My one liner: Criminal capers from a fun easy to read author imparting a few insights into the do’s and don’ts of how to be a master criminal

The Gafin principle:  Every criminal gets caught.  Every criminal gets caught.  The Gafin principle measures whether or not it was worth it.  As an example, a Mr Matthews is convicted for 5 crimes, for which he made £500 each.  And he serves five years in prison, or approximately 250 weeks.  So his weekly earnings from the jobs turn out to be £10 per week.  Which he could have earned in any risk-free non-criminal job.  So, under the Gafin principle: the crime isn’t worth it.

So what if he had stolen £5 million pounds, would that have been worth it ? Under the Gafin principle you may conclude yes, but in fact no.  Because cash is easily traceable, because the Bank of England changes notes and denomination on a regular basis, and because to all intents and purposes you wouldn’t be able to spend it when you got out.  £5 million worth diamonds on the other hand, that’s £20,000 per week for each week of prison time.  Definitely worth it, and our young students are starting to grasp the principle…

I like Danny King.

His Kindle books are riddled with errors, grammar, syntax, spelling, the lot.  I have no idea whether the print books are the same, but I assume there is some publisher quirk around this.

But it really doesn’t manner.  Mr King is an honest author, whose books do what they say on the tin.  Most relate to the English criminal underworld, ranging from petty to master criminals.  Tales hilariously told, and formulaically set up to put the reader firmly on the side of the burglar, thief, pickpocket, schemer – we are naturally emphatic with characters who are laughably pathetic.  Great reading when you have a couple of hours to kill and really don’t want to engage the brain.

I have chosen to review School for Scumbags.

You know you are on to a winner with the opening quote of book, from the 17th century by Jean de la Bruyère:

“If poverty is the mother of all crime, lack of intelligence is its father”

And the teenagers at school for scumbags need a lesson in probability and expectation so that they can understand which crimes are worth committing.  “Here at Gafin we take a different approach. We educate young men about crime, show them the effects of their actions, the consequences of indiscriminate robbing.”  Gafin, run by Mr Gregson, Mr Fotheringay, Mr Sharp, and lovely and flirtaciously delicious Miss Howard, being the outer-London boarding school where a bunch of teenage delinquents have pitched up (or rather have been sent to by divers despairing parents).

Put these 20 or so young layabouts in closed environment together and they will sound find ways to steal of each other, steal off the school, engineer perfect crimes, protect each other, grass on each other, physically assault each other. Each lad with his own distinctive personality, the schemer, the fat kid, the arsonist, the neanderthal.

The protagonist is a young lad called Wayne Banstead (“Banners”), who being of above average intelligence, ends up being the ring leader in most of the capers.  Including a hilariously rigged football tournament where parents are invited to witness the progress of their young angels and also to place “bets” on the likely winners.

But it turns out that the Gregson, Sharp, Fotheringay and Miss Howard have a dastardly plan.  They have devised the ultimate heist, and one that most definitely does pass the Gafin principle. 

The preparation.  The boys have not yet been told about the heist.

“Gregson told me to go and nick something in the gift shop…Anything, it didn’t matter. ‘Just nick something,’ he said, ‘and make sure they see you do it.’”

And then a period of intensive training for the big day.  No detail left to chance, intensive training, team spirit and camaraderie, removal of a couple of bad apples from the team, and hence from the school.

Each boy clear what his role would be. And who would suspect a bunch of teenage schoolchildren of actually walking out with the stash ?...

So, in keeping with the standard formula of the heist story e.g. [insert your favourite heist movie here], the reader finds himself egging on this disparate bunch of young budding criminals to successfully complete the job.

Naturally there are twists and turns along the way, some people do get hurt, and I won’t say what happens to the treasure, but it’s a fun yarn full of chuckles and giggles.

There is no Wikipedia page for this book. The Google Books link is here.

My one liner:  A sculptured glimpse into the resigned gloom of Pre-WWII Europe brought to life through the travails of a Parisian refugee inhabiting a twilight world.

In the opening scenes the protagonist Ravic first meets his lover-to-be Joan on a cold November night in the shadows of the Pont de l’Alma  in Paris after literally bumping into her, sensing her distress about some event unknown, and taking her home with him.  Only to find out shortly afterwards that her (now-former) lover has just collapsed and died.

That sets the tone for the rest of the book, set in the seedy underbelly of Parisian life of the epoch. 

Erich Maria Remarque is “of his generation”.  His works reflect a life that straddled two world wars. Arguably his more famous work is All Quiet on the Western Front (note to self: re-read).  Remarque’s themes are oppression, and Ravic, a German-speaking Czech, is the epitome of the stoical existence of those who fled the Nazis.

“Don’t you know that refugees are always as stones between stones? To their native country they are traitors. And abroad they are still citizens of their native country”.

Ravic, a refugee in Paris is a doctor, a surgeon.  As an illegal, he cannot work officially, so he works as a “shadow” surgeon, performing operations for lazy or incompetent French practitioners who pay him a small cut of their fee – the patients of course, do not notice: they are under the knife by the time Ravic appears.

The title Arch of Triumph is for me an ironical metaphor for what was about to sweep across Europe, a tidal wave of oppression, reaching its apex as it converges on the actual Arc de Triomphe.  And I think Remarque paints this scary vastness exquisitely in his descriptions of the grey Paris cityscape:

“The Arc de Triomphe emerged, gray in the silver downpour, and disappeared. The Champs Elysées with its lighted windows slipped by. The Rond Point smelled of flowers and freshness, a gay-colored wave amid the uproar. Wide as the ocean dawned the Place de la Concorde with its Tritons and sea monsters. The Rue de Rivoli swam closer, with its bright arcades, a fleeting glimpse of Venice, before the Louvre arose, gray and eternal, with its unending courtyard, all its windows dark. Then the quays, the bridges, swaying, unreal, in the gentle rain. Lighters, a towboat with a warm light, as comforting as if it concealed a thousand homes. The Seine, the boulevards, with busses, noise, people, and shops. The iron fences of the Luxembourg, the garden behind them like a poem by Rilke. The Cimetière Montparnasse, silent, forsaken.”

Remarque’s character construction is remarkable.

Some explored in rich deep colours, others with rapid brushstrokes conveying the essential traits that mark them out. This of Veber, one of Ravic’s more honourable French “clients”:

“It was Veber’s invitation. That tinge of pity in it. To grant someone an evening with a family. The French rarely invite foreigners to their homes; they prefer to take them to restaurants. He had not yet been to Veber’s. It was well meant but hard to bear. One could defend oneself against insults; not against pity.”

Or the young lad Jeannot, who fulfils a kind of jester role in the novel, when he wakes up in the operating theatre after a car accident:

“"The leg has been amputated,” Ravic said. “Above the knee or below the knee?” “Ten centimeters above it. Your knee was crushed and could not be saved.” “Good,” Jeannot said. “That makes about fifteen per cent more from the insurance company. Very good. An artificial leg is an artificial leg, whether above or below the knee. But fifteen per cent more is something you can put into your pocket every month."”

Indeed dark humour suffuses the novel, often as a means of illustrating the politics and attitudes of the era, a method perhaps oddly reminiscent of the sardonic, mocking style of Molière:

"“Veber,” he said, “you are a magnificent example of the convenient thinking of our time. In one breath you are sorry because I work illegally here—and at the same time you ask me why I don’t rent a nice apartment—”"

In amongst all of this depth of character, stoical acceptance, gritty greyness and political upheaval you may be thinking that the plot is somewhat incidental.  And in a way it is.  Yes, there is a love story.  Two actually.  And a holiday to the south of France to get away from it all. And a deportation.

Together with an opportunistic exacting of revenge for an old wrong. 

There are historical lessons too, and perhaps those who eagerly call for breaking up the current European political construct should reflect on how recent it is that is was so hard just to move from one European country to another:

"“To Italy? The Gestapo would wait for me there at the frontier. To Spain? The Falangists are waiting there.” “To Switzerland.” “Switzerland is too small. I have been in Switzerland three times. Each time the police caught me after a week and sent me back to France.” “England. From Belgium as a stowaway.” “Impossible. They catch you in the harbor and send you back to Belgium. And Belgium is no country for refugees.”" 

Also a timely reminder that complex challenges await our current crop of leaders.

And so ultimately, you cannot escape the fact that this is a political novel, immersing you at each turn of the page, every location, every interlocution, in the reality of what it was like to live at the time, and why:

"“Suddenly Ravic had the feeling that all the misery of the world was locked into this ill-lighted basement room. The sickly electric bulbs hung yellow and withered on the walls and made everything seem even more disconsolate. The silence, the whispering, the searching of papers which had already been turned over a hundred times, the re-counting of them, the silent waiting, the helpless expectation of the end, the little spasmodic acts of courage, life a thousand times humiliated and now pushed into a corner, terrified because it could not go on any farther.”"

Here is the movie based on the book

And the Wikipedia link for the book is here.

My one liner: Maugham is one of the 20th Century’s great authors, and this book touches so many sides of human emotion, development and  self-realisation

‘Deb quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
E riposato della lunga via,
Seguito il terzo spirito al secondo,
Recorditi di me, che son la Pia:
Siena me fè, disfecemi Maremma:
Salsi colui, che, innanellata pria
Disposando m’avea con la sua gemma’
 
‘Pray, when you are returned to the world, and rested from the long journey,’ ollowed the third spirit on the second, ‘remember me who am Pia. Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: this he knows who after betrothal espoused me with this ring.’

In his introduction to The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham quotes from Dante to let us know  what was the inspiration of the story. The passage is from “Purgatorio” which is the 2nd volume of La Commedia Divina (The Divine Comedy). Pia de’ Tolomei was a gentlewoman of Siena. Her husband suspected her of adultery.  He was too afraid of her family and station to put her to death, so instead he took her to his castle at Maremma and left her there, with the plan that the noxious vapours there would kill her off.  However, she took too long to die and in the end he had her thrown out of the window.

Similarly in The Painted Veil, Walter Fane, a bacteriologist based in Hong Kong  in the early 20th century marries Kitty, a frivolous young girl who, upon
arrival in Hong Kong falls for the charms of the local cad, Charles Townsend.  Upon discovering the affair, Walter volunteers a secondment for both himself and Kitty to Mei-Tan-Fu, a fictitious colony deep inside mainland China, which is infested by cholera, in order that Walter can assist in containing the disease.  In all probability he is leading one or both of them to death.

Many of Maugham’s works deal with the constant conflict in humanity between the transient or frivolous on the one hand, and the more stoical values of constancy, substance and true knowledge on the other.  Take for example one of his other novels, The Razor’s Edge. The main character of the book is Larry Darrell, an American former-WW1 pilot who decides to go on a spiritual journey of enlightenment that eventually takes him to the East, while his wealthy socialite friends mostly suffer reversals of fortune and continue to be mired in the demands placed on them by the high society in which they operate.

In The Painted Veil it is Kitty’s journey from wannabe socialite to a state of knowing, understanding and world-weariness that comes through experiences of sadness, betrayal and human suffering.  Her husband Walter himself is considered a nobody in the social whirl of Hong Kong.  

“She had discovered very soon that he had an unhappy disability to lose himself.  He was self-conscious.  When there was a party and everyone
started singing Walter could never bring himself to join in.  He sat there smiling to show that he was pleased and amused, but his smile was forced, it was more like a sarcastic smirk, and you could not help feeling that he thought all of those people enjoying themselves a pack of fools.”

A recurrent theme throughout the novel, and one which leads the reader to consistently reflect on the title, taken from a sonnet by the English Romantic
poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

"Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life"

Even Walter’s wife hates him:

“It was laughable; he had no sense of humour; she hated his supercilious air, his coldness and his self-control.  It was easy to be self-controlled when you were interested in nothing but yourself.  He was repulsive to her.  She hated to let him kiss her.  What had he to be so conceited about?”  He danced rottenly, he was a wet blanket at a party, he couldn’t play or sing, he couldn’t play polo and his tennis was no better than anybody else’s.  Bridge ? Who cared about bridge ?”

And yet, on the cholera-infested colony of Mei-TanFu, which is where Kitty pays the price of her infidelity, none of these skills are useful.  The only Western inhabitants are the Deputy Commissioner Mr Waddington, and the French nuns in a local convent, which also serves as an orphanage for children whose parents have succumbed to the disease.

Here, Walter is in his element:

“He’s doctoring the sick, cleaning the city up, trying to get the drinking water pure.  He doesn’t mind where he goes, nor what he does.  He’s risking his life twenty times a day.  He’s got Colonel Yu in his pocket and he’s induced him to put the troops at his disposal.  He’s even put a little pluck into the magistrate and the old man is really trying to do something.  And the nuns at the convent swear by him.  They think he is a hero.”

The landscapes painted by Maugham take you to the location.  As and aside, if you are interested in fin de siècle South East Asia as seen through colonial eyes, I would also highly recommend one of Maugham’s travel books, The Gentleman in the Parlour.

But Maugham’s speciality is conveying Eastern mysticism, and its impenetrability to Western eyes.  In The Painted Veil, this mystique is embodied in the Chinese wife of Waddington  An aristocratic lady who left her newly impoverished family after the Revolution to devote her life to the
Englishman.  And Kitty starts to appreciate the depth and intensity of her
surroundings and their inhabitants:

“Kitty had never paid anything but passing and somewhat contemptuous attention to the China in which fate had thrown her.  Now she seemed on a sudden to have an inkling of something more remote and sterious.  Here was the East, immemorial, dark and inscrutable.  The beliefs and ideals of the West seem crude beside ideas and beliefs of which in this exquisite country she seemed to catch a fugitive glimpse.”

Not that Maugham lets Walter get away with it either.  Walter had ‘courted’ Kitty, somewhat ineptly for many months before proposing to her. Indeed such had been his ineptitude that Kitty had not even been sure of his love interest at the moment of proposal.  But, she had been on the social scene for several seasons without any (in her mother’s eyes) ‘appropriate’ proposals, and she had accepted more of a desire not to disappoint her mother by not being left on the shelf.  It comes back to bite Walter, through Kitty’s infidelity.  And Maugham wastes no time in telling us that he was as much at fault as Kitty for marrying her in the first place, and he ultimately pays the price:

“What did it really matter if a silly woman committed adultery, and why should her husband, face to face with the sublime, give it a thought? It was strange that Walter with all his cleverness should have so little sense of proportion.  Because he had dressed a doll in gorgeous robes and then discovered that the doll was filled with sawdust he could neither forgive himself nor her.  His soul was lacerated.”

Maugham’s language is rarely flowery or sophisticated, and most of his novels are brief.  Yet, when you look back on his novels you see that you have gone on a journey with his characters, you have taken on their learning, you have wrestled with their dilemmas, you have lived in their physical space, and you have learnt about their cultural influences. 

That is Maugham’s true genius: that you don’t notice all of this until you reach the end of the journey.

The Wikipedia link to the book is here.

There was also a 2006 film which you can read about on Wikipedia here.

My one liner: The trenches of the First World War were horrific killing fields. Why would the French Secret Service be interested in their topography six decades on ? Other Paths to Glory is both a spy novel and a reminder of 20th Century European military heritage.

Other Paths to Glory won the Gold Dagger award of the CWA for its author Anthony Price.  Dr David Audley is the hero of this, and other novels, by Price.

Paul Mitchell is a historian and expert on the French and Belgian battlefields of the  First World War.  He spends much of his time in the archive rooms of the British Commonwealth Institute for Military Studies. 

Researching.

His mentor and hero is Professor Emerson, for whom Mitchell worked as a researcher at Cambridge.   One day Mitchell is interrupted in the archive rooms by two men, and his life changes:

“Number Two spoke this time.  And whereas Number One was a huge, rumpled, soft spoken, Oxbridge type, Number Two had “soldier” written all over him, from his carefully cropped red hair, and the mirror-shine of his boots, to the bark of his voice.”

Searching questions to Paul Mitchell about a small torn piece of German trench map produced by the two men.  That night, Mitchell, who lives with his mother, is brutally attacked and thrown into the canal near his house.  He manages to somehow clamber out, and make it back home, to the astonishment of the police constable, who have found his “suicide note.”  And Professor Emerson has died that day.  In a house fire.  Except it wasn’t the fire that killed him.

Dr David Audley (British Secret Service) arrives at Mitchell’s house, and persuades him to go into hiding.  Assumed identity...etc.

But Mitchell is also persuaded (seduced ??) into going further than that.  If he is to maximise his chances of survival he must help Audley find out what he and Emerson “knew” that has resulted in one murder and one attempted murder.

This book is somewhat of a trip down memory lane for me.  The school-trip that made the biggest impression on me as a teenager was a four-day tour of the battlefields of The Somme and Flanders, the main sites of the First World War trenches where millions of British, Commonwealth and German troops were killed.

“ “Terrible – yes, it was that sure enough,” he nodded.  Only terrible wasn’t the half of it: if there was a word in the English language for the loss of fifty-seven thousand men in a few hours that first day he hadn’t been able to find it.”

Paul Mitchell has now become Captain Paul Lefèvre (pronounced “Lefever” – English Huguenot, you see) of the 15th Royal Tank Regiment.  Accompanying Audley to find out what is was that had so intrigued and excited Professor Emerson on a recent visit that he had made.  The problem is that every time they find a war veteran, or local, who has something useful to say, he drops dead.

Spy novels, when well-written have the air of imparting “inside” knowledge of the machinations of global geopolitics and secret services, as if they are facts.  This one is no different.  Whether it is indeed true or not, we are told of how “neutral houses” work:

“...That’s the curse of open diplomacy – one side’s got to be seen to win or lose, and if neither does then it’s just as bad.  So the first thing that they came up with was the hot line...Except that when its a matter of life and death nothing beats face-to-face talking...So then they set up the neutral houses...if two countries have a problem they just approach a third party for a key to a neutral house.  No publicity, no TV, no questions asked, permanent top security guaranteed at head-of-state level.  France is a popular country for meeting...”

We find out that the French Secret Service has called its British counterparts to help out because a “neutral house” meeting is about to take place at a farmhouse in the Somme.  And there has been some murderous activity in the area lately.  So they are worried.

One of Paul Mitchell’s specialities is the Hindenburg Line.  In particular he has done much research into the feats of a British Regiment called the Poachers.  Recognised as one of the most incredible feats of the Battle of the Somme was the manner in which the Poachers captured a ridge where there was a Prussian Redoubt, which borders onto “Bully Wood”, or Bois de Bouillet.  The objective had been to attack a village called Hameau which was near Bully Wood.  The Prussian Redoubt was considered impregnable, built as it was into the side of a chateau.  The story of how the Poachers captured it was one of both bravery and foolishness.

But maybe also interesting to someone trying, several decades on, to penetrate an even safer and more impregnable fortress on the border of Bully Wood.

The plot is clever, but the battlefield descriptions and the recounted tales of the veteran characters make this novel as much a work of military history as of fiction.

There is no Wikipedia entry for this book.  The Google Books link is here.

Paul Torday – The Girl on the Landing (2009)

My one liner: A disturbing thriller, which leads you into an uncomfortable zone somewhere in between the supernatural and the deepest primaeval recesses of the human mind.
 
“Serendipozan is one of the new generation of neuroleptics.  While we must  concede that extrapyramidal symptoms (e.g. acute Parkinsonism) and neuroleptic malignant symptoms (sometimes resulting in mortality) have been observed in control groups, we believe that these occurrences are statistically insignificant. This must be balanced against clear evidence of the effectiveness of Serendipozan and the significant improvement it can give to the quality of patients’ lives, allowing in many cases for them to live within their own communities without the need for medical supervision..  Dr Hans Bueler, Tertius Corporation AG, International Symposium on Clinical Psychiatric Medication, Basle 2002” 

Paul Torday's novel switches protagonists neatly between Michael Gascoigne and his wife Elizabeth, both in their thirties, the story is told in both their first persons. Michael, an orphan, and owner by inheritance of the Scottish highlands estate Ben Carroun, doesn’t need to work. He spends much of his time down in London where he leads an affluent if non-descript existence.  The dusty, time-capsule encased, politically incorrect gentlemen’s Groucher club in Mayfair is the beginning and end of his social life, bounded neatly by golf, card games, stalking, and the petty internal squabblings of the club committee. And his personality reflects his existence.  Dull and predictable.
 
 Elizabeth has been married to him for 10 years.  An unremarkable marriage, largely devoid of passion. “I’m  making it sound as though we had an unhappy marriage. That’s not true.  It was what my mother used to call a ‘workable’ marriage.”   An unremarkable job on a woman’s magazine, which she didn’t really need to keep once she got married.  
 
Slowly however, things start to change.  The “Girl on the Landing”makes her first appearance in a painting. Michael and Elizabeth are staying with friends at a country house in Ireland, where Michael is captivated by a painting he sees on the staircase. 

“The painting was of an interior that showed a shadowed landing...The foreground of the painting was drawn with great attention to detail...The farther into the background the artist went, however, the less he appeared to care about the detail. The female figure was merely sketched in and she was dark, so dark one could make out only the merest suggestion of a face...”  Several chance encounters ensue between Michael and a strange and beautiful young girl. On train journey. In a restaurant. At the estate. She calls herself The
Lamia, and Michael starts to opens up to her about his past. 
 
“‘She seemed at once, some penance lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self’ Lamia, by Keats.”

 Elizabeth starts to worry as Michael’s personality starts to change.  He is becoming increasingly dishevelled, unpredictable, elusive, and aggressive, not to mention amorous.  She is at once more attracted to him (he is now “Mikey”, not Michael),  yet disturbed by him.  One evening at the estate they are hosting Peter Robinson and David Martin, friends of his, and fellow Groucher members, when he delivers a completely unexpected monologue. The conversation has turned to the candidacy of Vijay Patel, a successful second generation British banker of Ugandan Asian origin, whom Peter has proposed for membership at the Groucher. The club is deeply divided as he is the first “black man” they would be letting in.  Over dinner David makes some off-colour remarks about Patel’s (un)suitability, and Michael launches into a tirade about the origins of British identity.  But what a tirade.  It is clinical in its exposition of a hypothetical woman cave dweller in the post Younger Dryas ice age period making treks across to Britain from the Pyrenees, some time in the Mesolithic area.  Yes, the Anglo-Saxons and Celts and Vikings came after, but it made little difference to the DNA of the inhabitants of the British Isles. And not only is the content shocking for being so out of character, it is the primordial venom with which he delivers it that unnerves his wife.
 
As Michael’s unpredictability worsens, we start to understand why a violent conclusion to this story is the only possible outcome. 
 
Some nice touches in here, including a cameo appearance by Charlie Summers, down-on-his luck charmer and purveyor of luxury dog food.  Charlie will be known to Torday regulars as the tragi-comic subject of another of his novels The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the author.  There is no Wikipedia link for the book.

David Eagleman - Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlife (2009)

My one liner: These are extremely short stories, maximum 3 pages long, and hence very easy to read on the go. Hilarious, thought-provoking, moving, sad, and certainly not overtly religious. An experiment that went right.

 This is a book which makes us hold up a mirror at our own behaviour, our own existence, and our own values.  The method is ingenious.  By creating the trope
of the hypothetical afterlife, David Eagleman allows an observation of humanity from  outside the confines of the world we live in.  The tales, including some fables reminiscent of childhood readings of Aesop, are brief and colourful, some are morality stories, some motivational self-help guides, others just set off emotions of sadness or happiness.
 
Take for example our natural desire for familiarity. To be amongst people we know and care about, the communities we inhabit, the friends and colleagues we trust. In “Circle of Friends” you only gradually realise you are in an afterlife
after a certain period of time. Because initially everything looks like the world you lived in. You say goodbye to the wife and kids in the morning, leave for the office, where you spend the day working with your usual colleagues. But it does eventually dawn on you that you are in the afterlife. Why ? Because you come to realise that this world is populated only by people whom you’ve met before (whether friends, relations, colleagues, or fleeting acquaintances).  Although initially you like the attention you get from those around you, everybody is friendly, and you get to renew old acquaintances, you soon get depressed. 
Depressed because you come to notice an absence of crowds of unknown people, of new things to learn or explore. 
 
“You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting.  But no one listens or sympathises with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.”
 
Or why do we seek recognition, fame, our name in lights, the need to be the best-known fish in our particular pond ? Might there be a downside ? Well yes, a big one in the afterlife posited by “Metamorphosis”. You see, there are three deaths. And you have to wait in the waiting-room until the third death.  Death One is when the body ceases to function.  Death Two is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third death is some point in the future which is the last time on earth that your name is spoken.  Until then you stay in the waiting room, which basically resembles an airport departure lounge.  
  
“The gray-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history.  He waits with aching heart for his statue to fall.”

 In “Incentive” the incentive to constantly self improve and fulfil your potential during your life is clear.  Because you will have to spend your entire afterlife in the company of many many alternative versions of “You”.  But only the ones who in alternative parallel lives achieved greater success, for example because they reflect good decisions you should have made rather than bad decisions you actually made.  Or because of an instance where you didn’t fully motivate yourself to achieve a task, but did do so in a parallel life.  You will constantly be reminded of what might have been, so be motivated now, and you will have fewer “Yous” above you in the afterlife hierarchy.

 That’s three stories given away, but there are 37 more.  Eagleman is undoubtedly multi-talented; his professional speciality is neuroscience. And to cap it all I note from his Wikipedia entry that Italy's Style magazine named Eagleman one of the "Brainiest, Brightest Idea Guys for 2012" and featured him on the cover. Yeah, one of them.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the book.

Michael Dibdin: Vendetta (1990)

My one liner: Classic Murder Mystery, Italian Giallo style. The Aurelio Zen series of murder-mysteries was serialised by the BBC last year.Vendetta is a fun read. Takes place in Sardegna.

 The late Michael Dibdin created the Aurelio Zen detective stories in the 1980s and 1990s.  Zen, the Rome-based crime-solver is the epitome of the under-paid, under-resourced, over-worked middle-aged Italian crime solver battling against the departmental bureaucratic stupor of the Criminalpol.  And of course, his mother lives with him.
 
Vendetta is the second in the series and most of the action takes place in the beautiful, enigmatic, hostile countryside of Sardegna. Italophiles will enjoy.

 For members of the international elite to establish a retreat in Sardegna, “..the
only requirement was money, and lots of it.  As founder and owner of a construction company... there was no question that Oscar Burolo satisfied that requirement.  But instead of meekly buying his way into the Costa [Smeralda] like everyone else, he did something unheard-of, something so bizarre and outlandish that some people claimed afterwards that they always thought it was ill-omened from the start.  For his Sardinian retreat, Oscar chose an abandoned farmhouse half-way down the island’s almost uninhabited eastern coast, and not even on the sea, for God’s sake, but several kilometres inland !”
 
The fortress he constructs there is impenetrable, yet one evening he is brutally murdered, together with his wife and dinner party guests. “It had taken less than twenty seconds to turn the room into an abattoir. Fifteen seconds later, the caretaker would appear, having run from the two room service flat where he and his wife were watching a variety show on television.” No, the butler didn’t do it, but many other people had enough of grudge against Burolo, to exact such a vendetta.

 As ever in Italy, political considerations are never far way. In this case onorevole (MP) and fixer Favelloni was also at the dinner party but had managed to leave with his wife prior to the killings. The investigating magistrate and the weight of public opinion thinks that he did it, albeit that the evidence is weak and circumstantial. Favelloni’s political allies put the requisite pressure on Zen’s superiors to have him sent to Sardegna to gather the requisite evidence to show that Favelloni is innocent.  Who actually did it is not of particular concern, though in true Italian style it would be nice if someone else could be framed to add weight to the acquittal.

There are some nice little touches in the book.  I don't know if the author meant it, but a particularly cute one is the irate Zen explaining to the obstructive clerk in the department archives that surname is spelt Zen, not Zeno.  Surely the clerk has appreciated that he has swapped the word symbolising Mahayana Buddhism for the name of the founder of the philosophy of Stoicism !

 Back in the story,  also lurking in the  background is communist agitator-turned gangster Vasco Spadola, just released from jail, having been put away twenty years ago by Zen.  And he has his own vendetta to execute.

We follow Zen’s adventure into Sargedna’s hostile terrain (the people of this
island are not known for sharing their dark internal secrets) where slowly and
surely, by both luck and design, he exceeds his remit and closes in on what actually happened.

Here is wikipedia link to the book.

My one liner: An easy, if sometimes disturbing, often hilarious read

“May you live in interesting times” is a well-known Chinese curse.

Well, the apocalypse stories take that to the logical extreme, as there would
be very little that would be uninteresting about a post-apocalyptic world. 
This is a lovely little collection of (very) short stories that take human
beings out of their comfort zone into situations which they cannot have
experienced before. 

Some explore human existence in the context of a broken society.  In
“Trust”, R.C. Lewis explores the instinct for survival that leads to herd
behaviour, which can have disastrous (yet morally justified consequences).

On the other hand, “The Last Day of Fall” by Matt Sinclair is a mini Lord of
the Flies.  A community that initially comes together in the face of
apocalyptic disaster.  But there are some rotten apples in the basket…

Then hilariously, a short play / TB script “Disconnect” by Mindy McGinnis,
which joins God and the staff in heaven two seconds post-apocalypse.  God
has inadvertently triggered Judgment Day by setting up his iPhone calendar
wrongly. With queues of millions forming at the gates of heaven, God gives up,
flops on the couch and starts playing with his old Gameboy, leaving his son, and  a host of well-known angels to sort out the mess.

And the memorable grand finale by Judy Croome, “The Last Sacrifice”. 
Apocalypse in an ancient era.  A (Mayan??) king and demi-god performs
increasingly desperate sacrifices to appease the gods.

But to no avail.

The Slideshow Review for this book is here.

There is no Wikipedia link for this book.  The Google Books link is here.

(The image above is licensed by shakespearesmonkey under a Creative Commons License. The image below is licensed by Lea LSF under a Creative Commons License.)

My one liner:  The Breath of Night by Michael Arditti digs deep into the Philippines, its culture, people, and politics, to give us a thorough examination of the conscience and appetite of the Church to help the poor and disenfranchised through armed struggle.  A morality tale that sits in the grey area between good and evil.

This is the third in an occasional series, Lessons from Fiction. The Breath of Night is a new book by English author Michael Arditti.  It has been promoted, sorry, reviewed, extensively in the mainstream media already, such as the Spectator, the Independent, the Scotsman, the Telegraph, the Guardian, and even the Daily Mail Online.  With such revered Thought-Leadership behind it, I was curious to see what all the fuss was about.  

Arditti raises important questions about the role of the Church and whether it should be more overtly political. In this article I would like to explore that suggestion. My conclusion is that economic intervention is more effective than political intervention and I have put some numbers around one of the examples in the novel to illustrate the point.

If you have travelled extensively in developing countries (is it ok to use that expression any more ? I still like “Third World”, but that’s definitely off limits now), you will feel the smells, the sounds, the taste, the moisture, the “vibe” of Philippines, even if you haven’t been there, because it is just like all those other countries you have visited.

“The pavement was almost as tricky to negotiate as the road.  Ahead of them a man, wearing nothing but shorts, soaped himself nonchalantly as if he were in his own bathroom.  To his left, three men played cards on an oil drum surrounded by a jeering an gesticulating crowd; to his right three women sat stirring brightly coloured stews an bubbling pots of rice while their children frolicked at their feet, perilously close to the wobbly stoves. All around them were stalls selling food, drink, scarves, T-shirts, sunglasses, lighters and pirated DVDs.”

Scratch below the veneer of the (faux-)colonial hotels and malls catering to the whims of the newly-minted Global Traveller, and you find an incredibly complex society.

Or, I should say, “societal structure”.  An anthropological order that existed long before the colonial masters arrived and departed and continues to survive long after the arrival of “independence” and “democracy”.

“Nothing in this country is the way it looks.  You think that because the Filippinos have Spanish names and speak English that you understand them. Big mistake !”.

In Arditti’s model, there are essentially five main actors and somehow, like spheres rotating around a central gravitational force, they seem to maintain an equilibrium with respect to each other: the Elite Landowners, the Masses (workers in the cities and workers on the land, if they can get work), the Government, the Church, and the “communist” Freedom Fighters.

Revolutions and overthrows of the incumbent government come and goAquino
for Marcos, in the period covered by the book), but not much really changes:

“The most notorious Marcos ministers have been removed, but by and large the faces in both the Senate and the House of Representatives remain identical.  The army has been granted immunity for all its crimes during the State of Emergency”

Basically the Elite Landowners, control everything, and maintain their power
structures through the tacit or not-so-tacit government of the day. 

The personification of the landowner is the haciendo, the proprietor of the hacienda farm estate, acquired originally by the conquistadores.  The haciendo plays a benevolent role in society, because he provides work for tenants on his farm:

“Don Florante is reputed to be one of the more enlightened landlords. He takes a paternal interest in his tenants, advancing them money for seeds and tools, selling them cheap rice during droughts, and standing as godfather to their children (which, here, involves far more than remembering them at Christmas and birthdays).” 

And the tenants themselves recognise, accept and even embrace their own role:

“The farmers have a sense of indebtedness that goes way beyond  indenture.  They feel an almost mystical bond to the haciendos”

 Which is unfortunate, because economically, not surprisingly they are stuck:

“The share tenant is vulnerable to the proportion of his harvest due to the landlord, and the leasehold tenant to a fixed rent that takes no account of the all too frequent crop failures.”

I was fascinated by this statement, and since this article about lessons from fiction I would like to alight from the train here and just look into this a little it more: we will return to the Church and the Freedom Fighters later. 

Let’s analyse the above tenancy arrangements by putting some numbers on them.  These are unresearched assumptions, but they should give us a flavour of what’s going on.  I would be very happy to hear from readers who would like to challenge the assumptions or to provide better data to feed into the models.

Imagine a household which is a tenant on the hacienda, and which is a family of 5.  They harvest the land and for say four months of the year it produces an income.  Based on the Philippines’ 2011 GDP per head of $2,400 I have assumed 3 productive members of the household, so a total of $7,200 produced by the household during the year.   Assume that the household’s monthly expenses are $2 per person per day and 30 days per month.  Thus the monthly expense is $2*5*30 = 300, or $3,600 per year.

What happens under the first version described above, where the landlord takes a percentage of output ?  Let’s assume the landlord takes 45%. Why have I chosen this number ? Well, without doing detailed research I have made the following assumption.  It just so happens that at 45% the household is just about able to make some savings at the end of the year, amounting to $360.  The landlord is the one with all the information: if he sets the percentage too low he is not maximising his profit; if he sets it too high, the tenant has no incentive to work hard.  The tenant works the land in the Hope that he will put aside a meagre amount every year, and one day his family will be able to afford an education, or a life in the city.  The landlord is the one dispensing the Hope.

 And indeed it seems to work.  Look at Chart 1.  Lo and behold every year the household’s wealth increases, up to a respectable $4,320 after Year 12. 

But that’s not the whole story.  What happens if the crop fails ? Again, this is somewhat unresearched, but let’s assume one total crop failure during the 12-year period.  And let’s assume that there is a 75% probability of this happening, ie one total failure in a 12-year period (I did dig around a bit for some agricultural data, and I believe that’s not an unreasonable assumption).  And let’s say that this failure occurs in year 7.

What happens to our tenant household ? Well, on the one hand their savings will be wiped out, and the household will be put into debt.  Let’s assume that they can borrow the money, but will need to pay an interest rate of 50% pa (a reasonable assumption, I think).  Look what happens to their finances in Chart 2.  Ouch.  By the end of Year 12 our household is over $6,000 in debt.

So to re-iterate, although our model family has the Hope of steadily increasing its savings, in fact under our assumptions it has a 75% chance of ending up $6,000 in debt at the end of 12 years !

Is it any better for the tenant to adopt the second model, and pay a fixed rent ?  Suppose the landlord charges a fixed rent of $250 per month, regardless of output.  In this case, the wealth accumulation is even better, there is more Hope for the tenant.  Chart 3 shows that the family accumulates $7,200 at the end of Year 12:

How lovely.

But look what happens (Chart 4) when there a crop failure.  The rent still has to be paid, so an even bigger liability is incurred when the Year 7 income disappears.  And the debt spiral at 50% pa interest rates take the household to a whopping $15,000 in debt by Year 12, although you would imagine they will have been evicted into destitution long before that.

Some Hope indeed that is being dispensed by the haciendos.  More like the Hope that people have when they walk into a casino, when in fact the odds of coming out with any money are so overwhelmingly against them.

 In the novel Arditti examines in depth the role of the Church within a society such as this.  Julian Tremayne, a Catholic priest of mid-ranking English aristocratic blood, leaves his home country in the 1970s and sets out for the Philippines to take up a posting there as parish priest.  Over time, his pastoral duties bring him into contact with exactly the type of people described in the example above.  Initially he plays the role that is expected from him, preaching to the congregation according to local custom, and providing food, shelter, medicine and money for those in extreme need.  In this role he is very much part of the Church Establishment, which above all wants to maintain cordial relations with all factions in Philippine society.

However, over time, Julian develops a closer relationship with the country’s
Freedom Fighters, the New People’s Army or NPA, who are engaged in violent and revolutionary struggle against regime of the day (first Marcos, then
Aquino).  At first it is logistical support that Julian provides (e.g. transport and shelter).  But he struggles increasingly with his conscience and feels that the Church as an institution should engage actively in the freedom struggle:

“Poverty and oppression endanger the soul [of the rich] along with the body [of the poor]. A woman whose children are starving may break the seventh commandment, just as a man driven mad by tyranny and injustice may break the fifth. So as a priest, I’m obliged to concern myself with the here and now as much as the hereafter; indeed, the two are inexplicably linked.  If a priest is to stand in the person of Christ, he can’t avoid being political.”

Hence he becomes more actively involved with the NPA (it is ambiguous as to whether he actually engages in any acts of violence or terror) and is eventually murdered in 1989.

The novel’s other protagonist is Phillip Seward, a young and out-of-work Art Historian, who has an emotional connection (you need to read the book to know why) with Isabel, the niece of Julian Tremayne, and her husband Hugh (who happens to also own a trading company that has extensive commercial interests in the Philippines).  Isabel was particularly close to her uncle Julian.

Isabel manages to persuade Hugh to bankroll an assignment for Phillip to the Philippines to report on an investigation that is underway there into whether Julian satisfied the requirements for being declared a saint.  Progress on the investigation has been painfully slow and Isabel feels that Phillip would be able to provide an objective view as to what is going on, and maybe to speed it up a little.

The story flips between Phillip’s 21st century induction to the country, as he uncovers Julian’s story, and the Julian’s letters, which tell his own story 30 years earlier.

Arditti wants us to question the role of the Church, and whether it should proactively align itself with revolutionary causes.  Is the Church by definition a political institution that must fight to prevent poverty as well as treating its symptoms ? Certainly in previous centuries, both the Protestant and Catholic Churches have been more explicitly combative.

The author himself seems not sure of the answer:

 “I think that’s what Julian objected to.  He didn’t want a world that was split into masters and servants.  No, he and his friends wanted revolution.  They were terrorists, even if they had no guns – and believe me, there are many who swear that they did.  Suppose they had succeeded, what then ? They get rid of Marcos and end up with Mao or Pol Pot. Do you think the people would have been happier with that ?”

Amongst all this ambivalence about political intervention, may I suggest an alternative route for institutions with the means, such as the Church. That is, that rather than pick political fights which may lead to worse outcomes and more destruction, such institutions can provide real economic assistance.  

Let’s go back to the example that we analysed above.  The astute reader will have noticed what the real problem is (actually, there are two – answers on a postcard, please).  The real problem is the interest rate that the household pays when it goes into debt.  

A somewhat topical issue on which the Church of England has recently expressed a view as well.  Now, look what happens if the tenant can have access to cheaper credit, say at an 8%pa interest rate.  Chart 5 applies this to the first example (tenant paying a proportion of output), but I assure it works for the second type as well. 

 Et voilà ! A steady recovery back to prosperity.

This is the idea behind micro-finance, and there is no reason why the Church (or indeed any other religious institution) could not deploy its considerable balance sheet to become a serious micro-finance lender, not just in developing countries, but also in more developed markets.
 
Now that really would be putting its money where its mouth is.
 
There is no Wikipedia entry for this book.  The Google Books link to the book is here.

Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake (2003)

My one liner: Man Booker Prize Shortlist. Sci-fi and survival in a post apocalyptic world. But the apocalypse came from a somewhat unexpected source.
 
Where does our increasingly commoditised world take us, dominated as it is by large corporate entities ? Does the corporate effectively become the state, selecting its “employees” from childhood based on their predicted future capacity to add scientific know-how to the corporation ? As all “knowledge” is now captured, recorded and available on the internet, does regular society become increasingly dumbed-down, with those who opt-in fed on a diet of inane entertainment and leisure, and genetically modified food, while living in faceless corporate compounds ? 
 
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Margaret Atwood thinks so, and it is a vision she returns to in the sequel to this novel, The Year of the Flood (2009), whilst also echoing the society of the Handmaid’s Tale which she wrote in 1985.  Humans are valued only for the corporate value that they generate, and
there is a clear material hierarchy between corporates themselves.  The vision echoes a Marxian view of a society which is in the immediate pre-revolutionary stage, as capital dominates absolutely and labour, indeed 99% of humanity, is commoditised.  And  as in Marx, such a society is inherently unstable, and carries the seeds of its  own inevitable destruction.  In this case the destruction is  apocalyptic.

 We see the world through the eyes of Jimmy, an apocalypse survivor, whose post-apocalypse name is “Snowman”.  He is also a figurehead leader of tribe he has named the Children of Crake.  The Children of Crake is a naive and unsophisticated group of survivors of (as yet) unknown provenance who look to him for their material and spiritual guidance, and whom he in turn manipulates, by getting them to provide him with basic foodstuffs and materials. Snowman lives mostly in a tree, because the landscape is populated with wild and dangerous genetically modified animals – for example Woolvogs, a deadly cross between wolves and dogs, and Pigoons, balloon shaped humanoid sentient pigs bred to host human transplant parts – all roaming free after humanity was pretty much wiped out.

 The story flips back and forth between pre and post “final destruction”, as we learn more about Snowman’s (aka Jimmy’s) previous existence. His mother who left home (and hence the corporate compound) because she refused to assimilate herself into the  commoditised world.  She was thus a revolutionary and a security risk, and eventually killed by the corporate security service, the CorpsSeCorps. His “corporate citizen”father’s new wife, the compliant Ramona. Jimmy’s relationship with Crake, his childhood friend, far more intellectually gifted than Jimmy, and eventually landing a place to study genetic research at the Watson Crick Institute, whilst Jimmy goes and studies humanities at the Martha Graham Academy.  Inevitably Crake’s ability takes him to a secretive and lucrative role in the field of genomics.  And finally there is the woman Oryx.  Loved by both Jimmy and Crake.  Lover of both Jimmy and Crake.  The tie that binds them and the force that splits them.  And the subject of Snowman’s woeful reminiscences.

Snowman eventually ventures out of the tree, driven by the need to find food. And as his scavenging treck unfolds, we slowly learn the devastating truth about how and  by whom the destruction of society was actually caused.  Compelling, to use the reviewer’s cliché. 

We get the feeling that Atwood is a pessimist about the capacity of a society dominated by the pursuit of self-interested profit to reach a long-term equilibrium that is both stable and morally good. And given the current debates around extreme income inequalities in our current financial-crisis ridden world, there is much food for thought here as to where that world is heading.  Surely though, history has taught us that there are in-built circuit
breaks that prevent society from lurching into extreme states of self-destruction ?

Here is the wikipedia link to the book