Rushfield Babylon

Book Report: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper

While still in his teens in 1934, Patrick Leigh Fermor, high school drop-out, unemployable gadabout decided to walk from Amsterdam to Constantinople, and bathed in an ancient Europe that was crumbling, literally before his eyes.  The trip was set down on paper 40 years later in A Time of Gifts and Between the Water and the Woods, for my money the greatest travel books ever written, if for nothing else how they recorded the intellectual journey of a young man falling in love with the idea that everything around us is the seed of things that happened far back in the mists of time, and there is no calling more fascinating than tracing back those branches.

PLF grew up to become probably as close to the model for Indiana Jones as any human ever did: a classicist, linguist, adventurer, war hero, perpetrator of an untold number of crazed love affairs. A humanist in arms; passionately apolitical and conscious of how the manias of modern politics are likely to trample on all that is noble and uplifting in society.

Put simply, any young man who reads about Patrick Leigh Fermor and doesn’t want to be him is not to be trusted.

Artemis Cooper has written a beautiful and touching biography of our hero. Having known him towards the end of his 90 plus year life, her sympathy for him radiates through the book, but an fearless historian, she lets him get away with nothing and his many, many faults are diligently cataloged.  Which is frankly how I like my heroes, full of faults.  Perfection is for statues, and not very good statues at that. Believing your heroes are perfect is for political zealots, simpletons and publicists.

Most pleasing was it to hear about the epic procrastinations Paddy would undergo, handing in magazine assignments years late; books could take a decade and require him to look himself away in monasteries to finish. The internet didn’t invent procrastination apparently.

The final chapters brought me to constant tears I must say. Not that anything terribly tragic happened - he died peacefully and comfortably in his 90’s, but the specter of someone so brimming with life and intellect slowing down was horrible to take in. Devastating when he finally leaves us at the end.

And I didn’t know enough about Artemis Cooper before this, but she is apparently the wife of Anthony Beevor and the daughter of John Julius Norwich as well as the author of some fascinating looking books in her own right.  I will investigate further.

Very lovely book.  To be read after reading Time for Gifts.

BOOK REPORT:  Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh

I’m far behind in my book reports so here is the first of a flurry of short and poorly thought through ones that are going to come your way.

Men at Arms is the first part of Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy dealing with the British experience in the World War 2.  The British experience is World War 2 is pretty much the best thing you could write a novel about, and Evelyn Waugh is, it has been well established, the apex of the classical novel writing tradition.  Which would mean this is statistically the best book ever written.

Given that, it’s pretty good.  The reason why the Brits in WW II is the best thing to write about is that you’ve got those very last vestiges of Victorian tradition coming into contact with a genuine threat.  That had previously happened in WWI, of course, but the result there was too muddled and inconclusive to actually destroy the old world and much of it hung around to ultimately be smashed by Hitler.  There is a fearsome enemy,  danger - it seemed very likely that the British would lose -, comedy in all the missteps that led the way to victory and in the end heroism and triumph all around while an old world gives up the ghost.    This book, the first of the trilogy focuses on the comedy and missteps while giving you a pretty good taste of the slowly mounting terror of the times.  It is pretty hilarious and pretty bleak.   I think you should read it.

My other favorite books and movies about the British in World War 2:

Bridge on the River Kwai (as near a perfect film as you’ll find)

End of the Affair (The Book)

GUns of Navarone (The movie)

Journey Into Fear (The movie and the book)

The Ministry of Fear (ditto)

Put Out More Flags 

BOOK REPORT: TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA by William Shakespeare

Proteus and Valentine are best friends (in Verona, of Verona).  Proteus lives only for love - that of the fair Julia in particular.  While Valentine lives for…hanging out and travelling and stuff.    When they both end up in Milan however, all of Proteus’ big talk about love being the most important thing in the world comes back to bite him on the nose when - Zounds!  he falls in love with Valentine’s beloved Sylvia.

So in this play, Shakespeare confronts us with the dilemma - who say that love comes first in the Universe, so what do you do about it when you fall in love with your best friend’s damsel?  Either, apparently, you must betray your own nature or you have to betray your best friend to the Duke and get him expelled from the Kingdom and probably killed.  There can be, Shakespeare suggests, no other way.

Far be it for me to quarrel with an award winning writer like William Shakespeare, but it seems to me there are all sorts of middle grounds that he is overlooking; all kinds of ways to deal with falling in love with the wrong person short of betraying your best friend to a bloodthirsty Duke.

You could for instance, take a long walk on the beach.  You could call your other friend up on the phone and bore him/her to death talking about it until you can’t stand to hear about it yourself.  You could eat a lot of junk food- for a few days straight.  You could find somebody else. You could take up archery.  Yes, the heart can seem a cruel dictator but I guarantee if you were Proteus and did all of the above plus maybe a few valiums,  you would never need to betray your best friend to the Duke.

But one of the more fun of the minor plays thus far in my journey through the complete Bard.

BOOK REPORT: GAME OF THRONES

It is with a heavy heart that I file this book report.  

A major theme of this tumblr has been my shame at having been a nerd as a youth; my disgust with geek chic culture and anything that romanticizes nerds whom I know from experience are terrible, hateful angry people.  

I escaped that life and never want to go back.  And so it was with enormous trepidation that I picked up the first of George RR Martin’s Seven Kingdoms book.  Normally, I never would have gone near them, of course, but the moguls behind this series cleverly used a HBO series as a gateway drug…luring me in through the prestige network, and by the time ten episodes were done, I was hooked, telling myself that maybe just reading one of the books…just to see what it was like, wouldn’t be so horrible.

Martin and his lackeys also very cleverly hid the “magic” elements in the HBO series and the first book so there are just hints of them.  Normally I would run screaming from anything elfin or fairylike or dragonflecked.  But they just dropped in little tastes of them hearing, letting my system quietly build up a tolerance for dragons, without hitting me hard enough with them that I would be conscious of what was being done to me; letting me get through this first chapter saying, No, it’s not about magic, it’s about political intrigue and people and families…Just a basic human story.  All the while I’m taking in little nuggets about the Children of the Forest, and White Walkers and The Others…and not even feeling it.  Insidious!  

But having finished it…what can I say? It’s been three days since I put down the first book and I feel completely empty inside.  I am playing chicken with my psyche trying to calculate how long I can go before I pick up Book Two.  Can I make it a month?  Six weeks?  

Some other thoughts:

• Calling it Game of Thrones makes us all feel respectable somehow.  But that is not the title of the series, just of the first book.  Everyone who is reading it should be forced to say “I’m reading the latest RR Martin Song of Fire and Ice book” and see how that wears on them.

• I was completely with it.  Completely hooked. However, if he had used the term “Lady Mother” or “Lord Father” one more time I might just have cracked.

• Also pretend as you will that this is just a tale of political intrigue. It is not without passages like this: “Catelyn found her husband beneath the weirwood, seated on a moss covered stone.  The greatsword Ice was across his lap, and he was cleaning the blade in those waters black as night.  A thousand years of hummus lay thick upon the godswood floor, swallowing the sound of her feet, but the red eyes of the weirwood seemed to follow her as she came.” 

But what can I say?  I’m in. I love the characters. I love the whole warring thrones conceit.  I can’t wait to see how it turns out.  My the old gods have mercy upon my soul.

BOOK REPORT: LIFE BY KEITH RICHARDS

Ah yes, what more is there to say about the rock bio of our times?  I listened to the audio version of this book, so it’s taken me about six months to get through all 40-some hours.  I often wished I was reading it so I could skip over the vast meandering plains we are forced to pass through on the dark prince’s journey.  But apparently there were no editors on duty the week he turned this in, so go with him we must if we can’t skip through the pages.

It’s hard not to be impressed with the vast canvas. It’s been a pretty extraordinary life, all in all and Richards is a fairly brilliant raconteur leading you through it all.  At lots of points, it feels like that dinner party where the host is a fairly wasted and at 3 AM his fabulous stories have degenerated into disjointed lectures and you’re desperately trying to figure out how to interrupt him and get out of there.  At those points we get extended lessons on how to tune a guitar, how to drive a motorboat, how to properly cook sausages…You stagger out of the house as the sun is coming up broken and exhausted, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a brilliant evening - just until that ninth bottle of wine came out.

As honest and open as he is about much of his sordid journey, the book does have some interesting blind spots. It’s mysterious actually, how someone can see the world, and himself so well, can be such a sharp judge of character as he clearly is, but not really see that keeping a stadium full of tens of thousands of people waiting for an hour so that he can get a Sheppard’s Pie to stick a knife into the top of is not just determination to make a point, but the sort of behavior that non-rock stars get locked in padded cells for.  I mean, on some level he sees this.  He says he knows he’s being selfish, or blinded by rage.  But on another level, the book doesn’t quite account for the person who behaves in these ways.  The tone is so eminently reasonable, it’s hard to believe that such a perceptive narrator could also be off his rocker - and not just when someone “crosses him.”  But dropped here and there around the book are little tidbits of evidence that he clearly is.

It’s kind of a phenomenon I’ve seen in a lot of creative people and wondered about.  Particularly some of the comedians I’ve known.  They are often the sharpest observers  on the planet of human hypocrisy and idiocy.  They can spot from the slightest waver in inflection the minutest hints of sniveling behavior.  And yet often these same people are the biggest most self-absorbed nutjobs I’ve ever seen, completely blind to the monstrous ways they treat people on a daily basis.  I’ve asked friends in the psychiatric field what is the clinical explanation for this syndrome, the hyper observational powers combined with the huge blind spot around their own selves.  So far, no one has been able to name it for me.  So let’s call it Keithanoia until science steps in to investigate.

Another thing about the book, or at least the audio version of it.  The first third of it is read by Johnny Depp who sadly doesn’t do it in Captain Jack Sparrow voice but in the somber monotone he used to narrate The Doors documentary.   When Depp is reading, you think Keith Richards is just a pretentious self-absorbed jerk.  Then Depp hands the reins to some Brit who reads in a joyful working class accent that is a ringer for young Keith  Richards’ own.  Once this guy takes over, you suddenly hear the book not as sanctimonious bravado but in this great swaggering British storytelling tradition.  The lovable bandit indeed shines through and is hard to resist.

BOOK REPORT: COMEDY OF ERRORS BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Bard brings us not one but two sets of identical twins for mistaken identity frolics!  And two of them have the same name!  What merriment doth ensue!

Rushfield Babylon Recommendation: If you like watching mistaken identity hijinx on the screen, just think how much fun they are to read.  In rhymed pentameter! 

BOOK REPORT: THE WATER’S EDGE BY KARIN FOSSUM

The most notable innovation of the Scandinavian detective craze has been to introduce a line of detectives almost pathological in their self-absorption.  I suppose this is why this makes them popular these days.  A Scandinavian detective will never forget that he is the most important subject in any murder case.  

In the American noir novels of the 30’s - 50’s, the murder case was often of secondary interest to the author. Often they were more transfixed by the spectacle of their brooding antiheroes navigating through morally compromised worlds than they were focussed on solving some little ol’ murder case.  Chandler in particular completely lost his grip on his story on more than one occasion.

But as much as the authors let their own attention wander, the heroes always stayed focussed.  The detectives were men of resolve who never took their eyes off their mission of bringing justice to some innocent victim.   

In Scandinavia, however, the authors insist that their detectives share their fixations on bigger issues than mere murders.  Henning Menkel is worst of all with this; his Wallander has to be the biggest sap ever to be permitted to carry a fictional police badge.  While killers are on the loose, Wallander will often be so overcome with sadness over the state of the world he’ll have to take a time out from the case and lie in bed for days on end feeling sorry for himself.  Martin Beck, the Ur Scandinavian detective who planted the seed for generations of self pity, generally seemed a walking open wound while on the beat, staggering through cases bearing the sorrows of the world on his shoulders.

The Fanatical depressive tone of these novels can often been very satisfying to read.  Like an ice bath, I often find spending a few hours in a land of bleak despair very invigorating.  But you spend lots of your time in these books wanting to slap the detectives, and say pull yourself together and get on with it man.  Certainly the Dragon Tattoo had me screaming that at every page.  (And that book had no ingenious plotting to redeem it; only exploitative violence and torture and a schoolboy’s anti-capitalist-phobia worn on its sleeves in neon colors.)

Anyway, all this is to say that Karin Fossum’s novels are nothing like that.  Alone among the Scandinavians, her hero Inspector Sejer is forthright and driven.  He is almost comically  devoted to his job to a point where I wonder if Fossum means him as a rebuke to her peers.

Water’s Edge is not a great mystery, the pieces come together without anyone even trying.  Fossum is a very sympathetic writer, however, skilled at creating grand canvas stories where she takes us into the lives of all the people touched by a crime.  This case concerns a pedophile and there’s a lot of consideration and speculation about what turns people into these sorts of monsters, so if that isn’t your cup of tea, stay away.

It’s an engaging read, if not a terribly suspenseful one. It’s nice for once to take a visit to the fjords without wanting to slap our detective/guide.

BOOK REPORT: HOPE OF HEAVEN BY JOHN O’HARA

If you’re like me, there’s nothing you enjoy more after a hard day at the office then settling down in front of the fire, putting on your slippers, picking up a snifter of Dry Sack on the rocks or Cutty Sark and enjoying a couple hundred pages of good, staccato, mid-Century banter, charged with sexual tension and barely concealed contempt for humanity.

Well if that hard-edged banter is your thing, John O’Hara is your man.  Hope of Heaven is one of the most readable jaunts through the period you will find.  Actually, it’s sad that O’Hara seems to be falling through the cracks these days, when he is pound for pound as strong a writer as some of his more celebrated contemporaries.  I his his tales are too truly bleak and nihilistic to earn him many points with the world’s literary professors who prefer their doomed artists to be dappled in starry-eyed romanticism under a razor thin layer of bravado.  Also his stories may be too straightforward, not trafficking in the sort of overwrought metaphors that get college students and book clubs all worked up.

But Hope of Heaven written in 1938, may in fact be the best account of pre-war Hollywood I’ve ever come across, and I include Nathaniel West in that.  He works so many great details into the story, it reads almost like a historical novel, dropping significant period accoutrements, if you didn’t know better and know it was actually written at the time.  

Take for instance this graph, the narrator’s account of sitting down to read the newspaper, that to any olde timey newspaper fan is spellbinding:

I read Louella and her daughter and W.R.’s editorial, and studied my favorite study, Ginger Rogers, in color, and second guessed the eastern football scores, and got mad about the latest ex-Communist who was telling all, and won a bet with myself that my name would not be on a list of a party I’d gone to, and read the second hand automobile classifieds (but no Alfa Romeo for $450 cash) and saw a fairly good wisecrack I had made three years before attributed to a New York orchestra leader, and read the titles of the Sunday sermons, and tried to calculate how much I would make if I was a sports writer again and on the take. I thought, as I thought every day, of the Paramount writer who came home from the studio one day and saw his father reading the paper. ‘What’s in the paper, dad?’ he said.

'Huh” snorted the old man. 'LA dog chases LA cat over LA fence.'

And so on.  You get the picture, smart guy.

One historical detail that I always find impossible to believe, like the past is putting me on or something, is their accounts of what they eat.  I know from looking at menus of the time that pre-arugula nation this is how it was.  But still, to think our ancestors went to the Brown Derby and ordered, as did the narrator of this book, saying “I think I’ll have a straight whiskey. Rye.  And a chicken salad. Russian dressing. Coffee with the salad.  Melba toast.”

Who were these creatures and how did they survive?

BOOK REPORT: MASTER OF SPIES, THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL MORAVEC

I picked up this long out of print book on the recommendation of my college history professor and was instantly floored, and more than that shamed that i had never heard of such an amazing figure who had one of the most stunning intelligence careers you can imagine.  Moravec is one of those pivotal figures who touched upon so much, but whose name has largely been forgotten underneath to his accomplishments, like that guy who brought both the umbrella and the fork to the west.

If you wanted to teach a youngish person about the western world’s rough journey through through the 20th Century (if there was a young person left willing to learn about such a thing) you could do far than start with this book.  After fighting for Czechoslovakia’s independence from Austro-Hungary, Moravec became the first head of the new nation’s secret service, starting it up from scratch, literally going to the library to check out “How to Spy” books.  He built the service into a powerhouse that became Europe’s greatest source of information on the growing power of Nazi Germany and eventually from exile masterminded the assassination of Heydrich, a mitzvah of an assassination if there ever was one.  Post-war, after briefly returning to his country, he once again went into exile when he was declared an enemy of the new Soviet puppet state.  Thus Moravec became one of the few of the last century to take arms against not one, not two, but three empires.  

There is plenty of spine-tingling espionage stuff in here.  But the most poignant part for me was the tragic portrait of Czechslovakia’s pre and postwar President Dr. Benes, the stalwart intellectual who managed to be catastrophically wrong twice in his career; the first time by assuming the Nazis would never dare invade his country because England and France would stand up for them, and thus forbidding his country to prepare to defend itself as that might be seen as provocative by his erstwhile allies.  I’ve read many British accounts of the Munich treaty, but never read one by someone who was on the receiving end of the sellout and it is heartbreaking.    Benes’ second disaster was believing that Stalin wanted a strong independent Czechslovakia to stand as a bullwork against a future Germany, a belief which led him to shun his western allies in the face of all evidence about Stalin’s intentions.

The portrait of Dr. Benes presents a real caution for smart people everywhere.  The human mind loves nothing more than solving a puzzle on its own, and once it figures out a solution, nothing can pry that idea out of its head.  It is the basis of all con tricks - give people the evidence that they will put together themselves, that will lead them to a false conclusion.  Benes, being the smartest guy in the nation, took a look at the evidence and figured out that he had nothing to fear from the Nazis and the Soviets and once he had reached those conclusions, his mind was able to dismiss out of hand all evidence to the contrary.  What the mind often hides though in solving these puzzles is how often it will guide us to the answers that we want, that element is rarely considered.

I know this is Tumblr and we’re supposed to be posting stills of 30 Rock, but for the sake of civilization, I demand you stop what you’re doing, find a copy of this book and read it at once.  It’s your duty as a citizen of the internet.

 

BOOK REPORT: THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen

This book has just about everything that I hate in recent detective fiction: tough guy posturing, lackadasical haphazard plotting, transparent points to make, suggesting an author has bigger things on his mind to be bothered with mere crime solving.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t put it down.

Plotwise, The Guards is of the James Crumley school, wherein ludicrously unstable sleuths stumble around in the vicinity of a murder case, eventually collapsing somewhere near the finish line by dumb luck more than anything else.  Along the way there is generally a mountain of gratuitous violence and two-fisted philosophizing.  The Guards stays true to this tradition but throws in a magnum of post-modern devices, including telling the story in list form and extended citations of other detective novels.

The hero spends approximately 20 of the books 200 some pages involved in solving the case.  For huge swaths of the book, the dead girl seems to have just slipped his mind. He takes an extensive time out to go to a sanitorium to dry out from his daredevil drinking.

Despite all this, The Guards was somehow completely enjoyable.  The sad sack hero is an engaging and somehow sympathetic tour guide through an Ireland that is losing its connection to its past. His alcoholic, rootless plight may be too transparent a metaphor for the state of Ireland today, but it works.  It does not work as a mystery.  At all.  But to give it credit, it really doesn’t even try.  It’s a two-fisted hymn to a dying culture, but given that, it’s not a bad one.

I’ve seen this book at the top of a lot of people’s lists of the best contemporary Irish detective novel - a genre that has some real gems.  It would not be at the top of my list (Midnight Choir by Gene Kerrigan occupies that space), but I can respect why so many have put it at the top of theirs.

The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation:  Read it, but read Gene Kerrigan and Stuart Neville first.