by TCW | Nov 26, 2019 | Book review
I’ve been very enthusiastic about Frank Prem’s first two books of poems, so he kindly sent me a copy of his latest, The New Asylum.
I’ve taken a while to read it and I’m finding it quite a difficult book to review. When I was at university I spent one summer vacation working in a psychiatric hospital. It says a lot about the period that the official name of the hospital was the – Hospital for the Mentally Subnormal and Severely Subnormal. I doubt it’s still called that these days, although the cruel bluntness of its name was at least honest, unlike the weaselly ‘learning difficulties’ of today. I was on a ward for ‘psychotic and disturbed’ patients. Daily life could include violent attacks, trying to reassure a paranoid patient that the others didn’t all hate her, and dealing with random chaos. A tutor at university said that I described behaviour that was already unusual as the increased availability of effective drug treatment meant that patients seldom exhibited such florid symptoms. Perhaps part of the problem was that we had only limited access to drugs that could be used for acute interventions because they had to be administered by a qualified doctor and there was only one on duty in the whole hospital. By the time he got round to our ward in response to an urgent phone call we usually had the patient in a straitjacket (yes, we still used them) and the immediate crisis was over. Despite all this, though, it was a happy summer. I won’t say I made firm friends, but I did go back to visit patients I remembered with affection. There was the woman who was being prepared for a half-way hostel. “What do you want to do when you get out?” “I want to rob gas meters, Tom.” I wished her luck. She was a pleasant person and it’s good to have a goal in life. And the lady who thought she was the Pope always tried to be nice. “Do you want to hear a dirty joke, Tom?” “Go on then.” (It was always the same joke.) “A white horse down a coal mine.”
Why am I telling the story of my summer instead of reviewing Prem’s book? Because his poems took me back to that summer, which I haven’t really thought about for decades and it has aroused emotions I had forgotten. The hospital, by today’s standards was (like Prem’s) a dreadful place. And (like Prem) I had no idea what I was doing. The nurses had little formal training and relied on experience and instinct. They were wonderful and, like Prem, I am amazed at how they just kept on dealing with the blood and the mess and the violence and, despite everything, created a safe and, astonishingly, kind place for the people who lived there. The doctors (noticeably absent in Prem’s poems too) were never around, leaving the nurses and the nursing assistants (that would be me) to cope, and we despised them. But we got along and nobody died. (Given that we had actual murderers on the wards, this wasn’t something you could take for granted.)
Take it away, Frank:
today they’re okay
on this day at the start of october
I’m proud
this crew of mine
a random ragtag of workers
has pulled together
to make it through the shift
it wasn’t without drama
sickness left our numbers down
experience was light on the ground
and there was madness in the air
…
but today the shift held up
they worked for each other
for the people they’re here for
and it went okay
I feel proud
A good poem can touch the heart and take you to places you may have lost and it can bring back the sad things and the happy. These are good poems. I found them difficult to read, but I’m glad I did. They may not have as much effect on you as on me, but I hope you read them. Frank has things to say and it would be good to hear them.
in aftermath
it seems so clear
there are few mental-health
happy endings
and there are no
simple cures
there’s just the risk
of cynicism
among repeat offenders
with bad habits
and minds that won’t
take the time
to learn
there’s only so much
before enough
of trying to change worlds
enough of listening
catching flak
and shouldering tears
of bearing
other people’s burdens
there is no room
no role for heroes
there is only mental health
and all it requires is you
and I
to be its creatures
by TCW | Nov 19, 2019 | Book review
Terry Tyler’s move into dystopian novels has led her into
increasingly political territory and Hope
is a straightforwardly political book. It foresees a world where a right-wing
government uses draconian powers to round up the economically inactive and,
effectively, imprison them in camps where they are fed contraceptives with the
intention being that the unemployed will eventually die out. There are
sideswipes at lots of other things as well: the surveillance society; state
initiatives to make people live healthier lives; the ubiquity of social media;
the elimination of independent shops by huge chains; the increasing power
exercised by the USA over Britain’s affairs.
Terry Tyler makes a good case that this could happen here, but whether or not
you are convinced probably depends on your political opinions. It’s not a book
you want to give to that aunt of yours who is a stalwart of the local Conservative
party
Like a lot of agitprop (and that’s a word we’ve heard a lot
less of since the 1990s), characterisation is very definitely in second place
to plot. Reading this has made me revisit 1984
and it’s clear that the slightly sketchy drawing of all but the main character
is in a long tradition of books like this, and if we don’t hold it against
George Orwell, we shouldn’t hold it against Terry Tyler. But is her story up there
with Orwell’s classic?
Probably not. Tyler is a talented writer and her prose kept
me going but her opening (an email providing the background to the plot) is
hardly, “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking
thirteen.” Orwell captures the misery of life in 1984 with acute observation of
detail. Here he suggests that the food available is inadequate.
By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast.
Terry Tyler is more specific but somehow fails to capture
the sheer misery of the situation quite as well.
Our induction means we’re late, and there’s not much left. I eat pasta with a vaguely tomato tasting sauce, with a few things in it that might be courgettes.
The world Terry Tyler describes is not quite as grim as in 1984. The possibility of escape exists
and the ending (slight spoiler) is not as remorselessly negative, although I
was pleased that Tyler had resisted the temptation to provide a
straightforwardly happy ending either.
Hope has a lot to say and it says it well. I’ve found myself reviewing it by comparing it with what must surely be one of the most influential novels of the 20th century and that suggests that Tyler must be doing something right. Hope is not 1984, but it is worth reading and thinking about. It ends with the country waiting for the results of a general election. Try to finish it before 12 December.
Hope is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hope-Terry-Tyler-ebook/dp/B07S89DK54
by TCW | Nov 12, 2019 | Book review
Lynn Bryant writes stories of war and love in the Napoleonic
era. One day I may make her hero, Paul Van Daan meet my James Burke just as,
with a sort of inevitability, Lynn and I met up at various conferences about
Napoleonic military history.
Lynn has written several stories about Van Daan’s adventures
in the Peninsular War, but she has now branched out into another series
featuring the exploits of Captain Hugh Kelly, one of the stalwart sailors who
kept Britain safe from Boney. It should be an interesting series. It’s
important to remember that, at the time, the Navy was much more highly regarded
than the army and the war in the peninsula was seen as a bit of a sideshow. The
real land fighting was being done by other countries further north in Europe while
the Navy was engaging French vessels on a regular basis. In fact, our land
offensive in Spain was possible only because of British control of the western
coast of Iberia, maintaining our lines of supply and, in the early days of the
war at least, constantly harassing French positions near the coast.
An Unwilling Alliance
is set in the year before the start of the Peninsular War and centres on the
British attack on Copenhagen in 1807. This is one of those military engagements
that the British prefer to forget all about. British ships bombarded the Danish
capital when Denmark was a neutral country. The aim of the exercise was to make
the Danish fleet unavailable to Napoleon if, as expected, he invaded Denmark.
However, there were inevitably considerable civilian casualties and nowadays
the attack would almost certainly be seen as a war crime. Even at the time (as
reflected in Lynn’s book) there was considerable disquiet about the action.
Unlike me, Lynn is a “proper historian”
(shortlisted for the first Society for Army Historical Research fiction award,
no less) and she provides more military detail than I do, with a lot of very
precise factual information about the deployment of particular regiments and
brigades. I remember reading her fictional account of an action in the
Peninsular War and then later coming across a contemporary description of it in
my own research and realising how well I understood the situation from Lynn’s
story. She really is very good and weaves the detail into her fictional
narrative. But An Unwilling Alliance is not just a convincing war
story. It is also a romance. In fact the opening chapters are almost entirely
devoted to Hugh Kelly’s pursuit of the girl who is clearly destined to become
the love of his life, Roseen Crellin.
I can get very irritated by Georgian romances. A
particularly annoying example was the recent TV adaptation of Sanditon. Young ladies meet unsuitable
men in the peculiar absence of chaperones. Introductions are sloppily informal.
Any real Georgian woman behaving in this way would promptly be labelled a tramp
and unfit for decent society. So I could easily have given up by the end of Chapter
1 as Roseen Crellin wanders unescorted across the hills of the Isle of Man in
contravention of every rule of decent behaviour. However, Lynn gives Roseen a
convincing back-story to explain her behaviour and, more importantly, the poor
girl is shunned by decent society and
we see the social cost of breaking with convention.
When Roseen’s ill-considered behaviour destroys her budding
romance with Hugh Kelly and threatens to ruin her life, the story catches
something of the reality of the limitations that the world placed on young
women back then. And because the social environment and the character of Roseen
have been so well established, when an even more outrageous breach of decent
behaviour results in a near miraculous reuniting of the lovers, I was perfectly
prepared to accept it. This is, after all, as much a romance as a war story
and, though I won’t give the game away with the details, as soon as Roseen sets
out on a particularly inappropriate venture we all have a pretty clear idea of
where it will end up.
Lynn writes in fluid prose. The exciting bits are exciting,
the romantic bits are romantic and the whole thing has a wonderful sense of
place. Lynn is a proud resident of the Isle of Man and her love of the island
comes through. It made me want to visit, and what better recommendation can you
have for a writer’s descriptive powers?
All in all, I found this a book that is difficult to fault.
If you like Georgian romances, Napoleonic war stories, or just a dashed good
read, I do strongly recommend it.
(Some people will think that I’m only saying this because I know Lynn. Any writer friends who’ve been on the wrong end of a criticism of a book that I didn’t like will be happy to disabuse them.)
An Unwilling Alliance is available from Amazon: mybook.to/UnwillingAlliance
by TCW | Oct 8, 2019 | Book review
This is a follow-up to Weird War Two which I reviewed for the Whispering Stories Book Blog back in 2016. I enjoyed that, so the authors sent me a copy of this one to see what I made of it.
The short answer is that it is remarkably similar to the first one. I had thought that they might be scraping the bottom of the barrel, having used up all the best stories, but it turns out that besides killing millions of people, destroying many of the great cities of Western Europe, and wreaking economic havoc on an unprecedented scale, World War II provided an almost endless source of unlikely yarns.
There are stories of great heroism, some of which deserve to be better known. The defiance of those Jews who fled to the woods and raised guerrilla forces against the Nazis is not remembered as it should be.
There are, inevitably, stories of animals that fought alongside the troops – the most unlikely being a bear that fought with the Free Poles. More tragically there is the account of how hundreds of thousands of pets were put down, ostensibly to aid the British war effort.
There are one or two stories that I have never heard before, but which ring horribly true. The fact that Jesse Owens was not insulted by Hitler, but was refused a place at the White House reception for victors is quite shocking. Some other stories, though, are definitely not true. I really want to believe that Polish cavalry charged a German armoured column, but I have met historians who have traced this one down to the misreporting of an incident witnessed by an Italian newspaper correspondent. It should be true, but sadly it isn’t.
There are stories of criminals sheltering in the London blackout and German frauleins being taught how to make an SS husband happy (and no, sex was very definitely not on the curriculum). Anything that is even loosely associated with the war seems to be grist for the authors’ mill.
As with the first book, this one adopts a remorseless “factoid” approach that is well suited to the interests of the Internet generation. It’s designed to be dipped in and out of, but it’s easy to read much more at a time than you meant to.
There are occasional references to sources that have more information, but generally there is an absence of footnotes and you have to take much of what you read on trust. This isn’t a “serious” book about the war but rather, like the BBC, something that seeks to educate, inform, and entertain at the same time. On the whole I think it does this rather well.
by TCW | Oct 1, 2019 | Book review
The subtitle of Messengers is ‘Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, And Why’. In a world that has given us Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, learning the answer to this question seems worth the effort involving reading the book, but having finished it I’m not sure that I’m any clearer.
This is a pop psychology book with all the strengths and weaknesses of that genre. It starts out with a lot of anecdotes – some mind-blowingly banal (somebody who tweeted something on the same day that Barrack Obama tweeted something very similar got millions fewer re-tweets) and some quite fascinating (employees of an Indian entrepreneur with a caring management style offered to work for nothing when her business was in trouble).
Anecdotes, though, obviously don’t make up a convincing argument so the book quotes lots of psychological experiments, some by the authors and some from other sources. The problem with this approach is that you have to take an awful lot on trust. I’m sensitive to this because my degree was in Experimental Psychology and I’m aware that very small differences in the way an experiment was conducted can have quite profound influences on the outcome. It’s difficult to be confident in the results of an experiment which has been reported in a few short paragraphs. This is an inevitable problem with this kind of book and does not reflect badly on the authors, but it does mean that if you accept their arguments you will trust the research and if you don’t you will (probably at least sometimes justifiably) dismiss the research. In fairness, research studies are well footnoted and you can follow them all up, but it is unlikely that the non-specialist reader that this book is clearly aimed at will ever do that. You have to take a lot on trust and, ironically, one of the main messages of the book is that humans are terribly bad at judging when they can take stuff on trust and when they should be more sceptical.
Leaving these reservations aside, what does it tell us? Very crudely put, it suggests that we pay more attention to the characteristics of the messenger than we do to the characteristics of the message. We like leaders to be tall and square jawed, or empathetic and caring. It’s an analysis that explains the appeal of Donald Trump. He is a classic alpha male – bombastic, dominant, and pugilistic. Some of this, according to the book, is innate. He was born with a face shape that is associated with dominance. (There is a photograph that illustrates how facial height to width ratio is calculated, enabling this to be quantified.) Some of it may have been learned over his lifetime: the way he stands, the amount he gestures with his arms, the deep timbre of his voice. Perhaps it’s significant that when comedians who do not share his political approach mimic him they tend to emphasise the speech mannerism where his voice can suddenly move into quite a high register. Or perhaps it’s not – the authors don’t mention this.
That’s part of the trouble. Human behaviour is complex. Few people are consistent. Boris Johnson is often compared to Donald Trump, but untidy blonde hair is not the attribute that the authors think is important. On the attributes they do think important – posture, vocal mannerisms, etc – Boris is almost the antithesis of Trump. He bumbles on, waffles and, to a degree, charms – but he hardly fits the stereotype of an alpha male.
In fairness to the authors, they do acknowledge the complexities that underlie many of the behaviours they analyse – but perhaps still not enough. So, for example, at one point they write:
[Apologies] are … immensely powerful social tools, critical to the repairing or re-establishing of relationships. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd provided a formidable demonstration of this when, in the course of a four minute speech in February 2008 he issued a public apology for the way in which indigenous Australians had been treated years before he himself had achieved public office. He recognised, he said, that he needed to “apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians”.
Much later, in a separate discussion of apologies, the authors point out (in line, as it happens, with my own review of the literature1) that an apology is only likely to be affected if it is “made quickly… made sincerely. And it needs to be made in a way that shows remorse and commitment to change in the future.” Kevin Rudd’s four minute speech could not possibly have met these criteria and yet the authors explicitly link it to “the highest satisfaction rating of any Australian Prime Minister”.
Obviously there is more going on than can be covered in one relatively short volume. In fact some of the simplifications border on the absurd. At one point the book argues that an experiment showed that facial features are so crucial that “a glance at the faces of candidates running for election was all that was needed to make an informed, and largely accurate, estimate of who would (and indeed did) win.” Whilst what a candidate looks like can be a significant factor, the suggestion that facial appearance can be used to accurately predict the outcome of real elections would, if true, suggest that the selection of legislators by popular ballot is an idea that needs to be reviewed. Personally I am not suggesting that we abolish democracy, but that we view statements like this with grave suspicion.
There is usable, and indeed valuable, stuff in this book. It does no harm for us to be reminded how much we allow irrelevant assessments of people’s social class, dominance, or empathy to affect what should be rational judgements. This can even extend to favouring loan offers which are accompanied by a photograph of an attractive woman rather than an attractive interest rate. There are practical lessons to be learned, too. My wife does some university lecturing and I have passed on the information that lecturers who make more arm movements whilst speaking are perceived as better teachers by their students. In the new world of university education, where student assessment is critical to career advancement, I can confidently predict a fair amount from arm waving next term.
Overall, though, I found this an irritating book – neither an easily read series of anecdotes nor a serious academic study, it repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered. If, however, you honestly believe that you would never form your initial (and surprisingly firm) view of somebody based on the logo on their polo shirt, then perhaps you need to read it.
Note
- In a previous life I did a major review of complaints behaviour for (of all places) the Cabinet Office. Williams T and Goriely T (1994) Complaints: Literature Review, Cabinet Office
by TCW | Sep 17, 2019 | Book review
This is the second of M J Logue’s books about Major Russell and his young wife, Thomazine, and I’m happy to admit that I’m a fan. What I love about books is the characters and their relationship. Essentially these are love stories for grown-ups. This is still more true of A Deceitful Subtlety than the first book, An Abiding Fire, for the Russells are now settled in the Chilterns, concentrating on the rearing of sheep and raising a family. Respectability beckons, though theirs is still a passionate relationship.
It still felt odd, to be quite as bare as an egg – without even your shift – in the middle of the afternoon. Thomazine would have thought she would grow used to it by now, but it seemed not. No matter how much she found herself tangled up in bed sheets in the middle of the day, it still felt wicked.
We follow their falling outs and their making up, their misunderstandings and their struggles to iron out the wrinkles in their relationship. There are more of them than usual, for Thomazine is pregnant and moody and her temper is not helped by the sudden appearance of a woman who may, or may not, be an old flame of her husband’s. When husband and old flame have to journey to Bruges, Thomazine goes too, braving sea-sickness and the funny foreign ways of the Dutch so that she can keep an eye on her man.
There’s a nice sense of ‘foreignness’ to Bruges and an interesting picture of the English émigré community there, though I got little sense of what Bruges itself was like, which is sad as much of the town (a UNESCO World Heritage site) still stands and its beauty deserves to be celebrated.
Why are they in Bruges? I’m honestly not quite sure. There is a notional reason, but as with much of the plot, it didn’t quite make sense. This is, to be honest, not a book you read for its plot. In fact, I was completely bemused about a lot of it (no details because of spoilers) until I read the very long and fascinating historical note. It’s clear that Logue has researched her period extremely well, but if you don’t already have a definite grip on some minor characters of the time, you’ll likely have no idea what’s going on for much of the book. Who is William Scot and why are we looking for him? The historical note explains, but in the novel itself we are just constantly assured that he is a man of mystery.
“I would have said to you that there was not a man in this city about whom I did not know something, even if it were only that he keeps a second household in lodgings off the Mariastraat, or favours this tailor over that. I know nothing at all about Mijnheer Scot, and that troubles me. No one speaks of him, no one at all. He is like a man with no face, you know? He is alive, he breathes, so much I know. But no one speaks of what he is as a man.”
This does leave rather a hole where one of the main characters should be – an irritation that becomes more marked as it turns out that another person we meet is a fascinating historical character who is lost in a rather insubstantial sub-plot. It does raise questions though – like why are people so concerned about a man of very little importance while showing so little interest in somebody of real significance and – probably more relevantly to a writer – somebody that the reader will have heard of?
No matter. In some books the slightly rickety plot would be a real problem, but fans won’t be reading it for the plot. We want to know if Thomazine’s pregnancy will end safely, or if the scheming minx who started this all off will have her wicked way with Russell. (She won’t, of course, but will Thomazine believe this?) We may even end up caring about the latest addition to the cast – a rather repulsive small black dog who I fear we are all destined to come to love.
If all the domesticity gets a bit cloying (I didn’t think so, but it’s possible someone might), be assured that there is violence and sudden death and even torture (though of an anonymous individual in what are literally “noises off”). You may be confused at times, but you won’t be bored and you will (I hope) lose yourself in the love story.
And did I mention that Logue just writes really well? I show my age by caring about this in a world of plot-driven stories where no sentence runs to more than fifteen words and the vocabulary is deliberately unchallenging. Here, for no reason at all, she is describing a bit of excitement while they are penning their sheep to be shorn. If you’ve ever watched (or tried to help) as sheep are penned up, this will have a horribly familiar ring to it.
A chalky-blue butterfly settled briefly on Thomazine’s wrist, its threadlike legs tickling her hot skin, and she smiled down at it. Had she not been looking down, her eyes would not been caught by the old bellwether. A cunning villain, that sheep, with eyes as yellow and knowing as the Devil’s and twelve years of malevolent experience under his fleece. His witless ladies were milling and bleating in panic, but he’d been here before, that one. His baleful slotted eyes met Thomazine’s.
And he was out, the hell-spawned eunuch, forcing his scrawny besmottered flanks through the meagre gap in the hurdles. Where he went his ladies followed, and suddenly there was a flood of pounding hooves as the rest of the flock went with him.
If you don’t love those paragraphs, this probably isn’t a book for you. But if you do, you’re in for a treat.
