Bibliography, November 2023

BOTM: M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021)

J. Crace, eden (2022)
E. Crispin, Holy Disorders (1945)
J. Hamilton-Paterson, Cooking with Fernet Branca (2004)
R. Heinlein, Farmer in the sky (1950)
A. Martine, A desolation called peace (2021)
E. Mittelholzer, My bones and my flute (1951)
R. Sepetys, I must betray you (2022)
C. Spencer, Killers of the King (2014)

Almost all the novels I read were pretty good, though I think eden isn't up to Jim Crace's normal standards. Best of them was probably Mittelholzer, in part because of the distinctiveness of the background. Slightly unfairly, because I think this is a pattern, they all came second to a very done summary on a historical issue I'm interested in to read a full account of, but not enough to read several. I do wonder if I'd have put Mazower top if I'd read lots about the Greek revolution. As I haven't, this was a great book. I think he's a great historian. I would say he's undervalued, but this did win major prizes. Either way, it does a very good job of disentangling the complex background of the Greek revolution, and making clear the contingent nature of its success as well as the complexity of Balkan politics at the time. I'm very glad I read it before the Elgin marbles controversy blew up again.

Against Pelagius (probably)

Preached Remembrance Sunday (12th November) 2023, St Michael's Stockwell

Amos 5.18-24
Psalm 70
1 Thessalonians 4.13–end
Matthew 25.1–13

There is a lot of about justice in the readings today, and in context of today, today’s war, indeed any war, justice is hard to locate:

• Where was the justice on the 7th October when Hamas killed women and children.
• Where was the justice yesterday, and plenty of others, when Israeli forces bombed hospitals where children are under care.
• Where indeed is the justice when this conflict has been on the headline of every bulletin for a month, yet there are twenty other conflicts running that killed over a thousand people last year.

These positions are complex, and murky, and need a better political analysis than I am capable of, or than I am intending to give. They, and every war, are the backdrop to our thinking about justice, and about remembrance. It throws our readings into sharp relief.

And they made me think of two distinctly unbiblical quotations. The first is from the 1970s US comedy MASH, set in the Korean war, where there’s an argument about whether war is hell. No, ‘War is war, and Hell is Hell. And … war is a lot worse.’ Sinners go to Hell, but “There are no innocent bystanders in Hell, but war is chock full of them.” Divine justice is simpler than human justice. You know who the baddies are. And we long for the simplicity of divine justice: here is Paul who tells us that living and dead will receive their reward; here the Psalmist who talks of the coming of the Lord. They are waiting for divine justice.

The other quotation that came to me while I was preparing for today I first encountered in an Agatha Christie murder mystery (Hercule Poirot’s Christmas - an excellent seasonal read). It’s actually 2000 years older, about the time of Jesus: the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. That’s the justice people think they they are looking for. In the Second World War, both Churchill and Roosevelt quoted that line when promising retribution for the extermination of the Jews. Divine justice is transmuted into human vengeance.

But they are rather assuming that they, we, will be on the right side. And I think we all should be reading the book of Amos more closely. Amos is one of my favourite prophets. Not that he thinks he is a prophet. He is a shepherd – he tells people this several times in the book. He is an outsider. He stands apart from the establishment.

And he hates everyone: he hates the leadership of Israel, the pre-Christian northern Kingdom, not this one; he hates the priests; he hates the people: 'I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies …. I will not listen to the melody of your harps.' He hates the complacency of the Psalmist: 'Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light.'  The standard of divine justice may be simpler, but it's much much higher than human justice, and everyone fails.

It’s the same in the gospel. The bridesmaids who fail are not enemies. They do not face the bridegroom across a fortified border. They are part of the wedding party. They’re us. And they have failed. And they are locked out. We long for justice, but we will not be ready when it comes. Slightly annoyingly, the very next verse of Thessalonians is the famous one that says that the ‘the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night.’ It seems a missed opportunity. We should prepare, we will try to prepare, but we will not be ready. We will fail.

Where does that leave justice? And where does that leave remembrance?

Firstly, this doesn’t negate the striving. There are bridesmaids with flasks of oil. People should and will do the right thing. The Nazis were wrong. We should remember those who faced war and didn’t come back, and those who did and were marked by it forever. Every year, every news headline, I am conscious of my vast privilege of living away from war for my whole life – not the case for everyone here. I honour that. We should not be putting our judgement aside.

But we should also remember the limits of human justice and human action. We should think of those who were just in the wrong place, which at times is everyone. The fourth century heretic Pelagius is felt to have argued that humanity has autonomy enough to choose not to sin. Amos would say otherwise. When we think of war, we must recognise that human justice, however effective, has its limits. People cannot do the right thing all the time. We are remembering people who tried, not people who were perfect. People will fail.

Amos believes in justice. He believes it’s going to come. He just doesn’t think we’re going to pass. But listen to how he describes it: let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. He does not reach for the metaphor of the refiner’s fire – that’s Malachi – but water. Justice is broad, not narrow, replenished, not spent, cleansing, not destructive, and life giving, not deadly. It is not just retribution, but bounty.

So, knowing we will fall short. But also knowing that righteousness will come. We remember. And we hope for the ever-flowing stream of the love of God.

Bibliography, October 2023

BOTM: P. Lynch, Prophet Song (2023)

R. Adams, Trumpets of war (1987)
S. Bernstein, Study for Obedience (2023)

J. Escoffery, If I Survive You (2023)
P. Harding, This Other Eden (2023)
C. Maroo, Western Lane (2023)
P. Murray, The Bee Sting (2023)

J. Shapiro, 1606: the year of Lear (2015)

T. Shaw, The world of Escoffier (1994)

James Shapiro does not repeat the trick in his 1606 Shakespeare book that he did with his superlative one on 1599, but it is still good. I found it disjointed, though very good sections. Elsewhere, mostly Booker nominees, and it's a very frustrating list this year. All Booker debuts and that's probably unwise. Escoffery and especially Murray were just crying out for better endings and structure. In Paul Murray's case, it would have been better if he had just chopped the last quarter off the book entirely. Lynch's book ended well, though I don't think that's the best thing about it. It does require a leap of faith: it's st in an Ireland sliding into dictatorship and civil war, and it does precisely zero work on establishing how that happens. If you just buy that up front, it's a visceral and brutal exploration of how that is experienced and felt. It is not pleasant: it made my skin crawl. It's why I thought it was best. Its well written too.

If I've done the maths right, I've just tipped over the half way mark for all novels ever nominated for the Booker. 164 read; 163 to go. 2023 Booker ranking:

1. Lynch
2. Harding
3. Maroo
4. Escoffery
5. Bernstein
6. Murray

Bibliography, September 2023

BOTM: S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013)

L. Bracket, Shadow over Mars (1944)
N. Blake [C. Day-Lewis], Thou shell of death (1936)
F. Leiber, Conjure Wife (1943)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Secret lives and other stories (1975)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Devil on the cross (1980. English version 1982)
M. Pye, Antwerp (2021)

R.A. Salvatore, Streams of silver (1989)*
R.A. Salvatore, The Halfling's Gem (1990)*
T. Spector, Spoon-fed (2020)

This is what happens when you slightly let yourself succumb to temptation. I wouldn't say that any of the five genre novels I read were terrible, but only Conjure Wife could be said to be of real value. I enjoyed them all though, even if Salvatore's middle Icewind Dale novel has laboured plotting. It shares that defect with almost all the rest of my reading. I'm really liking Ngũgĩ, and his books are very well written, but Devil on the cross could do with digesting its Marxism (the short stories are better).

Even Alexievich's book, though I do think it is the best of the lot, and I think is essentially the one she won the Nobel for, suffers from uncertain narrative flow. Some of its passages are also just a little too long for me. These are niggles though, it is a masterpiece (again) and is a real testament to the historian's ear for source material allied to the ability to edit it to allow those voices to become something bigger. If it doesn't have the precision and pace of The unwomanly face of war, that's an impossibly high bar, and it's still enormously moving, humanising and powerful. 

Bibliography, August 2023

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005)

N. Cardus, Autobiography (1947)

I. Colegate, The Shooting Party (1980)
E. Donoghue, Room (2010)
P. Godfrey-Smith, Other minds (2017)
T. Judt, Postwar (2005)

A. Kwei Armah, The beautyful ones are not yet born (1968)
A. Levy, The long song (2010)
T. McCarthy, C (2010)

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013)

I. Pears, The instance of the fingerpost (1998)

This was a great month. Three standout books for me and only one duffer (Tom McCarthy's 2010 Booker nominee isn't as bad as his 2015 nominee, but it is bad). Vastly better, and shamefully not nominated at the time, was The shooting party, a finely etched gem of a book littered with brilliant quotations. It may be my favourite novel of the year so far. It was also better than Tony Judt's great book on post war Britain, which wore its many pages lightly, and held the narrative and the analysis very well till about the mid 1990s, where recency trumped perspective. It's a triumph, though I do wish I had read it on publication. The world has changed.

Best of the lot, and rightly garlanded with the prizes, was, in its conception, a book that also emphasises the importance of time and place. Shapiro is marshalling a lot of academic work by others, and I don't know it well enough to tell where, but he is doing it brilliantly. The focus on a year is inspired and allows those of us not deep in the literary scholarship to anchor our understanding of what drives some of those key plays. This reading of Julius Caesar in the light of the wars of religion will stay with me forever. Despite what may seem from outside to be a narrow focus, this is in fact a hugely accessible book, which says its many things lightly and fluently. It's a pleasure to read.

As a result of this month's reading, I have now read the full 2010 Booker shortlist. It wasn't great. My ranking below, though 3 and 4 were much of a muchness:

1. Donoghue, Room
2. Galgut, In a strange room
3. Levy, The long song
4. Jacobson, The Finckler question 
5. Carey, Parrot and Oliver in America
6. McCarthy, C

Bibliography, July 2023

BOTM: C.T. Powers, In the memory of the forest (1997)

F. Butler - Gallie, Touching cloth (2023)
J. Cocker, Good pop, bad pop (2022)
J. Duindam, Dynasties: a global history of power 1300-1800 (2015)
P.J. Farmer, The alley god (1970)
C. Jarman, River Kings (2021)
L. Kennedy, Trespasses (2022)
A. Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022)
R.A. Salvatore, The crystal shard (1988)
T. Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)

This was not a great month. Many of them were mediocre to poor, though I did find Duindam's survey of dynastic power interesting, if slightly slow going sometimes. At least part of that is around expectations. There is some pompous reviewing of Salvatore's debut novel, the one that launched a thousand sequels. It's obviously far from the best written novel, but it does its job just fine. The mythos holds together, the setting is compelling, the characters have little nuance, but they occupy their place in the plot very well, and it gallops long, and lots of things sound really cool. Thoroughly enjoyable. Adam Rutherford's book, which has much better prose, drove me into an absolute fury with its underlying smugness and lack of precision and honesty. Far from a recommendation.

Powers does all the right things well. It's billed as centring on a murder. It isn't in any way (though there is a murder at the start). It's actually a fascinating novel about a landscape we all know little about, even - as the book is at pains to say - many of the people who live there. We're really bad at the complexity of Eastern European history, and this is a very welcome look at how communities thought and didn't think about their vanished Jewish populations. It's well done, deep and expansively written, and nowhere near as dry as I'm making it sound. It's a resounding success as a novel

Infuriating books: a case study

I am very relaxed about bad books. Some books are bad in ways that are entirely expected. There is no pleasure or value in pointing that out. Some bad books can even be fun. Most are just boring. To be read, thrown our and no longer thought about. 

However, there are two kinds of book that infuriate me and force me to think about them: books that are overpraised despite being bad (this doesn't happen very often - reviewers are usually pretty good at this); and bad books that could have been good books if authors had worked harder. 

Combined, those books end up taking up disproportionate amounts of my thinking, often because I feel so let down by what I actually read. Control, Adam Rutherford's book about eugenics, is one of those books. Here is everything I didn't like about it: 

Structurally, the book is a short history, followed by a short summary of where we are now. Both had good parts, both were bad. 

Part I
This is the better section. Scientists don't automatically make decent historians (though more so than the reverse), but he's done the work, and writes well. It's a good canter through the cast, though I think it would have benefited from a better chronology and a wider geographical scope. As acknowledged, it's US, UK and Germany only. I think that's an issue. There were other major racists. But it's not major. However, it is peppered with historical asides that don't really add anything and are sloppy. Is it true that 'The powerful really only seek one thing, and that is to maintain their power.'? (p.59) I don't think so, though plenty do. It's certainly not true to assert glibly 'Hitler was a man of his time, and was legitimately appointed to the position of German Chancellor in 1933.' (p.141, my italics) ignoring the role of paramilitaries in early 1930s Germany, and also the obvious areas in which Hitler was an outlier.

These aren't needed, but also stand in juxtaposition to his dismissal of any erroneous position as 'pseudoscience.' Sometimes this is justified: I enjoyed his dismissal of the Nordic Theory (northern European are best etc), and its thesis that Nordic men are actually the progenitors of the ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians. But, for example, it wasn't an unreasonable hypothesis that there would be single genes for things it turns out there aren't, it's just wrong. All wrong science isn't pseudoscience. Indeed, I'm not even sure eugenics is based on this. Towards the end, Rutherford writes: 'Eugenics is a busted flush, a pseudoscience that cannot deliver on its promise. Maybe that will change in time, as we unpick our genomes ever more precisely.' If the issue is simply that the current science won't bear the weight that this put on it, that's important to know, but hardly fundamentally false.

I found this particularly true given the shortness of the period under discussion. The whole debate happens over pretty much one lifetime. This remains a very 

Part 2

However, my main reservations are for the moral and ethical judgements that permeate the whole book, but especially the current state of play. Rutherford has the standard scientist's confidence about their ability to make judgements. He clearly feels that he and his colleagues should be trusted to make the fine judgements about ethics. Here he is:

'Ethical discussions about research into human embryos and genetics occur in every lab as standard, and are a prerequisite for the work to take place. In my experience, these essential and thoughtful processes are largely unaffected by the intellectual posturing of academics who aren’t really involved, but enjoy a scrap on social media.' (p.200)

I am uncertain if all scientist's processes are unaffected by other academics' work, but in any case, he doesn't rely on scientists anyway. As is clear in the opening of the book, rogue scientists, even Chinese ones, are constrained by the legal framework. He is presumably happy with that framework, though it's hard to see how the law differs in kind if not content from 'Pseudo-philosophical articles' or debates that are 'just semantic arguments about definitions of words.' 

In fact, much of the book is a demonstration that definitions of words do - in fact - matter. Perhaps surprisingly, there isn't an argued definition of eugenics in the book at all. I infer from the argument, and the title, that he believes it is national level coercion and includes both euthanasia, abortion (on such grounds) and sterilisation, 'sculpt[ing] society through selective breeding' (p.13). He is clear though on what it's not: it's most definitely not parental choice terminations of babies with Downs Syndrome, that's fine. Now, I think you probably can a distinction around this, but is going to take work - work that he doesn't put in. It's no good saying 'the decision to terminate a pregnancy because of a pre-natal diagnosis is something that I believe is an absolute personal choice and should be an unstigmatised right for women and parents. To do so is not eugenics.' Personal choice isn't absolute. Everyone knows this. Financial incentives for sterilisations are bad, apparently, but I don't think there's an hard economic distinction between society paying you to be sterilised and not paying for enhanced care and support needed for children with severe conditions. If we invested more resources to care for Downs babies and adults, I'm confident that would reduce the termination rate. I don't have a view on whether we should, but either both are coercion, or neither are. 

If there, he's trying to put a line where I don't believe there is one, he's guilty of an extraordinary lack of sophistication elsewhere by omitting lines where there should be lines. Discussing enforced sterilisation, he notes that the Cheyenne 'claims ... sterilisation, sometimes without their knowledge or understanding, had been performed on more than a quarter of Native American women of child-bearing age. How is that different from the actions of the Nazis? Why is that not attempted genocide?' (p.154) Here, we have a claim of sterilisation of a quarter of a population, sometimes without proper consent. That's a lot of conditional words, but even if they are taken maximally, it simply doesn't measure up to enforced euthanasia of whole populations. It's an obscene comparison. I think it's made in good faith, in revulsion at the actions against the Cheyenne, and a geneticists perspective that draws no distinction between sterilisation or murder - their impact on populations in the long term being identical. But all bad things are not the same, and it's wrong. This inability to do distinction properly hampers the book.

Finally, I think he gets into a mess about heritability. As this is clear on, eugenics was conceived of based on as a theory of genetic determinism. Historical eugenicists believed that they could breed better humans. Rutherford is at pains to show how misguided this is and how much of heritability is environmental. I think he's very good on pointing out the weirdness of putting faith in high risk, high cost, genetic solutions when we have well evidenced social interventions that would work better. However, I think he opens the door without even noticing to a eugenics-adjacent position on heritability, which deserves discussion. It's in several places, for example 'alcohol use disorder or alcohol dependency are contemporary and more precise diagnoses, and we know that they are heritable, because everything is.' (p.174) But if it's heritable, then the cause of that heritability doesn't really seem to me to matter if you are trying to 'sculpt society'. If disease selected abortion is OK - 'they are medical techniques specifically conceived and designed for the alleviation of suffering in individuals.' - then why is behavioural abortion not OK. Why should we condemn children to be born into terrible circumstances if it is behavioural, when we don't if it is disease related? Is it eugenics to sterilise those people who would be terrible parents, who either lack capacity to consent or are unable to discharge basic parental obligation? If the distinction is choice, then the genetics is irrelevant. These are complex issues, which I am sure much has been written on. I don't pretend to have expertise in it, but it needs to be addressed here. 

I did think this last criticism was perhaps unfair. That's policy, not eugenics, but then I read this section at the end, 'If we truly wanted to reduce the sum total of human suffering then we should eradicate the powerful, for wars are fought by people but started by leaders.' (p.251) Leaving aside the quality of this argument, which is low, this is a political book. You have to so some of the political work.

Overall, this is such a missed opportunity; It's an relevant topic. The core content about the science and the scientists is well explained and well discussed. I wanted so much more. It is fatally undermined by lack of definitional work, unnecessary overreach and unexamined political positions that are central to the book as written. It's a bad book.