Review: Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire

This is a fascinating, well-written account of the final months of the Soviet Union. Though Gorbachev is presented as a much rougher, power-hungry figure than I had imagined, the book impressed me as balanced and nuanced particularly in its account of the "dance" between Yeltsin's Russia and Kravchuk's Ukraine in the last five months of 1991 - the period from Gorbachev's house arrest in Crimea by the ill-fated Moscow putschists to his 25 December resignation as President of the Soviet Union. This makes for very interesting reading, especially now in 2014 in the context of the armed Russo-Ukrainian conflict which post dates the completion of this book.

Plokhy has had access to important primary source material, including transcripts and notes on conversations between the first President Bush and Gorbachev, Yletsin and Kravchuk. He has also interviewed some of the important participants in the events of 1991. The book includes a great deal of surprising detail.

Ukraine was important to Russia both symbolically and practically. Yeltsin did not want it to slip away from a "Slavic Union" which would leave Russia with just much-smaller Belarus to face towards the Islamic republics - the half dozen Central Asian Stans. 

It was also still the case, as it had been in 1917, that Ukraine was important to feeding Russia and it is an extraordinary fact that, as Plokhy describes it, in 1991 the Mayors of Leningrad and Moscow were preoccupied with food shortages - there wasn't much in the shops and they feared that by winter 1991 - 92 there would be nothing. It could have been 1917  - 18 all over again. Russian history is often about the question, Who is going to be hungry? In the 1930s, Stalin decided that it would be Ukraine - the food it produced was needed in Russia.

This is one reason why I disagree with one of Plokhy's conclusions:

The death of the Soviet Union differed from that of other empires in that the resource-rich metropolis cut off its former colonial possessions from easy access to those resources. Russia stood to benefit from the loss of its imperial possessions more than any other empire of the past (page 399)

This may be true of oil and gas, but it is still not true of food - nor even of cotton which Uzbekistan produced for the metropolis. I discuss some related issues in my review on this site of Alexander Etkind's Internal Colonization (reviewed on 9 June 2012)

Review: Charles Clarke, The "Too Difficult" Box

I bought this book with a heavy heart. Yes, I got £5 off but pretty soon it will be £20 off in every charity shop. It's a book which will fall dead born from the press.

Charles Clarke is a former British Labour politician who has made a new career as a Visiting Professor. In that role at the University of East Anglia he invited 25 people to come and talk about difficult issues in British politics, nearly all of them Establishment insiders: thirteen are members of the House of Lords and most of the rest could be and some certainly will be.

Now the House of Lords is part of the problem and not the place to look for solutions. It's a comfortable London club of 770 members with house rules so lax as to positively encourage what in ordinary life would be corruption (Google "Baroness Uddin" for example and search out Keir Starmer's reasons for not prosecuting her). Unsurprisingly, no one in this book suggests its abolition - a cost-saving and very effective solution to the problem it creates for the credibility of  "British democracy".

Other parts of the problem do not merit chapters in this book: there is nothing on the baleful influence of the Treasury, the Monarchy or the Established Church (whose Bishops automatically sit in the House of Lords). There is a chapter on the Scottish parliament  - by a member of the House of Lords - but no suggestion anywhere that England might deserve one. There is no mention of Northern Ireland or Wales - the former subsidised from England at around £5000 per local inhabitant and the latter at £4 000. There is no discussion of the jingoism which has us cling to Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands (the latter subsidised at around £50 000 per local inhabitant).

These are matters "too difficult" for Charles Clarke's Establishment. They are committed to thinking inside the box.

Most of them have probably been asked to "talk to students" before and few of them try very hard. Lord Falconer contributes a very tightly argued piece in support of Assisted Dying, arguing for the adoption of the US state of Oregon's model and this is probably the sharpest piece in the box. . At the other extreme, Lord Shephard's piece is merely whimsical and Mary Honeyball's reads like the transcript of a confused but nonetheless self-congratulatory talk on How I Got the EU to Adopt the Swedish Model (criminalising men who pay for sex). Trevor Phillips and David Blunkett also offer unstructured chats.

Very few contributors are angry with the System - Lord Filkin (on an ageing population) is - and that adds to the interest of his piece. The outsiders - Anatole Kaletsky on the Banks and Adam Boulton on the BBC - also show exasperation, though of course neither Boulton or anyone else suggests that public funding of the awful BBC should be withdrawn - cost-saving and effective and no loss.

A couple of pieces are lively presentations of issues by people with deep inside experience - Baroness Hollis on pensions and Margaret Hodge on waste in public spending contribute interesting pieces, and so do Lord Howarth (on drugs) and Tim Loughton (on child protection).

But overall this is not the place to go either for sharp analysis of the nature of a problem or defence of decisive solutions. Overall, it heads towards a Lower Second - about par for modern British political life.

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.