George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman and the Tiger

I suspect, that had the blogosphere existed with George MacDonald Fraser's penultimate Flashman novel appeared, it would have erupted into loud moans. For decades Flashman's fans had been waiting for the novel that explained his adventures in the American Civil War. Instead, Fraser produced a novelette and two short stories. I suspect that there is an element of vanity publishing here. Fraser as a novelist had enough time and space (and presumably cash) to write about exactly what he wanted, and shucks to what the fans demanded.

Of course, there is much here to satisfy the Flashman fan. In my opinion, these stories round out the character of Flashman, particularly because they show how, in his later years, he was much more of the jovial old grandfather type. Keen to enjoy his well earned rest and not too prepared to show of his laurels.

The longest part of this book is the novelette The Road to Charing Cross a classic story of diplomatic underhandedness and attempted murder. It has some similarities to one of the earliest novels, Royal Flash and shres some characters with that novel. It has a couple of delightful twists too, and Flashman is left a little high and dry. Interestingly, it clearly was intended to serve as a bridge to one of the other eagerly awaited Flashman tales - the story of his involvement in the Zulu wars. Several references elsewhere have indicated that Flashman was at Rorkes drift, and while details are scarce, the final story here begins in that chaotic battle. It finishes with one of Flashman's few examples of bravery - albeit fuelled by a decent whiskey. A few literary stabs at another Victorian novelist finish things off nicely.

Finally, the middle story here, The Subtleties of Baccarat is by far the best. Dealing less with adventure and war, and more of drawing room scandal, the tale centres on the Royal Baccarat Scandal. This was a minor piece of ruling class snobbery, which had the characters involved been less interested in their personal images and the delight of scandal and expressed more of a collective attitude to solving problems, would have had a better outcome for all concerned.

Fraser puts his own spin on the story, but he illustrates brilliantly the life of the ruling classes in late Victorian times. Their scandals, gossip, adultery and lack of individual solidarity. The future Edward VII was dragged in front of the courts as a witness and the whole lot were made to look foolish in front of the mass of the population. The scandal was on a par with anything the Daily Mail might put on its front page and no doubt helped to undermine respect for the ruling class at the time. Fraser illuminates history neatly with this story, in a way that he would have done for the US Civil War had he lived long enough. Nonetheless Flashman fans should not dismiss these well written and fascinating episodes in the life of our favourite rake.

Dan Swain - Alienation: An Introduction to Marx's Theory

Karl Marx's ideas of alienation are often portrayed as being overly complex. Yet they are a rich and fascinating examination of the way that human lives are distorted by the capitalist society that we live in. Dan Swain's new book is a short, but never superficial examination of this part of Marx's work, it is a brilliant introduction to the subject and deserves a wide readership, particularly amongst people who are getting to grips with Marxist thought.

Swain locates his explanation of Marx's theories firstly in those that had come before. He describes how, out of the enlightenment, thinkers like Rousseau and later others like Hegel and Feuerbach were trying to get to grips with the place of humans within the natural world. Their criticisms of the established order of feudalism looked toward a new, more rational explanation of the world.

Marx built on their insights, but he did so critically. He located his understanding of alienation in a materialist explanation of the way that humans interact with the natural world. But he also argued that the alienation that people experience depends on their position in human society. Swain quotes Marx:

"The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human".

By locating the experience of alienation in a class society, Marx gets to the bottom of the question. Since, for Marx, what makes us human is our ability to labour on nature, to transform the natural world in our interest, alienation becomes the way that our labour is distorted and taken from us. The way that we lose control over it, the way that the products of our labour are prizes that we cannot have.

I particularly liked how Swain illustrates these theoretical ideas with practical and concrete examples. Drawing on examples from Apple factories and car plants, to working lives in call centres, he shows how people become merely extensions of the machines they work. This has practical consequences. Swain shows how there is evidence that lack of control over the working environmental is one of the biggest determining factors in physical and mental health. He quotes one report that argues "giving employees more variety in tasks and a stronger say in decisions about work may decrease the risk of coronary heart disease."

In one of the strongest chapters in the book, Swain shows how, with the growing environmental crisis, the alienation inherent in capitalism is "fast becoming one of the most important forms of alienation". The way in which the separation between humans and nature is increased under capitalism, as the natural world becomes something to be used for the production process, is directly linked to environmental crises. Swain illustrates this by pointing out that one of the proposed solutions to climate change, emissions trading schemes, is one of the clearest examples of commodity fetishism. Under capitalism, even molecules of gases are considered commodities to be sold.

As I said, this is a brilliant introduction to Marx's work on alienation. It deserves to be read widely and, it doesn't locate the question in an academic debate. Perhaps because of this, Swain is able to conclude on an optimistic note. He demonstrates how many of the problems he discusses break down during revolutionary changes. He quotes an Egyptian revolutionary speaking of the events of 2011, "Freedom for the worker did not only mean freedom to vote or freedom of expression, it also meant freedom from hunger and the constant threat of unemployment... Dignity was a meaningless notion unless it meant an end to poverty and need."

Marx's thoughts illuminate better the world around us. Swain explains them with clarity and straightforward language. He also updates them for the 21st century world of work, but shows how very little has changed from the early days of capitalism. I would recommend this introduction highly.

Neil Gaiman - Anansi Boys

Having now read three of Neil Gaiman's excellent fantasy novels, I think I've discovered a pattern. It basically  goes like this. Lead character of novel finds himself experiencing fairly inexplicable events. Turns out, reality is actually not as lead charactr thought. Magic, Gods or something else as unbelievable also share our world. Gradually said character accepts this new reality and even begins to be able to take part in it. Eventually world is saved by this character discovering hidden talents, God like powers or magic.

So it was with American Gods and Neverwhere. So it is also with Anansi Boys a novel that shares some of the world view of American Gods and at least one character. Anansi Boys though, is a much shorter, tighter and more straightforward novel than the other two. At the beginning of this story the God Anansi dies. Anansi was a trickster, enjoying jokes and tricks, poetry, singing and the finer things in life - wine, women and song. Charlie Nancy doesn't. The only things Charlie wants are a quiet life far away from his father. When his father dies, Charlie discovers a previously unknown brother, Spider, who seems to have inherited the worst aspects of their dad and proceeds to destroy Charlies life. Sleeping with his fiance, getting Charlie arrested for white-collar crime and the like.

The story, follows a traditional pattern. Charlie realises that his brother seems to have unusual powers and his attempts to have Spider banished, by making a pact with another God, only unleashes further problems. Making pacts with the Gods tend to have double sided consequences.

All in all, its a fun read. Existing Neil Gaiman fans will enjoy it, and the sub-plot, which is a neat little whodunit that ties all the strands of the magical world plot together with the bemused non-magical world orbiting Spider and Charlie, is quite fun in and of itself. The characters are pleasantly flawed. No goody two shoes here. Read it if you enjoyed American Gods, but do read that first.

Related Reviews

Gaiman - American Gods
Gaiman - Neverwhere

David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber has produced an important and stimulating book. It is a radical book, that clearly has its roots in the anti-capitalist movements that the author has been part of. But it is more than simply a book that is designed to challenge capitalism. Graeber is attempt to argue that the conventional way of looking at the world is wrong, and that the way we have lived our lives in the past has been very different to how we do today.

Debt, Graeber argues, means a very specific thing to us today. It is an obligation that we accept we have to someone else, be that someone a bank or a loan shark. The obligation we feel is the sense that the debt (usually money, though not always) must always be paid back. Graeber contrasts this, with how obligations have been viewed in the past. For most of human history, we have organised our lives through hunting and gathering our foods. In these society, the obligations we had, were never the result of someone making a loan with their own material interests. There were no hunter-gatherer loan sharks. Graeber illustrates this well with an example from a well documents group of hunter-gatherers, the Innuit.

One person who lived with and studied the Innuit described returning empty handed from a hunt. Fearing hunger, he found a successful hunter giving him several hundred pounds of meat. The man objected to his thanks.

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."


Such attitudes do not simply come from shortages. Other anthropologists such as Eleanor Burke Leacock have documented how hunter-gatherer tribes share food out, even when there isn't enough for food. In other words, the obligations people feel are rooted in their collective life, not out of self-interest.

The way these attitudes change is a great theme of Graeber's book, and would be difficult to cover here. He is at pains to argue though that debt as a general notion has existed throughout history, though most of the time it has been more to do with human social relations than with material gains. These social debts might be the obligations you take on when marrying someone - the promise to feed and look after them. They might also be the money you give as a dowry - not a payment, but a donation towards the cost of living. Over time, Graeber argues and in many ways, such social obligations take root as material debts.

Graeber upsets a great many apple-carts. One of which is in his discussion of Adam Smith and the conventional economics that have flowed from him. In trying to answer the question, what is money, Smith and others always answer in similar ways. "Imagine a world without money. We'd have to survive with barter. I have a bag of nails, you have a loaf of bread. I must exchange bread for nails. This barter economy is cumbersome, so money develops". I paraphrase, but you get the idea.

Graeber argues that there is no evidence for "barter economies". Those who say, for instance, that when the Romans left, the society "returned to a barter economy" are placing their vision of what they think happened over reality. The truth is that Roman money disappeared, but that in its place remained alternative currencies, sometimes virtual ones. "Barter economies" says Graeber did not exist, exchange took place through elaborate systems of credit. With the development of urban economies, rather than early agricultural ones, people might need bread, and only have nails, but the loaves would have a particular value assigned to them. As did nails. There are plenty of examples of how some societies have distributed goods to people who need them, waiting for future payment when the fishermen returned or the nails were manufactured.

So Graeber points out that after the Romans left, villages might no longer have Roman money. But they did have Roman prices. They might value a sheep as so many pieces of gold and bread as so many pieces of silver, and this allowed exchange to take place. Money wasn't real, debt existed by in a concrete sense of credit. Not an abstract one. Presumably the person who failed to come good on his or her debt was, eventually refused assistance.

All this is very interesting, and it certainly seems plausible. The problem with the book for me, was that I don't think that Graeber really gets a handle on what drives human economies. It isn't debt, nor is it finance. Production exists because people need to provide for their material needs and the way that production is organised determines all the other aspects of their society. The way that the forces of production in society develop, challenging and changing the relations in society ultimately helps bring about change. This is a very short explanation of historical materialism, but I think Graeber would have benefited from expressing his history in terms similar to this. Otherwise you are left feeling distinctly like human history being a series of events that are connected only through a gradual development of a money economy.

I also feel that Graeber misses out a class analysis. That's not to say he doesn't acknowledge the existence of classes, nor rich and poor. He's very clear that these do exist in society and critical of the attitudes of the rich towards the rest of society. But I don't think he has a handle on what motivates people in different classes. Why do the rich behave like they do? Why are they so irrational in their behaviour?

Finally, capitalism is a fundamentally different human society to earlier ones. Its economic dynamic is the need to accumulate wealth, for the sake of accumulation. This is not the same as earlier class societies. The lord of the manor did not go out and exploit the peasants for the sake of it. He did so until he'd satisfied his needs. Capitalism exploits workers because it needs more wealth, to reinvest and restart the treadmill of production. This difference also shapes how we perceive ourselves and our relations to others. In this context debt between people takes on a different meaning under capitalism then it did in previous societies. We are atomised and individualised, set competing against each other.

That said, Graeber has some good insights into different eras of human history and it may well be my own personal predilections that lead me to think his chapters on hunter-gatherers are the most interesting. This is a book that will be debated and discussed at length and is worth study. While there are holes to pick and arguments to be had, the themes are generally of interest.

Adrian Bell - Men and the Fields

There is always a danger when reading books about the rural past, of falling into the trap that there was a wonderful utopian life that has been forgotten, destroyed or superceded. Adrian Bell's book avoids this trap precisely because it is a celebration of what he saw and loved, rather than an attempt to pretend the world  was something it was not.

Bell was himself a farmer, though he was an accomplished writer. He loved nature, people and the landscape. Men and the Fields is his celebration of those things in various rural parts of lowland Britain, particularly Suffolk and the south coast. Bell's gift is a brilliantly economic style that sums up his surroundings without feeling like the reader is having descriptions piled onto descriptions. Here he ruminates on the view from a train station, but equally important is the station master:

"Out of the cottage came a countryman dressed in gold lace: he was the station master. He gave me my ticket and recommended the view from the end of the platform. I said I had seen in beautifully from the river. He insisted it was better from the platform: you could see all along the valley both ways. So I went and sat at the end of the platform. There were two sets of arches: the railway and the road, bridging each other and the depth at different levels. It was like a dim picture of ancient viaducts I remembered sitting opposite once in a farmhouse dining room. I would have thought I had made it up from that picture in a dream. But somehow that railway ticket was never collected. I have it still."

For Bell, the countryside cannot be seperated from the people who live and work there. His descriptions of fields rarely ignore labourers. His love of birds and plants frequently are linked to locals who tell stories of them. Here's a delightful description of a farming couple:

"A woman comes round into the wind; a big woman dressed in sacks and gum boots. The sacking bulks her out and the boots make her legs look like a horses. She comes out into the gale and hardly pauses in the force of it but pushes on through giddy straws across the stackyard... Then she stands full blast and shouts orders to a man in the field - she looks stronger than the wind."

The rigid class differences of the agricultural world lie, barely concelled below the surface of Bell's accounts. The deep respect from labourers for their masters, is often combined with a cynical attitude to those betters who think they know it all. There's a telling tale from a labourer who recounts the different attitudes of farmers towards their workers. The one who offers a cold glass of beer on the doorstep on a winters day, the other who stands him by the fire with a warming whiskey.

Bell was writing about the 1930s. British farming was coming out of an enormous depression caused by withdrawels of wartime subsidies. It was about to be transformed again, the Second World War led to an enormous expansion of farming and the massive motorisation of the industry. As he writes, rural Britain is on the cusp of change. Bell notes the changes to the roads, the impacts of the motor car of flocks of sheep, but he doesn't reject these, he sees them as part of an evolving, changing countryside. The beautiful language combined with the wonderful colour paintings that accompany the book, by the artist John Nash combine to make this a lovely read and a lovely piece of art in itself.


Related Links


Age of Uncertainty has more of John Nash's paintings from Men and the Fields here.

Stephen King - The Waste Lands

Volume three of Stephen King's series, The Dark Tower, develops the story into a much more concrete and traditional form. I found the two earlier novels slightly esoteric. They were readable, but seemed a little indistinct. The Waste Lands brings together some of the earlier loose-ends and seems to be taking the series onwards quite well.

The hero of the books, Roland, the Last Gunslinger is now permanently joined by two companions who we met in the previous book. All the characters exhibit imperfections, though Roland represents less the fallen individual, but the last of a noble race, who has watched, perhaps for centuries, his world decline. This fallen world is the real star of the story. A once powerful technologically advanced society has collapsed. Cities are ruins, population collapse has left a few small groups of people, who have lost the art of repairing their old technologies. In places these have reverted to almost medieval societies. Elsewhere groups of violent thugs scavenge the surrounding country like something from Mad Max III.

Roland's quest for answers takes him and his companions onwards. As they travel we learn more about the world around them, and our heroes themselves. But as I said, the world is the real centrepiece of the story. It appears to have some sort of relationship to our own, a crashed aeroplane is marked by insignia that we would recognise for instance. What keeps the story ticking over, like a lot of King's writing, is the desire for an explanation of what is going on. Where are they? What is the Dark Tower? What are the links with Earth? Knowing King, no definitive answers will be forthcoming even after all the sequels have been read. But the beauty of King's writing is that the reader probably won't mind. The point IS the journey.

The Waste Lands ends mid flow. It is much faster paced than the earlier stories, though I found it more readable and enjoyable. The urge to read the sequel as soon as possible has not left me yet.

Related Reviews

King - The Gunslinger
King - The Drawing of the Three

Chris Stringer - The Origin of Our Species

Trying to understand the development of the earliest humans is an extremely difficult task. What evidence there is, is limited to a  few fossilised bones from a handful of sites scattered across the world. Most of the other evidence comes from the DNA extracted from those bones, or a the stone tools that seem to have been produced in vast quantities by these early humans.

Chris Stringer's new book is probably one of the best introductions to the subject that I have read. His account is determindely materialistic. It is rooted in the evidence we have, and an understanding of the wider environmental conditions hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is also approachable, though I did find some of the sections on DNA needed re-reading at times, but they are rewarding if the reader perseveres. Rarely does a writer actually explain how the DNA is obtained and how it is studied.

Stringer has a long pedigree in terms of the academic study of ancient humans. He was one of the first scientists to argue for an Out of Africa hypothesis for modern humans. The idea that our species, Homo Sapiens, spread outwards from Africa, following earlier migrations by earlier species of humans. According to this theory, which it seems, is now fairly common currency the origin of Homo Sapiens was a fairly recent one and our immediate ancestors only left Africa around 100,000 years ago. Surprisingly it took some 65,000 more years before they reached Europe. Spreading initially eastwards, through the modern Middle East and into Asia.

Of course, with limited evidence controversry reigns. Stringer doesn't shy from giving both sides of a debate, though he never fails to give his point of view, backing it up with his own examples and evidence. Take the discussion about why the Neanderthals died out and were replaced by modern humans. Stringer cites the work of colleagues like Clive Finlayson, who argue that the Neanderthals were on a long decline and that their last homes, in Gibralter, were the last places they survived. The existence of their species ended by a changing climate to which they couldnt adapt.

Stringer's argument doesn't dismiss this, but builds on it. He argues that in some places modern humans may have pushed the Neanderthals out, in others the Neanderthals may have died out unable to adapt to a changing world. Modern humans may or may not have been present, but it seems unlikely that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens were always in competition, particularly given evidence that they may have exchanged ideas and interbred. This seems to me a more realistic answer. Trying to reduce the end of a intelligent species like our human ancestors, simply to climatic changes doesn't feel right. A more complex interaction with a changing world, with different groups struggling to adapt and one being better than the other seems much more logical.

Stringer also touches on other debates and discussions. How did language develop? Where did geographical differences in human bodies come from and when? How did changes in our bodies relate to changes in our behaviour and brains and vice versa? Many of these questions have surprisinly detailed answers given the lack of archaeological data. Chris Stringer has produced an excellent introduction to the subject. It is an excellent starting point for the debates and discussions around early human evolution.

Related Reviews

Finlayson - The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived