The Lone Caner

“Call me Ishmael.” It may be the most widely known and evocative opening in fiction ever written.

Herman Melville’s daunting, massive, intimidating magnum opus “Moby Dick” has a perhaps undeserved reputation of being hard to read and harder to get through (unlike Dumas’s unabridged “Three Musketeers” where the opposite is true). Like many other “great” novels, it is perhaps more scary in abstract than in reality, because, re-reading it for the first time in thirty years, I was struck by how (relatively) short it actually is. And like many other books I’ve appreciated over the years, it succeeds in marrying perceptive character studies with not only a fully realized, practically foreign world, but solid philosophical underpinnings just tailor made for meandering conversations.

“Moby Dick” is so well known, and so well established in the field of letters, that it seems almost superfluous to assess the plot, which can be summed up by simply noting it’s the whaling voyage of the Pequod, which, under its obsessed, part-mad Captain Ahab, seeks to find and destroy the white whale. But within that simple narrative structure coil greater questions about the nature of good and evil, free will and choice, man’s relationship with God, madness, obsession, racism, defiance, friendship, duty, death, and even ruminations about the meaning of life itself. It channels the Bible and Shakespeare (notably Macbeth and Lear). If one can embrace the rather heavy handed Victorian prose – I highly recommend that a reader take time with this novel and not speed read through it – it will fuel more conversations than half the rums in my collection. I won’t go in depth about the plot, except to note that after many foreshadowings, speeches and events, it all climaxes in a thrilling three day chase, where, at end, all perish but Ishmael, who survives in…a coffin.

Like many books ostensibly speaking to and about a larger than life character, Melville chose to write from the perspective of an observer – Ishmael. Ishmael is an archetypical innocent abroad, and we learn about the business of whaling, and the other people aboard (for this is a “lifeboat” or “ark” story too) through him. His voyage of discovery is ours, right from the point where he naively castigates the innkeeper of the Spouter Inn regarding Queequeg’s selling a shrunken head. Ishmael gradually takes from many different points of view in an effort to form his own opinions, as we must ourselves in our journeys through life. A notable example of his growth is his friendship with Queequeg, a man of a different colour, culture and faith, with whom he finds a common human experience underneath all the differences that supposedly would set them apart – all the more amazing since even handed treatment of an interracial, intercultural (and implicitly homosexual) relationship was written in the pre-Civil War years.

A key point of the novel is whether the whale is consciously evil or not, from which flow other questions like whether his attacks are random and defensive or deliberate and offensive, which in turn allows us to consider the relationship of a civilized, self-aware human being with the more elemental forces of nature (or even the stupidity of hunting an animal that doesn’t have a notion of revenge). My own take has always been (like Starbuck) that the whale doesn’t have any particular beef with Ahab, but isn’t about to get harpooned just for fun either, and will mess up anyone who tries…quite successfully. And I suspect Melville shared this view: observe Ishmael’s perusal of the painting at the inn, where he notes that the whale is “exasperated”. Blinded by his own madness, willing to risk everything (including ship and crew) to kill the whale which so badly damaged him, Ahab imputes motive and villainy to the animal, perhaps projecting his own fierce character onto the whale in a vain effort to suggest that there was meaning to his loss, a greater design of the universe…and that his tragedy was not his own fault. But consider also that a natural creature without morality that fights or defends itself from instinct, also has no mercy, which brings to mind the films “Jaws” or “Alien,” both of which featured impartially hostile forces (and in the latter, a single survivor in a lifeboat).

All this said, Moby Dick has its issues for the modern reader. The chapter on Cetology has probably repelled more students (or put them to sleep) than any exam on obscure points of Shakespeare ever set. The alternating monologues, reflections and lowbrow interludes skewer a narrative which we want to be more smoothly running…it’s like a sputtering engine on a cold day, turning over but not quite catching. At the end we are left with a novel that is a mirror of its own chapters regarding the different parts of the whale (“The more I consider this mighty tail, the more I deplore my ability to express it”) – we see the pieces without every quite coming to grips with the whole. In this lies both its difficulty to the modern reader, and its power. Because when you get down to it, Moby Dick can be approached in many different ways and from several perspectives. And it’s instructive to note that Melville cleverly did not state his own predilections in black and white: he expressed (so far as I could see) no opinions as to which side was “right”. Instead he put all the events and speeches and actions out there, leaving the reader to make up his own mind.

Herman Melville was an American author whose first three novels gained much success in the 1840s before he sank into relative obscurity – though he continued to publish less successful works for many years afterwards – from which he was only rescued in the 1920s by various academics who reviewed his life and works and linked him to the emerging Modernist ethos. Moby-Dick was published in 1851 and was not immediately seen for the classic it now is (probably an inspiration for every unsuccessful novelist seeking to pen the next Great American novel). In point of fact, it received scathing reviews, especially in England where it was first published, mostly by influential critics who were confused by the lack of an epilogue (where Ishmael survives) and did not appreciate the writing style. And in America, reviewers took their cue from there. It did not help that by the time the book came out, the whaling industry was in decline and maritime adventures no longer a focal point of literary curiosity…the west was. It took decades for the novel to receive a fairer hearing.

After all this time, Moby-Dick remains one of those seminal books which had an influence over many generations, and in many fields. In its pages we can see Lovecraft and Stephen King’s themes of monstrosity hidden beneath a banal façade; it supplies a subterranean metaphor for the fight against overwhelming, faceless odds, for American dreams of exceptionalism, the monomania of political and financial overlords who care little for the lives they impact; Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella did paintings referencing the novel; and there are tons of movies that take the unstoppable leviathan as their motif (like the Terminator). And of course, how could I not comment on “Star Trek II” with a deliciously over the top Ricardo Montalban quoting Ahab at every turn (as did Sheldon in “The Big Bang Theory” when he quoted the quote, so to speak).

In fine, Moby Dick is rightfully regarded as a classic, and will remain there for as long as people puzzle over the meaning of life. The novel is an ocean of metaphor and allusion from which we can take any perspective we wish, interpret it how we feel, and still not come up with a definitive answer to anything. A tough read it may be, and a coherent narrative it is not. But for those who take the time to pass through its pages, it can be a literary treasure that rewards the effort taken to complete.

Ray Bradbury is a twisted Isaac Asimov, a literary Dali who painted with his words, a Stephen King before Stephen King was there. If King is the master of the occult, of horror, and of long novels and deep characterizations playing “what if?” with the universe, then one of the wellsprings of his imagination was surely the taut, tightly wound dystopian short stories penned by his prolific predecessor. And indeed, how much of our subterranean mental landscape has been formed by this one man, a contemporary of the early 20th century dime novels and pulp fictions with which I am so in love? In Bradbury we see a Golden Age of horror fiction even before it became respectable, a right turn from the prevailing “hard” sci-fi of the day — and yet, even to use such terms shortens and simplifies an enormous body of work encompassing sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mythology, psychology and fictional futurism. Categorizing the man and his output is like trying to nail down Asimov, or King – it’s too much to encompass into a single sentence. To the extent that there is s cultural mythology of the twentieth century, a sort of inner world of our imaginations, surely Bradbury is one of its creators.

Bradbury – and if any of us do not know his name by now we cannot call ourselves book lovers – is one of the masters of the short form. Few of his short stories exceed fifteen pages in length, and are as tightly wound, as clear of expression and as dense in imagery as anything penned by King in his beginnings, by Asimov, Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett or any of the myriad others who dabbled in the field (even Bradbury’s novels – The Martian Chronicles, or Dandelion Wine, for example – are short story collections in disguise, and Fahrenheit 451 began as The Fireman, a short story). And yet, unlike these straightforward writers who are mostly plot – and I don’t mean this in a bad way – there is always something off-kilter and distorted moving beneath Bradbury’s work…something badly reflected, like a mirror with a flaw one can sense but not always see.

While I have read most of his collected works over the years, long and not-so-long, the ones to which I keep returning in order to sip at the well of his genius, are always the short stories of The Illustrated Man, “100 Celebrated Tales” and The Martian Chronicles. In the best of these, there is always a haunting sense of time and place…of America gone sour, perhaps, or of strange places in our memories, or even places that never were. And that feeling of almost – but not quite – recognition, like acquaintances long-forgotten who we feel we’ve met somewhere before.

Consider “A Sound of Thunder” – it combines time travel, a hunting safari, politics and chaos theory….how stepping on a butterfly irrevocably changes the course of history. Or “I Sing the Body Electric” which is only nominally about how a man brings a robot granny into the house to comfort his grieving children after the death of his wife. Or the creeping sense of horror about “The Playground” (which could have been written by King), where a man who changes places with his son to spare the child the cruelties of childhood, only realizes at the close how cruel childhood really is. There is the depth of psychological suspense in “The Veldt” where kids plot to murder their indifferent parents in a Star-Trek-type holodeck meant as a play area; and one of the most clearly realized, utterly atmospheric alien-worlds stories ever written, “The Long Rain”.

Bradbury’s work in sci-fi seems occasionally dated, but he himself argues that he doesn’t really write science fiction (at least not in the engineering style of “Red Mars”), but fantasy, because his worlds cannot exist, unlike those of the realists like Asimov and Heinlein. The reason his work still resonates, even after more than half a century is less because he wrote about futuristic rockets, robots or machines, than because he described people we can recognize – and how the development of the soul-annhilating techno-society he so clearly foresaw alters the way we think, the way we interact…who we are. He is a mordant ethicist who argues for humanity while pointing out how much more human our creations can become…and how little can be left in us if we are not careful.

Think of how “The Murderer” so acurately predicted our mad “always-connected” culture with his brilliant paragraph: Three phones rang. A duplicate wrist radio in his desk drawer buzzed like a wounded grasshopper. The intercom flashed a pink light and click-clicked. Three phones rang. The drawer buzzed. … The psychiatrist, humming quietly, fitted the new wrist radio to his wrist, flipped the intercom, talked a moment, picked up one telephone, talked, picked up another telephone, talked, picked up the third telephone, talked, touched the wrist-radio button, talked calmly and quietly, his face cool and serene, in the middle of the music and the lights flashing, the phones ringing again … Substitute an i-phone, laptop and TV and you’d have a picture of how my daughter spends time in her room.

And always, coiling underneath the spare plotline, is the dark side of Americana, in stories like the one where a child wishes for everyone in the world to disappear…and they do; of machines that stand around telling stories of the men who made them, now long extinct; of a man hurtling in space to his death, wondering what he can do “to make up for a terrible and empty life” before dying; how the Rocket Man wanted to be with his family when in space, and in space when with his family.

Bradbury is neither a Luddite nor a pessimist. Nor for that matter is he an optimist. He simply invites us to be alert to the consequences of our actions. He is realistic enough to know technology is not the answer simply because it can clean your house and create a robot replacement for you; just twisted enough to see the hope of machines wanting to act like humans will be overhsadowed by humans behaving like machines; and cynical enough to understand – and make us shudder at – the irony of youthful innocence reposing in adults while children are the amoral, devious homicidical crazies we ourselves allowed to be, and which we should fear. In the richness of his storytelling we see all the possible reflections of ourselves, all the permutations and possibilities of our society: we read his terse and evocative prose with appreciation and amazmenet and wonder…his stories take up residence in our minds. We know them, we love them, we dread them.

“There would be no King without Bradbury”, Stephen King once remarked. Maybe so, although he admits elsewhere to being as influenced by Lovecraft and Wheatley and pulp as by that old master. Be that as it may, it is thanks to Bradbury that we have an enriched body of often unappreciated, undeservedly low-rent work without pretensions of grandeur, that will stand the test of time — and which has become, somehow, part of the iconic literature of our age. If I were to think of which short stories out there I’ll be reading in the twilight of my life, when hope, realism and cynicism have taken equal residence in my heart, then I’ll pick Asimov, King, Heinlein, Naipaul, Lahiri, perhaps half a dozen others…and Bradbury for sure.

Dick Francis became a more known quantity in American letters in the last decade or so – one saw his newest offerings on store shelves presented front and center quite often, and they became plumper over the years – but for my money, I’ve always admired and loved his earlier, shorter and tighter works, and have, over the last twenty years or so, picked up most of them. This is in spite of the fact that his name still raises an interrogative eyebrow in most cases when I bring it up: Dick who?

Francis is perhaps better known in Britain than here, and more among older folks than today’s ADD younger crowd. A former jockey – he went professional in 1948 and retired in 1957 – he won his share of races (350 of them), rode for the Queen Mother, and in the 1953/1954 season was Champion Jockey. He began writing immediately after his retirement, a non-fiction book called “The Sport of Queens” which led to him being given a post as a racing correspondent in the Sunday Express newspaper; his first thriller in a long line came in 1962, and he never stopped until his death in 2010 at the ripe old age of 90.

Unlike many prolific authors who try to vary their output, characters, and settings, in Francis’s work there is an aura of similarity about all his protagonists and their milieu, no matter where the stories are placed or what the crime is (for he is above all, a crime writer). Consider: his characters are almost always involved, peripherally or otherwise, with horses, and usually in racing. Just about every story I’ve read is written in the first person, by a nondescript, in-control individual who may or may not be an ex-jockey, is emotionally repressed but has a rich interior life and dreams, and who is brought out of his shell by a crime, a friend, or a woman as a romantic interest (or all of them). They are all brave, unassuming, sensible and above all, competent. If they were fatter, one might be forgiven for thinking that his heroes are modern-day hobbits.

If this sounds boring and “same” – come on, you might be saying, how often can anyone write about the ponies without getting lazy or repetitive? — well, you really need to go through a few of his books, because after a bit they kind of grow on you, like familiar vintages from different years, or new expressions of much-loved whiskies where just enough is tweaked to make it a whole new experience. Throughout the novels you get a sense of a genuine love for and knowledge about, horses. It’s more felt around the corners than seen head on, something sensed and perhaps smelled but never precisely articulated. It’s in small asides, like how horses are cared for, how punters behave, what bookmakers do, how owners and jockeys and Stewards interact. It’s a window into a different kind of profession entirely, as seen from the inside. The beauty about his early novels is how well they present this — not written by someone who has done his research, but by someone who has actually been in the business of equines. And look at how short and taut they are (much like a jockey, really): “Knock Down” (1974) is a concise 188 pages and so is “Smokescreen”, written three years earlier (neither of these is on my list of four to discuss, but I had them in front of me so it saved me getting up to check the others).

Of all these early novels, four stand out as my favourites: “Odds Against” (1965), “Flying Finish” (1966), “Blood Sport” (1967) and “Rat Race” (1970). Yes there are others – certainly there are others – but these are the ones I’ve picked. These are the ones I reread.

“Odds Against” introduced the ex-jockey turned private dick Sid Halley, who was to star in three subsequent novels. Possessing a crippled arm, a dead horse-racing career and no particular desire to do anything or get closer to anyone, Halley takes on a case in quintessential noir-fashion (Phillip Marlowe comes to mind, but not Sam Spade); and in the people he meets during his investigation, he learns to pick up the pieces of a broken life. While solving the case. (Of course he solves the case, come on).

I really loved “Flying Finish” (1966), which is about a poor nobleman appropriately named Henry Grey, who works in a transportation agency that ships horses around Europe. As the plot thickens and people disappear, Grey begins to understand that more is being shipped besides bloodstock. Also memorable for two top-notch villains, the low-key and capable mastermind, and a pitch-perfect homicidal assassin named Billy. And I can’t leave out the romantic interest, an Italian stewardess who smuggles contraceptive pills on the sly (don’t ask).

“Blood Sport” (1967) took the genre in a different direction by presenting us with suicidal spy-catcher Gene Hawkins (he sleeps with a Luger under his pillow), who is recruited by his boss to go find a missing racehorse in America. It starts out hardboiled but doesn’t stay that way, and while I liked the story, I was particularly moved by the brief and almost tender description of how Gene (in that quietly undemonstrative fashion so characteristic of Francis’s work) knows he loves his boss’s daughter, but also knows he is wrong for her and tries to gently push her away.

And I took great pleasure in the disgraced, divorced ex-airline pilot now flying small charter planes from horse-racing meet to horse-racing meet in “Rat Race” (1970). In spite of himself, Matt Shore makes friends with a champion jockey, gets involved with his sister and stumbles across a nefarious insurance scheme which nearly kills her and later, him. Like Halley, Matt learns to live again through opening up to others, which makes the quiet moments he has with Julian’s sister simple, unassuming and a pleasure to read.

That’s a quality I really like in the Dick Francis novels: that deadpan, clipped conversational style that teeters on the edge of, but never quite falls into, the rhythms of pulp fiction. It’s concise, it’s clear, and there’s no waste anywhere. Even the dialogue is like that:

“You’re bastard,” she said.

“Mmm.”

See what I mean? When a writer uses the bare minimum of words necessary to carry the plot and sort out the dialogue, you find yourself paying rather more attention than, say, to whole paragraphs of a Stephen King tome. Some may decry this terse, almost unemotional style and sigh about its similarity from one book to another – for me, however, it works. Oh admittedly, characterization is not always the best – the tough but damaged heroes and their dry mannerisms and taciturn speech have a way of wearing out their welcome after a while – and in a couple hundred pages you won’t get War & Peace, for sure.

You just have to think of these earlier, crisper novels as train fodder…something nourishing and gripping to read on a short train journey. Small, bite-sized horse McNuggets about mostly small, bite-sized men who get involved in criminal matters, are battered and thrown about a whole lot, but always manage to get back up and gamely battle on. There may not be a life lesson in that, but there’s sure a lot of fun.

Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003, was the last of the old land explorers, whose likes included Burton, Speke, Younghusband, Lawrence, Connolly, Hedin, Amundsen, and stretched as far back as Marco Polo. Fluent in Arabic and French Thesiger was the first European to cross and extensively map the dreaded Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, and wrote acclaimed travelogues of now-vanished times in the middle east, and the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. An unashamed Arabist, he loved the great empty silences of the desert, and the nomadic culture of the Bedu; he much preferred to travel and live the way they did, and he despised the modern era of travel where all hardship was erased, and man could not longer test himself against the land he sought to describe and explain.

“Arabian Sands” which Thesiger published in 1959, is one of the great works of travel literature. It stands alongside “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” and the works of Sir Richard Burton (not the actor), Marco Polo or Ibn Battuttah, and the old victorian travellers of their day who shared the characteristic of describing not only the journey, but everything they saw on and experienced on it: peoples, customs, flora and fauna, geographical details…a sort of holistic experience that today is rarely found outside of fictional accounts (though I should single out Colin Thurbon’s work, or that of Thor Heyerdahl, and those others who go into the the Third World to attempt to achieve something singular and individual). If I were to name a modern equivalent – which has both greater and lesser value – it would be the Lonely Planet series, though this is not strictly comparable since these travelogues serve a different purpose.

“Arabian Sands” is, like “Seven Pillars”, part autobiography, part travelogue, part adventure story and part an account of various explorations Thesiger did in Abyssinia, and his years of being a civil servant in the Sudan Political Service. Thesiger did not appreciate the civilized norms of the service, and ensured his own postings to more remote areas. After the war, having been inspired by the exploits of Bertram Thomas and St. John Philby who had both crossed Arabia in the north, he resolved to try exploring and mapping the area of the Rub al Khali himself, not least because no European had ever done it. The heart of this book describes his adventures in the Empty Quarter, the vast sands which covered the Southern part of Saudia Arabia, the place where even today the maps read, “Border Undefined.” The first crossing was 1946-47. Wilfred Thesiger persuaded Doctor Uvarov of the Locust Research Center in London to allow him to return to Oman and the Empty Quarter in order to map the area.

The book describes in detail Thesiger’s experiences with the Bedu, his opinions of them, their habits and lives and customs, and how he longed to be part of their culture. And how, as he travelled with them, he was eventually accepted: there’s more than a whiff of “Avatar” or “Dances With Wolves” in this narration. But over and above the autobiographical details, what we really get is the description of a whole way of life that no longer exists. The existence of the desert Bedu, even then under threat from rapid modernization based on oil, is evoked in prose that is both Kiplingesque and nostalgic. Certainly Thesiger had a hankering for male camaraderie and, like many Orientalists, a rather odd attitude towards sexuality for the time; he did not find the wells of his soul filled with water from his own civilization, and found it elsewhere. It is this blend of honesty, clarity of prose and evocation od worlds gone, which give Thesiger’s books their power.

I’ve read Sven Hedin’s accounts of his trips in Central Asia, as well as some of Younghusband’s work, and that of Burton, Livingstone and Aurel Stein: these explorers all shared a blend of craziness and chutzpah that got them past many hurdles in strange places; however for the most part, they went with expeditions and equipment, all the trappings of their culture. Thesiger, like Lawrence, is more of an individualist, sometimes adhering to a code more closely seen as fascist or hero-worshipping, someone who wanted to sink himself into a different culture that did live and survive in the places he wanted to explore. Now to some extent, Thesiger’s vision of man the explorer against the unknown is a classicist and romantic one, more redolent of Rousseau than Hobbes: but the kind of life of manly hardship he extols was even then a vanishing one, and is best appreciated by those who have an option to turn their backs temporarily on a more luxurious lifestyle. These days, in an interconnected, always-on microculture where gender roles are blurred and the “old ways” are seen in a misty, traditionalist haze of nostalgia, some readers might look back at a man like Thesiger and sigh enviously.

“Arabian Sands” reminds us that civilization has its price. The world can support over six billion people but the tag on that is a perhaps more elemental way of life being given up for creature comforts and delicate parsings of justice and law; of fantastical, even obscene aspects of culture, style, fashion, media and privacy. Many people will read Thesiger’s work and either long for a simpler time when matters stood more clear, or despise it for its simplicity and extolling of manly virtues from a different era: I am not one of either of these camps, but I have lived in many parts of the world and travelled to many more remote corners of it, and, aside from my appreciation for the beauty of Thesiger’s writing, I also fully understand the siren power of its call.

The other day I was having a spirited discussion with a friend of mine in Toronto. He cautiously started a sentence: “The fall of Constantinople in the 16^th century…”

“1453.” I said

He gave me a doubtful look. It’s not one of those facts you expect a half drunk guest to have at his fingertips, and I kinda feel for him there. It was sort of unexpected. “Are you sure?”

“1453, April to May, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the 2^nd laid siege to the city, then took it by storm. It marked the end of the Byzantine empire and the flood of émigrés to western Europe was supposed to have helped fuel the Rennaisance.” And I buffed my nails complacently, had some more of the excellent rum I was filching from his stocks, and smiled like a cherub.

It takes more than guts to tackle some of the tomes in my library: it requires a genuine love for good writing as well as an interest in the world. By carefully parsing that sentence and the conversation above, you may gather that I’m not talking about fiction, but histories. I’ve got quite a few that handily exceed a thousand pages, and can be comfortably used to serve as foundation stones of your new house: A History of the World by J. M. Roberts, for one, and Europe: A History, for another. It was Europe that informed the discussion above.

Much of the blame (or credit, depending how you see it) for the accumulation of such massive works that take weeks, if not months, to get through, belongs to mon pere, who early on in my life suggested I never let a history class pass me by. Years – decades! – later, I still follow this dictum. And of all the works of the human past I have read, Europe: A History by Norman Davies, stands out as one of the most original, complete and readable presentations in the genre. Yes it’s long, yes it is daunting, but as with all well written works, treasures are there for the tireless reader who perseveres.

Three things make Europe stand apart from the herd. The first is the fact that here, for one of the few times I’ve ever seen, an author takes the time to go beyond the rather timid interpretations of what and where Europe actually is. Not limiting himself to those places where barbarians invaded – Britain, France, Germany plus a few extras — Davies remarks “For some reason it has been the fashion among some historians to minimize the impact of the Magyars. All this means is that the Magyars did not reach Cambridge.” And so he takes for his canvas northern, southern, eastern and western Europe…the continent in totality. What in effect this means is that previously ignored portions of the continent (or those that are the subject of specialist books on their own that do not integrate them into the larger canvas) are given equal weight with the more commonly written about countries.

Secondly, there is the oddity and charm of the “inserts” as I call them. These are boxes, bordered small essays, on one particulary tiny detail that is of interest in the period he is discussing, like time capsules. One describes why cheeses are similar across Europe; another discusses the origins of the word “jeans”, and yet another talks about the history of printing. These inserts help break up the admittedly monolithic text and keeps the narrative flow quirky and interesting. In fact, if you ignore the text and just read the three hundred plus inserts, that alone (in sheer informational and entertainment value) might justify a read of the book.

Lastly there’s the quality of the writing. Davies has a subtly ironic and quietly humourous style that is actually very readable (as the above remark on the Magyars should illustrate). He tends to take the overview, discussing mass movements, ideas, trends, and then delve in here and there for something more detailed. He avoids the bias of “western civilization” in the central portion (giving equal weight to other parts of Europe), covers the prehistory to the fall of the Soviet Union in twelve dense chapters, but for all that volume, it’s an entertaining read, however limited in its own way, and the prose helps the mass go down. I may be a bit strange this way, but I’ve read it twice so far, and it looks like a reread is in the cards this or next year.

No one book, no matter how weighty or long, can possibly cover the entirety of the history of such a large area, over such a long period of time, without getting bogged down in minutae or detail or length. That Davies has done as much as he has, is astonishing in itself, but he himself remarks that it’s an overview, and not much primary research was required. The book is best used as a sort of central point to gather all threads of other more detailed works into a cohesive whole, maybe as a research tool for students.

Professor Davies is a leading English historian who made his reputation with the book God’s Playground (1981) where he comprehensively reviewed Polish history (he studied in Poland and his doctoral dissertation was about the Polish-Soviet war). He has written much about Poland, also wrote The Isles: A History, much in the same vein as Europe, with numerous capsules dotting his pages and consistently writes for the mass media. His interpretation of the Holocaust has been criticized by some (this led to Stanford controversially refusing him a tenured position in 1986).

At 1400 pages and weighing in at 1.6kg (3.5lbs) Europe: A History is absolutely not for the faint of heart: but those who delve into its depths and brave its scope, will surely not be disappointed…always assuming they ever get to the end. I’ve dived into the deep ocean of Davies’s work twice now, and have always emerged months later, dripping, exhausted and tired, but also enervated, and always educated by some new thing I overlooked the last time. It may not be your thing, but what the hell, I highly recommend it anyway. You may only want to read the capsules, or you may brave the whole book, but whatever you read, you will absolutely come out with more than you went in with.

I don’t know of anyone from my generation who did not at least hear of Doom. This one game – first released in 1993 – was the single most eagerly awaited offering of any software company to that time, was a landmark event that crashed the servers of the hosting BBS one minute after the midnight “opening”, and was reputedly the second most common reason quoted for the loss of productivity in offices worldwide (solitaire being the first).

As a working pro who corrupted every team of auditors for three years into playing deathmatch games after hours in our darkened offices, I can testify to that game’s addiction, adrenaline pumping action and (for its time) absolutely stunning graphics in a fully realized, spatially coherent 3d world. It went beyond the trials of its zany predecessor Wolfenstein, made shareware common, game software respectable and launched a thousand coders into the gameworld. Even its terms have entered the common speech: Deathmatch, BFG, frag, First Person Shooter…Doom started a tidal wave in popular techno-culture that is with us still.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture seeks to go behind the scenes and trace the origins and development of the geniuses behind the game: John Romero and John Carmack . They were two guys barely out of their teens, but had already amassed experience coding games, and were the first (together) to create games that scrolled smoothly from side to side. The success they had with one of these – Commander Keene – led to another game which I obsessively played, Wolfenstein (long range thanks to John, who provided the 1.44mb diskettes which loaded it onto my computers all those years ago), that also enjoyed considerable popularity.

While Romero was the ideas man, it was Carmack who was the programmer who created the realistic 3d modelling engine that gave the games their realism and quasi-3d feel.

And then of course, there came Doom.

The book is a relatively short read at 300 pages, and while it covers the history of the founders, it also is a sort of introduction to the programming subculture made famous years later by the Google corporate ethos. A bunch of guys simply got together with some great ideas, programmed like crazy for weeks on end, living like hermits on pop and pizza and in the process created not only fantastic games but charted a course which all first person shooters subsequently followed. MoD discusses the role of the two egocentric and driven founders of id Software, the way they came up with ideas, the programming of the 3d engine that underlay Doom, and intersperses the lot with witty anecdotes about matters as varied as the reason for naming WAD files as such, what a BFG is, how the shareware concept evolved and the origin of the word Deathmatch.

As with all supernovas, things had to come to an end. Creative differences led to a dissolution of the friendship and business association between the two men and the team they had built up: MoD discusses this frankly and in surprising detail. In fact, the book could be seen as a sort of primer not only of programmers’ secret lives, but on how tech startups start great, develop some kind of killer-app, and then either fly high or flame out. It doesn’t stop with Doom either, but continues into the new century and gives weight to subsequent events like the development of Quake, and where the founders are now (well…then: it was published in 2003).

The reason I post this review is because I not only loved the game and am a bona fide trivia- and history nut, but because it is a remarkably tense, tight and interesting read (especially if the subject matter appeals to you). The chapters on how they posted the first shareware version on the University of Wisconsin – Madison server in December 1993, opened the file up for download at midnight and crashed one minute later due to overload; the section on how amazing the reception was, both by the gaming community and average office Joes the world over; and the popularity of Deathmatch…they are well written, well paced and a wonderfully fun read.

In comparison with the white-hot writing style portrayed in this short book, I found “The Ultimate History of Video Games” which should have been a great piece of work, simply plodding, pedestrian and plain boring. No such problems afflict Masters of Doom, and if you have an affinity and sneaking affection for behind-the-scenes work of software (games!) publication, then this book describing the early years of the industry will not disappoint.

What an enormous, sprawling, wide-ranging, dense, tragic, magisterial narrative has Robert Fisk spun out of his journalistic experiences. I have read Edward Said’s works on the Middle East, Huntigndon’s “Clash of Civilizations,” and passed through many histories of that troubled part of the world, but it is my considered opinion that this outcome of thirty years’ reporting there is in a class by itself. Personal, compelling, well-researched and passionately written, it is on a par with “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” for unbridled emotional and intellectual impact.

Fisk’s writing is a tour of the modern history of the middle east (although he digresses to other points from time to time). He writes about his interviews with Osama bin Laden, the Armenian genocide (it was the Congressional recognition of this in 2010 that made me go back to the book), the Algerian civil war, and 20th century histories of Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Through it all you get the sense of his outrage at how, as the British Empire waned and shrank and the American one rose, whole populations were manipulated, used, killed and moved as pawns across a strategic board, with fear and hysteria as coercive weapons. Nowhere is this more clear than in the account of the Iraqi invasion and how, by deliberately manipulated intelligence and populations whipped into war frenzies of hatred and revenge, the Western Powers commandeered the oil in Iraq, and labelled anyone who disagreed as being on the side of the “terrorists.”

This brief account of the book does little justice to the sweeping arc of Fisk’s accounts of the Middle East. Yes it’s a weighty read, and yes, it’s long – a book covering this much history can hardly be anything else. But his personalized writing style and in-place observations of the events that shaped the region for over a century are a valuable counterpoint to the drier historical tomes written by more erudite historians, and there’s no denying is research, or his passion for the innocent dead. Indeed, it is these accounts that inflate the book (a fact bemoaned by many). Fisks acts as a speaker for the dead, presuming to ask why. And if he writes stridently and with too many words, I can only recall the Emperor’s whine to Mozart about too many notes. And Mozart’s reply…”Which ones should I cut?”

I reiterate that if history is not your thing, this book won’t do much for you. But as year passes year and we are no closer to a Middle East peace, and nations continue to go to war in that region, then perhaps a book like this, unashamedly partisan and mourning the waste, is in itself, perhaps, a good thing to take hold of and read through, if only just once.

The Flood Tablet

Tablet XI, Column i, The Epic of Gilgamesh

Aside from historical and biblical scholars, not many people know about The Epic of Gilgamesh, though my research suggests that the character seems to be somewhat of a subterrannean cultural icon and is referenced quite often in the arts; those that do know the epic, came to it not as a classic in its own right but because they heard or read that it provided one of the first independent written records of The Flood (a fact not as startling as it may seem, since many creation myths from around the world have a destruction of man by gods in a titanic cataclysm as one the central theses).

But like Moll Flanders, the Ramayana, Huck Finn or The Tale of Genji, it shares a unique genealogy: it is among the first of its kind, if not the first. It may be the oldest tale ever written, and the earliest work of literature known to man.

The Epic is a Mesopotamian myth; it is a series of short episodic poems from the proto-kingdom of Sumer, which flourished around four thousand years ago (divorce and property rights were developed here, for the trivia nuts reading this). It describes the adventures of the King of Uruk, and his best friend Enkidu (in this it parallels the Kyrgyz hero-myth of Manas and his best friend Almanbet, though the legends are not strictly comparable), and is inscribed on twelve stone tablets found at the city of Nineveh, once part of Babylon, in 1849. Various interpretations suggest that the oldest part of the tale is from Sumer itself, but later Akkaddian additions created the famous 12 cuneiform tablets which form the basis of most modern translations.

In the first part of the Epic, Gilgamesh is a king, two thirds god, one third man, who oppresses the citizens of Uruk by – among other things – indulging himself in the droit de siegneur (the “prima nocte” made famous by Braveheart). They cry out to the gods, whose create a primitive man of the same power as Gilgamesh; he is Enkidu, covered in hair and living in the wild, until found; seduction by a temple prostitute is the first step in his civilization (an interesting twist on Rousseau’s thesis that it is civilization that corrupts the Eden-like state of primitive man). He goes to Uruk to confront Gilgamesh and after a titanic battle, they become friends

The next tablets tell the various adventures the two friends have: the slaying of the demi-god Humbaba; the encounter with the goddess Ishtar after returning to Uruk, and Gilgamesh’s refusal of her advances (Ishtar is part of the the prototypical triumvirate of elder gods, corresponding to the Sumerian Innana, Egyptian Isis, semitic Astarte…and the (downgraded) greek and roman goddess of love); her petulant plea to her father Anu to avenge her humilation by sending the Bull of Heaven to wreak destruction on Uruk. The heroes slay the bull, but the gods decide one must die for this affront to heaven, and after a short illness interspersed with many vividly recounted dreams, Enkidu dies. Mad with grief, Gilgamesh seeks to find a legendary man called Utnapishtim who may be able to to provide him with the secret of immortality and of regenerating life…since he has been alive since the Great Flood.

And here we come to it. Try and imagine the impact such a statement on a four thousand year old tablet must have made on a mostly secular but still religious culture which had not yet been exposed to Darwin. The description Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh corresponds very closely with the Flood Myth of the bible (and with many other myths in world culture, but I won’t go into that here), most particularly how one family was given advance warning to build a boat to ride out the flood, and then, after the waters began receding, released a bird to see whether it returned.

In the event, Utnapishtim instructed Gilgamesh how to find the sacred flower that provides immortality, but after Gilamesh discovers and picks it, the bloom is stolen while he bathes by….what else? A serpent. (I just love this stuff…even a modern novelist can hardly better this one)

Gilgamesh is one of those stories at the root of our memories and culture, so basic that we can’t see its murky outlines underneath our common notions of storytelling. Much like Robert Johnson’s primitive licks which whisper from under the bedrock of current rock music, Gilgamesh is one of the prototypical tales without which none of the others can be properly understood. He is the first Nietzschean superman, the most basic wandering hero like Rama, Hercules, Manas or Conan. He calls to our unconscious mental picture of a Jungian first man with correspondences in Aboriginal, Lakota, semitic, Hindu, Greek, Inca, Polynesian and shinto mythology. He is the first recorded attempt in world letters to nail down the concept in a permanent form. The epic dealt with sex, religion and flawed beings in a realistic way not found again for literally millenia, questioned dogma and the gods themselves, and told a coherent story that actually had a point (though scholars feel it is still incomplete and not all tablets have been recovered)

And for a legend this old and this dusty, it’s actually still referenced a lot in modern art and historical forms. Consider: Atlantis theorists refer to the Epic constantly as a secondary source for the Flood Myth they claim underlay the sinking of that fabled isle; Phillip Roth wrote a novel abut a baseball player Gil Gamesh, whose story arc followed the epic; it has been translated into Klingon for Star Trek fans (along with Hamlet) and been the focus of at least one episode in The Next Generation; at least three operas of that name have been written in the latter half of the 20th century; perhaps due to its oral backgrund, a variation of the legend has often been performed in theatre; and Japanese anime references it in Sword of Uruk and in Gurren Lagan (there’s this mecha called Enkidu…); even Hercules: The Legendary journeys, an American TV series, had Gilgamesh make an appearance. Think this is all? In the Final Fantasy video games, there is usually a boss called Gilgamesh and his sidekick Enkidu; in Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, there’s a Viraxo ship named Enkidu; in Civilization IV Beyond the Sword expansion pack, the leader of the Sumerian civ is called Gilgamesh.

Joseph Campbell’s powerful work The Hero With A Thousand Faces (which helped George Lucas fashion Star Wars, by the way) probably comes closest to allowing us to understand the peculiar longevity of a character in myth mostly forgotten and rarely read. The Hero on a Quest holds a fascination for us all because it is embdedded in our subconscious, part of our race memories of a wandering past. We seek the unattainable both within and without our physical selves, seek a state of grace and strength over and beyond the mundane lives we live. Gilgamesh, strong, kingly, flawed, who lost his best friend and gained knowledge if not enlightment, speaks to that part of us that rises above the petty considerations of our world and searches for a more sublime state of mind.

On the Road was the shot across the bow of an older generation, and heralded a new direction in American letters. Jack Kerouac pioneered the ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative style and dream worlds made flesh, flashbacks, flashforwards, plot departures and side trips, meandering soliloquies and sounded the first thrum of the counterculture. It is the Star Trek of the hippie sixties, presaging much of what came later, its uniqueness seen mostly in retrospect

At all times biographical, On the Road is a journey into the mental state and physical surroundings of Sal and his friends, who disdain the middle class existence they have (and about which not much is ever said) and who dare to do more than dream, by heading out on the great freeways and highways of America to discover themselves and sample what there is of life.

In form, On the Road is spare on plot (if one can even said to exist) and long on character. The various individuals who populate Sal’s life and travels are carefully drawn and in the structure of the observations about them – the novel is written in the first person – the only nod to development can be seem…that of Sal and how is growing maturity over a period of years leads to his gradual mental adulthood. Beyond that it’s just a series of vignettes about places visited, people met, things experienced, sights seen.

On the Road is a paean to the great new adventure of America – travel on the highways. The post war generation had no ‘good’ war to fight, no new territories to explore or conquer…what they had was a large sprawling land loosely connected by roads, and Kerouac himself travelled extensively on them (in a way he was like Steinbek), and the experiences he had germinated for years until he put it all down.

What sets On the Road apart is the narrative style. As Bob remarked in our discussion – “Where’s the damned plot?” It has none. Kerouac reputedly wrote the whole novel in three weeks fueled on coffee, and he typed where his thinking led him. Like Catcher he talked frankly – if amorally, distantly – about sex, about drugs, about the lure of the road to the detriment of personal relationships, about women, homosexuality, music (jazz), and anything else that occurred to him as he was putting it all down. This leads to a casual style of writing which almost lets one see what Kerouac is seeing, and offended the purists of the day who labelled it lazy and anti-intellectual.

For the many others who read it – and that seems to have been a great part of the youth of America at one point or another, another similarity it has with Catcher – it was a book that resonated, captured their unease about their lives, its pointlessness now that their surroundings were safe and perhaps even affluent; it encapsulated their idealism about getting away from The System and life spent working for The Man, and living a purer, more innocent life where the rat race had no place. It wrote about people not often written about, the Common Man (much like Peyton Place did). It was a major part of the works of the Beat poets (Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac himself) who were the source of the whole Beat generation of the fifties, which developed into the hippie counterculture of the sixties, what with its characteristics of drug use, easy love, eastern religious sensibilities, and the desire to experience life in all its facets, with all its immediacy.

Seen now, at a remove of over half a century, it’s difficult to clearly grasp the world into which it detonated with such force. Race relations had not yet burst into the great movements of the sixties; it was still deemed safe to hitchhike and travel the highways alone; vast tracts of the continent were still isolated from each other and a large part of the population remained rural, clinging to a more sedate, conservative lifestyle, ignoring the great social changes brewing underneath the deceptively calm exterior and behind the white picket fences. Drugs, sex (even less the seedier aspects of it), violence were seen as distant and never, ever written about.

Kerouac and the Beats changed all that. We live in the inner world they helped make. Cable, always-on computers, porn freely available, TV shows with graphic violence, sex and drug use, the infantilizing and numbing effects of popular culture (“pro” wrestling and reality shows are prime examples of this craziness), the baser side of man’s nature always on display, books written using any kind of language, on any kind of subject — the mental world which surrounds us, and the ability to write and watch and create fiction of this kind, of anything we please or can imagine, can all be traced to those crazies in the post war years who risked obscenity trials, jail time and contempt to realize an inner vision that proved to be more durable, and more freeing, than that of all those member of the Thought Police who sought to stop up the bottle and stuff the genie of free expression back in.

I may not like the writing style – I marked On the Road down savagely – but there’s no question in my mind of the debt modern society owes to the Beat poets like Kerouac and his generation. Every time I use an obscenity in my own writing, or discuss sex frankly, it is to some extent the Beats that I owe my right to do so. They fought the battles we don’t have to, and we eat the apples of the tree they helped water.*

For a discussion of the Beats and their effects, Halberstam’s The Fifties is a good reference, as, of course, is Wikipedia.

“Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger, seems to be one of those books one either loves or hates. Ostensibly the sory of one bored, directionless rich kid’s sojourn in New York, this short novel presaged the counterculture of the 1960s by over a decade, and arguably fired the imagination of an entire generation of post-war Americans like no other novel since. The reclusiveness of the author, and its being found in the effects of two high-profile American assassins, have merely raised public awareness of the book and enhanced the reputation surrounding it. People either despise its antihero or praise its carefully observed portrait of youthful alienation. Whatever your opinion, once you’ve read it, you always *have* an opinion.

***

The first-person narrative of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of “Catcher” begins as he is expelled from Pencey Prep, a fictional preparatory school not unlike the one Salinger himself attended in his youth. He ignores the paternal advice of one of his teachers, gets into a fight with his roommate and departs for New York in the middle of the night. Not wanting to return to his own family he books himself into a cheap hotel, and has varying encounters with three tourists, a prostitute (and her pimp) and generally wanders around for the next few days in a fog of loneliness, self-pity and a drunken haze. He sneaks into his parents’ apartment while they are away, in order to see his little sister Phoebe, for whom he has an idealized affection not unlike that of Travis Bickle for Iris, or Jake la Motta for Vickie (though she seems to have a similarly naive view of him at times). A key sequence takes place when Holden tells her about a fantasy he has in which he saves children running through a rye field — hence the title of the novel — which points up his immaturity and childish view of the world.

After leaving Phoebe, Holden visits a much-admired former teacher of his, Mr. Antolini. Mr. Antolini is another central figure in Holden’s journey, the one who dispels his grandiose fantasies by observing that it is the stronger man who lives humbly, rather than dies nobly, for a cause. This rebukes Holden’s ideas of becoming a godlike figure who symbolically saves children from “falling off a crazy cliff” and being exposed to the evils of adulthood. Holden’s subsequent response to Antolini’s apparent homosexual (“flitty”)advances sunders this relationship also, but it is unclear whether this has in fact occurred the way Holden tells it, and he himself wonders – in the first sign of growing mental maturity – whether his assessment was correct.

In the closing act, Holden decides to move out west, with about as much forethought and consideration as all his other actions, and at first decides to take Phoebe, then changes his mind, taking her to the zoo instead. And while he makes up his mind to go home and “face the music” (whatever that may be in his context), it is unclear what he actually does, since it appears he closes his narration while staying in a mental asylum (or having just emerged from one) and then planning to re-ener school in the fall.

***

Many forests have been cut down to provide paper for the reams of analysis springing from critics’ pens on this novel. Is it as great or as influential as people say it is? Like all art in literature, it boils down to a matter of opinion. What seems clear is that it is one of the best-known, most-referenced, most-quoted books on alienation, childhood’s end, and teenage angst ever written. It was a shot across the bows of the staid early 1950s establishment that lived in a simpler, less complex mental environment where America had not yet taken the cutural centre stage of the world. It was heralded and decried in equal measure, villified often and banned frequently. Its narrative style, profanity and frank discussion of themes like religion, drugs and sexuality — which were still ruled by a more prudish morality in public discourse — ensured its immediate fame (and notoriety), and that of its author.

Salinger found his own, unique voice and went on to inspire a different school of American fiction. He reintroduced an emotional range and unsentimental candour to American writing which had all but disappeared with the terse masculinity of Hemingway’s spare prose. To this day, most American writers find their voices through an apprenticeship to one style or the other. Decades of close reading and analysis in classrooms have placed Salinger’s fiction on the same footing in the American literary canon as The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. So although he never published a second novel his work exerted an enduring, and wide-ranging influence over the style and content of modern American fiction.”Huckleberry Finn” had a similar impact on the readers of its time, and indeed, the two novels share many thematic elements.

The consensus of Liquoratures’ members is that while we admired the prescience of the author in addressing the aforementioned modern themes, and while we were intrigued by Holden’s progress throughout the book, we despised Caulfield himself: his constant whining, his judgemental behavior, his lack of vision and self-criticism, his uninformed narcissism and baseless opinions on everything. My 17-year old daughter read the book within a week of the Club, and interestingly, came to exactly the same conclusion. The irony of all this is that we decry Holden’s opinions and judging of others, while in order to do so, we do exactly what he did (though hopefully with more knowledge and critical thinking).

Two pieces of insight which came from our discussion are worth mentioning here.

One, we thought that for people possessing a certain mental maturity, achievers who are reasonably confident in who they are, probably don’t hold with Caulfield’s judgements and dislike him. But for the lost, the disconnected, the visionless and pathless, for those who lack a direction in their life – mostly the young, I suspect – “Catcher” would probably hold real meaning.

And two, how far is it to go from making snap judgements and formless, baseless assumptions about people one barely knows (and these judgements are almost always negative, it is interesting and sad to note), how difficult is it to move from saying “This person has an aspect I do not like” to saying “We must do something about him”?

That second point, encapsulating something of the intolerance of our times and the dreadful repercussions of people who take that step, perhaps hints at the enduring appeal of “Catcher in the Rye” and its buried power, which is still there, not dead, awaiting a call.