Astonishing the Gods

Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion
Non-fiction – 2006 - 380 pages / Borrowed from the Dawkins loving Jamie
- 3 nods out of 5 -

For three decades Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself as sceptic and general fly in the ointment for religious buffs; a man who sticks in his oar in without hesitation if he feels that the truth is being tampered with. Why is it, then, that I do not wholly agree with his point of view? Admittedly, I do not know a great deal about Dawkins and his back catalogue of works (which includes The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker; The God Delusion is my first read. A wise choice for virginal eyes? Let's see…

The whole premise of the book is for Dawkins to not only refute the existence of God, but also to stress time and again that "He" is superfluous to human life. He makes a credible case at doing so – using illuminating quotes from many historical figures, including those such as Douglas Adams (to whom the book is dedicated), Einstein and Thomas Jefferson.

It is obvious that he is armed to the teeth about the debate in question: impressive bits of facts come out alongside interesting terms (such as ‘The Neville Chamberlain School of evolutionists’) and bits of research (such as ‘The Great Prayer Experiment’); all backed up by many delicious anecdotes that Dawkins regales the reader with, the majority of which concern his under-graduate Cambridge days.

This is all good, however, as Dawkins himself concedes (at the end of chapter 4) his argument of “God’s” non-existence is over; so what of the additional 200 pages? Dawkins decides to back up his original points, lurching from one argument to the next, in what is not a wholly convincing manner.Besides the waste of text, two of my largest gripes with the book are as follows: 1. Dawkins insistence to explain everything from a Darwinistic point of view. For example, he explains the roots of religion as coming from a need/instinct within our brains to listen out to a higher authority; but in doing so he completely discounts the political/social uses/vices of religion.

And 2. is Dawkins' belief that his point of view is the right one. This is to be expected in a book of 350 pages that is essentially one, long, drawn-out argument – Dawkins essentially sniping back at those who have attacked him. However, some of his comments in Chapter 9 – ‘Childhood, abuse and the escape from religion’ – appear misguided; he attacks the Amish for ‘their right to bring up “their children” in “their own” way’ (p.330), that ‘Amish children never volunteered to be Amish; they were born into it and they had no choice. (p.331). Hard criticism; and it must be asked, what does Dawkins suggest happen exactly - remove the children from the sinister clutches of their parents? And remove them into what exactly?: simply into another culture which has differing morals and ethical codes, of which there are countless amounts around the globe. Our Western bias should not permit to state that "our" way is right (the same, too, can be said of any view-point, either Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, Amish or, indeed, atheist).*

The strongest of Dawkins' points is his insistence on what man can achieve (as soon in full splendour in his last chapter). His mission statement was to persuade people away from the pitfalls of religion. Of course, Bible nuts won't come within breathing distance of the book, so presumably his target audience are those like myself. Have I done away with God? I don't believe I'm urgent to rule in or rule out anything yet. As Eric Hoffer once wrote, 'The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not'.

* Furthermore, in addition to the negative comments i've made to Dawkins' book, there is another comment i wish to argue against, being his comparison of Hitler to ancient figures such as Caligula and Genghis Khan (Hitler 'would not have stood out' (p.268)). This seemingly mis-interprets Nazism’s racial hatred – of which a considerable number of historians believe to be a revolutionary - if sinister - creation).

Blood & Guts: Blood Bowl by Matt Forbeck

Matt Forbeck / Blood Bowl: The Novel
Fantasy Novel - 250 pages - 2006 / Paperback a present given to me by Colin
- 1 nod out of 5 -

You’ve all played the game blood bowl, right? You haven’t? Well then, welcome to the world of brutal, unforgiving sports in which two teams try to outscore – and out-kill – one another.

A novel based on a fictional board game might not sound too promising; but it gets worse. The characters are wooden and clichéd, the storyline chaotic and mixed (seemingly a first draft never re-visited for an edit) and errors abound throughout with the author actually mistaking characters! – if he doesn’t know what’s going on, what is the chance for the poor, unsuspecting reader?

The plot, for what it’s worth, details the adventures of Dunk Hoffnung, a down-and-out who is in search of fame and fortune; he is befriended by a halfling (hobbit to those outside the Gameworkshop bubble) who is a blood bowl agent. Before he knows it, Dunk is escorted into the world of carnage and mayhem, becoming a member of the Bad Bay Hackers, in which he plays an entire season of various ups and downs – to the general frustration of the reader.

Yet despite this all, I kept turning the pages. Admittedly, not to see what became of Dunk Hoffnung, but rather to read the landscape of tournaments, teams and cities that appear in the game of Blood Bowl itself. I wanted to hear about the Chaos Cup, the Reikland Reavers and Altdorf…. Okay, so Forbeck does a lousy job of describing all of these things, and he does a worse job at carrying the main character through 250 pages of story; but his output stands alone in attempting to fictionalise in a novel the blood bowl universe.

Blood Bowl is one in a trilogy (or quad-ilogy now – whilst there is a further addition of a more promising graphic novel) and despite the low nod score I’ve given this book, I will continue forth with Dunk Hoffnung’s adventures. After all, blood bowl is the game I know and love. For it, I would swim an ocean.

The Short Twentieth Century: Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm / Age of Extremes (The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991)
History – 600 pages / 1994 / My edition (1999/paperback); bought for £2.49 in an Oxfam bookshop in Chiswick, London sometime early 2009

- 4 nods out of 5 -

Popularly seen as our most renowned living historian today, Hobsbawm continues his mammoth series of detailing the development of the modern world, Age of Extremes being the final instalment. Its outlook is one bound to intrigue: a Marxist writer publishing in the aftermath of the great, chaotic and dubious experiment of twentieth century communism. Surely, many questions marks are to arise.

All the major events are noted, shaped into compact segments; by far most interesting is the Age of Catastrophe: First World War, the coming of the Russian communists, the Great Depression and fall of liberalism, the rise of fascist regimes culminating in the Second World War and its aftermath. Here Hobsbawm is in fine form, generalising over one of the most disturbing and crucial periods in history.

Meanwhile, he gloatingly reflects over a Golden Age – 1950 to early 1970s, in which society advanced, though not without its threats (Cold War and the possibility of nuclear fall out); before ending with the last decades of the century – ‘The Landslide’ – in which chaos and uncertainty crept back in, as seen with the collapse of the Communist world. He notes the end of socialism, of imperialism and not a rosy picture painted of capitalism’s strength. Ultimately, this is a sceptical view of humanity’s progress; is this just the sound of an elderly man, whose generation has now passed? He does offer some glimmer of hope, in that the future cannot be predicted and doom is not certain.

His writing style has not waned, however, coming to his final chapters – and perhaps to the inability to generalise the world at such a fractious time – Hobsbawm’s overall control is not as tight as previous books have shown. An impressive array of facts and figures, surely this is the definitive account of the nasty and fantastic twentieth century.

A Great Nobody: The Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon Grossmith

George & Weedon Grossmith / The Diary of a Nobody
Novel – 230 pages / 1892 / My copy an orange Penguin paperback (1987), bought for £1.20 in 2008 in a junk bookstore in Portsmouth (with the inscription: ‘To my Darling Tricia, wishing you a very belated, happy birthday. With all my love, Adrian xxxxx’)
- 3 nods out of 5 -

Charles Pooter – the main character of the book and the Nobody in question – begins his diary: ‘Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to a “Somebody” – why my diary should not be interesting….’ Pooter, this pompous, late Victorian up-tight clerk, starts as he means to go on: in great comedic fashion.

The reader is treated to a year in the life of Mr Pooter and his daily neurosis and problems with social life; in his work place, his home life and wife, and friends – including his repeating of poor puns, such as the one on shirts to be repaired: ‘I’m ‘fraid they’re frayed’. But the book really heats up with the entrance of his son, Lupin, who is the exact opposite of Pooter: a modern being who wants to go where there is life.

This is an enjoyable read and I advise all to go to the local junk bookstore and buy one today; on ending the book I regretted to be leaving a friend in Pooter. But as book jacket testifies, beware, ‘there is a part of him in all of us’!

The Proto-Bateman: Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero
Novel / 190 pages / First published 1985 / bought in a junk shop in Lostwihiel, Cornwall, for £2 in the summer of 2008
- 2 nods out of 5 -

‘Disappear here’, writes the novelist who gave us the chain-saw welding, flesh eating, prostitute slashing character that was Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. However, Less Than Zero, his very first work (written at the tender age of 19 whilst still in college), holds back on the psychotic nightmares of his later books. Instead, we are treated to a novel of isolation from the modern world: a young Patrick Bateman before he turned to the chain-saw.

It tells the story – in first person – of Clay, an eighteen year old back for Christmas in L.A. from his college on the east coast. Throughout all, he describes his disconnection with the world and those around him, even though he spends most of his time around others and at parties downing copious amounts of drugs.

There is no plot, but a constant turning of action and characters; to illustrate this, there are no chapters, but rather small snippets of paragraphs, the longest of which takes no more than 3 pages – a novel for the short attention span that was the very first MTV generation. The main characters comprise Clay’s supposed girlfriend, Blair (who has an attachment to him, something he cannot believe in himself); his vain and egotistical friend Trent (who satisfies himself by watching snuff porn movies); and his old high-school friend Julian (who is descending into a more depraved world of drugs and male prostitution).

Yet alienation is the main theme throughout all this. Despite everyone always being together, these good looking Beverly Hills 90210 types, no one feels secure; nor does anyone display their own individuality. As Clay states:

‘They all look the same: thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices, and then I start to wonder if I look exactly like them. I try to forget about it and get a drink…’

Clay repeatedly looks for the bottle – or more exactly, drugs – to forget his own significance; clearly showing nihilistic tendencies. At the novel’s end, Clay leaves for college – disillusioned with the city:

‘The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my own point of reference for a long time afterwards’.

It may all seem morbid and depressing – yet it isn’t. Amongst it all is Ellis’s cutting wit. For instance, Clay sees his psychiatrist, who is only concerned about writing a screenplay with him to make it big in Hollywood, rather than help him with his problems; his younger sisters have a larger coke supply than him; friends are more concerned with what scarf they wear than discussing their futures. It is a laugh at the 1980s image conscious generation.

Unlike his later work, Less Than Zero is not a fully rounded story, more a snap-shot of troubled angst, and more than that, a snapshot of money obsessed and image conscious America in the mid-1980s. Well worth the read.

A Walk In Words: Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson / Mother Tongue: The English Language
Linguistics/ 250 pages/ 1990; my version Paperback (1991); bought from Waterstones for £8.99 in Plymouth, sometime 2002.
- 2 nods out of 5 -

Before he walked through the woods, before he went down under, and even before his journey around this small island of ours, there was Mother Tongue: Bryson’s historical and cultural study upon the English language.

Something as seemingly stationary as language may appear to be at odds with wandering many thousands of miles around the earth’s globe; however, Bryson’s writing style encompasses the roots of language, its pronunciation, wordplay, to that subject we all secretly love to indulge in: swearing (‘Cunt’ being frequently thrown up in Chaucer’s classic, The Canterbury Tales).

Allow me to state, that I am not a fan of linguistical knowledge: nouns and verbs still rattle my cage and confuse me. However, Bryson takes the reader, as he would a friend, gently easing him through the pages of trivia he has to offer, which include: The Great Vowel Shift, that the Australian term ‘fair dinkum’ has its roots in England, that if a standard Western keyboard was expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide!, whilst in an 1890s town in California a private language was devised which caught on with the wider town in which expressions were taken from local characters (Coffee was called ‘zeese’ after the initials of a camp cook named Zachiah Clifton). I could go on, and on, and on…

Yet despite Bryson’s nice, informal and breezy tone, the book has one obvious flaw: it lags in many places. In trying to fit in all he can, Bryson has the power to overload on the trivia to the point of distraction. From time to time he pulls the cat out of the hat – such as inserting the chapter on swearing after flogging to death the history of names – but it is a trick that can only be conjured only so often. This is at serious odds with Bryson’s travel books and his magnificent A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Sitting alongside my personal Bryson favourites – notably A Walk In the Woods – Mother Tongue falls flat; it is the younger, awkward brother alongside more successful and robust siblings. It is not a recommended starter for un-initiated Bryson readers (that should be reserved for his travel writing), but perhaps for those fans who are willing to foray into the dubious world beyond the pale which includes his Troublesome Words book. Troublesome indeed!

William Pitt the Younger by William Hague

William Hague/ William Pitt the Younger
Historical biography/ 2004; my version Paperback (2005)/ 600 pages/ Borrowed and not purchased!
3 nods out of 5

A winner of various awards, including the 2005 History Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, and garner of accolades from parties across the Westminster spectrum, such as Shirley Williams of the Liberal Democrats, William Hague’s recounting of the life of William Pitt is primarily a read of relaxation.

Our longest serving Prime Minister but one (Walpole of the early eighteenth century lays claim to such fame; however, Pitt never used the title ‘Prime Minister’ himself, it being a term of derision in the 1700s), he became chief of Westminster at the tender age of twenty-four, heading the country for 19 of the following 22 years. Hague charts his life, from child prodigy and son of William Pitt the elder, to his entrance in Westminster to his early death. Initially known as ‘Honest Billy’ for his seeming refusal to succumb to bribes and live off the fat of patronage – as was the custom of the age – his time in office saw him transform from being an advocate of parliamentary and economic reform to become a leader popularly portrayed as a repressor of political rights (infamously suspending Habeas Corpus in the 1790s).

The French Revolution of 1789 is seen as the primary cause of such a change, with the elites of England eager to suppress any similar uprising on this island. Dashed was Pitt’s dream of slaying the beast of National Debt, being converted into war-time leader against the raging French of what would become the Napoleonic Wars. Hague leaves many questions open as to Pitt’s effectiveness as a war-time PM, being reluctant to give comparisons to the likes of Winston Churchill. The effects of war took their toll on Pitt, as he became a darker character, highly probable alcoholic; whilst his lack of relationships outside of Westminster (he never married, with Hague only briefly considering suggestions of homosexuality) appear to show a stunted man, the price for so long occupying such an important post.

Pitt died with England still in midst of war with Napoleon – it would be another 9 years before peace was declared – with his dying words: ‘My country, oh! My country; how I leave my country’ (however, there is a second attributed line, the somewhat less dramatic: ‘I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies’). Such was the duress of leading the country for two decades – as well as the voluminous helpings of port – that his body was broken by its end, being labelled the body of a ninety year old, rather than that of a man in his mid-forties.

Hague’s biography is one in a tradition of this much noted Prime Minister; yet, in the modern age – where other PM’s have had much print expended on them – Pitt has had relatively little exposure. Such a new appraisal, then, is welcomed – as is the author’s expertise: a politician of Westminster, and too, like Pitt, a young star of his party, being in his mid-thirties when he became head of the Conservative Party in 1997. He speaks with authority, as a man who knows the parliamentary system - albeit the bloated, media hyped twenty-first century version over the more low-key late eighteenth century Westminster. Furthermore, Hague’s humour allows the reader to delight in accounts of Pitt’s love of port, King George’s madness and shaking hands with a tree – mistakenly thinking it to be the King of Prussia – whilst giving exposure to classic figures in Georgian political history, namely Fox and his scandals and those who later played mammoth roles in the Tory party (including Canning and Castlereagh).

Yet despite its plaudits, the book has its flaws. Primarily, its size: 600 pages in paperback. Unfortunately, Hague is prone to becoming engulfed by the larger political events of the time, taking us into the diplomatic forays as far a field as Russia. Furthermore, the personal experiences of Pitt seem to go neglected in the first period of the wars against Revolutionary France, Hague being heavily reliant on the correspondence between Pitt and his mother which seemingly dried up in this period. Personal flavour is only later resumed with the arrival of Pitt’s niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, into the household, who proceeded to insult the major political players of the day, calling Castlereagh his ‘monotonous Lordship’. By negating Pitt’s personal life in preferment of the great international landscape, the charm the book enjoys in its first hundred pages is lost. Such accusations, then, prevent Hague’s biography from becoming any sort of classic of modern political history.

Hague followed this biography with another on a second William (Wilberforce, of whom Pitt enjoyed a close friendship). Is there to be the William trilogy? My hopes are that he dedicates his time to the influential journalist of the early third of the nineteenth century, William Cobbett.

John Major said of Hague’s work: ‘If you only buy one political biography this year, make it this one’. The question remains as to how many MPs claimed it on expenses?