Review: Ian McEwan The Children Act

England has an Establishment, utterly sure of itself, and most of its members live for part of the year in London where they circulate between interconnected club-like circles. Sometimes they seek out worlds outside their own, as when they go looking for sex or drugs. Sometimes, other worlds erupt into their closed lives in unexpected ways.

This is the second or third  novel in which Ian McEwan makes his story out of encounters between Establishment and Other. This time it involves a judge in the Family Division of the High Court and a teenage Jehovah’s Witness; in Saturday it took a distinguished neurosurgeon and a street criminal. 

Both are very readable books, with fine pacing and deft evocations of place and character. Scanning through McEwan’s backlist, I find I have read most of his novels and found only one to be a dud: Amsterdam, which got the Booker Prize, largely - I suspect - because the judges had screwed up a couple of years before when they did not give the prize to Enduring Love, a novel in a completely different class with a spectacular opening sequence.

The Children Act is a morally serious novel which manages to explore or touch upon a remarkably wide range of important issues: marital fidelity, enduring love, childlessness, loneliness, religious fundamentalism, what “the welfare of the child” might mean, the limitations of judicial procedures, the importance of classical music … All this in just over 200 pages (but the lines widely spaced). 

I was unhappy at only one (key) point (page 197) where the judge, Fiona, learns of the death of the young Jehovah’s Witness just before she goes on stage to play piano in an end-of-legal-term get-together and concert. Her performance is then turned into a requiem for the lost young man. I found this too contrived to be really effective.

But it’s still an excellent novel, well worth what will be a short read.

Review: Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

This is really three books in one.

The first part aims to shift the way we see the Holocaust. When something becomes familiar and taken-for-granted like the Holocaust, then it is always a good thing when someone tries to make us see it afresh. This Timothy Snyder does. He wants to produce two shifts (at least).

First, away from Auschwitz – a late and relatively minor Holocaust scene – and towards the Bloodlands of eastern Europe where mass murders, mainly by shooting, claimed the lives of over a million Jews in 1941 – 42. Waitman Wade Beorn's Marching into Darkness is the companion book for this part of the narrative. Unhelpfully, the book jacket design misses what Snyder is arguing and gives us the familiar railway tracks. Most Jews did not travel by train to die; they were rounded up where they lived and shot in local fields and forests by ordinary soldiers and locals as often as by specially trained killers.

Second, away from an emphasis on (Nazi or traditional) anti-semitism, as sufficient explanation on its own, and towards an understanding of the broader contexts in which people turn on their neighbours and kill them. In this broader context, Snyder emphasises eastern Europe as a world of shortages (land, food, clothes …) and a world of insecurity. The insecurity was dramatically increased by the wilful destruction of state structures by both Germany and the Soviet Union – in the worst cases, we find both of them attacking in rapid succession. When you destroy states – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – remove their leaders, their leading classes, their political parties, their armies, and so on, you turn citizens into stateless individuals, denied a Leviathan to protect them. Fear alone is enough to turn them against each other; anti-semitism channels the direction of pre-emptive violence in which those who have no prior or no profound ideological commitment willingly join.  

When the world becomes seriously insecure, the idea of killing your neighbour takes hold almost as if it is human nature. At the end of his book, Snyder briefly ( page 336) references the US-UK invasion of Iraq as an exercise in state destruction which functioned very much like the Nazi and Soviet invasions of 1941 – 42 in turning people into killers of their neighbours. Snyder singles out one phrase from a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and Stalin's Gulag to illuminate what he is trying to get at: "a man can be human only under human conditions" (page 341)

The second part of Snyder’s book takes us over familiar ground – some of it familiar because of his earlier book Bloodlands -  and takes us through thumbnails of how the Holocaust proceeded (or was halted) in different countries and how individuals responded to their generally complex and intolerable situations. This is all readable (and occasionally perhaps sentimental) but does not add to or shift the way we see things, except insofar as it seeks to confirm the role of state destruction in unleashing the Holocaust.

The third part is a short essay which seeks to draw Lessons from the Holocaust which will allow us to understand the way our world is now and what threatens it. The main theme here is the potential role of food and water shortages – brought about by climate change -  in turning people against their neighbours, seeking to expropriate and secure scare resources for themselves. I would have turned this short essay into something a bit longer; as it stands it feels a bit schematic, despite brief references to interesting examples (like the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s).

If you are pressed for time, read the first part of this book. If like me you think that we can never stop learning from our own recent history, read it all.

Review: Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

I think Michel Houellebecq is a very good writer - sometimes superb - but I don't think this is a good novel. It doesn't really work.

He imagines France a few years on from now (2022) electing a (moderate) Islamic President one of whose (less moderate) priorities is to islamicise - with the help of Saudi Arabian funding - university education. The events of the novel unfold through the eyes of a jaundiced professor who is cast, first, as an Outsider à la Camus: there is an obvious nod to the opening page of L'Etranger at page 174. But he is cast, second, as a faux naïf  who sits open mouthed (always nibbling at the canapés or the mezze) as others, more clued in politically, give him lessons in what is happening to France. These lessons take the form of set piece speeches, delivered by a secret policeman and a university rector to their audience of one. It is one of the drawbacks of a roman à thèse that you are forced into such desperate literary devices.

I should add that the narrator is also cast, third, as an academic expert on J K Huysmans, sufficiently distinguished to get the invitation to edit a Pléiade edition of his works. What Houellebecq writes about Huysmans is interesting and clearly knowledgeable; some university should probably give Houellebecq a doctorate for his thesis and overlook the novel.

Houellebecq can be an amusing writer when he wants to be but I am not sure - maybe my French isn't good enough - if he intends that we should be in fits of laughter as he brings his novel to a close. His narrator likes food and sex, preferably free but he will pay for both if necessary. He's a bit down on his luck when he is compulsorily retired from the new islamicised Sorbonne. But he is tempted back. He sees what is happening to those of his colleagues who have converted to Islam. They not only have the salaries, but new wives. The rector of the University has been given a 15 year old, very sexy, but also has an older wife who can cook, very well.

And so the narrator, after dutifully reading the little introduction to Islam provided,  discreetly enquires - If I accept the invitation to return, for how many wives would I qualify? Well, there is no obligation to take all of them, but we could probably offer you three. That settles it and, to the delight of his colleagues, our Vicar of Bray returns to his university post.

Review: Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

The old Aristotelian device of “unity of time, place and action” works for the novel as well as for the theatre. If you want to create dramatic tension, it’s probably the device of choice. But it has a downside. You can end up creating implausible coincidences – on the stage, it means that the hero or villain enters stage left at just the right moment – just fancy that! – and in the novel it means pretty much the same thing. Joseph Kanon’s novel has a bit of this dramatic clumsiness, even though (because it’s a spy story) you may be unclear whether it’s a hero or a villain who has just walked onto the page.

Like his novel, The Good German, which I reviewed here on 19 January 2015, Leaving Berlin is set in early post-war Germany – 1949, in fact. This setting is now a sub-genre with its own tropes. One of them is in danger of being over-used: the mass rapes perpetrated by Russian soldiers as they entered Germany from the east in 1944 – 45. These rapes were known about, condoned and even encouraged right up to the top – Stalin knew. They are now documented in history books to make up for omissions in histories written at a time when you didn’t write about such things. Novelists now use the stories and are in danger of over-using them as if dealing with a peculiarly Russian disorder.

But it wasn’t only Russian soldiers who raped. So did Allied soldiers, not on the Russian industrial scale but in a few cases amounting to atrocities, notably involving troops from the French colonies: see the Wikipedia page “Rape during the occupation of Germany” for an introduction. These Allied rapes are not used as a literary trope: the French were on our side and their troops were African.

The novel has what seems a sentimental moment straight out of Casablanca (pages 315 – 318) but Kanon then gives it an unexpected twist – after all, this is a spy novel and as such it works quite well.

Review: Clive Driscoll, In Pursuit of the Truth

I usually have a fairly straightforward response to a book; to this one, I don’t

London’s Metropolitan Police has a reputation for idleness, incompetence and corruption. And that’s just the official view from numerous enquiries and investigations into its conduct. I would add servility to the list. The Met. has never stood up to its political masters who, it seems, will tolerate the Met’s shortcomings so long as it jumps when told to Jump! Only recently, the Leader of the House of Lords Baroness d’Souza reported her deputy, Lord Sewal, to the Met. for possession of class A drugs: the evidence provided by newspapers photographs of him snorting what he obviously believed to be cocaine. The Met. were on the case very quickly and obliged the Baroness by breaking down the door to Lord Sewal’s flat, an event duly publicised in those same newspapers. Now had I phoned the Met. and reported a neighbour who I suspected of snorting coke, I think it would have been seen as a case of wasting police time. London, after all, is the cocaine capital of Europe (that’s official too). Busting Lord Sewal was a complete waste of police time –  it may have  ticked the box, We acted on the Information, but it was done to oblige. It's forelock tugging.

The Met. is a traditionally working class organisation and Clive Driscoll presents himself as just an ordinary London boy from a difficult background who, despite dyslexia, has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps into a 35 year career with the Met. The style of the book is aggressively uneducated. I don’t know if this is Clive Driscoll alone or as he has been crafted by a ghost writer. The effect is sometimes comic and sometimes toe-curling. I think it is a main reason why I sometimes felt, This is an Unreliable Narrator. (But the low point comes when Mr Driscoll, who aims quite a few appropriate shafts at Roman Catholic church officials - spiced with reports of coded hand signals they use between themselves - then tells you that he himself is a  … Freemason. That had me in stitches.)

You cannot be a Comic Cuts Dixon of Dock Green Copper and at the same time successfully take on some very difficult investigations and secure convictions. That is where the style of the narration clashes all the time with the stories it narrates.

DCI Driscoll’s lasting claim to fame and gratitude arises from the fact that he took on the “Cold Case” Stephen Lawrence murder (which dated back to 1993), secured the confidence of the murdered boy’s parents – who provide Prefaces to this book - and others who had been bitterly disillusioned by the mishandling of the case, and eventually secured two convictions in 2012.

Things went wrong on the Lawrence case very early on: one of the suspects was the son of a well-known criminal who just happened to have a working relationship with the policeman put in charge of the murder investigation and who saw to it that the investigation went nowhere, despite information and evidence all over the place. Exceptionally bad luck? No, not completely untypical of the Met. 

All this and a lot more is on the record. So too is the fact that having secured the convictions, the Met. responded to Driscoll’s success not with congratulations but by pushing him into compulsory retirement – hence this book which though it never presents itself as such is also his revenge.

All these negative things said, there are stories told here which are entirely credible, greatly to Mr Driscoll’s credit, and often enough are stark reminders of what life in an “Inner City” is like for many of its inhabitants. Some of the things narrated here deserve further scrutiny, since the UK’s laws of libel have often enough prevented the naming of names. Mr Driscoll’s book is at its most frustrating when he points his finger upwards to the “high ups” in the Met.

Review: Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

This is a very well written and very interesting book. It argues that the elderly frail and the dying can enjoy a better quality of life than they often do - and that will often enough involve less medicine than more. It will certainly involve asking the frail and the dying what their own priorities are.

Gawande contrasts nursing homes, organised like penitentiaries, unfavourably with assisted living where even the very frail can keep something like their own front door and the freedom to schedule their own time and occupy it in their own way. Likewise, he is more impressed with hospice care (including hospice care delivered at home) than with medical interventions which go on for too long and often reduce rather than improve quality of life.

The argument is built up through some very finely written informal case studies, including one of his own father. As a result, the book is very easy to read - though, of course, it deals with end of life issues which are often enough traumatic for those involved - the person who is on the way out and the family who will remain. He also looks in detail at the ideas of practical providers who have sought alternatives to over-medicalised, over-hospitalised management and intervention.

I felt that the argument Gawande advances is really more general than he indicates. Even before we get into frailty and end of life, modern medicine often offers us too much and expects us to take it. 

It is now routine, for example, to offer rather unpleasant and often risky procedures as the means by which certain things (usually cancers) can be ruled out. But a good specialist using his or her hands and collateral information could in at least some cases make a reasonably reliable assessment. I would like the option of declining the invasive procedure until I had had a judgment from a pair of hands that concluded there was a real cause for concern.

Likewise, with medication. It is not only the elderly frail who are over-medicated to the point where side-effects are worse than the problem being medicated for. Play-safe prescribing or prescribing-on-request puts many millions of people onto pills they don't really need. 

There are signs that the problem is being recognised and  that things are changing. I hope so.

Review: Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

Books are read in context. I was working for a couple of days in Wiesbaden and took with me an unfinished Caitlin Moran How To Build A Girl. Well, that’s a book where you speed along, tripping over from one gag to the next, and I finished it faster than I had imagined. I heartily recommend it.

I needed something else to read. The nearest German bookshop could only offer me a dozen novels in English (I’ve given up trying to read in German) from which I picked this one.

Kureishi has a very long back list from which I recognised only My Beautiful Launderette which I remember as a fine film.

This is not a book where you trip along, despite the cover puffs which assure you that it is “Brilliantly funny” and “Hugely entertaining”. Maybe it depends where you are coming from. The novel tells the story of a London-based man commissioned by his London publisher to write the biography of an elderly Indian –born but rural England-resident writer, who in turn writes a novel about the upstart young man sent to write his biography. I guess it’s the kind of plot which goes down well in London literary circles where, Private Eye informs me, everyone is up everyone else’s bum.

As a novel, I found it quite flimsy: unambitious plot and characters who aren’t quite, well, characters despite (perhaps because of) the big brushstrokes with which they are painted. I found white working-class Julia the most interesting of his three leading female characters.

But as a novel of ideas – an essay in other words – it’s very interesting. And when it uses its near-to-death main character Mamoon to say things of which London literary society might disapprove if you said them in your own voice, it’s interesting and fun. 

Thus Mamoon:

"[On George Orwell] All that ABC writing, the plain style,the bare, empty mind with a strong undertow of sadism, the sentimental socialism and Big Brother and the pigs, and nothing about love - intolerable. No adult apart from a teacher would bother with one of his novels." (page 92)

“One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration [of a marriage] that one is at the mercy of someone else’s childhood” ( 115)

“The truth is, everything we really desire is either forbidden, immoral or unhealthy, and, if you’re lucky, all three at once” ( 275)

“[Of his personal archive] It’s all going to the university this week. I should have stuffed it in the grate. Ted Hughes, whom I knew and loved, had the right idea with Sylvia’s diaries – push them in the oven after the woman’s head. Otherwise those unreadable academics never stop trying to make their careers and a good income out of it, while making the man look like an ogre. They see it as they wish, without imagination. And it is ordinary male sexuality that they hate” (300)

But reading this last rant, I did wonder if Kureishi did not quite have the courage of his character’s convictions and has left it to the reader to silently insert "politically correct" or “female” before “academics”. Perhaps that's unfair; maybe an editor took something out as an outrage too far. Elsewhere, Kureishi does allow Mamoon his racism.

Refreshingly, and in defiance of the new norm,  Kureishi does not Acknowledge the help of any Facebook Friends.