Some short (and often negative) book reviews

As I have repeatedly said, I'm a great believer in the useful book review. Please consider these reviews in that spirit.

Shy, Max Porter

I'm a fan of Max Porter. I'd say a big fan: I thought Grief is the Thing with Feathers was amazing and I loved Lanny too. But I'm sorry to say that Shy is only for the Porter completists. It's a Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem-England type thing, with Porter-esque quirks. Fine, but you may well have better uses for your time. 

Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer

The title story is quite good, probably worth your time, but that one's head and shoulders better than the other ones in the collection, a surprising number of which feature demons. (Surprising to me, anyway, given that I was expecting charming, anecdote-ish stories of the old shtetls.)

The Fraud, Zadie Smith

God gives burdens, also shoulders, as Gimpel says. One of my happily-shouldered burdens is to review all of Smith's work (see this blog, passim). I would describe The Fraud as a careful book: it's entertaining and interesting enough, light and readable, but it lacks something of the zip and energy - the sheer aliveness - of her best work. The pros include her imaginative sympathy for different people, always one of her strengths: in this book, it's the second Mrs Ainsworth who stands out in this regard, as Smith can't help but turn someone we might laugh at into a real person. The cons include the sex life of the main character, which seems under-motivated, to my (male) mind. I described The Autograph Man as rather indulgent of the literary male: perhaps The Fraud is in part an attempt to redress the balance, although even in laughing at the various literary male, Smith can't help seeing something of value to him.

Babel, RF Kuang
Prepare for a slightly longer review here.

Babel is, in many ways, one of the worst books I have ever read. And it surely must be one of the worst books to get a glowing review in the British broadsheet press and to win multiple prizes. Don't worry - I'll get to the 'buts' in a bit, but I can't let you loose on a book set in a (slightly) alternative reality Oxford of the 1830s without warning you that it is absolutely chocka with Americanisms and anachronisms: a character says "just a tad", there is sticky toffee pudding, there are docents and postdocs, the female undergraduates (there is an explanation for the very existence of female undergraduates - it's not that silly) hang out in male undergraduates' bedrooms, a "Professor" says that she won't get "tenure", every thought appears to involve 21st century racial categories and so on. I don't know that every page contains a howler, but I'm pretty confident that every chapter does. At one point someone says (in effect) "when you were in London, did you see the King?" and receives the reply "William? No, what with the Poor Law and the Factory Act, there's been a lot of rioting so he stays at home" (yes, the "William?" is genuinely in there). The whole thing is terribly woke as well: everyone who is non-white (including some "Black" with a capital B characters) is a goody and almost everyone who is white is a baddy (the main exceptions being Luddites and a few other honest working class characters); killing innocent people is bad if you're white but, I think, ok if you're not; the British Empire is super-bad in every way, including being maybe responsible for the state of Haiti, but somehow also incompetent and idiotic; oh, and I almost forgot to mention that British people boil their food too much and don't use seasoning (although our cakes seem to be ok).

It's high time for the "buts", of which I have two. The first "but" is that the book is an fascinating glimpse into a modern worldview in which universities are massively powerful. For reasons that make (somewhat) more sense in the alternative reality of the book (in which silver plus skilled translators equals powerful magic) than in real life, the climax of the story comes when a group of undergraduates seek to overthrow the British Empire by [if you're going to read it, turn away now] ... seizing control of a university building! Other glimpses of this worldview are also evident: for example, an Oxford Professor is seen as a high-prestige job that might plausibly come with a high-status wife (yes, I know - married professors in the 1830s ...), a house in Hampstead and a country estate. At one point we are shown some 'aesthete' undergraduates, almost all of whom are set on having careers in the professions after Oxford: again, the idea is that universities control access to power and wealth and, allied to that, that high-prestige jobs are the source of power and wealth. 

That may be just a sociological insight you weren't terribly interested in, but my second 'but' is a more literary one: it's actually not a bad read. Not bad at all. I read it all the way to the end, despite everything that was silly and annoying about it, and at each point I wanted to know what happened next. The action was well-paced, the characters, twists and so on were all well-done. (In fact, it had such merit that I half-suspected that there was going to be a really big twist - e.g., that China were to replace Britain as imperial hegemon - and turn out just as bad! But sadly no.) I am not the target audience for an anti-colonialist tirade, but I enjoyed it. If you took the book, removed all the wokery and replaced the historical details with something plausible (or perhaps set it in a sci-fi world where it made sense) then it would just be a cracking good read. 

So my final verdict is that Kuang is a writer of real talent. She's still young and I expect that her mature work will be pretty solid.

The Ebb Tide, Robert Louis Stevenson 

Cracking good novella. Would make a great film (indeed, I see that it has been filmed a few times, although the still from the French adaptation here gives you precisely the wrong idea of what the book is like), although I'd change the ending for the big screen. Also, it is a more effective attack on colonialism than Babel. 

What does the political Promised Land look like?

There's a recent advertising campaign I've seen that I don't think is very good.

The campaign features two identical photos of someone enjoying a fun activity: going on holiday, say, or eating out. The punchline is that we're told that one of them is getting the experience "on points" while the other isn't. The concept is that, if you have the right credit card, you can get these great experiences for free. 

Now, I can see that getting free stuff is a Good Thing in the abstract, but the reason that the campaign doesn't impress me is that the impression one gets from looking at the posters is that having the credit card makes no difference to one's life: one can eat gourmet food, enjoy adventurous holidays and smile a wide, white smile just as easily without the credit card as with it. I think it would have been better to show the same person in two different photos: in one, looking tired, despondent and stuck in their boring home because they've run out of money; and, in the second, looking delighted and enjoying brunch because they've got points to spend. The contrast here is with the Duracell bunny: consider how much less effective that advertising would have been if the other bunnies had continued to run because their batteries had been replaced - the point that Duracell gives you more power is far more vividly illustrated by the other bunnies dying.

But I don't want to talk about the advertising of consumer goods and services. Instead, I want to talk about the advertising of political ideas. 

Political ideas - and I'm using that phrase in a pretty broad sense - tend to have two components: (1) what the Powers that Be (or Should Be) ought to Do About It All and (2) the wonderful things that will result from them doing it - the Promised Land that awaits. So, for example, the proletariat ought to throw off the shackles of bourgois oppression via revolution (component (1)) and, if they do, a glorious egalitarian communist age will be ushered in (component (2)). 

It's possible to imagine a political idea that only has component (1). Back in the good old days of the post-Brexit British national soul-searching moment (remember that?), I wrote a series of posts, starting here, about Matthew Parris' idea that the Leave campaign knowingly rode the tiger of racism to its victory. In part 5 of that series, I described what I called Power-Transfer Policies, i.e. policies that aim to achieve the transfer of power from one group to another, and I said that such policies might be supported purely on the basis that it is only right and proper that the second group rather than the first group should have the power, however that group chooses to use it: think of those supporting independence for a colony who say that the locals should choose their future even if they choose badly. But even in these cases it's rare that the supporters of the policy don't attempt to set out a component (2) Promised Land as well: the Leave campaign famously had plenty to say about more money for the NHS, for example, and independence movements tend to say that the locals will do a better job of ruling than the distant imperial metropolis.

But recently I've become worried that I don't understand quite what the Promised Land of various policies is meant to look like. I'll give you a couple of examples.

Neil O'Brien MP, a lively participant in online debates, published a piece over the Christmas break about the scandal of "Deliveroo visas", i.e. visas granted to immigrants, purportedly to study in the UK (or for other worthwhile aims), which result in a large number of young people spending their time delivering fast food. The responses to the piece that I have seen from pro-immigration people have been either "yes, this is indeed a problem worth looking at" (e.g. Rob Ford, Sam Bowman) or else "O'Brien's making it all up" (e.g., Jonathan Portes, Jonathan Portes and various people less well-known than Jonathan Portes). What I did not see was people saying "hooray!" - yet that, I thought, was precisely what the pro-immigration Promised Land was meant to look like: young, keen, thrusting immigrants, toiling away at the bottom of society to work their way up, creating a vibrant but chaotic employment market something like fictional depictions of 19th century New York.

Another example is this, the ever-interesting Peter McLaughlin accusing Kate Forbes of telling "pious lies" for giving public reasons in support of a position which are not her primary, private moral/religious reasons for supporting that position. Again, as I said at the time, I thought that was what the Promised Land of liberal debate looked like: people deploying publically-available arguments based on the shared values to be found in the Venn diagram intersection of the circles of beliefs held by the numerous religious, ethnic and moral communities that make up a diverse and multicultural society. You can't refer to what Allah tells you, I can't refer to what God tells me, but we can all refer to the principles of prudent budget management. Again, aren't "pious lies" precisely what liberals want political debate to be about in a multicultural society. Or rather, while I might call them pious lies, liberals should call them "appeals to public reason" or something of that kind - although we all know that secretly we're talking about the same thing.

This all started with Brexit, I think. Before the Brexit debate, free movement of capital, goods and labour and restrictions on public subsidies were the kind of thing that right-wingers favoured, while left-wingers wanted markets to be subject to democratic control, capital to be reined in, government subsidies to industry to be widespread ... and so on, and so on. But in everyone's haste to take sides on Brexit, positions got scrambled and so, for example, "free trade" went from being a Thatcherite right-wing obsession to becoming a left of centre shibboleth ("look at those stupid Brexiteers who want to cut us off from this huge market on our doorstep!"). Who whom?, in Lenin's phrase, took over from principle.

The pattern is wider than that. Take "diversity": is it a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Well, if you are a right-winger, diversity is a Good Thing when you are attacking Labour for never having women in charge or universities for not having enough intellectual diversity, or when you are celebrating the current cabinet for its ethnic mix. But there's no belief in any principle here, surely, merely a desire to find another stick for "Who" to beat "Whom". I feel my rightist credentials are sufficiently solid that I don't need to give a counter-example from the Left, but you can easily construct your own one for diversity with different examples (gay Muslims - good! conservative evangelicals - white men and bad! Sunak - rich!) should you not already be deeply bored of this kind of debate.

That change has an impact on what one's Promised Land looks like. Is the modern centre-left's Promised Land a world of free-trading capitalists bestriding borders? Does the modern centre-right want people with dark skins or ovaries to dominate politics? Not really. Both sides just want to win.

This is the predominant wider theme of modern politics. The Promised Land is one where Our People are in charge and Those People are not: whether Our People are "good" immigrants or sincere secularists or Remainers or the silent majority or... and whether Those People are immigrants or believers or out-of-touch elites or ... the pattern is still the same. 

To simplify only slightly, modern political debate in this country appears to have reached a consensus that there is always going to be a Blob running the publicly-funded bits of the country - and that there ought to be a Blob directing the privately-funded bits (telling it to do more manufacturing, housebuilding and domestic energy production, everyone agrees and then, depending on your tastes, less pornography or more environmental stuff or more science or more employment of ethnic minorities) - and hence the only real question is "who gets to run the Blobs?" (Or, if you prefer, "whose Long March through the institutions is the Longest and Marchiest?")

(Some examples: we have to have to "influencers", ergo they have to be "our" influencers; we have to spend billions on extra-London mass transit rather than defence or tax cuts, and the only question is where.)

I must admit that this kind of cynical Marxist view has some appeal. "Wake up and smell the coffee," its adherents say, "it's them or us. We've played fair before - and lost - but now it's time to play dirty". It's certainly got more appeal than "you can get avocado toast with points". But, ultimately, the two pictures of the alternative Promised Lands are too similar to each other for either to be tempting. I, for one, would welcome a Duracell bunny offering a wholly different outcome.