nwhyte's reviews
4413 reviews

Why I Write by George Orwell

informative medium-paced

5.0

This is a nice collection of four essays by Orwell, three very short and one much longer, and I'm going to treat them separately, because that gives me an excuse to inflict Orwell's gorgeous prose on you several times.

"Why I Write"

An interesting bit of self-reflection in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

"The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius"

The longest essay in the book, taking up more than two thirds of the 120 pages. On the one hand, it's very much moored in the particular time it was written - 1941, when it was not at all clear who was going to win the war - and with a particular agenda in mind - the necessity and inevitability of a Socialist government which would win the war and modernise Britain. In fact, of course, the Labour victory came only after the war was over, though it's certainly fair to say that the war could not have been won without the social changes that came with it. On the other, some of Orwell's observations are simply brilliant.

Since the ’fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins.

When I posted that last sentence admiringly to Facebook, lots of people jumped on me with examples of successful bayonet charges since Orwell wrote; but his point is that the soldiers were not being taught anything else.

"A Hanging"

A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation.

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You'd better all come out and have a drink,’ he said quite genially. ‘I've got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.’

"Politics and the English Language"

This is a tremendous piece on writing clearly. He is particularly interested in political writing, which he felt was especially bad:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.

I don't know if things have improved much since Orwell's day. But his six rules for good writing should be on the wall of everyone who writes for a living, or indeed for a hobby:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The God Complex by Paul Driscoll

informative slow-paced

3.25

The God Complex is one of my less favourite episodes in one of my less favourite series of New Who, and I didn't write it up at the time, nor did I recommended it in my epic "Which New Who to Watch" post. In case you need your memory refreshed, it's the one where the Doctor, Amy and Rory are stuck in a hotel with a few other characters, of whom the best developed is Rita, played by Amara Karan; but it turns out that the hotel is a prison for a Minotaur. Personally I didn't feel that the plot held together at all, and the scene at the end, where the Doctor basically kicks Amy and Rory out of the Tardis to start their lives without him, was disappointingly underdeveloped. But others differ, and Driscoll is clearly a fan, finding a lot more depth to it than I had imagined was there. The chapters are as follows:

• The symbolism of the Minotaur, and modern treatments of the story in and beyond Doctor Who;
• The roots of the story in Orwell's 1984 (surveillance in particular);
• The roots of the story in The Shining, film rather than book (hotel horror, obviously, though he also blames it for the weakness of the closing scene);
• The roots of the story in previous Who stories about bases under siege and about religion (though I think he misses a couple of interesting examples on religion);
• A rather good chapter on fear and terror as storytelling devices;
• A more confused chapter trying to work out what the story is trying to tell us about faith and religion;
• A long chapter on the Doctor's fallibility as a hero;
• A chapter on the role of the companions in Doctor Who;
• a concluding short chapter wondering what the hell the symbolism of the fishbowl is meant to be?

Driscoll likes the story more than I did, but is not unaware of its flaws.

Neither Unionist Nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Stephen Sandford

informative slow-paced

2.5

My grandfather fought in the First World War with the 6th battallion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and indeed ended the war as its commanding officer; the 6th Dubs were part of the 10th (Irish) Division, which mainly fought in the east - Gallipoli, Macedonia and Palestine. This book is full of detail about the nature of the Division, which unlike the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions was not aligned with either Nationalism or Unionism. I found it a bit hard to get through. There are lots and lots of statistics about the background of the soldiers, especially the officers, and the comparative disciplinary record; the actual fighting occupies only 22 pages, less than 10% of the book; only two maps are reproduced, and they are not much help in trying to understand the narrative. There is a rather poor chapter analysing military leadership as demonstrated in the Division's own leaders, and a better one on the lessons learned, or not learned, about military tactics in the course of the campaign. I couldn't really recommend it to anyone who isn't a First World War completist. 

The Doctor: His Lives and Times by James Goss

funny lighthearted fast-paced

4.0

One of the glossy volumes produced by the BBC in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who - and isn't it weird that we'll get to the 60th anniversary next year? This is really very nice indeed. For each Doctor, we get an account of the TV stories written from the perspective of one or more of the characters - Susan, Ian Chesterton, the Brigadier, occasionally the Doctor himself - combined with a collage of other mocked-up material, of which one of my favourites is a Salamander election poster. Each chapter then includes a box on the lead actor, and an assembly of quotes about the making of the show from those who were involved. There are also a few short commentaries on individual stories by guest commentators, most of whom have strong connections with the show, the exception being Sir Tim Berners-Lee on The War Machines. As my regular reader knows, I rate James Goss very highly as one of the best Who writers, and this really doesn't disappoint. It's the sort of thing that could, perhaps, be easily updated to include the next ten years and two Doctors for 2023; and would it be too much to hope that such an update could also include Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures and Class?

The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages by Helen Waddell

challenging informative fast-paced

4.0

This was the book that made the reputation of Helen Waddell, the medievalist from my own corner of County Down. It's a study of the lyrical tradition of poetry in the Middle Ages in Europe, tracing influences across geographies and cultures. I found the writing very dense; written very chattily as if these were all people whose reputations we already knew, with minimal context and footnotes mostly to works available only in well-equipped university libraries. I'm really surprised that it did so well on publication in 1927; perhaps the readers of the 1920s were more au fait with early medieval literature than I am.

Still there are some fascinating details in there. It's always interesting to be reminded of the career of Gerbert of Aurillac, which is crying out for an accessible biographical treatment, either factual or fictional. The same goes for the murky story of the Viking Siegfried (or Sifrid, as Waddell calls him). There's the mysterious figure of the Archpoet. And more locally it's interesting to see Liège popping up as an important centre of culture.

She supplies a lot of translations of the lyrics, to which she brings her own good ear for a phrase; I'm glad I have read this at last, and I'll put some of Helen Waddell's other works on my reading list now.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

challenging slow-paced

4.0

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I had read a lot of very disappointed commentary, and was prepared for masses of dry infodump, but in fact I thought it was quite a good, if old-fashioned, example of the "My God! What if..." aspirations of sf. Despite the almost 900-page length I kept turning the pages. There are some serious problems: the reason why the Moon explodes at the start of the book is never explained, the celebrity cameos are just a bit annoying, the Evil Woman President is much more annoying than that, and the last section of the book, which is set literally 5000 years after the rest, should really have been a separate novel and could actually have been expanded a bit more. Nevertheless, I warmed to it enough to give it my second preference.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

challenging slow-paced

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It’s obviously a refutation of the bizarre assertion that sf is not concerned with climate change; the scene is New York in 2140, after a couple more economica and climatic crises; the sea level worldwide has risen by 16 metres, and most of our numerous viewpoint characters live in and around the MetLife building, whose base is submerged but which has become accommodation for about two thoiusand people. As with the Mars books, the different points of view add up to make a whole; as it turns out, the viewpoint characters all end up on pretty much the same side, which is to bring about the fall of capitalism in America.

I felt the first part of the book, which builds to a couple of satisfying plot climaxes at about the half-way mark, was better than the second, where the fall of capitalism is plotted but mostly happens off stage, boosted by a natural disaster whose emotional impact comes across as somewhat blunted. It will be obvious by now that it’s a very political book, but it is more wonkish than angry, which is my own personal style as well, but doesn’t necessarily make for great drama. There’s also a frankly silly sub-plot about a young woman who broadcasts nude from an airship and attempts to transplant polar bears to Antarctica.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

emotional informative reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I've always been fascinated by Penang, where my father was born in 1928 but I have never been. This was the first novel by Tan, whose second novel The Garden of Evening Mists I enjoyed a few years back. The narrator, son of a marriage between an Englishman and a Chinese woman, finds himself playing a key role in the Japanese administration of occupied Penang during the second world war, and many years later encounters the lover of his Japanese best friend and tells her his story. The cityscape is vividly realised, as is the interaction of cultures, and the brutality of the Japanese regime. It gets a bit sanguinary towards the end, but this was true of that period of history in fact. I felt the prose was not as smooth as in the later book; one can feel that this is a first novel. However, well worth reading to deepen my own appreciation of my father's birthplace.

Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey by Bruce Clark

challenging dark informative reflective medium-paced

4.25

Quite a short book (270 pages) about a big big topic: the forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, following on the Treaty of Lausanne which officially ended the First World War, but also put a full stop to the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-22 and notoriously stipulated that Muslims living in Greece (except Eastern Thrace) and Orthodox Christians living in Turkey (except Istanbul) would be transferred to the other country. This meant 1.2 million Christians and 400,000 Muslims, many (possibly most) of whom did not speak Greek or Turkish respectively as their first language, if at all, suddenly became citizens in lands where their ancestors had never lived; historic communities were unmixed, cultures were wiped out, and unspoken traumas endured.

Bruce Clark wrote this book at the beginning of the century when a fair number of eyewitnesses were still alive, if elderly, and prepared to talk about what had happened to them eighty years before; I shouldn't think there are many eyewitnesses left now. So he combined historiography of the early Greek state, late Ottoman Empire and nascent Turkish Republic with powerful first-person accounts. These eyewitness stories are not only of violence and expulsion. A surprising number of his interlocutors were happy to talk about the happy times before the conflict, when villagers all lived together without fussing too much about whether they went to the mosque or the church. This nostalgia had survived eight decades of indoctrination by the Greek and Turkish states.

One fascinating (and sad) aspect is that in fact the Christians and Muslims who were displaced were a lot more diverse than the cultures into which they were assimilated. I was already familiar with the Bektashi sect of Islam, which flourished in what is now Greek Macedonia and is now basically restricted to the Albanian-speaking world. I wasn't previously aware of their neighbours the Valaades, or of the crypto-Christians of Anatolia, populations whose identity depended on the mixed cultures of their environments.

All of this is set against the high politics of the negotiations between Venizelos and Kemal (not yet Atatürk), who were both very much in favour of unmixing their respective populations, but both also faced significant internal opposition - both were nominally democracies with elected parliaments, but we should always remember that even autocratic states can have vigorous internal politics. (The subtitle of the book uses the word "forged", which of course means both making and faking.) There were significant interventions in managing the displaced populations from external players as well, notably in Greece which was very dependent on external aid from the British government and American individuals such as Henry Morgenthau.

It did make me wonder about an alternate timeline where Greece actually won the 1919-22 war. I don't think the territorial gains on the Aegean coast could have been sustainable in the long term, given Turkey's much greater population and advantage of strategic depth. The new Turkish state (Kemalism would not have survived) would have aligned firmly with the Axis in the second world war, rather than the neutrality of our timeline, and would surely have taken back all or most of the territory, with a second huge wave of human displacement.

Clark doesn't especially look at other cases of forced mass population movement - he mentions Cyprus in passing (tragic indeed, but on a much smaller scale) but one could add the Partition of India, which was an order of magnitude bigger on the human scale, or the Balkans in the 1990s, or indeed the place where both Clark and I come from which saw thousands forced from their homes in 1969. It's enough to look in detail at this one particular situation. He does however assess the outcome as a success for both the Greek and Turkish states, considered in their own selfish and brutal terms; a success gained at the cost of vast human misery.

(Also, Japan was part of the Allied military occupation of Constantinople/Istanbul! I had no idea!)

A great book, very readable I think even for those who are less familiar with the history and geography of the subject. 

Lethbridge-Stewart: The Daughters of Earth by Sarah Groenewegen

adventurous fast-paced

3.75

I am thoroughly enjoying the Lethbridge-Stewart books published by Candy Box. Here we have the Brigadier and colleagues fighting snowstorms in deepest Scotland, along with a cell of feminist activists which has in fact been taken over by alien forces. There are layers of uncertainty and deception, and a major plot twist in the developing plotline of the overall series. I enjoyed it a lot, as I have enjoyed the others.