The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond

I reviewed Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" last year and it is fair to say it made a significant impression on me. Readable but serious, refusing to duck some really challenging issues, I still find myself referring to some of the ideas and stories set out in this book. Guns Germs and Steel tried to answer the question why Western European countries were able to colonize large areas of the globe in the second millennium AD, and why other advanced civilisations were almost powerless to resist in the face of Western weaponry, bacteria, and technology. While I found many of the arguments in GG&S compelling, there were some sections that asked more questions than they answered. That's a good thing of course; anything that gets me reading more is to be welcomed. No academic book with such a broad and controversial range of subjects can hope to tie down every issue. So the end of the Easter Island civilisation, the Viking settlements in Greenland, and the future of Australia were all subjects which I read further on and on which I retain an open mind.

Diamond's overall thesis however was one which I found compelling, with one caveat. He argues Western dominance arose from our Guns Germs and Steel, but the development of these stemmed from an early move to city states, which in turn was caused by early advances in agriculture and domestication of livestock. He traces this to the fertile crescent in the middle east, a region that is now largely arid, and certainly not the home of super-powers. Is it simply that early civilisation arose here and spread to Europe where it took root and developed the ability to spread across the globe?

The World Until Yesterday is a natural sequel to GGS and opens with the observation that traditional hunter gatherer societies, where we lived in bands of at most a few thousand people, was an almost universal experience until relatively recently - in some case in the last few decades. He uses some striking images to make his point - for example in the introduction he surveys Port Moresby airport, and is struck by how much the Papuan New Guinean people have changed since first contact with westerners less than 100 years ago.

Diamond knows he is going to be taken on by many critical fellow academics, and in traditional style get his retaliation in first. He explains the terms he uses with care, and makes clear that generalisations can always be unpicked with individual exceptions, but still have value. He uses a measured, academic tone, writing more like a professor for a journal than a popular science writer writing for the mass market. This is not an academic paper of course ,footnotes aren't used, not every source is identified, and there is more personal anecdote than you would usually find, but it is written to appear as such. Certainly it is carefully researched and referenced compared to many other popular science books.

This is necessary - Diamond makes claims about traditional cultures and their practices which could easily been seen as being made from a colonialist, first world perspective that fails to understand the cultural differences between the West and the traditional societies he writes about. Survival International, a group campaigning on behalf of tribal peoples http://www.survivalinternational.org/ launched a strong attack on this book when it was first published in hardback, claiming that Diamond patronises tribal peoples by saying they represent life as it was once lived by westerners, ignores the impact of the west on these peoples, and manipulating statistics to show they are more violent than the West. The full case for the prosecution can be found here http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/30/savaging-primitives-why-jared-diamond-s-the-world-until-yesterday-is-completely-wrong.html

However aware Diamond is of the risk of sensationalism, he cannot avoid it completely. An example of this that jumped out at me was his description of the gruesome practice of widow strangling. Here's what he says, writing about the Kaulong people, a tribe of New Britain, just east of New Guinea.

"When a man died, his widow called upon her brothers to strangle her. She was not murderously strangled against her will, nor was she pressurised into this form of ritualised suicide by other members of her society. Instead she had grown up observing it as the custom, followed the custom when she became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or else her son if she had no brothers) to fulfil their solemn obligation to strangle her despite their natural reluctance to do so, and sat cooperatively as they did strangle her" (Page 21 of the paperback Penguin edition).

As soon as I read this I was instinctively sceptical. What is the evidence that tribal peoples killed their sisters or mothers in this fashion, and that the widows passively accepted their fate? Obviously there are parallels with the well documented Indian sub-continental practice of suttee which stubbornly persists in one form or another to this day. But however disturbing suttee may be, widow strangling with the passive participation of the widow is hard to swallow (sorry). Was this an extreme case of men enforcing their control over women, treating them as inanimate property to be disposed of on the man's death? In this interpretation the acceptance of their fate by the women is less a case of indoctrination than a choice between the lesser of two evils - accept their fate or face a worse one, with the shame brought on your family to make things worse. Widow strangling would have been a strong disincentive to women murdering their husbands, and a way of maintaining population control in an environment where infanticide was also practiced to the same end. But did it happen? Was it an established cultural practice (the internet gives examples from other cultures including Fiji) or simply some isolated murders inflated into a cultural practice for the benefit of nosy missionaries and explorers? Something like this would be extraordinarily difficult to prove other than by weight of personal testimony, or possibly independent witness. But I can't resist the impression that Diamond introduces this topic for more salacious reasons - look at these weird people, aren't they brutal and unfeeling compared to us? Don't they need our civilising influence? Strangely the reaction to Diamond's book online has not focussed on this topic - his commentary on modern against tribal warfare has attracted much more comment for example.

I am still less than halfway through TWUY thus far, and I am sure I will have more to say. I don't usually write reviews before completing the book, strangely enough, but this is a bit of an experiment.

The Long War - Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

This is the inevitable sequel to the Long Earth, which I reviewed last year.

In case you have forgotten, in the first novel a multiverse of parallel earths - the Long Earth - is discovered, along with the ability for humans to travel quickly and simply along a sequential series of earths. Its not quite clear how people "step", nor why a process in Book 1 which is restricted to the movement of a small amount of material can now in Book 2 be accomplished at speed in great airships.

The novel charts a series of voyages across the Long Earth in search of various goals. And there's the first of many issues - the different journeys recorded here are not clearly linked. The narrative switches between them at frequent intervals but the process of drawing them together, both thematically and in terms of their eventual outcomes, is pretty tortuous. The novel also struggles to find a theme - is it the relationship between humans and the other sentient species it discovers? (Strangely man has never evolved other than on Datum (the original earth) even though the novel is insistent that each earth is very similar to its neighbour save for small deviations, which over time lead to more significant changes (e.g. sentient dogs).) Or is it a rerun of the colonisation of North America, where the settlers gradually asserted their independence from the tax levying home country? Other weighty themes, on mortality and the uniqueness of the self are introduced but not pursued with any determination. The Long War promised in the title, a war across the parallel universes between man and trolls or settlers and state fizzles out with a shot being fired, thereby acting as a neat metaphor for the novel itself.

When you think of a typical terry Pratchett novel what do you envisage? A well developed, in fact a probably very cleverly thought out, plot, inventiveness in language, ideas, characters and plot development, well written fun to read prose, and above all else, wit. Witty turns of phrase, characters, plots. Characters that having been developed over several novels have come to have a life of their own, be it Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, or Lord Veterinari, all the way through to the minor characters such as Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler. None of which can be found here. No humour, no wit, no inventiveness, just more and more "stepping" and minor variations on the world before.

Clearly there is very little Pratchett here, or at least I hope so, and his name has been leased to build sales. Cynical but understandable. What worries me most is how many more volumes of this endlessly recyclable stuff is stored away for future publications, eventually becoming "based on an idea by". The Tolkien estate is still generating apparently new content under the JRR brand decades after his death, so I can only assume the same will happen here. Which is a pity, a real pity.

The Daylight Gate (2) - An afterthought

"When shall we three meet again" - daylight of course, it's such a nice witchy time of day isn't it?

What am I talking about? Something that has really bugged me about this novel, apart from everything else I wrote about earlier, namely the title of the novel. It tells you nothing about the subject matter, which is mildly irritating, but nothing out of the ordinary. But why daylight? In the novel there are a couple of relatively brief references to the time of day when witches' occult power is at its highest, and there is no mistaking the fact that this is intended to be a reference to twilight, the point at which day turns to night, and the creatures and spirits of the night begin to emerge. The "gate" in question is a bridge to this other world. "The Twilight Gate" as a title would have made some kind of sense, if only in the context of the novel itself.

But of course the "twilight" word has been thoroughly over-used in recent years, and pretty much franchised out to the werewolf/vampire community. So the editors of this novel must have thought to themselves, "how do we get a slice of that market without directly misleading people into thinking this is a book about teenage vampires with some kind of gate device? I know, let's use a time of day that sounds a bit like twilight but in fact is nothing to do with it!"

Now I know that doesn't make sense - if the wanted to just steal some of the teen vampire market they would have just called the novel "The Twilight Gate" and been done with it. This way they have the worst of both worlds - no direct reference to twilight and all the references that come with it, and a title that makes no sense, because daylight is the least witchy, occult, generally creepy time of day imaginable.

The Daylight Gate - Jeanette Winterson



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I thought long and hard about whether to write this review. On the one hand I have written far too many negative reviews this year, and would much rather write about things I had enjoyed reading. On the other hand, this is supposed to be a record of what I have read, and there's really no wriggling out of that. Anyway, it is written now so you can judge whether I should have bothered. I feel equally conflicted about the novel itself - while I read it in little more than a sitting, there are aspects of the book that are pretty repellent.

First, some background. Published in 2012, this novel (sometimes described as a novella, although at over 200 pages that isn't really right) is an imaginative recreation of the events of the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. The more astute reader will have spotted the coincidence of dates. The Witch trials are probably the best known, mainly due to the record of the trial kept by one of the lawyers, of all the historic persecution of wise women, healers and the like which disfigures this period of history. Winterson mixes in the pursuit of catholics and Jesuits in 17th Century England a few years after the accession of James 1st and Gunpowder Plot. If this wasn't enough, we also get some references to the alchemists of the period, and almost inevitably Shakespeare has a walk on part.

Broadsheet reviewers really liked this book. The Telegraph reviewer called it a "poetically stylised and visceral read". The Independent thought it "beautifully written" (which it may well be, but….) and the Guardian reviewer liked it even more, describing it as having "the grisly freshness of a newly exhumed graveyard corpse." But they avoid some of the more obvious problems with the book. Where to begin? This is very familiar territory - the Pendle Witch trial has been documented in fiction and elsewhere many times. The novel is published by Hammer, the publishing arm of the film company which is known to people of my generation for its Horror B Movies. Hammer has no pretension to being anything other than sleazy, exploitative, salacious, horror. All the tired clichés of the genre are present, down to the Satanic rituals graced by the presence of a priapic "Dark Gentleman" . It almost writes itself, and any suspicion of originality or creativity are missing.

The problems pile up. The abuse of women accused of witchcraft deserves and has received serious feminist analysis. It disrespects the women involved to exploit their stories for titillation. The treatment of sex here is horrifying and hard to stomach, particularly the paedophilia, although the detailed portrayal of 17th century torture techniques is almost as bad. The unlikeliness of this is being written by the author of the wonderful "Oranges are not the only fruit" really confounds me - its like J K Rowling writing for Mills and Boon.

Winterson can't make up her mind - is this a portrayal of innocent women being tortured and killed as a form of social control, keeping people (obviously, particularly women) in their place? That would be the obvious narrative direction, but throughout the novel witchcraft and sorcery is portrayed as "real" and its invocation forms a central part of the narrative. This is not just a case of deluded old women believing their own confessions, but the reader being invited to accept the reality of magic in many different guises. The Telegraph reviewer mentioned earlier struggles with this, saying: "There is a slightly hallucinatory quality to their efforts to make an exhumed severed head talk that evokes both the macabre and a curious sense of horrified pity. Can their doll-stabbing curses really work? There is a suggestion that they can. But because these women are actually just a means for the authorities to try to get to grander targets – Catholic recusants – their filthy graveyard rites have the pathos of ultimate impotence". Not really - there is much more than a suggestion that their magic works, and the pain of the Magistrate being targeted by the witches only ends when the figurine they are using is taken from them. They are far from impotent in this novel, even though in reality they would of course have been powerless. (interestingly one of the accused Pendle witches was actually acquitted).

That's more than enough of the negative. Can I find anything positive to say? Some of the characters are briefly believable, and the quality of the writing is what you would expect of an author of Winterson's calibre. One simple example - hares stand in fields like question marks - which is exactly right. At points the novel looks as if it is going to break out of the constraints of the known story and have something interesting to say about the persecution of the central character, Alice Nutter, but in the end all the bizarre accusations about here prove to be accurate. I can't avoid the conclusion that there is a genuinely interesting story here which would respect the memory of those who died. But this isn't it.

The Death of Grass - John Christopher

 I am puzzled why I have never heard of this shocking 1950's novel before. The threat of nuclear oblivion inevitably had a strong impact on writers in this country, producing a whole crop (ironically, in this context) of post-Apocalyptic novels. Obvious examples are "The Day of the Triffids" and "Lord of the Flies", the two novels most commonly referenced in commentary on "The Death of Grass". Although it had previously been out of print for some time before being brought back by Penguin for this edition, it does not suffer from these comparisons. I can however understand why it is not a school text book (as with Lord of the Flies) - there are some shocking, brutal scenes of murder and rape, described dispassionately. 

The re-issue of this novel is timely, because the crisis that precipitates the flight across the country of the band of middle class survivors is not nuclear nor alien, but ecological. A virus arises in Asia that wipes out all forms of grass and remains resistant to any form of treatment. The famines that follow rapidly lead to a breakdown in social order. While grasses may not form the central part of our diet that the novel suggests, this is really not relevant - our food supply chains are stretched, vulnerable and fragile. Equally we may not resort to the lawlessness that engulfs the characters in this novel quite as quickly as appears here - but we might. It is on this issue that the comparisons with Golding are most interesting, because Golding's cast of characters - schoolboys, albeit mostly middle class, privately educated ones, - has led many to argue that the primitive instincts they give free rein to are only found in little boys, rather than all people. Christopher leaves us here with no such comforting evasions - even the best of us can quickly resort to murder and brutality to defend our families. The veneer of civilisation is frighteningly thin. The men in this novel go from comfortable middle class lives to people who murder innocent families for some breakfast, with hardly a pause for reflection. These are not isolated monsters - around them society fragments with frightening pace, and even the Government contemplates/resorts to (it is not completely clear which) using nuclear weapons on their own people.

The economy of Christopher's writing is striking, and the pace of the action is a strength of the novel - no time for pauses for breath are allowed. Despite my slow reading in recent months I read this in a sitting. There are some caveats of course - the brutality of the treatment of women in the novel is hard to stomach, even thought they are not all the 1950's stock characters you might expect, with some of them showing resilience and strength in the face of appallingly difficult circumstances. The digressions on leadership and its role in feudal societies are a little over done, although again at less than 200 pages there is not much time to find this irritating. This is definitely a period novel - post war behaviours, language and attitudes anchor the events of the novel in the 1950s. Class is still a powerful factor in the way people defer to their betters, the war is a very recent memory, and people are self reliant and practical in ways we would struggle with today. But the novel transcends this datedness.

We like to scare ourselves with stories of "What if...?", and cling to the comforting thought that we would face whatever is thrown at us with a stiff upper lip. That's the mythology that we used and fostered to help us survive the Blitz and the threat of German invasion in the 1940s. Christopher refuses to offer any comforting conclusion to his disaster novel - the ravaging disease isn't contained, the army doesn't arrive at the death to reimpose order. All we have left is family and, if we lucky, a gun.

Competitive Reading Lists

Every now and again lists circulate purporting to show the 50 best this or the 101 best that, inviting the reader to assess their worth by deciding how many of the books shown they have read.

I say "deciding" how many they have read, because this is rarely a binary decision. Have you read "A Christmas Carol"? You almost certainly know the tale from numerous film adaptations, but have you actually read the book? What if you have read some of the book but weren't able to finish? (An example in this category for me is Don Quixote - many years ago I made a genuine and sustained effort to read this, but failed miserably). The Bible, The Canterbury tales, and Moby Dick are other examples of "books" that often appear on these lists, but for most readers the prospect of genuinely reading them from start to finish is remote.

But these are just quibbles, because there are no rules in this game, and if the "reader" decides that owning the book, having seen the film, or read a summary on Wikipedia is sufficient to merit a "read it" tick, then no-one is really to know. My real concern is that these lists are designed to make you feel bad about your reading habits. No-one with a family and job will have ever read all of the meritorious heavyweight volumes of "A Remembrance of Things Past", "The Barchester Chronicles", or "A Dance to the Music of Time" ("God, no!", "partially", and surprisingly, "yes, but a long time ago", would be my answers). But should I really feel bad about all those Russian classics glowering at me from my bookshelves while I indulge in yet another Pratchett?

From previous entries in this blog it will be clear that I have made a concerted effort to fill some obvious gaps in my reading record - Frankenstein, Dracula, The Great Gatsby, etc - but despite this I still find myself admitting "not read" as I run through each list more often than I would have expected. The other trick played in this game is to include less popular works by popular authors - for example by listing "The Quiet American" instead of "Brighton Rock", or "Men Without Women" (which is a collection of short stories) instead of "For Whom the Bell Tolls".  

I know I am taking this way too seriously, but there is a point underneath all this - if people read these lists on FaceBook or wherever and think "I must be really dim because I haven't read any of these" they will be put off even trying them, rather than filling in the gaps. So let's start writing "These are really fantastic books that you should read if you like romance/thrillers/historical novels/etc" lists, which would be a much more constructive approach to list making wouldn't it?

The Jefferson Key - Steve Berry

I have had a really bad run in recent weeks - some sub-par McEwan and the execrable Amis - so what led me to pick this one up I am not quite sure. Certainly the cover told me pretty much all I needed to know - US flag on fire, presidential seal, White House with lone figure in background - this is going to be a derivative thriller. Interestingly the cover art for the US version had a much more prominent picture of the White House - I am guessing that American reader won't need the Jefferson link spelling out so clearly.

No surprises there then. This book is a lazy cash-in on Dan Brown's success with "The Da Vinci Code". Many of the components are copied without any attempt at disguise, from the supposedly impenetrable code (tick) to the reinterpretation of historical events (tick) and the secret society hiding in our midst, controlling historical events (tick). The narrative style - many very short scenes cutting from one location to another quickly - and the attempt to compress the events of the novel into as short a time period as possible, (forgetting people's need to nap, eat, etc,) to give a sense of pace and speed is also copied directly from Brown. And then there is the simple fact of the novel's name itself, following the formula "The (Name of figure from history) + (synonym for mystery). Expect the Michelangelo Conundrum, the Caravaggio Puzzle and the Newton Sudoku to follow.

For what it matters, the plot revolves around an American pirating community which had its origins in the American War of Independence, when privateers were encouraged to attach English shipping. These pirates were allegedly given Presidential authority - letters of marque - to operate with impunity as long as the work against enemis of the state. Successive Presidential attempts to rein them in had been countered with assassinations. This novel focusses on attempts by a President Daniels to curb the powers of the "Commonwealth" and the pirates attempts to fight back. The cast of leading characters includes Cotton Malone, who has appeared in six previous and I guess highly similar novels (from their titles) although the characters are not distinguished from one another in any marked way.

While the plot is a huge predictable disappointment, the writing is equally dire. The author seems to have been paid by the word, because the plot is ground out to its far foreseen conclusion without a hint of suspense or interest. For example, some characters die in a building ruin which floods todally - this is flagged as likely early  on, returned to many times, and finally claims the expected victims, almost in passing. Techniques such as having a character shot, followed by a switch of focus to another scene, then returning to the shooting scene only for the character to have amazingly survived through a misfire, bullet proof vest, blank shot etc happens at least three times. As the novel is seventh in the series the reader is in doubt that the principal character will survive. The writing is as turgid and cliche ridden as one would expect, although some phrases still jump out with their awkwardness - for example a stairway is said to "rightangle". I have no problem with using nouns as verbs, but this one is a step to far for me.

Novels of this kind - written for the "if you like this writer why not try this writer" Amazon recommendation algorithm - really shouldn't apear here - but I did promise to try not to censor myself, and to review my reading good bad or otherwise. Gosh I have even written about books I have read and not written about! So I return to the question I began with - what possessed me to read this? In part it was because this was a gift, and I didn't want to show disrespect to the giver. Also, I was hoping that this might be one of those "so bad it is good" novels, or even something that was unoriginal but had its merits notwithstanding the genre. Sadly, not - trust the cover.

P.S. One other quibble. One character uses the phrase "a sticky wicket" which as far as I know is not American vernacular. This is a clumsy attempt to give "colour" to a character with a Spanish background - and the text refers to her father funding several Spanish national cricket teams. Now they do play cricket in Spain, Google tells me, but it's not the traditional home of the sport. Another example of clumsiness which really jarred.