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.