I finished Vanity Fair last night at about 1am, getting to the last page in a state of shock.  This morning I wrote the following review for Goodreads.

Novels originally developed from morality tracts designed to teach readers right from wrong.  In its own beautifully twisted way, Vanity Fair follows in this tradition.  The title of the book derives from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegorical Christian journey leading from worldly sin to heavenly virtue.  The difference with Vanity Fair is that when readers take its moral journey, they climb aboard a white knuckle roller coaster, with crazy loops showing up where down should be. The story’s virtuous characters find their good intentions leading to bad ends, while the vices of darker characters can ironically work to bring about good outcomes.  Make no mistake, this novel is unflinching.  People of a sentimental bent may feel that everyone always deserves the kindness of a second or third chance.  Well if you think that, read Vanity Fair. The portrayal of Rebecca will put you right, and persuade you that occasionally a person comes along who is constitutionally without empathy, who enjoys manipulation for the sake of it, and is adept at hiding their nature by aping the appearance of respectability.  To someone like Rebecca, the quality of seeing the best in everyone is a weakness to be exploited.  Reader beware.

 

These  books offer both practical advice, and a sense of friendship and support which is often lacking for a new writer.  Happy reading.

How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey

Wisecracking advice, support and tough love from one of America’s top writing teachers.

The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman

A New York based literary agent explains the reasons why manuscripts are rejected, and offers solutions to common problems.

The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler

A classic of the how-to-write genre.  The Writer’s Journey is a study of mythological patterns informing story telling.  Don’t expect advice on adverbs. This is a book about basic plot patterns, with reference to Hollywood films.  It’s a fascinating book, interesting for what it tells you about the history of humanity, as well as for offering help with writing.

Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose by Constance Hale

This is the place for your adverbs and many other nuts and bolts. The seemingly dry subject of grammar is brought to life with great examples of fine writing. There is nothing boring about a book that helps you to aspire to such work.

Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within by Dennis Palumbo

A lovely, warm book helping a writer to explore their life experience for the raw material of writing.

 

Reading Room at the British Musem

When I first arrived at university, innocent and impressionable,  I talked to a glamorous third year who didn’t read much because she thought it would interfere with the uniqueness of her writing style. She also corrected the spelling of a note I put up in the kitchen.

I have to say, at that time it was easy to find myself persuaded by the girl’s view.  Apart from the fact that she was attractive, a third year, and good at spelling, this was a stage in my writing career when admiring a book would immediately make me want to write in the style of its particular author.  Perhaps literary quarantine was required.  Maybe the usual advice for aspiring writers to read all the time wasn’t the right way to go.  It didn’t, of course,  take long to abandon this idea  I enjoyed reading for one thing, and while I was willing to accept sacrifices to be a writer – career insecurity, lack of marriage offers and so on – giving up reading was a step too far.   I also quickly came to the conclusion that it was precisely the wrong thing to do, because it’s a simple fact that a writer’s work is not unique. Each genre is like a great big soap opera with many writers contributing episodes.  Individual writers might not all be together in a big room, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t  working together.    A successful writer is like a scientist who we associate with a breakthrough.  This individual, for all their fame,  in reality worked with many other people, both directly in their working lives, and indirectly in basing their work on the efforts of others who went before.  People like a clear picture, a good story which focuses on an individual.  But while Thomas Edison, for example,  is meant to have invented all kinds of things, he was actually a man who ran research teams, the combined efforts of which became associated with the name Edison.   Writing is like that. Finding your own voice does not involve avoiding other writers, but rather finding out how your voice fits in with them. People imagine a writer engaging in solo effort in their attic.  In reality it’s more like singing in a choir, getting the odd solo if you’re lucky.  At the minute I admit that I am part of the chorus.  But no matter.  The soloists depend on the chorus behind them, and one way or another, successful or unsuccessful, we are all part of that common effort.  I will keep going, and if you’re a struggling writer I wish you the best.  We’re all in it together.

 

Looking up the hill at Robin Hood’s Bay

During our summer holiday we visited Robin Hood’s Bay. The entire town, tumbling down a steep Yorkshire cliff, was once an eighteenth century smuggling machine. To avoid tariffs, goods would be unloaded at night in the bay, either to be clandestinely stored in wall cavities and under floorboards, or carried via a hidden route through the houses and narrow lanes to the clifftop, where carts waited to move them away to market. The rewards were considerable, as would be expected when all wealth ultimately comes from trade. The risks, however, were great. Smuggling was a crime entirely created by governments, for which governments reserved their severest punishments.

Today Robin Hood’s Bay is a charming tourist destination and smuggling is not what it was. This is because, until recently, the world has generally supported an international trading system which does not use protective tariffs. A survey of American economists conducted by Robert Whaples in 2006 found that 87.5% believed the general benefits to society of free trade considerably outweighed local disadvantages. The overwhelming opinion of professional economists is that society would have benefited if the people of Robin Hood’s Bay had been allowed to carry on their business in peace.

There are dark echoes of the past in the way today’s populist politicians are calling for protective economic policies. This is part of a general trend of people wanting to retreat behind the apparent security of various borders. Politicians who support the rational idea of free trade, basing their support on the advice of the world’s leading economists, are vilified.  Just as smugglers of Robin Hood’s Bay were deemed criminals, one of Hilary Clinton’s “crimes” as defined by the recent Republican convention, is her past advocacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement which established open markets in 1994.  Personally I think Robin Hood’s Bay works better as a tourist destination that a smuggling operation.  It is somewhere to remember the bad old days, and learn the lessons of history.

The balcony in Maidstone, Kent, where Benjamin Disraeli gave his victory speech when he first became an MP in 1837

Theresa May in her first speech outside Number 10 said that she was a one nation Conservative.  As it happened, I was just finishing Sybil, by nineteenth century Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli – the book from which the One Nation idea derives.  Sybil, set in northern England, describes a calamitous divide between rich and poor, a division so dramatic that people live entirely different existences within one country.

Sybil certainly does not shy away from the iniquities of social division.  The descriptions of poverty, oppression and infanticide are comparable with Dickens.  Nevertheless, the complexity of the book comes from showing that the two nation divide is also an illusion.  There are all kinds of plot twists showing complex links between the two worlds.  Today Labour leaders like Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell cling to the illusion of worker solidarity; but as they face another day of rows, resignations and turbulence, perhaps they should read the following passage from Disraeli’s book as the lovely Sybil comes to realise that her cause is not as straightforward as it appears:

There was not that strong and rude simplicity in its organization she had supposed. The characters were more various, the motives more mixed, the classes more blended, the elements of each more subtle and diversified, than she had imagined. The People she found was not that pure embodiment of unity of feeling, of interest, and of purpose, which she had pictured in her abstractions. The people had enemies among the people: their own passions; which made them often sympathize, often combine, with the privileged.

As a story, Disraeli shamelessly uses that tried and tested Mills and Boon device, where a man and woman, though apparently hopelessly divided by wealth, find unlikely love – the worthy shop girl catching the eye of the billionaire idea.  This familiar plot becomes part of Disraeli’s bigger argument about the complexity of social divisions.

There are long nineteenth century sentences to deal with; and at some points Disraeli gaily abandons that good advice to show rather than tell.  But this is a great book, one of the most influential in the history of modern British government, with continuing relevance to the politics we see today.

 

Portrait of Harold Wilson by Ruskin Spear

Prime ministers are usually assessed historically by what they did. With the Chilcot Report giving a damning report on Tony Blair’s decision to support America’s invasion of Iraq, it is instructive to recall a prime minister who in a similar situation did nothing. Sometimes doing nothing is very difficult, and achieves more than any grand scheme. Prime ministers of the past such as Robert Walpole and Lord Melbourne were masters of doing nothing. But it is Harold Wilson’s success in holding off the people who wanted him to act which is most relevant at the moment. The best illustration of Harold Wilson’s cunning ability to do nothing is seen in his reaction to the Vietnam War. Wilson, like Tony Blair after him, came under intense pressure from the United States to commit British troops to a highly dubious foreign war. Unlike Blair, Wilson resisted the pressure. The situation was complex. Britain was relying on American aid to support a weak pound. So Wilson tried to give an impression of involvement. Foreign secretary Michael Stewart publicly defended the American position in Vietnam, and offered to mediate in peace talks. This was a lost cause, but it gave the impression of action, while keeping British soldiers from getting involved. Hopeless peace initiatives also helped keep certain aggressive elements in the Labour party happy. Wilson was to be heavily criticised for his seeming support for America in the Vietnam War. He couldn’t visit a university campus without students – supported by grants his government had instigated – calling him a fascist pig. Wilson it seemed had done nothing. Little did the students know the effort and resilience that had gone into doing nothing.

 

The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis is an alternate history.  In seventeenth century Europe, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens visits Isaac Newton in Cambridge, looks at his work on alchemy, and makes a massive breakthrough. The mysterious aim of alchemy, to win the ability to transmute matter and find a universal elixir of life, becomes a reality in the shape of clockwork robots imbued with the self-aware force of life.  To maintain control of this technology, Dutch clockmakers imbue their creations with a ferocious sense of obligation that demands absolute obedience through pain.  Using these robots Holland becomes the world’s leading power.  Only the French hold out in eastern Canada. The story then follows the fortunes of a rogue “clakker” robot who goes on the run after coming into possession of a mysterious lens, freeing him from his internal compulsions.

The story itself is rather James Bond in its feel. A French spymaster tries to help the freedom loving clakker.  Their efforts end up, as usual, in an underground lair, the setting for fighting and explosions.  Perhaps it is right that the story follows this highly conventional pattern, since it is really about how we might find freedom in a life that demands we follow a destined path.   While the clakkers have an overwhelming internal obligation to do their masters’ bidding, there are also suggestions that humans have obligations of their own built into them.  This human element of compulsion becomes overt when the Dutch secret police capture a priest, acting as a French spy.  They place clakker controls within his brain, and send him off against his will to spy on the French in Canada.  His only hope of escape is the lens in the possession of the rogue clakker.

The freedom-offering lens is the work of a Dutch contemporary of Huygens, philosopher and lens maker Baruch Spinoza.  Ironically, Spinoza’s reputation as a philosopher is based on his Ethics in which he argues that all human life is destined.  Famously in Ethics he says : ″the infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. … All believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak.”

Given all this, why is it a lens ground by Spinoza offers the chance of freedom?  Perhaps the answer lies in Spinoza’s idea that we can become aware of the compulsions that drive us.  We can detach emotions from their external cause and in this way master them.

Whatever conclusion you might come to, the important thing is that Ian Tregellis gets you thinking.  The book encourages a reader to explore all kinds of things.  I was off reading about Huygens, Spinoza, Descartes and Newton.  This is a very interesting book.  I recommend it.

 

 

 

 

 

England may have expected, but it wasn’t just England who answered the call.

The crew of HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar by nationality from Janes’s Naval History – 441 English, 64 Scots, 63 Irish, 18 Welsh, 22 Americans, 7 Dutch, 6 Swedes, 4 Italians, 4 Maltese, 3 Frenchmen, 3 Norwegians, 3 Germans, 3 Shetlanders, 2 Swiss, 2 Channel Islanders, 2 Portuguese, 2 Danes, 1 Russian, 1 African, 1 Manxman, and 9 men from the West Indies. So that’s a third of the crew of the Victory not classified as English.

“England expects” flag signal on the rigging of HMS Victory in 2005

This week there will be many people arguing over Britain’s past and future. It is worth bearing in mind that if Britain has a past as a powerful country, then that would not have been possible without European influence. I am reading Benjamin Disraeli’s book Sybil at the moment, and Disraeli reminded me of how the introduction of Dutch methods of finance underpinned British power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These ideas were introduced to Britain when Parliament arranged for Dutch monarch William of Orange to replace James II in 1688. Disraeli was not approving of Dutch finance, since the acceptance of national debt dates from that time. But all the power that the British empire wielded at its peak could not have happened without Dutch financial ideas.

The economic historian P.G.M. Dickinson writes of the crucial advantage of public borrowing during the Napoleonic Wars: “More important even than alliances… was the system of public borrowing… which enabled England to spend on war out of all proportion to its tax revenue, and then throw into the struggle with France and its allies the decisive margin in ships and men…” Acceptance of debt meant that Britain could outspend France, which was a bigger and essentially richer country. And it was the Dutch with their history of banking and commerce which allowed Britain to do this. These advantages allowed Britain to quickly recover from the huge setback of losing the American colonies in 1781 and become the world’s most powerful country up until the end of the nineteenth century. So even when Britain was at its most dominant, it is salutary to remember that this position would not have been possible without a Dutch king who took the throne in 1688.

The Republic is Plato’s famous fourth century BC description of the ultimate just society.

I have just finished this book, and I loathed it.

The Republic begins by asking how we can identify morality. Plato sees morality as a set of rules. He suggests putting individual desires second to general interests, fostering unity, and playing your part in a society where there is rigid specialisation of roles. Plato, however, has no conception that morality might have less to do with rules and more to do with empathy.  Morality is actually an extension of the ability to understand how others are feeling, which tends to count against actions that are selfish or hurtful. We also call empathy “having a conscience”. The thing is Plato shows no ability to understand what other people are feeling.

In the sections where he condemns poetry, for example, it is the sense of empathy that really irritates Plato.  Reading Homer, or any other writer, he is appalled when he is made to feel the pain of others:

“When Homer or another tragedian represents the grief of one of the heroes, they have him deliver a lengthy speech of lamentation or even have him sing a dirge and beat his breast; and when we listen to all this, even the best of us, as I’m sure you’re aware, feels pleasure. We surrender ourselves, let ourselves be carried along, and share the hero’s pain; and then we enthuse about the skill of any poet who makes us feel particularly strong feelings… However, you also appreciate that when we’re afflicted by trouble in our own lives, then we take pride in the opposite—in our ability to endure pain without being upset. We think that this is manly behaviour, and that only women behave in the way we were sanctioning earlier… So,’ I said, ‘instead of being repulsed by the sight of the kind of person we’d regret and deplore being ourselves, we enjoy the spectacle and sanction it. Is this a proper way to behave?”

This is typical of much of Plato’s criticism of literature, which he sees only in terms of false representation of the world, rather than in terms of communication between people.

From this basic lack of empathy derives all the things I hated about The Republic.  Plato is able to dismiss the little people in society, lie to them about why exactly they have to accept their rigid role in life, let babies die if they are judged unworthy, let sick workers die for want of medical attention because if they are that sick they are better off dead. He can suggest that no woman keep her own child, or that people do not form stable marriages with each other. Plato had no idea how people would be feeling in all these situations, and therefore is immoral in the way he talks about them. Plato is only interested in controlling people, not understanding them.

Some readers might say that at least Plato understood the pain of women, when he famously argues that women should play an equal role alongside men in society. But coming to this conclusion in no way involved Plato imagining himself as a woman, and feeling their frustration. Instead, he looks at female dogs, sees them making good guard dogs, and thinks that society would be more efficient if it were to treat human females in the same way.

Today we use the term sociopath to describe an individual who cannot feel empathy.  These people are without conscience, live only to manipulate others, and are adept at hiding their nature. What better place for a sociopath to hide than in a book on morality, which describes all kinds of ways in which people can be manipulated in society, from breaking up any possibility of power based on families, to brainwashing from an early age, to creating myths persuading them to accept their allotted role in life? The Republic could be a handbook for totalitarian regimes everywhere.

That’s why I loathed The Republic.