Category: Book Review

War of the Worlds (1894) by H. G. Wells.

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 3.83 by 316,380 litizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: In the beginning. 

Tagline: And so they came.

When I saw that there were more than 12,000 reviews posted on Good Reads…. I realised there was need for one more!

The opening narrative is perfect, and it has been retained in the 1953 film version (the only one I have watched), though I endured the first three episodes of the 2019 Anglo-French television production. The latter did not retain the narrative but opted for something else which I have now forgotten.  No doubt something the producer thought the audience could relate to, i.e., sex, money, or both. It has run to 24 episodes, but even the first three had already discarded Wells’s story. 

Back to the book, it starts well with that omniscient narrative, and the first landing and contact, and to be sure there are some gripping scenes that made it into the 1953 film. Hiding out, confusion, despair, regret, destruction are all described by the hero who survives by accident. He wanders around scenes of  incomprehensible catastrophe and describes the Martians and their devices in some detail. In this account Wells shows more imagination than most science fiction film makers today.  Hero also reports that the Martians to be vampires in rather more detail than any contemporary film maker would venture.  Implicitly, one reason they have come to Earth is to harvest living human blood, and they cage survivors for later consumption, some of which Hero sees.  The 1953 film omits this aspect, and so leaves completely unexplained why they came and later how they came to be infected.

The one film version I have seen changes the curate into a one-scene fool and deletes the soldier. These two were crucial to Wells, though admittedly they do not advance the plot, but that is because there is no plot to advance. Wells was an expository writer and his novels seldom had plots, and this one doesn’t. The aftermath of events are described while we wait….  

As to religion, while he had to include the conventional appeals to the all mighty to protect himself in Victorian England, he despised religion (see any biography of the man), and in between prayers and invocations, these pages show the pathetic uselessness of religion in such a crisis.  Indeed, the curate, while hiding from the Martians, prays so fervently that he is about to give away their hiding place with his ever louder hosannas so that Hero clubs him to death with a meat clever to silence him.  I doubt this murder is in any of the film versions.

The soldier is another whipping boy for Wells. His working class instincts for survival are admirable but anything more than a half-return to savagery is beyond his intelligence.  Not that hero has anything better to offer himself for all his intelligence as he acknowledges.

Instead of these characters the film versions invariably insert a love interest and or a family, where none exist in the original.  Something for Average to identify with, I guess, but it takes away emphasis from the Martians even if it does provide a plot.

By the way, in Wells’s text the title is somewhat misleading, for on Earth the only country invaded is England.  The unspoken assumption seems to be that it is the leading power of the world and once it is subdued the rest can done piecemeal.   

I said I have only watched one version through to the end but I have sampled many others in this endless franchise. While on a long flight I even saw a few minutes of the version that midget did.

There is an ingenious twist on this invasion in The Great Martian War 1913-1917 (2013). Recommended. There are also Russian and Soviet versions.

What is absent from the films I have sampled, and a quick scroll down the Good Reads reviews confirms it is the absence is any reference to what was likely Wells’s intention.

And what is that, you ask?

Go ahead, ask it!

Consider this Martian invasion as a metaphor for British colonialism for it is the only country attacked; it is singular:  Strange unknown creatures descend from unimaginable ships and conquer all with incredible weapons, while remaining largely impervious to the resistance of the native peoples.  

Why have they come? Why are they here? Why is it now? What can we do?  In reply to none of these questions can the native religion provide either an explanation or assistance. Nor can the technology of their weapons protect them against these advanced beings.

Thus do European colonists subdue the native population, and proceed to live off its back.   

When these Martian colonists take over, what slows their conquest, and eventually stops it is the world itself, its vegetation (there is a lot of gardening in Wells’s text that never makes it into the films) and bacteria. 

I complained about the plot because there is too much ruminating by hero during his wander.  It is not a quest but simply a walkabout.  And in these lengthy asides, not only is the action, such as it is, stopped, but the timeline is broken repeatedly with post hoc interpolations, so we know from early on all will be well for Hero.  

As is de rigueur for Wells, there is also an egotistical element when hero goes on about being a misunderstand intellectual, especially at the end.  But in this dose it is less distracting, irritating, unnecessary than in some of his other novels. 

Having unavoidably been exposed, if only in passing, to so many entries to this franchise, I realised that I had never read the foundation text, now I have.WW 1

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (2023).

Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.50 by 92 litizens.  

Genre: Non-Fiction; Species: Social History.

Verdict: One for trivial pursuits. 

Tagline: Get it down on paper!  

It was a double whammy.  First paper and then the convenience of the notebook to carry it around.  

The paperful office was the technological marvel of the age.  Papyrus, clay, and parchment were the media before paper.  Papyrus won’t grow anywhere else but the shores of the Nile River, and it does not travel well.  Clay, well impermanent and easily changed. Parchment, expensive and also easy to alter. Hence palimpsest.  None of these media facilitated commercial activity beyond goodwill and memory.  Altering something on clay or parchment was child’s play. That way lies fraud. Keeping either quick notes or detailed records on them was not feasible. 

Then a binder of books of parchment, began to experiment with flax and hemp, and discovered he could make paper.  Soon an experienced worker could make 4,000 sheets (slightly larger than A4) a day. The binder used this paper to record the accounts of his business, and was able to do so in a detail that exceeded everyone else.  Soon others wanted to do the same and he began selling them paper.  

All this occurred about 200 kilometres from Florence, and businessmen there heard of and tried this new development.  Paper gave them a competitive advantage in the detailed records they could keep.  In time, letters of credit replaced the risky and difficult task of moving gold and silver coins.  These letters made the Florin of Florence the stable currency of choice around the Mediterranean and as far north as the Netherlands.  In the long fallout the Dutch currency was called a florin well into the Twentieth Century.

Then the second innovation occurred: Double-entry bookkeeping. (See Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  Click away.) This method of matching assets and liabilities adding up to zero was a revolution comparable to Copernicus’s conceptual breakthroughs at Padua.  Florentine business flourished with these new found intellectual technologies.  

Ledgers, day books, receivables, inventories, catalogues, expense sheets, contracts, and more were quickly and easily recorded and were relatively fraud proof.  

Popes made use of these technologies to distribute and receive funds from the Catholic Empire. The Medici became the preferred agent for a number of Popes, and profited greatly from it.  

From the Thirteenth to the early Sixteenth Century Florence bustled, and one of the ways the rich indulged themselves was through art works.  To save their souls they commissioned religious art, and for their own diversion private art in oil, canvas, marble, granite, and more.  

All of this artistic explosion was worked out in notebooks, which became essential to artists, who could now do drafts, studies, cartoons, and the like, as Giotto may have done to create the lifelike figures he did.  

The most famous notebook user among artists, was of course Leonardo da Vinci who recommended the constant use of notebooks.  He carried one affixed to his belt. Mostly he used them for sketches of the constant motion of nature, but he also recorded plans in them by mirror writing and in a code. He filled thousands of pages only a fraction of which remain.

Likewise, later the irascible Isaac Newton made extensive, life-long use of notebooks to work out his mathematical ideas.  Historians of science have used them to map the evolution of his concepts.  

Paper also fuelled European exploration when Portuguese navigators started to keep logs, draw charts, or map islands with fresh water. These innovations were soon taken up by Portugal’s ally, England and these technologies made the world more familiar and smaller.  

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus started with notebooks but switched to cards in developing his system of nature. 

When the hospital practice of intensive care began in a Danish hospital during a polio epidemic, the notebook, monitoring patients, was almost as important as the tracheostomy tube.

Agatha Christie always had a notebook at hand and filled hundreds of them with ideas, snatches of dialogue, room maps, plot ideas.  Since she worked on several novels at once, alien that she was, and she did not date the notebooks, researchers make careers out of relating the finished book to notes scattered through dozens of notebooks over years.  It seems she read back over the notebooks periodically and extracted material from them years later.

The police ‘inspector’ was so named because when shifts changed his job was to inspect the notebooks the Bobbies carried wherein they recorded their rounds which were countersigned by worthies along the way to prove the officer did indeed do the assigned round.  The worthies might be Anglican vicars, school teachers, shop keepers, or publicans. The police notebook was thus in the first instance for management control. But officers soon began using them to record observations and events on their patch as further proof of their diligence. The police notebook as we knew today on cop shows came, like most innovations, from the bottom up.

I found the opening product placement add for Moleskine put me off but I kept at it.  For years I carried a notebook in a back pocket and there are shoeboxes of them in the office closet. I still use them to keep track of my gym activities. But these days to make notes I use Siri.

———

Operation Mincemeat (2010) by Ben Macintyre

Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rated by 4.02 by 20,290 litizens.

Genre: History.

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: Overloaded. 

Tagline: Tis a far better thing than he had ever done before.

Espionage has many forms and disinformation is one of the principal ones.  To mask the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 a deception plan was conceived, prepared, and launched to confuse the Nazis.  It would be impossible to conceal the fact that Sicily was the next geographically logical target, so the plan was to capitalise on that obvious fact by implying that a feint would be made to Sicily while the real attack would be on the Peloponnese in Greece with the strategic goal of a link with the Soviets via Yugoslavia.

Winston Churchill had often spoken of the soft underbelly of Europe, evidently having never seen the mountains of Italy or the Balkans, and the site would be consistent with that.  But how to do it?  

What would convince the Nazis? Soft intelligence of rumours and such is useful but that takes a lot of time and there was little time for that on this occasion because it was in February when the decision was made to invade in July. Still rumours were planted, but something that would rivet attention would be better. It had to be something that the Nazis found out for themselves and interpreted for it to have credibility with them.  It could not simply be handed to them. So a complicated and roundabout plan was hatched.  

An airplane crash would be faked off the coast of Spain at a place where the local officials were known to be pro-Nazi.  A cadaver would float ashore with a brief case chained to a wrist containing some papers which were vague, but which lent themselves to the interpretation that the next major objective was Greece.  

That sounds pretty simple but the preparation and execution was anything but simple. The imperative of secrecy meant everything had to be done carefully. (Although by launch date at least 50 people or more, by my count, knew the broad outline and purpose of the exercise. The author does not offer this kind of numerical summation.)  

Every step was hard.  In wartime England finding a dead body to use was the first, and in some ways the hardest problem.  One of the good points of this book is the deference and respect accorded to the deceased, one Michael Glyndwr.  Eventually, against an ever ticking clock, a cadaver was found that (1) could be used (no family to claim it, no witnesses to its death, no obvious signs of the real cause of death), (2) of military age, and (3) roughly physically fit enough to have been in the army: Someone who is not going to be missed or sought after. The final difficulty was the identity photograph on his service card.  The dead do look dead. 

Once found, a body would have to be kept for some weeks while the papers and other paraphernalia were assembled and the seasonal tides became right off the Spanish coast. There was no point in preparing the papers and gear if no corpse could be obtained so that only started once the corpse had been secured.

Getting a uniform also proved difficult, since every item of clothing issued had to be accounted for and assigned to a soldier. Most difficult of all, because they were the scarcest of all in wartime England, were underwear!    

Preparing the papers also proved a challenge.  No one was satisfied with the drafts others wrote, and so more drafts were written, each typed with copies by office staff.  Imagine a committee of twelve writing a letter! Impossible.  

Even harder was faking a plane crash. Even getting an RAF plane to fly the body to the right locale proved difficult. One could hardly say we need it for a secret mission to deceive the enemy to the RAF to file flight plan. Instead a submarine did it in such a way that only two intelligence officers saw the body. The crew of 60 certainly knew something unusual was happening. Using the submarine allowed for a more exact placement in the tidal action. (The crash was faked with an explosion on the water.)  

While all this was going on, the cadaver was decomposing in cold storage.  

Apart from these practical hurdles, the toughest nut to crack was pitching the information so that it tapped into the predispositions of the German intelligence analysts.  Not too much, just enough for them to find confirmation for what they already suspected.  

Another key, apart from Churchill’s focus on Southern Europe, was the British presence in the Balkans, mainly with Tito’s partisans, but also a remnant of British troops that had gone to ground in Greece when they could not be evacuated in 1941. These were stirred into some action to support the story.  Meanwhile, in Egypt Greek-speakers were recruited and organised.

He had to be named, and every serving officer was in the Army or Navy Register.  What name to use?  This was a comedy of errors.  The name of dead officer could not be used for reasons both practical and moral.  And so on, and on.  But it had to be a name in a register but who would not be surprised to hear he had died, because his death would be published. Long story on that one. Because once the body was found in due course it would be identified and buried. 

Once the man was in the water, there was a wait to see if the tides had been correctly predicted. Yes.

When the body was recovered would it pass examination by a coroner? Yes, but only just.  In fact, the Spanish medical examiner entered all manner of hedges and qualifications in the written report about the cause of death, how long the body had been in the water, and time of death but this report, by luck, did not accompany either the cadaver or the briefcase thereafter.  

Then would the Spanish hand over the papers to the Germans in Madrid.  No!  Some fool in the Spanish bureaucracy followed correct procedures and locked the papers up, pending release to the British after the body was identified, claimed, and buried by the Brits.  

A contingency plan went into operation to alert the resident Germans in Madrid (there a lot of them — about two hundred — who preferred that posting to the Eastern Front) that the papers existed and were valuable.  This was done by starting word-of-mouth rumours of a British reward for the return of the brief case and contents. Not a colossal amount of money but enough to set the German mind thinking. 

There was a lot of cat-and-mouse in Spain. Once the papers were finally in German hands, the Nazis saw what they wanted to see.  In Spain the resident Germans needed an intelligence coup to make themselves look good to their bosses back home in Berlin so they could stay in Spain. Their willingness to believe was duly noted in London and exploited with the later Normandy deception to come. 

In Berlin the OKW army analysts wanted something definite to concentrate on, and this gave them a target. Despite all the stereotypes of German realpolitik and efficiency what shows here again is the incompetence, disorganisation, and fantasy in much of their intelligence work. Just as bad as S.O.E.

And of course once Hitler accepted the truth of the Greek misdirection, no one else dared criticise, equivocate, question, or hesitate.  When the information proved wrong, of course, Hitler blamed everyone else but himself. This same cycle of incompetence and stupidity was repeated with the deceptions regarding the Normandy invasion a year later.  Once again Hitler was fooled, and that was that.  

In neither case could or would Hitler ever take responsibility for his own mistakes. Now that is genius!

There was another wait once the papers reached Berlin to see if they were examined, and acted on.  Well, after a wait, Field  Marshall Erwin Rommel was sent to Greece. He took with him two fully equipped armoured divisions that were then not in Sicily when the Allied landings occurred.  

The author has amassed a great deal of material, all of which is presented! There are too many back and side stories about the alcoholic intake of the Brits during the war. That may well explain S.O.E.’s catastrophic incompetence. Not so very amusing viewed in that light.   

A strong point is the account of the forensic assessment of the papers and the cadaver.  By the same token I would have liked a little more on the attitudes of the Spanish officials involved.   

I read The Man Who Never Was (1953) by Ewen Montagu (the main architect of the plan) (168 pages, rated 3.96 by 1412 litizens) when a lad of an (un)certain age. When the film of 2021 came around I was reminded of that.  However, I did not go to the movie at the local Dendy since having my ear drums assaulted for 2 hr 8 min after having my patience exhausted by the repetition of Val Morgan ads repeated three times, after having paid the $24 price of admission did not appeal to me.  Curmudgeon that I am. Perhaps one day I will see it on the telly chopped up by imbecilic commercials, but that is what the mute button is for. 

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark (2019) Cecelia Watson 

Good Reads meta-data is 213 pages rated 3.67 by 2126 litizens.

Genre: non-fiction; species: grammar.

DNA: Pedantry.

Tagline: Is it semicolon or semi-colon? 

Verdict: anti-climactic.

Tagline: Well, someone had to do it. 

‘Class just for fun today let’s review the uses of the semi-colon. There are two principle uses: (1) to join two independent sentences as clauses and (2) in lists where items contain commas, the semi-colon can be used to mark off separate items.’ 

‘There is (3) another less common use for effect to insert a pause shorter than a colon.  If a period is the longest pause of four beats, a colon is three, a semi-colon is two, and a comma is one.’

The effort to make grammar into a science has led to a proliferation of rules so that in the latest edition of that Bible of style, the Chicago Manual (more on this sacred text in a moment), there are now forty-six (46) rules governing the wedding of a dot and squiggle which is neither a period nor a comma but rather their unloved child. This proliferation of rules was ostensibly intended to clarify the use of the semi-colon but has only further shrouded it in mystery.  Try reading these rules and you’ll see what I mean.

Author uses the semi-colon to chart the growth of grammar and its priestly attendants since the Eighteenth Century.  The first English grammar books appeared in England and forced that unruly and irregular mongrel tongue into rules derived from Latin and Greek with parts of speech, clauses, cases, numbers, declensions, gerunds, conjugations, and the like. The rules propounded were policed by grammaristas who bludgeoned those who erred with weighty tomes on grammar seasoned with a superior smirk.

Sidebar: though not explored by the author, I wondered if this migration of grammar from Latin and Greek was one explanation for the long shelf life of those languages in British education.  

By the middle of the Nineteenth Century there are hundreds and hundreds of these rule books on both sides of the Atlantic.  Needless to say they contradicted one another on each side of the sea as well as across it.  However, they did not included punctuation which had roamed free until that time.  

Bringing punctuation into the fray was an innovation that gave a market edge for a time, but soon even more grammar books appeared with contradictory rules for punctuation.  These explorers of the dark reaches of English usage proved their points by rewriting the past. Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer were all corrected and revised according to the Nineteenth Century science of grammar.  

Nor were contemporaries spared this policing.  Mark Twain found the vernacular he used in his stories rewritten into correct English by a publisher.  He was so incensed, the more so after his first protests were disregarded, that he composed a story, then took out the punctuation marks and listed them at the end, while inviting the publisher to insert the marks where he liked.  

Henry James went further. He found American reviewers and publishers fastened onto his use of punctuation rather than the character, the plots, the events, the stories, drama, psychology, etc.  To escape this pedantry he moved to England, where….  What do you know? More of the same.

He was so angered by such reviews that he refused ever to be interviewed by a journalist, despite frequent requests. Many seeing this declaration as a challenge tried but all failed. His one and only appearance before the fourth estate was at a fund raiser for the American ambulance service in the Great War. Of course even there a journalist did try to embarrass him about the semicolon! 

In about 1906 the University of Chicago Press compiled a manual for in-house use.  This was the first guide to grammar aimed at neither learners nor students, but at writers and editors.  There was soon a grey market for it, and – delayed by World War I – it was published in 1921 as the Chicago Manual of Style, and I was suckled on it, starting with its school version (Kate L.) Turabian’s Guide.  I have the current Sixteenth Edition of the Manual on the shelf behind me as I type. Taken together the contemporary editions of these two now total nearly fifteen hundred pages. My undergraduate copy of Turabian was ninety-five pages. The new edition is now four hundred plus pages.  The forest is so dense that no trees are visible. 

The semi-colon has also had its day(s) in court as judges mind-melded with black letter law to infer its meaning.  I found all of this so much nonsense, but there it is.  

Many writers explicitly avoid the semi-colon, like Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, and George Orwell.  On the other hand, it was an essential pediment for Henry James to build his cathedrals of words, Martin Luther King, Jr employed it for cadence in his speeches, and Raymond Chandler made it zing on the rare occasions when he used it.  

It is true that James may have over done it because Author claims to have counted 4,000 semi-colons in one of his longer novels. It did sometimes take him a long time to get to the point. Why anyone would count semi-colons can only be explained by a PhD.

The book is enlivened with clever drawings at the beginning of each chapter.  The prose is easy to read. Recommended for pedants.

Felicity Wood, Universities and the Occult Rituals of the Corporate World (2018).

Good Reads meta-data is 219 pages, rated by ….  [It is listed without any readers’ reactions]. 

Genre: Polemic.

DNA: South Africa.

Tagline: ‘Dr Faustus will see you now.’ 

Verdict: Depressing.

Felicity Wood has long studied occult witchcraft and its allied practices in sub-Saharan Africa, and as she observed the evolution of the corporate university in the last decades she became aware of the similarities between the managerial practices that grew up in them and the rituals of myth and magic in the occult. 

Amen, sister.  

Superstition takes many forms, besides religion. The book offers to an increasingly depressed reader a detailed comparison of the metaphorical similarities of these two worlds.

She makes that case in good part by quoting from the maelstrom of mission statements, performance goals, impact declarations, management directives, justifications for near perpetual re-organisation, and so on issued by the managers of universities far and wide, not just South Africa. While a reader may not accept entirely her premise, still one nods in agreement very often with her comparisons and interpretations.

Just as witchdoctors never proffer evidence for the effectiveness of their ceremonies but instead offer explanations of why more witch-doctoring is always needed, so too managers. When managers managing does not spin gold that can only be because even more managers managing is required. And more. 

If the words of university managers are taken as invocations of spirits, well, that makes as much sense as trying to take them literally since most of the rhetoric is hollow: excellence, quality, impact, and so on are intoned at every breath, yet no one knows what they mean. But like prayers, perhaps mouthing them pleases the unseen powers of market, economy, and the most high and mystical of all – money. Mammon is indeed our god, and few of us prove worthy of that deity.  

A few quotations follow to sample the text. 

#####

‘One respondent contended that one specific vampire tale was factual, saying, “It was a true story because it was known by many people and many people talked about it.”  (Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p 31.)  All too often, the corporate fabulation at restructured universities has been made to seem more convincing by this means.  A mantra has been repeated so many times that it has become reality.’  

‘Wholly fictive place called “the real world” is quite unlike the actual world you and I live in. .. . [T]his invented entity called “the real world” is inhabited exclusively by hard-faced robots who devote themselves single-mindedly  to the task of making money.’  Rational calculators of material self-interest and nothing else.’ It is as false as reality television programming. 

‘They also owe their prevalence to the fact that they have been utilised to reinforce a further, related piece of corporate folklore: the notion that private profit is synonymous with public good.’  

‘In general, the fantasy seems to prevail that by imitating corporate models, imposing managerial chains of command and invoking the jargon of the corporate world, as well as some of the mythologies that emanate from it and reinforce its ethos, a magical transformation can be wrought, by means of which universities can be transmuted into more productive, accountable and efficient institutions, working for the greater public good. This state of affairs has come to pass as a result of a faith in the near-magical potency of the corporate world, fuelled by the vague belief that the corporate sector, situated as it is in local and global marketplaces, is closest to the sources of economic profit.’ 

‘This might be one reason emphasis has been on outward forms and ritual activity, rather than meaningful substance. Indeed, market-oriented institutions tend to be characterised by their ritualistic imitations of the corporate sector and their symbolic enactments of certain key qualities associated with this domain, such as excellence, quality, productivity and accountability.’

‘The voodoo-like potency of words include quality, excellence, mission, premier, benchmark, strategic, top rank, world-class, flagship, team-building, auditing, performance, accountability, and even ethics.’  

‘Quality is a term laden with mystery and magic partly to compensate for the fact that, like excellence, it is essentially a vacuous term: a receptacle into which different meanings can be poured.  As one of the principal words of power, the word quality is routinely uttered for purposes of ritual and enchantment, as if calling on this concept will cause it to manifest itself.’

‘Like quality the word mission has spiritual resonance evoking the image of a sacred quest.’

####

It is great fun to read, though hard-going, because even as the text ridicules the prolix jargon of corporatism, the book itself is riddled with an an opaque vocabulary of –isms , –itions, and –ites drawn from social science.  Much of this vocabulary is as vacuous as that which it bewails.  Sad, but true.  

I had hoped for some reality testing for the mystical properties of business that make it efficient and effective.  My experience of private business — large and small — has sometimes shown it to be incompetent, indifferent, confused, inconsistent, idiotic and the like.  And yet successful. The volatility of businesses that come and go is likely to be due to these factors rather than to vigorous Darwinian competition.  This is true in both large and small examples. 

Check you Enron or Boeing share prices for evidence, or book a musical chairs seat on Qantas. 

Good old days as she frequently notes were different but not better, but I have omitted those remarks since I know them so well.

Not a book likely to be reviewed in the higher education press and literature.  

The Plot to Save Socrates (2006) by Paul Levinson

Good Reads meta-data is 272 pages, rated 3.56 by 488 litizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy +  

DNA: [See title.]

Tagline: Socrates did it!

Verdict: Tour de force kickoff return…fumbled!

A grad student is completing a PhD dissertation on the introduction of Ionic Greek in written form about 500 AD. She is an archive rat and burrows into files undisturbed, perhaps for centuries, she finds…a whomping great mystery.  It is the year 2542 AD and the tech is even more techie than today but recognisable.  

What she finds, well, in fact, it is given to her by a mystery man, seems to be a fragment from a hitherto unknown Socratic dialogue by Plato.  It comes with several hallmarks that suggest authenticity.  The papyrus fragment is a copy of that lost dialogue in Ionic Greek from 500 AD, so declares a carbon dating certificate in the same file. The Greek text certainly reads like Plato.  Could it be? (By this time, I certainly wanted to know!)

Aside: There have been many spurious Platonic dialogue since the days of Aristotle.  Forgers made them to sell to libraries and collectors.  Intellectuals made them to pass off their ideas as Plato’s.  Students made them to see if they could.  Women made them to get published in a man’s-only world.  These frauds, no doubt, continue to this day.

 But, wait, there is more.  SPOILER! The fragment is a conversation between Socrates and … a time traveller come to rescue him from the hemlock.  Holy neurons!  

That sets her off on a chase to find the rest of the dialogue.  Authenticate it.  Find the original.  Trace the mystery man.  Identify the time traveller. Six directions at once!  

Now about that time travel.  You sit in a chair in a secret room and use a remoter built-into the chair’s arm and whoosh.  Well, no whoosh.  You’re just there in the chair, but the calendar on the wall has changed.  Back-and-forth they go through time.  Aside:  a time travelling sofa features in (T)Raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 (2004).  

After that whiz-bang start it descends into thriller mode, cutting back and forth, proliferating characters, and generally confusing me.   The ease with which ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Nineteenth Century Americans, and others accept time travel undercut that plot line.  The ease with which the time travellers surround themselves with minions and have plenty of money wherever they pop up likewise let the air out of the balloon.   Oh, and one them, his frequent time traveller allowance depleted, sailed in a Greek trireme to the Americas. 

Instead of dwelling on such matters as above, we have a hidden hand conspiracy that envelops one and all.  Boring.  

It is written as a thriller and that spares the author much and places all the responsibility on the reader to make sense of the to’ing and fro’ing, and this reader declined that onus.     

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk’s suggested it, for which thanks.  

P.S. I tried vol 2 and gave up: impossible to follow

Plot by Salvator Dali.

Maigret’s First Case (1948) by Georges Simenon. 

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 3.69 by 1664 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: France; sub-species Simenon.  

Tagline: In the beginning….

Verdict: Introspective.

A callow Jules Maigret and his blushing bride Louise have taken an apartment with his income as a police secretary at an arrondissement station.  The job is largely clerical but one night when he is working late in his youthful zeal and the duty officer is out on a call he records the statement of a witness who reports a gunshot.  Since it is what police officers do, Maigret takes it upon himself to investigate without waiting for a superior officer.  

In so doing he enters a closed world of a very rich but strange bourgeois family in whose mansion the shot seemed to have been fired.  Yet there is no evidence of such an occurrence when he rouses the household at 2 am to find out. Ooops!  

Evidence or no, there is something odd about this place and these people and he worries away at it. When he reports all of this to his chief it seems absurd, but the chief with more than a touch of condescension encourages him to investigate, but softly, softly, perhaps to give him practice. Maigret does so with the patience and persistence that would mark all of his investigations.  

When circumstances forced young Maigret (and it hard to picture a young and gangly Maigret) to leave medical school, the first job he could land to make money was with the police where his education and good handwriting fitted him to be a records officer.  In this story he is posted to the fictitious Saint Georges station as secretary to the chief of this outpost, far from the Quai des Orfeves.  Musing on the events that placed him there Maigret thinks the occupation he should have is part doctor and part priest: 

‘People would have come to see him the way they consulted a doctor. He would have been a sort of mender of destinies.’  Not because he was clever but because could put himself into anyone’s shoes.  Balzac 

This is Maigret’s motif: to become one with those he investigates. This melding is beautifully realised in some of the novels.

The solemnity of that reflection was relieved when I laughed aloud at the following passage:

‘He hadn’t slept with his moustache net on and he had to straighten the tips…’  

Moustache net!  Great Movember’s Ghost!  My efforts to find such a net for sale online have failed.  Must chaps now do without such a useful accessory?  See an example in use below.

This book is good evidence for not reading a series in publication order.  While this is case Number One in Maigret’s career it is book number thirty (30) in the publication sequence.  

There are occasional references to the future so the retrospective nature of the account is implicit, but this story is played out in a linear sequence.  

Having finished a period krimi with steaming heaps of superfluous historical detail and a mob of characters, I wanted something clean and focussed. Enter Maigret.  

Expedition to Disaster (2013) by Philip Matyszak

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 4.25 by 36 litizens 

DNA: Academic.

Genre: History.

Tagline: They make the same mistakes every time. 

Verdict: Chapeaux! 

With the verve, energy, exuberance, and creativity characteristic of Athens its response to a stinging defeat by Sparta was to go on the offensive in 415 BC to far Sicily, there to subjugate its fellow democracy at Syracuse.  

The primary source for these events comes from an involuntarily retired general, Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War. As with Machiavelli, Thucydides’ own meaning has largely been lost by contemporary writers seeking a classical authority for their own opinions who view it in a hall of distorting mirrors and see what they want to see in the text. A recent example is Graham Allison, Destined for War (2017).  For an antidote try my essay of archeology in the Antioch Review (65 [2007]1: 173-185). Get clicking.

There are other sources, mostly fragmentary, and the ever increasing excavated evidence as more ground is dug up to build apartments around the Mediterranean Sea and relics are discovered, enriching the museum collections but putting the real estate developer out of business.  

Matyszak mines these resources but in the main the book is a gloss on and homage to Thucydides.  And that is good enough reason to read it.  

Thucydides shows how men have acted under pressure and that predicts how we will act under a like pressure today or tomorrow.  To predict the future learn the past. That’s why we read him – yesterday, today, and tomorrow is between the covers of a book.

Whereas Herodotus recorded any story he heard about dragons, sea monsters, three-legged men, talking dolphins, magic rings, flying trees.…  Not so Thucydides who asserted nothing he could not confirm by evidence, reason, or both.  He had a network of contacts in military and commercial life in Athens and its allies that extended to Sparta itself.  These he used to research his book.  

What is more remarkable to contemporary sensibility is that Thucydides kept his opinions to himself. He passes only one personal comment in his 500 plus pages when he wrote that Nicias, he least of all men, deserved the terrible fate that he suffered. 

Thucydides quotes about 140 speeches; he himself heard some of them, and interviewed auditors who heard the others. But he also wrote what, after his research, he thought would have been said in many instances. Then there is that outlier, the dialogue on Melos. My take on that is in article cited above.

By the way we spent a few days on Melos once. I climbed to the top of the tallest point to look for the Athenian fleet, and later brought home a pebble from the beach where they could have landed.

After battles he visited several of the sites to see the terrain, sift through the remnants, and talk to local residents, if there were any.  He acquired specimens of the weapons the soldiers of different cities used to assess their value. Thucydides tried living on the rations that besieged garrisons had to endure. He walked the ground armies travelled to test the conditions. Moreover, he visited Sparta to hear that side of the story. Some speculate that he also sailed to Sicily during this campaign to see for himself the city of Syracuse which is certainly described in a great detail in his text. More than once he does, indeed, sound like an eye witness. Several historians have inferred that he interviewed some of the opposing generals.  

George Trevelyan made a similar hike to re-enact Garibaldi’s descent on Rome, see his Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909).  He carried a pack and lived off the land as he went much the Red Shirts did. 

The debacle at Syracuse is painful to read about because the drama always comes to the same climax. Leaving aside the complexities it is this: to conquer Syracuse Athens sent a force of 40,000 experienced veterans of citizen hoplites, mercenaries, and allies. To defend Syracuse Sparta sent one man.  The Athenians lost as comprehensively as the Germans lost at Stalingrad. Some military advisor that one man! Read Thucydides for details.

When I read of the Sicilian expedition, I am remind of this passage about Gettysburg: 

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago….  There is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin.’ William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948).   

“The War that Never Ends” (1991) is a documentary film portrayal of the whole war.  It is low key and spare with recitations of key passages, including Melos, and the debacle at Syracuse where Athenian democracy crashed with imperial and tyrannical overreach.  See it on You Tube. 

While I am assigning homework, see also Donald Kagan, The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (1991).  It is accompanied by three volumes that chart the rise, maturity, and corruption of that empire.  (There is a one-volume summary for the faint of heart.)

A theme in International Relations research which has influenced recent U.S. foreign policy has been that democracies do not go to war with each other.  It follows in the seminar room that promoting democracy promotes peace.  In this case both Athens and Syracuse were democracies and Athens went to war at the enthusiastic behest of its democratic majority, giving the lie to that generalisation.  (It might be worth noting that Hitler rose to office in elections, whereas Churchill did not.) 

The author has some very nice turns of phrase and offers a spritely prose that engages even a jaded reader like me.  My efforts to put his name below the picture failed.