy ending offered in one half of the sentence than the heroine is killed off in the second half.

There was some discussion as to why Scott’s reputation had declined in the C20th. One squarely laid the blame on F. R. Leavis, aided and abetted by E.M. Forster. Leavis had excluded Scott from his “Great Tradition” of English novelists, dismissing him in a footnote, and argued that the great tradition ran through Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad, and Lawrence. Leavis’s influence had been considerable and malign in respect of Scott’s reputation. The whole idea of a “great tradition” to which one had to belong was flawed, but Scott had been hugely influential on the great C19th English writers, with a clear line flowing through the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy to Lawrence. Half of all novels bought in the C19th were by Scott.

The general conclusion was that it had been well worth reading Rob Roy, particularly for an Edinburgh Book Group.  

     

31/1/13 “ENGLISH JOURNEY” by J. B. PRIESTLEY

 

The group convened in January 2013 to discuss J.B. Priestley’s record of an "English Journey" undertaken in the autumn of 1933, almost eighty years ago. That journey was suggested by the publisher, Gollancz, and their left wing views could be said to have coloured the excellent prose contained within the book. Not only could it be said, but it was said by more than one group member. Alas, not everything of note said by members of the group is recorded on this occasion because your humble scribe was unaware of his necessary recording role until an hour of discussion had ensued and someone noticed the lack of scribbling. What perceptive observations have been lost? (Perceptive? you must be joking, Ed.) Hence, this month’s episode is compiled from ill-remembered and prejudiced views, and the later contributed notes of other attendees.

In his summary, ‘To the End’, Priestley speaks of three Englands. Old England is defined by the cathedrals and minsters, the manor houses and inns, and quaint highways and byways. Nineteenth Century England is formed from coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool and railways. He suggests that ‘Merrie England” cannot be improved upon, at least with rose tinted spectacles. However, he does point out that there was a substantial exodus to the industrial, revolutionary cities in the nineteenth century. Vote with your feet, as they say. His third England was more universal, possibly born in America, of cinemas and Woolworth’s, of the city bypass and semi-detached bungalow, and so on. As he points out perceptively elsewhere in the book, the coming of improved transport and communications may signal the death of individual and regional character. When talking of East Durham, he talks of its strange isolation. ‘Nobody goes to East Durham’, and by implication, no-one who lives there can afford to leave. As elsewhere in the book he talks of the harsh northern environment either bringing its inhabitants to despair, or blunting their senses and clouding the mind. This is certainly harsh, and perhaps over-stated. As he observes, regional theatres flourish in the most unlikely settings, and there are merits in the enterprise and ingenuity of the sons of the industrial revolution that is not always echoed in the gentrified classes to the south of Sheffield.

Speaking of East Durham, rarely can a book have been so well illustrated by its accompanying photographs; the Bill Brandt picture of the brick house sheltering under the coal slag heap with the heavy machinery of the pulley system perched on its top is magnificent and such photographs can be as influential as the text. Although written eighty years ago, this at least was familiar from my own childhood, when part of Lanarkshire was dominated by these spoils from deep mining. However, not everyone had the same edition, and some were poorly illustrated by modern equivalents. If you buy this book, go for the Folio Society edition of 1997, and check the photographs before you buy! Of course, the power of the image is so dominant now. Think for example of the citizen in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square.

However, our discussion became less centred on the observation, and more on the causes of what was observed, in a historical and industrial or business context. Of course, English Journey is in itself an influential work and a precursor of the Mass Observation Project that followed, which we read about earlier in “Nella Last’s War”. Although titled an English Journey, many pointed out that it was incomplete. Priestley himself acknowledged that he had not completed the task, and had failed to meet his original intentions to be more comprehensive. Rather, than three Englands, a majority though that this was really about two Englands, and that Priestley betrayed his left wing sympathies in suggesting that the industrial north had been betrayed by the allegedly (by some, not all) unproductive, parasitic south of bankers and other financial contributors to the British economy. To what extent was the plight of the North the fault of poor management by its own community, to what extent due to southern exploitation? Was it due primarily to the location of the great natural resource of coal, which spawned the associated industries? Was it due to the inventiveness of the northern mind, which we considered earlier in “The Lunar Men”, unallied to business control? These are difficult questions to answer only in the context of this possibly biased book.

In defence of the South, one pointed out that the GDP was greater than the North in 1933, and that this was not dominated by the financial sector and other service industries, citing large aircraft manufacturers west of London as an example. While he appreciated Priestley’s descriptions of England in 1933, it was a partial account in that it neglected to cover London and the south east which were doing relatively well economically. By 1933 the recession was over and GDP growth for the UK as a whole between 1934 and 1939 was 4%, a much better recovery than we have managed this recession. Would social conditions not follow economic improvement? If WWII hadn’t come, would this recovery have continued? Has anything changed? Mind you, there are lies, damned lies and ....

Alas, no-one can be sure, so we await the thesis on contributions to the GDP then and now to ascertain the truth. Certainly, what the book does do is contrast the plight of the working class “up North”, where it is indisputably “grim”, with the rather diverse activities in the South and South West, for example in the description of his acquaintance on the coach to Southampton, who had in his varied CV experience of hairdressing, raincoats, wireless sets, and tea rooms. As Priestley observed, new businesses were springing up all around London, and so contributing to the aforementioned GDP in the more pleasant surroundings of the M4 (later) corridor. The industrial heartland was shifting from North to South, to be founded not on coal, but on semiconductors and plastics.

Published in 1934, there seemed little sense of awareness of events elsewhere in Europe, but then this is an English Journey and perhaps this reflects the times. There are references to the previous war. His time in the trenches obviously had a major effect on him. This was seen in the moving description of the battalion reunion, one of the strongest sections, and in the imagery he uses throughout the book. Yet even at the reunion it moves on to social comment. “We could drink to the tragedy of the dead ....this tragicomedy of the living, who had fought for a world that did not want them ..... to exchange their uniforms for rags.” Again, there is ambiguity in whether the commercial and social observations are a fault of economics, of history, or of individual lassitude.  “It is hard to look at small shops with anything but disgust. They are slovenly, dirty and inefficient. They only spoil the goods they offer for sale especially if these goods, as they usually are, happen to be foodstuffs. One large clean shed, a decent warehouse, would be better than these pitiful establishments.”

Time for a digression and a sideways swipe at Edinburgh’s current Tram Saga. Priestley states that “the people show a sound instinct when they desert the tramway for any other and newer kind of conveyance. There is something depressing about the way in which a tram lumbers and groans and grinds along like a sick elephant.”   Whoa, cowboy! Maybe Priestley was over-impressed by the wonderful motor coach, maybe he hadn’t tried to crawl past the illegally parked residents of Edinburgh tethering their own elephants (sorry, 4x4s) outside the local private school. Let’s get back to the point!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Some of us were un-attracted by his judgemental style, common these days amongst newspaper columnists, certainly. The default mode is belligerence and knocking down straw men, and is sometimes downright rude. Consider for example his comments on the whist drive: he was rude if honest(?) about participants (all ugly); patronising (but all such decent working class people); and sneering (unlike bridge players in the south).  He made many sweeping generalisations, e.g. on the Irish, “ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease”. Not just the Irish. “In those days you did not sing the woes of distant Negroes, probably reduced to such misery by too much gin or cocaine. I am not sure of the new Blackpool of the weary negroid ditties.” He was similarly dismissive of the working classes and their football, but then perhaps even Priestley was too young in 1934 to have seen a Hibernian cup win. One of us opined that Orwell’s tone was equally passionate, but less judgemental, and so preferable. Some of this may be a deliberate persona Priestley is cultivating - the cantankerous, plain-dealing West Yorkshire man. This was unattractive, in one view.

Turning again to the book’s origins, more than one thought the book biased by the political agenda of both author and publisher.  It was said that Priestley’s “English Journey” and Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” hugely influenced the Labour Party and popular perception of the 1930’s as a decade of depression. A historian liked and applauded the book, particularly the aforementioned regimental reunion, but had serious reservation about its influence (innocently or politically motivated?) on perceptions of the 1930s. To draw an analogy, he suggested that Neville Chamberlain’s failures in dealing with foreign affairs have also affected his reputation as an effective Chancellor.

And so we, too, moved “to the end”. I think there was universal agreement about the excellence of the writing and the evocation of time and place. He used language very effectively – a writer at the height of his powers.  Sometimes, the text was genuinely moving. Normally an outsider, it was felt that he wrote quite differently when an insider as in Bradford. However, there was much disagreement about the independence of the view and the accuracy of rendition. One quoted a comment that this was “a succession of moods rather than a succession of places.” Again, we could all agree that this was not an unbiased coverage of all Britain (omitting London and its environs); his insight into industrial development is uneven. Not everyone felt that this was necessarily a fault. Perhaps the North, in particular, was a far country of which the more affluent South, where policy was made, was not wholly aware. He was at his best when he was being descriptive, analytical, or anecdotal, at his worst when he was being judgemental, patronising or pushing a pre-devised agenda. The book is a good, if biased, historic record, and important in developing social concern for problems of unemployment and industrial squalor. There are some real flashes of insight, both into people and into the way some places have developed. Overall it was a fascinating book of abiding interest.

Yours in social justice,

TINA.