Preamble

Oh, the problems you come in for when you decide that you’re a book person! And more specifically when you decide that you’re a highfalutin books person. If you’re considering it, be warned: about fifteen minutes into any conversation with another book person (these conversations are sadly but mercifully rare) will come the question Have you read x (where x= a famous and obviously important book that of course you haven’t read)? Sometimes you get lucky and your interlocutor is an enthusiast of, say, contemporary fiction, and you can offer the excuse that you prefer something else, say, noncontemporary fiction. But most of the time you have to ruefully admit your failure – and then respond with the same question about a different book. In olden tymes I actually got in a “have you read” sparring match that barely managed to pretend it was a friendly conversation. I’m much better now, which is why I’ll just start with a little bit of

Confession Time

I have never read the following books:

Moby Dick, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Ulysses, Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, or anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, or Ayn Rand. I’ve never read Homer, Dante, or Virgil. Likewise Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire. I think the only French novel I’ve ever read was Hugo’s Notre Dame (so no Balzac, Zola, Proust – but I’ve just remembered I did read De Laclos’s Liasons Dangereuses). I have read virtually nothing by W.H. Auden, which is practically a thought crime. There are gaps in my reading that stand out to me as being in need of filling. Until recently one of those gaps was labeled “Goethe.” So, you know: check.

Is it tomorrow or just the end of time

Faust is probably best enjoyed while on drugs. There should be a page before the beginning of part two that reads “Diese scheiße ist etwa, merkwürdig zu werden, y’all.” So werden that there’s probably no point of diminishing returns right up to the moment where you’re too far gone to read. If Faust isn’t banned in Oklahoma, it ought to be. I’m not necessarily advocating drug use. I’m just saying: As your attorney, I advise you to knock back a couple of beers and maybe some painkillers before attempting this book. Faust and Loathing in [Your Location Here].

Okay, there are all my drug jokes quarantined in one paragraph. Onward! The Faust story should be familiar to anyone whose parents wanted them. A scholar who wants worldly power makes a bargain with the devil, seduces a girl, and at the end is damned. Part one dramatizes the first two of these events briefly and more or less straightforwardly. Then, one assumes, there was some kind of airborne release of a potent psychoactive substance above Weimar and the scheiße hit the lüfter.

One assumes this because there is a marked difference in the style between the two parts of Faust. Alot of this can be attributed to the twenty-four years that elapsed between the publication of part one and the completion of part two.

Interlude

And at this point, I stopped writing for two and a half months. Now I’m back to trying to finish it. The blog concept has, in the intervening period, become nearly impossible. We’ll see. Okay, back to it. I think I remember what I was trying to say.

Continuons

All of the elements of part one are present in part two, but something feverish has been added, and the whole thing swirls around like several operas being performed at once on a single stage. If you decide to read Faust, I urge you to find a free translation rather than the verse translations, which undermine the effect of the language and obscure the ideas. For example, in one verse translation you can read

They clash, it’s said, for Freedom’s right:
Seen rightly, slave with slave is all the fight.

Which was rendered (I think – I long ago returned the book) in the version I read as

They claim to be fighting for Freedom
But in truth it is a war of slave against slave.

The translation by Stuart Atkins which I found at my local booklenders’ was excellent.

Up next

“Oh boy,” has been my refrain since I started this damned thing, but if I keep it up (and I mean to), I’m going to really need to kick it into high gear. At my last writing I was finished with or in the middle of The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie, Born in Blood by John J. Robinson, The Battle that Stopped Rome by Peter S. Wells, Longitude by Dava Sobel, The Illustrated Day of Battle by John Keegan, Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, Blood and Faith by Matthew Carr, Strong Men Armed by Robert Leckie, and From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. Now these are all completed, along with  Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, and Zero History by William Gibson; Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton, and maybe some other books – I’ll have to have a look around the house. I’m currently reading Rivers of Gold by Hugh Thomas.

Preamble

Might as well bring it out here as anywhere. This year René Descartes seems to be the sun around which much of my reading orbits. It started with Unknown Quantity, where Descartes the mathematician made an appearance. As the famous French philosopher he was of course mentioned in La Belle France, even though he spent much of his career abroad and died in Sweden. In The Island at the Center of the World, also by Russell Shorto, Descartes the influential man of ideas didn’t actually make it on stage, but was rumored to be in a backstage dressing room with a couple of starlets and four grams of uncut Columbian. He makes an early appearance in From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, which I’ve been crawling through all year, and also features in Quicksilver, Longitude, and Born in Blood, all of which I’ve finished and will get to writing about eventually. So when my pal Aly, whose frequent book loans were part of why last year was so interesting, saw that I was reading Island and offered to lend me Descartes’ Bones, it seemed to be kind of inevitable.

René Descartes is someone everyone should know about, at least a little bit. And it’s funny, because my college degree is in philosophy, and I thought I did know about him. My reading this year, though, is making me reappraise the man. For one thing, I didn’t really work through Descartes beyond the usual Intro to Philosophy class, where Descartes was classed among the rationalists, whose epistemology broadly endorsed approaching truth through (but not exclusively through) reason, and contrasted with the empiricists, whose epistemology (again, broadly) restricts approaches to truth to sense data. What we never really learned about was Descartes’ role in the development of, oh I don’t know, everything to do with western intellectual life since the seventeenth century. Let’s try that again: What we never really learned about was Descartes’ role in the development of, oh I don’t know, The Essence of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Closer. Last try: What we never really learned about was Descartes’ role in the development of, oh I don’t know, INVENTING THINKING. That gets us pretty close to the actual impact of this one man. I’m hard pressed to think of a significant historical or intellectual moment that can’t somehow be traced back to him. Thesis: René Descartes is the Kevin Bacon of the western mind. Antithesis: Actually, that’s probably true. QED.

I’ll give you men who want to rule the world

Pity René Descartes. Strongarmed into leaving Holland for Sweden to serve as philosophy tutor to the famous and, let it be said, somewhat odd Queen Christina, he found to his woe that the weather didn’t suit his constitution and died of pneumonia before half a year had passed. Pity René Descartes. Buried in a churchyard in Sweden, his remains were subsequently exhumed and the bones placed in a ossuary for secret transport back to France. Reburied in a church in Paris, the French Revolution resulted in his being exhumed again (to be reburied in the Panthéon, but then not, because the French Revolution just couldn’t make up its mind) only for someone to realize that there was something wrong: no head. Yes, Descartes’ skull went missing somewhere between Stockholm and Paris. Maybe. SPOILER ALERT: Eventually they found it.

On this tale of posthumous woe Shorto hangs a kind of intellectual history. On the one hand, it’s kind of a lot to hang the whole god-damned enlightenment on an amusing if sad anecdote. Descartes’ Bones (the actual bones, not the book) are perhaps a literary first: a nonfiction MacGuffin. On the other hand, Shorto takes a chance in that he’s required by his MacGuffin to explore the history of western thought through a series of backbenchers, bit players, and – meaning no offense to these long-dead folks and their living fans – functionaries. The question of What Happened to This Guy’s Head is mapped onto the proceedings of the annual meeting of the Council of People Who Are Also Historical, We Promise.

Descartes’ Bones purports (in its subtitle A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason. Cute.) to trace through this bit of anecdotal history the outlines of the ongoing battle between the parties aforementioned. And I guess it does, but here’s the thing: to the extent that there is such a conflict, it exists only between radical partisans, and it is bafflingly stupid and tedious. As one who fancies a bit of both and has managed to balance them for thirty years, give or take, it’s sad and funny (Is there a word for that? Like bittersweet? How about melancomic? No?). The idea of a conflict between faith and reason seems to me kind of like a conflict between breathing and drinking water. Sure, they accomplish different things, and it’s difficult to do both at the same time, but anyone over the age of five should be able to figure it out. And, to spoil the wind of the metaphor, running it thus, extremism in the pursuit of one or the other will only leave you dehydrated or drowned. Taking this approach back to the book, you see that Descartes himself managed his faith and his reason just fine, thank you, and it was only the lesser lights who handled or didn’t handle his earthly remains that couldn’t seem to work it out. And then you feel pretty smart, because, hey, that means you’re like René Descartes.

Summary: Shorto tells an interesting story interestingly, and if you let yourself forget that there’s supposed to be a monumental metaphysical question hanging in the balance, it’s actually a bit of a romp, like a beach book for pasty nerds.

Up next: Oh, dear lord. I’m really in for it now. I’ve got to be like sixteen books deep in backlog, and I also meant to do something for the halfway mark of my year in books (by the way, you should now be able to find me at www.myyearinbooks.com). Well, let’s count ‘em up and see what we’ve got. The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie, Born in Blood by John J. Robinson, The Battle that Stopped Rome by Peter S. Wells, Longitude by Dava Sobel, Faust Parts 1 and 2, The Illustrated Day of Battle by John Keegan, Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, Blood and Faith by Matthew Carr, Strong Men Armed by Robert Leckie: okay, so that’s only ten books. Which means if I put these out at my average rate for the year, I’ll be done with the backlog by November and have another twenty or so books to write up. Crap.

Preamble

I think I’m done with Le Carré for a while. No, let me rephrase that. I hope to God I’m done with Le Carré for a while. I’ve read all his best work, and my local booklender doesn’t have a copy of A Perfect Spy, which is the book I would most like to reread. And besides, he’s really good at what he does, but he really only does the one thing: a man unlucky in love, a  curiosity to his peers, unravels a mystery within the confines of the utterly broken British intelligence service, and is sad about it. Can I be the only one who’s caught on? Probably not, but he has done it so well so many times that it’s hard to criticize it.

So I’m done with Le Carré, which means among other things I won’t be typing ALT-0233 as much. Just as well.

If you walk in the crowd you won’t leave any trace

So we have Alan Turner, unlucky in love and a curiosity, a nuisance, and a menace to his peers. We have one Leo Harting, a minor functionary in the Bonn (the titular small German city) consulate who has suddenly disappeared and who it is feared may have been some kind of spy, since a box of sensitive papers seems to have disappeared with him. We have a man named Karfield who is a popular right-wing up-and-comer who’s holding nationalistic rallies. And we have spoilers: Harting isn’t a spy, he’s trying to right the wrongs of the past. He stole the documents to expose Karfield as a former Nazi doctor guilty of gas experiments on Jews. In the end, though, the powers that be in Germany want to use Karfield’s past to control him rather than allow him to become some kind of martyr, and so it is Harting who pays the price. Turner having unraveled the mystery, is sad about it.

That’s what happens in this book. But don’t read it. Read A Perfect Spy; read the Karla books.

Up next: Descartes’ Bones by Russell Shorto, The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, Born in Blood by John J. Robinson, The Battle that Stopped Rome by Peter S. Wells, Longitude by Dava Sobel, Faust Parts 1 and 2, The Illustrated Day of Battle by John Keegan, and Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie, and Blood and Faith by Matthew Carr are ongoing.

Preamble

I’ve mentioned before that the fall of of the Berlin wall and the wider Soviet empire is one of the milestones of my young life. It was probably the first historical event that I actually understood in an adult way, that I actually had the intellectual background to consider in context.

In 1983 (that was the year, son) I started reading the Tintin graphic novels (as we now know to call them) and happened one day across something similar-looking called When the Wind Blows at my local booklenders’. It turned out that instead of an adventure story about a puckish boy reporter, it was about a middle-aged British couple who survive a nuclear attack only to die of radiation poisoning in a whimsical, British way. “Wallace and Gromit starring in Grave of the Fireflies” gets you close. It didn’t make me scared about a possible nuclear war, but the mood of it has stayed with me.

When I was older and more aware of world events, I learned the names of Lech Walesa and Václav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and understood that they were heroic. I heard about Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika, and understood that they were cause for hope. And then Solidarity became part of the Polish government, and there were people standing atop the Berlin Wall, and Gorbachev was whisked off to the Crimean due to ill health. Suddenly (it seemed), communism in Europe had vanished.

Wake me up when things get started

Revolution 1989 gives a wide view of the events of that year, proceeding chronologically from the Solidarity strikes in Poland to the fall of the Soviet Union itself after its satellite states had left its orbit. Views from the Kremlin and the White House, though, are wisely subordinated to a ground-level view from East Germany, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the other eastern bloc nations. Other histories I’ve read of the end of the Soviet empire, as Sebesteyn accurately characterizes it, tend to take a top-level geopolitical view in which the local conditions and personalities are overshadowed by the Big Personalities: Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II. By approaching the history from the ground level, so to speak, the particularities of each local revolution emerge – the cerebrality (forgive the neologism) of the Yugoslavian, the working class politics of the Polish, the cold-blooded revenge of the Romanian. The distinctiveness of the revolutionary experience in each nation makes Revolution 1989, I think, a uniquely worthy history.

Along with the history of the end of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe come personal notes of real interest. What was it like to be a dissident in Poland under communist rule? Like an expectant mother you kept a bag packed by the front door for when the police hauled you off to jail. Elena Ceausecu’s last request was that she and her husband be executed together, which is the first and only time I’ve ever been moved by a tyrant. Most interesting about the Ceausecus, though, is that they are portrayed during their flight from the revolution and throughout their trial that they are beloved by the people of Romania and that this is all some kind of misunderstanding.

Misunderstanding becomes a defining element in many of the revolutions, a kind of deliberate, institutional self-delusion. It’s kind of shocking that the rulers of a police state, whose policies call for ubiquitous surveillance and brutal enforcement of uniformity of opinion, could believe despite the evidence to the contrary collected by their own secret police that they and their policies enjoy popular support. Yet this kind of delusion is precisely the history of communism with its falsified productivity reports, its mandatory mass demonstrations in support of the state, and the cults of personality that many of its leaders built. That communism failed seems in retrospect less surprising than that it managed to hang on for so long.

It’s just that we can make you better

Apologists for communism (and it’s always surprising to me when I encounter them) often defend the system by saying that its failures aren’t really failures of Marxism, because that system has never been tried. This is manifestly false, and frankly a damning example of the paranoia of the entire worldview of Marxists. For this to be true, some cabal of 20th century cryptofascists would have to have decided to discredit Marxism by pretending to establish communism throughout the world and failing, in the interim oppressing all of their citizens, jailing many, and directly or indirectly killing them in shocking numbers.

A subtype of this defense of the communist system is the claim that, while communism seems to have failed everywhere it has ever been attempted, this is because the communist stage has never been reached, that reactionary elements within each society prevented the achievement of True Communism. In fact, the Soviets invented the expression “actually existing socialism” to differentiate existing conditions from the intended final state of communist bliss. In Marxism-Leninism, the workers’ revolution is initiated by a “revolutionary vanguard” of those who have reached the appropriate stage of consciousness, followed by a period during which a strong state works to raise the rest of the people to this level of consciousness (and God help the man who is found guilty of “false consciousness”). Once all workers reach this level, the state will wither away and the workers’ paradise will emerge. History, of course, puts the lie to this, since it was the workers who sought to escape communism at hazard of their lives, while the state suppressed dissent through prison camps where thousands died.

A third and extremely tepid defense of communism – what I think of as the original sin defense – is that communism is a great system in theory, but unfortunately it can only be practiced by human beings, who are incapable of bringing into existence the workers’ paradise because of innate greed and selfishness. This too is a pile of horseshit, not least because the first test of any theory of politics is whether it can be applied to political situations involving human beings. If communism doesn’t work because it can’t be implemented until the eschaton, then it’s a theology, not a politics.

More persuasive than any argument against communism, though, is the story of how it was uprooted by the very classes whose interests it claimed to serve, as portrayed in Revolution 1989.

Up next: A Small Town in Germany by John Le Carré, Descartes’ Bones by Russell Shorto, The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, Born in Blood by John J. Robinson, The Battle that Stopped Rome by Peter S. Wells, Longitude by Dava Sobel, Faust Parts 1 and 2, The Illustrated Day of Battle by John Keegan, and Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. That’s nine books, meaning that I’ve fallen further behind rather than caught up. Crap. I continue to read From Dawn to Decadence, and I’m also reading Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie and Blood and Faith by Matthew Carr.

Preamble

Well, here we are, at the last Takeshi Kovacs novel Richard Morgan is ever likely to write. I’ve enjoyed reading these books, but it’s kind of a relief. Takeshi Kovacs is a very angry man, and Richard Morgan is, to a lesser extent, an angry author. Sometimes, especially at first, this anger is invigorating. Having been through three books and countless, escalating acts of violence, it has begun to make all three of us (that’s Kovacs, Morgan, and me) tired.

I think I have a lot to say about the book, so let’s get to it.

If you know what life is worth

In Woken Furies, Takeshi Kovacs returns to his home world, Harlan’s Planet, which is effectively a wholly owned subsidiary of the Harlan family, the original settlers of the planet. He has returned home to carry out a vendetta, but finds himself caught up in – what? The web of his own past, perhaps. Over the course of the book, Kovacs seems to retrace his own history, backwards, from a recent romantic entanglement to the revolutionary leader he once served to the Envoy trainer who taught him everything he knows. As with my writeup of Broken Angels, I’m not going to rehash all of the important terms of Morgan’s fictional world, so look to the writeup of Altered Carbon if there’s anything you don’t understand.

The plot of Woken Furies moves between two fixed points: religion and revolution. At the beginning of the novel, Kovacs is on a crusade against a proto-Muslim religion called (appallingly) the “Knights of the New Revelation.” It seems that his love interest from the first fifteen pages of the Altered Carbon ditched him and married some other guy, who then converted to this new religion, which does not condone the practice of resleeving. When their daughter died, she ran away with the body to have her resleeved, but was caught. Mother and daughter were killed and their cortical stacks dumped in the ocean, presumably to await the resurrection. Doing this to Takeshi Kovacs’s former love interest is a marvelously bad idea. Kovacs starts the book with a pocket full of the cortical stacks of those involved. (I mean, seriously, page one and the body count is already easily half a dozen.) Near the end, we learn why he’s hanging on to them.

But first, Kovacs teams up with a group of paramilitary outcasts who sweep the wasteland of an old battlefield, destroying the still-evolving nanotechnology deployed in the end stages of the planet’s failed revolution. This revolution, which Kovacs himself participated in on the insurgents’ side, was led by a general/poet/philosopher named Quellcrist Falconer. Her revolutionary ideology is called Quellism, and is even now the inspiration for those who want to overthrow the Harlan family. While sweeping the wasteland one of these paramilitary soldiers, a cybernetically modified woman named Sylvie, somehow becomes possessed by what appears to be the digital persona of Quellcrist Falconer herself.

At this point the shit really hits the fan, as the Harlan family sends an assassin after this new incarnation of Quell – and who should they send but an illegal copy of a younger Takeshi Kovacs, one who is still in his own mind an Envoy, having none of the real Kovacs’s experiences since he left the Corps. Kovacs loses Sylvie to his former self, and seeks refuge with his former trainer, Virginia Virdaura, and a group of neo-Quellists, who help him plan and execute a rescue operation to get Sylvie, or Quellcrist, out of the hands of the Harlans.

Old friends, betrayals, grudges, vendetta. These are the essence of Woken Furies, and it succeeds in ways that its predecessor, Broken Angels, did not. First of all, it has momentum, whereas Broken Angels felt at times like the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Woken Furies moves relentlessly forward in pursuit of what is ultimately Takeshi Kovacs’s crisis of faith.

There’s certainly one kind of faith Kovacs doesn’t have, and that’s religious faith. In this, he’s very much in step with his creator, who said in an interview:

I have approximately zero time for religion of any sort — it continues to astound me that at the beginning of the twenty first century, we can still be grubbing about on our knees like a bunch of medieval peasants. But within the larger set of that idiocy, I’m driven to especial fury by the misogyny inherent in the great patriarchal religions. As far as I’m concerned, any belief system that assigns a separate and subordinate role to women in society is, by definition, uncivilized. Anyone who advocates it is, by definition, a barbarian.

Leaving aside for the moment any assessment of how much actual insight is available in this view of religion, the Knights of the New Revelation decidedly qualify as a barbaric religious group. But Kovacs’s crisis of faith revolves around Quellism, the revolution rather than the revelation. Is the woman he’s trying to save really Quellcrist Falconer (when she’s not Sylvie)? If she is, does he still believe in her revolutionary ideology or is his alignment with the neo-Quellists (who harbor similar doubts at first) simply the easiest way to get what he wants? And what does he want? Does revolution achieve anything?

At the end, Kovacs concludes that it’s a least worth trying, or more accurately, keeping Sylvie/Quellcrist safe so that she and those who still have a wholehearted revolutionary commitment can try. Kovacs, it seems, still needs some help with his unbelief.

Preacherman don’t tell me

I had started to say here that Woken Furies and, to a lesser extent, Altered Carbon are in part about the conflict between science and religion. I was going to say that while I don’t see any need for such a conflict, given what I think is a reasonable approach to and understanding of science and religion. Somehow, though, those statements didn’t feel right to me. And the more I considered it, the less I believed either that the books do consider the conflict between science and religion or that such a conflict could be avoided. The books could have said something interesting on the subject of science and religion, but they instead exemplify exactly why there is such a conflict, which is, simply put, the blinkered zealotry of both parties to the conflict.

In Altered Carbon this is embodied in a low view of Roman Catholics, who reject resleeving or any other kind of artificial revival after death (in addition to being put in a new sleeve, the data from the cortical stack can be placed in a virtual environment, which Morgan tells us is used for – rather macabre, you would think – family reunions and holidays, among other things). In a kind of bizarre Terry-Schiavo-in-reverse, the general populace disparages the Catholics’ rejection of life-extending technology, although even those with no moral objection to the practice tend to use it only once or twice, and find the experience less than pleasant. Those who perpetually extend their lives regardless of cost are also looked down on and disparaged as “meths,” after the biblical Methuselah, who lived some 900 years (albeit in only one sleeve). Never broached is the question of why it’s acceptable to use the technology once or twice, but not forever. Or, to take it from the other angle, why it’s acceptable to refuse the technology after one or two uses, but not to refuse it entirely.

The opprobrium becomes more direct in Woken Furies. Like the first book’s Catholics, the New Revelation rejects the resleeving technology, plus they subjugate women, making them twice-damned. As a result of what they’ve done to his former partner, he’s been on a rampage, killing the men involved and extracting their cortical stacks. Throughout the course of the book, he adds to his collection. What vengeance is he exacting? This: he pays an underworld ally to place the cortical stacks in swamp panthers, who then fight to the death. The cortical stacks are then put in new swamp panthers until their inhabitants, or whatever you want to call them, the ghosts in the silicon, are driven mad by the terror of it. This is Takeshi Kovacs’s idea of a moral victory, I guess.

Morgan has given us a fictional universe in which half-understood new technologies have profound moral consequences. Half of Harlan’s World is uninhabitable because of nanotechnology run amok. Placing someone’s cortical stack in a virtual environment may allow multigenerational family reunions, but it also permits incredible tortures. The moral effect of technology is determined by human choices, which is to say: complex. What Morgan doesn’t give us is a fictional universe in which religion contributes anything to informing those choices. Morgan’s religions are reactionary, rejectionist, and – consistent with his own views on religion – barbaric, which is to say: simplistic. And that’s really too bad.

Up next: Wow. No matter what I do, I’m still neck-deep in books waiting to be written up. Here’s what’s finished: A Small Town in Germany by John Le Carré, Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebesteyn, Descartes’ Bones by Russell Shorto, The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, Born in Blood by John J. Robinson, The Battle that Stopped Rome by Peter S. Wells, and Longitude by Dave Sobel. Faust Parts 1 and 2 and From Dawn to Decadence remain ongoing efforts. I’ve nearly finished The Illustrated Day of Battle by John Keegan, and I’ve started Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

Preamble

Usually, I try to start these things out with something a little personal. Something that describes how I came to be interested in the book or the subject, or something that reflects my response to it. I figure if anyone’s bothering to read this crap, they can google anything else they really want to know about the background of the author or whatever. I mean, Wikipedia exists for a reason (and yes, it’s generally adequate). That’s why I chose the heading “preamble.” It comes before, and it just sort of, I don’t know, walks around? Sometimes, though, I don’t really have anywhere to go. Now is such a time.

I guess I could mention that I first read Graham Greene during a period when I was reading a lot of early 20-century English Christian intellectuals – mainly Evelyn Waugh, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, a touch of Dorothy Sayers and Malcolm Muggeridge, and of course the perennial J.R.R. Tolkien. (I almost said “sainted” instead of “perennial,” and then I thought, is there a movement to beatify Tolkien? Why or why not?) I had read and seen The Third Man and picked up The Power and the Glory. That, my friend, is one hell of a book. In fact, Wikipedia tells me that it’s one of President Obama’s favorite books, and whatever you may think of him, the man’s no dummy. One year before The Power and the Glory, which is usually considered Greene’s best work, he published The Confidential Agent.

I have no friends to help me now

Throughout his writing career, Graham Greene divided his literary output into two categories: serious novels and “entertainments.” The Confidential Agent is classed as an entertainment, but – and perhaps this is because it was written during the same period as The Power and the Glory – it takes itself progressively more seriously as it moves forward. An interesting tidbit of background is here.

To begin with, a man, the agent of a faction in a civil conflict in an unnamed country (but doubtless based on Spain, since the Spanish Civil War was going on at the time), is on a boat traveling to England. The man, identified only as D., is shocked to meet an agent of the opposing faction, identified as L. Each faction wants a trade agreement with the British for coal.

The first part of the book relates D’s attempts to protect the papers that provide his bona fides long enough to make a scheduled meeting with the British Lord who can provide the contract for the coal. On the way, he gets tangled up with a couple of girls. One, the Lord’s wastrel daughter, ends up falling for him, kind of. The other, a maid at his shabby hotel, becomes his accomplice. He promises to rescue her, to take her away with him. She then falls suspiciously to her death from a high window while D is out having his papers stolen. The contract for the coal is thus awarded to the rival faction; D has failed. Subsequently, he goes a little crazy, steals a gun, and strikes out for the coal mines, hoping to persuade the mine workers to stand in solidarity with the workers in D’s country and refuse to provide coal to the (presumably) nationalist faction.

The Confidential Agent in a way anticipates the most famous novel of the Spanish Civil War (or at least the most famous English-language novel of that war), Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, but in reverse. Both have a somber, fatalistic attitude about the efficacy of a lone man carrying out orders on foreign soil in what is probably a cause already lost. But where For Whom the Bell Tolls takes itself very seriously (so seriously, that there is a great deal of comedy in the literal translation of idiomatic Spanish, as when characters continually say “I obscenity in the milk of your x), The Confidential Agent is for all its fatality and failure, a comic novel. Perhaps Greene and Hemingway worked out a deal to have history repeat itself, first as farce and second as tragedy.

Up next: It seems like no matter what I do, I remain consistently seven books deep in my backlog. At my last writing I had finished: Woken Furies by Richard Morgan, A Small Town in Germany by John Le Carré, Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebesteyn, The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, and Born in Blood by John J. Robinson. These are now joined by The Battle that Stopped Rome by Peter S. Wells and Longitude by Dave Sobel. And of course the poor are always with us, along with Faust Parts 1 and 2 (although I have only 70 pages to go, and could conceivably finish before Thanksgiving) and From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun (I’m about 260 pages in, with a mere 540 to go). I’ve also added The Illustrated Day of Battle by John Keegan, a classic of military history, and Blood and Faith, a history of the expulsion of Muslims from Spain by Matthew Carr (the book, not the expulsion).

Note: As you might have noticed, yes, I’m trying out the Amazon affiliates program as an easy way to get cover images for the books. I am totally not trying to make money here (nor, if I were trying to make money, would this be a particularly good or effective way to go about it). I’m just lazy and don’t want to do the work of stealing someone else’s images and uploading them to WordPress.

It’s an awful cliché, but let’s get it out there so we can look at it: At the end of a good novel we nearly always want to know what happened to the characters next. There’s a sense at the end of an enjoyable book that it somehow isn’t enough. Perhaps not at the end of À la recherce du temps perdu, but often the reader feels like the author should have or at least could have written more.

Out of this sense of incompleteness we get things like the pulp series of the 1930s and 40s – the serial adventures of Tarzan, or Mike Hammer, or Alan Quatermain. We get long series like the Harry Potter books. We get fanfiction, where amateur enthusiasts create new storylines for beloved characters (something many authors detest). And, alas, we get The Secret Pilgrim.

If we get to see tomorrow

George Smiley is the hero (if there is one, which is debatable) of Le Carré’s best work, the Karla trilogy, published in the middle and late 70s. In these books Smiley must uncover a mole within the British foreign intelligence service and the Russian master spy (Karla) who is behind him. What makes Smiley remarkable as a character is that, unlike a James Bond or a Jack Ryan, he’s the opposite of a man of action. His signature gesture is cleaning his glasses on his tie. He specializes in baroque German literature, if you can believe it. People always ask after his wife, Ann, who is peripatetically unfaithful and permanently absent. His methods are academic and bureaucratic. That he manages to be a dazzling protagonist is something of a mystery, but in the sooty light of 1970s British national malaise that is Smiley’s milieu, he somehow shines.

And Le Carré knew it. Smiley was his first protagonist, and once The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (in which Smiley plays a minor role) became a hit, it was probably inevitable that he’s return as the central character in the Karla books. First, however, he’d get another bit part in The Looking Glass War and be left entirely out of A Small Town in Germany and The Naive and Sentimental Lover. Since the Karla books mark George Smiley’s fifth appearance in fiction, I think it’s safe to say that the impulse to extend the stories of good characters is not always bad.

In The Secret Pilgrim, Smiley’s last appearance, it is. Oh, it’s bad. This book is Le Carré’s cash-in novel. He’s got a few disconnected stories and a famous character, and he just phones this one in. The pretext for this is Smiley’s student Ned, now the head of training at the intelligence training school, who brings the old man in for a valedictory address, a kind of victory lap. The cold war is over, and the fresh-faced youngsters who will fight the next war, whatever its temperature might be, must learn from the cold warrior himself. As Smiley speaks, Ned remembers events from the great man’s career and from his own. Crap. On a crap cracker.

None of the stories is terrible, and it’s all adequately entertaining, but there’s something lacking. It’s like driving a Porsche turbo in stop-and-go traffic: there’s just a sense that this is somehow wrong, that this vehicle isn’t meant for what you’re doing with it.

So I’m going to stop writing about it. Don’t bother with this book. Instead, read the Karla books: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People. Read A Perfect Spy, which doesn’t feature George Smiley but is probably Le Carré’s best single work and probably the best spy story ever written, period. Hell, read The Canterbury Tales, which is also a series of unconnected stories and relates to a pilgrimage.

Up next: I’m really tearing it up these days. Still to come are Woken Furies by Richard Morgan, The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene, A Small Town in Germany by John Le Carré, Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebesteyn, The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, and Born in Blood by John J. Robinson.

I have no idea why this year has become the year of genre fiction. This was not what I had set out to do. Until last year, my fantasy/sci-fi reading consisted entirely of a trip through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings every year or so, a little bit of Orson Scott Card (only the Ender books, including the newer “Shadow of x” books) and William Gibson. I would also read some Tom Clancy just to get some bad action writing in my diet. (It’s like salt: you don’t want to eat a whole mouthful of it, because it tastes like shit by itself, but it makes everything else taste so good.)

Then last year I found In the Name of the Wind, and that started everything. I think part of the attraction of this kind of writing as opposed to realistic fiction (and no, I don’t intend to get into a Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism-style digression here, but that’s where I’m starting, mentally. And you should read it, if you like that kind of thing.) is that by widening the scope and scale of possible actions, the potential for good plotting increases. (And if you don’t think realism constrains plotting, read Douglas Coupland some time. It’s like reading about your day at the office.) And this freedom in plotting also opens up potential for good writing that illuminates character. I don’t know exactly how to say this, but read George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and try to imagine a better story of political intriguing and you’ll understand what I mean. Of course, there’s plenty of bad plotting and writing, too, in genre fiction, but it stands out more somehow (to me, at least) and you’re always allowed to put a book down, even if I rarely do.

All that to say: here I am, writing up another science fiction novel, the second of the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan. That’s the other problem with sci-fi and fantasy: it’s always a god-damned trilogy, and so if it’s good, you know you’re going to have to read the whole thing. It’s the worst.

Every day we’ve all been led astray

The first Takeshi Kovacs book, Altered Carbon, was a genre-defining cyberpunk noir with a transhumanist twist. In Broken Angels, Morgan moves to a more typical hard sci-fi structure. Kovacs, elite mercenary, awakens from his most recent death and resleeving (see the previous writeup for the terminology – I’m not going to pad the word count by rehashing it here) on a planet called Sanction IV, where he is part of a mercenary arming fighting against a local rebellion. You know what? Let’s skip the plot-summary part, too. In fact, let’s just skip right to the part where I tell you the first three-fourths of the book is basically “Three Kings” in space with Martian technology instead of gold.

Unfortunately, Morgan was better when he was doing hard-boiled detective sci-fi. If I want military action sci-fi, I’ll reread Starship Troopers, which was a much better book than the movie would lead you to believe, although it did come off the rails here and there. With the change in setting, though, Morgan doesn’t find much for his main character to do. Both Morgan as a writer and Takeshi Kovacs as a protagonist were at their best when Kovacs was doing solo detective work in Altered Carbon. In Broken Angels he spends most of the book tagging along with other people, and while the book has its moments (including the climactic scene, which is terrific), there must be some way to use the character more interestingly than to have him literally just waiting around for other people to do things as he does for much of the book.

A quick scan through the book review pages of a few science fiction websites shows that most reviewers preferred this straight-up effort to the hybrid of Altered Carbon. That I don’t understand at all.

“If Richard Morgan’s first book, Altered Carbon, grabbed your attention by the scruff of its neck then Broken Angels will lock it into a sustained Half Nelson.”

“Superior to Altered Carbon (and entirely readable on its own), Broken Angels finally shows Richard K. Morgan cutting the umbilical from the influences he displayed so unabashedly before, and moving the stories of Takeshi Kovacs off into new and more interesting directions.”

“Richard Morgan’s first novel, Altered Carbon, was a home run by any measure. In Broken Angels, he delivers a grand slam.”

I’m pretty sure the only reason to write something as asinine as these (especially the first and third of them) is if you’re angling for a spot in the “early praise for Broken Angels” blurbs. It’s a shame, really. Since the last William Gibson book was a disappointment, it would have been nice to have someone writing human-scaled science fiction with a hard-boiled edge. Then again, there’s always Woken Furies.

Up next: Well, crap. I managed to write up three books, but I find my list hasn’t really gotten shorter. Coming up are Woken Furies by Richard Morgan, The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene, The Secret Pilgrim and A Small Town in Germany by John Le Carré, Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebesteyn, The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, and Born in Blood by John J. Robinson. I’m still reading From Dawn to Decadence and Faust Parts 1 and 2, and I’ve started Descartes’ Bones by Russell Shorto and The Battle that Stopped Rome by Peter S. Wells. All but Decadence will probably be added to the done pile this week, so expect more blogging from me in the next few days as I try to avoid getting any further behind.

In the interest of catching up with my seven-book backlog, I’m going to try to be briefer. I started out writing little 700-word précis, but the last few have been in the 1000- to 1400-word range, and that’s unsustainable when you don’t like writing and you’re as far behind as I am. But here’s a perfect book to be brief about: it’s a short history, after all.

Of famine. How on earth did I pick this one? At random. I simply walked into my local booklenders’ and addressed myself to the new nonfiction display. The cover of the book shows an engraving of one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer and some attractive typography. See?

I do so like a good cover. (I have meant, by the way, to include more cover images. I may do some kind of Amazon thing to save me the effort of having to find and upload images, which is a small hassle, but large enough for me to want to avoid it.) Anyway, that’s it. I thumbed through it and it seemed interesting, so I took it home with me. By coincidence, the thing that’s stayed with me from Famine is another image.

I see your face every time I dream

But first things first: Famine: A Short History provides a thematic look at famine over the ages with a heavy, and I mean heavy emphasis on social statistics. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with so many tables in it. Mercifully, Ó Gráda uses tables to illustrate or support points rather than to make them. The first four chapters describe the historical characteristics of famine, including the social consequences, the demographic changes, and the coping strategies that result. Which is just a fancy way of saying that during famines crime rises, fertility drops, and people eat their shoes, if they had any.

The second four chapters examine famines from different angles – French famines in the 18th century through the lens of market economics; Indian famines in the 20th century as a case study in colonial social policy; famine generally as aid becomes another aspect of globalization;and the famines of state policy in the USSR, China, Ethiopia, and North Korea. Finally, after an arduous review of the horrors of famine, Ó Gráda presents his happy conclusion that famine itself may be a thing of the past. The Malthusian view of famine as Nature’s preferred form of population control may have to give way to the successes of technology, transport, and globalization.

But what’s with me even as I write this is, as I said, an image. Several pictures of famine victims are included in the book, and each is affecting. But there’s this one picture, and, God help me, I don’t know what to do with it.

It looks like it was taken in a street or some public area. In it an emaciated African boy, maybe 10 years old, though it’s hard to tell, is crawling on the ground, looking up at a sack held in the hand of a person, seen only from the waist down, who is walking away from him. The caption reads , “A well nourished Sudanese man steals maize from a starving child during a food distribution at Medecins Sans Frontieres feeding centre at Ajiep, southern Sudan, in 1998.” The photo is here, if you want to see it.

And I guess why this stays with me, and why I think you ought to look at it, is because although images like this make me feel sad and angry and powerless and . . . cosseted, it’s real, and if you can’t do anything about it (and you can’t, not really) at least you can look at it instead of turning away. Because maybe some day you or I may be able to do something about it, and if we turn away now, we will then, too. And I at least need to look at this picture and feel this despair because, heroic fantasies aside, I know damned well that I’m not going to save this kid. I’m the guy holding the bag.

Up next: some books I read. I need a drink.

One thing I don’t do much is talk with other people about books. Mostly this is because I don’t know many people with my outsized appetite for them. I guess it’s also because I prefer reading books to talking (or, God help me, writing) about them. But the core of it is a kind of embarrassment. Many of the people I know who are devoted readers often specialize in a genre or subject, and those of use who are generalists share a kind of embarrassment about our dilettantism. Or I do, and project my own feelings on everyone else. But talking to someone who is, say, a science enthusiast about a science book is embarrassing, because (a) I don’t really share their enthusiasm, and (b) the sum of my reading is a drop of understanding in a deep black well of ignorance.

Then, too, I’m a very passive reader. I don’t make marginal notes (This has always seemed an odd quirk to me. Martin Amis in his review of Nabokov’s Lolita mentions that he has several generations of notes in his copy and lists a few, none of which seem especially insightful to me and most of which are on the level of “good,” “very good,” or even the euphoric “v v good!!!” But such notes would be useful for going back through a book and finding the bits that seemed interesting or important. I just can’t bring myself to do it.) or even take issue with the arguments of a book while I’m reading it. I simply accept the information and let my mind sort out what I like or find useful at a deep background level. Part of the point of writing about what I’m reading is to try to do this more consciously, and I’m finding I’m v v bad!!! at it.

The result of this is that I don’t usually have much to say about the books I’m reading, or have read, other than whether I liked them. I feel like I do a poor job of responding to what I read, except in a kind of absorptive way. If I feel like I need to give some account of the book, I’m usually better at talking about the style than about the content. One of the things I’m trying (I guess) to do with this whole blogging project is to set down some kind of coherent response to the books I read, so that I can look at it later and be embarrassed. It’s an act of delaying the moment when I feel like I need to talk about the book and finding that everything that comes to mind is trivial.

Despite my reluctance, though, I sometimes find myself in the middle of an unexpected conversation about books. (I may ask myself, Well, how did I get here?) Such a thing happened the other day at work with my colleague Evan, whose interests are – and here I’m going to risk insulting him (rather than, as usual, deliberately and directly insult him) – both eclectic and oddly circumscribed. He lent me 1491 as an act of mercy after I had, in a moment of mental weakness, confused the Inca and Mayan peoples. Well, I didn’t actually mistake one of them for the other. I just forgot that the Inca weren’t in Mexico. And before you start feeling all smug, remember: you probably do that kind of thing all the time without knowing it.

Water flowing underground

Mann’s principal argument is simple:

(1) The human population of the American continents prior to their discovery by Europeans was vastly larger than is commonly thought.

(2) Those populations were made possible by much more developed land management and alteration of the natural environment than is usually thought.

The ordinary understanding of Indians (and Mann includes a nice appendix justifying his preference for this obviously inaccurate descriptor based on the argument that, well, it’s what their descendants call themselves) is that they migrated to North America a long time ago and formed small societies of hunter-gatherers, relying on stone-age technology and, at best, extremely basic agricultural practices, but this was fine because nature provided bounty enough for them. When European explorers came to the Americas, they found a mostly pristine world, unmarred by man.

To disprove this, Mann bounds from the Hudson River Valley, where, unexpectedly, Adriaen van der Donack (from book nine) makes an unexpected appearance, to Aztec Mexico, to the Mayan and Inca (which he spells with a k: Inka) lands in Pacific South America and the Yucatan Peninsula, respectively. He reviews both historical documents regarding Europeans’ encounters with natives and archaeological research old and new, providing brief surveys of changing attitudes toward and assessments of Indian civilization. He makes the case throughout that the latest archaeology, though still a matter of some controversy, indicates a much earlier arrival than is usually taught in schools, as far back as forty thousand years ago (and that’s a mighty long time).

Reports of some of the first Spanish explorers in the Americas report such large populations that many historians, Mann says, have discounted them as fantasy, concluding that available agricultural technology could never support so many people. Subsequent explorers found much smaller populations, and many have concluded that these are more realistic estimates. Between these two phases of contact, European diseases wiped out Indian populations, with those in the greatest cities most vulnerable to the transmission of the diseases. In other words, there were fewer Indians during the second phase of contact because in between the two came an accidental genocide.

To support the large populations, Mann argues, Indian groups practiced much more extensive land management and alteration than they have been given credit (or blame, I suppose) for. Building on the scale that the Mayans did (Seriously, browse around here, because it’s just dumbfounding) would require a strong central leadership, a large working population, and extensive agriculture to support the nonagricultural workforce. Even where we don’t typically think of the local Indians as great builders, say for instance in the US, Mann argues that extensive land management in the form of frequent forest burnings and the deliberate cultivation of forests and other lands to ensure reliable food supplies. In fact, Mann says, the prairies of the midwest and the great forests of the eastern seaboard were the result not of primeval botanical geography (or whatever the word for that is), but rather the deliberate creation of the resident Indians. Those majestic herds of bison? Yeah, those too.

In short (if anything related to this accursed [yes, I took out an obscenity there] book report I’m writing could be called short), Indians were neither so noble nor so savage as we continue to be told they were, however many decades after that myth was supposedly abandoned.

I gladly recommend this book to anyone interested in ancient history in the western hemisphere. Mann takes fragmentary archaeological evidence and academic controversy; explores significant personalities, societies, and events; and emerges with a picture of ancient cultures that deals in both particulars and generalities without becoming either a catalog of minutiae or a toothless oversimplification. He hits the sweet spot, I think, in just the way I’m hoping someone will for Babylonian history. Seriously, someone write that book (or tell me that it’s already been written).

Up next: Well, it’s been a while since I wrote anything, and it’s not because I haven’t been reading. I hope soon to get to the following books I’ve already finished: Famine: A Short History by Cormac Ó Gráda; Broken Angels and Woken Furies by Richard Morgan, The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene, and The Secret Pilgrim and A Small Town in Germany by John Le Carré, and Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebesteyn. That’s seven books I need to write about, and I’m struggling to remember what some of them were about. Wish me luck.

Still reading From Dawn to Decadence and Faust Parts 1 and 2, and I’ve started Descartes’ Bones by Russell Shorto and The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, which I already like better than the book that started this whole stupid thing, Best Served Cold. Oh, and I haven’t found my copy of Ulysses yet, so I’ve been reading Born in Blood by John J. Robinson.