Year: 2012

THE GUN by CJ Chivers

This book is a history of the AK-47, and thus essentially a history of war for the last century. It makes for depressing but enlightening reading.

We begin in the nineteenth century, with Richard Gatling finally managing to create the world’s first workable automatic weapon. So much more deadly was any one gun than a platoon of rifles, that he, and many like him, genuinely believed that it would effectively end war, as no one would be insane enough to send men marching against it.

The gun is first used against people in Africa and Asia, as part of the colonial project. Lobengula’s whole army is effectively wiped out in five hours, as later is the Mahdi’s army. One wonders how different the world would look if Gatling had been just a little slower off the mark, and the British had had to face the Ndebele nation with just bayonets.

Despite the first hand experience the British had with the kind of death the machine gun could mete out, they were appallingly unprepared when the First World War broke out. They didn’t let a little thing like automatic machine gun fire stand in the way of their time honoured traditions: advancing in solid blocks, in bright clothing, with bayonets. “The English came walking, as though they were going to the theatre or as though they were on parade ground,” one German soldier said. “We felt they were mad.” This might have been understandable for the first couple of days, say, but the British kept this up for the first TWO YEARS OF THE WAR. Even after the Battle of the Somme, when 30,000 British soldier were killed or wounded in the first SIXTY MINUTES. The commanders, far back from the front lines, just weren’t willing to give up on their idea of glorious war and the terrifying bayonet. It’s interesting really how idealistic military people are.

The AK-47 (which stands for Automatic designed by Kalishnikov in 1947) was designed in answer to a competition in the Soviet Union, and was rightly selected as the winner not so much because of its accuracy, as because of its durability and ease of use. So simple and sturdy is the AK-47 that it can stand the worst of conditions, and be assembled and disassembled by a child. As the LRA will tell you.

One of the first major outings for the AK-47 was the Vietnam War. Here a major power found out what it was like to face an armed native population, and one that was armed better than they were themselves. As so much of what the Soviet Union produced in the way of shoes and elevators was crap, the US assumed its guns would be too, and only gave the AK-47 the most preliminary of glances, categorizing it, embarrassingly, simply as NIH: Not Invented Here. US troops were sent out to fight with M-14s and M-16s, which while they might have been invented here also tended to jam horribly after a few rounds, and rust immediately in the swamps of Vietnam. Here again we see the romance of the military man: so in love was the American high command with the ideal of the John Wayne sharp shooter that they entirely ignored the fact that in jungle war you virtually never actually even see your opponent, and thus do more praying than aiming when you shoot.

It is the world’s misfortune that the AK-47 was first produced in a planned economy, because that meant that guns could be produced way beyond any imaginable need. At one point there was one particular factory in the USSR producing 12,000 AKs a day. That’s 50 tons of steel a day. So durable is the AK, that these weapons are still with us – AKs from as far back as 1953 show up in Afghanistan today. In an old salt mine in the Ukraine, for example, in the 1990s, there were some three million guns stockpiled. Less what some horrible man from Croatia shipped to Uganda for use by Joseph Kony. One almost hopes there is a hell, so they can both burn in it. (On that subject: wow, Kony is crazy. Apparently his army used to march into battle chanting “James Bond! James Bond!” and covered in gun-repelling shea butter).

So an interesting if very sad book. Sometimes its a bit naively American, with sudden burst of discussion of the Second Amendment for no reason, and weird judgements. At one point, for example, he writes with shock about the first time an AK-47 is used by an ordinary citizen. In Hungary, someone shoots a secret policeman on the street and Chivers takes it for granted that this is a terrible thing to have done. I can only say, whatever. Not everyone needs a trial. Also, there are some factual issues: eg, apparently the flag of Zimbabwe has an AK-47 on it. Surely even the briefest fact check would have caught that?

Whatever, it’s a great book, and there are 100 million AKs in the world today, which won’t be disintegrating till long after we’re all dead, so we better care.

AN EDUCATION by Lynn Barber

Lynn Barber is a fun old battleaxe and her book is an entertaining read. The movie, which follows her affair as a school girl with an older con man, really covers only the first two chapters of the book. The remainder follows her life up to the present, and is undoubtedly an education in what it meant to be born female in the 1940s.

Horrifyingly, for example, when the older con man asks her to marry him, right after high school, her parents encourage her to do so even though this apparently means that she must give up her place at Oxford. Apparently the logic is that if you are married you don’t need to go to university. The poor deluded girl agrees, but luckily for her the conman is revealed to be already married, so she is allowed a tertiary education.

On the plus side, they haven’t yet heard of HIV, so she tells us “I probably slept with about fifty men in my second year.” This sounds fun, but then “there was no afterwards, either because the sex was a disaster, or because my pretence of sexual confidence scared them off. I did great, noisy, pretend orgasms with lots of “Yes! Yes!” . . .But I still hadn’t experienced the real thing.”

She begins to have some success as a journalist, despite the idea – apparently prevalent at the time – that women graduates ought to work their way up from secretary. Touchingly, she falls in love with her husband at first sight, and stays married to him till his death. The last long section while he is mortally ill in hospital is really moving. Barber is brutally honest about what she perceives as her failures during this period – she became annoyed with her sick husband, tried to avoid him, and so on. It’s a testament to the fact that neither grief nor love are orderly or as we expect, which I found comforting.

A PASSAGE TO INDIA by EM Forster

Mrs Moore travels out to India to visit her son Ronny, bringing with her a potential wife, an idealistic young woman named Adela. The two ladies are rather shocked by the insularity of the British in India, and insist on being allowed to meet ‘real’ Indians. Their follows an entertaining comedy of manners, where we learn something about how difficult it is to bridge cultures in any direction, no matter how good the intentions.

Forster has a delightful lightness of touch, and creates a believable little world of Anglo-India. Here’s a description of a teacher:

His career, though scholastic, was varied, and had included going to the bad and repenting thereafter.

The novel then takes an abrupt left turn. Adela is taken to see some local caves by Dr Aziz, an Indian doctor. Adela abruptly rushes back to town, and when Dr Aziz follows her, he finds out that she has accused him of ‘insulting’ her in the dark. Everyone makes such a big deal of this that for a while I thought she had been raped, but in fact it just meant a little light groping. The case becomes a flashpoint between British and Indian, SPOILER ALERT, until at the last minute, on the stand, Adela recants.

Bizarrely, this last section of the novel is no longer a political or social commentary, but apparently a meditation on religion. I know. What? I can’t really explain, as I started skimming after a while. This was a lot of blithering about how ancient the land of India is, and about the ferocity and fear of the eternal, and about the endless echo of the caves. Take this:

“Everything echoes now; there’s no stopping the echo. The original sound may be harmless, but the echo is always evil”

This I find to mean exactly nothing. And there’s pages of this sort of thing. There’s also abrupt and lengthy descriptions of Indian religious rituals.

Let’s end on an interesting note. Here’s a part where he actually says something interesting about spirituality. Mrs Moore dies on her way back to Britain, and these are Ronny’s reflection:

What does happen when ones mother dies? Presumably she goes to heaven, anyhow she clears out. Ronny’s religion was of the sterilized public-school brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics. Wherever he entered, mosque, cave or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook of the Fifth Form, and condemned as ‘weakening’ any attempt to understand them.

GEORGE PASSANT by CP Snow

This is the second book in CP Snow’s STRANGERS AND BROTHERS series, which is made up of eleven novels. I discovered the series in an odd used book store in Joburg which included such wonderful titles as RHODESIA: A HISTORY IN NEEDLEWORK.

I almost wish I’d gone with the Salisbury’s Womens Assocation take on Zimbabwean history, than GEORGE PASSANT. The first novel in the series, A TIME OF HOPE, was a brilliantly interesting story of the early life of Lewis Eliot. I thus had great hopes of the second novel, that it would follow him into middle age, and hopefully see him divorce his horrible wife. Bizarrely though the second novel goes back in time and picks up the story of George, one of Lewis’ early friends.

George is a free-thinking solicitor, who gathers young people around him, attempting to inspire them to live free of society. Somewhat predictably, this degenerates into sleeping with a selection of nineteen year olds. He is then accused of financial fraud, and Lewis comes to defend him in court. This might have been an exciting trial, if we hadn’t already heard all about it in the first book, up to and including the verdict.

Oh dear. My faith in minor authors is shaken.

TIME OF HOPE by CP Snow

You may recall my depressing conclusion at the end of Trollope’s THE PRIME MINISTER that I might in fact have actually completed the western cannon, and that what lay before me was either minor works by great writers or simply minor writers.

In this spirit I bought TIME OF HOPE by the not very eminent CP Snow. Hurray for minor authors! It is brilliant. And the best part is, that it is only the first in an ELEVEN BOOK SERIES. What is even better than one book? Ten books to follow! The Western cannon is still firing!

TIME OF HOPE tells the story of the early life of one Lewis Eliot. His father goes bankrupt at about the time of the First World War, when Lewis is a small child, and the book follows his attempts to make a life for himself.

It’s an interesting picture of a truly class bound Britain, because even though Lewis is exceptionally bright, and gets excellent results at school, the fact that he has no “connections” means that university is effectively barred to him. He takes an enormous risk, investing his small inheritance in sitting examinations for the bar, and manages eventually to become a moderately successful barrister – a huge achievement for someone of his background.

Showing that human nature does not change much, Lewis is also struggling with trying to disentangle himself from a girl who is clearly bad news. She says classic mess-with-you things like: “I don’t love you, but I trust you,” and “You’re the only one I feel safe with, but I’m not ready for a relationship,” and poor Lewis laps it up. Eventually, like an idiot, he marries her.

I don’t know anything about CP Snow, but I am quite sure that this book is heavily autobiographical. What is most touching about it is the sense throughout that everything he writes is something he has painfully lived. It is clearly the book of an older man trying to understand his past as honestly as he can, and that project – of being honest about what you have done – is always an honourable and a difficult one, whether you put it into book format or not.

Thus then, on his obsession with his horrible wife:

Some secret caution born of a kind of vanity made me bar my heart to any who forced their way within. I had only been able to lose caution and vanity, bar and heart, the whole of everything I was, in the torment of loving someone like Sheila, who invaded me not at all and made me crave for a spark of feeling, who was so wrapped up in herself that only the violence and suffering of such a love as mine brought the slightest glow.

Much though of the novel is very funny. Here he is on his aunt, a battleaxe of a woman:

She believed in speaking the truth, particularly when it was unpleasant.

And on the morality of his era:

It had often seemed to me strange that men should be so brazen with their moral indignation. Were they so utterly cut off from their own experience that they could utter these loud, resounding, moral brays and not be forced to look within? What were their own lives like, that they could denounce so enthusiastically? If baboons learned to talk, the first words they spoke would be stiff with moral indignation

One down, ten to go!

THE SADDEST STORY by Ford Maddox Ford

THE GOOD SOLDIER tells the story of two unhappy marriages. The narrator, an American named John is married to Florence, a heart patient. Except, as it emerges, Florence does not really have a weak heart – she has made it up so as to avoid having sex with her husband. (Obviously, this being an Edwardian novel, it isn’t put quite like that) Florence then meets someone she does want to have sex with: Edward Ashburnham, an English soldier, who is unhappily married to a strict Catholic, Leonora.

There is all sorts of misery and melodrama, crowned by Florence killing herself. Edward then falls in love with his ward, the nineteen year old Nancy, who he has bought up since she was thirteen. He manages to restrain himself, which is according to Ford a big achievement. Nancy is sent away to India, and Edward kills himself in despair. I mean, honestly, get a grip. Nancy then learns of his death in a newspaper, and – get this – goes mad.

I don’t know if I’m unfeeling, or what, but I just found it all totally ridiculous from beginning to end. The novel’s begins: “This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” which suggests to me Ford led a fairly sheltered life, and should have spent more time reading the news.

This thought clearly occurred to the publishers too. Hilariously, the novel’s original title was THE SADDEST STORY, but once the First World War began the publishers wrote to him to insist the title be changed. After the first million people died at Verdun, a new definition of saddest clearly had to be contemplated.

AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth

I was fascinated and horrified in about equal measure by Philip Roth’s PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT which is, oddly, a bit like my current relationship with KOURTNEY AND KIM TAKE NEW YORK. I thus had high hopes for AMERICAN PASTORAL.

Where Roth’s early works, including PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, were largely comic novels about Jewish American life, AMERICAN PASTORAL is clearly a work by a mature, much celebrated writer, who knows he is a mature much celebrated writer, and feels a need to write a novel as such.

So it starts off with a man named Nathan, clearly a proxy for the author (this is already what I as an experienced reader know to be a DANGER SIGN), who is attending his high school reunion. There is lots of agonising over the passage of time, which I could have gotten into, but then there is also lots of philosophizing about his generation, wich I found almost unbearably irritating. He writes about it as if the experience of Americans are the experiences of everyone. As if he can define an era. It’s sort of revoltingly insular. The pages just dripped with self-importance. I couldn’t handle it.

Then we go into how the one guy at their high school, nicknamed the Swede, went on to have this perfect life, till his daughter blew up a post office in protest at the Vietnam war. So then it becomes sort of state of the nation novel. Then I gave up on it. Sorry Mr Roth.

THE PRIME MINISTER by Anthony Trollope

I wasn’t stressed when I finished Trollope’s Barchester series, because I knew I had the whole Palliser series still to go. 6 books, 800 pages a book, surely I was good till well into my 40s? And now, somehow, oh god, I’ve almost finished all the Pallisers!

THE PRIME MINISTER is the second to last. I’m only in my 30s! What am I going to do! I’m running out of Victorians. This is terrible. I don’t know. Shall I start reading minor authors? Shall I start on people in translation? I never thought I’d reach the stage where the great partimony of world literature would start to look a bit thin.

THE PRIME MINISTER tells the story of Emily Wharton, who is much beloved of one Arthur Fletcher. She is however swept off her feet by another one, Ferdinand Lopez, and marries him in haste, regretting – in the traditional fashion – at leisure.

Ferdinand Lopez turns out to be a commercial adventurer, and gives us a very coherent explanation of today’s commodity bubble:

“If I buy a ton of coffee and keep it six weeks, why do I buy it and keep it, and why does the seller sell it instead of keeping it? The seller sells it because he thinks he can do best by parting with it now at a certain price. I buy it because I think I can make money by keeping it. It is just the same as thought we were to back our opinions. He backs the fall. I back the rise. You needn’t have coffee and you needn’t have guano to do this. Indeed the possession of the coffee or the guano is only a very clumsy addition to the trouble of your profession.” . . . Coffee and guano still had to be bought because the world was dull and would not learn the tricks of the trade as learnt by Ferdinand Lopez, – also possibly because somebody might want such articles, – but our enterprising hero looked for a time in which no such dull burden would be imposed on him.

Ferdinand commits suicide eventually, when he is ruined financially, which sadly most London bankers haven’t had the good taste to do. I was sorry to lose him, as he’s a fabulous character:

For he was essentially one of those men who are always, in the inner workings of their minds, defending themselves and attacking others. . . .He could not seat himself in a railway carriage without a lesson to his opposite neighbour that in all the mutual affairs of travelling, arrangement of feet, disposition of bags, and opening of windows, it would be the neighbour’s duty to submit and his to exact.

Emily now ought to have been happy but instead she wrapped herself in black and mourning not him so much as the ruin of her hopes and her (heavily implied) virginity. Lovely Arthur Fletcher keeps pursuing her, and I was in hell. I know Trollope well as a total bitch who won’t necessarily allow a happy ending (I am still scarred from this). But eventually he does. Hurray!

There’s also an entire parallel story with Lady Glencora Palliser, who we met in the first novel, and who has been appearing since. It’s like meeting old friends. Her husband is a rather failed Prime Minister, and we get lots of boring Corn Laws, Home Rule, etc etc in typical Trollope fashion. But we have to forgive him when we get letters from fathers like this:

Everett is well again, and as idle as ever. Your aunt Roby is making a fool of herself in Harrogate. I have heard nothing from Herefordshire. Everything is very quiet and lonely here. Your affectionate father, A Wharton

And this observation:

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

Or this:

What beasts, what brutes, what ungrateful wretches men are! – worse than women when they get together in numbers enough to be bold.

THE SLAP by Christos Tsiolkas

At a barbeque in suburban Melbourne a man slaps a bratty child who is not his own. Then everything kicks off. The parents of the brat decide to involve the police (!), which creates a problem, as the mother is the best friend of the wife of the slapper’s cousin. You may need to read that last sentence twice. Everyone in this small middle class world is now slowly drawn in to the drama.

It makes for an entertaining story which manages to capture within a small group of characters a swathe of contemporary Australian identity. The slap’s a small event, followed by a bunch of small reactions, that somehow manages to give an insight into a big continent.

It’s also a very interesting exploration of a certain life stage – lots of the characters are in their 40s, and seem to be faced with the fact that they have achieved much of what they set out to achieve, and now have to ask: what’s next? Here’s a television writer:

She was chic, and with age, that mattered more than looks. Chic didn’t desert you. She did look her age but she looked fantastic. She was secure, comfortable and she had a good life. She knew this but it was not enough. She wanted to do great things. Television was not a great thing. Rhys was not a great thing. She wanted to write a book that would shake or move of be known throughout the world. She wanted the grand success. Or the grand failure. It did not matter. She did not want the pleasurable and comfortable mediocrity in which she now wallowed to be the sum of her life.

The book did falter a little towards the end. The author clearly does not sympathize with the slapped child’s parents, and so there was towards the end a certain mean-spirited kind of banging away at his theme, which made it a less rich and complex book than it could have been. The characters also are not always as diverse as they could be – every single married man in the book is rather miserably having an affair. Thus we get lots of this sort of thing:

. . . the tearing open of a condom packet, and then his cock was entering her. she gritted her teeth, chocked back a cry as he pushed hard inside her, the pain slicing her . .

It’s also all a bit suffocatingly bourgeoisie after a while:

A cruel thought flashed quickly and guiltily in her mind: be a man, deal with your fucking mid-life crisis – it is so boring. She scanned the list of dishes. She would order the whole fish smoked in a banana leaf in nonya spices. She shut her menu.

These niggles aside, it’s a very fine book.

THE JOY LUCK CLUB by Amy Tan

This is a famous best seller which I have been ignoring for years fearing it was going to be a bit of a let-me-milk-my-heritage cheesy Americana. It’s not quite that bad, but I’m afraid that yes, that’s the general area.

The story revolves around four Chinese immigrant women in San Francisco who meet to play Mah Jong. Their daughters join them. We flash back in time to the mothers’ lives in China so we can all be in touch with our heritage. Yes, it’s a cheese fest.

There are some interesting stories, and some sweet bits – here’s a description of a little boy who’s just been disciplined:

So Bing wandered down the beach, walking stiffly like an ousted emperor, picking up shards of rock and chunks of driftwood

But then there are some dire bits. Here’s some quality believable dialogue, which shows how people talk in China:

Thank you Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not you hope. How to laugh forever.

Eventually one of the daughters travels to China, and to her horror, her mother’s home of Guangzhou “looks like a major American city.” Worse yet, in her hotel “There’s a colour television with remote-control panels built into the lamp table between the twin beds.” What a betrayal. But then luckily she takes a shower: “The hotel has provided little packets of shampoo which upon opening, I discover is the consistency of colour of hoisin sauce. This is more like it, I think. This is China.”