Tag Archives: literature

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: 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.

on not outgrowing books

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Patrick Kurp, as an aside:

As an adolescent, that’s how I first encountered Kafka and Dostoevsky, writers once important to me. The method isn’t foolproof. Sometimes we choose dull or stupid books, or books that aren’t right for us. Perhaps we are not the ideal reader. Kafka and Dostoevsky are no longer right for me but others prize them.

Kurp often mentions writers that he once liked but now despises, for example Hart Crane is now simply too wild to countenance. Kurp is now too sober and austere for such juvenile oupourings, I guess (ho ho ho). 

I thought back over my decades and realised I simply don’t outgrow things. I spent my entire teens reading Fantasy books and while I transitioned to Serious Literature when I was 20, I occasionally re-read e.g. Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance series, or David Eddings’ Belgariad, and just last year I re-read Douglas Hill’s Keill Randor books with great pleasure. I no longer seek out new Fantasy books, as every attempt (barring Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) has ended badly, but every few years I like to revisit the pleasures of my youth. 

There are Serious Writers I fell out of love with, for example William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac but even here my literary judgement hasn’t changed that much; I esteemed Burroughs & Kerouac because, aged 20, they were two of the first non-Fantasy authors I encountered, and they seemed like a portal to adulthood.

I thought they were cool the way a 14-year-old thinks smoking makes him a man. My literary judgement, however, was more neutral. I found Naked Lunch and Queer amusing & comical, the rest of Burroughs’ books pretty much hit & miss, and Kerouac’s works enjoyable but slight. I thought that Allen Ginsberg was mostly shit, ‘Howl’ and one or two other poems being enjoyable rhetorical bombast at best, the rest of his work being utter dreck. Even as the whole Beat image – drugs, alcohol, criminality – has long since ceased to allure, I dare say my literary judgement wouldn’t have changed that much over the last 15+ years, that is, I would probably still enjoy some of Kerouac & Burroughs. 

I was wondering if there was something wrong with me, since Kurp seems to have outgrown and come to despise almost everything he’s ever read. Am I weird, for still liking T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, Proust and Thomas Mann, after two decades?

My nature seems fairly constant in spite of much surface change: where I despise people I used to pal about with, it’s not that either of us have changed that much; it’s more that where I was once willing to tolerate a fair amount of bombast, finger-stabbing hectoring, sneers, cowardice, etc., because I thought well no one’s perfect, now I’m just too old and impatient to tolerate what Joe Biden would call malarkey. 

Twenty and more years ago, there were books I read because they seemed like the sort of things I should be reading, but if I didn’t like them I didn’t like them and that was that. I didn’t find Colin Wilson’s The Outsider all that interesting, or Sartre, even though I wanted to. By contrast, there were books which took me wholly & pleasantly by surprise: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Thomas Bernhard’s Holzfällen, Kafka’s Zuräu Aphorisms, Beckett’s Trilogy, Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel & Stella. I suppose reading habits are as various as people, which is one reason I rarely recommend books – apart, of course, from the fact that nobody reads books anymore.

book report: The Secret History, Donna Tartt

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One of the few hyped modern novels (1992) that didn’t leave me indignant & gasping at how much time and money I’d squandered. I read it in 2005 or so, in one of the darkest times of my life, suffering the most monotonous & meaningless of all office labour for 5 pounds an hour. My fancy education had proven not merely useless but actively counter-productive; as a chap I knew once remarked of himself, “I’m overqualified for everything except the worst jobs.”

It was a propitious time to read Tartt’s novel, about a gifted but impoverished student who goes to a good university (in Styxhexenhammer’s ‘hood, Vermont) and then hustles his way into an exclusive Ancient Greek course and an inner circle of rich, dandified students, one of whom is murdered by the others. This isn’t a spoiler, as the book literally begins:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. 

This is not a whodunnit. It’s more of a whydunnit; and even that can’t really be spoiled: the point of the novel isn’t anything so sensational as murderous motivation; it’s the sense some students have, of being initiated, separated from the lesser man. In this case, the initiation is partly esoteric/magical, with scenes of literally Dionysian ecstasy, and partly that of the good scholar. 

The bland protagonist, a hustling rube from California, inveigles his way into Ancient Greek classes, which are taught by invitation only. His motivation isn’t really clear; he is himself something of a blank, a useful canvas. In the recognisably modern university, the Ancient Greek students stand out; there are five, four men & a woman, all dressed like characters from 1930s Paris. The tutor teaches Ancient Greek for free; he is an unabashed snob who only accepts as students the young, the beautiful, and the rich.

It’s very much a first novel. There were one or two inconsistencies/repetitions which had escaped the editor’s eye (and I got the feeling it had been professionally edited) and in general it betrays a juvenile ignorance of how the world works, of how people work, get paid, pay the rent, survive. But the impression I received in 2005 was confirmed on my 2020 re-reading, that it is a powerful, authentic work; indeed, the “first novel” weaknesses merely make its strengths clearer – unlike most Creative Writing exercises (e.g. everything by Ian McEwan), it’s technically messy but unmistakeably about something, and that something not a theme plucked from The Guardian; it is something personal, an expression of the author’s soul. 

I was pleased to discover that Tartt not only avoids publicity but has an unapologetically formal public persona.

Artifice as an expression of soul. The book has an unmodern sense of things; as with the novels of Thomas Bernhard, The Secret History is both of its time and not; Bernhard feels weirdly timeless and ancient because technology barely exists in his works, or only as a distant prospect (the eventuell airplane flight in Beton) or distant catastrophe (the car crash in Auslöschung), and so with The Secret History.

The Ancient Greek scholars all wear ties and drink fine vintages and gin tonics while reading Plato in the original; they own country mansions and are indifferent to money, not to mention lesser concerns such as eventual employment and a career. They exist in a rarefied world of study and excessive consumption of gin. Dissolute in their personal lives, as scholars they strive to revolt against the modern world, to inhabit the ancient:

The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one’s head, it taught one to think in Greek. One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos. 

Pur: that one word contains for me that secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end. 

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

The Ancient Greek scholars are as it were shipwrecked upon modernity; their wealth permits them a certain liberty, to dress as from a better age, to study a dead language without concern for a future livelihood, to be as the Gospels have it, in the world but not of it. But they are then subject to the laws of their chosen realm, where actions multiplies from action, and all is movement & causation & ultimately violence, always pur of one kind or another. Thus, they murder one of their own, and then fall apart into alcoholic and suicidal purgation. 

All excellence comes of separation. Pure, as suggested by the Greek pur: 

pure (adj.)
c. 1300 (late 12c. as a surname, and Old English had purlamb “lamb without a blemish”), “unmixed,” also “absolutely, entirely,” from Old French pur “pure, simple, absolute, unalloyed,” figuratively “simple, sheer, mere” (12c.), from Latin purus “clean, clear; unmixed; unadorned; chaste, undefiled,” from PIE root *peue- “to purify, cleanse” (source also of Latin putus “clear, pure;” Sanskrit pavate “purifies, cleanses,” putah “pure;” Middle Irish ur “fresh, new;” Old High German fowen “to sift”).

This necessitates not merely separation but hierarchy, order. Before writing this little post, I Googled some reviews, to see if people still esteemed it in the year of Our Lord 2020. On the second page of Google I found this gem:

With some distance now, I know that part of why I disliked the book so much was because of its characters. This was my impression of them: entitled, snobby, privileged to the point of absolute ridiculousness, dramatic, flawed in really boring ways, predictable, and English. I have nothing against the English. It’s just that they weren’t actually English. Sure, the college they all attend is in New England, but NEW England isn’t ENGLAND, okay?! But all the characters wear sport-coats, seem to use phrases like “old boy” and appear to chuckle or glare a lot. They seemed like they themselves were trying to be the characters in Brideshead Revisited.

[…]

All of them were just all so pretentious. They studied Latin and Greek with an eccentric professor who was even worse a snob than the group of friends; they hung around and lounged a lot; and they seemed to be sort of limp snobby fish. 

The Secret History is one of the few books where the reviewers could be read as ancillary characters. The whole point of the novel is to be separated from Becky and Josh, to not have a Twitter account, to not have tattoos, to not have piercings, to not advertise and market oneself, to not look like the aforementioned journalist:

They seemed to be sort of limp snobby fish, quoth the professional, mainstream “writer”; that is entirely the point – the novel is about people who wouldn’t even talk to journalists, let alone tattooed, pierced, fashionable journalists. The point is to submit oneself to study, to form and elegance and restraint, to excellence. One can only imagine the reaction of the novel’s characters, were they to meet the aforementioned journalist, covered with tattoos, studded with metal, shrieking about zir’s mental disorders.

The “Secret History” is not so much that of a group of undergraduates; it is the secret history of Western civilisation, of divine vision & genius, as described by Peter Kingsley. For all the tawdry and revolting manifestations of Western (late) civilisation, it has a secret lineage & secret order. That this book has proven so popular reassures me that many Westerners, however deracinated & debased, lean to the true vein of the West, and will finally reject the poison of modernity, and prefer the true, the beautiful, the good. 

 

book report: Know No Fear, Dan Abnett

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Another Warhammer 30K book in the Horus Heresy series, following the Word Bearers’ attempts to destroy the Ultramarines in a surprise attack. It’s quite good fun, though not very coherently plotted, with some subplots and minor characters seeming to be of great importance and then just disappearing without trace. It has a lot of battles and gore and demons, and some good moments with Lorgar and Guilliman.

I wouldn’t recommend if it you’re dying and only have a few months left on the clock, but if you just want to kill time it’s okay.

book report: Warlight, Michael Ondaatje

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A surprisingly good read from an often disappointing writer. I first encountered Ondaatje in the late 90s through The English Patient and then In the Skin of a Lion. I thought he was one of the greatest living writers at that time and eagerly bought, in hardback, Anil’s Ghost in 2000; but none of the characters really came to life, and the setting (Sri Lanka) held no interest for me, though that latter is a purely personal note. I repeated my folly in 2007, buying Divisadero in hardback and regretting the purchase with great vehemence: I found it incomprehensible and uninteresting; it just came across as a creative writing project hastily cobbled together for a publisher. Having learnt my lesson I bought The Cat’s Table (2011) second-hand from Oxfam for 2 euros, years after its release, and to my surprise found it quite enjoyable, if rather slight.

Perhaps, I reasoned, there is an inverse correlation between my financial investment and the readerly return, when it comes to Ondaatje. I accordingly stole a copy of Warlight, and found it very good indeed. It’s set mostly in and after World War 2, following a boy whose mother works with partisan groups for British Intelligence. His father mysteriously disappears, the mother is gone for long periods, so he and his sister are effectively raised by a group of semi-criminals loosely associated with British Intelligence.

The setting and background – WW2-era espionage – recalls The English Patient. I think one reason so many writers choose this period is that it seems the last time greatness and large drama were so casual and everyday; it’s as if a door closed in 1945, and thereafter you have a lesser race of men, bureaucrats instead of brigadiers, forms signed in triplicate instead of massive tank battles commanded by men like Georgy Zhukov and Erich von Manstein. One senses something of this in The English Patient, with its two time frames (late 1930s Cairo & the desert; and then an Italian monastery in 1945): Almasy and Katherine seem grander, more mythic than Hanna and Kip, and even Caravaggio; the burnt, scarred Almasy of 1945 is as it were a remnant of a greater, destroyed world.

Warlight doesn’t quite rise to the peaks of The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion; none of the Warlight characters have that mythic splendour, nor does the prose reliably meet that standard. There are, however, many excellent passages, e.g. this description of a gardener:

He wore bottle-thick spectacles. His ox-like stature made him distinct. He had a long lowland “badger coat,” made out of several skins, which smelled of bracken, sometimes of earthworms. And he and his wife were my watched example of marital stability. His wife no doubt felt I lingered around too much. She was organized, ardently neat, whereas he was the rabbit’s wild brother, leaving what looked like the path of an undressing hurricane wherever he went. He dropped his shoes, badger coat, cigarette ash, a dish towel, plant journals, trowels, on the floor behind him, left washed-off mud from potatoes in the sink. Whatever he came upon would be eaten, wrestled with, read, tossed away, the discarded becoming invisible to him.

I feel that Ondaatje is, here, really making an effort to write an enjoyable, good book for the first time in 30 years. There are many fine moments, asides, secondary characters, observations. It has a very Ondaatjian sense of frequent wildness in the everyday, as the characters construct a personal routine & discipline which seems, from day to day, reasonably stable & even normal, but which is permeated by strange & maraudingly poetic event, by e.g. a nun falling off a bridge, caught by a construction worker swinging on a harness, by Bedouins recovering a burnt Hungarian pilot from his ruined plane, and pressing their cache of rifles and handguns against his hands for him to identify by feel alone, by a boy driving at night in a car full of illicit greyhounds.

book report: Isaac Newton, The Last Sorceror (Michael White)

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I’m too thick to understand Newton’s mathematical/scientific work, but heard he was an interesting chap so got Michael White’s biography second-hand for 50 pence on Amazon, and lugged it around for years from Germany to Italy, before finally reading it this summer. It’s a good enough work, mostly because Newton’s life & character were so astonishing it would be hard to write a dull biography of the man. Far from just sitting under an apple tree then retiring to Cambridge chambers for his entire life, he was also Warden of the Mint and became a spymaster, running espionage rings to uncover forgeries & forgers. The austere, seemingly asexual mathematical/scientific genius would be the boss Clint Eastwood’s Secret Service agent reports to after shooting a bunch of counterfeiters in In The Line of Fire:

Despite being stupid, I found White’s accounts of Newton’s scientific/mathematical work fascinating. One has something of the received glow of intellect which, I think, draws non-philosophers to Wittgenstein. Curiously, they both attended Trinity College, and both lived there for years; I’d be interested to know how close their rooms were, over the centuries.

White’s subtitle – The Last Sorcerer – refers to Newton’s decades-long study of alchemy:

Venerated by alchemists throughout history, it was said of Hermes Trismegistus that he ‘saw the totality of things. Having seen, he understood. Having understood, he had the power to reveal and show. And indeed what he knew, he wrote down. What he wrote he mostly hid away, keeping silence rather than speaking out, so that every generation coming into the world had to seek out these things.’

A Wittgensteinian resonance here, the opening and close of the Tractatus. The apparent foibles and silliness (as Auden would say) of many great thinkers is not a contradiction but rather the precondition for their achievements; hence the mystical impulse in Wittgenstein, the alchemical quest of Newton, join onto their more practical efforts:

Newton had acquired the information he needed to verify his lunar mechanics, and used it in the second edition of the Principia. It was this work that lay at the heart of computer programs employed by NASA scientists guiding the first spaceships to the Moon almost 300 years later. 

The biography is quite serviceable, though there is occasionally a sense of the immense gap between the subject and biographer; White is a second-rater, not terrible, just nothing special, and he also launches into unfounded assertions (e.g. that Newton was probably having sex with X) and anti-Catholic vitriol, e.g.:

[Alexander] Pope’s opposition to Newtonianism sprang from a rich vein of religious bigotry.

I googled White, curious to see if his real name was Weiss, and found he was a second-rate pop star in the 80s, and wrote a biography of Tolkien; and surprise surprise the Tolkien biography is full of assertions like “Tolkien was a fanatical Catholic idiot who hated X because he was a Protestant”.

It’s amusing to speculate, what would Isaac Newton have thought of an ex-80s pop star writing his biography, in the last years of the 20th Century?