Omnivoracious

Yes! Verdun!

In his NYT column today, David Brooks makes the following analogy:

For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism.

After reading Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 this month, I was able to say "Yes, because it was a long, drawn-out battle of infantry skirmishes punctuated by brutal artillery attacks!" And I said this to myself as if I'd achieved something great, when in actuality I'd only recognized a pretty obvious cultural reference.

Horne's book is a great read for anyone interested in WWI, but as to which candidate is Pétain and which is Falkenhayn: no comment.

McCarthy at the Oscars

Due to copyright enforcement, it's hard to find "the YouTubes" of it (as Hillary would say), but the cameramen working the Oscars had enough literary savvy to spot Cormac McCarthy in the auditorium last night among the Coen Brothers/No Country for Old Men contingent. And next to him, briefly seen, sat his young son, who was the inspiration for The Road and who I couldn't help pointing to and saying "Hey, that kid carries the fire!"

Incidentally, a friend of mine wrote a classic article a few years back about the Coen brothers' non-coincidental use of his surname for the fecklessly villainous Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. Well worth reading.

Quantum of Huh?

...Which is what many James Bond fans are asking this morning, now that the next Bond film's title has been announced.

But Quantum of Solace is a good choice, though the movie's plot sounds totally unrelated to the harrowing (and action-free) Fleming story that it references, in which a colonial civil servant tells Bond the story of a colleague's disintegrating marriage. It is one of two great, minimalist stories in the collection For Your Eyes Only, the other being "From a View to a Kill", also completely unrelated to the film of that title. I read both of these as a teenage Bond fan, and both have stayed with me--as has the phrase "quantum of solace" itself, which describes the minimal amount of comfort one needs to remain in a dispiriting job, disintegrating marriage, or the like.

Could be a hard sell as a movie title, though.

No Graham Greene? Really? Are you sure you want to do that?

Because if you leave him off a list of great British writers since 1945, you just look stupid!

I understand the logic, but penalizing Greene because he wrote a great book before Hitler invaded Poland seems a little arbitrary. Greene is the demented poet laureate of the 20th Century, and along with George Orwell (who comes in at #2) he will still define post-imperial Britain five hundred years from now.

Otherwise, it’s not a bad list. Great to see Roald Dahl there: 2007 has been my year of Roald, and in April I’ll most likely be paying a visit with my family to the Roald Dahl Museum outside of London. And Rosemary Sutcliff! I’ve been working my way through her novels for a few years now, and there is no better chronicler of Roman Britain.

A few of the choices are little-known in the US: Alan Garner, whose haunting Red Shift I read a few months ago (speaking of Roman Britain, he uses it as a metaphor for Vietnam); and Geoffrey Hill, a very fine poet. I’ve never heard of George Mackay Brown or Alice Oswald, but both sound intriguing.

Larkin at the top is a bit of a surprise, but a great choice, though it would have left him vaguely out-of-sorts until he’d written a cheeky letter about it to Kingsley Amis (who’s on the list too, along with his son). And Tolkien? The books left me cold (so did the movies) but he’s obviously had a huge effect on British culture. Ian Fleming seems to have snuck in for the same reason (I’m listening to James Bond title songs as I type this).

Finally, regarding Golding: yes, Lord of the Flies is good fun, but The Inheritors is a genuinely alienating book, in the best way, about a small clan of Neanderthals encountering a nasty new species of hominid. It is weird, wild stuff, and like most Golding you just need to accept that you won’t understand half of what’s happening and roll with it.

George MacDonald Fraser, 1925-2008

Sad news that British novelist George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, has died at the age of 82. (Fraser also wrote the screenplay for Octopussy, which some of us hold in high regard.)

                        

The adventures of Harry Flashman—a cowardly, bullying, licentious cad of the British Empire’s high period—managed to cover most every historical event of the mid-19^th Century. From the Sepoy Rebellion to the Charge of the Light Brigade to the raid on Harper's Ferry, the bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays managed to survive with only good horsemanship and an eye for the ladies, while giving the reader a rollicking good time and a solid dose of well-researched history.

Bizarrely, John Sutherland at the Guardian uses the opportunity of his death to expound on the idiocy of Americans. But then, it wouldn’t be the Guardian otherwise, would it?

Adventures in Misreading

Well, I managed to find my way here, even though in my head "omnivoracious" keeps getting garbled into "velociraptor" (a domain name that will apparently only set me back $8K).

                  

My name is Mike Smith and I've been at Amazon for nine years, in a data department called GRCSS (an acronym I refuse to decode). I tend to putter around in the older, fustier areas of the library—not a lot of current fiction comes my way. This year there's been a lot of history, popular science, and British biographies (and sometimes all three in the same book). I've also enjoyed discovering some classic British children's fiction with my 7-year-old son Stu, like Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and the works of Roald Dahl (my current favorite being Esio Trot), as well as Russell Hoban's touching The Mouse and His Child. If I had to choose a favorite novel I've read this year, though, it would be Hoban's 1980 gripping post-apocalyptic tale Riddley Walker.

 

The other book that has haunted me this year is Joseph Conrad's The Shadow-Line. Back in March a New York Times Book Review article mentioned Conrad's story in passing, and a too-quick reading suggested to me that it was partially set in the Arctic. I was fascinated: Conrad in the Arctic? I went home to find that I owned the novella in an anthology, and as I read I waited (somewhat skeptically, in my defense) for the story to move from a horrifyingly becalmed ship in the South China Seas to, somehow, the far North. I trust I'm not spoiling it by saying that the ship never leaves the Orient; but my mistake lent the story an extra measure of suspense. Even without the mistake, though, it's still a fine story, and I find myself thinking about it often.