Flood of Fire

by Amitav Ghosh, 2015 (November 2019) 

Flood of Fire completes Amitav Ghosh’s colourful trilogy of the linked histories of China, India and the colonizing forces, particularly Britain. I enjoyed it more than the last book, which got bogged down in ideological argument, but perhaps not quite as much as the first, which revealed a detailed story of people and places in the opium trade. This novel takes us into the early phases of the British invasion of China now known as the Opium Wars.
  Looking at the history from a South Asian perspective, Ghosh brings in the Indian traders who hoped to profit from the opium sales and Indian soldiers who had to fight the wars, as well as an educated noble class that found itself disposessed from its former privilege in India. The character of the mystic gomusta, Baboo Nob Kissin, adds a slightly comic viewpoint as he helps bring all the forces together for what he hopes will be a destructive cataclysm that will launch a new spiritual world. The British, the Chinese and the Americans all have characters representing their viewpoints, but the main focus is the characters from the Indian subcontinent.
  I found the clash of these varying national and personal interests brought a lot of interest to events that I knew of only as a  historical note. Ghosh describes home life, ship life and warfare in concrete detail that gives a real sense of what’s involved and what’s at stake for the characters that he chooses for his story. (Except for a few soldiers, he chooses only relatively wealthy middle and upper class characters.) The Indian soldier Kesri, for example, lives the farce of military bureaucracy as well as 19th century cannon fire and hand-to-hand combat in conditions where food, water and ammunition had to be carried to soldiers by hand. The advantage of modern weapons over traditional ones is violently clear.
  Each character’s personal motivations also develops and plays into the broader historical forces. Zachery becomes a key character as he develops from a naïve and generous American sailor with mixed-heritage into a self-interested businessman who wants status and wealth. He finds his way to prove his merit by making vast profits in the drug trade. In this, he follows the model and the moral justification of the British. They regard him as a useful tool in facilitating their own acquisition, and his anger at the emotional and social costs he has to pay is key to his motivation. However, it is Zachery that Baboo Nob Kissin is thinking of when he envisions the destruction of the world through greed. Pointedly, Zachery sees the bombardnent of Canton as the high point of rational civilization, where technology and science come together to project modern comercial values on a recalcitrant country.
  There are some things in the novel that, for me, don’t entirely fit. The characters are all drawn to travel together on the Hind in their passage from ancient India to modern Hong Kong, but somehow they are all connected through the Ibis, the schooner that was at the centre of the first novel in the trilogy. The Ibis was carrying its characters to a range of new lives in Mauritius when it was hit by a storm. The ghost of a key Indian trader appears on the Ibis before another storm sinks the ship in Hong Kong harbour. This is all a bit mystical and I’m not sure what it adds to the story. Modern transport and communications are the instrument that links new and old and brings about their destruction? It is obviously a factor, but it’s not the only one or the most powerful one, and it doesn’t act in a mystical way.
  Nevertheless, the narrative is a gripping way of looking at the history of southeast Asia. It shows not only the economic and political forces at work, but also their impacts on individuals of many classes. The narrative and the characters are interesting and keep the story moving along through its considerable length.

A People’s History of England

by A. L. Morton, 1938 (October 2019)

This review of the history of England was unexpectedly rich and insightful. Morton in his epilogue says that the book is not so much history as an exercise in historical interpretation. It is complex and ambitious and for me was a facinating overview of the economic and political forces that created Britain up to modern times. In a little over 500 pages, this book provides a densely packed summary from the pre-Roman tribes to the early 20^th century.

  I was initially looking for an overview of British history from a common person’s point of view, like Colin James’ excellent Cambridge Illustrated History of France. Although Morton’t book touches on the lives of common people, it’s focus is more to create an understanding for readers who are common people so that they can understand the forces that shape their lives. It does not dwell on detail much but focuses on the broad social, political, economic and technological forces as they were understood by a left-leaning historian writing in the 1930s. Morton sees history as a continuous process  of change and class struggle, not as an abstract movement but as people struggling to gain class interests that are important in their everyday lives. When talking about the shift from agricultural and craft production to the early phases of the industrial revolution, for example, he shows how trading and transportation technology created markets for factory products, but also how working people resisted through organized rebellions over centuries as well as through their individual attempts to protect their livelihoods.

  Although well grounded in historical fact, Morton does not hold back his opinions and he can be quite witty in his descriptions, which makes the density of the text easier to work through.

  I suspect Morton’s interpretation is open to some dispute and updating, but he provides an understanding of why British society was shaped the way it was, such as why the Romans entered Britain (to prevent their suporting the Gauls) and eventually left; how feudalism worked in the middle ages, but gave way to centralized political structures; how Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army changed contemporary warfare and politics; and how privatization of the commons led to both the exploitation and the growth of the industrial working class. I can imagine this book being a text for a working class discussion group, easily providing enough points in each chapter to stimulate an evening’s education sessions for a year. In fact, this is not a quick read – it took me months to read it because there is so much in each chapter that I wanted to absorb each section before moving on to the next. There’s too much in each brief section to quickly read and move on. It’s well worth the time, though.

  As a Canadian, we learn some highlights of English history, such as the Magna Carta and the Reformation. We get little detail, however, and less understanding. (We don’t learn that the Magna Carta was ignored and largely irrelevant until it suited bourgeious ideology in the struggle against the Stuarts, when it was brought out of storage and revered.) Although this book doesn’t cover the last half of the last century, it does give a basis for an understanding that goes far beyond historical facts. It added a great deal to my recent vacation in Britain, notwithstanding that it ends in the period leading up to the cataclysm of the Second World War.

Sweet Tooth

by Ian McEwan, 2012 

This is a book with a flaw. It purports to be about propaganda and literature: both literature as a form of propaganda and propaganda in other forms. Our protagonist, Serena (!) is first educated about ruling class propaganda in The Times of London and elsewhere by her left-leaning tutor, who turns out to be a Russian agent. Characters spin their stories in their own way and have their favoured versions of the truth. Serena gradually learns to doubt the surface messages. She is brought into MI5, and becomes part of a low-level propaganda campaign, providing a disguised income to Tom, a promising novelist who writes about freedom and creativity. Part of Serena’s indoctrination is a review of the efforts of the Comintern and CIA propaganda branches to support their own literary favourites. In the end, the whole scheme comes apart, and as readers we have to re-evaluate the story of Serena.

  Serena is more than a bit naïve, a shallow but voluminous reader who slowly learns to appreciate more literary writing. She is taken with Tom’s creative stories, sometimes quite moved by them, although the summaries she recounts seem rather bizarre, more like academic writing exercises than actually convincing stories. Serena falls for Tom and they have an affair, although she worries about how to tell him that she is a fraud who has been undermining his professional credibility. When Serena’s ex-lover brings Tom a different story that undermines her credibility, Tom turns the tables on her and makes up his own story. In the end, we see how creative story-telling is more successful than bureaucratically inspired propaganda, even in the hands of a literary writer.

  All this is very post-modern, questioning the meaning of storytelling and point-of-view, which could be an interesting twist, although hardly a new idea.

  The flaw, which I felt before reaching the various plot turns, is that it’s just not that interesting. The characters are sketched with little detail or depth, and their crises are not engaging. The plot seems to have so little at stake that it’s not interesting. The occasional background details of the social unrest of Britain in the early 1970s actually sparked more interest for me than the central story line. So it undermines the message that creative fiction is better than government propaganda when the creative fiction that I’m reading feels flat and boring.

  On a side note, the story line seems to challenge the notion of artificial limitations on writers and that writers can’t appropriate someone else’s voice. McEwan writes in the voice of a woman as if to show that it can be done successfully. In fact, the voice of Serena seems convincing enough as a young woman in 1970s London, but the fact that the story she is describing isn’t very successful actually seems to support the notion that writing in the voice of another is inherently limiting and incomplete.

  My reaction to the book is totally subjective, and perhaps others would react more deeply to the intensity of the love affair and the inherent conflict and loss that threaten it. But in the end, it seems to me to be another thought experiment that doesn’t really work rather than a successful novel. (For a thought experiment that does work even though much wilder than this one, I both enjoyed and bought into Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union.)

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

by Michael Chabon, 2008 

What if the messiah comes, but he doesn’t want to stick around? This question underlies a completely engrossing, brilliantly told detective noir story set in an alternative reality Jewish homeland in Alaska. As a detective story, it’s well done, with a mystery that leads to numerous other crimes and conspiracies, all of which seem plausible in the context of a corrupted, criminal underworld at the edge of the world and the end of time.

  The situation is a murder in a Jewish homeland imposed on a piece of the world that no-one wants except the Tlingit people living there (a nice parallel for the State of Israel in Palestine). The setting, with its ever-present fog, rain, snow and cold, hemmed in by forests and water, has the same foreboding character that Raymond Chandler would call up if his Los Angeles were 1,500 miles farther north. Also like Chandler, Chabon uses a colourful, hard-boiled style to evoke a tough, cynical and bleak view of the world. His language brings in yiddish slang and similes that fit naturally in the world he has created. It doesn’t feel like a forced pastiche of Chandler to find out that a sholem is slang for a gun (or “peacemaker” in western American slang); or that a latke is a street cop (or “flatfoot”). An artful homage, I would say.

  Another departure from Chandler, or at least the Chandler novels I’ve read, is that the past of the protagonist Landsman is not hidden. It is revealed slowly, but Chabon does explain how he came to his bleak outlook and self-destructive life. And while the story centres on male protagonists, the women in the story are strong capable individuals who contribute to the plot and the characters. Ultimately, Landsman finds that salvation is not in the messiah, but in his relationship to the woman he loves.

  The messiah figure is an interesting one, too. He has a genuine gift for bringing contentment into people’s lives, but he can’t bring the same satisfaction into his own life. The contradictions with his ultra-orthodox sect make him miserable and he wants out. His mother wants to protect him, but he flees before she can help him, if that’s even possible in her world. A self-sacrificing messiah this is not, which makes an interesting reflection on the Christian messiah.

  From the start, though, I wondered what the title referred to, and about page 230, we find that the Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a fake: after losing his badge, Landsman uses a union card to pretend to be an active policeman. So I take it that the Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a cover for looking at something else. What Michael Chabon is really looking at seems to be a multi-layered view of Jewish-American and Israeli politics, society and personal relations.

  A key theme in the novel is the expiration of the lease on the Jewish homeland in Alaska, which the Americans won’t renew it, leaving the few million Jewish settlers either searching for a new homeland or in a suspended animation – the existential challenge of Israel and the renewed diaspora of unwelcome Jewish people.

  To resolve the challenge, a group of Zionists finds a messiah and concocts a scheme to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem and return to Israel. Their willingness to stop at nothing, including genocide, and with the probably ignorant support of wealthy American Jewish sponsors, leads to a scheme that would stir the imagination of anti-semitic conspiracy theorists. Chabon keeps the story from descending to such fantasies, mainly by making the imagined setting so much a part of the novel that the storyline cannot be separated from the city of Sitka and its seedy inhabitants. That and the fundamentalist Christian allies who back the plot.

  Chabon uses the noir genre conventions to explore literature and society in complex ways, as Chabon’s Cavalier and Clay used comic book conventions to explore twentieth century Jewish life. I like the chess theme, for example, which returns frequently to provide clues to the mystery story, is also a reflection on order and disorder in society, father-son relationships and the ultimate puzzle of life, what to do when you have no good moves. This is a literary novel that is entertaining and a great read.