Edition: Yale University Press, 1981
Review number: 188
Greece had an incredibly complex history in the medieval period, from the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 until the fall of Crete to the Turks in the seventeenth century. Before and after this, it had hundreds of years as part of a large and stable empire, the Byzantine and the Ottoman; a fairly stable and slow-changing condition (though not without historical questions, such as the puzzle of when and how exactly the nature of the population changed from Greek to Slav). In between these periods of stability, though, come four and a half centuries of turmoil, incredibly complex political maneuvring among fragmenting states, all of which is little known in Western European histories.
The diversion of the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople was one of the more cynical crimes of history. Internal conflicts made the empire an easy target, and the commercial ambition of the Venetians made it a tempting prize to them (and they were organising the transport for the crusade). The capture of Constantinople caused the disintegration of the empire, particularly its European provinces, which had already been carved up among the participants in the Fourth Crusade before it took place. Greece was divided into four or five small states, some still ruled by Greek aristocrats, others taken over by the conquerors and reorganised along Western feudal lines, with the Venetians gaining many important ports and commercial privileges.
It is perhaps amazing that the Latin states (as they are known) lasted as long as they did, until in fact they were destroyed by the Turks. They were often at loggerheads with each other and with the Greek states; faced continual interference from the West in their internal affairs - mainly because the Angevin royal family of Naples got involved, which also involved their rivals for control of Sicily, the Aragonese; and experienced the dangers common to all foreign ruling classes which never even attempt to integrate themselves with the mass of the people. The first state to go was the Latin Empire, based in Constantinople itself, and the last the Venetian colony of Crete.
The complicated and often obscure affairs of these petty states are well described by Cheetham, a long-serving British diplomat in Greece, fascinated by the many medieval remains completely ignored in favour of the more well-known classical structures and artefacts. He even tries to unravel something of the economic and social history, in which material for the historian is almost completely lacking. The political manoeuvrings are incredibly dificult to keep track of, particularly given the way that pepople change name as they change the fief they hold, or marry, or their relatives die. Cheetham does his best, but even at 300+ pages can only manage to give a fairly sketchy picture of the history.
Monday, 18 January 1999
Thursday, 14 January 1999
Anne Perry: Callander Square (1980)
Edition: Fawcett, 1986
Review number: 186
Like The Hangman of Cater Street, the first of Anne Perry's Inspector Pitt novels, Callander Square is a tale of the worst of Victorian society's vice and hypocrisy. Other than Charlotte, Pitt's wife, there is scarcely a member of the upper classes without a disreputable secret; Perry's is surely an exaggerated version of Victorian London. (By their very nature, it is impossible to accurately know how many people have disreputable secrets.) Some fairly typical Victorian vices, such as child prostitution, are either still considered too unpleasant to talk about by Perry, or they just haven't yet proved relevant to one of her plots.
The plot concerns the police investigation into the bodies of two babies, discovered in the wealthy neighbourhood of Callander Square when some work is being done in the gardens. They are thought to be the results of a servant girl's indiscretions, so everyone in the square expects the investigation purely to be a formality. Inspector Pitt is in charge of the case, and when Charlotte discovers what he is investigating, her sympathy both for the babies and their mother leads her to take a hand. She encourages her fashionable sister Emily to start visiting in the Square to find out from gossip what's going on, and even manages to get herself a job as secretary to General Ballantyne, who lives in the Square and is writing a history of his family's involvement in the army since the days of Marlborough. Before long, the disreputable secrets of those who dwell in the Square begin to come out, and it becomes clear that there's more to the mystery than first appeared.
It's clear that Anne Perry has found a successful formula in The Cater Street Hangman, and that she has stuck to it in Callander Square. The portrayal of upper-class Victorian society as totally hypocritical may be exaggerated, but it provides many opportunities for a detective writer, through the existence of lots of disreputable secrets which the reader has to work out whether they are connected to the matter under investigation or not.
Review number: 186
Like The Hangman of Cater Street, the first of Anne Perry's Inspector Pitt novels, Callander Square is a tale of the worst of Victorian society's vice and hypocrisy. Other than Charlotte, Pitt's wife, there is scarcely a member of the upper classes without a disreputable secret; Perry's is surely an exaggerated version of Victorian London. (By their very nature, it is impossible to accurately know how many people have disreputable secrets.) Some fairly typical Victorian vices, such as child prostitution, are either still considered too unpleasant to talk about by Perry, or they just haven't yet proved relevant to one of her plots.
The plot concerns the police investigation into the bodies of two babies, discovered in the wealthy neighbourhood of Callander Square when some work is being done in the gardens. They are thought to be the results of a servant girl's indiscretions, so everyone in the square expects the investigation purely to be a formality. Inspector Pitt is in charge of the case, and when Charlotte discovers what he is investigating, her sympathy both for the babies and their mother leads her to take a hand. She encourages her fashionable sister Emily to start visiting in the Square to find out from gossip what's going on, and even manages to get herself a job as secretary to General Ballantyne, who lives in the Square and is writing a history of his family's involvement in the army since the days of Marlborough. Before long, the disreputable secrets of those who dwell in the Square begin to come out, and it becomes clear that there's more to the mystery than first appeared.
It's clear that Anne Perry has found a successful formula in The Cater Street Hangman, and that she has stuck to it in Callander Square. The portrayal of upper-class Victorian society as totally hypocritical may be exaggerated, but it provides many opportunities for a detective writer, through the existence of lots of disreputable secrets which the reader has to work out whether they are connected to the matter under investigation or not.
Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
Edition: Corgi, 1974
Review number: 187
Walter M. Miller's 1960 novel is really the classic of post holocaust science fiction. It contains three interrelated stories, set hundreds of years apart, as mankind slowly recovers from an atomic war, rebuilding the knowledge lost in the conflict and in the subsequent reaction against the scientists and intellectuals who had made a nuclear catastrophe possible.
The guardian of knowledge during mankind's lapse into pre-industrial technology is the Roman Catholic Church, and much of the book's background is based on Catholic ritual and symbols, including the titles of the three sections, which are quotations from the Vulgate - Fiat Lux ("let there be light"), Fiat Homo ("let [us] make man") and Fiat Voluntuas Tuas ("your will be done"). The action of each section takes place in a monastery in the Texan desert where large amounts of pre-deluge material (the holocaust is referred to as "the deluge", after Noah's flood) survives, most of which is completely incomprehensible to the monks to begin with (they copy it again and again by rote). In each section, the general level of civilisation increases and with it the understanding of the clues provided by the repository of knowledge. As the book progresses, the reader begins to realise that the renaissance of technology is going to lead inevitably to another holocaust. In fact, this is a large part of what I think Miller is saying; the point of the book is to make the pessimistic point that the evil side of human nature will win out over the good.
Throughout the book, Miller throws in symbolic characters: the wandering Jew, the Poet-Fool (a sort of medieval jester figure), an innocent who is thought to be the incarnation of the returning Christ. These characters interact with the more mundane groups of monks at the abbey, who form a sort of chorus through the changing circumstances of centuries.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a complex novel which well deserves its classic status.
Review number: 187
Walter M. Miller's 1960 novel is really the classic of post holocaust science fiction. It contains three interrelated stories, set hundreds of years apart, as mankind slowly recovers from an atomic war, rebuilding the knowledge lost in the conflict and in the subsequent reaction against the scientists and intellectuals who had made a nuclear catastrophe possible.
The guardian of knowledge during mankind's lapse into pre-industrial technology is the Roman Catholic Church, and much of the book's background is based on Catholic ritual and symbols, including the titles of the three sections, which are quotations from the Vulgate - Fiat Lux ("let there be light"), Fiat Homo ("let [us] make man") and Fiat Voluntuas Tuas ("your will be done"). The action of each section takes place in a monastery in the Texan desert where large amounts of pre-deluge material (the holocaust is referred to as "the deluge", after Noah's flood) survives, most of which is completely incomprehensible to the monks to begin with (they copy it again and again by rote). In each section, the general level of civilisation increases and with it the understanding of the clues provided by the repository of knowledge. As the book progresses, the reader begins to realise that the renaissance of technology is going to lead inevitably to another holocaust. In fact, this is a large part of what I think Miller is saying; the point of the book is to make the pessimistic point that the evil side of human nature will win out over the good.
Throughout the book, Miller throws in symbolic characters: the wandering Jew, the Poet-Fool (a sort of medieval jester figure), an innocent who is thought to be the incarnation of the returning Christ. These characters interact with the more mundane groups of monks at the abbey, who form a sort of chorus through the changing circumstances of centuries.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a complex novel which well deserves its classic status.
Wednesday, 13 January 1999
Paul Harding: Murder Most Holy (1992)
Edition: Headline, 1992
Review number: 185
One of the disadvantages to attempting to read a series of novels from a public library is that it is extremely difficult to read them in the correct order. This is why I have only just made it to reading the third of Paul Harding's "Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan", even though I have already read several later novels in the series.
Murder Most Holy is in fact three separate murder mysteries, which simultaneously test the abilities of the London coroner Sir John Cranston and his friend, the Dominican friar Athelstan. One is theoretical, a puzzle set Cranston by the Lord of Cremona, visiting London, as a bet; it is a locked room mystery. One involves a skeleton dug up during renovation at Athelstan's Southwark church, St Erconwalds, in danger of being thought to be the miracle-working remains of the saint himself. The main mystery is set at the friary of Blackfriars, where Athelstan himself had trained. There, a series of senior friars have been killed during the investigation into a thesis in theology presented by one of them which has to be defended against possible heresy charges.
The medieval background is as well done as ever, and the mysteries are interesting; an excellent member of the series.
Review number: 185
One of the disadvantages to attempting to read a series of novels from a public library is that it is extremely difficult to read them in the correct order. This is why I have only just made it to reading the third of Paul Harding's "Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan", even though I have already read several later novels in the series.
Murder Most Holy is in fact three separate murder mysteries, which simultaneously test the abilities of the London coroner Sir John Cranston and his friend, the Dominican friar Athelstan. One is theoretical, a puzzle set Cranston by the Lord of Cremona, visiting London, as a bet; it is a locked room mystery. One involves a skeleton dug up during renovation at Athelstan's Southwark church, St Erconwalds, in danger of being thought to be the miracle-working remains of the saint himself. The main mystery is set at the friary of Blackfriars, where Athelstan himself had trained. There, a series of senior friars have been killed during the investigation into a thesis in theology presented by one of them which has to be defended against possible heresy charges.
The medieval background is as well done as ever, and the mysteries are interesting; an excellent member of the series.
Tuesday, 12 January 1999
Terry Pratchett: Jingo (1997)
Review number: 184
The twenty-first Discworld novel tackles a most depressing subject - the warmongering, violent side of human nature. The scenario is that the lost continent of Leshp has risen again from the seabed, to be claimed by both Ankh-Morpork and the empire of Klatch. War seems to be inevitable, as patriotism apparently spontaneously breaks out in Ankh-Morpork. The City Watch are once again the centre of things as Commander Vimes tries to work out who is guilty of the crime of attempted murder through warmongering.
The book itself is fairly sombre in tone compared to the rest of the series, despite the convoluted farcical plot. War is a serious subject and the inhumanity of war is not something to be taken lightly (though it has been used to produce some of the greatest humour of the century, such as Heller's Catch 22). There are many obvious parallels intended between the patriots in Ankh-Morpork and the British and French generals of the First World War. Even eight years after the end of that war,m the stupidities of these generals is more material for tragedy than comedy, and even the best comedies which deal with it (Oh What a Lovely War, or Blackadder Goes Forth for example) have strong tragic elements which are almost entirely missing from this novel. On the other hand, the tragedy is so strong that even the more tragic works dealing with the War use comic effects (examples of this include Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and many of the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.)
The way that Pratchett writes about a non-naturalistic world in which he makes parallels with real history dilutes the tragedy while at the same time subduing the comedy. The fact that Jingo is the twenty-first Discworld novel tempts the reviewer to say that the series is coming of age, but that is not really the case; no serious points are made which have not been better made elsewhere, and Pratchett writes better when he does not even try to make serious points.
Monday, 11 January 1999
Molière: Le Malade Imaginaire (1673)
Editions: Penguin, 1969; Nick Hern, 1994
Review number: 182
Review amended: 4 May 1999Le Malade Imaginaire is the greatest and best-known of Molière's attacks on doctors. Like many of his other well-known plays, it is the exaggerated nature of the main character which provides the comedy; Argan is hypochondria personified in the same way that Harpagon is miserliness and Tartuffe hypocritical piety.
From the start of the play, with Argan in his bed adding up his doctors' bills in between injections and doses of medicine, we realise that he is soon going to be ruined by his hypochondria despite his riches, encouraged by his doctors who are anxious to make money out of him while they can - as long as he can withstand their ministrations. In order to be able to afford doctors for longer, he decides to marry his elder daughter Béline to Thomas Diafiorus, the son of one of his senior doctors, just qualified as a doctor himself. This is to secure himself cheap treatment as a member of the family, but unfortunately Thomas is not really the sort of man to appeal to any woman, let alone Béline, who has already fallen in love with another man. Stuffed full of useless pseudo-knowledge, which he appears to still believe, he seems never to have encountered a woman before (except on the dissection table). He is far more a figure of fun than the older physicians who use Latin and Greek philosophical terms only to confuse their victims. It is only when Toinette, Béline's pert maidservant, disguises herself as a doctor that Argan's family is able to begin to wean him from his hypochondria and persuade him to accept Béline's marriage to her lover Cléante.
The primitive state of medicine in Molière's time was one of the main reasons why doctors were such a target for his dislike and satire. When their cures were so dicey, it often seemed better to try and cope with an illness without them rather than risk being killed by the attempted cure. (Argan's brother says as much in the play.) The doctors used their pseudo-schientific language to justify their guesswork, to confuse their patients and convince them of their superior knowledge. This is of course a method used very commonly by those on the fringes of science (and a desire to impress by using technical language is not unknown elsewhere), because of the way that science is venerated by those who do not understand much of it. This is particularly true of the "science" touted by the New Age movement, even though that movement is generally anti-scientific in its worldview. This is particularly true of astrology, though other pseudo-sciences which may contain a grain of truth also do it, which is a pity since it tends to prevent any genuine scientific investigation into what may be happening. (I'm thinking about such alternative medicene as acupuncture and homeopathy, for example.)
The two translations show very well the differences between a fairly academic translation, typical of Penguin Classics, and one designed for performance, as the Nick Hern series are.
Martin Sorrell keeps the traditional title of the play, and it is hard to feel that John Wood improves upon it. It is the illnesses which are imaginary, after all, and The Imaginary Invalid really imples that the invalid is imaginary, rather than the invalidism. (Of course, the invalid actually is imaginary - he is only a character in a play - but that's moving into philosophical regions rather beyond what I suspect the title is intended to convey.)
Where Sorrell does make changes is in the medical language. He updates this to more modern-sounding scientific gobbledegook, on the grounds that our knowledge of Greek and Latin tends to be less than that of a seventeenth century audience. I am not sure this is really a problem, since the modern medical vocabulary is still full of terms borrowed from Latin and Greek. What has happened, though, is that a lot of seventeenth century medical language has passed into common speech. The philosophical idea behind medicine at the period was that the body contained four humours, and these needed to be kept in balance for good physical and mental health. The dominant humour determined your personality, and the names of the humours have become common descriptions of emotion or personality: bile, choler, phlegmatic, sanguine and so on. Doctors today also do not talk about astrology; the casting of horoscopes is not considered a valid method of diagnosis. Thus, I think there is an argument for updating the language, but it is not the one advanced by Sorrell in his introduction. (His updating works well, whatever the motivation, making the play much more graceful than Wood's straight translation.)
Thursday, 7 January 1999
Ngaio Marsh: Off With His Head (1958)
Alternative title: Death of a Fool
Edition: William Collins
Having in her previous novel, Scales of Justice, written a fair imitation of Agatha Christie, in Off With His Head Marsh attempts an imitation of certain aspects of Dorothy Sayers. Marsh always has a style which is more like Christie than Sayers, and this she keeps; it is the setting which reminds me of Sayers. In several of her books, Sayers took a particular part of English culture and wrote a mystery absolutely steeped in that culture: bellringing in The Nine Tailors, advertising in Murder Must Advertise, and Oxbridge in Gaudy Night. Off With His Head attempts the same with the peculiar world of the village folk dance and its much mangled pagan origins.
On each Sword Wednesday, that nearest the winter solstice, the inhabitants of the two remote villages of High and Low Mardian gather for a dance. The climax of this is a sword dance in which the Five Sonse cut off the head of their father, the Fool in a sort of mime in which the blood is provided by a rabbit's head; the Fool then hides for a time, to reappear at the end, resurrected. The dancers this year - and, indeed, every recent year - are really a father and his five sons; and this year the father is really killed.
There are several reasons why this novel is not among Marsh's best. She manages to make the background rather dull, that the way that modern morris dancing seems so silly is a problem. She continually emphasises the pagan roots, the parallels with the Adonis myth as explored in Frazer's Golden Bough, and explicitly distances her characters from the idiocies of the folk movement, but her invented dance, a synthesis of elements from real dances, still seems artificial.
The major problem with this novel is the stereotypical parade of suspects. There is the German folklore expert, desperate to see the dance and an object of suspicion to the villagers because of the war; she makes herself an object of suspicion to the police because of her fear of them derived from her experiences as an opponent of Nazism in pre-war Germany, the occasion for many annoying remarks along the lines of "It couldn't happen here." There is the epileptic, one of the sones, viewed as an idiot by the villagers but considered capable of killing without knowing what he was doing. There are the other sons, keen to move the family business into the twentieth century against the wishes of their father. Those who do not ever really come into the picture include a pair of young lovers, a standard accessory in crime fiction; these are among the more annoying of their kind. None of the characters are more than sketchy stereotypes; all in all, Off With His Head is one of Marsh's worst novels.
Edition: William Collins
Having in her previous novel, Scales of Justice, written a fair imitation of Agatha Christie, in Off With His Head Marsh attempts an imitation of certain aspects of Dorothy Sayers. Marsh always has a style which is more like Christie than Sayers, and this she keeps; it is the setting which reminds me of Sayers. In several of her books, Sayers took a particular part of English culture and wrote a mystery absolutely steeped in that culture: bellringing in The Nine Tailors, advertising in Murder Must Advertise, and Oxbridge in Gaudy Night. Off With His Head attempts the same with the peculiar world of the village folk dance and its much mangled pagan origins.
On each Sword Wednesday, that nearest the winter solstice, the inhabitants of the two remote villages of High and Low Mardian gather for a dance. The climax of this is a sword dance in which the Five Sonse cut off the head of their father, the Fool in a sort of mime in which the blood is provided by a rabbit's head; the Fool then hides for a time, to reappear at the end, resurrected. The dancers this year - and, indeed, every recent year - are really a father and his five sons; and this year the father is really killed.
There are several reasons why this novel is not among Marsh's best. She manages to make the background rather dull, that the way that modern morris dancing seems so silly is a problem. She continually emphasises the pagan roots, the parallels with the Adonis myth as explored in Frazer's Golden Bough, and explicitly distances her characters from the idiocies of the folk movement, but her invented dance, a synthesis of elements from real dances, still seems artificial.
The major problem with this novel is the stereotypical parade of suspects. There is the German folklore expert, desperate to see the dance and an object of suspicion to the villagers because of the war; she makes herself an object of suspicion to the police because of her fear of them derived from her experiences as an opponent of Nazism in pre-war Germany, the occasion for many annoying remarks along the lines of "It couldn't happen here." There is the epileptic, one of the sones, viewed as an idiot by the villagers but considered capable of killing without knowing what he was doing. There are the other sons, keen to move the family business into the twentieth century against the wishes of their father. Those who do not ever really come into the picture include a pair of young lovers, a standard accessory in crime fiction; these are among the more annoying of their kind. None of the characters are more than sketchy stereotypes; all in all, Off With His Head is one of Marsh's worst novels.
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