(A lecture series listened to while I’ve been spinning yarn)

I’ve long been a fan of modern history (20th century) and at university, we studied history and culture from various angles – almost all post-Industrial Revolution though. It is only in the last couple of years that I’ve expanding my range and that has, for various reasons, been largely British in focus. This lecture series, which covered European history from the 1300s, has helped me fill in some of my knowledge gaps.

The course begins with Bucholz setting out two themes which come into play time and time again through the years – geography as destiny and the Great Chain of Being. Part of the former is perhaps obvious – it’s surely no great surprise that the western sea-faring countries were the ones to
seize the “New World” to the west – but there is also subtler elements concerning political alliances, marriages and buffer zones, which was stayed particularly relevant all the way up to the end of history(tm) in 1989. The Great Chain of Being is largely an archaic idea now but one that was vital for societal stability for centuries: in one of the early lectures, Bucholz discusses how the GCoB is the reason there weren’t constant peasant revolts and whatnot – if your whole concept of the world is built around the Chain, to question the Chain is basically to question God and that wasn’t generally advised.

Once the core themes were established, the lectures progressed in a vaguely chronological order as you would expect – and I found some bits more interesting than others (also as you would expect). The lectures lasted about 25 hours in total – which is nothing when trying to cover 600+ years of history for a continent. I got a little annoyed when he didn’t particularly mention the Berlin Wall (and thought in general that a lot of the post-WW2 stuff was skimpy) but I guess it is understandable with so much to cover. He mixed in quotes from eyewitnesses and contemporary commentators, as well as poetry and bits of drama (Shakespeare) – some were overly long but others, particularly the quotes, were valuable — unless he tried to do an accent. Oh God, the British accents were excruciating. Overall though, and accents aside, I liked his teaching style – there was little padding and I thought it went at a good speed (not too fast or too not too plodding). It was far from a simple recitation of facts – a lot of time was spent looking at the bigger picture, at context, causes and underlying factors, and at contemporary and later responses to events: ie, proper historical study, not just lists of dates and names.

One thing that really got my goat, aside from (*read in the worst cockney accent you’ve ever heard*) the bloody accents, was his constant need to toe the national line on certain issues – for example, it felt like there was some rose-tinting in discussion of America, and the concepts of democracy and capitalism, and it was outright embarrassing the amount of pussyfooting he had to do around Marx or any time he used the terms “socialist” or “liberal”. There is providing an explanation to stop people getting the wrong end of the stick and there is helping give people the wrong end of the stick in the first place…

Overall though, two thumbs up.

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(I like listening to audiobooks and lectures when I’m walking the dog by myself etc but struggle to find suitable fiction. This popped up a little while ago so even though I’m not particularly a fan of ACC, I thought I’d give it a go.)

I think the original premise that sold this book to me was something basic, along the lines of someone “watching humanity come to an end from a spaceship orbiting the Earth”. I’d pictured humans on something like the ISS watching the fit hit the shan a few hundred miles below but it was a whole lot more complicated than that: an alien race, “the overlords”, arrives and takes control of earth as, essentially, benevolent dictators for life. They eliminate war and nations, cruelty and inequality, and through their technology, they automate the production and distribution of all of life’s necessities. The world becomes a nicer place to live but also a duller one, since tranquillity does little to foster art and the pursuit of (higher level) science becomes pointless, since the overlords have already achieved so much in terms of technology (even if they don’t always share it with the humans). One man still has a desire for scientific discovery though and eventually, he stows away on a spaceship to the overlord’s home planet: to “escape the nursery”. Their “star drive” allows his return journey to only take a few months as far as he is concerned, but eighty years have passed for someone on Earth, and in that time, homo sapiens have died out, or rather have evolved into another species, part of a Borg-like civilisation called the Overmind, and gone into a type of suspended animation while their powers develop and they wait to join the collective. The overlords, who had been appointed by the Overmind to be nannies to homo sapiens and midwives to the new race, leave the Earth as the newbies dissolve the planet during their assimilation.

It is an intriguing book, with some interesting ideas on religion as well as science and culture, but overall, I found it uneven. Some early episodes (such as Stormgren’s abduction) seem out of place when looking back on it as a whole and other parts – including the background to the New Athens section and most of Jan’s time on the Overlords planet – seemed superfluous. I didn’t like the Greggsons’ as characters, particularly George (in fact everyone at Rupert’s party was pretty repugnant) – I can’t decide whether that was intentional or not. It was also dated – though set from 1975 to around the turn of the 22nd century, references dated it to the 1950s when it was written. There were few female characters and those that were included were flatly drawn, either wet and prone to silliness (Jean) or noteworthy only for their looks (Maia) (though we only see both through George’s eyes, so it might be that he’s just a sexist dick). The “homo sapiens = children” metaphor was good but laboured too much.

On the positive side though, I liked Stromgren and Overlord Karellen’s interactions and the idea that the race that is “overlords” to humanity is ultimately just a slave race to a greater force, one that it’ll never be able to join itself. There were also a few wonderful quotes, my favourite being “a well stocked mind is safe from boredom”: I think I might stitch that on a bookmark ;)

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I have long heard good things about “The Road” but also long avoided it (and the film version) because, despite my love of post-apocalyptica, I’m a bit of a wuss and certain things stick in my head for a long time. In many ways, I was right about “The Road” – certain things from this will stick in my head for a long time! – but I’m glad I gave into the temptation too.

“The Road” is, funnily enough, about a journey through post-apocalyptica. Some years before the story, an unknown catastrophe has destroyed civilisation and rendered the Earth a barren, ashy place, devoid of life save for the handful of desperate humans still scavenging around. The Man and his son, The Boy, as they are known throughout, are making the journey south, to avoid a freezing winter. Very little of their past is mentioned – we don’t know how they had survived up to the starting point of the story or anything of the Man’s life before the end of the world. This gives their roaming an eternal quality – as if it has been going on, and will go on, forever.

“The Road” is, rightly, acclaimed and I was stunned by the variety and immense imagery of language. The whole world is grey by day, coated in the aforementioned ash, and black by night, and yet despite the monotone palette, McCarthy manages to paint a vivid picture of the world around them without becoming repetitive. I hope he dedicated the book to his thesaurus. Equally sparse is the language used between the pair: they are each other’s worlds, far beyond a normal parent/child relationship, and there is a private shorthand that is called back again and again – I found this pulling me further into their relationship.

Like most road trip tales, the story is relatively episodic with stretches of trekking in between. Some of the episodes felt conveniently fortuitous – reaching the absolute lowest ebb then stumbling across a perfectly stocked oasis of an underground bunker – but I am relatively forgiving of coincidences in novels if they further the story/characters (since it would have been a short book if they’d died at the first hurdle). Other episodes were as horrifying as I had worried they would be and I am trying not to think about them again **LA LA LA NOT THINKING**. Mostly though, it is about the passage and their threadbare survival in the wasteland and each fruitless expedition (they’re certainly not always lucky) drove home the futility of it: the Boy might keep the Man alive, by providing “the fire”, but to what end? “South” might be warmer but what was warmth if you starved to death or were killed so that someone else didn’t? For them, the aimless pilgrimage was its own destination but I could see why the woman, the Man’s wife and Boy’s mother, did what she did.

I realised about halfway through what it is that I usually like about post-apocalyptic stories – it is less about the end and more about the beginning (“ap-ositive-alypse” as I called it to John). There didn’t feel like there was any possible new beginning in “The Road” and that was, understandably and purposefully, depressing. But I kept going because I didn’t quite know how it was going to end. One possible ending, the expected (by the characters) one, would be unbearably painful to read yet a happy ending would be jarringly unrealistic: McCarthy went for a middle ground. I found some positivity in it – even though ultimately it was not more positive than any point of the journey – but keeping in mind what I said about coincidences above, I found it a little unnecessarily coincidental: I’d have been happier if the man in the ski jacket had been following them more closely, if he had intervened sooner after The Man’s death (um, spoiler alert) rather than happening to be on the road when the Boy finally decided to leave the woods. (It seemed unlikely that his band – possibly no more than two adults – would spare someone to wander aimlessly to look for the Boy; following closer because they saw the state of The Man would be more believable).

It’s not a cheerful book but it’s a bloody good one.

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(Sittenfeld’s debut novel “Prep” is one of my favourite coming-of-age novels (alongside “I Capture The Castle“”), and not just because of how heavily I identified with the self-doubt and self-esteem issues of the main character, Lee Fiora – I’ve read it, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine times. I think this is my third reading of “American Wife”.)

“American Wife” is openly inspired by the life of Laura Bush: in particular, her love of reading and career choices, her involvement in a car crash that resulted in the death of her friend (possibly boyfriend) at the age of 17, and marrying a rich party boy who would go on to be declared president in 2000 and lead the country into an unpopular and protract war (or rather wars). It is a fictionalised account of fictional characters, but there is heavy leaning on Bush’s story: I found this both interesting and a hindrance.

The novel is narrated by its protagonist Alice Blackwell from the vanity point of 2006 and is divided into four parts: the first covering her childhood up to the car crash and an abortion after she has (understandable but) misguided sex with her now dead friend’s brother; the second section jumps forward a decade or so, to when she meets “Charlie”; the third section jumps another decade, to a crisis in their marriage and his ultimate reform, which puts him on his path to the fourth section, which takes place during his second term at the White House and as a good novel should, pulls together all the themes and loose ends covered thus far.

Alice is a serious (though not cold) introspective reader and it feels like she spends considerably more time reacting to other and analysing things than doing. In the first section her narrative is driven by her more active grandmother Emilie and her best friend Dena but it feels rather a preamble – giving us a reason to care about Andrew before he dies in the car crash and setting up Alice’s big secret (the abortion) so it can be used again in the final act.

The novel really comes alive (and Emilie & Dena get sidelined) when she meets Charlie. Sittenfeld does an admirable job to convince us why quiet liberal Alice might fall for lightweight diehard-Republican Charlie – his charisma simply oozes off the page. I felt quite caught up in the whirlwind of their courtship, which made it more difficult to read about their marriage troubles later on – I very much felt the stings of the hurtful lines that Charlie threw at Alice in the darkest period. As we know that she returns to him after their separation (or else she won’t become the First Lady that is narrating), the interest in their temporary split is not one of story but one of how she will rationalise her return to him.

Their romance aside, Charlie’s family – his many brothers, his fearsome mother and his surprisingly warm father – play a large role in the middle two sections. I have mixed feelings towards them – I’m interested on a looky-loo level — how the other half 1% live — but found their number and boisterousness was anxiety-inducing enough without needing the more manufactured scenes to showcase Alice’s discomfort (the bathroom episode in Halycon being most obvious but also her numerous run-ins with Maj).

While the novel as a whole covers around more than fifty years of Alice’s life, we see much of it in close up – after skipping over her early childhood, we focus for around six weeks at the age of 17, then spend a similar amount of time exploring her courtship and marital crisis respectively. The sections are coloured with flashbacks and other padding but still, I felt in the middle of it, zoomed in, privy to Alice’s thought processes as she had them (even though we’re only hearing about them in hindsight). I think it’s this intimacy that creates my disappointment with the final part of the novel – it feels like it zooms out too far. We skip over Charlie’s time as governor and only hear about the problematic first presidential election and the first term challenges in flashback, which makes them feel like distant done-deals: Alice has already processed her thoughts and feelings on them and is presenting them to us rather than let us see the journey. I also felt distanced from Charlie as a character once his actions began to mimic the well-known ones of his real-life counterpart – his charm no longer worked on me and he seemed flatter as a character (in fact, we barely saw him). While their eventual rise to the White House is what makes us interested in them, I think the journey of how Alice & Charlie became the people they are is more intriguing. Aside from wrapping up loose threads, I could almost have done without the final part.

Whether zoomed in or zoomed out, the time periods felt slightly lacking in colour or differentiation – possibly why they were named after her postal address, as if that was the only thing that notably changed. We had retro cars and music in the early 1960s, a hippy Vietnam vet of an ex-boyfriend in the late 1970s, and a tiny reference to cocaine & Bon Jovi in the 1980s but there was little else to set the scene: if their daughter Ella hadn’t gone from non-existent to school girl between the courtship and marital crisis sections, I would have had no real sense of time passing at all. With the narration happening from some future point (is she possibly recalling it all on the plane to Chicago, with everything after that happening “live”?), we hear intelligent mature adult Alice’s thoughts on everything, which further extend the feelings of uniformity and even the difficult bits feel rationalised and rose-tinted. I can’t look back five years without thinking I was an idiot back then (and have no doubts that 39 year old me will think I’m an idiot now), but for all her self-doubt and introspection, Alice doesn’t seem to ask “why on earth did I do that?”.

I think my enjoyment of the first three-quarters of the book is enough to make me say, overall, I liked it, and knowing me, I probably will read it again but it certainly won’t be as regularly on my reading list as “Prep“. I’ve just bought Sittenfeld’s latest book “Sisterland” but I think I’ll have some non-fiction as a palate cleanser in between.

• Other reviews from January 2014
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For a variety of different reasons (none of which are particularly interesting or novel), I’ve decided to start reviewing some of the stuff I read and/or listen to (in the case of audiobooks & lecture series).

I thought I’d do one big review a month, and brief summaries for the other things worth recording – but me being verbose me, that didn’t work out so I’ve split them into their own posts.

• “American Wife” by Curtis Sittenfeld
• “Childhood’s End” by Arthur C Clark
• “Foundations of Western Civilization II: A History of the Modern Western World” by Robert Bucholz
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I’ve read/started reading a few other things too, and listening to most of two other lecture series, but hopefully I’ll finish those eventually & review them properly rather than listening them all here.