1984
Author: George Orwell 1949 326 pp
My rating: 3*
Started August 15 2008, Finished August 22 2008.

“a complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism” (57)

I found 1984, as I had found A Tale of Two Cities, to be a big name book that does not hold its own as a novel. And while I read it before I started blogging and did not record my impressions while they were still fresh and detailed, the book 1984 seems most comparable to is Brave New World, a similar thought experiment depicting a dystopic future whose author was unable to enrich his ideas with a fully believable human context. After my recent reading of much of Orwell’s oeuvre, I believe that Orwell’s strengths as a writer stem from his courageous willingness to get his hands dirty by becoming a participant in his subject (cf Down and Out …, … Wigan Pier, and Homage …) and then simply report on what he has seen and experienced, but that his ability to invent three dimensional people and envision their inner lives -- the sine qua non of a novelist -- is at best limited. The totalitarian world that Orwell envisions in 1984, while its control structures and extreme regimentation are a not implausible extrapolation of the some of the most diabolical aspects of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, overall struck as unbelievably lifeless and its inhabitants as not recognizably human-- the inner and outer party members may as well have been robots, while the distracted, downtrodden “proles” who were intended to much more resemble pre-Big Brother humans were indifferently rendered and come across as two (and even one) dimensional clichés. Plot details don’t ring true either: Julia’s infatuation with Smith seems weakly grounded and Smith and Julia’s arrest with the associated revelation that Charrington is part of the thought police struck me as absurdly melodramatic and allows even the very long arms of the Though Police’s law a bit too much reach.

If I were rating this book on its first two thirds, the section before Smith’s arrest, I might give it one or no stars. However, it is mostly salvaged by its cultural import -- perhaps more than anything else it has brought home to the free world the tone of existence in a totalitarian state -- and its last third in which it which it alternately abandons its novelistic affectations during the long excerpt from Goldstein’s manifesto on “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivsim”, a cogent exegesis on the motivations and intellectual underpinnings of totalitarianism and then, during Smith’s torture/reeducation, narrows its focus so drastically -- to just the bound and blinded Smith and his reactions to Obrien’s tortures -- that Orwell’s inability to depict a believable world are no longer a factor. The interrogation/torture/reeducation section is the strongest in the book, and while it still didn’t fully connect with me as Orwell was unable to impart a visceral sense of what Smith was experiencing , it is nonetheless quite powerful, particularly in its depiction of a world completely beholden to an evil ideology -- Obrien’s utterances during these scenes evoked hazy memories of The Grand Inquisitor and Smith’s gradual capitulation, his renunciation of his essential self, brought to mind (the far subtler and more persuasive) Darkness at Noon.

Shortly after finishing 1984, I read a New Yorker article by George Packer on life in Burma under a military oligarchy whose determination to maintain a hold on power with no consideration for the well being of the people under its control brought to mind the Big Brother and Ingsoc of 1984 with the difference that Packer’s reporting rife with real life detail seemed vastly more convincing than Orwell’s imagined world.

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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them (223)

All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed. (266)

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. (276)

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever. (280)

To die hating them, that was freedom. (294)

Shooting an Elephant

Shooting an Elephant
Author: George Orwell 1945-50 200 pp
My rating: 3*
Started August 8 2008, Finished August 11 2008.

This book of essays is for the aficionado. The essays cover a diverse range of topics, not all of which are remotely relevant to the modern reader: a couple of reminiscences from his Burmese days, including the essential Shooting an Elephant, a denunciation of Tolstoy’s denunciation of Shakespeare, thoughts about writing and reviewing, a critique of the writings of the otherwise lost to history James Burnham and some shorter pieces apparently written for a newspaper towards the end of his life, my favorite of which was a rare upbeat piece about the wonders of spring.
As ever, even when expressing another unsubstantiated, almost crackpot denunciation of capitalism, Orwell‘s prose commands the reader‘s attention: “… the civilization of nineteenth-century America was capitalist civilization at is bets. Soon after the Civil War the inevitable deterioration started.” (200) The book’s primary interest for me was the insight Orwell’s writing about writing provided into why I am finding him so compelling:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone;
Dare to have a purpose firm,
Dare to make it known. (106 - from a “Revivalist hymn)

To write in plain, vigorous language, one has to think fearlessly (114)

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With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in Saecula Saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. (4)

They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. (6)

… suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the [now calm and harmless] elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. (8)

… I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old. (25)


Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. (48)
“what is the relationship between agreement with a writer’s opinions, and enjoyment of his work?” (72)

The durability of Gulliver’s Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art. (76)

“no modern writer of the kind I am discussing … would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.” (84)

Rules for effective prose:
“(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. (DG note: the quote above about the British Raj violates this rule.)
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (91-2)

One may feel … a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi … [or] feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind! (103)

“Napoleon remarked once that if only a cannon ball had happened to hit him when he was riding into Moscow, he would have gone down to history as the greatest man who ever lived.” (132)

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples … that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles. (152)

All he knows, at least if he’s a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick or even your finger, w\he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. (162)

Echoes of patients etherized upon tables: “As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.” (163)

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, steeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it. (165)

Variations of the following sentiment from the essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” have occasionally crossed my mind during the book-a-week campaign:, “Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”(174)

Bottlemania
Author: Elizabeth Royte 2008 229 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started August 5 2008, Finished August 8 2008

“The outrageous success of bottled water, in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste test against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,,000 times less than bottled water, is an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” (40-1)
“Bottled water does have its place – it’s useful in emergencies and essential for people whose health can’t tolerate even filtered water. But it’s often no better than tap water, its environmental and social price is high, and it lets our public guardians off the hook for protecting watersheds, stopping polluters, upgrading treatment and distribution infrastructure, and strengthening treatment standards.” (225)

Royte summarizes my interest in her subject, bottled water, in the above two passages. Nonetheless, the book failed to engage me. It felt both somewhat slight and fairly padded -- it would probably have been better as a magazine article and I did not come away from it feeling that my knowledge of the subject was greatly enhanced. Royte seems to feel that there is something inherently wrong forcing people to pay for as basic a commodity as water; my reaction is why not -- we pay for everything else. Too much of the book is devoted to an inconclusive history the water wars of Fryeburg Maine whence comes Poland Springs bottled water. Also, Royte and her editors lose credibility with the following statement that “In 2006, Nestlé’s 32 percent share of the US bottled-water market … brought profits of $7.46 billion” (86) which makes the elementary error of confusing sales with profits.

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Over 700 domestic and 75 imported brands of bottled water are sold in the US (17)
“In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 686 single-serve beverages per person per year; in 2007 we collectively drank fifty billion single-serve bottles of water alone.” (42)
[In NYC] “During the Dutch period, freshwater was used for livestock and cooking; the preferred beverage was beer, which everyone, including children, drank warm.” (95)
“Federal law requires the EPA to prove that the cost of removing a contaminant doesn’t exceed its benefits (deaths averted, that is, with a human life valued at $6.1million). (106)
“In Fiji, as in Fryeburg, nothing’s simple.” (154)
“In Lagos, Nigeria, the poor pay four to ten times more for a liter of water than do people hooked up to water mains; in Lima, they pay seventeen times more; in Karachi, twenty-eight to eighty-three times more; in Jakarta, up to sixty times more; and in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, up to one hundred times more.” (206)
“… according to the EPA, letting a faucet run for five minutes consumes about as much energy as burning a sixty-watt incandescent lightbulb for fourteen hours.” (218)

Blood And Thunder

• Blood and Thunder
  Author: Hampton Sides 2006 404 pp
  My rating: 3.5*
  Started July 17 2008, Finished Aug 5 2008
  
  This book is consistently engrossing and informative, but suffers slightly from lack of a clearly defined theme. It’s partly the story of the demise of the Navajo people, partly the story of the occupation and annexation of the New Mexico territory by the United States and partly a biography of Kit Carson, mountain man, pathfinder and tracker extraordinaire. The books strengths are substantiating the legend of Carson, a man born for his times, and elucidating the plight of the Navajo (a symbol for all the tribes wiped out by white man’s occupation of the continent) whose historical way of life and general view of the world was simply incompatible with that of the encroaching Anglos. Though neither the Navajo, nor any of the other southwest tribes detailed in the book, whose existences were to a considerable degree perpetuated by rustling and slave-raiding of nearby peoples, come off as completely admirable by today’s standards, the reader cannot help but feel for them, once they have seen their field and flocks destroyed and been starved into accepting confinement outside of their historical territory on an agricultural reservation where the water is bad, the crops would not take and the entire tribe of formerly proud people either dies of disease or sinks into a an engulfing trough of despond.
  
  Observations:
  
• The book could have used more and more detailed maps.
• Major (later Colonel) John Chivington , a Methodist preacher of Old Testament judgment, could well have been the inspiration for the character of The Judge in Blood Meridian a book whose vision of southwest US in the middle of the 19th century, a near apocalyptic world of non-stop violence, this history often mirrors.
  
  
  Carson’s second daughter died as a “toddler was scalded to death when she fell into a boiling vat of soap tallow.” (34)
  
  “What was paper? Most of the Navajos had never seen it, nor ink pens, nor written words. They had no concept of individual land ownership or constitutions or the rule of law or the delegation of political authority. Their traditions were so radically different that they had no idea what the Americans were really talking about.” (239)
  
  Of a Confederate troop marauding through New Mexico territory early in the Civil War: “Most of the Rebels were armed with little more than fowling pieces, squirrel guns, pistols, and other frontier weapons – one quixotic unit was composed entirely of lancers.” (278) The opposing Union units were commanded by US Army officers though the enlisted ranks were comprised primarily of untrained “New Mexican paisanos” who “spoke almost no English”.
  
  Iraq parallel in the Indian Wars: “Before Carleton’s arrival, the vocabulary of the the Navajo wars was centered almost entirely on the principle of punishment – punishment in a raw Old Testament sense. The army was there to “chastise” and “overawe” them, to make them “fell the power and the sting of the government.” But now a certain noblesse oblige had crept into the dialogue, a sense of white man’s burden.”
  
  “Carson believed that most of the Indian trouble in the West were caused, as he once flatly put it, ‘by aggression on the part of whites.’ Most of the raids, by Utes and other tribes, were visited upon the settlements only out of desperation – ‘committed,’ he argued, ‘from absolute necessity when in a starving condition … their game is becoming scarce, much of it having be3en killed by the settlers, and a great deal of it driven from the country …” (334)
  
  “ … the Navajos could not understand the Judeo-Christian universe – its male monotheism was forbidding to a tribe with so many female gods, its stories of a chosen people half a world away had no relevance, and rituals like communion and confession seemed beyond strange.” (368)

McMafia

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
Author: Misha Glenny 2008 348 pp
My rating: 1.5*
Started July 17 2008, Finished July 24 2008

Aside from a sense that globalization has been a boon to large scale criminal operations, I did not get much out of this book which I found this book very annoying, a combination of overly ambitious, under researched and endlessly digressive wherein. The first section of the book dealt with the emergence crime networks in eastern Europe and was relatively focused and informed but marred by the chapters’ independence from the others and failure to build upon each other – they could have been randomly rearranged without much affecting how they read. The rest of the book is worse with some chapters having little to do criminal networks, instead being filler/digression concerned primarily with the author’s take on globalization.

The writing is generally characterized by TV docudrama-like suspenseful interruptions as if heading to commercial and sudden lapses into the most jarring slang.

For this book to be more successful, much more research would have been required which would have been an admittedly difficult task – showing how many of the world’s criminal networks operate and interact; such an expose seems beyond even the combined abilities of all the world’s law enforcement agencies. Glenny probably would have been better off focusing his efforts on Eastern Europe where he seems the most knowledgeable.


[During the Yugoslavian civil war] “ … “Bosnians, Croats, and Albanians [were] more than happy to sell oil to their Serbian enemies because of the extraordinary profits that a sanctions regime generates.” (29)

“Bulgaria’s main route to the rest of Europe was through Serbia. The UN Security Council had already told Sofia to kiss good-bye the $1 Billion it was owed by Saddam’s Iraq when it imposed sanctions on Baghdad. Now the UN was telling Bulgaria it could not send its trucks through Serbia. This was devastating, as the country’s most important exports to Western Europe were perishable. ‘Bulgaria had a GDP of $10 billion and on the fruit and vegetables alone they lost $1 billion of income annually, explained Bill Montgomery. ‘I proposes that we allow the Bulgarians to send a weekly convoy through Serbia [escorted by UN forces]. The UN signed off … the Europeans signed off …; but Leon Furth, advisor to … Al Gore … blocked it.’ [This provided a] boost to organized crime, which thrived on the economic distress such myopic policies promoted.” (31)

“Despite the murders and the shoot-outs, the Russian mob actually ensured a degree of stability during the economic transition [from Communism to Putinist stability] (61)

Tomas Machacek, head of the Czech anti-Russian organized crime unit “is a real life Arkady Renko … engaged in a quixotic struggle with much more powerful and darker forces.” (71)

Sloppy writing: “Gazprom .. [has] an annual turnover of just less than $30 billion” (78)

Pakistani ISI trains Indian Moslem criminals to plant explosives for a terrorist act in which hundreds die. (138-9)

Clinton administration had an anti money-laundering initiative which the Bush administration eliminated as being anti business. “After 9/11 no AML regime is too strong for the US. Any kind of concerns about secondary effects go out the window. … everybody has to have this regime, and the stronger, the more onerous, the better – no cost is too high.” (147-8)

“Gangsters from Mumbai to the Balkans began pouring money into Dubai’s property market in an effort to launder their money and, where possible, to launder their reputations as well.” (153)

The last 20 pages of Chapter Seven, ostensibly about the Mumbai underworld, is instead a long digression about globalization and Dubai containing digressions within digressions such as an account of the author’s summer job in Carbondale IL in the 1970s.

Page 167, in the midst of a wandering discussion of Nigerian 419 scammers, contains a nearly full page and absolutely irrelevant aside about a Macumba priestess.

Page 170 contains another annoying aside, one paragraph about McNamara and the World Bank.

Page 176 contains another big digression, this time about the history on international trade including the “mercantile period of the 16th to 18th century.”

(184) Of a South African drug courier imprisoned in a US minimum security federal prison where a guard manipulated her into having sex: “ … if she reported it, she said, he would have killed her.” Author presents this claim of ultimate retribution as if it were a likely consequence in a US minimum-security prison as if no one would have noticed or cared and the guard would have gotten away with it.

Page 206 the country China is spelled with a lower cased ‘c’.

Page 216. Account of marijuana growers in British Columbia running large artificial 24/7 indoor growing environments on electricity illegally tapped from grid. Doesn’t the BC power company notice the loss of such a large amount of power?

218 contains unsubstantiated generalizations about Canadian attitudes towards Americans that have nothing to do with the ongoing discussion of drug cultivation in the Pacific northwest.

Chapter ten is essentially a recitation of the failure of the War on Drugs and has very little to do with organized crime.

Logic attempting to indicate that growing coca plants is far more lucrative to the Columbian farmer than bananas would be: “a kilo of bananas during the 1990s would fetch $2 on average; a kilo of coca base … was worth between $750 and $1000.” (256) This is a meaningless comparison as it gives no idea of the amount of acreage or effort required to produce a kilo of each product – if, say, an acre could yield 1000 kilos of bananas or enough coca to produce a kilo of coca base, then bananas would be more profitable on a per acre basis.

Page 272 claims that each peripheral attached to a computer has its own IP address. This is not necessarily true.

301 paragraph long digression on how tattoos are created.

“… pachinko [in Japan] … has an annual turnover estimated at about $300 billion, twice the value of the entire Japanese automobile industry …” (308)

“Health concerns and legislation aimed at reducing smoking in the United States and Europe may have dented tobacco companies’ profits in the West, but in China and Asia, it’s party time!” (336)
“One man well known both to the ‘baccy mafia and the Chinese police was Tun Yan Yuk …” (337)

The last chapter, about China, again has very little to do with organized crime and is mainly a discussion of how Chinese manufacturing has prospered in the last 15 years.

The Road to Wigan Pier

• The Road to Wigan Pier
  Author: George Orwell 1937 232 pp
  My rating: 3*
  Started July 8 2008, Finished July 11 2008
  
  Orwell’s examination of working class poverty in the coal mining towns of northern England during the depression has two parts: the first is a detailed description of what that poverty entails based on Orwell’s first hand experiences living among his subject families and the second is Orwell’s proposed remedy, in a word, Socialism. The first part was quite compelling, but felt a bit truncated; perhaps as with The Reluctant Communist, there is just not very much one can say about such drab, uneventful and purposeless lives. Also of note about this section, since the early sproutings of what would eventually become the British welfare state were extant at the time of Orwell’s research, his subject families received enough assistance from the government to avoid starvation (though their diets were quite limited and innutritious) or homelessness. Since these people weren’t faced with starvation as say, the characters in Down and Out in Paris and London were, the most destructive effect of poverty for the residents of Wigan Pier was the lack of self-worth resulting from lives without gainful employment or any hope thereof.
  The second part of the book is a testament to the power of Orwell’s writing – his take on the human condition places such a premium on honesty, particularly due to his constant questioning of his own prejudices and biases, that his prose can be far more readable than his logic and conclusions would justify on their own. In part two, Orwell addresses the issue of what can be done to rectify England’s social-economic structure that allows perhaps one third of its citizens to exist in dire poverty. The only answer Orwell sees is the adoption of Socialism. The alternatives are dismissed in passing: capitalism is self-destructive, dying (if not already dead) and essentially designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many; Communism is a perverted, dictatorial perversion of Socialism; Fascism, which was ascendant at the time Wigan Pier was written, is an abomination that Orwell was willing to put his life on the line to combat it years before the outbreak of WWII. Orwell wastes much time defending Socialism from its supporters who are stereotyped as head in the cloud proto-hippies or the subset of the affluent classes which espouses support for the working class while secretly detesting almost everything about the people who constitute it. The biggest problem in this section though is that as the book’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, points out in the book’s forward, Orwell never defines what he means by Socialism; I read the forward after reading the rest of the book and this was a point that had bothered me for almost all of point two – I found this lacking severely undercut whatever points Orwell was trying to make.
  Also of note in part two are several instances where Orwell draws boneheaded conclusions or time has proved him utterly wrong:
• “I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners. Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.” (Ch 8) This reader considers it possible that such silent soup sipping is the ingrained habit of a lifetime, requiring no thought or effort, not an overt statement of social revulsion.
• “In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary.” (Ch 12) This passage, part of a section where Orwell inveighs against the increasingly complete mechanization of society, completely fails to appreciate that people could come to enjoy activities such as biking, hiking and running for their own sake.
• “… Socialism is the only real enemy that Fascism has to face. The capitalist- imperialist governments, even though they themselves are about to be plundered, will not fight with any conviction against Fascism as such.” (Ch 12) This quote is one of many throughout Orwell’s studies on poverty where he completely underestimates the health of capitalism; of course it was the “dying” capitalist and the corrupt communist countries that crushed capitalism, socialist countries playing no significant role whatsoever.
  
  
  
  
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. (Ch 1)
  
  This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. (Ch 3)
  
  It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty. (Ch 4)
  
  In a working-class home it is the man who is the master and not, as in a middle-class home, the woman or the baby. Practically never, for instance, in a working-class home, will you see the man doing a stroke of the housework. Unemployment has not changed this convention … (Ch 5)
  
  We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will--unless another war breaks out--never have a real job this side the grave. (Ch 5)
  
  Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards. (Ch 5)
  
  I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury. (Ch 5)
  
  Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. (Ch 5)
  
  The most obvious sign of under-nourishment is the badness of everybody's teeth. (Ch 6)
  
  I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages--an 'if which gets bigger and bigger--has a better chance of being happy than an 'educated' man. (Ch 7)
  
  In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances. (Ch 8)
  
  Hence, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I was both a snob and a revolutionary. I was against all authority. I had read and re-read the entire published works of Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy (at that time still regarded as dangerously 'advanced' writers), and I loosely described myself as a Socialist. But I had not much grasp of what Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings. At a distance, and through the medium of books--Jack London's The People of the Abyss, for instance --I could agonize over their sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated by their habitual rudeness. (Ch 9)
  
  And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. (Ch 11)
  
  the swindle of “progress” (Ch 12)
  
  But at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial traveller, the middle-class man who has 'come down in the world', the village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant, and all other doubtful cases that they are the proletariat, and that Socialism means a fair deal for them as well as for the navvy and the factory-hand. They must not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce their aitches and those who don't; for if they think that, they will join in on the side of the aitches. (Ch 13)
  
  “so that it is still necessary, and will be necessary for a long time yet, to show that modern methods of production do work under Socialism and no longer work under capitalism. (xviii) From forward by Victor Gollancz.
  
  Mr. Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism (xx)

Netherland

Netherland
Author: Joseph O’Neill 2008 256 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started July 2 2008, Finished July 4 2008


This book, belonging to that new genre, the post 9/11 NYC novel and subject of (too) much critical praise, often comparing it to Gatsby, has much to recommend it including state of the art prose that as with Updike and Roth, occasionally causes me to marvel “now that’s writing”, a couple of intriguing mysteries that keep one turning the pages, a refreshingly outer-boroughs centric point of view, a novel to the American reader central cricket-as-new-world-life-metaphor, an almost unequaled differentiation among voices – contrary to most novels, each character speaks in a unique and credible voice -- and a bravura stream of consciousness time changing in the narration of a long chapter near the end when the narrator’s thoughts range seamlessly across almost his entire life with each shift unapparent until well after it has occurred. However, Netherland falls short of greatness for me because the mysteries are not satisfactorily resolved and its central characters never really resonated. The novel hinges on the trans-Atlantic separation of the narrator, a successful early 30’s Dutch expatriate financial analyst, and his wife Rachel, an English lawyer who for nebulous reasons loses faith in Hans and their life in New York, prompting her return to her native country. The separation plunges Hans into isolation and despondency which ultimately lead to his immersion in the sub world of New York area cricket leagues comprised primarily of barely legal third world immigrants and through which he meets Chuck Ramskoonian, a Trinidadian expat, dreamer, schemer and bootstrapper who is the book’s Gatsby analogue. Chuck is an intriguing character, but not enough to build a book around. The nostalgic grounding Hans finds in cricket is more described than felt causes the book’s center to never fully cohere. However, the biggest problem for me was the inability of Hans and Rachel to communicate about their marriage. Hans clearly resents the separation and throughout the book longs for a resumption of the relationship, but is maddeningly passive, letting the barely communicative Rachel dictate their course. I find it very hard to believe that such a UMC couple would not have talked the issue to death or that at the least, Hans would have repeatedly demanded an explanation and a prognosis from the confused and tongue-tied Rachel; Hans’ simmering deferral to his wife, which extends over years, rendered him implausible to me; Rachel’s disinclination to explain her actions had a similar effect and my consequent lack of identification with and belief in the central characters significantly diminished the book for me.

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“You know what my motto is?”
“I didn’t think people had mottoes anymore.” (80)

“Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.” (109)

[London] “… I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.” (178-9)

… “ she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage’s course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door.” (183)

“As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.
… I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.” (200)

“ … all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket.” (211)