Author: Antenna

“Les Années” or “The Years” by Annie Ernaux: an individual take on “collective memory”

This is an autobiography which aims to avoid “sentiment”: “The point is not to speak of the personal”. Instead, referring to herself in the third person, or writing collectively as “we”, Annie Ernaux adopts a fragmented approach which tends to distance the reader from her.

As implied by the choice of quotations at the outset, she is preoccupied with our insignificance in the scale of things – not only shall we be forgotten as individuals, but matters of great importance to us will seem trivial to our descendants, and our way of living may come to seem ludicrous, even blameworthy. This has become very topical since our materialist way of life, justified by “the need for growth” is now under criticism for destroying the planet for future generations.

Annie Ernaux’s attitude may explain her tendency to give more importance to fleeting, often banal memories than to major events in her life. The opening pages are a list of ephemeral images, some from before she was born, reflecting her insight that, influenced by our parents’ talk, we may have a kind of false memory of events which happened to other people in the past before we even existed. Many of the images are sordid or grim, and it would seem quite arbitrary – a woman urinating behind a café, the glimpse of a thalidomide victim with no arms. This sets from the outset a somewhat depressing, negative, joyless tone which is never fully dispelled.

She often seems more interested in the social history through which she has lived than in recounting the main events of her life. So, on one hand she writes a good deal about the impact of the 1968 riots, the social revolution resulting from the availability of the pill or the arrival of a consumer- driven society which also discarded the taboos and traditions which constrained our childhood until the 1960s. On the other, I never learned, for instance, whom she married, nor when and how the couple parted. She makes no allowance for the reader’s frustration if significant details are hinted at but kept hidden. She writes about a woman’s desire for divorce, mixed with fear of rupture and independence, in an abstract, generalised way. In just one poignant scene, which reveals complex feelings during what may be the last family holiday with her husband in Spain, she becomes an individual with whom one can sympathise, suggesting that a little more “sentiment” in the book would not have gone amiss.

I formed the impression of a bright girl from a narrow, working class background, who “escaped” via the encouragement of her teachers and a good education. However, breaking the taboos over sex outside marriage just a few years ahead of “the pill” and loosening of the abortion laws, she joined the ranks of those obliged to marry and start a family before they would have chosen to do so. She seemed dissatisfied with her lot as a teacher, perhaps because of her long-held desire to be a writer. Drawn to left-wing movements, uneasy over consumerism and the faceless development of new urban areas, Annie Ernaux nevertheless comes across as an “academic” socialist, actually rather contemptuous of workers in the unappealing new suburbs built for them, where she would never willingly set foot.

It is not her style to discuss explicitly her frustration over being diverted by family responsibilities from achieving the ambition to become an admired author. Instead, it is revealed when, oppressed by the annual ritual of the Christmas celebrations in which she now occupies the head of the table, she imagines the crazed action of overturning the table and screaming. Perhaps because she is a writer, a recurring theme is her panicked sense of only having one life, which she has allowed to slip by, without realising it: the living of her past life amounts to a book, but one that has not yet been written – until now.

I found the book hard-going at times. The repetition and lists of people and events are quite tedious and I was not familiar with many of the cultural references. It was fascinating to learn about, say, Ranucci, the last French citizen to be sentenced to death as recently as 1976 by guillotine, which seemed particularly barbaric and antiquated although it was originally seen as more humane than other methods, but the need to look things up continually fragmented the reading of an already disjointed text which rambles on for over two hundred and fifty pages in short sections with no chapters to form natural breaks.

Annie Ernaux has said: “This is the story of events and progress and everything that has changed in 60 years of an individual existence but transmitted through the “we” and “them”. The events in my book belong to everyone, to history, to sociology”.

Yet this approach only works if the events are clearly explained in context to those who did not experience them at the time, and may be ignorant of them now. Admittedly, those who can share her experiences may derive a nostalgic pleasure from being reminded of them.

“Love is Blind” by William Boyd – a little off-key

When Ainsley Channon finds that his son is not unexpectedly making a hash of running the Paris branch of his piano manufacturing and sales company, he sends his protégé, young Scottish piano-tuner Brodie Moncur to use his initiative to improve business. In the process, Brodie becomes infatuated with Lika, a beautiful Russian aspiring opera singer. Their relationship has to be conducted in secret, since she is the mistress of the once celebrated but now physically declining and alcoholic pianist John Kilbarron. From the outset it seems doomed to fail, owing not only to Kilbarron’s jealous and unstable character but also the menacing presence of his “minder” brother Malachi, who may have designs on, even some hold over Lika as well.

It was never quite clear to me why Brodie loves Lika so much, in what seems like a purely physical relationship. She seems dull and devious, dragging Brodie down the same path, changing him from a purposeful, outgoing individual into a passive, moping drifter with his life on hold – but of course, as the title states, “Love is Blind”. Admittedly, Brodie has occasional insights, such as the fact that being in love does not guarantee happiness, while we can never truly know another person, even when there is supposedly mutual love.

I was disappointed by some aspects of the early chapters. The book opens with a detailed description of how to tune a piano, which made little sense to me in the absence of a labelled diagram or two, clearly out of place in a novel. It read like a piece of research conducted to give the story authenticity, but dumped rather clunkily into the text. Then there are the potentially interesting situations which do not lead anywhere, such as Brodie’s visit to the family home, where his widowed father “Malky” dominates eight of his children into adulthood, reserving particular venom for Brodie, the only one to have escaped so far. A charismatic preacher in public, Malcolm Moncur degenerates somewhat implausibly into a gross, drunken bully behind the scenes. Like too many of the characters, he comes across as a caricature. It is never clear why he detests Brodie so much. Is there any significance in the fact that he is so dark compared to his siblings?

The pace is slow as if an essentially thin plot is being padded out, until the novel reaches a dramatic climax at the end of Part 3, two-thirds of the way through. After this, the tension is more sustained, and some past threads are pulled together more, to reach a passably satisfactory ending.

With its varied locations, from Scotland to Russia and the remote Andaman Islands, and the extensive cast of characters, this is an original if rambling take on a well-worn romantic theme but it did not really move or engage me, although many critics and general readers have clearly found it entertaining and engrossing.

“Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh – cast out on the Black Water

The first book in the “Ibis” trilogy, named after the sailing ship which is the setting for some of the action, “Sea of Poppies” focuses on the C19 opium trade operated by the ruthless East India Company. It begins in rural India, where Deeti struggles to make a living from the poppy harvest which has replaced the crops which at least guaranteed a level of self-suffciency. She is resigned to marriage with a man who has become addicted to opium to ease the pain of his wounds, gained in fighting for the British colonialists. The fact he is employed in an opium factory does not help.
At the other end of the social scale is Neel, the unimaginably privileged native landowner, so complacent in his sense of entitlement that he has allowed himself to be trapped into debt by the hard-nosed employee of the East India Company, Mr Burnham. Aided by his eccentric Indian agent Baboo, Burnham is prepared to do whatever is necessary to gain full control of Neel’s lands.

Flitting between an at times confusing horde of characters, some larger than life and stereotyped, reminiscent of a Dickensian novel, the storylines gradually merge to bring the main players together on the Ibis, a converted former slave ship, which is scheduled to transport a group of criminals and unlucky migrants rejected by their families to provide cheap labour for the East India Company.

One of the most likeable and straightforward characters is Zackary Reid, the American carpenter-turned-sailor who, being the son of a slave girl and the master who freed them both, has a natural sympathy for some of the disadvantaged Indians he encounters. Another is Paulette, the spirited and frankly quite devious daughter of a deceased European botanist.

There is a good deal of humour, often somewhat heavy-handed, along with considerable violence and degradation. Despite the frequently implausible, exaggerated to the point of ludicrous events, with people on the brink of death miraculously saved, the novel provides vivid descriptions and creates a strong awareness of the nature and implications of the opium trade, and the attitudes and values of the various parties concerned. For instance, with the risk of an imminent war between Britain and China, Burnham, despite claiming to be a devout Christian, has no understanding of why Chinese rulers might wish to end an exploitative trade which is wreaking havoc on their population, and is over-confident that the conflict will be short-lived.

His Indian roots may make it easier for the author to identify with and portray a period perhaps understandably neglected by western writers. He has certainly undertaken an impressive amount of research on every aspect of the story, including opium manufacture and the operation of sailing ships. A downside of all this is that the presumably authentic language used by, for instance the Lascar and British sailors or even Burnham’s wife is so peppered with native language, jargon or slang as to be virtually incomprehensible at times. I found this very distracting, and would have liked a glossary, together with a map and list of characters for quick reference.

I do not mind the abrupt ending of the story, clearly akin to a cliff-hanger to encourage us to read on, although the novel could be regarded as free-standing, leaving one to imagine “what happens next”. However, for the time being, I do not feel sufficiently engaged to read the rest of the trilogy, I think mainly because I find some of the drama needlessly overdone.

“The Last Tree”

Femi is a young Nigerian boy growing up in rural Lincolnshire with a kindly white foster mother Mary and gaggle of white friends in an idyllic bubble which one senses cannot last. When his mother appears to take him back with her to London, Mary loses his trust through having, in a moment of emotional weakness, assured him this would never happen.

The run-down, vandalised tower blocks of South London are a grim contrast to his former life, as Femi is ordered to stay in the flat while his mother goes to work. School, where he encounters bullying for the first time, is equally grim. His mother makes matters worse, with her inability to understand the psychology of a child ripped from the world he knows and the foster mother he loves. Her harsh words and beatings, presumably based on the way she was raised, soon lead him to hate her.

As a teenager in a tough environment on the street and at home, Femi is vulnerable to going astray. When he is groomed by a local gangster, his studies suffer and one fears he will be dragged down into a life of crime. Yet, since he is intelligent and empathic, one hopes he will survive.

The film is very watchable, visually striking and often moving. The decision to divide the storyline into blocks of time with gaps in-between is potentially quite an effective way of covering his passage for an eleven-year-old to a young man. In this case, it sometimes seems too fragmented, with all the characters apart from Femi thinly developed.  The last section is the  least satisfactory in that the switch to Nigeria, which Femi, now a young man, is visiting with his mother, is too sudden. How have they come to have been reconciled on such apparently good terms? The meeting with the father we did not know existed is too abrupt, coming with no advance warning, and hard to follow since the sound is too indistinct. Yet the filming catches the colour and vitality of Nigeria which, although clearly much poorer than Britain,  “blows Femi away” giving him a powerful sense of the roots which he perhaps had not previously realised he was missing.

This film makes one think about how children may be unintentionally damaged by adults, how hard it may be for immigrants to adapt to a different culture, but also to be heartened yet again by the resilience of the human spirit which film-makers never tire of portraying.

“The Farewell” – caught between cultures

The Farewell (2019)As Chinese American Billi   wanders the New York streets chatting by phone  to her Nai Nai or grandmother, still living on the other side of the world, she casually supplies the white lies to keep the old lady happy. Yes, she is wearing a hat to keep warm but no earrings which might be grabbed by thieves, tearing her lobes. Meanwhile, Nai Nai tells a lie in turn, pretending to be at her sister’s house when she is actually in hospital for tests.

The diagnosis of an inoperable cancer creates the need for a bigger lie. According to Chinese culture, Nai Nai must not be told about her imminent death: this will cause great distress and speed her demise. With her American upbringing, Billi finds this impossible to accept at first. The parents who emigrated to the states when she was a little girl have been influenced enough by the West to have misgivings, but their engrained culture wins out, even to the extent of leaving Billi behind, convinced that she will be unable to conceal her grief, when they set off to pay Nai Nail what they imagine will be a “farewell” visit.  This is made on the grounds of attending a wedding which has been hastily arranged between Billi’s cousin and his Japanese girlfriend of three months, his family unit also having made the decision to emigrate, in this case to Japan. The bewildered air of the young couple who have been virtually press-ganged into an old-style arranged marriage would be amusing if one did not also worry about the shaky foundations of their future relationship.

In this environment of cultural conflict and concealing awkward truths, Billi does not tell her parents of her failure to obtain a Harvard scholarship, after the sacrifices they have made to support her studies financially. They are duly horrified when, unable to contemplate never seeing again the Nai Nai to whom she feels so close, Billi turns up at her flat in China, refusing to explain how she obtained money for the fare when they suspect she is broke.

This is the setting for a well-acted and subtly observed drama with a range of distinct characters which held my attention throughout despite its slow pace. Apart from exploring the dilemmas of being caught between two cultures, I was fascinated by its scenes of life in China, to build on my memories of visiting it twenty years ago. I was struck by how in some ways the Chinese have adopted the least attractive aspects of western urban living, with soulless high-rise blocks and the tasteless kitsch of a wedding parlour where couples go to be photographed. Yet beneath the western-style clothing and hi-tech gadgets, aspects of the traditional culture remain: the focus on eating, the table crammed with elaborate dishes prepared by the women of the family, assisted by their maids; the painful “cupping” endured by Billi, which seemed to involve singing her back with a live flame held over a tube; the elaborate yet to use slightly comical rites  (involving piling it with disposable plates of food) at the grave of Billi’s grandfather.

There was tension between those who had left and those who stayed. The latter claimed to have made more money “doing well” in China, yet were mocked for still wanting to send an only child to study abroad, even at the risk of his not wanting to return.

A blend of poignancy and humour, this is an interesting film which increases one’s understanding and sympathy for a culture in some ways very different from one’s own, yet in basic human terms very similar.

Pain and Glory – an emotionally satisfying feast for the eyes.

Pain and Glory DVD [2019]Superbly acted by Antonio Banderas, Salvador Mallo is a celebrated sixty-something film director whose sense that his career has come to an end is aggravated by poor health, particularly an aching back and tendency to choke. Desperate for pain relief, he is prompted to begin a drastic course of action which may prove self-destructive during his reunion with the charismatic but heroin-addicted former star of the film which fed his fame thirty years previously. At the same time, the meeting sets in motion a chain of events which may set him back on the path of creativity.

This has been described as semi-autobiographical in providing the director Almodovar with the chance to meditate on his own reflections on past influences and his own ageing and mortality. Yet it is far from a bleak or sad film: apart from the many moments of humour, the well-acted characters – as so often the case, the child actor portraying Salvador as a precocious little boy is particularly convincing – seem real in their expression of emotions and interactions with each other, arousing our sympathy, and there are many both emotionally subtle and visually striking scenes, particularly in the frequent flashbacks to Salvator’s impoverished childhood.

There is a sunlit nostalgia in the beautiful scene of his young mother (played by Penelope Cruz) washing sheets in the river, and singing in harmony with the other women as they stretch them out to dry on the bushes with the young boy looking on. Another very Spanish image is the neglected underground cave house in the catacombs which is the only home his feckless father has managed to find for his family. We see as it is gradually transformed with whitewash, exotic tiles and plants into a picturesque dwelling which a well-heeled visitor can admire, although Salvator’s mother points out that it still rains into the sunken living area which is covered only by an open metal grid. The deep bond is apparent between the mother and her only son, whom she forces to attend the seminary intended for priests as the only way of getting an education.

Salvator’s apartment in later life is a feast for the eyes, crammed with quirky furniture, priceless paintings and intriguing objets d’art. The darker side of Spanish cities is revealed during Salvator’s foray into the menacing locality of criminal gangs with scores to settle, drug pushers and drop-outs.

Although the plot is fairly thin and slow-paced, this is unimportant. This absorbing film is primarily a reflection on a flawed but talented artistic man’s life in a world of powerful visual images and empathy for people in their diversity.

Bait: not just fish but one another

BAIT [Dual Format] [Blu-ray]This is the tale of a fateful chain of events in a coastal Cornish community where there are tensions between locals no longer able to make a decent living from the traditional activity of fishing, and wealthy outsiders who can afford to buy picturesque cottages as second homes, but contribute nothing to the local community on their summer visits apart from their spoilt, bored kids patronising the local pub. The focus is on Martin who persists in trying to work as a fisherman, despite his lack of a boat – his laborious stretching of nets along the beach and planting of a single lobster pot yield meagre results . He has fallen out with his pragmatic brother, who has decided to use his boat to provide trips for tourists, and is full of brooding resentment against the couple to whom he has been forced to sell the family home. It is not just a question of fish bait, but of people baiting each other.

 

Hailed as a masterpiece by the critics for its unusual techniques, this is filmed in black-and-white with the sound added afterwards, using a handheld camera to produce often grainy shots in a square frame which tends to create the impression of not being able to see quite enough of an image which has been cropped. Although for the most part slow-paced, so that it feels longer than its duration of 88 minutes, I was not bored because of the need for intense concentration, in order not to miss some vital detail or simply to understand the heavily accented Cornish locals. The directors likes to use the device of almost subliminal shots to foreshadow what is to come, or to emphasise a dramatic past event. Scenes occurring simultaneously in different places are sometimes interwoven. In a Pinterish style, we may be bombarded with conversations occurring in parallel. More filming may be devoted to prising fish from a net than to the aftermath of a major event, such as the shocking climax of the drama.

 

I was left wondering whether the director had tried too hard “to be different”, and whether I would have preferred it to have been shot in shake-free colour to show the beauty of Cornwall, with a faster pace and a little more clarity over certain key events. However, on reflection the film “grew on me”: there is no harm in an unusual take on an interesting situation, nor in making an audience work a bit and deduce what is going on.

Marianne and Leonard: Songs of Love

Marianne & Leonard: Words of LoveIn the 1960s, Leonard Cohen joined the colony of aspiring writers on the exquisite Greek island of Hydra, with the lures of casual sex, cheap alcohol and easy access to drugs. He soon began to receive practical and emotional support from Marianne Ihlen, the beautiful young Norwegian who was for several years his lover and “muse”. Apart from not seeming in awe of him, she was a good listener with a gift for drawing out the talent in others. Abandoned by her husband and the mother of an appealing child, “Little Alex”, Marianne was open to ideas of “free love”, but as Leonard developed his megastar status as a singer/songwriter, she could not cope with hectic lifestyle involving long visits to the States, and having to share him with the hoards of fans who also wanted a piece of him.

Beneath the shield of charisma and charm, Leonard actually behaved appallingly at times, drifting off on assignations with women as the fancy took him, putting her under pressure to have abortions since he did not want to have children, or at least those who were not Jewish, when it came to the crunch. There is some remarkable film footage of his lifestyle: the scene where he invites the audience onto the stage in a kind of mass group love in, until the space is filled with a heaving pile of people, or when, clearly very high on drugs, he shaves himself with a flourish since he has convinced himself that this alone will enable him to revive a flagging performance.

I have read critical reviews to the effect that the film is too much about Leonard rather than Marianne, of whose early life we are told nothing. In fact a good deal is also omitted over, for instance, Leonard’s second major relationship with Suzanne, who it seems appeared, Cohen’s child on her hip, on Marianne’s doorstep in Hydra, demanding that she quit the property. This was the final trigger needed to send her back to a conventional life in Norway. Yet what had clearly been a deep and genuine relationship endured to the extent that, on her death bed years later, she received a prompt and moving note from Leonard. I remain uncertain to what extent inclusion of the film of this event is intrusive.

What makes this documentary particularly powerful is the plentiful footage of life on Hydra in the 60s, as recorded by the talented DA Pennebaker and stored unviewed in his attic for decades. For those who remember the 60s, and the hippy flower power at odds with what was still a very conservative Britain, it is very evocative. The magnetic appeal and unspoilt beauty of the Greek islands were enjoyed at the price of an eternal sense of nostalgia, making life anywhere else seem faded and dull for ever after.

There is a thorny debate to had as to whether the creativity gained from the use of mood-altering narcotics is worth the cost of their destructive effects. Must those with great talents like Leonard Cohen be inevitably self-absorbed, driven and selfish in order to attain their full potential? What are the costs for the children of those who practise a life without boundaries? One of the most poignant aspects of the documentary was to learn that Marianne’s son, Little Alex, so full of innocent joy and curiosity in the film footage, has, despite her evident love for him, spent most of his adult life in a Norwegian mental institution.

The Body Lies by Jo Baker – “When the trick is to make the whole thing up and still to tell the truth”

The Body Lies by [Baker, Jo]In this slow-building psychological thriller, a young creative writing lecturer discovers to her cost that she has become the obsessive focus of her most talented student Nicholas Palmer’s work, with the risk that he may move from “merely” recording his close observation of her, intrusive as that is, to actively manipulating her to fit his story, in his belief that, to be authentic, writing must be based on real experience.

It is also a study of how, even in these days of increased equality, men continue to dominate and exploit women in a number of ways, often without being aware of it. It was not until after I finished the book that I realised the writer who narrates this novel is never named, perhaps with the aim of making her a kind of microcosm of women’s lives in general.

At the outset, pregnant and walking home from work in London one dark evening, this young woman is mugged by a stranger, and makes her injuries worse by trying to resist. Three years later, she is still sufficiently traumatised to seize the opportunity to escape in the form of a lecturing post in a northern university, offered on the strength of her success in publishing a novel.

It is perhaps implausible that she should choose to rent an isolated country cottage a bus ride from the campus, or that she should so readily leave her husband behind to continue with his school post until the end of the year, expecting him to make regular week-end commutes to visit her. Of course, these factors are necessary to the plot.

With what some readers have described as irritating passivity, she takes on a mountainous workload, not appearing to have learnt the knack of “saying no”. The boss responsible for this is supposed to be her mentor, doubly ironical in view of the fact he seems perpetually on the brink of sexually harassing her.

I am not sure to what extent Jo Baker is trying to be facetious, but she neatly debunks some recent attempts to ensure equality and respect in academic life. The disruptive student Nicholas objects to the failure to issue a “trigger warning” before a fellow-student’s description of a crime scene. Yet his own writing is far darker and more sinister, bearing in mind that he claims only to write “what happened…the truth”. Also, isn’t it a contradiction in terms to apply censorship to a creative writing course?

Since finishing this I made a start on “A Country Road, a Tree” and realised that Jo Baker is a writer who seeks to avoid any kind of “typecasting”, but rather to create a different style and theme in each work. Comparisons between her books are therefore hard, but “The Body Lies” suggests she has developed in marshalling her material and honing her style. There may be the odd inconsistency in the sequence of events, the skilfully constructed sense of menace may peter out into the damp squib of a somewhat trite ending, and there may not be any very profound fresh insights into the female condition, but she has produced a well-written and neatly plotted page-turner, via a wry parody of the current state of academic life.

Galileo Watcher of the Skies – obscured somewhat by the fog of academia

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies by [Wootton, David]My fascination with Galileo, the brilliant thinker who was eventually gagged by a bigoted Inquisition, was fed by Michael White’s absorbing biography, “Galileo Antichrist”. Although very strong on childhood influences, personality, dealings with friends and family, his inventions and the tortuous path by which he fell foul of the priests pulling the strings behind an insecure and neurotic Pope, the biography seemed a little thin on the all-important scientific theories to do with motion and astronomy, and to have gone too far into trying to make ideas accessible by “dumbing down” the details.

In seeking out David Wootton’s much denser and more academic work, I got both more and less than I bargained for. Following an essentially chronological but more thematic approach, the author devotes lengthy passages to, for instance, experiments dealing with specific gravity, the physics of the motion of falling objects, or mathematical calculations to evaluate the respective merits of the theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy versus the more “heretical” Copernicus, and “fudged” Tycho Brahe. My lack of basic scientific knowledge made it hard for me to understand some of the author’s explanations and arguments, but I also suspected that, himself a historian, he may have strayed out of his own comfort zone. He certainly seems to make things overly complicated and long-winded.

Despite many examples of Galileo conducting practical experiments, Wootton is at pains to stress that these were mainly to demonstrate the truth of his real love, abstract theories, which is what led him to mathematics. Although he sometimes seemed too arrogantly confident, or perhaps simply busy, to put a theory to the test, he seems to me to have combined the two approaches, so that to suggest otherwise is hair-splitting. How could Galileo have done otherwise at a time when the words “experiment” and “scientist” were not used, and it was common for inquisitive thinkers to be polymaths.

Wootton concedes the limitations placed on historical research by the loss and corruption of data. So, we learn that much of the writing from Galileo’s most fertile period of invention was used by a butcher to wrap meat, or sold off as scrap paper. Similarly, his former student Viviani, who did so much to foster a positive legacy for Galileo, was not above fabricating appealing myths, such as the claim that he devised “the law of the pendulum” from observing the swinging of a lamp in Pisa Cathedral. However, in the absence of hard evidence, Wootton seems to me to indulge in too much academic conjecture as to, for example, the extent to which Galileo was a Catholic or even a Christian. For a man born in 1564, I see no contradiction in the fact that he, with unconscious male chauvinism, sent his two daughters to be nuns, that he paid lip service to Catholic belief when there was an Inquisition actively engaged in torturing and executing alleged heretics, but was dedicated to the pursuit of scientific enquiry which some Jesuits themselves pursued, yet could not deny what his reason told him to be true, unless his own life was at risk.

Not until two-thirds of the way through does Wootton state that his “primary purpose is to provide an intellectual biography of one of the world’s greatest scientists-to reconstruct the development of his ideas over time”. At the same time, he observes that, ”Amongst professional historians, biography is not an intellectually respectable genre”. He then makes what seems like a self-evident case for what he calls “a characterological approach to biography” to enable us to understand the study of scientific progress and cultural change, fitting themes for a historian, it would seem. This line of argument appears unnecessarily tortuous. However it explains why Wootton glosses over Galileo’s childhood and career, and why references to his family often seem awkwardly squeezed in, sometimes so condensed as to be hard to follow. I was troubled by the subjectivity of a chapter suggesting out of the blue that a bullying and devious mother may have been to blame for his reluctance to get married, his lack of communication as regards his emotional attachments and private beliefs, and also explain his aggressive, driven personality. In his summing up, Wootton writes, “the paternal conflict between experience and reason and the maternal conflict between power and influence shaped Galileo’s internal life and constitute the cosmography of his self” but I could not find clear and convincing passages in the book to support this.

Similarly, I was surprised by the author’s sudden break from the build-up to Galileo’s trial in order to speculate on his frustration over a missed opportunity to consummate a relationship with some married woman, Alessandra Buonamici who had not clearly figured in the story before. I would have preferred more along the lines of the moving account of Galileo’s close relationship with his daughter Marie-Celeste, a nun, to provide a more fleshed out picture of the man.

Although the work is informative and gripping in places, it continually frustrated me by failing to provide the further insights and deeper analysis I was seeking. The above factors make it an unnecessarily hard and opaque slog at times.