Book review: Howard's End

Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster, first published in 1910, about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. Howards End is considered by many to be Forster's masterpiece, or so says Wiki. I woudn't put it quite like that. Grokipedia says Howards End is a novel by English author E. M. Forster, first published in 1910 by Edward Arnold. The narrative intertwines the lives of the cultured, half-German Schlegel sisters—Margaret and Helen—with the pragmatic, affluent Wilcox family and the impoverished clerk Leonard Bast, centering on the titular Hertfordshire country house as a symbol of enduring English heritage and personal continuity; that is rather closer to what I would say. But then again, Gpedia goes on and on about social conditions, overloading a humble article about a book.

I like it. I first read it years ago; it is part of Mother's collection. It is itself cultured, and well written. The aesthete Schlegels are the sort of people that meet other people at Heidelburg; the nouveau wealthy Wilcoxes are not, but they meet there anyway. The Basts are an unpleasant reminder of lower class reality. I should perhaps say a little more about that. Forster, I suspect, is quite sympathetic to the Basts, or perhaps to the poor in general, but he is himself of course not of that class, and he does not hesitate to make them unattractive rather than idealised; they have found no redemption or spirituality in poverty. Leonard, before he is ground down, has some spark of life; but Jacky has gone by the time we meet her and Leonard does not survive the vicissitudes of the plot.

Our chief character, Margaret, despite being cultured has somehow reached thirty unattached, and oddly decides to love and marry Mr Wilcox. Helen is then the rather scatty one to which things happen. Early on there is a discussion group in which nice upper class women discuss how to help the poor; but as the book in the person of Margaret can't help noticing, all the ideas leave the nice upper class wmoen in charge of the money which they think of doling out to the poor as libraries, or trips abroad, or somesuch; Margaret's suggestion that they just give them money is not well received.

Various events occur which cannot but make us think that Mr Wilcox is not worthy of his wife; and eventually she and Helen essentuially retreat into England, personnified byt the house of Howard's End, which has come down through Mr W's ethereal first wife. Forster is clearly not happy with the march of modernity, but has no real answers to a problem he doesn't clearly state. The book's epigram is "Only connect" but while that might have helped some of the individuals, it too would not solve the problem. Indeed the problem cannot be "solved" in those terms, only embraced.

Fun fact: we used to live in Stevenage.

Trivia: Helen's fecklessness reminds me of Daisy.

Book review: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer... or so Wiki would have you believe. Writing quality is good. The book is somewhat depressing, just because it is describing life in the early 1960's England, which sounds rather grim, though he may be laying it on for effect. I don't recall my parents complaining.

Overall: quite good, interestingly complex, but by now not as striking as I presume it was at its debut. Towards the end there is something of a shift in tone and it becomes heavily philosophical about the whole spying business, except that's not quite the right word; introspective might be better. But by then it is too late. It seemed a little jarring and somewhat forced. And the complaint - I think Leamas was the one complaining - seems rather trivial: he is quite happy when he was there to get Mundt killed, but when it becomes clear he is there to save Mundt and get Fiedler killed, he becomes very sad, and says it is all a rotten corrupt business. I can't see why. Liz puts forward the idea that Fiedler is "only doing his job" but since he is doing his level best in service of the Evil Empire, I don't see we need to care much about that. And, as I think someone in a Len Deighton says at one point: it isn't British police putting bullets through anyone's head without real due process: it is the Evil Empire doing it.

At the end, both Liz and Leamas die, Liz by Mundt's treachery I think; and Leamas by his own choice. But this reads more like a carefully contrived dramatic, sad, conclusion to the book than a plausible event: Mundt has every reason to want everything to go quietly; a messy death, with all the press and trouble with West German and UK authorities and the notice that would then bring to the East German authority, is not at all to his advantage.

At the trial, Mundt is saved when it becomes clear that it is all a clever Blitish Plot to implicate him: Liz's lease has been bought, the grocer paid off, and so on. And yet... these moves are terribly clumsy. How could the authorities, when calmly reviewing the record later, not start to wonder about him? Are we really supposed to believe they would leave him in post? His "miraculous" escape from England remains unexplained.

Fairly early on I guessed that Leamas was doing his "death spiral" in order to get picked up by the Evil Empire. Unfortunately, that meant that the exact details of his fall were somewhat "yes yes I see now get on with the actual plot please". Unfortunately part 2, I think that for actual realism, his fall needed to be longer drawn out; had I been an Agent of the Evil Empire, I'd have been fairly suspicious.

Book review: Hammerfall

Yet more SciFi slop, this time from C J Cherryh.

Having asked myself "Should I just put in a bit more effort and read better books?" while reviewing The Devils, I find myself on this. In my defence I was pretty damn sure I was going to find it tosh; but perhaps unusually for such a prolific author I've not read any of hers before, so gave it a go. Also, it was a fairly easy not-brain-taxing read on a weekend.

The plot is reminiscent of The Memory of Earth in some ways, or at least I found it so (distant planet, forgotten beginnings, overseer, voices in the head). We encounter Our Hero in chains; he is freed and tasked by the Immortal Ruler of the planet to Go East and find out what is there, because A Time Of Trouble Is Coming. And so he sets out on a long weary trek across the great desert, and in the Farthest East he finds a mysterious tower and mysterious people. Unfortunately the plot then requires him to wearily trek all the way back again to the Immortal Ruler, gather all the peoples of the world and then, FFS, he treks wearily back across the desert yet again.

Laid on top of this is the actual point, that the Immortal Ruler has fled to the planet after doing naughty things elsewhere; that the nice people in the tower are trying to help, and that there is a Mysterious Alien Race who are a bit pissed off and will fling space rocks at the planet in order to sterilise it. Our Hero and those similarly afflicted receive Mysterious Visions that the space rocks are going to come, but for my part it was Bleedin' Obvious from the title of the book, so there were no surprises. To be fair, the characters don't get to read the title page I suppose.

The said characters, despite being desert folk on a distant planet, remain resolutely suburban USAnians. Token example: when in the depths of storm the captain of the guards' wife is giving birth, it is essential for Our Hero to go off and find the said captain of guards, for how could a women possibly give birth without her husband present? And Our Hero's inability to concentrate on the big picture unfits him for leadership. Related to this, there is the oh-so-common failing of such books: only the main characters are of any interest to the author, so the main character goes off alone, doing <interesting> stuff, even though he would obvs have a retinue.

I finished it, but only by skipping page after page towards the end, where nothing happens except yet more sand.

Oh, and another irritation, also a rather common one: because of the nature of the plot, piles and piles and literal heaps of people at the end of the caravan are going to die in various hideous ways in the desert. Our Hero knows this, but - despite plentiful lardings of "the law of the desert" whenever the plot finds it convenient - he is obliged to be sad about this; not just sad, but demonstratively sad, and do some pointless things to make this clear, as a suburban USAnian politician would have to weep crocodile tears in a similar situation.

Book review: The Devils

By Joe "Heroes" Abercrombie. It is... OK, I guess. But desperately formulaic. Pack of unlikely assorted magical adventurers sets out across the world on <task> and has <fights> along the way. 

In Heroes and BSC, and perhaps also in TBI, there was at least a spark of something more original; I would have hoped he might make some attempt to escape the tropes of his genre; but no, everything falls back into the same old lazy patterns. Am I too old? Have I read too much? Should I just put in a bit more effort and read better books? I fear that is the case.

To give some positives: the <cast of characters> are fun, there are some jokes, and the world might even be interesting. And of course I did actually finish the thing.

And yet... JA surely made lots of money from his previous books. Could he not afford to have spent an extra year and a bit more care producing this one? For myself, I spent about ten minutes writing this review, and don't feel that I owe it any more time.

London: Pictures at an Exhibition

To London, to see Pictures at an Exhibition. But we went up early, and it was a fine cold sunny day when London's monuments show at their best. GPS track, in case you want help identifying things. See here for all pix.

To Bomber Command. This one is new; 2012.

One of the arches.

Albert. The picture doesn't quite capture his gleam. The scene now shifts to the V+A.

I was struck by the outrageous costumes of the soldiers. And the lion "vomiting" his arm is nice. Not shown here, but on the next panel, we see Joseph, the Holy Virgin, and Our Saviour quietly slopeing off in the background leaving the poor infants to their fate.

Next to the Soanearium, a weird and wonderful place, worth a look I think but perhaps not an over-long one.

South, with views back to Nelson's column in the West.

 

And then finally the Queen Elizabeth Hall, to hear Benjamin Grovesnor, who was jolly good. M points out: we also heard him in March, at West Road. I thought his name was familiar.

New trainers

The thrill-a-minute blogging doesn't relent. Here the tedious news of some new shoes.

These are an el-cheapo (£24.99, good grief) Karrimor "Ortholite" from SportsDirect, bought as wear-around-town type things, and probably to erg in too. Here are the old ones:

The wear, apart from general tattiness, isn't too obvious. The final issue was the wearing down of the padding at the heel, which reveals the plastic stiffener inside, which then rubbed my heel; hence the plaster; but that isn't enough. Slightly less obvious is the hole where it flexes towards the front; this is probably caused by erging. I've hardly ever run in these; I bought them about 15 years ago I think, in Buxton, when I did forget my running shoes; but then mostly left them in the cupboard.

Film review: A Real Pain

ARP is a drama¹ of, as wiki puts it, two mismatched cousins who reunite for a Jewish heritage tour through Poland in honor of their late grandmother. One is neurotic and the other is charming and manipulative; the neurotic one is initially annoying but the C+M one rapidly takes over that role. They join a small tour in Poland; they see stuff like an old cemetery, they visit the Majdanek concentration camp, then the two cousins go see their Grandmother's old house, which predictably enough turns out to be uninteresting². The cinematography isn't interesting either; Poland comes out mostly flat fields; I think they deliberately avoid sun or charming vistas to get the we're-serious-about-this-Holocaust-stuff feel. But actually there's little discussion of that (what, after all, could they possibly say?); there is a bizarre segment where the C+M cousin finds it incongruous to be on a first class train in Poland, which makes no sense at all (perhaps they really were struggling to say something, but failed).

How do we interpret the "real pain" of the title? I offered the C+M cousin, who would indeed be a right pain to be anywhere around. This, I see belatedly, might be supported by the poster for the film. M countered with the pain, passed down the generations, from their Grandmother. My suspicion is that is the film's intent, but I dislike that. (I need to interject some film-back-story: it turns out that the C+M cousin is empty; he lives in his mother's basement and plays video games all day, won't bother go and visit his neurotic cousin, and has attempted to kill himself). I'm not interested in the "pain" of pampered USAnians whose only problem is they don't have anything to do to fill their empty lives. There are far too many people in the world - for example, Gazans oppressed by Hamxs, or if you want something less controversial, Iranians oppressed by the Mad Mullahs - who actually deserve sympathy.

Notes

1. The film, and wiki, claim it as a comedy-drama but really it isn't.

2. The trip hazard bit is so importing US mores into other cultures and just isn't plausible. Was it an attempt at humour?

Book review: Man's Search for Meaning

I think I came across this via an ACX book review; although it might have been this one; or even another; I'm not sure. The book is in two parts: the first is the original, about the concentration camps; the second expounds his "logotherapy" theory, as he says at the request of readers. Note that I finished this a couple of months ago, so my recollections are fading and this review may not be entirely reliable; it certainly lacks detail.

The obvious comparison is to If This is a Man by Primo Levi. The two are more similar than different; I think I preferred ITIAM. The subtext on the image "hope from the Holocaust" is sort-of correct: what he thinks, and it seems quite plausible, is that your chances of surviving rather than dying of misery and apathy were greatly increased by having some purpose in life. But this is trite. The reverse, which the slogan implies to me, that one can find hope - people still being good amongst the horror - is only weakly true.

Let me expand a little on the I am just a teensy tiny bit suspicious that there are things we aren't told, that might not be entirely to his credit; but only because that is almost inevitable, if you survived that I wrote in reviewing ITIAM. He says quite early on On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return. But a little later we have for example I spent some time in a hut for typhus patients who ran very high temperatures and were often delirious, many of them moribund. After one of them had just died, I watched without any emotional upset the scene that followed, which was repeated over and over again with each death. One by one the prisoners approached the still warm body. One grabbed the remains of a messy meal of potatoes; another decided that the corpse's wooden shoes were an improvement on his own, and exchanged them. A third man did the same with the dead man's coat, and another was glad to be able to secure some - just imagine - genuine string. All this I watched with unconcern. Notice that the only sin he confesses is to watching with unconcern. There are no instances of him using brutal force, theft or betrayal. Possibly he got really lucky and just didn't need to do any of that.

Part two, his description of his "logotherapy", I found rather less interesting and only skimmed. He has, of course, no actual meaning to offer - this I guess is good; he has not simply invented a spurious one - and falls back to "veryone has to invent their own meaning" or thereabouts. As a retired gentleman of leisure this resonates to a degree; though I'm not sure I would use the word "meaning" myself.

Book review: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Ben-Hur the book is not dissimilar at least in outline plot to BH the movie, assuming the wiki plot is accurate; I don't think I've watched it. This rather surprises me; I'd expected the two to differ strongly. Lew Wallace turns out to have been a union general in the USAnian civil war.

I don't think I recommend reading it, other than for a sort of evocation of the kind of times where the gentleman of the frontispiece sits in his book-nook in front of a fire; notice the carefully drawn screen that shades his face, or rather would, if it were at the right height. The book is rather ponderous, the characters are impossibly noble and self-sacrificing.

BH, when travelling from Italy to Antioch on govt business as the vastly wealthy adopted son and heir of a vastly wealthy and important roman, travels alone: he has not even a single servant, no govt officials flock around him, he disembarks from his ship with no notice taken of him. This is all quite implausible. Later, a messenger turns up inviting him to meet someone at a palace; he goes alone without asking any identification from the messenger; ha ha, it is a trap, as any fule could have guessed; our hero is not a man cut out for any subtle work. Balthazar the Magus has a daughter, beautiful obvs, but as it turns out hard-hearted; her only function is to beguile BH, and then to end up raddled and old before her time as a terrible warning of the evils of dissipation at Rome. But she fits very awkwardly as a daughter of B, who is deeply noble and religious (as well as, as a king, weirdly not needed to govern his kingdom). She attends him, but they don't speak to each other. The disjunction grates more as the book proceeds.

The context is the-time-of-Jesus's-ministry: the Jews groan under the yoke of Rome, and long for a King of the Jews to lead a revolt; but of course Jesus isn't like that. BH though naturally somewhat disappointed realises this is all for the best and lavishes his vast fortune on the church. I rather wonder how much your everyday Jew was groaning under the yoke of aqueducts, sanitation, roads and peace and how much the upper stratum of Jewish society was groaning under the yoke of not getting to be in charge.

New rock shoes

My old shoes¹ were falling apart; most seriously, the rubber was worn through in the toes, but also the sides were starting to tear away a little, and the interiors were going too. They were about 5 years old I think, though they could have been 10; I'm not sure. So I bought some new ones.

These are UP Lace LV; "LV" apparently meaning "low volume" and not the sort of thing I normally exepct to want from a show. But, I tried them on in Outside and they seemed decent; next step will be to try them on a real wall; I'll update this when I do. As to due diligence: I tried on four sorts of Scarpa's at the RR "try a show" event but while they all seemed nicely made, even the best kept biting my ankle; not what I want for the outside world and I am not yet the sort who has multiple pairs, but watch this space. They are, interestingly, size 44.5, which I would hacve guessed too small but it seems not. £138 from Outside.

Notes

1. Which I think were Five Ten Stonelands, size 46.5. See here for a pic.

Another new rope

I am become Immelda like Maz, except for ropes. Anyway, despite having a new rope I still wasn't quite happy in my mind, and decided to cure that with a liberal salve of money. Bought at Outside in Hathersage for £136. 

In essence, I decided I wasn't happy explaining to people that my ropes were old but I was happy to climb on them; especially (as happened on that day) with people who couldn't reasonably be expected to understand.

This, despite being as it says intended for Alpine use, is a bit more craggable than the other, being a whole 7.5 mm thick instead of 7.1; and a touch heavier at 39 g/m instead of 36. Here's a pic of its infosheet and instructions; here's their webpage. Also it turns out to be quite slinky which is nice. Orange is a nice bright colour and a good contrast to the others. It has a dyed-in middle marker that is surprisingly hard to find; I think I'll put some tape on too. Here it is unpacked and awaiting first use.

It is a 60m rope; all my others are 50s. Yesterday I used it at Burbage South and I think the routes were about 10m, so we could trivially use it doubled. There is a trend up from 50 to 60 which I think a little strange but perhaps following it with at least one rope will do no harm.

I did wonder if I should get something thicker and more robust for cragging and wall use. But I don't do roped wall stuff much; and if I do enough cragging to wear this out I shall be deeply grateful and happy to renew it.

Book review: The Fresco

The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper is bad pap on several levels. I'll put in a token piece of niceness - I finished it - and then move on to slagging it off. Grass was good, but this is more Raising the Stones: pantomime villains, fairy godmothers, and the wrong answer to the question "is it worth losing freedom for happiness?"². This one star review says much that I would say, if I could be bothered.

There's a slightly awkward feature of this book, which is that I recognise some of her ideas in my own. Suppose you were given <special powers> - and really, the aliens that turn up are just arbitrary powers - what would you do, if you wanted to make the world a better place? How would you oblige all these unruly humans to behave? All my day dreams of what I might do inevitably fall apart quite quickly, as I realise that instead of doing the sensible thing, people would get their backs up and react against. Well, perhaps fortunately I don't have <special powers>, and definitely fortunately SST doesn't (as well as being dead, obvs).

What, I hear you cry, are the levels on which it is bad? The text is easy-reading pap and the characters all tedious stereotypes, which is why I finished it; you will find no demands on your reading ability. The alien socities are badly crudely sketched; despite being starfaring civilisations their planets appear to be little more than villages. And as in RtS, the philosophy is bad: lying to people is good if done in a noble cause, as judged by those doing the lying; a certain amount of judicious culling of the population is fine, if done in a Darwinian manner¹; an inescapable caste-based system is good³; and more importantly, freedom - judicial, civil, mental - is to be traded for a quiet life.

As a token piece of analysis: SST is very very keen on people getting their comeuppance, to the extent that this occurs even when irrelevant to the plot. The obvious example is the aliens who insert their developing young into humans so that they can grow and feed, eventually clawing their way out (although most of the humans survive this process, the insertion, and clawing-out, are carefully described as very painful, even though the humans had to be sedated for the insertion and so could have been anaethetised, so this is deliberate cruelty, but that does not worry SST who salivates over the pain). But - aha, this is the bit that makes it all right - they only do this to right-to-life right wing males, who have publically stated support for no-abortion-even-for-rape. This doesn't work, of course: even the right-to-life people don't support rape, indeed they oppose it; but SST is so keen to see them suffer she doesn't stop to think.

Notes

1. Actually I have to admit a certain sympathy for that; but I think that's a reflection of why the book is bad, encouraging our worst instincts.

2. Or you may prefer "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".

3. Obvs, in her version, those choosing your caste for you are "nice", and only "rarely" make mistakes, and even then they err in favour of what you want. In a cleverer author I would suspect it was all ironic but SST is not such.

A visit to the Imperial War Museum

My chosen picture is by an Ethiopean artist, and shows the Eyties (on the right) invading in the 20s. You could almost, from this, think it was balanced; but of course it wasn't; and I have cropped out the aeroplanes, whose wheels you can just see at the top. It makes me think of The Deep, a little; you can try to work out why if you like. Other pix here. Web: IWM site; Wiki tells me Founded as the Imperial War Museum in 1917, it was intended to record the civil and military war effort and sacrifice of the United Kingdom and its Empire during the First World War. The museum's remit has since expanded to include all conflicts in which British or Commonwealth forces have been involved since 1914.

II have almost no memories of the IWM, though my father took us there as children, though I could not say how often. I do remember the 15" guns at the entrance; though I had not previously noticed that they aren't quite aligned.

Since it starts at WWI, it is naturally divided into the big blocks of WWI, WWII, and other bits. It felt quite small to me; though actually the bits out of the main hall where you wander around WWI or II is probably larger than I thought. And there's a big Holocaust block. Which has a touching display of letters, but also many photos of Jews who were killed; from my perspective the obvious thing about 95% of the pix is not that they are Jewish, because they don't look like that, it's just that they all look like 1930's type people that I couldn't really tell apart from the ethnically-Kraut, if that means anything.

WWI has the obvious horrors of seas of mud and alien-like gas masks. But some other stuff I was less aware of; here is a display of German posters exhorting people to gather nuts and women's hair, and pointing out that approx 500k civilians died of malnutrition; what the UN nowadays would call genocide I suppose.

Trivia: train to KC; Thameslink to Blackfriars, which is in the middle of the river; walk from there; and walked all the way back.