Books

Le Grand Meaulnes – Caught between dream and reality

This is a review of “Le Grand Meaulnes” by Alain-Fournier

Some of the cult status of this classic must stem from the poignancy of the author’s death at the outset of the First World War, aged only twenty-seven.

The autobiographical aspects are spread between the two main protagonists. The narrator François Seurel is, like Alain-Fournier, the son of teachers in rural Solonge. Augustin Meaulnes, the charismatic, shambling, undisciplined youth awash with adolescent hormones who falls obsessively in love with Yvonne de Galais, the young woman he has met only briefly in a remote country estate to which he is subsequently unable to find his way back, mirrors Alain-Fournier’s fateful chance meeting in Paris with the “young woman of his dreams” who was to haunt him for the rest of his life. Alain-Fournier’s additional troubled liaison with another young woman, a seamstress living in Bourges, portrayed as a bleak place in comparison with the magical estate, also provides material for Meaulnes’s later escapades, and a contrast to the purity of his idealised relationship with Yvonne. .

“Le Grand Meaulnes” is often cited as the ultimate novel on adolescence, the irony being that the generations of teenagers reading it at school will probably not appreciate this at the time. As a pre-boyfriend girl with no brothers, I could not understand Meaulnes at all. Forty plus years on, I recognise at once the truth of his moody, restless nature, continually testing boundaries, quite beyond the capacity of schoolmaster Seurel to control, so he simply resorts to overlooking Meaulnes’s misdemeanours. Meaulnes brings excitement into the dull, lonely life of the much more sensible and considerate François. Yet Meaulnes in turn suffers from the even greater follies and fantasies of Yvonne’s over-indulged, unstable brother Frantz. Meaulnes is self-absorbed, in love with the idea of being in love rather than with a real person, bound by a sense of honour without being able to see how this may hurt the one he claims to love the most.

When obliged to read this for A Level, I found it intolerably sentimental, wallowing in romanticism, perhaps an inevitable postscript to the style which dominated the C19. Decades on, I am still irritated by the continual implausible coincidences and improbable plot contrivances, although these may seem permissible in what amounts to a fairy tale grounded in the reality of French rural life which itself was about to be disturbed by a major war, and destroyed by C20 change. Yet I also now appreciate the poetic clarity and exquisite fluidity of the writing, the vivid evocation of the countryside and the simple, at the time no doubt seemingly unchangeable, long vanished way of life. Alain-Fournier has succeeded in his desire to create a dreamlike quality, particularly evident during the fateful wedding party which Meaulnes gatecrashes by chance at the mysterious estate .

Recommended to read in French, perhaps a little disappointing in English.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying: Look back in anger 1930s style

This is my review of  “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” by George Orwell

Since history repeats itself, Orwell’s caustic parody of capitalism in 1930s London still seems remarkably relevant in our post-financial crisis, commercially manipulative world of making people want things and often paying them too little to produce them.

Orwell’s anti-hero Gordon Comstock is not just trying to escape the clutches of what he calls “the money god” but is also a mouthpiece for the author’s own pet hats and self-doubt over his ability to succeed as a writer. In the first chapter which could stand as a short story in this own right, Gordon painfully perfects the first verse of a poem during a boring shift in a bookshop, in between raging at the adverts in the street which remind him of the better paid job in copywriting which he has abandoned on principle to get out of what he regards as a corrupt system. He despises most books on sale for being “turned out by wretched hacks at the rate of four a year, as mechanically as sausages and with much less skill.” With only twopence halfpenny left until the end of the week, not enough for the cigarettes he needs – like Orwell? – to be able to write, he is beginning to realise that “you do not escape from money by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on”.

Gordon is frankly rather tedious and unlikeable in his negative view of the world and borderline mentally ill in his desire “to lose himself in smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness… great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal.” Yet it is revealing to be transported back to the 1930s, beginning to emerge from a deep Depression, with the poignant wisdom of hindsight that the destructive war which Gordon claims to welcome is in fact imminent.

People tolerate appalling bedsits with repressive landladies, but expect to receive in the evenings letters posted earlier in the day. It’s a remarkably cheap world to modern eyes, where Gordon can take his girlfriend Rosemary on a trip to the country for only fourteen shillings (seventy pence). But it’s also riddled with social divides and casually-voiced prejudices that make us wince: Gordon comes from one of “those depressing families, so common among the middle-middle class, in which nothing ever happens”; his landlady is obsessed with “mingy lower-middle-class decency”; a poverty-stricken old couple, in a society with no proper pension system, are “the throw-outs of the money-god. All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description: creeping like unclean beetles to the grave”.

Gordon’s upper class friend Ravelston is unusual that “in every moment of his life” he is “apologizing, tacitly, for the largeness of his income” but still adores his girlfriend Hermione who remarks, “Don’t talk to me about the lower classes….. I hate them. They smell”. As narrator, Orwell often seems guilty of unconscious flashes of snobbery and prejudice – anti-semitic comments or cruelly amusing descriptions of a dwarf, but all this seems part of what was acceptable at the time. Ironically, advertising of specific brands, mention of real people or companies and “alleged obscenities” all had to be edited out at the last minute, leading Orwell to resist reprinting of a book he felt had been “garbled”.

There is in fact a good deal of humour in the book, not least in the aspidistras, symbols of “lower class decency” which refuse all Gordon’s efforts to kill them off. When Gordon stops moaning there are some striking descriptions: “the mist-dimmed hedges wore that strange purplish brown, the colour of brown madder, that naked brushwood takes on in winter.”

Apart from hoping that the likeable Ravelston and Rosemary might “get together”, there is the impetus to find out whether the book will end in tragedy or something will make Gordon surrender to “the money-code”.

The Dawn Watch: When fiction trumps history?

This is my review of The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff.

Beneath Maya Jasanoff’s breezy style, stuffing cash into her shoes for safety as she retraces Joseph Conrad’s route along the River Congo, lies a perceptive portrayal of “what made the writer tick”, although of course we can never really know. She succeeds in distilling from clearly thorough research a telling selection of incidents, quotations, and her own insightful conclusions in a biography of only 315 pages, rather than the ever more frequent 800 plus page doorstopper.

It is unnecessary to have read much Conrad to be fascinated by him: the author admits to having struggled to read what some regard as his work of genius, “Nostromo”, and what most struck me when first reading Conrad is his remarkably fluent grasp of the English language, which he only began to learn when he went to sea as a young man.

What is really interesting about Conrad is his acute observation of human nature in a changing world where the romantic hardship of sail was giving way to the more profitable transport by steam, while European powers and the United States vied for control of resources in “less developed” areas, bringing the hell of exploitation, destruction and corruption with their good intentions to establish Christian culture, education, law and order. Maya Jasanoff finds in his life and fiction, “a history of globalisation seen from the inside out”, a grappling with “the ramifications of living in a global world”.

Conrad’s cynical, questioning approach must have been shaped by the hardship of early childhood in the exile to which his Polish parents, members of the landed gentry, were sentenced for his idealistic and unworldly father’s political activism against Russian domination. Yet it was typical of Conrad’s contradictions that years later he refused to sign the petition against the execution of his onetime colleague the Irishman Roger Casement for his part in the Easter Rising: “by emotional force he has made his way and sheer emotionalism has undone him”.

Being orphaned very young, a solitary only child with no stable home, may have triggered Conrad’s wanderlust, the desire to get as far possible from landlocked eastern Europe onto the open sea. Perhaps because his father had been a writer who taught him reams of patriotic Polish poetry, he developed the motivation to jot down stories about places “beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines”…”among human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world”.

Since Maya Jasanoff is a historian rather than a literary biographer, her main interest is in how he dealt with “the moral and material impact of dislocation, the tension and opportunity of multi-ethnic societies, the disruption wrought by technical change”, with only passing reference to his writing style or any real literary evaluation of his work. Two interesting maps, which could have been superimposed, show the clear overlap between the far-flung countries he visited as a seaman and the settings for his novels: five months spent as captain of a steamship on the Congo inspired “Heart of Darkness”; service as first mate of the steamer Vidar plying between the ports of Borneo and Sulawesi led to “Lord Jim”. Yet, “Nostromo”, set in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguano, was based totally on the knowledge of an obliging friend.

Conrad was a man of strong opinions: although his son only once saw him pray over his own father’s grave, Conrad believed that “even the freest” is to some degree hemmed in by “fate”. Sickened by the fact that his later work, which he regarded as “second rate efforts”, which are no longer read, earned him so much more than such works as “Heart of Darkness”, he refused honorary degrees or a knighthood, but would have valued the reward of the international Nobel Prize, which was never offered. Even his humour was caustic: in his final years of belated fame after years of struggling as a writer, he remarked that Esperanto was “a monstrous jargon” but people could translate his work into it if they so wished.

Despite the earnest bleakness of much of his work, his periods of depression as a struggling middle-aged writer and his frequent illnesses, he clearly possessed a charm which drew a wide circle of friends, including well-known authors. After years of desultory flirting on shore-leave with attractive, highly respectable young women, and an intriguing correspondence with a widowed aunt only a few years his senior, he married a “to tell the truth rather plain” teenage typist called Jessie, perhaps as ever shrewdly realising how she could support him on a practical and emotional level – yet he clearly developed a strong affection for her to the end.

Minor criticisms: most of the historical maps included are too small-scale to be legible, the evocative photos embedded in the text would have been better if larger. Maya Jasanoff’s long, somewhat clunky resumés of Conrad’s better known works seem like padding, questionable since they include too many “spoilers” for those wishing to go on to read them. Although the chapters are mainly in chronological order, the thematic approach fragments Conrad’s life story so that a time-line would be useful. Despite all these reservations, this is an absorbing and very readable treatment of a complex and interesting man, flawed yet impressive.

 

Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived Loved and Died in the 1940s – Less would be more

This is my review of Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba.

Although much has been written about France under German occupation in the 1940s, “Les Parisiennes” takes a fresh angle on how women in particular were affected, describing the part they played in resistance, collaboration, or simply “getting on with life”.

The book is thoroughly researched with a six page “cast of characters” at the front, detailed notes on each chapter and an extensive bibliography at the end. However, I felt bludgeoned by the unrelenting spate of prose, since the basically chronological approach not only flits breathlessly between characters, but keeps digressing into a flood of often gossipy and gushing details or condensed potted biographies which seem of only marginal relevance.

Perhaps inevitably in view of the author’s interest in fashion, there is a clear preoccupation with the wealthy and glamorous who could afford to patronise the fashion houses which managed to flourish under Nazi rule. I suppose it is mildly interesting that gas mask holders were made into fashion items (but for how many women?) or that designer clothes had to be purchased under a “couture ration card” system with Balenciaga forced to close for exceeding the quota of seventy-five outfits (a year?) imposed to ration the amount of fabric used. It is made to sound like “a good thing” that of the 20,000 passes issued to attend fashion shows during the Occupation, only 200 were given to the wives of German officers, but weren’t the French women who attended to some extent collaborating? There is too much emphasis on people having a good time when for others basic food was in short supply and Jews were being dragged off by French police to the Vel d’Hiv (Vélodrome d’Hiver) en route for concentration camps. Also, can one really believe the example of so called “refugee-chic” in the tale of a woman fleeing from the fall of Paris who left her vehicle in search of petrol to remove the nail varnish which did not match the colour of her hat? Wouldn’t she have worried more about the smell and risk of catching fire?

The effect of this emphasis on celebrities and the privileged, is to trivialise events and create a sense of unease over being compromised oneself as a reader. In just one paragraph, we are told how “by the end of the forties”, the Marshall Plan had improved conditions, but not exactly how, except that a New Yorker journalist’s “Parisian friends had stopped griping about the black market (which they could presumably afford).. but are back to discussing passionately….the heady mysteries of La Grande Cuisine which, next to women, has always been their favourite topic of conversation”. The paragraph ends as follows. “Not only were the Parisians eating well again, but Wallis, Duchess of Windsor and her friends were buying jewels and couture clothes once more.”

If this book is best read by “dipping in and out”, there is the danger of missing some of the best passages, as in the chapter “Paris Returns” on the immediate aftermath of war, which actually includes some analysis, such as whether the death penalty was too harsh for the anti-semitic literary critic Brassilach (who gets very little mention elsewhere in the book, much less than Wallis Simpson). Simone De Beauvoir supported the punishment, perhaps swayed by De Gaulle’s view that “in literature as in everything, talent confers responsibility” but Anne Sebba points out with uncharacteristic tartness that De Beauvoir was also complicit, having claimed to be an anti-Nazi whilst eating well because her lover’s mother Jean-Paul Sartre took pains to obtain the best black-market foods. There is effective coverage on the practical problems of returning from the hell of the concentration camps and the guilt of those who came back alive: as a memoir recalled seventy years later, “”to survive it was necessary to destroy memory”. The author also considers the complicated relationship between the women who risked their lives in the resistance and were later rewarded as heroines, and those like the equally courageous Simone Veil who felt great bitterness over the lack of recognition of her suffering as a victim, deported to the camps.

Yet overall I was disappointed by the oppressive weight of excessive detail and too often superficial approach to a potentially fascinating subject matter – but the photographs are evocative.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars


 

Love in a Cold Climate – “Having our lovely cake and eating it too”

This is my review of Love in a Cold Climate (Penguin Modern Classics) by Nancy Mitford.

Nancy Mitford applied a sharp wit and first-hand experience of eccentric aristocrats to this well-known parody of upper class life. Palmed off on upper class aunts and uncles who have “relieved” her “divorced parents of the boredom and the burden of bringing up a child”, narrator Fanny recalls the quirky conversations and unperceived bubble of inter-war privilege in which they float She is preoccupied with the lovely Polly, daughter of the caricature of an earl, Lord Montdore, who, in his ageing ineffectiveness “might just as well have been made of wonderful old cardboard, and his wife, whose “worldly greed and snobbishness, her terrible relentless rudeness..formed the subject of many a legendary tale”. Expected to make a great marriage, Polly’s total lack of interest in any eligible suitors puzzles Fanny and drives Lady Montdore to despair which turns to rage when she discovers the true object of her daughter’s affection.

Many readers still appear to find this book highly entertaining, a harmless piece of escapism, although it is likely to seem dated to younger readers. Opinions will differ as to what is most amusing in Fanny’s inexhaustible gushing flow. I laughed over the ludicrous digression into “the Chubb Fuddler”. “He came. He walked along the river bank, and sowed upon its waters some magic seed, which soon bore magic fruit, for up to the surface, flapping swooning, fainting, choking, thoroughly and undoubtedly fuddled, came hundreds upon hundreds of chubb, The entire male population of the village… fell upon the fish….and the contents were taken off to be used as manure for cottage gardens or chubb pie, according to taste”.

There is a gossipy bitchiness which I disliked, such as the description of Lady Montdore’s curtsies which “owing to the solid quality of her frame, did not recall the graceful movement of wheat before the wind” as she “scrambled down like a camel, rising again backside foremost like a cow, a strange performance….her knees crackled like revolver shots but her smile was heavenly”. Descriptions of the formal socialising are quite tedious as it may well have been in reality, as when, for instance, everyone waits for the guests of honour at a dinner party, “a very grand Sir and Ma’am indeed” ,which can only be trite code for royalty.

In the current climate of concern over sexual harassment, some passages may reflect Nancy Mitford’s times, but arouse a sense of unease: it seems to be common knowledge that Polly’s uncle, “the Lecherous Lecturer” preys on his young female relatives, but everyone turns a blind eye. Nancy’s precocious cousin Jassy says, “The fascinating thing was that after the lecture he gave us a foretaste of sex, think what a thrill. He took Linda up on to the roof and did all sorts of blissful things to her, at least, she could easily see how it would be blissful with anybody except the lecturer. And I got some great sexy pinches as he passed the nursery landing.”

Many of the characters seem to be caricatures of the author’s relatives and acquaintances, living in a world of froth, with no real emotion beneath brittle, articulate facades as they drift to an abrupt, contrived and somewhat unsatisfactory ending.. The most extreme example of this is the male heir to Lord Montdore’s Hampton property, the Canadian Cedric, who hales from Nova Scotia –clearly Nancy Mitford’s idea of the back of beyond, who turns out to be a highly manipulative, flamboyant gay, apparently modelled on the famously decadent socialite Stephen Tennant, one of the “Bright Young Things” along with the Mitford sisters.

Obliged to finish this for a book group, I was resentful over the time diverted from a more worthwhile read. In yet another case of truth being better than fiction, I would have preferred an intriguing biography of the Mitfords and their circle.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars


Love in a Cold Climate (Penguin Modern Classics)

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 : Victims of a “Control + Alt+ Delete” policy”

This is my review of Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black.

This is a timely explanation of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the centenary year of the infamous glib Balfour Declaration in which the foreign secretary of what was then a major imperial power casually and irresponsibly promised the clearly irreconcilable goals of both establishing Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people and protecting from adverse resultant effects the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine and Jews living in any other country.

With chapters defined by time periods from the arrival of the first Jewish settlers fleeing Russian pogroms in 1882, Ian Black presents the facts systematically up to the impasse with continual outbursts of violence in 2017, with “much of the world” favouring an independent state for the Palestinian people “alongside a secure and recognised Israel”, the conundrum being that this can only be accepted widely within the 1967 borders all but erased by decades of “illegal” Israeli settlements.

Perhaps because journalist author Ian Black is now a university senior fellow, he has felt the need for an academic approach, presenting minute detail backed by sources. The book is therefore very informative and often gripping because the facts are so telling, but it is heavy going at times by reason of the plethora of Arab and Israeli names, organisations, and italicised terms. All this gives a strong sense of authenticity and objectivity, but I could have done with glossaries of the above, plus a time-line of key events for quick reference and a few more maps embedded at various points to clarify various incidents – particularly since the index is of limited use in “checking back” on points .

Black leaves it to the reader to form her or his own judgements. In the welter of detail, certain themes recur: the weakening effects of poor leadership, corruption and divisions within Palestinian resistance; Arafat’s Fatah versus the more militant Hamas, with the West Bank Palestinian Authority at times co-operating with the Israeli defence forces to track down Hamas terrorists, their fanaticism often fuelled from an upbringing in the grim Gaza Strip. Similarly, a lack of cohesion between neighbouring Arab countries has prevented an effective response to the iron determination of the Israelis to obtain their ends with ruthless risk-taking in hunting down proactive opponents. The vicious cycle of Israeli intrusive security checks and time-wasting controls on movement in the occupied territories and inexorable defiant construction of new settlements is the inevitable response to the acts of violence by a democratically-supported Hamas and Hizbullah.

It is unclear that the conflict could have been averted completely, but the so-called Great Powers were slow to grasp the problem, with France and Britain more concerned over carving up the Middle East, and a general lack of understanding and respect for Arab culture. Sympathy with the Jews or a sense of guilt over the Holocaust made it hard for influential powers to take a firm line with the Israelis assuming they wished to do so. Even Obama, who was probably the US President keenest to obtain more justice for the Palestinians, was unsuccessful in making progress, and in view of the outcome of recent intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq one has to ask whether military action to enforce a fair settlement would have made matters even worse.

Even an already well-informed reader will find something new of interest. I was shocked by the “Olympian disdain” or arrogance with which Balfour told Curzon that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad,…. is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”. Although I was surprised by how little Black writes about the great wall of separation – up to thirty feet of concrete in height and often constructed to fit round new illegal settlements, I had not realised that many of the latter are accessed by new roads and tunnels for use by Israelis only, reinforced the growing situation of an apartheid between western-style modern settlements in West Bank territory, highly subsidised to increase their attractiveness, and the squalid and deprived Arab communities which few Israelis get to experience firsthand. The Gaza Strip is described as an “open-air prison” where ironically some welcome the recent Israeli siege as a “blessing in disguise” which has boosted a billion dollar annual trade ranging from looted rocket launchers to wedding dresses passing through tunnels from Eqypt – a “blockade-busting” lifeline which sustains the rule by Hamas.

I was struck by the argument that it may now be too late to achieve a two state solution, since Netanyahu’s laws, edicts and funding of new settlements, often cunningly clustered to fragment Palestinian territory or occupy the more fertile land needed for economic viability, have increased the reality of “one state for two peoples, first and second class”. Yet a single state presents many practical problems: not only would Israel lose its distinctiveness and raison d’être as the Jewish nation state, but high birthrates could lead to a clear Arab majority within two decades, with the risk of “endless civil war” over say, the distribution of land or the “right to return” for those on both sides. So, at the end of a fascinating read one is left with a sense of anger over injustice, and despair over future prospects.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars


Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

Lonely Planet New Zealand’s South Island Road Trips (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet,Brett Atkinson,Sarah Bennett,Peter Dragicevich,Lee Slater -Skimpy and limited use as a sole guide

This is my review of Lonely Planet New Zealand’s South Island Road Trips (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet,Brett Atkinson,Sarah Bennett,Peter Dragicevich,Lee Slater.

Designed to whet the appetite with plentiful photos in colour and clear maps to provide some easily-grasped “on a plate” itineraries for those who for whatever reason want a trip planned for them, this contrasts with the “usual formula” for “Lonely Planet” guides: tremendously detailed, largely black-and-white with few illustrations, for serious-minded independent travellers who probably already have a plan of where they want to go.

The breezy style is mildly irritating: Queenstown is introduced as “a small town with a big attitude” which “goes for gold with an utterly sublime setting” on Lake Wakatipu, “ripe for rubbernecking, so keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel”. There are some useful street maps (once you get there!) of, for instance Te Anau or Central Nelson, snippets of good advice e.g. on leaving Te Anau by 8.00 to avoid heavy coach traffic to Milford Sound.. Yet the structure seems quite repetitive and therefore wasteful of space: introducing the four road trips, featuring main South Island highlights (Milford Sound, Kaikoura for whale-watching and Queenstown, then main cities, Queenstown again and Christchurch), then outlining each trip, finally covering each one in more detail but still quite skimpy as regards suggested activities and places to stay.

I question the rationale for the choice of road trips:

1. Sunshine Coast 4-7 day circular drive in vicinity of Picton, Nelson and Abel Tasman National Park on north coast

2. Kaikoura Coast 3-4 days linear route between Picton and Christchurch

3. Southern Alps Circuit 12-14 days circular drive from Christchurch via Arthur’s Pass, Fox Glacier, Queenstown with detour to Mount Cook

4. Milford Sound Majesty 3 – 4 days linear return trip from Christchurch via Te Anau to Milford Sound for boat trip

I do not recall reading this in the book, but starting from Christchurch, these four trips could be combined into a grand 4 week tour of the South Island.

I don’t understand why a few more features were not flagged up with a fuller index, and the inclusion of more itineraries e.g. to cover Dunedin and the Catlins Conservation Area in the south, or the Punakaiki Pancake Rocks on the west coast.

The guide in general seems over-simplified, fragmented and less informative than it could have been in the space provided.

⭐⭐ 2 Stars


Lonely Planet New Zealand’s South Island Road Trips (Travel Guide)

Go, Went, Gone – When “the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure”

This is my review of Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck.

In the original German of “Gehen, ging, gegangen” the title conveys more effectively the pathos and irony of rootless migrants having to learn the niceties of German grammar in a society putting them under pressure to move on, preferably to a place where ironically their German will not be required.

Living alone since his wife’s death, clinging to routine but at a loss in the recent retirement from his long-held post as a professor in Berlin, introspective Richard becomes aware of the growing number of African migrants squatting in the city. When some are evicted from a square, he obtains permission to interview them, reading several books on refugees to help him devise the questions.. What seems at first like an academic’s automatic response of viewing them as a topic for study, soon grows into a sense of empathy with the refugees, which it seems to be the author’s prime aim to arouse in readers as well.

As Richard’s life becomes more enmeshed with those of the migrants, he realises that actions which cost him little can transform lives. In return, puzzled by his decision never to have children, some refugees reciprocate by including him in the strong sense of friendship and community which is all they have. Richard rails against the rigid bureaucracy: the crazy world in which the refugees are not permitted to work, even in areas of skilled work where there is a labour shortage, and therefore doomed to become a burden to society, the motivation which led them to escape their past life sinking into apathy or boiling into rage.

Jenny Erpenbeck is keen to show the arbitrary nature of the boundaries which divide us. For a boy who has grown up in the Sahara, the borders drawn by Europeans are “perfectly straight lines” with no relevance. During his family’s wartime flight from Silesia to resettle in Germany, Richard himself was only saved from being permanently separated from his mother by the kindness of a vigilant Russian soldier. “What would have become of the infant if the train had pulled out of the station two minutes earlier?” He then lived for decades on the communist side of the Berlin Wall, so that post-unification, he still gets lost on trips to the still unfamiliar west side.

In a key passage, which also highlights the translator’s skills, Richard muses how to him and his friends, “the sense that all existing order is vulnerable to reversal..has always seemed perfectly natural, maybe because of their postwar childhoods, or else it was witnessing the fragility of the Socialist system under which they’d live most of their lives and that collapsed within a matter of weeks”. Have “long years of peacetime” made politicians believe that we have reached an “end of history” status quo which has to be protected from change by violence? Has growing up in “untroubled circumstances” distanced ordinary people so far from the suffering of those in war-torn lands that they are afflicted with a sort of “emotional anemia”? Must living in peace – so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world – inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?”

The author has drawn on the experiences of real-life refugees, although one cannot know to what extent she has altered them. In what often seems quite a disjointed approach, it is hard to keep the refugees in mind as distinct characters and engage with them. The text also gets bogged down at times in over-detailed explanations of the various, probably no longer applicable, regulations imposed. I wondered at times if the book would have been more effective if written as a straightforward account and analysis of actual events. As it is, the novel gives scope for artistic licence, creating the stream of consciousness in Richard’s head, leavening the grimness with wry humour and occasional diversions into magic realism. At times, Richard recedes as a character, but the book clearly begins and ends with him, understanding and developing himself more as an individual through his encounters with the refugees.

This is an original book full of insights, which repays a second reading to absorb all the ideas. However, although in many ways profound, it is also quite subjective, conveniently ignoring “other sides of the question”, such as the long-term implications of very high levels of unrestrained migration, and the need to grasp the nettle of managing it in some way.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars


Go, Went, Gone

Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee – “The man who looked like the sort of man who would vote for Attlee”

This is my review of Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee: Winner of the Orwell Prize by John Bew.

This prize-winning biography achieves the challenging task of marshalling a mountain of research into an absorbing analytical account of the man who presided over the first majority Labour government in the UK. Criticised, like the Blair period, for failing to seize the opportunity for radical change, Attlee’s pragmatic approach in fact changed a good deal: introduction of the NHS together with national insurance and welfare systems, the more controversial nationalisation of essential industries, and overseas, the dismantling of the British Empire to be replaced by a Commonwealth, with India one of the first to gain an independence, sadly marred by bloodshed.

Clement Attlee was a man of contrasts. Public-school and Oxford educated, he traded a career in law for charity work with deprived boys in London’s East End, which led him to join the nascent Labour Party as a means of creating a fairer society. Mocked as an “invisible man”, likened to a rabbit or one of the “three blind mice”, even called “the Arch-Mediocrity” by the sharp-tongued Bevan, Attlee proved a courageous officer in the First World War, and quietly tenacious, chipped away patiently at problems in civilian life, prompting Churchill to describe him as a “lion-hearted limpet”. Although often painfully shy when thrust into the limelight, lacking in ego and refusing to promote himself so that a retirement speech and media interview on his life would be remembered mainly for their brevity, he was in fact at ease with himself, and so able to establish a rapport with both a mineworker’s union leader and King George VI. Ironically, the man who hated pomposity ended up accepting a hereditary earldom. Although it was feared he would be a liability in general elections, with his reedy voice and mechanical delivery of speeches, his authenticity proved popular with the general public, who liked his values, but not his continual reminders of the need to be “good citizens” and restrict consumption so that Britain could meet its obligations. Having been brought up to revere the British Empire, he was one of the first to call for the granting of Independence to India, and was keen to accept “Red China” as a legitimate power before America was prepared to do so. Despite his vision of achieving a lasting peace through an effective United Nations, with an end to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, in the end he resorted to their development in order to protect the country against the threat of Communism. Very questionably, this was done covertly, to avert a violent outcry from the Labour left wing.

The history of the Labour movement which forms the background to this fascinating biography reminds us of how many of its current dilemmas are far from new. It is impossible to avoid making parallels with today as one reads about Attlee under attack from the left wing intellectuals in his party for his failure to attack the establishment, or criticised more widely for accepting huge loans from the US because of the crippling strings attached, or feeling obliged to enter into a costly war the country could not afford because of the need to show solidarity with the US over Korea. Likewise, there was his refusal to cooperate with west European states over the Schumann Plan to share coal and steel (forerunner of the EU) because he judged it incompatible with freedom to plan the UK economy. Another example was his inability to protect the Palestinians, as promised in the Balfour Agreement, because of a powerful US support for Jewish migration to the homeland of Israel.

With the current all-pervading media hype and obsession with celebrity, it would seem even less likely than before for such a man as Attlee to gain and retain power for so long. He may have been a Victorian at heart, puzzled by his grandchildren’s addiction to television, yet his unassuming dedication, based on a thoughtful vision of the world developed through years of observation, reading and reflection, still evokes admiration after half a century, and a regret that we do not have more politicians with his mix of altruistic vision, determination yet moderation.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars


Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee: Winner of the Orwell Prize

“The Red Collar” by Jean-Christophe Rufin – When dogs are faithful and men are proud

This is my review of The Red Collar by Jean-Christophe Rufin.

In the small French town of Berry where life is returning to normal after the First World War, Jacques Morlac is the only prisoner left in the barracks, while his faithful dog Guillaume, somewhat battered after his own spell in the trenches, barks mournfully for his master for hours on end. Lantier, the bourgeois young judge appointed to investigate the case and decide Morlac’s fate is fascinated by the stubborn working class man who has a foot in both camps, having been decorated for bravery only to commit an “outrage” against his nation, although we have to wait until the final pages to discover exactly what Morlac has done. Apart from the suspense this generates, the interest lies in the surrounding questions. What motivated Morlac to act as he did? Why does he seems so bent on being punished, rejecting the extenuating circumstances Lantier suggests? Why is he avoiding his former lover when he clearly wishes to see the son she has borne him? And why does he appear to hate his faithful dog?

This is one of those carefully constructed tales which depend totally on how the information is dripped out to keep us hooked. Rufin, who seems more in his element with short stories and in this case what is almost a novella, is very skilful in the deceptive ease with which he spins out and reveals a simple plot which could be summarised in a few words, itself inspired by a colleague’s anecdote about his grandfather.

Although the English translation has been praised, this is particularly worth reading in the original French if possible for the clear, economical prose which captures a sense of rural France, with locals spearing trout or hurrying to harvest the wheat as autumn storms threaten. This is also a subtle exploration of human – and canine – psychology: issues of loyalty, duty, wounded pride, jealousy, questioning of the accepted system and traditional class divides. Cynicism lurks beneath the lip service paid to patriotism even in a conformist like Lanvier, set off to fight as a “youthful idealist”, only to end with the private subversive thought that the suffering of the soldiers seems more worthy of respect than the ideals of those who inflicted it upon them. “No one could have lived through ths war and still believe that the individual has any value”. Yet when it came to condemning people, justify required that they be presented to him as individuals.”

Even if one is not a dog lover, it is hard not to be moved by the rapport Lanvier in fact everyone apart from Morlac seems to develop with the dog. Although the description of his wounds make Guillaume sound almost repulsive, his eyes are remarkably expressive, not merely conveying his own emotion but seeming to empathise with others.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars


The Red Collar