Books

Before I started this blog, I was posting the occasional review on amazon. I even had the idea that I'd review every book I read, which is rather silly. I even kept notes on a few! If you really did that you'd soon found you were losing time when you'd rather be reading. Quite apart from all the other pressures on one's time. What was meant to be a pleasure would soon become a chore.

As well as all that, I realised I was missing the sense of a conversation that I saw on the blogs I followed. Not only in comments, but simply in the way that the run of posts gradually build up a composite picture. It becomes a conversation with oneself, although hopefully one that is not too self indulgent.

Of the few reviews I did write, I was happy with only a few of them. Still I might put a few up here. In the meantime, here are a few books that have stayed with me.

Primo Levi, Collected Poems

Collected, but not quite complete. The very first thing I ever read by Primo Levi was quoted on the back of the sleeve to the Manic Street Preachers' second album, Gold Against the Soul. 'The Song of Those Who Died in Vain' is still one of the most powerful pieces of political poetry I know, but it's not included in the edition of Levi's collected poems I own. Doing a little digging, it looks like there was a second edition which added a few other pieces, no doubt including the one from the Manics' sleeve.

Of course, It's impossible to separate Levi from the experiences of the Holocaust which were so central to his identity as a writer. Several of the earliest poems directly reference that experience, and even in a later poem we see the past encroaching on a present day rumination. He was about far more than that however. He was also a scientist, and many of his poems demonstrate a lyrical appreciation for the material world. His repeated references to 'Human seed', a seeming archaism, bring to mind a vision of human beings as part of a web of history which both greater than any individual and also present within everyone. It's an immensely elegant and restrained vision of all that exists beyond politics. We should always remember that Levi was not only a great historical witness, but also a great writer.

Ronan Bennett, Havoc, in its Third Year

With its portrait of seventeenth century fanaticism it would be easy to find a contemporary resonance and lesson for the present in Bennett's novel. But that seems far less important compared to the language which takes on the rhythms of seventeenth century prose without ever lapsing into archaisms, or the moving portrait of an entirely loving marriage, or its depiction of the past in which the past is respected as the past. All of the characters here live entirely within their own time. Our hero, John Brigge, never becomes a mouthpiece for the author or a modern character ahead of his time. Which is not to say it isn't a political book. It's a Tragedy, in which the desire for order and security and the imposition of their values by an elite within the town, which is intended to secure that order, only serves to bring about a breakdown of order and the town's community.

Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level

Something I repeatedly heard when I was in India was how since the economy was liberalised and opened up to foreign investment in the early 90s money has been drawn upwards. Proper regulation should have been put in place in order to stop the abuses and graft perpetrated by elites and the growing disparity between rich and poor. Which is rather what Neo-Liberalism has done everywhere it's been put into practice. And of course, some people have benefited in India from the influx of foreign capital investment and break up of government monopolies, just as there may have been some positive benefits in Britain. And Neo-Liberalism isn't precisely the target of Wilkinson and Pickett's book. Their concern is simply with inequality and the effects it has on societies, building on a lot of research from the last 10 years. But it's hard not to apply their message to the biggest creator of inequality in our present: Neo-Liberalism. What their book shows is that what has been done to Britain and America and many other countries over the last thirty years was not only morally wrong, but also incredibly stupid, and we're still paying for those mistakes.

Either shortly before or after I read The Spirit Level I read a short piece in The Times in their 'Thunderer' section in which the journalist writing the piece complained that such a popular book was wrong to complain about 'growth' when the benefits which economic growth brings are so obvious. I remember correctly, the example she used was her sister's tomatoes. It's called the 'Thunderer' after all, so I suppose you shouldn't expect reasoned argument, but it might be nice if people actually read the books they criticise, since at several points the authors explicitly state that they are not specifically targeting arguments for economic growth and the changes of the last thirty years. Of course, whether they know it or not, that is the inescapable conclusion. The question I always want to ask is 'economic benefit for whom? Who benefits exactly?' If you're insisting that people should allow themselves to be exploited for the benefit of the very rich, you might want to explain why.

And one I've just finished:

Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel

I'm not sure if I didn't want to like this book rather more than I actually did.

It's interesting to see that she trained as a Jungian psychologist. I know very little about Jung's theories, but came across references to his work recently when I was researching an introduction I gave for Derek Jarman's film Caravaggio. I'm thinking particularly of the mysterious scene towards the end of the film where the young Caravaggio witnesses his older self as Christ in a painting he will go on to paint. I don't think that Vickers' novel achieves quite the same intensity of feeling, a feeling which I can only label 'religious', although there's nothing orthodox about it. Despite her admission in the reissued novel's introduction that novels shouldn't be reduced to simple messages about how to live, there's something that's rather too certain about her calm and fluid prose. It's ultimately a very kind book, building to a rather moving climax. No doubt that's part of the reason for the word of mouth success it apparently achieved, but somehow it doesn't always quite match the keenness of some of it's insights. It may acknowledge the darker, more brutal aspects of life, yet still feels rather too easy in its conclusions.