Review- Herrera, “Kingdom Cons”

May 31, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Yuri Herrera, “Kingdom Cons” (2004) (translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman) – Here we have a sort of lightly-magical-realist crime fable. The characters are all named for Types- the Artist, the King, the Witch, the Journalist, etc. etc. The Artist is the main character, a street performer who the King takes a fancy to and brings in to his compound as part of his court. There, the Artist composes narco-corridos to the greater glory of the King and his cartel. There’s no depiction of the inner workings of the industry or anything like that. All the drug dealing takes place off scene, and we only see the aftermaths of killings. The Artist eventually writes the wrong corrido and woos the wrong maiden (the Commoner, the Witch’s daughter) and is forced to flee. This is a short book and not a ton happens in it but it does maintain a sustained atmosphere of menace throughout. People praise Herrera highly but this, it turns out, was his first book- I’m somewhat curious what the others are like. ***

Review- Ellroy, “Hollywood Nocturnes”

May 26, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

James Ellroy, “Hollywood Nocturnes” (1994) – James Ellroy- the great and sometimes frustrating grand master of contemporary American crime fiction; this is a collection of some of his early 90s short fiction. His short fiction magnifies both the capabilities and the shortcomings of his distinctive style. He can be masterful at summoning up his world — noir Los Angeles, either contemporary or in the fifties — in short order. The telegraphic style works well in short form, too. His characterization can go either way- sometimes deft, sometimes cheap (I remember one where one of his identical perspective-gun-thugs was mainly characterized as being “into rhinos”). The actual action is always a crapshoot- he’s always better with smaller-scale crimes than the grand and sometimes ludicrous conspiracies he sometimes conjures as endings. There’s exceptions — “Blood’s a Rover,” which caps the seminal Underworld USA series, involves a big conspiracy that actually works with the text. But by and large, the sleaze and intimate understanding of power dynamics he displays works better than his efforts at coming up with something commensurate behind it all.

The centerpiece of “Hollywood Nocturnes” and by far the best piece is a novella, “Dick Contino’s Blues.” Dick Contino was a real guy, a famous accordion-playing pop star (I have difficulty seeing how an accordion guy can get THAT famous in America, but who knows, it was the fifties). He entered the list of aspects of LA during Ellroy’s fifties childhood that made it into the matrix of the author’s noir dreams. Contino fell on hard times after being pegged as a draft-dodger (even though he eventually finished out his hitch). Ellroy puts him through several circles of the hells he creates, much of which out of things that are supposed to be pleasant: lounge acts, rigged variety shows, negotiating with the tabloid press, working as a repo man for a crooked car dealer, “infiltrating” a hopeless left-leaning reading group, sleazy d-movie productions, finally into a phoney kidnapping scheme to get him back into the limelight in a positive way. It all ends with a car chase and an encounter with an actual serial killer, but it’s the ride that really works.

There’s another good story involving an Okie ex-cop turned fixer for Howard Hughes, playing his patron off of mobster Mickey Cohen and a college-aged femme fatale. I don’t really remember the others that well, for good or ill. As usual his stories set in the mid-20th century play better than his contemporary stories. “Dick Contino’s Blues” is worth the price of admission, a ride through the noir hellscapes Ellroy conjures better than anyone. ****’

Review- Ghosh, “River of Smoke”

May 23, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Amitav Ghosh, “River of Smoke” (2011) – The best part of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is its immersiveness in the worlds connected by early nineteenth century globalization, especially the areas around Calcutta and Canton, the two geographical loci of the story. In “River of Smoke,” the second volume, we spend most of our time in Canton on the eve of the First Opium War. Ghosh doesn’t so much throw away many of the characters from the first volume as much as puts them aside to concentrate on a few, old and new. A disgraced former raja becomes a functionary for Bahram Moddie, a Parsi opium trader and arguably the central character in this sprawling book. As a Parsi in Canton, Moddie exists in several worlds at once: the Parsi community in Bombay, the traders quarter in “Fanqui Town” (the enclave for outsiders the Chinese allowed to exist in Canton), he dabbled in the actually Chinese part of China (having a son with a Chinese woman), and he exists in the space between the three, where he’s not Chinese but not European, even if he’s a respected player in the same trade as they.

He’s staked everything on one big opium shipment, and wouldn’t you know it? The Manchu regime finally appointed a mandarin serious about stomping out the opium business, Lin Zexu (a real figure). Lin starts seriously interfering with the trade and refusing to be bought off, the Europeans want war to open things up, Moddie and his functionary are caught in the middle. Like it’s predecessor, this one was a lot of fun. Two slight criticisms: there’s a lot about various plants, and one character basically spends her whole time on a plant-based subplot which goes nowhere; andone of the viewpoint characters is a gay painter, which is cool, but Ghosh writes him as contemporary white male gay, including having his letters swishily emphasize words in italics, etc. It’s a little gauche and takes you out of the story some. In all, though, a worthy follow-up. ****’

Review- Weber, “On Basilisk Station”

May 19, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

David Weber, “On Basilisk Station” (1993) – I figured I should take a crack at reading this, the first volume in the flagship series by the doyen of military scifi. In a way, this is a case of truth in advertising. It really is “military” scifi, as opposed to war scifi or action scifi, because a lot of it has to do with bureaucracy, procurement, chain of command drama, etc, the stuff of quotidian life in any military. There’s not a shot fired in anger in the first two hundred pages!

Instead, you get long descriptions of space ships and their weaponry. You get the travails of young commander Honor Harrington (presumably a descendant of Michael, continuing the socdem tradition of being soft on imperialism) as vindictive space-naval bureaucrats exile her and her ship to a remote station. Her crew dislikes her, she hasn’t got enough ships to do her job, blah blah. She serves the navy of Manticore, space-Britain to the nefarious space-Napoleonic-France of Haven, which has to conquer planets to keep its darn welfare state going. The natives are getting restless and of course no one bothers to explain why they’re bothering natives on the nearby planet when all they want is an adjacent wormhole, etc etc. Eventually the bad guys, whose only motivation is nefariousness, spring their trap, Honor proves everyone wrong, and we move on to the inevitable sequels.

Look: I’m fine with either one or the other. If it’s gonna be raygun space battles, cool (though over-adherence to a Napoleonic model of naval battles transferred to space makes everything a little stilted). I also could get into a story of someone organizing things in spite of limited resources, bureaucratic interference, etc. But we get half-assed versions of both with cardboard stock characters and uninteresting worldbuilding. It baffles me this is as popular as it is, not because it’s so awful (it beats “Starship Troopers” in novel form, for my money- at least Weber doesn’t preach, though he is literally a Methodist preacher), but because military scifi is held up as the populist, exciting counterpart to “ideas” scifi. But it’s not that exciting! LeGuin, Delany, Jemisin etc offer at least as much action and derring-do. Do the later Honor novels ramp it up? I don’t know and only curiosity about the shape of the genre would make me find out. **

Review- MacLean, “Democracy In Chains”

May 17, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Nancy MacLean, “Democracy in Chains: the Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” (2017) – Now that the brouhaha around this book has died down a bit, it might be possible to look at it more objectively. The “deep history” and “radical right” the book’s breathless subtitle refers to is the relationship between economist James Buchanan, father of public choice theory, and Charles Koch, billionaire bankroller of the libertarian right. Aspects of public choice theory, which argues that governments should be understood as economic actors looking to maximize their returns through rent-seeking and other bad behaviors, has entered common sense widely in this country and elsewhere, especially among elites. Koch money has played a pivotal role in watering the fields where the assumptions of public choice could grow into policy, buying think tanks and politicians and generally advancing the genuinely unpopular tenets of free market conservatism on the country.

A lot of the brouhaha around this book was, essentially, tone-policing. MacLean writes of the collaboration between right-wing talent and money as a grand plan to destroy democracy. She summons up the ghosts of the Old South and Pinochet’s Chile, delves much further into the present than is usual scholarly practice, and if you believe the detractors, is highly selective with her quotes. The thing is, big picture, she’s not that far off the money. Buchanan and other free market political economists do disdain democracy. There has been a lot of money poured into making their position popular- all of which got, as they say, “owned” by a nativist tv show host with a second-grade vocabulary. Supposedly, Buchanan didn’t support Pinochet at first, but he certainly warmed enough to him later. The fact that a lot of the backlash came from people connected with George Mason, a university the Kochs and Buchanan lifted out of obscurity as an academic font for their ideas, is telling.

Tone is part of what we judge in a book, after all, and I do think the tone — breathless j’accusery — does detract from the argument, and symbolizes at least some of the analytical problems here. “Democracy In Chains” shows the limitations of approaching the history of the late twentieth century from a liberal, even a left-liberal, framework. In short, all this stuff is a lot less shocking if you have a class analysis that shows that this is a ruling class — not just a couple of guys — doing what ruling classes do. It’s not a question of a philosophical battle over the role some reified thing called “the government” — that’s strictly kayfabe, even if libertarian nerds take it seriously. The question is about power, in and out of the state, and who wields it.

If you can get over the shock of it you can do more, analytically, as people who’ve tackled adjacent material like Kim Phillips-Fein and Quinn Slobodian show. Maybe you can say MacLean exchanged sophistication for mass readability. But she gets into some weedsy stuff — especially about Buchanan and co’s emphasis in constitutional design as a way to “encase” (using Slobodian’s terms) the market from democracy — and makes it clear enough. I think she could have done more with stuff like that. That’s why historians are different from journalists. ***’

Review- Gourevitch, “From Slavery to Collective Commonwealth”

May 15, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Alex Gourevitch, “From Slavery to Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century” (2015) – Who doesn’t love them some classical republicanism? Well, “a lot of people” is the answer to that, but I’m not among them. I find it historically fascinating and politically compelling, a way to conceptualize freedom apart from liberalism. Of course, the latter comes with some major caveats, which is why I identify as a socialist with republican leanings rather than, say, the other way around. Most glaring is the way the republicanism of Cicero and Machiavelli depends on an economic analysis that doesn’t match industrial, let alone post-industrial, realities.

Connected to that, classical republicanism is dogged by its own elitism. Despite being pretty good for the time, most republics were slave states (including the early United States) and all of them held some people capable/worthy of republican liberty and others not. This, despite using the language of slavery and freedom to argue for their own liberties, crying “slavery” whenever anyone raises taxes or whatever. It’s galling! Those who have sought to resurrect republicanism as either a historical object or as a living political theory struggle with how to transcend the theory’s original contradictions.

Alex Gourevitch argues that an under-studied limb of the republican tree holds some (but not all) answers- the labor republicans of late nineteenth century America, most notably the Knights of Labor. The Knights and their fellow travelers imagined what a republicanism that maintained the ideology’s traditional abhorrence of domination could look like in the industrial era. At the height of the concept of liberty-as-contract, where many abolitionist Republicans (both big and small r) believed that self-ownership and free contracting already won republican liberty, the labor republicans attacked the wage system as inherently a system of domination and control.

Above and beyond collective bargaining, they envisioned a cooperative commonwealth, where management answered to labor and labor guaranteed citizenship. The Knights sought, through educational efforts (this is where the eight hour day comes in- to give workers time to learn) and other base-building techniques, to construct collective power. Rather than rely on the government to build the commonwealth, labor republicans wanted the government to stay out of the way so they could build it. They further modified the republican ideology in terms of their understanding of economic freedom- where austere classical republicans feared luxury, labor republicans saw private goods (if not the sort of obscene wealth seen in the gilded age) as complementary to public virtue.

As is often the case for the nineteenth century, the Knights and other labor republicans got tripped up on race. They were progressive in terms of organizing with black people, risking lives to organize sugar cane field workers in Louisiana in the 1880s, but disdained Chinese workers as lacking republican virtue or whatever other bullshit people say to justify prejudices like that. One wonders what could have been had they had less racism and more critically developed class consciousness- something your Marxian intellectual veggies are good for. All told, this is a fascinating reconstruction of an overlooked and intermittently inspiring area of history, and a great contribution to the rich field of republican studies. *****

Review- Ghosh, “Sea of Poppies”

May 9, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Amitav Ghosh, “Sea of Poppies” (2008) – This was very good. Taking place in Bengal in the 1830s, “Sea of Poppies” follows a variety of characters — indebted Bengali farmers, a disgraced former rajah, a mixed-race American sailor, a French orphan in Calcutta’s European quarter — as the forces of mid-nineteenth century globalization suck them in. The farmers of Bengal have been forced by the British East India Company to grow poppies almost as a monocrop- the Company foists debts on the farmers, and the only thing that grows for cash is poppy. Poppy, in turn, gets turned into opium. Opium (mostly- there’s still a subculture of Indian addicts) gets traded to China, which had previously only accepted silver as a trade item, an arrangement on which the British were none too keen. Meanwhile, debt peonage crushes the Bengali peasantry- there were massive famines in the 1790s, and forty years later you see peasants selling themselves into indentured servitude to go to places like Mauritius, to replace newly-freed African slaves in growing cash crops.

This makes it sound like it’s about the history, which it isn’t entirely. It is about characters getting swept up in forces beyond their control, from political economy to love to addiction. It’s also about the rough and ready adjustments people make on the fly to clashes of culture. Ghosh delights in the different dialects, including trade pidgin and the argot of the lascars, the sailors of the Indian Ocean. The characters are all pretty compelling, or anyway, “Berard Complete” – compelling without being tediously psychologized. It’s a longish book, but it moves at a reasonable clip. Eventually, everyone meets on former slave ship the Ibis, which carries its load of indentured Indians (who discover an identity as Indians, as opposed to one limited by region or caste, in their precarious position) into both literal and figurative storms, left to fates unknown. This is the first in a trilogy so if you’re looking for a conclusive ending this book won’t satisfy that, but otherwise it’s a great read. *****

Review- Payne, “Falange”

May 5, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Stanley Payne, “Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism” (1961) – Stanley Payne is one of the big figures in the historiography of fascism, and he built his career by studying the Spanish example. Spanish fascism is tricky, and gets right into the differences between academic and popular uses of the word “fascism.” In the popular sense, the Franco regime was fascist- violent, authoritarian, right-wing. In the academic sense, most definitions of fascism don’t include Franco or his Portuguese neighbor Salazar, instead defining them as authoritarians. There’s a number of reasons for this, starting with both dictators lack of interest in remaking society or fighting aggressive wars (both of which are more iffy than the model implies- just ask the Angolans). There’s also the differentiation between the Franco regime and the Spanish Falange party, the country’s premier fascist movement. For a brief period during the civil war the Falange played a prominent role in Franco’s coalition, but Payne shows that the general always worked to sideline the noisy and anti-clerical followers of Primo de Rivera, son of a former authoritarian leader. Once Franco consolidated power, he ruled through traditional institutions like the army and the church, and the Falange became something more like a club than a ruling party.

Marxists have done themselves few favors in defining the history of fascism by sticking with a few talking points defined by Trotsky, Gramsci, and a few other canonical figures and not going very far past them. Scholars like Enzo Traverso, Arno Mayer, and Domenico Losurdo have done more in that vein lately, but more liberal writers have a substantial head start in the historiography, Payne being one of the major figures writing since the early sixties. So I think we’re in a situation where real and necessary historical nuance comes with a politicization defined by Cold War liberalism. Fascists need to be destroyed; authoritarians can be negotiated with; the former are rare and the latter are easy to be found, including with America’s Cold War allies. What I wonder is if we can keep the nuanced taxonomy of far-right regimes but keep the urgency of anti-fascism. It’s not like right-wing authoritarianism (any authoritarianism) is some picnic we should tolerate. I think calling Franco “fascist” as in “intolerably right-wing” makes sense even if he’s not “fascist” in the academic sense.

Anyway- this is a fine book for what it is but I read it a little while ago and most of the thoughts it provoked were about the historiography. But hey, I don’t see anyone else reviewing the books around here! ****

Too Much Berard

Month: May 2019