The Big Change

Books read this week: Consuming Passions 7/10 (Judith Flanders), Midnight Tides 6/10 (Steven Erikson), The Bonehunters 7/10 (Steven Erikson)

Consuming Passions is subtitled "Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain", but this is really quite misleading: the book spends just as much time discussing leisure activities in the late 18th Century, and the early years of the 19th, as it does on Victoria's reign proper. It's a rather fascinating slice of social history, charting (amongst other things) the rise of the department store and the development of professional football teams. It is the type of social history which is packed full of interesting anecdotes and historical curios, rather than the more serious type which tries to properly explain and understand social trends. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, although I feel it would benefit from a deeper investigation into the less legal side of leisure in 19th Century Britain; an awful lot of Victorian Britain (especially in London and the other big cities) operated in what we would call the grey economy, and there were plenty of dog fighting rings and underground boxing matches, and I would have liked it if there was a little more space devoted to that type of entertainment.

The thing that really struck me, reading Consuming Passions, was the sheer amount of time and effort that the middle and upper classes put into preventing ordinary people from enjoying themselves. Whether it's Brighton, (fruitlessly) objecting to cheap railway tickets letting London workers visit the seaside, or the various government attempts to ban theatre (interestingly, whilst they always say the Charles II reopened the theatres, what they actually mean is that he allowed two (2) theatres in London to operate with a royal licence, as long as all their plays were censored before performance: very merry for him and his actress-mistresses: not quite the major victory for free speech and popular entertainment it's usually seen as), or the massive objections to lowering the price of admission to the Crystal Palace, there seems to be a haunting fear that somewhere, someone with an income of less than £500 a year might be enjoying themselves. It's all a little strange: I can see why, if one was a member of the Victorian bourgeoisie, one might want to prevent riotous gatherings, and I could understand a long standing fear of incipient revolution. But really, trying to stop people visiting the seaside? Of course, the puritan ethos ultimately lost out to the profit motive (as was so often the case in Victorian Britain): once it was understood that working class people could spend money just as well as the middle classes, most of the objections shrivelled away.

One of the most interesting (and informative) anecdotes in the book is about how Blackburn Rovers became the first working class team to win the FA Cup - partly because (due to the backing of a wealthy philanthropist) they were able to afford a special diet for the team before the Cup Final which contained actual protein, unlike their normal diet (their public school opponents, of course, didn't have that problem).

I do find the 19th Century fascinating, in part because it was, for Britain at least, the period when society starts to become recognisable to me. For ordinary people in Britain, life in 1800 was really much closer to life in 1800 BC than it was to life in 1900, and for all the talk about the singularity, and the information superhighway and how computers have revolutionised life, that was the big change. It was shrinking the travel time between London and Edinburgh from ten days to ten hours, it was running telegraph cables across the country, it was building railways and factories and department stores. And yes, the rate of technological development is accelerating, and yes we're now in a post-industrial society and yes we've made strides towards social, racial and gender equality that the Victorians couldn't have dreamed of (well, let's be honest, it's not something they would have wanted to dream of), but it was ultimately that century between 1800 and 1900 when we, as a species, started to do something we'd never done before.

My other two books this week, Midnight Tides and The Bonehunters are the next two volumes in Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I'm still enjoying them, although Midnight Tides is a weaker book than the Bonehunters, and I'm still not entirely sure what the plot is, or why it's happening (like I said last week that's not really the point of the books). I'm beginning to think that Erikson has something to say about Christianity (and something that's not very complimentary): I'm beginning to see parallels between the Crippled God and a crucified god, but I think my thoughts on that are going to have to wait until I've read at least one more of the books in the series. What's rather more interesting to me at the moment are the ideas about how one makes and army, and how one breaks one. Erikson's armies are really modern forces with the  guns replaced by crossbows, and the artillery with wizards, rather than the more medieval-period-accurate forces Martin describes in the Song of Ice and Fire, although I guess Erikson could also be using the Roman army as a partial blueprint. Erikson does a good job of showing us the essential fragility of an effective fighting force: most effective modern armies have a relatively small cadre of extremely efficient and effective soldiers, and a fairly large group of less effective soldiers. To break the ability of the army to fight, all one has to do is isolate and eliminate that small cadre of very good soldiers (Exhibit A: the battle of Kursk. Exhibit B: Dien Bien Phu): this is something Erikson shows both in The Bonehunters and House of Chains (the fourth book).

Erikson also shows the fundamental strength of the feudal system, or rather, the fundamental weakness of authoritarian regimes without feudal underpinnings, in the relationship between the Empress Laseen and her various subordinates (something which is definitely modelled on the Roman empire). Basically, Laseen (and the later Roman emperors) are confronted with a circle it is very difficult to square: outlying regions of the Empire need competent commanders, otherwise they won't stay part of the Empire. But if you appoint a competent commander, there's nothing to stop them using the army you've just given them to overthrow you. Whilst that's a nasty dilemma from the perspective of the ruler, from the perspective of the state as a whole, obviously having a massive civil war every time the ruler dies (or even if they don't) obviously isn't an efficient use of resources in the long term, even if it does (usually) weed out the more incompetent contenders for leadership. The feudal system ultimately arises as a solution to these two (kind of linked) problems: the ruler needs competent commanders they can trust, and if you can't trust family who can you trust? And if there are clear rules about who gets the kingdom when the current ruler pops his clogs, them there'll be fewer civil wars all round - although more halfwits running the country. Fundamentally, the feudal/monarchical system is a social choice to prize stability over efficiency in government. I think one of the big advantages of a well developed democratic system is that you don't have to make that choice: one can have both a stable and an efficient government.

Reaping the Whirlwind

Books read this week: Memories of Ice 7/10 (Steven Erikson), House of Chains 7/10 (Steven Erikson), The Complete Short Stories of Saki 5/10 (H.H. Munro)

Memories of Ice and House of Chains are the third and fourth books in Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which I'm really beginning to get into. I won't try and summarise the plot, partly because the plots of these books are enormously complex (they're not short books, and, unlike Tolkien, very little of each volume is dedicated to digressions on the pipe-smoking habits of the lesser spotted tree elf), and also because really the plot isn't the point of these books (I only read them a couple of days ago, and I've already forgotten most of the salient details). The books are written to give an atmosphere; a sense of a world with magical warrens and ancient undead armies and mysterious glacier-controlling hippies that are long extinct. A world where gods can be killed. Erikson does this very successfully, although he does not manage anything quite so memorable or interesting as Coltaine's Chain of Dogs in Deadhouse Gates (the second book in the series). But this might just be cultural bias: to the English I think a heroic defeat, a glorious last stand or a magnificent fighting retreat is always inherently more interesting and memorable than a victory; Dunkirk, Crete, Corunna; the charge of the Light Brigade and Gordon at Khartoum. Erikson does fall into a familar trap for fantasy writers however, and ignores the effects of disease upon the army; in every war fought before about 1900 casualties from disease dramatically outweighed casualties in combat. During a large conflict a general could expect to lose between a quarter and a half of his army every year, without even coming within sight of the enemy; and yet here this is ignored: the general sets out with 10,000 soldiers, and arrives months later with 10,000 soldiers. I'll admit, dysentery isn't very glamorous, but it's effect upon combat operations before modern medicine shouldn't be underestimated. Although I guess in a fantasy series one can always say "a wizard did it".

One of the more interesting things about the Malazan Book of the Fallen, as a series, is the approach it takes to gods; like I said above, gods can die: moreover, gods can sign contracts, and they can be cheated. This is an intriguing approach to take as it runs totally against the prevailing monotheistic framework in Western society; there are, of course, many differences between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but they do share a common belief in a deity who is both omnipotent and omniscient: not a being that can be comprehended by the human mind, let alone outwitted. Of course, it is a concept familiar from the polytheistic religions of antiquity, and the folk tales of the middle ages are rife with men and women who can trick the devil out of his due (the classic tale of the old woman hiking up her skirts and frightening off the devil is a personal favourite of mine), just not one encountered very often in modern Western literature* (I can't claim any deep knowledge of Hinduism, the Sikh faith or the various religions of Africa, China and Japan, let alone their popular folktales, so I don't know if it's an idea seen in that part of the world). Another question that naturally arises here (although not one that Erikson answers) is if a being is not omniscient and omnipotent, just far more knowledgeable and powerful than an ordinary human being, why should we call it a god? Obviously the natural answer is that when a being that can split continents with it's bare hands asks you to call it a god it's quite dangerous not to, but the underlying philosophical question of the necessary and sufficient conditions for godhood remain.

The Complete Short Stories of Saki are an interesting study of British high society in the years immediately preceding the Great War. The stories are very much set in that Evelyn Waugh/Jeeves and Wooster/Downton Abbey world of shooting parties, London clubs and unspeakable maiden aunts. Much like Downton Abbey, it shows that there was a considerable proportion of the upper classes in the Edwardian era who had absolutely nothing better to do with their time than come up with increasingly extreme and witty ways in which to be extremely unpleasant to each other - it is like Liasions Dangereuse in that regard. Pretty much every story Saki ever wrote was either a description of a mean-spirited or cruel practical joke, or a condemnation of the suffragettes. The sheer misanthropy of the collection, taken as a whole, is quite shocking, as is the reactionary, bullying nature of most of the interactions: basically, what we have here is an book of stories where every main character is a slightly wittier variation on Jeremy Clarkson. There are individual stories here which I would consider both extremely misogynistic and anti-semitic, were they not embedded within a collection of such deep and abiding misanthropy: Munro does not appear to like women or Jewish people, but he's also hateful towards men and Christians and Muslims. One gets the feeling that Munro has just as sharp a wit as Wilde's, but he lacks the outsider's view that Wilde had (Wilde was a socialist, after all), and so his work has an undercurrent of bullying meanness which is absent from Wilde.

* Goethe's Faust is the exception that proves the rule here, I feel.

A Thousand Words

Books read this week: Years of Wrath 8/10 (David Low), Deadhouse Gates 7/10 (Steven Erikson), D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology 5/10

They say a picture is worth a thousand words: for David Low, that's an enormous underestimate. Years of Wrath is subtitled "A Cartoon History 1932-1945", and is composed entirely of David Low's magnificent cartoons. Low is often compared to Gilray, but Low is both a far superior artist and a much sharper political commentator; in fact many of his cartoons verge on the prescient. That said, I would dearly love to own a book of Gilray's prints, and perhaps I would appreciate them more were I as deeply familar with the politics of the 1790s and early 1800s as I am with the 1930s and 40s. Still, the sheer amount of information, nuance and humour that David Low is able to cram into a simple monochrome drawing is absolutely phenomenal: his summary of the Nazis 1942 summer campaign in three words ("Stalingrad or bust") cannot be bettered, and his assessment of the V1 offensive (casting Hitler as a naughty schoolboy, launching "mad Adolf's pilotless planes for planless devilment" across the channel) is also pitch perfect.

I think Low's cartoon celebrating the liberation of Paris is a perfect example of why he was both a great artist and a great political cartoonist (needless to say the two don't necessarily go together). There must have been a strong temptation to draw the Eiffel Tower, or the Arc De Triomphe, or some other stereotypically Parisian landmark, but instead we get this masterpiece. We have a view of what is unmistakeably Paris, without the need to overemphasise the landmarks: just the spires of Notre-Dame in the far background. And we have the population of France, represented not by De Gaulle, or some other major political figure, but rather personified in the anonymous, jubilant Resistance fighter. Low seems to say: this is not a day for celebrating individual generals or politicians, but rather the liberation of an entire people. It's a cartoon that makes you want to get up out of your chair and start singing the Marseillaise.

Of course, I approach Low's cartoons as historical record - and I have tended to assess them as such - but one also needs to consider their impact at the time. And in this, I think Low's most important contribution was that he made the Nazis look ridiculous: to paraphrase the Godfather a man in Hitler's position can't afford to look ridiculous. This was something that Hitler knew, of course, and that's why David Low was on the Nazi death list, had the invasion of Britain succeeded. Low is such a gifted artist that we never forget the horror under the surface of the Nazi regime: consider this cartoon from 1942 or (one of my personal favourites) this one from late 1944. I think the use of humour as a weapon is often underestimated. I remember reading, years ago, a social history of Nazi Germany, and in the chapter on humour there was a section on the jokes the inmates of the concentration camps and the death camps told to each other, and I remember thinking then, and indeed I still think now that it was the most magnificently, astoundingly courageous thing I had ever come across. To stand in the closest place to hell on earth human ingenuity has been able to devise, to refuse to be afraid, and to laugh at your tormentors is an incredible thing to which words really can't do justice.

Fond as I am of Low, I do feel that, before finishing my review of Years of Wrath I have to acknowledge that  his cartoons about the war with Japan are problematic. Of course, all cartoonists deal in caricatures, and the essence of a caricature is the exaggeration of characteristics to the point of parody. But, even allowing for that, to a modern eye his portrayal of the Japanese is quite racist, although Low does nevertheless deserve credit for his longstanding support of Indian independence, and his objections to racial discrimination in Britain (although that last cartoon does not appear in Years of Wrath). And there was, of course, a war on.

I find I have said rather more about Low's book than I originally intended, and my other two books are both quite lightweight, so I will deal with them briefly. Deadhouse Gates is the second book in Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and just as good as Gardens of the Moon, the first book. I still find that Erikson sacrifices world-building to the demands of an ever more convoluted plot, although Deadhouse Gates was better in that respect than Gardens of the Moon. I am also slightly worried that the series may become infected with philosophy (a recurring risk for long fantasy series). I think Erikson has some interesting points to make about the inefficiency of a feudal society, but that may be my reading on the Thirty Years War bleeding in; as I have now read most of the third book in the series (and most of the book on the Thirty Years War), I think discussion of that can wait until next week. D.O.A Extreme Horror Anthology is (as one would expect from the name) an anthology of horror stories. Unfortunately it's not particularly frightening - for much the same reason that most of the video nasties from the 70s are not very good movies: the authors concentrate on the "extreme" and neglect the more basic elements of plot, characterisation and suspense which is necessary to create a truly chilling tale. Of course, the cardinal rule of horror fiction should be "don't show, don't tell" - an imagined horror is always worse that one you can see, just as a mystery is always more fascinating than it's solution - which is a requirement which comes into conflict with the whole idea of the "extreme" as if you don't show anything, it wouldn't be extreme. The anthology is therefore hoist by it's own petard somewhat, although I guess allowances should be made for the very, very high tolerance I have for sex, gore, violence and the just plain wrong in books: a less jaded reader might have found the stories in this book more shocking, and therefore more horrific.