Ashes To The Vistula by Bill Copeland

“The insanity of war has robbed me of everything I knew and loved.” These are the words of Filip Stitchko, a Pole, a concentration camp kapo, an overseer, a policeman in Auschwitz. And, by the time the reader has reached the end of Filip’s story in Ashes To The Vistula by Bill Copeland, those words emerge with poignancy, irony and inescapable truth intermingled.

Ashes To The Vistula, at first sight, is a wartime memoir of an innocent victim. But, in war, who is not innocent? And who is not a victim? Equally, who is innocent? As a result of mere circumstance Filip finds himself appointed to a position of responsibility within the concentration camp. He happened to be in a certain place when the Second World War broke out. Filip was in Poland, a country that was squeezed by a partially-shared conspiracy in 1939. Whilst fascists moved east, professed socialists moved west and the state that was created to keep the eagle from the bear imploded. An elder brother, an officer, probably travelled, defeated, to Katyn where history disputed precisely whose guns, whose motives perpetrated a slaughter of Polish officers.

Those left behind at the time, such as Filip and the younger Jakub knew nothing of the elder brother’s fate. This is one of the strengths of Bill Copeland’s book. It has an immediacy, a present that it is uncomplicated by received hindsight. On many issues, Bill Copeland leaves the jury out, enabling the reader to empathise with the dilemmas that confronted wartime and immediate post-war experience. 

This is the book’s subtlety. Though it is primarily plot led, the plot is genuinely surprising, ultimately engaging and, in a few late chapters, both confronts and rounds off several themes that the reader has registered throughout the narrative. Central to the book’s purpose is the relationship of dependence, ultimately inter-dependence between Filip, the privileged concentration camp policeman, and Jakub, a Jewish-named gentile, a slow-witted permanent child whose safety has been entrusted to the older Filip. 

Through the prosecution of his duty, Filip is revealed to be not only a protector, not only a survivor, but also ultimately a compassionate companion and overseer, despite the fact that both circumstance and insanity conspire against both young men. Filip is no saint, make no mistake, but there is an underlying reason for his excesses. Ashes To The Vistula in essence is an anti-war book. In it the reader is presented with thousands of people who suffer the consequences of conflict. None of them have been protagonists, none of them have sought gain or power, except, of course, over their peers once they have been pitted against them as their competitors and antagonists.

This is where we find the book’s tragedy. That war kills, that war kills innocents, that war creates potential for corruption and duplicity, all these are givens. But war also creates insanity, an insanity that affects all involved, where the need to punish someone, anyone, for one’s own arbitrary suffering might override rationality, evidence or even experience. And perhaps, given that insanity, the need to expunge the inexplicable is greater than the need to seek explanation, since, when threatened, we all react before we think. Ashes To The Vistula by Bill Copeland is an unusual and moving study of one aspect of World War Two. It has an immediacy and a clarity that bring the history of its setting completely to life.

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The Way To Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa

I rarely read novels more than once. There are some I have read several times, but the list might just run to double figures. I have read The Way To Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa twice, but not for the usual reasons. First time though I was so disappointed with the book that I thought I had to be mistaken. So I waited a few months and read it again. Second time through I enjoyed it much more but, on finishing it, I had many of the same reservations as I did first time round.

The Way To Paradise juxtaposes two stories which, in essence, deal with how people pursue ideals. It identifies the inevitable selfishness associated with a person’s obsession to achieve, how pragmatism and compromise inevitably dictate daily routine, and how fate, unpredictable and unyielding, has the ultimate say on all of our endeavours.

The two stories of The Way To Paradise are related by family. One describes how the French painter, Paul Gaugin, left his job as a mildly successful stockbroker to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. A closet painter while he acted out the humdrum of nine to five to provide for his thoroughly and properly domesticated Danish wife and five children, Paul Gaugin drooled over canvases by impressionist painters such as Manet. The latter’s nude depiction of Olympia played a significant role in crystallising Gaugin’s ambitions. A provocative and highly erotic painting it is, for sure.

What Gaugin did not know, it seems, was that the sitter shared the name of his grandmother’s lesbian lover. It would add poignancy to the story if the painting’s subject was actually the grandmother’s lover, but the decades don’t add up. Flora Tristan, Paul Gaugin’s grandma, was born into potential wealth. But she was illegitimate, her wealthy Peruvian father having sired her via a poor French mother. So she grew up in poverty. She marries. She hates sex, abhorring everything to do with the act, so the marriage to an impatient husband does not last. There is a child, but there is also violence, threats, public scenes and estrangement. Flora takes up the struggle for women’s rights, workers’ rights and socialism. She dresses as a man to research the experience of prostitutes. She travels from town to town giving presentations and speeches to guilds, assemblies of the poor and groups of women. Both Paul Gaugin and Flora Tristan travel.

The artist, of course, as we all know, went to live on various Pacific islands, where he painted most of the works that now make him famous. But at the time, the experience was far from idyllic. Having wanted to escape the constricting conventions and conservatism of France, he found it reincarnated in the officialdom that dealt with him, his poverty, and his illness, syphilis, which rendered him smelly, pussy and unsightly. On can only imagine what his grandmother would have thought of his processing of local women, whom he painted, infected, made pregnant and then deserted, sometimes in that order. The grandson was doing what the grandmother would have despised, derided. But then the women on the receiving end weren’t Europeans, were they? 

 Flora travelled to Peru in an attempt to claim the inheritance of her birthright. In South America, with colonial heritage all around, she brushed shoulders with the rich, with a way of life she could only dream about in Europe. The experience galvanised her, created the resolution to seek change, a resolve that drove her through her remaining years, prompted her to write, to seek self-expression that might widen and convince her audience. And so both grandmother and grandson pursue their own ideals, never consciously attaining them, of course, but the pursuit, like the life that bears it, is the point. The process is the end, the product merely existence. 

 In reviewing The Way To Paradise I find I have taken much more from the book than I thought. I had problems with the style in that its unidentified narrator constantly seemed to address Flora and Paul directly, referred to them as ‘you’, almost implying that they were acquaintances. On reflection, that might be part of the book’s point, in that celebrity renders those who possess it the friends of anyone. Both characters are thus part of our own common history. We already know them as Paul and Flora. In the case of Paul Gaugin, however, we meet a much lauded, selfish, self-obsessed, perhaps, painter whom everyone recognises. In Flora Tristan, Mario Vargas Llosa tells us, we have a member of the same family who ought to be known better than she is. In contrast with her grandson, however, her selflessness, her energy, her purity, paradoxically, identify her as a figure worthy of respect, worthy of history. The Way To Paradise was clearly worth its second read.

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The Spanish Inquisition – An Historical Revision by Henry Kamen

Henry Kamen´s The Spanish Inquisition is an amazing experience. It is a highly detailed, supremely scholarly and ultimately enlightening account of an historical phenomenon whose identity and reputation have become iconic. So much has been written about it, so many words have been spoken that one might think that there is not too much new to be learned.

But this is precisely where Kamen´s book really comes into its own, for it reveals the popular understanding of the Inquisition as little more than myth. He explodes the notion that the busy-bodies of inquisitors had their nose in everyone’s business. It was actually quite a rare event for someone to be called before it. And in addition, if you lived away from a small number of population centres, the chances were that that you would hardly even have known of its existence. Also exploded is the myth of large numbers of heretics being burned at the stake. Yes, it happened, but in nowhere near the numbers that popular misconceptions might claim. Indeed, the more common practice was to burn the convicted in effigy, since the accused had fled sometimes years before the judgment, or they might have died in prison while waiting for the case to reach its conclusion.

The intention is not to suggest that the inquisition’s methods were anything but brutal, but merely to point out that perceptions of how commonly they were applied are often false. Henry Kamen skilfully describes how the focus of interest changed over the years.

Initially the main targets were conversos, converts to Christianity, families that were once Jewish or Muslim who converted to Christianity during the decades that preceded the completion in 1492 of Ferdinand and Isabella´s reconquest. Protestants were targeted occasionally in the following centuries, but it was the families of former Jews that remained the prime target, sometimes being subjected to enquiry several generations after their adoption of their new faith.

A focus on converts to Christianity gave rise to a distinction between Old and New Christianity, an adherent of the former being able to demonstrate no evidence of there having been other faiths in the family history. What consistently runs through arguments surrounding Old and New Christianity, a distinction that was also described as pure blood versus impure blood, is that at its heart this apparent assertion of religious conformity was no more than raw xenophobia and racism. Henry Kamen makes a lot of the contradiction here, since Spain at the time was the most “international” of nations, having already secured an extensive empire and sent educated and wealthy Spaniards overseas to administer it.

In addition, of course, Spain was emerging from a long period when Muslims, Jews and Christians lived competitively, perhaps, but also peacefully under Moorish rule. It is worth reminding oneself regularly that the desire and requirement for religious conformity during the reconquest was imposed from above. Completing Henry Kamen´s The Spanish Inquisition prompts the reader to reflect on which other major historical reputations might be based on reconstructed myth. One is also prompted to speculate on the future of an increasingly integrated Europe, a continent forcibly divided for half a century where xenophobia and religious intolerance might be closer to the surface than most of us would want to admit.

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Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel

Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel is a novel set in Samoa, a novel that won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. At one level it is a simple story of one girl’s journey through childhood and adolescence.

Alofa tells us about her school life, her church, her favourite television programmes, and her family. She tells us of local practices, customs and mores. She describes what she eats and how it is cooked. She details her relationships with her friends, parents and teachers. And in this way she builds for us a picture and sensation of growing up in Samoa.

Alofa is quite a late developer. Long after her friends have succumbed to the moon sickness, she has not begun to menstruate. It troubles her. She worries that she is not like other people, that she might be destined for a life that is different from theirs. But she discovers what all adolescents discover, and delights in telling the minute detail of every encounter.

There are older men, younger men, and girls, mothers and boys. She has her share of experiences and learns that sometimes people are not what they seem. Through Where We Once Belonged the reader thus experiences Samoan life, how it once was, and how it is changing. It is not a rich life, for sure, but the poverty, both material and personal, never grinds down either the community or the individual. Like everywhere else in human existence, some can cope with apparent ease, whilst others find the process of life more taxing.

The true beauty of Sia Figiel's novel, however, is that it provides a foil to external, Western interpretations of Samoan life. Mention of this contrast with ´official´ views of the culture come late in the book, because the perspective is consistently that of the young girl narrator. In some ways this is unfortunate, since the book has real direction once this is understood. Until then, a casual reader may not develop this informative and rewarding overview. An uncommitted reader might also find the book a difficult read. 

There is extensive use of Samoan words, whole sentences in places. Though there is a glossary, it is far from complete. There is a temptation not to refer to it and thus to gloss over some of the detail, and it is in this detail that the book’s real richness lies. Eventually, it is a rewarding read, in its particularistic, individual way.

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Two Weeks Since My Last Confession by Kate Genovese

Two Weeks Since My Last Confession is a novel by Kate Genovese. It is a family saga, featuring the O’Briens from Boston, Massachusetts. On the face of things, the O’Briens are an upstanding pillar of the community.

John O’Brien is a politician, a senator no less, and a respected and long term incumbent to boot. Marie, Mrs. O’Brien, is a devout Catholic with five children. She is determined that they should be raised in such a way that ensures they develop values and respect rules. She fails.

The story centres on two siblings of the O’Brien household, and sets their stories in parallel, spanning three decades up to the 1980s. Molly and Sean are separated by several years, Sean being the older. Molly is the more impetuous of the two, Sean, in his own way, the less predictable. Things at home turn very sour indeed when Molly claims she is sexually abused by her brother. She complains to her mother, who blames her daughter for raising such ideas in the hothouse of her over-active imagination. She tells her father, who seems to be equally dismissive, being always more interested in the preservation of his own privilege and public face. It is only a long time later that she learns her father did, indeed, speak to Sean. They are words that the boy resents, for he has no recollection of having done anything.

Essentially, Two Weeks Since My Last Confession deals with the on-going consequences of these reactions which, at the time, were generated for merely rational reasons, their intended consequences designed to heal rather than harm. Events are described from the individual perspectives of the two children, Molly and Sean.

On the surface a devout Roman Catholic nuclear group, the O’Briens in reality are shot through with tension, hypocrisy, deceit and, indeed, corruption. They are perhaps a fairly standard family beneath the sheen of respect. When the lad misbehaves, his senator father pulls strings so that nothing will come of the issue and, importantly, there will be no record kept. The senator, himself, is a rampant womanizer and two timer, his clearly unhappy wife thus trapped in a marriage her religion would never contemplate ending. Sean gets up to some pretty naughty things before, during and after his tour of duty in Vietnam, but the experience of war does change him, so that his life is transformed. As he matures, he begins to understand and come to terms with the origin of the psychological demons that have haunted him since boyhood. 

But it is Molly, more formally Maureen Bridget whenever her mother scolds her, who provides the centrepiece of the story. Her life is a tale of deterioration, a personal tragedy that affects all around her. In Bobby Angelo, she finds a perfect boyfriend at an age when she is just too young to convince others her feelings are sincere. She develops an early, rich, sexual relationship with Bobby, who seems to be a likeable boy of Italian descent. He is convinced he is destined for stardom as a baseball player and somehow it just doesn’t work out with Molly. In fact, it actually worked out a little too well with Molly, but he is ignorant of this when he goes off to college. Molly is thus prevented from attending college herself and she takes up a career in health care. 

She has already smoked dope, as have most of her peers, and she has tried a few other things. Her professional activities facilitate her access to drugs, of course, and she begins to try something different, and then a little more, and a little more still. And so she drifts into a destitution of addiction. But it is a state that allows her to continue a semblance of a normal life for many years. The book describes the history of the whole family, however, in order to fill out details of the two principal characters’ lives. 

There are marriages and births – sometimes in that order, some more marriages, plenty of divorces, more births, domestic abuse, success, wealth, failure. There are breakdowns, rehab centres, a Vietnam War and pop culture. And so the characters inhabit a confused two decades to emerge older, wiser perhaps, more stable perhaps, certainly awaiting what life will throw at them next. Ultimately, the book is an examination of abuse and its consequences, both direct and incidental. The childhood traumas that centred on Molly and Sean resurface, demand attention, regularly reassert their control of lives. They have been denied. They will not go away. 

And again ultimately the book has a message of hope, as the skeletons in the cupboard are eventually brought out into daylight and positively buried. Life can be a messy process, with events becoming confused, subconsciously rejected or unacknowledged. But things do catch up with you in the end. The mistakes are truly easy to make, but unpicking their consequences can be an intricate, delicate and lengthy task.

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Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World by Michael Elsmere

In Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World, Michael Elsmere creates nothing less than a complete fantasy world of children’s literature. Rufus has been told a story by his father about a diamond of a size beyond anyone’s dreams. It is just waiting to be found, so, having lost his parents, Rufus sets out to do precisely that. 

It is a journey of total imagination, a journey through some quintessential scenes of childhood experience, settings of spectacular invention, surely reminiscent of places that many of us might have been. There is a treasure hunt bound for the Spanish Main, an adventure voyage on board ships from a chivalric, Romantic past.

But when the mission is redirected according to an omen unearthed by a submarine hero, Africa becomes the destination that Rufus and his companion, Jim, must explore. If only they could themselves have read the clues that explained how the under-sea horde was transformed into a diamond mine on land. 

In Rufus, Michael Elsmere has invented a wonderful, likeable character, a young lad with an imagination powerful enough to give ideas life and to do so in the most mundane of surroundings. The author also avoids cliché at all times. There are no platitudes of magic potions that appear just as they are required to do exactly what is needed, convenient shrinking or aggrandizement, and no mere description of scene after scene. 

Throughout Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World, Michael Elsmere offers elegant prose that provides regularly evocative surprises. It provides a quite beautiful vehicle to explore the power of imagination, to re-experience the joy of discovery. OK kids. Rufus is a good lad. He is perhaps about the same age as you. He’s lost his parents and there’s a diamond to be found. There’s a sailing ship, pirates, treasure, gold, shipwrecks, talking birds, submarines and electric eels. There are eggheads who know how to read things that other people can’t even see. Maps are redrawn in people’s pockets and point to new places. 

There are lions, jungles, snakes, beautiful ladies and witches. There are deserts, oceans, seas, mountains, caves, caverns, stones, stalactites and schools. And so Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World becomes itself a celebration of the form in which it exists. It is gentle, subtle writing to convey truly exciting, fast-paced fun. And kids, I suspect a few parents, especially those that might be rendered a little tearful by genuine nostalgia, might enjoy reading Rufus themselves. It’s a book that genuinely inhabits multiple levels, a story that will enrapture the young, and a concept that will fascinate the once young.

But then, when you have read Rufus, you will want to read more, because that is what Rufus is about. These imagined worlds are themselves bigger, greater, more vivid and more real just because they are imagined. 

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Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester

Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester is a novel that is hard to praise too highly. Set in Hong Kong, it presents the stories of four main characters, each of which is an immigrant to this city. Behind them at all times is a culture that rules their lives, sets the limits of what might be possible, but is always hard for outsiders to penetrate. 

That the culture affects all aspects of their lives, however, is a given. Each character pursues self-interest, the different eras they inhabit defining and characterising the different stages of the city’s development. Thus we see its pre-war emergence from a dirty nineteenth century right through to its contemporary role as a driving force of free market globalisation. 

When Tom Stewart, on his way to Honk Kong in the 1930s, accepts the challenge of a wager, he changes the direction of lives, not just is own. A random, trivial suggestion suggests he might learn Cantonese in the thirty days of a shared voyage to new lives. His tutor is Sister Maria, a Chinese nun who proves to be an enlightened, motivating teacher. 

Tom Stewart learns the language, wins the bet and begins a relationship with things Chinese that will sustain him through war, peace, economic growth, professional life, clandestine activity and property speculation. Dawn Stone, previously Doris, hails from Blackpool, but she makes it to Hong Kong. She has a career in the media, having gone through the once well trodden paths of learning her trade on provincial newspapers and then graduating to London. She makes it good and proper in the public relations business that booms out east. She seems to have few scruples and is ruled by pragmatism. 

She is not alone. Michael Ho is a young businessman. He has a vision of an air conditioned future that is on a knife edge between success and failure. He is sub-contracted from Germans who operate north of London to avail themselves of the country’s more flexible approach to labour. He has a rip-off sub-contracting factory in Ho Chi Minh City. He is Hong Kong based, but from Fujian, and thus also an immigrant. He has recently relocated his family to Sydney. Interests in Guangzhou will determine his fate. Mountains are high and the emperor is far away, his contacts tell him, so practices are mainly local. He must learn. He must raise capital. 

It is perhaps true everywhere in this global economy, where Hertfordshire taxi drivers remonstrate in Urdu and curse in English. And it is pragmatism that rules the place. As globalisation becomes an issue, the place is the world, not just Hong Kong. In this new world which appears to be built on the professedly liberal economic ideas that have underpinned the colony’s free-for-all, these immigrants to the place make their lives, make their fortunes in their own ways. 

But still there is a constant in that they can only succeed within the protective umbrella shade of bigger interests than their own. In a city state that grew out of an illicit and illegal trade in opium as British merchants and adventurers became international drug dealers to vulnerable China, people with wealth beyond measure push people around the chessboards of their interests, occasionally enthroning a pawn they might even have previously sacrificed. 

 As in A Debt To Pleasure, John Lanchester has us enter the world of an anti-hero. The character that drives events in Fragrant Harbour is but a name for most of the book. He is cold, calculating, driven by raw, undiluted self-interest. In this he is perhaps no different from anyone else. It’s just that he is more successful at it, and thus less willing to risk that success. And he prevails. The emperor is far away. The mountains are high. In his case, he is the emperor and he owns the mountains. Power lives in pockets and, in a globalised economy, we are all immigrants, even in our homes. What a superb book! 

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