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.

30/1/2014 “THE BRIDGE” by IAIN BANKS

Iain Banks considered this to be his best novel. He said ‘Definitely the intellectual of the family, it’s the one that went away to University and got a first’. But it is not the easiest one to read. It mostly deals with the thoughts and dreams of Alex, victim of a car crash who is comatose for most of the book. The crash itself is described in the first two pages. One of our members skipped this bit, thinking it was the preface. Dear reader, don’t make the same mistake. But whether one misses this or not, it takes a while – perhaps 70 pages – before the penny drops and structure and plot dawn on the reader.

The bridge is a fictionalized and exaggerated version of the Forth Rail Bridge, the huge cantilever construction in red-painted steel, built in 1890, connecting Edinburgh with Fife. The bridge in the novel is much bigger, vast and multilayered, very wide, apparently a world to itself with its own totalitarian government. The bridge is a powerful metaphor for society or possibly for the author’s psyche. Where does the bridge start and end? No-one knows; perhaps it doesn’t end on dry land at all.  Later, when the protagonist travels for days along it, he passes through different climatic zones, so we may conclude that the bridge is at least hundreds of km long.

In real life the protagonist is a young business man from Glasgow called Alex. He likes drink, drugs and fast cars. When still a young student in Edinburgh he falls in love with one Andrea Cramond, an advocate’s daughter. But she goes to live in France and enters into another relationship. He hits the drink and crashes his souped-up Jaguar. When in a coma he lives on the bridge as the amnesiac John Orr, periodically meeting his psychiatrist Dr Joyce. Sometimes another character called The Barbarian pops up; one who rants and raves in broad Scots dialect, often incoherently – something like a Scottish Caliban. The key to understanding the book is that Alex, John Orr and The Barbarian are one and the same, each representing a different facet of one man’s psyche. To make matters more complicated, the Barbarian has an enigmatic being on his shoulder called ‘The Familiar’. Not, we thought, the famous chip on the shoulder that Scots are supposed to have, but a representation of, well, what exactly? There was no consensus. One of us thought it was a phallus, but perhaps it was a mentor, a guardian angel, a parrot, or the id. Or even a representation of a controlling force, someone suggested the government in Westminster.

John’s adventures on the bridge are bizarre. At first, he lives a comfortable life in which he is provided for. He undergoes treatment for his amnesia by a psychiatrist and dream analyst called Dr Joyce, and to please the good doctor he invents dreams. Opinions were divided about whether there was supposed to be a real life Dr Joyce who was treating him during intermissions from the coma, or whether it is all a dream during the coma (we digressed: can comatose people dream? Can comatose people make up dreams during dreams? Can comatose people be considered amnesiac, since there are completely unconscious?). The invented dreams are so vividly recalled and detailed that Joyce suspects they are made up and tells John that he wants to change the treatment to hypnotherapy. When John refuses he is banished to a lower level of the bridge, where privileges and personal clothing are perfunctorily withdrawn. However, the beautiful Abberlaine Arrol rescues him; she is none other than the bridge’s version of his real life lover Andrea; she provides clothes and an apartment; they make love. During the act of love he fantasizes about girders, women’s underwear and other engineering structures and concludes ‘I feel like I have just fucked the bridge’.  Subtle.

Life on the bridge has strange twists and turns. One day, the bridge is buzzed by aircraft that strangely leave messages in the sky, in braille (should it be Morse code?); and a few days later barrage balloons appear, apparently to protect the bridge against further attack. Like many parts of the book, this appears to have no particular relevance to the plot, unless to give weight to the idea that governments frequently exaggerate external threats for political reasons.  In fact, the real-life Forth Bridge was similarly attacked at the start of World War II; something Banks would have known about because his father was a naval officer and worked at the Rosyth naval dockyard, the real target of the WWII bombers.

He stows away on a train, which travels far along the bridge to a war zone. Plenty of blood and gore occurs, but there are humorous passages too. The author’s imagination runs wildest in this area.

Finally, he comes out of his coma, and I won’t spoil the ending by telling you what happens. Perhaps the ending is a bit trite. One member found this last page had been torn from his second hand bookshop copy. Perhaps its owner thought the ending not worthy of the book.

What did we think of it all? It is a work of vivid imagination and rich description, plumbing the psychological depths of alienation. It was his third book (published in 1986). Later, he was to move into science fiction, and we see the start of that sci-fi interest here (he clearly had much fun writing about the invented dreams, the balloons, the flying knife, the war). The real life scenes, based in Edinburgh and Fife may be by contrast rather flat; his imagination comes into play when he deals with adventures on the bridge. The book is said by most reviewers to be a love story, but its power is not really in romantic matters (although the two sex scenes are some of the most interesting you’ll ever read). The love story takes second place to the adventures on the bridge; but the dreams are riveting; the characters in the consulting room are reminiscent of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, the 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks. The situation that John Orr encounters on the bridge reminds one of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle. The psychological parts are both Freudian and Jungian, and at one point the author makes reference to RD Laing, author of works on the existential analysis of personal alienation, and the classic 1960 book on schizophrenia The Divided Self.

The division of the book into geological sections plus metaphormosis, metamorpheus and metamorphosis is not very helpful, possibly pretentious. What are we to make of them? Alex begins as a student of geology – the geological periods used as section headings are Triassic (250 to 200 million years ago) and Eocene (56 to 34 million years ago). Possibly something can be read into this. The Triassic was a time of transition after a particularly nasty mass extinction. The Eocene saw the dawn of a new fauna with modern mammals and the rise of grasses; but really, what’s the point? Of course, Morpheus was the Greek god of dreams, so therefore a bit more relevant.

Is the work to any extent autobiographical? His father was a naval military man and his mother was a professional ice skater. What impressions did they make on him?  His early life was spent in North Queensferry, in the shadow of the Forth Road Bridge. Viewed from close quarters, we all agree that the bridge seems massive, oppressive, and the giant girders are unforgettable; even from a distance the raw engineering structure is awesome, iconic, likely to leave a deep impression on practically any young lad. The author was a young man when Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde, otherwise known as Faslane, became home of the Trident nuclear submarines (the Peace Camp was established in 1982): this may have helped to form his left-leaning politics, and sparked an interest in the alienated state of mind and the defence of the state, both themes in the book. After writing the book his life seems to mirror that of the fictional Alex. He collected fast cars, he had a car crash, he had an interrupted personal life. His characters like to rant about the politics of the day just as he did for much of his life (he was an active supporter of Scottish Independence, hater of everything to do with Margaret Thatcher and he campaigned with others to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached following the 2003 invasion of Iraq). I’m sure these things will interest his biographers (he died of cancer in 2013).

His place as a major literary figure in the English speaking world is assured. Perhaps he will be best remembered for his first novel, Wasp Factory or for his science fiction. But The Bridge will challenge, amuse, and intrigue readers for years to come.

28/11/2013 “CANADA” by RICHARD FORD

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Having been promised that a bottle of Lagavulin 16 would be on the table, your sharp-as-a-tack correspondent dragged himself away from Robbie’s, and the sunshine on Leith. Soon I was making a rare appearance at the Monthly Book Group, meeting in misty Morningside.

I was just relaxing into the first slug of the amber nectar when the host said “Canada?” “No” I replied, “never with a malt…” and then the frosty stares made me grab my pen…

Introducing “Canada” (2012) the proposer said that Richard Ford was an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works were the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the short story collection Rock Springs. He was associated with the ‘Dirty Realism’ movement, which includes Raymond Carver (see discussion 26/11/08). He was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, and changed from the study of law to that of creative writing. Like David Lodge, he had combined University posts with his writing career. He had won many prizes, notably the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day.

Ford has described his sense of language as "a source of pleasure in itself—all of its corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things look on the page".

For example, when asked why this novel was called ‘Canada’ he said ‘“Canada” – the word – possessed for me (and still does) what I think of as a plush suppleness. I like the three softened “a” sounds ...  sandwiched among those muted, staccato'd consonants. I like its pleasing, dactylic gallop on my tongue. I like its rather stalwart, civic assertiveness to the foreigner's eye’.

 [Run that one by me again? Dactylic gallop??!! Was he serious, or was he throwing dirt in the critic’s eye? The only answer was surreptitiously to award myself another generous measure of Islay’s finest. Now that’s what I call plush suppleness….]

So why did the proposer choose it? Well ….. he went to Waterstone’s to buy ‘The Secret Race’, and it was a “buy one get a second half price” offer. He had read Ford’s ‘Sportswriter’ and thought it so-so, but saw ‘Canada’ and thought maybe he deserved a second chance.

And then the opening lines had him hooked: “First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened later”.

“Canada” much impressed the Group. The book was unusual in a number of ways. The most obvious was that the author kept telling you what was about to happen before he described the event, as above, thus removing, at least superficially, suspense. Yet surprisingly this technique did not reduce the reader’s interest in what followed. If anything it enhanced it, as we wanted to know the detail of what happened. And the detail of feeling and description was Ford’s forte. He had the ability to conjure up the fabric of a scene so convincingly that you felt you were there. He created the very texture and rhythm of human interaction, the way that people thought as they dealt with each other, the way they spoke, the quirky little images of a scene that embed themselves in the memory.

Other writers – such as George Eliot or Henry James – like to analyse human interaction in similar detail, but they could be quite hard work to read without attention wandering. However, Ford was not like that at all. You always wanted to read more, to find out more. He was very accessible, and if the book was relatively long it could quite accurately be described as a page-turner.

To achieve this was literary craftsmanship of a highest order, and reflected a long apprenticeship. Part of the effect was due to his feeling for language and rhythm. He was very adept in not wasting words, and in using short sentences, paragraphs and chapters if needed to hold the reader’s attention. He did not bombard the reader with descriptive passages, but illuminated his work with the occasional striking image.

The structure of the book was unusual. It was divided into three un-named parts, all narrated in the first person by Dell. The first was set in the mid-to-late 1950s in Great Falls, Montana. It dealt with the build-up to a bank robbery by Dell’s parents – his plausible, self-confident and unsuccessful father and his introverted, literary mother. The second described how Dell was spirited over the border to a pioneer town in rural Canada. His new life, as an odd-job man for a mysterious American fellow-exile, soon led to his unwitting involvement as an accomplice in a ruthless double murder. Soon he was again spirited away, this time to a different part of Canada. The short third part, set in present times, sketched in the intervening years in which Dell had become a lecturer in English literature at a Canadian college. After a fair amount of philosophising about what Dell has learnt from his experiences, and about how he survived them, it dealt with Dell’s visit to his dying twin sister in Minneapolis.

Ford’s characterization was very strong. Dell, the narrator and centre of the book, was characteristic of the child of a military family always on the move - very self-reliant and with no friends other than his twin sister. From the outset he was an outsider, a loner, an observer looking through the glass into life and not actively engaged. Dell was attracted as a child to chess and bees – both zones of order. Dell was very accepting and did not blame his parents for what happened. Nor was he scared. He did not let things affect him much, did not allow himself to go under. Sh*t happened, and at end he emerged. Despite the shocks of the robbery and the murders, it was remarkable what a very orthodox and ordered life Dell had lived.

Dell’s sister Berner, to whom he was very close, was very different – rebellious, rushing into things, chaotic. Three times married, she could only live  “on the margins of conventional life”. Berner was unequivocally against her parents at time of robbery, but took to calling herself by her father’s name – Bev – once he was dead. This could be seen as an attempt to reconcile herself to her past, and to her father. However, we knew little about her life after the robbery, as the twins split up aged fifteen.

Dell’s parents were so well drawn you felt you knew that you would recognize them if you saw them in a shop, or walking down the street. We could identify with the problems faced by demobbed members of the Forces such as his father. We also recognized the man who thought he could get away with every scam. His mother had made two cataclysmic mistakes. She had married an unsuitable man when pregnant, instead of putting the twins up for adoption. She had joined in the robbery when she was already planning to leave her husband. In both cases she had weakly caved in. It was intriguing how the parents  had rationalized the robbery into something less than a crime, and amusing how they bungled its execution.

The figure of Reminger seemed a little less plausible, with something of a Gatsby imitation about him. However, Reminger’s character and motivation gained plausibility when he committed the murders. The half-caste Charley Quarters was a very striking creation, but again not wholly plausible, particularly when he was used as the vehicle to recount Reminger’s past.

Ford’s sense of place was very strong. Fifties USA was convincingly evoked, and Canada was brilliantly realized. This was pioneer Canada – lawless life on the margins, carnal and brutal, disfigured by decay and detritus as ghost villages rotted away. It was as different from the middle-class Montana that Dell knew, and the tourist Canada that we knew, as can be imagined.  It was remarkable how Dell remained positive despite living in this desolate borderland.

Crossing the border from Montana into Canada had a symbolic resonance. It took Dell away from his childhood into his manhood, and America became a foreign country much as childhood does. Yet there were some parallels between the two. On each occasion a father figure detonated change. In Montana it was Dell’s real father. In Canada it was Reminger, another chess-player, who asked Dell to play the role of his son in the confrontation that led to murder. Oddly, both fathers were bombers – his father in the airforce during the war, and Reminger in his activist period.

We could not resist discussing relations between Canada and the USA. These had often been tense, as Americans saw Canada as British North America and unfinished business. The Americans attacked Canada during the1812 war, and continued to make plans to invade Canada until well into the twentieth century.

So what were the main themes of “Canada”?

[Alas the group was not finished, but the Lagavulin was. What a great invention the screw top is, allowing you to sneak into your glass a few fingers of red from your secretly stashed bottle…]

The proposer empathized with the book’s sense that the accidental, the random, was dominant in life, and that there was no such thing as fate. This was the “sh*t happens” school of philosophy. It emerged very clearly from the events in Parts 1 and 2, such as the carcase deal gone wrong, the decision to rob the bank, Dell and Aunt Mildred fleeing the authorities etc. The lives of Dell and Berner would have been very different if it had not been for these events. The book could be seen as illuminating the error of the human impulse first to try to control our ‘fate’, and then retrospectively to try to make sense of our life, and give it some importance.

As the narrator put it on the last page: “I’ve often thought that where I live here, now – in the screwy way of things – was meant to be. But I simply don’t believe in these ideas. I believe in what you see being most of what there is, as I’ve taught my students, and that life is passed along to us empty.” However, the narrator was not entirely consistent, as when he said movingly of his father when he turned to crime: “I’ve thought that a long-suppressed potential in him had suddenly worked itself into visibility on his face. He was becoming who he was and who he was always supposed to be. He’d simply had to wear down the other layers to find out who he was.” But then artists did not have to be consistent.

Related to this, Ford seemed to believe that good and evil are not opposing forces but rather a matter of accident. “It’s best to see our life as and the activities that ended it, as two sides of one thing that have to be held in the mind simultaneously.... the side that was normal and the side that was disastrous” and  “how close evil is to the normal goings-on that have nothing to do with evil.” This might be a debatable position, but the novel certainly brought out powerfully the sense that committing a crime was an easy thing to do, that it was easy to fall through the ice.

Part 3 was the only part to attract some adverse comment. One member indeed felt that the book would have been better without it. Parts 1 and 2 were written in the tone and language of a 15 year old telling the story, not the language of someone reflecting in his sixties. A much older man could never have remembered all the detail with which Dell was writing. Perhaps Part 3 had been an afterthought? There was a hint or two in the acknowledgements that it had proved difficult to finish the book.

Another felt that the narrator was becoming too autobiographical in tone in Part 3. Ford’s childhood had been disrupted by his father’s heart attack, and he had spent much time thereafter with his grandfather, a hotel owner and retired prize-fighter. Had the novelist achieved sufficient distance from his creation?

Another felt that all the home-spun philosophizing in Part 3 was excessive. The author had forgotten the principle of “show not tell”. And it was ill judged to attempt to do his own literary criticism, in the clumsy guise of describing how his literature students reacted to his life story. But just as this reader was becoming irked, the author switched back to story-telling mode as he told the story of Dell crossing the border to meet his dying sister. And immediately the reader was hooked again, as Ford effortlessly conjured up the meeting, with all the little nuances of dialogue that reveal feelings, and all the little details of the scene that snag in the memory. And, for him, this got much closer to felt life than did Ford the philosopher. It brought back what an exceptional writer Ford was.

One member pointed out that Dell’s later life was certainly consistent with what had gone before. He had married an accountant, and had no children. You could say he had taken an “intellectual diazepam” to the strife of life. He had become a teacher, an observer and analyzer of life.

And Part 3 was also used to explore our urge to make sense of what has happened in our lives, to post-rationalize events, to think we have been in control. This urge might be self-deceiving, but was also very strong: “normal life was what I was trying to preserve for myself. Through all these memorable events ... - it is all of a piece, like a musical score with movements, or a puzzle, wherein I am seeking to restore and maintain my life in a whole and acceptable state, regardless of the frontiers I’ve crossed. I know it’s only me that makes those connections. But to try not to make them is to commit yourself to the waves that toss you and dash you against the rocks of despair.....”

The group then started debating how realistic it was that Dell would have sought so little contact with his twin in later life, or that his father would have made no effort to contact his children after coming out of prison. And should Reminger not have killed Dell too as the witness? Hold on, these were not real people and you had to give the author some artistic leeway…..

Basta! Yours truly put the top on the pen, pushed the now mysteriously empty bottle of red under the table, and lurched out into the murky November evening. Up ahead I could see yellow lights still shining in the windows of Bennets. Yes! I upped my pace, to a dactylic gallop….