Review: Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This is the second Junot Diaz I have read - his This Is How You Lose Her was the first (it's reviewed on this site 28 December 2013)). It's a weightier book which weaves in and out of the terrible history of the Dominican Republic under the US-backed barbarism of Trujillo and since. It could be read in companion with Alex von Tunzelmann's Red Heat - a terrifying history of Caribbean dictatorships (reviewed on this site 9 June 2012).

It is verbally spectacular and at the same time very raw and direct. There are no euphemisms. The title is actually a little misleading insofar as there are several main characters whose story is told - the story of Oscar's mother Beli is developed at length and is perhaps the most emotionally powerful of the narratives though some readers might select the story of Beli's father, Abelard.

Written in English, a fair amount of text and dialogue is in Spanish. I am not the sort of reader willing to sit with an urban dictionary or to constantly Google. It may be that English - speaking readers in the United States can handle the Spanish but that won't be true of English - speaking readers in other countries (like my England). Maybe there should have been a separate edition for those readers with glosses or translations to make things smoother - after all, Diaz provides English when occasionally he uses French or Latin and it is not disruptive if done intelligently. I wondered if the Spanish - language edition leaves chunks of text in English. If not, then by parity of reasoning nothing would be lost by making this book more accessible to English readers who don't have (much) Spanish as a foreign language

Review: Edney Silvestre, If I Close My Eyes Now

Yes and No. Much of this book is highly readable but some of it is awkward, some sensationalist, and some sentimental. 

The readability is provided by a Murder Mystery investigated by two boys and a retired school cook. The plot is sometimes awkward - Silvestre makes his incest story line as complicated as you can make incest. Some of the sexual violence is effectively edgy but at other times seems sensationalist. The ending is weakly sentimental and disconnected from the very short time frame in which the main narrative is set. In between, there is an interesting social history of modern Brazil  with harsh light cast on its darker side and, perhaps most effectively, there is a story of boyhood friendship.

Review: Richard Overy, The Bombing War Europe 1939 - 1945

I hesitated before buying this book: Would I actually read 642 pages and apparatus which takes it to 852? But I did. It's well-written, absorbing, detailed but generally avoids repetition, and slowly develops an overarching thesis, formulated in general terms only right at the end.

Everyone believes that in the First World War, governments and their militaries (often incompetent) sent millions of conscripted young men into the pointless slaughter of trench warfare. In the aftermath, they knew they could not do it again and so looked to aerial warfare as an alternative. Even before they had the bombers, they thought that the next war ought to be about strategic bombing from the air. Of the major powers, only the Soviet Union thought that air power should be used, almost exclusively, to give tactical support to ground forces.

Richard Overy's final thesis is that in the Second World War, governments and their militaries (sometimes incompetent) condemned half a million European civilians to mostly pointless slaughter as bombs fell on them from a great height.

The pointlessness had two main aspects. First - and this is true for American bombing - the bombers could not hit their intended targets. Time after time - because of  limitations of technology, the weather, human error - they missed. Instead of hitting factories or transport links, they hit residential quarters. At times, pilots under pressure to off-load simply gave up even trying to bomb on target. Reading Overy, I was repeatedly surprised at the very low percentages achieved for "on target" bombs. Aircraft loss percentages were sometimes higher than on target bombs.

Second - and this is true for British bombing - when bombers were sent to carpet bomb cities, they either failed to to do it (came home, got shot down, bombed rural fields) or else, where they were successful (as at Hamburg and Dresden), did not achieve their aim of breaking enemy civilian morale or crippling industry through killing workers in their beds. Bomber Command under Arthur Harris was at least five parts bluster. The bombs available to Harris were not able to do the job that the bombs available in 1945 did to Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

On the other side, neither the Germans and still less the Italians found a way of bombing the small island of Malta - hardly missable as a target in the open Mediterranean - into submission.

In other words, strategic bombing did not bring victory or end the war faster, with just one qualification: in all the belligerent countries, exposure to bombing tied up large numbers of personnel and a great deal of materiel in air raid defences. But that concession is not such a big one: all the belligerents had one hand tied behind their backs.

I picked up just one curious oversight in Overy's book. He mentions a 1931 book by H G Wells, The Shape of Things to Come which "ends optimistically with a benign world "Air Dictatorship" based implausibly in the Iraqi city of Basra" (page 31). Not so implausbily: it was in Iraq in the 1920s that Arthur Harris - then of the occupying British forces and later head of Britain's World War Two Bomber Command - experimented with the technique of bombing civilians from the air to terrorise and break them. What he did there was controversial within the RAF itself and attracted adverse publicity which Wells may have been familiar with. There is an account of what Harris did in Iraq in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn Young, editors, Bombing Civilians (New York 2009).

Review: Helen Rappaport, Four Sisters

There is a global demand - most obviously coming from the USA - for rose-tinted books about Royalty, dead or alive. Some readers want Royal babies (The British are prolific in supplying them) and others want Royal Martyrs - the Romanovs win hands down.

Though it is thoroughly researched  and very readable Helen Rappaport's book does not escape the weaknesses of the genre. To give an example:  the romance between Nicholas and Alexandra risked coming to nothing because of Alexandra's religious scruples and Rappaport writes, "To a forlorn Nicky there seemed an insurmountable gulf between them and he allowed himself to be temporarily distracted by other pretty faces" (page 16). This is saccharine. Nicholas had a mistress from 1890 until his 1894 marriage.She was Mathilde Kschessinskaya (1872 - 1971), a ballerina in St Petersburg who Nicholas met when she was 17. After being dropped by Nicholas, Mathilde took up with two other Romanov Grand Dukes, and had a child with one of them. She lived to a grand old age and wrote her Memoirs. "Pretty faces" is ridiculously coy and designed for the more prudish readers of Royalty biographies.

Again, in chronicling the cosy home life of the family, Rappaport again and again stresses simplicity, frugality, informality - things which come with this genre of writing - so that when, for example, she once mentions the Fabergé eggs which Nicholas presented annually to his wife and mother they simply cannot be integrated into the narrative she has constructed any more than the Royal yachts and railways trains.

Despite - in some ways because of -  its weaknesses, the book successfully chronicles the extraordinary degree of arrogant detachment from reality practised by the last of the Romanovs. They knew very little about the Russia they claimed to own and rule over and even their relationships with the Russian aristocracy were strained and limited. It was the aristocracy who brought them down - Rasputin was murdered by a Grand Duke and a Prince, not by proletarians.

The detachment from reality - maybe half way due to Alexandra's invalidism and Alexey's haemophilia - passed to their daughters in the form of an unworldliness rudely shaken by the First World War. Here it seemed that the two older daughters really did become nurses and did not just pose for photographs.

Among a mass of opinions cited by Rappaport, I was struck by a comment by Prince Wilhelm of Sweden attending the Romanov Tercentenary celebrations in 1913:

The Emperor made restrained greetings to the right and the left without changing expression; it was impossible to detect any enthusiasm from either side. The muzhiks [peasants] mostly stood there staring, a few made the sign of the cross or fell to their knees for the head of the church. It was more awe and curiosity than spontaneous warmth, more dutiful obedience than trust. Subjects kept down rather than free citizens. It was unpleasant, remote and as unlike how things are at home as possible. The unbridgeable gap between the ruler and the people was more notable than ever (page 197)

Sweden still has a Monarchy.

Review: Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

It seems a pity to read a 468 page book and not get a review out of it. But the truth is I only finished it because being unwell kept me at home for a few days and I had nothing better to read. The book is dull. I simply do not understand the three pages of gushing quotations from reviews which preface the book.

There will always be a problem if you set out to chart the lives of half a dozen people, plus bit part characters, over 40 years. It will be very hard to avoid précis as you update readers on what has happened to characters A and B in the five or ten years since they last appeared on your pages. I don't think Wolitzer avoids it. The book is full of précis.

It is also rather full of box ticking. We get Discovering you are gay, clinical depression, HIV/AIDS, autism, feminist theatre, cancer  though we don't get race or guns or divorce and we don't really get poverty (just the squeezed middle classes). It's actually quite a cosy book despite the fact that it axes itself around the themes of youthful aspirations turning into success or failure and envy or jealousy as you see others doing better than yourself.

No. Some of the gags are funny but I think you could find a couple of much better novels to read in the time it took me to plod through this one.

Review: Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends

Ben Macintyre is a very good writer and I have read three of his previous documentary Spy books with pleasure. I also read this one with pleasure and found that it raised interesting questions about both the British Establishment as it was and clearly still is, and about spying in general.

Every modern government feels that it has to spend large amounts of very sloshy money on spying, surveillance and on more active things like black propaganda, provocation, subversion and so on. After all, if They do it then We have to respond in kind. But books like this one raise the question of whether it is all worth it. For every resounding success there is at least one Bay of Pigs failure. Much of the time, spy agencies appear merely to be goading each other, so that their activities create problems which would not otherwise have existed. At worst, it becomes childish rather than glamorous Macintyre's book gives some examples, perhaps unintentionally. Singing songs in nightclubs to annoy your enemies doesn't just happen in the film Casablanca - according to Macintyre, it also happened in real life in Istanbul.

Many years ago (around 1954 I think) Costa Rica decided it could do without an army. The army just kept causing trouble as it did in most Latin American nations,with or without the USA and its criminal CIA inciting that trouble. Since then, Costa Rica has done rather well as a country and is currently doing very well. Maybe it's time for one country to find a way of doing without spying agencies - or at least limiting things to what are basically police operations - finding out enough to stop crimes in their planning stage. In the case of both 9 / 11 USA and 7 / 7 in the UK, a more focussed, less megalomaniac, intelligence agency would probably have pieced together the information which was in fact available to it.

Intelligence disasters are sometimes the result of poor policy decisions by politicians but often they are the result of freelancing by intelligence agencies whose members feel themselves above the Law and certainly above the Politicians.  Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev sailed into Portsmouth Harbour in April 1956 aboard a cracking new Soviet cruiser. The spooks very much wanted to take a look at it but Prime Minister Anthony Eden vetoed that. The spooks went ahead anyway, the Soviets were probably tipped off -  and if so by Philby - and the drunken, unhealthy and superannuated frogman, Lionel Crabb, chosen to take photos of the ship's underwater propellers and so on, never returned to dry land.

Of course, you could say that Eden would say that,wouldn't he? It's called butt covering. The job of the intelligence services is to figure out when a politician's "No" is really his way of saying "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"

More generally, politicians probably don't want to know exactly what their intelligence services are getting up to. It makes it easier to deny that they are doing what they are doing.

But in Britain leaving the intelligence services to their own devices meant - over a period of at least 50 years - that they turned themselves into Clubs on the model of Oxford and Cambridge universities. They did what they liked with their money, they employed who they liked - merit not being a particularly important issue - and once you were in the Club you had to do something really extraordinary to get yourself expelled. When Philby was eventually nailed as a Soviet spy, in exchange for a partial confession he was simply allowed to slip away to exile in the Soviet Union. To have put him on trial would have made the Club itself look remarkably casual, cavalier and self-satisfied in the way that it had operated during Philby's decades at the centre of it.

So as I read this book, one of its virtues is that in probing the details and tenor of Philby's relations with his colleagues, it provokes one to think about wider issues. One might, for example, compare how the political and civil service Establishment during and after Philby's era dealt with complaints of criminal activity - sexual abuse of minors in today's newspapers - involving members of their Clubs.

One final thing. It's often said that governments who rely on reports from their diplomats to know what is happening in a particular country would do better to read a good newspaper. The same is true of intelligence reports. Macintyre doesn't really probe it, but it is often unclear whether people in MI5 or MI6 had much grasp of geography or history or current affairs. But there are hints. For example, both American and British intelligence agencies have placed great reliance on emigrés with fairly disastrous results. They have failed to see that emigrés are not always honourable people forced into exile by unpleasant regimes. Some of them are crooks who used regime change as a chance to escape their country and present a new image to the world. Others are bitter and resentful at the loss of power they never deserved to hold. Some simply become absurdly nationalistic to compensate for their loss of a homeland. In all cases, emigrés should be treated with caution. But no one does that and so we still suffer from the Curse of Miami Cubans.

Review: Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist

Nowadays, young people writing their first novels seem to do it as an extension of their social networking. This thought occurred to me flicking to the Acknowledgments at the end of Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go - they link her in to well over a hundred individuals, alphabetically listed except for God who gets Liked first.

Suzanne Rindell does not have half as many Links or Likes, but enough for me to feel that at least one of them should have been of more actual help.

Rindells' first person narrator is cast as a police precinct typist in 1920s Prohibition America. She adopts a rather arch tone, is probably mad and certainly oblivious to her own self-serving inconsistencies. For most of the time, she is credible. 

She loses credibility when the author slips into anachronism - or, at least, since I am not an expert on 1920s US urban dialects, what appears to this elderly English reader as anachronistic.

Thus, I was distracted by "white noise" (page 41), "people person" (56), "time-line" (58), "body language" (136), "segued" (137), "trendy" (144), "leveraged" (159), and a "prepubescent" for which I have lost the page reference.

Now it is the job of those who read your novel in draft and get their names in your Acknowledgments to point out things like this and it is the job of the novelist to make sure she finds at least one reader with the necessary ear. Forget about the Links and the Likes, get an Expert.

I was more than distracted when I read, " I remember thinking at the time, aside from the simple fact of our gender, we did not appear to have much in common" (page 46). Now I would bet money that a typist in 1920's Prohibition America would have used the word "sex". It is only in 2010's America that Professors in Literature Departments of US universities (Suzanne Rindell studies in one) have prohibited the use of the word. 

The novel is quite successful and I read it all. The pacing is a bit unsatisfactory - large chunks of new information are hurriedly dispensed in a few pages to be followed by longer sections of longeurs. As a result, the novel did not really build suspense, at least in the mind of this reader.