Book Review: The Meaning of Treason

The Meaning of Treason
Rebecca West
History, biography, literature

The Meaning of Treason is about the life and post-war trial of William Joyce, the British traitor (known as Lord Haw-Haw) who broadcast for the Nazis. I read it in my college years; I don't recall much of my reaction. Then Anthony Horowitz dropped a couple of references to it in The Word is Murder, and naturally I had to reread it.

It's an exceedingly odd book. It could have been written by nobody on earth but a member of the British upper classes from before 1960. Imagine a collaboration between Tom Wolfe (the one who wrote The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities) and Lord Peter Wimsey, and you'll have some idea of the style: fluently literate, vivid, intimate, closely observed, and sometimes inane to the point of bafflement. Rebecca West (that's Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE, to you) belonged to that persuasion of writers who suppose that, once you have looked upon a man's face and clothing, and perhaps heard him speak, you are entitled to pronounce with high confidence any judgement you would care to make about his character, psychology, literary tastes, dietary foibles, or what have you. If you in addition know his ancestry, the thing becomes an absolute certainty. 

So, for example, we are informed with perfect seriousness that a certain man "had a great head, bulging at the back like the head of a foetus, in a conformation often found in men of exceptional talent." Of a minor witness, West explains that

People of this type need to construct around themselves dramas in which they play the leading part, and doubtless she had made her life in a riverside suburb into a very moving and uplifting drama, using her personal relationships as a fiery but solemn argument for love and decency

As for William Joyce in person, "All though his life he had been anxious, with the special anxiety of the small man, not to make a fool of himself". Good to know!

What makes this book particularly interesting, then, is not exactly its content. West's biographical eloquence is more poetical than informative, for example, and her discussion of the legal issues at question is sophomoric; by her analysis, a person who obtains a British passport by fraud or forgery would be nonetheless entitled to claim its protection. No: The Meaning of Treason is fascinating as a historical document. Rebecca West was of, in, and writing for a social class that basically ceased to exist a few years later. Notice the chummy insularity: "a black-and-lime scarf of the heavy and subtly-coloured sort that used to be sold at the expensive shops at the Croisette at Cannes." Naturally! Observe the unthinking assumption that all humanity can be sorted into fixed categories, predictable in nature, and differing in quality as they approach or fall short of the British Gentry: "He was a not very fortunate example of the small, nippy, jig-dancing type of Irish peasant." Not just an Irish peasant, you understand, but a very particular subspecies of the breed--as if there were some kind of Irish Peasant Fancy, devoted to breeding and showing Irish Peasants, wherein one might amass a modest collection of "Best In Show" ribbons to impress one's friends.

It's off-putting to a modern reader, but it's fascinating as well. The intelligent, sensitive, ex-post-facto writing of the early 21st century can never inhabit the world of William Joyce, of Rebecca West, of the immediate post-war London in which wildflowers grew in the bombed-out buildings around St. Paul's Cathedral, where everyone and everything was tired and a little grubby and still trying to adjust to what had happened. Everything seemed like it was in short supply. Everyone was trying to make sense of it all: what had happened in the War, whose fault it had been, what it might have meant to be pro-Fascist beforehand, what the new world might look like. Considered as reporting, The Meaning of Treason is persiflage. Considered as an entry into that world, it's peerless.

Book Review: The Year of Lear

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606
James Shapiro
Literature, biography, history

A more recent book by the author of this excellent 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, and similarly thought-provoking. Shapiro combines conventional literary criticism with a deep knowledge of what was happening around Shakespeare when he was writing. The result is really illuminating: however "timeless" the Shakespeare plays may seem, in reality he was writing for a contemporary audience who would see reflections of contemporary events.

Some of the information seems obvious--in retrospect. In 1606, James I--newly-installed on the throne of England, but already king of Scotland--was trying to effect a union between his two kingdoms. Lear deals with the disastrous division of a kingdom; Macbeth deals with an ambitious Scottish king. It's inconceivable that people at the time wouldn't have noticed the parallels.

Other pieces are new, at least to me. I hadn't registered, for example, that Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon and its surrounds were heavily involved in the aftermath of the Guy Fawkes plot. As to how that may have worked its way onto the stage . . . read the book! We can never know what Shakespeare was thinking. But we can know what was on his mind, which is perhaps the next best thing.

Book Review: The Bohemians

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
Ben Tarnoff
Literature, biography

The Bohemians isn't a bad book, but it's not original or insightful enough to be a great book. It's another IYTTSMSIYPETB. The big problem is that it wouldn't exist without Mark Twain, and Mark Twain does not lack for previous literary coverage. Without Twain, the three remaining Bohemians would consist of Bret Harte--briefly famous, now obscure--and a couple of (from a literary viewpoint) nonentities. It was Mark Twain who reinvented American literature; the others were "and supporting cast".

Okay, maybe that's a little harsh towards Harte. At the outset he was far better-known than Twain. He was the first to crack the eastern literary establishment, and he was a friend and mentor to Twain when the latter first fetched up in San Francisco. He didn't launch Twain's career by himself, but he played a part. So, too, did the city of 1860s San Francisco itself--its roaring debauches, its raw frontier cosmopolitanism, its outrageous Western characters, its sprung-from-nowhere ambiance, its boosterism. The city is a character in The Bohemians, one that Tarnoff limns particularly well.

If Tarnoff had stuck to the relationship among Harte, Twain, and San Francisco, this would be a more focused and more interesting read. No doubt his other two protagonists--Ina Coolbrith and Charles Stoddard--have a moral right something more than obscurity, but obscurity is what they have, and The Bohemians gives us no reason to think it should be otherwise.

---

Justin Martin's Rebel Souls is about the first American Bohemians--the New York set centered around Walt Whitman. There, too, there's the problem that one member of the cast completely obscures the others. I thought it was more enlightening than Tarnoff's book, though, in part because the New York Bohemians made a somewhat lasting impact as a group.

Book Review: Churchill and Orwell

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
Thomas E. Ricks
Biography

Churchill and Orwell is an audacious attempt at an interleaved dual intellectual biography, showing the parallels and cross-connections not just of its two subjects' lives, but of their thoughts. It doesn't entirely succeed, but it's a worthwhile attempt.

Churchill and Orwell never met, though they had acquaintances in common. (Given the chummy closeness of the British politico-literate classes, it would have been surprising if they didn't.) Ricks, therefore, tries to highlight two things: the ways in which their personal story arcs reflected each other, and the ways in which their thinking--specifically, both men's hatred of cant and unyielding defense of freedom--ran in parallel. When he sticks to this program, he's doing something really interesting. 

He just doesn't stick to it strenuously enough. Both threads of Churchill and Orwell spend a bit too much time in basic biographical detail, the kind you could get anywhere. It's all interesting, but it's not all deep. Ricks quite rightly magnifies the episodes that he considers most formative--particularly Orwell's experience in the Spanish Civil War and (inevitably) Churchill's triumphal return from political exile from the late 1930s to 1941. But he doesn't entirely solve the problem of making that stuff his exclusive, concentrated focus.

Still, I'd rather read an ambitious book that doesn't quite pull it off than an unambitious success. At its worst, Churchill and Orwell is entirely readable. At its best, it's thought-provoking. If you any interest in the 20th century's intellectual response to the problem of totalitarianism, this is a good book for you. Sadly, the matter is still relevant.

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
Stephen Greenblatt
Religion, art, philosophy

This is a pretty good, readable account of the purposes to which people have put the Adam and Eve story. (As a person with no religious background whatsoever, I found some of it decidedly odd.) Greenblatt is at his best when he resists the temptation to theorize; happily, the bulk of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve takes the form of good, clear, interesting accounts of what other people have thought.

The account is perhaps a little uneven. There are big chunks devoted to St. Augustine and to John Milton, for example, but there's not much in between them. I didn't mind, particularly--a comprehensive survey would surely have been unreadable--but it's of a piece with Greenblatt's other books, which make it clear that in his mind everything between Rome and the Renaissance was a mistake. The book also digresses from Adam and Eve in spots, but the digressions are interesting, so I didn't mind that either. Pay attention and you may learn a little bit about paleoanthropology, a certain amount about art, a few snippets of poetry, and (in a surprisingly moving closing essay) something significant on chimpanzees.

This is, then, the kind of book that's ideally suited to the pondering classes. It's not a deep philosophical-theological dive. It's not an exhaustive history. You could call it a highlights reel, picking out some key ideas and interpretations of the Adam and Eve fable. No doubt readers who are more theologically sophisticated than I will find little new here, but I quite liked it.

---

There's a strong connection between The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve and Born Bad, which I read in 2015. Greenblatt's book is better, though.

Book Review: Time Travel

Time Travel: A History
James Gleick
Literature, science

As far as anyone can tell, there isn't any history of actual time travel. This book is, accordingly, a history of the idea of time travel. It's fairly light on physics, discursive, playfully written, and enjoyably meandering. What it lacks in mass, it makes up in range. There can't be all that many books out there, for example, that quote T. S. Eliot and Commander Spock within a few pages of one another. (Admittedly the comparison is a bit unfair; Eliot's cultural influence is comparatively minor.) There are some mind-bending asides, some witty aphorisms, some unexpected cultural crossovers. All in all, a fun read.

---

Much of Time Travel is about the fictions of time travel. In the process, the fictions themselves are described in some detail, which would rather spoil them for anyone who hadn't read them already. Read Asimov's The End of Eternity, Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and "--All You Zombies--", before you read Time Travel.

Book Review: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
James Shapiro
History, literature, biography

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare is a very good book with a great introduction. In fact, the intro is so good it's worth quoting at length. Like this;

The commonplace that dramatists are best understood in relation to their time would go unquestioned if the writer in question were Euripides, Ibsen, or Beckett. But only recently has the tide begun to turn against a view of Shakespeare as a poet who transcends his age, who write, as Samuel Coleridge put it, "exactly as if of another planet."

And this:

Those committed to discovering the adult Shakespeare's personality in his formative experiences end up hunting for hints in the plays that they then read back into what little can be surmised . . . But the plays are not two-way mirrors: while Shakespeare perfectly renders what it feels like to be in love, betrayed, or crushingly disappointed, it doesn't necessarily follow . . . that he "must have loved unhappily like Romeo, and like Hamlet not have known for a time what to get on with next."

And a disclaimer which all such writers should engrave on their hearts:

 And as grounded as my claims are in what scholars have uncovered, a good deal of what I make of that information remains speculative. When writing about an age that predates newspapers and photographic evidence, plausibility, not certitude, is as close as one can come to what happened. Rather than awkwardly littering the pages that follow with one hedge after another--"perhaps," "maybe," "it's most likely," probably," or the most desperate of them all, "surely"--I'd like to offer one global qualification here. This is necessarily my reconstruction of what happened to Shakespeare in the course of this year, and when i do qualify a claim, it signals that the evidence is inconclusive or the argument highly speculative.

Bravo!

In the end James Shapiro can't--quite--live up to his promises. Multiplying weasel words creep past his guard--yes, even the despicable "surely". He indulges in the two-way-mirror fallacy: "Only someone who had seen the effects of crop failure could write so poignantly . . .", and "Only a writer who had partly believed in the possibility of heroism could have turned so sharply against it . . ." He sometimes bends facts to suit his purposes: the claim that by 1599 "only on Accession Day did knights still dress in otherwise rusting armor" would have startled the armored men who fought the English Civil War in the 1640s.

But AYitLoWS is still a really good book. Where it shines is in its mission statement: explaining to modern readers what Shakespeare would have had on his mind when he was writing plays, and what his audiences would have had on theirs while watching them. Some of these insights are small but telling: a reference in Henry V to "a beard of the General's cut" would have been understood as a reference to the distinctive square-cut beard of the Earl of Essex.

Others are large-scale and reflect on the plays' themes and meanings. I had had no idea, for example, that in the summer of 1599 England underwent an invasion scare due to (unfounded) rumors of a second Spanish Armada. Even the better-known facts are effectively marshaled: it is . . . ahem . . . surely true that an Englishman seeing Julius Caesar would have been reminded of the uncertainty concerning the succession to the aged, childless Queen Elizabeth (an uncertainty wherein the aforementioned Earl of Essex played a large part).

This is great stuff. A Year etc. is full of it. There's far more than I can summarize here, and it's genuinely enlightening. So James Shapiro gets a full pardon from me for falling off the wagon relative to his introduction. I'm sure he'll be relieved.

Book Review: A is for Arsenic

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie
Katherine Harkup
Medicine, literature

This book is aimed squarely at a particular demographic: fans of Agatha Christie who are also interested in forensics. Given that Christie has sold somewhere north of two billion books, that's not as narrow a target as you might think. Needless to say, I'm in it.

A is for Arsenic is more about the science than about the literary criticism. Every chapter picks a separate poison and discusses its chemical properties, how it works, its symptoms, antidotes (if any), how to detect it, real-life cases, and (finally) how Christie used it in fiction. It's an extraordinarily informative book--good enough for aspiring mystery authors to use as a reference. The tone might have benefited by being more sprightly and less stately; Harkup periodically reveals a sharp sardonic wit. The writing is very clear, though, and should be accessible even to non-scientists. A non-mystery-loving reader won't find much in A is for Arsenic, but for the right-thinking remainder of us it's a lot of fun. 

WARNING: Katherine Harkup does her best to avoid spoiling the books, but it's an impossible task. In some cases, just knowing that book X features poison Y--or any poison--is a spoiler. Read the books first. If you've already read them, read them again.

---

An excellent companion book is Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook.

Agatha Christie published something like eighty books over a 50-plus-year writing career. Naturally, not all of the books are of equal quality. My semi-subjective list of the absolute best would include (in no particular order):

• And Then There Were None
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
• The ABC Murders
• Murder on the Orient Express
• Death on the Nile
• Cards on the Table (warning: contains a spoiler for Murder on the Orient Express)
• Evil Under the Sun
• Sleeping Murder
• A Murder is Announced
• Thirteen at Dinner
• Curtain
• Five Little Pigs
• The Patriotic Murders
• The Moving Finger

If she'd written any one of these, it would certainly have been considered a classic, one of the absolute best books of the puzzle-mystery genre. To have written all of them, plus twenty or thirty others that are almost as good . . . well, it's just plain unfair.

Book Review: The Man Who Made Lists

The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madnesss, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus
Joshua Kendall
Biography

The Man Who Made Lists wants to be Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman. It isn't. It would probably settle for being Everything Explained That is Explainable. It isn't that, either. Joshua Kendall spends way too little time on the Thesaurus itself. He spends way too much time on psychoanalyzing Roget, frequently on the flimsiest of evidence. At various points he tells us not only how a conversation went, but what expressions were on people's faces or even what they were thinking. Since there are no end notes, there's no way to know on what basis (if any) Kendall makes these assertions. Buried in the end matter, however, is this:

Though all the scenes are based on actual events, in several instances, where primary source material was lacking, I offered my best approximation of specific details.

"Based on actual events," huh? 

Book Review: Song of the Vikings

Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths
Nancy Marie Brown
Biography, history, mythology

When I reviewed the author's Ivory Vikings, I ended with this comment:

I don't know that I'd be in a rush to read another non-fiction book by Nancy Marie Brown. On the other hand, if she ever publishes any translations of those sagas, I'm there.

Song of the Vikings isn't quite that, but it's the next best thing: the story of how the sagas and myths came to be written down, and the biography of the man who did the writing. It's a subject that play's to Brown's strengths (hugely evocative writing, a sense of place and time, deep knowledge, passion for the subject) and largely avoids her weaknesses (a lack of intellectual discipline).

There are excerpts from the myths themselves, which are nicely done. There's also a good character portrait of Snorri Sturluson, "the Homer of the North"--a sobriquet which is richly deserved, as a vast chunk of what we know about Norse paganism comes from his writing. He was no neo-viking himself: fat, gouty, duplicitous, funny, learned, ambitious, and perhaps a bit greedy. That, if anything, makes him more comprehensible and more sympathetic to us.

In contrast, the weakest parts of Song of the Vikings are about what a true viking would consider important: fighting. Brown tries mightily to make sense of the dense, generations-long series of feuds and counter-feuds, raids and revenge, politics and war that characterized Iceland and Norway in the middle ages, but she doesn't pull it off. (It's a small-scale echo of the absolute spaghetti that characterized the dizzying interrelationships of the classical Greek city-states.) To be fair, putting this history into a coherent story would be hard for anyone.

Finally, any fantasy lover owes a big debt to Snorri Sturluson. Brown does a nice job tracing the later influence of the Norse Eddas, particularly regarding J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. To read Song of the Vikings is to catch a glimpse of the troll-haunted, giant-ridden, bleak, and beautiful world of our collective imagination. I wouldn't recommend the book to everyone, but if you're interested in the roots of fantasy literature or in Iceland or in the Norse myths it's worth checking out.

Book Review: Finding North

Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human
George Michelson Foy
Biography

Finding North is what I've dubbed a personal-theme book. It is, however, far more "personal" than "theme". There's some factual information in there around navigation and wayfinding and whatnot, but mainly this book is about George Michelson Foy.

In other words, if you're looking for another Rust, or even another The Triumph of Seeds, this isn't the place to find it. You won't learn much. The longest fact-oriented segment in Finding North occurs when Foy visits the U.S. Air Force center that controls our G.P.S. system. There he gathers the same information he could have gotten from a Wikipedia article--which he admits he doesn't really understand, but condenses and summarizes anyway.

Foy isn't really interested in things. He's interested in his reaction to things. (In this he reminds me of Paul Theroux, whom I find alternately involving and pretentious.)

With that out of the way, I quite liked Finding North. Foy is an unusually lucid, fluent, and lyrical writer. He's terrific with description, with sense of place. His personal story, which drives the book's narrative, is both interesting and moving. Granted that he's a little precious sometimes--non-fiction written in the present tense is always a danger sign--he mostly gets away with writing deliberately for style, for effect.

In addition to Foy's five-generation family saga, Finding North contains continuing minor chord of complaint against G.P.S. and all it represents. I must be one of the few people in the western hemisphere who has literally never navigated using G.P.S., nor had any real need to do so. Ergo, I have a certain sympathy with his viewpoint--especially when it's backed up by one of the few really informative scientific passages in the book. It's a little bit predictable, all the same. Foy is, and writes as, a humanist in a technological world. It puts limits on Finding North's audience. Given how good some of the writing is, I can't help but think that's a shame.

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The writer who most lucidly combines a literate style with a command of facts is probably Tracy Kidder. Though technologically long outdated, his The Soul of a New Machine remains a don't-miss classic about what it feels like to be an engineer.

Book Review: Better Living Through Criticism

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
A. O. Scott
Literature, culture

I wanted to read this book for obvious reasons: I take some pride in these book reviews, and I want to make them better. I was hesitant, though, because Scott is a film critic. I don't watch many movies. I figured that Better Living Through Criticism would be full of references that I wouldn't get.

Surprise! Better Living Through Criticism is almost devoid of specifics. Instead, it's virtually 100% at the level of (broadly speaking) theory--maybe even philosophy. Scott barely touches on movies. Heck, he barely touches Earth. He's too busy reeling off a checklist of intellectual touchpoints. Aristotle! Ranier Maria Rilke's sonnet Archaic Torso of Apollo! The appalling Edmund Wilson! Susan Sontag! Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment!

The weird thing is that Scott eschews the one thing that one would expect from a critic: drawing a conclusion. Is Kant right? Is Sontag wrong? Scott doesn't say--or, rather he says both no and yes. He proceeds by a relentless, repetitive cycle of Hegelian synthesis (see, I can be an intellectual name-dropper too). Here's a juicy but totally typical example:

The impulse to conserve and move slowly, to build incrementally and protect what has already been done, is an honorable one. So is the drive to start again, to bend the energies of creation towards an unseen future. But this is also to say that both sides are wrong. Each one's error is inevitable, since it reflects an ineradicable fact of the human predicament. We live at the mercy of time and can only fail in our efforts to master it, to speed it up or slow it down.

Uh, okay, A.O. If you say so. It's not clear that this helps me think about art, pleasure, beauty, or truth, though.

Scott's devotion to the theoretical is just baffling. He quotes with evident approval a long piece of poetical lit-crit that is, basically, one giant failure of basic logic. He loves good critical writing, but he doesn't seem to care whether it makes much sense or has anything material to say about How to Think About Art etc. Better Living Through Criticism has some neat if slightly self-conscious postmodernist prose, but the overall effect is that of watching someone else play a complicated and largely pointless game of solitaire.

Book Review: The Man Who Invented Fiction

The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered In the Modern World
William Egginton
Literature

This is a pretty good book. I say that here, at the outset, because I'm going to spend most of this review taking pot shots at it.

What? I hear you cry. Is JT going soft? Why is he not airing out the ol' sarcasm vocab, the way he did here? Where is the steely-eyed dissection, like this?

The difference is that The Man Who Invented Fiction is an unambiguously humanist book. Most of what I read here falls, broadly speaking, under the the umbrella of . . . empiricism, I suppose, is the best label. Empiricist writing is about facts, while humanist writing is about interpretation. Or, alternatively: the empiricist writer seeks to inform; the humanist writer seeks to convince. To disagree with a humanist book is not (necessarily) a failure of the book, but (arguably, probably) a success. The author has a thesis. Agree with it, challenge it, disagree vehemently, modify it: these are all valid responses.

So here's the thesis. Before Cervantes, people wrote stuff that they and their audience knew wasn't true, but readers/listeners didn't experience it in the way that we call "fiction". Aristotle divided literature into history (the true) and poetry (the untrue), and had some very specific ideas on how the latter worked. Egginton's argument is that pre-Cervantean readers followed Aristotle in considering only certain forms of the not-true: fables, allegories, and satires, more or less.

Fiction--and here I'll agree with Egginton--is none of these. In fiction, we know that the story is not true, but we accept it as true for the duration. This willing suspension of disbelief allows us to identify with a fictional character in ways that we can't with a satirical or fabulous or allegorical one. When a favorite character hurts, we hurt. This doubleness of vision allows for a deeper and qualitatively different experience. And Cervantes (pace Egginton) is its inventor.

It's an interesting idea. I don't buy it. In the first place, some of what Egginton derives from Aristotle's theory of tragedy seems to me to be pretty strained (although I admit I haven't read the Poetics since high school). Anyway, the fact that Aristotle divided literature into a particular taxonomy doesn't prove anything about how actual people actually experienced it 1900 actual years later. Does Egginton seriously believe (for example) that the medieval consumers of the Arthurian tales didn't identify with Arthur--that they somehow were incapable of feeling along with him when Guinevere's adultery is forced into the open? Does he imagine that ancient Greeks couldn't grieve along with Odysseus, when his dog Argos--old, weary, sick, neglected--sees him, and recognizes, him, and dies? It seems highly unlikely to me.

Maybe Egginton would dismiss that and similar material as mere escapism, unworthy of the label of "fiction" (much less "literature"). That's his loss. I can assure him, from personal experience, that it is quite possible to identify with Arthur, Odysseus, Luke Skywalker, Mr. Spock, Dr. John H. Watson, Frodo Baggins, Alvin of Diaspar, Robin Hood, Beowulf, Horatio Hornblower, Philip Marlowe, Spenser, Clark Kent (the Christopher Reeve version), and a great many others besides.

Then, too, Egginton's claims can get pretty thoroughly imbrangled. For example:

What fiction permitted Cervantes to do in a way that no author before him managed was to juxtapose ideals and their inevitable disappointment in such a way as to force the reader simultaneously to acknowledge their value and to recognize the comic tragedy of their defeat. And because portraying the disappointment of expectations required him to draw on his own experience to imagine how those expectations would feel to those who held them, the shuttling back and forth between expectation and disappointment, between belief and its betrayal, or simply between different points of view in turn animated the characters he created, pulling them into relief by virtue of the difference between their views and those of their counterparts.

I wrote some papers in college that sounded very much like that, but I'm not proud of them.

And then there are blanket statements like this:

And it was not until Rene Decartes wrote his Meditations at the end of the 1630s that a rigorous distinction between how things appear to be to a person's senses and how they in fact are in themselves entered the philosophical lexicon.

Whaaaaaa . . . ? I don't know exactly what Egginton is trying to say here, but this is prima facie nonsense. This distinction has been around since Plato.

Then, too, Egginton just ignores the fact that Don Quixote really is satire, especially the first part. Cervantes is making fun of a popular genre of his day--the chivalric romance, close cousin of the trashy, never-ending series of fantasy novels that we know so well. (Seriously. Robert Jordan and Dragonlance are their spiritual descendants.)  There was Amadis of Gaul and Tirant the White and Palmerin of England and many more, each of which spawned sequels and imitators galore. Don Quixote's misadventures make copious references to this vast literature. 

In addition to literary criticism, The Man Who Invented Fiction has a substantial biographical component. Much of this is very good. Where it goes off the rails is where Egginton tries to substantiate his vision of Cervantes-as-inventor-of-fiction by interpreting the life of Cervantes-the-man. The weakness of this approach is made obvious by the liberal use of weasel phrases: "Surely Cervantes understood that ..." and "Cervantes must have felt ..." and "Clearly Cervantes intended ..." and "Perhaps this led Cervantes to write ..." and so forth.

Egginton, in short, has the luxury of constructing his own "Cervantes". "Cervantes" has some relationship to the actual, historical Miguel de Cervantes, but they're not identical. "Cervantes" serves as a vehicle for Egginton's ideas. This allows him to discover that "Cervantes" was a sympathetic character with a compatible world-view, and that his experiences made him the father of "fiction" per se. Similarly, a nationalist Catholic can discover that "Cervantes" was a devout and conservative man, while a liberal pacifist can discover that "Cervantes" was himself a liberal pacifist. (In English literature, we have a multiplicity of "Shakespeare"s with much the same effect.)

As I said, I don't buy it. But, as you may note, I did engage with it. I read the book with interest, taking mental notes and analyzing and (usually but not always) disagreeing. That makes The Man Who Invented Fiction a success on its author's terms, I think.

---

Don Quixote itself is well worth reading, even in an abridged version. It's still very funny in places, and wise as well. Honestly, there's not much "classic" fiction that can be read for pleasure by the general reader, but the Quixote is an exception.

Book Review/Essay: The Fellowship

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Philip and Carol Zaleski
Literature, biography

The Fellowship is a readable, detailed, and sympathetic biography by a pair of Smith College professors. It's nice to see the Inklings get some scholarly attention, even if it's only a fraction of the attention that's been given to contemporaries such as the Bloomsbury Group. It's not, perhaps, for the casual reader; if your interest starts and ends with Middle-Earth and Narnia, you might want to work your way up to this one.

Inevitably, the coverage of the Inklings is uneven. Lewis and Tolkien get roughly equal time, with Lewis emerging as the driving force of the group. Williams and Barfield share a second tier. The remainder of the group, aside from Lewis's brother Warnie, gets only token attention. 

To be honest, that's fine by me. I've read some Charles Williams, but in general I find him obscure and unengaging. I have read nothing by Barfield, and based on this account I'm unlikely to do so; each of us would consider the other as spouting tendentious gibberish. No doubt both men were genuinely deep and original thinkers, but they wrote for an audience of which I'm not a member.

If anything, that points out the genius of Lewis and Tolkien. Both of them were first-rate intellectuals (critical snobbery aside), and far more deeply versed in theology, literature, and philosophy than I will ever be. They put that depth into their writings; and yet both men--especially Tolkien--can be read for pure, unadulterated pleasure. 

This, I think, is one of the two major divides between JRRT and the vast legions of schlock artists who've followed in his footsteps. You might not see the genuine depth of The Lord of the Rings, but you can still feel it. The sense of mingled loss and consolation, for example, that pervades the book isn't an accident; it's fundamental to Tolkien's Christian, Catholic, and Boethian philosophy.

The other (and related) major divide is that all the Inklings were fascinated by myths: how they work, why they work, and what they're good for. Commercial fantasy writers focus on the mere trappings of myth (swords, magic spells, divine power, etc.) without having the least idea of why. The result is a kind of literary placebo, which dulls the imagination rather than stimulating it. It is to the genuine stuff what Nabisco's "Chips Ahoy!" is to home-made chocolate cookies.

Confession: I've read my fair share of this writing. I hope never to do so again. Life's too short to spend it killing your own brain cells.

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Humphrey Carpenter's J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography is a good starting point for the curious. Lewis has had a good many studies of his life and work, but they've mostly taken a rather academic slant.

Book Review: The Theater of War

The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today
Brian Doerries
Literature, psychology

Brian Doerries sees things in the classical tragedies that the authors never intended, and he ignores things that they would have thought crucial. That's not a knock on Doerries, much less on the playwrights. If anything, it's a compliment. Great literature is great, in part, because it transcends its original time and place.

Having said that, The Theater of War is a rather shallow book. It's interesting on the level of memoir, but it provides little in the way of either analysis or synthesis. Doerries is doing good work by presenting Greek tragedies to, among others, PTSD-vulnerable vets; surely there's something to say that surpasses the magazine-article level.

Book Review: The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong
David Orr
Literature

I once got into an argument about "The Road Not Taken". (As Frost himself observed, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem--very tricky.") Is the poem, as it seems on the surface, an ode to rugged individuality? Or is it, as the oh-so-sophisticated would have it, ironically subverting that idea, by suggesting that the choices we make ultimately don't much matter?

As I recall, I made myself irritating to all sides by insisting that the correct answer was: it's both. Poetry is supposed to be interpreted. Why bother with poetry if you want to clearly and unambiguously communicate one single meaning? That's what prose is for.

I am happy to report that David Orr, perspicacious man that he is, agrees with me. "The Road Not Taken" is about the act of choosing, not the choice, and it gives the reader the freedom to choose either road--either interpretation. For us, as for the speaker in the poem, the choice lies in the eye of the beholder: the two roads are "really about the same", but one of them seems less taken.

That's one of the things (in Orr's interpretation, anyway) that make it a peculiarly American poem. We make something of a fetish of choice. To deprive a person of free choice seems somehow un-American; witness many recent political debates. Whether the choices are consequential, or whether having them is a good thing, is different question.

Book Review: In Search of Sir Thomas Browne

In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Literature, science, philosophy

I must admit that, before I read this book, I had never heard of Sir Thomas Browne.

Now I've heard of him, but I'm not terribly clear on why.

"The Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind" is a very large title for a period that included Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, and Galileo. OK, this is the U.S. title, and presumably the choice wasn't the author's. All the same, it seems to me that this book tells me more about Hugh Aldersey-Williams than it tells me about Sir Thomas. The latter still seems like a minor figure of English letters, in the classic mold of the early-modern gentleman dabbler. His thinking is fairly typical of the proto-Enlightenment--an eclectic melange of modern-seeming attitudes and traditional verities, in much the same way as Newton spent much of his life working on alchemy and Biblical eschatology.

Read as a series of interlinked personal essays inspired by Browne, the book is quirky and personal in a stereotypically English way. I admire Aldersey-Williams's ability to draw out tangible connections across the centuries, I enjoy his digressions, and I applaud him for putting the intellectual roots of humanism on display; but he's too ready to read his own views into Browne's writing, and make of him something that he isn't. His admiration for Browne's highly mannered writing style is lovingly communicated, but I'm not fully in agreement; perhaps I would be if I read more of the original.

In short, this is a book with considerable charm and a pleasing central message, but without a lot of consequential information. I'm not immune to the charm, but I can't help noticing the gaps.

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I am reminded somewhat of Steven Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which likewise imputes to some fairly obscure early-modern literature and biography period an exaggerated importance. In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more personal. In the spirit of its central character, furthermore, it's both more accurate and less polemical.

Book Review: Why Homer Matters

Why Homer Matters
Adam Nicolson
Literature, ethnography

This is a Romantic book. I am an Enlightenment reader. It's a bad mix.

If Adam Nicholson had stuck to writing a book called Why I Love the Iliad and the Odyssey, he'd have done fine. The bits where he tells his personal reactions or interweaves his own stories with Homeric prose are good. Unfortunately, he doesn't stop there. He tries to mix his own passions with actual scholarship, and he's not good at it. 

A few--a very few--of the things that irritated me in Why Homer Matters can stand for the whole.

Nicolson loves fine-sounding generalizations divorced from any actual logic or evidence, because they fit whatever grandiose theory he's propounding at the moment. For example, discussing the decoration of some Bronze-Age artifacts, he comes up with this:

Spirals are everywhere ... The spirals might be taken as abstractions of the waves of the sea, but they are more than that: a recognition that this pattern of bind-and-release, alternating connectedness and separateness, is intimate with the nature of existence, of the thinking mind, the experiencing heart, the world that weaves and severs.

Really, Adam? Good thing you're a time-traveling psychic to tell us so confidently what a bunch of craftsmen were thinking when they drew their spirals five thousand years ago. Otherwise we might be fooled into thinking that the spirals might symbolize something else, or that--I know this thought is shocking--maybe they don't symbolize anything; maybe the craftsmen put them they're because they're neat designs, or the equivalent of a coat of arms, or for some reason that we would never think of. But none of that can possibly be true, because Adam Nicholson says "they are ... a recognition etc. etc. etc.", and he just knows.

Similarly, he spends far too much time gassing on about the fact that some of the Bronze-Age stick figures carved into the rocks of Extremadura (Spain) have disproportionately large hands, because that suits some airy thesis that he's building. Well, it turns out (I know from experience) that drawing hands is tricky, even with a pencil--but of course, in Nicholson's world, this must be a Deeply Meaningful Fact. OK, fine ... but a glance at the accompanying illustration shows that the hands aren't really all that prominent. Rather, the most noticeable thing about these figures by far is that their legs look like they're about nine inches long. But Adam Nicolson doesn't notice. Homer talks about "man-slaughtering hands" and not about "little stubby legs," so obviously the legs are not a Deeply Meaningful Fact. Q.E.D.

Finally, take the matter of dating. Most scholars think the Siege of Troy occurred some time around 1100-1200 BC. Nicolson prefers a substantially earlier date. He presents some evidence for his side--pretty decent evidence, it seems to me--and then he gets around to refuting the conventional date, which he does by saying: No it isn't. His view seems to be that it's a better story if you take the earlier date, so anyone who disagrees with him is a stupid poopy-head.

Here and elsewhere, Nicolson shows a complete grasp of how to make a fallacious argument. He has a wide variety of techniques, and he deploys them all with skill: the selective evidence, the out-of-context quotation, the assertion-presented-as-fact, the beautifully-worded but vacuous generalization, the cherry-picked facts ...

It's a pity. When he isn't making meaningless noises about some unprovable generality or insisting that Homer is an uncanny fit for the 21st-century worldview, Nicolson is a very fine writer. I was particularly struck by some of his insights, such as the parallels between modern gang mores and the behavior of the Greek chieftains before Troy. If you're a Romantic reader, Nicolson's prose may sweep you off your feet. But if you're not--if you read Why Homer Matters with a cold, rationalist eye--you'll end up seeing the empty, anti-intellectual vacuum lurking under the flashy surface.