Bibliography, September 2013

BOTM: A. Patchett, Run

T. Harford, The undercover economist
N. Hawthorne, The house of seven gables
W. Horwood, Duncton Wood*
C. Smith, The Rediscovery of man
D. Swann, Swann's way out

I meant to read Ellison's Invisible Man this month, but I moved house instead and didn't get round to it. I'm sure it's excellent. Many of the books on this list aren't. Swann's book is silly; Hawthorne and Harford slight and while I love the Duncton trilogy, it is ultimately a fantasy trilogy about moles with most of the plot drawn from the Bible. However, Run was a deserving BOTM. It's been sitting on our shelves for ages (it's Anna's, so not included in my reading all my books), and I read it solely because it was set in Boston. There are lots of things to like about it, not least the simplicity of the concept. You can certainly easily imagine the pitch for the novel. I suspect I'm currently pretty susceptible to novels about parenthood, but this was a great one, despite it's really obvious setup. Anyway, what I liked was that despite the really obvious setup, it was full of lovely byways and really well done other bits, around politics, religion and, indeed, fish (read: obsessions). Good end too.

Tax does actually have to be taxing

In case you were in any doubt about the value of the Liberals, here they come with a plastic bag tax that isn't even a plastic bag tax. I'm objecting here not on the issue of whether we should have a plastic bag tax - I don't really see why not, but that's not the point - but the muddled and dangerous thinking behind the idea of a compulsory levy that doesn't go to government (as per the system in Wales). It's awful, in principle and in practice.

I think we can quickly attend to one half of the problem. Donating the money to a good cause is optional. Therefore, if they choose supermarkets can net additional profits by keeping the money. It's an odd (and badly designed) sin tax that incentivises those charging it to sell more. We wouldn't suggest that the markup on cigarettes was kept by the tobacco companies. Luckily, public and political pressure will mean that all the big firms will pass it on to charity. That's almost worse.

And there are two big reasons why:

• It suggests charity is a better use of money than government spending. It isn't: it's not universal; it's not monitored; it's not accountable and it's not capable of the large scale planning and investment that government does. I know we do it for gift aid, but that's for additional voluntary giving. This is compulsory. This matters: once you start attacking the principle that taxes go to government for government to allocate, it's not clear why you have government at all. 
• Worse, it also suggests a direct link link between a single tax and an area of spending. That's not what taxes are for (Nota Bene, people who bang on about 'road' tax). Fiscal policy is set to do two things: raise money (this won't) and influence behaviour (this will, pace tobacco). It's muddleheaded thinking to link this to spending priorities. That's just a waste of money simultaneously leading to a downward spiral of decay for poor places and unfashionable causes. Governments must allocate spending where we need it, not based on where they raise it. 

In the end this particular element doesn't matter very much, and not just because it's a Liberal policy. It's not pointless (it will shift behaviour in probably a positive way); it's not very much money (especially if it works). It's just an unnecessary signal in the wrong direction and symptomatic of the weakness of political thought. 

Anathema.

Bibliography, August 2013

BOTM: J. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

W. Cather, O Pioneers
A. Christie, Lord Edgeware dies
A. Christie, Dumb witness
G. Greene, The Comedians
L.P. Hartley, The Boat 

J. Lees-Milne, Ancient as the Hills*

Honourable mentions all round this month. I'm loving Willa Cather at the moment, Greene was moving and excellent, while Hartley is repaying investment outside his big hit. I was also tempted to give BOTM to Lees-Milne, whose diaries remain exquisite, ten years after I read them the first time round. However, McPherson was pretty much perfect. Obviously, I don't know much about the American Civil War (or the second American civil war as I think we should call it), but it is a major - and salutary - topic. My host in the States was of the view it's far more important than the revolution in understanding the country and I think he might be right. This treatment was as engrossing as it is economical (here defined as getting it in to one volume). Buy it; read it.

Bibliography, July 2013

BOTM: G. Orwell, Coming up for air

M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination
A. Christie, A pocket full of Rye
J. Crace, Quarantine
R. Gunesekera, Reef
Y. Martel, Life of Pi*

W.S. Maugham, Of Human Bondage
G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

G. Orwell, Animal Farm*
A. Trollope, Lady Anna

I was briefly worried that I'd struggle to get through Lady Anna and thus put my 'two new Trollopes a year' plan under threat. But no - 17 Trollope novels read; estimated completion of corpus still due for 2028. Similarly, I was starting to be concerned I might not make it through Orwell this year. But no - three Orwell books read this month alone; one more novel and some essays to go. Unlike Trollope, Orwell also provided BOTM. On reputation it should be Animal Farm, but it doesn't really repay rereading (unlike Life of Pi which really did). Coming up for Air I suspect will. It's quite unlike any of his previous novels (which are essentially social commentary masquerading as fiction; whereas this is history masquerading as fiction), and it's a masterly evocation of the Edwardian, pre-war, age. It's particularly haunting given its prescience about the second war, and the end is brave, and very un-Trollopian in its approach to tying up loose ends. A great, and neglected, book.

Bibliography, June 2013

BOTM: R. Young, Electric Eden

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World*
A. Christie, Third Girl
J. Harding, Alpha Dogs
C. Louvin, Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin brothers
N. Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
S. Owen, The Rice Book
S. Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
N. Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Tricky month this for BOTM. Literary credibility would make me put down Mailer (though neither Anna nor my parents had ever heard of it); career enhancement (because I am sure my incoming Director reads this), would require me to name Alpha Dogs; and a general sense of being a la mode would say Silver. They were all good, especially Silver, but it didn't quite have enough politics in it for my liking. So BOTM is for Young's hefty tome on English Folk-rock.  It wasn't without flaws - too long (they always are), a slightly confused chronological approach in the middle sections and a lack of reference tables (I could have done with one just to keep track of the member of Fairport Convention) - but it was a great read, with a lovely turn of phrase (of which I've highlighted elsewhere my favourite). I'm off to buy the works of Mr Fox [actually this is surprisingly hard].

Bibliography, May 2013

BOTM: M. Gellhorn, The Weather in Africa

L. Beukes, Zoo City
A. Christie, Taken at the flood
J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
F.S. Fitzgerald, The Basil and Josephine stories
G. Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a death foretold
D. Lodge, Paradise News
G. Orwell, The road to Wigan Pier*
P. Theroux, Sailing through China
P.G. Wodehouse, A Pelican at Blandings

Some reputations suffered this month. The Ginger Man is a classic, but by God it's dated; I love Fitzgerald, but these stories were ropey. And though Orwell's reportage is excellent, his prescription lamentable, and though not the only criterion on which it should be judged, manages to be wrong on just about every prediction of what would happen to Britain.

That still left me a decent selection, of which Garcia Marquez was was outstanding and well worth the (very short) read, but Gellhorn's triptych the best. I generally find Africa boring, but this was a compelling sequence of stories, only notionally linked, which vividly brought it into focus. There's a nice little introduction where her writing style was discussed, and in particular her approach to fiction, which largely seems to have been writing, cutting and cutting some more. And I think that shone through - there's no spare fat on them; it makes them extraordinarily compelling reading.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Dead, Dead, Dead! (II) Historiography

I meant to do this a fortnight ago, just after my reflection on the Thatcher legacy. But even more interesting  is the context in which that debate happened. To me, the unnoticed story of the coverage was that this was really a debate about the 1970s. Because what you think of Thatcher is really about what you think about the decade before her. If you think that we were on our knees in 1979, Go Maggie; if you think we would have sorted it out given time, Go Foot (or something like that). It’s no surprise that this debate would have been made better by context. Sadly, it was done stunningly badly.

In particular, no-one knows any figures. I've lost count of the times someone appeared and lamented that she destroyed manufacturing. Helpfully, the Guardian did some nice data which tells us that industry was 34% of output in 1990. Incidentally, we also still had 4.5m council houses (20% down on 1979, but hardly a wholesale sell-off). There are plenty of figures to show Thatcherite failure (both those may be seen to be failures depending on your position), but saying untrue things makes you look stupid.

On reflection, it's not true that no-one knows any figures. A number of people know one figure. If you're smart, like Ken Livingstone has been, you bang on about it - conveniently forgetting everything else. Every time the erstwhile mayor has been on anywhere, he's talked about the fall in levels of investment. He's right, it's fallen too low, but there was other stuff going on you know. I'm reminded of when I went to Baltimore and the Americans discussed how they 'won' the War of 1812 or at least got away with a good draw, neglecting to mention that a) we burnt the White House to the ground and b) we were a bit busy with this French chap (just in case) nearer to home. Focusing on one thing to the exclusion of the rest is irrelevant really. It's like a referendum - i.e., bad, and stupid.

But although this lack of figures isn't helpful, it's not the biggest problem. That was both sides going overboard on the polemic, because they can't do counterfactuals properly. On the right, we started talking about her saving the country. The left simply ignored the state of the political and economic landscape in 1979. Neither will do. She didn't save the country. This is a nonsense which does no-one any favours. North Sea oil would still have come in; the ability of, for example, France to come through 1980s, without major market reform suggests that, even in decline, we’d have been alright. I’m pretty convinced we would have been worse off, but Callaghan wasn't a Bennite. On the other hand, it's no good saying that Britain in 1979 wasn't in real trouble; or that Labour would have fixed the unions in a nice way, or indeed at all. Industrial strife had been a characteristic of the entire preceding decade. It's preposterous to suggest that it could have been addressed easily. Similarly, privatisation: no-one really thinks the state should own BA, BT and BP, yet Labour's 1987 manifesto still advocated bringing them back into state hands. And I think would have done regardless of 1979.

I find this lack of contextual sensitivity a bit depressing. It's ahistorical. It polarises opinion around abstract positions that aren't rooted in reality. It judges people against ideal standards which no-one will ever fulfil. And it doesn't help assess the record. In this case, it means Thatcher isn't judged by the reality of the situation in 1979, but rather some kind of theoretical face-off between left and right. And that's pointless. History judges records, and since the late nineteenth century, we've tried not to judge things outside the context of their time. With Thatcher, despite it being a few decades ago, we've failed that basic test.