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: Fratricide, Patricide, Matricide, Infanticide, Blood, Guts, Gore, Pillage, Murder, Incest, Intrigue, Betrayal, Incompetence, Brilliance, Genius, Aggression, Passion, Fervour, Docility, Stupidity, Hubris. In other words the first five hundred years of the Byzantine Empire as described by John Julius Norwich in this classic account.
 
“After over half a century of contact with the Romans, his people had become perhaps one degree less bestial than at their first arrival; but the vast majority still lived and slept in the open, disdaining all agriculture and even cooked foods – though they would often soften raw meat by putting it between their thighs and their horses’ flanks as they rode.  For clothing they favoured tunics made, rather surprisingly, from the skins of fieldmice, crudely stitched together; this they wore continuously, without ever removing them, until they dropped off of their own accord.  And as they had always done, they still practically lived on their horses, eating, trading, holding their councils, even sleeping in the saddle.”
 
The Huns were a savage tribe which smashed their way out of the Central Asian steppes around 376AD.  Attila the Hun, “the scourge of God”, led a series of attacks on the Byzantine Empire and built up a vast dominion stretching from Constantinople to the Balkans in the East to Italy and France in the West. He came within a whisker of invading Rome itself.   
  
The Hun invasion is  just one example of the incursions and travails that beset the Byzantine Empire during the period covered in this book, 300 to 800AD. 
This colourful account by John Julius Norwich tells the story of the early Byzantine Empire, established by Emperor Constantine I (“Constantine the Great”) in 311 AD in the new city of Constantinople on the banks of the River Bosphorus.  The New Rome.
 
Whilst the Pope, and hence the religious centre, of the Roman Empire continued to be seated in Rome, the political centre had now gravitated towards the East.  

It was not a smooth and unambiguous transition, and often there were
Co-Emperors, one for Byzantium and one for the West of the Roman Empire.  
 
However, throughout the period of this volume, there was one inalienable and unargued article of faith for every Byzantine (and from which they drew strength of unity in times of turmoil), namely that the Emperor (or Co-Emperor) was the sole Vice-Gerent of God on earth.  This volume ends with the shattering of that practice in the most remarkable way in the year 800AD.  Pope Leo III produces a document (proved to be fraudulent only several centuries later) entitled the “Donation of Constantine”, pursuant to which Constantine the Great had allegedly, 500 years earlier, “retired” to the “province” of Byzantium, having bestowed on the Pope the right to confer the title of Emperor. 

By this document the Frankish ruler Charles (“Charlemagne”) was crowned
Emperor by Pope Leo and despatched to Byzantium to replace the supposed Empress Irene whose reign over Byzantium had been an economic and political
disaster.

Of course, the transition was helped by another factor: “That the Empress was notorious for having blinded and murdered her own son was, in the minds of both Leo and Charles, immaterial: it was enough that she was a woman.  The female sex was known to be incapable of governing, and by the old Salic tradition was debarred from doing so.”  
  
In between the bookends of Constantine the Great and Charlemagne, we read of a fascinating period of Christian history.  Of Emperors who were disastrous.  Of others who ruled Byzantium with skill, care and competence.  
  
For example Heraclius came to the throne in 610 AD.  He introduced a new structure into the eastern side of Byzantium, organising it along military
lines:
 - The part of Asia Minor (the northeast coastline running from Selifke in the Mediterranean to Rize on the Black Sea) which had recently been recaptured from the Persians was divided into four “Themes”, or regions.  The choice of word was significant, because tema was the Greek word for a division of troops, thus underlining the warlike division of the region. 
- Each tema was put under the governorship of a“strategos”, or military governor.  
 -  A reserve army was maintained by providing potential soldiers with inalienable grants of land, in return for hereditary military service if called up.  
 - The net result was that Heraclius did not have to rely on ad hoc recruiting or on doing deals with dodgy barbarians in order to raise an army.  
  
On the economic front he fixed the parlous fiscal position of the Imperial economy through:
 - Taxation and government borrowing
 - Restitution from supporters of the previous corrupt regime
 - Subsidies from “friends and family” in Africa
 - Most importantly however, he persuaded Patriarch Sergius, the Archbishop of Constantinople, to declare that the coming war would be a religious war.  Hence all of the Church assets and treasure would be at the disposal of the Emperor. 

Leadership 101 for aspiring modern warmongerer.  
  
You will need to read the book to find out what became of Heraclius.  

Every Emperor was confronted by tribes trying to nick territory.  The Gauls and Franks perennially switching their loyalties to and from Rome.  The Lombards (from modern Germany and Austria) settling in Northern Italy. The Slavs trying to take the Balkans. The Goths, the Vandals and Huns having to be bought off or fought off.  
 
But, there are two stand-out foes of Byzantine Christendom over this period.  
 
First, the Persian Empire, whose rulers always seemed to have the knack for knowing when they had the upper hand. As an example, in 359AD Emperor Constantius II receives a letter from the Persian King:
 
“Shapur, King of Kings, brother of the Sun and the Moon, sends salutation...
 
Your own authors are witness that the entire territory within the river Strymon and the borders of Macedon was once held by my forefathers; were I to require you to restore all of this, it would not ill-become me...but because I take delight in moderation I shall be content to receive Mesopotamia and Armenia which were fraudulently  extorted from my grandfather.  I give you warning that if my ambassador returns empty-handed, I shall take the field against you, with all my armies, as soon as the winter is past.”
 
I guess a lawyer would call that a Letter Before Action.

And of course the other formidable challenge to Byzantium was the rise of Islam.  

In 633 AD, shortly after the foundation of the religion, it suddenly “burst out of Arabia.”  First Damascus, then Jerusalem.  Next, the whole of Syria.  Egypt and
Armenia fell within the decade. The whole Persian Empire was subsumed within 20 years.  And then Afghanistan and Punjab within another 10 years. 
To the West, North Africa and Spain. Across the Pyrenees and finally checked
at the banks of the Loire.  
 
The rest, as they say, is history.
 
The various Emperors acceded and reigned using diverse styles of governance and deployed some interesting procedural instruments.  

The Emperor Maurice, though fundamentally a good man, faced financial
pressures as a result of the extravagance and incompetence of his predecessor.  Around 602AD he introduced austerity measures, but went too far, at one point cutting military rations by 25%, refusing to ransom 12,000 captives of the Avars (leading to them being put to death), and decreeing that the army should not return to base for winter but should sit it out in inhospitable territory beyond the Danube.  Eventually he become so unpopular that he took the decision to flee to Persia (with whose king he had previously  concluded a truce), taking his family with him.

His successor Phocas, embarked on a brutal purge of all his enemies. 
 
“Debauched, drunk, and almost pathologically cruel, he loved, we are told, nothing so much as the sight of blood..; it was Phocas who introduced the gallows and the rack, the bindings and mutilation which were to cast a sinister shadow over the centuries to come.”
 
First, Phocas despatched troops to Asia and killed Maurice and family. Then he exterminated his own brother and nephew. Plus a whole bunch of military men.  He even managed to kill Narses, his best general in the East.  Unsurprisingly, the Persians took their chance, invaded, and took
significant chunks of territory, including Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia,
Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, and Galatia.  
  
Other examples abound. 

Julian the Apostate, who eventually became Emperor in 361 AD, had to bide his time (indeed he didn’t really have imperial designs, and in fact was a sort of travelling scholar, and by all accounts a little bit of a geek).  

His cousin Constantius II preceded him as Emperor.  He had had Julian’s father and stepbrother killed when Julian was a young child.  Constantius made the error of elevating Julian, appointing him as the Caesar of Gaul.  Julian must have had a festering hatred for Constantius II.   He bided his time, and then led an army against Constantius.  
 
This book has some other useful features.  The tables of lineages, emperors and family trees, the maps and illustration all add to understanding.  Moreover there is a tourist guide, providing a list of the Byzantine monuments still surviving in Istanbul today.  
  
I agree with the author in his Introduction that Byzantium is an era of history under-taught in schools, yet it has more than enough material to capture the imagination of a schoolchild.  
  
The narrative of this book is tight, so it leads you swiftly from one reign to another quite seamlessly.  
 
And that perhaps, is a clue to the central message of the book. 

Dynasties come and go.  Some leaders are good people, some are bad, most a bit of both. They are able to wield huge power. And yet they are all merely human beings powerless against the passage of time and events.

The wikipedia link to the book is 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.

My one liner: Neuroscience is a discipline still in its infancy.  This book reaches some quite startling conclusions about how we  can “re-wire”our own brains and hence tweak or change our own personality.

We know intuitively that our minds can be “trained” so that we become an expert in something, or maintain our mental agility (think Sudoku, or those Nintendo puzzles designed for old codgers).  Neuroscience is an evolving discipline, and research has shown that we can take this intuition much further.  
 
It goes something like this.  
 
Our personality can be described by six Dimensions of a person’s “Emotional Style” – we sit at some point on line between two extremes for each of those Dimensions, and the combination of all those points, in essence sums up to form our personality.  Now, here’s the interesting bit.  Which part of the line we sit on with respect to each Dimension depends on either the activity in, or physical properties of, a particular part of the brain. 

So what, I hear you ask.  We are born with particular brain characteristics, and therefore our “personality” is determined by genetics and that’s it. End of  story.
 
Not so, according to the authors, Richard Davidson (a neuroscientist) and Sharon Begley, a science writer.  

Davidson has spent over four decades researching this, and reckons that the size, shape and activity of the various parts of the brain can be changed by  “exercise” in the same way that we might change our body shape and fitness by
going to the gym. In other words the brain exhibits neuroplasticity.
 
The implication ?  We can reconfigure our own brain in order to change our location within each Dimension of Emotional Style, and hence alter our own personality over time.  Nurture can override nature, in other words.

The book concludes with practical actions we can take in order to reconfigure the brain, ranging from different styles of meditation, to targeted social training “drills”. It also provides possible ways to treat “disorders” such as depression or autism.
 
What are the six Dimensions of Emotional Style ? They are: (1) Resilience Style (how quickly or slowly do you shake off a setback ?); (2) Outlook Style (broadly, are you an optimist or a pessimist ?) (3) Social Intuition Style (are you good, or bad, at reading visual, aural and oral clues from other people and hence gauging other people’s emotional state ?) (4) Self-Awareness Style (are you intensely self-aware of physical cycle and states of your own body, and are able to relate them to changes in your own mood and behaviour, or alternatively do have difficulty in understanding why you behave the way you do ?); (5) Sensitivity to Context Style (how often, or not do you adapt your actions or behaviour to current social situation ?); (6) Attention Style (how easy or difficult do you find it to focus on a particular task, rather than letting your thoughts or attention wander ?).  
 
An example.  Social Intuition. Guess who this is:
 
“I ushered him to a quiet table [to] get waiters to bring him lunch, [but] he would have none of it.  Maroon robe swirling, he walked up to the buffet table, took a plate, and waited in line to serve himself like everyone else – attracting no small number of stares, but even more smiles of appreciation that this Nobel laureate, head of the Tibetan government in exile, best-selling author, and spiritual leader was waiting his turn for poached salmon, rice pilaf, and a Weight-Watchers nightmare of desserts like everyone else.  Social Intuition, indeed.”
 
Note, the Dimensions of Emotional Style are a continuum and each person sits at some point on the continuum for each Dimension.  Note also that for each Dimension there is not one “good” extreme and one “bad” extreme.  Take Self  Awareness.  At first blush you may think it is good to be highly Self-Aware.  It means you can quickly recognise when you are angry, sad, jealous or afraid, and can relate this to emotional cues within your body. But, taken to the extreme, “someone with very sensitive emotional antennae for his own feelings who observes the pain of another will feel that person’s anxiety or sadness in both mind and body –experiencing a surge of the stress hormone cortisol, for instance, as well as elevated heart rate and blood pressure.”

So how does neuroplasticity work in practice ? Well, for example, scientific research and experimentation conducted by Davidson demonstrates that a more Positive Outlook Style is caused by a stronger physical link between the Pre-Frontal Cortex and the ventrial Striatum (see the Diagram, apologies for the hand-drawing, probably the first time I have drawn a human body part since ‘O’ Level Biology).  So to give yourself a more positive Outlook if indeed that is what you want (Remember: pessimism can be good as well, as it may make you a better manager of your personal risk), you need to do exercises which strengthen that link. The authors suggest repeatedly putting yourself in situations which require forethought and planning. Slightly counter-intuitively, this means you actually repeatedly place yourself in front of temptations for instant gratification (e.g. junk food, shopping for luxury goods), and practice refusing, because you convince yourself this would be better for you in the long term.
 
As a supplement, they advocate techniques originally developed by Giovanni Fava (University of Bologna, Italy), called “well-being therapy”, which also strengthens the Pre-Frontal Cortex to ventrial Striatum link. Broadly, each day, write down positive characteristics of one or two you know, express gratitude regularly (and look into people’s eyes when you say “thank you”), and compliment other people on a regular basis (again, looking into their eyes when you do so). 
 
What I like about this book is that it leads you through the link from the scientific to the practical (as Davidson says: “I am admittedly biased, but I believe that any program that purports to alter something as fundamental as Emotional Style simply has greater credibility if it is grounded in neuroscience). And it leads us through the evolution of the research, from its slightly rickety days in the early 1970s (electrodes strapped to the head monitoring dream activity in volunteer students, with results recorded on polygraphs) to 21st century fMRI analysis in highly controlled environments.  
 
We learn how early science and philosophy contributed. Charles Darwin’s 1872 book “The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals”, emphasised the instinctive signs of emotions, particularly facial expressions, hence providing an indication that different emotions must be linked with distinct physiological profiles.  Or Carl Jung’s autobiography, entitled Memories, Dreams, Reflections, containing the first observations about introversion and extraversion as traits, and speculating about psychological and physiological differences among people of each type.
 
And there is alot about Buddhist Monks.  Richard Davidson tells of his meetings with, and subsequent co-operation from, the Dalai Lama in collaring monks (the “meditation Olympians”) to participate in medical trials on the effects on the brain of different styles of meditation.  Initial attempts to get older mountain-dwelling monks in Dharamsala to participate “on-location” were, as hilariously recounted, a complete disaster.  But persistence paid off, and younger, more outward-looking monks did eventually collaborate in studies in the USA, leading to findings that prolonged meditation did increase levels of “neural synchrony”, a phenomenon whereby neurons from different parts of the brain fire off at exactly the same time, a process which research apparently demonstrates will typically make cognitive and emotional processes become more integrated and coherent.

This is a difficult area of science, and has been tackled well.  Should you adopt the conclusions and recommendations in order to develop your personality in the ways that are proposed ? Well, the approaches suggested are hard work. And it would be difficult for a layman to verify the scientific research that underpins the conclusions, so you would have to take it all at face value, and hence it would be somewhat of a leap of faith. But then, we don’t read scientific research papers before joining a gym and doing physical exercise.  So perhaps this is no different.

There is no Wikipedia link for this book. The link to the author's website is here.

My one liner: If Huckleberry Finn gave you pleasure as a child, this collection of letters and notes of Mark Twain, will give you as much pleasure now. 

Take profits on your stock positions when they have gone up.  Not all new technologies are great investments.  Heed the advice of technical experts. Due diligence is no substitute for “friends and family”.  Some basic investment propositions that are as true today as they were 150 years ago. And Mark Twain was a pretty disastrous investor. 

Some time in the 1860s he took a stock tip from his acquaintance Mr Camp, “a bold man who was always making big fortunes in ingenious speculations and losing them again in the course of six months by other speculative ingenuities”.  The tip was to buy Hale and Norcross, and he purchased 50 shares at $300 a share, putting in 20% himself, with the rest on margin.  He also persuaded his brother, Orion, to come in for half the amount, and awaited the cheque.  Predictably enough, Hale and Norton went through the roof hitting $6,000 per share.  Inexplicably Twain waited for Orion’s money before selling out.  Predictably enough Hale and Norton came crashing back down.  Blasted through the margin and into Twain’s equity, and “at last when I got out I was badly crippled”.  Only later does Twain find out that his brother had sent the money in gold (rather than a cheque which any “normal human being” would have done) to a nearby hotel, and the clerk had deposited it in the safe and forgotten about it.

Then there was the foray into patents. Twain acquires a patent for $15,000 from an “old and particular” friend who had neglected to mention to him that it was worthless. The deal was that Twain would pay a further $500 per month to the friend who would do the manufacturing and selling.  In his colourful humour Twain tells us “that raven flew out of the Ark regularly every thirty days and the dove didn’t report for duty.”

Or the steam engine, which “another old friend” told him would get out 99% of all the steam that was in a pound of coal.  He takes the advice of a coal and steam expert who shows him using a book of “figures that made me drunk and dizzy” which the machine could not come within 90% of the claimed steam release.  Despite the expert advice Twain proceeds and engages the inventor because “maybe the book was mistaken”.  Five thousand dollars later, the inventor comes up with a machine which saved 1% steam, but “you could do it with a teakettle.”  Undeterred, Twain now fancies himself as an enthusiast on steam and takes some stock in a Hartford company which is a making a new kind of steam pulley.  “That pulley pulled thirty two thousand dollars out of my pocket in sixteen months, then went to pieces.”

These are just a few anecdotes from a collection of letters and notes which constitute the autobiography of Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens), put together from 1870 up to his death in 1910, and edited into a book by Charles Neider in 1959.  He is not afraid to admit his follies, and he is not afraid to admit his vanity:

“This Autobiography of mine is a mirror and I am looking at myself in it all the time.  Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back...and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation I set these things down in my Autobiography.”

We learn that Twain was a highly proficient billiards and pool player. And with our modern world obsessed with level playing fields and standardised rules he gives us the story of the billiards table at Jackass Gulch, a dilapidated former mining town which the gold deposits were now exhausted. The saloon is of a “ruined and rickety character struggling for life, but doomed.”  And the pool table reflected this, with chipped balls, the cloth darned and patched, the table’s surface undulated with headless cues that “had the curve of a parenthesis”.  And Twain postulates that it would be much more entertaining to have the great champions who grace the competition tables of Madison Square pit their skills against Texas Tom of Jackass Gulch on the bad billiard outfit, where adjustments have to be made for all of  the table’s faults and inaccuracies.  Possibly some life lessons there.

And how did Twain conceive of Finn, the reckless boyhood adventurer ? Well there must have been something of the Twain about Finn.  An example comes from 1845 when a measles epidemic is claiming the lives of many children in Mark Twain’s home town.  The ten-year old Twain is so engulfed with impatience as to whether he will succumb to the epidemic that he forces the issue by deliberately sneaking into the house of his measles-infected friend and jumping into bed next to him.  Needless to say he contracts that disease, but survives by a whisker.

The book is a fascinating insight into an America which is transforming from Emerging Market to Global Superpower (“Steadily, continuously, persistently, we are Americanizing Europe, and all in good time we shall get the job perfected”).  Twain was a supporter of equality, though his language reflects what was culturally acceptable and normal in a country where slavery was still prevalent.  And he was active all the way to his death.  Although one suspects that if the death of his wife in Italy 1904 was a near-fatal emotional blow to him, then the loss of his daughter Jean in 1909 probably sapped his remaining will to live.

This is the Wikipedia link for the book.

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.

Steven Strange & Jack Zupko (Eds) – Stoicism: Traditions and Tranformations (2004)

My one liner: A collection of articles which traces the development of the Stoic school from its origins through to it contemporary application. The early articles are seriously heavy going, but there are some real gems in here for the lay reader who perseveres.

Since I come to most of my reading as a non-specialist, I feel comfortable suggesting this book to the lay reader, even though some of the articles (particularly the first few) will be 75% impenetrable (although those with some school level Latin or Greek may be able to get that down to 50%). Indeed it gave me comfort when I read the opening paragraphs of the introduction, which says that in compiling the book there was a possible “High Road” approach and a “Low Road” approach, the latter “would focus less on questions that interested ancient Stoics and more on broader tendencies and trends, looking at the way Stoic doctrines were employed in new settings and against different competitors.”  The editors have decided to take the low road. And therefore the reader can equally do likewise.

 To that end, if you need a primer on Stoic philosophy, start, as always, with the Wikipedia entry on Stoicism.  No shame there.  
  
How can these be translated into our contemporary lifestyles, if at all ? The final essay in the collection is by Lawrence E. Becker on Stoic Emotion”. Becker takes us through contemporary developments and attempts to demonstrate that ancient Stoic principles can be applied to our modern lifestyles, with a few “adjustments to the ancient doctrines”.  To take a concrete example, Becker tells us that “Neurophysiologists have identified at least four anatomically distinct structures in the “ancient” or subcortical portion of the human brain that generate affective senses –fear, rage, panic, and goal oriented desire”.  But if these are neurologically generated, how can one then apply a Stoic discipline to controlling these ? The answer is broadly that the neurological response is a “raw” one. The cognitive content that turns it into full-fledged emotion can still be controlled and tamed.  
 
Becker’s essay is interesting because it also forces us to answer some difficult questions about the “good” or value to society of emotions. The modern world seems to feed us with the view that expressing and feeling emotion is a good thing in its own right.  But this is potentially problematic, as human emotion is arguably good only insofar as humans are emotional creatures and expressing emotion allows us to communicate with other humans using emotional gestures. In other words the argument is“frustratingly circular”. Stoics, on the other hand place much less value on emotion, valuing instead the cognitive response which allows us to control our emotions so as to reduce our material attachments. In turn this also makes us think about the nature of attachment, in particular attachment to others.  A Stoic sage will love another person in a way that many would not recognise. In other words “she would not for example, become so attached to others that she literally cannot bear the prospect of losing them, any more than she would be attached to her own life in a way that made the prospect of her own death unbearable.  Nor would she wish others to love her in that way – to be desolate and helpless when she is gone, unable to bear the loss. What Stoics wish for others is what we wish for ourselves: good lives; virtuous lives; including the ability to cope with loss.”  

What this means in practice however is that a Stoic will not fit in many of the commonly prescribed behavioural norms, and will come across as aloof and detached and unemotional.

 Another interesting article in the book deals with contemporary approaches to foreign aid from developed to developing countries (Martha Nussbaum: Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid – Cicero’s Problematic Legacy). Its central tenet is that developed countries do not make enough financial transfers to developing countries in the form of direct aid to fight poverty, so-called Material Aid”. Nussbaum traces this allegedly moral deficiency back to a chain of political thought that goes right back to Cicero (who arguably was in a good position to comment as he wrote the work, De Officiis, whilst on the run to escape assassination from Antony and the other triumvirs in 44BC).  Cicero set out some very clear ideas of justice. His duties of justice had two parts, firstly not doing any harm to anyone unless provoked by a wrongful act, and secondly “using common things as common, private possessions as one’s own.”  So passionate was Cicero about the importance of private property that his idea of justice extended to the appropriate way to behave towards the citizens of a country conquered by war. He felt that there should be a strong commitment to institution-building, and that judicial and property-upholding institutions should transcend national boundaries.  Which sounds much like the programmes of “conditionality” (restructuring, supply-side reform,  privatisation) attached to today’s IMF and World Bank lending facilities. But where Cicero then deals a blow to Material Aid of the direct action type is that he sets out a clear hierarchy of whom justice demands that we should help.    He sets out explicit categories that justify some giving as follows: “the bond of nation and language; of the same state; of one’s relatives; various degrees of familial propinquity; and finally, one’s own home.” And just as explicitly he excludes other nations, on the basis that this is a potentially infinite cohort of recipients [infinita multido].  Now, whether you agree or not with (a) the proposition that Material Aid  is desirable in its own right and (b) that there is currently not enough wealth transfer from rich to poor, it is surely interesting and useful to understand that many of the current arrangement for trans-national relationships have their roots in ideas of justice formed 2000 years ago.
 
The book contains much else of interest, too extensive to enumerate, and still keep the review readable.  Epictetus was a Stoic who extolled the virtues of Socrates as defining everything mankind should know about a philosophical methodology for living one’s life. One of the more difficult essays describes the Socratic discourse in Epictetus’ work. Other essays lead us through the development of Stoic thought over time, from the Middle Ages, to Descartes, to Spinoza. Take what you find useful from these, and discard the rest.
 
Sten Ebbesen in his essay Where were the Stoics in the Late Middle Ages ? says: 
 
“Stoicism is not a sport for gentlemen; it requires far too much intellectual work. Most of Western history consists of gentlemen’s centuries.  But there were the couple of centuries, the fourth and the third BC, in which the ancient philosophical schools were created, and there were the three centuries from AD1100 to 1400, when medieval scholasticism flourished – centuries that produced a considerable number of tough men ready to chew their way through the tedious logical stuff that disgusts a gentleman and to make all the nice distinctions that a gentlemen can never understand but only ridicule, distinctions necessary to work out a coherent, and perhaps even consistent picture of the world.”

 If that is indeed the prize on offer, then perhaps we as gentlemen should consider whether we might want to invest a little more time and effort to look into this abit more.

There is no Wikipedia entry for this book. 

Here is the link to Google Books entry.

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:  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.