The Peoples of the Hills – Charles Burney & David Marschall Lang

History
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Cover of The Peoples of the Hills


The Peoples of the Hills
Charles Burney,
David Marshall Lang
324 pages including index
published in 1971

I picked up The Peoples of the Hills because I wanted to know more about the history of the caucasus in general and Armenia in particular, mainly because Doug of Halfway Down the Danube had been blogging about his being stationed there. He had been posting about some of Armenia’s history and it seemed interesting. Since I knew next to nothing about any of the history, espcially the early history of Armenia, Georgia and the Caucasus, The Peoples of the Hills seemed a good start.

Unfortunately however it disappointed. For a start, I didn’t realise how dated it was, having originally been written in 1971 and reprinted for the History of Civilization series published by Phoenix Press. Not that there was much choice in the library I picked this up: it was this or nothing. In thirty years a lot can change and I’ve found that on the whole more modern history books are preferable to older ones (this is not an absolute rule of course). But what also disappointed me was the writing itself. This is, unfortunately, a very dull book, full of facts but lacking sparkle.

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Orientalism – Edward Said

Politics
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Cover of Orientalism


Orientalism
Edward Said
396 pages including index
published in 1978

There are some books that I’m sort of ashamed to review, not because the books themselves are so bad but just because I should’ve read them years ago. Orientalism is one such book. Both it and its author are so often namechecked by leftwing bloggers that I felt a slight twinge of embarassement for only reading it now. Also, I don’t know how it is with you, but I’m often wary to read such widely acclaimed books anyway, as there’s something so “Rik the people’s poet” about reading Said, or Chomsky for that matter. It can look poseurish and nobody wants to come over as that.

Nevertheless, Orientalism is a genuinely important book, even now, thirty years after its first publication. It’s main argument — that Asia in general and the Middle East in particular have long been misrepresented in the west as “the Orient”, an exotic world filled with prejudices and cliches in order to serve imperialist goals in the region — may look a bit obvious now, not as radical as it was at first publication, but this is in great part because Orientalism laid out this argument so convincingly first. In fact it had such an impact, that even thirty years onwards there are still people trying to cut it down to size, as a quick Google search shows. It touched a nerve, perhaps not in the least because Said was an outsider to the academic orientalist tradition he was criticising.

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The Steep Approach to Garbadale – Iain Banks

Other fiction
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The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Iain Banks
390 pages
published in 2007

A few days ago Roz Kaveney, in a review of Bank’s latest Culture novel, argued that it’s the Iain M. Banks science fiction novels are his serious contribution to literature, while the conventional literary novels he writes as Iain Banks are “more frivolous and irresponsible”. Not a new idea for us science fiction fans perhaps, but she was writing for the Times Literary Supplement after all, and they require baby steps. Which is to say, in a rather roundabout way, that The Steep Approach to Garbadale for all its bluster is not a very serious book, but more an, as Graham Greene would say, entertainment.

Which doesn’t make it a bad book, of course, just that it isn’t another Wasp Factory. it is in fact somewhat of a remake of The Crow Road, another saga about a large sprawling Scottish family with deep dark secret at its core. Something Banks had said he has a weakness for. Where The Steep Approach to Garbadale differs is that it has much less dark humour – no exploding grandmothers here.

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The Celtic Empire – Peter Berresford Ellis

History
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Cover of The Celtic Empire


The Celtic Empire
Peter Berresford Ellis
246 pages including index
published in 1990

This was a bit of a disappointment. The full title of this book reads The Celtic Empire: the First Millennium of Celtic History 1000 BC – 51 AD and I picked it up thinking I would get a full overview of Celtic history, up until the final subjugation of the Celts by the Romans. However, most of the promised history is skipped over in favour of telling the last part of the Celtic story, of how Rome conquered the various Celtic tribes in Italy, Gaul, Spain, Asia Minor, Britain, etc. An interesting story in its own right, but not what I expected.

More disappointingly, this story was told, more often than not, not through Celtic eyes, but from a Roman or a Carthegenian or other point of view, in a context that’s almost exclusively that of Roman history. So not only do you not get the entire Celtic history as the title promises, but the history it does tell of the Celts is somewhat fragmented, shown only where it impacted on the expansion of Rome.

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The Fall of Rome – Bryan Ward-Perkins

History, Rome
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Cover of The Fall of Rome


The Fall of Rome
Bryan Ward-Perkins
239 pages including index
published in 2005

When I was googling for some background information on Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome was mentioned the most alongside it in reviews. In those reviews The Fall of Rome was described as a much more agressively counter-revisionist attack, compared to Heather’s book, much more scathing in its rejection of the view that the fall of Rome was not that big a deal. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to read, to see what the more traditional view of Rome’s collapse would look like.

It turns out however that Ward-Perkins’ rhetoric here is actually stronger than his actual disagreement. He’s scathing about those historians who go too far in arguing that the transition from Roman Empire to the post-Roman, Germanic west was a relatively gentle affair, but his own view isn’t quite the Gibbonesque tragedy of traditional history either. He argues that the transition period was violent, that there was a decline in civilisation, that the death of the western Roman Empire was a tragedy, but that this was far from the end of civilisation. But because Ward-Perkins spent much of this book arguing against the more rose-tinted views currently in vogue of the transistion from a Roman to a post-Roman world, his disagreements may seem bigger than they actually are.

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