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.

The Leopard

by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, 1958

The Leopard strings together a series of wonderful scenes and images while reflecting ironically on the shift in power from the old Sicilian aristocracy to the new bourgeoisie after the Italian risorgimento. It has a mood of quiet contemplation, even sadness, as massive social and political changes gently overturn the lives of its central characters. Don Fabrizio is the last Prince Salina, though he knows his time has come. He is a man of the old world, with its families, traditions, biases and connections. The new world, he knows, is a world where tradition means little, but crass new ways of making money are the future. He sees the follies of his class, and retreats to the science of astronomy to get away from them. Yet he is part of that class, and not of the new world.

  Being a man of vision and appetite, Fabrizio supports his favourite nephew, the charismatic Tancredi, in marrying Angelica, the beautiful daughter of the ambitious peasant who is rising in the new world. Although Fabrizio despises her father, he dotes on Angelica both for her physical beauty and for the manners she has learned at a finishing school in Naples. She and Tancredi will lead the Salina family into the new world while the older folks fade away. Fabrizio is smart enough to turn down a position in the new Senate and recommend Angelica’s father in his place.

  And the old rulers fade away into senility, decrepitude and death. The scenes of Fabrizio’s sisters fighting and trying to protect their collection of holy relics from the new rules of the church are tragi-comic. But the death of Fabrizio is slow and sad, as he falls ill on a long train ride returning from Naples back to his home in Sicily. Unable to make it home, his family stops to rest in a hotel, where he hears the birds on the beach and feels the sea breezes before losing consciousness.

  Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who comes from the same class as Fabrizio and wrote the novel as a sort of homage to his grandfather, describes the loss of the old ways, but he doesn’t romanticize them. He notes Fabrizio’s disgust when he has to meet with his smelly tenants, and Fabrizio locks his long-time hunting companion with the dogs when Fabrizio gives him information that he doesn’t want out too early. He rationalizes his visits to his mistress and brings along his priest for cover. His sensuality comes through in his admiration for Angelica, as well as in the food at his table. The dessert castle that his family eats away at, and the macaroni he serves to guests at his family estate are wonderful images. They fit into the satirical depiction of the elegant Sicilian aristocracy, which reminded me of the ironic dialogues and superficial characters of a Jane Austin novel.

  Irony runs through the whole novel. While understanding that the change of class is inevitable, Fabrizio sees the unification plebiscite as a farce. Everyone votes in favour because the alternative is worse, but no one supports it, and the votes are fraudulently counted, bringing the Italian nation into a fraudulent existence. The novelist describes two long, difficult trips in the stifling heat of southern Italy, representing perhaps the difficult transitions that Italy faces as it changes from the old ruling class to the new.

  And in spite of the change in the ruling class, nothing really changes – the agricultural aristocracy is replaced by middle-class landowners who continue to exploit the working peasantry. And while I felt a little sadness at the passing of an intelligent and memorable figure, it’s clear that his time has passed, and who can really live in an agricultural feudalism besides the princes? But perhaps the greater regret is that it has passed to a crass and materialistic new layer. The nouveau riche will bring Italy into the industrial age, so it’s not quite right to say that nothing has changed. But inequality and exploitation remain, whether under the elegance of the aristocracy or the cruder arts of the new ruling class.

Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman, 2007

What is André Aciman doing with Elio? Is he a naïve youth exploring different aspects of his feelings and personalities? Or is he a self-deluding narcicist who sees everything the the unreliable lenses of his shifting passions? I suppose he is both, which, for me, makes him a bit difficult to relate to. I want to shake him up and say, come on, you’re a smart kid, intellectual, talented, sensuous, feeling. Why are you wallowing in this overblown romanticism? Either jump the guy or move on, but don’t mope endlessly.

  And there’s the problem, I suppose. Elio is a romantic teenager, exploring his identity and trying to come to terms with his desires, both emotional and sexual. In his relationship with Marzia, he learns something about love and willingly sharing his psychic being with another person. In his relationship with Oliver, he goes farther, and wants to become Oliver when he says, Call me by your name. Communication is a repeated theme in the novel, with successful and unsuccessful communications that  range from the hinted and unspoken messages that Elio wants to read in a glance and that extend to to his desire for total intimacy and shared knowledge. But communication is the last thing that any of the characters find here when they are so often speaking at cross-purposes and avoiding what they want to say. And perhaps that’s the point.

  Aciman parallels Elio’s two relationships when he joins them in the gift of the book, Se l’amore, If love. But the relationship with Marzia is a brief and simple one that Elio quickly abandons. The relationship with Oliver is complex and layered, which Elio (and I) hoped would prove to be more lasting. (This is a little ironic, as the European sensibility is portrayed here as more sophisticated and complex, while the American Oliver is brash and straightforward.) Aciman also mocks the literature of love in the pretentions and artifice of the poetry reading in Rome, which Elio sees through but still enjoys.

  But of course, this is a summer love and even Elio knows that Oliver is leaving at the end of a few weeks. So he ends the summer heartbroken but wiser for having experienced a deep connection to Oliver. This is so familiar that it’s a cliché, even if it’s one that a reader can enjoy.

  But then, there’s the conversation with Elio’s father, in which his father hints that he gave up (repressed) his homosexuality and married, ending up in a distant relationship with his wife. He tells Elio not to make the same mistake, not that Elio seems likely to. Elio does, however, show some casual homophobia in his self-loathing after his first sexual experience with Oliver, when he compares it the next morning with his experience with Marzia. Since the story seems to be set in about the 1970s or ’80s, that’s probably common enough for some young men, particular given Elio’s ambivalence. This adds a sociological line to the story that seems out of tone with the exaggerated romanticism of the rest of the story.

  There’s another layer of complication here. The story is in the first person, in Elio’s voice, but apparently as a recollection of a distant past. A contemporary narrator occasionally makes an appearance reflecting on Elio’s story. And Elio himself re-connects briefly with the married Oliver later in life, and still finds a bond of unspoken communication. Is this story the naïve voice of Elio the younger or the mocking voice of Elio the mature exaggerating the naivety of his youth? In fact, there were several times, before the appearance of the narrator, where I wondered if this story was a satire of romantic self-absorbed youth. Perhaps this is how to take the story of the peach, so sensuous and yet so ridiculous.

  So is this an exploration of the formation of the identity of a young gay man in the 1980s, or is it a satirical reflection on the comical exaggerations of romantic love? I’ll be interested to read what other readers comment on the novel.

Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia

Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015

This review of the past century of indigenous art in Australia is completely fascinating. It may be limited by the fact that it is based on the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, but that doesn’t diminish the depth and range of the arts portrayed. These include iconic and colourful dot paintings, naïve sketches and abstract landscapes, photojournalism and photo arts, woven crafts and carved funerary poles. Pieces are represented in full colour, often astonishingly vivid, with two pages and occasionally four devoted to each of over 100 artists. A sparse commentary briefly describes the artist’s history and touches on elements of his or her style and relation to traditional practices.

  The greatest limitation on these reproductions is that they are contained in a page size of 7.75 x 9 inches, while many of the artworks are two or more metres tall. I remember vividly going into the Gallery in Sydney and standing in front of a series of a dozen similar paintings that were at least two metres tall. When the notes to a reproduction say that a piece is 185 x 465 cm, I have to imagine the impact of a piece on that scale. And many of them are very large in scale. I asked at the Sydney gallery shop if there were reproductions of the lobby paintings, and was told that there were not. I bought this book as a consolation, and it is a great one.

  The book does not try to explain too much, but leaves it to the art pieces to tell their story. The pieces are worth slow contemplative exploration. It is an excellent parallel read to David Day’s Claiming a Continent. Day’s book gives the history of the sometimes brutal Australian efforts to end the Aboriginal presence in Australia. This book shows the strength, diversity and depth of the Aboriginal culture, as well as the impact of colonial practices on them. Many of the paintings and artefacts are representations of homelands and their importance to various Aboriginal peoples. Sometimes they are places remembered or places in traditional stories, but often they are real places represented in an abstracted style, like the formal maps that we recognize in Euro-American cultures.

  In spite of the limited text, the stories of the artists’ lives frequently refer to their being displaced from traditional territories, their alienation in an unwelcome environment, their economic struggles to survive with their families, substance use issues, etc. Many of the artists reconnected with their communities and their stories through artists’ collectives, learning to express their connections to land, tradition and community through new media. Several artists are respected keepers of traditional knowledge and ceremony, and used their art to preserve and share their culture. Some also use it in an activist way to advance land claims and traditional rights, and to point criticisms at Australia’s colonial past and present. Interestingly, the book notes that it was often the commercial media for which markets developed that shaped the public expression of these arts, so what we see most reflects what sells as much as the forms that the artists chose to use.

  I learned also that many of the designs that appear abstract have very distinct and clear meanings to the artists and their communities. The dots and striped patterns, for example, may be taken from ceremonial patterns or body painting styles that have been practiced for many generations, and they refer to specific things, such as the patterns of grasses or bushes that grow in the desert. Some represent dream scapes and celestial stories. These patterns sometimes hold secret meanings that belong to one family and cannot be revealed outside of the initiated. They are reinterpreted by contemporary artists, sometimes simply through the use of new media and sometimes through the development of new treatments that break away from tradition. I can only imagine the work of applying paint in little dabs across such the large scale of many of these canvases.

  I spent several months going through the few hundred pages in this book, and hope to spend more time with the images. They also led me to several websites where gorgeous reproductions can be found. Happily, it’s been one of the more rewarding books I’ve read recently.