Fitzroy Maclean – Eastern Approaches

I suspect that few boys have read the novels of Rider Haggard through the years and not dreamed that they would one day cross deserts, fight in battles and explore strange countries. The reality of escapist adventure though, is that it is the stuff of dreams, not normal life and the closest most people get to adventure is running for the bus in the morning.

Fitzroy Maclean however was a real life adventurer. His career reads like the mad out-pourings of a Victorian thriller writer, but in the early 1930s he had travels and adventures that seem almost impossible.

Clearly born to the better end of society, Maclean joined the Diplomatic Service with a view to serving the British Empire. In his early twenties, he yearned to visit the Soviet Union, and surprised many by volunteering to work at the embassy in Moscow. It wasn’t a popular destination and he was able to get posted there.

The first pages of the book are his fascinating account of his train journey from Paris to Moscow. Once there, he interspersed his diplomatic work with barely legal trips into the Russian east. He visits Kazakstan, Samarkand, Baku and many other famous (but by then almost impossible destinations). Along the way he dodges the Soviet agents sent to track him down, meets all manner of locals and uses every dodge he can come up with the see parts of the world few westerners could visit.

While in Moscow, during a break from his adventurers, he witnesses the final show trial, at which Stalin consolidated his power. The chapter describing the “Trial of the Twenty-One” is a must for anyone interested in socialist history, describing as it does the great lengths that Stalin was prepared to go to, in order to destroy his opponents, and the manner in which friend became victim. Of the twenty one on trial, Maclean devotes some time to Nikolai Bukharin, once a leading Bolshevik intellectual who capitulated to Stalinism. Maclean describes how Bukharin repeatedly runs rings around the prosecutor's invented stories, but is unable to break out, fearing, Maclean feels, to criticise the Soviet Union even though it had by then strayed far from the orginial socialist vision.

Few were brave enough to believe that Stalin had destroyed genuine socialism, like Trotsky argued. But Maclean shows that even when they had been completely crushed, the old revolutionary spirit could still show itself.

At the outbreak of World War Two Maclean is back in London and discovers he is unable to join the military due to his important foreign office role. Discovering a loop-hole that means he cannot remain in his post if he stands for electoral office, he resigns to fight a seat for the Tories and wins. Soon after becoming an MP he is called up for service and ends up in the Western Deserts of Libya with the SAS and the Long Range Desert Group.

Further “boys own” adventures occur, until he is plucked out of this hell hole and parachuted into Yugoslavia on the personal orders of Winston Churchill to aid and abet the guerilla forces sabotaging the German war effort there.

Maclean quickly becomes indespensible to Tito the Guerilla leader as a conduit for weapons and resources and spends the rest of the war fighting with the partisans against the Germans. He is even present with a British Jeep at the Russian liberation of Belgrade.

Fitzroy Maclean, SAS soldier, Tory MP, friend of Churchill and Tito lead a life full of excitement and adventurer. His book is a fascinating insight into the nuances of an amazing period of history, even if his ideas and politics aren’t something that I can share. I recommend it as a piece of history as well as adventure.

Fredrick Engels - The Condition of the Working Class in England

Before he became Karl Marx's friend and closest collaborator, Frederick Engels had already achieved more in his life than most philosophers do in decades of thinking. This book, his first major work, is nothing less than a classic work of social investigation. It wasn't the first book to document the poverty and alienation of the emerging working classes, but it was the first to do so with an explicit attempt to understand the role of workers under the newley emerging capitalist system. In part, this was to explain and document this new social situation for those outside England where industrial capitalism had yet to take hold, but in part it is clearly a stage of Engels' thinking as he grasps towards the theory that would ultimately become Marxism.

The major parts of the book that deal with the conditions of people's lives in the mid-1800s are horrific. Walking the streets of Manchester today, it's impossible to comprehend the lives of those who lived in the slums that made up so much of the town. Engels mainly looks at Manchester as it was both the city where he worked (in his father's business) and the foremost industrial city of the world.

One brief passage would serve to get a taste of Engels' descriptive powers:

"In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a dorr, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement...... below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stnech of animal putrefaction."

This description of the area around Ducie Bridge in central Manchester continues in this vein for many paragraphs because this was typical of working class areas of the time - left, effectively to rot.

Themes that are to become central to the Marxist thought that Marx and Engels develop later are touched on here. The atomisation of the worker that leads him or her to compete with others, turning them against those who should really be allies.

Talking of London he writes "The dissolution of mankind into monads of which each one has a separate principle and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme"

The role of the family as both a haven from the horrors of working life and a source of pain, stress and suffering. The way that physical work distorts both physically and mentally, and the way that the factory owner makes profits from the exploitation of the thing that makes the worker human.

In the 1840s, Manchester was a source of immense profit for a few capitalists. Yet none of this significantly improved the lives of those who created this wealth. Engels' documents the medical and scientific reports that show how human life was stunted and deformed by the repetative, back breaking jobs. Constantly in this work, we find Engels raging at those responsible for the wretched lives of the workers.

"During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found posessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. Let testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation".

Engels' hatred of the consequences of capitalism and the rise of these giant industrial cities lies alongside his understanding that for a socialist society to emerge the force to create it must be created. He understands that only in these industrial towns does the concentration of economic power in the hands of thousands of men and women give the proletarian movement the hope of success. To this extent the book is also a celebration of working class revolt. However it's in this context I mention one thing that slightly surprised me - this is Engels' description of the Irish in the book.

Marx and Engels, writing years after the completion of this work, understood that the racism directed towards the Irish was a huge weakening factor in the unity of workers. It damaged their movement, distracted from the real enemies and was artificially stoked by the media and the ruling class of the times, for precisely those reasons.

However in passages in this book, the young Engels certainly echoes some of those prejudices.

"These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend on drink. What does such a race want with high wages?"

Given that this is could be the worst racism directed at more recent immigrants to these shores, it's important to venture the opinion that this was very much Engels at a young age. His ideas were not fully rounded and perhaps he reflected the awful prejudices of the time, and his class (he was after all from the factory owners, not the factory hands). Later in his life, he explicitly rejected such ideas and indeed had a lifelong relationship with an Irish woman, Mary Burns.

The work is clearly an important one, not simply for the documentation of the life of the workers of early capitalism, but for an understanding of the development of Marxism and also to show that Frederick Engels, a man who all to often stands in the shadow of his friend and collaborator, was also a man of formidable skills.

For those who would like to know more about the life of Frederick Engels I would recommend this article by Lindsey German.

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Alastair Reynolds - Pushing Ice

This is the first Alastair Reynolds work that I have read that isn't set in his future history set in the so called "Redemption Ark" universe.

It's really a three part novel that starts moving very slowly and gathers pace, until the end, which is extremely fast moving. This is only in part due to the immense acceleration in space/time that the principle characters experience.

The title refers to the particular employment of the "Rockhopper" and her crew. Rockhopper is a fairly beaten up space-craft that really could do with a re-fit (think the space-craft in Alien for instance). It's crewed by a dedicated band of miners whose job is to manouvere comets into earth orbit.

The opening chapters describe the fairly mundane work that goes on, until Janus, an unusual moon of Saturn, starts to leave the solar system. Clearly under some form of alien propulsion, Rockhopper and her crew give chase. They're the only humans near enough to possibly get close to the rapidly disappearing Janus.

What's interesting, is that while this is a fairly normal plot device for SF (remember Rendevouz with Rama and its sequels anyone?) Reynold's adds some interesting twists. Firstly, unlike Arthur C Clarkes famous book, the people who explore Rama, sorry Janus, are very much fleshed out characters. The main storyline, other than humans travelling across the universe trying to investigate strange alien space craft, is that of the conflict between two women for control of the space craft. There aren't really any good or bad people in this - just those who have difference ideas of how best to save their own lives, but this makes for a much more human SF than normal.

There is, disappointingly little information on what the Janus spacecraft is eventually. I kept hoping for some big explanation about what was going on. When it finally comes, the story has, to be honest moved on to a different arc, and dramatically changed it's course. So I felt it was a little lacking in clear explanations to why a moon of Saturn suddenly left the solar system at great speed.

This is a good bit of writing, from a SF author who is clearly writing at his best. I look forward to more of these standalone novels, just as much as I look forward to the next Redemption Ark book.

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Larry Niven - Crashlander

Crashlander brings together all the short stories that make up one of the more famous "arcs" in Science Fiction - the stories dealing with Beowulf Shaeffer. Or so it says on the back, however since reading this, I've discovered that there is a further Shaeffer story, which I'm glad about, because the last one in this volume is strangely unfulfilling. In the "future history" that is Larry Niven's "Known Space", Shaeffer fills an important role.

It's him who discovers that the core of our galaxy is exploding and sets the scene for the Puppeteer exodus... leading to the Ringworld Series. He also has a number of adventures that serve to set the scene for key plot elements of Niven's universe - the near indestructibility of the General Products spaceship hull for instance. He also is the father of Louis Wu - the hero of the Ringworld books.

This story collection contains one new story, and a bridging story - giving context to the last tale and taking the form of a conversation where all Shaeffer's tales are recounted - giving the excuse to reprint them. The latest story is interesting - the nuances of the writing give the game away that it's written many years after the earlier stories (people have handheld communications devices and use them frequently, unlike in the earlier works for instance).

For Niven (and Known Space) fans this will be a must have. For those interested in the development of one of the classics of Science Fiction it will be interesting. For many others, the stories might seem a bit dated.

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Cathy Gere – The Tomb of Agamemnon (*)

The story of Agamemnon, the King who led the Greeks to the siege of Troy is one that deserves reading. Possibly of far greater interest and excitement is the story of how the ancient city of Mycanae was named as the hero’s place of burial.

This story is fascinating because it shows how history and archaeology are often the battleground for more contemporary ideologies, and that far from being independent investigators of the past, archaeologists can suffer the same desires for fame and fortune as anyone else.

In 1876, the German archaeologist (Wikipedia describes him as a “treasurer hunter”, which is both accurate and amusing) Heinrich Schliemann, in search of the aforementioned fame and fortune discovered a spectacular trove of buried gold artifacts covering several bodies. Schliemann immediately announced that the location of the burial, in the ancient city of Mycanae was that of King Agamemnon.

The public response was amazing. Front page news on The Times and newspapers across the globe, fame, fortune and celebrity belonged to Schliemann. Few questioned that the 3000 year old grave goods were anything but what he said they were. Even fewer questioned his destructive methods of investigation.

The truth did eventually emerge - partly as the era of Colonial archaeology disappeared and local archaeologists did a more thorough and critical study of the sites. But in the creation of the idea that Mycanae was the lost city of Agamemnon, Schliemann brought into the world a more lasting idea.

Tourists still visit the lost city, some no-doubt still believing that Agamemnon did come from here. But the idea of a ancient “super hero”, gloried in battle and carrying before him all his foes, to be betrayed and murdered by those closest to him inspired many more. Poets, writers and politicians over the decades following the excavation traveled to Mycanae. For some this was a near divine moment of inspiration. For others the ancient Swastika symbols inspired more terrible ideas – as shown by the signatures of Goebbels, Himmler and Goering in the guest book of a nearby hotel.

Since the Second World War, theories about those who lived at Mycanae, now identified with Bronze Age Greece, have waxed and waned at great speed. First seen as the home of some sort of Aryan super-hero, then re-imagined as a place of “pacifism and democracy”, the site is now viewed as a place of war and defence.

Cathy Gere’s book is an immensely readable account of the way that Mycanae has been imagined throughout history. Anyone who reads it, will only be inspired to read further and visit the place. The most remarkable fact that she brings out however, is that the first people to dream of what had happened in those ruins weren’t the western archaeologists desperate for riches. Rather it was the ancient Greeks themselves, those who returned there long after the Bronze Age civilisations had vanished. Just as the modern tourists must stare at the ruins and wonder, those Greeks couldn’t comprehend the giant walls of the city. For them, only a hero from their greatest epics could have lived there, and so the myth was born.

(*) Full title – The Tomb Of Agamemnon, Mycenae and the Search for a Hero

There is a fascinating interview with Mary Beard, editor of the Wonders of the World series, of which "The Tomb of Agamemnon" is part, here.

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Alastair Reynolds - Galactic North

This collection of short stories fills in some neat little gaps, and ties up a few loose threads from Alastair Reynolds' galaxy-wide future histories. The stories are pretty much self contained, though I imagine that a few of them would benefit from a prior knowledge of Reynold's universe and ideas.

Reynold's universe is populated by a few different "types" of humans and very little else. Other intelligences have reached a certain point, then been destroyed. This is alluded to in these stories, but you'll need to read some of the other books to understand why.

The stories in themselves are not as brilliant as either the longer novels, or the author's earlier collection of novella's "Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days". In a couple of them the "twist" ending, or the crux of the plot can be spotted a long time before the reader is meant to, particularly if you've read a lot of SF! That said, there are a few brilliant ideas here - "Grafenwalder's Bestiary" is a genuinely creepy tale of people who will collect anything (though I had to resort to Wikipedia to remember just who is who in the stories finale). "Nightingale" is an exciting story that deserves to be made into a feature length film, along the Aliens theme, though in some ways, its plot is close to that of that appalling film "Event Horizon".

Finally, there are some moments of pure genius. I found the gun in the titular story, "Galactic North" that cheerfully says "Thank you for using this weapons system" as it's put away, particularly memorable.

For Reynold's fans this collection will be a must have. For those new to his work, I'd recommend one of the longer novels as a better introduction to this particular universe.

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Madison Smartt Bell - All Soul's Rising

When I reviewed CLR James' magnificent work of history, The Black Jacobians, I commented that someone had described it as the greatest work of history ever written. I commented further that to read it, was to be inspired to challenge oppression and racism today.

Madison Smartt Bell's three volume work of fiction based on the events described in CLR James' book has that same aim - no one who reads it can fail to be inspired in the same way that James' work does.

The revolt of the San Domingo slaves against their oppression was violent and brutal. Decades of slavery, and it's associated violence, torture, murder and rape meant that the backlash against it echoed this violence. No one can condemn this though. The pages of the novel that deal with this, make for grim reading. But for every white slave owner tortured or raped, a dozen further atrocities are committed as the colonial rulers try to regain their power.

What makes "All Soul's Rising" so powerful, is that this violence reads like a history book. At no point did I think that this was some sort of fantastical fiction. Every event that is described here carries the feeling of historical accuracy. That doesn't make it easy to read - descriptions of rape and torture never are. But you feel that you are being carried along as an observer to a crucial moment in history.

The Haitian revolution had world-historical consequences, it was revolts like this, that sealed Slavery's fate. Certainly without the heroism of the black slaves who refused to continue to be ruled in the old way, many hundreds of thousands more would have suffered that terrible fate. Madison Bell manages to deal with the complex details of the rebellion extremely well. Though it's this complexity that presumably means that there must be three volumes to the story. However there is a handy time-line in the book that gives the background to events (and crucially, further details about events in Revolutionary France that so impacted those on the island).

Anyone who wants to understand how Slavery was ended should read this book, though I would recommended CLR James' history as well, if only to get a complete view of this great historical event.

Eugene Linden - The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations

Just how civilizations have been altered by the climate is something that scientists, historians and archaeologists are happy to debate to a great extent. There is no doubt however, that climate (or rather changes in climate) has had a tremendous effect on the development (or retardation) of various historical societies.

Eugene Linden has summarized these discussions remarkably well. In particular, Linden has produced a useful account of just how the earth’s climate works – how air circulates in the atmosphere above us, how the great oceanic currents bring warmer water to parts of the North Atlantic, and cold water elsewhere, altering local temperatures. He paints a complex picture of an intricate system, where minor changes in on area can have dramatic consequences elsewhere.

Linden also tells us the story of the study of climate – in particular how modern scientists determine how the climate was in past ages. We meet the men and women who study ice cores from the Arctic, looking at the makeup of bubbles trapped in the ice from centuries ago.

This then would be a fairly useful introduction to the study of historic effects of climate. However it suffers very much from bad editing and overbearing writing. While this is minor, it’s really annoying in places – often for instance, Linden uses acronyms that aren’t immediately explained. Sometimes he makes the same point twice (as when he mentions the launching of an underwater measuring robot, shaped like a torpedo – he jokes twice on the same page that it was done on September 11th).

Additionally, I occasionally felt that the writer was trying to hard – for instance “milquetoast” is a word that is rare even in its native America. It certainly makes the writer sound pompous, when he really wants to be accessible and readable.

There are a couple of little errors in the science too, which are annoying in the context of a popular science book. The Maunder Minimum was not the “coldest period” of the Little Ice Age, a time of “dramatically reduced sunspot activity”. Rather it is the name given to the period when sunspots almost disappeared from the face of the sun. This isn’t hair splitting – it’s a silly error given that this is one subject that climate deniers go on about.

Climate Change did bring down ancient Pharaohs, Vikings and probably played a major role in the end of Mayan civilization. Eugene Linden brings the evidence together well, and is at his best when describing how the impact of climate events are hampered by the priorities of modern society. In an excellent chapter “El Nino meets empire”, Linden shows how the free-market priorities of the British Empire meant that climate related famines had a destructive result far greater than they should have. Linden dwells on Mike Davis’ well known book on El Nino, Late Victorian Holocausts to emphasize this and to lead into a discussion on the impact climate change could have on our modern society.

As I said, Linden is at his best at this point. How major and abrupt climate change would impact a planet of 6 billion people is horrific to imagine. The book is very much I think a polemic at a US audience blinded by corporate funded climate deniers and uncaring government, as such it’s an interesting read, but probably not the best starting place for someone interested in the topic who has already read some stuff on the subject.

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Norman Collins - London Belongs To Me

London 1938 - war hangs like a shadow over the heads of every inhabitant of the town. But London doesn't stop. In his beautiful preface to this, Norman Collin's most famous novel, the author introduces the "Real Londoners" who star in his novel.

These Real Londoners "sleep the night in London as well as work the day there", and of these, some are "in love, some in debt, some committing murders, some adultery, some trying to get on in the world, some looking forward to a pension, some getting drunk, some losing their jobs, some dying, and some holding up the new baby."

Each of the characters in Collin's book are perfectly crafted. None of them are perfect, they are ordinary working-class folk (though some pretend otherwise), often struggling to survive living ordinary lives. As with all people, ordinary lives are full of drama and excitement, love and hate, passion and fear. And London on the eve of war, is a city that forms the back drop to their stories.

First we meet Mr. Josser, fiercly proud of his job, at the moment of his retirement,struggling with a bag of memories and an ornate clock as he tries to get home to Dulcimer Street to spend Christmas with his family. As he arrives, we met both his family and the other characters who live in the house they share with their landlady, Mrs. Vizzard who seems to be waiting for the end of her life.

To tell more about the story would ruin the book. But beware, if you base your knowledge of this story on the famous film, the novel is more complex with a longer ending.

But what struck me as fascinating, as someone who lived in London for almost 7 years, is how contemporary the novel reads. The streets are crowded and the tube over-full. People work different hours, but still laugh and joke as any officer worker does in the run up to Christmas. The pubs are full and people watch their pennies, calculating how much they can afford to drink, and everyone dreams of getting out. I was surprised at how often extra-marital sex is mentioned (or hinted at!), so that's accurate too!

It's a great novel, funny and exciting and a window on a strange moment of history, when war was on the horizon and London was on the target list.

Barry Lopez – Arctic Dreams

Subtitled “Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape” this is a strange tome indeed. The first chapters read very much like a somewhat florid natural history book. The Arctic is often described and imagined as a desolate landscape of snow, ice and few living things. Barry Lopez explains why this isn’t the case.

Lopez explains how the peculiar nature of the arctic makes the things that live there very special. Take for instance his explanation of soil. Soil is, he says “a living system”, a combination of dirt and decaying organic matter. “It draws in oxygen like an animal through myriad tunnel built by ants, rodents and worms”. However the further north you go, the less living this is. Because of the cold, there are less animals and plants to help the material decay and aerate the ground. Eventually you get to a situation where dead material will take years, perhaps decades to decay.

It is this understanding of the arctic as being a continuation of other areas and a break that makes Lopez’s writing so interesting. It is not simply that the Eskimo people are humans adapted to the cold regions, it’s that there has been a gradual transition as people moved into the arctic and changed their lifestyles to suit the conditions. Lopez describes how Eskimo’s can survive with almost no possessions rebuilding their lives if everything they own is destroyed, but he doesn’t pretend that they are somehow super humans, capable of doing the impossible.

For this author, the arctic is a perfect example of how nature is interlocking. Polar bears depend on the seals, the seals are dependent on other animals to eat, other animals depend upon the tides and weather freezing the water in particular ways, to encourage or discourage the formation of microscopic plants and animals. All of this is subject to change (sudden and gradual) and all of it is affected by the presence and actions of man.

In fact it is when it comes to man that Barry’s writing really comes into its own. The last few chapters dealing with the history of man’s conquest of the Arctic – in search of financial gain in the most part, is a breathtaking story of voyage, exploration, accident and bravery. Imagine being trapped in the ice with several hundred sailors for over a year, but it’s precisely this that happened to many who braved the icy lands. This is not to say that the natural writing isn’t as interesting – the chapters on the Narwhal and Polar Bears are particularly fascinating… I liked the explanation of why the Narwhal’s tusk is covered in a spiral pattern for instance.

Ultimately, even if Barry Lopez’s florid writing gets on reader's nerves occasionally, this is nothing less than a wonderful explanation of how natural systems, depend upon each other in such a delicate way. It is also a terrifying portrayal of just what we have to loose if any part of those systems are destroyed or displaced.

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Christina Hardyment - Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint's Trunk

One of the hardest things about loving the novels by Arthur Ransome as a child, was not being able to sail, or even having access to a boat, apart from the occasional rowing trip on the pond in the local park. Novels like Swallows and Amazons, Peter Duck and We Didn't mean to Go to Sea were books to stimulate the imagination and let a young reader dream about sailing across the oceans.

There is no doubt that Ransome would have wanted that - it's clear from the biographical details in this book that he loved children as well as boats and fishing. His novels, we discover are populated with friends and family either as exact duplicates or amalgamations. The fascination of discovering that there really was someone who inspired the Swallows and the Amazons is only tempered by the excitement at the knowledge that Wild Cat island and similar places are real places.

Ransome of course would have enjoyed the fact that the boats and ships that inspired, Swallow, Amazon and Captain Flint's houseboat still exist and in the case of the later, still ply Lake Coniston.

Christina Hardyment has written a book that is nothing less than her Odyssey to find the places that inspired Arthur Ransome. He comes across as a larger than life character, a journalist prepared to suffer for his craft, but one to whom the good things in life are very important. While in Russia during the revolution, he found time to fall in love (and eventually marry) Trotsky's secretary and play chess with Lenin. He got a boat built and sailed it back to England, with adventures along the way. While expressing sympathies with the Russian Revolution, his friends and family clearly came from the well-off members of those that England sent abroad to manage her Empire, and the letters sent to him are full of fascinating details written by those who missed mucking about on boats in the Lake District.

For those who loved the novels Ransome wrote, there is much here to supplement them. Including, for instance, the missing chapter of Peter Duck that explains why the adventure doesn't really fit with the "reality" of the children's lives. The pictures illuminate Ransome's creative process - photos of people mimicking the poses needed to illustrate the books, and I liked the detail that Ransome went to, to ensure that the stories were accurate.

Finally back in print after many years, this is well worth grabbing, particularly if you hope to visit Swallows and Amazon country.


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John Romer - Ancient Lives; The Story of the Pharaohs' Tombmakers

Whenever you wander around an ancient place, be it Roman, Egyptian or Greek. Or visit some long ruined castle or cave, it is impossible not to gaze around and imagine what it must have been like for the people who lived there.

This is doubly problematic for those who have been lucky enough to visit the Pyramids. After all, no-one lived there. These were the tombs of the richest of Egyptian society. The people who made these places died, in the most, forgotten. The ordinary people of Egypt who created the wealth of the Egyptian Pharaohs leave few if any markers.

However for those who created the beautifully engraved and decorated tombs of the Valley of the Kings in southern Egypt. This is not true. For hundreds of years, men and women of the village that is now known as Deir El Medina lived and worked on the tombs and we are lucky enough to have a wealth of detailed accounts of their lives, as well as much more circumstantial evidence to back up the documents that have been discovered.

In the last hundred years or so, Archaeologists have discovered dozens of papyrus scrolls, which detail in minutiae the lives of these tomb builders. It seems that the foremen of the working gangs were meticulous in the day to day detail they recorded.

"Year one, on the twelfth day of the first month of summer, the boulder of flint was found on the right" wrote Scribe Kenhirkhopeshef, who was in charge of keeping the work journal of the tomb of the Great Ramses (who died in 1212BC). Each day he recorded the depth of digging, the number of wicks used by the quarrymen lamps and other details of the dig. Writing mostly on flakes of stone, the scribe recorded the 13 years work on the tomb of Rameses' successor. We know he sat and watched the workers from a niche cut into the rock above the tomb because he scratched "Sitting Place of the Scribe Kenhirkhopeshef" on the rock beside his seat.

While hard, the work was rewarding for the villagers. They held a priority place in Egyptian society - the important job of creating the resting place for the Pharaoh's corpse as the king travelled into the here-after. As such they got better food rations and more beer than most ordinary people. Though this didn't always mean the villagers lived in perfect harmony. Court records record the arguments and legal wrangling that must always occur in tight-knit communities where food might be short and possessions few. We hear about the rows and the fights, and the occasional murder.

Romer has brought together the most compelling stories of these people. To use a cliché, he brings them to life. For me though, the most lifelike the workers become is when they are forced, perhaps for the first time in history, to struggle together.

During the reign of King Ramesses III (around 1160BC to 1170BC) rations went short. Probably through robbery by bureaucrats in Thebes. The tombmakers did what their brothers and sisters of generations to come have done, they used the only weapon available to them - they downed tools.

Tempers finally broke on 14 November 1152BC, in the 29th year of the King, when the two gangs stopped their work and marched together out of the Great Place. The senior men, the two foremen, their deputies and the Scribe Amennakht had no idea where they had gone.

They went and found the local elders to demand rations and the next day headed for the temple of Ramses II, where the Mayor promised food. However, this wasn't forthcoming (not the last time a bureaucrat's promises came to nothing) and the strike continued. The next day, we learn that the missing rations were given to the men, and they returned to work. This victory seems to have given them confidence as further strikes are recorded necessitating the Pharaohs' Vizier to visit the village later in the year to examine what was causing the problems.

I could go on in great detail about similar events. The rise and fall of the village, matching the rise and fall of the power of the Pharaohs is here in detail and the final chapter brings the story up to date - detailing the discovery of the village and it's records, as well as information on how the story was decoded.

This is a fascinating bit of history - my only minor quibble, is that there is little on how the works were decoded.... the scratch markings reproduced here, carrying so much information are impossible to understand... I'd love more information on how they related to hieroglyphics, and how we know what they say. This is a minor criticism though of a fascinating book - perfect for anyone who believes that history should not be about kings and queens, but those that created their wealth, and in the words of Brecht built "Thebes of the Seven Gates".

Related Reviews

Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt: Volume 1
Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt: Volume 2

Shaw - Ancient Egypt - A Very Short Introduction

Verner - The Pyramids: Their Archaeology and History

Kurth - The Temple of Edfu - A guide by an Ancient Egyptian Priest

Chris Harman - Revolution in the 21st Century

Chris Harman has been writing about the revolutionary transformation of society for over 40 years. Whether writing about the broad sweep of human history, the "Lost" German Revolution of 1919-1923 or in more detailed work on Marxism and History, he has, in my opinion been one of the best Marxist writers for decades.

This little book is a fantastic re-assertion of the Marxist theory of revolution. In only 126 pages Harman puts across both the necessity for revolution and takes up all the counter arguments you ever hear when you raise the transformation of society at work, or in the bus queue. In doing so though, his writing never sounds tired or cliché ridden, and he continually surprises with new examples and ideas.

For instance in an early chapter called "the actuality of revolution" Harman takes up the idea that revolution is unusual. He writes that

In fact, revolution is so characteristic a feature of the modern capitalist world that the 20th century can be described as a century of revolution.... Britain is virtually alone among European states in not having fairly recent memories of revolutionary change and most of the non-western governments represented at the United Nations would not have a seat without the revolutionary movements that ended colonial domination.

There in one paragraph Harman brings alive both the scale of revolutionary history, its internationalism and its importance.

Socialists are perhaps used to hearing discussion about revolution in the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Harman of course goes into detail about this most important moment in history. But he doesn't limit himself to the "classic" European revolutions. The events of this century in South America are used to illustrate arguments such as the inevitability of working class resistance and the necessity of independent revolutionary organisation. But he also shows, particularly in the case of Bolivia, how the working class is constantly changing.

Common to those on the right in Europe who claim that the working class is no more, Harman points out that commentators in South America argued that Bolivia was undergoing "de-industrialisation" and its working class disappearing. The reality is different, the numbers engaged in manufacturing has reason tremendously, and it was these workers who formed the core of those on the streets of La Paz who drove Mesa from office.

The final chapter "Knocking on History's Door" reasserts the choice facing humanity - the creation of a society based on need, not profit or the ongoing destruction wrought by the nature of capitalism itself. Harman wouldn't be a revolutionary Marxist if he didn't conclude by urging the reader to become part of building revolutionary organisations. It is a argument I am happy to reiterate.

Related Reviews

Harman - Marxism and History
Harman - The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After
Harman - Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-83
Harman - Selected Writings
Harman - Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis & The Relevance of Marx
Choonara & Kimber - Arguments for Revolution

Harry Harrison - The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell

When I was about ten, I was given a copy of a collection of Science Fiction stories, that I still have today. The book can be credited with a lifelong love of that particular genre. Amongst the many stories in it, was one that wasn't a complete story, but actually turned out to be the first chapter of Harry Harrison's novel, The Stainless Steel Rat.

From the moment I read it, I was hooked on the idea of the underground criminal, the last of his kind, living beneath the surface of the dull utopian future society. I loved his warped justification for his actions, his quirky sense of humour, the funny little sayings, and the amusing philosophy:

"At a certain stage the realisation striked through that one must either live outside of society's bonds or die of absolute boredom... There is no longer room fro the soldier of fortune or the gentleman adventurer who can live both within and outside of society. Today it is all or nothing. To save my own sanity I chose the nothing."

So when I discovered that not only was the story I had just a first chapter, but part of a series of novels, my ten year old heart nearly popped in excitement. Since then, I have followed the Rat's adventures on both sides of the law. Read and re-read his fixing of elections and his travels in time. I've often smiled to myself at the gratuitous use of invention to save the day, and the fact that no matter how many bullets are sprayed around in an armed robbery, nobody ever seems to get hit.

This latest escapade is very much written with tongue firmly in cheek. When his beautiful wife disappears after visiting a strange religous temple on a utopian pleasure planet, the Rat travels through time, space and alternate universes to get her back. The evil (and multiple personalitied) rogue physicist Slakey will stop at nothing to prevent someone getting in the way of his evil plans, and the Rat has to use all his resources to save the universe again.

Well, it made me laugh a few times, though I did not like this Rat, as much as I liked the younger Rat who had to rely on his own resources and invention far more. Maybe it's the revolutionist in me, but I prefer the tales of the underground bank robber, hiding in society's cracks much more than those of the rich, experienced Rat working for the planetary police force. Or maybe it's just some nostalga for the days when reading The Boys Big Book of SF wouldn't look strange on the bus.

Hans Zinsser – Rats, Lice and History

Throughout history, on hundreds of occasions, various epidemics decimated the human populations. On many of these occasions the dead have remained uncounted, entire villages and towns have been emptied and very occasionally, the course of history has been changed.

We have become used to the type of history book that focuses on one particular commodity, material or scientific discovery and declaims how it has “changed the world”. In contemporary times, perhaps the first to do this was Longitude, Dava Sobel’s work that examined how the ability to measure distance at sea fundamentally transformed man’s ability to trade and wage war, and thus altered history. Since then, we have seen books claiming that their subject matter is singularly responsible for changing the world. Mark Kurlansky’s books Salt and Cod spring to mind, but there are others, and sooner or later some enterprising author will no doubt write 200 pages on the historical importance of “Dust”. But I digress.

However, many years ago, Hans Zinsser had a similar idea. In 1934, this scientist decided to write a long book which, amongst other things, touched on the shaping of history by Rats and Lice (in particular through their ability to carry and pass on diseases such as Typhus). Zinsser describes his work as a biography of Typhus. But Zinsser is far from a scientist who is limited by his scientific subject. The book starts with a gentle discussion of the ability of scientists to discuss subjects not related to science. It’s an important discussion – should scientists touch the realms of history for instance. Zinsser concludes that they both should and must and energetically goes about doing so, quoting such literary greats as Joyce, Shelley and Eliot along the way.

Zinsser’s style is a wonderful blend of poetic writing and simple science. But he is also very funny. At one point a footnote to the word “saprophyte” tells us that “if the reader does not understand this word, it is too bad” [1].

To understand the history of Typhus we need to learn a little about the spread of disease, how certain diseases love the dirty cramped conditions of human existence and how the medicines that fight them work. We learn also how humans can get disease from animals, and how animals (or insects) can carry these diseases, but not succumb. We also learn how terrible an epidemic really is. This book was written shortly after millions died in the First World War. Millions more died in the great influenza epidemics that followed that conflict.

More interestingly the non-biologist like myself learns that diseases like Typhus have a history of themselves and Zinsser, in those pre-DNA testing times shows us how scientists can show that the disease had evolved down different paths. The different variants having different effects, and different victims. Part of this discussion looks at epidemics in history and Zinsser examines the evidence for whether certain mass deaths described by Pliny or other ancient historians can be attributed to various “modern” diseases.

This is a fabulous work. Science as it should be written, by an author who clearly didn’t think that one should never stray from one’s area of special understanding. But one who also believed that knowledge was important to combat disease. I’ll leave the last words to Zinsser himself:

About the only genuine sporting proposition that remains unimpaired by the relentless domestication of a once free living human species is the war against those ferocious little fellow creatures, which lurk in the dark corners and stalk us in the bodies of rats, mice, and all kinds of domestic animals; which fly and crawl with the insects, and waylay us in our food and drink and even in our love.

[1] The Chambers Scientific and Technological Dictionary actually defines it as “an organism living heterotrophically [2] and osmotrophically on dead organic matter”

[2] if the reader does not understand this word, it is too bad

Related Reviews

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John Bellamy Foster – The Vulnerable Planet; A Short Economic History of the Environment

Most famous perhaps for his examination of Karl Marx's understanding of nature and capitalism, in his book “Marx’s Ecology”, this older book was John Bellamy Foster’s first venture into the world of environmentalism. It is short – barely 150 pages in length, but contains a succinct analysis of both the history of the human race’s relationship with the environment and the Marxist understanding of the relationship between nature and society.

Foster’s basic thesis is that humans have always exploited their surrounding nature. In some cases, in the past, this has led to human societies undermining the very basis of their existence. This is important for Foster, because he argues that while there is a difference between the exploitation of nature under capitalism, it is important not to fall for the “mainstream conception….. which traces all environmental problems, other than those linked to demographic influences, to the technologhy of production that emerged with the Industrial Revolution, inventing a gloried past characterized by ecological harmony”.

For Foster, drawing on the work of Marx and Engels, humans exploit the nature around them as the basis of their existence. Different historical socities have of course done this in many different ways. But this process becomes accelerated with the development of industrial capitalism.

The industrial revolution, the development of capitalism and the expansion of capitalism to every corner of the world, as well as the imperialistic wars that have been fought by various national powers have all associated environmental and ecological consequences. The destruction of the flora and fauna of the America’s by the settlers that arrived there. The oil spills and fires associated with the First Gulf War, the terrible pollution associated with the creation and rapid expansion of industrial cities are all good examples. Foster spends some time looking at the terrible health problems in the world’s first industrial city Manchester – he quotes Tocqueville

“From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilisation works its miracles and civilised man is turned almost into savage.”

This can of course be compared to the environmental destruction caused by the rapid expansion of modern Chinese cities, or as Foster points out, that caused by the industrialisation of East Europe and Soviet Russia during the cold war – he describes one city in the Urals, which was so polluted that the only cause of death was cancer.

For Foster, environmental destruction is part and parcel of capitalism. Capitalism’s drive for profit, it’s short termism and its externalisation of nature from its calculations of profit and lose are the basis of the environmental catastrophe we face. Attempts to change this are always subverted or undermined by those whose interests are linked to maximising profits. Foster points out how historically there have also been countervailing strategies – those that campaigned for national parks (or local ones) in the USA in the later decades of the 19th Century for instance. But the author concludes that these are only really short term victories. In his 1999 afterword he writes

“environmental history is not simply a product of technological or demographic change; rather it is inseparable from, even subordinate to, the way we organize out social relations. The environmental crisis is a crisis of society in the fullest sense. It signals the fact that a one-sided development of human productive powers without a commensurate change in the social relations by which we govern society spells social and ecological disaster.”

His conclusion is very stark, without social revolution, capitalism will continue to rape and pillage the world’s natural resources. This isn’t a process that can continue indefinitely and there is a matter of urgency about the need to hasten the end of an economic system that threatens the very planet we live on.

Related Reviews

Bellamy Foster - Ecology Against Capitalism

Charles Stross – The Atrocity Archives

This is a remarkably strange SF&F novel. I should clarify that I mean this in a good way. The world of the Atrocity Archives is one where magic is real. Demons can be summoned, the paraphernalia of which-craft is real and secret government organisations battle to save the world from monsters from other dimensions.

What makes the novel clever is that this is all part of our normal world. The secret government institutions battle for cash from a stingy treasury and their agents fight bureaucracy. Our hero is a normal IT techy, promoted to active duty instead of his normal work fixing file servers and lost data.

There are also terrorists (as there always must be these days) who in an attempt to commit some terrible crime, come close to summoning a “Lovecraftian” horror from another dimension. To complete Charles Stross’ checking of every available cliché, there are also fugitive Nazis, living on an alternate Earth in a different universe (accessed through a gate opened in a dodgy hotel in Amsterdam).

Now, if this was a plot by Robert Heinlein, you would, loyal readers, expect me to scoff and mock his immature storylines. Instead I must praise Stross for making all this nonsense extremely readable, funny and firmly tongue in cheek. Fantasy writers have to be able to take a few mocking words from readers who don’t care about dragons. Stross shows here that he is prepared to be laughed at by a few reviewers because he knows that many other people will laugh with him. There are dozens of in-jokes about mathematics, physics and computer science – more than enough to entertain the extreme geeks out there.

If I have one criticism about this book, it’s that bundled with it, is a short story set in the same world, with the same heroes. It’s great fun too, but I wasn’t expecting it and you don’t get the impression from the cover of the book that it’s there. It meant that the main story finished about 80 pages before I expected it to.

This is of course not a real moan about what is fabulously entertaining fantasy. A Resolute Reader Recommended Read!

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Gareth Dale – The East German Revolution of 1989

The closest I have ever been to revolution was to be one of the “Mauer-Spechte” who helped, from the western side, chip away at the Berlin wall in December 1989. Of course, by then, the wall was no longer the barrier it once was. As a symbol of oppression and dictatorship, it had been rendered totally impotent by the struggles of millions of ordinary East German’s over the preceding months.

In the summer of 1989 I’d visited East Berlin with an Uncle. Standing on the Eastern side of the Brandenburg gate he’d told me how he believed that the wall would always be there. Unconsciously he was echoing the thoughts of the then president of East Germany Honecker who argued that the wall would remain for a hundred more years.

Yet a few months later the wall was breached in many places, Eastern Germany was on the brink of collapse in the face of mass demonstrations and a new unified Germany was on the horizon.

Academic, Marxist and Eye-witness, Gareth Dale has documented the exact process that lead to this remarkable turnaround. Through a myriad of human stories, we hear of the millions of ordinary Germans who took to the streets in ever increasing numbers until their voices could no longer be ignored.

Some of this has been documented elsewhere. In particular, the role of the Leipzig protests that grew out of the “peace prayers” in the Nikolai Church. What Dale does very convincingly is to show how the role of the “masses” was the central driving force of the revolution. Arguing against those who believe that the fall of East Germany was simply the result of the growth of internal opposition groups, or the machinations of the west, Dale shows that 1989 saw a grass-roots revolution that showed “the potential that arises when established order breaks down in the face of collective protest”. How this potential was derailed down the path of German unity (which Dale shows was rarely a demand of those who took to the streets in 1989) and rampant neo-liberalism forms the bulk of the latter part of this work. There are many factors, but not least amongst them was the fear of many of those at the head of opposition organisations like New Forum, of the organised workers whose strikes (both real and threatened) shook the German state in early 1990.

At a time when Germans were storming the headquarters of the secret police, demonstrating in their hundreds of thousands, the threat of mass strikes in huge workplaces opened the opportunity for the very “grass roots” democracy that oppositionists had called for. Instead, New Forum condemned the strikes and turned their backs on the organised workers, help to open the way for the destruction of industry and economic collapse that followed reunification.

This is not to condemn those who had for so many years bravely opposed the East German dictatorship. They were not revolutionists and indeed where often swimmingly at the head of the flood, rather than leading it. The German state was easily able to co-opt them into harmless “round table” discussions rather than allow them to lead the struggle for real change.

Gareth Dales’ book is more than a fascinating examination of one of Europe’s most recent revolutions. It’s a reaffirmation of the role of the masses in revolutionary moments. Drawing upon recent works in Social Movement theory, it shows how ordinary men and women do extraordinary things, how revolution changes people’s lives and how even the most apparently powerful of states are often very weak indeed.

Neal Asher – Hilldiggers

Neal Asher is not a new writer on the SF&F scene - “Hilldiggers” his latest [2007] novel, is clearly the continuation of earlier works and themes.

Initially this seems to be a classic story of first contact between a solar system of humans “cut off” in some way from Earth and left to develop in isolation, and the more advanced human societies, left behind. However as we delve deeper we find it’s not quite so simple. The isolated solar system contains two planets whose inhabitants, descendents of Earth’s original colonists have only recently concluded a long, bitter and almost genocidal interplanetary conflict. They have also to a changed substantially from the human form.

Back on Earth, a civilisation now ruled by Artificial Intelligences, sends a human ambassador (himself with various flaws and secrets) to the solar system. The more powerful, victorious, civilisation he encounters seems sick to the heart – militaristic, and superficially democratic – understanding its many secrets, including the initial provocation for war itself and the consequences of a strange “alien” artefact discovered during the war are key to solving the ongoing interplanetary hostilities. This is the precondition for welcoming the worlds back into the warm embrace of humanity (or at least it’s governing AIs).

The alien artefact has imbued four individuals with superhuman powers of intelligence and analysis. But as the different forces these people represent in our alien solar system jockey for power, war becomes once more inevitable and it is left to our human envoy (alongside an invisible, faster than light travelling, cat shaped AI, nicknamed Tigger!) to save the day.

If all this seems a bit like the proverbial literary whirlwind, don’t worry, it reads like that to – probably intentionally on the part of the author. So readers might like the myriad of plot twists and technological innovations that are thrown out on every page. Personally I find it a bit tiresome, though I was, I admit hooked till the last page.

However if this story of a flawed human envoy, travelling to a lost outpost of human civilisation, as an ambassador of a near utopian civilisation ruled by Artificially Intelligent machines, aided by a companion who has more technology in one robotic arm than the entire solar system being visited rings any SF bells, this is because it’s been done before in one of the best contemporary SF novels. Neal Asher’s book is enjoyable, but it’s not first class SF.

Peter Linebaugh - The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century

Loath as I am to quote favourably anything from the odious Daily Mail, when reviewing Peter Linebaugh’s monumental work, they got it absolutely spot on - describing it as “A remarkable book… this is history as it should be written”.

Linebaugh’s starting point is to argue that you cannot understand the history of London without understanding property relations within that society. And you cannot understand property relations and the development of capitalism without understanding the struggles that took place between those who had property, and those who had little or none. In this he consciously echoes the famous lines of the Communist Manifesto, whose authors wrote that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Following on from this argument, the author examines how punishment and indeed crime changed to reflect the changes taking place in society itself. The ultimate in punishment is death and Linebaugh’s work examines society through the often detailed records that accompany the judicial murder of London’s criminals by hanging at Tyburn Hill.

Those with even a cursory knowledge of crime and punishment will recollect that capital punishment in the early eighteenth century was often for what we would consider the most minor of crimes – the stealing of a handkerchief for instance. What this book argues is that the public spectacle of capital punishment had a more complex purpose – to shock and cow the public into the acceptance of new forms of property relations and the destruction of old forms.

Perhaps the genius of Linebaugh’s book is to combine this understanding of the rise of capitalist society with the voices of those who where hung. Their explanations of why they committed the crimes, their contempt for a society whose only interest in their lives was the brief life history before their condemnation, and their belief in a more just way of living.

The way our modern world is shaped by the struggles of the past is brought out in fascinating detail. The network of national banks arose as a response by rich farmers unable to return home from the markets in London and Bristol because of the overwhelming numbers of highwaymen. But those highwaymen themselves were often those whose traditional livelihoods in the countryside had been destroyed by new practises that centralised farming and destroyed the small butchers and traders, replacing them with larger businesses.

Time and again, through Linebaugh’s detailed examinations of the lives of butchers and highwaymen, prostitutes, Irish immigrants, former slaves and shipbuilders we discover a willingness to hold onto the few “rights” they had, the customs and practices of decades, in the face of a brutal and rapidly changing world. Sometimes this exploded into anger as with the burning of Newgate prison. For too long this event was described as an anti-Catholic plot by a drunken mob, yet in relating was a huge mass movement that targeted and destroyed symbols of oppression, such as the prison, as well as the houses and homes of those establishment figures who had condemned so many to it.

We learn of the first “general” dock strikes in Shadwell where the strikers raised the Red Flag for the first time in history and on a smaller, but no less important scale, we read time and again how the crowds gathering to watch a hanging often tried to intervene, sometimes with great success.

Towards the end of the book, Peter Linebaugh describes a world where capitalism is almost triumphant. Through his examinations of day-to-day custom and practice in the Deptford shipbuilding yards, we see how establishment figures are grappling with the very nature of exploitation through work. How they measure, quantify and calculate surplus value. We see the first attempts to deskill a workforce, to introduce piece work and to “rationalise” industry through the introduction of technology.

Shipbuilders, in all their different tasks, had for centuries taken “chips” home. These were the excess cuttings from the colossal amounts of wood required to build the ships needed for Britain to further its imperialist ambitions abroad. For the capitalist, these “chips” represented waste, inefficiency and outdated methods. For the workers on the other hand “chips” were the difference between starvation and life, in an industry where payment was often 15 months behind schedule.

The attempts by the establishment to stop this tradition – first through legislation, then with violent punishment and then to the aborted attempt to use technology to make sure that the waste was minimised are countered by the struggles of the dockyard workers themselves – from the smuggling of bits of wood under clothing to strikes and machine-wrecking.

These stories are mirrored throughout this wonderful work in the stories of the men and women who struggled against the consequences of a rising capitalism, to try and ensure that their space within the new society was their own.

In his afterword to the second edition, Linebaugh makes an obvious point – we continue to live in a world where countries around the globe, and in particular the world’s major capitalist power still use capital punishment to cow and batter their oppressed peoples. The struggle for justice and freedom cannot be successful, until that is no longer the case.

Through their struggles, the men and women of eighteenth century London ensured that hanging was no longer seen as a safe option for the London establishment, and brought forth a new (if still oppressive) form of justice – it is a battle that will have to be won again and again today.