Anicius Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524 AD)

Translation: V.E. Watts
Edition: Penguin Classics, 1969
Review number: 1475

There are a few books which have had a huge influence on the age in which they were written. However, few people today read The Consolation of Philosophy, which could be considered the foundation of medieval culture.

Boethius was a statesman in sixth century Italy, just after the final fall of the Western Roman Empire, but was disgraced and imprisoned; like many politicians in that situation, he maintained his innocence. But in prison, according to the account in this book, he underwent a mystical experience, being visited by a woman he eventually recognises as Philosophy, who goes on to teach him to treat his situation in what could nowadays be termed a "philosophical manner".

What appealed to the medieval mind about this? From the literature of western Europe over the next nine hundred or so years, it is partly the mystical element, and partly the allegorical flavour - the figure of Philosophy is a precursor of many later personifications. Not only that, but Boethius' distillations of classical philosophy, as well as his translations of Greek philosophers into Latin, were the main way in which their thought survived in an age of little literacy and where Greek scholarship was almost non-existent. Writers and thinkers influenced by The Consolation of Philosophy would include almost every notable figure from the best part of a thousand years of history.

The only book I can think of with a similar effect is Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which has many points in common with The Consolation of Philosophy. The later work was basically a way to make it easier to understand Puritan ideas about Christian salvation, while the earlier was doing the same with classical philosophy;  both had allegorical elements, Bunyan's more so; both authors were imprisoned, with prison playing an important part in their books; both proved incredibly popular and influential. The influence of Bunyan continues to this day, and many of his figures of speech have entered the English language ("slough of despond", for example); Boethius was responsible for the popularity of the idea of a "wheel of fortune", though he did not invent it.

Essentially, what Boethius is doing is a popular exposition  of neo-Platonist thought. He was a Christian, and yet is pretty circumspect about his theology in the book, talking of "God" but never mentioning Jesus. Some readers have wondered whether he was a Christian in name only, as he would have needed to be to be a successful politician in sixth century Italy, but his approach to philosophy inspired the medieval mind because he is able to start bringing the pagan thought into a monotheistic context, a process which culminated in the elaborate systems of Thomas Aquinas celebrated in Dante's Divine Comedy.

In modern editions such as this one, The Consolation  of Philosophy is divided into books each made up of several sections, which each end with poetry. Boethius was famed for his Latin prose style, though Watts does admit that the poetry is uneven in quality. Not having ever read the original, I wouldn't know, and it is perhaps less apparent in this translation, which I would suspect is not as great as Boethius at his best nor as poor as his worst, but is more even throughout. This is also one of the most academic of the Penguin Classics translation in its presentation (the actual translation is clear and readable enough), with footnotes identifying references in learned articles throughout.

Ours is an age which has learnt from the romantics to value "originality". Perhaps less so now than a few years ago (after all, what is original in the albums of the latest winners of the X Factor). I suspect that this is part of the reason why Boethius' work fell out of favour. As a philosopher, he does not claim to have any new insights - just ways to put together old ones to appeal to modern (in his time) tastes. As a distillation of ancient philosophy, the alternating prose and poetry is perhaps harder to get into today when it is not the kind of writing commonly encountered; there are far better introductions for the modern reader, which would go on to later thought - for a philosophy beginner who wants a close modern equivalent, where fiction and philosophy mingle in an approachable manner, I would recommend Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, aimed at a young teen audience but with plenty of charm for older readers.

The Consolation of Philosophy appeals to me because I have long been interested in the medieval way of thought. Perhaps in itself it has less to offer than as a window into a very different, yet recognisable, world to the modern West. But in the end I rate it at 8/10.

Christoph Fischer: The Luck of the Weissensteiners (2012)

Edition: ebook provided by author (2013)
Review number: 1474

The story of Slovakia in the thirties and forties is likely to be quite obscure to most British people, even those interested in the Second World War (which, as far as the histories commonly read in the UK are concerned, mainly happened in Western Europe, the North Atlantic, North Africa, and the Far East). Briefly, Slovakia was part of the Czechoslovakian republic which formed when Austria-Hungary collapsed at the end of the First World War, and had large German and Jewish minorities as part of its population. After Hitler gained power in Germany (the date at which The Luck of the Weissensteiners opens), Slovakia's German population became more powerful and nationalistic, until Czechoslovakia was split up, Slovakia becoming an independent republic which was a German ally (and effectively puppet state) during the war years, hard times to be a Jew in the area.

The central character of the novel, Greta Weissensteiner, is the book-loving daughter of a Jewish weaver, who falls in love with the German shop assistant Wilhelm in the town bookshop in 1933. Over the next few years, the story follows the increasing pressure on their relationship from the political situation in the country, leading to a spilt orchestrated by Wilhelm's rather unpleasant sister and the Weissensteiner family going into hiding.

The story itself and the way that the political changes going on around them affect the lives of the characters are fascinating. Fischer attempts to answer some difficult questions, such as why many people began to accept Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda: many people were fooled into believing that Jews were inferior beings, and didn't just go along with what they were told as a public necessity. Fischer portrays people who are just stupid, or who want to believe the lies for other, personal, reasons. Other aspects of The Luck of the Weissensteiners were less to my taste, however. One of the quirks of Fischer's writing is the way that the reader is frequently told the emotions and desires of the characters directly. Many paragraphs in this novel start with sentences like "Apart from the fear, she also felt guilty for hurting his feelings", chosen from a random page about half way through. This occurs so often that it begins to feel as though the narrative has a huge number of different viewpoints which are swapped between almost randomly. I often found the dialogue rather stilted, too, and so never really managed to suspend disbelief in the story. Other readers might well not be as finicky about this kind of stylistic point as I am, but for me these problems rather spoiled what was otherwise an interesting story with an interesting setting. My rating: 5/10.

Aldous Huxley: Ape and Essence (1948)

Edition: Vintage, 2005
Review number:1473

When I came across Ape and Essence in the local library, I was surprised. I like Huxley, and I have read a lot of science fiction, but here was a science fiction novel by Huxley I'd never heard of before, let alone read.

On reading it, the reason that Ape and Essence is comparatively obscure is pretty clear. It is, firstly, not a conventional novel. It purports to be a short description of the discovery of a film script in a Hollywood studio's reject file, followed by the script in question. Huxley himself worked in Hollywood as a script writer, unsuccessfully: the story, retold in David Bradshaw's short biography printed as the introduction to this edition, is that Walt Disney rejected a synopsis of Alice in Wonderland, explaining that he "could only understand every third word". The pairing of Disney and Huxley is incongruous in itself, without wondering what the eventual author of Doors of Perception might have made of Lewis Carroll - and what the children who watched a Disney cartoon using the script would have thought of the result. On the basis of the screenplay incorporated in this book, it would not have been one of the studio's greatest successes.

Ape and Essence, the screenplay, is a post-apocalyptic story, set in a devastated Los Angeles in 2108, decades after a nuclear war, on the occasion of the landing there of an exploratory mission from New Zealand, which was isolated enough to escape destruction. The savages who now inhabit the ruined city interpret the war as the time when Satan took control of the earth, and they are first encountered looting the graves in an exclusive cemetery. Their purpose in the story is almost too clearly satirical: there is no real subtlety here. The theology of the savages, who are portrayed at one point performing a ritual in praise of Satan, is something which would probably provoke protests even today if a film were ever made of this script.

Controversial material is not the only problem with Ape and Essence. The script has a large role for an off-screen narrator, who is very pretentious, almost to the point of parody, drawing conclusions about how the real events of 1948 lead into the world depicted as its future. The voice is similar to the best-skipped introductory essays which George Bernard Shaw added to many of his plays, especially that in Back to Methuselah, which also depicts the future of humanity. The narrator is irritating even in the script; in a cinema I think it would be unbearable, and makes me wonder whether Huxley had been to any films since sound came in. There's also a kind of masque forming the first section of the screenplay, a symbolic drama featuring baboons and multiple Albert Einsteins which is very dated, and might well have seemed so in 1948, even though its subject matter is firmly post-Hiroshima.

The title is picked up in the body of the script, most clearly on p. 55: "Only in the knowledge of his own Essence has any man ceased to be many monkeys." Huxley's point in Ape and Essence is to discuss the relationship between the bestial and civilised parts of human nature, and what he wants the reader to pick up is that it is only by understanding that he or she has a bestial side that it is possible to have any hope of overcoming it. It is a potentially pessimistic point of view, and motivates a thoroughly pessimistic tale. There are some good lines in the story, but generally, anything of interest in Ape and Essence has already been said better in Brave New World. My rating: 4/10.

Nina Bawden: The Witch's Daughter (1963)

Edition: Faber, 2008
Review number: 1472

This is the second book I have read from Faber's "Faber Finds" series of reprints, and the second which has been a revelation. Nina Bawden is not a writer who is entirely unfamiliar to me; I am sure that I read some of her books as a child, but no titles spring to mind unprompted. I definitely hadn't read The Witch's Daughter before.

The story is aimed at young readers of around ten or eleven, and is set on the fictional Scottish island of Skua. Two girls are central to the tale. The first, Perdita, is native to the island but is an outsider to the community because she is the orphaned daughter of a reputed witch, and spends her time running wild on the island, having never been to school. The other, Janey, is a visitor to the island, with her family; she too is separated from those around her, because she is blind.

Even today, I cannot think of another children's book which has as unusual a pair of characters at its centre. In 1963, it must have had a huge impact to its readers. Just think about what would have been popular books at the time for children of about this age to read, especially from the "classic" children's authors. Enid Blyton, Anthony Buckeridge, C.S. Lewis, Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton... All these writers feature children from upper middle class backgrounds (Crompton's Just William perhaps slightly less "upper" than the others), almost all attending private schools. The actual plot of The Witch's Daughter - the discovery of stolen treasure, and the children, unable to convince adults of its reality, trying to outwit the thieves themselves - could be from any one of Enid Blyton's popular adventure series - The Famous Five, or The Secret Seven, for example. Whether or not Bawden deliberately set out to counterbalance these stories, she succeeds in doing so, without preaching.

To any receptive child, The Witch's Daughter will have a lot to say about what it means to be different from those around us, and how even those who are dismissed from consideration in society have the ability to have adventures and do amazing things. Whether this Faber Finds edition is one which will appeal to children is another thing. In the midst of colourful, bright, and illustrated children's books, this is plain and has a only a couple of illustrations, and also has very small print: Faber seem to be aiming it at adults who remember the book from their own childhood, by using the standard packaging from the imprint. Perhaps they might read the book to their own children - I would definitely recommend it to parents whose children are the right age. My rating: 9/10.

Michelle de Kretser: The Hamilton Case (2003)

Edition:Vintage, 2004
Review number: 1471

The genre of post-colonial literary fiction has become one of the mainstays of the Booker Prize, with wins for several over the years. When starting to read The Hamilton Case, I thought that it was strange that this novel, set in Ceylon in the generation leading up to independence, had been overlooked by the judges  - and I am not the only one, as Hilary Mantel (herself now of course a double winner of the prize) suggests that it should have made it to the short list in her endorsement on the back cover.

Sam Obeysekere is a Ceylonese from a wealthy background, descendant of a family which has worked with the rulers of the island for centuries (hence the schoolyard taunt, "Obey by name, obey by nature). His father's profligate generosity destroys most of Sam's inheritance, but not before a (local) public school and then Oxford University education let him become a prominent lawyer, who then achieves fame by solving the murder case of the title, leading to the arrest of an Englishman for the killing. This all takes place against the background of nationalist unrest (parallel to, but less well known to me than, Ghandi's campaign in India), in which Sam's brother-in-law (and long term hated rival) Jaya plays a prominent role.

Much of the novel is told from Sam's point of view, but not all of it. I prefer the parts of the novel which are told by Sam, with observations which appear in the third party narrative such as "He gave no signs of understanding that his life had been a series of substitutions" being irritating brickbats from a writer who has shown herself able to use Sam's one-sided account to portray the relationship between Sam and Jaya with subtlety and humour.

The later parts of the novel become a different story, of madness and ghosts, but this is nothing like as powerful as the first half. I found myself no longer being engaged by a novel which initially seemed to be one of the best (excluding things I had read before) I was going to read in a while. Some of the short chapters remain atmospheric, but the real meat of this book is exhausted by page 121, the end of the second section and the Hamilton murder case itself.

Perhaps this change is partly deliberate: there have been many people who have lived lives of early promise and a brief flowering which then go nowhere - at least in some terms. But it is odd: to catalogue the life of a Sri Lankan who would have been closely associated with the British colonial regime in the period after independence could have been an interesting story. There is little of this to be gleaned from what Kretser chooses to write about, which is basically Sam's inability to relate to those close to him - his parents, his sister, his wife, and his son.

Perhaps Hilary Mantel only read the first half of the book; perhaps there is more to the second half than I saw - as I find Mantel unreadable myself, I am unlikely to appreciate the same things in fiction that she does. The best rating I can give The Hamilton Case is 6/10, despite the brilliance of the beginning.

Lord R. Benson: iPlot (2012)

Edition: Marador, 2012
Review number: 1470

A simple but arresting idea sets off this thriller: a couple pick up the wrong iPad after an airport security check when travelling to Australia, and find that it is fill of files about terrorism, including copies of hate mail sent to the Australian Prime Minister Carla Moore. The documents are fairly swiftly erased, the iPad having a feature that makes it possible for the owner to delete documents on a lost device. When Carla Moore falls ill suddenly, they suspect that there might be a link between the event and this iPad, but, having nothing concrete to show the police, they need to investigate for themselves.

iPlot starts slowly, and I found the basic idea of the swapped iPads difficult to believe: surely it can't be the case that there is no security to stop unauthorised users accessing the content on an iPad without entering a password? I'd be surprised if there were no apps to add biometric authentication capabilities such as iris scanning to iPad authentication. I am not an iPad user, but the answer to both questions appears to be yes, from a quick search on google, though it seems to be possible to bypass iPad authentication; this is a list of biometric authentication apps. So the idea that it would be possible to pick another person's iPad and only realise it is not your own when you see it doesn't contain the film you planned to watch on your flight - especially as the iPad concerned contains seriously sensitive data. My doubts made it hard to accept the verisimilitude of the story from the beginning.

There were other flaws which did not help. There are some rather clunky passages of prose, including the second chapter, which consists of lengthy and dull extracts from the documents on the laptop, including information about the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which is likely to be fairly familiar to anyone who has followed the news over the last few years, at least in the UK. This material could have been better introduced, and there is no need for so much of it, just a few bits and pieces to establish the type of content which is stored in the iPad. Anyone who has watched shows like Spooks or Homeland will already have a pretty good idea of what these documents will be like, so it will feel like familiar territory which could be skipped to many readers. There is something of a tendency to over-explain the background throughout, especially as many of the topics involved (the iPads, the terrorist plotting, the science) are likely to be of interest and fairly well known to potential readers, who I suspect will be - I hesitate slightly to say - geeks like me, who will be drawn in by the iPad idea.

The characters are poorly drawn; they all seem to have the same personality, pretty much, and even their physical descriptions are similar in many cases - this is a world of good looking, intelligent, and basically nice people.

But there are good sides to iPlot too. The story builds to its climax well, and eventually the most cynical reader will be drawn in. In terms of the plotting, I would have liked to have seen more use made of the iPads after they set the plot in motion, but the finale of iPlot was good anyway. I liked the technological and scientific aspects of the novel, even if they were over-explained, but I wanted to enjoy iPlot as a whole more than I did. My rating - 6/10.

Michael Johnston: Rembrandt Sings (2012)

Edition: akanos, 2012
Review number: 1469

Art historian Bill Maguire tells the reader his life story in Johnston's new novel. At least, he narrates a version of his life: he is clearly a constant reviser of material from his journals, and undercuts much of what he says with sardonic footnotes. His story is bound up with that of a rather older man, a painter named Joe Rembrandt, and most of Maguire's story is taken up with Joe's recital of his own life story, told to the young Bill while in the last stages of terminal illness. And in turn, Rembrandt's story is bound up with (fictional) painter Alexander Golden, whose daughter he married. Or perhaps not: it is clear fairly quickly that not only is Bill Maguire an unreliable storyteller, so is Joe Rembrandt, even if he does share an insight into Golden's paintings which Maguire uses to establish his academic reputation.

What unites these characters is a love for (and knowledge of) fine art. Even their involvement in dubious activities - including forgery and possibly, murder, as the front cover puts it - is fuelled by and part of their love for painting. Johnston captures the power of their obsession well, which is particularly useful, as it is of vital importance to the plot, as well as making the characters sympathetic: a forgery (and even a murder) for the love of art is easier to accept than the same crime carried out just to make money.

Rembrandt Sings is not intended to be an action thriller, and is more concerned with the motivation of the forger than anything else. The ending has a nice thriller-style twist to it; if reading the novel, do not skip forward as you would ruin a treat. Having said that, it is also a novel I wished had been longer, a rare object. There is nothing much recorded from Bill's live between the early twenties when his academic career was beginning and the position of senior and respected art historian, a likely candidate for the next head of the Tate gallery, who is looking back to his early days in the art world. Perhaps nothing out of the ordinary would have happened, just a standard academic career path, but more information would have been interesting.

Painting is not really my thing (colour blindness means that I tend to have problems perceiving pictures in the same way as people with normal vision), but I do enjoy fiction about art. I was in fact just starting Michael Gruber's Forgery of Venus as I finished Rembrandt Sings, another novel about art forgery, with a rather different slant on the subject. And I love Iain Pears' Jonathan Argyll series, which seem to have finished, unfortunately; they are more traditionally crime stories, and have less convincing forgers than Joe Rembrandt (which is not surprising, as it is  not the point of the books). I don't think that, even though music is the art form dearest to me, I would find a musical faker as interesting as the characters in this book, no matter how well done.

Altogether, I found this an interesting and impressive picture of the forger, with a clever twist, though lacking in pace for most of the time. My rating: 7/10.