The month of January takes its name from the Roman god Janus. If you’re feeling confused at the beginning of the new year, then Janus is the god for you. In Roman mythology he was the ruler of both endings and beginnings. Just for good measure Janus was also in charge of transitions, of the middle ground, between such opposites as barbarism and civilisation, city and countryside, or youth and adulthood. So you could say he was in charge of everything.

Out with the old, in with the new, business as usual – it was all the same to Janus.

Janus was not the senior god of the Roman world, but he was perhaps the most powerful. He had to be called upon at the beginning of every religious service involving any other god. After all he ruled gateways, including the door through to the godly realm. Whether you are dealing with endings or beginnings or anything in between, January is named after a god who kept an eye on all those things, and treated them just the same.

Happy new year

As 2016 ended, I decided to read Ernest Hemingway’s famous book about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom The Bell Tolls.  On the first page, he quotes those famous lines from John Donne:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.

In 2016, as part of a worldwide trend towards division, the UK was a clod washed away by the sea.  Teresa May has since told us to be unified, but at what stage does a group of people become unified?  At what point do borders truly reflect the oneness of the people within them, so that they can say, “this is who we are”?

Reading Hemingway I would say, never.

The novel’s central character is Robert Jordan, who in an earlier life taught Spanish at an American university.  Now like many other idealistic young men in the 1930s, he has joined the International Brigade of volunteers fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.  He has gone behind enemy lines to help a partisan band of republican Spanish.  Finding a situation that is not exactly black and white, he reflects on how hard it is to find unity amongst people:

“Of course they turned on you.  They turned on you often, but they always turned on everyone.  They turned on themselves.  If you had three together two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other.”

That is the reality of people living together.  There is no final cohesive unit of humanity.  People chase after a secure sense of identity when such a thing does not exist.

The book pulls apart all the usual ways people consider themselves to be together.  National identity means nothing; comrades in a life or death struggle seem just as likely to shoot each other, as they are to shoot at the enemy.  Even an individual seems divided.  Robert Jordan has many arguments with himself.  But set against all this are moments which can only be described as transcendent in the unity they describe. These blissful interludes involve a love affair between Robert Jordan and Marie, a young woman the partisan band have rescued from fascist captors during a raid on a train.  The pressure of the situation drives these two together, so that in them we see the other side of the coin. Unity can exist in division.

In a world that wants to divide itself in pursuit of identity, For Whom The Bell Tolls should be required reading.

I’ve just finished the Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s famous dystopian novel published in 1985.  Once I recovered sufficiently to think straight, I decided that, for me, the Handmaid’s Tale is about fundamentalism. It describes a society which thinks that certain truths do not change, as though you can brush your teeth and drink orange juice just afterwards, and the orange juice will always taste like orange juice.

Religious zealots have taken over the government of America.  They respond to the ills of modern western life, both moral and physical, by creating a society of merciless rigidity.  A falling birth rate has resulted in the creation of a caste of women called Handmaids, used by powerful men to bear children for them.  The narrator is one of these unfortunate women.  From her perspective, little things we take for granted look very different.  For example, she plays a secret game of Scrabble. While for us Scrabble is harmless fun, in the dark Handmaid future, such apparently spurious ways to pass the time are outlawed. Scrabble is a forbidden pleasure, akin to drug taking.

For the Handmaid, telling a story becomes, like Scrabble, something dangerous.  Telling a story is about communication, something that can only happen when there are different points of view to share.  In the Handmaid’s world there is only one point of view, that of the government.   For them orange juice always has to taste the same, whether you’ve brushed your teeth or not. So there are no books and no writing.  Books suggest that there are other equally valuable truths out there.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a fascinating, scary and all-encompassing meditation on social ills, with the book itself becoming part of the struggle it describes. It deserves its status as a modern classic of speculative fiction.

Neuromancer is a genre defining book, written at a time when computer technology was about to change the way people lived.  1982 saw the standardisation of the Internet Protocols, which gave the potential for world wide proliferation of computer networks.  1983 saw the introduction of Apple’s Lisa, the first commercial personal computer to use a “graphical user interface”, the now familiar visual way of interacting with a computer using icons, menus and windows. Then in 1984, Ace Books published William Gibson’s Neuromancer, imagining a future where computer users can enter a shared “matrix” of linked data, which opens up in a visual way.

This is a historic book capturing an important moment in the development of world changing technology.  It is written in a visual style, like a comic in words.  However, this comic is a tough read, densely written with sudden jumps between scenes, often over the course of a short sentence.  These scenes can be in the real world, in the matrix world, or in a combination of both. It is impossible to skim read.  By the same token you also have to just let the writing open out in front of you.  If you want to know exactly what is going on at all times, this will be a frustrating book.

So is it a good book?  While Neuromancer may have captured a moment in history, when people began to interact widely and visually with computers, it is inevitably less successful in viewing the future.  There are so many anachronisms – pay phones, floppy discs, space stations with magazine stands and libraries of books.  Imagine a space ship full of glossy magazines and books straining into orbit when you can just send up weightless data to a screen.  The story involves data thefts – an idea which has a modern feel – but this involves hackers shutting down security systems in a physical building, so that people can get in there and steal a CD.

Sill, in making a judgement we should bear in mind that science fiction does not so much reveal the future as use a futuristic scenario to tell us about ourselves in the here and now.  That is where the real quality of Neuromancer lies.  The story portrays people with vast ambitions to develop human potential in partnership with computer technology.  But there is some wonderful, subtle imagery suggesting a kind of Buddhist stillness in this bewildering, violent, flashy, fast moving future.  For example, the magazine stocked space station, the setting for the story’s second half, contains a city built on the vast, curving inner surface of a hollow sphere.  There are two main roads in this city, a ring road called Rue de Jules Verne, and a road running across the length, called Desiderata.  If you go far enough around the Rue de Jules Verne, you will only ever come to Desiderata from one side or the other.

Desiderata is of course a prose poem written by Max Ehrmann in 1927. The tone of the poem is revealed by its opening sentence:

“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.”

Go far enough around the science fiction circle of Jules Verne and you will only ever come back to the peace and acceptance of Desiderata.  This is the vision I found interesting, the stillness combined with all the disorienting action.  For me this nuanced view of human development constitutes the lasting quality of Neuromancer, allowing us to overlook details about pay phones and magazine stands in space.

Some of the most successful science fiction has gone back to the past in imagining the future.  2001 a Space Odyssey starts in the earliest days of human history before catapulting out to a space station in Earth orbit.  Jurassic Park brings back dinosaurs. Then of course, there’s Back to the Future.

J.G Ballad’s story The Drowned World is an archetypal story of the future that includes a vision of the past.  The sun has become hotter, creating a flooded, tropical Earth.  The climate has returned to a state that prevailed during the Triassic period.  Human survivors of this watery apocalypse find themselves drifting back in dreams to an earlier incarnation of life on Earth.  Life has a buried memory of all that has gone before, and those buried memories begin to emerge during sleep.

This is a great premise for a story that can range from past to future.  I would also say that the idea has biological accuracy. I once read a book by the evolutionary theorist and writer Lynn Margullis tracing the echoes of ancient life in our own cells.  She points out, for example, that the salt balance of human tissue fluids mimics the salt balance of the ancient ocean from which life first emerged onto the land.  (See Microcosmos by Lynn Margullis for more.)

So this is a fascinating scenario for a book, which in many ways is poetically explored.  There are a few downsides, however. The dialogue between the characters can be that of “British schoolteachers hoisted out of the 1930s”, as Martin Amis puts it in an introduction.  The middle part of the story, centred on an evil looter, also becomes very conventional – the rescue of a damsel in distress trapped in the bad guy’s lair.  The damsel herself is vapid and lifeless, trying to hang on to the superficial cosmetics of her former self, even as she sinks into her Triassic dreams. All of the characters, for that matter, are somewhat two-dimensional.

Then again, Ballard is a clever writer who uses conventional structure while giving it a twist. The conventional part of the story coincides with people trying to hang onto a world that has gone – during a section when the evil looter drains part of flooded London.  In this way it’s as if the creaky old world emerges from the flood in hackneyed old plot devices. As for the characters, Will Self makes an interesting suggestion in an essay written for the reissue of The Drowned World in 2013.  Self writes that Ballard is not creating characters in the normal sense, with backstories designed to make us identify with them and read on. Instead, these are archetypes of people responding to change.  Some are vigorous in their resistance, wanting to hang onto what they know.  Others are accepting, waiting to see what the new situation will bring. The damsel in distress is a combination of these reactions. In that sense The Drowned World is more of a myth or a fairy story than a novel, despite aspects of the novel that are straight out of the Ian Fleming style of writing.

I don’t know if I buy this idea entirely, but I buy it enough to see that this is a fascinating book, interesting more for what lies beneath the water than for what floats on the top.

Recently I read a book called The Populist Explosion which tried to explain to me why Europe and the United States have decided to vote in highly unusual ways.  Getting to the end, I wasn’t much the wiser.  Initially I thought it was all about the economically marginalised and the left-behind.  But then I learned that one of the most extreme populist movements in Europe can be found in Denmark, which has the world’s second most successful economy.  Similarly, the UK decided to leave the EU even though it had one of the strongest economies in Europe.

Then I read a BBC article called The Trump-Brexit Voter Revolt which told me that Trump was not particularly successful with voters on a low income.

So I have another theory.  This all started with TV shows where wannabe celebrities try to be pop stars, or where people who are already celebrities do horrible trials in the jungle, or learn to dance, ice skate or ski jump.  In all these shows, viewers vote to save the contestants they want to remain in the programme.  And in virtually all of these shows the audience has at one time or another decided it would be fun to vote for the most unlikely candidate, whether they are scared of spiders, have two left feet and no sense of rhythm, or can’t sing very well.   Two Scottish lads lasted long enough on the X Factor one year to get under the skin of the establishment, personified by Simon Cowell.  In 2008, John Sargent had to leave Strictly Come Dancing because he thought he might win.  John’s run of success dismayed the government of Strictly, led by PM Len Goodman.  This year the populist candidate on Strictly is none other than that former member of the establishment, Ed Balls.

The same populist pattern then crossed to the United States.  In the final of American Idol 2009, underdog Kris Allen beat the heavily favoured front runner Adam Lambert.  The writer Michael Prell tells me that over 50 million Americans voted for Kris.  Not many of them, however, went out and bought his record – only 0.16% of those 50 million decided they wanted his debut album.  It was the story of the underdog coming through that mattered, not how good that underdog was at singing.

This is where people realised how much fun it is to use votes to dismay the establishment.  It started with Pop Idol, veered off through votes to give crazy names to Antarctic research vessels, and ended up giving us Brexit, Corbyn and Trump.

It might not be so much fun now.

The Design Museum which reopens in November celebrates a process which is inextricably linked with the modern world. The period from 1770 to 1914 saw European society change profoundly. Industrialisation meant that craftsmen could no longer make spontaneous decisions about what they made. The actual creation of a product was increasingly mechanised, and a product’s form had to be worked out carefully beforehand, by someone who became known as a designer. This process began late in the eighteenth century, and is well illustrated by developments in textile production. In 1764 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, a machine with sixteen spindles that greatly speeded up the spinning process. By 1769 this machine was being sold widely. Before any item was made using the spinning jenny it had to be planned, and then put into production.

But it wasn’t only technical planning that designers were responsible for. As they were designing the process to create a product, it occurred to many that planned changes to a product would help sales. From the 1760s the Lyons silk industry introduced twice yearly collections to enhance differentiation between products, to stimulate trade, and to combat copying. By 1800 patterns in printed cotton for dresses changed routinely with each season. For furniture fabrics new patterns were produced every two to three years.

Apple Headquarters on Infinite Loop, Cupertino (Photo by Joe Ravi CC.BY.SA.3.0)

So designers created the technical ability of modern industry to produce products efficiently. They also created the idea of fashion that would keep people buying those products.  This process is exactly the same as the one applying now with something like the Apple iPhone.  The iPhone is upgraded annually, with a smaller upgrade within this cycle every six months.  These upgrades include both technical and aesthetic changes.  This design philosophy first emerged in the Lyons silk industry of the 1760s and has been travelling around an infinite loop ever since.

We by Yevgney Zamyatin is famous as founding the genre of dystopian science fiction.  Written in Russia between 1919 and 1921, the novel imagines a future society based on surveillance and control. Glass-walled apartments allow the state to keep an eye on everyone at all times.

I thought parts of the novel were wonderful. The best bits for me were the descriptions of an obsessive love affair, between the book’s protagonist – a highly-strung space ship engineer known as D503 – and a rebellious young woman, known as I-330, who drinks, smokes and talks revolution. D503’s love affair causes him to challenge assumptions that the state is all knowing and all good. He starts to feel like an individual. At the same time, he wants to lose his newfound identity in the beguiling eyes of his feisty girlfriend.

“Like a crystal I was dissolving in her, in I-330.”

The book is not simply a portrayal of an oppressive controlling state. This is a nuanced study of relationships, both personal and social. It has no clear messages to suit propagandists of any kind. D-503 likes maths, and realises that just as there is no final number in mathematics, so in life there is no final revolution. Life keeps going, with doubt and uncertainty keeping the wheels turning:

“Man is like a novel: up to the last page one does not know what the end will be. It would not be worth reading otherwise.”

I also liked Zamyatin’s quirky humour, not what you might expect from the father of dystopian novels. The manuscript of We is part of the story. As D-503 writes it, he describes various misadventures that affect his growing pile of paper. At one point, I-330 leaves her stockings lying on page 124 of the open manuscript. As well as making me chuckle, this also made the point that books really are just a pile of paper. No book, no philosophy, is the final word in wisdom. We is about discovering that such wisdom does not exist.

Unlike Ursula le Guin, I wouldn’t say this is the perfect science fiction novel. The plot is creaky in places, with sudden jumps that sometimes left me bewildered – particularly towards the end. Considering all that D-503 gets up to, the secret police seem rather absent, which was part of an occasional mismatch between actions and consequences.

Overall, however, this is a historic book, up there with the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as one of the foundations of science fiction.

An envoy arrives on a rather backward planet called Winter.  His mission is to try to persuade Winter’s leaders to join a wider confederation of planets.  Blinkered nationalism, however, refuses to see the benefits of cooperation.  The envoy remarks sadly on his conversation with a stubborn king: “All I’ve told him means to him simply that his power is threatened, his kingdom is a dust mote in space, his kingship is a joke to men who rule a hundred worlds.”

Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is best known for its feminist theme, the inhabitants of Winter containing both female and male potential within one body.  But the book’s fascinating meditations are not confined to the relationships of men and women. Gender politics are part of wider duality informing religion and politics generally.  So wide ranging is the story’s scope that within a few paragraphs, this book published in 1969 was making me think of news I had read that day about Brexit and American elections. In an age of resurgent nationalism, The Left Hand of Darkness has much to tell us.

The minister Estraven could be giving advice to nationalists everywhere when he says: “No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism.  I mean fear.  The fear of the other.”

Did you know that the experience of staying at a hotel today is actually the re-imagining of an Edwardian country house weekend?  I had my own modern country house weekend at Goodwood recently.  Here’s how history conspired to give me my great few days:

If you were wealthy and well connected in the early twentieth century you might have received an invite to join Edward VII and his family at Sandringham.  Here a guest would enjoy luxurious accommodation, and begin their day with a strange meal, which we know now as the typical hotel breakfast…

“At Sandringham guests were expected to come down for breakfast between nine and ten o’clock. This was served at small tables, an innovative departure from the ‘long board’… Breakfast was a substantial meal; on the sideboard spirit lamps kept hot huge silver dishes of porridge, eggs, bacon, deviled kidneys, finian haddock, kedgeree. Another sideboard held a variety of cold meats, pressed beef, ham, tongue and game. China and Indian tea, coffee and chocolate, bread rolls, toast, scones and muffins, jams and preserves and fresh fruit were all laid ready.” (Bentley-Cranch Edward VII Image of an Era P 78).

After your breakfast, a program of various outdoor activities would start, usually hunting, riding and shooting in summer, and ice skating in winter.

With the aristocracy taking its lead from the king, other powerful families organised their own special weekends.  Then in a trickle-down effect, the fledgling hotel industry adopted and developed the format for a wider audience.  There have been some welcome changes to meet  modern tastes. Golf, for example, is a gentle evolution of hunting and shooting, with golfers walking through an idealised hunting park, taking their “shots”, hoping to bag a birdie, or even an eagle.  Today the loader offering a loaded gun to his master on a shoot at Sandringham has been replaced by a caddie offering golf clubs.

Echoes of Sandringham can be heard by any hotel guest, but they were particularly clear during my stay at Goodwood. There was the breakfast of course, which, if you stay at the Goodwood Hotel, you eat looking out at the golf course.  Then you might go off and and visit the famous horse race course.  Alternatively there’s the classic circuit for racing cars, the modern replacement of horses, the horse racing heritage seen in terms such as “paddock”.

I had a great few days enjoying an experience once confined to the few.