Books read this week: The Strange Death of Liberal England 9/10 (George Dangerfield)
Political parties rarely die except by their own hand. Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England is the story of the four tumultuous years between 1910 and 1914 when the old Liberal party discovered that it had to change, or to die - and elected to die. I say story rather than history because The Strange Death of Liberal England really reads more like a novel in which Dangerfield is trying to capture the feeling of an age and I think he succeeds very well. Of course, I have no first hand knowledge of pre-war England, and it lies at that grey intersection between human memory and proper history: I have met and spoken with people who were alive then , but I have much less of a feel for the time than I do of even the 1920s. Partly this is because of the immense shadow the Great War casts back in time, rendering the political arguments of the preceding years petty and insignificant. The overarching feeling one gets is of a pot about to boil over, a society bubbling and seething with tensions almost to the point of explosion, before plunging itself into the icy waters of war. Dangerfield's digression on the Great German Airship Panic - a flurry of what would be UFO sightings today - seems to sum up the character of the time perfectly.
The Strange Death of Liberal England is a truly superb book: by turns witty, scathing and tragic, and a perfect portrait of the death of the Victorian Respectable middle class which was the Liberal party. Dangerfield divides that death into three acts: the Tories' Rebellion (more properly the Ulster Rebellion), the Women's Rebellion and the Worker's Rebellion. In all three cases one gets the feeling that things were spinning wildly beyond the government's control, and yet Mr Asquith sat serenely in Downing Street while the country sped towards catastrophe. And yet the Liberal Party was willing to countenance a surprising amount of brutality (for a 'Liberal' party): the descriptions of force-feeding of suffragettes are very disturbing, and the passage George Lansbury's desperate attempts to get the government to stop (attempts which culminated in Lansbury being expelled from parliament and losing his seat in a by-election) are very moving. There is also some very black humour to be had: "What was to be done? Since Women's Suffrage was not a party question, the honour of the whole House seemed to be involved. Some members maintained that the women should be left to die; Lord Robert Cecil thought that deportation might answer: only Mr Keir Hardie suggested, as a logical solution, that women should be given the vote."
Fundamentally, the Liberal Party suffered from two political maladies which combined to kill it: a belief that politics was a game and not a matter of life and death and a chronic inability to keep the promises it had made. The second problem to a certain extent flowed from the first: the Liberals did not realise how important change was to the Irish, to the workers, to women, and so they though they could play their little games and people would accept the status quo. They were wrong and it is the strange persistence of these errors which has ensured that the Liberal party has never won a general election since the introduction of universal suffrage. It is perfectly encapsulated in an anecdote given in the Strange Death of Liberal England: Asquith, when Home Secretary, gave orders for troops to fire on striking workers. When confronted with a heckler who condemned him for "those men you murdered in 1892" Asquith's reply was "You are quite wrong - I murdered them in 1893". How witty! How urbane! How utterly morally bankrupt!
I have often thought the failings of the 19th Century Liberal party can be encapsulated in their approach to the problems raised by prostitution. A truly laissez-faire approach would be to do nothing. A social democratic approach would be to commission reports to look into the problem, to set up organisations to help the communities involved and to strengthen the welfare net so no one is forced into prostitution. The Liberal approach? The octogenarian prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, personally wandering the streets of Soho at night, preaching the Gospel to "Fallen Women".
The Strange Death of Liberal England also left me with a renewed respect for Sylvia Pankhurst, Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, and a huge amount of admiration for George Askwith (a totally different, and far more interesting figure than Asquith the Prime Minister), the government's chief (indeed, apparently only) labour negotiator who seems to spent most of 1911 and 1912 dashing around the country patching up agreements between striking workers and their employers. It is just unfortunate for him that pretty much everyone higher up in the government (with the partial exception of Lloyd George, and the full exception of Winston Churchill) was so utterly useless.
Monday, 31 October 2011
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come
Books read this week: The Cold Commands 8/10 (Richard Morgan), Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti 7/10
The Cold Commands is the latest entry in Morgan's fantasy trilogy, and follows on directly from The Steel Remains. It's not quite a good as his debut, Altered Carbon, but as this is Richard Morgan we're talking about, that's a bit like saying A Midsummer Night's Dream isn't as good as Julius Caesar: I think Altered Carbon is the best science fiction novel, if not the best novel full stop, of the last decade.
It may be that I like The Cold Commands less than Altered Carbon because I like science fiction more than fantasy: not that I don't read both (as regular readers will know) but I generally find I only enjoy very good fantasy, whilst I can get a quite a lot of entertainment out of even quite bad sci-fi (David Weber, I'm looking at everything you've ever written). Partly this is because science fiction is, by it's very nature, a forward looking genre (apart, of course, for the small but significant Frankenstein inspired Things Man Was Not Meant To Know stories, like most of Michael Crichton's stuff), whilst fantasy tends to be backward looking at best, and positively reactionary at worst. Some of this can be put down to Tolkien's immense influence on the genre - science fiction doesn't really have a similar colossus in it's early history (HG Wells is influential, but you have the equally influential Jules Verne at the same time, whilst Tolkien doesn't really have any peers). I like the Lord of the Rings as a book, but the wholesale contempt for the modern world is a little hard to take, even if you ignore the comically unsubtle attacks on the Attlee government in the Scouring of the Shire. Why do we never hear about how Saruman's plumbing has eradicate dysentary in Isengard?
However, I think a larger contributing factor is the escapism many fantasy fans are looking for: they want to imagine that they are barbarian heroes, or princesses, and don't want to be reminded that for every princess there are a thousand peasants grubbing around in the mud. It's a bit like Marie Antoniette playing at being a shepherdess - it's the fantasy of a bucolic rural idyll without the inconvenience of actually having to be a subsistence farmer. Because the truth is that life in a European* pre-industrial agrarian society is shit. It's shit if you're the king. It's even more shit if you're not. It's yet more shit if you're a woman, or if you're gay. If you're both, it's even more shit than that. And if you're a member of a religious or ethnic minority, well.... you get the idea. Now, we can argue about why that is, we can argue about whether it's an inevitable consequence of the religion, or the climate, of the shape of society or the type of agriculture but the fundamental fact remains that the life expectancy was thirty if you didn't happen to live through a historically important and interesting famine or plague: there's a reason why all the characters in fairy tales have stepmothers. And it's fundamentally dishonest to write about a medieval European society (which is what most fantasy is about) and ignore that. To his credit, this is one of Martin's main targets in the Song of Ice and Fire (the other is the whole concept of hereditary rule, but that's something for another day), but even he is so far tied into the typical fantasy world view that he can't give us a viewpoint character outside of the aristocracy. I've even seen complaints that basically boil down to: how dare the Song of Ice and Fire dispel my cosy medieval fantasy with it's inconvenient use of actual history and real facts.
This is why I enjoyed the Cold Commands so much: it takes a large number of irritating fantasy conventions and drop kicks them out of the window. We have three protagonists: two are gay, and one is also a black woman (although not disabled, thus cleverly side stepping all those stupid jokes about diversity). We have an interesting examination of sexuality within an oppressive almost theocratic society, and how people can bend the rules if they are sufficiently useful to those in authority. We have 'elves' who are (probably - I'm pretty sure that the helmsmen are in fact AIs) using technology, not magic, and who are black. It's not a big thing in the novel, but I don't think I've ever come across a work of fantasy where elves (or their analogue - the wise, calm, ageless and magical people who are better than ordinary humans) are assumed to have anything other than white caucasian features: I'm hard pressed to think of a work where they don't look like Nazi poster boys. And we have a society based quite heavily on the Mongol khanate and Yuan China, rather than medieval England.
Of course, this is all coupled with Morgan's trademark bleakness, cynicism, sex and ultraviolence, as well as his flair for memorable phrases. There's nothing here that quite matches the extracts from "Things I Should Have Learnt By Now, Vol. II" in Altered Carbon, the Patchwork Man rhyme or Kovacs' resolution that ends with "For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.", but there's some pretty good stuff nevertheless. A personal favourite of mine is the full name of the sword Ravensfriend:
I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors. I am Friend to Carrions Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.
So, thoroughly recommended, although I should put in a word of warning: when I say sex and ultraviolence, I'm not kidding. It's not for the easily upset, not really for those who like happy, shiny endings, and some of the protagonists walk so close to the line between anti-hero and villain that it's hard to tell when they've skipped over it (we're told that "A Dark Lord Will Rise". It's entirely possible, indeed probable, that it refers to the main character.)
My other book this week was a Wordsworth Poetry Library Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti. I've always enjoyed Pre-Raphaelite art, and so I guess it's not really surprising that I found Rossetti's poems to be so enjoyable (the earlier work at least, I've never really enjoyed religious poetry). I was particularly struck by the influence of traditional ballads on her work: Maude Clare is effectively a retelling of the Nut Brown Maid from the nut brown maid's perspective (and also less death, in the time frame covered by the poem at least) whilst The Poor Ghost is a retelling of another common ballad where the ghost cannot rest until his lover ceases to mourn and the escalating question and response format of the Noble Sisters is strongly reminiscent of the ballad Edward, and fairly similar to a couple of other ballads. A lot of the language is also of the ballad type (probably one reason why I enjoyed it so much). And of course the Goblin Market is using the traditional, malevolent image of fairies, rather than Shakespeare's mischievous elves. Of course the Goblin Market also has a homoerotic subtext so blatant that frankly it's text: we have the repeated references to the evil goblin-men, rather than to just plain goblins, and the dramatic climax of the poem where Lizzie entreats her sister to "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you / Goblin pulp and goblin dew / Eat me, drink me, love me". Of course, one could argue (a la Lewis Carroll) that Victorian standards for this sort of thing were different from our own, but I'm unconvinced.
I was also struck by the bleakness and cynicism on display in Rossetti's work, especially when compared with her contemporaries: contrast the fate of the protagonists in Cousin Kate, Maggie a Lady and The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children with that of Tennyson's Lady Clare: I have to say, I think Rossetti is rather more realistic (not that one necessarily looks for realism in poetry).
* Non-European pre-industrial agrarian societies may have had less inequitable distributions of power between genders and across classes: the same amount of shit, but more equally spread, if you will.
The Cold Commands is the latest entry in Morgan's fantasy trilogy, and follows on directly from The Steel Remains. It's not quite a good as his debut, Altered Carbon, but as this is Richard Morgan we're talking about, that's a bit like saying A Midsummer Night's Dream isn't as good as Julius Caesar: I think Altered Carbon is the best science fiction novel, if not the best novel full stop, of the last decade.
It may be that I like The Cold Commands less than Altered Carbon because I like science fiction more than fantasy: not that I don't read both (as regular readers will know) but I generally find I only enjoy very good fantasy, whilst I can get a quite a lot of entertainment out of even quite bad sci-fi (David Weber, I'm looking at everything you've ever written). Partly this is because science fiction is, by it's very nature, a forward looking genre (apart, of course, for the small but significant Frankenstein inspired Things Man Was Not Meant To Know stories, like most of Michael Crichton's stuff), whilst fantasy tends to be backward looking at best, and positively reactionary at worst. Some of this can be put down to Tolkien's immense influence on the genre - science fiction doesn't really have a similar colossus in it's early history (HG Wells is influential, but you have the equally influential Jules Verne at the same time, whilst Tolkien doesn't really have any peers). I like the Lord of the Rings as a book, but the wholesale contempt for the modern world is a little hard to take, even if you ignore the comically unsubtle attacks on the Attlee government in the Scouring of the Shire. Why do we never hear about how Saruman's plumbing has eradicate dysentary in Isengard?
However, I think a larger contributing factor is the escapism many fantasy fans are looking for: they want to imagine that they are barbarian heroes, or princesses, and don't want to be reminded that for every princess there are a thousand peasants grubbing around in the mud. It's a bit like Marie Antoniette playing at being a shepherdess - it's the fantasy of a bucolic rural idyll without the inconvenience of actually having to be a subsistence farmer. Because the truth is that life in a European* pre-industrial agrarian society is shit. It's shit if you're the king. It's even more shit if you're not. It's yet more shit if you're a woman, or if you're gay. If you're both, it's even more shit than that. And if you're a member of a religious or ethnic minority, well.... you get the idea. Now, we can argue about why that is, we can argue about whether it's an inevitable consequence of the religion, or the climate, of the shape of society or the type of agriculture but the fundamental fact remains that the life expectancy was thirty if you didn't happen to live through a historically important and interesting famine or plague: there's a reason why all the characters in fairy tales have stepmothers. And it's fundamentally dishonest to write about a medieval European society (which is what most fantasy is about) and ignore that. To his credit, this is one of Martin's main targets in the Song of Ice and Fire (the other is the whole concept of hereditary rule, but that's something for another day), but even he is so far tied into the typical fantasy world view that he can't give us a viewpoint character outside of the aristocracy. I've even seen complaints that basically boil down to: how dare the Song of Ice and Fire dispel my cosy medieval fantasy with it's inconvenient use of actual history and real facts.
This is why I enjoyed the Cold Commands so much: it takes a large number of irritating fantasy conventions and drop kicks them out of the window. We have three protagonists: two are gay, and one is also a black woman (although not disabled, thus cleverly side stepping all those stupid jokes about diversity). We have an interesting examination of sexuality within an oppressive almost theocratic society, and how people can bend the rules if they are sufficiently useful to those in authority. We have 'elves' who are (probably - I'm pretty sure that the helmsmen are in fact AIs) using technology, not magic, and who are black. It's not a big thing in the novel, but I don't think I've ever come across a work of fantasy where elves (or their analogue - the wise, calm, ageless and magical people who are better than ordinary humans) are assumed to have anything other than white caucasian features: I'm hard pressed to think of a work where they don't look like Nazi poster boys. And we have a society based quite heavily on the Mongol khanate and Yuan China, rather than medieval England.
Of course, this is all coupled with Morgan's trademark bleakness, cynicism, sex and ultraviolence, as well as his flair for memorable phrases. There's nothing here that quite matches the extracts from "Things I Should Have Learnt By Now, Vol. II" in Altered Carbon, the Patchwork Man rhyme or Kovacs' resolution that ends with "For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.", but there's some pretty good stuff nevertheless. A personal favourite of mine is the full name of the sword Ravensfriend:
I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors. I am Friend to Carrions Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.
So, thoroughly recommended, although I should put in a word of warning: when I say sex and ultraviolence, I'm not kidding. It's not for the easily upset, not really for those who like happy, shiny endings, and some of the protagonists walk so close to the line between anti-hero and villain that it's hard to tell when they've skipped over it (we're told that "A Dark Lord Will Rise". It's entirely possible, indeed probable, that it refers to the main character.)
My other book this week was a Wordsworth Poetry Library Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti. I've always enjoyed Pre-Raphaelite art, and so I guess it's not really surprising that I found Rossetti's poems to be so enjoyable (the earlier work at least, I've never really enjoyed religious poetry). I was particularly struck by the influence of traditional ballads on her work: Maude Clare is effectively a retelling of the Nut Brown Maid from the nut brown maid's perspective (and also less death, in the time frame covered by the poem at least) whilst The Poor Ghost is a retelling of another common ballad where the ghost cannot rest until his lover ceases to mourn and the escalating question and response format of the Noble Sisters is strongly reminiscent of the ballad Edward, and fairly similar to a couple of other ballads. A lot of the language is also of the ballad type (probably one reason why I enjoyed it so much). And of course the Goblin Market is using the traditional, malevolent image of fairies, rather than Shakespeare's mischievous elves. Of course the Goblin Market also has a homoerotic subtext so blatant that frankly it's text: we have the repeated references to the evil goblin-men, rather than to just plain goblins, and the dramatic climax of the poem where Lizzie entreats her sister to "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you / Goblin pulp and goblin dew / Eat me, drink me, love me". Of course, one could argue (a la Lewis Carroll) that Victorian standards for this sort of thing were different from our own, but I'm unconvinced.
I was also struck by the bleakness and cynicism on display in Rossetti's work, especially when compared with her contemporaries: contrast the fate of the protagonists in Cousin Kate, Maggie a Lady and The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children with that of Tennyson's Lady Clare: I have to say, I think Rossetti is rather more realistic (not that one necessarily looks for realism in poetry).
* Non-European pre-industrial agrarian societies may have had less inequitable distributions of power between genders and across classes: the same amount of shit, but more equally spread, if you will.
Monday, 17 October 2011
Smiley Happy People
Books read this week: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 7/10 (John Le Carre)
It is a strange thing how some works have such a titanic impact on the collective consciousness that they undercut their own references: before reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I hadn't heard the nursery rhyme, but I had of course heard of the book. It's the first in Le Carre's Karla trilogy, and a very good (although scarcely cheerful) look at espionage at the height of the Cold War. It's something of a curiosity to me: a glimpse into what life was like in a large bureaucracy before computers. Most of the time is spent tracking and stealing files and notes, in a way that just doesn't happen today: everything is on a network, so a comparable thriller today would have far more hacking, and far less tense walks through shabby libraries.
I also find it peculiar how local in space and time the espionage genre is: really, all the great espionage novels are set during the cold war, and most of them in the 60s and 70s, and they were pretty much all written by British intellectuals who were in intelligence during the Second World War. It's not as though there haven't been other periods where there's been a lot of undercover shenanigans and great power antagonisms: Francis Walsingham ran a first class intelligence network, and there was a lot of spying during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (handled well in O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, but not the main focus). And even just looking at other combatants in the Cold War, the Americans had plenty of well educated spies during WWII, and presumably not all of them stayed on afterwards (I would guess the USSR was similar, but given the Soviet government's institutional paranoia, I doubt they'd have let anyone reveal anything about espionage tactics and strategy, even in novel form, so the lack of good spy novels there isn't that surprising).
The closest thing the US has to a spy novelist is Tom Clancy, and he's too stupid to write a great spy novel: the essence of a good spy novel is an understanding of psychology - your's and your opponent's, and to do that you really need to both respect and to understand the other side. This is, I think, the crux of the issue: the prevailing view in the USA was always that the US was Right, and the Soviet Union was Wrong and that was All Right. Such a black and white view doesn't really lend itself to the study of the other side's point of view: if you enemy is the devil, you can be confident that everything they say or do is evil, because, well, they're evil. This makes for good action films, and poor spy novels. By contrast, there's been a tendency in British literature to respect a worthy opponent for a long time: you can see this in Owen and Sassoon's poetry, which always has more contempt for the generals behind the line than for the soldier's on the other side of No Man's Land, and also in Wellington's respect for the French army, but the best example has to be Kipling: partly because he is a very good poet, but more because he is the poet that best personified the jingoistic late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the generation that claimed an empire and then watched it's children die in the mud and blood at the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres. It is precisely because Kipling was such a cheerleader for the British empire and invading, well, anywhere Britain hadn't got round to invading yet, that it's notable that he does respect the other side: in his "Fuzzy Wuzzy" (which I'm not going to pretend isn't racist, because it really is) he describes the Sudanese as "A First Class Fighting Man": I can't imagine Clancy (who occupies a similar position as author best representing the pro-invading countries we've never heard of position) writing a similarly positive portrait of the martial qualities of a Taliban fighter (and after all, the Sudanese Kipling is talking about were the army of the first modern Islamist movement).
It is a strange thing how some works have such a titanic impact on the collective consciousness that they undercut their own references: before reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I hadn't heard the nursery rhyme, but I had of course heard of the book. It's the first in Le Carre's Karla trilogy, and a very good (although scarcely cheerful) look at espionage at the height of the Cold War. It's something of a curiosity to me: a glimpse into what life was like in a large bureaucracy before computers. Most of the time is spent tracking and stealing files and notes, in a way that just doesn't happen today: everything is on a network, so a comparable thriller today would have far more hacking, and far less tense walks through shabby libraries.
I also find it peculiar how local in space and time the espionage genre is: really, all the great espionage novels are set during the cold war, and most of them in the 60s and 70s, and they were pretty much all written by British intellectuals who were in intelligence during the Second World War. It's not as though there haven't been other periods where there's been a lot of undercover shenanigans and great power antagonisms: Francis Walsingham ran a first class intelligence network, and there was a lot of spying during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (handled well in O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, but not the main focus). And even just looking at other combatants in the Cold War, the Americans had plenty of well educated spies during WWII, and presumably not all of them stayed on afterwards (I would guess the USSR was similar, but given the Soviet government's institutional paranoia, I doubt they'd have let anyone reveal anything about espionage tactics and strategy, even in novel form, so the lack of good spy novels there isn't that surprising).
The closest thing the US has to a spy novelist is Tom Clancy, and he's too stupid to write a great spy novel: the essence of a good spy novel is an understanding of psychology - your's and your opponent's, and to do that you really need to both respect and to understand the other side. This is, I think, the crux of the issue: the prevailing view in the USA was always that the US was Right, and the Soviet Union was Wrong and that was All Right. Such a black and white view doesn't really lend itself to the study of the other side's point of view: if you enemy is the devil, you can be confident that everything they say or do is evil, because, well, they're evil. This makes for good action films, and poor spy novels. By contrast, there's been a tendency in British literature to respect a worthy opponent for a long time: you can see this in Owen and Sassoon's poetry, which always has more contempt for the generals behind the line than for the soldier's on the other side of No Man's Land, and also in Wellington's respect for the French army, but the best example has to be Kipling: partly because he is a very good poet, but more because he is the poet that best personified the jingoistic late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the generation that claimed an empire and then watched it's children die in the mud and blood at the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres. It is precisely because Kipling was such a cheerleader for the British empire and invading, well, anywhere Britain hadn't got round to invading yet, that it's notable that he does respect the other side: in his "Fuzzy Wuzzy" (which I'm not going to pretend isn't racist, because it really is) he describes the Sudanese as "A First Class Fighting Man": I can't imagine Clancy (who occupies a similar position as author best representing the pro-invading countries we've never heard of position) writing a similarly positive portrait of the martial qualities of a Taliban fighter (and after all, the Sudanese Kipling is talking about were the army of the first modern Islamist movement).
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Bellamy's Veal Pies
Books read this week: William Pitt the Younger 6/10 (William Hague)
Caesar read a life of Alexander the Great and wept because he was 30, and by 30 Alexander the Great had conquered the known world. One gets the impression, reading Hague's life of Pitt, that more than anything else, Hague would have liked to be William Pitt the Younger. This is not a problem: to write a truly first class biography, one must sympathise with one's subject. I think this is why so many of the good political biographies I have read were written by politicians: Jenkins' Gladstone and Hattersley's Lloyd George immendiately spring to mind. Longford's Wellington is also a favourite of mine, and although Longford was not herself a politician, she came from a family of politicians (specifically, Lloyd George's). The exception is Blake's Disraeli, and that had the advantage that Disraeli was a truly fascinating individual.
Unfortunately, William Pitt the Younger is not a fascinating individual. Raised from birth to be a politician, he seems to have all the faults you see today in people who go straight into full time politics from university, just magnified: above all, he was incredibly dull. He never had an intimate relationship with a woman or a man, he never had a friend outside politics and he never had a life outside politics: he spent his life alternately politicking and drinking himself into a stupor (consuming 3 bottles of port a day: something else which endears him to "16 Pints A Night" Hague). He was phenomenally good at gaining power (Prime Minister at 24): unfortunately, he didn't really know what to do with it. As Hague continually points out, Pitt's first instinct when confronted with a short term political problem was to conceive some enormous, intricate and complicated permanent solution, which would promptly fall apart once it encountered the real world, leaving everyone no better off than before (Exhibit A: Ireland). The net result of this is that for all the effort Pitt put into being Prime Minister, his actually achievements were fairly minimal.
The other problem Hague has in maintaining our sympathies with Pitt is that the causes he was defending were fundamentally bankrupt: Pitt died shortly after Napoleon rose to power, and so he spent years fighting the French Revolution: he was responsible for the last suspension of habeas corpus in British history in order to deal with the London Corresponding Society, and their evil demands for universal suffrage and free speech (those bastards!). Of course, Wellington was a similarly reactionary figure, but he possessed enough of a life outside politics (and enough of a sense of humour) that one can sympathise with him, despite disagreeing with his politics (also, Longford's life of Wellington is superb): Pitt had no life outside politics. In many ways, this was a personal tragedy for him, and it's probably ultimately why he drank himself into an early grave. His only longstanding attachment appears to have been to his niece, who appears to have been a thoroughly unpleasant woman: the only example of her cutting wit we are given is mocking an elderly lord for his limp.
My ultimate verdict on the book is this: it is as good a biography as could be expected about a very dull figure in the middle of some extremely interesting politics. I'd be interested to see what Hague makes of a life with more life in it, and I'm going to try and track down his life of Wilberforce.
Caesar read a life of Alexander the Great and wept because he was 30, and by 30 Alexander the Great had conquered the known world. One gets the impression, reading Hague's life of Pitt, that more than anything else, Hague would have liked to be William Pitt the Younger. This is not a problem: to write a truly first class biography, one must sympathise with one's subject. I think this is why so many of the good political biographies I have read were written by politicians: Jenkins' Gladstone and Hattersley's Lloyd George immendiately spring to mind. Longford's Wellington is also a favourite of mine, and although Longford was not herself a politician, she came from a family of politicians (specifically, Lloyd George's). The exception is Blake's Disraeli, and that had the advantage that Disraeli was a truly fascinating individual.
Unfortunately, William Pitt the Younger is not a fascinating individual. Raised from birth to be a politician, he seems to have all the faults you see today in people who go straight into full time politics from university, just magnified: above all, he was incredibly dull. He never had an intimate relationship with a woman or a man, he never had a friend outside politics and he never had a life outside politics: he spent his life alternately politicking and drinking himself into a stupor (consuming 3 bottles of port a day: something else which endears him to "16 Pints A Night" Hague). He was phenomenally good at gaining power (Prime Minister at 24): unfortunately, he didn't really know what to do with it. As Hague continually points out, Pitt's first instinct when confronted with a short term political problem was to conceive some enormous, intricate and complicated permanent solution, which would promptly fall apart once it encountered the real world, leaving everyone no better off than before (Exhibit A: Ireland). The net result of this is that for all the effort Pitt put into being Prime Minister, his actually achievements were fairly minimal.
The other problem Hague has in maintaining our sympathies with Pitt is that the causes he was defending were fundamentally bankrupt: Pitt died shortly after Napoleon rose to power, and so he spent years fighting the French Revolution: he was responsible for the last suspension of habeas corpus in British history in order to deal with the London Corresponding Society, and their evil demands for universal suffrage and free speech (those bastards!). Of course, Wellington was a similarly reactionary figure, but he possessed enough of a life outside politics (and enough of a sense of humour) that one can sympathise with him, despite disagreeing with his politics (also, Longford's life of Wellington is superb): Pitt had no life outside politics. In many ways, this was a personal tragedy for him, and it's probably ultimately why he drank himself into an early grave. His only longstanding attachment appears to have been to his niece, who appears to have been a thoroughly unpleasant woman: the only example of her cutting wit we are given is mocking an elderly lord for his limp.
My ultimate verdict on the book is this: it is as good a biography as could be expected about a very dull figure in the middle of some extremely interesting politics. I'd be interested to see what Hague makes of a life with more life in it, and I'm going to try and track down his life of Wilberforce.
Friday, 7 October 2011
Peasants and Kings
Books read this week: The Struggle For Mastery 5/10 (David Carpenter)
The Struggle for Mastery is part of the Penguin history of Britain series, and covers the years 1066-1284: a choice which is a little peculiar. Starting in 1066 I don't have a problem with, but the book stops abruptly halfway through the reign of Edward I, in a place which really isn't one of history's natural break points. It is however a very ambitious book: unlike many purported histories of Britain, this volume does dedicate considerable space and time to Scottish, Welsh and Irish history, which I found interesting, as I know relatively little about any of them (I couldn't, for example, list the kings of Scotland). It is unfortunate that it gives the book something of an episodic feel: the narrative frequently jumps from one country to the next mid-chapter. A far better approach would have been to divide the book clearly into sections on English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish history, as the sections on each country tend to be clearly delineated in any case. Apart from these minor irritations the book is interesting enough, and I will try to track down the other books in the series. The main thing I took from the book is that it's really a misnomer to identify the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War as being distinct periods of civil strife: up until about 1260, the countries that make up Britain experienced continual low-grade civil war. The reason we remember the Wars of the Roses as civil wars is because they came at the end of a long (extremely unusual) peace.
The Struggle for Mastery is part of the Penguin history of Britain series, and covers the years 1066-1284: a choice which is a little peculiar. Starting in 1066 I don't have a problem with, but the book stops abruptly halfway through the reign of Edward I, in a place which really isn't one of history's natural break points. It is however a very ambitious book: unlike many purported histories of Britain, this volume does dedicate considerable space and time to Scottish, Welsh and Irish history, which I found interesting, as I know relatively little about any of them (I couldn't, for example, list the kings of Scotland). It is unfortunate that it gives the book something of an episodic feel: the narrative frequently jumps from one country to the next mid-chapter. A far better approach would have been to divide the book clearly into sections on English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish history, as the sections on each country tend to be clearly delineated in any case. Apart from these minor irritations the book is interesting enough, and I will try to track down the other books in the series. The main thing I took from the book is that it's really a misnomer to identify the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War as being distinct periods of civil strife: up until about 1260, the countries that make up Britain experienced continual low-grade civil war. The reason we remember the Wars of the Roses as civil wars is because they came at the end of a long (extremely unusual) peace.
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