Martin's Booklog

Byzantium — Judith Herrin

Published on March 15, 2009

Cover of Byzantium

Byzantium
Judith Herrin
392 pages including index
published in 2008

In her introduction Judith Herrin explains she was inspired to write this book by a conversation she had with two workmen knocking on her office door. They had been doing repairs on the building in King’s College where she worked and noticed the sign on her office: “Professor of Byzantine History” and were interested enough to ask what this meant. As she puts it, she found herself “trying to explain briefly what Byzantine history is to two serious builders in hard hats and heavy boots”. From their suggestion that she should write a book explaining Byzantium to people like (or me, for that matter) who knew little if anything about the subject, this book arose. Byzantium — The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire is an attempt to explain more than a thousand years of Byzantine history, as well as the many facets of this history.

It sounded like the perfect book to read, now that I had temporarily exhausted my library’s stock of interesting looking books on Roman history. Byzantium was after all a clear succesor to Rome, I knew little about it and Herrin’s book easily passed the page 37 test. She isn’t a historian I was aware of before, but with Byzantium she’s become one of the names I’ll pay attention to when looking for new books, no matter the subject. She manages to write a good introduction to a complex subject without talking down to the reader.

My treasures, let me show you them

Published on March 14, 2009

What good is a booklog if you cannot permit yourself a small gloat over newly acquired treasures every now and then? I struck a rich new vein of fantasy and science fiction books last Monday and would like to show them off to you now:

Sweet Silver Blues – Glen Cook
Dread Brass Shadows – Glen Cook
Old Tin Sorrows – Glen Cook
The Game Players of Titan – Philip K. Dick
Counter-Clock World – Philip K. Dick
The Man Who Japed – Phlip K. Dick
Strange Seas and Shores – Avram Davidson
Or All the Seas with Oysters – Avram Davidson
The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World – Harlan Ellison
Flandry of Terra – Poul Anderson
Can you Feel Anything When I Do This? – Robert Sheckley

All of these, except Anderson, are authors whose books are rare to find secondhand here. The Glen Cook novels you can find are usually Black Company ones, all of which I already have. Ellison is rare as hen’s teeth, the Dicks are usually marked up because too many booksellers know they’re supposed to be rare and Avram Davidson and Robert Sheckley are such acquired tastes few Dutch sf fans seemed to have bothered with them….

Dansen met de Duivel – Peter Rensen

Published on February 28, 2009

Cover of Dansen met de Duivel

Dansen met de Duivel
Peter Rensen
167 pages
published in 1994

Geert Wilders is far from the first racial demagogue to appear in Dutch politics; he’s just more succesful than most. His most recent predecessor was Hans Janmaat, who at his best only managed to get three seats in parliament with his party, the socalled Centrumdemocraten. In constrast, Wilders managed to get nine seats in his first election and is currently polling anywhere from fifteen to twenty seats. Of course, Wilders is operating at a time when rightwing radicalism and Islamophobia have almost become respectable and opinions that would’ve gotten him ostracised twenty years ago are now applauded. But, as Dansen met de Duivel (“Dancing with the Devil”) shows, there are other reasons why the Centrumdemocraten never grew very far beyond the real hardcore racist vote of about two percent or so.

Dansen met de Duivel is the story of how its author, Peter Rensen, infiltrated the party and his experiences working for them. Inbetween his personal experiences he also sketches a quick history of Janmaat and his party. What comes across is a party that’s content to stay relatively small, doesn’t really want to move beyond the comfortable limits of the protest pary, as that might entail losing control. Janmaat himself was kicked out of the first racist group he was involved with and got elected for, the Centrumpartij, who remained first competitors and were more openly racists than Janmaat’s party. He wasn’t about to let that happen again.

Saturday — Ian McEwan

Published on February 15, 2009

Cover of Saturday

Saturday
Ian McEwan
278 pages
published in 2005

I’ve been suspicious of Ian McEwan ever since I read his Book prize winning novel Amsterdam and almost threw the book against the wall at the denouncement where McEwan descended into stupid cliches about the Netherlands’ attitude towards euthenasia. That suspicion deepened when it turned out McEwan, like Martin Amis had turned into a permanent bedwetter after the September 11 attacks. He’s been less outspoken than Amis, but he has said enough for me to know I dislike his politics, which seems to be of the Decent Leftist persuasion, being obsessed with the struggle against “Islamism”, the threat of terror attacks and the vulnerability of the western democracies. As with Amis, “9/11” seems to have functioned as McEwan’s midlife crisis, his fear and doubts about his own encrouching mortality being confused for insight into the general condition of the world. It’s this mixture of Decent politics and midlife crisis that’s been poured out into Saturday. I didn’t want to read it at the time when it first came out, being warned off it by various reviews, but four years on I thought it would be interesting to see if it really was as dire as it was made out to be.

It is.

Had I read this in 2005 it would’ve been thrown against the wall, library book or not. Set on the day of the worldwide anti-war protests on 15 February 2003 a month before the invasion of Iraq, with the London march making regular appearances througout the novel. Not that any of the characters in the book actually go on the march, they all have something better to do. Even the protagonist’s son, described as anti-war doesn’t, as “he doesn’t feel much need to go tramping through the streets to make his point”, confusing making a political statement with narcissism. It’s typical for the entire novel, which hammers this point home again and again from the first encounter with the march, with a street cleaner sweeping up garbage left behind by people going to the march to the last, with the same street cleaner still busy cleaning up behind the march. This way the anti-war protest is reduced to something hypocritical, narcisstic and even frivolous. Saturday only pays lip service to the arguments of the antiwar movement, spelled out explicitely just once, in a row between the protagonist and his daughter, who gets to represent the antiwar side. She gets emotional and slightly hysterical while her father gets to stay calm and collected; later it’s revealed she’s pregnant. In such a way the antiwar movement is constantly dismissed, at best shown as shallow people who mean well but who just don’t realise how bad Saddam is.

Diff’rent strokes

Published on February 2, 2009

Andrew Wheeler goes through his weekly ritual of making the rest of us jealous by reviewing his mail and gets excited about Dan Simmons’ newest novel, Drood:

It’s a historical novel about Charles Dickens, with Wilkie Collins as narrator. (A similar connection got me to read Peter Carey’s excellent Jack Maggs.) And it sounds like it has some of the qualities of a Tim Powers novel — twisting a story in between the goalposts of known history, and trying to explain things that don’t quite make sense in the established record. So it’s aimed right at me as a reader, and I’ll have to examine my reading budget very closely.

This synopsis has exactly the opposite effect on me. There’s nothing so offputting to me as yet another novel that uses historically figures, especially authors, to hang their own story on. With which I don’t mean historical fiction of the kind Mary Renault wrote, retelling the story of Alexander for exampe, but the kind of novel that aims at being Literature and who use historical figures to gain a kind of instant chachet. Drood sounds particularly egrigious, with its stuntcasting of Wilkie Collins as the narrator.

What also plays a part is that I don’t think Dan Simmons is a particularly good writer anyway. He has had one genuine hit, Hyperion but even that was a curate’s egg and anything else I’ve read of his was worse. Some authors I would trust to pull off a book like this –Andrew mentioned Tim Powers –but Simmons was never a particularly subtle or nuanced writer.