“ALONE IN BERLIN” by HANS FALLADA

 “ALONE IN BERLIN” by HANS FALLADA, also known as “EVERY MAN DIES ALONE”.

  Discussed 28/8/2014.

The proposer of the book described how he had come across it randomly in a bookshop, and had liked the quality of the paper and the font size (qualities to which those of us who had read the book on a Kindle were oblivious).  He had a long-standing interest in the history of the Third Reich, and so possessed a solid intellectual pretext for purchasing this desirable physical object.

A biographical run-through of Hans Fallada’s life (real name: Rudolf Ditzen) revealed a tormented tale of traumas, including a childhood accident, a self-inflicted gunshot wound, alcoholism, morphine addiction, an unhappy marriage, trouble with the Nazi authorities, and spells in prison and mental hospitals.  In spite of this, he was quite a prolific writer, and no fewer than eleven of his works have been translated into English.  “Alone in Berlin” became a best-seller in English only in 2009.  A new film version is in pre-production at the time of writing, featuring Emma Thompson.

Hans Fallada reportedly wrote the first draft of the novel in twenty-four days in late 1946, and died shortly before its publication.  It was based on the true story of a couple who distributed anti-Nazi postcards in wartime Berlin.  We commented upon the similarities with our previous month’s book, George Orwell’s “1984”, written just over a year later, which also portrayed the relationship of a rebellious couple living under a repressive regime.  Although both books were enjoyed and highly praised by the group, the view was expressed that “1984” was the book with the more interesting ideas, and “Alone in Berlin” was the book with the most convincing characterisation.

The proposer admired the quality of the translation, although a few oddities were noted (such as the use of the Scottish ‘youse’ to indicate a less educated manner of speech) and there was speculation on the reasons for frequent shifts between past tense and historic present tense, which may have originated with Fallada.

We returned to characterisation, and commented on the large number of brutal and unpleasant individuals to be found in the book.  One reader was reminded of the paintings of George Grosz, and commented on the ‘nasty, brutish and short’ vision of life that predominated in the book.  Others drew attention to redemptive characters whose role grew stronger in the latter part of the story – the retired judge from downstairs in the Quangels’ building; the conductor with whom Quangel shares a cell; the prison pastor; the previous postmistress and partner of Enno Kluge, who re-educates the delinquent son of Borkhausen.  These characters provided some counterbalance to the sadism and criminality that was otherwise pervasive.

There was agreement in our group that the book provided a strong sense of ‘living through’ the circumstances of wartime Berlin, and confronted us with the uncomfortable question of ‘what would you do?’  The dilemma of individuals whose innate decency and morality is compromised by fear and suspicion probably reflects Fallada’s own difficulties as an artist who chose to remain in Germany throughout the Nazi hegemony – a choice castigated by Thomas Mann.  In this respect the Gestapo inspector Escherich was found particularly interesting.  Initially he is brutal and unscrupulous, but Quangel’s defiance, combined with his own sufferings at the hands of his vicious superior Prall, brings him face to face with his own failings and leaves him no option but to kill himself.

Although one reader found that parts of the novel – notably parts dealing with Enno Kluge and his parasitic attempts to live off the prosperous owner of a pet shop – were rather over-extended, there was general agreement that the story moved at a good pace.  The dual narrative of the Quangels’ postcard dropping and the Gestapo’s attempts to track them down created suspense and tension, and the later parts of the book, in which action was replaced by the static claustrophobia and despair of imprisonment, were also thoroughly engrossing.

Our discussion ranged briefly over many other topics – Biblical echoes in Quangel’s suffering, medical doubts about the description of his execution, and the relationship of the story to the true events on which it was based.  The proposer recommended another book, Roger Moorhouse’s “Berlin at War” as reading for those who wanted to know more of the general context of the novel.  He commented that only a minority of the population of Berlin ever voted for the Nazi party, and that they were particularly subject therefore to suspicion and surveillance.

This brought us – as with our discussion of “1984”  – to consideration of contemporary examples of growing surveillance by the state, such as face recognition technology at airports and the issue of chip-bearing identity tags for this year’s Ryder Cup sporting event.  The proposer modestly informed the group that he had made his first hole in one at golf recently, and we then drifted to golfing anecdotes and even a brief flirtation with the subject of football, so it was clearly time to clear away the glasses and issue forth beside the Forth, into the salty night air of Portobello.

"1984" by George Orwell and "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin

“1984” was written by George Orwell during 1947 and 1948 while he was living on the Scottish island of Jura, and suffering with tuberculosis.  It was published in 1949, and met with immediate success.  Orwell died in 1950.

The book’s proposer was unavoidably late for the meeting, and we began with a quick round-up of first impressions.  The first speaker recalled that the book was part of the school literary canon, and along with others in the group he had first read it during teenage years.  As an adult he had been pleased to note that the year 1984 came and went without Orwell’s gloomiest prognostications having come to pass.  However, it was agreed by all that the date was not critical to Orwell’s intentions – it was merely an extrapolation of some of the political and cultural directions of the 1930s and 1940s, including Nazism and, in particular, Soviet communism.  The book was agreed to be more political satire than science fiction, and the items of futuristic technology described (telescreens and hidden microphones for example) were primarily of interest as tools of state surveillance.  In passing we observed that the uses of CCTV and internet and mobile phone surveillance in contemporary societies suggested that Orwell was not too far off the mark in this respect.  The shabby living conditions and food rationing further located the book’s world as that of the 1940s, albeit an altered and extrapolated version of that world.

Another reader raised the question of whether our own society (ie. Western European) was as hierarchical as that of  “1984”.  This brought us onto the question of ‘who are the proles of today?’  One member of the group in particular felt that we were all as powerless as Orwell’s proles, and that contemporary political cliques held power as surely as The Party in the book.  Others disagreed, pointing out that we had a vote for who was in government, and could influence government policies.  For a little while our debate moved off rather tangentially.

We were brought back to the book by the observation that although Orwell had closely followed the plot of the earlier  “We” by Zamyatin (a debt which he acknowledged), he had improved upon it in many ways, and had developed two brilliant themes that were absent from the previously published book.  These were the idea of re-writing history (which is actually the occupation of the book’s protagonist Winston Smith) and the idea of a gradual constriction and diminution of spoken and written language (Newspeak) in order to eliminate any form of conceptual thought inimical to the state.

Once more these aspects of the book turned our discussion towards contemporary issues.  It was observed that the book was as much socio/political essay as novel, and therefore inevitably raised questions of a general nature about humanity and systems of society.  Were the “Sun” and  the “Daily Mail” examples in practice of a kind of Newspeak?  Could conceptual thought be limited by a paucity of vocabulary and grammatical sophistication?  How did physicists for example develop concepts for which there was no existing vocabulary?  Did different world languages govern their users’ modes of thought?  We did not have the answers to these questions, although we were not short of opinions.

Another general question was raised by one reader – was individual freedom an inevitable component of a utopia, and conversely a life constrained by the state a dystopia?  Did one kind of life result in more happiness than the other, and who defined happiness anyway?

By this time the proposer of the book had arrived in the room and refreshed himself with the contents of a small bottle (perhaps recently supplied by an airline) containing a reviving red liquid.  He brought us back to the book once more with the observation that the appendix on Newspeak, being written as a description of a failed idea, and not in Newspeak, provided a subtle note of optimism at the end of the book by suggesting that the world described in  “1984”  had come to an end.  He then spoke further about what had drawn him to choose the book for discussion. He felt the political content seemed to set Orwell the novelist's imagination on fire, making it one of the greatest novels of the post-war period. He felt that Orwell was more of an iconoclast than an ideologue, and that his driving passion was a hatred for all forms of authority.  Orwell was brilliant at identifying and attacking the abuse of power, and 1984 was best seen as an extended denunciation of where this can lead, a kind of worst-case scenario.  Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was cited as another, perhaps even more effective, development of this theme.

Another reader suggested that Orwell had a fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature, and the portrayal of the sadistic O’Brien was a chilling vision of how the ultimate use of power can be deliberately to cause suffering for others.  It was noted that in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and many other places and times this tendency in human nature could be observed in practice in the real world.  Lord Acton’s dictum “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was cited.

We turned to the question of whether or not Orwell’s pessimism extended to disillusion with the British Labour Party in the post-war period.  After all, the Party in 1984, “Ingsoc” in Newspeak, is “English Socialism”.  Was Labour’s programme of nationalization and anti-capitalism merely resulting in the creation of a new political clique, and failing to benefit the proletariat?  The book’s proposer had read some of Orwell’s political essays of the time, and had found no real evidence of disillusion of this kind.  He restated the view that Orwell hated all forms of authority, and speculated that his experiences of growing up in an English boarding school, and the low self-esteem evidenced by his poverty-stricken existence as an adult were more potent drivers of his vision than simple political preferences.  In fact “Ingsoc” bears more similarities to Soviet socialism than British socialism.  O’Brien’s invented enemy of the state, Goldstein, for example seems to be a clear equivalent of the disgraced Trotsky in Stalin’s Russian.

Moving on to the second book, “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin, the proposer said that the idea of combining it with “1984”  came from one of the Group’s E-mail members. Zamyatin was a serial Russian revolutionary and a serial satirist. He was an engineer for the Imperial Russian Navy and helped to design icebreakers for Russia on Tyneside in 1916 and 1917. Zamyatin stated that seeing the Tyneside work force in action was his first real experience of the collectivisation of labour, and he wrote a satire about life in Britain.

He returned to Russia in late 1917, and although a communist it was not long before he was disenchanted with the Bolsheviks and was writing another satire. “We” was published in translation in America in1924. The book achieved the distinction of being the first to be banned by the Soviet Censorship Board. When by 1931 the Russian text was nevertheless circulating, Zamyatin was, luckily, allowed by Stalin to go into exile in France. He died there in poverty in 1937 at the age of 53.

Orwell read  “We”  and reviewed it, and said he would write a book based on it, shortly before starting “1984”. Orwell thought Huxley was lying when Huxley denied having used “We”  as his inspiration for “Brave New World”.

There were several similarities between Orwell and Zamyatin. Both were anti-authority and both fell out with communism. Both were fans of Jack London, who also wrote an early dystopia. But Zamyatin always wrote satire, whereas Orwell came to it late in life. And Zamyatin, like Huxley, was writing in the shadow of the First World War, whereas Orwell was writing in the shadow of the Second.

“We” impressed us. Zamyatin’s creativity was exceptional. Apart from the main anti-communist thrust, there were many other layers of reference, including mathematical and scientific. There was even a religious dimension as the story paralleled Genesis. The novel was rich in psychological depth, and a splendid femme fatale drove the plot. A majority of us, nevertheless, felt that Orwell’s was the finer work – tauter, better written, and easier to follow. The fact that Orwell’s book was inspired by “We” did not make it the lesser book, just as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” was not a lesser work than Kyd’s version which inspired it.

Not everyone shared this positive view of  “We”. One member reported, from halfway through, that it was a struggle, requiring a huge amount of concentration – indeed the book seemed a very muddled, bizarre ramble. Another, by contrast, had been inspired to read it twice, and concluded that he now preferred it to “1984”.

We finished our discussion with some general discussion of the continuing genre of dystopian visions of the future, encompassing films and computer games as well as books.  It was pointed out by one member of the group, a scientist, that such visions had some rational basis, since the world’s finite resources are being used up at such a rate by the burgeoning planetary population that future wars over water, agricultural land and so forth seem inevitable.  Nodding in gloomy assent to this Orwellian observation, we drained our own liquid containers of their final resources and passed out into the night.

26/6/2014 “THE SHADOW OF THE SUN” by RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI

“The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life” was first published in Poland in 1998 bringing together material written by Ryszard Kapuscinski in his forty years as a journalist in Africa. It was first published in translation into English in 2001.

Africa was a subject to which the Book Group had often returned. We touched on it  in “The Undercover Economist”. We wrestled with its complex past in V.S. Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River”. We arrived in Ethiopia in comic mode in “Scoop”, and returned to Ethiopia in serious mode with “Digging for Stone”. And we were immersed in tribal life in Achebe’s masterpiece “Things Fall Apart”. Common themes of our discussion had been the sheer mystery of Africa, the impact of the slave trade and of colonialism, and why Africa had problems achieving economic growth. We had also wondered whether the questions we ask with our Western European mind-set were simply the wrong questions.

The proposer had been recommended “The Shadow of the Sun” to help resolve the mysteries of Africa. And the book had given him a clear and convincing explanation of, for example, the background to the Rwandan genocide, and much more besides. It brought out the geography clearly, and the impact of heat and water shortage on everything that happened.

Kapuscinski had been born in Pinsk, in what was then Poland but now part of Belarus, in 1932. He died in 2007. His early years had been marked by war, poverty, and fear as his family moved about struggling to keep themselves alive in the chaos that followed the Nazi invasion of Poland. Thereafter he had been brought up in a Poland under Communist control. He had been lucky that a controversial article criticizing regime policy had brought him prominence rather than disgrace. In 1957 he first went to Africa, and for much of the next forty years he was criss-crossing Africa as a poorly paid Polish journalist.

This book was ostensibly a collection of press articles that Kapuscinski had written from different African countries over the years. However, he kept two diaries as a journalist: one for the purposes of the reports he filed, and one a more private and literary journal. It was not clear to what degree this book consisted of press reports he had actually filed and to what extent he had reworked material by drawing on his private and more literary journal.

Kapuscinski described his work as “literary reportage”, and had gained international fame as an author. Many thought him the best Polish writer ever. Recently, however, his reputation had become mired in controversy. A fellow journalist, Artur Domoslawski, had written a book which “exposed” the real Kapuscinski. Domoslawski alleged that Kapuscinski had invented much that he had written as fact, embellishing the truth quite inappropriately. This allegation placed Kapuscinski somewhere in between a journalist and a writer of fiction.

He also claimed that Kapuscinski had made more accommodations with the Communist Government of Poland than he admitted later, even acting as a spy. Finally Domoslawski stated that Kapuscinski had been a womaniser on a large scale, regularly betraying his wife who remained in Poland bringing up his family.

The book was nevertheless well received by the group. It was captivating, riveting, fascinating, very enjoyable. It was also educational and insightful:

“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere the sun…..Have we sufficiently considered the fact that northerners constitute a distinct minority on our planet?...The overwhelming majority live in hot climates…”

“The problem of Africa is the dissonance between the environment and the human being, between the immensity of African space and the defenceless, barefoot, wretched man who inhabits it…. isolated and scattered over vast, hostile territories, in mortal peril from malaria, drought, heat, hunger….”

“Individualism is highly prized in Europe and.. America; in Africa it is synonymous with being accursed. African tradition is collectivist, for only in a harmonious group could one face the obstacles continually thrown up by nature…”

But how universally valid were such insights? Some felt the book was more a series of impressions, and the writer was inclined to over-generalize from one or two instances. He tended to dwell on the central areas of Africa, on an east-west axis, rather than describing the Maghreb or South Africa.

Others felt Kapuscinski had an exceptional ability to get inside the mind of Africans. His forte was to speak to people and get inside areas of African culture – such as attitudes to witchcraft and religion – that most of us do not grasp. And he himself had warned against the dangers of over-generalisation in his preface: “The continent is too large to describe… In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist…”.

The book’s episodic structure meant it was perhaps better to dip into than read in a long session, but this made it no less enjoyable.

His descriptions of people and situations were, even in translation, believable and profound. Ernest Hemingway, that pervasive influence on twentieth century prose style, and another journalist turned author, had been an important influence of Kapuscinski’s prose style. For most the quality of his writing stood out, although one member found some of the descriptions too over-embroidered, too florid. By contrast another felt that the quality of Kapucinski’s writing was such that he had transcended the journalism genre.

We could see the force of the allegation that Kapuscinski had made things up. Some of the James Bond, or Ernest Hemingway, style adventures seemed highly implausible. There were factual inaccuracies about the history of Ethiopia. An axiom of journalistic style was to assert everything with great confidence, however shaky your knowledge, and Kapuscinski may have been guilty of this.

Kapuscinski might have been stronger on issues about people than on politics, but he was not afraid to tackle political issues head-on:

“The government could, of course, have intervened, or allowed the rest of the world to do so, but for reasons of prestige the government did not want to admit that there was hunger in the land….A million people died in Ethiopia during this time”

“They attack women and children because women and children are the targets of international aid …whoever has weapons has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are not here among people who contemplate…the meaning of life. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day….”

“Many wars in Africa are waged without witnesses, secretively, in unreachable places, in silence, without the world’s knowledge, or even the slightest attention…”

The book was almost completely silent on the relationship between the sexes and sexual matters, despite their importance for a full understanding of African society and issues such as HIV/AIDS. Against this odd omission, the allegation that Kapusckinski had been a major philanderer had some traction.

However, the various allegations of Domoslawski, who had waited for Kapuscinski’s death before blackening his name, seemed to us fairly unimportant in the context of what we valued about the book.

Perhaps the most striking thing for us was the empathy that Kapuscinski had for ordinary Africans, and his ability to convey how they felt about life and the world:

“the concept of breakfast does not exist here. If a child has something to eat, he eats it….the children share everything; usually the oldest girl in the group makes certain that everyone receives an equal share, even if it is only a crumb. The rest of the day will be a continuous search for food. These children are always hungry. They instantly swallow anything that is given to them, and immediately start looking for the next morsel…”

“Half the people in African towns don’t have defined occupations, permanent jobs. They sell this and that, work as porters, guard something. They’re everywhere, always at one’s disposal, ready to serve, for hire…”

“The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics…[For Africans] it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time… Therefore the African who boards a bus sits down in a vacant seat, and immediately falls into a state in which he spends a great portion of his life: a benumbed waiting…”

The basis for this capacity for empathy with the poor may have been the desperate childhood he had experienced during the Second World War. Indeed one of us had preferred this book to Kapucinski’s better known “The Emperor” (ostensibly about Halie Selassie, but also a disguised attack on the Polish Communist Government) as it displayed more humanity than the latter book.

But not everyone agreed that Kapuscinski had made the case for the African mind-set being fundamentally different to the Western European mind-set. Perhaps if, say, the Polish people were moved into Uganda, and subject to the same climate, they would behave in much the same way as Africans? For example become involved in endless obscure wars?

But against that what was different was the history that European peoples had been through. They too had been involved in endless wars, many now obscure, through the centuries. We hoped, perhaps unrealistically, that they had learnt from that and now were better at avoiding them. For example Europe had been through the phase of religious war for several centuries, and it was disappointing to see religious wars currently breaking out in the Middle East and in Africa. Was religious war a phase that societies could not avoid going through as they evolved?

And so the group wandered on through the great mystery of Africa; sometimes circling back to our starting point lost in the desert; sometimes pausing to stare at a scene of horror, such as child soldiers; sometimes spotting an oasis such as a desalination plant – or was it a mirage?; sometimes being stalked by a big beast such as the survival of the fittest…..

“Enough!” said the guide. “Sum the book up in one word!”

“Enlightening!”

“Educational!”

“No – impressionistic – educational would be more reliable!”

“Impressions of people are reliable; only the facts are unreliable!”

“Great strengths are:

·      empathy with people

·      insights into African culture

·      readable. Language is enjoyable and rewarding. Sentences shorter than the eighty line examples in a recent book!”

And so we came back to the beginning. Who said that the Western European view of time was linear?

                

24/4/2014 THE SLEEPWALKERS by CHRISTOPHER CLARK

The proposer indicated that the reason for selecting a book about the origins of the Great War was obvious. The 100^th anniversary of WW1 was understandingly receiving much attention. The BBC had shown some excellent programmes and the articles on its website were well worth a read. As Fritz Stern said ‘The Great War is the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’. Before turning to ‘The Sleepwalkers’ some context would be helpful.

CONTEXT

The proposer indicated that in 1964 on the 50^th anniversary of WW1 he was in 6^th format school.  There were no Advanced Highers in those days so in history class WW1 was studied for a whole term. The British narrative was much as now: there was a great deal of emphasis on the horrors of trench warfare with 1July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme and the worst day for casualties in British history and 3^rd Ypres or Passchendaele receiving much attention. The war poets, particularly Wilfred Owen, fitted into the theme. ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ which had recently opened as listened to with its emphasis on the ineptitude of the British generals.  Alan Clark’s book ‘The Donkeys’ also recently published mined the same ground. Incidentally Clark admitted later he had made up the ‘lions led by donkeys’ quote from Ludendorf.  The most significant British book published in 1964, however, was John Terraine’s ‘The Educated Soldier’ which attempted to rehabilitate Haig as the commander of the largest army ever put in the field by Britain, 60 divisions, and the victor of one of the greatest victories in British history, the 100 day campaign in 1918 which caused the Germans to seek the Armistice.

Interestingly the most widely read account in the UK of the First World War published a few months after OWALW in 1963 for the 50^th anniversary was AJP Taylor’s ‘The FWW; an Illustrated History’ which sold 250,00 copies by 1990.The book was the first short popular narrative of the whole war and was dedicated to Littlewood. From start to finish Taylor depicted the war as a succession of accidents, the product of human error. Statesman miscalculated. War was imposed on the statesmen of Europe by the railway timetables of mobilisation. He also claimed that the ‘lions led by donkeys’ applied to all the generals. The war was beyond the capacity of generals and statesmen alike.

The other distinctive British reinterpretation of WW1 was the excellent BBC TV series ‘The Great War’ aired on the new BBC 2 channel in 26 episodes in 1964 as the centrepiece of the BBC commemoration which achieved huge audiences.  Corelli Barnet and John Terraine were the principal scriptwriters and the programme was intended to be a robust defence of the British army and generals against the likes of Clark and Taylor. But while the script was balanced, the visuals overcame the words and the British narrative was reinforced.

          

It would be fair to say that Terraine’s view of the War and the successes of the British army and generals is widely held today by military historians but, despite their efforts, in popular perception in Britain the Great War has remained a saga of personal tragedies, illuminated by poetry, fiction, eg Pat Barker and Birdsong, and popular TV, eg Blackadder, a subject for remembrance rather than understanding.

This is a peculiarly British perspective; none of the other participants see it this way and it is instructive to consider why. One answer is that Britain in 1914 was not fighting directly for the defence of the homeland. All the other countries thought they were; Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary justified aggression as an act of pre-emptive defence.

The causes of the war has long been an issue everywhere including in Britain. German aggression has been one answer enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles but others have argued that the war just happened through the failure of European diplomacy. While the Terraine view of the military War is broadly accepted by military historians there is no such consensus on the causes of the War. In the 1960’s the ‘Germany was the aggressor’ view received a huge boost from the writings of Fritz Fischer, Professor of History at Hamburg, and his followers such as Imanuel Geiss. Fischer argued that Germany used the crisis of Sarajevo to seek to grab world power. The ‘Fischer thesis’ was that Hitlerite expansion was no aberration but part of the dynamic of German history since at least Bismarck. The proposer had heard Fischer speak during his time at Edinburgh University in the 1960s doing history and also heard AJP Taylor who supported the Fischer thesis. The Fischer thesis became the dominant view of the origins of WW1, not least because Fischer and his followers were German. Not surprisingly the main opposition to the Fischer thesis came from Germany.   

Given the attention produced by the centenary of the War, it seemed a good idea to choose one of the many books published recently. Why ‘The Sleepwalkers’?  As can be seen from the blurbs, many reviewers have said that it is the best account yet of the origins of the First World War. Even those opposed to the Clark thesis, eg Max Hastings, is quoted on the front cover saying ‘One of the most impressive and stimulating studies of the period ever published.’

Understanding the causes of the War is complicated by the huge amount of source material. Over 25000 books on the origins of the war had been published at the last count 20 years ago. Clark makes the point that the sources are so extensive they help to explain why the outbreak of the War has proved susceptible to such a bewildering variety of interpretation. He says in his introduction ‘There is virtually no viewpoint on its origins that cannot be supported from a selection of the available sources’

DISCUSSION

The majority of members of the Book Group did not find the book an easy read. Others disagreed. It was a dense, detailed analysis of the origins of the War and difficult perhaps to engage with for those unfamiliar with the period. Nonetheless almost everyone enjoyed the book, found it engrossing and stimulating with a good structure and narrative prose style.

One thought the work read like an academic thesis and as such made for a difficult long-winded read. It was beyond the redemption of editing. More significant perhaps was Clark’s interpretation and presentation of "facts" which this reader found unconvincing. While the number or references was impressive he felt that he could have presented a counter position had  he selected different sections from the same documents. In short he did not trust Clark.

Another liked the presentation from individual country viewpoints, and the highlighting of the tribal nature of humans. But the overall problem with the book was that it became a shopping list rather than a concise reasoned analysis or argument. By droning through the entire Serbian parliament and greater Slav-dom etc. etc. for 100 pages the point was lost. There was a difference between a ‘paper, a thesis’ and a log-book. This was a log book.

What was also worrying that by presenting the ‘chains of decisions’ in enormous detail, he sought to submerge the key points under a wave of trivia.

Another became progressively more disenchanted the more he read. He was so surprised by Clark’s pronounced Germanophilia that he had to look up his biography. And it turned out that Clark was not an expert on the First World War period, but was an expert on German history. He had studied in Berlin, married a German wife, and been awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit by the German Government. His pious renunciation of the blame game was disingenuous, as his objective, as noted by Bogdanor, was to exculpate Germany and Austria-Hungary as far as possible from their responsibility for starting the War, while pointing the finger of suspicion at all other possible candidates.

This reader was not convinced by Clark’s attempt, and, because of what he viewed as remarkably partisan omissions and distortions, by the end he also ceased to trust that anything he said was the whole truth. He would have much preferred if Clark had been upfront and said that as a German expert he was going to write a book that set out the German perspective on the events.

Members were not convinced by the psychobabble aspects of Clark’s analysis, eg the ‘crisis of masculinity’ and the title was also criticised. Only in the last pages does Clark explain the reasoning for the title: ‘ The protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, blind to the reality they were about to bring into the world’. This is unconvincing. The ‘watchful, calculated steps’ he had chronicled did not constitute sleepwalking. Secondly the American Civil War should have shown the protagonists of 1914 what modern war would be like. 

There was also some debate as to whether the book was an academic or popular work. It was agreed it fell between the two. It was too detailed to be a popular account yet assumed too much knowledge to work as a general introduction. 

One argued that despite its populist title, its initial narrative drive sagged too much to be a popular read, but it was too partisan, and too compressed in its argumentation, to rank as serious academic revisionism.

Inevitably there was discussion of Clark’s thesis of the origins of the War.      

The proposer pointed out that in Clark’s view the War was not inevitable.

The War had specific causes, principally the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the most successful terrorist act in history. Franz Ferdinand favoured a federal Habsburg empire, giving all the Slavs equal powers, a major threat to an expanded Serbia including all South Slavs. In addition he was strongly opposed to war with Serbia let alone Russia. From the Serb point of view he was their prime target.

Even so, argues Clark, the Austrian response to Serbia only become a general European War because the Russians, allied to the French, supported Serbia. Clark pointed out that the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia was less draconian than the NATO one of 1999. One’s view of the legitimacy of the Austrian action will influence one’s assessment of the actions of Russia, France and Germany. Initial UK reaction was supportive of Austria. If Austria had immediately conducted a policing action against Serbia no one would probably have intervened. There are good reasons, explained  Clark, why they did not and this enabled opposition to Austria to grow. Even then many people in UK opposed support for Serbia and autocratic Russia. Germany’s crass attack on France and Belgium silenced critics.   

While there has been general praise for ‘The Sleepwalkers’ it is fair to say not all have been convinced by his thesis. Some members of the Group argued that, in the words of Vernon Bogdanor, ‘It is the most sophisticated and penetrating of all attempts to shift responsibility for the war away from Germany and Austria Hungary’. They considered that Clark was misleading in this attempt. For example, Clark says that Edward Grey the British Foreign Minister ‘showed no interest in the kind of intervention that might have provided Austria with other options than the ultimatum’. One member pointed out that Grey in fact made six proposals for international talks to Germany which were ignored. After the war Grey regretted he had approached Germany rather than Austria.  Not just Britain but France and Russia had argued for international talks to resolve the problem of the assassination, and only Austria-Hungary and Germany had refused to countenance such a solution.

The same member pointed out that mobilisation is quite different to a declaration of war, and that Clark lazily conflated the two. He also pointed out that whether there was a difference in the case of Bosnia between a protectorate and annexed territory might seem arcane, but that it was important to the outbreak of hostilities.

Others suggested that Clark’s discussion of the Austrian ultimatum showed him at his worst. No unbiased person could equate Milosevic, a war criminal, with Pasic. After a two-page rant about how the UN’s ultimatum in 1999 was worse than Austria’s, he limply concedes that Austria’s ultimatum was designed not to be accepted (did his editor insist on this?). Moreover the world had moved on a lot since 1914 and to compare the UN and Austria-Hungary is a jest not a serious piece of analysis. A serious analyst might rather have referred to contemporary reaction to the ultimatum – such as that of Grey, who turned pale and said it was “the most formidable document I had ever seen addressed by one State to another that was independent.”

Clark is over critical in a personal way of those with whom he disagrees. He downplays the German preparations for war and willingness to attack Russia and France. Some pointed out that Clark was seeking to redress the argument away from German responsibility and the book should not be read in isolation. 

Clark argues he is concerned with how the War happened not who to blame. His view is that responsibility is collective. The majority view in this country is that German aggression is to blame, as argued in the Treaty of Versailles. That has been a controversial view ever since; there is still no consensus on the causes of WW1. The view people take will depend on various factors including inclination and nationality. For example American reviewers of Clark, eg Professor Thomas Laquer in the London Review of books, have been broadly supportive of the Clark thesis, unsurprisingly as neutrals in the War until 1917. In his classic 1928 study the American historian Sidney Fey argued for shared responsibility for the War, essentially Clark’s view.

     

History of course is written from the perspective of the times in which the writer is living.

Clark makes the interesting point that developments in our time, eg terrorism and suicide bombers mean we have less sympathy with a rogue terrorist state such as Serbia, particularly after their violent irridentist nationalism in the 1990’s. Equally we are now more sympathetic to the Habsburg Empire, a model for the EU. Almost all Habsburg territory is now within the EU; a major exception is Western Ukraine.

Clark’s emphasis on contingency rather than necessity for war origins also fits into postmodernist theory which has influenced historical analysis as much as other disciplines. Agreement on the origins of World War 1 is not achievable. 

The discussion in the group reflected this. Some members were more persuaded by the Clark thesis than others. Others felt that Clark was not to be trusted, and that his book had received much more attention than it merited. There was general agreement, however, that the book had been an excellent and stimulating choice.    

 

   

29/5/2014 “THE GOOD SOLDIER” by FORD MADOX FORD

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford was published in 1915, and the story is set just before World War 1.

The narrator, John Dowell is an American from Philadelphia married to Florence from Connecticut. They are very friendly with an English couple, Edward Ashburnham (the ‘good soldier’ of the title) and his wife Leonora. Most of the action is set in continental Europe, on the French coast or the spa resort, Nauheim in Germany, where Edward and Florence are seeking treatment, ostensibly for their heart ailments. The narrator describes the characters as ‘all quite good people’ – Edward especially so – but as the story progresses it becomes clear that all is not what it seems: the good characters unravel rapidly and their dark sides are revealed.

Edward is a philanderer whilst Florence is scheming, manipulative and unfaithful; neither suffer the heart ailments that they lead others to believe – they have constructed elaborate fake heart-trouble in order to pursue adulterous affairs in Nauheim. Leonora struggles to control her husband’s womanising and financial carelessness. She ultimately succeeds, but ends up marrying a dullard. Most importantly, the narrator himself is unreliable, telling us about his bad memory (although some details are recounted in vivid detail).  The story he tells is chronologically confused, full of inconsistencies and confuses the reader. At the end of the book we were left thinking that he might not merely be a poor story-teller with a bad memory but something worse, a murderer who has been obfuscating the truth and deliberately misleading us.

The book’s title does not describe the content of the book. The author’s preferred title was The Saddest Story - a tale of passion, echoing the famous first sentence ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’, but the publisher thought a book with a sad title, published in wartime years (1915) would not be saleable. Ford was asked for another title, to which he replied, probably sarcastically,  “Why not the Good Soldier...’ and was horrified when this silly title was actually used (we learn this from the author’s 1927 letter to Stella Ford, who was really Stella Bowen and not his wife).  The book didn’t sell very well, perhaps because readers found its content quite different from what they had expected and didn’t recommend it to friends.

We struggled with the book. Most of our discussion was between members who had read the book two or three times and in one case also twice viewed the DVD (Granada TV, 1981). The author’s writing style is clever and some thought elegant, but he conveys a blurred and uncertain vision of events, much as the impressionist painters were doing at that time on canvas.

The proposer of the book prefaced his introductory remarks by telling us about a modern book called The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, in which a distinction is made between books that are ’readerly’ and those that are ‘writerly’.  The chief distinction is that in a ‘writerly’ text the reader is expected to do some of the work, even retracing the steps taken by the author, whereas in a ‘readerly’ text, a fairly straightforward narrative style makes everything clear.  The proposer suggested that The Good Soldier is firmly in the ‘writerly’ category.  Some of the other books read by the group have ‘writerly’ qualities: for example in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, the reader is not always told who is speaking, but must work that out from the content and context of the spoken words. 

We talked about John Dowell’s character a good deal.  In fact he can be said to be the only character in the book, as everyone else is presented from his point of view, and their words are only the words he reports to us – sometimes from scenarios at which he was not himself present.  He is an unreliable and inconsistent narrator. He presents himself as a naive type, a daft laddie, and frequently apologises for his bumbling style, but there are at least some grounds for suspecting that all this is a ruse to obfuscate a dark deed that he has perpetrated – murdering his wife Florence and making it seem like a suicide.  

John Dowell’s attitude to Edward Ashburnham, the ‘good soldier’ of the title, is deeply ambivalent.  At various points he describes him with contempt, and at others with admiration and even envy.  He even says that he ‘loved’ him.  ‘He was the cleanest sort of chap; an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords…in Hampshire…to the poor and to hopeless drunkards…he was like a painstaking guardian.’  He is a ‘good sportsman’ and risked his life to save others at sea.  He was also the inventor of a new army stirrup! 

But Edward obviously has a high libido, and conducts a series of affairs with other women while apparently abstaining from sexual relations with his own wife.  On the final page of the book the narrator tells of Edward’s final demise: we are led to believe he has slit his throat or his wrists with a penknife, although, as with the death of Florence (Dowell’s unfaithful wife), we are left feeling that John Dowell himself could have done it.  After all, Edward has cuckolded him for years, and Dowell is in love with Nancy Rufford, who is besotted with Edward, and has also – inconsistently as ever – confessed to coveting Edward’s wife Leonora.

Like his narrator, the author himself was a somewhat inconsistent character whose emotional life was complicated, as discussed by Julian Barnes in The Guardian, 7 June 2008.  Ford Madox Ford was born in Surrey in 1873 as Ford Hermann Hueffer but German-sounding names were unpopular at the time of the Great War. Rather belatedly, in 1919 he changed his name to Ford Madox Ford (after being in the British army with his German name, 1915-1917). His real wife was Elsie Martindale but although he took other lovers she refused divorce. He lived first with Violet Hunt, a novelist whom he called Violet Hueffer and then with Stella Bowen, an Australian painter, whom he called Stella Ford. There was also the writer Jean Rhys in Paris. 

So in some respects the author might have served as his own model for both the womanizer Edward Ashburnham and the shifty and confusing John Dowell.  Perhaps all fictional characters embody some elements of their creators. Biographers think there may have been an original Edward Ashburnham – and Ford himself claims that both the man and the story were drawn from life - but he hasn’t been identified so far.

As one grapples with the plot, there are many passages of great humour, often satirical of social manners, and of attitudes towards, among other things, the Catholic Church, Scotsmen, Northerners, and Americans. The way the characters express themselves is often funny too – for example Edward’s reported worry that using one’s brain too much may diminish performance on the polo field.  The book also has, in passing, much to say about class – the contrasts and imbalances between the ‘county folk’ like the Ashburnhams and their servants, and Dowell’s lack of compunction in beating up a long-standing and loyal negro retainer. 

Dowell’s generalisations about women are also humorously handled, and are perhaps infused with the historical context of the suffragette movement that was at its height in 1913 as Ford Madox Ford was writing the book:

‘For although women, as I see them, have little or no feeling towards a country or a career – although they may be entirely lacking in any kind of communal solidarity – they have an immense and automatically working instinct that attaches them to the interest of womanhood’.

The author considered this to be his best work. He thought it was a ‘serious analysis of the polygamous desires that underlie all men’. Some of us thought it was something in the nature of a technical experiment: his attempt to be clever, or at least clever enough to see whether the narrator could hide the truth by pretending to be a poor story-teller, as distinct from more obviously unreliable narrators in fiction, such as a clown, madman or naive person.  The confused timeline was also a technical experiment, and Ford’s overall intention was a form of ‘impressionism’, in some ways akin to the vision of the impressionist painters. 

Although the work was not popular at the time it was published, it has stayed in print and is nowadays often in the lists of ‘most important books to read’. Ford imagined his book could be required reading for university students in 150 years time.  It hasn’t quite made it yet, but there is still a half-century to go!

27/3/2014 “CUTTING FOR STONE” by ABRAHAM VERGHESE

I woke up suddenly.

Frankincense drifting in the air, mingling with the strains of Ethiopian music and the fragrance of Ethiopian coffee….where could I be? 

Someone jabbed me in the ribs, said there was a blogger crisis, and told me to grab a pen…ah yes, I had nodded off. I knew that third bottle had been ambitious…

It was March at the Monthly Book Group, and the book was “Cutting for Stone” by Abraham Verghese (2009).

A nurse had recommended it to the proposer, who was himself in the medical profession. And the well-informed medical content of the book had appealed to him immensely. There was a very informative section on fistula medicine, and the character Shiva’s major work in this field. The proposer had heard Dr Catherine Hamlin, a pioneering fistula surgeon in Ethiopia, talk in Edinburgh, which made it very meaningful.

He, like others amongst us, had heard Ethiopia described as the most beautiful country in the world, which again added allure to the book. So did his familiarity with most of the book’s settings - in Kerala in India, the Bronx and Queens in New York, and of course with Stone’s training in Edinburgh.

He felt Verghese wrote with much compassion and empathy, maintaining tension and suspense as he wove the different story lines together. The twists and turns of the medical stories mirrored and illuminated the twists and turns of life as a whole. His observations both of people and of places were vivid, full of description and detail, and some of the best that he had come across. He enjoyed the wide variety of realistic characters. The book had captivated him from the opening paragraphs, when we hear of a nun giving birth.

Verghese had been born in Addis Ababa in 1955, to Indian parents recruited by the Emperor Haile Selassie to teach in Ethiopia. He grew up near the capital and began his medical training there. When the Emperor was deposed, Verghese briefly joined his parents who had moved to the United States because of the war. He worked as an orderly in a hospital before completing his medical education in India.

After graduation, he left India for a medical residency in the United States and initially found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him. However, he progressed and became heavily involved in the stressful work of caring for AIDS patients. He then took a break, cashing in his retirement plan to study writing full time in Iowa. He now combined a Professorship at Stanford on the Theory and Practice of Medicine with a very successful writing career.

Amongst his wide range of influences were A.J. Cronin’s “The Citadel” (see discussion 28/3/13), Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” and Conan Doyle. The lengthy acknowledgements at the end of the book revealed Verghese’s very wide and rich range of cultural reference, even if it were showboating a little to draw such explicit attention to it.

The lengthy and explicit passages on surgery featured strongly in our initial discussion. For some they were too long, too gruesome, or too boring, distracting attention from the main story. Others felt they marked the book out as exceptional, so clearly expressing his love and passion for medicine. For these readers he brilliantly depicted the bone and gristle and sinew of the operations. And yet others simply skipped the medical  passages.

So not much agreement there, nor was there on the characters. Some felt that they were very well drawn. Others felt they were rather weak with little real feelings. Genet in particular was cited, who had the most interesting but tormented life, but about whose feelings we learned very little.

But was that because we only saw her through Marion’s eyes, and Marion idealized her but was frustrated by his inability to get close to her? And didn’t we learn a lot about Stone’s torment, and to a lesser extent Hema’s?

We felt Hema was the best drawn of the female characters. She had had to move from India to Ethiopia to progress in medicine. She had become a dominant person in Ethiopia, controlling the hospital and medical procedures.

The issue arose in discussion of whether Hema was an imagined character, or a projection of the Australian doctor Catherine Hamlin. This might account for the greater strength of writing about Hema than the other female characters. Or was rather Shiva modelled on Hamlin? However, we agreed that the historical genesis of a character or plot was not relevant to judging the quality of a book.

Another feature was that none of the characters achieved satisfactory relationships, with the exception, eventually, of Hema and Ghosh. This was sad, and perhaps linked to the pervasive sense in the book that sex was dangerous. Many characters were destroyed or seriously damaged by sex: Mary Praise, Genet, Marion and indirectly Shiva, Thomas Stone and so on. The genital mutilation of Genet was one of the most powerful and shocking of such scenes, and showed an unflinching willingness to confront unpleasant physical issues.

Thus was the danger of sex the moral - conscious or unconscious - of the book? The idea that sex leads to death was of powerful archetypal origin (see discussion of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” 25/7/07).

Marion’s sexual inhibition was not easy to comprehend at a literal level. He turned down the Probationer, and decided not to pursue Tsige when she put him on hold, but saved himself for years and years for what proved to be a nihilistic and destructive coupling with Genet. Given that Marion was obviously a largely autobiographical figure, there might be an autobiographical basis for this, but that did not constitute a convincing explanation.

Meanwhile Marion’s twin brother Shiva, from whom he had been sundered at birth, was unthinkingly promiscuous, and named after a god. This led us to wonder if the author had in mind some notion of dualism, of illustrating different aspects of humanity, through the trope of the divided twins. However, if so it was not too clear to us what the idea was. Nor was it clear if there were some intended notion of universality in giving a man, Marion, a female name. And was the choice of name of “Genet” for the woman he loved, echoing the writer Jean Genet, also meant to have significance?

Despite these hints that the writer might have high literary ambitions, there was some enjoyable humour in the novel, e.g. in the description of the cricket team. There were fine homilies, such as Stone’s question about what treatment was administered by ear (reassurance) or his injunction never to operate on a patient on the day of his death. More generally we liked the strong Indian influence in the book.

So, taking the book as a whole, what were its strengths and weaknesses? Most felt that the first section of the book in Missing Hospital, climaxing with Mary Praise’s dramatic delivery and death, was outstanding. One, for example, thought that the book showed fantastic imagination, especially the first 100 pages. It was rich in references to different cultures, and totally gripping in its depiction of the panic when they operated on the Sister. Generally the later American sections were less powerful than those  set in Ethiopia.

The plot, and in particular the use of coincidence and the neatness of the ending, attracted criticism from some. Others liked the overall coming of age structure of the book, the way in which the twins and other characters influenced the lives of each others, and how external events affected them all. Perhaps you needed to cut the author a bit of slack on plotting given the type of novel he was writing.

And it was a pleasure to see another Indian author writing an expansive, compassionate,  ebullient, self-confident novel, at a time when so many British writers were writing cramped and overly self-conscious works.

Yours truly felt he had done quite well to record all this high-flown stuff, and was just dropping off for another well-earned and well-sedated snooze, when rudely awakened by laughter.

“Everybody says that the Ecstasy of St. Theresa is an orgasmic pose!”

Run that by me again???!......

And Ethiopian Airlines are the best, despite the odd hijacking!

No, I must have been dreaming….

27/2/2014 “A NAME IN BLOOD” by MATT REES

There is an assumption that those attending Monthly Book Group meetings have read the book. Sometimes members find little more than unintended humour in it, but almost always there is something. Often the proposer shows that there is more than the member realized. Sometimes another member provides enlightenment. Commonly the doubts of the first 50 pages are dispelled or put into perspective. No such reservations were associated with “A Name in Blood” by Matt Rees (2012). There was a sense that folk had enjoyed the read. They were relaxed rather than enquiring or confrontational.

The proposer introduced the author as having made a name for himself by writing crime novels set in Palestine. Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet had influenced him. “A Name in Blood” was, however, not chosen by the proposer because of these earlier works, but rather as a whim in a bookshop, and why not?

To write the book Rees learnt to paint, studied the artist who inspired the book, visited galleries throughout the world and was taught sword fencing. What he then produced was a novel about power, love, duplicity and patronage. His use of language was effective and sometimes shone.

Thus the artist, Michelangelo Merisi (called Caravaggio after his home town) first sees the female he would come to love:

“The soles of her bare feet were turned upward as she leaned forward to brush. They were soiled in such striations of black brown and grey that he could taste the dirt on his tongue”.

To add to the significance of this vivid sentence, Caravaggio saw her when he was visiting a Cardinal in Rome and she was his menial employee.

The proposer particularly liked the challenging conversations between the artist and his patrons. These were superficially the idle creation of the author. However, nothing can obscure the contrast between the sacred subjects he was commissioned to paint and, the actual works, which for the papal aristocracy of the late Renaissance were almost heretical. Often he used prostitutes as models for sacred subjects, and did little to disguise their earthy appearance, or indeed their identity. Caravaggio was revealed in his works to be brave to the point of folly, but saved by his sincerity and his genius. Rees was thus on sure ground when he explored Caravaggio’s art through invented conversations between a sophisticated religious elite and a rebellious artist.

We had descriptions of Rome in this period:  the beauty, the sin, the grace, the vulgarity and the cruelty. The proposer enjoyed all this and everyone agreed.

We were then invited to comment. What was the title about? Was this literally to do with the signature on a painting?  Or possibly, it was thought, to reflect the gradual change from the innocence of youth to the braggadoccio of the adolescent to the imminent prospect of death, which dominates the later chapters of the novel. As to the life of Caravaggio, the group discussed his paintings, noted that he fell out of fashion for a long period, and only re-emerged in the 20^th century as a true great.

What of the detective in Mr Rees? DNA tests suggest Caravaggio was buried in Porto Ercole, so was he in fact on the return journey to Rome? Why did the Knights of Malta cooperate if Rees was to blame one of their number – Roero - for executing a great artist in return for the release of the rather doubtful Fabrizio? Why was the death not investigated by one of the artist’s important friends? This prompted one of our members to raise doubts about historical novels. Is your problem whether simply to read the novel and judge it as such or check it against historical record? “It is not just my problem, it is the problem” was the reply. The group discussed this and with reference to Walter Scott and his successors as exponents of this genre. The conclusion was that we make our own choice. Did this book ring true? Yes. Let each of us decide if there is a need to know more.

The early work of the artist was contrasted with the later. The sexual preferences of the artist may have been important to some at the time, but not to all. Derek Jarman’s film from 1986 was referred to, but he had an agenda. Caravaggio’s early work had a homoerotic quality, but his later work was religious, with messages not of a sexual nature.

What, belatedly, of the characters? The main relationship is between Caravaggio and Lena. He is presented with the classic “behave and live with me, or go off and die”. The way he goes off and dies could have been taken from an Italian opera. We have the wager on the outcome of the tennis match, the numerous scenes where he is urged to pay the debt, the elegant development of the feud until a duel with Ranuncio becomes not foolish but necessary. Having been engulfed in this he does not see Lena to try to explain. He flees. This sets up the remainder of his life.

And details? Do we appreciate his work less than those four centuries ago? Yes. However, the proposer was of Italian extraction. Did he understand the work better than we did? Possibly, but we all have to understand the Bible and Greek and Roman myths to understand so much of European culture.

The proposer drew our attention to a place name in the book whose shared surname will lead some to rename his house as such in future. We noted that the camera obscura was used to help portrait painting. We also read about the make up of a tennis ball of the period, which was self indulgent, as was the detail in the duel scene. One member thought that the lack of semi colons made the prose too staccato. Did the lead in the paint make Caravaggio “hyper”? Possibly.

It was hard to focus on the novel itself, as opposed to the art, history, religion etc, and if we digressed from Matt Rees the novelist, who cares! We enjoyed ourselves.