Tag Archives: book review

book report: 1900 or the Last President, by Ingersoll Lockwood

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A book I wouldn’t have read, save for Ingersoll Lockwood’s memetic resonance. Briefly put, he wrote children’s books with a hero called Baron Trump, back before the First World War. As Barron Trump (aged 14) now towers over his father, resembling nothing so much as a genetically-enhanced Astartes, it seems increasingly likely that Lockwood had visions of a future where Barron has indeed become a kind of godlike figure.

1900 or The Last President is, by contrast, a rather dry and tedious little book about the dissolution of the United States with a charismatic, well-meaning President who manages to fuck everything up. It has, however, memetic echoes; for example, as the new President, Bryan, is elected:

In less than half an hour, mounted policeman dashed through the streets calling out: “Keep within your houses; close your doors and barricade them. The entire East side is in a state of uproar. Mobs of vast size are organizing under the lead of Anarchists and Socialists, and threaten to plunder and despoil the houses of the rich who have wronged and oppressed them for so many years. Keep within doors. Extinguish all lights.”

There’s also a curious foreshadowing of the recent silver rush (writing in February 2021):

The first year of the Silver Administration was scarcely rounded up, ere there began to be ugly rumours that the Government was no longer able to hold the white metal at a parity with gold. “It is the work of Wall Street,” cried the friends of the President, but wiser heads were shaken in contradiction, for they had watched the sowing of the wind of unreason, and knew only too well that the whirlwind of folly must be reaped in due season.

The country had been literally [sic] submerged by a silver flood which had poured its argent waves into every nook and cranny of the Republic, stimulating human endeavour to most unnatural and harmful vigour. Mad speculation stalked over the land.  […] Every scrap and bit of the white metal that they could lay their hands upon, spoons hallowed by the touch of lips long since closed in death, and cups and tankards from which grand sires had drunken were bundled away to the mints to be coined into “people’s dollars.”

I was also amused by this, very much of its time:

The black man, ever at the heels of his white brother, set to rule over him by an inscrutable decree of nature, came forth too in thousands, chatting and laughing gayly, careless of the why or wherefore of his white brother’s deep concern, and powerless to comprehend it had he so desired.

I plan to read the Baron Trump novels next, which promise to be more engaging, and even more memetically relevant.

book report: the Kybalion

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A classic modern occult work, I would imagine composed in the early 20th Century; many have suspected the author is in fact William Atkinson and having read several of his books I would agree there is a similar style and approach. It begins:

The purpose of this work is not the enunciation of any special philosophy or doctrine, but rather is to give to the students a statement of the Truth that will serve to reconcile the many bits of occult knowledge that they may have acquired, but which are apparently opposed to each other and which often serve to discourage and disgust the beginner in the study. Our intent is not to erect a new Temple of Knowledge, but rather to place in the hands of the student a Master-Key with which he may open the many inner doors in the Temple of Mystery through the main portals he has already entered.

The entire book is written in a stuffy but readable Edwardian mode. It is mostly commentary on seven principles:

1. The principle of mentalism

“The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.”

2. The principle of correspondence

“As above, so below; as below, so above.” […] This principle embodies the truth that there is always a correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of being and life.”

3. The principle of vibration

“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

4. The principle of polarity

“Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”

5. The principle of rhythm

“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”

6. The principle of cause and effect

“Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.”

7. The principle of gender

“Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes.”

I would describe it as a work of philosophical occultism; there are no practical techniques here. In essence, it treats of cosmic laws, and their manipulation. Hermetic occultism is about transcending our mundane reality, in order to see and be more, and to thus control the lower:

We overcome the lower laws, by applying still higher ones – and in this way only, But we cannot escape Law or rise above it entirely.

Having studied the occult for a decade and more, I found much of it obvious; though I can’t say if that is because the Kybalion’s themes have been so echoed in subsequent works, or because it borrows from earlier works, or both. However, it would be an interesting read for anyone beginning to study the philosophical occult; and even I found much of interest, e.g.

The word Positive means something real and strong, as compared with a Negative unreality or weakness. Nothing is further from the real facts of electrical phenomenon. The so-called Negative pole of the battery is really the pole in and by which the generation or production of new forms and energies is manifested. There is nothing “negative” about it. The best scientific authorities now use the word “Cathode” in place of “Negative,” the word Cathode coming from the Greek root meaning “descent; the path of generation, etc.” From the Cathode pole emerge the swarm of electrons or corpuscles; from the same pole emerge those wonderful “rays” which have revolutionized scientific conceptions during the past decade. The Cathode pole is the Mother of all of the strange phenomena which have rendered useless the old textbooks, and which have caused many long accepted theories to be relegated to the scrap-pile of scientific speculation. The Cathode, or Negative Pole, is the Mother Principle of Electrical Phenomena, and of the finest forms of matter as yet known to science.

For the time, pre-WW1, this is an interestingly Taoist insight.

That is, that lack itself generates, by its very lack & vacuum, an enabling suction. Imbalance is the driving force for balance. As in The Four Quartets, the perfect figure is found not in static being but rather in becoming; in the ceaseless motion of death and rebirth, striving and becoming, failure and regeneration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugc5FZsycAw

book report: Old School by Tobias Wolff

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Another in my run of university/school-themed novels, Tobias Wolff’s Old School is, on the face of it, a rehashing of the standard “working class protagonist gets scholarship to elite institution and observes the rich kids’ lives” trope. The plot centres around a 1960s boarding school, a clique of 6th form budding writers, the school magazine, and guest writers who come to give speeches and “advice”. I really enjoyed the portrayal of these adolescents all trying to write like Hemingway – it’s inconceivable today, even in an elite institution; even at my (elite) university, the English Lit students were almost completely uninterested in reading, let alone in learning how to think or write.

Wolff really captures the sense of excitement some feel with novels; that great literature is wisdom literature. Although Wolff demeaned himself by jumping aboard the “Trump is literally Hitler!” train, one can forgive him because he has a Beowulf ‘stache and a great face, like an old rain-worn statue, and after all Old School is partly about the disjunction between the writer as man and the writer as book.

Look at that ‘stache. That’s a ‘stache that means business.

I especially relished the description of Robert Frost and Ayn Rand visiting the school; Rand is simply ghastly, strident & self-mythological for all her insight & intellect. There’s also a fine portrayal of the schoolmasters, their life bonded to the school and the pupils; their difficulty in forming a self separate from their role as teacher. The narrative control is impressive, the focus mostly on the boy protagonist and his peers, but then effortlessly flickering onto the teachers; for example, a teacher who quits the school:

In former times Arch had supposed that his sense of being a distinctive and valuable man proceeded from his own qualities, and that they would sustain him in that confidence wherever he happened to be. He’d never imagined that this surety was conferred on him by others, by their knowing and cherishing him. But so it was. Unrecognised, he had become a ghost, even to himself.

I was forearmed against the book by the surname, “Wolff”. I wearily imagined a kind of Philip Roth “look at how Jewish I am!” exercise, but while the protagonist’s Jewish background drives the plot & character development, it’s not too obtrusive, or not obnoxiously so. I was reminded, subtly, of The Great Gatsby, another story about a (presumably) Jewish parvenu and self-mythologiser in WASP-world. The subtleness is the thing here – I probably wouldn’t have noticed Gatsby is most likely Jewish were I not in the habit of Noticing; and likewise with Wolff’s novel, the narrator doesn’t really think of himself as Jewish, so only experiences a mild sense of friction, of unbelonging in the WASPy school – but that mild friction generates, as it were, a pearl. Deception, illusion, a metamorphic & chameleon self, is so central to the protagonist’s Jewish being, that his very attempt to articulate his unbelonging becomes deceit: he plagiarises another Jewish writer’s short story because it so clearly expresses his own unease and pretense; pretending to be another pretender, to confess his pretense. All too circumvoluted and frankly Jewish for the Anglo-Saxons, it’s perfect matter for a novel.

book report: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

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A Christmas book for this old dog. There aren’t many modern books I would look forward to, as most of my favourite writers have died; Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a great read and resonated curiously with my own preoccupations, 15 years ago (English magic). JS & Mr N is a strange beast indeed, a Fantasy work set in Georgian England during the Napoleonic wars, and written in very passable Jane Austen; I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who loves the Game of Thrones books, but it would also probably irritate those who sneer at anything lower than Henry James.

It also made a great, surprisingly unpozzed TV drama:

Her later & related short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, was surprisingly excellent, but Clarke is far from a prolific author and so I was astounded & pleased to hear of Piranesi. Where the Jonathan Strange world was, if you like, Fantasy filtered through Jane Austen, Piranesi is somewhat Borgesian but quite often reminded me of my own short stories –  although Clarke is a little older than me, we hail from a similar part of England and so perhaps there was something in the air. Piranesi is a curious meeting of genres – an allegorical fable at the beginning, later it became more concretely-grounded in an everyday, quasi-plausible reality, while never sinking to the mundane. As it opens, the main character is almost totally alone in a vast stone building of great halls & staircases, full of statues and floods. The lower halls are permanently underwater, and clouds form in the upper halls; fish and birds abound. The narrator, Piranesi, wanders these halls in his own routines & understanding; I say “his” but I was sure he was a she until his gender was specifically mentioned. He survives on fish soups; he avoids the floods; he takes care of skeletons he has found among the alcoves, regarding them as other people who just happen to be dead. As the novel progresses, he encounters others, strange visitors to his halls.

The prose is unflashy and pleasing:

In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall. I imagine I am walking the path from the vestibule to the hall. I note with precision the doors I must pass through, the rights and lefts that I must take, the statues on the walls that I must pass. 

As I began reading the book, I was alone in a vast stone building of great antiquity, free to wander the halls and staircases without a mask, for there were none to meet – not even ghosts, for the thousands who have died here, over the centuries, died at peace; there are statues but also bookshelves and paintings and sofas, a pingpong table, a kitchen, a stove; and, mercifully, no floods; and so the book had a special significance for me, constructing my own private rituals and order amidst a Piranesian world:

Il pozzo, tavola XIII dalle “Carceri d’invenzione” di Giovanni Battista Piranesi
(Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma – ANSA)

book report: Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

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One of my “I didn’t finish the book” reviews, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. Like a lot of these university/school novels, the dirt poor protagonist has won a scholarship to an elite institution where all the other pupils can trace their family back to the Mayflower. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad book by any means, I just found myself unable to engage with it so gave up about 10% of the way in. It felt inauthentic and a bit too creative-writery to me, a common failing of most modern novels; for example Donna Tartt’s The Secret History also felt like something of a creative writing exercise, albeit one that had burst through the constraints & niceties of its apparent origin. Prep just felt lame, formulaic, everything you would expect from a modern, successful novel: carefully attuned to the needs & phobias of New York publishing, and unilluminated by even a flicker of real passion or creativity or intelligence – at least in the first 10%, which was as far as I got before I decided I’d be more intellectually nourished by Baldur’s Gate 2.

 

book report: Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe

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I’m on an academic-themed novel run at the moment, after Donna Tartt’s Secret History. Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue is, in its way, as concerned with tradition as Tartt’s novel, but has a totally different tone, one of rambunctious satirical comedy. In short, a Cambridge college, Porterhouse, acquires a new Master, who attempts to modernise affairs much to the chagrin of the old dons and staff.

Like all really good, enduring comedies (e.g. Withnail & I), it’s also about something – in this case, the absurdity of tradition and the absurdity of modernity. In our ghastly modern times, it is fashionable to critique tradition by pointing to its silliness & occasional inhumanities, without admitting modernity’s faults (a regulated, inescapable inhumanity, among others). Much of the novel is seen through the eyes of Skullion, a loyal college servant who has overseen decades of tradition.

He went back into the Porter’s Lodge and sat down again with his pipe. Around him the paraphernalia of his office, the old wooden clock, the counter, the rows of pigeonholes, the keyboard and the blackboard with ‘Message for Dr Messmer’ scrawled on it, were reassuring relics of his tenure and reminders that he was still needed. For forty-five years Skullion had sat in the Lodge watching over the comings and goings of Porterhouse until it seemed he was as much a part of the College as the carved heraldic beasts on the tower above. A lifetime of little duties easily attended to while the world outside stormed by in a maelstrom of change had bred in Skullion a devotion to the changelessness of Porterhouse traditions. When he’d first come there’d been an Empire, the greatest Empire that the world had known, a Navy, the greatest Navy in the world, fifteen battleships, seventy cruisers, two hundred destroyers, and Skullion had been a keyboard sentry on the Nelson with her three for’ard turrets and her arse cut off to meet the terms of some damn treaty. And now there was nothing left of that. Only Porterhouse was still the same. Porterhouse and Skullion, relics of an old tradition. As for the intellectual life of the College, Skullion neither knew nor cared about it. It was as incomprehensible to him as the rigmarole of a Latin mass to some illiterate peasant. They could say or think what they liked. It was the men he worshipped, some at least and fewer these days, their habits and the trappings he associated with that old assurance. The Dean’s ‘Good morning, Skullion’, Dr Huntley’s silk shirts, the Chaplain’s evening stroll around the Fellows’ Garden, Mr Lyons’ music evening every Friday, the weekly parcel from the Institute for Dr Baxter. Chapel, Hall, the Feast, the meeting of the College Council, all these occasions like internal seasons marked the calendar of Skullion’s life and all the time he looked for that assurance that had once been the hallmark of a gentleman.

When I think over the past, and what I miss, it is of course the architecture, the ethos of the old scholars (now mostly dead or retired or fired, to make way for the fashionable new academic), but also the people, the type. It once made sense to talk of a “gentleman”, of a man who acts according to a higher standard where it counts. Today, were one to say a coarse TV presenter or a traitor like Tony Blair is “not a gentleman” people would simply jeer. The notion of being a gentleman has been replaced by being a good SJW, a shrieking blue hair with BPD, or a smirking Blairite bureaucrat parroting the latest buzzwords (tolerance, respect, diversity, etc.)

Now sitting there with the gas fire hissing before him he searched his mind for what it was those old men signified. It wasn’t that they were clever. Some were, but half were stupid, more stupid than the young men coming up these days. Money? Some had a lot and others hadn’t. That wasn’t what had made the difference. To him at least. […] He spat into the fire affectionately and remembered an argument he’d had once with a young pup in a pub who’d heard him going on about the good old days.

‘What gentlemen?’ the lad had said. ‘A lot of rich bastards with nothing between their ears who just exploited you.’

And Skullion had put down his pint and said, ‘A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be. And that’s something you will never know.’ Not what they were but what they ought to be, like some old battle standard that you followed because it was a symbol of the best. A ragged tattered piece of cloth that stood for something and gave you confidence and something to fight for.

It’s not that the past was perfect, merely that the flipside of pointless snobbery was a reverence for the things that really mattered. And there is something endearing about the snobbery; for example reading this passage in 2020, where every grubby polytechnic calls itself a university, is an amusing experience – it concerns a research graduate called Zipser, with an undergraduate degree from Durham:

The Porter seemed to regard him as an interloper, and lavished a wealth of invective on him normally reserved for tradesmen. Zipser’s attempts to mollify him by explaining that Durham was a university and that there had been a Durham College in Oxford in 1380 had failed hopelessly. If anything, the mention of Oxford had increased Skullion’s antipathy.

I rather like a world where the University of Durham is regarded as a made-up institution. That’s snobbery done right. Even at my alma mater, which was not Cambridge, there was a pleasant sense of being excluded, by not having gone to one of the very best public schools, not having a Norman family tree, and so on. For me, it was somewhat like going to the theatre and knowing that I would always be in the audience, observing the curious ceremonies of those on stage:

‘Crumpets,’ said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. ‘Just the thing. You toast them.’ He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the fork into Zipser’s hand. Zipser poked the crumpet at the fire tentatively and felt once again that dissociation from reality that seemed so much a part of life in Cambridge. It was as if everyone in the College sought to parody himself, as if a parody of a parody could become itself a new reality.

Of course all this has been undone now, and the parodic old dons have been replaced by parodic SJW blue hairs and their ilk. For example, the University of Durham’s website is full of such multicultural wonders:

No commentary required.

book report: Last Call, by Tim Powers

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My first Tim Powers book was the great Declare. I like European history and spy thrillers and Fantasy, so for me Declare was like Alan Furst’s Dark Star, impregnated by The Dark is Rising. Alas, everything else of his I’ve read has been interesting & well-written, but unengaging – at least for me.

Last Call is one of the unengaging reads, for me. As far as I could tell, it’s about a guy who lost his soul in a poker game, to his father, who blinded him with a Tarot card when he was a small boy, and now he’s in Las Vegas with a Greek neighbour who has a huge moustache, and his sister, who is also Isis, trying to do something to play poker with his father again, and win this time. It’s occasionally difficult to follow, as the father figure has several identities so I often thought “who is this, again?” and also I found it a big of a slog so read it in pieces over several weeks, forgetting parts of the plot en route.

It is however well-reviewed elsewhere, and not a bad book by any means. I like this kind of magic realism, where instead of an outright Fantasy world of dragons & whatnot, you have the modern world in all its mundane grime & absurdity, overlaid with strange magics. In this, it resembles Twin Peaks, the last season of which was also partly set in Las Vegas. Powers is good at this, e.g. the edifices of gambling:

Leon had suspected for years that the mannequins in the built-to-be-bombed houses out at Yucca Flats in the 1950s had been, unknown even to the technicians who had set them up, sacrifices to the gods of chaos that were about to be invoked by the detonation of the atomic bomb, and it had seemed to him, too, that the multitude of statues around Las Vegas, from the stone Arabs in front of the Sahara on the Strip to the towering figure of Vegas Vic over the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street, exposed constantly to the sun and the rain, were offerings to the random patterns of the weather, another manifestation of the chaos gods. Chaos and randomness, after all, in the form of gambling, were the patron saints of the city, and had to be appeased.

I found the characters utterly uninteresting, flat, American and kind of pointless, but I suspect that’s just a personal reaction. As I get older my tastes become narrower & more violent. I’ll probably try at least one other Powers novel, in case it captures some of Declare’s, well, power.

book report, Calm Before The Storm (Dave Hayes/Praying Medic)

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Well, I came across Praying Medic aka Dave Hayes through my own Q researches, and decided to buy his first Q Chronicles book when I needed to add costs to get free Amazon postage on some booze. It’s a good read, self-published but very well-edited: I am normally irritated by typos and bad grammar in new, mainstream-published books, so Hayes’ book is testament to how much one can achieve with one or two pair of eyes, sans an expensive media machine.

Hayes writes much as he speaks, in a clear, intelligent, approachable style. The book is divided into chapters, e.g. “Admiral Rogers and No Such Agency”, “Huma and HUMA”, “The Clinton Foundation.” He’s clearly done his research, even as he carefully simplifies it into manageable chunks. It’s hard to isolate anything especially quotable, as it’s all much of a muchness, that is, lucid & no more complicated than it needs to be. 

I would definitely recommend it for anyone new or reasonably new to Q. Even I, who have followed Q since early 2018, found new things to contemplate, so I dare say anyone save an utter Q-savant would benefit from the book. Hayes avoids anything too nutty (even if it is true) so it would also make a good gift for normies who are beginning to ask questions but don’t want the full Lizard People experience.

book report: War As I Knew It (General Patton)

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A book published shortly after General Patton’s death, drawn from his war memoirs. It’s full of passages like this:

I decided to attack Casablanca this day with the 3d Division and one tank battalion. It took some nerve, as both Truscott and Harmon seemed in a bad way, but I felt we should maintain the initiative. Then Admiral Hall came ashore to arrange for naval gunfire and air support and brought fine news. Truscott has taken the airfield at Port Lyautey and there are forty-two P-40’s on it. 

That is, solid workmanlike prose and a matter-of-fact, cool approach. I dare say the book would mean more to a military historian, however it’s perfectly engaging for the layman. There are some amusing moments, e.g. in Sicily:

The Mayor of the town, who was by way of being an archeologist, took me to look at these temples. When we came to the temple of Hercules, which was the biggest but in the worst state of repair, I asked him had it been destroyed by an earthquake. He said, “No General, it was an unfortunate incident of the other way.” When I asked which was the other war, he said that this temple was destroyed in the Second Punic War.

These moments take on more significance in the light of Patton’s apparent past life memories:

For all his bluff, no-nonsense manner Patton saw things in historical depth:

Furthermore, he sanctioned my plan to cross the XX Corps at Melun and Fontainebleau and the XII Corps at Sens. It was evident that when these crossings were effected, the Seine and Yonne became useless to the Germans as military barriers. The Melun crossing is the same as that used by Labienus with his Tenth Legion about 55 B.C.

He has the war-eye for detail, an appreciation for sound tactics:

Just east of Le Mans was one of the best examples of armor and air co-operation I have ever seen. For about two miles the road was full of enemy motor transport and armor, many of which bore the unmistakable calling card of a P-47 fighter-bomber – namely, a group of fifty-caliber holes in the concrete. Whenever armor and air can work together in this way, the results are sure to be excellent. 

For all Patton’s deep theoretical and historical learning, he has a pragmatic closeness to things, a tactile simplicity: 

He also said, and this was more to the point, that the easiest way through the Siegfried Line was the Nancy Gap. I had come to this same conclusion from a study of the map, because, if you find a large number of big roads leading through a place, that is the place to go regardless of enemy resistance. It is useless to capture an easy place that you can’t move from. 

Not to mention a ruthless, clear-sighted approach:

On the sixteenth, Stiller, Codman, and I drove to Chartres, which had just been taken by Walker whom we met at the bridge, still under some fire. The bridge had been partly destroyed by a German hiding in a fox hole who pulled the detonator and blew the bridge, killing some Americans, after the leading elements had passed. He then put his hands up and surrendered. The Americans took him prisoner, which I considered the height of folly.

Only Patton could write something like this:

Christmas dawned clear and cold; lovely weather for killing Germans, although the thought seemed somewhat at variance with the spirit of the day.

One can see why some speculate that Patton reincarnated as Donald J. Trump. While the lives are in many respects very different – the New York businessman and the career soldier – a man like Patton most likely bore a multifacted, deep soul, which could just as easily manifest as a foul-mouthed, impolitic soldier, or a foul-mouthed, impolitic politician – both of genius, in their respective fields. And certainly, Patton’s ivory-handled revolvers are a very Trumpian touch.

book report, The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz

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A book I’ve seen recommended on /x and various occult sites, it’s advertised as something of a Carlos Castaneda-esque work, and Ruiz makes ample use of Castaneda’s terminology (impeccable, warrior, hunter, dreaming, etc.) but alas I found it to be self-help pap, dishonest in its presentation and frankly tedious. 

There has long been debate over Castaneda’s authenticity. A quick run-down for normies: he claimed to have been mentored in magic by a Mexican shaman called Don Juan, producing a series of books from the 60s to the mid-1990s. I came across them (via William Burroughs) when I was 20, and found them mesmerising, even while I doubted they were describing events with much accuracy. 

Naturally, many have accused Castaneda of being a charlatan, pointing out factual discrepancies in his books, not to mention shady goings on (deaths of disciples etc.). I don’t really care whether Don Juan existed or not, or even if Castaneda was a fraud or a genuine magician; the books have a psychological truth to them, like Ursula le Guin’s wholly fictional Earthsea books (at least, the first three) or Tolkien’s legendarium.

My own supposition, now, is that Castaneda’s Don Juan is akin to Plato’s Socrates: a real person who was worked into a fiction for didactic purposes. I think that just as most of “Socrates'” philosophy is actually Plato’s, so with Castaneda – perhaps Don Juan was his own personal model, only loosely based on a real human being he met once or twice in his youth. I’m inclined to doubt the books describe a factual reality, because the narrator (Castaneda) retains his naive, flawed character from start (The Teachings of Don Juan, 1968) to end (mid-90s); he is the permanent ephebe to Don Juan’s wizened old mentor. 

The Castaneda books are weird, and often dark and pitiless. I’m surprised they are so popular in the New Age community, as they describe a universe of ruthless predation and power, a far cry from the fluffy unicorn playground of the average hippy. The only ameliorating, human quality is a kind of low-key affection between Castaneda and Don Juan, and a frequent and surprising humour.

Disappointingly, Miguel Ruiz’s book is just your run-of-the-mill self-help, with platitudes and truisms dressed up in Castaneda’s terminology. I found my mind often disconnecting from the text; as on a monotonous motorway drive, one sometimes loses all memory of the last few minutes (highway hypnosis), so here I succumbed to reading hypnosis, unable to focus on passages that were as memorable as a stretch of the M62 at night. The word “love” abounds, hypnotically, horribly; ironically, given one of the so-called four agreements is “to be impeccable with your word”, Ruiz’s words come across like over-boiled vegetables: they still bear a resemblance to some original form but taste of nothing, and fall apart under the slightest examination. For Castaneda, to be impeccable was an existential challenge & imperative. Ruiz debases the concept to the kind of thing you’d tell a small child when they lie about eating all the cookies:

Being impeccable with your word is not using the word against yourself. If I see you in the street and I call you stupid, it appears that I’m using the word against you. But really I’m using my word against myself, because you’re going to hate me for this, and your hating me is not good for me. 

The intended audience seems to be women, or rather women with the mental age of a small child:

Gossiping has become the main form of communication in human society. It has become the way we feel close to each other, because it makes us feel better to see someone else feel as badly as we do. There is an old expression that says, “Misery likes company,” and people who are suffering in hell don’t want to be all alone. Fear and suffering are an important part of the dream of the planet; they are how the dream of the planet keeps us down.

The dream of the planet, I thought, that sounds interesting, tell me more. But he doesn’t. 

Later, he describes right action:

A good example of this comes from the story about Forrest Gump. He didn’t have great ideas, but he took action. He was happy because he always did his best at whatever he did. 

It’s hard not to smile at the idea of a shaman in the lineage of Castaneda’s Don Juan, who watches a film like Forrest Gump with his mouth agape, awed by such wisdom. But then, Ruiz is the kind of shaman who appears on the Oprah Winfrey show.

So, overall a typical New Age self-help book, full of easy platitudes. I can’t see it doing any harm, but if you need a book to tell you such things you’re probably beyond help, let alone self-help.