In praise of the White Guard

Usually I wait until the end of a book to make comments about it but The White Guard is one of the most enjoyable books I have read for a long time. Enjoyable not in the sense of it being a rip-roaring yarn but because it is so well described, detailed and conveyed making you really sense the war going on around you. As a description of the way that being in the middle of a war feels like trying to stand up on a piece of floating ice then this book, which is criminally undervalued compared to say All Quiet on the Western Front, is in a class of its own. If the idea of a story being based around a City and a few selected individuals and one family being torn apart by war sounds appealing then track down The White Guard. The way it is working out so far, and unless things go off the boil in the last 100 pages this is shaping up to be one of my favourite reads of the year.

A healthy prognosis

The Bookseller blog points to an interesting comment in the Forbes special report about the future of books with a conclusion that although conventional wisdom would suggest that in the age of the Internet the traditional printed paper format should be in trouble the world of reading is healthy.

There are a series of piece about books, publishing and literacy. An interesting one for web savvy users is the piece about the impact of the web on literacy which covers blogs, Amazon reviews but also some of the interesting ways teachers are using web applications to get students to interact with characters and language.

The White Guard - post III

It must be a real challenge for writers trying to describe the impact of a war on individuals and a city, a bit like painters trying to capture the sea in a storm, but Bulgakov manages to do it.

Over and over he manages to capture the sense of uncertainty, fear and cowardice that the soldiers of all ranks display in front of the enemy or possibility of combat

Bullet points between pages 110 – 179

* The Reds appear to have a coherent plan that tries to draw resistance out of the City in one direction while the attacks comes in the other but it quickly becomes clear that there is going to be sporadic and limited resistance

* The focus turns back to the city and chaos reigns as leaders succumb to fear and exhaustion and either flee or become so ineffective they might as well have left the field of battle

* There is a sequence focusing on the troop of men that are responsible for the running of four armoured cars that sums up the attitude of the White troops to the prospect of fighting the Reds

"By ten o’clock Pleshko was looking paler than ever. Two of his gunlayers, two drivers and one machine-gunner had vanished without trace. Every effort to get the three armoured cars moving proved fruitless. Shchur, who had been ordered out on a mission by Captain Pleshko, never returned. Needless to say his motor-cycle disappeared with him. The voices on the field-telephones grew threatening. The brighter grew the morning, the stranger the things that happened at the armoured-car troop; two gunners, Duvamn and Maltsev, also vanished, together with a couple more machine-gunners. The vehicles themselves took on a forlorn, abandoned look as they stood there like three useless juggernauts, surrounded by a litter of spanners, jacks and buckets.

By noon, the troop commander, Captain Pleshko himself, had disappeared too." pg125

* Among the various stories across the front Nikolka is highlighted leading a troop of men out onto the streets to fight and Alexi reports to an abandoned school and has to go back to headquarters to discover the papers being burnt and defeatism set in before he really understands what is going on

* Nikolka barely escapes with his life after encountering the Reds and heads home in a state of shock where he sleeps and wakes to find a stranger in the house and his brother seriously wounded

* The family rally round to try and save Alexi but he has a bad wound in his arm and is delirious and suffering from fever for most of the time contrasting with Lariosik who with his clumsy ways and desperation to please is a bit of a comic character

More of this brilliant book tomorrow...

Save the world - buy a book

I put these words together for a piece I did for the magazine Poet's Letter but thought they might be worthy of a posting...

As Christmas approaches there are going to be plenty of people that pop into a bookshop to choose something to give as a present and the choices are varied but there are a number of titles that could persuade a relative or friend to change the way they lead their lives.

We are not talking about those dreaded leadership and How to Meet Friends… type books, but the growing number of titles that are addressing the crisis the planet finds itself in.

Even before the Stern Report, which rivals James Joyce’s Ulysses for length, came out warning about the costs of climate change there were plenty of other books making very similar warnings already on the shelves or in production.

Bearing in mind how topical the question of carbon emissions, melting ice caps and burning summers are there is one part of the book publishing world that should be kept busy for the next few years covering the topical subject of climate change.

Already there are atlases that map out the parts of the planet that are pumping out the most carbon emissions as well as books that are designed to provide you with tips on how to reduce your own carbon emissions and plenty prepared to explain the headache inducing science behind it all.

The guide to judging the good from the mediocre will be based largely on the author but the challenge is going to be to try and make a subject that can easily become bogged down in scientific argument something that is not only widely understood but has the power to change opinions.

Those arguments need to be powerful because there are plenty of people that are prepared to ignore the arguments with Noel Gallagher, from Oasis, summing up one school of thought when he told The Sun towards the end of November that maybe it would be best if the sky fell in and he wouldn’t care anyway because he would be dead when it happened.

Books have the power to change minds and across the globe there is a
real need for the call for action to be taken up and shared in books
that will be written in the native language of those countries that are causing most concern about future pollution levels, India and China.

As most environmentalists are only too aware paper is also a precious
commodity and it need not be wasted on books that will fail to engage
with a readership.

book of books - The Odyssey

The reason for reading Homer’s Odyssey was simply because I thought it would make reading James Joyce’s Ulysses easier. Being honest it did not do that because where there were references in Joyce they are either quite oblique or in the wrong order so unless you are really looking for them you miss them.

The surprising thing was that in its own right the book has a solid story and plenty of action at keep you interested and at some points reads like a script for a Sinbad the Sailor or Lord of the Rings film and at others like a who’s who of Olympian Gods.

Plot summary
Odysseus the hero has been marooned on an island for years after upsetting the gods on his way home from victory in Troy. Athena, Zeus’s daughter, looks him on with favour and so is allowed to leave his exile and head home and on the way tells of his adventures with Cyclops, sirens, spider legged six headed beasts and the Gods. But once home he discovers that suitors have moved into his palace and are waiting to marry Penelope his wife so he reveals his true identity to his son and with some old comrades who have remained loyal slaughter them all and things end happily ever after

Is it well written?
The text in set out in poetry form but it reads more like a piece of prose so that is sometimes a challenge. In style it reminds you of anything written in the same way, Dante springs to mind, and has the same dense text that makes you feel that half the time you are missing some crucial details. Having said that it is surprisingly easy to read and the story is gripping enough to make you want to stick with it, although at the end he does spin out the length of time it takes to reveal Odysseus is back and then dispatches the suitors.

Should it be read?
For most people the idea of going out and reading Homer for fun and not because some lecturer has told you to might seem odd. But this does link in with other texts, mot just Ulysses, and for that reason it is one of those books that has a wider relevance for someone who wants to get into literature so should be read.

Version read – there are numerous translations, even my local library stocked three, but I plumped for the Robert Fitzgerald translation in a Collins Harvill hardback

bookmark of the week

After rooting around in the garage in a bid to clear things up and preventing books from being destroyed by the damp – some victims had to be binned sadly – I stumbled across these two Mr Men bookmarks. I enjoyed the stories as a boy and now read them to my boys but the interesting thing about the books is that they often contain a very odd little story that displays a different imagination at work.

Great Odyssey link

I know the Odyssey is not everyone’s cup of tea but if you want to go through it quickly and get the benefit of the story without the need to go through some of the repetitive retelling of the years of Odysseus’s exile then the Odysseus web site is the best place I discovered while looking for Homer link’s that I can recommend.

The temptation of a $2 rate

A few years ago on a business trip to the US, Boston to be precise, a colleague of mine literally ran straight off the plane into a branch of Barnes & Noble to get books that were not only cheaper than the UK but had a slightly US spin on the choices on offer. He staggered out of the shop with two arms cradling a pile of books up to his chin with a wide smile on his face. No doubt he is now sat in front of a screen buying as much as he can as the dollar and pound exchange rate hits new highs.

I have to confess a temptation myself to head onto the web (there was a great store near where my parents live in Naperville Illinois called the Bookzeller, which now trades only online, and that might be worth a visit) to try to pick up the first book in the Robert Caro Johnson biography series plus a whole lot more...it's time for the bank account to brace itself.

book of books - Taras Bulba

Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol is a highly praised book that has a quote on the dust jacket from Hemingway saying its one of the top ten books of all time. I haven’t read anywhere near as widely as him but I would ay in terms of using a piece of literature to sum up a style then this is one of the most perfect Russian books I have read

Plot summary
Taras Bulba is a Cossack that starts the book by welcoming back his two sons from the seminary and then in his impatience to turn them into men takes them to the Cossack military camp and from there agitates the Ataman into launching a campaign against the Poles. On the campaign one son defects to the other side because of love and the other becomes a leader and is captured and tortured. Bulba returns to the Cossack camp without either son after losing one and killing the other and then sets off after a break to fight the poles again and in the end is captured and nailed to a tree and burnt to death.

Is it well written?
It is Russian to the core in that in that moment that when he confronts the son who has followed his heart and is fighting on the other side he shoots him. Another author would have tried to use that as a point at which both sides are reconciled but that’s not the tragic bitter approach that Gogol takes. Throughout the entire story Bulba stays faithful to his principles, which are based on dying defending the orthodox faith and his motherland, and in the end gets a chance to prove that he will die for them. The story flows quickly and there is enough characterisation around the father and two sons to get you involved with the story.

Should it be read?
If someone wants to know what Russian literature, or at least the tragic tag that always gets applied to it is all about, then this is an easier starting point than Crime and Punishment or Onegin. It is also a complete story, whereas Dead Souls, which is a great book, peters out a little bit because of part II being unfinished. The other factor is length and at 141 pages really even for people who have difficulty reading this is more than manageable. You also get the chance to meet arguably one of the hardest men in literature – Taras Bulba.

Leads to
More Gogol in the form of Dead Souls or other Russian literature from the pool of great writers that remain influential until this day

Version read – Modern Library hardback edition

The White Guard - post II

The blurb on the dust jacket of the book praises the description of Kiev describing it as the main character in the book but it takes until page 50 for it to be really introduced

Bullet points between pages 50 – 110

* Kiev is described in 1918 with a real love for the city coming through the description as well as a placing in a historical context with the German occupation, then the influx of Russian refugees following the revolution and also the opposition the city feels towards what was happening in Moscow

* Then there are a series of omens that indicate things are changing with firstly the ammunition dump on the top of Bare Mountain (remember Mussorgsky?) explodes, then the Germans release a communist insurgent Petlyura who starts to organise against them and then the Germans start to lose on the Western Front

“Only someone who has been defeated knows the real meaning of that word. It is like a party in a house where the electric light has failed; it is like a room in which green mould, alive and malignant, is crawling over the wallpaper; it is like the wasted bodies of rachitic children, it is like rancid cooking oil, like the sounds of women’s voices shouting obscene abuse in the dark. It is, in short, like death” pg65.

* The Germans start to pull out and those including Alexei and Nikolka who go off to do their duty, which they expect will be to garrison the town then march on Moscow when the White Army of Denikin arrives

* The recruits meet at their old school and are handed uniforms and get ready for potential action and all seem keen enough to emulate the troops at Borodino who repulsed Napoleon under the leadership of Tsar Nicholas I

* But things change overnight and the Hetman and their generals abandon them to 100,000 Red Army troops so the troops are dismissed and told to head back to their homes and forget about trying to fight against superior numbers

* The story then switches to take up the point of view of the communists who have moved troops up in a circle around the city and have started bombarding it with artillery

More to come…

Shared depression

At the risk of being accused of going on a bit let me post a short comment about the fuel thrown onto the celeb book debate today by The Times (headline sorts of says it all: ‘get warm: burn a Xmas book’) and the introduction to The Independent’s Christmas book special which includes the line: “Any honest observer of the book business in Britain will spend much of any year sunk in head-shaking gloom”.

Embracing or fearing?

Interesting email received this morning bearing in mind what is happening right now with the debate raging about lit bloggers and the value of their literary criticism with a media agency, immediate future, trying to work out the level of engagement UK journalists have made with blogging. A simple questionaire asks if you blog, if you know any other journalists that blog and if you don't why not and will you in the future?
The results will either back up my fear of change theory or be surprising. I know what my money’s on.

The Odyssey - post X

This epic comes to an end and it has not been the experience I expected at all being much more accessible and enjoyable. You expect this to be a heavy tome that is full of intellectual but irrelevant content but that is far from the reality

Bullet points from chapters twenty two to twenty four

Twenty two
This is a chapter of carnage as one by one the suitors are slaughtered and Odysseus gets his revenge with the text merrily describing the punishment he hands out to the suitors

He then goes further and gets the women, twelve of them, who have betrayed him and gets those maids to take the corpses out and wash down the blood then they are taken and hanged for their disloyalty

Twenty three
There are some scholars, I got his surfing the web, that believe this is where the story should have ended and the next chapter was added later and it makes sense because it is the moment Odysseus and Penelope are reunited

Initially the wife refuses to accept that Odysseus has come back but then he reveals a secret only he would have known and she embraces him and listens as he recounts all that has happened on his travels

Twenty Four
The suitors head into the underworld and recount their tale of woe and blame Penelope for leading them on

Meanwhile Odysseus goes to visit his father and as before pretends at first to be a stranger and back in the town the fathers and friends decide to avenge the suitors deaths and a battle is just on the brink of starting when Athena comes down and orders them to stop and make peace

That’s all so I will post a full review in the next couple of days…

The real reason for the attacks?

An interesting point is made on The Bibliosphere about the legitimacy of the research done by those people who are attacking lit bloggers. The thing about this debate is it is bigger, much bigger than just about lit blogs, but is about the future of the publishing industry. Writing as a print journalist (who writes about computer suppliers) I know that we are coming under pressure to move to the web and the strategy although unclear in the detail seems to be heading in only one direction – the web.

A large number of journalists don’t understand the web, don’t blog or MySpace so have no direct involvement with it but have obviously heard about it and seen the blogs grow in influence and reputation.

What they are really worried about is that the web will not only bring the barriers down and allow someone without their connections and position to write about the same subject publicly but when they finally make the move from paper, to paper and web and then maybe at one point in the future just web, there will be a lot of content already vying for the readers attention.

At that stage it becomes about hits, content and advertising and maybe in these sneering attacks on bloggers there is a growing recognition that there may come a day soon when they have to compete with bloggers more head-on and that is what is really scaring them so they are getting in now to discredit the emerging competition.

The White Guard - post I

The First World War and revolution are such deep wells to draw on to provide inspiration for events and characters that it is almost impossible not to feel the fear of approaching violence from the very first pages of Bulgakov’s book

It is the perfect book to follow Taras Bulba because again the location is the Ukraine and again the backdrop is war.

Bullet points between pages 3 – 50

* You are introduced to Kiev in the last month of 1918 and a family of three – Elena, Alexei and Nikolka – who are burying their mother and are left all alone in their second floor apartment to live and defend for themselves

* The eldest son Alexei is studying to be a doctor, Elena is married to a solider Talberg and Nikolka is 17 and they are surviving the cold winter burning wood on the stove when they hear the distant sound of artillery fire

* The sound is put in context with the city being occupied by the Germans but being attacked by the communists and Elena is worried because her husband Talberg has yet to return home

* The door bell rings but it is an old friend come from the shambles of the front and he scares them with his talk of frostbite, machine gun fire and the chaotic state of headquarters

* Talberg does return but reveals that the Germans are pulling out and he is a marked man and so is going to go with them into hiding and try to link up with General Denikin’s troops in the South and return with that army

* Two more old friends and soldiers arrive and they start discussing the war and show their loyalty to the Tsar, which frightens the neighbour below who has acted as a metaphor for the fear the townsfolk are feeling about the rise of communism

More tomorrow and the final parts of the Odyssey tonight…