Fay Weldon. Polaris and Other Stories (1985)

     Fay Weldon. Polaris and Other Stories (1985) Weldon’s stories are generally depressing slices of suburban women’s lives. Chick lit in the 70s and 80s focussed on how men messed up marriage and in general done women wrong. Weldon’s observation of human weaknesses, those so-called minor vices that too often cause major damage, is sharp and accurate. But the gloomy tone wears after a while, and counters the pleasures of reading a skillful writer. ** (2006)

Alison Baird. The Dragon’s Egg (1994)

     Alison Baird. The Dragon’s Egg (1994) Baird has a nice idea, but her sense of narrative is weak. Mr Lien returns from China with a present for his daughter Ai: a rock he picked up on the shore of the Yangtze River. It is in fact a dragon’s egg, and when it hatches, Ai has a friend to help her overcome the sad feelings caused by a bully at school. The dragon, Ling Tau, is the eldest son of the King of Dragons. When he reaches maturity, he takes her to his palace under the waters of the Yangtze, where she is suitably rewarded; and the dragons will be her friends for the rest of her life. Dragons can shape-change, as well as command the weather, etc, so there is opportunity for a good deal of poetic justice. The grownups of course refuse to believe that Ai’s friend is real, but that just helps him hide his true nature. Baird’s dialogue is good, but she doesn’t use it often; she tells too much, and doesn’t show enough. Still, a nice story for the tweenagers. Bria (11) liked it. ** (2006)

John Greenwood. Murder, Mr. Mosley (1983)

     John Greenwood. Murder, Mr. Mosley (1983) Mosley is one of those seemingly bumbling ‘tecs who manage to accomplish a good deal more than their more up-to-date, always-active, and ambitious colleagues. He not only solves the murder of the Brenda Thwaites, village hoyden returned to her home after many years absence; he also gives his colleague the evidence and pointers needed to bring another villain to justice. The murder itself was motivated by that most pathetic of motives, the desire for respectability. But Brenda was mixed up with a bent lawyer, so Mosley gets the goods in him too. Sergeant Beamish, one of those young fellas who knows better than his elders, becomes a loyal disciple of Mosley’s roundabout methods. This looks like the beginning of a promising series, but I haven’t found anything else about Mosley or Greenwood. **½ (2006)

Gary Larson. The Pre-History of The Far Side (1989)

     Gary Larson. The Pre-History of The Far Side (1989) Larson tells and explains the development of his cartoons. He’s not quite as weird as his drawings and their subject matter suggest, but he comes close. Like all true artists, technique and style matter to him as much as content. I doubt that this book will interest others than Far Side aficionados and graduate students, but for them this will be a treasure and a pleasure. *** (2006)

Colin Watson. Bump in the Night (1960)

     Colin Watson. Bump in the Night (1960) A number of explosions eventually result in a death. Insp. Purbright is dispatched to sort out the clues, which he does with the reluctant help of the local man, Insp. Larch, whose marriage to a Councillor’s daughter has placed him a little too close to the action. Well plotted, nicely characterised, but uncertain about its focus: detective story or social comedy? This was Watson’s second book; I don’t know whether the series developed any further, but it would work well on TV. ** (2006)

Bharati Mukherjee. Darkness (1985)

    Bharati Mukherjee. Darkness (1985) Mukherjee has developed into a moderately successful but undervalued writer. This collection shows her early work, before she achieved renown and success. The stories are uniformly depressing and sad, occasionally brutal in their depiction of the difficulties of immigrants attempting to adapt and assimilate into their new culture, and their inevitable failures. These are bad enough for European immigrants, much worse for Indians, especially the upper caste Indians that make up the bulk of the Indian immigrants to America. The burden of class consciousness merely exacerbates the problem of becoming an ordinary American or Canadian. A couple of the stories deal with an Indian woman married to a white man; one wonders whether these reflect or refract Mukherjee’s experience as the wife of Clarke Blaise, a writer much overrated by himself.
     A good book, but a depressing one. **½ (2006)

Moshe Flato. The Power of Mathematics (1990)

     Moshe Flato. The Power of Mathematics (1990) This could be read as an extended gloss on Wigner’s well-known paper on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics as a model of the physical universe. How can such an abstract, human-invented system of symbolisms become such an accurate and powerful tool for explaining and predicting the behaviour of the material world?
     Flato limits himself to a few themes, especially misunderstandings of what mathematics is and what it can do. Like many mathematicians, he stresses that mere calculation is not a mathematician’s work. Unlike many earlier pure mathematicians (eg, Hardy), he finds the interplay of physics and other sciences with mathematics to be essential to both.
     The translation limps. One can tell that Flato’s original French was idiomatic and plain, but the translator was unfamiliar with English idioms. He’s also unfamiliar with mathematics, so that too often he translates the French terms literally, not into the corresponding English mathematical terminology. These faults make the book difficult to read, which may explain the fact that I found it on a remainder table a few years ago. I shall not keep it. ** (2006)

Ruth Rendell. Means of Evil and Other Stories (1979)

     Ruth Rendell. Means of Evil and Other Stories (1979) All of these have been made into episodes in the Wexford TV series. Rendell says they should be read “as if each was a little novel in the series”, i.e., the reader should flesh out the tales with his or her knowledge of the characters. This, the TV series did very well, so I read with the video images in mind. This helped, for the stories are sparse in character and detail, and heavy on exposition. All the same, they are good entertainment on a summer afternoon. *** (2006)

Bill Watterson. Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons (1992)

      Bill Watterson. Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons (1992) Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes strips catch the essence of childhood, but their strength is touching on the questions that we start asking as children and still can’t answer as adults. Or don’t want to answer, since we like to keep our amour propre intact.
     Calvin just wants to do what he wants to do. He has glimpses of his own evil, but his morality is simple: Don’t get caught. Hobbes is both his alter ego, providing sage advice, and moral insight and guidance; and his id, ever ready to pounce, trounce, and not quite devour Calvin. Calvin imagines himself as a tyrannosaurus rex, or as Spaceman Spiff, to escape the realities of his existence, but reality always intrudes. We may make ourselves out to be heroes in our fantasies, but we know they’re only fantasies after all. I like Calvin and Hobbes. It’s a strip with a huge range, from straightforward comedy and farce to subtle plays on words and ideas. It’s a pity but not surprising that Watterson ended the strip. It’s impossible to keep such high standards for very long. **** (2006)

Lynne Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003)

     Lynne Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) Great book; well written, witty disquisition on punctuation, and I agree with 98% of what Truss says about the rules. Should be on every teacher’s desk, and should be reread frequently while reviving oneself with a cup a coffee. I do wish she'd make a distinction between the hyphen, which is a spelling mark, and the dash, which is a punctuation mark. **** (2006)

Ron Brown. The Last Stop (2002)

     Ron Brown. The Last Stop (2002) Brown specialises in Ontario historical nostalgia, which makes his books valuable (though often incomplete) resources for information not otherwise easily available. This book lists and comments only on those stations designated “heritage buildings” under Jesse Flis’s 1984 private member’s bill, which mandated the Environment Minister to review any building under federal jurisdiction for possible designation before demolition was permitted. From that point of view, the book is a success, but a list of all stations extant in 2002 would have been a useful supplement. A few more, and better reproduced, photos would also help, but would probably have raised the price beyond that which rail fans (a notoriously cheap bunch) would be willing to pay. As it is, I found the book on Coles’ remainder table, at $3.99, and a bargain at twice or three times the price. **½ (2006)

Technology, customs, ethics, morality, and economics (Comment)

Technology, customs, ethics, morality, and economics

     Technologies change our values. Every new technology changes the range, and some the type, of choices we can make. New choices raise new ethical and moral questions. Customs yield and bend to new technologies.

     The printing press cheapened books. The industrial revolution needed and expanded literacy. That created a market for fiction, which in turn prompted the adaptation of the romance to the more literal tastes of the new reading classes. Hence the novel, which presents the old tropes as imitations of real life. As more and more people took up reading, they began to translate the ideals of the romantic novel (derived from courtly love) into actual behaviour. Jane Austen’s books crystallised the new genre. They adumbrated the tension between the practicalities of money and social status on the one hand, and the desires of the heart and mind on the other. She showed that while money and status could provide creature comforts, they could also destroy the soul.
     In the new marriage ethic, it wasn’t enough for people to enjoy the same social status and similar wealth; they should also be compatible in intellect, interests, and above all in passion. Every one of her books contrasts the ideal marriages of people whose primary bond is mutual attraction and common interests, and those whose primary bond is money and respectability. Her imitators simplified and spread the message. Their sentimentality made their books more popular, and the concept of marriage began to change.  It  was always primarily a commercial and social transaction, but now people began to talk as if it were a personal contract. Once people begin to talk about a social convention of polite pretense as if it referred to reality, the convention sooner or later becomes a social fact.

     The bicycle accelerated the changes. Middle class courtship customs became more personal when couples could escape the oversight of a chaperone just by cycling away. Where family approval had been imposed (and often desired), now young people began to choose their own partners. The shift from marriage as a social obligation to marriage as a personal choice accelerated even more when the car became cheap enough for most families to own one. The car prompted the invention of the motel, which could make a profit for the owner even when it was small. Motels provided cheap temporary accommodation for families touring the country, and for couples wanting affordable privacy for sex. What later was noticed as the sexual revolution was well under way, in fact nearly complete, by the time Reader’s Digest reprinted hand-wringing discussions of the End of Civilisation As We Know It in the 1960s.
     Examine any technology, and you’ll find social and economic change that raises ethical quandaries. Most of these changes aren’t recognised until long after they’ve taken hold. People resist the necessary shifts in values. The young, who’ve grown up with the new techno-economic landscape, often find themselves at odds with their parents and grandparents, which causes a good deal of pain on both sides. This is especially true when values are confused with their expression, as in courtesies and fashions. We need to be polite to each other, for politeness is the casual daily acknowledgement of each person’s dignity and value as a fellow human. But any particular form of politeness, any particular etiquette, is more a matter of fashion than of deep conviction, or even superficial necessity.
 

     But some values are deeply ingrained. Technology may make revaluations necessary, but that doesn’t mean they’ll happen. Mechanised production has made workers into tools, mere flesh-and-blood extensions of the machines they operate. As machines become more complex and subtle, workers lose economic value. They become more valuable as consumers than as producers. But our economic values are still attached to notions developed in the several thousand years of scarcity that have marked civilisation. Our economic choices haven’t caught up with that new reality. Worse, sacred texts enshrine the old economy. That makes people reluctant to even think about what an economy of abundance implies, let alone examine economic judgments masquerading as moral ones. In our economy, the truly lazy man is rare, and precious. The mere producer is a dime a dozen. 2013-07-18