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.

Arabia by Jonathan Raban

At the end of the seventies Jonathan Raban wandered across the Middle East. Arabia was the book he wrote after impressionistic visits to Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and, briefly, Lebanon. Paradoxically, the book starts and finishes in London, because it was there that questions about Arab identity and culture arose in the author’s mind. 

 In Earls Court the author muses on the question, “Who are the Arabs?” At the time in common prejudice they had a reputation for association with terrorism, being fundamentally religious and having uncountable wealth. So it seems that times have not changed that much… So Jonathan Raban resolved to find out for himself. Unlike most authors of travelogues, however, Jonathan Raban saw his first task as learning the language and, as a result of this laudable approach, Arabia is perhaps more of an achievement than it otherwise might have been. 

In a nutshell, he found Bahrain seedy and Qatar rich but built in a scrap-yard. Abu Dhabi was new and squeaky clean, eager to impress, while Dubai seemed to be populated by business sharks, opportunistic, pragmatic but obsessively driven and eager to excel. All Yemenis appeared to be overactive dwarves on a spending spree. Egypt was big and scruffy, and Jordan was like Switzerland with parties.

You will gather immediately that Arabia is not an in-depth study of Arab culture, society or indeed anything else. Its pages are heavily populated with stories of expatriates, the sort of people who might be eager to talk over a drink in a bar. Though he quotes Thesiger, Jonathan Raban seems to have neither the inclination nor the means to follow the explorer into the desert. This is not a criticism. He also quotes Alice, but does not venture into wonderland. But there again, perhaps he does precisely that, especially in Abu Dhabi. 

Thirty years later, a casual visitor to the places Jonathan Raban frequented might have similar impressions, except the places and the associated reactions would all be much bigger. Bahrain’s planned causeway was built and at weekends there are even more Saudis doing what Saudis do at weekends. Abu Dhabi is vastly more splendid, and Dubai is still trying to be the tallest, biggest, the best in something measurable and sellable.

Jordan may well be significantly poorer than the country Jonathan Raban found. It seems he may have found it difficult to escape the swish diplomatic and international resident areas, and he never made it to Wadi Rum or Petra, so didn’t even have a tourist experience to relate. I have never been to Yemen or Egypt, so I cannot comment on them. One thing that always comes across in Jonathan Raban’s work is a willingness to engage with people, very often over a whisky! And, though Arabia might only make a very light scratch across the surface of its subject, its focus on individual vignettes makes it a highly entertaining and engaging read. The region is no doubt still host to many others like them. 

The book is also mildly informative. And, on a weekend where debates rage on the proposed construction of a mosque in New York, it is interesting to reflect how little attitudes towards the book’s subject seem to have changed.