A Gentleman in Moscow -- the mind and face of Bolshevism

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The best book I've read so far this year.

Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced by the Bolsheviks to indefinite house arrest in the Hotel Metropole in Moscow's theatre district. He becomes head waiter of the hotel, with friends among the staff and some of the regular guests, including an actress and a nine-year-old girl who has acquired a master key to all the hotel rooms, and shows him all the secret places. His life is so bound up with the hotel that it almost becomes a character in the story.

Through the life of the hotel Count Rostov (and the reader) learn of the changes of Soviet society. Once, many years ago, I read a book called The Mind and Face of Bolshevism and this book reminded me of that one at several points, in that it actually gives one a fairly good picture of Soviet life during that period. The Mind and Face of Bolshevism must be a fairly rare book. The copy I read was at the library of the KwaNzimela Centre in Zululand, but when we visited it in 2012 about three-quarters of the books had disappeared from the library, including that one.

It is also a book to savour, like a good wine. I found I only wanted to read a chapter, or sometimes a scene or two, and think about them before reading on, so I interspersed my reading of it with several other books. One needs to pause after each scene to think about it.

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The Dictionary of Lost Words -- and lost printing technology

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Esmé Nicoll's widowed father was an assistant to James Murray, the editor of the first Oxford Dictionary, and because her mother was dead, she accompanied her father to the Scriptorium, the shed in the Murrays' garden, where the work of compiling the dictionary was carried on. While they sorted the slips of paper with the entries, many sent in by volunteers, five-year-old Esmé sat quietly under the table, noting the shoes and socks worn by the editorial assistants.

One day one of the slips falls from the table, and when no one bends down to retrieve it, Esmé puts it in her pocket, and later hides it away in an old trunk belonging to Lizzie Lester, the Murrays' housemaid, who is only a few years older than Esmé herself. So Esmé becomes a collector of lost words, words that are discarded from the dictionary, words that are lost inadvertently, and a few that she pilfers from the sorting table. When her pilfering ways are discovered, she is banished for a while from the Scriptorium, but her interest in words continues and as she grows older she begins collect them on her own account.

She also becomes aware that the all-male lexicographers are not aware of, or not interested in words that are used only by women, or words that are spoken by the common people rather than by the educated classes, and so becomes aware of social inequalities in late-Victorian and Edwardian England.

The Dictionary of Lost Words is only semi-fictional. Not for Pip Williams the usual disclaimer that none of the characters bear any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead. James Murray and most of the other editorial assistants, including members of Murray's family, are the real people, and they appear in a photograph at the end of the book. Of course their conversations are imagined, but some of the things they say are taken from their own writings, or contemporary reports and memoranda. One can learn quite a lot of the way in which the Oxford Dictionary was compiled from the book.

I really enjoyed reading it, not just because, having worked as a proof reader and editor at various times, I have an interest in words and how they are used, but also because Esmé and the other characters, fictional or otherwise, come across as real people, so that one shares their joys and sorrows, and cares about what happens to them.

The book also sparked lots of memories for me, which don't belong in a GoodReads review, as they go beyond the merits of the book itself, but I'll share some of them here. 

Esmé visits the Bodleian Library, and the Oxford University Press, where she becomes friendly with one of the compositors, and describes the work of the compositor in setting up the page for printing. And that recalled to me my time as a proof reader on the Windhoek Advertiser in the early 1970s, which was the end of the hot-metal type printing era.

When I began working as a proof reader I sat at a table in the works near the typesetters, who were mostly German-speaking, and worked on Intertype machines which set each line of type in hot lead. The lines were collected in "galleys", and once they had finished the story they would bring me a galley proof, which I would correct, not merely as a proof reader, following copy, but also as a line editor, checking for errors of fact, grammar and spelling. These would go back to the typesetters, who would set the corrections, often with much swearing.

The galleys would then go to the sub-editor and the compositor, who fitted them into the page, sometimes shortening the story to fit, and added the headlines. Once the page was set up, the page proof would come back to me for final corrections -- the most common mistake being transposed or missing lines. Then paper maché clichés or stereotypes would be made from the set page, from which the moulded lead plates would be made for the rotary press. All this was a much longer process than the book printing described in The Dictionary of Lost Words, where the compositor appears to have done the typesetting as well.

While I was at the Windhoek Advertiser however, electronic typesetting was introduced. A typist in the newsroom would type the story on a machine that produced a punched paper tape, which was then fed into an attachment on the Intertype machines, and the skilled typesetters became mere machine minders. They fed the paper tape into the machine and watched it work. The only time they touched the keyboard was to set the corrections.

Then I moved to Durban, and my wife Val had a cousin who married a compositor on The Daily News. He had just completed a five-year apprenticeship, and was almost immediately made redundant when the newspaper switched from hot-metal printing to offset litho. The job of compositor, as described in The Dictionary of Lost Words, had ceased to exist.

I read an article in the same Daily News about the journalist's experience with the new Atex computerised typesetting system. The journalist would compose the article on the machine, polishing and correcting it as it went. The sub-editor would read it on the same machine, edit, cut it and write the headline, and it would then go to the people who did page makeup, all marked by codes on the same machine. I wanted one. That was in about 1974, fifty years ago. I dreamed of having a machine that could store whatever text I wrote, and could correct and change without retyping.

Twelve years later I got my wish. I went to work in the Editorial Department of the University of South Africa in 1986, editing academic texts on their Atex system. It was not as exciting as I thought it would be, though, because by then I already had an Osborne portable (well, luggable) microcomputer and could use the Wordstar word processor. The Atex system was clunky by comparison. If you wanted to save a document you were working on, you could walk to the canteen and have a cup of coffee and a chat while waiting for it to return to the screen.

The following year, however, we got microcomputers, where the Atex system had been ported in a new word processing program called XyWrite, which was much faster, and, for sheer word-processing power, has still not been surpassed 35 years later. It may lack the bells and whistles of the latest word processors, but still has more pistons and cylinders, and the whole thing fitted on a 360K floppy disk.

All these memories, and many others, came back while reading The Dictionary of Lost Words. I thought the book was very good indeed, but perhaps that's just me, because of my experience with words and meanings and putting them into books. But I still think it's worth five stars.

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The Drunken Silenus

The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality by Morgan Meis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is an extended personal meditation on Peter Paul Rubens's painting of the drunken Silenus.

Silenus was the tutor of Dionysus (whom the Romans called Bacchus), the dying and rising Graeco-Roman god of wine. Silenus was also the leader of the Satyrs, the half-human, half-goat companions of Dionysus. Silenus is shown as a fat old man, and, in contrast to his companions, his drunkenness is not the drunkenness of frenzied excess; in Rubens's painting it is the semi-conscious stumbling drunkenness of one who drinks to forget.

What made me want to read this book in the first place was the appearance of Silenus, Dionysus and their retinue in C.S. Lewis's children's novel Prince Caspian. And while this book doesn't explain it, it certainly gives more of the background.

Morgan Meis takes us on a journey, starting with the life and times of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), going back to ancient Greece, when the cult of Dionysus flourished, and forward to the time of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who had his own view of Silenus, whom he regarded as the father of Greek tragedy.

Meis examines the significance of Silenus against the historical background of each of these periods with an intertwining of history, biography, art history, philosophy and religion, with a great deal of personal speculation thrown in. None of these is treated in a formal academic way; there are no footnotes or other references, though there is a short bibliography at the end. But this broad, comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach does present Silenus, and Rubens himself, in a more holistic way than, say, a purely art-historical approach would do. The only fault I could find with this approach is that at times Meis tends to become too verbose and repetitious.

I found the book stimulating. It stimulates an interest in all these topics. One does not necessarily have to accept all Meis's speculations, but one can treat them as a starting point for one's own. Rubens painted the drunken Silenus at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, and the book would be interesting to anyone interested in that period, or art of that period.

One regret is that I could not find a decent reproduction of the painting online, and none is included in the book. The ones I could find online lacked the detail that is described in the book, and a full-colour reproduction would have been a useful additions.

In addition to being tutor to Dionysus, Silenus was a philosopher and a prophet, and when the legendary King Midas asked him what was the best thing for man, Silenus answered that the best thing for man was never to have been born, and the next best thing, having been born, was to die.

That's a pretty pessimistic outlook on life, and makes me wonder, even more, why C.S. Lewis would include him in a book written for children, even though he doesn't mention that side of Silenus. According to Meis, however, Nietzsche liked it:

The Greeks, Nietzsche thinks, the ancient Greeks— the Greeks of the satyr plays and the music in the forest, the Greeks who came before the classical period of Plato and the brilliant days of Greek rationalism, the Greeks before that, the ones who danced the Sicinnis dance and celebrated their secret rites—those Greeks were bold enough to make a health of their pessimism. They were strong, thought Nietzsche, tremendous in their ability to think that pessimism all the way through. Nay, to live that pessimism all the way through. That’s the way Nietzsche thought about it.

For Meis, the tragedy of Silenus is that he is immortal without being fully divine; he cannot die although at times he longs to do so. This is reminiscent of Tolkien's elves, for whom death is "the gift of Illuvatar", for which they envy men.

Faced with such a fate, it is perhaps unsurprising that Silenus should seek refuge in liquor. Again, as Meis puts it:

Silenus is, after all, somewhere between dying and not dying. He is not fully immortal like Dionysus, he isn’t a true god, nor is he fully mortal like King Midas, since he must always exist in order to be the attendant of Dionysus as Dionysus is perennially born and then torn apart and then reborn and then torn apart again. And Silenus is also, we should mention again, extremely drunk in the painting. And one of the key aspects of being very drunk, as everyone knows, is that you are conscious without being all the way conscious. You are there without being all the way there. You are present while at the same being absent. You are moving around without going anywhere.

For C.S. Lewis, however, even Dionysus, though a god, is not the True God. He is a creature, created, not begotten, and it is only in Christ that both Dionysus and Silenus find true fulfilment. In Prince Caspian Silenus is still tipsy, and still falls off his donkey, but it is the tipsiness of revelling rather than the drunkenness of oblivion.

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The Color Purple (Book Review)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An epistolary novel.

It's set in the southern USA in the 1930s & 1940s. and is about the life of a poor black family there.

Celie is raped by her stepfather and has a couple of children who disappear. She is then more or less forced to marry a man, Albert ____, who doesn't love her and treats her badly. Celie is gay and doesn't love him. Initially the story is told in a series of letters she writes to God.

Celie's sister Nettie goes to Africa as an au pair with a couple of missionaries and their adopted children, and writes to Celie, with descriptions of what is happening in the place where they live. This, for me was the best part of the book, reminiscent, in a way, of The Poisonwood Bible. It describes how an overseas rubber plantation company dispossesses the local people, forcing them to move off their land, and destroys their way of life -- "expropriation without compensation" is the latest political buzz-phrase for that kind of thing. Though the book is set in the 1930s and 1940s, it is the kind of thing that could still happen in South Africa 80 years on.

Celie, however, doesn't at first receive her sister's letter, because her husband hides them, but nevertheless switches from writing to God to writing to her sister. Celie eventually leaves her husband, finds someone who loves her, and starts a business, but things go wrong again.

In many ways it is a very sad book, all about people's messed up relationships, and how they manage to cope with them. I also found it quite a complex book, and had to read the first few chapters again when I was halfway through, just to keep track of the characters' relationships.

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Travelling through southern Africa in the 19th & 21st Centuries

Footing with Sir Richard's Ghost by Patricia Glyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Patricia Glyn, having heard about the travels of her great grand uncle Sir Richard Glyn, decides to walk the trail of his 19th-century journey from Durban to the Victoria Falls. This is the diary of her journey, with excerpts from his diary, and notes on the places they passed through, and historical events that had taken place there.

Sir Richard Glyn and his English companion were that comparatively rare species of traveller, the British "sportsman", who came to Africa primarily to hunt animals for sport, and left with their trophies. Though comparatively rare, however, unlike most other travellers they kept comparatively good written records in the form of diaries, and so their travels are better documented than most.

The book was a toss-out from the Alkantrant Library, probably a donation from a deceased estate. I hope the reason that the library tossed it out was that they already had a copy, and not just that they didn't think they needed one because it would be a pity if this book were not available. Just as her relative's diary is a valuable account of how people travelled and lived in the 1860s, so hers is a record of how people travelled and lived in the same parts of the world in the early 21st century.

In the 1860s the travellers relied of paid local guides, accounts of other travellers, or local advice or knowledge. In the 21st century this was supplemented by cell- and satellite phones and more accurate maps.

One of the reasons I found it interesting was that in 2013 my wife Val and I went on a similar journey, following in the footsteps of her great-great-grandfather Fred Green, who travelled through much of the same region, and also that to the west, from the 1850s until his death in 1870. Unlike the Glyns, he was not a sportsman, but a professional hunter, trader and explorers, his main source of income being ivory for which he hunted and traded. Unlike Patricia Glyn, however, we did not walk, but drove by car, taking three weeks instead of five months.

The book is illustrated with photos and maps, and has side panels with historical and geographical notes drawn from a variety of sources, which are all listed in the copious bibliography.

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Rites of Spring

Rites of Spring by Anders de la Motte
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Scandinavian whodunit with a difference -- the protagonist isn't a boozy detective drinking himself to divorce and death.

Instead the protagonist is a doctor, Thea Lind, who goes to the small town in southern Sweden where her husband David had grown up. He goes back to start a restaurant, while Thea starts working at the local clinic. She soon discovers that there is a secret in the village that affects her husband David, something that happened on Walpurgis Night several years before. She gradually learns that the events back then had affected her husband when he was a child, and a young girl had been killed in a ceremony to mark the night.

The story moves back and forth between past and present, in a manner reminiscent of the books of Robert Goddard, and the past events are written in the past tense, which those in the story present are written in the present tense.

St Walpurgis Night (strictly St Walburga's Eve) is celebrated in Sweden and several other northern European countries to celebrate the canonisation of St Walburga, an 8th-century English missionary nun who worked in Germany. It took place on the night of 30 April, and her feast day was 1 May, which also marked the beginning of summer in Sweden. 

In the story some elements of English folklore have also been incorporated into the celebration, including the Green Man. The "green man" folklore has grown up around the foliate heads that appear in the decoration of churches in various parts of Europe, and in the story the Green Man is treated as a person who appeared on St Walpurgis Night, and the girl who was killed was enacting a rite of sacrifice to the Green Man.

The more Thea discovers about those past events, the more opposition she encounters from those who want to keep the secret, but Thea has secrets in her own past as well.

It's a gripping story and well written.

It also interested me in ways that go beyond this particular story, and that is the incorporation of motifs from folklore into the story, even quite recent folklore, such as that of the Green Man. I like writing such stories myself, and so I find it interesting to see how other writers do it.

The "Green Man" legend goes back about 85 years or so, and was originally applied to the names of pubs, which was then linked to the foliate heads found in churches, and a quite extensive folklore has developed around the linked symbols. 

The legend has been used and developed in several novels. I recently reviewed another novel, Wildwood, that also incorporated it. That was a so-called "young adult" (teenage) story, and each such story adds to the legend. A Facebook friend, who was a fellow student at university with me, recently posted an interesting article on Facebook linking it to the Arthurian story of the Green Knight and the Green Chapel.

While I haven't used this particular story in books I've written, one of my children's stories, The Enchanted Grove, incorporates creatures from Zulu folklore, while another, Cross Purposes has them from Russian and Mongolian folklore.

Rites of Spring doesn't incorporate anything from the life of St Walburga, but I looked it up anyway, and found that German Christians asked her to protect them from various diseases and witchcraft. That didn't seem to form any part of the Swedish celebrations, but then neither, apart from in this story, did the Green Man.

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Inside the Worm by Robert Swindells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A small town is celebrating the millennium of the martyrdom of their patron saint, St Ceridwen (is there a real St Ceridwen?), and so a weeklong festival is planned, culminating in a play on the life of the saint, who, in addition to dying as a martyr, had defeated a dragon that plagued the small village, not my killing it, but by banishing it to a fen.

The Year 8 pupils of the BottomTop Middle School are given the responsibility of producing the play, and Felicity "Fliss" Morgan is chosen to play the part of St Ceridwen, while her best friend Lisa Watmough is one of four children playing the dragon, whose costume they create out of whatever materials they can find.

Lisa is at first reluctant to take part, as she has a strange feeling that something bad will happen, but once she gets started she participates enthusiastically, and it's Fliss's turn to get worried as Lisa seems to change, and not in a nice way, and those who are acting the dragon's part seem to become too enthusiastic. The tension increases, until the day of the festival itself. 

I found this book particularly interesting because it is in more or less the same genre as children's books I have written -- intrusive fantasy, some have called it. So I was interested to see how the author handled dialogue and the relationships between the characters. It was comparable in that way to my published book The Enchanted Grove, and even more to one I'm still putting the finishing touches to, provisionally titled The Venn Conspiracy. I rather hope that one day soon the page for The Enchanted Grove on GoodReads will have books like Inside the Worm listed under "Readers also enjoyed...", but that wont happen until more people have reviewed it.

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How social networks undermine community and promote extremism

I don't know who coined the term "social media", but in its narrower sense of commercial web sites whose main purpose is to link people with "friends" and "followers", they are becoming increasingly contradictory. 

As Tano Santos and Luigi Zingales point out in their article How Big Tech Undermines Democracy

...social-media platforms purposely seek to undo local communities to maximize profits. The reason is that social-media companies profit from our digital relationships, but not from our “physical” relationships, those that take place in parks, coffee shops, book clubs, and the like. As a result, social media platforms see the physical relationships between people as competing with the digital relations they offer.

The advantage of social media, what makes them "social", is that they have the potential to facilitate communication between people who are separated by physical distance, either through geography or through such things as the Covid19 quarantine. But this potential is often not realised because of the very commercial interests cited in the article. This is like the effect of alcoholic liquor on sex; as Shakespeare notes in Macbeth, in stimulates the desire but takes away the performance.

As for how commercial social network platforms promote extremism, Santos and Zingales explain it thus:

The local nature of physical relationships forces us to compromise. When the pool of potential friends is limited, we can’t be too picky; we must accept what we can find. Being stuck with the locals, our only option is to improve the quality of our relationships. In a digital sphere, where we can instantaneously connect with the entire world, why should we invest energy in making the current match work? By searching a bit longer, we can find a better match. The quality of any specific relationship becomes less important when there is a large pool of readily available alternatives. It is quantity over quality. As a result, digital platforms create shallower relationships among like-minded individuals that are easy to make and easy to drop.

The emphasis on quantity over quality is exacerbated by the gamification embedded in the platform’s design, carefully curated to maximize engagement and the platform’s profits. The number of followers and likes is prominently featured. Thus, users end up maximizing the number of relationships, not their quality. As many others have noted, in a boundless virtual community, the best way to get attention is to be extreme, to radicalize your position, and even to attack others. In a physical community where people constantly interact face-to-face, it is difficult to dehumanize adversaries. Not so in virtual communities. Online people are just avatars like the ones we are used to shooting in video games. Online, we don’t live with the consequences of our actions when we offend others because we do not observe the pain we inflict on them. We only live with the benefits: more retweets, likes, and followers. This is why otherwise calm and lovely people transform into aggressive beasts online.

Commercial social media are also curated to exacerbate the silo effect. Like the concrete grain silos used for holding corn for loading on to trains or ships, users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now confusingly called X, so I'll continue to refer to it as Twitter), Instagram and TikTok are funnelled into silos insulated from those in other silos. 

One of the things that social media were initially good at was linking people to information. Twitter, for example, started off as a microblogging platform. One could not say much in a microblog, but it was very good for linking to longer articles that said more. A blog, after all, was a web log, a log and commentary on web sites visited that one thought might interest others. So many web sites made it easy to post links to them on social media platforms. If you think others will be interested in this, share it on your Twitter feed, or on Facebook or somewhere else. But what do the people who run those platforms do? They adjust their algorithms to ensure that such posts are shown to fewer people. They stimulate the desire, but take away the performance. They destroy the very thing that attracted people to their site in the first place. They don't want people clicking on links to other sites because they fear it will mean fewer eyeballs on ads. But the links are what keep people coming back to their site.

There are, however, some anomalous hangovers from the past, when the social media platforms were more user-oriented than they are now. Sometimes I retweet a link to an article I see on Twitter, and it asks "Do you want to read the article first?" That is a hangover from a time when they were trying to give the impression of being "socially responsible" and at least make it appear that they were trying to discourage users from retweeting clickbait articles that might be fake news. I quite often retweet articles I haven't read, however, because I don't have time to read them now, and want to read them later. 

One effect of this that I have noticed is that fewer and fewer people respond  to things I post on social media, so they aren't social at all. I have something over 1100 "followers" on Twitter, but if I post something only 10-30 people see it. The more important it is to me, the fewer the people who see it. And in most cases the people who do see it never respond. A post may occasionally get a "like" or two, but at least half these "likes" are from bots with fake names, no profile information, and no followers. If Twitter were a real social medium, then there would be social interaction, but there isn't. It is antisocial.

I'll put links to this article on Facebook and Twitter, and it will be interesting to see how many people see it at all, and, of those, how many interact with it in any way, by "liking", sharing, commenting etc. 

Again, Santos and Zingales explain this thus:

...digital [networks] are designed and regulated by the platform owner: They are centralized. The reason is that digital relationships are built and maintained in a space that is controlled by a platform, and this control confers the platform with the ownership of the relationship. We can’t take our X (formerly Twitter) followers with us to a different platform, nor can we access our followers without X’s permission, which can be withdrawn at any time without cause. In contrast, X can advertise to our followers and connect them with other followers. We don’t own our followers—X does.

Not only are most digital networks centralized, but they also have another motive to create and maintain the network: to monetize it. Their economic motives fuel their interest in undermining physical networks. All else being equal, customers are indifferent between a digital relationship and a physical one, but platforms aren’t. They profit from digital relationships but not physical ones. In their effort to subsidize digital relationships and undermine physical ones, these platforms are even willing to pay us to remain glued a little longer to the smartphone and not go to the bar with our friends.

Facebook is much the same. It is forever offering me new "people you may know", but there is very little interaction with people I already know. It doesn't show me what they post, and it doesn't show my stuff to them. Or perhaps it does, but they don't like it, and they don't like me, and if I knew what they really thought and they acted on what they really thought we would unfriend each other. So far from being a "social" medium, it promotes the feeling of:

Everybody hates me, nobody loves me
I'm going to go and eat worms
Big fat juicy ones, little itty bitty ones
See how the big ones squirm.
First you bite their heads off, then you suck the juice out
Then you throw the skins away
Nobody knows how I can thrive
On worms three times a day.

I recently had a look at some of my Facebook "friends" that I hadn't heard from for a long time. Some had died, and their last posts were usually from other people saying that they had died, but Facebook never showed me those, so I didn't even know they had died. But if they had posted some trivia just before they died, Facebook would probably have been more likely to have shown me that. But posts with news of their death weren't monetised enough. 

Other friends had probably just dropped out because they found that having their relationships and friendships manipulated by the platform socially unrewarding. It increased the desire but took away the performance, and eventually they found the lack of performance unrewarding and left.

Back to the danger to democracy...

Once again, Santos and Zingales indicate that

Without information, political participation dwindles, and vested interests have an easy time capturing local administrations because most people don’t vote or don’t vote in an informed way. A captured democracy functions poorly, reducing incentives to participate and the trust in the democratic process. If, as Tocqueville hypothesized, local communities are the gymnasium of democracy, then these trends do not affect just local administrations but also national ones.

State capture is not something peculiar to South Africa, though the Gupta affair was a good example of how vested interests can manipulate social media to undermine democracy. 

But it can also work the other way, as we have recently seen when the Western "mainstream" media were captured to channel Israeli government agitprop after 7 October 2023 (and probably before that as well), social media platforms were used to keep alternative viewpoints alive. Even though social media platforms are manipulated, it is possible to some extent to find workarounds, though that requires a great deal of time and energy.

And back in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were a lot of non-commercial social media platforms like BBS (Bulletin Board Service) networks, Usenet newsgroups and email mailing lists that were not captured by vested interests. BBS networks, in particular, were run as a kind of private-enterprise socialism, email mailing lists still exist. If any of my friends would like to communicate online without the commercial manipulation, contact me through the OffTopic forum here.

Advice to would-be horror writers

The Abominations of Yondo by Clark Ashton Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I first bought this book, about 50 years ago, I disliked it intensely. If I were reviewing it then, I would have given it one star.

I bought it because I liked horror stories, or thought I did, and the blurb led me to believe that I had found some good ones. When I began reading them, however, I was put off by the author's style. He tried to build an atmosphere of horror by piling adjective on adjective which became so cloying as to be almost meaningless, so by the time one reached the end of the story there was no horror left.

My taste for horror was shaped by reading Dracula and a collection of short stories edited by Dorothy Sayers, called Detection, Mystery, Horror. For more on that, see A Taste for Horror. Clark Ashton Smith did not appear in it, and his stories were disappointing by comparison.

Years later, when I became a professional editor, I read books on writing to help me in my work. I read warnings against this practice of piling on the epithets, and advice to use them sparingly. When I read that advice I thought of Clark Ashton Smith and thought I knew exactly what they meant.

Later, in the 1990s, a friend, who was researching new religious movements, told me about H.P. Lovecraft, who, he said wrote some passably good horror stories as well as a lot of third-rate dreck. His interest was sparked by the phenomenon of some readers thinking that a fictional book mentioned in some of Lovecraft's stories, the Necronomicon, actually existed, and developed a cult based on it. 

I got a book of Lovecraft's stories from the library and read it. I agreed with my friend's assessment, and when I discovered that Clark Ashton Smith was an associate of Lovecraft, I decided to try and read his stuff again, and found it not quite so rebarbative as I did the first time.

Nonetheless, I would urge any would-be fiction writers who have wondered about the advice to be sparing with adjectives and adverbs to read books like this with that advice in mind. Not all of Clark Ashton Smith's stories are overflowing with superfluous modifiers, which showed that he could write quite decent prose if he wanted to. But in re-reading this one I did note some over-the-top examples, like:

corroding planets
dark orb-like mountains
abysmal sand
hoary genii
decrepit demons
leprous lichens
unmentionable tortures
unknown horrors
immemorial brine
undetermined shadows
abominable legends
cacodemoniacal night
forbidden inferences
and eldritch anything at all

Many have the prefix un- or the suffix -less (nameless is another favourite).

Smith and Lovecraft gave rise to the Eldritch School of horror writers, and many have tried to imitate them since then, with unmentionable results. Perhaps it was this that inspired another prolific author of horror stories, Stephen King, to advise aspiring writers to go through their manuscripts and remove every forbidden adverb they found.

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Of Wild Dogs, and South African crime novels

Of Wild Dogs by Jane Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An above-average crime novel set, like so many South African crime novels, in Cape Town, which, in the case of this one, leads to one of its chief weaknesses -- that though the focus of the story does at some points move out of Cape Town to Limpopo province, the story at those points becomes blurred and sketchy, lacking in the detail that makes it interesting at other points.

In the story Ewan Christopher, a British journalist, travels to Cape Town to meet an old flame, Hannah Viljoen, whom he had met when she was in exile in England. Hannah is working as an artist in a museum, but Christopher arrives to find she has just died, and murder is suspected. He befriends Helena de Villiers, the pathologist, and Cicero Matyobeni, the detective investigating the case, which becomes more complex and involved the more they investigate it.

There are some nice descriptive passages, one that caught my fancy being

Helena's father had marked his European cast of mind by marrying Athena Papandreas, a dark beauty who caught his imagination when he first saw her, in a ruched fuschia-pink bathing suit and floral swimming cap, bobbing like a frosted tea-cake upon the contained tide at St James

I suppose it all depends on how you like your crime novels. Those who like them "gritty" might find a "floral swimming cap bobbing like a frosted tea cake" a bit flowery for their taste. but I found it all added to the local flavour, as did the mention of "varsity", which even now in South Africa has not yet been superseded by the Australian & Brit "uni".

If it weren't for the skimping on the Limpopo bits, especially towards the end, I'd have given it five stars. Chapters 30-36 look like rough drafts that the author meant to complete later. But it's still worth reading. 




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Plausible versus Credible: the Language of Genocide

The International Court of Justice recently declared that South Africa's accusation that the government of Israel was committing genocide in Gaza was "plausible", and ordered the government of Israel to desist from certain actions, and to allow others, such as "humanitarian assistance" to the people of Gaza. 

The response of many Western governments was not merely to connive at, but to actively support this possible genocide by immediately cutting off support to UNRWA, the main agency providing this "humanitarian assistance". They thus directly went against the judgement of the court, which had examined the evidence. and did so because they found some unsubstantiated allegations by the government of Israel that some UNRWA employees had participated in the October 7 outrage in Israel to be "credible".

This raises the question of what the words "plausible" and "credible" mean.

"Credible" is a much stronger word than "plausible" -- it means trustworthy, reliable, worthy of being believed. 

"Plausible", on the other hand, is a much weaker word. It means that something is apparently true.  We speak of someone who is a "plausible rogue", a person who has the gift of the gab, the ability to persuade people that something is true even though it may not be. 

The Western governments that apparently rejected the judgment of a court that examined the evidence, and yet immediately accepted unsubstantiated allegations by the accused in the case as "credible" are therefore credulous at best, but more likely to be complicit in war crimes, mass murder, and possibly genocide (if the ICJ eventually does find that the government of Israel was indeed practising genocide in Gaza). 

But it might clarify a lot of muddled thinking about such things if people were more careful about how they use words like "plausible" and "credible".

 

A Quiet Belief in Angels

A Quiet Belief in Angels by R.J. Ellory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Given the title, it was not quite what I expected.

It starts off with this kid, Joseph Vaughan, who's 11 going on 12, and in love with his teacher and half in love with the girl who sits next to him in class. But his father dies and the girl is murdered, and someone tells him about dead people becoming angels so he gets interested in the topic and tells his teacher all about the Celestial Hierarchy -- the works. Like he's read Dionysus the Areopagite (Pseudo, if you insist) and all that stuff, but he says he got it from the Bible.

But after that there's not much mention of angels, apart from a few feathers. Joseph's teacher encourages him to become a writer, and give him books to read.

A lot more girls get murdered, and Joseph and his friends vow to protect them, but fail to do so, and his friends grow up and forget their promise, but Joseph persists, and his life is pretty sad. It's a sad story, but worth reading, only not for the reason I thought.

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Winds of Evil: a Christian urban fantasy novel (incomplete)

Winds of Evil by Sharon K. Gilbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have not finished the story, this book is not a stand-alone, or part of a series. It is a long book published in several volumes, but as I didn't see the next part in the library, I probably never will finish it, and so this is not a review, but just a few observations.

The book is billed as a "supernatural thriller", which immediately makes me think of Charles Williams, whose novels have been described as such.

But the back cover blurb begins "what would you do if your town was infested with demons?" -- to which my answer would be "Thank God they were exorcised." And it immediately makes the think of Frank Peretti whose "supernatural thrillers" have very materialistic demons.

Fortunately the demons in this story (or at least the first volume of it) are not as materialistic as Frank Peretti's. The story is set in a town called Eden, in Indiana on the banks of the Ohio River. Katherine Adamson, now a successful author, returns to her home town after the death of the aunt who brought her up after the death of her parents, and everyone tells her that the town is much worse than when she left it. There seems to be endemic corruption in local government and local business. On the outskirts of town there is a sinister Institute reminiscent of the N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. And a child who was among the first to see one of the infesting demons compared it with the description of a balrog from The Lord of the Rings.

So far, so good. I'd be interested to see how the story develops in subsequent volumes, though I would hope it didn't go on for ever, like The Game of Thrones, which I gave up halfway through the second volume.

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