Book review: Elephants Can Remember

Christie / Poirot again. Not her finest I fear; indeed, as a detective story rather poor; but as a book to read, not bad. Wiki is not kind: According to The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, this novel is one of the "execrable last novels" in which Christie "loses her grip altogether". I don't think it is quite that bad.

I shall not trouble you with the plot, only the flaws in it. The chief one is that there are identical twin sisters in it; in a mystery novel, this inevitably means that they get swapped, and alas "the mad rejected one pushed the nice one over the cliff" is all to obvious a solution. So much so that it is inconcievable that the police at the time didn't consider it. Did they, for example, take fingerprints or consider dental records to establish identity? This isn't even mentioned, because it can't be, because if it was ever mentioned even the dullest reader would find it obvious.

The bit with the dog was better and more subtle. I pat myself on the back that I got that too. I didn't get the "general decides to kill sister in law out of duty and self out of honour" bit, party because that bit is arbitrary. An alternative, darker, and perhaps non-AC motive would have been after the wife's death he decided to have a fling with his sister in law - frightfully attractive filly and all that - and then felt guilt. The finding the wife, having been pushed off and hit with rocks, and her being not quite dead, but instead of rushing for the doctor they stop to listen to her extended dying words, isn't plausible.

The bits - heavily, painfully, frequently repeated - about the four wigs are odd. They were identical twins; the housekeeper was of poor eyesight; did it also really need a wig or two for the diguise? I feel this bit was poorly thought out; possibly even an element not properly worked in; maybe it seemed good at the start and she couldn't be bothered to re-write it.

I think it implausible that our good general would not have left a suicide note - he would have known full well that suicides normally do, and he is trying to make it appear as such; well, in fact it is. I also think it unlikely he wouldn't have left an envelope with his solicitors, to be delivered to the children when they reach maturity.

Book review: the Grand Titration

This is a collection of essays by Joseph Needham about science in China and the West. The nominal question to be answered is "why, given that in ye olde dayes, China was like ZOMG much more tech than the West, how come it didn't invent modern science?". But in practice much more space is given to convincing us that ZOMG those antient chinks were well up there maaan.

Oh dear, am I revealing my prejudices?

There's a pretty scathing review in Science from 1970 which says quite a bit of what I wanted to say, but perhaps more authoritatively.

Before I get into lengthy quotations, let me say a bit about how badly he establishes his core concern, which is (I am paraphrasing, I hope you understand) that "everything" in the West was really invented in China. His method of doing this is to notice that the Chinese had, say, clocks, quite early on; that the West had better clocks later, and then to say or imply or infer that Western clock tech comes from China. But what he never does is prove any transmission; or really make any effort to demonstrate.

There's another issue, which is that in most cases he is talking more about tech than science. Bureaucracy isn't greatly threatened by tech; people making better ink or an improved lock-gate aren't a threat; it's the people wondering about the stars who need to be controlled.

Let's quote some of JN:

So we come to the fundamental question, why did modern science not arise in China? The key probably lies in the four factors: geographical, hydrological, social and economic. All explanations in terms of the dominance of Confucian philosophy, for instance, may be ruled out at the start, for they only invite the further question, why was Chinese civilization such that Confucian philosophy did dominate. Economic historians such as Wu Ta-Khun, Chi Chhao-Ting and Wittfogel, tell us that though Chinese and European feudalism were not unlike, when feudalism decayed in China, it gave place to an economic and social system totally different from anything in Europe: not mercantile, still less industrial, capitalism, but a special form which may be called Asiatic bureaucratism, or bureaucratic feudalism. As we have already seen above, the rise of the merchant class to power, with their slogan of democracy, was the indispensable accompaniment and sine qua non of the rise of modern science in the west. But in China the scholar-gentry and their bureaucratic feudal system always effectively prevented the rise to power or seizure of the State by the merchant class, as happened elsewhere.

So his answer is the China got bureaucracy, Europe got merchantile democracy. Or said another way:

This is the background, then, which alone enables us to say that there was no modern science in China because there was no democracy. Democracy of a sort there was, in so far as (in many dynasties at any rate) it was possible for a boy of whatever origin to become a great scholar (the village neighbours might club together to provide a tutor for him) and so take a high place in the official bureaucracy. Democratic, too, was the absence of hereditary positions of lordship, and democratic was, and still is, the psychological attitude of the commons within whom the four 'classes' (scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants) interchanged with considerable fluidity among one another. It explains the utter lack of the servility so noticeable in other peoples of the eastern hemisphere. But that particular sort of democracy associated with the rise of the merchants to power, that revolutionary democracy associated with the consciousness of technological change, that Christian, individualistic and representative democracy with all its agitating activity, which characterized the New Model Army, the Army of the Marseillaise, the Minute Men, the Floating Republic, the Dorset Martyrs, the Communards, the Sailors of Invergordon and Kronstadt, and the Motor-Cycle Battalions which took the Winter Palace that China never knew until our own day.

(note we can tell from this that democracy is a good thing, because JN feels obliged to pretend that China had it). But note that he is uneasy in his explanation: is it democracy, is it merchants? And why are all of his "applications" military? More on the Chinese system:

There is probably no other culture in the world where the conception of the civil service has become so deeply rooted. I myself had no idea of it when I first went to China, but you can find it everywhere there, even in the folk-lore. Instead of stories about heroes and heroines becoming kings or princesses, as in Europe, in China it is always a matter of taking a high place in the examina-tions and rising in the bureaucracy, or marrying an important official. This was, of course, the only way in which to acquire wealth. There is a famous saying (current till recently) that in order to accumulate wealth you must enter the civil service and rise to high rank (Ta kuan fa tshai). The accumulation of wealth by the bureaucracy was the basis of the phenomenon often described by Western people in China as 'graft', 'squeeze', and so on, and of which so many complained. The attitude of Westerners, however, has been prejudiced by the fact that in Europe religion and moral uprightness had a historical connection with that quantitative book-keeping and capitalism which had no counter-part in China. At no time in Chinese history were the members of the mandarinate paid a proper salary, as we should think natural in the West. There were constant efforts to do so, decrees were always being issued, but in point of fact it was never done, and the reason is probably because the Chinese never had a full money economy.

It really doesn't take much to realise that a society where the highest ambition is to be an arts-side bureaucrat isn't going to get scientific flourishing. And

There cannot be much doubt (as we can now see) that the failure of the rise of the merchant class to power in the State lies at the basis of the inhibition of the rise of modern science in Chinese society. What the exact connection was between early modern science and the merchants is of course a point not yet fully elucidated. Not all the sciences seem to have the same direct con-nection with mercantile activity. For instance, astronomy had been brought to quite a high level in China. It was an orthodox' science there because the regulation of the calendar was a matter of intense interest to the ruling authority. From ancient times the acceptance of the calendar promulgated by the Emperor had been a symbol of submission to him. On account of a great sensitivity to the 'prognosticatory' aspect of natural phenomena, the Chinese had amassed long series of observations on things which had not been studied at all in the West, for example auroras. Records of sun-spots had been kept by the Chinese, who must have observed them through thin slices of jade or some similar translucent material, long before their very existence was suspected in the West. It was the same with eclipses, which were supposed to have a fortunate or antagonistic effect on dynastic events. Then there were the 'unorthodox' sciences, for example alchemy and chemistry, which were always associated with Tao-ism. Neither astronomy nor chemistry could enter the modern phase, however, in the Chinese environment.

You can't trust him on the details, of course. He asserts that "astronomy had been brought to quite a high level in China" but what he means is observations. Their theory was utterly deficient; they weren't even interested enough to ask.

And that's a good place to segue into a congruent but distinct view, which I get from Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: that the Key Insight, which the antient Greeks provided, was criticism. The idea that you created theories of how the world was, but others were allowed to criticise and scutinise, and propose better. You see immeadiately that kind of attitude fits well with merchantile democracy, and very poorly with bureaucracy of any stripe.

In a way, we're back to the similar "why poverty?" question. The answer is "you don't need to explain poverty; it is the natural state". Similarly "why ignorance?". And so "why no science?" gets the same answer: that's the default. You have to be special to get science.

Book review: Murder in Mesopotamia

See wiki. The usual group of suspects is gathered in isolation at a dig in Iraq. I rather liked this, and enjoyed reading it. The denoument is pleasing in that it preserves symmetry: usually inevitably we have to break symmetry as one of a set of carefully balanced candidates is selected.

But it is terribly flawed, I think in ways that we might think of "yes I accept that because it is in a detective book". So Posner is a convicted German spy, but escapes, unlike every other such. He then has the bizarre misfortunte to coincidentally die in a train crash. And then mysteriously becomes sufficiently expert in archaeology, despite a total lack of training, as to become eminent; he (I think this was the idea) acquires the identity of someone else in the crash, and somehow none of the people that ever knew him recognise the change. Meanwhile, his own wife doesn't recognise him.

Turning now to the murder, it turns out that a heavy stone had been dropped onto her head. This is a desperately unreliable way of killing someone, so much so that it would be a mad plan. But more, if you've stuck your head out of a window, and someone drops a heavy stone on your head, then there will be a wound underneath, where your neck has hit the windowsill; not to mention blood on the windowsill; but in the book there isn't. As to the second murder, I think it implausible that poor J really necked an entire glass of acid in the middle of the night; sipping it is far more plausible; and once again it is a desperately unreliable way of killing anyone¹.

Meanwhile, the obvious possibility that "someone dropped a rope from the roof and let someone up" is completely ignored.

On the trivia scale: we are given a careful plan of the house, and which room everyone is in. Naturally, it must all be neat and tidy, and it is: there are workrooms, living room and such, and everyone has their own bedroom. Including nurse L. Even though she only arrived a week ago, the house mysteriously grew another room for her.

One more thing: we are told that no-one could possibly have got through the barred windows; and so of course we accept this, as part of the fixed stars of the plot. Then she is killed by a pot dropped on her head as it sticks out of the window through the bars, and technically this isn't cheating, as it is possible to do this even if you couldn't climb through. But nonetheless I think it is not reasonable that people would have been certain that no-one could climb through - what about a small man, or boy - if the gap is large enough to permit a head? And remember these were bars, not a grille.

Refs

1. We're also back, somewhat unfairly because obviously it would spoil the book, at the "why not fail gracefully?" problem. Suppose you've killed your wife, who you both love and hate; and on-site is yer Famous Belgian Detective. When faced with the choice of fess up, or go on a killing spree (with the inevitable prblem that you're spewing out yet more clues, and increasingly unlikely to escape), slaughtering your best friend... wouldn't you more likely just confess?

You! I wanna take you to a towbar!

I wanted to get a towbar, trailering for the purposes of. I ended up going to Towbar Express, or rather they ended up coming to me, since they do it on your driveway. It took about 2-3 hours, and cost about £700, for the 13-pin connector, and a detachable "swan neck" type.

Pic: the detatched towbar itself. Quite heavy. It comes with keys for locking it once in place. The "green" indicator is "locked in place" I think; it twists, to insert or remove.

Not easily seen from that pic: the plastic cover under the bumper needs a hole cut for the towbar to peek out of. Here is the bloke cutting said hole, having taken off the plastic to work on it. Distant view. Here's a pic with the bar removed, note plastic dirt-protector in the socket.

All this went without problem, and towing to Norwich was fine. Trivia: the car complained a couple of times that "ACC" was unavailable... I think this was it struggling a bit on cruise control up some of the hills.

Note that I ended up with a six foot length of metal that used to be where the towbar is. I'm keeping it for a year or two, then will probably throw it away, since I don't ever expect to remove the towbar fitting. If you knew you didn't want it, you'd probably have to pre-warn them to take it away, I don't suppose they want it either.

Book review: Funeral in Berlin

Funeral in Berlin is perhaps the classic of the early Deightons. Wiki says: Funeral in Berlin is a 1964 spy novel by Len Deighton set between Saturday 5 October and Sunday 10 November 1963. It was the third of Deighton's novels about an unnamed British agent. It was preceded by The IPCRESS File (1962) and Horse Under Water (1963), and followed by Billion-Dollar Brain (1966).

My pic is of my copy; I don't think I'm responsible for the ink blot. Not that there are no submachine guns in the book.

The plot concerns a nominal attempt to arrrange the defection of a soviet scientist; but actually to recover valuables in a Swiss account owned by Broum; but who is Broum? The plot consists of Our Hero exploring the situation and gradually unravelling a genuinely interesting story.

Sometimes there's an impression of individually written scenes not totally fitting together. For example the Hendaye bit: it is all very nice, but it isn't clear how he, Vulkan or Steele got there from Berlin; or indeed why Vulkan went there instead of directly to Spain. But mostly the joins are not too obvious, and certainly on first reading it flows by; all rather confusing, but becomes clear at the end.

The interviews with death camp survivors works I think; and the whole evocation of that not-long-post WWII period also works. The world-weary spy going along with the naive young bunnies also works; the relationship with Stok is perhaps just a little too chummy, but can be excused; and Stok is a good character; indeed the book is full of them.

Book review: Cat Among the Pigeons

Cat Among the Pigeons is a Christie. Wiki will tell you about it. It is, meh, OK I guess; fun enough to read but nothing more.

The story background - revolution in an unspecified middle eastern kingdom, and some missing jewels - is all a bit hackneyed but at least it isn't rich Americans. The setting of a country girl's school is nice although it does feel like a very small school.

Once the fundamental premise is accepted, British Intelligence does a rather poor job: three teachers are slaughtered, and a four badly wounded possibly fatally at the end, despite their having a man on the scene at all times.

I didn't guess the answer, at least in part because I wasn't trying very hard. But AS's succession of short jobs, and a conveniently sick mother, was arousing even my suspicions.

What was never explained was the implausible coincidence of someone just happening to be in the hotel room next door out in Ramat. I think something is needed there; it would have to be something around AS spying on Bob or the like... meh, I'm not sure. Quite what AS was supposed to be doing out there is never specified. Also, as a supposedly pro international hit woman, I'm a bit suspicious about single-shot-to-kill; wouldn't std.practice be a couple more shots: it is surely hard to be certain, especially in the dark.

The "Miss Blanche was killed when she attempted to blackmail the killer" red herring is a bit dodgy too: Miss B is extorting loadsamoney, and yet a hired killer isn't obviously rich - if you were, why would you stay in the job - but is obviously dangerous.

At the end, AS shoots Chaddy and as she lies possibly mortally wounded - but happily silent - on the floor Poirot goes into a long spiel explaining the situation. Once that important matter is over Chaddy can be attended to. We also learn that Chaddy killed Miss V by hitting her with a sandbag, an astonishing feat for an old woman which no-one remarks on. One thinks of the oh-so-many other novels when characters manage to merely knock out others with a sandbag, and yet here death occurs on the first blow. What's more, there's a convenient golf club nearby, the supposed murder weapon, and yet a complete absence of any pathologist's report into blood, or matted hair, on the golf club; or anything about the indentation in the head. So what this really is, is a badly done red herring.

The abduction of Shaista is a better red herring; I had S tagged as the killer, and still think it would have been better if she had been.

Christmas 2024

Christmas 2024 was the now standard pattern: to Ma for a few days; home; to Mfd+J to New Years Eve.

It was the usual pleasant time; I won't analyse it in any detail, just pull out some pix. The full set is here.

The children around the tree. Mother's tree in the front garden.

Christmas day meal was as ever. The bringing of the pudding. Mother in state. The Rulez. My morning half in just under 2 hours, alone this time.

Boxing Day to RNLT for lunch then a walk around the mystical Five Standing Stones of MuW. Photo by M (proof she came). It was all too much for some.

On the Saturday we went home we were going to Parkrun but it was closed-for-mud. So we did our own. Finish order: D, Toby <gap>, me, Lara <gap>, Rob, Miranda. Nina went over the fields with the dogs.

Our faithful cat was waiting at home to greet us.

DE and I walked to Ely and the cathedral on a cold frosty but lovely day that was so cold people were skating. E and I didn't find time for the Backs because she is a busy little thing, but I did scull.

For New Year's Eve to Mfd+J. And in the end, Mfd+J finished the puzzle. Indeed, the Ely walk was after NYD, but I think the puzzle makes a nicer last pic.