Bibliography, November 2016

BOTM: H. Jeffreys, Empire of Booze (2016)

J. Bloodworth, The myth of meritocracy (2016)
D. Brown, The American West (1994)
J. Crace, The Pesthouse (2007)
A. Huxley, Antic Hay (1923)
D. Levy, Hot Milk (2016)

I was surprised by most of this list. Levy, rounding off the Booker shortlist, was surprisingly good - especially as the synopsis sounded dire. Huxley, Bloodworth and Brown all disappointed. Jim Crace didn't, but he never does.

There were no surprises around Book of the Month. I came across Henry Jeffreys in Slightly Foxed (which is also brilliant) some years ago, and he's been a great discovery, not least because he comes from my home town. More importantly, he has an excellent, accessible and interesting drinks blog. Now, he's written an amazing book, which I helped fund - in somewhat bizarre company. Now, given this, and the fact it's about two of my favourite things, Empire and Booze, I was bound to like it. But it is also excellently written, fascinating, practical, and makes good use of amusing footnotes. What more could anyone ask for?

In other news, my definitive Booker ranking this year

1. Beatty
2. Thien
3. Levy
4. Moshfegh
5. Macrae Burnet
6. Szalay

Bibliography, October 2016

BOTM: P. Beatty, The Sellout

G. Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project
O. Moshfegh, Eileen
D. Szalay, All That Man Is
M. Thien. Do Not Say We Have Nothing

On my third, equally doomed, attempt to get through the Booker shortlist before it's announced, I managed three of them, though I did pick the winner. I read Eileen and the Szalay afterwards and they definitely did not change my mind - indeed I'm not sure what Szalay is doing on the list at all. Like the bookmakers, I thought the jury would choose Thien, and it was good - I was particularly struck by the obvious but important insight around how those in the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution were the parents of the 1989 protesters.

Beatty has his own kind of history to tell, and tells it rather brilliantly - but it's really about how we think about race now, or rather specifically how Americans think about race. It's well done, outrageous, and very funny. I've heard him say he doesn't want it to be labelled as a satire and it is hard book to pin down in a genre, though it is definitely at least partly a satire. I'd call it a somewhat madcap fantasy about the complexity of racial politics. That said, I certainly wouldn't want to be the person doing the press lines on the plot.

Bibliography, September 2016

BOTM: E.L.Carr, A month in the country

R. Adams, The coming of the Horseclans
R. Adams, Sword of the Horseclans
R. Adams, Revenge of the Horseclans
R. Adams, A cat of silvery hue
J. Smiley, A thousand acres
S. Pinker, the better angels of our nature

So, I read some classic (by which I just mean old) fantasy novels last month after I found them in Hay on Wye. They were splendid, especially given this intro:

However, it must be confessed everything else was actually better. I thought I was going to give this to Pinker which is well written and (for the first two thirds) and excellent history of the decline of violence, but a) the last section is about psychology and I lost a little bit of interest and b) having read it, I'm increasingly concerned about the robustness of some of the data. Instead, Carr's book, a sixth of the size, is BOTM. It's perfectly formed, charming and brimming with gentle mischief and melancholy. And it's got churches and religious art in it. I loved it.

Bibliography, August 2016

BOTM: P. Frankopan, The Silk Roads

K. Amis, The Riverside Villas murder
J. Littell, The Kindly Ones
M. Wickstead, Aid and Development

It took me two months to read Jonathan Littell's work on the Holocaust. Last month, I said it was brilliant, but harrowing. Having finally finished it, I'd qualify that. The end (and especially the bit before the end) is very weak. However, the book as whole is also deeply flawed. In some ways it is brilliant,  and it's one of the best treatments of the bureaucratic workings of the Nazi state and the Holocaust I've read. It really drives home the nature of how the task sucked in so many otherwise decent enough people; and in the first section, which is the best, it outlines what it did to them. But in the end, the book is hamstrung by the main character. He is sympathetic - given he is a murderer and a mass murderer, this is impressive - but he's also psychologically damaged before the action even begins. This means not only does the book fail to address the question that Littell posed himself - what would someone like me have done in Nazi Germany - but it also bloats the book with a fantastical subplot that adds little. A better book would have excised that entire element, which would have made it better and happily shorter.

So I've given, not without reservations, book of the month to Frankopan's on Central Asia and the Near East. I've issues with this too. It's a worthwhile book and is jam-packed with gems, but it suffers from two major issues. Firstly, I don't think it holds focus well enough in the middle, where we flit too rapidly from the ostensible subject of the book to the West. In a work seeking to correct western centric views of history, there's just too much on the European age of discovery rather than its impact on the aforementioned Silk Roads and this leads to real compression; Timur gets a single page. Secondly, and surprisingly given Peter's background (he taught me middle Byzantine history briefly), it has what might be termed 'Ferguson syndrome' where the lure of modern politics gets in the way of the historical analysis. That means that it's got too much modern in - we get to 1900 with 40% of the book to go. And some of it is too obviously the author's political view without enough backup: for example, he's keen to emphasise the Taleban's insistence in the 1990s that they wouldn't shelter Bin Laden if he committed terrorist acts, but no comment on their volte-face in the aftermath of 2001 two pages later. This is a shame ass the historical perspective he brings to the twentieth century is actually fascinating, just a) overlong and b) too partisan. 

I'd read both of these, but with caution.

Roots

I listened this to promising, but actually pretty bad, summary of women in Country music last week. It was poor for a number of reasons, not least because the presenter couldn't bring herself to call it Country, but instead referred to roots and Americana (I hate it when they do that), but it was mostly disappointing because it couldn't do its history properly. I find this is often the case when niche genres are discussed in music (though pop and rock bands tend to receive absurdly detailed excavations of their backgrounds and influences). This may be a small problem in genres I don't listen to, but it's a disaster for Country. There are few more self-referential and historically orientated genres of popular music. In this case, there were a few minor infelicities - there's no need to labour a plot precis of Ode to Billie Joe - and one big one: the airbrushing of the roots of Country music from a programme notionally about roots. 

Specifically, when introducing with one of Loretta Lynn's many great songs for women, the presenter made the big claim that she is 'arguably the cornerstone for all women of roots and Americana.' This is nonsense (and I love Loretta Lynn) and ignores the pre-1960 Country tradition. Where are Sara and Maybelle Carter? Where, most pertinently, is Kitty Wells? Her It wasn't God who made Honky Tonk angels was the first song by a solo woman to top the charts, in 1952. Here she is:

That song is a riposte to Hank Thompson's The wild side of life. By pure coincidence, in the same week, Bob Harris played them both. I've not listened to them together before and it's extraordinary, making a very good song into a powerful cultural statement. Bob Harris knows his history, most people don't. They should, and until they do, we definitely shouldn't give them a radio show about roots. Anathema.

The Alteration (a historical prosopography)

I reread The Alteration a couple of months ago (I love The Alteration). A friend who read it at the same time noted the sheer wealth of historical allusion. I thought there would be a list somewhere, but couldn't find it, though wikipedia is a decent crib for some of it. So I made my own. For those who have not read the Alteration, 1) read The Alteration, 2) it's an alternative history where the divergence from ours comes in the Reformation: Luther, Calvin and Thomas More are successively Pope ('The three Northern Popes') and Arthur, Henry VIII's (here, Henry the Abominable) elder brother has a son (Stephen II) who is restored to the throne by Catholic forces. Britain is therefore catholic and the church is triumphant. As a result, almost every historical figure (unless they are American) has been pressed into the service of the church, usually in painting one of them or composing for it. Amis spends much of his time amusing himself by having real figures pop up in unlikely places.

So here goes. Page references from the Vintage Classics edition and refer to their first appearance only.

Contemporary figures - it's set in 1976 (*denotes a any reference that's less than obvious):

• A.J. Ayer, Professor of dogmatic theology (119)
• Tony Benn, as 'Lord Stansgate', head of the Holy Office in England (122)
• Beria, Monsignor (8) 
• Enrico Berlinguer, Cardinal and chief of staff to Pope John XXIV (109) 
• Anthony Burgess, still a novelist, but who has met an unspecified bad end by the 70s (194) 
• Francis Crick, a disastrous scientist (194)
• Philip K. Dick, who Amis has great fun with, making him an alternative history writer, whose Man in the high castle outlines 'our'  history  - or something close to it (25)
• Ian Fleming*, as author of the Father Bond novels - with a nod to Chesterton (78)
• [Paul] Foot, a policeman for the church, not a crusading journalist (126) 
• Harry Harrison*, I think this is who is meant as the engineer who builds the channel tunnel, as an homage to his SF story on the issue (105)
• Himmler, Monsignor (8)
• Ernest Lough, singer, presented as the case for castration - his career faltered once his voice broke (50)
• Paulo Maserati*, the Papal 'inventor general' [There's no useful contemporary Maserati, but the link is clear] (194)
• [Corin] Redgrave, a policeman for the church (126)
• Keith Roberts, as another alternative history author - I'm told there's complicated reference about dancing, Galliard here doing duty for the real life Pavane. (132)
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Monsignor and Jesuit (though I've not actually found the reference)
• Tolkien*, or at least an author of Lord of the Chalices, (78)
• Harold Wilson*, reinvented as Pope John XXIV (109)
• John Wyndham*, as J.B. Harris - Wyndham's real name - author of The orc awakes (100)
• Fritz Wunderlich*, the castrato Federicus Mirabilis (9)
• Wolfgang Windgassen*,the castrato Lupigradus Viaventosa (9)

Historical references:

• Benedict Arnold, American leader. So significant, he gets the capital named after him (164)
• John Bacon, sculptor (16)
• William Bartholomew*, called Bartley here, but the writer of Hear my prayer (50)
• Beethoven, here dying young (28)
• Blake, though only as a painter of frescoes (8)
• Brunel, who Amis credits with designing the highest cathedral spires of the world (10)
• George Butterworth (201)
• Jefferson Davis, ambassador to England (63)
• Rudolf Diesel, whose eponymous invention is ubiquitous as electrical ignition is discouraged (13)
• Epstein, Anglicised to Epstone here, but still a sculptor (8)
• Gainsborough (7)
• Richard Grenville, knight and sailor, who fights at Lepanto, with not against the Spanish (109)
• Kenneth Grahame*, assuming that's what's meant by The Wind in the Cloisters (77).
• Hockney, referred to, maliciously, as 'excessively traditionalist, almost archaizing' painter (8)
• Holman Hunt, painter (8)
• Willem de Kooning, painter (78)
• Rudyard Kipling, the First citizen of 'New England' 1914-18 (56)
• Thomas Kyd, whose version of Hamlet is famous (14)  
• Labelye, bridge builder, who builds here the London bridge he never did in reality (173)
• Michelangelo*, here 'Boonarotty', ie.Buonarroti, who kills himself when Luther, as pope, stops the construction of St Peter's (111)
• William Morris (8)
• Mozart, given both extra years and more compositions (8)
• Nelson, here famous for defeating the Turks at Lipari (200)
• Purcell, seemingly unaffected: there's a Dido and Aeneas here too (12)
• Edgar Allen Poe, a New England General (177)
• Satie*, though a piano maker rather than pianist (61)
• Schumann composer (30)
• Shakespeare, famous only in America, banned in England (152)
• Percy Shelley, who survived longer and led an expedition that burnt down the Vatican in 1853, but dismissed as a 'minor versifier' (199)
• Sopwith, engineer, but a builder of a channel bridge rather than aeroplanes (105)
• Jonathan Swift*, only a book Saint Lemuel's Travels (77)
• Zachary Taylor, one imagines still American President, certainly important enough to get a major New York bridge named after him (164)
• Tintoretto, the painter of the victory at Lepanto in Amis' and the real world (109)
• Turner, who paints a ceiling devoted to the restoration of Catholicism in England (7)
• Velluti, the most famous castrato in this version of history, as in ours (34)
• Weber, composer  (30)
• Wagner, composer (201)
• James McNeill Whistler, though we only know he had airship named for him  (177)
• Wren, architect (7)
• Yamamoto* (maybe), in Amis' world he's an architect. He's most likely the same as the real commander in chief of the Japanese navy (155)

There are a few others who may be specific individuals (e.g., Joshua Pellow, the 'archpresbyter'), but I think they are pure inventions. There are also references to places which suggest different roles for the individuals concerned, all in the US - Cranmeria, Hussville and Wyclif city - but not enough to go on. 

What have I missed?

Bibliography, July 2016

BOTM: P.K. Dick, Flow my tears, the policeman said*

E.M. Brent - Dyer, Eustacia goes to the Chalet School*
G. Burrows, Men can do it

It's been a bad month. I'm still reading the book I started the month on, and I'm not even half way through. It's brilliant, just harrowing (and very long). In between, I read a couple of lighter things. They were fine - Dick was the best.