Robert Darnton. The Great Cat Massacre (1984)

Robert Darnton. The Great Cat Massacre (1984) Subtitled And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. A collection of Darnton’s essays on the subtitle subject: academic, and apparently intended for a reading list in French history. (My 2nd-hand copy has blue highlighter marks throughout). The cover blurb quotes Newsweek’s opinion this is a “brilliant work of popular history”, a somewhat excessive judgement. The essays are interesting, but not, I think, to most of the public. I learned a lot, mostly along the lines of how hard it is to recover the mind set and unspoken assumptions of our ancestors. Visiting the past entails a culture shock.
     I have some experience of culture shock, having been taken to England in 1945, and spending time alternately there and in Austria until 1954, when we emigrated to Canada. This perhaps makes it easier for me to imagine a different way of thinking, but there is still an impenetrable barrier, which no amount of reading of historical documents will remove. But Darnton does make me aware of just how much of a difference in worldview there must be.
     The essay on a reader’s response to Rousseau, which quotes and interprets an enthusiast’s letters to his book seller, is probably easiest to apprehend: we all know what it’s like to enjoy or endure an enthusiasm for a particular author, and fantasise about what (s)he is really like: to believe that one has somehow come to know a person intimately whom we can encounter only through their printed words. In this case, I found myself once again irritated by Rousseau, who I think has much to answer for. He made sentimentality respectable, no, worse, he encouraged people to believe that having the right attitude was more important doing the right thing.
     Oh, about the title essay: Darnton re/deconstructs a cat massacre, and shows us that it was a not too veiled attack by the workers on their masters and mistresses, whom they despised as not only taking a large profit from their work, but also as less than qualified in the metier. One of the things that we may have difficulty understanding these days is a society in which the middle and upper classes not only thought of the lower classes as below them socially, but thought of them as hardly human beings. It’s no wonder that resentment triggered brutality of a type we can barely imagine.
    Overall, a book worth reading, but I recommend reading it one essay at a time over several weeks. **½

K. C. Cole. Mind over Matter (2003)

     K. C. Cole. Mind over Matter (2003) Cole wrote a column about science for the L. A Times for many years. This book collects a number of them. She writes well, explains clearly, and ends almost all her columns with an implicit question: How does this bit of science affect you? The answer often is, Much more than I ever realised. It’s clear she loves to think about science. I liked this book a lot. It’s like eating potato chips: once started you can’t stop. I’m not sure how well her explanations will resonate with people who are not already “entranced with science”, since any explanation assumes some prior knowledge in the audience. I know too much to be able to judge how much is needed to read Cole well. Nevertheless, I recommend this to any one who wants to spend a few hours in the company of a delightful mind. It’s difficult to choose a sample, so I’ll just find one at random
     In terms of the energy required, there’s no difference between accelerating and decelerating.... This is a good thing to remember the next time you’re struggling to break a bad habit. Whatever energy you put into creating the bad habit is the amount of energy you will need to push it out the door. Which implies that because we want to break the habit faster than we acquired it, getting rid of it will feel a lot harder than getting it.
     Good book. **** (2012)

Carola Dunn. Fall of a Philanderer (2005)

 

    Carola Dunn. Fall of a Philanderer (2005) Charming, lightweight fluff, well plotted, well told with main characters interesting and sympathetic enough to hold attention. The Hon. Daisy Dalrymple, now the well-married and pregnant Mrs Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher, with happy step-daughter Belinda and her friend Deva, has taken rooms in a small village on the Devon coast while Alec finishes up a case. The local pub-owner, George Enderby, is not only a cad, but a cruel, unsociable bounder and bully. He’s taken advantage of the young landlady’s loneliness (her husband serves in the Navy), as well as of several young girls and dissatisfied wives. His marriage to the owner of the pub is of course rocky. He torments the local idiot, a mild-mannered mute. He’s clearly destined to die.

     Alec arrives, the family go on a picnic on the beach, and Alec finds Enderby’s body smashed up on the rocks below a high cliff. It looks like murder. Of course he is drawn into the case, and Daisy’s hunger for facts, her ability to engender trust, and her sympathy for several of the suspects makes her a valuable assistant. The denouement is a surprise almost to the end, but plausible. As with other novels in the series, this one has the feel of being severely edited to fit into a small book (under 300 pages of medium size print), so several promising subplots and their characters are perfunctory, cliched insertions. Pity; Dunn’s talent is for dialogue and the sardonic authorial aside, which together need more room. I’ve decided to find others in this series, but I won’t be collecting them, despite the temptation to do so. **½ (2011)

Ben Wicks. When the Boys Came Marching Home (1991)

     Ben Wicks. When the Boys Came Marching Home (1991) I bought this book at the Walter Stewart Library book sale recently. In addition to this book, Wicks also compiled one about the children who were evacuated from the cities into the supposedly safer countryside (he was an evacuee himself). I wish I had bought that book, too.
Update: I did buy the book, see my review.
     Wicks seems haunted by the Second World War. This compilation consists of excerpts from letters solicited from people who had lived through the war, and recalled what it was like when the war ended. Wives and family, children and sweethearts, as well as the soldiers and women volunteers, all have their say.
     All in all, there was a mixed response, but even when the necessary adjustments went well, the war left its scars. In many cases, perhaps the majority, those scars went deep. The wounds of war were inflicted on the families and loved ones of the returning men, and lasted for the rest of their lives. Women resented having to go back to subservient roles; children resented the stranger who appeared one day and claimed all the privileges and rights of the head of the family. Wicks makes clear that the image of the soldier as stalwart hero is a lie. Most of them were ordinary men; their experience of the war damaged them. It’s not surprising that adjustment to civilian life was hard even when it succeeded. What’s surprising is that people managed to achieve a life that hid the scars, or at least coped with the continuing hurts inflicted by men who did not know how to handle their pain. That’s normality of a sort, I guess.
     Many of the stories told in this book touched a nerve. My father, too, was damaged by the war, and he took it out on us. He saw many evils; he told us of some of the less horrific events from time to time, but like all men who saw combat or its effects, he did not really want to talk about it. He was also deeply disillusioned by the betrayal of the German people by the Nazis. I don’t think he ever really came to terms with his disillusionment. For the rest of his life, he resented the Allies and their victory over the 3rd Reich, and could not stomach what he thought was the weakness, money-grubbing, and corruption of the people who had defeated Germany. He despised the sloppiness of Canadians, their cheerful disrespect for experts, for “Fachleute”, their attitude that “good enough” was good enough. He believed in the myth of the Volk despite himself, and told me repeatedly that modernity would not appeal to Austrians. Of course, it did. That is why he did not want to go back after his last trip in 1975 or ‘76, not even for the funeral of Urli-Oma. He would have found his relatives happily enjoying the consumer society. I went on his behalf, and that’s what I found.
     Nevertheless, most of my memories of my childhood and the years before we came to Canada are happy ones. Children have a great facility of accepting whatever surrounds them as normal, and getting what pleasure they can when they can. As children, we see the light of the sun; as we age, we see the shadows cast by it. *** (2011)

Kenneth Graham. Der Wind in den Weiden (1976)

     Kenneth Graham. Der Wind in den Weiden (1976) Translated by Harry Rowohlt. It’s odd to read Wind in the Willows in German. At first, I read this to see how the translator managed Graham`s cosy informal style, one carefully crafted to mimic the language of its intended audience of Young Readers. But very soon the tale itself captured me, as it did so many years ago when I first read it while recovering from the mumps. Well done. The illustrations are by the artist who drew the main cels for Yellow Submarine, but they lack the firmness and clarity of line found in that wonderful movie.
     A major problem when translating English into other languages is grammatical gender, which does affect how the reader imagines the fictive world. ‘Rat’ translates into ‘die Ratte’, feminine noun: it’s odd to read of a feminine Rat, who is so definitely an elder brother figure; much easier to imagine in the English version. At least ‘Toad’ translates into the masculine noun ‘Kröterich’. *** (2011)

Eric Frank Russell. Men Martians and Machines (1958)

     Eric Frank Russell. Men Martians and Machines (1958) Russell was English, something I didn’t know until I looked him up on Wikipedia. And he served in the RAF, not the Navy, despite the naval tone and tropes in these stories, in which the spaceship crew is very much a naval one. In fact, the tales belong to the “strange worlds” genre, which was well-developed long before SF adopted it. The alien worlds could just as well be undiscovered islands in the unexplored reaches of the Earth, the aliens could be monsters such as were imagined by medieval cartographers and confabulated by explorers who came back with tall tales about their really quite mundane (but dangerous) voyages. Always give the public what it wants.
     The plots are of the “how humans (and Martians) manage to overcome alien dangers by means of ingenuity, courage, and luck” variety. Fantasies, IOW, but nicely done. The ship-board cameraderie is a shade too stereotypical even for its own time, but this is pulp fiction. Stereotypes enable the writer to telegraph whole settings and characters by means of slight variations on the expected imagery. “Jay Score” (ie, J20) is a robot who manages to pilot the ship past the Sun while the crew barely survives in the refrigerated hold. “Mechanistria” tells of a world whose intelligent life is machines, perhaps the remnants of a civilisation that destroyed itself by using robots for warfare. I didn’t finish it, it seemed too ponderous to me. “Symbiotica” describes a very tightly interconnected ecology: the intelligent life forms depend on trees, and vice versa. It’s hard to tell which is the dominant life form on this planet. “Mesmerica” gives us aliens that can make you see what they want you to see. But not all senses are equally affected, and of course Jay Score is immune. Between humans’ ability to recognise aliens by touch, the aliens’ inability to produce original speech (shades of the Turing Test!), and Jay Score’s objective vision, the crew manages to rescue their shipmates and lift off the planet safely.
       If there is an overriding theme, it’s that the universe is a hostile place: we go exploring it at our peril. Considering the times, with its fear of subversion by apparently nice, normal, neighbourly people who were really evil Commies, one might also notice the motif of an apparently pleasant place that turns out to be lethal, of seemingly innocuous aliens with a murderous bent. Imagined universes, it seems, always resemble what we fear and desire most. The characters are stereotypical and fixed, like those in a comic book. The dialogue is occasionally atrocious, the style is very American Pulp Fiction. A fun read, mostly, but not a keeper. **½ (2011)

The Painted Veil (2006) (Movie)

     The Painted Veil (2006) [D: John Curran. Naomi Watts, Edward Norton. Liev Schreiber. Based on a novel by Somerset Maugham] Dr Chris Fane marries Kitty Garstin even though she does not love him. When they are posted to Shanghai, she has an affair with the local British Commissioner. Chris decides to volunteer to help care for cholera victims far inland and if possible stem the epidemic, and gives Kitty an ultimatum: come with him, or face being divorced by him. She follows, and over the next couple of months (the time line is bit fuzzy), they come to love and trust each other again. Then he dies. A few years later, Kitty encounters her ex-lover in London, and closes off all contact with him.
     A typical Somerset plot, simple and predictable from the beginning. So what makes this film so watchable? The careful adaptation, especially of Somerset’s trick of revealing significant details in casual conversation. Much of the time, these details show the central character(s) how they appear to other people, or what they misunderstood or misestimated or simply did not know. Somerset is also very good at revealing the emotions that the characters hide from themselves and from each other. His stories are about how people come to know themselves; but self-knowledge rarely leads to happiness.
     The movie’s script is first rate, not only in the dialogue, but in the visuals, which are used to link and frame the essential scenes that tell the central story, the near destruction of the marriage and its painful rebuilding. China was undergoing the Nationalist reforms that eventually triggered the Maoist wars and brought it into the 20th century. This and the cholera epidemic add the lethal dangers that make their reconciliation more crucial to Chris and Kitty, while at the same time commenting on their privileged status and their slow realisation of the injustices and social perils that surround them.
     The secondary plots and characters, the repeated views of the surrounding landscape (in the vicinity of the Three Gorges), and the varying narrative rhythm  give us a sense of a complete world. I don’t know to what extent this is the moviemakers’ contribution, and how much comes from Somerset’s novel, but it works. A well done movie, recommended. ***