Books of the Year 2020

 

Some of the books of the year - I tend to give away the books I enjoyed most, so this is an incomplete selection of all the chosen titles. The best ones always get away!

Not much to celebrate about 2020, which went downhill from March onwards with coronavirus and final stages of Brexit, but despite everything, there were some books I encountered during the year that were truly inspiring (and some of them I even finished). Here is a quick list of eight books (and one art exhibition) that impressed, entertained, or challenged, and all took my mind off other things. 

Norman Scarfe (ed), A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk, 1784

This book only arrived in December, but already it has proved fascinating. Norman Scarfe is no doubt a monarchist, a reactionary, and against everything the French Revolution stood for, but I forgive him everything for bringing to life the diaries of the La Rochefoucault brothers during the year they spent in East Anglia. Their accounts of the everyday life of the English upper classes – their drinking, their hunting, and their impoliteness – is a wonderful corrective to the accounts of insiders such as the dreadful Parson James Woodforde, writing at a similar time, but utterly complacent and self-serving. Scarfe’s edition is a model of good scholarship: everything explained at the foot of each page, with illustrations of people and places, and a scene-setting introduction. It’s lovely to see this book has been reprinted four times since its first publication in 1987. 

Grace Paley, Collected Stories

What a discovery! She wrote only three collections of short stories, in 1959, 1974, and 1985, no novels, and yet managed to write pioneering experimental fiction, as well as being a political activist and campaigner. Her stories draw on her lower-class Jewish background in the tenements of New York, with many of the characters reappearing in several stories. She is never afraid to experiment (which means that some of the stories go nowhere, or simply fall over) but you forgive her for the success of some of the other stories. These stories have an immediacy, a vividness, that grips the reader, in great contrast to the more leisured, cossetted atmosphere of Updike. You suspect that for every Updike there is a Grace Paley somewhere looking after the kids and writing on the kitchen table. Best of all, Paley has no axe to grind; she writes believable fiction, not to prove a thesis. And her dialogue rivals Damon Runyon’s!   

Calvino, Italian Folktales

This vast collection of hundreds of tales constantly defeats my expectations. I’ve written about it at length elsewhere; suffice it to say here that I find it is consistently entertaining, while ploughing through collections of Grimm or Afaneseyev’s Russian folktales becomes heavy going.  However (two weeks later), just a minor update, after having read 155 of the 200 tales: I wish Calvino had exercised a little more rigour in his selection. Several of the tales repeat elements found elsewhere, and are not great tales in their own right. I think the selection could have been further reduced by around 20%. It would still remain the definitive selection of Italian folk tales. 

Susan Woodford, Greek and Roman Art (2020)

A real achievement, this one, in a series by Thames and Hudson, entitled Art Essentials, along the lines of Gallimard Decouvertes. There are plenty of introductory guides on the subject, several of them by Susan Woodford herself, so this one should have been unmemorable. What made it stand out was that is in full colour, with an integrated layout, with the excellent choice of illustrations, captions that read as if she has actually looked at the work in question (“the elegant pose of the statue folds into unintelligibility”), a good glossary and further reading section. All in all, a highly successful use of the concise format to focus on the essential artworks and artists. Very easy to read, and very inspiring to make me want to go and see some of these things in museums. 

Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)

It may be thought cheeky to select a book that I’ve only read a few hundred pages of. Given the size of the novel, however, these few hundred pages are as long as some novels. And you can already see some themes emerging. You notice the omniscient narrator, who tells us what to think, for example, that we should be fond of Pierre, and that we should see the social life of the rich in Moscow and St Petersburg as shallow: “Here in Moscow we are more occupied with dinner-parties and scandal than with politics.” It’s a clever trick, to give the appearance of neutrality, but to lead the reader by a hundred signs into agreeing with Tolstoy’s often peculiar ideas. 

Tim Parks, Medici Money (2006)

Medici Money is my nomination for book of the year. Discovered in the Amnesty Bookshop, Cambridge (remember second-hand bookshops?), at a price of £3, Tim Parks’ Medici Money turned out to be a real page-turner – pretty impressive when you think it is a book about banking and economics! But the combination of Parks’ accessible but informed writing style, and the astonishing subject matter, made this book a winner. I will never again look at the word “Medici” without suspicion, and the book has changed the way I see the Renaissance in Florence. 

Machiavelli, Florentine Histories

Inspired by Tim Parks (above), we read the first two hundred pages or so of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. The pattern seems to be clear: the city of Florence places its hopes in an individual or group to free them from a tyrant, only to discover that the resulting political situation is worse than ever. Unfortunately, the edition was a rather stodgy and unhelpful one. You need some assistance to make a contemporary historian accessible.  

Van Eyck exhibition, Ghent

This was certainly the exhibition of the year, even if the show was rather distorted into comparison of Flemish versus Italian art, with the winner being, of course, Van Eyck, the local; I wrote about it here.

Defoe, Captain Singleton (1720)

Defoe is remarkable for writing fiction that seems amazingly realistic, despite his not having any experience of the situation describe. Here, Captain Singleton is a pirate who crosses Africa from east to west with his band of followers. 

A Much-maligned town: Opinions of Reading 1126-2008 (2008)

I chose this book as a tribute to the small publishers across the UK who produce books about a place, for a local readership. Reading, not a city that you would immediately associate with publishing, has one of the best local publishers, The Two Rivers Press. I don’t see any truly local publishers like this in Oxford or Cambridge, which is a shame. Plenty of publishing about the universities - but that's not the same thing.   

Should we worry about not liking Céline Dion?

Cover of the original 2007 Continuum edition

Carl Wilson (not the former Beach Boy, but a Canadian music journalist) is a deeply troubled man. Given the assignment of writing about Céline Dion (for the book Let's Talk About Love, a title in a series published by Continuum, each volume devoted to individual albums) he agonises for over 150 pages about whether it is OK not to like the album he presumably has been commissioned to write favourably about. He must be worried, because he quotes from works on aesthetics (David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg) as well as academic sociology (Pierre Bourdieu, Petersen (actually Peterson), and Kern) to try to come to terms with his unease. He deserves top marks for honesty, at least. 

Wilson asks an interesting question, if you persevere beyond his mixed metaphors (“Schmaltz circles the rim but seemingly never wholly dissolves in the melting pot, bubbling up again decade after decade.” [p62]) and the odd vocabulary (see my post on music journalists’ style). He is most interesting when moving furthest away from his own response, and weakest when describing Ms Dion, perhaps because he has nothing much to say about her music. As an experienced music journalist, you think he could say something more specific than “her voice is nouveau riche” [p72] and “her singing is aspirational” (and I don’t think he means she pronounces her “h”s). He describes his problem, but despairs of ever resolving it. At one point he states: “For all the sense I’ve been able to make of Céline, why am I still bored?” [p74]. 

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about not liking Dion’s music, but sadly for Wilson, he appears condemned to feeling guilty about some popular music he cannot respond to. Let’s look at the reasons he gives for justifying liking Dion’s music: 

She had a challenging upbringing. As one of 14 children, born to a poor Quebecois family, and not initially speaking any English, Dion progressed the hard way. Nonetheless, that’s not a justification for the music either. 

She is a nice person. I don’t doubt that Ms Dion is a very nice person, but that’s not going to make me like her music. In my teens, I went with my girlfriend to a Donovan concert. I’m sure Donovan was and is a lovely, sincere, person, but I found the music utterly uninteresting. 

It’s impossible to describe your response to some musicians [a bit desperate, this one, from a music journalist]. “It’s not uncommon for musicians to bypass taste categories when they hear technical achievement, and Céline seems to be such a case.” [p67] 

Dion’s music is not white, nor black, but schmaltz. Wilson hears Dion’s music as “black music”, but on reflection, decides her music is neither black nor white; “the only unhyphenated label I can find is “schmaltz”. If nothing else, this response characterizes Wilson's unique way of reasoning. 

My response is tribal, not intellectual: “our guts tell us certain kinds of music are for certain kinds of people” [p19]. “My aversion to Dion more closely resembles how put off I feel when someone says they’re prolife or a Republican: intellectually ‘I’m aware how personal and complicated such affiliations can be, but my gut reactions are more crudely tribal.” [p19].

In other words, he can’t do anything about this matter of taste; that’s just how he is. Later in the book he considers taste in a more formal way (that’s where Hume and Kant come in) and moves, I think, to a useful conclusion, but doesn’t in the end respond to his own findings. “The question is whether anyone’s tastes stand on certain ground, starting with mine.” 

I think the problem is more simple than that. Hume, Kant, and even Clement Greenberg talk about appealing to some kind of authority, who can provide a neutral judgement. But in pop music, there is no such authority. Pop music is just another commodity, to be bought and sold. The only authority is sales figures, which make Dion without doubt one of the greatest stars ever. As consumers, we humans have just one main task in life: to purchase. For most of us, the only individuality we can express is our preference for A or B, for Dion or Dylan. Through these preferences, we make friends or lose friends. We believe we are free because of that choice, but even when Wilson describes Bourdieu’s famous survey in the 1970s on “discrimination”, that “taste is a manifestation of a quest for social status … to perpetuate the class structure”, he is not convinced. It is no choice; most of popular music is created so that young people can identify with a group (as well as representing something that their parents do not like). Popular music journalists beyond their teens, like Wilson (born 1967, and writing Let’s Talk about Love at the age of 40), struggle to make any sense of it, yet they lived through it; does he not remember? For Wilson, the bands and singers he liked in his teens are the ones that are “real”; the others, like Dion, incomprehensible. Why else would Rolling Stones concerts be full of audiences in their sixties? 

Pop bands and singers come and go, regardless of their cultural significance, and, as Bourdieu points out, cultural significance may well be determined by a different group to the consumers of the music. Consumers of the music may not like this presence or absence of cultural significance, but it doesn't matter to them. At the time, the important thing for the consumer is to have a preference: X is my favourite; I hate Y. Likes and dislikes create bonds and establish identity. Wilson more or less recognises this, at times: “It’s most blatant in the identity war that is high school, but music never stops being a badge of recognition.”[p19] 

Dion is a badge; nothing to do with autonomous value in the eyes of critics. As Wilson memorably describes, she “tastes good” to her audience, even if she is not “in good taste”. As a music journalist, he worries about good taste; music consumers do not. It might have been a problem for his book commission, but he can rest assured that most Dion admirers will not even know that his book exists. His secret is safe, despite publication.

The Style of Music Journalism

 

I’m reading a book by Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk about Love. Wilson is a music journalist, and it’s a long time since I’ve read any music journalism. I vaguely remember seeing articles in New Musical Express, during the 1970s when I was a student, and perhaps I was more tolerant at that time, but today this writing strikes me as very peculiar. As for the argument of the book, that is for a later post, but here I will try to clarify the main features of the music journalism style. You could say that much of the NME journalism could be excused as the result of enthusiastic youthful ardour by the writers, but Wilson was 40 when he published Let's Talk about Love. 

Mixing things up

Wilson constructs sentences by combining formal and informal, academic and popular discourse. This technique is certainly arresting: I stop reading with every example. I can’t decide if the technique is thereby successful or simply confusing: 

“This epidemic of second thought made critical scorn generally seem a tad shady.” [p15]

 Perhaps it is simply that Wilson confuses us with his baroque melange of metaphors:

 “Once pop criticism had a track record lengthy enough to be full of wrong turns, neither popular nor critical consensus seemed like a reliable guide.” [p15]

Using a phrase “track record” in the context of pop music seems likely to confuse. And a long track record isn’t necessarily full of wrong turns – it might just be long. 

Mixed metaphors

“After the tumult of the early 1990s, when ‘underground’ music was seized on by the mainstream and just as quickly thrown overboard” [p15]

“For four years her legions have tithed their salaries to fly to Los Angeles for her nightly revue” [p18]

Mixed metaphors are not confined to Wilson's writing. There are plenty of other examples, such as a review of the Wilson book by another (former) music journalist, David Zahl, who writes: 

Having authoritative taste in cutting edge music is a particularly cruel mistress, especially in an age when technology has put so many extra players on the field. 

Sentences that defy expectations

One of the challenges that AI teams are working on is to parse an English sentence correctly – to understand its meaning. Most English sentences are quite straightforward, but I feel sorry for the AI experts to have to deal with such illogical constructions as these: 

“The epiphany was ethical, but it led to musical enjoyment”.

That word “but” worries me. Are ethical actions not enjoyable? Does enjoyment have anything to do with ethics? 

References for the favoured few

A further confusion is references to popular culture where it is assumed that the reader knows what Wilson is talking about. For example: “[I had] gotten married (to a woman with a severe Gummo fixation)”. Do we know what Gummo is? It’s a cult film about teenage boys. As Wilson himself points out, pop music criticism often “hinges on turning your readership into an incrowd [with] the power to exclude”. [p16]

Perhaps the real challenge when writing about popular music is that the subject matter can be so banal, that the journalists feel they have to embellish their text to provide more interest. Perhaps you might say I am being unfair to Wilson, as his book makes a serious point - but that is for the next post. 

The Bridget Jones phenomenon

Being Bridget Jones, a TV documentary about the Bridget Jones books and films prompted a re-evaluation of the character. What made the Bridget Jones character so memorable? Is there anything more to be said about her?

It was clear from the documentary that what is memorable is not the males, however much screen entertainment they provide (usually based on rivalry). Hugh Grant versus Colin Firth, or Colin Firth versus Patrick Dempsey was not what we remember about the films: three of them, from Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), based on the book of the same title (1996), up to the film Bridget Jones's Baby (2016). By the end the story declines into wish-fulfilment, but there is enough in the earlier films and books to reflect on. 

No, the abiding achievement of Helen Fielding is to record female insecurity. Women have gained so much in the last 150 years, and yet hesitancy and lack of confidence remain very common in women. As Germaine Greer stated in the TV programme, we all of us have Bridget Jones moments, waiting for the phone to ring. I realised when she said this that she was referring to women, but it could equally refer to men. Here is a limitation of these films: all the leading males are secure in their roles; they are strong-jawed ciphers. Real men might sit waiting for the phone to ring, but not these males. Even Colin Firth, although he may be slow to reveal his true feelings, is a world-class lawyer.

Of course the reality is more complex than that. Bridget is the woman who is on the edge of her class, as you sense her creator Helen Fielding is. Fielding grew up in a small industrial suburb of Leeds in Yorkshire, and then went to Oxford as an undergraduate in the 1970s, where she will have encountered a very different, more polished world. “She seemed not to have read any books”, said her contemporary Richard Curtis, revealing perhaps more than he realised. It would be typical of Jones to reveal that she hasn’t read books, which the more poised public-school educated male undergraduates haven’t read either, but can confidently talk about in conversation.

The Bridget Jones character sits uncomfortably with feminism. Already, 20 years after the first film, we all realise that the attitudes would no longer be tolerated – groping women’s bottoms is not a matter for laughter any longer. The Jones character is not what many women want to dwell on (however much her attitudes, fear of failure, obsession with trivia, chronic insecurity) might be shared by males. “Will I get married” is not high on the feminist agenda.

While we can all agree that the obsession with weight and body image is sad and misguided, although very much the result of a world presenting images of female models who are spectacularly thin as a norm to be emulated, we might be a little more uncomfortable about other aspects of Jones’ character.

Making a mess of things in public (particularly with lawyers, given that Mark Darcy is a barrister) makes us feel at one with Jones, but sometimes the character exploration goes further and raises some questions. Jones’ talent for making a fool of herself in public is, I think, more than simply representing her background and openness. Fielding/Jones argues for a particular female attitude, not just rejecting the driven professionalism of some of the women in the TV company where Bridget works, but in the second film, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), her journalistic efforts are lame and amateurish. By comparison, Hugh Grant reveals himself to be an accomplished and relaxed presenter. He would get a job over her any day. Am I reading too much into the stories, but is there perhaps some underlying plea by Fielding for human failure rather than business success? After all, at the end of three full-length films, Jones finally gets married. Who does she choose? The charismatic, sexy, supremely confident and talented millionaire, or the repressed English lawyer who is anything but streetwise, but looks honest. The fact that he’s probably also a millionaire doesn’t mean she is marrying only for love.

What it means to be British

Some words have become highly emotive for me in recent years. I cannot hear the words “Brexit” any longer without a sinking feeling, but now it has extended to include “British”, and “Britain”. The terms are chilling because the effect of Brexit, now it has happened, and perhaps unintended by the supporters of Brexit, has been to sharpen the distinction between Britain, and everything British, from the rest of the world. As Brexit inexorably takes place, something that seems to happen in slow motion (we are now years after the fateful referendum and the point of withdrawal has still not been reached) a kind of slow poisoning results from every mention of the word “Britain”. The Brexit mentality, the focus on myths from history that are brandished to demonstrate British uniqueness (such as “We stood alone” during World War Two, ignoring when it suited Churchill the contribution of all the peoples in the British Empire), seems to turn a screw in my brain with every mention of “Britain”.

So I can no longer ignore mentions of “British” sport, or books on “British” this or that, with a certain pang. I have now started to feel uncomfortable with any aspect of nationalism. So much so that only now, many years after the event, I begin to question the rather insidious propaganda aspect of having studied “English literature”. Why study a subject that threatens to produce a kind of jingoism by its very title? Is not the veneration of Shakespeare, unthinkingly labelled the world’s greatest playwright, a pawn used by many in the relentless emphasis on the superiority of things British? I dutifully read the rather small-scale body of medieval English literature, not questioning why it was seen in a completely detached fashion from medieval European literature, particularly French, which in many ways has a much more coherent corpus. I didn’t question why my degree ignored the vast body of Anglophone literature from the Caribbean, from India, from Africa – none of it mentioned in a three-year course on “English” literature. What was meant by “English” was, of course, the literature of Britain, not literature in the English language. A handful of English literature academics such as John Bayley would bravely write about Tolstoy, but such an attitude was becoming slowly squeezed out behind a mask of professionalism, of sticking to Eng Lit.

Having seen the unthinking populism that generated Brexit attitudes, I would seriously contemplate abolishing all national sport. Why drape a United Kingdom flag around athletes when they win an international event? Why even persist in the concept of a United Kingdom when it becomes increasingly apparent that the colonialism Britain imposed on India and African nations it controlled applied also to Ireland and to Scotland? That there never was a United Kingdom, just an efficient myth-making hegemony that included, I realise to my horror, university departments of English Literature? Just as a university department of theology is a crude attempt to hide religious propaganda behind the veneer of Enlightenment-inspired rational study, as if theology takes an equal place alongside chemistry and biology as an exercise of pure judgement? What am I doing in this island nation which appears determined to sever all ties with the European mainland and sail off incoherently in insignificant isolation?

Calvino's Italian Folktales

 

Calvino, Italian Folktales, 1971 edition

Big collections of fairy tales can be dull – and I speak as a great defender of fairy tales. But I always turn to Italo Calvino with pleasure and anticipation. Why is this?

Back in 1956, Calvino was invited by publisher Giulio Einaudi to compile a representative volume of Italian folktales (Fiabe Italiane). The resulting book has been for me a source of entertainment and pleasure ever since I first encountered it in the 1970s. Calvino was an ideal choice to compile a representative collection of Italian folktales, to be placed alongside Grimm: his trilogy of fairy-tale inspired fiction, collected as I Nostri Antenati (our ancestors), was written between 1952 and 1959, that is, contemporaneous with the two years he spent compiling the folktale collection.  

Calvino makes it quite clear he has adjusted and rewritten the tales as he sees fit (“I enriched the text selected from other version and whenever possible did so without altering its character or unity, and at the same time filled it out and made it more plastic. I touched up as delicately as possible those portions that were either missing or too sketchy” (Introduction, p xix). Does his rewriting make the stories more appealing, or is it perhaps that Italian folktales are more enjoyable to read than, say, Russian tales?

Calvino reveals some of his motivation behind the compilation in his introduction. First, a clarification. The book is entitled in English “Italian Folktales” contains not simply fairy tales, but a mixed bag including witches, fairies, kings and princesses, but also tales of cunning, popular religious tales and curiosities. Indeed, some of the stories contain no magical events at all (for example, no 56, “Lose your temper, and you lose your bet). The Italian title Fiabe Italiane could mean “Italian fairy tales” or “Italian folk tales” and Calvino states quite in his introduction (p. xx) that fairy tales comprise only a part of his collection. He also included “popular narrative components of various kinds … which held me by their beauty”. Hence he includes, as the Grimms do not, examples of the still continuing folk religion, the inspiration behind The Golden Legend, and some of those lovely tales about St Peter at the gates of Heaven.

Calvino’s compilation was not limited simply to selecting the stories. His goals were to select representative stories from all the regions of Italy. However, Calvino explains in his introduction that the geographical designation he provides for each story doesn’t mean the story originated there, merely that Calvino selected his version of choice from that region. Calvino makes it quite clear that some regions of Italy are richer in folktales than others, notably Tuscany and Sicily. His attempts to try to create a collection with tales from each region strikes me as a curious survival of the 19th-century Italian determination to forge a nation out of very disparate regional elements. In any case, Calvino redefines his region as the Italian linguistic area (so including Nice) rather than the present-day boundaries of Italy (he excludes South Tyrol as largely German-speaking). Hence I am worried by the single word at the end of each story: “Bologna”, or “Montale Pistoiese”, which suggests to the casual reader that the tale is from just one location. He makes it clear in the notes that he blends and merges versions from all over Italy.  

He rewrites them, or sections of them! He is unapologetic about this: he follows the proverb “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it”. Critics such as Jack Zipes have great pleasure in identifying how the Grimms changed their sources to fit the profile of a growing middle-class bourgeois class, but it seems less well-known today that Calvino was doing exactly the same thing to the folktales he selected. Despite our contemporary ideas of establishing the best text, fairy tales remain a genre where changing the story is perfectly OK.

Finally, Calvino tries to recreate a mythical pure, unadorned, form of the tales, as if to preserve their essential character. The notes to the tales are fascinating evidence of this practice – for example, no 80, “Fearless Simpleton”: “Pitre’s text closes with the hero’s head cut off … but since that brings an element of fantasy into an otherwise realistic narrative, I thought it best to exclude it”. In other words, Calvino has tried to create folk tales closer to his idea of what a tale should be than any of the actual examples in front of him. So much for textual fidelity. But if the resulting text is so enjoyable, should we be worried?

`

What is a fairy tale?

 

Here is a simple question: what is a folk tale? What is a fairy tale? And what is the connection with, say, the fabliaux of French medieval literature?

Before going any further, I’ll try a few definitions. Then I can compare them with those of other writers, and see if the definitions stand up after reading a few examples.

 A fairy tale is:

• A short story, not a novel
• A story of obstructions before a resolution is reached.
• Often includes the supernatural and magical.
• A path to a happy ending for the hero or heroine.
• Often ending in marriage.
• Does not question social boundaries. A peasant may marry a princess if he is clever enough, but there is no question that class distinctions should survive.
• Usually, but not always, involves magic.
• Typically has no sex. Sex is implied (Sleeping Beauty) but unspoken.
• Having a clear distinction between good and evil. The evil are usually punished and the good are rewarded.
• Often involves repetition (typically three times, with the last being successful).
• Moral world similar to that of Christianity: good deeds will ultimately be rewarded, even if not immediately. 

Helpfully, many critics make a distinction between “oral” fairy tales, transmitted by recitation, and “literary” fairy tales, which are written down and therefore subject to reworking by the author, and typically read rather then heard.

In contrast are folk tales or fabliaux (I have grouped them together, as they seem to have more in common with each other than with the fairy tale). Examples include Boccacio’s Decameron, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. Their characteristics are:

• Less supernatural, more based on individual attitude. The crafty characters are usually the winners, even if they have only a lowly place in the social order.
• Both fabliaux and folk tales are humorous, often raucous and sexual.
• Fabliaux are written in verse, folk tales in prose. 

There are of course cases of overlap, and collections that deliberately mix the different types. Calvino’s Italian Folktales mixes fairy tales with folk tales, and some of the lesser-known tales in Grimm are anything but fairy tales. But the distinctions above are, I hope, a good start to an assessment of fairy and folk tales. Let's see how these rules stand up with actual examples! 

The magic of fairy tales

 

Fairy tales! I’ve always been fascinated by fairy tales, without ever having been able to articulate exactly why. Fairy tales don’t correspond with the standard rules of literature. They have no characters. Rather embarrassingly, they are not politically correct. Disabled people are condemned. Beautiful people are praised. Success in a fairy tale is usually getting married, and usually to a prince or princess, with the implication that you are freed of any financial worries for life. Success doesn’t only come to those who deserve it, although the wicked never seem to prosper. Finally, fairy tales are almost always formulaic: the rule of three seems ubiquitous, with the first two failing but the last trial successful.

So what are we to make of fairy tales? Can they be justified? Yes, of course, because they address things that other types of literature don’t reach. They have a kind of primeval power that is very memorable. If you want a justification of fairy tales, just remember how the third bowl of porridge is just right – in Robert Southey’s words, “and that was neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right”.

 So over the next few posts, I intend to look at some aspects of fairy tales in more detail. I’ll look at some of the major commentators (the Opies, Bettelheim, Zipes) and some of the famous collections (Perrault, Madame d’Aulnay, Grimm, Calvino’s collection of Italian Folktales, which I’m currently reading, the Pentameron of Basile) and finally, some of the original writers (Andersen, Macdonald, Nesbit, Marcel Ayme). One thing is certain: it’s fun reading fairy tales!

Beginner's Guide to Bollywood classics

 

For many years, my arty-farty and rather snooty knowledge of Indian cinema was restricted to Satyajit Ray – in other words, to Indian art films that would be shown in film clubs. I knew that Bollywood existed, and that there was a lot of dancing, but that was about it. 

But, of course, the relationship between high art and popular entertainment has always been full of overlaps, and it’s not surprising that there are many classics from the popular tradition, nor that more recent Bollywood films have started to become much more aware of other ideas and attitudes 

One positive result of the Coronavirus lock-down is that I have had the time to watch several Bollywood films, and so I am entitled to construct a mini-guide to the Indian film industry in less than a thousand words.

 

Which leads me to the first point: Bollywood films are long. Three hours seems to be about the average for the “classic” titles. Frequently the stories are so rambling that it is difficult to know how they could be shortened.

 

How to choose your Bollywood classic film? I started by consulting the many top ten lists available on the Internet, as well as the useful (but dated) guide to Bollywood by Ashok Banker (2001). It’s important to remember that lists of top ten Indian films haven’t (yet) been corrupted by PhD studies and the inexorable drift of Hollywood towards the academy. No, the best Bollywood films for many people are the worst technically.

So what are my recommendations for beginners to Bollywood? 

Sholay (1975)

If there could be one film that summed up Bollywood, this would, I think, be it. It combines melodramatic plotting, Bond-style action, a (rather limited) love interest, and finally, celebration of anarchic humour in the shape of the two lovable villains, played by Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan, who bear more than a passing resemblance to Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere in Les Valseuses (1973).

Sholay is a lovely film because the seriousness of the main plot – a policeman plotting revenge against the bandit leader who killed his family – is balanced by the charming antics of the two small-time crooks. Bachchan steals the show.

Unlikeliness rating: 5/5 (for staging a fight between a man with no arms and a gangster, and the gangster losing) 

Lagaan (2001)

Starring (and produced by) Aamir Khan, this film cleverly combines the rags to riches formula of Hollywood (think 42nd Street) with the British Empire. The film was highly successful outside India, since it presented a very simple plot of villainous British rulers against an oppressed group of villagers who at the start don’t even know how to play cricket, let alone defeat the British at it. It was fun to think that today, Indian cricket is far more lucrative and successful than the game in England.   

Amar Akhbar Anthony (1977)

Here is another three-hour blockbuster, but this time, although the entire plot is ludicrous, the film-maker (and all the cast) seem to be aware of it. There is a feeling of enjoyment throughout this film that makes it very easy on the eye for the spectator.

Three young boys are separated from their parents and brought up as Christian, Muslim and Hindu. Later in the film they are (inevitably) reunited and of course bond happily together. This demonstrates another principle of Bollywood movies: although they are almost always shown from a (perhaps rather too easily assumed) Hindu perspective, they typically take pains to stress their ecumenicalism. There is an element of tokenism in all this, but it’s better to have some mention of other ways of life than no mention at all.

Again, the film is stolen by Amitabh Bachchan, as Anthony Gonsalves, brought up as a Christian, and demonstrating his religious adherence by jumping out of an oversized Easter egg at the start of a crazy musical number.

Unlikeliness rating: 5/5 for the first 15 minutes, which covers more narrative than many full films elsewhere. And that’s just the start – the film continues at a hectic pace, with car chases, jokes, and gunfights.

Greatest moment in the film is the final scene where the three brothers collaborate using outrageous disguises to hold up a wedding. They succeed, with a lot of music and dancing en route. 

Three Idiots (2009)

Here is a much more recent Bollywood film, and it reveals a major trend in Bollywood away from the traditional genres of large-scale and very colourful Hindu wedding ceremonies, good heroes versus evil gangsters, and similar rather hackneyed themes, to more contemporary themes. Three Idiots is a good example. While ostensibly following the student careers of three pranksters, headed by Aamir Khan, looking at least 20 years younger than his age - he was 44 when the film was made, but looks very convincing as a young student.  Yet while retaining the trappings of Bollywood, there is a serious point to the film, revealing the pressure felt by students in higher education within an exam-driven culture, unsympathetic teachers, and boys-school culture of bullying and oppression of new students. The film has an excellent script, in one scene revealing just how money-focused a suitor for the heroine is. When a drink is spilled on his shoes, his first response is to tell everyone how much the shoes cost. We all know people like that.

Other indicators of a drive towards more present-day concerns include Queen (2014), based on the startling idea that a woman jilted at the altar by her would-be partner might want to go on a honeymoon by herself; and Dil Se (1998), a love story set against a background of terrorism. The terrorists are a minority group fighting for recognition and political rights – a theme covered with sensitivity and awareness, yet at the same time, Dil Se includes a magnificent musical number set on the roof of a moving train – one of the great set-pieces of Bollywood, I am told, and it looked quite astonishing, filmed before AI tools made it unnecessary for most stunts to be carried out live.

So the future looks good for Bollywood, as long as it continues to resist the government's continuing push towards an unthinking Hindu perspective for every new film. The dancing and singing have not (entirely) gone away, but the plots have moved towards a new realism and to some awareness of contemporary issues. I certainly look forward to my next encounter with the next blockbuster, including a thumping musical soundtrack, fast-moving plot, and lots of action.

Books that can be right as well as wrong

 

Peter Thonemann, writing in the TLS, makes a passionate celebration of Moses Finley, the historian: 

More than any other individual, it is Finley we have to thank for shaking ancient history out of its mid-century belletristic torpor and restoring it to a position of respectability among the historical sciences. 

More specifically, Thonemann goes on to describe Finley’s best-known book, The World of Odysseus (1954) and it is very apt (for once) that his review (of a series of essays by academics about Finley) is entitled “Homer for everyone”. When I read Finley, I felt he was not talking down to you; he is writing for a general and a learned readership at the same time.

Interestingly, Thonemann makes the case for the book’s importance not in what it says, but for Finley’s refreshing approach.  Thonemann continues: 

Whether that argument is right or wrong (it is probably wrong) does not matter very much. What gave The World of Odysseus its extraordinary impact was not Finley’s overall thesis, but his uncompromisingly sociological approach. Finley was not interested in Homer’s poetry itself, but in what Homer’s poetry took for granted: the social relations, economic structures and ethical values that underlay the fictive narrative of the Iliad and Odyssey. 

For a reader like me, who had probably read no other books on the classics before reading Finley, the appeal was not just the subject matter. It was that Finley could write, in a straightforward and uncomplicated way, with genuine enthusiasm, about his subject.

 Here is the paradox of many great books. We read books for many different reasons, but unfortunately only rarely with enthusiasm. It is always a great surprise to discover a book that  captures your imagination by a combination of learning and ability to enthuse. And all the more fascinating to discover, years after you read a book for the first time in a fever of excitement, that actually the argument was full of holes – and yet it doesn’t matter, because the author has communicated their thesis with passion. Here are a few examples:

Ernst Panofsky: he carries you along with his astonishing range of visual and literary sources, and his tone so confident that you feel whatever he is saying must be correct, and all other (modern) critics wrong;

Paul Hazard: the French historian of the Enlightenment, who seizes you with enthusiasm, for the eighteenth century, one of the least interesting periods for students of literature; 

George Dangerfield, whose The Strange Death of Liberal England grips you from the title alone. Here are the opening lines of the book: 

The right honorable Herbert Henry Asquith was enjoying a brief holiday on the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, bound for the Mediterranean on some pleasant excuse of business …

Dangerfield’s depiction of the Suffragettes seems to have aged badly; but that doesn’t detract from the novelistic quality of a dry historical narrative.

E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Classes; I cannot read the name of some East Anglian towns and villages without remembering the raw injustice of industrialisation foisted on a rural community.

These are writers who write with learning but equally with passion. What Thonemann points out is that they can be wrong in their argument, but right in their passion. Perhaps all education could consist of celebrating “wrong” books. Who cares about the argument when they could write so grippingly? 

What's wrong with a meritocracy?

 

Like many of my generation, I grew up in what I later believed was a meritocracy. I went to a grammar school, because of my score in the 11+ exam. I did not become part of the establishment. I did not study at Oxford or to Cambridge, but nonetheless I believed I had been successful because of that magic examination result. My father loaded lorries; I made my living from my pen. Am I a success or a victim of the meritocracy? 

Thinking about a meritocracy is something that occurs after watching a thought-provoking programme on TV such as The Good Place. That series at least made its watchers ponder why some people got to heaven (or The Good Place, as they call it nowadays) and others did not. 

Like many others, I used the term “meritocracy” thinking it had positive connotations. Occasionally, in my reading, I would notice a few slightly uncomfortable statements that made me reflect on a life that was not a meritocracy. I read somewhere that UK members of Parliament used not to be paid. This meant, according to one commentator, that they were doing the job for altruistic reasons, not because they simply wanted the money and were prepared to jump through hoops to get such a lucrative post. This argument did make me ponder; was anyone an MP just for the money? The scandal of MP’s expenses suggested that altruism was no longer high on the list of reasons for people becoming parliamentary representatives. 

It was a shock to discover that Michael White, in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), intended the term as a criticism, or at least as an argument for or against [all quotes are from the 1994 introduction to the book]: 

The book was, in other words, intended to present two sides of the case – the case against as well as the case for a meritocracy. It is not a simple matter and was not intended to be. 

It was even more of a surprise to learn that White was responsible for coining the term. “Meritocracy” was his term for what you had when you rejected “nepotism, bribery, or inheritance” [from White’s 1994 Preface to the book]. According to White, there is a meritocracy because “otherwise the people who exercise power are going to be undermined by self-doubt and people over whom the power is exercised become indignant and subversive because they deny that the others have any right to lord it.” 

What’s wrong with the term? First, it tends to be used by the very people who believe themselves to be members of the new elite. Not surprising if they are positive. But, argues Young:

A good society for provide sinew for revolt as well as for power. But authority cannot be humbled unless ordinary people, however much they have been rejected by the educational system, have the confidence to assert themselves against the mighty.

'The dubious appeal of ESG investing is for dupes only'

Some months ago I took a deep breath and moved my pension from a traditional pension provider into an investment fund. I wouldn’t call myself a skilled investor. I didn’t look very hard at the options, but before choosing which fund to put my money in, I did glance at the biggest investments within each of the available funds to see what where the money was going. I was shocked when the first fund I looked at had for its largest single investment British American Tobacco. I couldn’t believe it. Instead, I chose an ESG (ethical, social, and governance) fund, that invests only in companies with these goals. Was I wrong? According to the FT, I am “a dupe”. 

In an opinion piece in the FT, 24 August 2020, entitled “The dubious appeal of ESG investing is for dupes only”, Robert Armstrong gives some reasons for rejecting ESG investing. In so doing, he reveals some of the values at the core of the Financial Times.

 Why not invest in ESG funds? Because, according to Mr Armstrong:

1. They do not provide “adequate” returns
2. They provide cosmetic, rather than real change
3. Behind ESG and stakeholderism lies a dangerous idea: Shareholders’ economic interests and the social good always harmonise over the long run.

Armstrong’s argument is that since economic interests and social good do not always harmonise, there is no point in seeking for them ever to harmonise.

First, let's confirm the terminology. “Stakeholderism”, also referred to in the article as “stakeholder capitalism”, is defined in Investopedia as follows:

Stakeholder capitalism is a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. ... Supporters of stakeholder capitalism believe that serving the interests of all stakeholders, as opposed to only shareholders, is essential to the long-term success and health of any business. 

Mr Armstrong has a PhD in philosophy, so you would expect him to know how to argue a point. He is also chief editorial writer, so you can assume he offers a fairly standard FT approach. Here he argues that companies ultimately make decisions for shareholders, not stakeholders, and this commits them to making short-term policies. As he memorably states:

 it is obvious that shareholders’ and stakeholders’ interests can conflict. If they did not, there would be far fewer lay-offs announced and far fewer oil wells drilled.

For some perhaps unconscious reason he describes drilling an oil well as a necessary short-term activity for a company. I know it is a common phrase, used without thinking, but drilling an oil well is the very thing that investors in ESG companies hope will not happen. We don’t drill oil wells any more, Mr Armstrong. I would suggest the goals of ESG investors (certainly my goals) are as follows. I want companies to carry out their activities for the long term. I mean by that a sustainable activity, not one that results in the destruction of the planet (the example of Rio Tinto destroying a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal cave in Australia to expand their iron ore mine springs to mind). Perhaps Mr Armstrong regards that destruction as an understandable and necessary short-term activity that companies will do.

In any case, he states, we have “democratic action and the rule of law” to fall back on, in case companies misbehave. Although nobody lost their job at Rio Tinto after this environmental disaster, so perhaps there is no law against destroying cultural heritage. In any case, the law is usually a few years behind the latest commercial practices. Perhaps that explains why the FT regularly reports on the activities of tobacco companies and praises them when their profits increase – see, for example, “BAT beats profit forecasts as US stimulus bolsters sales” (30 July 2020). The “US stimulus” they refer to is government unemployment support during the coronavirus pandemic, which “has meant smokers have not been forced to switch to cheaper brands, smoke less or quit”. Perhaps if you follow Mr Armstrong’s principles, than companies like BAT should carry on doing what they do, and continue being one of the biggest dividend payers in the FTSE 100. You would be a dupe to think otherwise. 

Postscript: about a week later, the Chief Executive of Rio Tinto was sacked. 

The English Terraced House (Stephan Muthesius)

At the very mention of the word “house”, I start asking questions. After all, houses are quite close to our hearts – we all grew up in a house. How does a house influence the way we live? Do people in big houses and in bungalows lead different lives? One of these questions that I ask whenever I see a new housing development is, why is there a preference today for detached and semi-detached houses over terraces? In some places today (Oxford and Cambridge) terraced houses are wildly fashionable, in other places (Hartlepool, Newcastle) they are slums to be removed and all traces obliterated.

So I turned to Stephan Muthesius, The English Terraced House (1984), with great anticipation. Will it answer my questions?

Sadly not. But is it fair to condemn a book so full of detail simply because it doesn’t ask the same questions you ask? Well, I think so. Especially because this book not only fails to answer the questions I had, but often fails on its own terms. Mr Muthesius has written about 100,000 words, so he should have space to answer some at least of these questions. And one question I have is why a book on the English Terraced house uses the American term “row house” when the book doesn’t consider American examples. 

Instead, what we have, although wonderfully detailed, is rather complacent, and uncritical. For many people, the horrors of industrialisation are revealed most starkly by row upon row of grim terraced housing imposed without feeling on Welsh valleys or Peak District hills; but there is little condemnation here. 

By concentrating on the English terraced house, the author fails to compare and contrast to determine what is distinctive about English development. It would be good to understand why so 19th- and early 20th-century housing in Danish towns is mainly flats, compared with terraced housing in England. Worse, he accepts without question many general assertions about things English that have no place in a scholarly essay: 

Architects and planners from abroad still come to study the English set-up, as they have done for the past hundred years. We have those better dwellings because we seem more capable of a more judicious, small-scale kind of planning than other countries.

 Notice the imperceptible shift from the third person to “we”. Muthesius doesn’t mention that his own father was one of those “architects from abroad” who became an evangelist for the garden city in the early years of the 20th century. This is another problem with The English Terraced House. Muthesius senior wrote about “The English House”, not “The English Terraced House”. Much of what Muthesius writes about – speculative development, building controls, the ‘ideal’ family dwelling – is not restricted only to terraced housing. The debate, and the results, were about housing generally, including many different building types. In fact the garden city development at Letchworth include few if any terraced houses. But all this is rather incidental to Muthesius, who devotes much more space to small-scale changes in style within the terraced house, as if it were unconnected with other types of accommodation. For the detailed information we are grateful, but it only represents a part of the story. There is no mention of the systematic development by Oxford and Cambridge colleges that led to the creation of much of the housing of those cities. 

I grew up in a terraced house in a suburb (Orpington) that pretended to be part of the garden city movement. There was a garden in front, a garden at the rear, and a small green area between our house and the other side of the street (with a sign saying “no ball games”). The fact that it was a terraced house was not really the point; the houses could have been detached or semi-detached, but the values would have been the same.   

The terraced house was a regional phenomenon. Although it is found in other countries, it appears to be something characteristic about the England and Wales (I don’t know enough about Ireland to judge), at a particular historical period, say between 1800 and 1960. Terraced houses are still being built, but far less frequently today. 

Does the book define its terms? I can find no definition of “terraced house” in it. It is a house adjoining others, with access only from the front or from both front and rear. They often (but not always) have access from front to back via a passageway, which is typically shared between several properties. 

One key implication of the terraced house is that it was typically built to minimize cost of development by sharing some of the outer walls with neighbouring properties. In other words, the terraced house is the result of a large-scale development rather than an individual builder creating one building at a time. One implication of the terraced house, in other words, is speculation. Muthesius does include speculation in the index, but the passages on speculation are few and unsatisfying: “it would be pointless even to try and give an account of all major speculative developments”. Why? For example, the pattern of some building in North Oxford makes much more sense when it is understood that the Oxford colleges parcelling out the land provided it to speculative builders in lots that could be bid for, which accounts for the variety of buildings in some streets rather than homogeneous development.

In fact, I find Muthesius’ book maddening for three reasons:

First, its accretion of detail without providing signposts to interpret it. The book is poorly organised. Page numbers are placed on the inside of pages, near the gutter, rather than the outside where a reader can see them more easily. Colour plates are scattered unsystematically through the book, so the reader has to hunt without a signpost. The index appears to have a reference for every proper name in the book, with no indication of major or minor references.

2.   Secondly, there is a failure to quote sources for many of its statements. References, where given, are often inadequate as a source. Here are some examples, the first three all from page one, none of which has an attribution:

Most town walls had lost their importance by the 16th century, and there was no need to squeeze into a narrow area within these walls, as there was in so many continental cities.

 

The leading “estates” in the country were often the most important developers of “estates” of houses in the towns. The use of the same word in both contexts is significant and seems peculiar to the English set-up.

 

The suburb developed early in England.

 

Work on the building site was generally well paid. [p28]

Finally, the book focuses on architectural detail when the real interest of terraced housing is not so much the architecture (much of it repetitive, low quality and lacking in innovation) as the social and political environment that led to this kind of housing being built. Plus, there is a more recent angle. The author seems almost unaware of the phenomenon he was participating in himself, as a lecturer living in Norwich in the 1970s, and choosing to occupy an older terraced house rather than a more contemporary house (a decision that might even have been slightly bohemian for its time). Today, in Cambridge, some of the most desired housing is to be found in poorly-built terraced housing largely for railway workers off Mill Road near Cambridge Station. How did terraced housing become so fashionable? The book doesn’t answer this question.  

4.     There are no references in the index for “housing association” or “council house” or “social housing”, but there are over 50 index references for “brick”. This suggests a sense of priorities many of us don’t share. Could the state raise standards and provide beauty?

To be fair, the merits of the book are many. There is a wealth of detail. This is a useful book to refer to. Many of the illustrations are fascinating and documents in themselves. Muthesius is clearly very well read on 19th-century books on housing, such as J J Stevenson, House Architecture (1880), and T Webster and Mrs W Parkes, An Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy, 1844. There is no denying their contemporary validity as primary sources.

But ultimately, at the end of the book, Muthesius returns to the issue that clearly concerns him most. Can the terraced house be an art form? Not according to Ruskin, Morris, and Unwin, who “condemned millions of houses with their countless items of craftsmanship belonging to the polite vernacular - if such a formulation is permissible” [p256]. Ultimately, such a question is meaningless today, as the industrialization of building led to a mechanical standardization, which is what we for the most part live with today. As with many other aspects of this book, it is an answer to the wrong question: We don’t read a book on terraced housing to worry about if it is art. Perhaps another book might address how local authorities attempted to bring beauty to the working-class house. But not this book.

Learning more about local villages

I am a perpetual tourist, I can't help it. I can’t stop visiting places near to where I live. I live in Cambridge, and today on the bicycle I was visiting the wonderfully named Shudy Camps, a small village of some 300 people just ten or so miles from Cambridge. The village appears to be a rather odd collection of clusters of buildings, rather than just one central area. But that's about all I was able to gather from passing through it. Yet Shudy Camps is the site of a major Anglo-Saxon burial site, dating from the 7th century, with over 149 burials. One of those burials was a woman, buried in her iron bed, a remarkable discovery from an excavation in 1933, )although the same type of bed burial was also found elsewhere in Cambridgeshire just up the road at Cherry Hinton). 

How do I know all this? Not, for once, because I can find out in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia entry for Shudy Camps is just five sentences. No, I have in my hand a pamphlet – small book, more like – that tells me in remarkable detail the archaeological history of each village in this part of Cambridgeshire. It is called Archaeology of Cambridgeshire, and comprises two volumes; Shudy Camps is in volume two. I discovered these volumes being sold off by the Cambridge local studies library for £5 each volume. The first two volumes don’t cover all of Cambridgeshire, but I’ve never seen volume three, and I don’t think it was ever published.

 

For each village, Taylor gives an outline of the growth (and decline, if relevant) of the settlement, showing fascinating details about individual houses, in their historical context. For many of the villages, there is an excellent annotated map, full of information that could only be gained from someone with Taylor’s experience (she was County Archaeologist for 21 years). By comparison, the relevant entries in Pevsner’s Buildings of England are limited only to a few buildings, and lack much of the context that makes the articles so fascinating. The Victoria County History, where it exists, is full of detail, but you cannot see the wood for the trees. Next to no maps or illustrations. 

Map of Balsham, Cambridgeshire, from the Archaeology of Cambridgeshire (Taylor, 1998)

With those maps, Alison Taylor achieves something that many major UK publishers failed to do, which is to create some effective integrated publishing – the text and illustrations complementing each other on the same page. You wouldn’t think it so difficult to do until you try it. In contrast, Wikipedia for small communities tends to be anecdotal, full of trivia, and frequently praising local details (“The Holy Trinity Church [at Balsham] holds two services every Sunday and communion every Wednesday. The church also plays host to two yearly concerts by the village choir.”)

Instead, Taylor analyses. Simply by looking at census records, Taylor is able to tell a story for each village. Shudy Camps, for example, had 85 tenants recorded in 1279, which grew to 418 people in 1831, since when it has declined. Which leads to lots of questions: why the increase? Why the decline? For one village in West Cambridgeshire, Knapwell, Taylor identified that the entire axis of the village had moved to follow the movement of the main road through the village, from east-west to north-south.

Sadly, I don’t think there will ever be a third volume. The finances of local authorities have been challenged so drastically by central government cutbacks that such discretionary expenditure is unlikely ever to be possible again. I cannot imagine Reading Borough Council, for example, ever again publishing a guide to a Terry Frost exhibition at Reading Art Gallery, which took place in 2009 (the guide cost me £1 in the Gallery shop).

After reading Unsheltered

Mary Treat, the real-life 19th-century naturalist and correspondent of Darwin, one of the improbable heroes of Kingsolver's fiction title Unsheltered [photo: public domain]

Some months ago I wrote about Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Unsheltered while in the middle of reading it. Now, finally, I have finished it, and here is a revision and update to my thoughts. To be honest my views are rather confused and contradictory, so I’ve labelled the thoughts into sections: what I liked, what I didn’t like, and what I noticed (but am neutral about). Spoiler alert, I give away details of the plot below. 

What I liked 

• Both the modern and the 19th-century tales are about the loss of shelter: Greenwood Thatcher and Willa both move out of their former home.
• The fearsomely intricate plotting: the entire book combines two separate stories, one chapter for each century.
• But the cleverness doesn’t end there. My partner very cleverly pointed out the book begins and ends with a little baby. The book opens with the mother’s suicide, leaving the baby alone and, well, unsheltered. The book ends with the same baby learning to stand up. The baby represents the new generation. The baby’s mother represents the old generation: materialistic, unconcerned with the environment, and committing suicide (no future for that kind of world view). The child, under the new management of Tig, the environmentalist, will grow up with a new vision, rather than remaining with her father, the financial trader (no future in that, either, at least not in this novel).
• The incredibly artful plotting, so that each chapter title is the final word or words of the preceding chapter.
• The capture, in all its horrific detail, of sibling rivalry (between Tig and Zeke) and how appalling it is
• The incredibly naturalistic micro-detail. By this, I mean that every sentence of the book is artfully composed and full of believable detail. For example (from chapter one):

He [Landis] should see his dying little burg now, with its main drag so deserted Willa felt safe taking out her phone to check the time as she and her legally blind dog casually jaywalked. 

Why mention “legally blind”? We have been told the dog was old, but not that it could barely see. And, of course, if the characters are jaywalking, there is clearly no traffic problem. The text is constantly artful, and draining.

What is Kingsolver’s world view? She is quite like Tolstoy: everything is grist to her mill, so she brings in her reading on whatever subject is of interest. It is indicated by the three books she recommends in her acknowledgements. The contents can be seen pretty clearly from the title of one of them: The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, The Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. That sounds like it echoes Tig's world-view. Another of the recommended books is The Book that Changed America, by Randall Fuller, about the impact of Darwinian evolution on contemporary America. That would be Thatcher Greenwood. It’s rare for a fictional work to have a kind of reading list at the end.

What I was neutral about

The sheer, overwhelming proliferation of detail. Whether is it Greek swearing, or the details of changing nappies, or how to treat an elderly man with dementia, or the details of how (or how not) to get tenure in academia. 

What I didn't like

• All that detail [Yes, I know this is the same point I just made in the section above]! It was impressive but overbearing. This was a novel I could only manage in small doses, otherwise I would have drowned in all that detail.
• The heavy-handed and trite plotting. The novelist includes as an essential part of the structure  for Willa and her daughter Tig to be arguing about the environment. They are too nice to argue that much! Truth is, adult children don’t typically get involved in stand-up slanging matches with their parents, but it provides for the novelist a way of expressing the debate about the environment. Rather clumsy plotting, I think.
• Likewise, the debate about Darwinianism versus evolutionism is clumsy (as I wrote in my last post). Mary Treat is an impossibly perfect character: a infinitely calm naturalist with infinite patience. Too good to be true.
• Similarly heavy-handed is the way Zeke, the financial trader, simply disappears when he hears his baby has been appropriated by Tig, his sister. In my reading of the world, financial traders like Zeke don’t disappear quietly. Yet in this novel the transfer of the baby seems to be the accepted and unquestioned order of things at the end.
• The heart-on-sleeve sincerity that is only possible in novels, which are not the real world.
• The transfer of real-world arguments to the fictional universe, which means that Kingsolver can take the parts she likes from her reading and create a good or bad ending as she chooses. Real life isn’t like that. At the micro-level, the characters are believable, but at the macro-level, the plot just doesn’t hang together.
• I drowned in the minutiae, the sheer proliferation of detail, that left me begging for mercy like a fighter on the ropes. There was so much detail, and the novel was so naturalistic, that I wondered: can any novelist hold so much detail in their head? At the same time, I realised that because of the detail, there could be no true closure at the end of the novel. Life would flow on, and I felt the book could have finished effectively at any point in the last hundred pages. And yet the final sentence does, improbably, offer a happy ending, unlikely as it may seem.

To be honest, I’m no closer to a balanced judgement than I was three months ago. Exasperating and enthralling in equal doses.