Category: Book Review

Emperor Rudi the Two was a retiring and secretive man by nature and nurture. Perhaps that made the lure of the Occult sciences all at the more congenial to him. While he would seldom leave the keep of his castle in Prague on Hrady hill, he would welcome anyone who claimed to have a secret to tell. Not gossip about people, but rather secrets about how the world works and the meaning beneath appearances.

The Occult claimed to penetrate beyond the world of appearance and experience to the hidden reality that underlay it. Clues to this reality appeared to the cognoscenti in symbols and emblems from crosses to hexagons. An inspired artist was as likely as a scientist to chance upon these keys to the mysteries of the universe.
Alchemy was the most self-conscious of such sciences but not the only one. It was different from the later stereotype of a crazed individual throwing this and that together to see what happens, for alchemists in Sixteenth Century middle Europe comprised a disciplined school that followed certain principles. Rudi had as many as two hundred alchemist in his employ, with his own private laboratory where he did his own experiments.
The alchemists sought to control reality, not to understand it. Natural philosophers of the day sought knowledge, but the alchemists sought power.
The Occult belief in the reality of unseen things aligned them with much the religious mysticism of the era as did their denial of Enlightenment rationality. Most of their number ignored both Catholicism and Protestantism in preference to sui generis sects of neo-Platonism and such ilk. Secret rituals, incantations, E = MC squared, they were all on the same plane in the cosmology.
Rudi paid a high price for hermetic books that would open a door to the beyond. Many were written and published with his financial support. Many of the books ostensibly revealed the code, but were themselves coded. Some of them were so heavily encoded that no one could understand them. Indeed sometimes the more incomprehensible a text was, the higher the price it commanded. What a field for a charlatan. Or even a professor!
In a few years some of this would be codified under the Rose Cross of the Rosicrucians. Esoteric knowledge went on the curriculum.
All manner of Occultists went to Prague to take some of the Emperor’s gold while promising to replace it by creating gold from lead. Whether sincere or fraudulent, none delivered on the otherworldly promises.

In the same vein, the Occultist believed that some objects were transmitters or receivers of the hidden reality, usually gems of great beauty or perfection. Or unusual natural formations. Rudi was a one-man market for these things, and sometimes engaged in a bidding war with others to acquire them. Other bidders wanted them for their beauty and uniqueness, Rudi wanted to tune them into an Occult broadcast.
He funded the construction of many clockwork automata, partly because, like a Shinto follower in Japan, his spiritism meant even inanimate objects could channel the Occult. Many rooms in his ever growing palace complex housed these toys some life size and even lifelike. Imagine a stormy night in one of these warehouse of automatons with shutters banging, and floors creaking, glassy eyes staring. Spooky.
One of the many tenets of the Occult is that some geniuses are touchstones — like a medium at a séance — who hear, understand, or transmit (to a small and select audience) the secrets they receive. This knowledge is so fantastic, so powerful, so awe-inspiring most of us cannot fathom it. Indeed most of us would not recognise these profundities even if face-to-face with them, but if we did, then we would misuse it. It is best hidden from the ordinary people like thee and me. They are secrets in plain sight.
The steam from this kettle leads to the supposition that some geniuses leave coded messages in their works, poems, books, painting, statues. Often the code is numeric, especially in books. Think of Johnny Depp in ‘The Ninth Book’ or Dan Brown’s various larks. Accordingly, it is said that a genius like Plato hid his message in the seventh word in seventh line on seventh page of his seventh book. The Occultists then strive to determine which is the seventh book, which is the seventh page, which the seventh line, and the seventh word. The example, if crude, is nonetheless indicative of how such minds work.

Plato’s text contains a coded message, perhaps several, and we have to find the key. To find the key, we disregard what Plato said explicitly and look instead at the incidental remarks, fillers, repetitions, seeming errors, non-sequiturs, apparent discontinuities – these offer the clues about whether it is the seven word or the ninth. The least important parts of a Platonic text may be in fact the most important.
Thus do some political theorists discount most of Plato’s explicit arguments and turn them upside down and inside out to arrive at conclusions that they alone can see. The example that comes to my mind is Plato’s repeated assertion that women equal men. Plato says this is different ways in three of his major works. A dedicated follower of the esoteric school of interpretation will conclude that the more Plato says it, the less he meant the knowing reader to take it at face value.
One can never win an argument with such an interpreter. And believe me, such interpreters exist.
To get back to Sixteenth Century Prague, Rudi also sponsored all manner of seminars which took the form of séances in many dark rooms in his palace. He did not often sit in himself, but he wanted to know what happened, and was inclined to be credulous. Though in his ecumenical way many of those he kept around him in court were skeptical and he permitted them to express their doubts.
By the way, when Rudi moved the capital out of Vienna it was not obvious that Prague was the best choice. There were plenty of other cities from which to choose in northern Italy, along the Danube, or in southern Germany. He chose Prague perhaps because it had a reputation as a religiously free(r) city than any other. It was not dominated by either an entrenched Catholic or Protestant establishment. These two had battled it out a hundred years earlier in Prague, murdering each other with great energy, and fell into an exhausted and dispirited peace where they (barely) tolerated each other. That would have suited Rudi who had no interested in religion beyond the most minimum formalities. A move to some other city might be seen as supporting the religion dominate in that place.

This is the twenty-first novel in which Richard Sharpe’s career is recounted by a master story teller. As a teenager, Sharpe’s career started in India, but in these pages he is nearly forty, called once more into the breach.

The wife of an old friend solicits the assistance that only Sharpe can lend to find her husband, who has been lost in the fog of war in rebellious Chile in 1820-1821. He reluctantly leaves home and hearth in his farm in Normandy. It is a common set-up made fresh in Cornwall’s hands.
En route to distant Chile his ship calls stops for water at St. Helena. There Sharpe meets face-to-face the nemesis that has dominated his life from 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte. In the company of a group of a dozen Spanish officers with whom he is travelling, Sharpe is received by the Emperor. This scene is well realised. While everyone in the room is an officer, the Spaniards all decked out in grand uniforms for the occasion, there are only two soldiers in the room, and each recognises the other as that almost immediately. After some polite formalities Napoleon dismisses the gaudy Spaniards, so that he and Major Sharpe in a faded field jacket and he can talk about …,well, what else, Waterloo. For his part, Sharpe clearly sees in the sallow, pudgy little man, the inner warrior.
As well done as that is, at the time it seems window dressing, but read on.
In Chile Sharpe finds a mare’s nest. The Spanish officials range from incompetent to corrupt. The British consul is a useless. The rebels are not any better, back-biting and bak-stabbing.
Sharpe’s perception of the Spanish colonial administrator is insightful and amusing. He enters a room to find the governor surrounded by officials. Each is intense and focussed, none more so than the Captain-General Bautista.
“The Captain-General had resumed pacing up and down …stabbing more questions into his audience as he paced. How many cattle were in Valdivia’s slaughter yards? Had the supply ships arrived from Chiloe? Was there any news of Ruiz’s regiment? None? How many more weeks must they wait for those extra guns? Had the Puerto Crucero garrison test-fired their heated shot, and if so, what was their rate of fire? How long had it taken to heat the furnace from cold to operational heat? It was an impressive display, yet Sharpe felt unconvinced by it. It was almost as if Bautista was going through the motions of government merely so that no one could accuse him of dereliction when his province vanished from the maps of the Spanish Empire” (p. 88).
A few pages (p. 91) later the Captain-General outlines his strategy to defeat the rebels, which is to build ever larger fortifications and lure the rebels to their deaths before the cannons, if only Spain will send him more men, cannons, ammunition, and artillery men. It is, as Shape muses a strategy of doing nothing and shifting the blame for the result onto others, not enough cannons, not enough ammunition, poor artillerymen. In short, he has no strategy. The puff seems plausible because of the theatrical presentation. Why does this remind of briefings from some of my leaders? I could not possibly say.
The action scenes are so energetic that the reader suspends disbelief due to the momentum of the prose. Cornwall knows how to do this. The small rebel force succeeds by subterfuge, guile, surprise, and audacity and more audacity. It succeeds because the Spanish are poorly trained, poorly led, poorly equipped with rock bottom morale. While the Spanish have sturdy forts and many cannons, they have no reason to fight so far from home, being well aware of the corruption of their leadership. While the rebels are resilient, the Spanish are brittle. This, too, Cornwall does well.
Bernard Cornwell
In addition to Sharpe, Cornwall has also published another many other novels on a variety of other themes from the Saxon Trails to the Copperhead Chronicles. Then there is the non-fiction. Wow!
The idiom a ‘mare’s nest’ traces back to the Sixteenth Century where it meant something extraordinary and remarkable. Indeed too remarkable to be a true, a hoax. By misuse, that god of idiom, came to mean something extraordinarily complicated and confused.

A novel with that super nerd Johannes Kepler in the leading role. It is part of a series of such eponymous works by the tireless John Banville, on whom there will be more later.

The young Kepler, having exhausted alternatives, goes to work for the great Dane Tycho Brahe who is sustained by that screwball emperor of the vestigial Holy Roman Empire, Rudolph II in Prague (been there).  In so doing Kepler’s backstory unfolds in several flashbacks.  
Kepler is a teacher whose tenure is precarious in a world still riven by the Great Schism and where schools exist at the whim of the local grandee.  He marries largely for the dowry which is quickly spent on an inadequate model of the planets.  His wife Barbara is seen only through his eyes as part whore and part harridan.  
Brahe is a remote and glacial figure who treats Kepler as an underling, not a colleague. Tyco is moody, vague, and irascible by turns. Hardly the ideal patron, but Kepler has no alternative but to bear it. Rudolph is seldom seen, and exercises no influence, it seems. He just lets Brahe get on with it.

The atmosphere is laid on by the cement mixer load and gets in the way of both the plot, if there is one, and character development, if there is any.
The author tries too hard to create a foreign world by reaching for the dictionary and using as many an arcane words as possible each of which distracted my attention as I looked each of them up.  Moreover, I soon lost patience with Kepler’s tongue-tied ineptitude. He blunders about like one of the Stooges alienating even his supporters.  Now that may been historically accurate portrayal, but it does not inform, entertain, or enlighten a reader.  
When he is offered the chance to explain his system to a patron (and thereby to the reader), he does not seem to know what to say and starts with the most minute details, quickly boring the auditor, and this reader, too.  It is as though Kepler does not know the point either. I wondered if Banville was trying to show this as an example of pure research scoffed at by practical people, but if so, it fails. All I got was the urge to shake Johannes and tell him to get to the point, whatever it is.
Towards the middle of the book one finds a series of letters written by Kepler and the man revealed in these letters is not the bumbling oaf of the preceding pages. The letters are succinct, clear, and revealing. I do not know (yet) if they are real or imagined, but they are a relief of the clown Kepler of the earlier pages. Then in the last third we have Kepler again, not quite as bumbling and irritating. There is no explanation for the insertion of the letters and no indication at the end about their veracity. While there is an end note that mentions a biography of Kepler there is nary a word to explain Banville’s caricature.
John Banville is a one-man industry with scores of books to his credit under a phalanx of pseudonyms, or so it seems.  He writes contemporary novels, mostly set in Ireland under his own name, krimis featuring Dr Quirk under another name, still others as Benjamin Black, and this series of biographical novels about great scientists. It must be in the blood since his brother Vincent is also a busy author-bee, too.   Sadly nothing in this book motivates me to read another.
There was some added interest in that much of the novel takes place in Prague on that hill, which we visited in 2014. We walked through some of the rooms where Kepler worked. Moreover, that odd specimen Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, is a character. This Rudolph sponsored all manner of invention and science. There is an excellent account of him in an ‘In Our Time’ episode from Lord Bragg. I have not been able to locate a biography of Rudi.

Two teenagers, aged 16 and 17, are chosen by aliens to justify the existence of humanity by preventing the murder of Adam and Eve. Such a trial of poor old humanity is a common premise in science fiction. Consider the Q Continuum for one.

That old chestnut is given a new twist in these pages by sending the pair — Ellie and Nick. — back in time to 50,000 B.C. to save themselves by saving the genetic forbearers of our species in East Africa, styled Adam and Eve.  
Nick has all the egotistical misery and self doubt of a normal teenager, while Ellie is several classes out of his league, pretty, smart, decisive, and confident. Nick is a loner with few interests.  But together they make something of a team, the more so with a box of matches, a Swiss Army knife, and few other things in their pockets when the trial began, but their greatest asset is Twenty-First Century knowledge (hygiene, maps, the wheel).
Yet for all their several advantages they have a lot to learn about living in Eden, stay downwind of the animal herds. That standing still while a lion passes in the distance is very hard when the fire ants swarm.  
They do find the genetic bearers whom they call Click and Foxy, and they do try to protect them and also get them to move toward Sinai thanks to their Twenty-First Century knowledge of maps and cross into the Middle East in time to come.  
In the course of these exertions they learn to kill, butcher, and eat, sometimes raw, wildebeest and other delights of the teeming flora and fauna. This is no place for vegetarians, vegans, lactose intolerants, etc., etc. They also learn to trust each other, and slowly win the trust of Click and his clan.  

Woven into the story are comments, too many for this reader, about the dire straits of the environment in the Twenty-First Century and the looming environmental catastrophe that threatens the Earth.  The self-destruction of planet Earth, a perfectly good piece of real estate, is what has prompted the aliens to intervene, thinking to reset this world by extinguishing Click (Adam) and Foxy (Eve) and let evolution start over. This is a clever idea for a plot.
There are two sub-plots to muddy the water, though the major twist was evident long before its revelation. Even so it was well done.
The suspicion of my acne years that high school science teachers are not human was at last vindicated. 
Dietrich has a good ear for teen-speak though it is mercifully shorn of speech crutches of ‘like’ and ‘actually.’  Though the latter has long since migrated to adult speak.  Quarantine failed on that one.  He is even better at getting inside the mind of Nick, whose high school experiences perhaps reflect Dietrich’s own. I know they do reflect mine.
William Dietrich who is an accomplished writer whose Nathan Gage I have much enjoyed. 

This book is a novel. Aqa Jaan and his family live in a house attached literally and figuratively to a mosque.  In fact his family owns the ground upon which the mosque was built.  Imams come and go but the Jaan family goes on and has done so for hundreds of years in the house of the mosque.

The story opens in the latter days of the reign of the Shah of Iran and ends twenty or so years later. That is, it encompasses the origins and start of the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah, started a civil war among Iranians, led to a war with Iraq, and blood letting without end, all the while praising the God of peace.  In pauses during the slaughter, there is much praying.  

Leaving aside the details, the account has many, many parallels with the French Revolution, the Russian revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and no doubt others from Cuba to China and back. First the uprising, followed by increasingly brutal repression. Then victory for the revolutionaries followed by a purge, first of previous enemies, and then of tepid friends, and then as the paranoid of incumbency develops a cannibalism its own. Remember Robespierre?  Revolutionaries eat their own.
Under the guise of the New Dawn, old grudges re-surface and old scores are settled with revolutionary justice, i.e., a bullet to the brain right here, right now. Anonymous denunciations are enough. Silence is betrayal. Any criticism, or hesitation is treason.
Some estimates of the death toll exacted by the Ayatollahs at 60,000. The Iran-Iraq War added another 1.5 million deaths. Iran being roughly four times larger than Iraq its military strategy was to win the war by piling up corpses. It was the same strategy General Alexander Haig favoured on the Western Front in World War I.
Aside from those generic features, the portrayal of the Ayatollah Komeini is interesting, and there is some explanation of the factions that existed in Iran before, during, and after the revolution. 

The trials and tribulations of the Jaan family are without end, though somehow a few of them survive and retain their faith in Islam despite its bastardisation during and after the revolution.  As for many others, their faith is in God, not in the church.  
Some gratuitous grostequieres like the Lizard.  
I read it as an Ebook on the Kindle which means only saw the cover once in a poorly rendered graphic. Ergo when it came time to type these notes I had to make a point of opening the cover to get the title right and to get the author’s name.  On the title page I could not find the year of publication. 
Kader Abdolah
Translated into English from a Dutch translation. Odd that, I would have supposed the best thing is to translate from the original into English, not from Farsi to Dutch to English. Having said that, I found no faults with the translation, but then I might not but someone who knew Farsi might. 
It was hard to keep track of characters because of the unfamiliar names, like those in nineteenth century Russian novels, and the over lapping webs of the extended family and the mosque.

In this novel Lewis recounts the life and adventures of the title character with the sledgehammer subtlety that marks all of his work that I have read: ‘Arrowsmith’ and ‘Babbitt.’ In a generous mood, I will call it satire rather than sophomoric caricature.

Elmer Gantry is a self-centred charlatan who starts out a travelling salesman selling anything and everything from snake oil to farm machinery to anyone with a dollar. He has a gift of the gab and personal charm that makes him a success, but he also has many faults that undermine that success, chiefly the faults of whiskey and women.
He learns to sell religion and salvation, and not only does that make money, but it also gives him a power that is so satisfying that, to some extent, he controls his faults. Indeed, he stops drinking altogether. Gantry enjoys the competitive element in drawing crowds and raising money against other rival churches and barnstorming evangelists. Most of all, he enjoys manipulating others, for which he seems to have a gift, i.e., people believe what he says, even those who should know better.
He uses and abuses believers, fellow preachers, and several women.
There are a few bon mots and a couple of well-turned phrases, but for three hundred pages the prose is, well, prosaic.
The telling is episodic and relentless in demonstrating Elmer’s one-dimensional unscrupulousness and complete amorality. There is no limit to Gantry’s mendacity, duplicity, and deceit. There is never a qualm of conscience. Never does he do something for another but always for Elmer over the forty year period covered in the book. He never seems to grow or to change. He switched addiction from booze to power, discovering he could still have women on the side. It becomes one note repeated again and again.
The only people who see through him are either bookish ineffectuals or the blackmailers, who are themselves so corrupt that they have to back off.  
The underlying theme is that religious people are all fools in one way or another.  Like those without religion, Sinclair cannot imagine what faith means to others.
There is one dramatic moment when Reverend Pengilly asks Elmer why he does not believe in God at the end of Chapter 27 and it not resolved and so becomes a non sequitur.
By far the most interesting character and the best part of the book concerns the strange evangelist Sharon Falconer. She is far more compelling than Gantry himself. She also seems to be sincere in her mission, though she likes the money, too.  Doing well by doing good, as Ben Franklin did say. She seems to be a split personality. Lewis kills her off. That is approximately the middle third of the book.
Sinclair Lewis on the cover of Time Magazine.
I retain a very strong recollection of the film ‘Elmer Gantry’ (1960), but had never read the book. In memory the film concentrates on Falconer. Time to do the homework. While travelling in Turkey, I downloaded it to the Kindle and read it.
A lobby poster for the film.
When I started reading the description of Elmer at the beginning brought to mind the very actor who embodied him in the film, Burt Lancaster. It seemed as though, Lewis created Elmer cased on Burt, though that is chronologically impossible.
 

I read it in one sitting, stifling laughs, snorts, and chuckles as I went. Set in academe though it is, like ‘Dilbert’ it resonants with life in any large organisation these days. The drive for ever more meaningless detail and perfunctory documentation that is never used is endless and general. Nor is it only in academe that one part of the organisation thrives while another starves. Then there is the snivelling twelve-year old from Tech who mocks those he supports.

Professor Jay Fitger has long since made a separate peace with research and teaching, instead spending many a long day writing letters of recommendation for any and every one, each peppered with asides about life, his life, The universe, and the university that is grinding him to dust. An old salt, he knows many of his correspondents, been married to some, thrown-up on others, and takes that intimacy as licence to be ever more long-winded, circuitous, and explicit. Professor Fitger is surly, mendacious, anachronistic, energetic, and sharp along the edges.
His letters support students applying for internships (unpaid jobs), scholarships, two-week training workshops, jobs in mortuaries, summer jobs, places in a queue, and seminars taught by people Fitger despises but needs must, and for colleagues applying for tenure, part-time jobs, summer jobs in garage, meaningless awards, their own jobs twice in one year, honorary titles (more work for no money), and the use of the toilets where even that prerogative is limited. The point is, everything has to be applied for and every application must be supported by five letters of recommendation.
Fitger brings some of this load on himself since he never says no, and ends up writing in support of candidates — both students and professors — he does not know, nor want to know. along with those he knows and does not like. That is understandable. There are some colleagues, there are some students to whom it is far easier to say yes than no. If they want a letter it is best to do it, rather than try to talk them out of it. Safer, too.
His passing descriptions of colleagues brought tears to my eyes. Two-thirds of the members of his department bear the scars of long-term abuse from the university, mostly imagined but some real, and busy themselves tending to personal grudges like scraps of carrion on which they gnaw in the corners of the open-plan work space they now have instead of offices with doors. Few will survive the killing fields of administration in the next re-organisation. Fidget expects his department will be re-organised out of existence soon.
Against such threats to its existence there was the Department retreat where instead of discussing survival they argued for hours about the placement of a comma in a resolution that no one voted for when it was finally presented. Exhausted and frustrated, they turned to drink.
When not likening students to primordial ooze without individuality, Fitger says of one: she has endured the intellectual abuse and collective disdain for which this university is widely known, overcome administrative snafus of Orwellian proportions, and been penalised by other professors because she is his supervisee.
Though the best is perhaps the periodic correspondence with the campus Wellness Office about a disruptive student, one who terrorises the other twenty-nine in a discussion section, a fact deemed irrelevant to the Wellness Office, which repeatedly charges Fitger to be more supportive, understanding, and lenient. If not, then it is Fitger who is the problem! We have training courses for that! One more irritating complaint and off Fitger will go to be re-educated, Comrade Number One.
Julie Schumacher
Class, there is further reading. Another tale told in letters is Mark Harris, ‘Wake up, Stupid’ (1959) which left me gasping for air in 1980, according to the records. Then there is Iain Pears’s ‘The Titian Committee’ (2004) in which the chair of the eponymous committee, despairing of achieving consensus among the fractious members of said committee, begins to murder them, one-by-one, in the hope that the survivors will be more pliable. As if! The survivors become even more determined to resist consensus. Evidence be damned!

In April 1962 William Faulkner spent a few days as a writer-in-residence at a college in a small town in New York state, West Point. The book combines the typescript of the story from ‘The Reivers’ which he read (including his hand-written emendations), and transcripts of several question and answer sessions with students and faculty.

It is overproof Faulkner and there is no stronger elixir. The moral purity of the man glows. By moral I mean his commitment to lift the hearts of readers with true accounts of the conflict within and between us. ‘Morality’ does not mean telling other people what to do; it means doing the best one can at what one does. Believe it, Faulkner says it better.
He acknowledged that his novels are uneven but he loves all his children, the crooked as well as the straight, as would a mother, and learns from them each. When asked about the parochial nature of his work, he admits it, and then goes on to the eternal themes of loss, love, onus, anger, belonging, challenge, and — most of all — comprehension. Asked to say which novel is his favorite, slowly he answered, as I knew he would, ‘The Sound and the Fury’ because it hurt so much to write it, and it still hurts ‘when I read a few pages of it.’ The implication is that a few pages at a time is all he can bear.
Why is the idiot Benjy the narrator in ‘The Sound and the Fury,’ he is asked? Is it because of his childlike simplicity? No, said Faulkner, though much more politely than that, it is because Benjy does not understand what he sees, and even so the novelist must try to make it understood.
Asked about Southern racism he replies that it is a terrible disease to be eradicated by education, but it won’t be as easy as eradicating polio. No, not the education of blacks to be like whites, but the education of whites to end racism. [Maybe in another thousand years.]
The students asked leading questions right out of the textbook, and he gently turned them aside to come back to the bedrock where there are no labels, no simple either/or answers, no symbols, nothing that can go on an exam paper, just the story. Any man’s story is, in part, every man’s story, someone once said.
Asked how he plans his novels he said this:
‘A disorderly writer like me is incapable of making plans and plots. He writes simply about people and the story begins with a phrase, an anecdote, or a gesture, and it goes from there and he tries to stop it as soon as he can. It’s not done with any plan or schedule of work. I write about man in his comic or tragic condition, in motion, to tell a story — give it some order and unity and coherence.
Or in reply to a question about the value of literature:
‘Poetry is best and first. The failed poet writes short stories. The failed short story writer has nothing left but the novel. Poetry condenses everything in a few lines, the short story in a few pages, the novel… goes on.
That old chestnut is tossed in, Where do you get your ideas from?
‘It starts with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does, and maybe even thinks, but he is in charge. I have little to do with it but edit it into some coherence to lay emphasis here and there, but the characters themselves, they do what they do, not me.
Leo Tolstoy said something like that in his time.
When I visited Rowanoak in Oxford Mississippi on stifling hot day one August I beheld his well-used typewriter and the walls on which he used to doodle with his characters. He did try to use the technique he had learned in Hollywood of storyboarding for some of his later novels.
My nomination for his most powerful novel? That is easy: ‘Abalsom, Absalom.’ His most accessible novel for a newcomer who has yet to enter Yoknapatawpha County is ‘Intruder in the Dust’ and his long short story ‘The Bear.’ The funniest is ‘The Reivers.’ The most exhausting? ‘As I Lay Dying.’ The most compelling? ‘Light in August.’ The most harrowing? ‘Sanctuary.’ The most penetrating? ‘Go down, Moses.’ Each of his titles has something distinctive while they form a whole. And let’s not forget that very short story, ‘A Rose of Emily.’ I was always sure it was ‘Emily’ for Emily Dickinson.

A word of warning. Faulkner only became Faulkner in Yoknapatawpha Country.

His earlier novels like ‘Pylon,’ ‘Mosquito,’ and even the elegiac ‘Soldier’s Pay’ are pre-Faulkner. I do believe I have read them all (some more than once) and most of the stories, too, that he managed to stop short before they, too, grew into novels.
On that pilgrimage to Oxford I also recalled that it was on the campus of the University of Mississippi that there were race riots in 1962 led by the governor of that state and subdued by Federal troops. This was a time when Faulkner could not show his face on campus, where now he is honoured.

Eggheads! Did Victor Hugo (1802-1885) wrote ‘The Miserables’ on Guernsey in the Channel Islands? Yes, he did! He spent nearly twenty years in exile, three years on Jersey and most of the remainder on Guernsey. While this book is not a biography it does limn the relevant elements of this gargantuan writer’s gargantuan life. His books were big and so was he, and as big as he was his ego was even bigger. He regarded himself as the greatest writer ever, full stop, period, and end. He did not mean the greatest French writer, though he meant that, but the greatest writer of all, including William Shakespeare, who latter confirmed this judgement! (The best French writer had to be the best, because French was the best language per Hugo, though he had no knowledge of any other languages. It was a priori knowledge.)

No he was not a Mormon but yes the long-dead Shakespeare did concede Hugo’s surpassing genius … in a séance, for he sampled, practiced, and studied spiritualism with the same intensity he did everything else. At first he was disinterested in the many varieties of spiritualism that washed around Europe in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, but tolerated his wife’s interest, and then himself became hooked when it seemed that he could communicate with his dead daughter, the first born whom he loved (almost as much as himself, as one wit had it).
Some may remember ‘Bergerac.’
It was a time when the line between the living and the dead was a veil to some. Magnetism, mesmerism, table talking, automatic writing, rap rap, these were all in vogue. Once Hugo tasted this activity he drank deeply of it. A séance might start at 8 pm with a dozen participants in his Guernsey house and as the others departed or fell sleep in place, he continued on and on into the small hours of the morning.
And why not, he was H U G O after all and the spirits of the long dead crowded around to meet him! To the dead, he was a celebrity. [Pause.] Thus did Shakespeare rap out a message as did Aeschylus, Molière, Niccolò Machiavelli, and the Emperor Napoleon. Ego, indeed. He found further confirmation of his own self-estimate in these exercises, as if the chorus of praise from his contemporaries was not enough. Gargantuan that ego.
A séance.
Hugo was not a Christian and yet he prayed. Hugo was not a socialist and yet he spoke for the dispossessed. Hugo was not a monarchist and yet he supported Louis Napoleon. Hugo was not a democrat but he came to oppose Louis Napoleon. Hugo loved Paris and yet lived in exile in the Channel Islands. Hugo was principled and yet he broke his word more than once. Hugo despised politics but twice served in parliament. Hugo made a point of defying classification with any one side or position. The words of Walt Whitman came to mind: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contract myself, I am large, I contain multitudes’ (‘Leaves of Grass,’ 1855). Hugo was a multitude.
Statue Hugo on the island.
Among the spirits who paid court to Hugo was Niccolò Machiavelli during a séance 16 December 1853 and on two other, later occasions (p. 224), and that is why I had look at the book. Most of the séances were recorded by a scribe as the spirits spelled out their messages a letter at a time, mostly in French, sometimes in Latin, and occasionally in an incomprehensible mishmash. While several participants including Hugo himself wrote up the experiences using the transcripts, most of the original transcripts have joined the spirit world, i.e., they have been lost. In this book we find that Machiavelli visited Hugo twice, the first two times they talked politics, and the last the subject was reincarnation and a summary of that last conversation is presented. Nothing further is said about the political discussions because these are among the lost transcripts. Given the Hugo was proscribed by Louis Napoleon III it is likely that Hugo denounced tyranny to Machiavelli, ah hem, in the transcriptions that survive Hugo does a lot of the talking, and so he probably did with Machiavelli who was probably left to agree as most people, living or dead, were in conversation with Le Grand Victor.
John Chambers
The book is well written and based on Hugo’s own accounts and those of contemporaries and it reads like a novel with asides for exposition. However, I had no interest in the word-by-word translations of the actual channeled material in the sessions which form the bulk of the book.

This is a personal memoir of a French officer who was on the front line in Flanders in 1940 during The Defeat. He was a supply officer who managed fuel for tanks, ambulances, motorcycles, cars, and trucks with Henri Giraud’s First Army. Bloch was a professor of history at the Sorbonne, and he volunteered to serve in 1939 again, having been an infantry captain in World War I. Some may recognise the name for Bloch was also a remarkable historian whose two volume study, ‘Feudal Society,’ is one of the most compelling works of history I have read.

Bloch wrote ‘Strange Defeat’ as a diary in the last months of 1940, and it remained unpublished at his death in 1944. He was in the Resistance, arrested by the Gestapo, tortured for information, and then murdered. None of this figures in his pages but it is a grim reminder of the mortal gravity of the place and time.
Bloch muses on his own reactions to the approach of war and his decision, at age fifty-two, to take up arms again and reflects on the men with whom he served, and analyses the Defeat from his captain’s eye-view.
Professor Bloch of the Sorbonne
He emphasises that the military shibboleths of order and method could not bend but they could break. That is, there was little sense of urgency when the German attack began. He had fuel requisitions rejected because a corner of the page was torn or the ink had run, which meant a long drive back to complete a new copy and get it signed by field officers whose troops were engaged with the Germans, and then return along roads strafed by the Luftwaffe. None of these exigencies were sufficient to compromise protocol. There was all the time in the world, until time ran out and then panic set it.
Even when the First Army retreated, it did so at a leisurely pace, moving back twenty kilometres. His point is that the insistence on procedure and these short retreats were measured against trench warfare of World War I, not against the mobile warfare of the Panzers. A twenty-kilometres retreat was but less than an hour from the next tank attack, which was never enough time to re-set the line of defence. Yet French Army doctrine would not permit a longer retreat, and so nothing was available to facilitate it in the way of equipment, road signs, traffic controls, communication, identified positions, marked map coordinates, and expectation. (To retreat a longer distance required an order from Supreme Command and Supreme Command could only reached by courier and no courier could get through. Supreme Command refused radio and telephone communication even in distress.) The First Army then retreated in these bite-sized steps five or six times before it completely disintegrated. At each retreat more units lost contact, were cut-off by marauding Panzers, read the map sideways and wandered into a Belgian bog, or collapsed in exhaustion and fear.
Then there were the personal rivalries he saw in the career officers in the many headquarters where his duties took him. To say to one colonel that he had instruction from another colonel meant he would get no hearing at all, because these two colonels were old adversaries in the promotions list. After mentioning the first colonel’s name, Bloch watched helplessly as the second colonel dropped his requisition into a drawer and with an icy word dismissed him. Clearly that chit was going no further up the chain of command.
There are many other examples but perhaps enough has been said to make the point. The procedures were cumbersome, inviolable, mysterious, and most of all based on absolute obedience at the expense of any initiative. (By the way, German intelligence services were aware of French army procedures and took them into account in their own planning.)
Black was the day, but Bloch also met, worked with, and observed many officers who manfully did their duty despite the circumstances. More than one staff officer stayed at the radio or telephone directing retreating units to Dunkerque even as shell fire fell on them. Bloch is one of those thousands of men who spent days on the sands at Ostend as British troops were evacuated while the Luftwaffe strafed the beaches and artillery fire grew closer.
The miracle at Dunkirk
Along with more than 120,000+ other French soldiers he was himself evacuated. (Winston Churchill personally ordered the Royal Navy to make no distinction among Allied soldiers and to board them first-come, first-served. For a day or more before that order the Royal Navy had only taken Brits.)
Bloch landed in Dover, marched to the train station, stopping for tea and scones served to the group of French troops he was with at the local lawn bowls club, then onto a train to Plymouth where he boarded a ship for Bordeaux, and thirty-six hours later he was again in France. The French troops shipped back to French Atlantic ports like this were without weapons, some had lost clothing, particularly boots in the surf at Ostend-Dunkerque, some were wounded or injured, and devoid of any chain of command. Bloch and the compatriots he shipped with were billeted in a health camp near Bordeaux, where, he observes, they were received with far less warmth and civility than they had experienced in England where he and his fellows were heroes who had stemmed the tide of the Boches, but in Bordeaux they were burdensome failures.
In World War I the city of Bordeaux was a million kilometres from the front; not so in the mechanised age. No sooner did Bloch arrive than did the Germans. He became one of those poilus, dirty, dazed, ragged, head down, among a thousand others on a road, escorted by a lone Wehrmacht private with a single-shot carbine, marching into captivity.
Les poilus
At fifty-two the Germans deemed him too old for slave labour in the Reich and he was paroled to begin his career in the Resistance shortly thereafter.

A book to be read in parallel with ‘Flight to Arras’ from the pen of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, he of the ‘Little Prince.’ St.-Ex was an air force pilot who flew combat in 1940, then fled to Algeria to continue the war with the Free French. He, too, died in 1944 while on a mission.