Review: The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Trade paperback, 184 pages
Published 1998 (originally 1984)
Acquired March 2008
Read January 2015

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Were books about unpleasant children doing unpleasant things in vogue in the 1980s? This made me think of Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, and I feel like I've read other similar books. In any case, though the ending revelation went some way to alleviating/explaining some of my quibbles with the book, I overall found this to be a very well written evocation of something I had no desire to read about. So, kudos to Iain Banks I guess, but I won't be rushing to reread or recommend this.

Review: Voices Prophesying War by I. F. Clarke

Hardcover, 268 pages
Published 1992 (first edition: 1966)

Borrowed from the library

Read January 2013

Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763-3749
by I. F. Clarke

Voices Prophesying War is the classic study of future-war fiction. It technically begins in 1763, but I. F. Clarke's study really kicks off with 1871 and The Battle of Dorking, and the book's real focus is the period from 1880 to 1914, where future war fiction was immensely popular. Clarke traces its interaction with science and with politics, and these three chapters are the real heart of the book. Clarke's reading is wide and deep, and if it wasn't for him, I don't think contemporary literary critics would look at this body of work as its own distinctive genre, with its own features and projects. I found the post-Great War sections of the book less interesting, but then I would.

Review: Dubliners by James Joyce

Trade paperback, 317 pages
Published 1993 (originally 1914)
Previously read April 2005
Acquired June 2014
Reread November 2014

Dubliners by James Joyce

At the end of my course on British literature 1890-1950, I polled my students on the best and worst of the readings they had done. I lost those notes, unfortunately, but I did write down one of them for posterity: "Dubliners cut across all the necessary themes literature may demand. It helped me understand life better." She's not wrong.

I first read "The Dead" as a high school senior, and liked it so much that it inspired me to pick up all of Dubliners in college, and of course I had to reread it to teach it. On each iteration, I like it more, and I understand it more. The whole book is excellent, but "The Dead" is a masterpiece, and you could probably argue that Joyce singlehandedly changed the direction of the short story in English. So much that's meaningful comes together in "The Dead": it's all about connection, imagining the other, projecting desire, recognizing the self, and experiencing epiphany. It's sort of uplifting and sad at the same time. Joyce captures humanity as it is in a way few others do. I look forward to reading Dubliners again and again. Hopefully it will allow me too to understand life better.

Review: The Twentieth Century by Albert Robida

Hardcover, 397 pages
Published 2004 (originally 1882)

Borrowed from the library

Read August 2013

The Twentieth Century by Albert Robida

This is one of those futuristic novels that doesn't have a story per se, but is more an exploration/travelogue of a fantastic future. It's a mix of utopianism and satire and deadly warnings-- some things are awesome, other things less so (emancipated women are so un-feminine they even have harsh names!), and other things are just supposed to be funny (the president is an automaton, which I feel like is the nineteenth-century equivalent of Futurama's disembodied heads). There's sky pirates and telephonic courtship and attempts at a fun revolution, but Nihilist bombings destroyed Russia so utterly there's neither Nihilists nor Russians anymore, and Italy has become a theme park for American tourists. There are also air-wars, but they seem more exciting than frightening.

Sometimes long-winded (seriously, very long), but the real highlight is that Robida illustrated it himself, so you get to see his fun futurism brought to life in a lively fashion on page after page. The text translated here is from the first French edition, but editor Arthur B. Evans selected illustrations from every edition in order to get the best set possible. More fun to look at than to read, but then, Robida was more illustrator than novelist.

Review: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

In a story probably as about as different from the below as you could get, here's my review of Jago & Litefoot, Investigators of Infernal Incidents: Series Twelve.

Trade paperback, 216 pages
Published 1994 (originally 1970)
Acquired August 2004
Previously read October 2004
Reread September 2014

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

If you have the kind of facebook friends I have (literature academics), you may remember a few years ago when a bunch of articles trended with titles like "Reading Novels Makes You More Empathetic" and "Reading Novels Makes You a Better Person" and so on. (Here's an example from Scientific American.) This was the scientific study-backed version of something previous posited by the literary critic Elaine Scarry in The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence in 1998, in an essay called "The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons."

Scarry argues that human beings are actually really quite terrible at imagining what it's like to be a different human being, and that this has dangerous, real world consequences: "The human capacity to injure other people has always been much greater than its ability to imagine other people. Or perhaps we should say, the human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our ability to imagine other people is very small. […] But there is a place—namely, the place of great literature—where the ability to imagine others is very strong" (45-6). Literature, she argues is all about imagining oneself as another person: "literature at least holds out to use the constant invitation to read about others, not only other ethnic groups within one’s own country but the great Russian or German or Chinese writings; and universities are, in their departmental organizations, still structured to encourage this cross-country imagining" (47). We might be able to easily think of novels that have created empathy in notable ways, such as how Uncle Tom's Cabin created empathy with the plight of slaves.

But Scarry isn't as optimistic as she might initially seem, because she goes on to argue that

we must recognize severe limits on what the imagination can accomplish. One key limit is the number of characters. […] Presented with the huge number of characters one finds in Dickens or in Tolstoi, one must constantly strain to keep them sorted out; and of course their numbers are tiny when compared with the number of persons to whom we are responsible in political life. […] For this, literature prepares us inadequately, since even secondary characters (let alone second hundredth or second thousandth characters) lack the density of personhood that is attributed to the central character. […] Literature—even when it enlists us into the greatest imaginative acts and the most expansive compassion—always confesses the limits on the imagination by the structural necessity of major and minor persons, center stage and lateral figures. (47)

You might access the plight of the urban poor better if you read Oliver Twist, but though you now better empathize with Oliver himself, you empathize no better with the vast majority of the characters in the novel, some of whom can remain quite one-dimensional.

Therefore, the best literature (according to Scarry) turns this bug into a feature. "Literature […] is most helpful not insofar as it takes away the problem of the Other—for only with greatest rarity can it do this—but when it instead takes as its own subject the problem of Imagining Others. The British novelist Thomas Hardy is a brilliant explicator of this problem. […] Hardy maximizes the imaginary density of a person, then lets us watch the painful subtraction each undergoes as she or he comes to be perceived by others" (48). According to Scarry, we inhabit Tess's world for most of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but then we jump to someone else's perspective and see how they look at Tess so shallowly, missing most of what constitutes her: that is "painful subtraction." Suddenly Tess becomes a secondary character in someone else's story, and we discover how easy it is to not empathize with someone eminently deserving of empathy.

All of this is a long-winded introduction to the fact that I would argue that The Bluest Eye belongs to the same category of novels as Scarry claims for Tess. It is not just designed to make us empathize with other persons, but takes as "its own subject the problem of Imagining Others." The book is all about Pecola Breedlove, but for most of the novel, we never get a scene written from her perspective. All of our empathizing with Pecola must be done without the benefit of interiority. When we finally do go inside Pecola, it's to find out she's fallen apart: there are two Pecolas, and she/they utterly believe they finally have the blue eyes that will make them attractive.

If anything, the structure of The Bluest Eye emphasizes what we might call "painful addition." We switch back and forth between Claudia's narration about her relationship with Pecola Breedlove and flashbacks seemingly told by an omniscient narrator that tell us more about Pecola and her family. Even though Claudia is the best friend Pecola has, each flashback makes it clear that there's so much about Pecola that no one knows, not even her. We learn about how the terrible home life of the Breedloves made Pecola the way she was, then about how Pecola's mother became the way she was, then about how Pecola's father became the way he was. When we finally see the rape of Pecola by her own father, it's from the perspective of her father. We are made to understand why he does what he does. Yet, as the novel makes clear, no one other than the reader (and, to a lesser extent, Claudia) will ever have this level of understanding of these characters. Pecola, as Morrison says in her afterword, is the hole at the center of the novel.

In a sense, we know nothing about Pecola. But in creating painful addition, Morrison makes us see how horrific it is that we know nothing about Pecola.

Review: Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Trade paperback, 482 pages
Published 1989
Acquired June 2006
Previously read July 2007
Reread November 2014

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Is Hyperion a novel? These are the kind of questions I irritated my Modern Novel class with. There are two potential objections you can make, I think. The first is that it's actually a series of short stories. The second is that the story doesn't actually end: Hyperion is really only the first half of a novel that ends in The Fall of Hyperion. (These are, I guess, mutually exclusive objections.)

Yet, I would argue, Hyperion stands on its own. Fall is a vastly different book with a different focus; it picks up what was begun here, but the focus on character and genre that motivates Hyperion is gone. And Hyperion comes to a perfectly satisfying conclusion in its own way. But I'm getting ahead of myself there.

Like so many of the stories I like, Hyperion is a story about stories. Its format is self-consciously literary from the moment someone in the book actually points out that you're reading The Canterbury Tales in space (p. 25). This is brought to the forefront in chapter 3, the Poet's Tale: "Hyperion Cantos." Martin Silenus asks, "Haven’t you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are—at this instant—poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago?" (180-81). I suspect this is an Adam Bede reference; in that novel, the narrator complains that people identify too much with fictional characters: "It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers—more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish [...], than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay." You'll note that for George Eliot, having more sympathy for fictional characters than for real salesmen is a negative, whereas Silenus seems to revel in it. But then, Silenus is an ass.

I doubt he would have been into Hyperion, but I think there's a sense in which Henry James agreed more with Dan Simmons than George Eliot when he wrote "The Art of the Novel." According to James, "It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a 'make believe' [...] shall be in some degree apologetic—shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to compete with life. This, of course, any sensible wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it, disguised in the form of generosity. [...] The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life." Now, Hyperion does make that confession that James says fiction should not, but I think it does so in order to compete with life. James wanted literature to compete with history by pretending to be history: "if it [fiction] will not give itself away, [...] it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian." But for Simmons, literature wins by unabashedly being literature.

This Hyperion does. It has a profound sense of history, yet at the same time, it is conscious of its fiction. Hyperion is okay with competing with reality-- and possibly even beating reality-- because Simmons, like James, knows that we need stories to make sense of the universe: "history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians" (Hyperion 190). Without stories, we won't know we're in a cow, we'll only perceive a dark, digestive mess. But, on the other hand, perhaps the cow is lie, for Silenus says that words "are also pitfalls of deceit and misperception. Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings" (191). This is what's happened to all the characters in Hyperion: they are all locked in the prisons of the stories they have told about themselves.

But that's the reason Hyperion spans seven different genres: because each genre supplies a different truth about the world, building up our composite picture. When the Hyperion pilgrims tell each other their tales, they are set free because they are able to see all the other possible stories. They have gone from having a cow to having seven possible explanations for the dark, digestive mass that is life.

And this is why Hyperion actually is a novel. It may be made up of seven different stories, and it may continue into a second book, but it does have a conclusion and a resolution: having told their own stories, and having heard those of the others, the Hyperion pilgrims achieve a measure of self-acceptance, and walk off into the unknown, singing "We're Off to See the Wizard." Reading it, I got the shivers. A group of broken people has achieved peace at last.

Hyperion lets us step outside of our stories and histories, remove ourselves from our prisons, by showing them to us in a new context: it lets us reevaluate faith by imagining we live in a world where faith can literally be proved, or lets us imagine what it means to be a parent sacrificing a child by imagining a world where God literally contacts someone to get him to do this, or lets us contemplate how we build God by showing us computers literally trying to build God, or lets us explore the relationship between sex and violence by giving us a being that is literally sex and violence.

At the same time, these people hear the disparate stories, and step outside their own prisons. No matter what happens in Fall, they've escaped their prisons and so have we, through the art of the novel.

Review: A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

Trade paperback, 362 pages
Published 1984 (originally 1924)
Acquired June 2014
Read September 2014

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

I had actually never read any E. M. Forster before teaching this novel. There's a lot going on in it: it amazes me to think that anyone could have ever wondered if it was pro-British or pro-Indian, but maybe that's my modern anti-colonialist biases at work. (Though maybe as a feminist, I should believe the accusation.) The crux of the whole book is arguably the incident in the caves, but the alleged sexual assault is just one part of that. There's a weird break in the narration at that moment-- if there is a sexual assault, it occurs between pages, and that feels like a cheat designed to up the ambiguity, given how closely Forster renders point-of-view throughout the rest of the novel.

But is it a cheat? If there was a sexual assault, it's a very modernist move to indicate it through a break in narration: the trauma of the event would render it unthinkable and therefore unnarratable. (It's kind of like, but very different to, how Hardy handles the rape of Tess in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which I taught in the same class.)

However, then the cheat becomes: if there wasn't a sexual assault, why is there a break in the narration? The answer to that, I would argue, lies earlier in the novel, where we are told, "Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence" (146). Like all moments where fiction tells you about what fiction does, you have to read this as indicative of what this work of fiction is or is not doing. According to A Passage to India, there are long passages of time where nothing happens, where the brain is lying if it indicates emotion was actually felt: "a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent" (146). So if nothing happened in the caves, of course there's a break in the narration, because if nothing is happening, the book must be silent since this book is a "perfectly adjusted organism," not an exaggerator like all those earlier works of fiction.

What is easy to overlook if you focus on the sexual assault, I think, is that there's another act of violence in the cave: Mrs. Moore's crisis of faith. Mrs. Moore struggles with what she thought were fundamentals of existence when she finally travels to a place where they are not true. India is older than anything in world (135), upsetting her beliefs in Britain and in Christianity, and the darkness of the cave shows how a whisper can be echoed to seem all-consuming (166). She thinks the cave is evil, but it turns out to just be that the cave amplifies what is brought into it; I never thought I'd make this comparison, but it's basically the cave from The Empire Strikes Back. In the end, she cannot write down what happened (165)-- it really was too traumatic for her. Later we are told that there is no sorrow like Mrs. Moore's sorrow, the experience of an utterly unprofound vision. When East meets West, Mrs. Moore accesses the modern condition and realizes how meaningless life is. Poor woman.

Review: Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century by Ignatius Donnelly

Hardcover, 275 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1890)

Borrowed from the library

Read May 2013

Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century
by Ignatius Donnelly

Nicholas Ruddick's introduction to my Wesleyan edition of Caesar's Column argues for its place in the lineage of science fiction: Donnelly was the first to use Jules Verne's motifs in American literature, and George Griffith borrowed from Caesar's Column when he wrote his own proto-sf. And indeed, there are a lot of things I recognize from later sf: a secret revolutionary Brotherhood, fleets of air-ships, a corrupt world that needs to be obliterated so it can be rebuilt, flagrant racism that is distasteful to the modern reader. Donnelly is a little more sophisticated than Griffith is, I think; his analysis of the fact that public schools made the "trampled" working classes intelligent enough to want to rebel made me think of a similar point H. G. Wells makes about colonialism in The War in the Air.

The end of the novel is more realistic that Griffith's, too, or maybe I just mean it's bleaker. Unlike all those apocalyptic novels where destruction leads to utopia, Donnelly sounds a pessimistic note near the end: "The rude and begrimed insurgents are raised by their terrible purposes to a certain dignity. They are the avengers of time--the God-sent--the righters of the world's wrongs--the punishers of the ineffably wicked. They do not mean to destroy the world; they will reform it--redeem it. They will make it a world where there shall be neither toil nor oppression. But, poor fellows! their arms are more potent for evil than their brains for good. They are omnipotent to destroy; they are powerless to create" (200). But the book is just as condemnatory of those who permitted/caused the conditions that the mob rose up against. The end of the novel is bleak all around.

Review: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Trade paperback, 192 pages
Published 1997 (originally 1985)
Acquired January 2007
Previously read February 2007
Reread September 2014

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Look, why oranges anyway? When one of my students asked that in class, we came up with a tremendous list of resonances and symbolisms that the oranges have in this novel-- the cover of my edition, at least, makes a sort of "forbidden fruit" interpretation obvious. One of the meanings of the oranges comes from fairy tale narratives embedded in the text of the novel, like the tale of Sir Perceval or the tale of Winnet. These are the stories that young Jeanette needed to hear but never did, the kind of stories that could have helped her operate in the world, but she never received; she only had one source of stories, her mother's (often warped) Bible tales. She had a steady diet of oranges, so to speak.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is filled with embedded narratives like the fairy tales. This novel, as Mikhail Bakhtin would say all novels are, is heteroglossic, different-tongued. Bakhtin reminds us that you can't separate the form from the content; the fairy tales aren't a sideshow or a diversion, they're part of the meaning of the text as much as the plot is. Everything in a novel refracts the intentions of the author. So why the fairy tales? We should remember that, as Jeanette/Winterson tells us, stories are "a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained" (93). Every story explains something and fails to explain something else; we all forget the aspects of the past that make us uncomfortable. So what can we do about this? As we're told (95), the world is a sandwich made up of other peoples stories, so you need to add your own mustard! Or, go even further, and make your own sandwiches.

Jeanette's mother never gets it. She only has one story. She reflects near the end of the novel, "After all… oranges are not the only fruit" (172), but this is in the context of her feeding a group of houseguests only pineapple! She's just substituted one universal story for another. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit argues that the world is heteroglossic, that everyone needs a different story, and the worst thing that you can do is fail to recognize that. Jeanette grows up and loses the simplicity of her old world, the one where oranges were the only fruit, but she gains a new world with new stories-- and yet the old stories remain there too. She can go back and see her mother, and Jeanette is different but the same, and her mother is different but the same.

We're always finding new stories and discarding old ones when they don’t work. Jeanette’s mother’s stories work for her, but Jeanette needs a different set of stories, and yet the old stories remain inside her. Our sandwiches need mustard. We need oranges and pineapples and many other fruits. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is filled with different stories because we all need to be filled with different stories if we're going to survive.

Review: Red Planets edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville

Hardcover, 293 pages
Published 2009

Borrowed from the library

Read May 2013

Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction
edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville

This is one of those books that's not as good as the title makes you think it will be. I guess I wanted more Marxism? I feel like the book was more a discussion of class and utopia in science fiction, without the Marxist lens being as prominent as the (delightful) title implies. I also wanted more on revolution. Like any critical anthology, it's a bit of a mixture, and every now and again a little nugget would shine through, like Carl Freedman's observation in "Marxism, Cinema and Some Dialectics of SF & Film Noir" that some sf is deflationary (life is not what you expected) and some is inflationary (it's more than expected), but Marxism is both, in that it destroys illusions but also promises a better humankind. I feel like there's a better book on this topic to be written-- the futurist orientations of Marxism and science fiction seem similar-- but I know I'm not familiar enough with Marx to be the one to write it. Though maybe if I was, I'd've gotten more out of this book as it was written.

Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Trade paperback, 428 pages
Published 2007
Acquired July 2014
Read October 2014

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

since his death my Granddad had become more a collection of scenes than a real man to me. (79)

When I was assigned to teach The Modern Novel, I wanted to teach a novel about being a book-- in the physical sense. Novels are often books, of course, but in this electronic age they don't have to be. My students were pretty split on the far-out ideas Hall advances in The Raw Shark Texts-- some thought the book was baffling in the extreme, others thought it was the coolest thing they'd ever read. I'm okay with such a contradiction.

We read the book in the context of what N. Katherine Hayles in Writing Machines calls the "technotext": "When a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it." (An "inscription technology" is a device that initiates material changes that can be read as marks, e.g., print books, computers, telegraphy, video and film, basically any technology that produces interpretable, linguistic information.) When a print book calls attention to the fact that it is a print book, it is a technotext, and Hayles argues that you should look at technotexts not just to see what the text "means," but how that meaning interacts with the material form of the text. (Hayles has actually written about The Raw Shark Texts herself, but ended up going in a different direction than what I'm going to do with her ideas here.)

The Raw Shark Texts is preoccupied with inscription technologies and how we're remediated through them: there's the quotation I opened this review with, but also: the idea that when a person dies, they leave an afterimage in the machinery they set up to run their life, which slowly runs down and dies itself (101); "I think we’re going to wear away from the world, just like the writing wears off old gravestones in the aisles of churches" (229); the narrator, Eric, reading the guidebook of Clio, a woman he supposedly had a relationship with but doesn't remember (266); Eric's admission that the journal we're reading is incomplete: they were never that witty or cool, Clio wasn’t always sexy, and all he has now is stories: "well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles," as the characters in the journal aren’t the two of them but actors regurgitating Hollywood clichés (412-13). And of course The Raw Shark Texts itself is a life remediated through an inscription technology: we only know what happened to Eric Sanderson because we have this book to tell us.

The book ends ambiguously. Did Eric die? Was anything Eric experienced even real? My students wanted to say "no" to the latter question, that he was hallucinating to cope with grief, but I reject that interpretation on the grounds of it not being very interesting. As for the first question, I think it depends on what you mean by "die." As the book emphasizes over and over again, we are the marks we make on the world. We are the scrapbooks, the gravestone inscriptions, the journals, the stories we wrote down about ourselves. Eric Sanderson didn't die fighting the conceptual shark, and we know this because we're holding Eric Sanderson in our hands. The Raw Shark Texts records his very existence. He is the sum of the inscription technologies used to mark his place in the world, much as we all are. The postcard at the end of the book-- another inscription technology-- shows that he continues to exist, that he hasn't worn away from the world yet.

Review: Dreamworld and Catastrophe by Susan Buck-Morss

A few recent audio drama reviews at Unreality SF: the Doctor and Benny try to save Christmas in "The Hesitation Deviation"; the Doctor submits funding applications (not as good as it sounds) in Vampire of the Mind; and two Masters meet in, well, The Two Masters.

Hardcover, 368 pages
Published 2000

Borrowed from the library

Read September 2013

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West

by Susan Buck-Morss

I liked the first chapter of this book a lot. It sets up a lot of interesting ideas: that there is an intimate connection between the state and violence (1) (shades of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State), that state violence against noncitizens is more acceptable than that within the civil state (8, 16), that revolutions are simply wars fought in civil society for the control of time rather than space, i.e., the future rather than territory (22, 29), and that revolutions sacrifice the present to bring about a better future (29). Once Buck-Morss set up these basic principles, however, I found the rest of the book much less compelling; it was one of those critical books where I just kept flipping pages, hoping to find something insightful, but to very little avail. As always, this doesn't necessarily mean it was bad, but it certainly wasn't the book I was looking for.

Review: Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, Annie Di Donna, et al.

Comic trade paperback, 347 pages
Published 2009 (originally 2008)
Borrowed from a friend
Read February 2015

Logicomix

Concept & Story: Apostolos Doxiadis & Christos H. Papadimitriou
Script: Apostolos Doxiadis

Character Design & Drawings: Alecos Papadatos
Color: Annie Di Donna
Inking: Dimitris Karatzaferis & Thodoris Paraskevas
Visual Research & Lettering: Anne Bardy

This book was okay. It's a comic that straddles historical fiction and biography, providing the life story of Bertrand Russell as well as some background in developments of logic in the early twentieth century. It's occasionally interrupted by pages where the creators of the comic discuss creating the comic. These moments I found twee and not very insightful. The main story is fine, though not very deep, and I was irritated at the number of things the creators outright made up yet still ascribe character significance to-- the whole book is driven by a dichotomy between madness and logic in Russell's life that has no basis in reality.

Review: Imperial Eyes by Mary Louise Pratt

Trade paperback, 276 pages
Published 2008 (originally 1992)

Borrowed from the library

Read January 2013

Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
by Mary Louise Pratt

Like many good critical books I read during the final flurry of my Ph.D. exams, I kind of forgot about this one until I went back over my notes to write this review-- a mere four years since I read the book. Pratt has some good insights into the imperialist/scientific/capitalist discourse of the nineteenth century, showing how scientific ways of seeing and imperial ones are entangled, how the Europeans culturally constructed their colonial authority, how "a woman [...] is not to see but to be seen, or at least she is not be seen seeing" (102), and how supposedly colonial metaphors of understanding were really ones of control (if you paint a landscape, you're actually making yourself the producer, for example). I wasn't as interested in imperialism and power then as I am now; I should go back over it and see what new insights I can glean.

Review: The Riddle of the Sands by Erkine Childers

Trade paperback, 301 pages
Published 2011 (originally 1903)

Acquired September 2013

Read January 2015

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service
by Erskine Childers

I read this book while travelling to the Eaton Collection to read science fiction from 1890-1910 during with future war/revolution. This turned out to be something of a coincidence, as The Riddle of the Sands is pretty much a member of the same genre-- except that it's not science fiction. It's about a planned German invasion of Britain, but the invasion is thwarted during the trial stages, meaning there's no counterfactual or future history proposed. Yet the book is clearly responding to the same concerns that drive contemporary science fiction novels like The Three Days' Terror and The Stolen Submarine: Britain's supremacy is under threat, but Your Humble Author knows how to rectify that, both in reality (some policy changes) and in fiction (plucky amateurism, which is the supreme skill of the fin-de-siècle Englishman).

If ever you wanted to know how difficult yachting in sandy waters was, this is the book for you. I mean that both facetiously and seriously: I never even thought about it before, but Childers really makes you the reader feel as though you're lost in an unnavigable fog. Hard going sometimes, but fun, and worth it. (The film adaptation is decent, too, though I think my wife mostly liked it for Michael York in tight trousers.)

Review: His Wisdom the Defender by Simon Newcomb

Hardcover, 329 pages
Published 1975 (originally 1900)

Borrowed from the library

Read October 2013

His Wisdom the Defender by Simon Newcomb

Simon Newcomb was a Canadian-born U.S. astronomer; H. G. Wells actually references him in The Time Machine to justify that book's depiction of time as another dimension. His Wisdom the Defender, Newcomb's own stab into scientific fiction, is much more typical of fin-de-siècle attempts at the genre than Wells's exemplary work. Basically, in the 1940s, a Harvard physics professor named Archibald Campbell invents the air-ship and decides to use it to impose his law on the world: that there should be no more war. It's a sort of typical position of the era, peace through brute force. Newcomb engages with some of the philosophical ramifications of this ("He who would wield the power of a god must bear the responsibility of a god"), but most of the book is pretty plodding, to be honest. When he's finally forced to use his air-ships ("motes") in combat, Campbell knows that what he is doing is intellectually sound, but can't shake the feeling that it's just murder-- so he's got more of a conscience than any George Griffith protagonist at least. (This is damning with faint praise.)

Thankfully and somewhat improbably, the problem of one man imposing his will on the world through overwhelming destructive force does not backfire, because Campbell is such a swell guy he eventually becomes known as "His Wisdom." Everyone comes to like Campbell's rule and there are no problems of any sort in international relations ever again, thanks to Campbell's arbitration. Who knew a physics professor would have it in him? This is the sort of novel that Wells would skewer in The War in the Air, and rightfully so.

Review: The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson

Trade paperback, 188 pages
Published 2010 (originally 1931)
Acquired March 2010
Previously read May 2010
Reread October 2014

The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson

What I can never get my editors to realise is that every soul who is alive is ‘modern,’ and that when they use the word they privily mean depraved or racketty. (12)

When I was assigned to teach The Modern Novel, I absolutely knew I wanted to teach this book, even though it's not exactly canonical, as I would argue that it takes the narrative techniques of modernism-- stream of consciousness, fragmentation, and so on-- but deploys them to make jokes. Jesse Matz, in his book The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction, argues that "whereas writers of the past might have thought they could take a certain 'reality' for granted and get right to the work of writing, modern writers had to pause at the outset and self-consciously ask: what is 'reality,' exactly – and how do we know it?" (32). This is exactly what's going on in The Brontës Went to Woolworths, except it's got jokes in it. (There aren't a lot of jokes in Mrs. Dalloway as I recall.) The whole book is about the complications that ensue for three sisters and their mother who have a menagerie of imaginary friends, but Ferguson deliberately writes it so that it's difficult for the reader to tell who's real and who's not.

Matz argues that after the advent of modernism, "Reality now becomes not a thing, but a process. It is not something out there, for sure, that the novelist must describe. It is a process of engagement, a set of subjective acts, a psychological performance, something always ongoing" (36). But unlike in other modernist texts I've read, this book's attitude seems to be that the breakdown of our conventional ways of knowing the world creates the possibility of fun. Matz says, "Questioning reality transformed realism in the modern novel, producing a new realism based strangely on doubts about reality itself" (33), but I can't recall any other modernist text where the doubts about reality were used as an excuse for game-playing. Or perhaps not an excuse-- maybe the only choice in the face of the collapse of epistemology is to play games. Except you can't acknowledge they're games; you have to commit to them as being part of reality because you no longer have yardstick for distinguishing objective and subjective realities from one another.

Anyway, like with a lot of my more esoteric teaching choices, some of my students had trouble with it, and we spent one whole 50-minute class session just working out what had happened and what hadn't. But for me as a teacher, that's a feature not a bug.

Review: Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe by Pamela Gossin

New Year, New Who: I'm back to reviewing Doctor Who audio dramas, starting off with Philip Hinchcliffe Presents: The Genesis Chamber.

Hardcover, 300 pages
Published 2007

Borrowed from the library

Read February 2013

Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World
by Pamela Gossin

It's a book about astronomy, but you still gotta get Darwin in the subtitle. Academics love their Darwin. Anyway, this is a good example of a type of book that doesn't interest me a whole lot, if that makes sense. I find discipline-focused literature and science books to just not be my bag, as I'm more interested in broader issues of what it means to do science than I am more focused issues of what it means to do astronomy. This especially comes down when Gossin gets a little too bogged down in the actual astronomy, which as much as I like Herschel, I don't really find very interesting. Still, this is by no means a bad book, and Hardy's frequent use of astronomical imagery and metaphors means that Gossin delivers some good insights into texts like A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, and especially Two on a Tower (that's the one that's about an astronomer, after all), though I don't always agree with her readings. I should come back to it sometime.

Review: The Third Man by Graham Greene

Trade paperback, 157 pages
Published 1999 (originally 1950)
Acquired and previously read January 2007
Reread September 2014

The Third Man by Graham Greene

"What about views on the American novel?"
     "I don't read them," Martins said. (17-8)

Even though this is probably a novella, I knew I wanted to teach it in my class on The Modern Novel. Like many novels I am obsessed with, it is itself about novels: the protagonist is Rollo Martins, a writer of paperback westerns who discovers that actual conflicts between good and evil are not so much like the ones he writes about every day. As a result, there's a lot of meditation here on knowledge: how do we know things and where does our knowledge come from? I see a lot of resonance between The Third Man and the later Justine; I guess it's no coincidence I read them in the same course as an undergraduate, or I taught them together myself.

Martins's emotional knowledge conflicts with the well-researched factual knowledge of Cab Calloway. Martins says, "I don't suppose anyone knows Harry [Lime] the way I do," causing Calloway to meditate, "I thought of the thick file of agents' reports in my office, each claiming the same thing" (27). Martins means 'as well as I do,' but there's a second sense you could take it in: that Martins's way of knowing Lime is distinct from all other ways of knowing Lime, and two pages later, Calloway thinks, "It was odd how like the Lime he knew was to the Lime I knew: it was only that he looked at Lime's image from a different angle or in a different light" (29). Martins is always meeting people whose views of Lime conflict with his, and he doesn't know how to deal with this. Lime's girlfriend Anna suggests to Martins, "There are always so many things one doesn’t know about a person, even a person one loves—good things, bad things. We have to leave plenty of room for them.… [S]top making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn’t just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.… [A] man doesn’t alter because you find out more about him. He’s still the same man" (114-15).

Some would say that the detective story—especially in its quintessential, Sherlock Holmes style—suggests that truth is a findable, achievable, objective phenomenon, but that’s not what’s up in The Third Man: all truth is mediated, through time, through personality, and we can never have access to the whole thing. Anna argues this is okay, but Martins seems to believe it’s something to be mourned. And, indeed, Martins doesn't solve his epistemological dilemma by reconciling or even acknowledging his way of knowing was unsophisticated; rather, he kills Lime, allowing him to return to his old paperback-style worldview. Lime threatened it, but Lime has been destroyed.

A subplot concerns Crabbin, a literary snob who accidentally invites Martins (whose pen name is "Buck Dexter") to speak to his literary society instead of the literary novelist he meant to bring (Benjamin Dexter). It's a source of good jokes, but it means more; Calloway closes the novel with a reflection on Crabbin, of all people: "Poor Crabbin. Poor all of us when you come to think of it" (157). No one is ever who you think they are. The story is mediated through Calloway to make sure we get this, to make sure we understand that the world is vastly more complicated than we can ever understand. Most of the characters in The Third Man, like Crabbin and Anna, know that they do not have the world solved, that any way of understanding life is only a fiction-- except for the one who writes fiction.

What a strange world unknown to most of us lies under our feet. (148)

Review: Scientific London by Bernard H. Becker

Hardcover, 340 pages
Published 1968 (originally 1874)

Borrowed from the library

Read December 2012

Scientific London by Bernard H. Becker

Becker says that the purpose of his book is to "describe in a compact form the rise, progress, and present condition of those great Scientific Institutions of which London-- and for that matter England-- is justly proud" (v). To do so he visits the Royal Society, the Royal Institution, the Society of Arts, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Chemical Society, the Department of Science and Art, and so on, talking about the personalities of the places and their members: Royal Society members, for example, are thoughtful, gray-haired, active, hard-working, constantly studying, cheerful, and serious (25), whereas the members of the Institution of Civil Engineers themselves admit that though they have the virtue of patient application, their power over numbers is of "rare [...] utility in the ordinary affairs of life" (123).

Basically, there's a lot of details here that were of little or no interest to me, but everyone now and then, Becker or one of his interviewees communicates a little nugget indicating how science was perceived and understood in the mid-Victorian period: that English engineers reshaped India, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Japan (129); or that Huxley always assumes his students are ignorant and begins from first principles rather than "build an airy and showy superstructure upon a rickety and insecure foundation" (181); or that science started as a torrent, but has subdivided into smaller and smaller streams through specialization, but also been purged of what we now see as unscientific (231-2); or that statistics are saving humanity: "It would [...] be difficult to exaggerate the influence exercised by statistics at the present moment over every department of human thought" (278). Not exactly riveting reading, but Becker provides some insight into a key era in the institutionalization of British science.