Charles Robert ‘Bert’ Kelly (1912–1997) was a farmer from South Australia. A Liberal, he served twenty years in the Commonweatlh Parliament, where he waged an often solitary battle to lower tariffs, which he thought kept Australia poor and some in it rich. A ‘Liberal’ from a farming constituency was a rarity in his day during the agrarian ascendency of the Country Party of Jack McEwan. Kelly did not set out either to be a parliamentarian or to be a Liberal but became both.
He became a parliamentarian this way. In his community he kept going to meetings and making ever modest suggestions, until others suggested he chair the meetings, perhaps as a way to shut him up. After making so many modest suggestions he could hardly refuse, so he did. Because he liked people and he liked agreement, he found the basis of agreement and that him popular in a modest sort of way.
All modesty aside, his father was very well connected and some of father’s friends saw the potential in young Kelly. In time these elders as well as his peers thought he was the man to nominate as the Liberal Country League candidate for the Commonwealth parliament. That is what the party in South Australia was called at the time, ‘Liberal Country League.’ He won as was predicted. In 1959 the Australian Labor Party had no chance in any rural constituency. Off he want to distant and foreign Canberra.
There he found the Liberal Pary and the Country Party were distinct entities, each having its own caucus, \ meeting room, and pecking order. Which was he, Liberal or Country? To McEwan any rustic came to Canberra to be his pawn and nothing more, so the Country Party sat back and awaited Kelly’s obeisance. Liberals in contrast were nice to him, helped him find his way in the labyrinth of (Old) Parliament House and more. There is no sense that this hospitality was a scheme, it just happened that a couple of avuncular Liberals befriended this young fellow wondering about Parliament House looking lost. What is implied is that the iron fist of McEwan, a man who had dominated Prime Ministers three, alienated Kelly from the zero hour. True or not, it is charming story that makes a point in a modest way.
For much of his subsequent career Kelly was the only Liberal of and from the bush. In time that gave him both an authority and an advantage. The authority was that he became the Liberal Party’s expert on agriculture. The advantage was that he represented Liberal wedge in the bush, one that some Liberals wanted to increase so holding on to him was an asset for them. Modest though Kelly was, he played both cards astutely over two decades. Yes other Liberals represented rural areas, but most of them were Bourke Street farmers, who visited the constituency a couple of times a year. Not so Kelly who continued to live on and work the family farm. Accordingly, he had an interest and a knowledge of agriculture few Liberals could match.
He went at being a parliamentarian the same way he went at farming, from an hour before dawn to an hour after dark. He was always a reader, and he found much to read in the parliamentary papers and so he read it. In time he became a self-taught economist specialising on one theme, tariffs and protection. The Great Tariff Wall of Australia did not make sense to him. While he was no advocate of free trade he did question the blanket and often secretive approach to tariffs. Though the words are not used in these pages, it seems he also supposed that the constant lobbying for tariff protection led to graft and corruption both among politicians and administrators.
And who was the dark Master of the Tariff in Liberal hegemony? Black Jack McEwan, that’s who! I was told once that the sobriquet ‘Black’ referred to his temper not his appearance.
From the first weeks when Kelly began to ask about tariffs, McEwan marked his card. Then came the Yellow Card in the form a visit from the then Deputy Leader of the Country Party and a McEwan acolyte. The message was ‘Shut up.’ Still Kelly kept reading, annotating, and asking. The details were so complex in time he changed his focus to the indirect questions of procedure. How were the levels set and for what reasons and then how were they implemented?
In retrospect the secretiveness of this process is surprising. Special Advisory committees with no tenure and no professional support from economists were created and then set the levels without either publication or justification. Again it is not said, but the inference obvious is that these committees promulgated the levels the minister who appointed them wanted set. That minister, Class, was….? Yes, Black Jack.
Any committtee member who resisted was thanked for service and dismissed. This exercise had flourished from 1949 and McEwan, while he did not invent it, brought to perfection. Then in 1961 the Liberal Country Party coalition won re-election by a single seat where a few hundred votes did make a difference, and Jim Killian made a subsequent career out of winning that seat.
Here is a paradox. That result made the support of the Country Party essential, and McEwan ratcheted up the pace of his demands on Prime Minister Robert Menzies, but it also made the voice and vote of the solidarity Liberal from the bush crucial in parliament and conspicuous in the media.
Comes the hour, comes the man. Kelly discovered his true métier. He had long written for agricultural newspapers and magazines, often about technical matters of crops and machinery. And sometimes when writing about new technology he had run up against the prohibitive cost of importing special machinery thanks to that Tariff Wall. He took to the typewriter with renewed vigour and much more detailed information and and won a national audience. He became a columnist not to be confused with the verboten C word of the era. His columns went under a few titles over the decades but ‘The Modest Member’ was the most enduring. Hence the title of the book and my several uses of the word ‘modest’ above.
When John Gorton had his brief moment as Prime Minister he put Kelly in the ministry in large part to silence him on tariffs under the rules of cabinet solidarity. Only that desire for silence could explain why this man from the interior of South Australia became Minister for the Navy. There must be a witty image here of him reversing Odysseus and carrying the anchor to the sea but I cannot grasp it.
In those days when the Royal Australian Navy wanted a new Minister a crash occurred. One night Kelly was woken by a phone call telling him the HMAS Melbourne had done it again and within a few days he got another late night telephone call to tell he was dismissed for letting that destroyer run into the ill-fated HMAS Melbourne. Back to the typewriter he went!
Kelly was an engaging figure, a writer with a perfect pitch for the general reader, a polemicist who argued from first principles when that was appropriate and from down to earth examples when that was the best place to start. He was no ideologue but rather he thought high, secret, and blanket tariffs held back Australia. The high, blanket, and secret tariffs were paid for by the consumer at the start, including farmers, and by would-be exporters, like farmers, in the end. Moreover, the high and ever higher tariffs encouraged sloth in both management and labour practices, affirming the historic compromise between Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes a century ago. Kelly thought tariffs to shelter embryonic industries that otherwise would not be viable and which were vital made sense, but not five car manufacturers in a market smaller than some European cities! Such tariffs ought to be publicly justified and rationally explained, and not the product of lobbying by gift-giving agents.
Irony of ironies when the Whitlam Labor government cut tariffs by 25% one of the few voices raised in support of this revolution was the Liberal Kelly. Though many supported the move, few were brave enough to say so publicly. None of the thirty members of Whitlam’s cabinet uttered one word of support for this initiative. Kelly was one of the first of the few. One of the speeches excerpted in this book is an address he was invited to deliver to a convention of Labor economists. A generation later when the Hawke Labor government floated the Strine dollar, again he applauded. Again many Liberals agreed but kept silent. Again Labor cabinet ministers, apart from the Treasurer, kept silent.
Kelly at work.
Despite the title, this book is not a biography, more is the pity, but rather a string of excerpts from Kelly’s many publications with comments and transitions. There are asides about his early life but nothing chronological that shows the man emerging from the boy. Moreover, it jumps around in his career. We see glimpses of the man as rustic, parliamentarian, farmer, Minister, advocate but never the man whole at any stage. It is easy to read but in this respect disappointing. Tant pis.
The short Wikipedia entry on Kelly styles him a passionate free trader, something he spent years denying. in addition that entry mistakes effect for cause in saying he was ousted from the Gorton Ministry because of his opposition to tariffs. On the contrary he was put in the ministry because of disagreement on tariffs to silence him on that subject. Once sacked he was free to say his piece and he did.
He saw freer trade to be a means to cheaper consumer goods like cars, refrigerators, and footwear and the easier export of wheat and beef. Freer trade was a means to an end and not an end in itself as it is for ideologues.
Behind the Great Tariff Wall of Australia the automobiles were expensive and poor quality but many workers were employed in making them. Because of their cost and poor quality there was no export market. The same applied to refrigerators, fans, and every other manufactured product. Moreover, the Australian dollar was vastly overvalued at $US 1.47 in 1974, making agricltural exports too expensive for anyone to buy. A farmer paid high prices for tractors and could not sell any surplus overseas to earn the money to import new agricultural equipment which was over priced by the addition of the tariff. For a time the Commonwealth Government bought agricultural surpluses and distributed it as foreign aid, sometimes to places that did not need or want it, but all of this was a house of cards. Though it goes unmentioned in these pages the Oil Shock of 1973 finally blew this structure down once and for all.
Modest Kelly was but also at times mercilous. Consider Kelly’s comment on Andrew Peacock. He ‘has all the attributes I envy most: grace, charm, intelligence, and eloquence. But he gives the impression that he is waiting to be called to be Prime Minister’ and in the meanwhile he would rather not get involved in anything. Indeed.
There is in this book no account of the war years (1939-1945) except to say agriculture was an exempt occupation and Kelly stayed on the farm. But did he want to join the army at 28 and only reluctantly stay? Many men that age and older joined the army. Did he contrive to stay home? If so, how did he live that down? Later going to Canberra presented no problem to the farm. This defining hour for his generation of Australians is passed over. Gorton was a year older but served, and bore the scars thereafter.
Though later it is said a knee had been injured in youthful sports, there is nothing about that. Yet sports would have been a major social outlet for him.
And what about Lorna? She is often mentioned but we learn next to nothing about her or any children.
Colebatch is a widely published poet.
The book is a guide to some of the high points of his life but not a biography. To make a geologic comparison, it describes the sites but does not explain the geological forces that shaped them.
I was inspired to read this title at last (for a biography of Bert had long been on the assigned reading list) by the Australian Democracy Museum in Canberra, one of the failings of which was to give no recognition to the role and work of parliamentary backbenchers, the focus being almost entirely on prime ministers as though they governed alone. This the only ostensible biography I found.
‘The Perón Novel’ (1998) by Tomás Elroy Martinez
A novel of some 400 plus pages set at the time of Juan Perón’s return from exile in 1973. Half of the story is in Madrid as The General and his entourage slowly prepare for the return to Buenos Aires. As the day of departure draws nigh Perón and his secretary Lopez go over the latest version of his memoirs. Lopez is frustrated by the many inconsistencies in Perón’s litany of contradictory and fictional autobiographical statements but the General has no interest in such matters as facts.
Meanwhile at the airport, Ezeiza, in Argentina a throng gathers, leading the pack are journalists, including our author, who had earlier interviewed Perón in Madrid. Distant relatives of the General have been bussed in by another journalist, who has interviewed them looking for a new angle, and finding none. Others there include the Montoneros and their rivals, all armed. There are also Perónist unions and anti-Perónists, too. There are also urban beggars and impoverished campesinos come from afar for a blessing from the bearer of Evita’s fire.
Finally there is the army that in desperation arranged for the return only now to find the situation out of control. The factions in the army blame each other but none takes action, each checkmated by another.
The clock ticks and the forces gather while Perón’s muses on the past, the present, and the future. Perón’s confidence is diamond hard. He will put things to right. The entourage flutters around him reading auguries in his choice of shoes. But those forces gathering at the airport are, as the reader sees, comets following their own trajectories, bouncing off each other. There were about two million people in, at, and around the airport where he was scheduled to land. When the shooting started, as was inevitable, the plane diverted.
Having read a lengthy biography of Perón a few weeks ago, I could navigate many of the names of the actors in the drama. Without that a reader would be lost, as was I the first time I tried to read this novel a decade ago.
Perón always kept dogs and could be seen walking them in Madrid.
What’s to like? The portrayal of many of the supporting players is good, e.g., the relatives, the buzzing journalists, and some of the entourage. But others are cardboard like President Camorra and Lopez is an invisible man. He is there but has no substance, yet some say he manipulated everything and this is given credence in the pages here when he lip syncs a Perón speech.
I also liked the author as as journalist in his own story, which is done lightly and without making the author-journalist the centre of attention, as too many journalist-authors do.
More importantly, it seems Perón was a post-Modernist avant le mot in his refusal to privilege fact or truth. His easy dismissal of Lopez’s worries about consistency or authenticity are well handled. Perón’s explanation derived from Alfred von Schlieffen (page 210) made me stop and think. Von Schlieffen was the architect of the eponymous plan of attack on France in World War I. He was never wedded to the plans he made, but generated one after another. No sooner did he perfect one plan than he superseded it with another, because… a better plan is possible, if I thought of it so have my enemies and I have to stay ahead of them, circumstances change and plans change with them. The stereotyped rigidity of the Prussian Army did not apply to him, but then neither did it apply to the Kaiser’s army in World War I where junior line officers and sergeants had much more freedom of action than in the British army where blind discipline was enforced by firing squads.
Perón’s recollections of Eva ring true. His faults are many but he was devoted to her and she even more to him, and that is given full measure here. No cheap shots, no smart-ass remarks of the Bill Bryson kind. No easy hindsight of an ABC journalist.
Interesting also to see that Perón said that the example of Salvador Allende in Chile meant he had to go slowly. The threat of another coup, the threat even of a civil war is always there.
What is not here is the change in Perón from a man with a mission to the desire to rule period. Goal displacement occurred but there is no sign of it here. The subject and the treatment will remind read of Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘The Autumn of the Patriarch’ (1975), but this novel is much more accessible than the elliptic and, dare one say it, self-indulgent work of García Márquez.
Eloy Martinez
Eloy Martinez has another novel based on Eva, and that is tempting, but I found this one hard going. Maybe because I was only reading a page or two at a time, but much of the early chapters concerns the gathering kaleidoscope of Argentine society which had no interest for me. The Madrid part was more engaging. Once I started reading whole chapters at a time, I connected with it. I read while we tourists toured the goldfields of central Victoria.
The role of the army in Argentina has many dimensions, but one key one is this. In the United States, the Continental Army that defeated the British in the American Revolutionary War disbanded within days of the surrender at Yorktown. In Argentina the revolutionary army that drove the Spanish out remained under arms for forty years in continuing and continuous conflicts with the Portuguese, resurgent Spanish loyalist, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, French adventurers, the native indians, and so on and on. For two generations it was the only Argentine institution. However much it later debased itself, it was in this way the nation itself.
‘The Creation of the Humanoids’ (1962) at 1hr 15 min
This film rates a miserable and miserly 5.9 from 660 votes on the IMDB. That puts in the company of some Roger Corman’s creations. Democracy, so overrated, as Plato said.
This is a thoughtful science fiction film about racism and bigotry in a post-apocalyptic world. It starts with 92% mortality in a nuclear war, the origin of which is unknown, after which the survivors have created ever more elaborate and human-like robots. The robots are programmed to serve the best interest of humanity! Always tricky that, just ask anyone in politics. (Only journalists know all the answers.)
A lobby poster
The robots are necessary but they have to stay in their place! Evidently some Republicans survived — no holocaust is ever perfect — and those who most want to restrict the robots are members of the Order of Flesh and Blood, i.e., code for the GOP. Indeedy. These Luddites accept the work the robots do so long as they look and act like mechanical contrivances and stay in their distant and inferior place. Jack Haley as the Tin Man in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is their idea of a good robot.
However, the robots themselves realise that such Tin Men are inefficient. They are technically inefficient, clumsy of movement, slow afoot, so they improve themselves with each new iteration. (The make-up is good on this.) The more important way in which they are inefficient is that there are social and psychological barriers between them and human co-workers. Some humans refuse to work with these talking machines.
The robots face the facts: the long term effects of the massive radiation unleashed in the forty minute war has doomed the capacity for human reproduction. The birth rate is falling at an increasing rate.
The robots confer on their Key Performance Indicators.
For the Flesh and Blooders the answer is simple, ahem, as always, to get rid of those damn robots. Period. Their service makes us soft! Rid of them, humanity would fend for itself and grow stronger again, scientific evidence be damned! Ayn Rand should get credit for this part of the script. In her world the will power of rugged individuals could triumph over any old facts.
The Flesh and Blooders wear party hats and harass those who support and use robots. (On the hats, read below.) They skulk around robot recharging stations. Among themselves, the robots call the charging stations temples and refer to the master computer with admirable and anticipatory political correctness as the Mother/Father or Father/Mother. As it turns out, there is a point to this mumbo-jumbo.
Humanity is dying out and the robots will have to put a stop to it. And they do!
The drama is played out with two principle characters (Don Megowan and Erica Elliott). The irony is that the Luddite leader, vociferous and violent, is himself an undercover humanoid! But wait there’s more. His squeeze is also one of THEM! The explanation of all of that is ingenious and thought-provoking.
It is all talk and no action against cardboard sets spray painted in primary colours. It seemed more like a play than a movie, but the talk is interesting and I paid attention. A rarity that. That there is no action, that the women are fully clothed, and that it is complicated talk must together explain the democratic rating. The Maestro of ‘Dark Corners of this Sick World’ Robin Bales, no democrat he, also shreds it for the inertia and the inconsistencies in the story, while admitting that it is full of ideas. The alleged inconsistency is that it starts out about the downtrodden robots and then shifts to the future of humanity. Get with it Robin! It is a segue. Stories develop.
By the way, he, too. suspected theatrical origins but evidently found no confirmation, an inference since he left the point hanging. Just the sort of omission he derides in the films he reviews with his razor tongue.
Don Megowan, large of size, chiselled of chin, deep of voice, dark of hair, was a stalwart in television westerns for years, while Erica Elliot quit with this role, she also started with it, as did the director Don Doolittle whose coda was a nice touch.
Dr Doolittle, who talked to the vacuum tubes.
The opening credits say ‘Introducing Don Doolittle’ and the Internet Movie Data Base indicates this introduction was also his finale.
The hats the Flesh and Blooders wear are ersatz Confederate forage hats. They were sold as novelties at the centenary of the Civil War. Yes, I had one.
Big Don is the big one.
Did they purloin those hats from the dustbins after a revival of ‘Gone with the Wind?’ Who knows. It is all of a piece with the hundred dollar budget for the film.
I came across it on You Tube when trawling for 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s science fiction.
It has whet my appetite for ‘Real Humans’ (2012), a Swedish series aired here, which for reasons lost to time, we did not watch.
Jaded cinephiles will think of Isaac Asimov’e ‘I, Robot’ and ‘Blade Runner.’ Readers may recall ‘Tin Men’ (1965) by Michael Frayn, which tried awfully hard to be funny.
Future Man versus the Man from Lisbon
Future Man won!
‘The Man from Lisbon’ (1978) by Thomas Gifford was homework for our 2018 Iberian excursion. It chronicles the escapades of Reis who lies his way into an engineering job in Angola in 1915. Africa seemed better than the Western Front. I got it from Audible, about which more below.
From humble origins, his father a mortician, Reis strives to better himself. But to get started he needs an angle in the stultified society of Portugal and this he procures by faking a degree from Qxford University in engineering. There will be few Oxonians in Angola, he reasons, and he will not be challenged. He does have some technical school training in mechanics so off he goes, diploma in hand, with his adoring wife and faithful sidekick in tow for Africa.
His forgery is nothing more elaborate than some expensive paper on which he writes out a diploma for himself. That ought fool ‘em! It does.
The little he knows together with the willingness to do the hard work himself lead to success in Angola. Soon he is doing two full time jobs as director of public works for the colony and director of the Angola railroad company with ease and raking in the escudos. While other engineers think the railway bridges will fail under the weight of the new engines he has imported, Reis is confident they will not. It is a confidence based on nothing. Damn those pesky stress tables! Even the laws of physics yield to his will power! Miraculously they do. It seems those stress tables were fake news avant le mot.
He returns to Lisbon loaded with dosh but blows his fortune on the vanities of automobiles, luxury fittings in his home and office, speculative investments that come to nothing. Getting desperate. he tries yet another bold swindle and this time the stress tables are right and he goes to the slammer in Oporto! I stopped at this point because I did not care about his fate, though I see on Good Reads some were gripped. It runs to be in all more than 21 hours. Agony without ecstasy.
Of passing interest was the account of early twentieth century Angola and its myriad natural riches. The colonials are sun-stunned alcoholics for the most part and the natives all but absent. Reis’s basic knowledge of mechanics sufficed, together with his readiness to get his hands dirty by doing the work himself, for his early successes, and also set him apart socially. The few other engineers in Luanda supervised natives who did the dirty work, but Reis did it himself, and got it done in record time and with good effect. These successes of course angered the others.
The references to World War I ring true because Portugal did join the Allies and suffered for it. But scant are these references. The Portuguese division on the Western Front was obliterated in a single day in an offensive. Its replacements met the same fate later. The survivors brought home Spanish flu.
The prose has many nice images. This Iowan Gifford could write, if only he had something to say.
Thomas Gifford
But my disbelief did not remain suspended. How could that hand written fake Oxford degree in Portuguese fool anyone? Second that will power prevails over stress tables, i.e., the laws of physics. But most of all, there was nothing about Reis of interest, a superficial egoist. So what, a dime a dozen they are.
The narration is by a Portuguese speaker who handles the proper and places nicely while mangling the English. Possessives invariable are said as ‘es’ and extra letters creep in elsewhere, too, e.g., ‘dastardsly’ and more. This became predictable and distracting. Twenty hours of this narration would be enough to put me off going to Lisbon in 2018 and so I took no chances.
However it was the inanity of the narrative that exhausted my good will. Thomas Mann’s ‘Felix Krull’ was the confessions of a confidence man (like Reis) whose career revealed the venal and moral corruption of post World War I Germany, told with wit, insight, grace, and rueful good humour. It dissected events and individuals with a scalpel. Not so here, where soft focus prevails. Me, I kept hoping the jerk, Reis, would get his comeuppance, and the sooner the better. I left him stewing in the Oporto slammer.
In contrast Captain Future together with his Futuremen in ‘Worlds to Come’ by Edmond Hamilton (aka Brett Sterling) from Radio Archives has to save the universe from a shape-shifting critter out of the sixth dimension! That narrative had purpose AND drive! This, too, was from Audible.
Loved the death rays, atom pistols, proton canons, and other NRA boy-toys. Then there is the robot assistant who took itself apart to pass through a small hole in a wall and reassembled himself on the other side. That reminded of something I tried once without success near a girls’ dorm. The deathless brain floating around in a plastic box caused me to re-examine some of the leftovers in the refrigerator Tupperware. Yuk! Is that the fate for professors emeritii, I had to ask?
Of the moon pets the less said, the better. I am not picking up after them! And that is final.
The scientific explanations of the hijinks was pulp fiction which where it all began (1940-1951) and so suitable for a climate change denying anti-vaxxers. While I turned off ‘The Man from Lisbon’ I could not turn off ‘Future Man’ and I will go back for another episode of exploits, there being at least another fifteen! Whopee!
Ed Hamilton
There is a ponderous entry on Wikipedia about ‘Future Man’ that almost destroys the pleasure in it. It has all the appurtenances of Cultural Studies. (I always fear the worst when I hear the phrase ‘Cultural Studies’ and it has never let me down. The worst follows that term as the night, the day. It is an even more reliable indicator of nonsense than ‘Post-Modern(ism.’)
I acquired both books from Audible, whose customer service is superb. I reported a problem in downloading these titles on the web page and got a phone call within the hour walking me through the correction. This was followed by an email setting it out in writing for future reference. Many profuse thanks. Of course, the problem was obvious once I realised it. Doh!
My listening is done on solitary dog walks while Majic sniffs the trees on nights when the diva is rehearsing or performing, or mornings when I am at the gym where I passed a hundred visits on the current annual membership as I have each of the retirement years to date.
The Legacy of the Civil War
The poet Robert Penn Warren wrote ‘The Legacy of the Civil War’ (1961). In it Warren asks readers to imagine General Robert E. Lee shaking hands and congratulating the strutting Southern governors of the 1950s and 1960s barring children from schools, encouraging baying crowds of Bible-grasping gorgons to shout abuse at children, licensing hissing mobs to burn churches, sanctioning lynch parties, raping and pillaging for sport, and praising masked men hiding in the dark. Would Lee approve such deeds done under that flag he served? No, he would regard such acts as the desecrations that they are, and he would have said so.
The old remains new.
A close examination of pictures from the March on Washington in 1963 will show Warren there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial come to give his own thanks. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work, living most of his latter years in New England, no longer welcome in his homeland, and it shows in the poetry.
A callow undergraduate, I heard him recite some of his poems and the memory has since remained bright. There are some short excerpts on You_Tube.
‘Night Train to Lisbon’ (2008) by Paul Mercier
Raimund Gregorius, known as Mundus, teaches dead languages to gymnasium students in contemporary Berne, Switzerland. He eats and drinks dictionaries of ancient Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, barely noticing when his wife leaves him. His only topics of conversation is the ablative case in Latin, declensions in Hebrew, and inflections in demotic Greek. He can bring boredom to any dinner table and so is invited to few, well, none.
Think Immanuel Kant, Mundus is a man of unvarying routine, a routine not interrupted by the aforementioned wife’s departure. Every morning at 8:15 a.m. he walks across a bridge to the school, where students and staff are silently agog at his myopic intensity. This he has been doing for thirty plus years for he is now fifty-seven.
In the rain, with wind inverting his umbrella, he trudges to school with a brief case full of marked essays to return to students whose every error, great and small, has been meticulously annotated, and he has prepared a lecture on the main themes in their work, mostly about their errors, which lecture he calls to mind as he wrestles the umbrella.
Losing the battle with the wind, he sees ahead a woman in a red coat, standing next to the bridge rail in the rain staring at a piece of paper. (Immediately I saw Irene Papas in the rain from ‘Zorba the Greek.’) The rain continues and the paper is sodden. Is she going to jump off the bridge into the gorge? He quickens his step; as he approaches he can see the ink running on the page. He looms up and she is startled out of her reverie and in reaction he drops his brief case spilling out the essays. In the ensuing confusion he takes her to a coffee shop across the bridge to regain composure. Even before getting away from the rain she extracts a piece of paper from him and writes down a telephone number, which in the coffee shop is copied again on a dry piece of paper, while Mundus sweeps the sodden copy along with escaping essays into his brief case. She keeps the telephone number once it has been transcribed.
They speak French and he discovers that she is Portuguese. He takes her along to the school where she can dry out in one of the women’s cloak rooms. He is thus late for his class; moreover the janitor is stunned to see Mundus late AND in the company of this woman, dripping on the just mopped floor. She goes off to dry, and with a word of thanks leaves. Enigmatic.
He goes to the classroom and thinks about what he has just seen, and done. He did not ask her the obvious questions. What were you doing standing there on the bridge. What is so important about that telephone number? Who are you? What is a Portuguese doing in Berne? He has spent his life not taking an interest in others and does not start now. Yet he cannot let it go.
As he hands back the essays, he notices the wet paper with the telephone number on it. (The pedant in me wondered how he could tell it was a telephone number, and not an account number, or social insurance number, a series of soccer scores, or…. ) He stumbles through the morning double class, quite uncharacteristically letting errors go unmentioned, and then goes to lunch. Ah, the life of the scholar.
This man is a loner and seldom mixes with others. On that score he has reverted to routine. He sits in another café letting the food and drink he ordered get cold: Portuguese, a Romance language derived from Latin, but that is all he knows. Instead of eating he goes to a bookstore that specialises in languages and finds Portuguese books. As a scholar he relates to books. He does not look for Fado music, or a Portuguese restaurant, or DVD of Lisbon travelogue. Bored on a rainy day and in awe of Mundus, of whom he knows, the store owner, who just happens to know Portuguese, reads some passages to him from a book of reflections, the substance of which reminded this reader of Michel Montaigne’s musing on life. Mundus likes both the sound of the spoken Portuguese and the musings which owner translates for him. He buys the book, along with a Portuguese dictionary and grammar and goes home, blowing off his afternoon class. This is the first class he has ever missed.
Overnight he begins to learn Portuguese. That may sound impossible but Ekkehard with whom once I shared an office in the Netherlands was a linguist who soaked up a language like a sponge. After a few days in the Netherlands he was speaking Dutch. Mundus finds the train connections to Lisbon by telephone (no internet for him) while dodging inquirers from the school come to look for him at the door and on the telephone, and he sneaks out of his apartment to go to Lisbon! By train. At night.
He has that telephone number. He has that book of musings. But why is he going? He asks himself that very questions more than once. He does hesitate but on he goes.
The local takes him to Geneva, where he changes trains for Paris, where he will change again for Irún in Spain and then on to Lisbon. While he rides he reflects on what he has left behind, a routine set in concrete that contains within its walls more sub-routines, and nothing at all, a series of nested do-loops that lead nowhere.
A European train station at night.
Mundus’s recollections of academic conferences, seemed familiar. All those people trying to prove (to themselves as well as each other) how smart they are. Yes, the one-up-man-ship is eternal, phrased ever so politely and usually by reference to some obscure secondary source from a foreign language. Who needs primary sources, after all. But also all those smart people for whom the subject is simply a commodity, today it is Louis Althusser and tomorrow it will be Michel Foucault, and then Jacques Derrida, with no inner feeling for or commitment to the subject matter, despite the ritualistic mouthing these days about passion. The passion is always about the ego, the self, not the subject. Though such poseurs would be the first to decry universities advertising degrees like products, they themselves approach their subject in the same detached way.
Mundus nails many academic pretensions on show in any seminar or conference.
– the high-flown gibberish that means nothing outside the classroom and very little within it
– French notions introduced as seasoning not substance, and unnecessary at that
– study is not fodder for an academic career, it is life itself with colour and melody to which a reader submits but does not conquer
Amen, Brother Mundus.
In Lisbon he begins to investigate the author, Amadeu de Prado. and pieces together his biography. There is detective work here, and the characterisations of the still-grieving sister thirty years later is a masterpiece as also some of the surviving school friends, especially Maria.
Lisbon
Amadeu is Mundus’s alter ego, yet he, too, was a creature of habit. Amadeu lived through the Salazar years and like all Portuguese still bears the marks of those days, good and bad. This is a new world to Mundus as he interviews family, friends, teachers, and others who knew Amadeu, who died years ago of a brain disease. Amadeu’s life is a microcosm of the life in Novo Stato of Salazar in his latter years with the PIDE, the secret police, had a free hand.
In Lisbon he makes no mention of the mysterious telephone number or the woman in red on the bridge who was the catalyst, but only that it seems. Indeed he stops thinking about her altogether and she does not reappear. If she did, I missed it, as explained below.
The musing is beautifully realised. Particularly striking to this scholar was the exchange of letters with the head of the school he left behind. When I mentioned this novel and this episode in particular to a lunch gathering of jaded scholars, there was a respectful silence, which I took to be each imaging the exhilaration that would follow walking away from a yet another pile to essays to mark, yet another pro forma about key performance indicators, yet another research grant application, yet another decanal briefing.
All that and more is true, but it does seem to go on and on for 4 5 8 pages. Mundus wanders through Lisbon, travels to Coimbra, and Finessterre in Spain, following links in Amadu’s life. Then he goes back and forth to Bern and…..THE END.
Like a bad student, doing a reading assignment badly, I kept watching the percentage tick by on the Kindle, ever so slowly. I kept at it because of the jewel like prose, the insights into friends, filial love, comradeship, chance, and so on, but there is no narrative drive. All trip and no arrival.
Pascal Mercier.
The story is very well measured and the prose is exact, and yet a certain mystery remains. The film derived from the novel passed through the Newtown Dendy a few years ago and I was tempted by the prospect of a European travelogue but put off by the prospect of watching Jeremy Irons for two hours. Seeing him always makes me think, and no doubt this is just me, that he has haemorrhoid pain which he manfully bearing, just short of grimace.
The travelogue reminded me of my travels in those parts. I went to Geneva (from Zurich) by train to burrow into the archives of the League of Nations housed there by the United Nations when I was investigating the International Brigades for ‘Fallen Sparrows’ (1994) and then on by train to Neuchâtel to see some Jean-Jacques Rousseau manuscripts, an article based on this study appeared later. To this nerd boy both were thrills. In Geneva I found a 3” x 5” card file prepared by a Greek diplomat in 1939 of individual Brigadiers walking out of Spain to France: name, nationality, age, gender. Nothing much but authentic to the touch. Each soldier an Odysseus and few with an Ithaca to which to return. In Neufchatel I held in my hands, there being no requirement to wear gloves, pages that Rousseau himself had written. He would go on and on for pages after page of quarto, say thirty of them, and then there would be one cross-out, the prose just flowed from his quill in a steady pulse for twenty or thirty pages before it hit a rock. These are nerd-boy thrills.
Moe recently we took a night train from Amsterdam to Prague and back with DeutscheBahn. We did not do much musing. On boarding there were no directions or staff, but everyone with heavy suitcases, narrow corridors, and tiny compartment numbers elbow high. The compartment was a broom closet and the train was boiling — it must have been sitting in the sun for hours. Food was nearly non-existent. But there was worse. The toilet. [Gasp!]
The Man in Seat 61 recommended this service, and said it stopped four times. Get a new abacus, Mate! It was twelve times, each punctuated by bells, whistle, red flashing lights, and much yelling, no doubt all dictated by safety. We arrived exhausted and swore off such travel.
‘The Late Scholar’ (2013) by Jill Paton Walsh
It had to happen sooner or later. Lord Peter Wimsey has become the Duke of Denver, upon the death of his older brother Gerald. That dukes are higher than lords is news to me.
With the title Duke comes ducal responsibilities, most of which were new to Peter Wimsey. There are vexatious relatives, disputatious tenants, ravenous charities, clogged drains in the strangest places, a crumbling pile that is crumble still, elderly retainers to retain, so that when he is called to Oxford, off he goes! What a relief!
When he was but a lord, to him the relatives were polite, the tenants deferential, the charities distant, the drains unknown, the ancestral pile was for holidays, and the retainers retained. As duke, it all changed.
Called to Oxford? One of the Duke of Denver’s entailments is to be The Visitor to a not very distinguished college at Oxford. While every other Oxford college Visitor is a royal of one magnitude of another, this college has the Duke of Denver. Investigation in the muniments room of the aforementioned crumbling pile reveals that generations ago a Duke of Denver handed over some dosh to replace a roof or two at the college and in return for that largesse the title The Visitor was bestowed upon him for his lifetime, but in a subsequent change of the college constitution the limitations ‘his lifetime’ was omitted, perhaps by error.
Well, no matter, an escape to Oxford is most welcome for the poetry quoting, incunabula collecting, Saxon speaking Wimsey. It is a return to lost youth for this old soldier.
Peter is now married to Harriet (née Vane) and it seems to be after World War II and in the early 1950s. The stately home is crumbling in part because of a fire caused by an errant German bomb and taxation is vexing.
Together they descend on the college to find themselves in the middle of an acrimonious and bitter conflict among the twenty of so fellows of the college over the status of a tenth century book in its library. The conflict is so vitriolic that no one speaks of it! Immediately I found this scenario easy to believe.
These scholars seem to do little else but plot one against another, while seldom is heard a discouraging word from their lips. Backstabbing, undermining, poisonous rumours, slanderous gossip, attribution of venal motives, all communicated by innuendo and sotto voce, these are the weapons of choice. Meanwhile, at high table meals the weather is much discussed. This is brutal realism at its best.
Even the engineers and economists among the brethren have taken sides over this book. On the one hand, the goal is to sell the book to raise money for yet another roof and on the other hand is the over-our-dead-bodies group! Yep, prophecy there.
Each fellow votes in a time honoured, and otherwise incomprehensible, arcane ritual and each poll results in a tie. After three such votes, some of the parties invoke the right to summon The Visitor to adjudicate. Enter the Duke!
While the vote remained tied in those three rounds, the constituency shrank. The senior most fellow, the Warden, went missing and another died falling down stairs. Two others had unlikely accidents, which while damaging, were not fatal, but which precluded participation in the voting ritual. In the best tradition of krimis the ritual does not admit of absentee or proxy voting. Is someone mowing down the voters? Are there two mowers, one on each side of the question, the keepers and the sellers? Are there only two sides to the issue?
Before any Solomonic adjudication can occur there must be sleuthing to find out what is going on.
Harriet takes no convincing to join in, and engages her own distaff Oxford network, and the ever reliable Bunter mines the college servants with his usual dexterity.
Nothing is what it seems to be.
As in C.P. Snow’s Cambridge novels, all of which I have read [Groan!], the scholars do little scholarship but make an enormous fuss over the rituals and prerogatives that fall to them, like passing the port. It is all too credible.
Dorothy Sayers created Wimsey in the 1920s.
While Ian Carmichael brought him to life on the small screen in the 1970s.
Ian Carmichael as Peter Wimsey
Bunter was an older man, and he and Wimsey had been through trench warfare in Flanders together and had survived, thereafter bonded for life, and with a considerable amount of unspoken communication.
Despite the dreadful experience of Flanders, Wimsey (and for that matter, Bunter, too) remains Edwardian in manner and morēs. Wimsey is an enthusiastic and effete dilettante, who quotes obscure poems in dead languages and playwrights unknown all the day long while playing the piano and sporting a monocle. His private collection of incunabula is the envy of museums. His flow of witty banter is without end and without purpose. Noel Coward could not have bettered him as a caricature.
Bunter unfailingly addresses him by his title and always stands in his presence. Always and always. Bunter out butlers even that fellow James Stevens in ‘Remains of the Day’ (1989).
Harriet, mindful of her own modest origins, tries after a fashion to loosen them both up, with little success. Nor does she seem aware of the changing times of the 1950s.
The unalloyed Edwardians Wimsey and Bunter are an odd couple in world of a Labour government and many new social attitudes. Still that is part of the fun.
Like Sherlock Holmes and more recently Hercule Poirot, Wimsey has his re-animators. This is the fourth title by Paton and I have liked it enough to read another. Though I did find it wordy, but Peter is like that. There is much talk, often about nothing much, and too little detection. It must be struggle to be arch and witty when talking about staircases and fence posts, but Wimsey is made to do it. Poor fellow.
Jill Paton Walsh
He even indulges in the future subjunctive interrogative at times, such is his mastery of all things Fowler. (Mortimer, skip it. It would take too long to explain.)
Even in the sleepy village I know well, the absence of the senior scholar for three months would be noticed and some effort made to figure how what happened to the missing savant lest the key performance indicators be spoiled.
‘The Treasure of Saint Lazare’ (2014) by John Pearce
Our hero, Eddie Grant, he of the chiseled jaw, martial arts belts, multi-lingual talents, and accomplished lady killer …. [Is there nothing beyond him?]
The set up is this. Ed (I refuse to call a grown man with such a cv as above Eddie) is the son of World War II veteran whose assignment in 1944-1946 was tracking down art looted by Nazis. His father died earlier, in suspicious circumstances that Ed mentions but apparently was not motivated to do anything about at the time. Then the father’s assistant from the wartime assignment dies, again in suspicious circumstances. This assistant left a letter to Ed’s father, not knowing he had predeceased him, and asked that his executor deliver it by hand.
Since the dad is dead the messenger, a daughter, delivers it to Ed. She is of course a beautiful woman who falls under Ed’s spell, taking her place in the queue.
It just so happens that Ed has many contacts in the worlds of policing and art, and these he now mobilises. Why he did not mobilise them when his father died is unknown. Even more mysterious is why he did not mobilise them when his wife and child were murdered after his father’s mysterious death. All of this death is supposed to awaken sympathy I suppose but it just makes Ed seem a jinx and jerk. Four dead before he goes into action.
Then the big black Mercedes limousine appears bearing — as it must — Germans.
So much for subtlety. The plot is by the numbers and the characterisation are connect the dots.
I quit at about 25% on the Kindle. I was reading topic sentences only and flipping on; it was time to move on.
At the start there is much too much backstory forced into the opening pages so that we may appreciate Ed, followed later by extensive and pointless descriptions of hairstyles. clothing, drinks, furnishings, cars, and so on and on. This later I guess is the Paris part. If this superfluous detail were cut to the standard say of Georges Simenon the text would reduce by more than two-thirds. Good grief. Amid all the bland descriptions there is very little story. With John Stuart Mill, I suppose that we know a person by deeds not by the recitation of a backstory. What do I care about the backstory until there is a front story?
Nor is it possible to warm to Ed for whom everything seems to come easily though he moans and groans about it.
This is described as ‘a novel of Paris’ and I wanted to test that proposition. There is much Paris in the early going and I consulted by Michelin map, but then we head off to Orlando in Florida and…. I supposed it gets back to Paris but without me. The Florida trip seems mostly to be an occasion for more pointless description.
After re-reading all of Iain Pears krimis with Jonathan Argyll and Flavia di Stefano chasing lost paintings the reference to a lost Raphael was intriguing, but this treatment is not arresting for this reader.
I had a look at the comments on Good Reads to see what I was missing. I looked at the effusive ones, further confirmation that this source is not credible.
John Pearce
Speaking of sources without credibility, one of the local rags has a weekend feature called something like ‘Books that made me’ in which minor celebrities, well I guess they are but they are unknown to me, list and comment, briefly, on five books that had a formative impact of their being. Nice idea, but the execution is kindergarten.
These celebrities seem not to do much reading and certainly not of, say, a novel of consequence or a historical study of insight. Instead we have excited drivel over self-help manuals, diet plans, children’s books – see I said kindergarten – and Mills and Boon stories, Alice’s adventures. In some cases it is pretty clear it was a stretch for the subject to think of five books. When one of these pieces refers to ‘Death in Venice,’ ‘Swann’s Way,’ ‘Absalom, Absalom,’ ‘The Iliad,’ ‘Crime and Punishment,’ ‘Hotel Baltimore’ and their kind, let me know.
‘Mega-Headaches’ by Bent Flyvbjerg
‘Australian Financial Review’ of 28 July 2017.
Why is it that large projects continue to be undertaken and to repeat the same mistakes of all those which went before them, that is the question? Flyvbjerg explains the recurrent attraction of mega-projects along four intersecting and interacting vectors: they are technological challenges, they are politically attractive, they create a constituency of profiteers, and they are aesthetic.
Mega-projects by definition have not been done before and so engineers, designers, builders, technologists, find them stimulating, ready and willing to give it a try. Look at the sails of the Sydney Opera House, and remember they were made and fitted by hand, long before lasers.
The political attraction is in the grand project that will define an administration, or even an era. Think of the those pyramids in Ghiza.
The profiteers are the facilitators, the bankers, consultants, fixers, the lobbyists, financiers, and all those others in the middle, who do not build anything but without whom nothing can be built. Then there are the builders themselves, the construction firms and their employees, and their insurers and suppliers. ‘Profiteers’ is my word, not his.
Finally, there is the aesthetic dimensions anticipated in the completed project by designers, artists, and users.
Despite all of this impetus many, many mega-project go awry. Before getting to that, a few definitions. A mega-project is big, over a one billion USA dollars. For examples, in addition to those passed by above, consider the Canadian Firearms Registry, the Big Dig in Boston, Channel Tunnel, Viaduc de Millau, Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, North Sea Protection Works in the Netherlands, and that black airport in Montreal, Mirabel.
The most common failure of such projects is cost overruns, some of which are truly astonishing, like the Sydney Opera House that came in — sit down, Mortimer— 1,400% over budget in real terms.
The second most common failure is missing the target completion deadline and running on and on, and here I think of another example close to home, though it may not have hit the billion dollar price tag, the OPAL public transport card system, a three-year project that took fifteen years before the first tap. (OPAL users will get it.)
The third most common failure is to return the benefits asserted for the project. Investors lose a lot of other people’s money in mega-projects, even in the private sector, e.g., the Chunnel. Every rider on EuroStar is still being subsided by the financiers who invested the pension funds they manage into that hole under the water while paying each other six-figure bonuses for their wit.
With these failures, other matters recede, but there are also failures regarding the environmental impact of mega-projects. Is it any wonder that the public is cynical about the projections and promises made?
The failures are so numerous and catastrophic that one wonders why we keep doing it. It certainly undermines confidence in the financial projections, the pace of construction, that management of labour, the environmental impact assessments, projected use and earnings, the alleged rate of return on investment, not solving the problem the project was supposed to solve, and more. The litany of such failures makes fascinating, if morbid reading.
Yet this reader wondered if that was the whole story. Impressive though the data in Flyvbjerg’s study is, much has been omitted. For a start the study concerns only failures, and not successes, and there is a long list of mega-projects on Wikipedia that seem to be successes, again including some close to home like the desalination plants in New South Wales and Victoria which proceeded so smoothly no journalist could make up a story about either of them. The unerring eye of hindsight on display in this account is like Barbara Tuchman’s successful but superficial ‘The March of Folly’ (1984).
What foresight distinguishes successful mega-projects from unsuccessful ones? No enlightenment comes from this account.
Flyvbjerg also omits one crucial constituency in his rather jaded four part explanation: The public. When commenting on the political attraction of mega-projects and the interest of the profiteers, Flyvbjerg’s explanation is cynical self-interest. That is why I used the work ‘profiteers.’ Hmm. Doubtless a factor, but generative or decisive?
What is the political benefit from the colossal failure? If failure is so likely, why take the risk? Maybe that caution explains the long delays with the Opal Card.
Those who stand to profit may also have more complex motivations about the challenges and competitive opportunities. Ready as I am to disparage others, preferably those about whom I know nothing, I reserve judgement on this.
There is a missing player in the epic of mega-projects and that is the general public. The mega-project can create, stimulate, and capture the public imagination which the media then reflects and amplifies. It would be a brave political leader, pension fund manager, or designer, to reject the public pressure that can be conjured for such projects. Another local example was the millennial Orange Grove project in Sydney that had a considerable popular following. A state government minister who rejected that development because of skepticism about the projections would have be crucified by the same journalists who lit the fires when the project fell.
The public is missing in another respect, as an opponent of some mega-projects. Surely one reason for the costs of the Big Dig in Boston was sustained and calculated strategic and tactical opposition of several publics. The bill for the litigation must have been enormous. Indeed public opposition has stymied many mega-projects, e.g., a third Sydney airport.
Bridge-building Italian style.
In this short newspaper reprint Flyvbjerg omits that recurrent five-ring circus of the Olympics which illustrate the popularity of mega-projects regardless of the cost over-runs. Olympic bids are wildly popular and hosting the Olympics is even more popular to all, but the die-hard spoilsports like me. One of the masterminds of the Sydney Olympics once privately said it was worth the money for the lift it gave to public awareness and pride.
Nor does this analysis include defence projects or military planning where there are many failures to be sure, but there have also been some spectacular success in projects the complexity of which dwarf even the largest mega-projects. Note that NASA did put astronauts on the moon and bring them back. These examples suggests plans and forecasts can work. Why sometimes and not others?
Defence projects are legendary for cost over-runs and that is as true in Australia as anywhere else. Those Collins Class submarines are an object lesson, and I hope PhD students are examining the details. In order to mobilise the public support to spend money on competitive submarines, the government had to insure that the boats were built in Australia and that the work was spread around the country, so that there was an informal coalition of parliamentarians and community groups who supported the project because of the money to be spent in their electorates. None of that is cost efficient in the short term, and probably not in the longer term. But it is political necessity. Ditto the financing has to be distributed to create support.
A Collins class submarine in Sydney Harbour
At a formal dinner once I sat next to a Royal Australian Navy officer who was in submarines, and inevitably I asked him about the Collins submarines. He had a lot to say about how excellent they were, but when I asked him about the cost over-runs and missed completion dates, he said that it always happens. [Pause.]
If so, then why were not such costs and delays built into the original planning, just as the builder who did our kitchen had an allowance for extras in money and time to cover the unforeseen? If foreseen, then why not integrate an allowance for the unexpected into the process? That was my question. His line by the way was the official navy line at the time as subsequent research showed. ‘No big deal, it always happens.’ If so….!
Much of the four sublimes, as Flyvbjerg calls them, are generated, empowered, and enabled by the public appetite for such projects, and according to the fount, Wikipedia, many are in fact successful. That term ‘sublimes’ grates on this reader. It seems forced and uninformative.
No doubt in the full text of the studies Flyvbjerg has done of the massive data set he has complied with care and wit such niggles are resolved.
Bent Flyvbjerg
While this article was in a newspaper this week, I read virtually the same text in 2014. Slow news takes on a new meaning.
For years Bent Flyvbjerg’s book ‘Rationality and Power‘ (1999) held pride of place on the syllabus. The abstract title came down the the ground with a thump in the study of the building of a bus terminal in Aalburg, Denmark.* What a story! What a story-teller! Altogether it was what social science should be but seldom is, wise, contextualized, plain spoken, dispassionate, located within major intellectual currents, and modest. This study also shows the public enthusiasm for such projects and the distortion of the original project necessary to achieve a coalition to realise it. By the time all of the interests which wanted a piece of the project got it, it was distorted beyond recognition.
That was democracy at work, not dastardly financiers, unscrupulous politicians, air headed aesthetes, or pastry faced tech heads.
*Many travelling students sent me pictures of the bus terminal at the heart of this study, for which much thanks.
Arnaldur Indridason, ‘The Shadow District’ (2017)
A krimi set in wartime Reykjavik Iceland in 1944. The island is awash with soldiers and sailors of the Allied forces: Brits, Canadians, French, and mostly Americans. Harbours are dredged, piers built, fuel tanks dug into hillsides, pipelines laid, barracks built everywhere, landing fields levelled, hangers erected, roads paved, concrete bunkers made, ammunition dumps created, and on and on, from 1940. There has been more money spent on the island in those five years than in the previous five hundred years.
With so much money comes loose morals, it would seem, despite the language barriers. While Icelandic men are not off at the war, they are off on construction jobs all over the island, leaving wives, sisters, cousins, and daughters to their own (de)vices.
The setting and the set-up are good. On the plus side is some detail about the impact of this intrusion on Iceland, and not just the sex, but also on nationalism, though that is merely mentioned and not in any way developed. The weather is there, too, but it does not figure in the story, as it did in ‘Trapped.’ There is also a little more about Iceland legends, the hidden people, but again it is a sidebar that is not cemented into the plot.
The execution is not equal to the set-up. First, the story is split between then in 1944 and now in 2000, say. This is a technique I cannot abide because it makes the reader responsible for integration. Second much of both stories, the then and the now, is padding, e.g,
‘I walked up the the three plank steps to the door. I took off my left glove and knocked on the door, and waited, while I put the glove back on. I heard faint sounds insider but the door did not open.
I took my glove off again and knocked on the door again. I put the glove on and waited. And waited.
The door opened. I introduced myself and asked to come in for a word. She said, no. I asked gain very politely. she said no and turned away. I asked once more for a word inside. She said alright.’
Snappy, uh? He then asks her what she saw. She says she saw nothing. He asks her three times and three times she says she saw nothing. Bold, he asks a fourth time, again no result. He leaves, descending the plank steps.
That took about five pages for nothing. He then repeats most of this verbatim to his partner over the next two pages.
While this book is slow, it is not detailed, but rather superficial. Two examples suffice. (1) The Icelandic nationalism is mentioned more than once but never articulated. (2) While there are many soldiers around there is never anything about their role in the war effort or how Icelanders feel about being occupied. Is this war their war? They are, after all, eddas or not, Danes by blood and the German heel is on Denmark, yet that is never even referred to as an issue in the story.
The text, perhaps thanks to the translator, is replete with banalities. If there was a clichéd way to say something, that was the way it was said.
Arnaldur Indridason
This is one industrious writer who has three series, the one that includes this title is Reykjavik during World War II, including ‘Silence of the Grave’ (2007), which was adequate, and another series that follows the investigators of Inspector Erlendur, e.g., ‘Jar City’ (2007) which I liked a lot for its meticulous attention to detail, especially in thinking things through. Erlendur as I recall does a lot of thinking. In contrast is the author’s third series ‘Reykjavik Thrillers.’ On the strength of Erlendur I read his ‘Operation Napoleon’ (2012) and regretted it and did not bother to finish it. The list of his titles on Amazon translated into English is long,
While my recollection of Erlendur is strong enough for me to try another, from now on I will pass on the other two serieses.