Books read this week: Les Liasons Dangereuses 7/10 (Choderlos de Laclos)
There are some societies that are so dysfunctional and damaging to their members, so fundamentally broken, that any accurate depiction of that society must necessarily condemn it; the stifling stupidity of the Russian provincial aristocracy in Gogol's Dead Souls is one such, and the portrait of the twisted world occupied by aristocrats of the French ancien regime given by Laclos' Les Liasons Dangereuses is another.
We have here in the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont some of the most interesting, entertaining and downright evil villains in all of fiction; master manipulators, playing games with the lives and livelihoods of others not for profit, but just because they're bored, and society denies them any other outlet for their talents. The epistolary framing of the novel makes discerning the characters underlying motivations difficult; every letter is written is elicit a response, and all of the characters are lying, if only to themselves. It is an interesting question how far Merteuil has herself become caught up in her own web; Valmont's entanglement is much clearer. The first time I read the book, I thought that her destruction of Valmont was motivated by love; she loves Valmont, and she can't bear to see him in love with anyone else, but she's also too damaged to let him in. This time, I'm less sure of that interpretation; I felt that she destroyed Valmont just for kicks.
We should not forget that they are both, Valmont and Merteuil, very damaged people; the perfect example of what happens when intelligent, motivated people are denied any outlet for their talents. I have always felt Valmont to be somewhat more sympathetic than Merteuil; he does, at least, have a moment of redemption at the end. But perhaps that is a reaction less to their relative merits, and more to social conditioning (or, as my feminist friends would say, the patriarchy); we are conditioned to expect women to be care givers; this makes the truly selfish, amoral manipulator a more disturbing figure if they are female. So when, in an early letter, Merteuil says to Valmont "why don't you just rape her", it is both disturbing and evil; the same sentiment from a male author I would find just evil. In much the same way, in Vanity Fair Becky Sharp's total indifference to her children appears monstrous; we would be far more forgiving of a neglectful father.
It is also interesting that the ordinary people of France make only one appearance in these pages; when Valmont decides that he must appear virtuous before the Presidente de Tourvel, he seeks out a local family about to be evicted for lack of a trifling sum and pays their debts; it is the only time we see any of the characters pay even a little attention to the world outside their little games.
Even though this book is the best argument for storming the Bastille ever written, one can't help but feel a little sorry for the characters; it is not, fundmentally, their fault that they are in the positions they have been placed in; afterall, the Marquis de Sade became a good revolutionary. That said, compared with Valmont and Meteuil, Sade was a saint; a very, very disturbing saint, but a saint nevertheless.
My edition is an old Penguin classics translation from the early 60s by PWK Stone; as I've said before, I do really rate the Penguin translations.
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
Reavers
Books read this week: The Steel Bonnets (George MacDonald Fraser) 7/10
It's been a busy week, so this'll be a fairly short post. The Steel Bonnets is subtitled "The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers", and is a fairly comprehensive history of the border between Scotland and England during the 16th Century. It's a fascinating period, which I didn't know much about, when half the population of the border counties supported itself by robbing the other half. It was a romantic period, with something of the feel of the Wild West, populated by larger than life ruffians with names like Jock O' The Side, Edom O Gordon and Kinmont Willie, with very little real law except the blood feud.
As Fraser makes very clear, it wasn't a particularly nice place to live, and the reavers (alternate spelling: reivers. The latter is less likely to get confused with Firefly, which is why I haven't used it.) were not particularly nice people. Nevertheless, there is, I think, a certain romantic attraction to going your own way, without society to hold you down, and stories of the border speak to that.
The most interesting thing about the book for me, apart from finding out about the real individuals behind some of the ballads which I am fond of, was the insight into Scottish history; I've picked up bits and pieces here and there from relatives, and when it intersects with English history (Bannockburn, Culloden, Towton), but I've never really made a proper study of it - an oversight I intend to rectify. The version of history given in the Steel Bonnets justifies the old joke that the Scots spend their history engages in a mortal struggle with their arch-enemies - the Scots. There's a bewildering chaotic swirl of changing allegiances, rising and falling fortunes and foreign intervention. I was, for example, quite unaware the Henry VIII (the poster boy for psychotic manchild) had decided that the best way to induce Mary Queen of Scots to marry the future Edward VI was to overrun her kingdom with fire and the sword. Not, given Henry's personality, that it was particularly surprising, but it's something that tends to get overlooked in the Anglo-centric histories I tend to read.
It's been a busy week, so this'll be a fairly short post. The Steel Bonnets is subtitled "The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers", and is a fairly comprehensive history of the border between Scotland and England during the 16th Century. It's a fascinating period, which I didn't know much about, when half the population of the border counties supported itself by robbing the other half. It was a romantic period, with something of the feel of the Wild West, populated by larger than life ruffians with names like Jock O' The Side, Edom O Gordon and Kinmont Willie, with very little real law except the blood feud.
As Fraser makes very clear, it wasn't a particularly nice place to live, and the reavers (alternate spelling: reivers. The latter is less likely to get confused with Firefly, which is why I haven't used it.) were not particularly nice people. Nevertheless, there is, I think, a certain romantic attraction to going your own way, without society to hold you down, and stories of the border speak to that.
The most interesting thing about the book for me, apart from finding out about the real individuals behind some of the ballads which I am fond of, was the insight into Scottish history; I've picked up bits and pieces here and there from relatives, and when it intersects with English history (Bannockburn, Culloden, Towton), but I've never really made a proper study of it - an oversight I intend to rectify. The version of history given in the Steel Bonnets justifies the old joke that the Scots spend their history engages in a mortal struggle with their arch-enemies - the Scots. There's a bewildering chaotic swirl of changing allegiances, rising and falling fortunes and foreign intervention. I was, for example, quite unaware the Henry VIII (the poster boy for psychotic manchild) had decided that the best way to induce Mary Queen of Scots to marry the future Edward VI was to overrun her kingdom with fire and the sword. Not, given Henry's personality, that it was particularly surprising, but it's something that tends to get overlooked in the Anglo-centric histories I tend to read.
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Romans and Pictsies
Books read this week: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I (Edward Gibbon) 7/10, A Hat Full Of Sky (Terry Pratchett) 7/10
This week I've been making my way through the first volume of Gibbon's phenomenal Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is an amazingly well researched, and often extremely funny journey from the age of the Antonines (which Gibbon identifies as the happiest period of human history, ever) to Constantine the Great. It's basically the period when the Romans collectively sat back, after conquering the known world, and said "fuck it. Let's go on a bender." We have a bewildering succession of emperors, some lasting only weeks, or even days, before being bumped off by their soldiers/concubines/passers-by. It's a long list of the sad (the Gordians), the mad (Elagbalus) and the bad (Caracalla).
It is fascinating to me how high the heights of civilisation were scaled under the Romans, before collapsing back into darkness - I was reading a book by Churchill the other week, where he argued that at the time of writing (1956) the average inhabitant of England was less comfortable that his ancestors under the Romans. I think that's highly debatable, but it's certainly only in the last century that the general level of human comfort has approached that obtained under the Roman empire at it's height. It's a sobering thought (for me at least), and one that dispels any lingering faith one might have in the inevitability of human progress.
The best thing about Gibbon is, of course, the footnotes; a treasure trove where he hides all his most cutting and entertaining comments; unfortunately I haven't sufficient language skills to understand the best bits - writing as he was in the 18th Century, and dealing with a high level of censorship (this volume was banned in several countries) and enlightenment views of propriety most of the more salacious footnotes read something like "He had a most unusual arrangement with the virgins of Antioch: <GREEK>" .
It was however the chapters on Christianity which got Gibbon into trouble; basically because he applied the same standards of historical evidence to the claims of the church as he would to any other institution, which leads to thing like Gibbon pointing out that it is strange that if there was darkness at noon when Christ was crucified, that this is mentioned by none of the Roman authors of the time who collected information about solar and lunar eclipses and other strange phenomena. Gibbon also wonders why it is that Bernard of Clairvaux discusses at length in his letters the miracles of other saints, but never discusses his own. It's fairly innocuous by today's standards (and also bloody obvious), but at the time it caused a serious stir - mainly because Gibbon is just too good a historian to accept "God did it" as an explanation.
The fundamental problem Gibbon had was that he was a rational, sensible man, and so he's incapable of understanding the mad fanaticism which motivated the early Christians to demand martyrdom - and they did demand it. We have, for example, the Emperor Hadrian's system where there were severe penalties for being a Christian, but also severe penalties for accusing someone of being a Christian - basically amounting to a classical system of "Don't ask, don't tell." Unfortunately, this broke down when Christians started to march into law courts, denounce themselves as Christians and demand that they be punish with the full rigour of the law. One gets the feeling that Gibbon is very much on the side of the exasperated Roman magistrates, one of whom is quoted as saying "If you're all so desperate to kill yourselves, why don't you just jump off a bridge and save me the paperwork?". The mindset that drives someone to seek martyrdom is as alien to Gibbon as the literal interpretation of Matthew 19:12 that led Origon to self-castration (the account of which here is accompanied by a footnote that basically says "What the fuck did you just do? It's supposed to be allegorical, all-e-gor-i-cal, for fuck's sake.", in Gibbon's very proper 18th Century English, of course).
My second book this week was Pratchett's A Hat Full of Sky, the second book in his Tiffany Aching sequence and the sequel to the Wee Free Men. It's a very good read, as Pratchett always is, although I thought it lacked some of the sparkle of the Wee Free Men - but maybe that's just my mood; sometimes I'm in a Pratchett mood, and sometimes I'm not.
This week I've been making my way through the first volume of Gibbon's phenomenal Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is an amazingly well researched, and often extremely funny journey from the age of the Antonines (which Gibbon identifies as the happiest period of human history, ever) to Constantine the Great. It's basically the period when the Romans collectively sat back, after conquering the known world, and said "fuck it. Let's go on a bender." We have a bewildering succession of emperors, some lasting only weeks, or even days, before being bumped off by their soldiers/concubines/passers-by. It's a long list of the sad (the Gordians), the mad (Elagbalus) and the bad (Caracalla).
It is fascinating to me how high the heights of civilisation were scaled under the Romans, before collapsing back into darkness - I was reading a book by Churchill the other week, where he argued that at the time of writing (1956) the average inhabitant of England was less comfortable that his ancestors under the Romans. I think that's highly debatable, but it's certainly only in the last century that the general level of human comfort has approached that obtained under the Roman empire at it's height. It's a sobering thought (for me at least), and one that dispels any lingering faith one might have in the inevitability of human progress.
The best thing about Gibbon is, of course, the footnotes; a treasure trove where he hides all his most cutting and entertaining comments; unfortunately I haven't sufficient language skills to understand the best bits - writing as he was in the 18th Century, and dealing with a high level of censorship (this volume was banned in several countries) and enlightenment views of propriety most of the more salacious footnotes read something like "He had a most unusual arrangement with the virgins of Antioch: <GREEK>" .
It was however the chapters on Christianity which got Gibbon into trouble; basically because he applied the same standards of historical evidence to the claims of the church as he would to any other institution, which leads to thing like Gibbon pointing out that it is strange that if there was darkness at noon when Christ was crucified, that this is mentioned by none of the Roman authors of the time who collected information about solar and lunar eclipses and other strange phenomena. Gibbon also wonders why it is that Bernard of Clairvaux discusses at length in his letters the miracles of other saints, but never discusses his own. It's fairly innocuous by today's standards (and also bloody obvious), but at the time it caused a serious stir - mainly because Gibbon is just too good a historian to accept "God did it" as an explanation.
The fundamental problem Gibbon had was that he was a rational, sensible man, and so he's incapable of understanding the mad fanaticism which motivated the early Christians to demand martyrdom - and they did demand it. We have, for example, the Emperor Hadrian's system where there were severe penalties for being a Christian, but also severe penalties for accusing someone of being a Christian - basically amounting to a classical system of "Don't ask, don't tell." Unfortunately, this broke down when Christians started to march into law courts, denounce themselves as Christians and demand that they be punish with the full rigour of the law. One gets the feeling that Gibbon is very much on the side of the exasperated Roman magistrates, one of whom is quoted as saying "If you're all so desperate to kill yourselves, why don't you just jump off a bridge and save me the paperwork?". The mindset that drives someone to seek martyrdom is as alien to Gibbon as the literal interpretation of Matthew 19:12 that led Origon to self-castration (the account of which here is accompanied by a footnote that basically says "What the fuck did you just do? It's supposed to be allegorical, all-e-gor-i-cal, for fuck's sake.", in Gibbon's very proper 18th Century English, of course).
My second book this week was Pratchett's A Hat Full of Sky, the second book in his Tiffany Aching sequence and the sequel to the Wee Free Men. It's a very good read, as Pratchett always is, although I thought it lacked some of the sparkle of the Wee Free Men - but maybe that's just my mood; sometimes I'm in a Pratchett mood, and sometimes I'm not.
Monday, 9 May 2011
Mad Monks and Pictsies
Books read this week: The Romanovs (W Bruce Lincoln) 8/10, The Wee Free Men (Terry Pratchett) 8/10
Peter the Great was a very odd-looking bloke. The picture of him in Lincoln's The Romanovs looks very much like a small dog that has eaten something unpleasant. Not at all the image I had in my mind of the heroically proportioned giant who dragged Russia kicking and screaming into the 18th Century. Then again, with the Romanovs first impressions always seem to be deceiving; this was, after all, the dynasty that gave us the Potemkin village.
The first thing to note about the Romanovs, as a family, was that they were all, without exception, hideously nasty evil people. Now, I don't believe in cursed bloodlines, and I come down hard on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate, and, it has to be said, very few of the Romanov monarchs had happy childhoods; still it is surprising that a dynasty could sit on the throne of Russia for 300+ years, and not produce one single decent human being. To be sure, there are some impressive ones, and some entertaining ones, and more than a few terrifying ones - but not a single one that makes you think "they were a good person, trying to do their best". Just one example; we are told that Tsar Mikhail is known as "Mikhail the Good", and on the same page we are informed that he had ten thousand peasants impaled in the week of his coronation because they asked for lower taxes. We have Tsarina Elizabeth, forcing her fool to spend the night in a palace carved from ice, so that he froze to death. We have Catherine the Great, murdering her (it has to be admitted, utterly repulsive) husband to seize the throne. The main distinction one can draw between the very evil Romanovs and the just a little evil is this; the less evil ones would happily kill thousands of innocent people because it was politically expedient. The more evil ones would do it just for fun.
I think there is an interesting comparision to be made between Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible (it is to be remembered that Ivan's title, "Grozny" translates both as "terrible" and "great"). Both monarchs had disrupted, unhappy and dangerous childhoods, and both were determined to revolutionise Russian society, using whatever (often extremely bloody) means that had at their disposal. Both engaged in extremely formal, extremely obscene mockeries of Orthodox religious ritual. And both murdered their first-born sons; Ivan in a fit of rage (immortalised in Repin's famous, and utterly harrowing painting), and Peter after luring him back to Russia with a false safe conduct, and having had him tortured by his secret police. Both left the country in total disarray by their failure to select a competent successor.
And, of course, both were utterly, utterly mad. Ivan's madness took a more obvious form; fits of rage, violence, the Oprichniki. Peter's was more effective; there must have been a conversation he had which went "I'm going to build a new capital city" "That's a bit mad." "In a swamp." "That's very mad." "That belongs to Finnland." "What have you been smoking?"
A sizable chunk of the book is dedicated to the evolution of St Petersburg - which was a Romanov city, through and through. This is a very different approach to the mass biography than Norwich's book on the Popes - the focus here is on the entire Russian state, rather than keeping a laser like focus on the subjects of the biography. Which is not to say there isn't a lot of detail on the individuals here; there's plenty on how Tsarina Elizabeth made her entire court dress in drag, and the countess who was employed by Catherine the Great to test drive potential lovers*.
The book is divided into four parts; the first three, dealing with the period up to 1894, are deeply depressing reading as they basically detail how successful the Romanovs were with two stage policy which they applied to every problem; i) Oppress the peasants ii) If the problem has not resolved itself, repeat step (i).
And then in Part IV we get to Nicholas II. It has been said the revolution is the kicking in of a rotten door. Never has this been more true than Nicholas II's Russia. One of his ministers even said of the Romanov state "Don't you see - the slightest warm breath of life will cause the entire edifice to rot away." Nicholas was a vicious, weak and stupid man. Deeply antisemitic with a burning hatred of democracy. So far, par for the course in his family. He was also massively incompetent. This is what made the crucial difference; he is, as far as I know, the only monarch in history to have managed not one but two Bloody Sundays in his reign. There is dark comedy to be had in the way he had to be protected from his own subjects by a fleet of battleships (yes, actual battleships) and his choosing as minister of the interior a syphilitic madman who used a oujie board to commune with the ghost of Rasputin. Also "The Dogger Bank Incident"**.
This part of the book also has some individuals one can actually admire; the worker scribbling a poignant last letter to his wife and child before joining the peaceful march that turned into the second Bloody Sunday, the female revolutionary smuggling hand grenades to besieged workers in Moscow, and the mad heroics of the Social Revolutionary Combat Detachment.
I would love to read more about the Combat Detachment; the book notes in passing that whilst it took the People's Will three months and a lot of dumb luck to assassinate Alexander II, and that he was their only success, only 8% of the targets of the Combat Detachment escaped unharmed. I would really like to know why it was that they were so successful.
There is a certain about of pathos in the final months of Nicholas II and his family; it could scarcely be otherwise. And afterall, the children did nothing to deserve their fate. Then again, neither did the tens of thousands of peasant children who died because of Nicholas II's policies, the unarmed demonstrators gunned down on his orders or the Jews killed in pogroms he authorised.
My second book this week was rather more cheerful - Pratchett's The Wee Free Men which deals with Tiffany Aching, a nine year old Witch-in-training and the Nac Mac Feegle, a band of six-inch tall blue "Pictsies" ("their swords glow blue in the presence of lawyers"). It is classic Pratchett - easy to read, very funny and also quite thought provoking. It is part of his series of Discworld books for children, so the plot is a little simpler than the mainstream Discworld novels, and as a result I ripped through it even faster than usual, but that's not really a problem; Pratchett writes books that really benefit from re-reading. I've been reading Jingo for fourteen years now, and I still turn up jokes I missed the first few dozen times I read the book.
The main antagonist of the Wee Free Men is the Elf Queen, who is one of my favourite Pratchett villains. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett have really rejuvenated the idea that elves and fairies are wild, scary things - not cuddly tinkerbells with sparkly wings. It is a theme I like - I've always been partial to the folktales and folk songs where elves steal people away, and claw out the eyes of those who could see them. We also have here the traditional fairy vulnerability to iron. Iron, salt and church bells traditionally ward off th Fair Folk; all, of course, are the products of civilisation. Salt needs mines, or pens to evaporate sea water. Iron needs blast furnaces and mines and smiths. Church bells need architects and smelters and a community. All three represent humanity's taming of the wild things in the world, which is why they ward away elves, the personification of the human fear of the wilderness.
*Sounds like quite a fun job really.
** What is more embarrassing: that the Russian Baltic Fleet mistook the Dogger Bank fishing fleet for a flotilla of Japanese torpedo boats and opened fire, or that the combined fire of the entire Baltic Fleet managed to sink only one fishing boat?
Peter the Great was a very odd-looking bloke. The picture of him in Lincoln's The Romanovs looks very much like a small dog that has eaten something unpleasant. Not at all the image I had in my mind of the heroically proportioned giant who dragged Russia kicking and screaming into the 18th Century. Then again, with the Romanovs first impressions always seem to be deceiving; this was, after all, the dynasty that gave us the Potemkin village.
The first thing to note about the Romanovs, as a family, was that they were all, without exception, hideously nasty evil people. Now, I don't believe in cursed bloodlines, and I come down hard on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate, and, it has to be said, very few of the Romanov monarchs had happy childhoods; still it is surprising that a dynasty could sit on the throne of Russia for 300+ years, and not produce one single decent human being. To be sure, there are some impressive ones, and some entertaining ones, and more than a few terrifying ones - but not a single one that makes you think "they were a good person, trying to do their best". Just one example; we are told that Tsar Mikhail is known as "Mikhail the Good", and on the same page we are informed that he had ten thousand peasants impaled in the week of his coronation because they asked for lower taxes. We have Tsarina Elizabeth, forcing her fool to spend the night in a palace carved from ice, so that he froze to death. We have Catherine the Great, murdering her (it has to be admitted, utterly repulsive) husband to seize the throne. The main distinction one can draw between the very evil Romanovs and the just a little evil is this; the less evil ones would happily kill thousands of innocent people because it was politically expedient. The more evil ones would do it just for fun.
I think there is an interesting comparision to be made between Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible (it is to be remembered that Ivan's title, "Grozny" translates both as "terrible" and "great"). Both monarchs had disrupted, unhappy and dangerous childhoods, and both were determined to revolutionise Russian society, using whatever (often extremely bloody) means that had at their disposal. Both engaged in extremely formal, extremely obscene mockeries of Orthodox religious ritual. And both murdered their first-born sons; Ivan in a fit of rage (immortalised in Repin's famous, and utterly harrowing painting), and Peter after luring him back to Russia with a false safe conduct, and having had him tortured by his secret police. Both left the country in total disarray by their failure to select a competent successor.
And, of course, both were utterly, utterly mad. Ivan's madness took a more obvious form; fits of rage, violence, the Oprichniki. Peter's was more effective; there must have been a conversation he had which went "I'm going to build a new capital city" "That's a bit mad." "In a swamp." "That's very mad." "That belongs to Finnland." "What have you been smoking?"
A sizable chunk of the book is dedicated to the evolution of St Petersburg - which was a Romanov city, through and through. This is a very different approach to the mass biography than Norwich's book on the Popes - the focus here is on the entire Russian state, rather than keeping a laser like focus on the subjects of the biography. Which is not to say there isn't a lot of detail on the individuals here; there's plenty on how Tsarina Elizabeth made her entire court dress in drag, and the countess who was employed by Catherine the Great to test drive potential lovers*.
The book is divided into four parts; the first three, dealing with the period up to 1894, are deeply depressing reading as they basically detail how successful the Romanovs were with two stage policy which they applied to every problem; i) Oppress the peasants ii) If the problem has not resolved itself, repeat step (i).
And then in Part IV we get to Nicholas II. It has been said the revolution is the kicking in of a rotten door. Never has this been more true than Nicholas II's Russia. One of his ministers even said of the Romanov state "Don't you see - the slightest warm breath of life will cause the entire edifice to rot away." Nicholas was a vicious, weak and stupid man. Deeply antisemitic with a burning hatred of democracy. So far, par for the course in his family. He was also massively incompetent. This is what made the crucial difference; he is, as far as I know, the only monarch in history to have managed not one but two Bloody Sundays in his reign. There is dark comedy to be had in the way he had to be protected from his own subjects by a fleet of battleships (yes, actual battleships) and his choosing as minister of the interior a syphilitic madman who used a oujie board to commune with the ghost of Rasputin. Also "The Dogger Bank Incident"**.
This part of the book also has some individuals one can actually admire; the worker scribbling a poignant last letter to his wife and child before joining the peaceful march that turned into the second Bloody Sunday, the female revolutionary smuggling hand grenades to besieged workers in Moscow, and the mad heroics of the Social Revolutionary Combat Detachment.
I would love to read more about the Combat Detachment; the book notes in passing that whilst it took the People's Will three months and a lot of dumb luck to assassinate Alexander II, and that he was their only success, only 8% of the targets of the Combat Detachment escaped unharmed. I would really like to know why it was that they were so successful.
There is a certain about of pathos in the final months of Nicholas II and his family; it could scarcely be otherwise. And afterall, the children did nothing to deserve their fate. Then again, neither did the tens of thousands of peasant children who died because of Nicholas II's policies, the unarmed demonstrators gunned down on his orders or the Jews killed in pogroms he authorised.
My second book this week was rather more cheerful - Pratchett's The Wee Free Men which deals with Tiffany Aching, a nine year old Witch-in-training and the Nac Mac Feegle, a band of six-inch tall blue "Pictsies" ("their swords glow blue in the presence of lawyers"). It is classic Pratchett - easy to read, very funny and also quite thought provoking. It is part of his series of Discworld books for children, so the plot is a little simpler than the mainstream Discworld novels, and as a result I ripped through it even faster than usual, but that's not really a problem; Pratchett writes books that really benefit from re-reading. I've been reading Jingo for fourteen years now, and I still turn up jokes I missed the first few dozen times I read the book.
The main antagonist of the Wee Free Men is the Elf Queen, who is one of my favourite Pratchett villains. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett have really rejuvenated the idea that elves and fairies are wild, scary things - not cuddly tinkerbells with sparkly wings. It is a theme I like - I've always been partial to the folktales and folk songs where elves steal people away, and claw out the eyes of those who could see them. We also have here the traditional fairy vulnerability to iron. Iron, salt and church bells traditionally ward off th Fair Folk; all, of course, are the products of civilisation. Salt needs mines, or pens to evaporate sea water. Iron needs blast furnaces and mines and smiths. Church bells need architects and smelters and a community. All three represent humanity's taming of the wild things in the world, which is why they ward away elves, the personification of the human fear of the wilderness.
*Sounds like quite a fun job really.
** What is more embarrassing: that the Russian Baltic Fleet mistook the Dogger Bank fishing fleet for a flotilla of Japanese torpedo boats and opened fire, or that the combined fire of the entire Baltic Fleet managed to sink only one fishing boat?
Tuesday, 3 May 2011
American Exceptionalism
Books read this week: Clear and Present Danger (Tom Clancy) 4/10
The UK does not have a written constitution, and I often find when consuming American media, such as Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, that as a result my perspective on political questions is very different from what the author assumes it will be; my first instinct when confronted with a policy is not to ask "is it constitutional?" but rather "is it right?". There is a very clear (to the author, at any rate) distinction made within this book between secretly sending soldiers to murder foreign nationals in another country without full congressional approval (BAD!) and secretly sending soldiers to murder foreign nationals in another country with congressional approval (GOOD!). Really, I'm hard pressed to see the difference.
Of course, when reading Clancy's books one either needs one's mental filters up or to assume that the books are set in some kind of alternate reality where, for example, Fidel Castro is actually Satan himself, and the IRA is composed entirely of doctrinaire Maoists who receive all their funding from Moscow. I find the best way to deal with it is, just like when watching 24, to say that there are two teams, both of which are made up of nasty, evil people, but, for the sake of having someone to root for, we're going to pick one and cheer them on; much like I might pick a side when reading about the Punic wars, just for fun*. As long as one can make those adjustments, there's a halfway decent page turner there.
The most interesting thing, for me, about this book (and Clancy's other work) is the lack of perspective; the total inability to understand why the rules (or in fact any rules) should apply to American foreign policy. Thus the huge amount of space in this book devoted to whether the President's actions contravene US law, but no attention at all is paid to the contempt with which he is treating international law (or, in fact, elementary human decency).
*Hannibal FTW!
The UK does not have a written constitution, and I often find when consuming American media, such as Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, that as a result my perspective on political questions is very different from what the author assumes it will be; my first instinct when confronted with a policy is not to ask "is it constitutional?" but rather "is it right?". There is a very clear (to the author, at any rate) distinction made within this book between secretly sending soldiers to murder foreign nationals in another country without full congressional approval (BAD!) and secretly sending soldiers to murder foreign nationals in another country with congressional approval (GOOD!). Really, I'm hard pressed to see the difference.
Of course, when reading Clancy's books one either needs one's mental filters up or to assume that the books are set in some kind of alternate reality where, for example, Fidel Castro is actually Satan himself, and the IRA is composed entirely of doctrinaire Maoists who receive all their funding from Moscow. I find the best way to deal with it is, just like when watching 24, to say that there are two teams, both of which are made up of nasty, evil people, but, for the sake of having someone to root for, we're going to pick one and cheer them on; much like I might pick a side when reading about the Punic wars, just for fun*. As long as one can make those adjustments, there's a halfway decent page turner there.
The most interesting thing, for me, about this book (and Clancy's other work) is the lack of perspective; the total inability to understand why the rules (or in fact any rules) should apply to American foreign policy. Thus the huge amount of space in this book devoted to whether the President's actions contravene US law, but no attention at all is paid to the contempt with which he is treating international law (or, in fact, elementary human decency).
*Hannibal FTW!
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