Know Your Rights

Thomas Paine – Rights of Man (1792)
Political Tract – 270 pages – my copy (1985; paperback) bought for £1 from the Comic Book Exchange in Notting Hill, London, in 2007
- 5 nods out of 5 -

We’ve all heard of those large, looming figures that claimed American independence from the British crown. Washington, Jefferson and the much cited Hancock; however, there is one man who for much of the past two hundred years has been forgotten. That man is Tom Paine. Recent decades have seen an increase in his popularity; historians have re-enacted him, novelists have spoke for him, whilst Bob Dylan rhymed him (see track two on John Wesley Harding).

This revivial rests on Paine’s influential works, of which Rights of Man arguably made the largest impact. It was written in the beginnings of the French Revolution, before it turned bloody and Napoleon arrived on the scene; Paine’s raison d’etre to contest the claims of another spokesman upon the revolution, Edmund Burke (though a man with reforming ambitions, Burke was, at heart, conservative and a believer in monarchy and tradition). In the words of Eric Foner, ‘the Burke-Paine debate was the classic confrontation between tradition and innovation, hierarchy and equality, order and revolution’.

Paine strikes at the heart of tradion, attacking the right of monarchy: ‘A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original’ (p.9). The insults heaped upon Paine provoke laughter today: ‘I know a place in America called Point-no-Point; because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr Burke’s language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all. Just thus it is with Mr Burke’s three hundred and fifty-six pages’ (p.49). These wonderful, biting comments never desist; Paine always adhering to his belief that Burke's words 'is darkness attempting to illuminate light' (p.45). The language remains fresh and readable to us today; one of the reason's for Paine's success was the accessability of his works, a lesson continued by other Paine adorers, such as William Cobbett in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Yet Rights of Man is much more than a continuance of an argument. Paine believes in revolution and the good it can bring to the people; always fighting for progress and the welfare of all mankind; as he boasts: 'my country is the world, and my religion is to do good' (p.228). In the second part of the book, he sets out a possible welfare system to help the poorest of the country - one of the first of writers to commit such a vision to print.

Hindsight now shows Paine to be naive in his blinkered support of revolution. Little was he to know that it would turn sour and bloody as heads were sliced from bodies, while his predications of the future ('I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe’ (p.156)) were wide off the mark; the monarchies of the world continuing, if with their feathers clipped, in the twenty-first century.

Although his influence may wax and wane, it will never be extinguished. Paine admirably stated, 'it is a duty which every man owes to society to point them out' (p.156). Sadly, the world could use more Tom Paine's today; those who will adhere to his commitment of helping manking.

Britannia Ruled the Waves

Niall Ferguson – Empire (2003)
History – 380 pages – my copy (2007; Penguin paperback) purchased for £2.99 from the Bookcase in Chiswick, London, July 2009
- 3 nods out of 5 -

Niall Ferguson has made a name for himself as one of Britain’s eminent working historians. Primarily publishing economic histories – concentrating on the Rothschild family – he has also turned his pen to America and, more recently, world wars. What then holds the value in yet another book upon the British Empire, its birth and its eventual eclipse?

The shelves are filled with so many tales upon this small island’s large holdings, from the glowing portraits to the critical studies and lamblasts from an unforgiving, modern generation. Ferguson, though, has no wish to stick the sword deeper into the corpse. Instead, he argues that his family was shaped by empire, his study – though covering its excesses and abuses – being ultimately positive in argument and tone.

The reader gets the familiar story: the explorer beginnings in Tudor times, confidence under the Stuarts, the great expansion in Victorian times, resulting in the disasterous wars in the twentieth century and the end of the journey, ‘empire for sale’. Amongst this, Ferguson performs admirably well; a writer of considerable skill he highlights various interesting tidbits and facts; such as the Maroons of Jamaica and the adventurers from Clive of India to Rhodes of Africa.

Though not a full-blooded apologist, Ferguson concludes with examining Britain's sacrificies in the Second World War, the period that Churchill coined the country's "finest hour". Ferguson suggests:

‘Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?’

An interesting question for the critics of empire, the many of who have recently been winning the debate on the validity and morality of Britain’s colonial adventures and abuses. However, the issue is much too wide to be simply packaged into such a question. Empire meant many things to many differing people from all walks of life; yes, some benefited, yet many did not - including the average-Joe-Briton himself.

Ultimately, it is the same tired story, told once again. Britain, it would seem, is forever fascinated with its more glorious past. Yes, we once ruled the waves. Now the empire rules the history shelves of our bookstores.

Everest

Leo Tolstoy – War & Peace (1869)
Novel – 1,300 pages - my copy (paperback; 1998) bought for £2.99 in a charity shop in Liskeard, early 2008
- 4 nods out of 5 -

Tolstoy’s War & Peace is a mammoth book; the champion of heavyweights; a lord among giants; the Mount Everest of all novels. This paperback edition alone comprises over one thousand and three hundred pages, the book’s spine cracking near breaking point long before I reached the book’s climax.

So, what is it all about? The novel takes place between the years of 1805 to 1813 (with an epilogue expanding to the 1820s); a time in which Napoleon rules Europe, the result of which is the French invading Russian soil on their march to Moscow. As the title suggests, the reader is switched back and forth from the tranquil bourgeois life of the higher classes in Moscow and St Petersburg to the rough and tumble of the front line of war, beginning in Austerlitz in 1805 and ending on the battlefields in the heart of Russia.

There is a vast cast of characters, centring principally on two families (the warm hearted Rostovs and the austere Bolkonskys), as well as the loveable and confused Pierre Bezukhov. We witness the loves and broken hearts (and broken bones), the squabbles and matches of these characters throughout these years; such as Andrei’s supposed death, Natasha’s absconding with a rival lover, the angry and disciplined Prince Bolkonsky and the ever inquisitive Pierre’s travels and tribulations in society. It is reminiscent of traditional English family saga novels – an influence on Tolstoy – and his romantic ink can be easily viewed throughout, such as in Nicholas and Sonya’s kiss:

‘ "Quite different and yet the same," thought Nicholas looking at her face all lit up by the moonlight. He slipped his arms under the cloak that covered her head, embraced her, pressed her to him, and kissed her on the lips that wore a moustache and had a smell of burnt cork.’ (p.565).

The characters are alive and vibrant, yet this is not the total sum of the book. Tolstoy philosophises on life in combat and in general, the digressions becoming so numerous as the book proceeds that it is estimated that in Books Three and Four they fill one chapter in six, as well as the entirety of the second epilogue. This is reflected best in the thoughts and words of the characters, such as when Pierre reflects of life on the battlefield: ‘Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s all the same – only to save oneself form it as best one can…. Only not to see it, that dreadful it!’ (p.575)

However, it is frustratingly worn into the book via Tolstoy direct; his mission seemingly to confront historians of the period and their bias on hailing Napoleon as a learned and magnificent leader. No, there is no such thing as a Great Man in History who decides the fate and destiny of millions of people - states Tolstoy – and he continues to hammer this point, much to the reader’s annoyance. His argument runs thus:

‘When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth, is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.’ (p.648).

Due to Tolstoy’s feud with the historians of the time this book – at times mesmerising and thrilling – suffers as a result. The author is hell-bent on the revision of the history:
‘Had Napoleon then forbidden them to fight the Russians, they would have killed him and have proceeded to fight the Russians because it was inevitable’ (p.840)

But is anything in life inevitable? Only death. The book is a large mammoth, and due to its scope and the years it took to write, it appears at times to be directionless – the pages being moved along only by the feet of the advancing French. There are many wasteful pages and it could have been suitably trimmed back. This may sound a sacrilegious suggestion, but I have the strength (or audacity?) to see the worth in the latest frenzy of abridged and shortened classic novels. The soul of the book’s pages could be preserved without the seemingly pointless events of Pierre’s jaunts with the Freemasons.

Yet War & Peace remains one of the heavyweights of the novel – even if some critics have concluded it may not, in fact, be a novel (this is shown in Tolstoy’s employment of mathematics in his philosophical discussions, for example: ‘Consequently the four were equal to the fifteen, and therefore 4x=15y. Consequently x/y=15/4…’ (p.1105)). It recently received the somewhat dubious honour of being ranked second on a list of books that people claimed to have read in order to impress people, number one belonging to Orwell’s 1984. Such is its vastness and quality, Tolstoy’s book will long continue to amaze and astonish the reader.

Cider Drinking Fascists

Todd Gray - Blackshirts in Devon (2006)
Local History – 300 pages – my copy bought from Waterstones for £14.99 in summer of 2008
- 2 nods out of 2 -

The fascists in Devon? – in the land of cream teas, of grassy moorland, of the farmer and the janner? For a brief flurry in the mid 1930s, it appeared that the Right in Might would indeed, prove right. In the fascinating premise of this book, Todd Gray delves into Devon’s murkier, darker secrets; his quest to pose the question on just how large a presence fascism held in the west-country.

The scope of the book is wide and interesting to anyone with a passion for local history. Gray examines the activity in Plymouth (1933-34), the later concentration at Exeter (later 1930s) and the Blackshirts and their lives during the Second World War. The towns are well documented, but so are the smaller villages of Devon, giving the book its full deserts in its title on being truly about Devon.

However, Blackshirts in Devon is not the tour de force of local historical writing it perhaps should be, say, on comparison with A.L. Rowse’s Tudor Cornwall. Immediately apparent is Gray’s limits in writing ability; to put it bluntly, he is a poor author. The book is home to many interesting facts, gleamed from painstaking research, yet they have been squandered in a shoddy and confusing narrative (if narrative is the right term?). The book is cut into three parts, dependant on date (i.e.: part one is 1933-34; part two 1935-39), which makes complete sense; however, within the details are misplaced in no coherent whole, meaning that the reader must re-read previously stated details whilst waiting thirty or forty pages to continue on a previous thread. Why was it done in this way? Perhaps it is due to the lack of a central, driving force. There a few interesting characters (especially noted in the third part – the strongest of the book), and the study would have been better served on a central, controlling figure, in a condensed but arguably stronger examination. Yet the ultimate truth must be admitted: there was simply not a great deal of Blackshirt activity in Devon in this period.

The bulk of Gray’s research rests mostly on newspapers and fascist literature – some of which are excellent finds. Yet the book is missing that essential human ingredient of the words in their own words. It is understandable that few testimonials had in circulation, given the nature of the political activity and now more so due to the distance from this period – around seventy years. However, such investigation has been undertaken in even greater hushed, darker pasts, such as Nazi Germany and the occupied France during the Second World War.

Most infuriatingly are the continual mistakes present in the book’s layout and text. The graphic of title and sub-title are consistently confused, whilst further errors are founding basic areas such as spelling and referencing. I ask the question: Where was the proof-reader? Sadly, these detract from the book’s whole and importance; perhaps eliminations could be undertaken in a later edition.

The scope of the issue saves Gray’s book from joining other dubious titles in the Worm’s 1 nodder sin-bin. Despite its flaws, Blackshirts in Devon remains an illuminating read for anyone with an interest in Devon; yet further afield, it is one of quaint interest.

What in the Dickens!

Walter Allen - The English Novel (1954)
Literary critique - 360 pages - my copy a Penguin paperback bought for 50p in a charity shop
- 2 nods out of 5 -

Walter Allen’s long standing critique on the English novel is a competent read, a book well worn by the pen marks of students in the post-war period. The title could as easily be read as a question, rather than statement; a question in which each literary nation asks itself. The American novel? The French novel? The Russian novel? All attempts are the same, exactly just what is it?

The novel itself is a hard thing to define. Allen himself exerts much energy to tell the reader what it isn’t; on writing on Swift he states ‘though possessing many of the attributes of a novelist, cannot be called one’ (p.42). Allen attempts to show us the qualities that make a novel, this following statement being particular useful: ‘Like any other artist the novelist is a maker. He is making an imitation, an imitation of the life of man on earth’ (p.14).

The English Novel traces novelists from ‘The Beginnings’, from the eighteenth century (Allen concentrating on the Big Four: Fielding, Richardson, Smollet and Stern), through the nineteenth century (principally Dickens, James, Wells) to what was to Allen, more recent modernist works (such as Joyce, Woolf and Lawrance). The nineteenth century holds a large bias, with four of the book’s seven chapters featuring in it. Allen argues the case, that it was in this period (the 1880s to be more precise) that the ‘more serious conception of the novel as art’ was pondered (p.260). Chief causes of this, he lists as greater literacy rates and easier, cheaper methods of printing.

This un-presuming, modest book (its subtitle: ‘A Short Critical History’) never threatens to be anything more than a guide to further reading. Allen does not pour vitriol on the pages; playing the role of acting as interested and jubilant uncle to a nephew who has yet to pick up a copy of Dickens’ David Copperfield. One of its chief problems is acknowledged by the author in the opening preface:

‘If in a book on the novel of 150,000 words there is room only for 6,000 words on Dickens, the greatest genius among our novelists, how much space is one to give to Joyce Cary or Mr Greene’ (p.11).

And, in any case, what is 6,000 words of a critic talking on Dickens, when the reader could easily pick up a book on Dickens himself and directly enjoy the source.

God Save the Queen

David Starkey - Monarchy (2006)
History – 360 pages – my copy (paperback) borrowed from Pete
- 3 nods out of 5 -

David Starkey has made a name for himself with his silver, piston tongue and large glasses that sit upon his combed hair. He is, in short, the typical television personality historian: keen to put down others and lavish grand statements upon a public; for the benefit of winning attention.

Starkey’s general interest has long been the Tudor period, on which he once acclaimed in a television interview, when things really got interesting in England. Monarchy begins in this period, continuing to the present day, taking in Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s I & II, the beheaded Charles, the mad George III and, of course, Victoria. The book is aimed at the layman and, as such, has become a best-seller, cementing Starkey’s name alongside other media personalities like Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson.

However, both Schama and Ferguson do greater justice to their audience. Monarchy may well be an effortless read; but time and again Starkey patronizes his readership, constantly repeating the story, never going in depth, never even threatening to argue fresh insight. This is shown in his lack of concrete referencing and the committing of the ultimate scholarly crime: getting the facts all mixed up. I allude to a particular point (in pages 22-23), when referring to an uprising in Cornwall in the early years of Henry Tudor’s reign. He misses the actual date by a year (1496 rather than 1497) and doesn’t seem to recognise there were in fact two disturbances: one against tax hikes (as led by An Gof) and the one in support of the pretender to the throne (Perkin Warbeck). The revolt led by An Gof succeeded in closing in on London, though it was never a ‘close-run thing’ as Starkey believes (p.23). It was, it appears, to be a rout: the Cornish rebels were easily apprehended, the leaders taken to the capital for quartering and death.

So, if this is wrong, can the remainder of Starkey’s pages be confidently trusted? The answer, in short, is no. But such is the strength of the book’s narrative, that it can certainly be enjoyed. The years of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are featured most prominently, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 onwards. This is when Britain was forged, when the vicious religious disputes were put into the past, and when this small island became a great, world power. Unlike many modern historians, Starkey is unembarrassed about Britain’s empire, never pandering to the critics’ dislike of its grizzly realities (slavery, of bondage; of ruining others to line the pockets of our rich).

Starkey is unabashedly a romantic for monarchy; for King and Queen. The name Windsor, he states, is ‘redolent of all things English. Shakespeare. Pageantry. Sweet, old-fashioned smells’ (p.297). Yet despite his attachment, he warns that the monarchs may yet fade away, ‘having bored us and itself to death’ (p.297). This shows in the last chapter of his work, in glossing over a century of kings and queens of modern Britain in one chapter. But this, in many ways, makes perfect sense. Our monarchs are no longer integral to the nation, not to our day-to-day running of our lives, and nor to our future.

Suicide Pact

Nick Hornby – A Long Way Down (2005)
Novel – 250 pages – my copy (hardback) bought for 50p from Plymouth Library
- 2 nods out of 5 -

A Long Way Down is a novel about the coming together of four characters who accidently meet on top of a noted London suicide spot on New Year’s Eve. Rather than kill themselves they decide to share their thoughts and feelings with one another, becoming a tightly bond gang, there to help one another though the tough times.

So far it has the makings of typical Hollywood trash (though perhaps substitute suicide with the threat of not being able to go the prom). But fear not, as Hornby, being British, makes them squabble throughout all the book’s pages in suitable fashion fitting for this rain-soaked island. The characters consist of Martin (disgraced TV presenter, jailed for having sex with a fifteen year old); JJ (an American who has endured the breakup of his band and his girlfriend walking out on him); Jesse (a disturbed teenager girl whose elder sister went missing); and Maureen (a fifty-something woman who can no longer cope being the sole carer for his mentally disabled son).

The book is told via the four perspectives, flicking from one to the other every four or five pages; and whilst it starts strongly (particularly Maureen’s opening narration) this tactic ultimately confuses reader and author alike. The chief problem here is that despite which character is talking, Hornby’s voice is undisputedly heard behind them. Take, for instance, Hornby’s favourite past-time of pointless analogies:

‘But it isn’t like that. I’m sure it must have been an ingredient, sort of thing, but it wasn’t the whole recipe. Say I’m spaghetti Bolognese, well I reckon Jen is the tomatoes. Maybe the onions. Or even just the garlic. But she’s not the meat or the pasta.’ (p.107).

If it’s not pasta, then it’s a sponge, or not that then a TV show, or if not that some other trifling matter. My gripe is not with the analogies per se, but rather that every character repeatedly uses them; thus committing the crime of authorial intrusion, or worst, sloppy writing.
This would be forgivable if the book contained the humour of Hornby’s earlier books, Fever Pitch and High Fidelity particularly. Yet the fountain here appears to have run dry, giving more credence to the critical finger waving at Hornby’s recent output.

The book has one similarity to his previous outings: Hornby’s complete inability to comprehensively finish a novel. High Fidelity’s climax occurred forty pages before its end; whilst the ending to About A Boy was so misguided that the film tried rectifying it with another. A Long Way Down is the worst yet, attempting a climax with a meeting of all the central character’s close relations, it goes off the boil, Hornby seemingly typing away until feeling tired, bunching the foursome together over a coffee at the book’s end.

Has Nick Hornby – one of our most celebrated British writers of recent times – gone off the boil for good? A Long Way Down continues in the un-thrilling vein of previous novel How To Be Good. The energy of High Fidelity has fizzled. It is the Worm’s sincere hope it will return.