Imperium by Robert Harris

Imperium by Robert Harris, 2006, 2009

This book in many respects seems to have been written with Hollywood already in mind. It is vivid, action-packed, and the episodes often almost beg to be filmed as scenes.

All the characters are carefully drawn and differ convincingly and memorably from one another. In particular, Pompey is the larger-than-life type, so that reading his “scenes” one can feel him as almost physically present. The episode of the pirates – the sudden menace that made it “necessary” to grant Pompey extra powers to deal with them, which he then did with literally incredible rapidity – was strongly reminiscent of Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein’s WMDs in 2003.

Robert Harris has clearly done a lot of research. He refers to this briefly at the end of this book, and in more detail at the end of the third book in the series, Dictator. His chosen approach is to present, and to some extent fictionalise, Cicero’s life and the events that ended the Roman Republic, as a modern-day political thriller. The book is easy and compelling reading. This means that people who have no idea about and perhaps minimal interest in history as a subject (including some of us, who weren’t sure whether the book was set in the fifth century BC, fifth century AD, or somewhere in between), can read about it and acquire a fair picture of what went on.

This approach, of course, has its problems. Anachronisms are not altogether absent: references to a “drawing-room”, and others.

There is also the risk of being carried away by enjoyment of the story and suspending critical judgement.

Another problem is that some of the episodes that Harris does invent are totally unbelievable from start to finish – especially where he has Tiro (Cicero’s private secretary) taking copious notes of a top-secret meeting of Cicero’s enemies while hiding in a hole behind a tapestry.

The choice of Tiro as first-person narrator seemed in some ways rather laboured, in that it involves inventing more or less likely reasons why he was present at all the episodes he describes, and how it is that he remembers them or has all his notes of them. N.B. notes were normally made by scratching on wax tablets – not a method that really lent itself to extensive long-term preservation, particularly not through the various exiles and escapes that Tiro experienced in his life.

There are some wonderful quotations. “If it’s gratitude you want, get a dog.” “The ability to listen to bores requires stamina…” “Gossip is a trade…” “There can never have been anyone quite so worldly in their pursuit of unworldliness as Titus Pomponius Atticus.” “Since when has idiocy been a bar to advancement in politics?” “The trouble with Lucius is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.”

What the book brings home is the sheer brutality of the ancient world, which it is not, unfortunately, impossible to parallel in today’s world. Worst of all of these, in many ways, was Verres’ hideous underground prison in Sicily. All of Verres’ crimes as discovered and detailed by Cicero are fact.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1945; 1992)

There are plenty of claims on the internet that “this book saved my life” and many more that "this book changed my life". It is easy to see why.

Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist living in Austria before the Second World War. After the Anschluss, he and his whole family were arrested and taken to concentration camps. Viktor himself survived, but his parents, wife, and siblings were killed. The first part of this very short book describes, fairly briefly, his horrific experiences in the concentration camps, together with some of the reflections and lessons that he drew from them. The second part is an even briefer account of logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy which he founded.

Although it is so short, the first part of the book touches on many subjects: religion and spiritualism; love; beauty; inner life; the meaning of life; death; “the last human freedom”, much quoted (“everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way”); hope; time; suffering; “collective psychotherapy”; the dividing-line between good and evil; and morality. A quotation from Nietzsche is key: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Prisoners who had a reason for living were more likely to survive the starvation and brutality of the camps. Frankl’s understanding of love, which he describes almost in terms of a revelation, is perhaps the most striking of all:

But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise (...)

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

In the second part Frankl explains the fundamental approach of logotherapy, which is the conviction of the “will to meaning” as being the most essential driving force in the human mind, more so than the will to power or the will to pleasure. He then describes how this is applied to all sorts of different situations and problems. He covers freedom and conditioning;

responsibleness, which he terms “the very essence of human existence” (“I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the east coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast”); the existential vacuum; love; happiness; the meaning of suffering; the error of Freudian psychotherapy; freedom; euthanasia; “paradoxical intention” as a means of combating phobias or compulsive behaviour.

A very important point is what he calls “the self-transcendence of human existence”. He says: “What is called self-actualization [self-fulfilment] is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.” Or, in the words of the Second Vatican Council often quoted by Pope John Paul II among others, “Man can only find himself through the sincere gift of self”.

Frankl says very much the same about happiness. It is not to be aimed for directly; it comes as the result of finding meaning in life.

On love, Frankl declares:

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being until he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Nicholas Nickleby - notes

Names, as always in Dickens, are often invented for comical or other effect, starting with Dotheboys Hall (apparently in one audiobook version it was pronounced to rhyme more or less with Sotheby’s – completely obscuring Dickens’ intention).

Reading Dickens takes commitment these days. He published his books as serials, and the result is what we might be tempted to see as a colossal “waste of space” (e.g. the storytelling about the Five Sisters of York and Baron Grogzwig; all the business with the Kenwigs and Mr Lillyvick; and, of course, Mrs Nickleby). Several bookclubbers listened to audiobook versions, which were really excellent as far as expression and characterisation were concerned. However, his elaborate descriptions are hugely enjoyable, e.g. of the Infant Phenomenon, who is used to show what a complete sham the theatrical world is.

Another thing that strikes the modern reader is the number of married couples: husbands and wives who, with all their faults or even wickedness, still loved each other in their way – the Squeers, the Mantalinis, the Crummles.

The Cheeryble brothers, extreme philanthropists, balance the extreme evil of Ralph Nickleby and Squeers.

Dickens’ work is modern writing in that his humour stands the test of time, and still makes readers laugh aloud; it is not staid or dated. There was a recent West End show of Nicholas Nickleby – British humour is a cultural thing, often consisting of laughing at ourselves.

Kindness and mercy are completely absent in Squeers (and Mrs Squeers). Dickens plays with horrible effect on their affection for each other in combination of their cruelty towards the boys, as when Mr Squeers is about to beat Smike for running away:

'Have you anything to say?' demanded Squeers again: giving his right arm two or three flourishes to try its power and suppleness. 'Stand a little out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; I've hardly got room enough.'

'Spare me, sir!' cried Smike.

'Oh! that's all, is it?' said Squeers. 'Yes, I'll flog you within an inch of your life, and spare you that.'

Mercy is also absent from Ralph Nickleby. He does soften slightly at the sight of Kate’s beauty and gentleness, though not much, often, or for long. The theme of mercy is brought home very tellingly by Charles Cheeryble at the end of the book: he offers mercy to Ralph, who contemptuously rejects it, only to fall prey to bitter remorse without repentance.

Connected with mercy is solidarity and brotherhood, notable especially in Nicholas’ behaviour towards Smike throughout the book.

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin, 2009

This book has already been discussed and reviewed very extensively. It is a good read, convincingly written so that you can, or imagine you can, hear the Tanzanians and Rwandans speaking. It invites comparisons with Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency books, but is in a way much more serious, being set in post-genocide Kigali, with the multiple problems of “truth and justice”, Aids, malaria, orphaned street-children, and more.

A very telling aspect is how the various characters work together to rebuild Rwanda, at a very local and personal level.

Angel, the central figure, makes cakes to order. Each chapter is broadly built around a different cake, and the Cake Order Form, is one of the devices that unite the narrative into a whole. Angel also has a habit of polishing her glasses when she needs time to think; and making hot steaming mugs of sweet, spicy tea.

Parkin clearly draws very extensively on her own experience as an HIV-Aids counsellor in Kigali. What is conspicuous by its absence is any coherent notion of marriage or of the value of morality, continence, chastity or faithfulness. In the many incidents and discussions in the book which touch on weddings, marriage, and couples, there is no understanding of marriage and love as self-giving.

Certainly, Angel and Pius are faithfully married, and Angel refers with deep disapproval to the way a young woman called Linda dresses: “she had never seen a man look at Linda’s face; there were always other parts of her body that were asking more urgently to be observed.” Angel has good values, but does not reflect on them. She and Pius are Catholics, but they know that some Catholics, even nuns and priests, took part in the killing in 1994. “In Rwanda we’re simply Christians. I’m nervous of attending just one church here, of listening to just one priest. Because how can we know what is truly in that priest’s heart after so many showed that love and peace were only words in their mouths? So we attend a different church every second week; in between, we still attend our local Catholic church” (p.85).

At the very start of the book, Angel explains that when she and her husband got married (they are now grandparents), they were “pioneers” of contraception, and were careful to have only two children “so that we could afford to educate them well.” In the event, their children, having had children of their own, both lost their respective spouses and died before the start of the book, and Angel and her husband Pius are now starting all over again, bringing up their five grandchildren as their own children. The book does not point the moral, but it is actually a clear instance of how wrong-headed it is to contracept in order to have fewer children and hence more money.

A fairly important figure in the book is Jeanne d’Arc, who, having been orphaned and gang-raped during the genocide at the age of eleven, has been a prostitute for the past seven years in order to support herself, her two sisters, and a small boy they found abandoned. Angel is able to help Jeanne d’Arc in many different ways, finally putting her in touch with someone who can teach her to sew to be able to earn her living in a “safer” way. But, at the same time, she jokes with someone else about Jeanne d’Arc and her “business”. Perhaps she develops more compassion for Jeanne d’Arc in the course of the book.

Angel is able to help people in many ways in the course of her business. One often has the impression that the author had a list of themes she wanted to bring in, and worked through them – FGM, the mayibobo (street children), truthfulness to oneself and to others, Catholicism in Rwanda – chapter by chapter, through the book.

Overall it is a good read, ideal for provoking enjoyable discussions, which need to take each theme a lot deeper, with a lot more informed input, than the book itself is able to do.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

     The book is a “journey” book – Harold discovers more and more about himself as he walks from Devon to Berwick-on-Tweed, and the reader gradually finds out about the secrets in his life. It is certainly formulaic, but still very fresh. A good read, absorbing and lively: people who would not have chosen to read it themselves were surprised to find how they enjoyed it. One, in her 20s, was surprised to find herself relating to someone more than forty years older than herself. Some found Harold painfully awkward, and annoyingly so – he could not even take the step of buying proper walking-shoes. Some readers asked if this was realistic or unbelievably exaggerated, but one said she knows someone who is in fact exactly like that. As for buying walking-shoes, it underlines the fact that people have familiar, comfortable things that they will always refuse to change for something new even if it would be much better.

     Harold and Maureen both lacked the capacity for self-reflection. They actually loved each other but had no idea how to express their love, let alone develop it, and as a result each felt unloved by the other. Their love was embryonic. Interestingly enough, at the very end of the book they revert to, and replay, their first meeting; their love appears to be adolescent again, unmatured, almost reduced to the mere “chemistry” of their first attraction. But before this they have gone through the explanations and confessions that they needed to make to each other.

     Obviously, Harold’s disastrous non-relationship with his appalling parents was the reason why he could not manage his relationship with Maureen – or David. After his mother had left, his father had introduced a succession of “aunts” into the house. Then “his father had presented him with an overcoat on his sixteenth birthday and shown him the door.” (p. 158), which was why he had never even had a proper education.

**SPOILER ALERT**     David’s suicide was his attempt to destroy not only himself, but both his parents too. He was manipulative, playing each parent off against the other; he was more intelligent than either of them, but this only made him despise them. This left him deeply unhappy and led him to ruin himself with drink and drugs. Yet Harold loved David just as much as Maureen did and, twenty years on, still agonises over his loss.

      Harold blames himself for David’s suicide, and for the apparent failure of his marriage with Maureen, and for Queenie’s departure from the brewery. He is tormented by these things but, perhaps surprisingly, his self-blame does not produce bitterness in him.

     Harold’s and Maureen’s lives are extremely small, extremely narrow, but also extraordinary. “... a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had done so for a long time” (p.180).

The amount of detail is satisfying and not over-done. Especially, of course, the descriptions of the sky, the plants, that Harold gets more and more involved in as he walks.

     Then comes the existential question: if Maureen has lived Harold’s life for him for most of their marriage, “Then who am I?” By getting away from her, he found out. He had not had any early relationships in order to be able to work out his own self.

     It is through some of the different people Harold meets and talks to that Harold – and the reader – discover more and more about Queenie’s cancer. **SPOILER ALERT** This prepares to some extent for Harold’s actual arrival and seeing Queenie, but it is still a shock, and the reader has to ask why it has to be such a horrible one – her tongue cut out, half her throat gone, and her face ballooned with a tumour?

     Harold is non-judgemental throughout: he helped the people who confided in him by being honest and not opinionated. He has an unexpressed well of compassion within, and suffers with people’s sufferings. “... he knew that in meeting her, and listening, he was carrying another weight in his heart and he wasn’t sure how much more of that he could take” (p. 148).

     His compassion grows as he walks on: “He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other” (p. 180).
     The journey is a pilgrimage in many senses, and Harold learns the meaning of freedom of spirit, firstly in his need to be in the open, and then in his realisation that he has to get rid of all the things he is carrying with him, all the props that he has been relying on. In the end, significantly, he loses his precious compass.

     The question of religious faith runs through the book, and is never resolved, although the nuns praying for Queenie do point to the affirmative at the end of the book. “If we can’t be open, Maureen thought, if we can’t accept what we don’t know, then there really is no hope.”

God's Secret Agents by Alice Hogge

God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot by Alice Hogge. HarperCollins 2006.

A totally absorbing and, for many of us, un-put-downable book. Hogge herself is not a Catholic, but she came across the story of the Catholic priests who came to England in the second half of the sixteenth century, when Catholicism was being stamped out and it was a capital crime to celebrate Mass or to shelter a Catholic priest. Hogge was fascinated by the doings of these clandestine Catholics, and started to research the story and finally to write it up in book form.

Her research is painstaking thorough and detailed, and she writes very well, in a simple, matter-of-fact style appropriate to the historical nature of the book, but never becoming boring.

The cover of the paperback edition of this book shows a wooden panel with someone peering through a knothole in the wood from the page behind. The book uses historical documents to tell the story of the proscribed Roman Catholic priests who came on the “English Mission” during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First and King James the First and Sixth. These were often the sons of Catholic families, or else converts, who had gone abroad to train for the priesthood, been ordained, and returned to minister to Catholics (“Recusants”, as refusing the government-imposed new religion) and, where possible, receive Anglicans back into the Catholic faith.

It was, however, a crime for a Catholic priest to minister in England, and these men knew what was awaiting them: a life on the run, from one hiding-place to another, hunted by spies who were hopeful of receiving a bounty for information leading to their capture. (Much of Hogge’s detail comes from reports written by these same spies for their masters, and still preserved in archives and other historical collections.) After the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth I and released her subjects from their allegiance, Catholic priests were considered by the English government to be in the pay of a hostile foreign power, and executed as traitors, by hanging, drawing and quartering. First, however, they would be tortured to extract information on their fellow-Catholics.

The book does not hide any of the gruesome details. Nor does it soften the difficulties that the “English mission” encountered, such as the factions and disunity within the Catholic community, and the number of priests and lay-men who recanted their faith for fear of torture and death. The characters that stand out, however, are magnificent men like Fr John Gerard, and Nicholas Owen, whose ingeniously constructed hiding-places often enabled a hunted priest to survive for another adventurous episode, or even escape altogether. And, of course, Fr Henry Garnet, who had the well-nigh impossible job of keeping the Mission functioning, and who was arrested as a result of the Gunpowder Plot, convicted of misprision of treason (though he denied to the end that he had known about it) and executed.

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer

A Civil Contract

 by Georgette Heyer, first published 1961

All of Heyer’s Regency novels are simple escapism; this one is certainly that, but at the same time it gives readers a lot to think about. The theme could be stated quite simply as “Romantic love versus matrimonial love”.

Adam Deveril, an officer in Wellington’s army, in love with the beautiful and aristocratic Julia Oversley, has just succeeded to his father’s title of Viscount Lynton, and finds himself overwhelmed by his late father’s massive debts. In order to provide for his family and save Fontley, the family home, he marries the plebeian Jenny Chawleigh, daughter of a very wealthy banker. The book follows their first year of married life, up until the Battle of Waterloo (18th June 1815).

As in all Heyer’s books, the research is impeccable. From Adam’s colonel in the 52nd Regiment, to the exact day and time when the news of Waterloo reached London, from the behaviour of the Prince Regent to the fashions of the day in hats and dresses, the details are reliable and accurate.

The other very enjoyable feature that this book shares with other Heyer novels is the excellent writing. Not a single sentence jars; plenty of them are memorable. In A Civil Contract, perhaps more than in any of her other books, Heyer sets herself to give a very complete picture of the main characters in the book.

Adam is a gentleman through and through: his character traits are loyalty, chivalry, honesty, a sense of humour, and strength of character (he holds out in support of Wellington against surrounding friends who are Whigs). Fastidious, even finicky, reserved, he retires behind “an impenetrable barrier” when displeased or upset. He is deeply attached to Fontley; he loved soldiering, but turns out to be a farmer at heart. He loathes accepting gifts – either from Lord Oversley or from Mr Chawleigh.

He feels a romantic love for Julia; over the course of the book he develops a solid matrimonial love for Jenny. Having taken the decision to marry her, he commits himself fully to his marriage. Right from the start, as soon as they were married, “He did pity her, and forgot his own aching heart in the need to reassure her.” Later on, Julia suggests that since they both still love each other, they could have an affair: he rejects the suggestion out of a sense of honour, and loyalty and compassion for Jenny. We witness his feelings develop from his reply to Julia’s question “ ‘Can you be happy?’ A tiny headshake answered her”, through “he had grown to be fond of (Jenny) — so fond, he realized, that if, by the wave of a wand he could cause her to disappear he would not wave it”, to “ ‘I do love you, Jenny,’ he said gently. ‘Very much indeed — and I couldn’t do without you’.” By the end of the book he has recognised what Julia’s father, and Adam’s friend Brough, had seen clearly from the start: that Julia and he would have been very badly suited.

Jenny’s character includes common sense, generosity, and strength of character. She is well-educated and intelligent; loving, forthright, blunt, understanding, and perceptive. We discover that she has been secretly in love with Adam ever since she first met him the year before. She is “unromantic”; “a round, rosy face remarkable only for its determination”. “The trend of her mind was practical; she entered into married life in a business-like way; and almost immediately presented the appearance of a wife of several years’ standing. She quickly discovered, and never forgot, his particular fads”. She sets herself to make Adam comfortable by creating a welcoming, well-cared-for home and being constantly even-tempered and undemanding – though being pregnant, and unwell, causes a considerable change in her behaviour!

The other really remarkable character is Jenny’s father, Mr Chawleigh. He is rough, generous, vulgar, too old to learn, sharp, decent, honest, and bullying. He is ambitious for Jenny to enter high society, but not for himself: he recognises that he would only appear ridiculous among “the nobs”. Adam says to Jenny at one stage, “I think there can be no more generous persons alive than you and your father.” Adam and Mr Chawleigh have several clashes, but in the end, recognising how totally different they are, they each learn to respect and even admire the other. Adam reflects about Chawleigh that “He did not know that the things he said were unpardonable, or that self-control in moments of stress was incumbent on him. He had fought his way up in the world with no other weapons than his hard head and his ruthless will. He was brutal but generous, overbearing yet curiously humble, and he gave way to his emotions with the ease of a child.”