Jewel In the Crown: Pax Britannica, by James Morris
Elgar collaborated with Kipling in several songs and a cantata called "The Fringes of the Fleet", and for all his Catholicism he seemed to stand for everything properly Anglican and open-air, muscular virtues, honest loyalties--English music should have to it, he thought, 'something broad, noble, chivalrous, healthy and above all an out-of-door sort of spirit'. Elgar married the daughter of a distinguished Anglo-Indian general, and he was much taken with the country style of life. Sometimes he pretended not to be interested in music at all, in his zeal for gentlemanly English attitudes, and it gave him pleasure when he was mistaken for a general in mufti himself.
An interesting snapshot of the zenith of the British empire as seen during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, and giving roughly equal treatment to the glorious POV of the colonizers and the grievances of the colonized. There are chapters about Canada, Ireland, Egypt, India, Australia, South Africa, and a mushel of famous and little-known island nations, all with the British flag flying pompously over a government office staffed by some noble's resentful second son. Many colorful personalities, many incidents that have unfortunately passed out of the common mind, all collected by an author who feels no need to choose between "British Exceptionalism" and "British Oppression", because you can kind of have both at once. Very highly recommended as a survey of the lat victorian history I've been focusing on all year.
Penny dreadful: Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Peacock
The north-eastern tower was appropriated to the domestics, whom Mr Glowry always chose by one of two criterions,—a long face, or a dismal name. His butler was Raven; his steward was Crow; his valet was Skellet. Mr Glowry maintained that the valet was of French extraction, and that his name was Squelette. His grooms were Mattocks and Graves. On one occasion, being in want of a footman, he received a letter from a person signing himself Diggory Deathshead, and lost no time in securing this acquisition; but on Diggory's arrival, Mr Glowry was horror-struck by the sight of a round ruddy face, and a pair of laughing eyes. Deathshead was always grinning,—not a ghastly smile, but the grin of a comic mask; and disturbed the echoes of the hall with so much unhallowed laughter, that Mr Glowry gave him his discharge. Diggory, however, had staid long enough to make conquests of all the old gentleman's maids, and left him a flourishing colony of young Deathsheads to join chorus with the owls, that had before been the exclusive choristers of Nightmare Abbey.
I picked this up as an example of "trash fiction" because, in the 19th century, not every author was an Austen or a Dickens...and I ended up having a great gothic good time, in an Addams Family sort of way.
It reminded me of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast because of the relish it takes in painting tongue-in-cheek portraits of macabre gloom. The plot is a brief bit of nonsense where the son and heir to Old Glowry pursues the love of a woman who is not sufficiently gloomy to suit the family tradition.
It needed Edward Gorey drawings.
Great American Meander: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it's the best way; then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn't no objections, 'long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn't no use to tell Jim, so I didn't tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.
Last month I postulated that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was Twain's best novel; but then I went and re-read huck Finn to be sure. And....I don't know. It's sort of a toss-up, it seems to me. It depends on whether you prefer Mark Twain writing from an adult perspective with his full vocabulary and array of satirical weapons, or Twain writing with half his brain tied behind his back, from the perspective of a kid with no education, seeing the world through gradually less innocent eyes and experiencing conflict between his conscience and what the grown-up world tells him is right.
Huck Finn is not a solid plot; its frequent N-bombs are jarring and problematic, and the final chapters where Tom Sawyer takes over again are a noticeable step down from the 'masterpiece' aspects of the book....but ultimately, I found myself overlooking those things and marveling at the universality of life far from the big cultural centers of the world, and at nuggets of real wisdom that I had overlooked on prior readings. this time around, for instance, I was in a frame of mind to be critical of white male entitlement, and so i found the Duke and King a lot less funny than I previously had, and felt the plight of the Wilkes Sisters and what they could expect trying to own property in Arkansas without a man in their lives. And then there's the episode where the Colonel shoots the town drunk in the middle of the street and disperses the resulting angry mob simply by being "the only real man" among a bunch of cowards. The first few times I read that book, I considered him to be a hero (he took a ton of verbal abuse from the drunk and gave him fair warning well ahead of time)...but this time I wasn't so sure. Guy has an ego and a sense of entitlement, and so he just gets to use deadly force on an unarmed, all-mouth jerk who is trying to get away at the time, and who dies in his sobbing daughter's arms? What if the "mob" was instead a posse come to arrest him?
Anyhow, those were my main thoughts this time around. And in another decade, I'll get something completely different again. seems to me, that's part of what makes a novel a great one. Like the Mississippi itself, it's never the same experience twice.
Socialist fucksticks: News From Nowhere, by William Morris
Said I: “I thought that I understood from something that fell from you a little while ago that you had abolished civil law. Is that so, literally?”
“It abolished itself, my friend,” said he. “As I said before, the civil law-courts were upheld for the defence of private property; for nobody ever pretended that it was possible to make people act fairly to each other by means of brute force. Well, private property being abolished, all the laws and all the legal ‘crimes’ which it had manufactured of course came to an end. Thou shalt not steal, had to be translated into, Thou shalt work in order to live happily. Is there any need to enforce that commandment by violence?”
This is that variation on the Utopia novel in which something something garbanzo happens to the narrator and he wakes up in the far future, at a time when everyone has long since learned to be sensible as the author understands it and made a perfect society, and they all chuckle over how ridiculous things were back in the primitive days of the reader's own time.
In this case the perfect society is perfect socialism, which requires only that we get along with one another and act as nature intended, though it might just as well have been perfect capitalism or perfect communism in which the true believer writer just postulates that everyone behaves in such a way as to make the system work, and the rest follows.
Morris's vision is short, simple, and pleasant. but for a feeble attempt at a love interest, and a rowing expedition up the Thames, it is almost entirely conversational and composed of reaction shots of Morris gaping as, for example, shopkeepers laugh and laugh at the notion of being paid for their work.
Edward Bellamy did it better.
The Victorian Murders: The Death of Achilles; Special Assignments, by Boris Akunin; No Escape, by James D. Brewer; Death of an Honorable Member; Counterfeit of Murder, by Ray Harrison; Treachery at Lancaster Gate; Murder on the Serpentine, by Anne Perry
A difficult task had been carried off very neatly. The Gardener's body was lying in a pit of quicklime, and as for the boy lawyer, he had died without any suffering or fear--Achimas had killed him in his sleep before he set fire to the watchman's hut.
--from The Death of Achilles
"Good Lord, Masey," Tyner said, producing a handkerchief to cover her mouth. "This place smells awful!"
"It's a damn trash heap," he replied. "For fifty years, people been hauling every kind of filth you can imagine and dumping it over the bluff. Rain washes it down, spreads it out, and pretty soon you got free land."
--from No Escape
"A dear friend of his was convicted and hanged a couple of years ago. Alexander did everything he could to save his friend, certain that he was innocent. He failed, and Dylan Lezant went to the gallows. Alexander never really got over it. He believes that a large proportion of the police are deeply corrupt, and they are being shielded by other police for reasons of their own."
--from Treachery at Lancaster Gate
Sergeant Bragg hunched his shoulders and advanced menacingly on the pawnbroker. "Do you know, Jock," he growled, seizing him by the shirt front, "every time I come within a mile of you, I feel soiled. For two pins I'd bloody choke you now, and do society a favor." he thrust his face within an inch of jock's. "Why shouldn't I, eh? What sodding good are you to the world?"
---from Counterfeit of Murder
Boris Akunin is frighteningly good. fortunately he has another series I can read next year. Meanwhile, the few books my library has in the Fandorin series are works of art. The Death of Achilles is a masterpiece, the first half of which is told from the detective's POV, and the second half from the murderer's, and the twists are ASTONISHING. The same is true of the two stories in Special Assignments, in which the sidekick is a pathetic Checkhovian clerk-type who finds his strength under Fandorin's tutelage, and where chapters end with tantalizing clues from the villain's point of view. I was fooled, and you probably will be, too.
The last of James D. Brewer's Mississippi riverboat-based mysteries is the most disappointing of the four, but there you go. It does chillingly re-create a Memphis Yellow Fever epidemic, but the first of two crimes is too easy and the other is far-fetched and relies on a feeble trope. Read the other three.
I read one Ray Harrison late Victorian mystery in January, and put the series aside until later. Honestly, it isn't my cup of tea. Police procedurals with all the cliches, including endings where the killer says "It's a fair cop" and "You've got me bang to rights." Here we have a murdered MP who is mostly a banker, and a counterfeit ring where, starting with no clues at all, the incognito constable just happens to be recruited at random into the gang. In crowded London, they just happen to run into each other. yes, suspend disbelief; do not hang it by the neck until dead.
Waxwork is considered to be Peter Lovesey's masterpiece, at least where the Sgt. Cribb tales are concerned. As with his other works, it focuses ostensibly on an oddball part of the culture, in this case the traditions of Madame Tousseau's "chamber of horrors" waxwork museum exhibit and how it ties in with actual historical murderers...really, the wax museum subplot and the scenes with the crown's hangman are a side-plot that distract from the main event: a woman condemned mostly by her own written confession, and whether the confession is the truth or not. the defendant in question is one of the great mystery characters in fiction.
And then there's Anne Perry's Charlotte and Thomas works which (because of a new set featuring their grown son) I figure comes to the end with Murder on the Serpentine, which gets Thomas a knighthood and thanks from Queen Victoria and maybe wraps it all up nicely.
More Shadowy Doubles: The Master of Ballantrae, by Robert Louis Stevenson
So much display of life I can myself swear to. I have heard from others that he visibly strove to speak, that his teeth showed in his beard, and that his brow was contorted as with the agony of pain and effort. And this may have been. I know not. I was otherwise engaged. For at that first disclosure of the dead man's eyes, Lord Durrisdeer fell to the ground, and when I raised him up, he was a corpse.
This is a lesser-known Stevenson that tries to straddle the macabre tales and the regular adventures, and to my mind, fails. Stevenson was big on shadowy "others" that haunt the protagonist, from the pirates of Treasure Island to Mr. Hyde.
In The Master of Ballantrae , we get two brothers, the bad good guy and the good bad guy. The younger brother is the colorless but dutiful protagonist who always does the right thing at great personal expense and gets no credit for it, while his elder brother is a charming, narcissistic asshole who takes him for everything and maneuvers him into looking bad every chance he gets, frequently being declared dead and then coming back alive after all, JUST to keep tormenting poor brother Harry.
Their dad sides with the asshole and loves him. His wife sides with the asshole against him. The fucking village acts like Trumpkins on steroids, they are so quick to accuse him of evil. Even when he leaves town, the damn brother follows him to America. At least he eventually has a son who loves him. I wanted to pluck him out of the story to someplace safe where he would stop being mercilessly persecuted by given circumstances.
The narrator is an old family retainer, apparently the younger brother's only friend, who loves him and is so moved by the injustice of it all that he sometimes almost speaks up about it to the people persecuting him because they continue to trust the elder brother without cause.
Conversational Philosophy: The Will to Believe, by William James
What do you think {31}of yourself? What do you think of the world?... These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them.... In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark.... If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes.... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.
William James was one of the early American philosophers, who either helped to define the American spirit or was influenced by it to form a philosophy that explained and suited the American frontier way of looking at things. He quotes and praises Whitman a lot. He puts a lot of stock in the practical consequences of accepting or rejecting a philosophical theory, as a basis for asserting whether it is true. And he writes in a conversational English for which, after many months of struggling with weighty German tomes, I am very grateful.
A running theme in this collection of essays is the justification of faith (believing certain things without adequate evidence). James really, really wants you to know that it's okay to make your own choices, and that you don't have to have proof by the scientific method before you're allowed to believe something. Living in the present, where the mob of screechweasels actively rejects science in favor of 'gut feelings' and cites your expertise as a reason to reject your evidence, I find myself wistful for an era in which James apparently felt he was in a minority simply saying that belief without proof (in such areas as religion, where no proof can exist) is at least acceptable.
James's acceptance of religion is not so much Pascal's wager as "If it makes you a better, happier person and costs you and those around you nothing, then go ahead and believe it." Phrased that way, I have no problem with it.
Everyone's a Critic: What is art?, by Leo Tolstoy
The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example: one man laughs, and another, who hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another, who hears, feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man, seeing him, comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements, or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination, or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena.
And it is on this capacity of man to receive another man's expression of feeling, and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.
In a nutshell, Tolstoy defines art as a work that conveys genuine feelings and emotions in peaceful peasants who have not had their souls adulterated by education in technique or the decadence of the upper classes. In fact, Tolstoy has little but contempt for the upper classes, and appears to doubt whether they have actual feelings that can be touched by art, choosing instead to lavish praise upon huge gaudy, bombastic, fake representations such as Wagnerian opera. So much fake.
And then, in order to be real art, it should also have a wholesome moral message like brotherhood and universal love.
Seems a bit limiting to me, but then he wrote War and Peace (see June's bookpost), and so it's not as if he doesn't know anything....but then War and Peace has great long parts that do not meet Tolstoy's stated criteria for art, as when it eschews feelings and emotion to give professorial history and philosophy lessons, or when the successful dirty fighting in battles results in victory without moral consequences....
Matter over Mind: Principles of Physiological Psychology, by Wilhelm Wundt
The Mental functions form a part of the phenomena of life. Wherever we observe them, they are accompanied by the process of nutrition and reproduction. On the other hand, the general phenomena of life may be manifested in cases where we have no reason for supposing the presence of a mind. Hence, the first question that arises in an inquiry concerning the bodily substrate of mentality is this: What are the characteristics that justify our attributing mental functions to a living body, an object in the domain of animate nature?
A complex and technical scientific textbook exploring functions of the brain and nervous system, recommended only for serious students. I read it mainly because William James, in his far more accessible Principles of Psychology refers to Wundt very frequently.
