Review: China Mieville, October

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I sense that in Russia, the hundredth anniversary of 1917 is a bit of an embarrassment. The current government stresses continuity with the past and so links itself to the double headed eagle and two-faced Russian Orthodoxy. It is out of the question to celebrate the February 1917 downfall of the Romanovs, who now have a cult following among the very stupid. Nor is the regime in any position to celebrate the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 since it exists only as a consequence of the downfall of hated Bolshevik power in 1991.

Outside Russia, it’s not so difficult – the Romanov dynasty deserved its fate, period – but hindsight casts a very long shadow over the October revolution. 

China Miéville has had the excellent idea of writing a would-be popular narrative of 1917, a sort of John Reed story but with the benefit of all the archives which historians have now turned into many books. The narrative starts with great brio but rapidly narrows its focus to a blow-by-blow, day-by-day account of political events in Petrograd. This in turn descends into a chronicle of socialist in-fighting so painful that you can see why the words socialist and sectarian now seem inseparable. Miéville is dispassionate enough to realise that sometimes he is demonstrating the truth that it is not only second time around that history presents itself as farce. As someone who has read quite widely in the history of this period, I still found myself reading about factions and organisations I had never heard of and have no reason to want to read about again.

The author is good on the Provisional Government's multiple weaknesses. It is hard to believe how a government in a position to take fresh stock of the situation could have persisted in a war from which there were so many very good reasons to get out. The legacy of the Romanovs was a country which could not win a major war, still less realise grandiose designs - Nicholas's government reckoned to get Austrian Galicia and Constantinople as war loot in return for their contribution to the Allied war effort.

The focus on Petrograd politics and personalities of the revolution could have been lessened. The author does fairly repeatedly allude to  hunger but doesn’t really present it as a driving force. He has more to say about Peace and Land but less about the Bread which was the first word in the Bolsheviks' revolutionary slogan. Russia had undergone a sort of Industrial Revolution but no corresponding Agricultural Revolution. It’s major cities – Petrograd and Moscow – were far away from fertile agricultural areas. There was always a problem about feeding the cities and  the First World War turned the problem into an impossibility when not only were there armies as well as cities to feed but the fact also that peasants who worked the land were drafted to be killed in the trenches. The Romanovs could not feed Petrograd, nor could the Provisional Government, nor could the Bolsheviks. In the end, the Americans stepped in and created a vast Relief Administration in the early 1920s. People still starved and would continue to do so.

I did not baulk at any of the facts presented (except at a 5 November instead of 7 November on page 3), but I felt the scale of the February revolution – the Revolution in the eyes of contemporaries – is perhaps underplayed and the abrupt cut off on 26 October is too soon –Miéville should have followed John Reed at this point and given us Ten Days That Shook The World, taking us into the first week of November 1917 (Old Style).

Review: Matisse in the Studio, edited by Ellen McBreen and Helen Burnham

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Everything we write is marked by the time and place in which we write, sometimes very lisibly so as in this interesting study of Matisse’s relation to the objects which he collected over a life-time, housed in his studio and used in his work. The contributors to this exhibition catalogue have had to read about and hear about Orientalism, the male gaze, cultural appropriation and so on. As a result, they sometimes write as if they are walking on eggshells and you can sense it. 

It shouldn’t be like that. Either you accept a theory and deploy it actively, which in this case might lead to rather more criticism of Matisse than is to be found here, or you ignore it and just get on with what you want to draw our attention to.

That said, the authors are good at drawing our attention to what Matisse thought he was trying to do, as expressed in letters and interviews; how in practical terms, he tried to do it using a studio which he tailored over decades to his purposes; and how that converts into the work he produced. There are some very telling illustrations and juxtapositions of object and work.

Because it is a discourse which is out of fashion, there is really nothing here on how Matisse’s personal life and work intersected so that his separation from his wife in favour of his secretary is not even a blip, and the fate of his daughter Marguerite likewise (page 183). There is also very little on the later cut-outs which interest me partly because they seem to be the way in which an old man turned to good account a bad hand dealt him by health and age.

Review: Tim Marshall, Worth Dying For. The Power and Politics of Flags

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Back on 11 August 2016, I reviewed here Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography which I felt had a lot of zest and a clearly-articulated argument. As a result, his publisher sent me this new book to review.

It also has a lot of zest and a great deal of incidental detail for those interested in Pub Quizzes and such like. But it does not have the analytical sharpness of the previous book and this is probably inevitable given its subject matter, a history of mostly national flags and their symbolism. A few things struck me.

Flags, flagpoles and rules about hoisting flags onto their poles etc are pretty much cultural universals. This is in some ways rather odd, since the whole business is a fairly arbitrary one. True, there are some motivated explanations of how flags came into existence – so that you could see where your own lot were re-grouping during the battle, and so on – but this hardly explains the universality and large measure of conformity we have got to now.

Where we have got to now also leaves many flags unresponsive in their design to the fact that they will (mostly) be flown at the top of large static poles. Just a couple of more modern flags – those of South Africa and, notably, Seychelles have dynamic designs which respond to the possibilities opened up by the fact that they will be attached to a pole at the left side and flutter out from that static point. Most flags are symmetrical, imagined from the standpoint of someone (the designer) looking at them as illustrations on a page. Many are also cluttered with detail which, though visible to designers at work on the page in front of them, will be lost on those casting an upward glance at a pole. Most of the flags of Latin America – Brazil an obvious exception - look to me ripe for a design overhaul. They are without flag-design or artistic merit.

Quite a lot of Tim Marshall’s text is devoted to explanation of the symbolism of individual flags. This is necessary because though flags are usually icons of something or other, what something or other it is has to be pointed out – so “X stands for Y” and then, once we are told, we see it. Technically, this is to say that flags make a great deal of use of translucent icons as opposed to transparent ones. An icon is transparent when pretty much anyone can see what is meant without any supporting verbal explanation – most road warning signs are meant to be like this, so that you can understand them wherever you are coming from. But there are resemblances between sign and object which have to be pointed out and the same sign may mean more than one thing: on one flag, the colour Green may stand for Islam, but on another it may stand for a nation’s forests or fields.

Over fifty years ago, I had a summer job in a lakeside Swedish hotel. One of my duties was to raise and lower the very large Swedish flag each day from its very large pole. I realised early on that I was being watched from guest windows as I performed my tasks, and so I adopted a sort of Boy Scout formality, marching briskly to the pole and so on. Somehow - perhaps because I had indeed been a Boy Scout - I knew that I should fold the flag carefully when taking it down and at no point when it was going up or down allow it to touch the ground. Such indeed are the expectations in Sweden and most other places, but at some point one guest did congratulate me on how I did the job. He also explained to me what the colours of the flag represented: blue for the sky and yellow for silver birch leaves. But I bet that isn’t the only explanation around for Sveriges  farger. No one made an issue of the fact that it was an English schoolboy handling the Swedish flag.

Review: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

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Mr Dostoyevsky has written a long book – 650 pages in my Penguin Classics edition – but it is still a gripping psychological thriller. In the foreground of the story are poverty, prostitution, mental illness according to the latest theorising, God according to more traditional theorising, the Russian soul and, seemingly inseparable from that, Russian vodka. There is a lot of vodka in this book, as there was and still is in Russia where it has always held down male life expectancy. The short Epilogue suggests a sort of redemption through suffering and unconditional love but I think it would be wrong to see Mr Dostoyevsky as a simple bringer of The Good News. He is too clever to fall into that trap, though there will be readers who try to push him into it.

His substantial cast of characters do genuinely seem to develop in the course of the novel, and to go off in unexpected directions. It doesn’t feel as if they are mouthpieces for views Mr Dostoyevsky has fully worked out in advance. They each have a distinctive voice and the author allows those voices plenty of free expression throughout the book. Indeed, the largest proportion of the book is given over either to set-piece conversations between two or more characters or to interior monologue. There is little commentary or obvious authorial intrusion, to the extent that rather than have a character exclaim something within inverted commas with an authorial remark like he laughed to follow it, Mr Dostoyevsky (at least, in my translation) incorporates the laughter into the speech with a he-he or ha-ha. I have to say that I found this rather wearing and unsatisfactory since it is so clearly authorial anyway and also terribly repetitive.

Professor Bakhtin has said that the style adopted in this book could be called polyphonic. Dostovevsky assembles a cast of characters, as one might in a play, and lets them speak, each in their own voice. None of them speak with the voice of the author though he clearly has his partialities, most obviously in regard to Sonya, a Magdalen figure who is chosen by Raskolnikov as his confessor – a traditional role for a prostitute. In this case, confession is a route to intimacy rather than a result of it. 

It is part of his skill that at the same time as he is setting off characters by their conversations, Dostoyevsky manages to move the narrative story line forward in a way which keeps the reader reading. It helps in this respect that he has an astute detective who is hot on the trail of the murderer and keeps up a cat-and-mouse game intended to bring the perpetrator to the point of confession, a strategy in which he is arguably successful. The detective plays a vital role in moving the story along.

As with many Russian novels, it is hard to keep track of characters who sometimes appear with first name and patronymic and sometimes with familiar names.My edition lacks a Cast of Characters such as often appears at the front of  Russian novels. One would have been useful here, at least for this older reader.

Review: Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness

I knew Martha Nussbaum’s name but had never studied her work until I came across, by chance, an old essay of hers which offers a wonderfully clear and decisive critique of the work of Judith Butler (best known for her 1991 book Gender Trouble). I was sufficiently impressed to order a couple of Nussbaum’s books online and this is the first one I have read. It originated in the 2014 John Locke lectures at Oxford. It’s very wide-ranging, starting in Ancient Greece and ending in the liberation struggles and civil rights movements of twentieth century India, USA and South Africa. It stays throughout with a few key concepts – anger, forgiveness, gratitude, punishment, justice.

Nussbaum’s characterises her overall ethical and political philosophical vision as essentially forward-looking and welfarist, indebted among more modern writers to the utilitarians (specifically J S Mill) and liberal theorists (specifically John Rawls). From this very general position, she tries to discourage any enthusiasm we might feel for anger as a virtue of some kind. She doesn’t like conditional forgiveness – here she is very forceful in her critique of pervasive religiously-inspired views. If there is to be punishment at all, it should not be backward-looking retribution or payback but forward-looking deterrent. 

Very interestingly, she partitions her discussion in terms of areas of social life: the intimate relationships of family and close friendship; the non-personal relationships of daily life where we meet other people as waiters, travellers on the same plane, drivers on the same road; the more enduring but non-intimate relationships we have with people like work colleagues; the world of criminal justice, where the courts act for those who have been wronged and against those who have wronged them; and the more historically specific worlds of revolutionary justice where fundamental social re-orientation is at issue. Here she focusses on the Civil Rights struggle in America, the campaign for Indian independence, and the re-organisation of South Africa achieved by the ANC with Nelson Mandela as its leader. The discussion is packed with examples and with different ways of coming at the same questions. It’s readable throughout and I found myself thinking of how her arguments relate to contemporary issues like Twitter shaming and apologising, safe spaces and no platforming.

I had one general disquiet which emerged when I read the chapter on the Middle Realm of non-intimate everyday relationships (chapter 5). She discusses various cases where we have to respond to people who have angered us by inconsiderate behaviour or worse and where we may feel the need to vent our anger or seek apology or in some other way basically stick up for ourselves, our dignity or our status. She canvasses various strategies and they do indeed fall into the category of strategic action rather than communicative action (using Habermas’s terms, but others make the same distinction). In strategic action, we do not aim to say what we think or express what we feel but, rather, aim to get someone else to improve their behaviour by saying or doing whatever seems most likely to work even if that involves telling untruths. So, for example, in order to discourage a stranger on a plane giving unwanted help when it comes to getting her cabin bag into the overhead locker, she imagines saying and does say (falsely), I’m terribly sorry. That suitcase contains fragile items, and I’d rather handle it myself so that, if anything should happen, I would know that I’m responsible and not you (p. 148).

Quite a speech, but this is a pure example of strategic rather than communicative action. In the present instance, communicative action might involve saying. No thank you. I prefer to do it myself which is a polite form of saying I don’t want your help which is what she actually feels.

Now, we act in strategic ways all the time in the Middle Realm but the fact that it can be ethically dubious emerges the moment we switch the context to that of intimate relationships. Here we rely on people close to us to say what they think and express what they feel, not least because intimate relationships become deserts if people don’t do that for each other. So, suppose a wife knows her husband hates wearing suit and tie but wants him to dress up for some social occasion which might be important for his career or their social standing. Even though she has no great love of suit and tie herself, she hits on the strategy of saying, Why don’t you wear a suit and tie this evening? It makes you look so handsome. The strategy may work but it involves dishonesty and that is high-risk in an intimate relationship and, over time, can be very damaging to it.

This may seem at some distance from the concerns of Nussbaum’s book but I think it connects. Indeed, she herself edges towards a discussion of the problem when she writes admiringly in chapter 7 of the ways in which Nelson Mandela brought important white groups onside in the transition to majority rule in South Africa. But when she discusses, for example, some of the ways in which Mandela won over the Springboks (pp. 234-37) she realises that what he did could be seen either as strategic – the work of a man who had read up on winning friends and influencing people – or as the expression of his personality. This leads her to point out such things as that Mandela was a real sports fan, not a fake one.

But it is arguable that in chapter 5, she seems happy to deploy pure strategic action which is  insincere or untruthful and this is in obvious respects more consistent with her overall forward-looking, welfarist position which obviates any prying into people’s souls to test their sincerity. The problem I find with her very strong expression of such forward-oriented welfarist views is that though they are meant to be both politically progressive and consistent with a liberal pluralism (of the kind articulated by John Rawls), they have a general paternalist (or maternalist) feel so that other people are to some degree manipulated or infantilised. The exchange over the suit and tie which I just sketched could be construed as manipulative or infantilising and, indeed, when writing about difficult colleagues (pp 154 – 160) Nussbaum characterises one as a “selfish genius  two year-old” (p 159) and others as suffering from “infantile narcissism” (p 160) and  who have to be handled accordingly – that is, handled strategically as patients rather than agents. Sometimes it will work when you handle someone else strategically, but at other times you will cause offence and invite anger when your ruse is seen through. In intimate relationships, give the other cause to think you are treating them as a patient and you are in deep trouble. Likewise, treat  Springboks patronisingly as patients and you will be told to fuck off. Kantians would simply shake their heads, advising that treating people as means rather than ends - objects of strategy rather than partners in communication - can never be justified.

Well, I have done my duty as a critical reviewer in outlining an area of doubt but it remains the case that this is a very impressive, wide-ranging, much reflected upon work of moral and political philosophy with much of which I am in cheerful agreement (as the chapters on “Crimes and Punishments”, “Ingratitude and Disloyalty” in my book The Best I Can Do will attest).

Review: Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The 2016 Man Booker Prize was won by Paul Beatty's The Sellout which I reviewed on this Blog 2nd November 2016. Madeline Thien's much longer book ( 470 pages against 288) was short-listed. Both books will be challenging for most readers because they are written from inside specific cultures about which many readers will have only schematic knowledge. Beatty's is written from inside Black American cultures and Thien's from inside the cultures of  Western classical music and Chinese literary, musical and political life.

So I am sure I missed a lot reading both books but I ended up feeling that Thien's multi-layered historical novel is a much more significant work than Beatty's. She takes seventy years of Chinese history, a cast of characters in love with stories and music - and in the central cases, professionally engaged with Western classical music -  and she writes about the experience of civil war, The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square,  Bach, Beethoven, Profokiev, Shostakovich and much more besides. The novel is not only panoramic but complexly structured and at times I had to check back when I lost a thread. I read the book slowly.

It has very clever aspects especially in the way it acknowledges its own partiality and incompleteness, just one among the millions of  stories which circulate in the world. It emphasises how things are lost but often not completely so that fragments remain, which may be greatly valued in themselves - a theme which I no doubt responded to because I make something of it in my own book Materials and Medium: An Aesthetics (2016).

There is an extraordinary, haunting theme about searching for lost others by leaving coded stories lying around the world in bookstores, libraries, on Blogs and websites.

The book is an extraordinary achievement. It must be out there at the limits of what a single writer can be capable of creating. Maybe the sheer layered complexity of the book put off the Man Booker judges. I just hope it wasn't the severe, critical narrative of Chinese political history since 1945 which deterred them.

Review: Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

This novel belongs to the Stiff Drink school of writing. You adopt your voice, you start in the middle of things and you keep going until, ninety thousand words later, you bring it all to a close. You provide the reader with no more than a small geographical map of Civil War America and you offer no Acknowledgements to anyone for anything. I guess when it’s all over, you pour another stiff drink.

So you begin with the sentence, “The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake” and, starting from that, introduce your two main characters, John Cole and the narrator Thomas McNulty – who start out as two teenage boys saving themselves from famine and disease, lost in the frontiers of frontier America. They make shift as improvising stage artists, join the army to fight the Indians, join again to fight the Confederate rebels and along the way of killing for their supper, acquire a child - an orphaned Indian Sioux to whom they give the name, Winona.

Winona is not much more than a cypher. She is young, traumatised, pretty, clever and determined. In a world which has not yet replaced brute force with bureaucracy, she easily becomes their daughter and more precious to John and Thomas than their own lives. The reader is led to agree. Nothing bad must happen to Winona, absolutely nothing.

On this foundation, Sebastian Barry is able to carry off John and Thomas as gay men and Thomas as a cross-dresser when opportunity demands and with a taste for continuing that way anyway. In a society no more regulated by convention than bureaucracy, John and Thomas also carry off their difference, indulged by the black members of the household they eventually join, and enjoying Winona’s uncurious love.

Inevitably, there is a whiff of opportunism in this gay men and cross dresser casting but the Stiff  Drink approach allows Sebastian Barry to carry it off. But not only that; it is the rootedness of a story of violence and suffering in some very simple values which carries us along. At one point, I felt that all was revealed when at page 136, John occupies himself trying to soothe a restless, troubled Winona to sleep. He succeeds. “Got her sleeping” he says, “You sure do” says Thomas and adds for the reader one of his short, characteristic lines of laconic wisdom, “Not much more than that needed to make men happy”. All’s well in a world where grown men can soothe troubled children to sleep. If they can do that, who’s gonna care if they’re gay?