Snow by Orhan Pamuk

When I read Snow by Orhan Pamuk a second time, I will pay more attention to its central character, nicknamed Ka. He is a poet, a Turkish émigré, fresh from Germany. He’s also a journalist and is travelling to Kars, a town in north-eastern Turkey (can the similarity of name be mere coincidence?) to investigate a series of crimes. It’s the detail of these crimes that give the book its poignancy, tension and fascination. 

Girls have committed suicide. These are crimes. In Islam suicide is a sin, eternally damning. So what drove apparently happy, conventional, balanced young women to take their own lives? On the surface there are some obvious candidates for the answer. Turkey’s secular though military state requires women not to wear a scarf, while their religion demands it. Could it be this political and cultural tension that has provoked these women, out of shame, to end their lives?

My review will not be a plot-spoiler. In the case of Snow, that would also be hard, because it’s the issues and contexts that matter, not the events. Suffice it to say that while in Kars, Ka meets many people who can offer opinion and proffer hypothesis on the town’s recent history. There’s a newspaper owner who, in order to promote circulation, predicts the news. There’s an old-fashioned communist, a one-time agitator, whose current activities appear to be thoroughly questionable. There’s a travelling theatre group who will play great roles in the plot. There’s an underground Islamist on the run. He’s called Blue, surely a reference to themes raised in My Name Is Red. Political associations of colour might be naïve, but might also be a tad revealing. There’s military personnel, policemen, secret agents, an occasional murderer. There’s also snow, and enough of it to cut off the town and prevent outside knowledge of a shooting coup where interests vie for control.

And if this were not enough, there’s a hotel owner with two daughters of stunning beauty. One, İpik, was once the apple of Ka’s desire. His return promises a long-deferred bite of forbidden fruit. But then there’s politics, history, culture, religion, rules, regulations, laws, even personal preferences that can get in the way. Snow is a complex novel whose density needs to be fully entered for a reader to share its preoccupations. It’s an intense experience, a miasma of contradictions, political, cultural, religious, the whole gamut. 

The only problem with Snow, in my opinion, is its central character, Ka. This is why next time I must be more careful to assess his sincerity. Unlike most poets of any worth, he writes from revelation, not from hard work, etching out a word at a time. For me, this does not seem genuine. But then, as the book unfolds, the reader realises that these are merely Orhan Pamuk’s own recollections of Ka, described from afar. Some years later, he has tracked the poet down to his apartment in Germany, soon after he has been murdered by an anonymous assassin. Now I wonder who that might have been? As ever in Orhan Pamuk’s work, Snow is deeply enmeshed within the characteristics and contradictions of Turkish culture and society.

Equally, as we would expect from Orhan Pamuk, it allows the Western reader (politically and culturally Western, not geographically) to appreciate how Western values, so rarely questioned on the inside of the argument, can be perceived as essentially imperial, colonial and perhaps oppressive. If you like your reading to provoke thought, please do read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Like father, like son… This could be the motto that underpins Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. This might be a rather flippant way of summarising a novel approaching 250,000 words, and yes, there is much more than this in the Egyptian Nobel Prize Winner’s book. But it should be said at the outset that it is family relationships that dominate the book. 

The work has a broad canvas, but its substance is generally writ small, often within the walls of the family home. Palace Walk is the first of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, a series that spans that spans Egypt’s twentieth century. It features the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al Jawad, a shopkeeper. Strangely, there seems to be little that is seen from his point of view, except of course that which he demands. Throughout he remains somewhat aloof, even inscrutable. I would not want to claim this to be a deliberate portrayal of paternal power. But whatever the case, planned or implied, these sketches of family relations are wonderfully credible as well as enlightening.

By contrast, we see much through the eyes of Amina, Ahmad’s long-suffering wife, who appears to tolerate her husband’s nightly excesses without either question or judgment. She even acts independently, just once, and is made to pay for it. There are two daughters, Khadija and Aisha. Khadija, the elder, has unfortunately inherited her father’s looks. Aisha, by contrast, is known for her beauty, and there is much discussion of potential husbands, associated with much anguish on the subject of who should marry first.

The sons are very different characters, but perhaps they each display different aspects of their father. The older ones of course develop an eye for the local talent and this leads to unexpected encounters with their father in unfamiliar surroundings in which he displays talents that no-one in the family suspected he had. The other talents on show are very much anticipated. When the youngest son befriends members of the British garrison in Cairo at the end of World War One, he is treated very much as a clown, a figure of fun, a role he seems to enjoy. This is clearly not dissimilar to the way the British appear to want to treat the country, not to mention the hated Australians.

Later, when this particular generation marches to demand political representation and power, it is British bullets that deny all rights. Like father, like son, the issues go round and round. Does anything change? If the reader approaches palace Walk as if it were a nineteenth century novel, its style, length and content will provide great enjoyment and insight. But don’t expect in this great work overt philosophy, analysis or comment. Egypt as described, especially within this family, was just not that sort of place.

Ladder Of Years by Anne Tyler

Delia, short for Cordelia, is the central character of Anne Tyler’s Ladder Of Years. As usual for Anne Tyler, Delia is a Baltimore resident, a wife, a mother and probably, at least from the outside, a pillar of strength and dependability in both family and community. The children are growing up. Which children don’t? Bet then it’s how they grow up that matters, isn’t it? 

Sam, the husband, is doing moderately well. Moderate seems to be the word, as far as Sam is concerned. He’s hardly made a success of the business he inherited from Delia’s father, but the family survives to inhabit a middle class, rather liberal niche in the common psyche. As Ladder Of Years opens, the family is holidaying by the sea and Delia is dressed, mentally, for the beach. And then, without warning, even to herself, she takes off. Just like that, whatever “that” might be.

She absconds. Goes missing. Disappears. There’s suspicion of drowning. A report appears in a Baltimore paper. The family fears she has come to harm. But no, she hasn’t. In fact, still dressed for the beach she is heading off to a place she doesn’t know with a stranger. It’s no particular stranger, just a stranger. Quite soon, and with new clothes, a new address and a changed life, Delia takes on a new identity. 

Though Baltimore wife and mother still lives in her head, she’s become a new Delia, single, independent and employed. In this new guise, she inter-reacts with her new community and gradually becomes part of it. Why did she leave the apparent safety, security and responsibility of her family? Not even she can answer. What slowly begins to emerge, however, is that Delia’s choice of opting out becomes increasingly one of opting in. 

By degree the characters in her new life start to become more demanding. Without needing to state everything explicitly, they start to assume Delia’s support and claim reliance upon her. She, of course, responds and finds that she now has two levels of responsibility created out of the demands of her new life and continued contact with her family. Interestingly, Delia, this pillar of support, never feels either at home or secure in either role. 

 And so it is via this scenario of identity change, relationships of dependency, insecure self-image, alongside a fixation of demand that Anne Tyler relates how Delia’s life unfolds. Delia notices a lot about people, but she’s no great analyst. Surely she’s the type to apologise before expressing an opinion, but would harbour unspoken bigotries like the rest of us. At the start of the book she seems confused. By the end, a few more rungs along the ladder of life, she apparently remains so. Perhaps the ladder is horizontal … and with irregular spacing… But then Delia has little time to consider such arcane ideas. After all, there are things to do, people to talk to, arrangements to be made, jobs to be done…

The Reader by Bernard Schlink

In his novel The Reader Bernard Schlink provides us with a pair of strong characters. As we get to know them, we find a challenge for ourselves. How would we have reacted in those circumstances? What would we have done? The challenge surfaces many times in the book and, by the end, the reader is probably confused by conflicting answers.

A review should not reveal plot. In the case of The Reader, this makes writing a review very hard, since what happens to these characters is the whole basis of the book. In some ways the relationship between them has to be interpreted and reinterpreted through a prism of what we know about them, and this should not be revealed. So what follows is mere outline. 

We first meet Michael Berg in his mid-teens. He’s a frail young man, rather disaffected and, as a result of missed time at school, an under-achiever. As the story progresses, he finds new energy and direction, completes a university degree, embarks upon a successful career and the usual muddled personal life. Michael, however, always wants to reflect, to analyse responses. At first glance Hanna is a rather different kind of person. She is in her thirties, has a son and works as a conductor on the trams.

One day she ups and leaves without notice, despite having been offered promotion by her boss. She resurfaces later, on trial in a distant future, accused of crimes from her past, crimes she shared with many others. Hanna seems to have an uncomplicated directness. It appears that she sees what she wants in life and pursues it. Michael and Hanna have a relationship. She is twice his age and in public everyone assumes that they are mother and son. But they have an intense, highly erotic arrangement. It changes Michael’s life, but perhaps merely occupies Hanna’s. At least that’s what we initially fear. 

When the couple are not coupling, Hanna demands that Michael read to her. He becomes her reader, and they spend many and regular hours at the pastime. When Hanna ups and leaves, Michael is devastated. They have had their arguments, but he cannot understand why she has gone. Then, years later, after lives have changed and they have drifted apart, Hanna resurfaces along with her dubious past. She is on trial.

Over a period of years Michael contacts her regularly. He makes sure she always has tapes of him reading to her. He makes no allowance for her taste, choosing to record what he personally wants to read. Hanna, it seems, cannot get enough of this. It is Hanna’s past that is on trial and the events in question are carefully documented and related in detail by those involved. But what were the motives? Why did these people do what they did? And exactly who might be culpable? And what would you have done under such circumstances? That is the challenge. By the end of The Reader, Bernard Schlink has turned our perceptions of these people onto their heads and back again. As you read, you, the reader, should always remember the book’s challenge. What would you have done?

The Captain And The Enemy by Graham Greene

The Captain And The Enemy is one of Graham Greene’s late works. Like most of his novels, it is quite short, deceptively intense and, despite what might appear to be a quite literal plot, highly enigmatic.

Then captain of the title is a man we hardly get to know. His name might be Smith, or Baxter, or even anything he might have noticed in passing that morning. His title might be captain, or colonel, or sergeant, or even plain mister. Doubtless he had been Lord at some point.

He can become anyone he wants, but at heart he’s a pirate, sailing alone through life in search of elusive treasure. One day he was whiling time away with an acquaintance, a man always called The Devil, playing backgammon (or was it chess?). The stakes rose and The Devil wagered his son. The colonel won.

The book opens with the colonel claiming ownership of Victor Baxter, then a boy at a boarding school. The colonel abducts the boy. They both agree that Victor is a naff name and from then on the boy is called Jim.

At home, if home it be, is Lisa, the woman to whom the captain continues to devote his life, even if the norm is devotion from afar. Lisa gets irregular cash or cheques through the post to cover the housekeeping and never questions the source.

The Captain, of course, never offers anything more. Jim, as the lad Victor has become, becomes part of the insoluble equation. He keeps a journal for some reason and, discovering it years later, he embarks upon an edit. And then Jim is grown up and in search of the man he now calls his father.

He left Lisa and the household years before in search of fortune. Jim tracks him down to Panama and discovers a strange life packed with intrigue. When they meet again, Jim finds a changed man, someone he hardly recognises. Jim’s response is to lie to him. The Colonel is eventually revealed as a man with principles, principles worth personal risk. At least that’s what he says today, and who ever knows about tomorrow?

And so we are left with memories of people who live towards the edge of even their own lives. They adopt identities bestowed by circumstance and change apparently at will. Who cares about contradiction? I mean really cares?

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie is a thoroughly entertaining read. It’s a super-real experience, so vivid and sharp that the focus starts to blur even imagined distinction between the real, the unreal and the surreal. And when everything becomes clear, the process starts again.

We are transported to the sixteenth century and the court of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great, who has many concerns. Akbar, indeed, has all the concerns you would expect any self-respecting emperor might have. He agonises, for instance, over being “I” or “We”. Usually, of course, as befits his status, he is “We”. He has grown up as “We”, assumed himself to be “We” and continues to recognise himself as “We”. But recently he has tried “I” and found it lies strangely on the tongue and might even have changed his reflection in the mirror.

On top of this, he worries about his succession, the indolence and ambition of his offspring, the comfort of his harem, the performance of his armies, the future of his fortunes. But Akbar is also the ruler of a vivid imagination. His favourite queen, the one who adds grace to his harem, the one whose every step must be upon polished tiles, exists only in his imagination. He spends more time with her than with any other of his wives, and she probably consumes more of the palace budget than anyone, so perfectly does Akbar desire to provide for her insatiable needs.

So what might Akbar the Great make of a fair-haired young man in a multi-coloured coat who arrives with a story to tell, a claim to make and tricks of the hand that can be explained as illusions? His name is Uccello, bird, when we meet him aboard ship. Then he is Vespucci, a relative of he who had in the recent past sailed to and named the real new world that Columbus had both missed and misinterpreted. 

And later he transforms into Mogor dell' Amore, the mughal of love, or perhaps with a little imagination, the Mughal’s love-child. And more than that, he arrives bearing a letter from the Queen of England, herself a virgin in her own legend. Uccello Mogor Vespucci, whoever he might be, also has a claim. He is a direct descendent of the Mogul royal line by virtue of an almost forgotten princess, Qara Köz, who as an infant was abducted, traded, swapped, travelled, perhaps trammelled until she emerged in Florence as a young woman of enchanting, perhaps bewitching beauty.

Mogor Vespucci Uccello related how he and her apparently permanent, inseparable assistant, her Mirror, captivated the interest of Medici Florence. Suitors queued at the door, including Argalia, if indeed that be his name, a soldier of fortune. The abandoned princess is then adopted by European high society and learns to live by its rules. She has liaisons whose confusion is only doubled by the constant proximity of the Mirror, and offspring springs outward. Now for an emperor who already has the facility of imagining his favourite wife, Vespucci Uccello Mogor’s story fires the mind, re-ignites memory and raises possibility.

He dreams dreams, interprets them, re-interprets what he doesn’t like and then seeks them in reality, only to find them. A conjoined history that spans Asia and Europe unfolds and he, alongside the reader, sees the familiar in a new, conflicting light. But in the end, who is telling stories? Are the stories true? And, if we can imagine, who might judge them to be false? Is this trickery? Or is it claim? The Enchantress Of Florence is an enchanting read. It is provocative, humorous and in places iconoclastic. Fiction and fact become blurred and, even in reality, we can hardly distinguish between them. We create stories to enhance our experience and sometimes we believe them. Sometimes we also deign to believe what is real, but often we cannot agree on a definition of the label. It’s a magical experience, a conjuror’s achievement.

The Museum Of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

The Museum Of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk presents what might appear to be a daunting challenge. It runs to more than 500 pages and a flick through the text reveals scant use of dialogue. It all looks very dense. There is also the added challenge of knowing that the novel is set in an unfamiliar cultural landscape, underpinned by assumptions we may not share, assumptions that we may not even recognise.

But no reader need be daunted. I read it – and even re-read some sections – in less than two days. Rarely have I been drawn by a writer inside a character in the way that Orhan Pamuk invited me to become Kemal Bey. The book is a perfect example of a work that tells you nothing, but takes you all the way there.

Kemal is a rich young man at the start of the book’s recollected but largely linear story. It is 1975. Kemal has returned from business school in the USA and has taken up a perhaps assured position in Satsat, literally Sell-Sell, his family’s distribution and export company. It’s a successful company, making money hand over fist, and provides its owners with both status and wealth. Kemal is part of Istanbul’s, even Turkey’s elite, a rich man even among the rich. He can have what he wants. His life is on a flat track in the fast lane from the start. He is close to engagement and marriage to Sibel, a beautiful woman he loves.

And then one day Kemal visits a shop to buy his girlfriend a present. He recognises the girl who serves him as the daughter of a distant relation, a woman he used to call Aunt Nesibe. There was no direct blood tie, perhaps, but ties with this poorer branch of the family were stronger when Kemal was young.

Hence he remembers the shop girl who serves him as Füsun, Aunt Nesibe’s daughter. She is just 18, has bleached hair in the modern style and promises an imminent and full bloom of womanhood. Kemal is transfixed and from that moment on his life is changed. The Museum Of Innocence – at least in part – is a novel about obsession. Kemal wants to possess, to own every aspect of Füsun. He yearns for her body – that might be taken for granted – but he also wants to absorb her, in some ways to become part of her. 

For him she is a Madonna, a sex object, a future wife, an analyst, a support and a superstar all in one slight, beautiful frame. He changes every aspect of his life so that it fits the shape she projects merely so that he can metaphorically and literally wrap himself around her. In one of their encounters, she loses a monogrammed earring. Kemal finds it, but doesn’t return it. And so this earring becomes the first of many things associated with Füsun that Kemal collects. Eventually these thousands of artefacts become the exhibits in his museum dedicated to her, Kemal’s museum of innocence.

But Orham Pamuk’s writing is never merely one-layered. In The Museum of Innocence he takes us on a tour of Istanbul’s high society and culture. We experience – not just observe – clashes of culture, tradition versus modernity, family versus individuality, responsibility versus interest. Events that made Turkish history of the period affect everyone’s lives. Political and economic change go hand in hand, though sometimes the hands are fists. We meet Zaim, for instance, whose company makes Meltem, Turkey’s favourite domestically-made soft drink.

But as the years pass, can his brand compete with Coke and Pepsi? And if so, what tactic should it employ to find its market? Should it use Western advertising methods? Kemal also meets Feridun, a budding film director who, via various mechanisms eventually persuades Kemal to finance a film company as a joint venture. Lemon Film’s first offering is hammered by the urban critics, but poor communities throughout Anatolia can identify with its traditional message and so it becomes a capitalist hit. Kemal has success is almost every aspect of his life but not, it seems, in love, a subject he confines to his museum. He becomes, incidentally, a compulsive museum visitor!

A review of The Museum Of Innocence cannot begin to offer a flavour of the entire book. Its canvas is too broad, its achievement too great, its success too complete. Obsession is the key word, however, and Orhan Pamuk manages to draw the willing reader into Kemal’s psyche, so that his tunnel vision becomes an obsession for the reader. We see his world through his eyes, and thus feel what he feels. Perhaps we even empathise. Looking back, The Museum Of Innocence, like life itself, is not such a long journey after all.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Initially, the form of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid seems forced. Surely it will restrict what the author can achieve. By the end, however, the form has become a crucial part of the plot. The turnabout then works very well indeed.

Changez has returned to Pakistan from the USA, where he both studied and worked. He is in conversation with a foreign visitor to his country. Apparently they are sitting in a café. The visitor is probably an American but, surprisingly, the conversation is entirely one-sided.

Basically, Changez tells his life story, eventually relating in detail the conspiring events that led him to his current preoccupations and status. He was the child of an upper class family in Lahore. He was a bright thing from the start and when the time was right a place at Princeton beckoned. He excelled and was offered a job with a business consulting group, where he learned much more than merely contemporary jargon. He also fell head over heels in love with an American girl, herself a gifted student with a desire to write.

She wanted to tell stories, beginning perhaps with one featuring herself and describing her former boyfriend’s struggle with terminal illness. Initially at least she seems newly besotted with her new Pakistani friend, with Changez’s unexpected and wholly foreign politeness, good manners and dress sense all creating favourable impressions. The silent listener absorbs all this without comment as he and Changez await their food in a Lahore restaurant.

Everything looks rosy for our graduate and the listening tourist seems to respond to the raconteur’s story. The narrator then begins to describe a new era, an era that began on September 11 2001 and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s tone changes abruptly as the world and the individual’s place in it seem to need reinterpretation.

As things turn out, Changez returns to Pakistan, where he takes up teaching. And still our listener absorbs the story without response. The book’s denouement is both surprising and satisfying. The form that has seemed to be a handicap suddenly contributes to the experience. We are left with an enigmatic, open ending where surely something will happen.

Mohsin Hamid perhaps allows each of us to fill in some blanks. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is quite a short book. It possibly just exceeds the novella form. But in a succinct and sophisticated way it addresses and comments on some complex issues. Its methods are both sympathetic and involving. Its efforts convince the reader without being didactic. It is thus a significant achievement.

The Battle For Spain by Anthony Beevor

Occasionally, very rarely in fact, one comes across a thoroughly outstanding book. From beginning to end it’s authoritative, clearly written, lucid and somehow both committed and balanced. Eventually such a work will take a clear position, but it will never approach polemic. Such books are indeed rare, but Anthony Beevor’s The Battle For Spain is without doubt one of these few great works.

The Battle For Spain chronicles the Spanish Civil War, 1936-9. Anthony Beevor examines the political, economic and social background of the country prior to the war. He identifies historical context and offers explanation of why Spain found itself in a position of near-irredeemable political impasse in the 1930s. He also examines the movements, parties and associations that existed at the start of the struggle, alongside institutions such as the Church and monarchy that also played significant roles.

So well portrayed is all the in-fighting, intrigue and manoeuvring that we feel we almost get to know the characters involved. The reader constantly has to remember that this is not mere fiction. Its immediacy almost tricks us into thinking that these events might be just some thought-up plot created merely to keep us involved. 

But then the casualty figures start to stack up and we are reminded by the executions and the refugees that this is a bleak and stark reality. The story’s detail may come as a surprise to the casual reader who remains unaware of just how intense and bloody this conflict was. Anthony Beevor also provides the essential geopolitical context of the Spanish Civil War. He identifies how the rise of fascism and communism in the years preceding the war both played their perhaps inevitable roles by backing their favoured sides in the conflict.

It was inevitable in a Europe that was already unstable. Spain was a prize that would add weight to any interest. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Battle For Spain is its description of the role played by the northern Carlists. Much has been written about the Falange, the POUM anarchists and the communists. But little usually emerges about the religious conformists who played a significant role on the Nationalist side.

The character of Franco eventually comes to dominate proceedings. He is revealed as obviously victorious and without peer, but he also sometimes dithers, lacks judgment and seeks rather unsuccessfully to play off one side against another. He is not alone, however, in that the British and the French displayed the same skills or ineptitudes, depending on which side you take.

But where The Battle For Spain excels is in its catalogue of the horrid events of the war. The detail of Anthony Beevor’s account really brings out the confusion of conflict alongside the luck and opportunism on the one hand and incompetence and chance on the other. It’s a cocktail of these that grant both victory and defeat. Just ask the dead, the wounded and the refugeed.

None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

Life often presents an illusion of constancy or even continuity. They are illusions, of course, because ultimately we can never take anything for granted. Just ask the last friend who died. Equally, however, there are always things that we work towards, goals whose continued non-achievement gives life both meaning and direction. Surely we fear their achievement, because everything would then have to be redefined, a process that would prove at least messy.

This is the territory of Nadine Gordimer’s novel None To Accompany Me. For me the title signifies how every individual, when confronted with the necessity for change, must pursue personal, perhaps even selfish goals.

In None To Accompnay Me Nadine Gordimer presents characters in a newly-liberated, but as yet ill-defined South Africa. The struggle has been long. It has also been defining for its participants. It allowed differences to be ignored, splits to be papered over. It convinced some of a necessity to over-react, to over-compensate. 

And then, when the uniting goal is achieved, all realise that opposing is a less complicated act than supporting. We all know what we are against, but what we are for can only be argued. Like Byron’s Prisoner Of Chillon, experiencing the security of captivity can seem reassuring when the unknown of freedom is finally achieved.

Vera is as central a character as any. She’s white, married to Ben, has a daughter and has worked for liberation. She devoted just less than her life to the cause, less because she has retained an element of selfishness in her personal relations. So loosely intertwined are all of the strands of her life that change in one can apparently unravel all of them. And then there’s Dydimus and Sibongile, also lifelong devotees of the cause. Opportunity begins to divide them. So does their past. There are new positions of responsibility to be adopted, politics to be worked out, compromises to be made. But there are also deeds from the past lacked away, skeletons that can be marched out for other’s convenience.

And not all of them are personal. The major issues of the time appear in the book. Cultural and economic differences between black and white cannot be escaped. Neither, it seems, can the prevalence of violence and crime. A pressing need to redistribute land will have to engage in battle with those who own it and want to exploit it. A nation whose majority has never been asked its opinion has to learn to live with the fact that the question’s answers now promote division above the assumed unity of the past. And, if this is not already sufficient complication, those released from struggle must also come to terms with a generational shift.

Progeny do not seem to have the same values. Whereas community was demanded by struggle, freedom promotes the individual, allows personal decisions that the older generation would not have tolerated. A reader looking for a linear experience with characters wheeled on and off the set in order to assist a plot’s continued progress will truly hate None To Accompany Me. A reader with the patience to get to know people, to empathise with them and share their dilemmas will appreciate the non-linearity, non-literalness of Nadine Gordimer’s book. It is certainly a novel of its time, a period of uncertainly presenting perhaps an illusory cusp between a known past and an unknown future. Eventually we must ask if this state is anything unusual.

Voyagers, travel stories by Philip Spires

People should not do quite a number of things, including reviewing their own work. Well, I suppose that’s another resolution I have just broken, because here is Philip Spires’s review of Voyagers by Philip Spires. Voyagers is a set of short stories loosely based on the experience of travel. They all portray a srong sense of place alongside characters that find themselves in unfamiliar settings. Several of the stories have grown out of personal experience, or sometimes events I witnessed along the way. I have traveled a little over the years and it has always seemed to me that when a voyager ventures beyond the habitual comfort zone, then the potential for surprise and challenge increase, thus presenting opportunities to learn. And that learning, as often as not, is about oneself. Voyagers begins with Discoverers, a novella. Mr Tony has worked several contracts as an expatriate biology teacher in Brunei. We meet him as he sets off with yet another group of students on a field visit into the rain forest. These are jungles he knows well and loves. They are, however, under threat, and are being burned by people trying to establish building rights. Mr Tony has a campaign against these illegal practices and his efforts are about to uncover publishable truth. He learns over a long weekend, however, that people of power have their own schemes to stop his work. Assessors is a grovelling email written by a professional of the future who has seen his status redefined. The story was inspired by an interview with the physicist Michio Kaku. On a morning when London Heathrow’s new terminal could not match passengers with their luggage, he confidently claimed on BBC Radio that the near future would confirm our ability to tele-transport entire molecules in real time. Initiates is also set in Brunei. Aussies Ted and Sylvia have been invited to a Malay wedding. Ted works alongside the bride most days and knows her well, well enough of course to be invited to this normally wholly local event. Despite easy-going friendship and apparent shared experience, however, there is one part of the day’s custom that reminds both Ted and Sylvie that they remain mere guests in this place. I know that the principal characters of Protesters did in fact meet. One, a president of a Central American republic outlawed by the West was to address a solidarity group meeting in Westminster Central Hall. An aged writer – and a very famous one as well – is also present. His personal history suggests a pointed conversation between the two men, a conversation that forms the story. I put them together for a few minutes before they emerge to deliver their speeches. Predators is set in Nya Trang on Vietnam’s beautiful coast. A holidaying couple find themselves witness to predatory acts along the hotel corridor. Candid observation of the society and their surroundings suggest that such exploitation might not be too rare. A few decades later, the memory comes home. Seers is set in pre-war Yugoslavia. A group of Australian travellers are caravanning across Europe. In a Dubrovnik café they meet a bar-fly who likes to brag about the quality of his contacts. There may be truth in some of his words. He may even be the arms dealer he claims to be. Who knows? Strangers is the shortest of the stories. Set in England’s north Devon, a couple on a long weekend seek rest and recuperation in an idyllic coastal village. They idyll soon fades to a reality as they learn more of local lives. Victims is a set of emails. An aid worker finds herself caught up in the complications of struggle in Sri Lanka. She seeks advice on how to deal with the unique position she occupies by virtue of the information she has learned. Who does she think she is talking to? Whose interests will prevail? And is she, herself, now in danger? Wonderers follows a retired Englishman who is trying to pay his personal homage to wonders of the ancient world. These dependable, classical, trustworthy images of unquestionable greatness and significance offer him confirmation of the psychological stability and order he craves. His means of accessing them, alongside the contrasting and challenging experience of visiting them offer up difficult questions, however. He finds an answer that surprises him. Worshippers is set in Florence. A recent art school graduate finds her life at a crossroads. Her secular upbringing has created a near-religious commitment to art. But her own identity and self-obsession often appears at the centre of her universe. She meets a resting actor, a man whose pragmatism seems at first to be attractive. But he is troubled by something, an emotional response she resolves to uncover. They do seem to share a passion for art until, that is, aesthetics get in the way. Voyagers thus examines how a traveller’s identity might be simultaneously questioned and confirmed by the surprising moments that arise when we are beyond our own context. The voyagers themselves sometimes emerge both richer and wiser, but sometimes their limitations are merely confirmed. Voyagers is available both as a paperback and an ebook, including a Kindle edition.

The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul is a deceptively ambitious project. And this applies as much to the reading of this great work as to its writing. The novel addresses some great themes on a multiplicity of levels and in every case succeeds in both illustrating issues and provoking thought via a deceptively simple story of kidnap and espionage. 

 The Honorary Consul is set in Argentina. We are in the north, far from the sophistication of cities, on the banks of the Paraná River, cheek by jowl with Paraguay. And over that border there is the iron-fisted rule of the General, an oppression that has created a social orderliness based on fear and persecution. About twenty years ago, a victim of that oppression, an Englishman resident in Paraguay, put his wife and young son onto a ferry to Argentina. He stayed behind to rejoin the struggle and was not heard of again.

The wife took up residence in Buenos Aires and devoted herself to gossip and sweet eating. The son, Eduardo Plarr, went to medical school, qualified and, at the start of the novel, is practising his profession in that small, provincial, northern town. His thoughts regularly cross the river to contemplate his father’s possible fate.

It is by virtue of his father’s nationality that Eduardo calls himself English. Eduardo is one of just three English residents in the town. Humphries used to be a teacher, while the third, Charles Fortnum, has the title of Honorary Consul. His role is minimal, of course, and his status is less than that. But he ekes a few bob out of the role by the resale of the new car he has a right to import every two years.

Charles is a heavy drinker, preferring whisky of all types, but willing to drink almost anything in the right measure. He and the other two English residents frequent the same bars, restaurants and brothels, and so they also share the same sources of pleasure. Eduardo is surprised to learn that Charles, a sixty-year-old slob, has married one of the girls – a twenty-year-old stripling – from their favoured haunt. He wonders how it will all work long before he becomes her doctor and thereby provides the most thorough examination that medical science knows. When she falls pregnant, she at least is sure whose child it is.

And then one day visitors from Paraguay bring news of Eduardo’s father. They have a plan. There is to be a visit by the American ambassador. Charles will actually have to do something. There is to be a visit to a local site. The group of opportunistic Paraguayans plan a kidnap. They will hold the ambassador until named detainees in Paraguay, Eduardo’s father amongst them, are released. They carry out their threat, but bungle it. As Charles Fortnum’s car passed by, they mistook his CC plate for CD and thereby kidnapped the wrong man.

Instead of an American ambassador, they have a merely an honorary consul, and one without much honour. El Tigre, their remote, anonymous commander is clearly not pleased. We never get to know much about El Tigre, but then perhaps we know more than we think. As ever in Graham Greene, the characters are presented with moral dilemmas. In The Honorary Consul these span the domestic, the religious, the familial and the political.

A short review can do no justice to either the complexity of the ideas or the economy and subtlety of the writer’s treatment of them. Tragedies ensue and there is even a happy ending of sorts. A former priest – there’s no such thing as a former priest! – grapples with the contradictions of liberation theology on the one hand and the obedience demanded of servile duty on the other. Graham Greene does not resolve all the dilemmas he raises. Good writing, after all, is not about answering questions. But it does necessarily involve asking the right ones.

The Honorary Consul is the work of a writer of genius at the height of his powers. It is also the work of a man with a keen sense of politics and morality. And it is also surely one of the few books that all people should list as a must read.

First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan

Having read much of Ian McEwan’s later work in the last few years, I was intrigued to chance upon a copy of First Love, Last Rites, a set of his short stories published in 1975. I read The Cement Garden and The Comfort Of Strangers just after their publication, but I have not picked up any early McEwan since then. First Love, Last Rites proved to be an eye-opening read, not least because hindsight offers real clues as to how Ian McEwan has developed as a writer.

The stories in this set vary from Disguises which, at around 20,000 words, might even be a novella, to Cocker At The Theatre which is definitely a short story. What characterises all of these tales, however, is that they focus on characters whose behaviour or personal culture might be seen as towards the minority end of taste. I use the word minority to indicate that only a few people would admit to such proclivities, not that they might comprise only a small element of generality. It was this concentration on arguably the freakish that allowed the nickname Ian Macabre to stick.

In First Love, Last Rites, for instance, we have a touch of incest, sexual intercourse on stage, not a little child abuse seasoned with transvestism, an episode of boiling in oil, childhood games that grow prematurely adult, rats scratching at the skirts and more. I am reminded of the photographs of Diane Arbus from roughly the same period. It seemed that wherever she pointed her camera, no matter how potentially mundane the shot might appear, there would be evidence of sadomasochism, bestiality, paedophilia, even meat-eating. It was this mix of what was understood as marginal mixed with the manifestly prosaic that caught the attention in the photographs and rendered them so disturbing. Viewing them reminded oneself of diverse aspects of humanity that – at least potentially – we all share and yet publicly try to deny. For the British, that might include all sex that cannot be advertised or sold. It certainly includes all the aspects of human behaviour listed above. I am not accusing all adults of paedophilia. I am suggesting that all of us have both privately and publicly appreciated the neat, taut beauty of a child’s body. 

The question, and it remains an interesting one, is where is the line between ‘normal’ appreciation of beauty and socially unacceptable ‘perversity’. I will never forget a trip around London’s National Gallery with a relative younger than myself, someone with little previous exposure to “art”. Her comment was that the paintings were pornographic, merely because they portrayed nudes. All Ian McEwan’s characters straddle this question’s necessary confusion. Maybe their acts are merely imagined, leaving the individuals grappling with aspects of themselves they cannot understand, admit or control. Maybe they do what they say but, as a result of some inner drive that others do not share, cannot comprehend their own marginality. Whatever the case, these peoples’ psyches must continually grapple with a conflict between a truth of what they are versus an image of what they believe themselves to be. There’s a gap of communication wide enough to allow most experience to fall through.

And it is these gaps that Ian McEwan exploits. He presents people in situations that for them might seem completely mundane. For the rest of us, these are highly individual worlds that publicly we do not expect to see. But, like the images of Diane Arbus, we find we can enter into them because those aspects of humanity are within us as well, though often we don’t like to admit it. Where Ian McEwan’s later work triumphs can now be seen more clearly. Whereas in the earlier work there was a need for a fundamental shift by the reader to admit a possible likeness with his characters, in his later work he presents the individual foibles of his characters in much more rounded, complex forms, forms that all of us can easily associate with. Then the contradictions emerge. Then the conflicts surface and then the gaps in communication widen. The approach is the same, but the effect is so much greater. First Love, Last Rites remains a brilliant read in its own right, but I reckon that for many readers of Ian McEwan a re-visit would shed much new light on his later work.

The Telling by Miranda Seymour

The Telling by Miranda Seymour is the life story, life confessions perhaps, of Nancy Parker. She is living out her retirement in a satisfactory way, given that she has been one of life’s downtrodden. 

She has been victimised, abused, betrayed and even framed, a recipient of repeated short straws through no fault of her own. And Nancy Porter also bears witness to the fact that if enough of it is thrown, then some of it starts to stick.

Now she is old and dearly wants to relive it all by writing it down on paper. She does not attempt a linear recollection, though. Instead she allows time to switch across decades to recall salient events in their context. Throughout we are aware of a crisis that drew the heart from the middle of Nancy’s life. As a result, she was incarcerated for fifteen years.

It is the circumstances that led to this that form the central plank of The Telling’s plot. We begin at the beginning, however, with a childhood that knew abuse, denial and bigotry. Despite this, Nancy grew up. Then, as a young woman, she was packed off to relatives in New York.

They immediately try to remake her in their own image, but her interests are aroused by an acrobatic character she meets in the street. He inhabits a part of the city unknown to her well-heeled hosts. He has the unlucky first name of Chance, and Nancy takes it to become Mrs Brewster. Chance is on the edge of the city’s cultural life. The couple hobnob with writers and other who claim insights into the human condition. Nancy meanwhile becomes a mother and makes a home. She is a giving sort. But the daughter, Eleanor, is a source of concern.

Events conspire further to spell danger for the household. There are crises. Via a mutual friend the Brewsters meet Charles and Isobel. They live abroad, but a change of circumstance brings them to the Brewsters’ cottage in New England as lodgers. The rambling house proves too small for everyone and, according to the record, Nancy suffers a breakdown of sorts, a catastrophe that starts her fifteen year incarceration in institutions. There is a twist, by the way. But, as a result, her own daughter never again entrusts her with the care of her own children.

The Telling is eventually a satisfying read. But I repeatedly felt themes surfacing and then sinking back to the depths, lost, ignored and out of mind. For me it was a novel that lacked coherence. Nancy’s childhood experiences, for instance, were vividly portrayed. One felt there would be consequences, but they were apparently forgotten. By the end I was mildly disappointed by the claim that much of the material was based on the lives of named people. I felt this added nothing to the book or its ideas. These are fairly small criticisms, however, because The Telling remains a worthwhile read.

The Rules Of Life by Fay Weldon

The Rules Of Life by Fay Weldon aspires to the feeling of a full-length novel in the guise of a small novella. In less than 30,000 words, we are presented with a science fiction scenario, a society- and even culture-wide ideological and religious shift, a transformation of our approach to death, and then, if that were not enough to make a cake, a life history and the reactions of others to it iced on top. It is a remarkable feat to bring all that off, create a complete and highly satisfying experience for the reader and to do it in an easy, but sophisticated style that is never didactic. 

 The Rules Of Life begins in a new era, that of the GNFR, the Great New Fictional Religion. Grades of priests proclaim different levels of access to truth. Not a lot new there, then! It’s an age of science, apparently, despite the general absence of anything that seems even vaguely scientific. GSWITS is a character who figures prominently in the book, but we never meet her. She, or perhaps he, is the Great Screen Writer In The Sky, and was probably a comedian in an earlier life, though few laughs are raised. 

Thus the book opens, and we expect we are to be transported into yet another clichéd distopia, full of romantic references to dysfunctional but homely aspects of the present. How easy is it for a writer to play on people’s shallow fears? But The Rules Of Life does something more subtle than this. Fay Weldon uses the scenario merely as a means to examine further – and in a different way – those apparently permanent aspects of life that have been the raw material for writers since writing began, and for people in general even before that. Ghosts have a new status in this rather cowardly new world. Lives can be replayed like cassette tapes. They can be examined, but not quite reconstructed or relived.

Our narrator, a recorder priest in the new order, has a disc to examine. It contains, he finds, the life of one Gabriela Sumpter. As he replays the dead woman’s life, he finds himself ever more engaged in her experience. A relationship develops between them as Gabriela relates her life story. 

 The point of The Rules Of Life may be that no matter how much human society changes its assumptions, its organisation or even its adopted values, there are aspects of life that remain immutable, perhaps inevitable. But despite inevitability, each individual experiences these givens of human existence in what – at least at the personal level – feels like a wholly unique way. No matter how many times we replay it, it only ever happens once. That maybe is the only rule of life.

Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness by Lawrence Durrell

Some decades ago I read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and all his travel books. The term addict could easily have been an under-statement of my obsession with the author’s work. I also discovered Tunc and Nunquam and drooled over Dark Labyrinth, Sappho, the Collected Poens and the rest. Soon afterwards, following a break of a couple years from Durrell’s work, I bought a copy of Monsieur and expectantly embarked upon what I anticipated would be a return to the sublime, sometimes intellectual complexities of the sophisticated, often Bohemian travellers that populate his work. I reached page sixty-five, which promptly fell out when I flipped it over in a frustration that had been growing from page one. 

The people in the Avignon books seemed different. They were of the same ilk as those I had previously revered, but somehow these people were fundamentally less engaging than the Alexandria residents with their guarded complexities. In Monsieur, they seemed stuffy, self-obsessed, bound up in the over-complicated minutiae of what I now saw as an isolation, not a liberation, of travel. 

Thirty years on, I gave just finished Monsieur, its time on my bookshelves in the intervening years being merely decorative. It retained a mild disappointment, but this time I was completely engaged.

 Piers has died. His life-long friend, Bruce, is on his way to the rambling but grand old house in the south of France to see to his friend’s affairs. Bruce recalls their friendship, the tripartite relationship they shared with Piers’s sister, the delectable but unstable Sabine. Sutcliffe, the writer, was also a long-term mutual acquaintance. His frustration with his own creativity as never diminished. His notes testify to how hard he tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to sustain his task. And there are others, such as the delicate Pia and a man called Toby, who seems to be exactly what men called Toby ought to be. 

But the central dimension of the book is not the interpersonal relationships between the characters, which form a kind of currency via which the main themes are traded. It is when the Egyptian Gnostic Akkad enters the story that things start to hang together. They went to meet him at Macabru in the desert, where he provided an hallucinogenic stimulus and invited them to a vision, which some of them shared. 

It changed Piers’s life, while others could not get past their scepticism. But in fact the experience changed all of their lives in that it revealed aspects of themselves that each, independently and perhaps collectively, would rather have not admitted until that day. Some of them continued to deny. And laced over the top of all this is a filigree of plot arising from the fact that Piers’s full name was Piers de Nogaret. He was no less than the last earthly survivor of a line that led back to the Grand Master that saw an end to the Knights Templar. The ancestor, the historical figure that became the head of one of the most powerful orders of medieval Christian warriors, was born of parents who were themselves burned as Cathar heretics, so perhaps there was the motive. Perhaps… 

 To cap it all, there’s also sexual confusion. There are homosexual tendencies that seem to be linked to religious cravings. There’s the usual Henry Miller-esque hetero variety that so often suffuses through Durrell’s characters. And here there is more than a suggestion of incest in the dusty rooms of that Avignon chateau. Confused? So was I. And don’t expect much resolution. Perhaps now that I a tad older than when I first read Lawrence Durrell, I am more willing to accept this.

Monsieur, the first of a set of five books, becomes thus a meditation on motive, religiosity, belief and Lord knows what, juxtaposed by a sense of place and history, and all layered with a near scatology of bodily functions. And when it comes to the crunch, why should a corpse need a head anyway? This time I got past page sixty-five, which fell out again, by the way. Monsieur is not the kind of novel that contemporary, plot-hungry readers might crave. It is a page-turner, but you have to go back as often as forward. That’s life, I suppose.

How Long Is A Piece Of String by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham

If you have a couple of hours to spare and are intrigued by apparently simple problems that turn out to be more complex than they seem, then Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham’s book How Long Is A Piece Of String? would be an engaging way to fill the time. This is a carefully constructed book, with each of its sixteen chapters occupying about ten pages. There is just enough space to introduce an idea, pose a couple of questions and then deliver suitable solutions. The style is a little polemical, since there is not much space for the reader to investigate. But overall the material is well thought out and offers one or two surprising ideas. Each chapter poses a question. How Long Is a Piece Of String, Am I Being Taken For A Ride, What Makes A Hit Single, Is It A Fake are just a few examples. In Am I Being Taken For A Ride the authors explain the logic of the taxi fare. It’s ironic that as the chapters go by they themselves have something of the air of a driver eyeing the customer in the back with an associated, “And another thing…” The authors consider chance in game shows alongside how soon a drunk will fall into the ditch. Their analysis of how predictable sporting contests might be might itself also explain why I gave up watching tennis decades ago. They examine fractals and make a tree and then conclude that numbers quite often start with one. You may find this last revelation surprising. I did. All right, it’s populist stuff, but there is enough mathematics to keep the specialist interested for a couple of hours. The book is strangely but usefully illustrated and some of its explanations are extremely well presented. It’s undoubtedly a worthwhile read. Oh, and How Long Is A Piece OF String? Well, as Richard Feynman famously answered, it depends on the length of your ruler.

East West by Salman Rushdie

East West is a short collection of short stories by Salman Rushdie. But there is nothing small or even limited about the themes they cover, nor anything bland about the palette Rushdie uses to colour his ideas. They were published in the mid-1990s, when the writer was deep into the confines of the fatwa that threatened his life. It is thus refreshing to reflect on the wide and poignant use of humour trough the collection. The stories are enigmatically arranged in three groups entitled East, West and East-West. They thus form a kind of triptych.

In East we visit territory well known to readers of Rushdie. He is in the sub-continent, addressing notions of tradition and culture, notions that are interpreted and reinterpreted by change, personal ambition and by familial and religious associations. 

 In West, Salman Rushdie presents Yorick’s view of Hamlet and an encounter between Catholic Isabella and her hired man, Christopher Columbus. One is fiction superimposed on fact, while the other approaches the reader from the opposite direction. Both stories turn in on themselves, reverse roles and blur the distinctions between fact and fiction. In East-West we find people in new contexts, away from home, inhabiting places unfamiliar to them. We meet people who impose private, personal structures on a wider experience that others share. 

Misunderstandings create their own new language, and fiction expresses and interprets a shared reality. But what is continually astounding about these stories is the literary style that Salman Rushdie brings to almost every sentence. The pictures he draws are surreal, even hyper-real and yet utterly mundane, even prosaic at the same time. A change encounter with a particular object can evoke memory, visual allusion, lyrics from pop culture and tastes of what grandma used to cook. Then, in the next sentence, he can sustain the effect by unloading another bus-load of metaphors. The writing is arresting, but also beautifully fluid and entertainingly readable. For anyone who has tried Salman Rushdie’s novels and recoiled at the challenge of their density, I would recommend these stories as a taster in miniature of what the bigger experience can sustain. Once you are used to the style, it flows easily.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

On the face of things the two families featured in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty are fairly functional. The Belsey family lives in New England, near Boston to be more precise. Howard is English and white. Kiki, the wife, is from Florida and is black. There are three intensely sophisticated progeny, Jerome, Levi and Zora. The Kipps family, meanwhile, lives in Old England in a less than fashionable area of north London. Monty and Carlene are black British with Caribbean roots. Their children are the delectable Victoria and an older, cool, already achieving son, who figures little in the tale. Both husbands are academics. Howard is a specialist on art history and is an arch-liberal. His rival, Monty, is almost rabidly neo-conservative. They have feuded for some time, academically speaking, despite their families being on good enough terms to want to stay with one another.

When the story opens, Jerome Belsey is in London and has fallen for the obvious charms of Victoria Kipps and is suggesting engagement. Now wouldn’t that complicate things! As the book progresses we learn that these apparent domestic heavens are less perfect than they appear. The two fathers are not as dedicated to the promotion of domestic harmony as they at first seem. Romances bud and blossom amongst and between the younger members of the plot. 

There are inter-generational liaisons of various kinds. There is also a heightened professional rivalry between Howard and Monty. There ensues an ideological battle that intensifies when Monty joins Howard’s US college on an invitation. Monty tries to stir things up and, as ever, liberals are his prime target. Howard effectively assists by rising to take the bait, trying, as liberals sometimes do, to equalise before he has gone behind. Zora, Howard’s daughter, wants to enrol in a poetry class. There are no places, however, because the tutor – a poet who has a special relationship with Howard – takes in talented candidates who are not actually on the college roll. 

A campaign is launched and Zora, her dad and Monty are in the thick of the argument. Things come to a head when a poor lad from the rough end of town is invited to join the class because of his unique gift for rap. An accommodation must be found. Victoria, Monty’s daughter also figures on campus and she manages to complicate most things simply by looking the way she does. Basically the lives of these families begin to unravel as tensions pull at the frayed ends of their lives. 

Zadie Smith writes with great poignancy and irony. She is particularly successful in characterising the generational gaps, and she does this without ever sounding clichéd or patronising. The sex that simmers throughout just beneath the surface occasionally bubbles through and, when it does, it generally makes quite a mess. In theory, all these people want to do the right thing by and for others, but when opportunities arise, they usually can’t resist the pull of blatant self-interest. They all profess the long view, but in reality they all live for the moment, and that is usually passing. On Beauty is a convincing and moving portrait of modern family life. Zadie Smith consistently resists the temptation to pitch the populist against the elitist. Her characters merely live, and the ups and downs they all suffer are eventually no more than their individual and collective experience.

My Brother, My Executioner by F Sionil José

F Sionil José’s novel, My Brother, My Executioner, is set in a period of Philippine history whose international significance is worthy of wider knowledge. The author’s Rosales novels describe the life of a Filipino family over several generations. Rosales is a fictitious town, but its location is quite real, as is the history that unfolds around it. Rosales is in Ilocos, in northern Luzon, whose people are seen by many Filipinos as a race apart. The events that form the backdrop to My Brother, My Executioner are the Huk rebellion.

It’s the 1950s. Don Vicente is a Rosales landowner and he is ill, close to the end of his life. He reminisces, recalling the immense suffering of his wife who presented him with multiple miscarriages. But he did have a son, Luis, born of a poor woman is a small village called Sipnget. So, unlike others from that poor place, Luis received an education courtesy of the fees his rich father could pay. He became a writer and moved to Manila to pursue a self-contained,and ultimately selfish life.

Luis writes for a magazine owned by Dantes, a rich businessman with a reputation for ruthlessness. Esther, the boss’s daughter, fancies Luis, but her advances are not reciprocated, except intellectually. Personal tragedy threatens.

Luis is also worshipped by Trining, a teenage cousin who shares some of his roots. When Luis’s father notes their affinity and also identifies the convenience that their marriage would facilitate. Luis seems quite happy to do the right thing. Trining has her way with him and promises to bear him a dozen children. The first is soon conceived.

But it is when Luis makes a visit to his father’s house, a rare excursion beyond Manila’s city limits, that he also decides to look up his estranged mother. He visits Sipnget to find his home village levelled and burnt, its inhabitants ‘disappeared’, its crops destroyed. The Huk guerrillas have been there and the military, amply aided by local militias have cleansed the area. The militias, of course, are controlled by Luis’s father and they have driven his mother from her home.

Luis resolves to publicise the injustice. He researches the events, writes an article and publishes. But when vested interests question his facts, his motives and allegiances, he finds himself challenged on many fronts.

In another twist in the scenario we meet Vic, Luis’s half-brother. He was a freedom fighter during the Japanese occupation. While collaborators made money, he fought with the resistance that sought liberation from foreign rule. Now he is the commander of a Huk unit, a leader of a communist insurgency, if I might use a word that would be employed today to describe indigenous resistance. Vic operates near Rosales.

The Huk rebellion is an era of Philippine history that surely deserves wider analysis and discussion. It became a hotspot of the early Cold War. Events in Korea occupy the 1950s limelight, of course, but the Philippine rural guerrilla war was perhaps a precursor of what we now call Vietnam. The United States was involved, of course, and when the rebellion against the landowners was defeated under President Magsaysay’s leadership, he became an internationally-renowned champion of the North-American brand of freedom. In 1980, F Sionil José received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and creative Communication Arts.

Given this history, a history that is incidentally wonderfully described by Benedict Kerkvliet in his book The Huk rebellion, there ought to be more than ample scope for the novelist to create tension, conflict and surprise. Unfortunately, the denouement of My Brother, My Executioner is a tad predictable. The tragedy is eventually too personal, its obvious metaphor becoming a punch pulled. Little is made of the potential conflict between the inheriting Luis and Vic, his guerrilla-commander brother. The book remains an engaging and enjoyable read, but the drama of its setting seemed to promise much more.

The Music Of The Primes by Marcus du Sautoy

The Music Of The Primes by Marcus du Sautoy is not a book for the faint-hearted. The author may be a populariser of mathematics, but certainly in this book there is plenty of substance that would maintain the interest of the specialist and also enough technicality to cause the general reader to pause. The book is a brilliant piece of work, however, so all must resist any temptation to skip. The Music Of The Primes is a glittering account, superbly paced, of an unfinished story.

From the very first page it demands to be read, so much so that like me you will probably finish it in two sittings at most. Marcus du Sautoy regularly refers to prime numbers as the atoms of our number system. I have some reservations with this metaphor, but I was willing to live with it. For the uninitiated, a prime number has just two factors, one and itself. It cannot be exactly divided by anything else. The list begins 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and continues ad infinitum. The sieve of Eratosthenes established that fact a couple of thousand years ago. But, despite many lifetimes of trying, we have never successfully been able to predict whether a particular number would be prime, or conversely, exactly where the next prime number might be. They seem to be distributed randomly throughout our number system, all odd except for that initial 2, the odd-one-out pair that spoils it for every other even. 

 The Music Of The Primes relates how mathematicians have closed in on the mystery of how these numbers occur without, as yet, managing to crack the complete code. Marcus du Sautoy describes some of the great contributions to the understanding of prime numbers. The names Fermat, Gauss and Euler figure regularly. But it is the great name of Riemann that emerges as the lynchpin of this story, his Conjecture being the unsolved problem that currently occupies many a brain, the one million dollars in prize money offered for its solution oiling the machinations. 

Riemann turned the search for prime numbers on its head when he used complex numbers to reposition the problem. Complex numbers, by the way, are at least in part imaginary and, though they don’t exist, no self-supporting bridge would stand up without them. His now famous Conjecture was that evidence of the existence of prime numbers would line up in a predictable way in a four-dimensional space created when one two-dimensional complex number was plotted against another, the latter being the solution to a particular power series called a zeta function equated to zero. His problem was that he couldn’t prove that things lined up in precisely the way he predicted. He had strong hunches that he was right, but, lacking proof, a conjecture is what it remained. And people have been trying to prove it for a century and a half. 

 Prime numbers are now big business, of course. Public-private key encryption now oils the wheels of internet commerce and the security it offers is based on the possession of quite huge, quite astronomically large prime numbers. Find a few new ones and you could make a very good living. If you want to taste the complexity of the task, then spend no more than five minutes finding the two tree-digit factors of 8051. Imagine then the work involved in identifying two 200 digit prime numbers that combine to a Rivest, Shamir and Adelman security key. Reading this superb book will provide further insight. It will also illustrate very well the value of pure research conducted by specialist academics. 

When the accountants complain that programmes have no apparent immediate application, it is worth remembering how advances in human knowledge made over two hundred years ago are only just finding wide application in fields completely unenvisaged by their inventors. Without the knowledge they developed in their apparent vacuum, of course, the modern-day application may never have been conceived. Just imagine where the human race might be two centuries from now if Kurt Gödel’s ideas have become the basis for all mathematics. Read this book and then imagine.

Deterring Democracy by Noam Chomsky

It is almost twenty years since Noam Chomsky published Deterring Democracy. Its contemporary context is an important starting point in the understanding of its position since most of the material seeks to analyse and contextualise United States foreign policy in the post-War years to the early nineties. In 1991 the United States under George Bush was embroiled in the First Gulf War. I must stress the word “first”, since this gives a clue to the book’s eventual prescience.

Also in 1991, a dim and distant past when the new millennium was not yet a talking point, a bi-polar world, whose permanence and assumed conflict provided the framework for all political analysis, was already being transformed. The Soviet Union had already ceased to be, but the years of Yeltsin’s IMF poverty lay ahead, as did those of Putin’s new pragmatic if demagogic prosperity.

Regimes of all political stances came and went in Central and South America. But all of them were classified as good or evil by the Manichean filter of the age. Occasionally, a convenience of political pragmatism offered re-branding, as in the case of Jamaica, where Michael Manley, a leader once undermined as a leftist was reinstated with eternal backing after Edward Seaga’s neo-liberal experiment predictably burnt out. Chomsky’s record of Manley’s second era being that of his violin phase is extremely succinct. He was put up by the left, but played by the right.

Descriptions of prevailing issues in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala figure large, of course. But Chomsky also visits the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and Europe to illustrate his central point. And it is a point that he makes and re-makes, a point that he still makes today. His analysis, simply put, is that an alliance of elite interests involving legislators, the powerful and those who own and control big business drives the US foreign policy agenda. The elite’s sole aim is to preserve and further its own power, influence and prosperity. The fact that it does not always speak with a consistent voice is merely evidence that within the group there remains competition. Indeed, the group is neither particularly stable nor permanent. It is rather a loose alliance of interest, perhaps heavily reliant on birthright, but not determined by it. Notions of freedom, democracy, individual or collective rights and even development are peddled, attached like advertisers’ catchlines to the same product every time it is recommended. To maintain its ascendancy, this ideology that fosters profit via power needs an enemy to provide a shield behind which it can hide its pursuit of self-advancement. The Soviet Union sufficed for most of the second half of the last century, but since then others have had to be identified to fulfil this essential role. It will not require much imagination to identify the current dark threats.

The population at large, meanwhile, has to be sold these ideas. When threat of nuclear war between super-powers loomed large, it was not difficult to fix the framework. How much easier is it now, when the current all-powerful, all-pervading enemy might just be within and among us? This low-intensity, back-burner threat continues to mask the activity that fuels an ever-increasing concentration of power and wealth. The people of the democratic, individualistic West are perfectly willing to stand by as recession bites, banks declare deposits worthless, pension funds dwindle, retirements recede and wages stagnate while those who perhaps cause these strictures luxuriate in ever-increasing, often self-granted rewards.

And, in a truly prescient passage, Chomsky describes this submissive, passive mentality perfectly. “For submissiveness to become a reliable trait,” he writes, “it must be entrenched in every realm. The public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products. Eduardo Galeano writes that ‘the majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and power to the weak.’ Nothing less will do.” In this context, is it any surprise that the average contemporary consumer knows more of celebrity gossip than political option?

Deterring Democracy is packed – perhaps over-packed – with detailed evidence. Chomsky makes his point repeatedly and forcefully. I was once privileged to co-host the author as chair of a London conference. At first hand I can vouch for the sincerity and passion that underpins these views. I can also vouch for the solidity of the evidence upon which they are based.

Noam Chomsky is not anti-American. It is the exploiters of self-seeking power and self-deferential influence who deserve that label. Noam Chomsky is a man of the people, intensely humanistic and fundamentally democratic. He seems to maintain that if people turn their backs and refuse to acknowledge the obvious, they will have foregone a real opportunity to realise something more sustainable than the current illusion. And, along the way, they will probably have said goodbye to their principles, along with their bank deposits, pensions, retirement and freedom. At least they can talk about their woes on their latest-model mobiles, if, that is, they can still pay the bill. When you read Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy, give its arguments a chance to register. Then see if they ring true.

The Child In Time by Ian McEwan

Stephen Lawes appears to be pretty well-heeled. His successes seem remarkable. He is a successful writer of children’s books. He is acquainted with Charles Darke, who is apparently being groomed for a ministerial position in government. Via this connection, Stephen also sits on a Whitehall committee to examine policy options on childhood, children, education and related issues. He himself also seems to have the prime minister’s ear. He has a wife, Julie, who loves him and beautiful little three-year-old daughter, Kate, whom he worships. But then one day Kate is no longer there. On a trip to the shops with her father, there are events that take her out of her parents’ lives.

In her absence, Stephen continues to worship her, to see her walking along the street, in a school playground, perhaps everywhere he tries to look. Meanwhile life goes on, but for Stephen aspects of it begin to disintegrate. The child has stopped his time. There follows, in Ian McEwan’s novel, The Child In Time, an examination of childhood. 

In various guises, this biologically-fixed but socially-defined state is seen to influence and control the lives of the book’s characters. The fact that children are sexually and physically immature human beings whose characteristics are still developing seems pretty immutable. But what is it that demands they should eat special foods from special menus? Is it essential that the experience of childhood should be always multi-coloured, perhaps as a preparation for the unending greyness of adulthood? 

And why, in the twenty-first century is it deemed that children should not work, when in the nineteenth it was considered desirable, perhaps even essential for everyone’s greater well-being? If we are stressed in our daily lives, how much of our ability to cope, or not cope, stems from our ability to re-invent a child’s curiosity and enthusiasm, not to mention naiveté? And is this state also perhaps a place of protecting retreat? 

And how exactly did we manage to create this space? The Child In Time examines several strands of thought relating to infancy, childhood and dependency via the assumptions and reactions of adults. It is a novel with multiple parallel strands, more of a meditation on a theme than a focused, linear progression. It always plays with its ideas. But not all of them work. 

Charles Darke’s adoption of a second childhood, whether conscious or not, as a means of protecting himself from himself, is compellingly credible. But the presence of licensed beggars in a society not located in any particular time or any declared political ideology simply doesn’t wash. This science-fiction element of the book asks a sound but imagined question about our attitudes toward childhood, but jars with and detracts from the rest of the book’s recognisable landscape. 

 As ever, Ian McEwan mixes concepts of philosophy and sociology with the minutiae of daily life. Stephen Lawes does not seem to be wholly credible, however. His mix of interests and capabilities seems to be a tad too eclectic, too widely and thinly spread for him to come across as convincing in any discipline. At times, he seems even peripheral, dashing from one event to the next merely to witness what the author wanted to illustrate. But these are small criticisms of a magnificent book. Eventually the novel provides an uplifting experience. 

It takes the reader to places where the characters find themselves, places where they also want to be. Then, having reached their goal, much of what went before falls into new perspectives, and the whole process might just be ready to start again, but this time in socially-changed garb. It’s a bit like life, really... See this book on amazon The Child in Time

The Steps Of The Sun by Caroline Harvey, aka Joanna Trollope

I approached The Steps Of The Sun not knowing what to expect. Its author was listed as Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey. I had previously read nothing in either name. But it struck me that if you wanted a nom de plume, then Non de Plume was not a good choice. I persevered, however, largely because I have also never read a novel set in the Boer War. The Steps Of The Sun presents life amongst a middle-class set whose lives are turned upside down by the conflict. Matthew Paget is a college lad, son of a churchman, and he is seeking something exciting out of life. His passions sometimes take him that step too far. He enlists to fight in South Africa without his family’s backing or even knowledge. Will Marriott, his cousin, is a military type and also thinks that way to boot. He performs his duty when required and is proud to represent his country in battle. Hendon Bashford is the obvious cad. He’s half Boer but considers himself true-blood English. His contribution to the conflict will always be against his own people, which ever side he joins. 

There are women in The Steps Of The Sun. Adelaide is the most interesting. She flirts with pacifism, even meets journalists. But then she assists the war in her own way. Matthew’s sister, Frances, tends to the prissy. And then there’s a Boer girl who is twice excused her fate. First her home is not burned down – at least today – and second, apparently unlike all other Boer women, as we are told, she is not pregnant. There are some interesting aspects to the book. A description of the war’s concentration camps is welcome, as is Adelaide’s conflict of interest. But overall what promised to be an intriguing read tended to gloss over the military, fragment the history and barely visit the country. The Steps Of The Sun was still worth reading, but its high points were quite well buried.