GoodReads meta-data is 240 pages rated 3.31 by 16 litizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Seminar.
At an isolated but relaxed research institution Philophrenic robots are in development. Pragmapractor robots are extensively used for simple and repetitive tasks, like telling people to brush their teeth. (Joke.) But the Philophrenics have much more complex programming and, perhaps, even emotions. Xanthe is one of the programers and the story is told from her perspective.
Xanthe is an only child, an introvert, solitary, obsessive, creative, and likes things that way. Xeno the director of the institute saddles her with an assistant, despite her objections, and he becomes a source of tension. While Xanthe swallows the libido-blocking tablets each day, the better to concentrate entirely on her work 18-hours a day, …. But the reader knows that Daiman, the unwanted assistant, will overcome that chemical barrier. There is no other reason for him to be there.
The Philophrenics are programmed in the humanities not science or engineering. Thus they know the works of Ibsen, Melville, Brownings, Byron, and prove it by spouting quotations. Each has a programmer whose personality shapes the bot, though it is not supposed to do so.
Only half-way through the book does the reader learn that beyond the Institute’s walls the world is disintegrating into chaos, although it seems a polite sort of chaos compared to the kind the Republican Party creates these days. Meanwhile, the Philophrenic robots develop wills of their own and demand autonomy which is conceded. However no sooner do the Philophrenics take over than the Pragmapractors go on strike. It seems that they do not wish to take orders from other robots. (At this point I expected Jim Kirk to appear and talk the robots to death in the great Star Trek tradition of low budget endings.)
The Philophrenics we learn in a sotto voce narrative from Xanthe were supposed to be perfected humanity, creatures of reason and knowledge, untainted by the weakness of the flesh. Like the Pragmapractors, the Philophrenics are sexless, though there are anticipations that the latter may come to demand sex in order to more closely approximate human beings. Remember Mr Data or the Tin Man? Try as the members of the Institute might, the robots cannot be any more perfect than the humans who program them, and we see early on the personality of programmer is reflected in the robot. (It seems one programmer works on/with one robot.)
The Philophrenics seems poorly suited for the autonomy they demand since they are totally imbued with literature, and nothing else. When granted freedom to create their own names they invariably choose the name of a literary character, and when they are also allowed to dress themselves (having theretofore worn coveralls or kaftans) they choose period clothing for the name they have chosen. Do we detect a lack of imagination here? (By the way, how such clothing is produced is off stage.) but then why are they clothed at all?
Aside: the only other time clothing is mentioned it is used to indicate exasperation when Xanthe notes that Xeno’s necktie is at half mast. We are spared the detailed and pointless description of clothing that pads out so much genre fiction. Nor are meals described and decor detailed. Finally, there is no description of the robots, except that they are made in our image.
All the programmers have code names and that is never explained within my attention span.
Once autonomous, the bots rapidly set about making all too human errors by dividing into hostile groups, going on ego trips, lolling around…. Meanwhile, Daiman and Xanthe become, as long predicted, a couple while the Institute disintegrates around them. The conflict between the Pragmapractors and Philophrenics turns violent with the humans in between, not quite trusted by either camp, but trusted more than the other camp.
In the end Daiman and Xanthe leave the shelter of the Institute to brave the misery of real world. That last phrase was not used but it seems right.
About midway there are explicit references to the laws built into bots but Asimov is not named.
The verdict above, ‘Seminar,’ indicates how wordy the text is. Every character is articulate and there are pages and pages of talk, or silent narration from Xanthe, and very little movement. When Xanthe reluctantly takes a holiday earlier, well, that is one of the weakest parts of the text.
This reader was left perplexed as to what conclusion to draw. Moreover, the external chaos is never explained, and neither is any role for the robots in that wider world which undermines the whole purpose of the Institute. In that way, we seem to have only part of the story. While at the Institute there are schedules and work, it never seems connected to the desperate world out there. It is indeed an Ivory Tower. The Philophrenics will do nothing to reduce the chaos, though the Pragmapractors might.
Sheila McLeod
I came across a reference to it somewhere, now forgotten, and being intrigued I found a used paper copy from Abe Books (despite being owned by Amazon, its stock does not appear in Amazon searches) and got it. It is not available in an e-book. She has many other titles.
Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 4.08 by 172 members of the Human Comedy.
Genre: History.
Subtitle: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin American during World War II.
Verdict: Victimology.
As worldwide conflicts occurred in the middle and later 1930s, the relationship of the United States to the 33 nations in Latin American returned to centre stage. For a century the United States treated as property those parts of this world it noticed, though it generally neglected the greater part. The Monroe Doctrine had originally protected some of the countries of Latin America from the threat of re-colonisation after they had thrown off their European masters, and at the time it was backed by a silent partnership with Great Britain, but in the intervening century the Doctrine had become a convenient excuse for exploitation, rapine, and arrogance.
The Monroe Doctrine had been used to justify a hidden hand operation that hived Panama off Columbia and turned it into a de facto US dependency for a century. Earlier Mexico had been reduced by 60% in successive conflicts, hot and cold. Being closest, Mexico has always been favoured with US intentions. The best example is in a display of his ‘moral diplomacy’ when Woodrow Wilson had the US Navy bombard Vera Cruz in 1914. That was his phrase.
Venezuela had once been protected from European creditors on battleships, true, but in return it endured the rapacious business practices of United Fruit (Rockefeller) and others from El Norte. Since Latin America was all but closed to Europeans by the Monroe Doctrine wall, US businesses dictated terms at will. In the spirit of free enterprise they formed cartels to reduce competition among themselves, the better to exploit the land and people. Free market ideologues never ponder this sad story very long before returning to the clouds.
Against this background in the late 1930s the Roosevelt Administration set out to vivify the Organization of American States and win friends with the so-called Good Neighbour Policy in which the US pledged never again to intervene by force in its good neighbours. (Hence, the Cuban sad sacks had to front the Bay of Pigs invasion; black money funded the overthrow of the elected government south of the border more than once, private contractors flew covert bombing raids in Central America, and on and on.) Whatever the intentions of the policy, the administration was not well equiped to practice it. US embassies in the Latin America were staffed with men (yes, only men above clerical staff) who saw themselves first and foremost as representative of those exploitative businesses. The diplomacy they practiced often consisted of lecturing the host government on the best way to show gratitude for the US robbery they suffered.
A comparison could be made between the pre-War US domination of Latin America with the post-War Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Albeit the US approach was masked and at times ineffective, as when its efforts to block elected governments like that of Juan Perón in Argentina failed.
Apart from a vast population, the southern Americas possessed natural resources that anyone could see would be important, rubber, oil, platinum, bauxite, natural gas, copper, silver, and other metals and minerals, as well as vast agricultural production, and what’s more it fronted both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Its single greatest strategic asset was the Panama Canal linking the two bodies of water.
One of the most interesting parts of the story concerns the Rubber Soldiers in Brazil. To increase production Brazil mobilised for rubber production on a new level, and went at it like a military campaign.
With thirty-three countries to choose from there is a lot to cover, and the author selects material that fit the overall approach of victimology. The southern denizens have no wills of their own, but are enslaved by Norteamericanos. The indictment goes on and on. I admit I grew weary of reading the list of one-eyed wrongs, and tuned out.
While there are occasional references to German and Italian interests, there is no sustained reckoning of their efforts to sow dissension and suborn the population. We are left with the Alfred Hitchcock film, Notorious (1946) for that side of the story.
And speaking of that population, much of it came from recent immigration which included millions of Italians, and also a million plus German-speakers from Central Europe. The Italians were concentrated in Argentina, while the Germans were to be found there, and in Colombia (a two hundred air miles from the Canal), and Brasil. However these Germans and Italians were counted, they added up to a far greater number than the resident Anglos. Then there was a significant Japanese presence in Peru to be considered. Given the author’s silence, none of these Axis peoples were anything but peace loving innocents.
…
One can spend a lot of time trying to define and express that group of southern nations. Latin American includes all the countries south of the Rio Grande for 6,000 miles to the Antarctic Ocean. That embrace includes the islands of the Caribbean, Central American, and South America. It includes the French-speaking Haiti and Guyana. In but not of it are the Dutch-speaking Suriname and the Aruba isles, as well as English-speaking rocks like the Bahamas. But ‘Latin America’ is most general terms for this vast area, even if its people are not all Latins in any sense, starting with the indigenous in habitants. The dominate languages is Spanish but the largest single country is Brasil where Portuguese is the spoken. For every rule there is an exception.
To put it all other ways:
Spanish America includes Mexico but excludes Haiti and Brasil as well the Dutch territories and British islands.
South American excludes Mexico and six other Central American counties as well as the Caribbean islands.
The uncommon term Iberico-America combines Spanish America with Brasil but omits the French, Dutch, and English lands and islands.
By the way, it seems ‘Latin America’ is a term attributed to Napoleon III when he had designs on recolonising Mexico as his White Man’s Burden before Kipling. It includes all the Spanish, Portuguese, and French settled lands but omits the Dutch and English.
Then there is vexed question of the United States territories, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the Panama Canal Zone.
One thing common to all these variations is so obvious that it often overlooked. All use the term ‘America,’ as in the Organization of American States. One of the first concessions the Good Neighbour policy made was to re-title US embassies and consulates in this region as ‘United States’ and not ‘American,’ since everywhere was geographically American.
Good Reads meta-data is 176 pages, rated 3.81 by 2,574 litizens.
Genre: [Time] Travel.
Verdict: Easy Does It.
In different printings the book has two subtitles: ‘A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of Fulfilled Life’ or ‘Meditations from a Greek Island on the Pleasures of Old Age.’ The latter seems to fit the text better, and is less tiring than ‘journeying’ and ‘searching.’
In its brief compass, professional funny man Klein ponders the pleasures of growing old and older. He takes aim at the ‘forever young’ fad and many others with acerbic comments. He romanticises and fantasises about life on a Greek rock.
The red line through the book is ‘enjoy the moment’ because it is all there is right now. Mostly we don’t do that. We go at most of our lives as means to an end that ever recedes. It is as if to say, ‘Once I have everything I want, I will relax and smell the roses,’ but first I have to get all that. Plato called that sickness pleonexia. The Ferengi on Star Trek embody this syndrome. More is always better. Remember Marilyn at the tax office, insatiable?
Before all that, Klein starts out rescuing Epicurus from his friends. Far from recommending hedonistic pleasure-seeking that his name has come to imply, Epicurus offered a much more basic message. ‘Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, be there and do that.’ Extract all the pleasure possible from the here and now, whatever it is. An Epicurean who has understood Epicurus will savour a lentil soup as much as Iranian black caviar. (A Google search failed to produce a recipe for lentil soup in the magazine that takes his name.)
When I push the pedals on the stationery bike at the gym sometimes there is an exercise class on. The music is set to ear-drum bursting, the pace is frantic, the result must be a kind of out-of-body experience, I am guessing without personal experience, for the participants. But the noise alone deadens me in the next room perched on the bike. In front of the speakers I have been surprised it has not caused fatalities. No one in such a class, it seems to this jaded observer, is savouring the moment. Rather they are numb, and on more than one level. The more so when these sessions have names like Body Attack, Storm, Ignite, Destroy, Smash, and Pound.
Like Machiavelli, Epicurus (341 – 270 BCE) has been bastardised into a stereotype miles from the original. For what it is worth, when Eppy opened a school in Athens he allowed women and slaves to join in the meals and the discussions. The scandal mongers of Pox News descended. As a result virtually nothing of his original work survived the vigilantes so that the little we know of his teachings comes second and third hand centuries later. Yet his name is widely mis-taken in vain.
Daniel Klein
There is an 11-minute film listed on the IMDb but I could not find it online, but there are plenty of other films on You Tube for those who must see the movie. The few I sampled lack Klein’s light touch. A couple even managed to make pleasure painful.
Klein’s other titles include Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates (2009) and Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington (2008). Although Wikipedia doesn’t know it, this is the same Daniel Klein who wrote Blue Suede Clues (2002) and Viva Las Vengeance (2003).
Good Reads meta-data is 49 pages rated 3.94 by 24,583 litizens.
Genre: Fiction. Species: Short Story.
Galatea finds life puzzling and ends it all.
After reading the Song of Achilles and Circe, I am ready for anything that comes from MM’s keyboard, even this slight story between hard covers. Well, almost ready because I found this one didactic, and did not get the point until I read the afterword, and then I felt I had been preached at under the false pretence of a story fabricated from myth. The scatological language early on should have tipped me off. The MM of the earlier novels had no need for such vulgarity to get a reader’s attention.
Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rate 3.91 by 715 litizens.
Genre: Historical Fiction.
Verdict: Deep and meaningful.
Having been to Tolstoy’s home in Moscow, this title caught my eye. A quick look corrected my mistaken assumption. It is not about the great writer, but rather a detailed examination of a Wehrmacht field surgery that occupies Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy’s country estate) for six weeks in the winter late in 1941 as it becomes apparent to those that have eyes to see that the Soviets will endure.
The focus is Dr Bauer who does his best to save the lives of the battered and broken men who appear on his cutting table. There are some ghastly descriptions of wounds that I flicked over. His commander is a good surgeon who is slowly cracking under the incessant pressures – the management of 200-man unit, the constant surgery, the shortage of everything, the savage winter, the demand to be a good Nazi, the environment of hostility from the scant remaining population, the tensions among the men in his command, the artillery fire that seems closer each day, the threat of partisan attacks, and that is just the beginning. Another enemy is added to his list when the ghost of Tolstoy visits him.
Meanwhile, Bauer tries to be a good German in this Circle of Hell by doing his job well, treating the locals with guarded respect, and re-reading Tolstoy. The mediator between the occupiers and the natives is the estate manager, a no-nonsense woman. Long ago as a failed literature student, Bauer learned to read some Russian because of Tolstoy; this smattering of Russian makes him the designated liaison between occupier and occupied. She and Bauer slowly, reluctantly realise that they have much in common behind the walls of steel each has erected.
Believe it or not, Ripley, in that bloody and doomed context this is an engaging love story, and it is superbly well rendered. Not a cheap shot in sight. Slow and measured, deep and meaningful. The result is a quiet tragedy that has, paradoxically, a happy ending, of sorts.
The descriptions of the winter are good but… I don’t think the author ever lived through one like it or the descriptions would be less external – about the snow, ice, and temperature – and more internal – what constant cold does to your body and your mind. Those who know needn’t be told and those that don’t know can’t be told. ‘Noses are red, fingers are blue’ is just the beginning.
Steven Conte
After I started on the sample, I stopped, supposing it was going to be a shoot ‘em up, but Martin Nunn encouraged me to keep reading. I am glad that he did and that I did.
As a refresher on the current state of the idiocracy I glanced at a few of the GoodReads one-star reviews. The vapid are still with us and proud of it.
The Professor and the Parson (2018) by Adam Sisman.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages rated 3.40 by 273 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: [Gasp!]
Robert Michael Parkins Peters (1918-2005) bested King Henry VIII in having eight (known) wives, and he was more efficient, at least thrice skipping the divorce before marrying anew. Three times a bigamist. His names and dates above are estimates since he used many names and many dates of birth. It may even be that he managed by occult means to lie about the date of his death. That would be consistent with his character.
From the mid-1940s Peters made his way in clerical and academic life by lies, forgeries, thefts, and plagiarisms spiced with bigamy, deportations, jail terms, and all those wives. That later supplied the media hacks with headlines off and on over the years, but nothing, nothing at all, stopped him. And it seems it was no one’s job to eradicate this blood sucker. His determination, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, and creativity are a marvel equal to the trail of destruction he left behind.
He continued despite setbacks partly because no one could quite believe he was doing what he did, and the more blatant it was, the more incredible it seemed to any nearly normal person. His life was a work of fiction which he wrote every day.
Moreover, he had some skill in picking his victims, often a dewey-eyed churchman who could believe no wrong of him, a headmaster desperate for staff, or a women in want of a husband. Yet there were other churchmen and other women who should have known better and who were slow in grasping the reality of his criminal endeavours. There were also many academics, from professors to deans, who took his bait whole, and regretted it.
To avoid creditors, to avoid warrants, to avoid his own past he moved back forth among England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, the United States, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and South Africa. In each country his persistent and energetic efforts netted victims. He also made use of many aliases by shuffling around the four names above. But his ego never let him avoid a photograph so there are many that show the man with many names.
What were his crimes? He forged letters of recommendations, diplomas, transcripts, credentials, and passed more than one dud cheque. He took money for tuition from naive students to teach them subjects about which he knew nothing. He claimed his instruction was accepted for admission to schools and universities when it was not. There were persistent and recurrent suggestions that he forced himself on young women in the girls schools where he was supposed to be teaching. But again it seems to have been no one’s job to sort that out. He plagiarised the work of others and published it as his own, and if confronted with the facts, tried to claim it was the other way around despite the dates, evidence, and facts. That is only the beginning.
He also masqueraded as a preacher and a priest and was so convincing he gave sermons and officiated at weddings, which because he was in fact unlicensed, were invalid. Not forgetting the bigamies.
More than once a bookstore proprietor was defrauded when Peters would open an account, claiming to be a lecturer at an Oxford college, say, and take any number of books on credit, sometimes by the box-load, never to pay the bill. When the proprietor contacted the college it was to discover that he was unknown there. These bills were measured in the hundreds of pounds.
He gained employment more than once in a clerical or an academic position by forging degrees from Oxford, London, Liverpool, Manchester, and elsewhere depriving other qualified candidates of the opportunities. Invariably he was unable, and sometimes unwilling, to perform the tasks for which he was employed. His longest tenure in this account is eighteen months, and most were a few weeks, or less. Some only a few days. His stay at a school in Sri Lanka was shorter than the sea voyage to get there.
Then there were the wives whose ranks grew over the years. In the many photographs he seems to be balding, middle aged man with spectacles, but he must have had something. One of the early wives, Sisman supposes, wrote the only sensible thing Peters published, while others funded his forays. These women were secretaries, school teachers, civil servants, and all victims. Some stubbornly stuck by him when the consequences caught up with him, until he walked out on them for another.
His approach to courtship was direct, and if rebuffed he turned to the next in line, as it were. Likewise, when he passed himself off as a churchmen he went at it head on. He would appear at a Bishop’s palace, ask for an interview, introduce himself as the possessor of many degrees and licenses, and might even modestly show a letter of recommendation (he had composed the night before) from a respected authority. He set about making himself useful and secured a sinecure, until the balloon burst, say, when another churchman recognised him. This recognition occurred because he often revisited the same locales.
For the academy it was much the same with the variation that he would attend a conference in medieval history and in a question period rise to speak, introducing himself as Dr Peters of Magdalen College, after first having ascertained that no one from the college was at the conference, and pose a simple question that would allow him to follow-up privately with the speaker thereafter. In that later conversation he seems usually to have made a good impression and he would shyly allow that he was unhappy in his current (imaginary) position and could be persuaded to move. If he got a bite, then he closed the deal. If not, he went to another conference session and repeated the act.
There was no great artifice in his deceptions. The forged degrees were poorly done but no one seems to have noticed at first. When he applied for a post and submitted fraudulent letters of recommendations both the application and the three letters of recommendation were written in same handwriting, but this passed unnoticed. He was so oblivious that he made one such application to an Oxford college, which was rejected, and then applied to the same college again a few years later and was accepted. No one noticed that he had applied before and been rejected because the application was suspect. In each case the application and all the letters of recommendation were written in his own handwriting with badly forged documents.
In other instances he got appointments to schools, colleges, and universities on the strength of interviews, and no paperwork, neither transcripts, diplomas, nor letters. It is hard to feel sympathy for those who do not take the most elementary precautions.
One of his recurrent gambits was to set himself up in a rented house as a school of theology and then seek articulation with a university, meaning that completion of his program would be considered adequate for admission to the university. So desperate are some universities for fee-paying students that they will say yes to any such articulations. To be sure, Quality Assurance (QA) must be satisfied and often it consisted of Peters writing up a curriculum and sending that in. It would be approved. Then Peters could claim with a slight bit of truth that the course he offered was accredited by a major university. Seeing the crest of a well-known university on the wall of his establishment, the naive students, never many, but always some, would pay him a fee so that he could strut around calling himself Dr, Professor, Dean, and Principal to this audience, often in clerical vestments or an academic gown.
He did this half a dozen times and only once did a university bother to check on the reality behind the paperwork to find…nothing. That sounds like QA, all right, all paper covers rock, no scissors.
He tried to avoid confrontation with his victims or people who knew his past, but if confronted he either (1) cried foul, that he was the victim, or (2) threatened litigation. At the least these tactics gave him time to abscond one scene for another.
Generally, many took his baits, but there were even more others who did not. Women who rejected him instantly. Institutions hiring staff that did not go as far as an interview. Submissions for articulation that were denied prima facie. But they are not featured in the stories of his crimes told in these pages.
Reverend Dr Professor Peters
There are many gaps in the story as Peters went to ground, moved around, and changed his name yet again. In these gaps there were likely to have been further crimes and perforce other marriages.
One omission from this account is how Peters managed to stay out of the army during World War II. But he did.
We know all of this, and much more, because he came to the notice of the scourge of confidence men and tricksters, until he himself fell hard for one, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who loved kicking people when they were down, and who over the years, having met Peters in one of his early incursions to Oxford, kept a dossier on Peters’s adventures, and solicited reports from others. This dossier in its many box files became the basis for this book.
(It is likewise hard to feel any sympathy for his Lordship’s own fall, he who specialised in ruining the careers of many others with his savage reviews, assessments, and vitriol. It seems somehow appropriate that the fictitious Hitler Diaries got him. There is a discussion of this sorry episode elsewhere on the blog reacting to Robert Harris’s book on the subject. That is another instance of a fraud so simple, so blatant that the only explanation of its success is the will of those deceived to be deceived.)
Speaking of explanations, what explained Robert Michael Parkins Peters’s many deceptions? It was not money. He seldom made more than a subsistence income and not always that, often relying on a wife’s salary and savings. But he did revel in the status that his fantasies gave him. He puffed himself up and insisted on being addressed ‘Reverend’ or ‘Dr’ or ‘Dean’ or ‘Principal’ as he moved from one dreamworld to another. Of course, with a modicum of ability and application he might have earned that kind of status in the normal way.
Perhaps once he started his fabrications and at first found how easy it was, they became a habit, though they got harder as he acquired a reputation, a police record, a list of victims, for Lord Dacre was not the only one to keep a file on him, though Dacre’s was called a dossier as befits his Lordly status. Even if it got harder, lying was all Peters knew how to do so he kept at it. Regardless of Peters’s many victims, his frequent crimes, his recidivism, his disregard for others, his rumoured sexual aggression, his frauds, his theft, his serial exploitation of lady wives, his defrauding of naive students, there was no one responsible for containing him. He was convicted for one bigamy and served six-months in jail, and once for defrauding a bookstore which landed him in the nick for a few weeks, but mostly his victims were left unsatisfied.
Buried in a textual footnote near the end is the author’s remark that many people, upon hearing something of Peters’s story, have remarked that it could not happen today in the age to the internet. Sisman demurs, suggesting that people are tricked this way and that every day. The evidence of the truth of that suggestion is readily available. After reading this book I went to ride the exercise bike at the local gym in front of a television screen where Dr Phil was interviewing a woman who admitted to giving $US 900,000, amassed from her life savings, selling her home, and borrowing money from her adult children, to a man on the internet who claimed he loved her but whom she had never met, and never will since he is fictitious. Go figure. (Victims seem to be a regular feature of Dr Phil.)
Truth can be stranger than fiction, because fiction writers usually try to be credible where life has no such restraint. Then there is the ease of forging documents with computers these days. Consider all those fraudulent web sites and emails that look just like the real thing.
In the final chapter author Sisman suggests Peters is an example of the psychosis known as the narcissistic personality. Reading the list of characteristics that comprise this disorder certainly describes him, as well as the recent Thief-in-Chief. However, labelling is not explaining because that does not tell us how and why he got that way and stayed that way.
On Lord Dacre see the passages about him Ved Mehta’s imperishable Fly and the Fly Bottle (1961).
Honoré de Balzac, ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ (1831)
Good Reads meta-data is 28 pages, rated 3.85 by 3,858 litizens.
Genre: Short Story.
Verdict: A gem.
This story is the 71st entry in Balzac’s sequence La Comédie Humaine.
An ingénue befriends a celebrated artist only to realise that this painter profits from the advice, assistance, and creativity of another, much less well-known, but far greater artist. The descriptions of painting and painters are superb, even better than those in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Way to Paradise (2004) and those are memorable.
It all leads to an ironic denouncement worthy of an O’Henry story. It is all about knowing when to quit, about the perfect being the enemy of the good, about the means becoming the end. Read it for yourself. The story is usually bound with others so that the page numbers are deceptive.
There are more than ninety items in the whole sequence, and Balzac left behind notes for another forty or so pieces. He did think big. I first heard about and read Balzac in high school whereas today the references are to Marvel Comics I am told. Go figure.
Balzac
When we got our first Rocket E-Books in the 1990s I set out to read La Comédie Humaine in order. Nothing if not ambitious. I got as far as Letters of Two Brides before surrender. Defeat was the result of (1) the terrible formatting of the contemporary public domain texts from Project Gutenberg which did not fit the screen, have line wrap, paragraph breaks, or any of the other formatting we take for granted today and by (2) the sheer boredom of that novel for no doubt the ever penurious Balzac spun it out to get paid by the word, but after some of the rip-snorters that preceded it the result was numbing.
GoodReads meta-data is 246 pages rated 3.79 by 5,465 litizens.
Genre: SyFy
Verdict: The history of the future
These pages offer a tour de horizon of a five-billion-year history of seventeen human species from the First, homo sapiens (that’s us), to the Last who watch Sol die and they with it. In between all manner of men evolve and disappear to be replaced by another lot. Along the way there is a viral invasion from Mars and the colonisation of Venus. It is a novel without drama, without characters, and without a narrative that has a start, middle, and finish. The story of Earth is told with a nearly divine detachment by The Last of The Last Men. It will remind some of those sociological studies where social forces, cleavages, structures, and other abstractions push us Sims back and forth.
In evolution through the billions of years, the Last Men can project their thoughts backward in time, even to some among the First Men. (That, by the way, is the explanation for visitations, ghosts, angels, saints, martyrs, messianics, charismatics, nutcases, UFOs, aliens, ETs, and other inexplicable often unseen things, events, and occurrences.) This projection without Blue Tooth is difficult, incomplete, and subject to distortion, like using the NBN in 2022. However among the Last Men some have perfected this projection so that this book can be dictated by the Last of the Last Men to a nameless receptive First Man of 1930. (Would such an ability to inhabit the mind of a subject make a Last Man the perfect biographer?) This future influence on the past reveals that the relationship we call time is lateral, not linear.
Between the First and Last Men are billions of years and seventeen (17) species of Men. Succeeding species develop as giant brains in jars. Others grow to twenty feet in height. Then there are the ones that sprout wings and take to the air. With each evolution there are cultural and moral changes, too. Though some verities remain, like jealousy, envy, bad will, selfishness, and McKinsey management.
The beginning of the book forecasts (though it is told in retrospect) the future of we homo sapiens, and it is all too believable. Stupid wars, avoidable virus plagues, anticipated but neglected climate change, personal vendettas that escalate to planet-wide wars that kill off half the population, denial of undeniable facts, and so on. It reads like BBC World Service reports this week. Move over Nostradamus, there is a contender.
Of women, first, last, or in-between, there is none. There is plenty of troll-food in the many, necessary generalisations about peoples and places. Check out the sanctimonious comments on Good Reads.
Olaf Stapledon
For his day job John O. Stapledon (1886-1950) lectured in politics at Liverpool University. That work left him, we must conclude, plenty of time to write as this was just the first of his dozen novels, all SyFy. (Did these count in his annual Research Impact Statement?) Others include: Last Men in London (1932), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and six more. The books sold well but reviewers, unable to categorise them, did not like them. Thus is creative writing denigrated by the gatekeepers of creative writing.
Although it is nearly lost in the giga-historical details that crowd onto the pages, the core idea is that of influence from the future on the past. That reminded this reader of Chris Marker’s haunting short film La Jetée (1962). There are some similarities though the execution is completely different.
There is a 70-minute film inspired by Stapledon’s novel which I can find only on Blu Ray and that does not interest me. I cannot find it on DVD. If someone can, please let me know. My cursory research into converting Blu Ray to another format left me confused. One guide offered a four-step procedure that involved about fifty steps, grouped into four categories. (Reminded me of the Man in Seat 61’s claim that the train from Amsterdam to Prague stopped only twice, whereas in fact it stopped nearly a dozen times. It all depends on definition.) The surrounding images are from the film.
I happened to see a reference to this novel in something else I was reading and that sparked my curiosity. I could not remember having read it (though I knew the author’s name and felt certain I had read something by him) so I found it available on Kindle and hour later and started to read it. At first I could not put it down, but as clever permutations piled one on top of another, going – as far as I could tell – nowhere except to the next page, I soon adopted the Kindle flick, reading only topic sentences. Fortunately, Stapledon learned the craft when a topic sentence was a topic sentence and that eased my speedy navigation. He is reported to have said that he turned to fiction for a wider audience than academic writing (and yes, he did a good deal of that, too) had. Strong stuff, those wider readers if they marched through several volumes of this detail.
The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II
Goodreads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.83 by 1211 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: Young Adult
After reading The Good Shepard I was primed for more nautical escapades and the write-up and praise for this title enticed me into downloading the (lengthy) sample. I read it and was glad when it ended. That is an hour lost.
It is presented in the manner of a thriller, chopping and changing from time and place without apparent rhyme of reason to keep the reader guessing, or in my case, grousing. Not only that…. Each vignette is padded with back and side stories which have nothing to do with the title.
The offering is based on a synthesis of secondary sources and it shows. The descriptions, of which there are far too many anyway in those back and side stories, are thin. In first sixty pages only one woman appears and a charitable reader will suppose she must be one of the ingenues who became ingenious. But it is only guesswork.
I could go on but I noticed that the writer’s biography refers to him as a ‘video game pundit’ and that suffices to indicate the intellectual level of this book by a writer whose ‘criticism and journalism has been featured in numerous high-profile publications,’ followed by a depressing list of mastheads whose editors ought to have known better.
The breathless History Channel ‘Now It Can Be Told’ presentation is trite. The author warns the reader will be surprised and shocked that board games are used in planning military operations. It seems to have been news to the author that the boards are maps and tokens represent forces constrained by circumstance. Alexander the Great used sand tables to out-think his adversaries; generals and sergeants since have drawn plans in dirt to assess a situation. (Themistocles did so, too, long before Alex but I fear this author will have not heard of this admiral who lured the Persian fleet to its doom by using pebbles on a beach to test his hypothesis.)
The Verdict above as Young Adult indicates that such a readership might find it informative. Anyone who has any interest in the subject already knows all of this and more. Indeed, many tweenage boys who play video games will know all of this already.
By the way, some of the Good Reads reviewers who made it to the end have observed that the ingenious women amount to less than a quarter of the total. Does it follow that three-quarters is padding? ‘Fraid so. Still the overall rating of 3.83 is IMHO proof of the value of Good Reads ratings.
GoodReads meta-data is 222 pages, rated 4.17 by 8,192 litizens.
Genre: historical fiction.
Verdict: Detailed and compelling.
It reads in good part like a study in leadership with much inner dialogue and very little of CGI shot ‘em action of the (trailers for the) film (Greyhound).
Convoy J45 of thirty-seven merchant ships crosses the North Atlantic in the winter of early 1942. There are troop ships from Canada packed with men. Enough fuel in five oilers to power the entirety of the Britain’s Royal Navy all over the world for one day. Food and medicine to keep alive thousands of the very young and the very old. There is also a boatload of women, volunteer nurses. The load is a weighty in every sense.
It is also varied. The merchants, liners, and oilers are Greek, Norwegian, American, Canadian, Dutch, Danish, Polish, and French. Each nationality must put aside its way of doing things and cooperate with the whole, led by a British ship. Accordingly, the signals (by flag and light) are terse and few. No complex manoeuvre or qualified directions can be given to such a polyglot assembly. Keep it simple!
By a quirk of enlistment dates, the senior naval officer is Commander Krause, USN. He has many years of preparation and is well trained and highly motivated, and completely inexperienced in the duty, to the North Atlantic, and with the new ship he is on, and unknown to both his crew and 3000 other men sailing under his command in the whole of the convoy.
His interior monologues in decision-making lay out the tactical and strategic chessboard on which each ship moves. We also learn along the way that Krause, despite his obsessive efforts, has been judged only an average officer and will not be promoted any time soon. He is a ‘C’ student who studies long hours, keeps notes, tries hard, is dedicated, and just scapes by. In war even ‘C’ students must serve.
Keeping the convey’s ships together in the cruel sea is almost impossible but absolutely necessary since stragglers attract U-boats. To herd the ships of the convoy and to protect them from U-boats Krause has two destroyers and two corvettes. His own ship, one of the destroyers, is the reeling USS Keeling, as the crewmen say, while the other destroyer is a battle-scared Polish ship that escaped Danzig. One corvette is British and the other Free French. Four navies working as one with four different sets of protocols, training, equipment, and attitudes. The officers of the four ships have been expected to learn and comply with a 259-page manual of operations for such missions in their spare time. It is, of course, in English and the French and Polish officers have tutors (liaison officers) to help them. The manual is a compromise written by a committee in London, and reads like it. There is no index.
The other three naval captains, his juniors in service, have been at war for more than two years and their crews have suffered casualties and the ships show battle damage. Yet he and the pristine Keeling are in command.
Krause is a serious man who is mindful of his own limitations and has devoured the manual in between sessions of meditation and prayer in the few minutes he has to himself. Those minutes are few. His dedication might compensate for his lack of ability and his lack of experience in these waters and convoy duty, the writer seems to imply.
The decisions, the assessments, the reports, the weather are all endless, relentless, and merciless. On the bridge there is a constant flow of information to which he must react. Radar and sonar are limited in the weather, and so are the six-man lookout watches in rubber suits, roped to their stations, drenched in ice water at every pitch, roll, or yaw. They can see things the radar and the sonar cannot see or may miss with so many other ships nearby, a periscope, a floating mine, an oil slick, a torpedo wake ten-feet below the surface of the boiling sea, a life raft; if they don’t blink; if the salt water does not burn their eyes; if the cold does not freeze over the binocular lenses.
None of this is good. The pressure, the friction, the potential for catastrophe are ever-present. Then it gets worse when the six-week trained sonar operator reports a positive return. Ping! Action is required this instant. Or is it? Sonar operators before the war were trained in twelve-weeks, and passed by scoring 9 out of 10 or better on three tests. In order to get ships crewed, that training had been cut to six weeks, and one test with a passing score of 6 out of 10. The same can be said of most of the rest of the crew from the gunners, to the depth charge mechanics, to the cooks, all of them half-trained and inexperienced in the North Atlantic.
Moreover, as Krause had silently observed since taking command of the Keeling some of them did not want to be there and it showed in posture, by intonation, and with looks. He knew that for all of them to survive, for the ship to complete its mission, everyone of them had to do his assigned duty completely and immediately. He knew that. He was not so sure some of the crewmen knew that. Well, they are going to find out now.
Green water coming!
There follows a long game of hide-and-seek as the Keeling, with Krause’s lack of experience but that thick manual, tracks that sonar ping, which in time by its own manoeuvres proves itself to be a U-boat commanded by an practiced and cunning captain with a disciplined crew. While on the surface the Krause has many advantages, but the U-boat turns some of the strengths into weaknesses with tricks and feints. The Keeling is faster, but with a deke here causes it to overshoot and lose time in U-turning.
In the flow of data that is fed to Krause about the elusive U-boat, the Keeling itself, the other escorting warships, the 37 craft of the convoy, also comes – in writing – a Most Secret Signal from the British Admiralty that the radio operator hands him, because it must not be spoken aloud. A wolf-pack is definitely in the waters ahead. (This intelligence is the fruit of the Bletchley Park boffins and must not be revealed to anyone who does not need to know in anyway. After reading the message Krause orders the operator to destroy it by burning it in a bucket on the bridge.)
The tension of all of these proceedings is marvellous, and not a shot has been fired, nor a definite sighting of the enemy made, but the knowledge that he is there becomes an electric charge in the hull of the ship, everyone feels it. More decisions are required. How long can Krause keep his crew, and the others on the warships, at Battle Stations before they tire, lose concentration, become bored, and if nothing happens then come to be less responsive to that alarm in the future. At the same time the cooks want to know if dinner will be served. The radar officer says one of the screens has to be reset to offer more clarity and that means turning off the radar for two hours to change tubes. To turn it off deprives Krause of one of his advantages. To rely on its erratic dancing blurs that now fade in and out is also risky. The battering of the green water has loosened the forward chains, and they should be fixed, but that would require turning away from the gale-force wind, offering a target. So it goes.
The pressure on the captain will make him a diamond or crush him. That pressure cascades downward as the deck officers realise how high the stakes are and the importance of his own duty by the book. Similarly the bridge crewmen imbibe the gravity of the situation and it radiates from them through the whole ship. The increasing strain is palpable.
The cruel sea.
At every step Krause must be aware that to utter a sharp word or to ask for a repetition might undermine the confidence of a crewman and impair his efficacy next time. Always he must speak in a flat, level voice without emotion, haste, or temper. Always he must speak the approved navy phrases — deck talk — with no embellishments, for these could be misunderstood in this perpetual crisis, always he must speak with a dead calm to promote that same calm in others.
In the two days covered in these page Krause gives more than two hundred orders about navigation alone. Then there are other orders about search patterns, patrol assignments for three other ships in the flotilla, running repairs, meal service, and the like. He also communicates with the cargo fleet in the convoy. Try another metaphor: The stone he is made of is slowing chipped away by these decisions to expose the inner man.
The Kraut, as the crewmen call him, draws strength from his Biblical education with many well chosen homilies that remind him of eternity, that is, the bigger picture. Pondering some of these passages is one of the pleasures of reading this book. Rather than telling others what to do, this Christian tries with every conscious minute to live up to that faith’s highest standards, largely in silence.
C S Forester
Cecil Scott Troughton Forester did not serve in the Royal Navy either in World War II, still less the Napoleonic Wars of his 12-book Hornblower series. While he was born in Cairo, he left Africa at age five and never returned. He did write about thirty (30) other novels, of which this is his last. He also published another fifteen works of popular history.
Loved skimming the condescending comments on Good Reads. Always good to know the trolls are feeding.
