The reader's dilemma

One of the biggest problems right now is struggling to keep with the books I am currently reading while walking past and sleeping next to piles of other tempting titles that are stacked up by the bed.

It is hard not to go from a casual flick through a book to getting involved in it and then wishing you had more time to take it on. That is my dilemma right now and the reason for introducing a third book into the current reading mix.

In an ideal world I would live in a library with food and drink occasionally delivered in but no other demands on my time…

The Testament of Gideon Mack - post II

Not sure about this. I get the need to tell the back story to put the events that are going to be the centre of the book into some context but I have to admit I am not that bothered about Gideon Mack.

As a result the life story is starting to drag a bit and you want uit to move with quicker speed to something more dynamic. It is hard to be bound over by an awkward man like Gideon. Someone who has compromised his whole life and done what he thought other people would like is a hard trait to admire.

He ends up going out with the girl he didn’t want after his friend nabs the one he was actually after. He ends up doing what his father wanted and becoming a church minister despite not believing in God and he continues to lie to himself and others.

Maybe that is going to be the point of this that the meeting with the devil is the moment when the compromising stops and he feels that he can start to reject everything.

We will see. More tomorrow…

bookmark of the week

I took the kids to the Imperial War Museum today because my eldest son had expressed some interest in learning about the First World War. It’s odd because you don’t realise how difficult it can be sharing history until you try and sum up the causes and consequences of the First World War to a six year old.

The museum helped a bit but you still get the feeling the majority of the exhibits are designed to be consumed by adults. Still in the shop afterwards the boys helped me find a bookmark for the collection and came across this one celebrating the life of Winston Churchill. Decided that the conversation about Churchill can wait for another day, until after I have worked out how to translate some of my thoughts into easily digestible chunks...

book review - The Military Philosophers

Of the three books in the series of Dance to the Music of Time that cover the war this is the most enjoyable. The other books that Anthony Powell wrote that covered the war had the main character Jenkins failing to find a role and hanging on to the coat tails of Widmerpool, hoping that his ambitious old school acquaintance will help him.

By the later stages of the conflict Jenkins is working in a department that liaises firstly with the Poles and then the Belgians. The war is coming to an end with the Germans in retreat. Jenkins still connects with people from his past with Widmerpool and Farebrother working in Whitehall. But a character that emerges, initially as just a minor mention driving Jenkins, suddenly becomes something quite obsessive. Pamela Flitton, the niece of Charles Stringham is an odd woman.

You are introduced to a woman who is rude, sexually a tease and spreading herself through London and at the same time an enigma that Jenkins keeps meeting but never quite getting to unwrap. She is going through men at a rate of knots and manages to bewitch most of the Poles and Belgians that Jenkins has to work with.

She also manages to drive Templer into the jaws of death making him feel too old sitting in Whitehall so he goes out to chase bullets. She also mingles with Odo Stevens who she leaves in the middle of an air raid.

If there is a theme apart from Pamela emerging it is about remembering the past. The numerous references to Proust are not accidental and then underlined when Jenkins and the allies visit the hotel Proust described in his books. This is not just about allies rediscovering the countries that they had been locked out of for years as Hitler was in control.

There is also a sense of Jenkins mulling over his own past as he hears of the deaths of his old school friends Peter Templer and Charles Stringham. Memories of the era that is described in the first couple of books is fading fast. There is a sense of how much the war cost a certain generation and a certain class. Those that had been able to exploit their connections and had their eyes on power managed to use their war to their advantage.

But those that came into the conflict already battered and weak were finished off by enemy and friendly fire. Although not too much is said it is the death of Stringham as a POW in a Japanese prisoner of war camp that is most poignant to Jenkins.

It is for that reason that as he sits with foreign officers at the service of remembrance he thinks of those he has known to have died and casts his mind back to a Proustian world of safe and comforting childhood.

As he leaves the church to walk off into a military-less future he comes across his old flame Jean and is reminded of a pre-war world and the reader is pulled back from further recollections. Unlike Proust, who naval gazes for too long over the same period Powell seems keen to move the reader on.

And onwards we go to the next volume...

The testament of Gideon Mack - post I

Starting this book I had flashbacks of something I read last summer, Imposture by Benjamin Markovits, that started with a prologue that described how the publisher came to have the text that follows in their hands.

It is a literary device that is deployed with greater skill here because the idea is to grip the reader from the start with a journalist phoning up a publisher with a manuscript that has come from a missing priest who has just turned up dead in the Scottish mountains.

The key to the priests disappearance is the events leading up to his wanderings in the wilderness with an apparent meeting with the devil making him appear mad to most of those around him.

There are mysteries of why even after he is meant to have been dead for months he was seen by three witnesses alive on the mountain his body eventually turned up on.

Having got through the preamble, which does have you convinced in its authenticity the text from the mad minister himself starts.

In some respects it is quickly into the supernatural with the minister describing how he stumbles across a stone while out running that has literally appeared out of nowhere. This starts some sort of self examination that gives Gideon Mack pause to question not just his standing in the community but his standing with God.

Oddly addictive it is growing on me and as the quality of the writing kicks in the shame of reading a Richard & Judy book club choice is starting to wear off.

More tomorrow…

Books should weather the economic storm

Everyone is looking for a safe place to hide right now as the global economy crashes around their ears.

One area that might remain safe, according to those heading up European publishing groups, is going to be the book. Apparently it is not seen as a luxury item, people still have the money to buy books and of course it has the power to transport people away from the current misery.

That verdict came out of a session at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which has been across the wires and picked up by Reuters.

The book is a cheap gift. The book is always affordable," said Fran Dubruille, director of the European Booksellers' Federation, "Actually, maybe the crisis is a chance for booksellers to reassert their role in the community as providers of pleasure, of knowledge, for a very, very cheap price."

It might just work as long as the bookshelves are not packed full of economic tomes and guides to getting a perfect CV like some bookshops I have wandered past recently…

Hearing Secret Harmonies - post IV

The end of the end comes with an odd move by Powell to use a long quote and an outro that has a dream like quality to it.

In some respects there is a feeling of anti-climax but the more you think about it there is an increasing sense of the right side having won. What I mean by that is that with the announcement of Widmerpool’s tragic death the last survivor of the original passages of the first book is Jenkins.

He actually reminds you of the start with a reference to the smell of the workmen in their hut using a brazier to keep warm as he stirs up his bonfire. Of those characters, Stringham and Templer died in the war and Widmerpool has now bitten the dust. He does so in a way that is so tragic. Bullied and victimised in his own home by the young cult leader Widmerpool tries one last time to assert himself and as they run through the woods, naked, he goes to the front “I’m the leader” he shouts before his old and infirm body hits the floor.

These books are about power, with Widmerpool’s quest for it the most obvious, but there are numerous characters in search of money and influence. Jenkins drifts in and out of these worlds. He is in a position to do so because he went to Eton and Oxford and so knows a great deal of the figures that come across his path at functions and in numerous settings.

But this is also about a lost age. Although Britain is still a country riddled by class prejudice and contacts and connections are vital to making your way through to the top the landed gentry described here have largely gone. The age of the debutantes slipped into history and the second world war saw off a number of the generation that would have carried the torch forward.

In that sense as the reader turns the last page and leaves an image of an elderly Jenkins burning a bonfire in his garden in autumn it is a world that you leave behind with that last lines. A world of intelligence, appreciation for beauty, art and culture, but also a world that had the ugliness of the hunt and quest for money and power.

A review will follow soon…

Why do we do it?

Overheard this conversation today between two sales staff on my floor who were discussing reading.

After one told the other he was reading Steinbeck, but couldn’t remember the title, the following philosophical exchange took place:


Salesman one: “I have been asking myself and friends recently about what are the benefits and the point of reading?”

“I have decided it is to be entertained. You want to have a good read that is entertaining”

Salesman two: “yes but it is also a chance to read about places, history and other people”.

It would be an interesting question to sit and ponder for any of us I expect…

Hearing Secret Harmonies - post III

Dare I say it but you start to feel sympathy for Widmerpool. The young cult leader Scorpio bullies him and at a meeting with Jenkins at a wedding he reveals he has been forced to atone for previous moments of aggression with deeds of penance. You can only guess at what they are but in a moment when Widmerpool attempts to apologise to an old acquaintance for the things he did wrong by falling prostrate at his feet it gives you some idea.

Add to that the nudity, sense of the distance from the House of Lords to a house full of blue robe wearing harmony seeking cultists and the fall of Widmerpool is complete.

Jenkins remains detached as he has done all through but you wonder what he real feels as his old acquaintance who has shadowed his life ends literally begging in public to leave the cult and being bullied into heading back for more penance and punishment.

Powell is able to use father time to start to sweep up the numerous characters as most fall to old age and those that are left become increasingly obsessed with their health and immobile. Yet for all of that there is remarkably little reminiscing on the part of Jenkins. Others, Stringham’s Aunt for instance, are happy to talk about the past and try to draw some summaries but for the narrator it is simply a question of watching and recording.

Even when Gwinnet turns up and leaves the story with a bride clinging to his arm it gets the same straight commentary as the battle to protect his local stone-age monument from a local quarry expansion.

I am going to miss being able to look into this world when it is gone, which looks like being tomorrow…

The Gutenberg Elegies

Chapter 9

Computers can provide the tools but the problem is when it becomes more than that and it becomes the only way that people learn a crutch that has replaced books with a collection of video, soundbites and selected texts.

“The danger should be obvious: The horizon, the limit that gave definition to the parts of the narrative, will disappear. The equation itself will become nonsensical through the accumulation of variables. The context will widen until it becomes, in effect, everything.” Pg 138

The question being asked here is whether or not the user can handle the data.

Chapter 10

Along with his belief in reading being connected to the soul the other phrase that most people connect with Birkerts is ‘deep reading’. Here he sets out exactly what he means by that:

“Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don’t just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.” Pg 146

He then goes on to talk about audio books and how they change the process of ‘reading’, if that’s what it can still be called. He likes audio books but believes the reader has lost control, their rights, having to sit through a telling and a single interpretation of a text.

More tomorrow…

book review - Midnight's Children

This is a big book in many ways. In terms of printed pages it falls into the category of doorstopper at 600 plus and in terms of reputation as the Booker of Bookers it cannot get much higher. Add to that the larger than life author Salman Rushdie and you come to this with a certain sense of trepidation.

In some cases minds are clearly made up before the book is given a chance. One friend saying he didn’t like Rushdie and therefore wouldn’t try the book. But there has clearly got to be something there if it won the awards it has and has remained such a popular read even after a couple of decades since its first publication.

After reading it the first thought is that it might have made more sense to have gone through some sort of brief Indian history refresher because the crucial years in the book and the lives of the main character Saleem Sinai are connected with Indira Ghandi and events I had no knowledge of, the state of emergency she declared and then abused. In some respects you pick a great deal up but with the mixture of myth, fantasy and reality it’s not always clear what did happen or what is a dream.

What you can say for sure is that this weaves you through a period of history where India had gained its independence but struggled to find its soul. The splits in society quickly emerged and the country split, went to war and then consolidated with seething bitterness still continuing in some quarters.

Taking the reader through the thirty plus years of independence is Saleem who discovers that he has the ability to communicate telepathically with all of the other children who were born in the midnight hour on the arrival of independence.

It is the Midnight’s Children that link Saleem to a different world, an India of old beliefs and strange powers, as well as a hope that the future will be different from the past. But in the end the children are literally neutered as they fail to break with tradition and produce an India of their dreams.

The second thought is that you wish there was a way that a book could come with a sense of smell because this invokes many smells and tastes that although described well would have been pouring out of the book like an Indian market had smell been possible.

In the end it is the sense of smell, both natural and almost supernatural, that allows the hero to reconnect with his past. But just like his country he is disintegrating into a million pieces.

At the end you realise that imagination and fantasy can be powerfully deployed to help make sense of a real history that at times must have seemed to be unreal.

The final thought is about the writing and the style. There are motifs established in the early part of the book that return again and again. There are big themes with justice, love, betrayal and religion all getting their chance to be played out in the form of grotesque characters and situations.

Time is crucially important. Being born at Midnight not only gives Saleem his telepathic powers but also makes him who he is in the sense of being a child of national prominence. He can only talk to the others after the midnight hour has been struck and it is the sense of his own time running out that ruins through the book from start to finish.

An odd feeling about the book is that in places it feels cinematic to the extent that you see the images as if shown on a screen and the impact of cinema is clear on the writing technique.

But ultimately I guess the real question is not about the writing, the story or the length of time it lingers in the memory but whether or not it is enjoyable. It is intimidating but after a while even with the madness of circus freaks, wars and a family of flawed characters grows on you.

bookmark of the week

This is a bookmark from Leeds Castle in Kent. I have a bookmark acquired almost a decade ago when I last went but this is the latest offering from the shop. Still the traditional leather – they have not yet shifted over to the now obligatory magnetic bookmarks.

A great place for a day out because it combines stately home/castle, aviary with a large and enjoyable children’s play area.

Apologies the image appears to be upside down. You get the idea though...

Hearing Secret Harmonies - post II

Having described his role as a judge on the Magnus Donners biography prize Jenkins and fellow judges are panicking that nothing will turn up for this years award when Gwinnet’s biography of Trapnel is submitted. The prize is run past Widmerpool who is a trustee of the prize and he seems to have no objection but does demand to be allowed to come on the night.

He turns up accompanied by the Quiggin twins who wait until Widmerpool has stolen the stage shouting on about the need for non-conformity and the need to shy away from the system before letting off their stink bombs.

The impact of the moment is to underline just how strange Widmerpool has become and that continues with another chance meeting with Jenkins later on. Widmerpool is now obsessed with meeting up with Scorpio Murtlock and the idea of the two combining forces is something both strange and potentially interesting.

Will Widmerpool be able to hear the secret harmonies?

More Monday…

Hearing Secret Harmonies - post I

Right here we go. The last book, the promise of loose ends being tied up and although you sense this is going to again be about Widmerpool you want to see what happens to Jenkins.

The clock has ticked on from the last book and now a slowing Jenkins is involved as a judge on the Magnus Donners biography book prize. Totally embroiled in the literary world this book opens with a feeling that unlike the war novels or the school starts and Oxford this is really describing Jenkins in his own world.

There is more mention of his wife as a result and the chapters come faster than in some of the other novels. That gives it a pace that us fuelled by the move towards a meeting between Widmerpool and Gwinnet the American that Pamela Widmerpool fell in love with before her death. Piecing together the story it seems that knowing of his obsession with death Pamela took her own life to satisfy her lover.

But that is nowhere near as strange as the figure of Widmerpool who has become a university chancellor and also some sort of hippy and cult leader. He seems to have renounced all that he previously worked so hard for.

There is a sense that this is an era of cults, drop-outs and protests against the Vietnam war and the establishment and there is a passage where Jenkins allows a small-scale cult leader, Scorpio Murtlock, to camp on his land.

These books have been about the quest for power, the way it consumes, changes and destroys people and the society that helped create people like that. In some respects this is a historical novel but in others it is totally contemporary because the lust for power continues today as much as ever.

More tomorrow…

The Gutenberg Elegies

Chapter 8

He uses an anecdote of the time he went as a book buyer to a 19th century literature professor who was selling off all his books as he went into computing.

The professor is an extreme case of one world replacing another and a case that Birkerts says is not isolated.

But the immediate threat is described as coming from television with the mindshare that grabs being the most pressing threat to reading. Presumably as this is pre-YouTube has Birkerts come across that it would be his own special version of hell – video and computers.

The great thing for Birkerts about tapping into the whole video versus books debate is that you are onto something big. But you are also potentially into something of a diversion. It is largely an educational debate about how children learn.

He warns about a modification in the form of reading:

“Whether all of this sounds dire or merely “different” will depend upon the reader’s own values and priorities. I find these portents of change depressing, but also exhilarating – at least to speculate about. On the one hand, I have a great feeling of loss and a fear about what habitations will exist for self and soul in the future. But there is also a quickening, a sense that important things are on the line.”

The things on the line are all of the things about reading that Birkerts values and he starts to list the developments that could happen as a result of erosion from technology and television.

1. Language erosion as dumbing down and simplification becomes the norm
2. A flattening of historical perspectives: “Once the materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will surely mean differently…”
3. The waning of the private self as social collectivisation challenges the individual isolated self