Review- Wolfe, “Operation Ares”

December 13, 2017 Peter BerardLeave a comment

ares

Gene Wolfe, “Operation Ares” (1970) – I mainly associate Gene Wolfe with the Book of the New Sun, a staggering, profoundly immersive work and some of the best books I’ve read in the last few years. So it’s a little weird to read him doing straightforward pulp scifi, like “Operation Ares,” his first novel. In the early 21st century, welfare bureaucrats have suspended constitutional governance and run America into the ground. Wolfe’s depiction of callous, patronizing social service bureaucracy actually does seem pretty sharply drawn, though some of the other choices he makes for the world — namely, the welfare state consciously turning its back on technology, allowing the Soviets (now allies with the US) to pull way ahead — are real headscratchers even from the perspective of a paranoid mid-century American right-winger. The hero is a standard-issue scifi ubermensch, universally competent and cool-headed, who chafes under this reign of mediocrity and conspires with Martian colonists — who the liberals in the US abandoned and blame for their troubles — and, weirdly enough, the Maoist Chinese to rebel against the government and bring back the constitution.

Even leaving aside the politics, it’s a bit of a bummer to read Wolfe do such generic plots (and often hare-brained, ill-explained schemes- he would come to master the use of limiting information to the reader, but hadn’t at this time) and stock characters. But he brings some glimmers to it that more pedestrian writers wouldn’t. To his credit, the charges of the welfare bureaucrats are depicted as realistic humans (and, seemingly, aren’t racialized), and develop some interesting ideas of their own, including a sort of urban-primitivist hunter cult that’s pretty well-drawn. He gets some good mileage out of the strains in the alliance between the cerebral, technocratic Mars colonists, the Maoists, and the ragtag American constitutionalists, and isn’t naive about how much damage internecine war will do. But how much can you say about a scifi novel that ends with the hero lecturing King Bureaucrat about personal responsibility and the need for a Universal Basic Income to replace welfare entitlements? ***

Review- Lessing, “Landlocked”

December 11, 2017 Peter BerardLeave a comment

landlocked

Doris Lessing, “Landlocked” (1965) – the fourth of Lessing’s “Children of Violence” series, Landlocked takes the story of Martha Quest (based on Lessing herself) to the end of her time in the colonized Rhodesia in which she was raised. The little group of reds, marooned in a provincial capital, among whom Martha tried to find meaning and companionship loses what little traction it had with the masses once WWII ends and Cold War anticommunist paranoia — racialized, naturally, in this white settler colony — takes hold. Quest continues trying to do her bit from the movement, even as her German Stalinist husband takes up open philandering (and in very progressive, “civilized” fashion, he encourages her to find her own boyfriend while they await his citizenship papers, which in turn will allow a divorce) and the little red scene in their town continues to split between stalinists, trotskyites, zionists, etc. In some of those painful scenes Lessing does so well, all of them try to reach out to the great prize, the black population, all painfully patronizing to varying degrees and completely unsuccessful. The whites are growing increasingly paranoid, the blacks are going to go their own way without much input from middle class white leftists, and no one’s fantasies or half-measures will cut it anymore. People also start to die at an alarming rate- some of sickness, some by violence, like the Greek RAF men posted to Rhodesia for the war, going back to Greece knowing that they will fight and die alongside their fellow communists in the civil war.

Lessing knew whereof she spoke when it came to sectarian backbiting and half-hearted efforts at living out values, and it shows, in this book and the previous installment, “A Ripple From the Storm.” She also depicts, like no other, living multiple lives- that was what her magnum opus, “The Golden Notebook,” is about, and in “Landlocked” we see her furiously pedaling her bike between her many lives: activist, thankless peacekeeper between activists, working secretary, wife, lover, daughter in a fraught relationship with a dying father and hypochondriac mother. The whole time, Martha is dreaming of making her way to Britain and escape- and she does get on the boat to Britain, in any event. This gives the whole installment a certain “running out the clock” feel, especially when you know that this is the penultimate book in the series, but Lessing can be relied upon to make even a feeling like that come alive. ****’

Review- Abbott, “Varieties of Sociological Imagination”

December 10, 2017 Peter BerardLeave a comment

celarent

Barbara Celarent (aka Andrew Abbott), “Varieties of Social Imagination” (2017) – Andrew Abbott made a fun decision when he was in charge of the American Journal of Sociology. In each issue for the six years he was in charge, he wrote little (~five page) capsule biographies/analyses of a given sociological figure from the perspective of a “Barbara Celarent,” a scholar writing from a University of Atlantis in the year 2049.

After the first year, all of the sociologists were from outside of the European/American metropole, and a lot of them weren’t sociologists in the conventional, professional sense- including Mariama Ba, a Senegalese novelist, Ali Shariati, the Iranian Islamist philosopher, political leaders like Leopold Senghor, etc. The essays are a good way to learn about a diverse body of interesting figures, especially scholars from peripheral and colonized countries before and around the period of decolonization, who can often be neglected in favor of post-independence figures.

The Celarent framing is fun though sometimes a little forcibly didactic in a twee kind of way. Abbott has some kind of point he wants to make about humanistic social science which sounds agreeable enough, but I could see being irked by someone with a substantial pulpit inventing a cool lady sociologist from the future to pick out a diverse cast of role models to chide his readers with on their assorted inefficiencies. The nature of the medium (and his Borges-gone-all-social-science schtick) means there’s no programmatic statement of how Celarent thinks us pastbound types should be doing it. Still and all, the essays are mostly engaging and edifying, and it’s encouraging to see someone do something a bit off the beaten path in academia for once. ****

Review- Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

December 9, 2017December 9, 2017 Peter BerardLeave a comment

kundera

Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim) (1984) – Boring. And not in the way that people in my generation (and those younger) call things boring because they’re offended by something and want to brush it off. Genuinely not interesting, causing me to woolgather more than usual while reading it. Was/is the craze for Kundera part of the pre(?)-history of the Eastern Bloc — and the Czech lands in particular — being seen by westerners as a site of dispassionate, decadent sexual libertinage? Did this schmancy postmodern book prefigure the way in which the Czech Republic is synonymous with grindingly formulaic pseudo-amateur porn for millions of deeply lonely millennials whose main cultural outlet is the ‘tubes? Probably not! But thinking about that problem is more interesting than the comings and goings of Horny Czech, Horny Lady Czech, Lady Czech Who Believes In Love But Is Also Horny, Horny German Who Isn’t Quite Horny Enough To Make Anyone — Especially Women, Who Need A Real Man No Matter What They Say — Happy, etc. Or his philosophical maunderings, all of which are based on the idea that if everything happens but once, that means all of it is meaningless and hence, weightless. That seems exactly backwards for me. If everything is unique, wouldn’t that make everything rare and weighty? Probably he says something like that towards the end — this seems like the kind of book that deploys rope-a-dope epiphanies towards the end like so many ejector seats on a F117 meeting its first Serbian militias — but honestly, I wasn’t paying much attention towards the end. **

Review- Williams, The Country and the City

December 8, 2017 Peter BerardLeave a comment

city and country

Raymond Williams, “The Country and the City” (1973) – The great British social historians of the mid-twentieth century were almost obnoxiously overachieving. Raymond Williams may not have had the star power in history that his peers Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson had, but he shared their multifaceted intellectual productivity (he was a novelist on top of being a historian, critic, and activist- I wonder if his novels are any good). And I’d say he actually mastered and interwove two fields — history and criticism — in a way that the others mastered one (and dabbled in others).

The Country and the City is notionally about depictions of the countryside (and the city it is contrasted to) in English literature. It is that, but it’s more than that. It uses history — social history, the history of lived experience and changes in the basis of production and reproduction — to view literature and vice-versa, but it does more than that too. He really uses literature and history to interrogate each other. He traces the inner life of the British class structure through its literature, not not by taking the writings as prima facie evidence for a given belief or feeling common at a certain point, but by contrasting the imagery and tone of novels and poetry with what we know of the facts on the ground.

Perhaps the best example of this is his treatment of the consistent theme of “the good old days,” when good small landlords cared for their tenants and earned their respect, before big mean capitalist agriculture gave everyone the boot and created class society. Williams shows how successive generations of English writers cast that golden pastoral earlier and earlier in the past, up to at least the 14th century. But he doesn’t just dismiss these feelings, either. He interrogates the way pastoral idylls and laments (and he seems to know every piece of English literature ever produced) change over time, in structure, language, and tone, and incorporates them into his analysis of the “structure of feeling” about class society and history, primarily in the period of the agricultural and industrial revolutions between the 17th and 19th centuries.

These feelings went on to define, more than facts can, how people came to look at the past… and make decisions for the present. Williams was a socialist, and wanted to both excavate usable pasts — like the self-educated rural working people who resisted agrarian capitalism and its fantasies of contented (or better yet, doomed) small-folk — and illuminate better ways of understanding rural life, a frequent stumbling block for leftists (and sometimes a fatal one for leftists who attain power). There are, as he points out, really a lot of ways to understand it wrong. Learning to get it right the way Williams did — with immense erudition, a sharp critical eye, and deep empathy — sounds hard but also rewarding (and maybe necessary?).

There’s things to nitpick — his stuff on the city seems comparatively perfunctory next to his country material — but all in all it’s a masterful work, and deeply felt. Williams was a Welsh working-class country boy before going to Cambridge and becoming an academic, and he sees himself as providing lineaments for understanding the countryside (one wonders how he got along with Hobsbawm, a consummate urbanite even if he did help gentrify rural Wales). The Country and the City helps give the lie to the idea that social history has to be ignorant of culture, or drily written. *****

Too Much Berard

Month: December 2017