

# _Literary Liberties_

_Commentaries, book 1._

_Copyright © 2015: Richard Lung._

* * *
_Style note:_

_English is an unruly language. like a growing child. My slight attempts to be more consistent were not wholly successful and may seem like carelessness, when the opposite is true._

_My main use for the apostrofe is to show a missing letter, like: didn't for did not.  
I try to reduce the use of the "possessive" apostrofe but sometimes leave it in, to show that a personal name does not have an s-ending. Also, I do not alter quotations. So, Uncle Tom's Cabin is not rendered as: Toms._

_There is no standard world English spelling. Computer operating systems may allow some dozen different options. I prefer simpler spellings, when the occasion seems to present itself.  
My books of verse, which no-one reads any-way, allowed me to be more radical, especially in odd poems._

_Most of the following essays are revised and up-dated from my web pages, with further text and illustrations, tho the dates, when the original versions appeared, are usually retained._

* * *

## Table of Contents:  
Literary Liberties

#### Classic reformers.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.

H G Wells. _Scientific romances; "free love" and marriage_.

George Orwell: _"against dictatorship."_

Aldous Huxley: _Island_.

J B Priestley, _man of letters_.

#### Contemporary novelists

#### (1) on by-gone greatness

Irving Stone: _The agony and the ecstasy. (novel on Michael Angelo)._  
_Lust for life. (Literary biography of Vincent Van Gogh)_

James A Michener: _Caribbean_.

A S Byatt: _Possession. A romance._

Julian Barnes: _Arthur and George._

#### (2) on ordinary lives

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: _Purple Hibiscus_.

Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell): _A Dark-adapted Eye_.

Monica Ali: _ToBrick Lane from David Copperfield_.

Isabel Allende: _The Stories of Eva Luna._

Margaret Atwood: _Alias Grace; The Robber Bride; Cat's Eye._

Robert Harris: _Pompeii._

Khalid Hosseini: _The Kite Runner_.

Andrea Levy: _Small Island_.

Marina Lewycka: _A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian._

Ian McEwan: _Atonement._ _Saturday_.

Toni Morrison: _Beloved._

Bernice Rubens: _Yesterday in the Back Lane._

William Trevor: _Felicia's Journey_.

Ben Elton: _Blast from the past._

Alan Ayckbourn _on plays._

And two Wellsian movies:

Tim Burton: _Mars Attacks!_

Steven Spielberg: _War of the Worlds_.

#### Non-fiction

Have you an Erdös number from working with the great and the good?

UK internet elections.

HG Wells political writings & forty years of unfair votes.

Solzhenitsyn, the spiritual sickness of the West, and Constitution healing.

Peter Oborne: The Triumph of the Political Class. And a monarchic premier or elected first among equals?

The social violence offer of a death penalty referendum.

Draconian sentencing: 20 years for an intimacy.

#### Other books by the author:

in the Democracy Science series

in the Commentaries series

in the Collected Verse series.

# Literary Liberties

The slogan which was given out for all countries, _Realpolitik_ , meant the approbation of a shortsighted nationalism, and compromises with forces and tendencies which had been resisted hitherto as hostile to progress. One of the clearest indications of decline for me was the fact that superstition, which had hitherto been banished from educated circles, was again thought fit for admission to society....

In spite of the great importance we attach to the triumphs of knowledge and achievement, it is nevertheless obvious that only a humanity which is striving after ethical ends can in full measure share in the blessings brought by material progress and become master of the dangers which accompany it. To the generation which had adopted their belief in an immanent power of progress realising itself, in some measure, naturally and automatically, and which thought that it no longer needed any ethical ideals but could advance to its goal by means of knowledge and achievement alone, terrible proof was being given by its present position of the error into which it had sunk....

Later on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way thru a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, "Reverence for Life."...

_Albert Schweitzer: Out of my Life and Thought. (1933)._

* * *

# Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Table of contents.

#### Links to sections:

The system drags down both slave and master.

Character degradation of slaver and enslaved.

Womens rights, childrens rights and complacency.

A Moorish mansion.

Martyred in the labor camp.

### The system drags down both slave and master.

> Yes, Tom, we must confess it, was rather proud of his honesty, poor fellow \-- not having very much else to be proud of;

A long time ago, I read some Black Power advocate (Eldridge Cleaver: Soul On Ice) dismiss Uncle Tom, in passing. Toms humility would not have asked that much consideration. His social humility is really religious humility. And Nietsche thought Christianity a religion for slaves.   
Yet Christian fervor moved Stowe to move America towards emancipation. Having read the book, I fully believe it. If _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ couldn't change hearts and minds, nothing could.   
It is worth immoderate quotation. Take two long exchanges between Miss Ophelia and her southern cousin, St. Clare:

> "My dear cousin, you may as well understand, once for all, that we masters are divided into two classes, oppressors and oppressed. We who are good-natured and hate severity make up our minds to a good deal of inconvenience. If we _will keep_ a shambling, loose, untaught set in the community, for our convenience, why, we must take the consequence. Some rare cases I have seen, of persons, who by a peculiar tact can produce order and system without severity; but I'm not one of them -- and so I made up my mind, long ago, to let things go just as they do. I will not have the poor devils thrashed and cut to pieces, and they know it -- and, of course, they know the staff is in their own hands."
> 
> 'But to have no time, no place, no order -- all going on in this shiftless way!'
> 
> "My dear Vermont, you natives up by the North Pole set an extravagant value on time! What on earth is the use of time to a fellow who has twice as much of it as he knows what to do with? As to order and system, where there is nothing to be done but to lounge on the sofa and read, an hour sooner or later in breakfast or dinner isn't of much account. Now, there's Dinah gets you a capital dinner -- soup, ragout, roast fowl, dessert, ice-creams, and all -- and she creates it all out of chaos and old night down there, in that kitchen. I think it really sublime, the way she manages. But, Heaven bless us! if we are to go down there, and view all the smoking and squatting about, and hurryscurryation of the preparatory process, we should never eat more! My good cousin, absolve yourself from that. It's more than a Catholic penance, and does no more good. You'll only lose your own temper, and utterly confound Dinah. Let her go her own way." 
> 
> 'But Augustine, you don't know how I found things.' 
> 
> "Don't I? Don't I know that the rolling pin is under her bed, and the nutmeg-grater in her pocket with her tobacco -- that there are sixty-five different sugar-bowls, one in every hole in the house -- that she washes dishes with a dinner-napkin one day, and with a fragment of an old petticoat the next? But the upshot is, she gets up glorious dinners, makes superb coffee; and you must judge her as warriors and statesmen are judged, by _her success._ " 
> 
> 'But the waste -- the expense!' 
> 
> "Oh, well! Lock everything you can, and keep the key. Give out by driblets, and never enquire for odds and ends -- it isn't best." 
> 
> 'That troubles me, Augustine. I can't help feeling as if these servants were not _strictly honest._ Are you sure they can be relied on?' 
> 
> Augustine laughed immoderately at the grave and anxious face with which Miss Ophelia propounded the question. 
> 
> "Oh, cousin, that's too good -- _honest!_ \-- as if that's a thing to be expected! Honest! -- why, of course, they arn't. Why should they be? What upon earth is to make them so?" 
> 
> 'Why don't you instruct?' 
> 
> "Instruct! Oh, fiddlestick! What instructing do you think I should do? I look like it! As to Marie, she has spirit enough, to be sure, to kill off a whole plantation, if I'd let her manage; but she wouldn't get the cheatery out of them.' 
> 
> 'Are there no honest ones?' 
> 
> "Well, now and then one, whom Nature makes so impracticably simple, truthful, and faithful, that the worst possible influence can't destroy it. But, you see, from the mother's breast the coloured child feels and sees that there are none but underhand ways open to it. It can get along no other way with its parents, its mistress, its young master and missie playfellows. Cunning and deception become necessary, inevitable habits. It isn't fair to expect anything else of him. He ought not to be punished for it. As to honesty, the slave is kept in that dependent, semi-childish state, that there is no making him realise the rights of property, or feel that his master's goods are not his own, if he can get them. For my part, I don't see how they _can_ be honest. Such a fellow as Tom, here, is -- is a moral miracle!' 
> 
> 'And what becomes of their souls?' said Miss Ophelia. 
> 
> "That isn't my affair, as I know of," said St Clare: "I am only dealing in facts of the present life. The fact is, that the whole race are pretty generally understood to be turned over to the devil, for our benefit, in this world, however it may turn out in another!" 
> 
> 'This is perfectly horrible!' said Miss Ophelia: 'you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!' 
> 
> "I don't know as I am. We are in pretty good company, for all that." said St. Clare, "as people in the broad road generally are. Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it's the same story -- the lower class used up, body, soul, and spirit, for the good of the upper. It is so in England; it is so everywhere; and yet all Christendom stands aghast, with virtuous indignation, because we do the thing in a little different shape from what they do it."

In the succeeding chapter (XIX) St. Clare continues telling home truths to his naive New England cousin. This next extract includes the nick-name "Quashy," which another Tom, Thomas Carlyle used to air his "ugly" views (as James Michener described them) perhaps in racist retaliation to such passages as these:

> "It's commonly supposed that the _property_ interest is a sufficient guard in these cases. If people choose to ruin their own possessions, I don't know what's to be done. It seems the poor creature was a thief and a drunkard; and so there won't be much hope to get up sympathy for her."
> 
> 'It is perfectly outrageous -- it is horrid, Augustine! It will certainly bring down vengeance upon you.' 
> 
> "My dear cousin, I didn't do it, and I can't help it; I would, if I could. If low-minded, brutal people will act like themselves, what am I to do? They have absolute control; they are irresponsible despots. There would be no use in interfering; there is no law that amounts to anything practically, for such a case. The best we can do is to shut our eyes and ears, and let it alone. It's the only resource left us." 
> 
> 'How can you shut your eyes and ears? How can you let such things alone?' 
> 
> "My dear child, what do you expect? Here is a whole class -- debased, uneducated, indolent, provoking -- put, without any sort of terms or conditions, entirely into the hands of such people as the majority in our world are; people who have neither consideration nor self-control, who haven't even an enlightened regard to their own interest -- for that's the case with the largest half of mankind. Of course, in a community so organized, what can a man of honourable and humane feelings do, but shut his eyes all he can, and harden his heart? I can't buy every poor wretch I see..."
> 
> "Wait -- I'm coming on -- you'll hear. The short of the matter is, cousin,...on this abstract question of slavery there can, as I think, be but one opinion. Planters, who have money to make by it -- clergymen, who have planters to please -- politicians, who want to rule by it -- may warp and bend language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their ingenuity; they can press nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what else, into the service; but, after all, neither they nor the world believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the devil, that's the short of it; -- and, to my mind, it's a pretty respectable specimen of what he can do in his own line." 
> 
> Miss Ophelia stopped her knitting, and looked surprised; and St. Clare, apparently enjoying her astonishment, went on:   
>  "You seem to wonder; but if you will get me fairly at it, I'll make a clean breast of it. This cursed business, accursed of God and man, what is it? Strip it of all its ornament, run it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it? Why, because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and strong -- because I know how, and _can_ do it \-- therefore, I may steal all he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy. Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable for me, I may set Quashy to doing. Because I don't like work, Quashy shall work. Because the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun. Quashy shall earn the money and I will spend it. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that I may walk over dry-shod. Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at last, as I find convenient. This I take to be about what slavery _is._ I defy anybody on earth to read our slave-code, as it stands in our law-books, and make anything else of it. Talk of the _abuses_ of slavery! Humbug! The _thing itself_ is the essence of all abuse! And the only reason why the land don't sink under it, like Sodom and Gomorrah, is because it is _used_ in a way infinitely better than it is. For pity's sake, for shame's sake, because we are men born of women, and not savage beasts, many of us do not, and dare not -- we would _scorn_ to use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands. And he who goes the furthest, and does the worst, only uses within limits the power that the law gives him...
> 
> When I have been travelling up and down on our boats, or about on my collecting tours, and reflected that every brutal, disgusting, mean, low-lived fellow I met, was allowed by our laws to become absolute despot of as many men, women, and children as he could cheat, steal, or gamble money enough to buy -- when I have seen such men in actual ownership of helpless children, of young girls and women -- I have been ready to curse my country, to curse the human race!"

And so on! There is no substitute for reading the book.  
One might as well have quoted from the wittily titled chapter XI: In which property gets into an improper state of mind. (This concerns Eliza's husband, George, also on the run, and hoping to meet her in Canada. The poster, on which he is wanted dead or alive, describes him as _"a very light mulatto... very intelligent... will probably try to pass for a white man;_ ")

### Character degradation of slaver and enslaved.

To top.

All this may not have had any appeal to the Black Panthers. Indeed, Uncle Toms mid 19th century appeal was largely to sober dress-black puritans. Stowe brings the keenest intelligence of the effects of the slave system on the whole of society. She combines this with acute observation of its demoralisation of character. She tracks its evils and depravities into every corner of human misery. And she does so in human terms that the reader can feel for, and desire to follow the story.

She combines tragedy, comedy and adventure, for instance, when Eliza runs away with her child, about to be sold from her. Tom is also to be sold, leaving a gap in the service ranks:

> Black Sam, as he was commonly called, from his being about three shades blacker than any other son of ebony on the place, was revolving the matter profoundly in all its phases and bearings, with a comprehensiveness of vision and a strict look-out to his own personal well-being that would have done credit to any white patriot in Washington.

This observation was first published in 1851, by which time Stowe has already got the measure of the typical politician, in the democratic experiment.   
It turns out, tho, that Elizas mistress doesn't want Eliza to be caught by the child-buyer. Seeing which way the wind is blowing, Black Sam displays his talents for delay, obstruction and misdirection of the pursuit.

Another woman and child are not so lucky. Thinking she is taking an ordinary boat trip, Lucy finds, to her bewilderment, she is the victim of a cowardly betrayal by her owner. Not only has she been sold, without her knowing it, but her new owner, well versed in these arts (I almost said "black arts") sneaks away her child from her, for extra profit. Her two owners deceit, thus avoids them an embarrassing "fuss."

Lucy, not surprisingly, is completely thrown down in spirits. During the night, on the river, there is a splash into the water.

> The trader was not shocked nor amazed; because, as we said before, he was used to a great many things that you are not used to. Even the awful presence of Death struck no solemn chill upon him. He had seen Death many times -- met him in the way of trade, and got acquianted with him -- and he only thought of him as a hard customer, that embarrassed his property operations very unfairly; and so he only swore that the gal was a baggage and that he was devilish unlucky, and that, if things went on in this way, he should not make a cent on the trip. In short, he seemed to consider himself an ill-used man, decidedly; but there was no help for it, as the woman had escaped into a state which _never will_ give up a fugitive -- not even at the demand of the whole glorious Union. The trader, therefore, sat discontentedly down, with his little account-book, and put down the missing body and soul under the head of _losses!_
> 
> "He's a shocking creature, isn't he -- this trader? so unfeeling! It's dreadful, really!"   
>  "Oh, but nobody thinks anything of these traders! They are universally despised -- never received into any decent society.'"
> 
> But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public sentiment that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

This homely title is a passionate denunciation against the sum of vileness towards "the unprotected." Slavery confirms CS Lewis justification for being a democrat, that no man is good enough to be anothers master.

Stowe is no patronising propagandist. All libertarians, Black Militants included, could learn from the derided tale of Uncle Tom. Essentially, she attacks slavery as an institution. The colored people, oppressed, included the color white, as well as every deeper shade. Racialism became indistinguishable from legalised snobbery.

_"So, you're the little woman who started this war."  
Abraham Lincoln, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe._

### Womens rights, childrens rights and complacency.

To top.

Stowe attacks also the abuse of women and the break-up of families, quite apart from race. No false delicacy, of her age, prevents her telling about sexual blackmail. An apparently European woman has her lover seduced from her. She is then told her children will be sold into slavery, if she does not give herself sexually. The children are sold, anyway, under threat they will not be "redeemed," if she is not compliant. And so on.

The race issue over-shadows the book as a pioneer work in womens rights and childrens rights. The little girl Eva is a Victorian ideal, influenced by the Christ holding up a child as an example for entering the kingdom of heaven. The high child mortality rate made this moral especially poignant to readers of that period.

Raymond Moody, in _Life After Life_ , has accustomed the modern American, again, to the positive attitude to death, the reader finds in the scene of Eva dying. Consumption was a drawn-out but deadly disease, common but not certainly diagnosed at first, which punished the hopes of families for loved ones.

_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was first serialised, like Dickens novels, which made the nation pray that Little Nell might be spared. The recent age of complacency, about eradicating infectious illnesses, may have made such trials remote from our sympathies.

Nineteenth century Christian readers would have been completely at home with Eva being drawn to heaven as she dies. At this supreme moment, the writing loses its power. But its conventional offer of comfort would have been very much to the taste of the time.

Nor should this obscure the authors spiritual strength. She was clever enough to see the first psychologists had not made matters any clearer, in their dogma that spiritual experience was nothing more than a material phenomenum. This daughter of a famous Congregationalist minister may sound melodramatic in her faith. Perhaps that is because we have less faith than she has.

This Christian values heaven more than earth. She is not corrupted by thought of material gains from oppression. Rather, it is an intolerable obstacle to decency, in this short life, or any life to come.

The unspoilt girls name, Eva is short for Evangeline. Stowe even spells out the idea of Evangeline as evangelist of the gospel of love for all.   
(Also, Eva is an example to her author, not to be too proud of her talents.)

Eva is an extravert version of the neglected daughter in Dickens _Dombey and Son_. For much of the book, Florence Dombeys thoughts poured out unrequited love for her father. After nearly a thousand pages of close print, she redeems him, in the end, rather unconvincingly.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a novel that not even Dickens genius could match for its message of radical reform, in all his great works. Nor is she inferior in her reading of character. The abused girl desperado, Topsy and the prim New England puritan, Miss Ophelia, and their eventual rapport are as good, or better, than the passages I've described or quoted.

The adult may be the childish one. Mother of Eva, Marie, is a study of callous and vindictive self-pity. The failed pleas for merciful good-will, or even the generosity to abide by her late husband and daughters word, show-up her character (as in ch. XXIX). There are any number of quotable passages in the book. This one ends with the comment:

> She (Miss Ophelia) saw, at once, that it would do no good to say anything more; for Marie had an indefinite capacity for hysterical fits; and, after this, whenever her husband's or Eva's wishes were alluded to, she always found it convenient to set one in operation.

Even so, the author leaves Marie, affording some sympathetic understanding for this unsympathetic character.

There is an example of complacent character, in the woman with her two children (in ch. XII) recognisable as a type, in all ages, and, usually, to be seen in ourselves, if we care to look:

> The lady said "Indeed!" yawned, and looked out the cabin window, and finally repeated, for a finale, the remark with which she had begun --"After all, I think they are better off than they would be to be free."

This anticipates the shallow sentiment behind the romanticising of the plantation "civilization." A satirical passage follows on a clergyman quoting scripture to justify keeping the African race in a low condition. He is counter-quoted, by another of his cloth, with the golden rule.

### A Moorish mansion.

To top.

Stowe, herself, does her best, in her book, to use the authority of the Christian bible to deter wrong-doers, since the slavery law is a refusal to do so. She is aware that preacher apologists for slavery will discredit Christianity among slaves. Hence, American negros widespread change of religion. There is even a passage that is almost prophetic of the unthinkable: Uncle Tom turned to Islam!

> The carriage stopped in front of an ancient mansion, built in that odd mixture of Spanish and French style, of which there are specimens in some parts of New Orleans. It was built in the Moorish fashion -- a square building enclosing a courtyard, into which the carriage drove through an arched gateway. The court, in the inside, had evidently been arranged to gratify a picturesque and voluptuous ideality. Wide galleries ran all around the four sides, whose Moorish arches, slender pillars, and arabesque ornaments carried the mind back, as in a dream, to the reign of oriental romance in Spain. In the middle of the court, a fountain threw high its silvery water, falling in a never-ceasing spray into a marble basin, fringed with a deep border of fragrant violets. The water in the fountain, pellucid as crystal, was alive with myriads of gold and silver fishes, twinkling and darting through it like so many living jewels. Around the fountain ran a walk, paved with a mosaic of pebbles, laid in various fanciful patterns; and this, again, was surrounded by turf, smooth as green velvet; while a carriage-drive enclosed the whole. Two large orange-trees, now fragrant with blossoms, threw a delicious shade; and, ranged in a circle round upon the turf, were marble vases of arabesque sculpture, containing the choicest flowering plants of the tropics. Huge pomegranate-trees, with their glossy leaves and flame-coloured flowers; dark-leaved Arabian jessamines, with their silvery stars; geraniums, luxuriant roses bending beneath their heavy abundance of flowers, golden jessamines, lemon-scented verbenum, all united their bloom and fragrance; while here and there a mystic old aloe, with its strange, massive leaves, sat looking like some hoary old enchanter, sitting in weird grandeur among the more perishable bloom and fragrance around it.
> 
> The galleries that surrounded the court were festooned with a curtain of some kind of Moorish stuff, and could be drawn down at pleasure, to exclude the beams of the sun. On the whole, the appearance of the place was luxurious and romantic. 
> 
> As the carriage drove in, Eva seemed like a bird ready to burst from a cage, with the wild eagerness of her delight. 
> 
> "Oh, isn't it beautiful, lovely! my own dear, darling home!" she said to Miss Ophelia. "Isn't it beautiful?" 
> 
> "'Tis a pretty place," said Miss Ophelia, as she alighted; "though it looks rather old and heathenish to me." 
> 
> Tom got down from the carriage, and looked about with an air of calm, still enjoyment. The negro, it must be remembered, is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has, deep in his heart, a passion for all that is splendid, rich, and fanciful; a passion which, rudely indulged by an untrained taste, draws on him the ridicule of the colder and more correct white race. 
> 
> St. Clare, who was in his heart a poetical voluptuary, smiled as Miss Ophelia made her remark on his premises, and, turning to Tom, who was standing looking around, his beaming black face perfectly radiant with admiration, he said: 
> 
> "Tom, my boy, this seems to suit you." 
> 
> 'Yes mas'r, it looks about the right thing,' said Tom.

Like children, the negro slave had no legal rights, so even the kindliest owner called him "boy." When I went to grammar school, the teachers (mainly kindly) were called "masters," and addressed as "sir," like local squires to the serfs.

### Martyred in the labor camp.

To top.

However, Tom loses his kind master and is bought by a merciless slave-driver, who tests to the utmost his Christian charity. The "bad" plantation anticipates the inhuman privations imposed by the twentieth century dictators.   
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is a deeply informed root-and-branch exposé of a labor camp regime, as influential in the nineteenth century as Solzhenitsyn was in the twentieth.  
The truth is, as Solzhenitsyn said in _The Gulag Archipelago_ , it was not possible to be kind and stay alive. He likened the process to one of "natural selection" of the most ruthless inmates.

Stowe already saw the same systematic evil in slavery:

> The woman sternly continued:   
>  "And what are these miserable low dogs you work with, that you should suffer on their account? Every one of them would turn against you the first time they got a chance. They are all of 'em as low and cruel to each other as they can be; there's no use in your suffering to keep from hurting them."
> 
> "Poor critturs!" said Tom -- "what made 'em cruel? -- and, if I give out, I shall get used to't, and grow, little by little, just like 'em. No, no, missis! I've lost everything -- wife, and children, and home, and a kind mas'r -- and he would have set me free, if he'd only lived a week longer; I've lost everything in _this_ world, and it's clean gone for ever -- and now I _can't_ lose heaven too; no, I can't get to be wicked, besides all!"
> 
> "But it can't be that the Lord will lay sin to our account," said the woman; "He won't charge it to us when we're forced to it. He'll charge it to them that drove us to it." 
> 
> "Yes," said Tom; "but that won't keep us from growing wicked. If I get to be as hard-hearted as that ar Sambo, and as wicked, it won't make much odds to me how I come so; it's the _bein' so_ \-- that ar's what I'm dreadin'."

So, Tom is not really a white mans model of a submissive black man. He is a good man, who is forced to become a Christian martyr, redeeming two of his black persecutors.  
Lest there be any misunderstanding, however, the Islamic militant came to the fore of the American negros civil rights movement.

#### Aunt Harriets house

To top.

# H G Wells

_Table of contents_

_The War In The Air (1908)_

Preface.

The scientific romances.

"Free Love"

Marriage.

### Preface.

Of all the famous writers, whose work I grew up with, for sheer volume and variety of unfailing interest, H G Wells was easily my foremost entertainer and educator.   
This was not true after middle age, by which time I'd read most Wells books. In later life, another writer was a personal influence on me, with her poetry, knowledge of the country-side and literary criticism.

Wells never wrote verse, apart from a rather good pastiche on Edward Lear, in a letter to "Jane," his second wife. (These personal letters were adorned with sketches -- another talent.) If Orwell is to be believed, he had no time for poets. All the same, he employed readers to summarise the latest books. Wells evidently made use of this information with discrimination. His novels are amazingly up to the minute, in picking-out future classics of twentieth century English literature.

It is one of the misconceptions about Wells that he was a philistine. Allied to this, is the notion that only his earlier novels have lasting value. Certainly, his post-Edwardian out-put remains neglected. Ive come across a few unrepresentative re-prints of later novels.

_Jules Verne._

### The scientific romances.

To top

From Wells Edwardian period, _The War In The Air_ (1908) stays in print. Wells dismissed this as "a pot-boiler." Tho, I also seem to recall his drawing attention to it. Such was the abundance of his creative power. In fact, it was his last great science fiction novel or "scientific romance." And it is unique in combining comic Cockney low life (himself) with the super-human power of science, capable of destroying its own labor-saving inventions, in a morally antiquated civilization. Wells does moralise -- intelligently -- it is part of the books appeal. But I read and enjoyed it, several times, as an amusement and an adventure story.

Nevertheless, _The War In The Air_ , under-rated even by its author, is lost from the public psyche. In some ways, it's the truest of his prophecies. Because it springs on the reader, the rise of Asia to world dominance, over a century before it has happened, albeit in a peaceful fashion.

Compare Wells Victorian SF, from the last half-decade of the nineteenth century. These scientific romances were short, by the standard of the social novels he was to write up to 1941. But people have heard of them: _The Time Machine_ , _The Invisible Man_ , _The War Of The Worlds_. Rather less known, but still holding its own, is _The Island Of Dr Moreau_.

_First Men In The Moon_ (published in book form in 1901 but serialised the year before as usual with his books) was remembered along with Jules Verne, when men did first land there in 1969. Jules Verne voyagers only orbit the moon in their ballistic vehicle. He imagines a tank of water cushioning their launch out of the giant gun, as if this would prevent the would-be space-men from being turned into scrambled eggs by the firing.

Verne still complained about the scientific standing of Wells moon journey, which did go one up on Verne, allowing landing and departure, by an anti-gravity substance, named "Cavorite," after its inventor. "Show me this Cavorite," Verne demanded of the press, who asked him what he thought of Wells version.

_Journey To The Moon_ is told with that humorous lightness of touch that delights the reader of _Around The World In Eighty Days_. He does make a serious attempt to be "scientific." But is limited by the limitations of the science of his day -- just as he tries to play fair with the reader by limiting his imagination to what current technology might conceivably achieve.

Nuclear energy was unsuspected, tho the Curies had begun the road to its discovery. Consequently, Verne discusses the scientists perplexity with how the sun could burn more than a few thousand years on chemical energy, concluding it must be replenished by matter, such as comets, falling into it.

Vernes moon-projectile follows a trajectory like that of the first real space-men, who orbited the moon, before a manned landing was attempted. He appears to conceive of space as like the sea, and the shell, as like a diving bell. Vernes space travelers open a hatch at the base of their vehicle and the air stays in! As they approach the moon, they throw out their rubbish but this stays near the craft, not forgetting the law of conservation of momentum

Arthur C Clarke book, _2060_ , in the series following from _2001_ , is pure Verne. He treats the SF genre in just the same way, which may be called the classical manner. Like the French Enlightenment, it is sceptical and humorously detached. The main concern is to stay within the bounds of scientific accuracy. Once, Clarke replied to a long-standing SF fan and engineer. Terry Jeeves wrote the longest-standing SF fanzine, knew and was known by the American wave of SF pulp magazine pioneers, before the genre became a mainstream money-spinner. He had seen a mistake in his latest story. Clarke agreed but he had hoped no-one would notice it!

Clarke shares Vernes addiction to truthfulness, as Ambrose Bierce called it. When their tales bring them to the unknown, they both adopt a caution, reminiscent of the responsible authors of a scientific report. When Vernes orbiters pass over the side of the moon, that the earth never sees, we are only told as an after-thought that someone saw something that might have been habitation.

Like Verne before him, Clarkes explorers land on a comet. In its recesses, there only seems to be something unexpected. In these two stories, Verne and Clarke are curiously inhibited, like a child told by elders not to tell tales. Then again, the truth is that no amount of exploring will ever remove all mystery. Pretending to tell all is merely to close ones eyes to the quests and questions that remain.

In 2015, a satellite did land a probe on a meteorite, verifying the presence of complex chemicals, that may have initiated life on earth.

Of course, even Verne, the pioneer lets himself go, such as in the tale of traveling round the solar system on an asteroid. Deceptively matter of fact, Clarkes _The City And The Stars_ played with (then) mind-boggling ideas, albeit based on a scientific intuition.   
The unearthed space-ship had a sub-terranean power source that allowed it to maintain itself indefinitely. It traveled round the universe in a single day, not by propulsion, but like an arrow pulling the bow of space.

Where then does Wells stand in relation to the Verne-Clarke tradition of classic SF? He is an admitted classic in the sense of pioneer. But was he just a romancer, suggested by Verne, demanding to hold the Cavorite in his hand? The smoothed-over fancifulness of Vernes own moon enterprise tells us that he was putting on an act as Doubting Thomas, patron saint of science, who won't believe till he sees and touches for himself.

It would only be human of Verne to want to put down his young rival, even if doing so amounted to a certain amount of self-deception about his own "scientific" plausibility.

The fact is that Wells belongs both to the classic and the romantic traditions. He has the eighteenth century Enlightenment vision of secular progress thru free scientific enquiry, as well as being steeped in the emotional pessimism of the nineteenth century romantic reaction -- a reaction to excess.

Verne himself is touched by a romantic alienation from the world. In rejecting the human madness of war, his lone heroes inflict that madness on the bearers of arms. Wells later SF tends to rant about the unredeemed state of humanity. _In The Days Of The Comet_ (1906) and _Men Like Gods_ (1920) are examples.

The Wellsian complaint takes itself seriously. But it cannot compare with the somber aloofness of the Vernian hero. Captain Nemo, by his assumed identity is the very negation of egotism, particularly of nationalistic egotism. All his crew have renounced their nationalities. They are humanity first, however misguided their mission of terror on all war-ships.

Not till _Things To Come_ , the movie version of _The Shape Of Things To Come_ (1933) do we get a Wellsian over-lord of Vernian grandeur (acted commandingly by Raymond Massey).

Verne may have influenced Wells in striking an attitude to the world, as a sort of new Moses, and prophet of science. (Moses himself may not have been above the latest tricks to impress both adversaries and followers.) But these are generally his later, less successful SF works.

Wells early poetic power has its source in another contemporary writer. Edgar Allen Poe left an unfinished novel, called _The Mystery Of Arthur Gordon Pym._ Jules Verne "finished" this work. That is to say he tagged a typical adventure story, whose speculations on terra incognita would be approved by a right-thinking geographical society.

Whereas, I was impressed that the first chapter of _The Island Of Dr Moreau_ read like a very capable apprentice taking up Poe - this was only Wells third novel. Moreau headed off to a tropical clime. Nevertheless, I wonder whether Poes last novel didn't also exert an imaginative influence on Wells fourth novel, _The Invisible Man._

Vernes character can only shrug off tales of the weird phenomena Pym progressed to, in the polar regions. Yet marble-veined ice-rivers, or what have you, may not be so far from the truth. Ice-bergs, for instance, don't have to be merely white. The whaler, explorer and naturalist Scoresby jr. described the colors that could suffuse ice. (I quoted this in my review of Dorothy Cowlin biography, _Greenland Seas_. Like much of this book, it remains on my unedited Dorothy Cowlin website. It is also in my verse collection, _Dates and Dorothy_.)

Maybe Poe saw the ice-bergs that sail down from Canada past the North-East American sea-board. And what has this to do with _The Invisible Man_? Well, he was a sort of human ice-berg. His albinism was a whiteness like ice. His invisibility was like the whiteness of ice turned transparent. And in the transformation, his veins and arteries stand out like the colors of faulted light in ice.   
And as the ice-berg is often an unseen hazard to shipping, the invisible man proves a hidden threat to mankind.

### "Free Love"

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The Edwardian period covers Wells best remembered social novels, such as _Kipps_ , _Ann Veronica_ , _The History of Mr Polly_.   
True, _Ann Veronica_ remains in print for being a social history of womens rights in literature, rather than for being literature in its own right. The scandal, it caused, marks it out as a fore-runner of the common-place novel of irregularities in sexual relations.

My friend, Dorothy Cowlin, a novelist herself, read the story, as a young woman, and laughed at how Ann Veronica was spotted, by a passer-by, escaping from a window. Ann pretended, till he had gone, to be just enjoying the view, with one leg over the sill -- as tho she was riding a horse, a mans way and not side-saddle.

_The New Machiavelli_ (1911) continued the sexual rebellion. American political scientists admired its "literary analysis" of the composition of British political parties. I could open the book and appreciate the fluency of style but I wouldn't want to re-read it. Tho, wonderful is its early personal experience of how change came upon static English society.

This novel promoted "the Endowment of Motherhood," which would be introduced about a half century later, as "child benefits." Undoubtedly, women should be paid for the labour of child birth and child care. Tho, Wells seemed to believe in "free love" in the sense that most people believe in free libraries: they are free to use but payed for by taxation.

Yet _A Year of Prophesying_ (1923) showed Wells was about fifty years ahead of his time on population control; emigration controls and the causes and direction of future war; suitable housing for women to manage, not designed by male architects ignorant of such things.

Wells still keenly felt how his mother, Sarah Wells "slaved" for them in their domestic hole; the need for "a new treaty" on womens rights with the new generation of ambitious career women; conservation of endangered species and resources, with European and global controls against their destruction for private profit and national advantage; the nature of democratic voting method.

Bernard Shaw was rebuked as "a mid-Victorian moral ass" because he tried to make Wells draw in his claws, during his Fabian membership, and the putting into practise theories of free love. This period was when Wells had an illegitimate child by Amber Reeves. He was obliged to endow her motherhood without the help of state benefits. Single parentage no longer has any stigma attached to it. Then, it was not tolerated, and the young woman had to have a husband found for her, in short order.

Wells wrote of a character, in _The World Of William Clissold_ (1926), that he had never met anyone with less appetite for life. Wells may have seen this in a real person, who provided a stark contrast with his own appetites. He even wrote a posthumous third volume, to his auto-biography, about his sexual adventures, _H G Wells In Love_ (1984). And he still wished he could have had more.

Wells was a spoilt mothers boy, with a penchant for tantrums, whose genius, not least for hard work, allowed him full scope for self-indulgence. His secret third volume is obsessed with his current partner, Moura Budberg, rather than any obsession with the sexual act. It makes sad reading. He first met her, as a Maxim Gorky interpretor. This was in 1920, seven years before his second wifes death.

Wells lost the haven, his wife had given, and he didn't want his orderly work life disrupted. He was trying to juggle the Moura relationship with another lover he had domiciled in France. He offered Moura her freedom in love, as well he might, then was jealously suspicious, when he found that he couldn't trust her word. This happened to be in connection with visits to Soviet Russia, which Wells perhaps felt he should be fair to, but tells her he doesn't like.   
It may be worth remembering that this was the regime of which Solzhenitsyn asked for "one word of truth."

Budberg wasn't being truthful about her movements in Russia. Some Western governments suspected she was a spy. Perhaps trying to keep herself in good odour, she informed that Anthony Blunt was a spy, which the British secret service somehow managed to over-look, as one journalist put it. The tip-off would seem to confirm the secret agent hypothesis, as it's highly doubtful she could have otherwise known this secret, that even the British government did not know about one of its own establishment inner members.

It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Budberg was made to keep tabs on Wells.   
When asked, in later life, what attracted her to Wells, she replied, that it was his smell.  
That tit-bit sounds like someone trying to be convincing with a quirky answer, coming from her as an individual. It is not true to life.

Wells was a shrewd man but he was emotionally involved long-term, while beset by the loneliness of old age.

_H G Wells In Love_ has its brighter moments. He tells of one woman, he was suspected of having an affair with, that their "guilty secret" was that they just enjoyed each others company.

The book is certainly not pornography. Despite the censors, that, too, has its place in literature. This is because the decently private act of sexuality is also a universal experience. Besides the natural appetite itself, there is an appetite to talk about it. Better that it should be done with a sense of comradeship and affection, as well as a sense of its ridiculous animality, rather than prohibited as necessarily degrading and shameful.

Wells was the most prolific and diverse of writers. And there is probably a little erotic classic lurking in his letters to Rebecca West, no mean stylist herself. When their censored version was published, the editor remarked on the endless resourcefulness of Wells sexual imagery. He depicted Rebecca as "Panther" and a drawing is reproduced of this animal lying in wait for him, from the branch of a tree.

In _The Island Of Doctor Moreau_ (1896), the panther also symbolises grace and passion. The surgeon, in the house of pain, finds this animal graceful enough to be made human but at an intolerable suffering that leads to his own downfall.

Wells once said that Gautama Buddha was perhaps the greatest man that ever lived. The Buddha taught independence from pleasure or pain, so that we should not become enslaved by either but retain our freedom. This would be freedom of thought as well as action. Otherwise, we must admit David Hume was right, that reason is, and must ever be, the slave of the passions.

Carl Jung would say that we cannot be free of our passions, we can only hope to choose which passions we would serve. Ideally we might wish to serve love, recognised as being a better master or god to us than any other. But other passions, tho they may be much less estimable, still are so powerful that they exact a more or less willing tribute from us.

During the first world war, Wells lived a double life with Rebecca West. He mischievously surprised a friend by getting him to meet a "Mr and Mrs West," at the second home he had set up for Rebecca and their love-child.

The Great War was also Wells religious period, when he believed in God as a captain of mankind. While practising bigamy, his alter ego was writing _The Soul Of A Bishop_ (1917). The bishop eventually has to live in privation, endured by his loyal wife, because of his unorthodox views, brought about by the war. He refuses the wealthy advances of a woman who wants to recruit him to some dubious religious promotion.

One might almost say of Wells that, in innocent youth, he enjoyed the fantasies of a triumphant career. And in his success, he enjoyed the fantasies of innocent youth. We now know from _H G Wells In Love_ , that when he was about thirty, he went on the prowl for extra-marital sex. This was the age he wrote _The Wheels Of Chance_ (1896). The villain of this piece is indeed just such a bounder, whom the author, speaking in his own voice, affects to detest.

It cast something of a shadow over my enjoyment of this jeu d'esprit, to know that this story was no mere shadow-fight between Wells and his shadow personality. Being two-faced was not so abnormal, considered as a late example of Victorian hypocrisy.   
Claire Tomalin researched _The Invisible Woman_ , the covered-up affair of Charles Dickens with Nelly Ternan. She points out that there were plenty of other secret bigamies or affairs.

The cyclist hero, of _The Wheels Of Chance,_ is a simple drapers assistant, the calling, that Wells pious mother put him into. He rescues a young woman from the cad who has made her false promises of an independent start in life. She is above her rescuer, etc. But, like a benevolent goddess, she will watch over his progress in getting himself an education and raising himself by his boot-straps out of his lowly estate.

This plot outline does no sort of justice to Wells humor and holiday spirits. And he notices things, tho the trained biologist carries his learning lightly. For instance, he hears a corncrake in the parsons English garden. These fine birds remain in Ireland and the northern reaches of Scotland and France.

By 1908, the explanation for the retreat of wild life is already at hand. In the beginning of _The War In The Air_ , Wells best combination of social comedy and science fiction, urban housing and infrastructure for the growing masses relentlessly advance over the country-side.

### Marriage.

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Wells once claimed that the loves of his life were his first wife, his second wife, and Moura Budberg (while tactfully putting in a word for Rebecca and Amber). In this statement, Wells is no longer the preacher of "free love" but an adherent of romantic monogamy. This reduces extra-marital affairs to the level of satisfying the sexual appetite and puts love under the monopoly of monogamy.

If "Mr West" was not a bigamist (or polygamist, which only sounds better) then Rebecca West was another mistress, left outside the charmed circle of matrimony. Yet she was left with the same office of child-bearing.

"Free love" seems nothing more than sensual self-indulgence. The poor may steal this privilege. But only the rich can afford to set up a mistress, with the security, if not recognition, of a polygamous state. "Free love" must know its limitations, if it is to be free even for the privileged.

Bernard Shaw personally advised women against "burning their boats" in extra-marital sex. The business-like Bernard would appreciate that child-conceiving is, or should be, the contractual relation of a binding marriage. One is not free to break at will, responsibility for child-rearing, without legal consequences.

I once glimpsed on tv a rare inter-war footage of Shaw and Wells together, as old men. Wells looked ill and was perhaps shy. The vegetarian Shaw looked leanly fit with flint-hard assurance and indifference to the camera. Shaw, tho, had nothing of Wells family and progeny, and, despite his legendary reputation for personal generosity, there was a certain sourness to his old age.

There is no doubt that Wells did love his wives. _Love And Mr Lewisham_ (1900) means no less than it says, with the name "Lewisham" a reflection of "Wells." This was his first serious novel of social manners, which he took much time over. For, it is essentially a memorial to his meeting his cousin Isabel Wells, his first wife.   
His autobiography first volume describes her as "heart's delight."

However, she suffered from an ignorance and dread of sex, inculcated in Victorian women, and Wells suffered from his appetites. Moreover, her mind had not been educated or led-out and the narrowness of her views made it impossible for the young student Wells to discuss topics of any seriousness.

Wells, the young teacher, scandalously ran-off with one of his students, Amy Catherine Wells. He re-christened her "Jane," perhaps a sign of how much he took her over. Her posthumous book speaks of her continued belief in free love, which perhaps was just as well, considering her husbands chronic "unfaithfulness." Agreeable, educated and passionate companionship, in his second wife, did not content him.

Yet, again, there is no doubt that he did love his second wife, also. The affectionate reminiscences and character insights of Wells _Experiment In Autobiography_ (1934), the "amoosin" "picshuas" and anecdotes are convincing enough and, indeed, not matched in the secret third volume. Fotos of Mrs Wells show an impressively attractive character.

Also, there is outside evidence of the happiness and "flying fun" of the hospitable Wells household, in Frank Swinnerton _Autobiography_.   
"Jane" was the manager, investor, and orderer of Wells life, so that he could get on with his work, typically writing in his fast long-hand, in the quiet of the night. As Wells remarked of himself: They feeds him and he turns out three or four books a year. Swinnerton says Jane was liable to tease. She probably learned that in retaliation to her husband.

At their week-end parties, Wells was always trying to think up games he could win. There was a streak in him, of his sporting father, Joseph, the record-breaking amateur county cricketer. They had everyone playing charades, the fashionable dressing-up game of the inter-war years. Even the most dignified guests were drawn out of their reserve.

Wells had the knack of being able to strike-up a talk with all ranks of society. He was American, in his relaxed informality, as if he had been a product of that classless society. This facility fed his novels, which remained prolific, even as his non-fiction burgeoned. The fluency of his conversation was so admired, it was thought a pity, it didnt go into his books. Others said that, of course, it did.

Wells once summed-up his achievement as that of a man, who had escaped from his class. This was not the modest statement it now seems. _Tono-Bungay_ (1908) is a celebrated sociological novel that shows how a feudal model of society was still imposed on the country. Rising private enterprise, without social conscience, merely seems to enter the old manorial shell, so that new money is moulded by old money.

It would be a mistake to remember Wells only as a womaniser. He had a genuine sympathy and interest in all people, as his novels and other writings reveal. Admittedly, he was accused of not having any well-drawn women characters. This was well before his late novel _Apropos Of Doloros_ (1938). Doloros is a sadly memorable female leading character. And I can't help feeling that suffering, in his old age, at some difficult woman for a companion, has etched her disagreeble character with painful vividness on the author. If so, he gets a literary revenge -- not an advisable practise, considering British libel laws.

All the same, this is one of Wells best novels, tho biographers and critics usually ignored his later fictions, when he went out of fashion. From the start, its style is assured. This is a man of the world, the encyclopedist, you know has an encyclopedic knowledge even in his novels, because he deploys just what is needed to explain any setting.

_HG Wells_

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# George Orwell: "against dictatorship."

Table of contents.

#### Links:

Schama on Churchill and Orwell.

Inter-war novels.

Writing for the poor.

_Homage to Catalonia._

_Animal Farm_

_1984._

Orwell and Stowe.

### Schama on Churchill and Orwell.

Fragments of memory, from a young mans reading of Orwell, I hoped would be helped out by Simon Schama, with his last episode of _The History of Britain_ , called The Two Winstons. These were Winston S Churchill and Winston Smith, the fictional hero of _1984_ , when Stalin has become Big Brother.   
Orwell allowed himself a comment on the bathos of the English class system, with some common Smith calling their son after the aristocratic Winston.

One is tempted to change Winston Smith to Winston S Myth or Winstons myth.  
Churchill made an ill-humored post-war election speech notoriously warning of the jack-boot from British socialism. The third of the CS Lewis classic SF trilogy, _That Hideous Strength_ (1945) is essentially based on this idea that a political victory of the statists was almost as if Britain had lost, rather than won the war.

From its inception, Churchill was notorious for his fulminations against bolshevism. In his _War Memoirs_ (1933 to 1936) Lloyd-George regarded Churchill morbid in his attitude to that most mortality-inducing of regimes. This goes to show how easily the great mans opinion was discounted. Churchill had made less than no headway in persuading others. From the onset of the Revolution, he said that Russia had sunk into barbarism.

His warnings against Hitler were as thanklessly received. Lady Astor regarded Churchill as a "war-monger" for trying to prevent another war by preparedness against an irreconcilable enemy.   
A celebrated exhange is too good to omit. Nancy Astor said: Winston, if I were your wife, I would put poison in your tea.  
Churchill answered: Nancy, if you were my wife, I would take it!

Schama summed up the first half of the twentieth century in Britain thru these two literary activists, Churchill and Orwell. He also illustrated the pros and cons of television documentaries: vivid, with well chosen period footage, but a sketch of a sketch of the times. His television outline of Orwells life is like an artists line drawing that conveys how much he knows of his subject by his choices of the minimal number of strokes.

Churchill and Orwell, from the top and bottom ends of the British ruling class, were more often than not, at odds with it. Neither of them were party men. They were distrusted by their respective "sides."   
Thru-out most of the inter-war years, Churchill was "a study in failure" to quote another historian. He was considered yesterdays man. Churchill does not represent the history of most of this period.  
And George Orwell was a marginal figure on the Left. He was unpopular with the Popular Front that included Left-wing tyranny against Right-wing tyranny.

Not until the second world war does Churchill represent history. Orwell does not represent history, until the onset of the Cold War.   
Ultimately, the man of the Right would be vindicated against the right wing dictators, and the man of the Left against the left wing dictators.  
Schama is justified in picking them as correctives, rather than representatives, of twentieth century history.

Simon Schama began his program with the swinging sixties when all they could say to the past was: good riddance. Then came Churchills state funeral. (Churchill himself had planned for it, like a last campaign, an Operation No Hope.) Then, Schama was a history student, deeply influenced by Orwell. Schama alludes to the nations out-pouring of grief, in terms of when "the snivelling" was all over.  
Schama, for dismissive cynicism, is pure Orwell.

### Inter-war novels.

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This pure Orwell, that Schama characterised in a remark of his own, is the bitterness of a betrayed idealist. In his first novel, _Burmese Days_ (1935), disillusion with the Empire is over-shadowed by despair over the woman who deserts the character, based on Orwells experience as an Imperial police-man.   
Orwell was to say he found the Burmese Buddhist monks particularly trying. Apparently, they were the only example in Asia of a highly politicised Buddhist clergy, and of a particularly antagonistic kind.

The jilting womans shallowness, however, only emphasises that of the whole colonial culture. The suicide of the jilted man, after a nights torment, in which he even perceives her for what she was, symbolizes the death of Orwells imperial ideal.

Orwells personality is already marked in the first novel -- the biting and dismissive judgments on frailties -- the satirist with a leaning to tragedy, rather than comedy, in the human condition. This links to his political commitment: maybe he feels humorous tolerance of human failings is too indulgent of the worlds wrongs. He once declared English writers sense of humor, as their "besetting sin."

Orwell said _Burmese Days_ embodied his early aspirations to literature, full of "purple prose." In my opinion, it is his best conventional novel -- an esthetically satisying work, a work of art, in a way that later novels are not. He put a lot of descriptive work into it, and it paid off.   
Orwell retained a commitment to literary values, as in championing the modernist poets, tho, as he put it: most of them went politically wrong.   
He criticised HG Wells for wasted talent. As others have said, Wells deserted his books before they were well finished work.

Orwells own novels, after Burmese Days, may not be free of his own criticism. Orwell admitted he was no novelist. He turned to non-fictional reports of his experiences in search of the working class. Some of these encounters are to be found, as articles, in their own right, as well as finding their way into his novels. Hop picking, when she finds herself on the road, becomes one recourse of _A Clergyman's Daughter_ (1935).

This character is another expression of Orwells own up-bringing in genteel poverty, where the thinly congregated parish church is visited, in summer, by the sickly corruption of the entombed.   
This was an early work, which was almost destroyed. It is perhaps not fair to judge him by it, as a novelist. Orwell did destroy one of his novels. He regreted doing so, because there was probably something there he could have salvaged.

_Keep The Aspidistra Flying_ (1936) alludes to the lower middle class fashion of keeping this plant in their homes. The title suggests mock heroics in the style of Cervantes but the novel is nothing of the sort. J B Priestley was asked what he thought of various authors. "Jolly Jack" one-liner for Orwell was: too much of a misery. This novel vouches for that, more than any of his works.

Orwell had a similarly poor opinion of Priestley. A review belittled _Angel Pavement_ as holiday reading. There is often no love lost on the Left. In Literature and Western Man, Priestley didn't mention Orwell. __

Had the fictional police-man, in _Burmese Days_ , given himself a reprieve, he might have become the life-denier, who ill-graces _Keep The Aspidistra Flying_. The contrast in story lines is that the former character is doomed, and the latter is saved, by a woman. Until then, the anti-hero seems determined to be more depressed than the Thirties Depression, he is half-living thru.

In the end, his girl-friend gives herself to him, when he is down. A corrupt puritanism allows him a perverse satisfaction from not enjoying her. Yet things are supposed to work out. The failed poet becomes an advertising jingler and married life beckons.

Thus, the misleading propaganda of the weak man redeemed by his willing woman. A woman may be led to believe she can change a man, when she cannot. Some men may be best left alone till they learn how to behave themselves, if they ever do. (This reviewer admits he may have been no better!)  
When it was too late for a woman to undo her mistake, she had nothing left but heroic stoicism, as Sean O'Casey played-out, in _Juno and the Paycock._

_Coming Up For Air_ (1939) is the last conventional Orwell novel, before the last two politically motivated out-breaks into fable and science fiction. The author re-creates himself as a different human being, which is perhaps the distinctive pre-occupation of novelists. Orwell is imagining himself as having another life, to the one he has had.

The main character is big and fat. He has children: watching over them on a night, sometimes, but not often, he feels he is nothing more than the husk of these wonderkind, redeemed in their sleep. (Later, Orwell and his wife will adopt a child.)

In most literature, whether the writers have children or not, there is not much about them. Most novelists seem to think that children should be not seen and not heard. As David Lodge says:

> Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round.

The passion in _Coming Up For Air_ has gone out of the narrative characters marriage and indeed his whole life. He seeks to re-kindle youths joy of living by going back to his roots -- coming up for air. As the title hints, fishing was his boyhood passion. There was a deep, secluded, arbored pool, the haunt of pike like primeval monsters.

Orwell manages to infuse the reader with something of his passion for the sport (which, after all, stems from human need).  
I remember being thoroly bored by a fisher boy, eyes blazing, go on about his pastime. I listened with as polite an interest as a youngster could muster, and wished the girls, with who we played hide and seek, hadn't left for their teas.   
Now I am not only bored but repelled and sympathise with Leigh Hunt extravagantly condemning Izaak Walton.

Orwell, like Priestley, fired an early warning shot in the conservation battle. The beautiful pool has been drained and filled with rubbish for a new building site.

The narrative character has sensibilities but he is not an intellectual. You couldn't say he was a working class man because there is none of the solidarity with mates working together in the factories. To say he was lower middle class would be to say he was isolated, and to that extent an individual. But not an educated individual.

He has an old public school teacher, of the classics, who tells him there were ancient Greek tyrants, the spitting image of Hitler. (Orwell received a letter, about one of his novels, from a former teacher.) A plebeian character, such as Orwell tries to portray, wouldn't have had a "public" school education, which in England means a _private_ education.   
But, in 1939, Orwell gets across the fact that war-mongering is nothing new.   
The bombing of some houses is implicitly believed to be the start of the coming war. When it turns out to be an accident, this is regarded as nothing more than a reprieve.   
The story itself is a reprieve of age with a last visit to the haunts of ones youth.

### Writing for the poor.

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Orwell documentary writings on the conditions of the poor are much more important than the pre-war novels. The first of these, _Down And Out In Paris And London_ , was rated well-up in a book-shop top hundred list of twentieth century books. ( _1984_ and _Animal Farm_ took second and third places.) This may be an exaggeration of its merit compared to the twentieth centurys best writings (mostly missing from the list) but it is a fine book, never the less.

In Paris, Orwell worked in catering. Anyone who has been a washer-up will recognise the hectic hotel atmosphere behind the scenes. After a while, it tends to eject one like the contents of a pressure cooker. (Hence, Harry Truman remarked: If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.)

Orwell lands in England to wander the country with the unemployed. He doesn't join the ranks like the Jarrow March. Rather, he tags along with individuals, finding out how they came to be down on their luck. With this book, one enters into these forgotten souls aimless walking the streets in the summer dust. (Winter, of course, would have been much worse.)

One destitute man, he urges to take a bottle of milk from a door-step. For all his hunger, he dare not do so, despite the fact that the bottle has obviously been left by mistake, at an empty premises. This incident opens ones eyes to the paralysing severity of the law at that time.

The limited number of places, where shabby individuals can rest without being moved on, or thrown out, makes Orwell cutting about the phrase "street-corner loafer." "The spike" is the last place they would rest up, if they had any other choice. Orwell finds himself (the pitier) the object of pity there, because his accent gives him away as a "gentleman" presumably fallen on bad times. He wasn't too pleased at the misguided decency of this English class discrimination, tho it happened to be in his favor.

In _Notes from a small island_ , Bill Bryson takes issue with Orwells distaste for the standard of cleanliness he found at his lodgings, when writing his investigation, _The Road To Wigan Pier_ (1937). You only have to consider Alan Bennett reminiscing, of a chip in the sugar and a cream cracker under the couch, to recognise Orwells description is authentic.

Or, for that matter, the cartoon strip _Andy Capp_ will serve. Capp lives a closed round of betting, boozing, bawdying and sporting. If he is one of the sea of bobbing caps driven in and fleeing out of the factory gates, the cartoon hardly shows it: Capp shuts out the trauma of labor from his consciousness. His cap is pulled down over his eyes, which we never see, seeing he has no sensibility.

His Missus, he may patronise, when caught in a good mood. As Capp always wears a cap, she always wears a head scarf, the symbol of her relentless domestic servitude to her do-nothing master, his intransigence being the standing joke that kept the cartoon going. Capps put-down rejoinder was always punctuated by Flo, in dopey-eyed aside at the reader, as she trots dutifully behind her lord.

"Married men live longer than bachelors," Flo tells Andy.  
"Serves 'em right," retorts Capp.

No matter how hard a woman slaved to wash off the atmosphere of soot, ever undoing her efforts, a partner, who behaved at home like a sack of coals on her back, would, as likely as not, degrade her to a slattern.

Times have changed for some. In Germany, husbands are required by law to help with the house-work. (As for the Andy Capp type, I doubt they would bother to throw him in jail. More like, they would bring back capital punishment!) Germany apparently has domestic democracy as well as industrial democracy. Into the twenty-first century, Britain still hasn't the latter. Industrial partnership, between management and work-force, obviously would have been a better example for the marital partnership.

HG Wells gave the _Penny Dreadfuls_ etc their due, as a gateway to literature for the likes of Mr Polly. But Orwell pioneered essays in cultural trivia, such as the strip cartoons in the boys comics. He recognised what would nowadays be called their sociological significance, their naive imparting of attitudes or prejudices, instilled in young minds.

He exposed that for what it was. But he would have fought cultural and literary censorship. Nowadays, taxes often subsidise a left wing "thought police" to tell the public what is best for them. The "thought police" is an unheeded warning we owe to Orwell.

With respect to the enjoyment they gave in childhood, he would find value in a hack like Frank Richards, who, nevertheless, created in Billy Bunter, amidst his chums, a literary immortal of sorts. At the time, such sloggers of literature would not have been deemed worthy of academic notice. Richard Hoggart, in _The Uses of Literacy,_ perhaps marks a turning-point in that respect.

The long and arduous hours of working people didn't leave surplus energy for creative leisure. Orwell met an activist, who consciously channeled his bitterness, at not being able to have children, into political agitation. With a family to look after, he wouldn't have had such energy to spare on aggression.

From the comfort of his departing train, Orwell left us with the view of a womans utter hopelessness, lost amongst the endless house rows, as she tried to unblock a drain.   
He seemed relieved to leave. The second part of _The Road_ is a polemic against doctrinaire socialism. _Marxism for Infants_ is an example, he imagines, of the latest doctrinaire text, sarcastically implying it is a fairy tale compared to the bleakness he has just witnessed.

Orwell is guilty of his own strictures: the polemics of the second part are altogether inferior to his observations in the first part. It is his relief, to speculate, from having to take in the spectacle. That is not to say Orwell lacked commitment. Rather, the scale of the industrial depression offered no obvious means of remedy.   
The fight for republican Spain was an opportunity to do something for a working class government.

### _Homage To Catalonia._

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Most foreign volunteers, for the Spanish Republican cause, were ushered into the ranks of the communists. By an unlikely chance, Orwell found himself among a small anarchist brigade. This is the story of _Homage to Catalonia_ (1938), of which I share the opinion it is one of his best books. It also should be read to appreciate his famous two final anti-totalitarian works.

These Spanish anarchists called themselves Marxists but they were not communists. They accepted Marxes view of class society. They were against the socialists route to "the withering away of the state" via state regulation. The anarchists were correct, in that state socialists proved to be control freaks. Also they were right in that scrapping rules, as in the capitalist deregulation of economies, has weakened state power, indeed made it the tool of "global capitalism."

The current anarchist riots against global capitalism, when the most powerful economys heads of state meet, are really a family quarrel, in terms of the history of political theory. The political anarchists and the laisser-faire economists are branches of an originally shared ideology.

Orwells six foot-two height embarrassed him in Spain, as it had embarrassed him in a visit down the mines. Travel along the low galleries was an exhausting torture to him. In the Spanish civil war trenches, his height got him shot thru the throat and hospitalised.

He was to say afterwards that, in Spain, he came to believe in socialism. That is not just as a theory but as workable in practise. An Encyclopedia Britannica article says that Orwells socialism was not the centralised socialism of the British Labour party.

Brought up among race and class distinctions, as if they were the natural order, Orwell was deeply impressed to find himself in a Catalonian city with all kinds of flunkeyism conspicuous by their absence. It was a liberating experience, whose working class drabness could not be rivaled by all the gaudy charms of romantic royalism and hierarchical deference.  
To this day, the region has retained some of its anarchist tradition, as in the Mondragon worker co-operatives.

Orwells attitude to class may have been a bit ambiguous. Alan Ayckbourn has said: Put three Englishmen on a desert island and within an hour they'll have invented a class system.   
Orwells list of reforms, on reaching the question of the monarchy, decided to probably keep it. But the old feudal system hangs on the royal family at the apex.

At the end of a letter, Orwell said, on buying a left wing periodical, the working class seller had called him "Sir." He finished the letter with "Good old England." No doubt, there was a grin on his face.   
A nineteen seventies British satire show pretended a knighthood accepted by a "Sir George Orwell."

American political scientists, Almond and Verba, approved of this ambiguity in political loyalties or "cross-cleavage" in a countrys political battle-lines. When all the people are dogmatists divided into two clearly opposed camps, as nothing more than enemies, they are not going to make progress as a community.

Republican Spain had the worst of both worlds. There was an irreconcilable split between Republicans and Royalists. The Popular Front should have been a compromise of left wing doctrines, held together against fascism. But it was being systematically under-mined by the communists to replace it with a state monolith, like the Soviet Union. They were steadily picking off their left wing allies, in order to take complete control of Spain. In provoking this war within a war, they helped destroy the Spanish Republic.

A search party, in Orwells lodging, uncovered _Mein Kampf_. Orwell heard the sensation this created, commenting, that his reading _Mein Kampf_ , of course, made him a Nazi.

Orwells homage published a chapter on the deceit of British news-papers in defaming the republican regime. One siren voice of a friend suggested he had spoiled the literary form of a good book, by the inserted chapter, showing-up these lies. Orwell agreed but the truth was too important to over-look for reasons of either political or esthetic expedience.

He was detested by much of the Left for exposing communist tactics, as if he were to blame for its self-defeating consequences. It reminds of the Kipling poem, _If_ , about all around losing their head and blaming you.

### _Animal Farm_

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Not much needs to be said about the short fable _Animal Farm._ Its theme is anticipated by Aesop fable, _The Kingdom of the Lion._ This book would be the one, I'd guess might still be widely read in a couple of thousand years time -- if civilization survives that long.   
As Malcolm Muggeridge said: It will always be of interest -- as long as people want to tell each other stories.

Many great writers have lived much longer and written much more, but Orwell has the distinction of having written a perfect work of art, a flawless little master-piece.

Rated the twentieth centurys most popular English novel, J R R Tolkein romanced _Lord of the Rings_ on a hugely greater scale, a gothic cathedral, compared to the pure classical lines of a puritan chapel. But Tolkien ideal, of loyal stooge, against every menace, is the reactionary distraction of a glamorised feudalism.

Indeed, the _1984_ Big Brother is essentially the feudal ideal of subservient loyalty to a military master. Lacking in capitalist enterprise, it brain-washes the masses with production propaganda.

_Animal Farm_ only took a month or so to write. Orwell called it "a squib" he had been working on. The development of this counter-strike, to all-conquering communist propaganda, probably took much longer.   
The squib was too hot to handle for four publishers, in 1944. One demured at the portrayal of the betrayers of the revolution as pigs! Good business-man tho he was, the idealistic Left Book Club publisher Victor Gollancz never regreted passing up its sales, because of the need to finish the war with the help of those satirised.

When Gollancz asked to be Orwells publisher again, the author sympathetically declined, admitting Gollancz had come close to his views, but naturally wanting to reward Secker and Warburg for their support. Gollancz was the author of a post-war plea for humanity to the defeated, _Our Threatened Values._

_Animal Farm_ was the answer to Orwells mockery of a title, "Marxism for Infants." The fable is usually found in the childrens section of libraries. It is the ultimate in his desire to write prose clear as a window pane.

This was also an ideal of one of the worlds most prolific writers, Isaac Asimov. He pointed out that the poetic style of writing, colorful and obscure, is like mosaic cathedral windows, of the middle ages. But plate glass, one can see thru flawlessly, is a modern invention.  
That is to say one shouldnt under-rate the literary accomplishment of clarity in prose, compared to ingenious but obscure poetry.

However, Orwell respected poetry, not least modernism. Moreover, his tale reminds how Geoffrey Chaucer parodied the chivalrous romances, in Chaunticleer. The undone romance of the revolution, even one conducted by animals, is a tragi-comedy.   
Orwells love of animals is apparent straight-away from the naive joy of the farm animals in their supposed liberation from the farmer -- an impossible idealism the author still makes us regret being betrayed, step by step, even while we laugh at the illogical but self-serving after-thought to "All animals are equal" - "but some animals are more equal than others."   
We pity the poor dumb animals, who are so easily confused and deceived. They are just like a modern electorate of the "inattentive," as H G Wells called them.

The human ability with words extends to turning intelligence against itself, to arrive at a sub-animal stupidity and destructiveness.

_Animal Farm_ outlines the main features of the Russian revolutions betrayal but it is really about the typical take-over of revolutions by dictators. The fact, that the pig dictator is called Napoleon, confirms this in a word. His henchman, called Squeeler, sums up the use of informers to cowe the public, in any nasty police state.

_Animal Farm_ was not the total condemnation of "the Russian experiment" it seemed in its day. The fable stresses the devastating effect of the war. Orwell allows, at first, there was much genuine idealism. He shared it. Whereas, some of the soviet elite would come to admit (at first in private) that the revolution had been a total failure.

More than the homely satire, of _Animal Farm_ , was needed to spell out the peculiar horror of the twentieth century slave state. Hence, _1984_ , the arbitrary setting of a date for the arrival of a tyranny more monstrous than the world has ever known.

### _1984._

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You dont have to agree with this reference: Bush's Orwellian Address; Happy New Year: It's 1984, by Jacob Levich, whose style is worthier than mine of Orwell. http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0922-07.htm But one must admit that however over-used an inspiration, _1984_ can still create controversy.

As _Daily Mail_ said: If Americas enemies wanted to provoke a knee-jerk reaction to the twin-towers atrocity, they have been brilliantly successful. _The Mail_ , a conservative paper, subsequently deplored excessive bombing resulting in much loss of civilian life in Afghanistan.

Levich focuses on Orwells theme of the age-old use of war to crush dissent within nations. Carl Jung treated the Cold War conflict between East and West as like the dissociated personality of a neurotic. We project our dark side or Shadow on someone else, blaming only them and not ourselves for the bad state of the world.

This self-righteousness makes it acceptable to wage war on opponents as a means of supposedly eradicating the evil in the world. It only prevents conflicting sides from correcting their respective mistakes and putting the world to rights.

Very simply, the continuing fault of the West is economic expoitation and corruption. Its feeble political democracy is too compromised to tackle greeds endless crimes, great and small. Genuine political economic democracy is an essential condition to make amends. That means two chambers, scientifically matching political theory to economic practise, with community representatives and occupational representatives, effectively chosen by the scientific method of elections.

I believe any reform platform must include those couple of planks to stand. The Wests one-dimensional democracy of party-rigged elections wont do. Parties have been turned into oligarchys Fifth Column to strike down democracy.

Instead of the world religions of a brotherhood of man, the religion of _1984_ is the worship of "the Party." Big Brother is as all-knowing and all-powerful as a god. He is like the Victorian deity who always saw what you were doing wrong: Big Brother is Watching You. He is supposed never to do wrong and is always to be obeyed.

In modern society, crimes and sheer vandalism do Big Brothers work (just as international terrorism provokes a world police state.) Television camera surveillance is ever being extended to keep up with the trail of greed and destruction. Keeping the public under observation does nothing to make for self-restraint and good-will, either in the watchers or the watched. It is a stop-gap to defend some of the innocent some of the time.

In all areas of the community, genuinely democratic elections would empower the public shrewdness in judging character, to pick the best leaders to lead by good example, so that everyone behave decently to each other, because they want to.   
Mass obedience may seem docile but is as capable of mass atrocity.   
J B Priestley said that nations, behaving like a flock of sheep at home, turned into a pack of wolves abroad. Military Germany was an obvious example.

In a way, Orwell under-states the down-grading of reasoned criticism. In his novel, mystifying changes of policy are covered-up by destroying history: old news is rubbished so inconsistencies can never be checked. In contemporary politics, consistency is treated as an over-rated virtue.

(Speaking on BBC radio 4, Malcolm Muggeridge delighted in repeating that Orwell got his ideas on news manipulation from working at the BBC. He was in the over-seas service.)

Catalonia and other sources of "leaks" explain why Orwell was able to write so authentic a picture of a totalitarian world. It appears that most, if not all, of the historic works of the dissidents will not live on in the popular mind as well as Orwells science fiction.

Most people may not have read Orwells "dreary classic"; the telling phrases live on. The year, 1984 recedes; _1984_ remains invested with prophetic menace. Television program names have appropriated or misappropriated both another Orwell number, Room 101, and Big Brother.

In Orwells epitome of the terror state, pain is more powerful than pleasure. For that reason, Winston Smith knows that his lover will betray him, as he betrays her. We are not talking about heroic exceptions. Orwell has no answer to this fatal weakness of the human condition, tho the Buddhist philosophy, he must have met in Burma, says: I will show you suffering, and the end of suffering.

Orwells celebrated poem _The Crystal Spirit_ suggests he was not always so hopeless a humanist, as in his last illness, writing _1984_. "No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit" ends this tribute to the comradeship he found in Spain.  
Also from this period, Orwell made the well-known statement: Every word, I have written, since 1936, was against dictatorship.

### Orwell and Stowe.

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Orwell may not have had convictions of an immortal soul, to sustain him in his mission against all-powerful oppression. The disillusion with imperialism did not prevent a certain fervor to his patriotism and with that went the usual English sympathy for protestantism. The attitude, that there was life in the old dog yet, tells of a faith that has moved on.

He was scathing of Catholic writers who dealt in sentimental miracles, thinking they should grow up. He noted with some surprise "the usual left-wing scenery" in Graham Greene novels.

Orwell the reviewer could have more fluency than judgment. He dismisses _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as "a good bad book." Its influence on nineteenth century political opinion was perhaps greater than _1984_ on twentieth century attitudes. Notice that Orwell himself was prone to use "doublespeak" before he satirised the corruption of intellect in such terms.

Stowe had an easier task as a reformer in one respect: she was seeking to extend an already recognised principle, equality before the law -- not only to an enslaved race, but also, one feels, to women and even to children, in her Christian optimism. Orwells humanist pessimism may not be any nearer the truth, and may be a good deal less robust a belief system.

_1984_ could not succeed nearly so well as Stowes classic because Orwell does not have a clear idea of the democratic reforms to replace the dictatorship. Nor, in his fatal illness, does he have the vivacity of Stowe, that makes her novel work on more than one level, as a compelling case for emancipation, and a story full of incident, containing vivid characters drawn with humor, compassion and consideration or charity even for the villains.  
Orwell villains are irredeemable. They have reduced themselves to a souless party machine that does not know how to dismantle itself.

Orwell found his mission in life, in some sense a spiritual conviction of human worth, in defiance of its degradation. And he just got on with the job. He did not trouble himself with inconclusive religious speculations, that brought about disdain, in David Hume, for metaphysics.

Uncle Tom on the plantation "gulag" dreads to lose his immortal soul more than life itself. This is in line with Christs admonition to fear those who can take away the former rather than the latter.  
Tom is admitted to be "a moral miracle." We are not strong enough for an endurance test such as Christ in prayer would have put off.

_1984_ rests on the reality that we are ruled by our weakness. The novel was to be called The Last Man, because there was no-one else left with common poetic feeling for nature or courtship or whatever. When Winston Smith has been broken in spirit, the shot in the back, at end of story really feels like "end of story." There is not the most tentative question of life after death.

In practical terms, the difference between Stowe and Orwell may not be so great. If ones humanity is easily broken, we may value the more what we may lose -- especially if no store can be set by an after-life. Freedom of the individual is violated, it seems, in an effort to leave nothing sacred, to remove the knowledge of the sacred, that is conscience.  
The sacred, in some sense, "heaven" exists. As the reformed atheist C S Lewis said: It is more important that heaven should exist than that we should get there.

Freedom of conscience may also be under-mined by hedonism, Aldous Huxley portrayed in _Brave New World_. __Hedonist conditioning for a consumer society is consuming the legacy of the world.

_  
27 july 2002 with revision._

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# Aldous Huxley: _Island_.

Table of contents.

> Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence -- those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster. Ignorance, militarism and breeding, these three -- and the greatest of these is breeding. No hope, not the slightest possibility, of solving the economic problem until _that's_ under control.

_Island_ (1962) was the one last novel Aldous Huxley wanted to write. It is a utopia or ideal society, imagined in the wisdom of his last years. This is a more mature work than _Brave New World_ , for which his name is best remembered. The latter is a dystopia rather than a utopia. Destructive criticism, of the obvious faults of society, however cleverly projected, is easier than creating a realistic and interesting alternative.

In point of fact, there isn't much of a plot to _Island_. It is a vehicle for Huxleys pet ideas about human betterment, to be recognised with affection by those who appreciate his company. That does not mean to say he has forgotten to set the scene. The reader is soaked in an exotic landscape and culture.

An obscure south asian island has luckily escaped colonial exploitation and indoctrination. The best of ancient oriental religous philosophy survives to meet the best of modern scientific progress, in the two founding figures of a humane social experiment that works -- so the author would have us believe.

The modern world finds that these blessed folk have oil to plunder. The narrative character is a hack journalist, being bribed as a spy to serve his bosses portfolio of interests. He gate-crashes the island, in a ship-wreck. As he recovers, he is given a conducted tour of the utopia.

One of the survivors first encounters is with a talking myrnah bird: "Attention!" It repeats. The old rajah freed a thousand of these instructors about the island.   
Attention to what?   
One finds out the answer is: Attention to attention. What else?  
"Here and now, boys, here and now," the bird goes on. The idea is that one lives for the moment, meaning that one live in the eternal present.

Will, the castaway is carried on a stretcher to the doctor, for attention.

> From his moving bed Will Farnaby looked up through the green darkness as though from the floor of a living sea. Far overhead, near the surface, there was a rustling among the leaves, a noise of monkeys. And now it was a dozen hornbills hopping, like the figments of a disordered imagination, through a cloud of orchids.

The journalists only baggage is a bad conscience. He deserted the woman, who loved him, for another he craved. The latter, of course, got rid of him when it served her turn.   
The regreted triumph of lust over love also marked a relationship that started off _Ape and Essence._ This dystopia was Huxley at his most resigned. Written at the end of world war two, it seemed that scientific progress was matched by moral regress. What then more natural for the author to take human debasement to its logical conclusion?

_Ape and Essence_ was one of science fictions early post-nuclear war scenarios, of which thousands were to be written. Human remnants, on west coast America, are still plundering their fellows. But those best preserved are in the mausoleums of the new rich, where they turn out to have been embalmed to a living likeness, and in all their worldly livery.

However, the journalist, on _Island_ , is given psychological, as well as physical healing. Describing a place he knows, as a peaceful and happy memory, takes him back there in his imagination. And putting the patient in a light trance removes distraction of the mind from healing the body.

It is all rather over-shadowed by the impending fate of the island. A hundred years humanitarian work is about to be wrecked over-night by ruthless greed. Inside help for the coup comes from a gushing "spiritualist," regal, self-regarding and over-bearing, together with her son, Murugan, in adolescent power drive:

> "One of the first things I'll do is to build a big insecticide plant." Murugan laughed and winked an eye. "If you can make insecticides," he said, "you can make nerve gas."

War, famine and disease are the usual results of over-population, tho they cannot be said to have controled it. Famine could be averted by breeding improved food-stuffs. The usual result is an increased birth-rate, unless there is birth-control. Huxleys island of "Pala" happens to inherit a Mahayana and Tantrik strain of Buddhism. People accept that "begetting is merely postponed assassination," and use traditional means of contraception, known since the stone age.

The esoteric practices of "the yoga of love" are taught to the common people. Sexual union is used as a means of transcending one-self with a partner, rather than mere self-gratification of bodily appetite. And, in general, sensation is not denied for some nirvana, but as a means of transcending ones narrow identification of the self with ones bodily nature.

Much evident in the novel is Huxleys famous pre-occupation with mind-expanding drugs to escape the prison of ego. He cautions they are not suitable for people with certain physical and mental disabilities, such as a liver condition or schizophrenia. Huxley might have added that all prescriptions may be more or less disallowed because of side effects. He also wrote essays on his drug trips: _The Doors of Perception_ and _Heaven and Hell._

Much to the scorn of the modern consumer addict, Murugan, the islanders are happy without "economic growth." Pretending to be a virtuous school-boy, learning _Elementary Ecology_ , he secretes a mail order catalog in his desk. Elsewhere, in the novel, comes the comment that compassion and intelligence toward nature make ecology applied Buddhism.

Pala is neither capitalist nor state socialist. It relies on de-centralisation and co-operatives in agriculture, industry and finance. Instead of over-specialisation to maximise production, job satisfaction is sought by a part-time system of sampling different jobs. Since Huxleys day, more flexible working arrangements only gradually became accepted.

_Ends and Means_ and _Brave New World Revisited_ are among his main studies on social reform. _The Perennial Philosophy_ perhaps is his main look at personal improvement, a problem which death itself may not put an end to. The two approaches are really part of each other. In _Island_ , there is no artificial separation, of personal and social welfare, for the convenience of exposition.

Huxley was much taken with Sheldon theory of personality, based on three body types. No doubt he was influenced by being an obvious "ectomorph." Later tests have discredited the theory. Huxley is on safer ground with the introvert-extravert personality range, associated with CG Jung, and so successful as to enter into the popular consciousness of relationships.

In _Island_ , a woman describes her mother as being like "a permanent invasion of her privacy," because she is so exhuberant in her extraversion. The daughter admits to being like her introvert father, regarded by his wife as lacking common feelings, because he is so withdrawn.

Modern industrial society aggravates mental disturbances by forcing incompatible personalities to live together in "the telephone box" of the nuclear family. In Pala, they have informal extended families, Mutual Adoption Clubs, with more than one "mother" or "father." When members of the biological family are getting too much on each others nerves, they can stay away from home, for a while.

There is no maternal clinging. If parents and children don't get on, they don't force themselves upon each others company. It is considered natural to go ones own way.

Children are acclimatised to other children of incompatible physiology and temperament. All the nervous, tense introverted children are put together. A few boisterous kids are introduced to their group, till they learn the right to exist of people different from themselves. For squabblesome small children, different personality types are likened to different kinds of animals, cat-people, sheep-people, guinea-pig-people etc, so even they can understand contributing causes to their conflicts.  
As a celebrity once said about her pets: I keep cats and dogs together. It broadens their minds.

If Western families are as socially claustrophobic as telephone booths, the schools also are like boxes. Huxley describes westerners as "sitting addicts" who have lost the right balance in their lives between mental and manual labor. Huxley characters argue: Not "back to good old child labor" but rather "forward from bad new child idleness."

Practical work and challenging recreations also work off aggression, which judging by contemporary schooling, there is much need of. Huxley was in many ways a prophet.

Late on in the story, we join an inspection of a Palanese school, taking a cross-section of its lessons, that give a particular flavor to Huxleyan thoughts on education, which I wont attempt to convey. This review doesn't do justice to the variety and subtlety in his novel of ideas.

He recognises that emotionally damaged individuals, in power, can cause, in their turn, incalculable damage of all kinds, mental, physical, emotional, social, economic... The EH, as he calls it, the Essential Horror of life has no single solution, but must be tackled on many fronts. The specialist sciences, especially the biological and psychological sciences have their part to play. They should be grounded in an accumulated practical wisdom such as some types of Buddhism, which are scientific in the sense of stressing immediate experience and deploring unverifiable dogmas that dictators work on people with.

Schumacher, in _Small Is Beautiful_ , satirises the naive assumptions of western economics. He demonstrates that other moral imperatives can be used to supply an economics, in which human beings matter, sketching out a "Buddhist economics" as one possible instance.

For Huxley, the EH haunts both the personal life and the mass spectacle. A malignant disease like cancer can destroy not only the body but radiant goodness of character. One of the Palanese childrens lessons is that pain is a warning that must be heeded, in the attempt to find a cure. But there are also spiritual techniques to lessen the pain once its message has been received and acted on.

Huxley was much ahead of his time. He was cosmopolitan when the England he left, for futuristic California, was still parochial. Now, you don't have to go far in England to find local societies that are Huxleyan in their oriental pre-occupations.

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# J B Priestley, man of letters.

Table of contents.

#### Links to sections.

Part one: two world wars.

Introduction.

_The Good Companions._

Further inter-war novels, travel, social comment.

Priestley war broadcasts.

Priestley war-time manifesto.

_Theatre Outlook_

"Disarmament."

Part two: before and after the wars,

"Magical" works.

Paradise lost

Tricksters, amiable or otherwise, in post-war literature.

Last novels, coffee-table books.

Literary criticism.

## Part one: two world wars.

### Introduction.

A teacher once advised that life isn't long enough to read all of Priestley. Having almost fully committed that folly, this review is offered as an indulgence to myself -- but with two cautions. Priestleys real talent is for the theater. I have seen some of his plays, years ago. They have to be seen to be appreciated. They were impressive yet I don't remember much.

I would like to see the BBC or someone put on all Priestley time plays, either as repeats or new productions, if not already on film.   
His main novels are dominated by his enthusiasm for theater. This review does not properly value Priestley on his strongest suit.

Moreover, it is decades since I read his out-put. So, I cannot give detailed criticism. I can only say what has left a lasting impression, amongst the books I have pored thru, before and since.

Priestley is given the old-fashioned term "man of letters" as harking back to an age when fluent literacy was still considered rather exclusive. Writers were the few who made a living by it. Now, a fair few make a living by it. Especially since the web, anyone can be a writer. The term has lost its professional significance.

Before Priestley could hope to make it, he was confronted by the Great War. As a volunteer (inspected by Kitchener) he was astonishingly lucky to survive, narrowly missing death, and having to convalesce.

Priestley doesn't say much of his war experiences in his writings. One of the best sources (also of interest to aspiring writers) is his writing biography, _Margin Released_. (This rather duff title has to do with a type-writer function.) It is as if he felt that the most appropriate treatment of World War One was as a part of his literary apprenticeship.

He has a few interesting observations to make on human nature, at least the male half of it, from acquiantance with such large masses of folk. He reckoned that there was about one tenth of the population, who were so life-denying or recalcitrant, that only a great religious teacher could have turned them round. (Priestley doesn't comment on the fact that, in the trenches, they were the only people who were "socially adjusted.")

Once, he heard, thru a partition, some men from the officer class, being the upper class, saying that they didn't think much of him.   
When Priestley wrote mock-seriously of "The Enemy," he wasn't thinking of German shells that nearly buried him alive, but various monsters of the English class system, he caricatured in his novels.

As a surviving soldier, he would get an Oxbridge scholarship -- so did CS Lewis. He says even less about that. It gets a mention in _Margin Released._

### _The Good Companions._

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Priestley managed to earn a literary living by unremitting hard work. For Priestley, the amateur writes when he likes to. The professional writes because he has to.   
When his first wife was dying and he was struggling with the bills, the last thing he felt like doing was writing. Yet his work was none the worse for how he privately felt. His first accepted publications were literary criticisms of established names. They contained some of his sharpest work. The critique of the character of Falstaff, in _The Comic English Characters_ , was admired by a famous actor.   
Priestleys dramatic bent showed itself before he entered theatres by the stage door.

This debut happened thru the runaway success of his first major novel, _The Good Companions_ , which was turned into a play and a film. The inter-war story emerges from an austere Yorkshire back-ground. Unlike several later novels, the length, with clarity of style, gives the story a space and refreshing sweep, comparable to the Yorkshire moors themselves, as a great out-doors.   
A diverse little group meet to become touring players and an unlikely success. One, of their number, writes a catchy tune. It gets accepted by the music industry, "which hardly ever happens" (as the author says of outsiders).

At first, the group give themselves the twee twenties name of the Dinky Doos. They re-name themselves The Good Companions, which would seem a bit ponderous by later standards. Think of all those sixties bands, like The Pretty Things, The Kinks, The Who, The Searchers, The Zombies and so on and so forth.

All the same, when you think of it, Priestley was a prophet here. His was a romance within the bounds of credibility. So much so, that by the affluent sixties, the idea became a mass reality, before the recruiting corporations took over music.

The Companions fame could scarcely happen in the Great Depression. The storys huge popularity must have owed to the feeling, that this show business jaunt was an escape that almost anyone might take part in.   
A joiner might become a back-stage props man. And he, like most readers, has an unrealised talent. With his Broad Yorkshire forthrightness, he is a natural comedian. "Wouldnnt he make a good one?" The stars of the story agree.

After the war, thousands of young people would get together to go into the music business. They tended to be inspired not by the old music halls, as Priestley and his fictional characters were, but by popular music, especially of the American negro. Many would return their inspiration in triumph to the States and the world over.

Priestley deliberately wrote in the tradition of the comic adventure novel of Henry Fielding and Dickens _The Pickwick Papers_. Like Dickens, he became a national celebrity, as a result. In my youth, I've seen old pictures of pairs of puppies or kittens, captioned The good companions. I didn't know it but this was the sentimental debris from the Dickensian sensation caused by Priestleys novel back in 1929.

The mood of the author in that work is more subdued than in later novels. Comparing the novelist with theatre director, I would describe the difference as follows. The author as "director," in _The Good Companions_ , takes a more laid-back approach. Priestley seems to patiently watch his show from one of the audience seats, only removing his pipe to make a few quiet interruptions.

Later novels give more sense of the "director" striding about the stage, growling comments. Priestley was once reprimanded for this preachy trait. The same person asked him why didn't he write more like -- Dickens.

JB was suitably flabberghasted: Dickens! Dickens, of all people, who Bernard Shaw said had turned him into a revolutionary.   
Evidently, Priestleys critic had but a cosy fire-side family image of Dickens writings.  
Priestley is one of many distinguished novelists, who have written a study of "the master."

### Further inter-war novels, travel, social comment.

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After his "block-buster," Priestleys career takes two branches. This review follows the fork thru the subsequent novels, rather than the experimental plays dealing with the nature of time and why we are here in this mysterious universe.

Fellow Bradford writer, John Braine, in his biography, quotes a Priestley actor asking: Why are our lives long enough to make mistakes but not long enough to remedy them?

This fact of not getting many chances in life, if we get one at all, comes up in the authors verdict on his characters in _Angel Pavement_ , his next big novel.

The hero, as junior office clerk, or some such lower middle class nobody, futilely searches the metropolis for a mate. He sees plenty of women in cinema queues -- all nicely paired. Eventually, he becomes infatuated with a young lady, passing thru. He over-looks the adoring girl at the office.

The anti-heroine is a spoilt young woman who plays with the clerk and then thinks no more about him, while he becomes obsessed with her. The author gives a shrewd and balanced assessment of this rather common predicament.

Priestley recognises how close is the dividing line between common clueless youth and gruesome stalker (to use the current name). A nasty tale is narrowly averted.   
The stalked girls father doles out some rough justice to the clerk.

The father is one of Priestleys dubious characters without the usual amiable side. He is not so much an alter ego as a "Shadow" personality of the author, in the Jungian sense.   
Priestley would take considerable interest in the metaphysical psychologists work.

The clerk learns from the office girl that glamor may be cosmetic. They get together. The author comments this was the best days work in their lives -- or the worst.

_Angel Pavement_ is commendable social realism, conceding no fairy tale endings for the common youth. But, with luck, he may find "his sufficient happiness," as Wells said of Mr Polly. Unlike Mr Polly or the good companions, the clerk knows no escape from the grey urban environment and his daily round of dull employment. This lack of high spirits detracts from the enjoyment of the novel.

A subsequent long novel was _They Walk In The City_. This title conjured black and white line drawings of visionary figures, in high perspective against tower blocs. But the reading left only a feeling of disappointment. My remaining surface memory is of the ending with an unexplained but sinister cult being exposed. I suspected this tag as a cue for a possible sequel. Far from being moved to demand more, I nearly didn't persist with this authors works.

Another of the long novels of this period, _Faraway_ , is also a falling off -- practically at the end of the world, a mid-pacific nowhere, for the denouement. Apparently, the author, having come into the money, has gone on a world tour. He is combining business with pleasure, by making it the setting of his next novel. Fair enough. But the writing, as well as its writer, seems to loosen its braces in the deck chair, and cruise as loosely as the ocean liner.

Priestley was also writing non-fiction travel books, before and after the second world war, particularly about the Western Americas. In this, he resembled Aldous Huxley, who actually settled in California. Both writers were seeking earnings from the Hollywood film industry. One of Priestleys first fictions, _Benighted_ , was one of the early talkies, creakily filmed as the melodrama, _The Old Dark House_.

Priestley wasn't just enjoying a hard-working holiday life in wonderful climates with grand views, to sell in print-form to the industrial masses. He also set out on an _English Journey_.

On the train to Birmingham, he tells us the Chamberlain family had furnished no heroes for him. For a city of its size, he regarded it as remarkably lacking in civic architecture. He professed to discern any at all, only by glimpsing one of its streets at an odd angle.

Two Tyneside working class habitations, he summed-up as "dormitory towns."   
Tho he didn't say so, this implies treating people as factory fodder, without community facilities.

In one of his discursive journals, _Rain Upon Godshill_ , he is back at home, in the English rain, bemoaning the fact that but for the German armada of bombers, Chamberlain wouldn't have to travel to Munich to keep away the monsters.

Sight-seeing tours are bound to be esthetic exercises. Bill Bryson _Notes from a small island_ (1995) sound like John Betjeman, in unending protests against ruthless property developers. Artists impressions of modern British cities show streets full of fine old buildings that are no longer there.

Bryson reminds us that Glasgow transported its slum population to new high rise buildings out of the city, forgetting to give them an infrastructure: Priestley "dormitory town" with a vengeance, and a blow from which Glasgow housing conditions have never recovered.

In an editors essay, to a 1939 anthology _Our national heritage_ , called "Britain is in danger," Priestley wasn't discussing the Luftwaffe, that Prince Charles was to say did less damage than the developers. Priestley concluded:

> Unless all of us, young and old, make up our minds to banish messiness and ugliness, agree that all future building must be carefully planned and that the countryside must not be ruined by anybody's foolishness and greed and take care that nothing we do ourselves, even if it is only throwing orange peel about at a picnic, shall contribute to the general vandalism, the beautiful isle of Britain that has been praised by so many great men will be nothing but a fading memory.

Also written on the eve of war, _Let the People Sing_ is a typical theatrical novel. I caught a glimpse of its film version: stock characterisations of the German refugee and the vaudeville comic, a chorus of young female excitement verging on the hysteria, their daughters would show in the era of Beatle-mania. It all contributed to an unbearable period atmosphere.

The book doesn't have these faults. There is in Priestley novels, of the time, a good-natured indulgence of lads and lasses.   
His late essays would favorably compare young women with the troublesome creatures in the time-consuming courtships of Edwardian times. In contrast, he deplored, nowadays, the harmful effect of male aggression on women.

Watchable as a film was a war-time play, _The Foreman went to France._ I didn't realise this down-to-earth treatment was by Priestley, till the closing credits.   
An ephemeral war-time novel, with a memorably gritty north-town title was _Blackout in Gretley_. Billed as a novel about war time for war time, it served as a warning against spies.

Priestley set the brilliantly titled _Daylight On Saturday_ entirely in a factory confines -- using his ability as a playwright for a novel. This was apparently a forbidden zone for middle class novelists. He is positive about the freeing of women from service, with factory work and wages. As in the first world conflict, women gained in status from war production. The characterisations of the work force are lively. And who better than Priestley to draw management of both a good and a bad character for industrial relations?  
A casualty in the machine shop was one of the authors selections from his works, in _The Priestley Companion_. The incident was told with a moving solemnity.

### Priestley war broadcasts.

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Priestley writing career soon moved him to London. Just as his Yorkshire accent remained with him, all his life Priestley was under the spell of the thriving artistic society, he came from. He may not have had a scientific side but he had a broad grounding in the arts.

He played the piano, which was useful to pound obsessive tunes out of his head. Even in old age, he would go on a rural painting holiday, complete with Bohemian artists beret, and stayed with the two authors of _The Wonders of Yorkshire_ , Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby.

The gentle West Riding burr seems a part of the authors greatness. I heard this accent from a war-time commentary and guessed it must be Priestley. Why?  
Because, British documentaries were dominated by southern accents. Well into the nineteen sixties, up till ITVs new regional television studios, it was an amusing novelty to hear regional accents on television.

Not that there was anything comical about Priestley speech. It was serious and quietly thoughtful, very much like the proverbial favorite uncle. His war-time radio talks were massively popular. He achieved a kind of simple poetry in his talk of the little sailing ships that rescued much of the British army and some Free French Forces from Dunkirk.

He was to be much exasperated thru-out his later life from strangers who remembered these little talks but knew nothing else of his out-put. In old age, he could still be sour about the fact that the prime minister Winston Churchill stopped his broadcasts. Priestley didn't know why. He certainly deserved an explanation of why the field was left to the likes of "Lord Haw-Haw." Just because there was a war on, that didn't mean to say people need not be treated civilly.

I dont believe there was a good reason to give. Priestley, with Yorkshire grumpiness, thought it may have been because he was promising too much. (Such is the fear of independent thought, however restrained.) It was a case of political rivalry and clash of style.

There was Churchill roaring his speeches of epic defiance from the House of Commons -- most of them were not heard publically till after the war, by popular request. As Churchill said, he was not the lion. He was only the lions roar. But that was more than a match for the menace and rants of dictators.

Such unaccountable censorship is not acceptable, tho it may have been the least of war-time sins from a great and good man, during the desperate conflict, when he allowed such crimes as bombing of civilian targets like Dresden.   
There was a retrospective cartoon of a war-time meeting between Stalin and Churchill. Stalin is covered monstrously in gore. A few flecks of blood have splashed onto Churchill sitting by him.

Churchill was also moved to test germ warfare as a contingency plan against the rocket bombs, so low can war degrade the best of people.   
Maybe the worst of people are jealously tempted to force war on others, to drag them down to their own level.

One Priestley war broadcast was about "a dig in the ribs." He got round to explaining he had noticed this from Churchill to his war-coalition Labour deputy, Ernest Bevin, in the House of Commons. The gesture afforded Priestley a homily on a country whose rulers indulge such chumminess with a humble stalwart like Bevin -- a less than adulatory Sam Gamgee to Frodo Baggins, in the Tolkien "Fellowship."  
(The modern urban industrial setting, that Tolkien found so alien, was native to Priestley, who had no time for his feudal rural romancings.)

Who knows? Churchill may not have appreciated Priestleys personal observations, when he stopped his broadcasts.  
It must have been galling for Priestley to be so ill-used, under cover of a war emergency.

### Priestley war-time manifesto.

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In 1940, HG Wells started a national debate on war aims, which became the Sankey declaration on Human Rights, a forerunner of the post-war United Nations declaration. "The Wells debate" spread under-ground thru-out the war-torn continent of Europe. Wells was a particular influence on Priestley.

Priestley produced his own political manifesto, in 1941. The very fact of a dictators war, to "seek to bar the progress of mankind," as Churchill eloquently put it, made Priestley publish his only such plan, _Out Of The People._   
Churchill would hardly take to its formidable radical rhetoric. The title comes from Walt Whitman:

> Everything comes out of the people, everyday people, the people as you find them and leave them; people, just people!

The ill-fated Labour leader, Ed Miliband, who lost the 2015 general election, was scorned for using the phrase "everyday people," as the ultimate in cluelessness about the public. Certainly, it betrays the ignorance of the scorners.

Priestley manifesto reads like a combination of policies from the Labour Left and the Liberals. This made political sense at the time, because there seemed no chance that a divided opposition could ever defeat the Conservatives. There is no doubt that Priestley was a particularly English "social liberal" - his own phrase - in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and HG Wells.

At the same time, a thought-out scheme is curiously "un-English" and untypical of that literary rambler, Priestley himself.

Priestley program for Britain has been largely rejected by history. It involved more state control than even the post-war Attlee government contemplated. And as yet, its compensating political liberalism, notably the liberal form of proportional representation, has been little implemented, tho authoritarian forms have been.   
Priestley lent his name to the (formerly named) Proportional Representation Society, to promote the original democratic form of PR, before the parties made "PR" partisan, for their own oligarchic ends. He was long a vice-president of The Electoral Reform Society, as the PR society was re-named.

He mentions Regional Councils. His _English Journey_ has an early word about Home Rule for East Anglia! There, the spiel is pitched more as a fancy than a realistic prospect.   
In 2002, the deputy Labour leader John Prescott introduced proposals for English regional assemblies. A poll showed an average 62% support for them -- East Anglia least wanted one.  
They would have been poor representations of democracy, with the Scottish and Welsh assemblies party list oligarchies of Additional Members to the (equally unsatisfactory) monopolistic single member system.

Priestley attacked the new plutocracy hiding behind the old feudalism. He wanted the English class system to be scrapped. This audacity might have been enough to give Churchill apoplexy.

It took the Thatcher governments to bring closer Churchill and Eden wish for "a property-owning democracy." The Tories sold off houses in the council estates, that the Attlee post-war Labour government had forced most new housing into. (Note the feudalistic sounding "estates.") This sell-off was in the teeth of Labour opposition.

Since the 2008-9 credit crunch, the property democracy is a wrecked dream, with out-of-control inequality, the inflated price of houses, huge rents, dispossessions.

The unforgivable failure of socialism, in the twentieth century, was the illiberal notion that private enterprise could be replaced by bureaucracy, instead of its humanisation by economic democracy. We are left with the growing environmental catastrophe of a rapacious plutocracy.

Priestley socialism might have been more readily humanised, because his policies, if implemented, would have made liberal democracy much stronger than either Labour or Conservative parties have ever wished, in more than half a century since.

### _Theatre Outlook_

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Priestley was not one for details, except in his own profession. He wrote a promotion, called _Theatre Outlook_ for post-war Britain. He made the point, oft repeated, of its (relative) cheapness compared to the spending on drinks and cigarets etc.   
He objected to the commercial pressures on the drama. Star-struck audiences came to see movie actors in the flesh, raising box-office receipts by a thousand pounds a week -- a small fortune, then. Priestley characterised these "playgoers as enemies," because the film stars got all the parts regardless of whether they were most suited to them.  
You can see this ill-effect of "the star system" within the movie industry, itself, to this day.

Priestley might have taken the good with the bad. Instead, he wanted to free the theatre from commercial pressures altogether, by dispossessing the rich people who happened to own them and putting all the theatre people in control.   
He mentioned how packed the Russian theatres were. This commendation passed muster in 1946, when even Churchill called Stalin his old comrade in arms.

One needn't believe in any system whereby the public has to get what they are given and like it. If the profession owns its theatre, it still should have the financial incentive to be sensible of popular demand, rather than regard public opinion with contempt. Shows may fail because they are bad, as well as because they are avant garde.

_Theatre Outlook_ is a collectors item for those interested in a period account of all aspects of dramatic art. Its many illustrations show at a glance the class system in dress -- all the more so, in the time of Labour government, with a Labour supporter like Priestley, who would put the ordinary folk in the picture.

Color fotos show the cast in middle class evening dress taking a bow to post-war austerity audiences, fotoed in black and white. Even the side-stage prompt wears a cleaning ladys head-scarf. She seems symbolic of the coming fifties assault on the stage with Arnold Wesker kitchen sink dramas.

### "Disarmament"

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About 1960, Priestley supported the growing movement in the Labour party opposition for unilateral nuclear disarmament. In an article about "Ambience or Agenda," he suggested this gesture was needed to further international relations. Notice the impatience with practical details.

Gorbachev and Reagan made eventual formula of "Trust _and_ Inspection," in mutual nuclear disarmament. (Admittedly, the dangers from all kinds of war preparations, thru-out the world, remain daunting.)

During the Cold War, Priestley visited and gave lectures in the Soviet Union. He was once asked by Russian students why he wrote _The Thirty First Of June_. And replied that he just wrote it for the fun of it, causing a ripple of laughter in his audience.  
This frivolity must have been as alien to soviet youth, as it was to Priestley himself.

Like HG Wells, before him, and Arthur C Clarke somewhat after, JB Priestley was taking part in an international fellowship of writers. In effect, this made him an ambassador of friendly relations between hostile blocs.

After all, Jerry shared Christmas 1914 with Tommy across the trenches. And who knows? If the top brass hadn't started the shelling off again, peace might have broken out!

Perhaps for the same reason he was good in personal relations, Priestley could be bad as a critic of international politics. It is one thing being diplomatic about the failure of ones friends political system, it is another thing being diplomatic as a political critic.   
It led him to one of those inane "even-handed" remarks, like: the soviet system was better than the capitalist one, in that it didn't have all the advertising \-- as if they didn't have their own form of indoctrination, by the state.

Of course, if you don't have the consumer goods, there is no need to advertise them. It is thought the feeling of this lack was one of the main sources of discontent with the soviet system. This source of change included the soviet leaders and more particularly their wives.

The "new order" of unregulated capitalism in the East is not reassuring: wealth beyond the dreams of avarice for a few, bitterly resented hardship for many, crime, corruption, the stampede to despoil the wildernesses of the old Soviet Union, adding to the dire ecological plight of the planet, the precarious state of hard-won freedom of speech, under state encroachments, murders of journalists and human rights activists...

The soviet authorities had simply published Priestley works that were favorable to them and censored those that were not. He was being implicated in the half truth that is worse than a lie.

## Part two: before and after the two wars.

Table of contents

### "Magical" works.

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Priestley had a sense of the magical, which may be related to the show-man in him. Of his works that may be crudely so classed, the jeu d'esprit, _The Thirty First Of June_ , need not detain us. You get a character from the middle ages remonstrating about our shambles of a political system, run by various ad hoc bodies.

Not that this little satirical thrust is typical but it does point to TH White as the source of this topsy-turvy fairy tale genre. White did it sooner and better in his long novel series based on the Arthurian legends, _The Once And Future King._ He could put you in the picture of the dark ages with his word paintings and confide in the reader, as tho he knew something about those obscure times.

His Merlin is a sort of anticipation of a Dr Who time-lord. After all, he is the magician for the once _and_ future king. He is also a bit of a clown and absent-minded professor, like some of the Dr Who actors were to be. The resulting culture clash and future shock, Whites fantasies achieve, must have been achingly funny, when they first came out, but perhaps only to an avant-garde.

If White never became a house-hold name, because he was too much of a pioneer, later imitators have done his novelties to death. This can make him tiresome reading, where once he was relatively original -- like a prequel to _1066 And All That_ written by a disarmingly eccentric literary scholar.

White was writing during the second war, and his whimsy co-exists with a serious intent. Merlin is an amusingly exasperated tutor to his monarch on questions of who is an aggressor and the difference between hypocritical war-mongering and self-defense.   
White had a historical sense of great gaps in civic morality, that we nowadays take for granted.

A friendly critic of Priestley novels admitted you can skip fifty pages at a time without losing the plot. He belongs to a more expansive age. But this doesn't make them memorable. A few of his novels show an awareness of the growing power of science and turn a plot on it.   
_Wonder Hero_ follows Dickens _Little Dorrit_ in featuring an invention. Nevertheless, what Priestley said of Wells is only true of himself: his mind was almost wholly literary rather than scientific.

Quite late in his writing career, Priestley embarked on a Wellsian collection of short science fiction stories. There are some enjoyably creepy stories among them. He doesn't make a radical departure from Wells themes, tho, of course, the SF genre had moved on considerably since the masters time.

The title story, _The Other Place_ , is the longest and best. The idea comes from Wells: _The Door in the Wall._ Priestley gives ampler treatment to what's on the other side. There is a clever twist. The narrative character enters the other place by accident and is entranced, in the full sense of the word. In his determination to regain the experience, he finally manages to force his way back in. The state of mind of the inhabitants is appallingly changed, reflecting his own changed mentality.

It is reminiscent of Aldous Huxleys _Heaven and Hell_ , whereby a mind-enhancing drug can enhance a bad, as well as a good, frame of mind. _The Other Place_ is a rare example of Priestley writing taking on an enhanced poetic power.   
Another is _The Magicians_. I remember being moved by sheer force of style. The plot turned into a super-natural thriller against the reduction of mankind into the uniformity of an insect colony.

Priestley also wrote thrillers about the world put in danger by natural means. These Ian Fleming type plots didn't have the epicurean snobbery or sexual and aggressive indulgence associated with the James Bond spy genre.  
Priestley shuns these sub-literary expedients for stimulating the reader. _The Doomsday Men_ is infiltrated with his travel book wonder at the chromatic strata of the Grand Canyon.

He chose this chapter to represent his writing, in "The Worlds Best." This was an American anthology of the fifty greatest living authors. It was pains-takingly garnered by compiling voting lists of representatives of literature, from authors and experts, of all kinds, to book-sellers.

Bernard Shaw was the clear winner. He gave a cantankerous response to the editor and refused to be included in the anthology. This was 1950, the last year of his life, temporal. And a sorry bowing out of a great man.

Priestley himself only managed fifty-first place and was only allowed in the collection, because a higher voted author died before the book went to press. For all his epic dedication to nurturing no mean talent, and winning popular acclaim, he scarcely made himself visible, in that thoro survey.

Shaw, who was still struggling in middle age to make a name for himself, knew only too well what an immense amount of hard work it takes to make any impression on the public imagination. And how unfair it seems when you do so well, yet fall just short of others who eclipse you.  
He said as much, in a letter to the actress Janet Achurch, ambitious for her husband to "succeed," that ill-defined objective.

Such statistics, as the worlds best, are not much use for comparisons, because lives, like reputations, are usually short. But it was commendable, as well as financially astute, for a publisher to promote best living authors, who still need to earn their living.

I am old enough to recall most of the selected fifty authors, more or less. I am surely less familiar with the contemporary great names, which shows how past it, I am. I probably could make a better estimate of great names living before the 1950 survey.

Why Priestley doesnt often achieve the power of _The Magicians_ is easily explained. As he admitted once, he never revised his work. Apparently his type-writer was a conveyor belt, which his works passed straight thru, as earnings depended on production. It sounds a working class idea. That is where Priestley came from and he didn't have any option but to work.   
The lack of quality control must have become a habit he didn't break even when better-off. By then, he may have lacked the mental energy to take a new direction.

He was gracious enough to say he thought poets were "the best people." In a charity shop second-hand book section, I came across a nineteen twenties anthology of contemporary poets. It seemed a show-case for up-and-coming authors.   
Priestley had a token presence with a romantic rhyme about Elsinore. He soon gave up the time-consuming demands verse makes, in return for an impoverished obscurity. A few early attempts survive, that he would have destroyed.

### Paradise lost

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There is another Priestley novel of some magical power, tho less obviously a fantasy. This is a post-war work, _Bright Day._ The cultured working class city of Edwardian Bradford, provincial but cosmopolitan, is the scene of Priestleys childhood, when reality hasn't lost its air of fantasy. Hence, the spell the author is able to cast over the reader.

The narrative character, who found himself being schooled in the Bradford woolen trade, is himself under a spell, especially of a family of three sisters. He is projecting feelings which originate in himself. A supporting character tries to tell him something of the sort, before reality brings him too traumatically to his senses. Priestley title page quotes the Shakespearian moral: "It is the bright day that brings forth the adder."

Adders would be found on the moors, where the citizens of Bradford went for walks en masse. Priestley requested his ashes be scattered on his beloved Yorkshire moors.  
There is already a serpent in the Eden garden that will be lost forever with the Great War. One Priestley play is called _Eden End._

A clairvoyant woman predicts a monstrous future. This is no mere sensational ingredient. Priestley had come across something of the sort in real life. He always had time for the intuition of a scheme of things beyond our normal observation of the senses.

The Edwardian disbelief in another war is an opening remark by a less-than-intuitive representative of business in the play _An Inspector Calls._ This was not a very reassuring remark, in the film appearing after the second world war.  
This play gives a nod to the acute social tensions in the "golden age" before the great war.

Alistair Sim successfully lost his comic persona, as an inspector enquiring about "trouble at t'mill." Not merely a factory inspector - the trouble has gone beyond that - but a police inspector. Or so we assume, as he probes the cast about a dead young woman. All the failures in responsibility, towards a fellow human being, emerge.

As they turn back to confront the inspector, they are met by the empty, but still moving, rocking chair he was in, a moment ago. This one fantastic touch to the play transforms the inspector into a sort of recording angel. In effect, the actors have been confronted by their own consciences, in the vision of the inspector.

### Tricksters, amiable or otherwise, in post-war literature.

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Priestley contributed to the Festival of Britain, amidst the post-war rationing, with his longest novel to date, _Festival At Farbridge._ One of his biographers, Susan Cooper thought it almost as funny as _Lucky Jim_. This naive compliment beautifully misses the point - the point of times arrow, which tells us the Kingsley Amis book is not much (if at all) funnier than Priestley, tho he had the benefit of the older mans comic inventiveness before him.   
Both books are about getting the girl. Both authors are "on the Left." (Later "Lucky Jim went Right," Amis meaning himself with his alter ego.)

Funnily enough, I've read Coopers remark said about John Wain, with _Hurry On Down_ compared to _Lucky Jim_. Jim really was lucky. It appears he had not one but two comic models to learn from and take the credit for! Amis avoided Wains depressing ending but Jim, too, was pre-occupied with what to do after university and how to get the girl.

The same old Amis anti-hero starts off _The Old Devils_. The typical Amis patter runs to the effect: He's a charlatan.   
Response: Of course he's a charlatan but he's a charlatan with flair.

This line admirably catches the sense of a standard Priestley lead. If Amis takes a direct literary descent from Priestley comedies, these rather pathetic ideals of human behavior are not a flattering comment on his influence.  
One might repeat the remark of the dancing heroine, in _The Good Companions_ , that so surprised her suitor, the song-writer: You're so _feeble_.

In Jungian psychology, the Trickster is a characteristic stage of development in human personality, to be found in all societies. It is a resort of youth, rather than an accomplishment of maturity.

John Wain read Priestley, as may be gathered from a passing comment that opens _The Contenders_. The narrator dismisses the notion of calling his town the likes of "Bruddersford." This fictional place is a typical Priestley anti-litigation ploy, implicating Huddersfield in a story presumably inspired chiefly by Bradford.

Priestley prefaced several novels with the plea not to mistake any of his characters for real people. John Braine book, on the novel, cautions against falling foul of defamation suits from people who are after money. Extreme caution was the order of the day from both Bradford authors, who no doubt found earning a literary living hard enough, without the severe English legal constraints.

One of Coopers laughter-quakes, at _Festival at Farbridge_ , prompted Priestley to tell her: You over-rate that book.   
One can just imagine him taking the trouble to release the pipe and turn his head to impart that laconic remark.

It is his most determinedly - relentlessly - funny novel, mainly observational humor, in the small change of human relationships. Reading _Festival at Farbridge_ absorbed me more than a successful comic play like _When We Are Married_ , which I didn't think carried its length too well.

Some middle-aged couples at a re-union discover that they were not legally married. This plot is a bit like one of the time plays, in which the characters start all over again, at a crucial point in their lives, with the chance to make a new beginning. Except in the comedy, they don't have their youth back. They don't have any illusions back about their partners, either.  
Of course, there are some rueful reckonings of the marital state.

The tv play starred the multi-talented Ronnie Barker. Shortly before he died, the BBC staged a fulsome tribute. Getting past the studio audience without a titter, Barker remarked, studiously, at the close: And it's all true.   
This used to be my fathers closing remark on science fictions and fantasies.

Like other Priestley novels, _Festival_ has a flimsy plot. The characters converge, as in _The Good Companions_. I can't say that I took to any of them. Their leader is one of Priestleys favored dubious characters, moreover, with a dubious cause -- a bit of a charlatan and an actor. They decide to raise enough money to blow on a fire-works display - a less than inspirational movement for a repeat of fire-works night - despite objectors (in authority, as usual) against the waste.

This spurious cause reminds me of my surprise when charities began fund-raising by asking donors to sponsor people for doing enjoyable things, like going on a day out jogging together, instead of useful work.

Perhaps, it is not too unfair to suggest that the good and bad points of this legacy of Priestley can be discerned in contemporary society. The tone of his novels challenges authority, instead of the customary English deference. (This may have had something to do with why I read so many of them.) Even a writer in a right-wing newspaper, deploring our anti-social society, will admit that, on the whole, we are better off without the unquestioning acquiescence towards authority figures.

The question remains, where do the British people now place their respect, after the too often misplaced respect for authority?

This defiance of authority links Priestley to the next literary generation of the nineteen fifties - much more to Wain and Amis, tho, than John Osborne. Amis denied he was one of the angry young men, granted the more or less suppressed anger in his humor.

John Osborne, ranting, makes Priestley rhetoric seem substantial in comparison. Also, Priestley has no Osborne phobia of his country. He volunteered his life for it, before he had had a life.

If anything, he was too indulgent of his country. Hearing Tory politicians say the world doesn't owe us a living, the controversial essayist, one supposes clamping his pipe dogmatically, had to argue they _did_ , lauding Britains undeniable achievements, and forgetting how very well some did to others misfortune.   
Of course, Mrs Thatcher was right. No country that expects a free ride can prosper. The real objection to the enterprise system, in the UK, USA and indeed the whole world, is how unequally and unjustly distributed its rewards - without economic parliament to regulate it.

Priestley has got to be a strong influence on John Braine. Then again, Braine is an angrier writer. Or rather, Braine, in _Room At The Top_ has a cynicism of brutal power. Priestley was never this formidable, except in _Out Of The People_ reacting to the war as the ultimate attack on democracy. He was typicly English in taking some rousing.

Braine swung Right before even Amis did. Lesser novels, in his "reactionary" phase, had an outspokenly hostile attitude. Priestley could be combative enough, but the conflict was always mellowed by humor, which he cherished as an English trait.  
(I noticed this recently of a bus queue towards a driver, arrived before his delayed vehicle.)

Priestley admitted a host of biographies found him objectionable. He didn't make the excuse of the abrasive northerner in the genteel south. A funny essay called _The Yorkshire Grumbler_ describes his Yorkshire regiment grumbling their way thru the trenches and the successive catastrofes of the twentieth century.

### Last novels, coffee-table books.

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This fundamental good-naturedness may explain why critics dubbed John Priestley as "Jolly Jack." In his old age, he said he didn't care what they made of his literary reputation.   
Reading between the lines, he would perhaps have liked his best works to be read for a couple of hundred years after his death. This wish is a credit to Priestley realism. Bernard Shaw once defined artistic "immortality" as: in other words, a couple of hundred years.

Priestley was undogmatic about life after death. His essays, as well as the time plays, speculate - the field is open. He doubted death was an easy way out for wicked deeds in this life. Without pretending to know the truth of this, it is a reasonable assumption that death is no more an easy option than life.

One genre, we haven't mentioned Priestley write, is the murder mystery. In _Salt Is Leaving_ , the nature of the crime is far-fetched enough. At the resolution, Salt, the amateur sleuth, reveals his investigative method. He didn't guess the criminal by the kind of hard evidence that would hold up in court. Rather, he pondered the suspects little emotional over-reactions, an unnecessary remark trying to distract from a clue...  
It's perhaps worth adding that such depth psychology, which Priestley studied, is only as good as the man who does it.

Priestley thoughts on angered youth may be infered from the end to his longest and nearly his last novel, which therefore had a special place in his affections: _The Image Men_. The characters decide more than enough attention has been given to the needs of youth and it is time something was done for the old. Priestley anticipates a university of the third age, as it came to be called.

Another prophetic touch may be mentioned. One of his minor late novels anticipates pirate radios, before Radio Caroline. It was still many years before BBC radio officially lost its broadcasting monopoly.  
That idea didn't appear till towards the novel end. I got the impression that the aging author, sticking to his type-writer as tread-mill, was himself dissatisfied with this lack-lustre work. I guess he took a break to have a drink. Then some Danish schnapps found its way into the story.

_Let The People Sing_ naively preached the virtues of drink, by having an adjudicators cold personality humanly transformed into a no-nonsense common sense, refusing to be detered by dire warnings and prohibitions against a popular cause.  
Like Churchill, Priestley indulgences didn't prevent him reaching a big age.

_It's An Old Country_ moves from Australia to the old country. The author suggests the former is less weighed down by tradition preventing change. But the point is made, to any one with wonderlust, that the world-over is coming to look the same. One could forget where one is, from ones surrounds.  
One feels much the same about too many of those type-writer travels, that are Priestley novels.

_It's An Old Country_ rehearses the story-line (as in the novel, _Faraway_ ) of a man on the shelf, like a magnificent railway engine shunted off onto a siding. It's right for some people but not for you, he is told, and finds in middle age, a marital partner.

_The Image Men_ is not a great late work, except in length. The short fat one, of the two image men, is an obvious alter ego, not quite so aged. In the end, he gets the girl, younger than himself, with "eyes like head-lamps." Priestley seems to have misread this, his own character as a heroine. The two male leads are the familiar benign rogues. They infiltrate the academic world as pretentious experts on "image."

The shallowness of this contemporary reverie is shown-up by a reminiscence, shortly preceding it: _Lost Empires_ begins with characters meeting in London "amidst the ruins of empire." The title is a pun on the loss of the British Empire and the loss of the old theatres, many of which were called out of patriotic pride, _The Empire_.

By now old, Priestley takes a last deep plunge into his youthful frequenting of the music halls, which made such a profound effect on him as an artist. This story is something of a companion early-life novel to _Bright Day_.

It was not to be quite the last time he reminisced on theatrical comedy tho. Priestley managed one last phase, as an author of lavishly illustrated coffee table books. One title, _Particular Pleasures_ was recommended by Mr Showbiz himself, Max Bygraves. It largely celebrated the post-war era, itself a golden age of British comedy. For instance, Priestley allowed that Jimmy Edwards could have held his own with the best of the vaudeville acts.

Another Priestley theme was given a last airing, in over-size glossy form: _The English_ \-- as distinct from Irish playwrights or Scottish engineers. This was timely during the then governments marathon pre-occupation, to no purpose, with Scottish and Welsh devolution.

### Literary criticism.

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One has to be impressed that Priestley kept himself in harness almost to the end, when, he admitted, he sometimes let himself off.  
The down-side of this rigid discipline was that it didn't allow him to do less, better, when he perhaps could afford to. This was, and probably still is, a fault of writers of all abilities.  
Contemporary publishers are partly to blame, when they promote "a name" that the public will recognise thru quantity rather than quality of out-put. Priestley knew the limits of his own abilities. He refered to Shaw and Wells as "my elders and betters." The Left writers of the fifties, the angry young men and The Movement might have said he was their elder and better.

Priestley had some opinion of himself as a political influence. Perhaps, this was a warm vanity rather than a cold conceit, to use his own distinction.  
And he was a possibly under-rated literary influence on the post-war Left.

A university authority, on Priestley, said something like: only one or two of his books would last: It was some such pitiful estimate. His writings were much fresher in my mind then, when I would have put the estimate at five or six \- or a dozen.

One thing that can be said for sure is that Priestley didn't approve of literature degrees. He had come across this phenomenum in the colleges of America, where they always seem to do things, good or bad, before Britain does. Kingsley Amis also noted this trend and doubted its results.

You can and should train for science and engineering, which modern society cannot do without, but there is no set formula for great art.

One cannot measure literary merit, as one can and must lay down scientific and engineering standards. This is the starting point of the film _Dead Poets Society_ , with Robin Williams, as the eccentric professor, who has his new class literally tear out a merit-measuring introduction to a poetry anthology.

J B Priestley made the most telling criticism of himself as perhaps a Jack of All Trades and a master of none.

I agree with the critical regard for _Bright Day_. Priestley writings, as a literary critic, provide a Wordsworthian explanation why this is perhaps his best novel. He said of Dickens that he was one of those rare writers whose perception did not dim with childhood. One might add that even Dickens constantly went back to his childhood, to re-new his imaginative vitality. The English novel, since Defoe, has tended to root itself in childhood to grow a distinctive individual world view.

Priestleys great work in literary criticism, _Literature and Western Man_ didn't come out till he was past the usual age of retirement. Priestley knew he would be regarded as "past it" by then as a writer, anyway. He pointed out, very reasonably, that a young man couldn't have written this work, because he wouldn't have been able to read as much. He makes the claim, less reasonably, that all the main writers are included. He is easily refuted.

At the end of the twentieth century, a list appeared in book-shops, of the top hundred novels of the century. Tolkien claimed the first place and Orwell the next two positions. Neither, if I remember rightly, are included by Priestley.

I must say that I thought such a list pretty worthless. It neither seemed to properly reflect the best nor the most popular works. It also seemed to suffer from too short a memory to do justice to earlier writers in the century. People don't have that long a reading life.

_Literature and Western Man_ helps to remedy such short-sightedness and will remain a useful reference book whatever fate Priestleys own literary reputation suffers. One can say this of his other non-fictional source books and his sociological novels. He will remain read because he will remain useful. Perhaps, that would please this no-nonsense writer. He liked criticism but with "not too much sugar."

_Literature and Western Man_ tells us that the printing press was suppressed almost as soon as it was invented. "Power has its intuitions," Priestley comments. And he inadvertently gives us an insight into his own frame of mind, when he discusses the Romantic movement. He conjures up its castles in the air and demolishes them with the problems of paying the bills and finding ones next meal.  
There was a romantic Priestley, but realism kept him in stern check.

Whereas, with GK Chesterton, the romantic kept the realist in stern check. Priestley met many of his contemporary artists. He wondered why the musicians bothered with his lowly art of writing. His comment on Chesterton was that, to all appearances, he was lacking in the fantastic drollery he preached. _Manalive_ he was not. But then this verdict would suit the dominant realist in Priestley. Looking at Chesterton, you wouldn't take him for a mental gymnast.   
Chesterton was also one of the most prolific writers, who spread his talents much too thin.

Like Chesterton, Priestley may never have written an indisputable master-piece. But he came close enough. And twice in his life - as a novelist and as a broadcaster - he achieved national celebrity. He has a permanent place in Britains social history.

From his books mentioned in this review, I would consider more than a dozen are of lasting value. And there will surely always be a place in the theatre for mind-expanding plays, that the playwright takes care the audience will follow.

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# Irving Stone

Table of contents

Lust for life. (literary biography of Vincent Van Gogh)

### _The agony and the ecstasy.  
(literary biography of Michael Angelo.)_

_Moses, by Michael Angelo._

Michael Angelo was the great rival of Leonardo as the supreme artist of his age. Dmitri Merezhovsky, in The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, makes him a railing grotesque against his idol. Irving Stone rehabilitates him, if Michael Angelo also must be a figment of his imagination.

Merezhovsky is strong on characterisation, as in the anguished Leonardo or decadent Borgia pope. Shakespear, like Merezhkovsky, would have melodramatised the evil glamor of the popes son, Cesar Borgia. The most feared man in Italy, he makes little impression on Stone, for whom, one suspects, he would hold little fascination. Cesars general "works manager" Leonardo may have seemed "a servicable villain" to Florentines. For drawing Borgia an exquisite map of Florence, Merezhkovsky is reduced to passing-off his hero as politically artless.   
Michael White (Leonardo, the first scientist) says Florence has never taken Leonardo to their hearts, as it has Michael Angelo. There is not even a plaque where he served his apprenticeship with Verrocchio.

Irving Stone makes Michael Angelo but a reasonable, if forthright man, happening to have exceptional insights and abilities. Stone does not invest his main character with personality, such as Merezhovsky gives. But first rate are his many probings of the thoughts and techniques of the artist. We are shown the influence of many other artists going thru the mind of Michael Angelo.  
This is a novel for any one interested in the arts.

Stone doesnt have Merezhovskys scenic poetry. The descriptive advantage isn't all on the Russians side. The Americans description, of a capsized Empire in Rome, conjures some colossal ocean liner of stone that has been already a thousand years in the wrecking.

Irving Stone passages of romantic love are blessedly rare. Any unfair critic could easily discredit him by quoting them. The reader would be inclined to believe that any one who wrote such gush was not worth trying.

Big mistake! Because, the bathos of the scarce love scene is an unimportant aside. A writer, who can make one read rapidly some eight hundred pages of close print, and still want to know more about the man he presents, deserves respect as a practitioner of his craft. Here, surely, is one of the best researched and assimilated biographical novels. In fact, Stone edited Michael Angelo letters, as an autobiography. He had them translated into English.

Altogether, the bibliography covers six years of research. He visited the scenes of his novel. He took expert counsel, not least as to sculpting, which he was shown how to do. And the novel is an eminently approachable political and social history.

A comment by a biographer of Jame A Michener perhaps applies here. He said that probably no other American author could have afforded the cost of the research that went into the writing of _Centennial_ , the fictionalised story of the wild west.

_Centennial_ makes historical sense of the cowboys in movie classics like _Shane_ and _The Sheepman_ , or a tv series like _Rawhide_. _The agony and the ecstasy_ shows the wonder of how all those breath-taking works of art got done at all, in the warring states of Renaissance Italy. (This reviewer hasn't seen the movie version.)

When he showed promise as a sculptor, the young Michael Angelo was taken into the palace of Lorenzo de Medici. Like another Pericles, _Il Magnifico_ wanted to make Florence a second Athens, in the re-birth of classical culture. He gathers scholars of astonishing accomplishments. Brave, courteous, a lover of learning and an antiquarian, he conducted his international business in an open house and mixed freely with the citizens.   
Lorenzo was a leader that the people of any time and place would be glad to have, but too seldom get. (Stone has the under-rated ability to make sympathetic and inspiring characters out of the good people he portrays.)

As a whole, the Medici family left a contradictory influence, sometimes fighting Florence as a republic. It must be said that its looting mob ill repaid his legacy. Lorenzo had ensured a son was made into a cardinal. As he had hoped, he eventually became pope. In Florence and Rome, where most of his work remains, Michael Angelo was associated with the Medici for good or ill, partly depending on them, but also frustrated by the intrigues and caprices of these and other patrons: the agony and the ecstasy.

Of the Medici, Michael Angelo had most affection for Lorenzo and those of his relatives most like him. His sympathies were with the aspirations for a republic in Florence, shared by many of its brightest spirits, and often treacherously suppressed.   
At one point, he found himself translated from sculptor to architect to military engineer in defense of the city state. In the desperate and doomed struggle, one incident sounds like an anecdote from Baron von Münchhausen. Rebuilding the key fort after a bombardment, Michael Angelo hung baffles of wool down the newly cemented walls, so that the cannon balls bounced harmlessly off.

Stone comes from the United States, also a classically inspired republic. He values the wisdom of tact and peaceful diplomacy, in Gonfaloniere Soderini. The same man cannot be recognised, in Merezhovskys slighting remarks on the mediocrity of popular rule.

As to their leading characters, Merezhkovsky and Stone both bring a refreshing determination to dignify, rather than deride, the human condition, as exemplified in two of the highest mountains in the renaissance range. In this respect, they are true to the renaissance ideal.

### Irving Stone: Lust for life. (Literary biography of Vincent Van Gogh)

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This novel title sounds rather ordinary, at least by present standards. It has just occured to me what it implies. Van Gogh paintings were a passion to put life on canvas. As a young man, I once was surprised when a Van Gogh scene came to life, in a tree-surrounded field of high grasses under the turbulence that warns of storms.

His self-portraits don't make any concessions to ones sympathy. In one, the face radiates streaks of multi-colored fire as if from the fierce Arles sun. The style is an impressionism writ too large to be any longer mistaken for reality, as an immediate impression of how things really look.

Van Goph has become identified with the artistic temperament taken to extremes. Irving Stone made him human. The Michael Angelo novel prepared me for his ability to make characters sympathetic. I wasnt prepared for the trials that made Van Gogh tragic.

He was unlucky in love. These relationships sounded as if told to the author by someone who had been in the painters confidence. Stone drew on the many letters to his brother Theo. Most of his material came from following Van Goph trail thru Europe. Some forty years after his death was within living memory of the man. He says Paul Gachet (apparently the son of the portrayed Doctor Gachet) "remains Vincent's staunchest friend in Europe."

rving Stone must have made some valuable source notes for art historians.

Vincent Van Gogh led a life of false starts before he found his calling. Like last movement of Ludwig van Beethoven choral symphony, the opening fumbles over its theme, discarding, in turn, the themes of the previous movements, as young people sometimes find that the usual occupation of their family or district is not for them.

Van Gogh painting did at last break out into a triumphant fanfare of chromatic form. It is commonly said that he only sold one painting. In fact, that and a favorable art review portend that he was beginning to be appreciated before his short life ended.

(There was no need for Stone to invent the scene of "Maya," a sort of Venus who makes a visit to the artist with a fantasy of all the worldy success he never enjoyed. Just for a moment, it intrudes the sentiments of a formula romance into a popular classic.)

The novel touches on the big questions of life, in a simple and unpretentious way. He has written about the American socialist, Eugene Debs. He explains carefully the economics of poverty for the Belgian miners of the Borinage. There is no suggestion that it is the fault of "wicked capitalists." Rather, the miners fate seems so inexorable, that it is enough to turn away Vincent from his evangelist work. He brought himself to the brink of death, trying to help the mining families, but came to feel that his comforting words of Gods mercy were a childish evasion.

Later, in Provence, he wonders whether this world isn't just the work of an artist on a bad day.

> "When I was young, Monsieur," he said, "I used to think a lot about God. But He seems to have grown thinner with the years. He is still in that cornfield you painted, and in the sunset by Montmajour, but when I think about men...and the world they have made..."
> 
> I know, Roulin, but I feel more and more that we should not judge God by this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. What can you do in a study that has gone wrong, if you are fond of the artist? You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue. But you have a right to ask for something better."...
> 
> "Then you think there are other worlds besides this, Monsieur?"
> 
> I don't know, Roulin. I gave up thinking about that sort of thing when I became interested in my work. But this life seems so incomplete, doesn't it? Sometimes I think that just as trains and carriages are means of locomotion to get us from one place to another on this earth, so typhoid and consumption are means of locomotion to get us from one world to another."
> 
> "Ah, you think of things, you artists."
> 
> Roulin, will you do me a favour? Let me paint your portrait. The people of Arles won't pose for me.

Stone finished his portrait of Van Gogh, giving the feeling of a satisfying completeness. You realise that, when Van Gogh meets all the Impressionist painters in Paris. They are like so many blank canvases for other literary biographers. Stone can no more than sketch them in conversations with Vincent.

Stone doesnt stint on the hard work that goes into the making of an artist. How does the young aspirant know whether he should persevere?   
Vincent had doubtful ability, except to a discerning few. His stubborness did not know how to take "no" for an answer, as a suitor and misled him. He seemed to have no natural facility for his self-imposed task. Stubborn practise of his art eventually proved itself an authentic commitment. He wanted to justify his painting financially but ultimately he cared more for his art for its own sake.

Stone gives simple, surprisingly effective descriptions of the paintings. Naming their garish colors, is enough to remind of their vividness. When Van Gogh reached the height of his powers, he worked suicidally hard and burned himself out. Illness and poverty did the rest.

This great novel redeems the image of Van Gogh as a crazy artist and makes him stubbornly human, even in fear of madness.

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# James A Michener: Caribbean.

Table of contents

### Michener the traveler and teacher.

Members of our local readers group each chose a modern novelist. My choice was James A Michener. The book we were assigned was _Caribbean_ , one of many I hadn't yet read.

I would say, tho, that Michener is not primarily for stay-at-homes like me. Michener is firstly for those, who want to learn about the world and its peoples, by travel. Apart from academic or official reports, the writing, on which his fame depends, didn't begin till middle age.

Also, he listened to any number of stories from people he met all over the world. He still had to practise the art of popular fiction but he had the advantage of really knowing what he was talking about.   
After all, new knowledge comes from personal experience and sharing experiences with others. It doesn't come from reading this book review, which only hopes to point some reader in the right direction for him or her.

Anyone, who wants to be an inquisitive traveler like Michener, can learn from his life-story, _The World Is My Home_. Presumably, they would try, first, one of his novels about a country they are most interested in, to see if they find them readable.

All I can say is that Michener writings would have been invaluable to me as a social science student - had I known about them; had they all been written and had I not let on, to my sociology teachers, that my new-found erudition was coming from "literature."   
Of course, Michener was a professor but his novels would have been regarded as moon-lighting.

Moreover, sociologists liked to distinguish themselves from historians. And Michener, despite his social insights, might have provoked a demarcation dispute. This did happen, in my student days, when I tried to champion HG Wells, as a sociologist.  
Wells and Michener, also, have their individual out-looks on the world and standards by which they measure human achievements and failures.   
There didn't seem to be any purpose in the academic abandonment of purpose for "value-neutral" or "value-free" studies.

In fairness, I should add that there were empirical works of sociology that I could have enjoyed, had I taken the trouble to find them. Nine-tenths of set books may not make great reading. But that is usually true of any category of literature, whether meant to inform or entertain - not to mention my own writings.

### Caribbean.

_The Fires of Spring_ is a not entirely successful early novel. Otherwise, Michener goes on and on being readable. He is not so reviewable. In paper-back, some of his novels clear 1000 pages of close print. Consider _Caribbean_. The hard-back copy is 672 fairly large pages of fairly small print.   
This works out at sixteen stories or novelas averaging 40 pages. Many are linked thru national and family traditions. Some characters have their story completed in another tale.

The genre, known as "faction" may not be regarded as respectable scholarship by all academics. But Michener observes the highest standards. _Caribbean_ begins with a note on "Fact and Fiction," separating the two. We are told who the real persons and fictitious characters are. He also tells us when he has speculated on the activities of a historical figure.   
Every care is taken to get his facts right. In _The World Is My Home_ , he admits ruefully to a few errors, in his novels, that escaped the checking by experts and got into print, to be pointed-out by readers.

The weakest chapter is the one where the scholarship is weakest. That is not Micheners fault. As he says, nearly all the records of pre-Columban civilization were destroyed by the conquerors. We know that the astronomical calculations of the Maya were superior to those of their invaders.   
Michener seems to treat the Mayan astronomer priests as academic devotees of pure science. Recent controversial study suggests an astrological interest in the heavens had a fatalistic influence on their history and attitude to the European explorers.

Michener wouldn't dream of writing about somewhere he hadn't been. No "pure" scientist, himself, his descriptions of the ancient temples include judgments on how religious decline is reflected in the art.   
Michener slipped a fictitious woman prophet, into his novel of Judaism, _The Source_. Here again paying his respects to women, a girl mathematical genius covertly does the calculations beyond the male inheritor of the task.

He gives her lineage the credit of being above the degradation of a religion corrupted by barbarians. However, there are growing claims about how global the practise of cannibalism and sacrificial rites were.   
Sigmund Freuds amateur anthropology of _Totem and Tabu_ has been derided. But his guilt psychology may contain an insight into a gruesome legacy from human pre-history.

So far, Ive reviewed one story (the worst) out of sixteen, in one of about thirty Michener novels. That is the scale of his work. I shall go on reading, not reviewing them.

_Caribbean_ , like his other works, wouldn't be readable if he didn't like people, for all their faults. Despite all the greed, corruption, exploitation and oppression, you still are interested in the fates of the characters. They are limited by their situations but usually have redeeming traits.

In the conflicts of nations, Michener shows no partisanship. Only in the interests of good government, does he point out the weaknesses and strengths of their systems.   
He is a good observer of the fact that individuals themselves are a battlefield of good and evil. The official investigation into the rule of Columbus in Hispaniola is a back-and-forth conflict of witnesses. His impositions are set-off against his ordeals. This character-searching is an essential reason why Michener novels are so absorbing.

In extreme cases, there is an indecent promiscuity of good and evil in the same person. Michener shows a most unacademic loathing for the character whose hero is his ego.

In the Guadeloupe story, Victor Hugues was a very able historical figure who did much good and more evil, as it served his turn. Detestable, tho he no doubt was, he was, after all, a small-fry careerist, compared to his later master, Napoleon. (HG Wells chapter, where every sentence bites, in _The Outline of History_ , is aptly called: The career of Napoleon Bonaparte.)

In the Haiti story, Michener detected the immoral nature of Bonaparte, in his treachery towards Toussaint L'Ouverture.   
The black slave over-throwers themselves were to become despotic and corrupt, to the last degree. Even the evidence of zombies, intriguingly told, is an accusing relic of African slavery.

The formative years, of Napoleons repeated foil, were partly spent in the Caribbean. They are related in chapter eight.  
Young Nelson was an aggressive prig, for protocol and unworkable laws, making him a terror, as much to his own government as to the French and American colonists. He is snobbish and calculating in seeking a marriage alliance to further his career of patriotic glory. This rebounded on him, as he deserved, and was to leave his romantic nature prey to an affair.

Beyond the conventions, he lacks moral insight. Nothing, that is, beyond an evident freedom from fear and frenzied belief in his destiny and daring ability to inspire others, in his commands. He is Englands real patron saint.

The Caribbean exploits of his predecessors, Drake and Hawkins prove worth the re-telling. Hawkins comes out as much the better man. Drakes fame has out-lasted his follies - for Englishmen.

Unheroic careerists, who see no further than their own opportunities, seem to particularly afflict the running to ruin of the modern world.   
In his life story, Michener regreted that he had not turned out a study in the unscrupulous female careerist. Her charms exploit men, she has no genuine interest in, except to advance herself. Equal opportunities being denied, this is the traditional recourse of the ambitious woman. A novel, like _Caravans_ , shows his psychological insight, in this line of female opportunism.

It is tempting to stop at that moral but this would be unjust to the variety of human interest in _Caribbean_ , a typical Michener product, in this respect. This is the more so, when you consider it is the work of an old man. Note his generous sympathy, without sentimentality, for teenage first love and the unsuspected wisdom and humanity of the inquisitorial priest, towards it.   
This is all the more remarkable, considering Michener knew neither parents nor children of his own: he was an orphan, rendered sterile by an illness.

Later stories show relationships between the various human groups, failing or succeeding, but again with the same warmth of good-will, which imaginatively shares their inner-most hopes and needs, as if they were his own.

The tragi-comedy of two small groups, at odds by nation, religion and class, trying to keep apart two star-crossed young lovers is in the story about Buccaneers. Their crews elected - and re-elected their captain, as they saw fit. Michener makes a sly democratic comedy - but not an anti-democratic comedy \- of this.

A lesser writer would have scored some cheap points against democracy. Michener makes democracy, on board, funny and fallible. He also shows, without lecturing the attentive reader, that this flexibility can be a gain.

The apprentice navigator opines that the English method of captaincy is the best. Captains should be absolute rulers, who know that if they sink the ship, they'll have to go down with it.   
Unfortunately, this anticipation of evolution by natural selection is flawed. The incompetant captain also will sink potentially able people, rendered helpless by the autocracy.   
An ordinary seaman was so concerned that his ship was off-course, that he dared to advise the captain, and was hanged for insubordination. The consequences were dreadful. This mishap begins Dava Sobel best-seller, _Longitude_.

So, the buccaneers "parliamentary" institutions had positive value. Civilisation must supplement natural selection with popular election.

Michener gives an honest account of the state of humanity and inhumanity between national rivals, such as the Spanish and the English. The writer doesn't parade his feelings, like a ritual mourner, at every further atrocity.

Michener is a moralist but always in the context of an informed discussion. And always there is an appeal to the readers imagination from the constant supply of geographical and historical settings, which don't seep thru into this review.

The chapter on martial law, in Jamaica against a slave rampage, is one I actually know a little about, having read Mill: Autobiography. When the excesses of Governor Eyre, in martial law, were finally rewarded by a handsome pension, Mill was so disgusted, he vowed never again to support the Liberal government.

M. St John Packe, in his standard biography, _The Life of John Stuart Mill_ , gives a typically satirical account of the incident. With all the sense of humor and imagination lacking in the Utilitarians, this pains-takingly researched book is a fitting tribute to the great man.

The Michener novel makes the reader realise just how excessive those excesses in Jamaica were. At the same time, he is judicious as to the extent that Eyre was involved. One feels that had Michener been alive at the time, his diplomacy would have been equal to visiting the pro- and anti-Eyre camps, as his eye-witness character does.

By a slip of the pen, this character is made to address Mill as "Professor." Michener knew perfectly well that Mill only taught personally his younger siblings. Tho, such teachings were carried to lengths almost as heroic as his own learning schedule from infancy.

This chapter is just one example, in _Caribbean_ of the writers short-story telling skill, lulling the reader into a settled opinion, which he is then shaken out of.

The last five stories reach Micheners life-time and are told with the assurance of one who knows and has felt times, when they could have turned out differently. He invents an isle, called All Saints. This fantom is even fictiously placed on a map of the Caribbean. Socially, it is race- and class-riddled, a genteel left-over of the old order. Tho, things are not quite as they seem. Also, cricket is beginning to promote inter-national ties of sportsmanship.

In this tale, even the Germans get a look-in, after stories on the various European sea-faring nations, including the Dutch traders and freebooters or "privateers," and the Danes with their draconian slave-laws. The _Graf Spee_ enters All Saints harbor, making the occasional flag-showing visit by a British destroyer, in comparison, "laughable."

Immigrants to Trinidad from India, thrifty, hard-working shop-keepers, who were almost substitute slaves, are not forgotten. A gifted but naive scholar falls foul of US immigration law.   
A rastafarian meets the law head-on.   
Even Fidel Castro gets his say, as do the Cuban refugees to Florida, who hate him or anyone of their own people associated with him.

_Caribbean_ ends with an academics cruise round "the golden sea." (Learning by companionable travel perhaps is the authors idea of paradise.) After heart-searching and indecision, a scholarly love-match is made.

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# A S Byatt: Possession.

Table of contents

_Byron ancestral home looks like a dispossessed monastery._

An impressive amount of ability and hard work has gone into this novel of some 500 large pages in close print. This suggests a deal of commitment to what it stands for. Romance, as the sub-title says? Well yes, but not, I think, "the romance of religion," or rather, not in the other-worldly sense GK Chesterton meant by the phrase.

Speaking for myself, I found the luxurious style of Byatt a welcome contrast to the mundane novels, I've come across, from her famous sister, Margaret Drabble. I admire Drabbles critical mind in its plain prose. She is a distinguished literary critic. More than that, she was willing to contest a neglected cause, that of greater equality of income.

I bring this in, because, it seems to me, _Possession_ is a prodigious work to no great purpose. It is as tho the sisters still had much to learn from each other. _Possession_ and her other writings may have possessed themselves of the glittering prizes. But book awards tend to be academic judgments of "literature" more than anything else. Rewards for ideals, or what have you, are cleaved into the odd peace prize. This often goes to politicians, whose job peace is, it should go without saying.

Perhaps the secret of _Possession_ is that it has no purpose. The novel is enjoyed for its own sake. One might say as much for possessiveness. Byatt, the artist, clutters the imagination with curios. One dwells, one luxuriates, in their gothic atmospheres. Bibliophiles are especially pandered to, with a succession of libraries, voluminous, state of the art, specialist, together with discoveries of literary treasure troves.

Tho, the fifty pages of illicit love letters, in best Victorian style of pompous circumlocutions and affected emphases, were a considerable brake on this readers progress.

Apparently, Byatt studied her task before producing accomplished passages of blank verse and more feminine lyrics. They interrupt her novel, for some readers, but provide clues that two nineteenth century poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Cristabel La Motte were together on a surreptitious holiday.

Fusty book shelves are well off-set by provincial wildernesses of England and France. Cristabel comes from French immigrants and we are reminded of the artistic Italian immigrants, the Rossettis. Cristabel companion in love, Blanche Glover is a painter. And one of the pre-Raphaelite names is put to an Ash portrait.   
You get the picture.

The plot is driven by twentieth century academic rivalry over discovering the unsuspected relation between Ash and La Motte. Two American researchers are in on the hunt. They are powerfully drawn and their wealth over-whelming. They are also the main comic relief, in a context that takes itself so seriously, namely romanticism.

The English characters may be irritating, pitiable, pathetic or deplorable but are not generally laughed at. It is as if they are the true heirs, however debased, of the romantic agony.

It seems true that Byron manages to escape the spiritual malaise named after him, in his self-mocking _Don Juan_. Early verses express a determination his epic should go on indefinitely. He eventually abandons it on the point of another secret affair, perhaps bored off his head by the prospect of setting himself a further bout of sexual propaganda.

Anyway, _Possession_ is a pastiche of the English romantic movement; its family and cultural circles. The radicals are mentioned, in the name of Mary Wollstonecraft and _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman._

The married poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are drawn on. Robert appeared to have a grudge against the apparent powers of spiritualist DD Home, whom he versifies or vilifies as Dr Sludge. This was not the opinion of Elizabeth or of other contemporary witnesses.

Byatt has her fictional poet, Ash, write a cynical revelation of a spiritualist dubbed Sybilla Silt. It is done with some verve.   
Sybilla also gets her say, as having seen Ash in luridly angry aura. However, this can be viewed as sensitivity to a natural phenomenum. While Sybillas integrity is restored, the plot does not depend on any supernatural agencies at work. God Himself is like the locked-up church in Cristabels graveyard: no longer in business. Another house of God is converted to a tourist reception centre.

Ash is characterised as a student of the new sciences of his time, such as geology and micro-biology. A secular religion depends on some idea of scientific advancement or progress. But the modern English literature academics betray no awareness of the burgeoning of scientific ideas. That is perhaps a weakness. Most of us lack technological foresight, so not much can be made of the fact that the novel is set firmly in the era of type-writers, and the foto-copier is regarded as a great democratic invention.

Rather than science, the novelists concern is with better matched relationships. As soon as one of the nineteenth century characters finds herself "superfluous," by coincidence, a twentieth century character expresses the same opinion of herself.   
A psychologically deep folk tale, by La Motte, _The Glass Coffin_ has a hidden parallel in the lodgings of the unemployed academic and his "superfluous" bread-winner. The land-lady won't let them out of their underground room, into her garden.

In the end, this hero, of our time, does find his way out there. It is a symbolic liberation, in which the first ideas for his own poems come to him. The incident is nicely under-stated but may give a vital clue to the novels secular religion. That is, value is placed on ones creativity as a personal contribution to the Creation.   
It should be said, he has just been offered employment. So, creativity had to wait on practicality. As I've mentioned of Priestley and Amis, and as with JM Coetzee, in _Disgrace_ , there is an unconcealed disillusion with English literature studies, as pretentious and unfruitful.

This is as well as the usual worldly belief in finding a suitable partner and continuing the line of procreation, which is what the cleverly wrought plot is about. The sex drive generally doesn't permit the young (or the not so young) not to take it seriously.   
The novel also caters for gourmets, tho a less sympathetic character is given the job, with special culinary tools, of demolishing the shell and picking clean the inner flesh of a sea spider.

We are in an indulgent exploration of the sensory world, from the gross to the refined, rather than a speculation about other worlds.

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* * *

# Julian Barnes: Arthur and George.

Table of contents.

_Sir Arthur Conan Doyle._

This has been the most "engrossing" read, to quote a truthful blurb, that our Readers Club has provided me. In a way, it is an exception that proves the rule. Julian Barnes has picked up some of the gold dust from the golden age of English literature, from which he has borrowed this true story, to be given imaginative life.

For the eponymous Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. George Edalji is from a family of one of the early Parsee Indian settlers in Britain. His thoughts are entered-into with almost as fascinating, because thoughtful, detail as are Arthurs. These are two people with minds that are worth inhabiting, which says a lot for the intelligence of the author.

Both Arthur and George have the snobberies, long since discredited, of their Age. (Georges minister father patiently tries to lead him out of them.)   
We do not dislike George or Arthur, at least I didn't. The finer qualities of they and their families are made evident, without the moralising, once called Victorian. George is patient and tolerant and seeks to reach a just estimate of those, he might be forgiven for giving up. Both men see deficiencies in the other but also make allowances for deficiencies in their own judgment, to arrive at more balanced character assessments.

Arthur becomes the man of chivalry, he always wanted to be. It redeems wholly the archaic pre-occupations with his familys heraldic status, like another Sir Walter Scott, whose feudal pretensions even the Victorian Macaulay derided. Sir Arthur, the sort of social climber, who didn't think a knighthood good enough for him, till the Ma'am told him otherwise, doesn't take a moment to put his sense of honor before being agreeable to the Establishment.

The wrongful imprisonment of an innocent man, George Edalji, leaves the Home Office to do its best not to admit the wrong, tho that compromises a mans good name and reputation and livelihood. Arthur rages at their incompetance and inconsequence. It makes the reader give a silent cheer.

Two disappointments of the book are not the fault of the author. Those guilty of the "Outrages" against animals, round about the parish of minister Edalji, are not brought to justice, because of the back-ward and prejudiced policing. There was also malicious misrepresentation. Tho, Doyle does seem to identify the worst offenders.

I guess why the police inspectors, in the 1930s and 1940s Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone, are ill-educated dupes. It may be a left-over perception of certain inexpert constabularies of the nineteenth century, such as graced the Edalji case. A poison pen letter-writer in the area was eventually convicted.

The second disappointment was the verdict, also inconclusive, on Doyle for Spiritualism or Spiritism, as he prefered to call it. Doyle did write a fantasy on this (one of his Professor Challenger novels), and I felt that his views there had something of wishful thinking in them. To his credit, Barnes leaves the door open on the subject, without feeling able to come up with any reason to believe in spirits of the dead communicating with the living. Doyles favorite medium comes over as rather unsatisfactory.

I've heard the contemporary medium Stephen Fry, on one of the digital freeview channels, and I don't know how he knows about details from the lives of former relatives of members of the audience. Sceptics put forward the usual explanations of fraud or deception or unintentional fraud from sub-conscious information cues.   
In his novel, Barnes mentioned that other old favorite explanation: statistical guesswork - from an audience to fill the Albert Hall.

Barnes doesn't go into Doyle being so gullible about "the fairies in the garden" that two girls crudely mocked-up from fotos of cuttings. It's well outside the period of the story. He does mention that his father was a rather good painter of fairies.

Doyles limitations don't matter so much. Everyone has limitations. Much more to the point is the comprehensive energy and ability from a youthful maturity. I admit to envying how well such people make their way in life. That's to say nothing of his achievements as a "sportesmann". And he knew how to live from his accomplishments. He found a micro-climate "Switzerland in England" to suit his wife with TB, and built a fine house there amongst hills and trees.

Barnes is never superior to his characters but is perfectly in sympathy with their out-looks, so that we seem to have the privilege of being them. They are humans not idols. An Affair is particularly convincing in the way it happens to Doyle. He rigidly adheres to his code of honor. There is an ultimate irony to this. Meanwhile, Barnes intimates the various points of view, even of the bachelor secretary, considering how husbands get bored with their wives.

The mistress and eventual second wife never got bored with her older husband but patted her hair, like a girl, and ran to meet him.   
It's curious to think back to her introduction to a posthumous collection of the historical novels, where she goes into the immense amount of research he did. Obviously, she had not given up on his belief that they were his real work as a novelist.

I believe there is one minor incident, in which the author slips. That is the case of the mono-rail, the affluent Doyle has installed in the garden, as the transport of the future, as HG Wells has persuaded Doyle. But his son makes infuriating remarks about it being too small and slow.

One feels that Barnes is inviting us to laugh at one of those ludicrously inaccurate prophecies about another invention that never realised its hopes. Barnes does not disabuse the reader of the idea that the mono-rail was just a clattering curiosity, much as the ancient Chinese regarded the steam engine as a toy, rather than an invention.

I believe the modern mono-rail uses magnetic repulsion of vehicle from rail, to achieve frictionless super speeds. Yes, I grant you, it has not come into general use and probably never will. And future traffic may be based not on mono-rails but zero-rails or zero-roads.

Yet, the gyroscope, that can keep a vehicle balanced on a mono-rail, is in standard use, as a ships stabilizer, as an air-craft auto-pilot, a rocket guidance system, and no doubt comparable uses, if I were to pretend to be more knowledgable from checking them.   
I suspect also that disappointment of Sandy Kidd with gyroscopic propulsion may be succeeded by devices inspired by atmospheric electrical vortexes.

The real significance, of the mono-rail instance, may be that Wells and Doyle were much nearer the mark than the author is aware. And that, whereas they were forward-looking and scientificly literate, modern English literature may be neither.

That incidental scientific gripe does not detract from the excellence of this novel. As a psychology of characters, most novels don't match its depth. As an appreciation of how the law should work, as well as why it doesn't, this novel is a good mental discipline, as well as a good and true to life story.   
As I've said, the most interesting Readers Club book I've read, to date.

_October 2006._

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# Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Purple Hibiscus.

Table of contents

Kambili, the narrative character of this novel is a sixteen year old girl. She and her brother, Jaja, are subjected to a ritual schedule of religious and educational advancement that takes up most of their hours. Their father is a poor boy made good, who expects the utmost of his children in turn. Like an Old Testament God, he intrudes with a jealous solicitude ready to punish any falling short of his own uncritically accepted standards.

His abuses of his wife and children are the riddle to the story of a man of exemplary public virtue. Eugene is a wealthy and influential industrialist, who goes out of his way to sustain the poor and unfortunate. Not only that, he sustains freedom to criticise a lawless regime of corruption and coups. But violent repression stalks the household as it stalks the land.

Eugene dominates the novel thru dominance of the narrative character. Then Aunty Ifeoma manages to get the two children away for a stay with their cousins. Kambili moves on from palatial opulence to the parlous state of the professional classes in a Third World country. Basic services are on the blink, with power cuts and strikes and shortages, the hardly-met costs of emergency needs.

This covers most of the main characters. There is an almost Western-like restriction of ties. One could imagine the relish with which Dickens would have investigated an African extended family but it isnt much in evidence here. Tho, Eugene spares no expense on dependants and, it seems, everyone he meets and many he doesn't. The exception is his father, who wouldn't convert to Christ. His daughter portrays him as a devotional man in his countrys traditions.

If Eugene remembers his impoverishment, Kambili is mainly confined to a car-window-view of lifes scramble by the poor. And when the view gets too bad, Mama says "Don't look," even if she already has.

Aunty the academic and her argumentative children are kept firmly in their place as characters, rather than being allowed to subvert the novel into a treatise. There is a manifest hopelessness towards reform. (That wasn't shared by Dickens.) Aunty believes the nation will eventually find its feet but she does so, after being driven into exile.

Maybe that is why the narrator is mainly interested in day to day Nigerian life. She is, after all, young and has hardly experienced anything of the out-side world. The foods are exotic and the flora, the insects insistent as the sun. Animals are not much in evidence. I've read elsewhere that there is some scarcity of them in Nigeria.

Kambili has her first bitter-sweet awakening to love in the company of Father Amadi. The unstable state of the nation could never supplant such an experience in the mind and heart of youth.

My local readers group was horrified by the fathers treatment of his family. That took up all their attention. There was little political consciousness. Mind you, I don't think the author was really interested in the politics. The young girl narrator just wanted to experience life, as youth does, despite the invasive state.

I don't know whether an aversion to set study, the narrative character endured, has anything to do with it, but a glossary of Igbo words and phrases is absent. There are plenty of them, in the text. They give emotional emphasis, whose meaning would be a clue to the characterisation.  
As for the authors own name, it is a poem in itself: Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie.

The typicly African "ng" foneme, in her middle name, was kept going, by the pedantry of Victorian teachers, in English, which doesn't really need it.

* * *

# Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell): A Dark-adapted Eye.

Table of contents

This is a novel of Vera, a murderess, shortly before the abolition of capital punishment in the UK. She is no Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged. There was an out-cry that she should have been spared because of being persecuted.

In the novel, Vera herself comes over as a petty persecutor. So, the author isn't looking for a sympathy vote for her from the readers. Yet, one feels it is not Vera that the author is condemning but the era that she comes from.

Faith, the first person narrator came to stay as a girl with Vera and Eden. She is preyed-on by thoughtless adherance to convention and constant carping criticism. This may be symbolised by the ticking clock in her bed-room. The ticking is like Veras relentless ticking off. She cannot stop it, so she puts it out on the window ledge.

This is a nice counter-point to the fact that Faith has been removed from their living room and hypocriticly sent to bed for her own good, tho it is really because they are bored with her. When Vera noticed the evicted clock, she couldn't let the incident go, any more than could any persecutor of heresy. Or, as Kingsley Amis would say, he eventually found the reason, he had been looking for, to dislike him.

This novel is seasoned with an unholy relish for detailing the small-mindedness of her villain. The author seems to have a load of it to work off. But it makes for good social criticism, this counter-attack on personal criticism. At one point, the author explains that Vera got inordinately worked-up about little things, that didn't matter, because they were important to _her_.

Like the indictment of an age, even the home-made cooking with its dietary deficiencies is put into the enemy camp.   
I have to say that "Toast," the story of a boys hunger, by Nigel Slater impressed in far greater detail with the sickliness of commercial recipes from those times.

Faiths brief family history is forgettable because not linked to personal introductions. Otherwise, there's a strong behavioral perception of people. That's like Dickens and one wonders, if like him, the author suffered from a wronged childhood, to make perceptions almost too sharp. Faiths father stops reading the morning paper in mid-sentence, because he's reached the end of the first page. Tho it's The Daily Telegraph, he still acts like a school-boy told to stop his share of a class-room reading lesson.

Fathers habitual stop resonates with the abrupt halt to Veras life that morning. This reader was teased by the author how the narrator knew that Vera was going to die at a given time. The impression was given of a murder plot, she had something to do with, instead of her being a passive witness. And it makes one reflect how much an individual does in fact contribute to anothers fate, however unwittingly. So much in life is governed by chance, which relations are bound to throw up.

Nothing is said at the break-fast table. Vera becomes a non-person to her family. So does her victim, whose name suffers from guilt by association. The father wanders to work by a long route thru the leafy suburbs. The patriarch is a school-boy, still.   
The author just does not expose a period of snobs and snoopers but remembers her own characteristic part. The self-recognition only may be to say good-bye to a by-gone age.

_March 2006._

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# Monica Ali: To "Brick Lane" from "David Copperfield."

Table of contents

_Mr Micawber impressing London street names on David Copperfield.  
Illustration by Fred Barnard._

As the world goes global, culture diffuses, to use the anthropologists term. Jane Austen goes to India, in the movie "Bride and Prejudice". And Dickensian characters come to London Brick Lane from Bangladesh. Admittedly, Dickens is not one of the authors that Ali claims as her influences, in this first novel, published in 2003.

Nazneen, the narrative character has a friend, Razia, whose description might be that of the author, Monica Ali herself:

> When she smiled she looked deeply amused although her mouth turned up only slightly to indicate pity rather than laughter. She had a long nose and narrow eyes that always looked at you from an angle, never straight on, so that she seemed perpetually to be evaluating if not mocking you.

Monica Ali belongs to that school of novelists who, like Arnold Bennett, communicate in observant detail, the extraordinary interest of ordinary life.  
This is just as well, because the father sold Nazneen off from Bangladesh to England in an arranged marriage with - what must have been to her - an old man. She is mainly confined to a flat and the visits of a few friends and neighbours from the same immigrant community.

The authors intelligent artistry makes the most of a little. Nazneen has a more boring life than ones own, making this long novel heavy going.

Other readers in our book club, whether they took to it or found it depressing, did not find it light reading. Another club title, "Pompeii" by Robert Harris, was to me easily the most entertaining that the club came up with. In contrast to Brick Lane, it lifted the spirit, being always outdoors, instead of in, and featuring the bay of Naples no less.

Like Ali, Harris is for a reader of intelligence. Unlike Ali, Harrises best drawn character is Vesuvius, the volcano, which from the start makes its personality felt, at first subtlely, then with ever stronger hints, until it can only be described as deplorably over-bearing.

Monica Ali, however, is a character-driven novelist. I was continually grumbling to our readers club that the usual run of committee prize-winning books, the publicity-driven best sellers have no character. The characters don't come alive out of the authors narrative.   
This is an old complaint, once made by GK Chesterton, who compared his own generation unfavorably with Dickens, our greatest novelist. Sherlock Holmes, he admitted was an exception. But nothing is made of minor characters. What would Dickens have made of Mrs Watson, for instance?

A novelist friend, Dorothy Cowlin avidly read new novels, long after writing novels herself. When I put this question to her, she thought that a decline of characterisation owed to the rise of the stream of consciousness novel pioneered by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (one of her favorites). It seems that novelists don't get out of themselves as they used to do.

I admit, tho, that Monica Ali characters don't compare badly, even with Dickens. In fact, I amused myself by drawing unlikely parallels between "Brick Lane" and another topographical-sounding title "David Copperfield".  
If you had known Mr Micawber, as well as Ali main character, Chanu, his heroic pretensions would have been as sadly reduced. Chanu doesn't just wait for something "to turn up" but his attempts, to help fate on, keep being rebuffed.

Dickens is thought to be a rather unrestrained writer, whose novels luxuriate like character jungles. But Dickens could have let Micawber get out of control, as Chanu stretches over "Brick Lane" in the authors consciousness. In much the same way, WC Fields as Micawber, could have stolen the classic movie (full of great character actors) with his routines, had he been required to do so.

Chanu is a great character, great not only in the way he sprawls over the story but great in the way that the author does justice to a complexity that is recognisably human. He is man the microcosm of society, embodying its hopes and failures, wisdom and folly, knowingness and naivety, enlightenment and reaction, generosity and meanness, honesty and self-deception.

Chanu starts off as a career bore, who makes the reader wonder how demeaning can his naive ambition make him. In the end, he almost comes to the realistic self-assessment, that awaits us all. The defining moment is perhaps when he confesses however much he tried he never seemed to get anywhere.

His unsympathetic elder daughter Shahana, with a hard-set face and habit of kicking things, including her mother, turns human, at this confidence, and says: I know. Don't worry about it.

Chanu refers to another no-hoper in the immigrant community. Shahana points out this man took up "Right to Buy" his flat, as they should have done, and made a huge profit on rising property prices.

But educated Chanu, who isn't one of the "ignorant types," isn't listening to her. His remark, that they are father and daughter talking to each other, is a day dream. The communication, such as it is, is one way. He has learned nothing from the exchange.

Shahana, like David Copperfield himself, runs away.

Chanu isn't the type of enterprising and hard-working Bengali, who makes his pile abroad then re-invests it back home. Rather he is one of natures civil servants, who believes the way to advancement is paved with qualifications, he collects with a mix of respectable ability and comical lack of discrimination.  
There is a compensatory friendship with Dr Azad, the successful professional, who recognises Chanu as an educated man, tho he has no more status in his adopted country than a "rickshaw wallah."

When the bumptious Chanu repays his visits, despite never being asked, he finds out the compensation the doctor gets from Chanus home life and respectable family. Chanu meets Dr Azads somehow vaguely appalling wife and off-spring. Azad has a distinguished public life but his family life has somehow gone wrong. In the end, almost despite himself, he lets us know why:

> "...We lived on a cup of rice, a bowl of dal and the love we did not measure...We thought that love would never run out. It was like a magic rice sack that you could keep scooping into and never get to the bottom...It was a 'love' marriage, you see." The puffy grey skin around his eyes seemed to grow, as if he had shed tears on the inside. "What I did not know - I was a young man - is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand."
> 
> ...At the door, he turned. "All the little irritations," he said. "Who would think they could add up to anything?"

In answer to that last question: not me (at the time I wrote this review).

Ali lets us know, finally, that Chanu and Azad are not merely feeding off each others misfortunes. Azad helps Chanu and when asked why, replies, no doubt sincerely: Because he's a good friend.

Ali sees the range of relationships. She is not limited to a cynical view.

The philosophy of love learned too late in old age compares to a passage in "The Leopard" by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. (First published in Milan 1958. Revised English translation by Archibald Colquhoun, 1961):

> When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation, however, in a way sufficient to itself, exquisite and brief; like those overtures which outlive the forgotten operas they belong to and hint in delicate veiled gaiety at all the arias which later in the opera are to be developed undeftly, and fail.

Chanu, lives on, in pretentious incompetance, like Mr Micawber. Mrs Micawber is driven, every time she opens her mouth to speak of Mr Micawber, to add: whom I will never desert. This is her mantra repeated like "peace be upon him." Nazneen, also an avowed sacrifice to fate, acutely faces the problem of whether to stay with her husband.

"Brick Lane" has other parallels with "David Copperfield," which makes the similarities a bit more remarkable. Nazneens younger sister, Hasina is an innocent seduced, like Li'l Emily, by not one but several of the Steerforth type idol with clay feet. Hasina never loses her innocent spirit and this becomes the authors instrument of satire in her ungrammatical letters from Bangladesh to her sister. "Li'l Emily" finds her own voice.

Like Steerforth, Karim, the idealist, falls into adultery and eventually disappears to seek redemption.

The ambushing business corruption of Uriah Heep finds its counterpart in the usury of Mrs Islam, who is also hypocritical and scheming, with a sort of ludicrous repulsiveness.

Christianity and Islam, in their respective times and places, play comparable moral roles, whether in a novel by Dickens or by Ali. These two religions have much in common, tho not necessarily in the same place at the same time.

Mr Murdstone, like Razias husband, would sooner break than free his charges. Razia is one of humanitys supportive souls. The sort of person in matters big or small, we too easily forget we could not have managed without, when we were in a spot of bother. Her kind is there for David Copperfield, as Betsy Trotwood.   
Monica Ali reminds me of Margaret Atwood in that most male characters are gems well flawed.

To a confined Bengali woman, the problems of the community appear mainly on the margins of the story. That is the high unemployment of young males, roaming the streets in gangs, roosting in the stairwells of the tower flats, where residents are prisoners in their own homes. While outside is drugs dealing and taking, the violent crime, as against local shop-keepers. (It was featured in "No Go Britain," a BBC 3 program, on 13 november 2004.)   
Ali ends by staging a riot. It didn't convince me she had witnessed one. If her novel is translated into film, no doubt some producer will "improve" on the riot scenes.

_November 2004._

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# Isabel Allende: The Stories of Eva Luna.

Table of contents

The author tries to tie this volume of 23 short stories together by conjuring up a Latin American Scheherazade. To that effect, _The Arabian Nights_ are quoted and a prologue introduces the story-teller.   
In my opinion, this does nothing for the book, whose stories hold themselves together, because based on a common culture to the continent. I was going to say the "unifying" culture. But it seems to be a common culture that defies unity. Isabel Allende, on macho man, offers reason enough why chaos reigns rather than consent.

_The Gold of Thomas Vargas_ serves-up the suffering irresponsible men inflict on women left to rear the children in poverty. While, running thru the stories, the petroleum wealth oils everyone it touches. The laying waste to the forests is told from a supposedly native view-point, in _Walimai_.

A recording angel could not make a better case against the political sins, as well as the sexual ones. The first story in the book, _Two Words_ , is actually the weakest, a pale imitation of the Eva Peron legend from Argentina, neighbor to the Chile of Isabel Allende. The main character is one of the authors Latin American heroines of self-reliance.

It is to her credit that, also, she appreciates men, that women may slight, but have hidden worth, as in the story _Tosca._ Tho, this tale has no male villain. The heroine is merely a victim of a romantic vanity. A typical male complaint against women is that they are carried away by a bad lot. Allende redressed that grievance.

She never forgets the humanity even of her tyrants, brigands and revolutionaries. Left and Right have their share of villains. She can even make her heroes human and likable, as in _A Discreet Miracle,_ possibly the best of several tirades against injustice, oppression and squalor.

Her main characters tend to be exceptional or exotic people, whether good or bad. Humanity in the mass suffers on, whether at the hands of the tyrants, brigands and revolutionaries or from a natural catastrophe or some combination thereof, as in the last story, _And of clay are we created._

The worst of the above-mentioned characters may escape justice but be caught by romance. In _Phantom Palace_ , the old dictator abducts a woman, who takes pity on him but "realized that his habit of distrust was much stronger than his need to yield to tenderness" and so "lost interest in him and longed to escape..."

Allende makes this story one of her most satisfying flights of fancy, absurdly far-fetched yet plausible in the light of governmental over-sight, with good somehow evading evil against all likelihood.

The stories of courtships stretch from gross enough to offend polite society to polite beyond the grossest comprehension, as in _Toad's Mouth_ and _The Little Heidelberg_ , respectively. The relations between the sexes stretch from the highest ideal of married love (which unfortunately does not conquer all) to criminal neglect, as in _Interminable Life_ and _If You Touched My Heart_ , respectively.

Just to measure the extremes doesn't do justice to the twists and inversions of fate under-gone by the characters. The captive sex-slave finds herself trailing to her abductors prison. But their mentality, or lack of it, in their reversed situations, is not one of a conventional romance. Similarly, with regard to the out-come of Revenge. Allende is a psychological realist, if that realism recognises the need for the oxygen of romance in our routines: the story _Wicked Child_ is a fair example of this.

Emotions don't follow rules and the most unlikely characters find themselves being enrolled by unexpected passion in the school of love, as in the light-hearted tale, _Gift for a Sweetheart._ __

Less satisfactory is the tale of small-town vigilante justice, _The Schoolteacher's Guest_. A killing, which happens to be manslaughter rather than murder, is avenged by the mother of the victim, after many years.

The teacher is certain she recognised her sons killer. The fact is that recognition tests of the accused, put in police line-ups, show how unreliable witnesses can be, the more so with time. After all those years, the avenged might just have been a relative or other look-alike.

Her friend arranges a local cover-up. As the author says, the avenged was a stranger. Had he been part of the community, summary justice would have split the folk between relatives and friends of slayer and slayed, respectively.

A feud would have been the most likely out-come. Hence, the need for law not vigilante justice. Granted the avenged was a stranger, he might still have family and friends to trace him and put two and two together, as to his disappearance. The vigilantes would have faced a reckoning of some sort. That is not to forget the repercussions on the imaginations of the teacher and her accomplices, the story says nothing about, as if nothing would change.

With that exception, Allende crafts plots, tho I can't believe the out-come of _The Judge's Wife_ , either. She could have found ways of dismissing her persecutor cum lover, to save him. To suggest, that she couldn't, is to under-estimate her sex, as to its pushing, as well as pulling, power.

At our readers club, we are usually asked if the writer being reviewed has pulling power. Certainly, but Isabel Allende is working against the vices of a continents political economy that have become depressingly familiar.

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# Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace; The Robber Bride; Cats Eye.

Table of contents.

#### Old Canada

#### Section links

The Robber Bride.

Cat's Eye.

### Alias Grace.

This novel is slow in getting started, as it works you into the historical setting of two notorious back-woods murders in nineteenth century Canada. Atwood had already written a play on the incident. A collection of her poems is named after a woman, who left written evidence of the events. So what drew her back?

A maid-servant, barely into her teens, was only a fortnight at house, when its master was murdered. She ran away with the young man, who also murdered the mistress of the household - mistress in the fullest sense of the word. Also, she was wearing clothing belonging to the murdered woman, when the fugitives were caught just over the border, in the United States.

Grace, then, was well and truly implicated. But the trial procedures left a lot to be desired. Grace was held for months in custody, as tho she was as good as proven guilty and her being charged a formality. Right up to the scaffold, the murderer blamed her for leading him on. He was known to be a man, whose word could not be trusted.

The pair should have had separate defense lawyers to represent their separate interests. Yet they were tried by the same lawyer, as if their case was the same and the fates of both stood or fell together.

Moreover, the job was passed on to a novice. He is supposed to have conducted his first case well. Atwood says in her end notes, to the novel, that she couldn't trace him, because several lawyers of that period bore his name. This hardly speaks well for his supposed distinction. More likely, the apparent merits of Grace almost spoke her defense for her. Former employers did speak for her character.

Such a high-profile defense case, being given to a beginner, gives away how unpopular the cause. There had been a rebellion in Canada and this murder was seen as another case of the lower orders rising up against their masters. Political passion may have prevented Grace giving a coherent account of her part in the crime. A competant investigation should have got to the truth of the matter.

Grace was not pardoned from her life sentence, till the franchise was extended, many years later, and she received a more sympathetic hearing from the new regime.

Atwood says Grace didn't help her case by giving three different versions of events. One wishes that former court reporter, Charles Dickens had stopped by, to make some '"Canadian notes," on the lines, perhaps, of "Bardell vs Pickwick" or "Jarndyce and Jarndyce."

Atwood conspicuously omitted Court scenes. We inhabit a womans world of Mrs Beeton household management, told from Grace, the servants point of view.   
A young doctor interviews her. He is trying to understand the workings of her mind with the Association psychology of his day. With comic ineptness, he tries to pick a locked mind on its past.

At the same time, Grace finds he is the merest baby, when it comes to understanding anything about household economy - really the basics of survival in the harsh Canadian wilderness.   
These details gave plenty of fibre to the story.

Atwood takes us thru every way Grace could be involved in the crime. Because the case was botched, the authors evident integrity obliges her to try out characters like costumes on Grace. She may even have been a morally corrupt child, for all we know. It is a tribute to the novelists skill that she manages to harmonise all the different possible ways of seeing Grace in one story, without resorting to a science fiction of alternative histories.

Late on, Grace has a sleep-walking dream, like a work of surrealist art, featuring the beast of seduction. We are not sure whether this took place with the murderer or the murdered man or whether it really took place at all!

Atwood had already invented a character with suppressed multiple personality, in _The Robber Bride_. This further possibility of character explains the title _Alias Grace_.

We are left to believe just about anything we want about Grace. The novel speaks thru her but she doesn't know what to think of herself. This gives her an innocence of a sort. And it allows her to become a symbol of all women have endured at the hands of men.   
Her father is represented as a vicious and selfish wastrel - not the only one in the novel, either, just in case we mistake him for an exception.

A couple of foul-mouthed ruffians prison escort Grace, trying to have it off with her. Nor are some of her over-seers from the professional classes free from trying to take advantage.   
Thackeray said that literature had not been able to express this seemy side of life, since Henry Fielding. Dickens novels are full of scoundrels imposing their basest passions on helpless women. But you don't get the actual coarse banter that allows you to know how a woman feels to be subjected to its threats and humiliations and dangers.

Ironically, Grace might almost be one of Dickens innocents. But her maid friend, the alias of Grace, who dies from a callous abortion, is as realistic as she is earthy. The undeniable hint is that she is deceived by a spoilt youth from the upper class, who is covered-up for.

Not all Atwood male characters are bad. The psychiatric doctor, who inter-views Grace, is introspective enough to recognise his potential lack of self-control. Yet he is seduced without difficulty by his land-lady - another abused wife. We don't spy her thoughts but her actions, which show her going out of her mind with infatuation.   
If a thirty year old man gets himself into a complete mess, then how does one expect a girl half his age, to have fared with an unscrupulous man?

It takes his mother to extricate him. This gently mocked, fussy mother hen of a character, we only hear of by letter, proves unexpectedly firm and wise. Atwood throws off some marvellously drawn minor characters.

The mothers continued advice to invest in railways and sewing machines is perhaps as much a joke at the expense of the over-rated male world of inventions. The sewing machine is admitted to be a real potential help against the female drudgery of perpetual darning. When Grace leaves prison at last, she is alarmed by a train as a great clanking monster - no admiration, there.

_Alias Grace_ is a novel from the womans point of view, in the fullest sense. Atwoods male characters are thoroly convincing to their masculine souls. But they are generally spoilt. In an uncharacteristic slip, Atwood speaks as the author, rather than one of her characters, when she says Graces psychiatrist (Dr Jordan) is spoilt, because he is not used to the insubordination of his waiting maid.

The novel is not really about whether Grace is more or less innocent or guilty. That is beyond our reach. Tho, that question drives the plot.   
_Alias Grace_ shows up the corrupting master-servant relation between men and women.

The pedlar is the exception that proves the rule. He offers Grace a relation of equality. But this travelling salesman cannot offer her the security of the home, which is also the womans prison.

* * *

### Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride.

To top.

JB Priestley attributed success as a writer to "a genius for hard work." I know an aspiring novelist, who has that, and intelligence, too. And she was all enthusiasm for _The Robber Bride_. It's an insight into the human condition, I hazarded. She agreed that it was that. Now she was reading _Alias Grace_ \- a fan, then (who later became an artist).

Atwood was at a disadvantage with Grace, as a character. She had to respect the historical facts about her. Her character wasn't really known. It seems to me, Atwood makes a symbol out of her, for the ordeal of being a woman, while admitting her frailty and short-comings.   
A woman, at our local reading club, put it less sympathetically, by saying: there's a strong smell of burning martyr about Grace.

Those, who know, reckon if you can create characters, you're almost there to being a novelist. Your characters will lead their own lives and you will have a story. _The Robber Bride_ follows three disparate women, who are brought together by their man-stealing acquiantance, Zenia, a strong character, if nothing else..

Margaret Atwood is fond, perhaps over-fond, of prefacing her stories with quotations. They can give the game away. Who needs reviewers? So, we are quoted: A rattlesnake, that doesn't bite, teaches you nothing.   
On learning that Zenia, the deadly creature isn't dead, after all, the three heroines gather round for safety, like three small mammals, quivering for the safety of their surviving men folk, at the return of the man-eater.

I forget the second quotation. No doubt it is highly significant. The third was to do with the cherishing of illusions. You strip people of their illusions at your peril.

The reader enters the thoughts of each of the three heroines in turn. The first is a diminutive military historian. By some miracle, she ponders how her man is still with her, after Zenias depredations.   
Zenia swopped confidences with her and won her pity. She cheated her, came back and picked her partner up, before throwing him away again, like an old dish cloth.

After all, he did know Zenia first, and Zenia is about as resistible to men as a runaway lorry. So, our forgiving first heroine thinks. Our lulled suspicions are gradually awakened by the emerging nature of the relationship of the second heroine with "her" man.

He is a Vietnam war draft dodger. Alright, that war is long discredited now. Here we have a just cause for a woman to feel compassion and take the man in. We are made more uneasy, until it is more than a question of who has been "taken in." Again, Zenia insinuates herself and eventually takes him away.

Heroine two is a scatty New Ager, drawn with commanding knowledge of all the baggage that entails. She is not to be persuaded her fugitive never really could be taken from her, because he was never hers.

She is a sensitive who can see auras but she cannot divest herself of her illusion of a loving relationship, she needs so desperately, after an abused childhood, that is the apparent cause of a split personality.

Atwood would use this psychiatric condition, in _Alias Grace_ , hence the title. Curiously, it seems less crucial to the latter than the former novel plot. I am being scanty on details, because I don't want to spoil the enjoyment of future readers. The novelist is crafty. If you skip on your way down the pages, you are liable to miss some cleared misunderstanding or revelation as to the nature of her various major and minor characters. Like life, appearances can be misleading, and often are.

The third heroine is a different personality, again - the corporate business-woman. She is the type, who doesn't think she can ever compete in the looks league, so decides to be smart and funny instead. Her wealth attracts a hunk, of family, for a husband, who infatuates her - and all the women he seduces. She maintains the illusion of their marriage, by covering up for him.   
Working on the dubious origins of the corporate wealth, Zenia steps in and uses the adulterer as he had used others.

By now Zenia the fallen angel is, in effect, an avenging angel. How does she practise her witchery? How does she, like a pick-pocket, slip out a mans soul? Seeing it for the abject thing it is, she throws it away in contempt?   
For, when it comes down to it, Zenia is nothing more than a glamorous confidence trickster.

When challenged on her soul-stealing, in the denouement, Zenias answer is interesting. But we never share her thoughts. We know she moves freely and puzzlingly across the ambiguous boundaries of truth and falsehood. ("Zenia lies.") She is, on that account, as ambiguous as life, itself. Life cannot be taken on trust and neither can she. She is more like a force of nature than a human being. Both nature and Zenia are "out there" and lack scruples.   
We never really learn to what social back-ground she belonged, to make some sense of her exploiting ways.

The truth may be she doesn't really belong anywhere. She's a privateer, a pirate - that obvious image is used - but even pirates need to come into port, occasionally. Tho, they always abuse their shore leave. Genuine confidences slip out: that men are only interested in getting sex and the only question is how much you can make them pay.   
There is a ring of truth that Zenia didn't commit quite all the offences put down to her. Signs of tiredness show.

And are the three heroines quite what they should be? In the end, they bring their questions about what Zenia did or is plotting now. When her mix of deceit and frankness, at last, fails their trust, her hatefulness comes out. It is devastatingly charged with more than a little home truth about themselves.

Writing this review made me think again that the three heroines were wimps towards their men. Three different types, their various origins still led to kinds of inferiority complex that made all three pathetically grateful to have partners, who more or less let them down.   
It's Mozart opera _Cosi Fan Tutte_ but "All _men_ are like that" \- unfaithful.  
Were these men worth standing by? Each case would have to be decided on its merits. The three women make their decisions, which they may or may not come to regret.

As in _Alias Grace_ , the male characters range from inadequate to horrible. The pedlar was an apparent exception to the rule but he couldn't offer a settled life, a nest, for Grace. Similarly, in _The Robber Bride_ , the business-woman has the perfect male assistant but his being gay proves to have reproductive drawbacks, in the story.

An exchange between women sets the novels tone. This is the never-failing excitement, they pass on to each other, at having found themselves a man, tho he usually proves a disappointment.

* * *

### Cat's Eye

To top.

A cat's eye is a marble. It serves in the story as a forgotten girlhood fetish secreted in a purse, stowed in the steamer trunk in the cellar. This is a first-person narrative about a woman who feels alien to the rest of the human race, as well as herself.

Her father is a field entomologist, given to early warnings on world woes. His familys nomadic life-style is more than physically eccentric. Her elder brother, her only playmate, of sorts, is a physics prodigy, who becomes absorbed in cosmology.

She, Elaine, is a social version of the many-worlds theory. Some physicists suspect, from the merest experimental hints, that our universe is only one of a multitude shut off from each other.   
Likewise, Atwood narrates from Elaines point of view. Others thoughts are divined thru her.

When the family stopped-over, in the town, the girl got the companionship, she had yearned. Three girls become part of her life. When her family returns from the wilds, they form a reception committee.  
But Elaine relates to them, on a wrong assumption, from which she barely saves herself. Lonely people like Elaine are perhaps especially vulnerable to predation.

The novel forms a life story. Like real biographies, the childhood recollections are the most powerfully rendered. On some days, the trio of Cordelia, Grace and Carol treat Elaine with kindness and affection. On others, they reprimand her. Graces parents induct her into church-going. But Elaine finds that Cordelia expects her every whim to be religiously observed.

She leads the trios secret policing of how Elaine behaves, at school or wherever. A woman writer confirmed to me that the portrayal is authentic. Indeed, there are points of similarity with the treatment of political prisoners.

One ruse of captors is to replace a terrifying interrogator with an apparently kind and helpful one. This is to make the prisoner relieved, dependant and gratefully compliant.   
Arbitrary conventions, put upon one, under-mine reliance on reason, whose independent judgment is regarded as a threat to the authority of those in control.   
Elaine is worn down. Her health suffers.

Telling on ones persecutors, by seeking a more humane system of values from parents (comparable to courting the inter-national treaty on human rights) is regarded as treason, because public disapproval would stop their little game.

Unchecked, the trio go too far. The high point of the book is when Elaine just survives to wise-up and walk away. She is still afraid of the insolent demands and threats. But she perceives they are losing their needed scapegoat. Their clamor recedes. They were not "best friends" not even friends. She is free.

By accident, Elaine learned that narrow suburban minds were behind the "disciplining." Mainly, Mrs Smeath, the orthodox mother of Grace was to blame.

After Elaine turns from her fathers biological drawings to art, she finds herself producing outré portraits of Mrs Smeath. Conventional morality christens her painting with a flung ink bottle. Elaine is launched on her career.

Elaine was puzzled why she hated the woman so much to fuel this perverse creativity. The point is that childhood is unreflective. A year after her miseries, she has so far forgotten them, that she allows herself to be befriended by Cordelia. Her former peremptory manner is gradually exposed as a lack of responsibility to others or herself.

Elaines unconscious mind is not only the source of spontaneous creativity but of dormant desperation, ready to take over again, should her adult life become as stressed as her childhood.   
This happens, predictably thru an affair and a marriage with two specimens in Atwood gallery of unattractive manhood.

And Elaines children feature as inconvenient luggage up steps and thru doorways, in this down-beat solipsist novel.

Elaines mother reminds her of the hard time her "friends" gave her. She can exorcise the desperate measures of a harassed nine-year old, still surreptitiously goading her. She may stand-down the defensive hard-case, she became, that, nevertheless, dreaded turning into another Cordelia.

To top.

# Robert Harris: _Pompeii._

Table of contents

Of all the books set by our readers club, this was the one, that to date I most clearly enjoyed. (Later, I favored Julian Barnes for "Arthur and George" - but that is a contrasting kind of book. Neither is a substitute for the other.) The narrative character is a water supply official sent to investigate disruptions in the water supply to towns along the bay of Naples. In town, the reservoir had emptied. A trove was uncovered in the basin.

He sets off on a fresh and sunny morning, climbing the hills, with only his own company. The official has something of the hauteur of a minion of the Emperors public business. He is searching for some unreliable water works employee. He turns out to be an unpleasant character, who he meets with only his own slender resources to see him thru. One knows that this is not the end of their encounters.

The novel is like a holiday book, in the best sense of being like a holiday to read, rather than being a book you take to recuperate with. The expert knowledge has been passed down, and in the course of the novel we learn the simple but effective basis of the ancient Roman penchant for colossal structures. Among these are the miles upon miles of more than man-size pipe bores that carry water to dependant settlements without springs.

Climbing down inside, he finds one of the bores has been disrupted. Back in town, he has another set-to, this time with some self-made barrow boy and empire-climber. Another one for a final reckoning. There are earth tremors. No great significance is attached to these.

They emanate from the books only real character, Vesuvius, who asserts himself eventually quite recklessly. Many must have been sorry they did not take him seriously. Only a few knew enough to read the signs of the extent of his coming out-bursts.

Pliny features as encyclopedic mind, rescuing admiral of the Roman Fleet, and himself a victim. (His nephew, Pliny the Younger, survived to leave a record.)

There is a heroine, in keeping with the token characterisation, and an attempted rescue, as the volcanic menace approaches. A few clevernesses of plot sustain the narrative as an adventure. Read the book to find out. It is true that Robert Harris is still more historian than novelist in this work but he carries his learning lightly. There is no heavy back-pack to carry on this literary traveling light. No disparagment is meant by saying it is a light read.

I can't say that his fictions, as alternative modern history, appeal to me as much. Of course, this modern historian is much better informed than this reviewer. I still am fairly conversant with the Soviet era. So, in Harris novel "Archangel," I found myself wondering how close was this fictional account to the witness accounts of Stalins last days and hours. A recent documentary suggested that history still does not really know why Stalin ended, as he did, and who was responsible or irresponsible. The secret state keeps its secrets still.

No doubt Harris indulges some informed guess-work. To be sure, it isn't a sympathetic farewell to a fellow human being bound on our common destination, he sent so many to, prematurely. I can't say I found the basic plot idea compelling. The brother novel to "Archangel" is based on a similar premise. "Fatherland" is not about the threat of a resurgent Stalinism but an alternate history of the Nazis winning world war two.

I don't find this a compelling possibility, which is why I haven't read the book. It's been done before, if not by one so learned in the history. A case in point is "The Pelican Brief," about which one critic regreted that the film wasn't brief, too.   
Philip K Dick re-wrote the war in "The Man In The High Castle." General Rommel was made high commander of North America. This was told from the point of view of the Japanese, as amiable orientals, as cautious of their co-victors as of the vanquished.

_2 october 2006._

* * *

# Khalid Hosseini: _The Kite Runner._

Table of contents

The first half of this first novel is a good character-driven plot. I didn't realise that it was a plot, taking me by surprise, as authors like to do. All credit to the author, he was only reproducing an effect of long experience. You look back on your life and see it in ways you hadn't realised.

The narrative character Amir is pretty mean but redeems himself thru an honest retrospective, and does eventually atone for his childhood misdeeds, as he had to, to live with himself, or indeed with the readers patience.

Amir is a child with a child servant and play-mate or rather play-servant. Hassan, the servant, who is better than his master, has been done famously before, in comic, heroic or tragic versions. This tale in no way suffers from comparisons. The faithful servant is faithfully rendered. The draw-back of such master-servant relationships, in a post-feudal age, is that the servant seems misguided - a chump, to put it plainly.

Hassan, in his simplicity, never loses his dignity. One only feels about him, that it is a pity such good service were not put to better use. One of our readers club said Hassan gave "unconditional love."

The father of Hassan is Ali and the father of Amir is Baba. That goes together to remind of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. As it happens, theft, Baba says, is the one deplorable sin, by which all the others can be described.   
I didn't know that any Muslims had caste differences. Apparently, Hassan was of a lower caste Hazara. The novel says there were killings of them by the Taliban. There was also a Muslim religious divide, in Afghanistan, between Shi'a and Sunni, which we've heard so much of in Iraq of late.

These divides prevent Amir from so much as calling Hassan his friend, tho he uses him as such, enough to attract unwelcome attention from the prejudiced. Of course, there are obvious parallels to such racial and religious discrimination and its obduracy in the West.

Less than half way thru the story, Baba and his son have fled from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. I wondered if the novel was going to descend into a colourless account of the American consumer society.   
Well, they are in it at the bargain basement level of the car-boot sales. Baba the refugee is reduced from a bear like tower of strength for his community to a chain-smoking pump attendant wasting away on cancer.

In this reduction, the bear reduces to a human size that his son can at last relate to, in a way he craved, as a boy. In his last days, the father becomes the helper and companion to his son, that he was so renowned for being to so many others of his countrymen. It is the other touching relationship of the novel.   
It does not matter where Hassan and Baba come from, they win the readers regard as real people might. This is welcome relief from the characterless stream-of-consciousness indulgences of the modern novel.

Like his narrrative character, Amir, the author doesn't seem to know much about women, tho. His wife only comes to life when sparks fly in conflicts with her father. He is an exiled bureaucrat, who never doubts his worth will at last be rewarded by recall to his countrys government. His moral mediocrity is a perfect foil for the heroic characters. He is also a well-observed type, tho with a less prominent role in the story.

I only really reviewed this novel because of the characterisation. The return to Afghanistan on a rescue mission didn't have the lived-in feeling of the childhood story. Amir is taken for a tourist. When his privileged early back-ground is guessed by his guide, he concludes: You were always a tourist. You just didn't know it.

The novel treats the Taliban as a culminating affliction of Afghanistan. Tho, they don't have a monopoly on arrogant young men with arms. Many people already deplore their human rights violations, anyway. We never really get an insight into their mentality, which is what a novel is supposed to give.

A BBC documentary in Kabul gave more of a feel for things. That, too, seems hopelessly out of date, judging by a report of the once again degenerating order. A long article, Death Trap, in The Sunday Times, 9 july 2006, by Christina Lamb, supplied much more about the dire plight of the people, and any attempts to help them, than conveyed in half a novel.

The novel itself rather degenerates into a vendetta, which threatens to become a saga. Again, the authors sensitivity to children is apparent in the son of Hassan. But the cruelty of events confines the novel to adults book-shelves. If this plot heads for Hollywood, it is liable to come out as yet another revenge movie, that may not make audiences much the wiser.

Tho the plot turns into a melodrama with a mad and vindictive villain, that is not to say the author believes in revenge. Hassan is recalled as having said that you must not harm others and that even bad people may become good.   
We all may hope to become better people.

The novel ends with a glimmer of hope as Amir, about to run the kite, quotes Hassan to his withdrawn son: For you, a thousand times.

20 july 2006.

#### Post-script

(30 july 2015):

Hollywood did make The Kite-runner. And my apprehension of a revenge movie proved unfounded. It didn't surprise me that Steven Spielberg was attracted to the child-like understanding of the author. He might be famous for working with children but he's just the director. He doesn't have to act with them, as WC Fields warned against. The child actor, recruited from on location, justified what we know of the natural talent children have for acting.

The Mail on Sunday criticised the American film company for its relatively modest payment of the child, or his family, to what Hollywood actors receive, considering the huge profits involved. It was also criticised for rousing jealousy in the locals against the family, receiving what in Afghan terms was a fortune.

Nevertheless, the production is a faithful rendering of the story. A low-key delivery intelligently avoids the temptation to sensationalism. Its mastery of economic script-writing helps explain why the US movie industry has retained world domination of filmed performing arts, tho not without rivals, on the rise, across the globe.

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# Andrea Levy: Small Island.

Table of contents

This story is told from the points of view of four main characters: Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie and Bernard. The author was new to me, as usual, and for over half the book I thought here was an honest and competent novelist. Like nearly all writers, not one that made me want to read on. That changed when Bernard, at last, got his turn to speak for himself. This readers change of heart reflected favorably on earlier passages - tho I maintain that riot scenes are hard to write convincingly.

Till taking up the story, Bernard had not seemed alive. Queenies rather too objective description of the man found him objectionable. She married to get away from the butchers farm and business. The author knows his business, as if she was familiar with it. That is to say she knows her business.   
Bernards minor clerical demeanour singled him out as "a gentleman" to her aunt, the confectioner, with a weakness for sugar-iced coconut. His unromantic little traits are writ large, because there is nothing big about his character to dismiss them.   
A strength of the book is the clash of out-looks from the characters successively taking up the narration, so that they are seen jarringly both as persons and as aliens.

The second world war gives Bernard a feeling of release from clerical routine. There is no corresponding mental release. Yet Andrea Levy does not pass a final judgment on her creation. Right till the end, one cannot finally say whether the man is completely lost to his prejudices, or even quite whether he has finally lost the glamorous Queenie. Certainly, once the narration reverts from Bernard, he seems to lose again such humanity as the divulgence of his personal thoughts afforded.

His bigoted antagonisms tend to blot him out as an individual, even when he is the narrator. The author does not treat him as an enemy. He is more like the carrier of a moral disease. The disease or discomfort is largely dormant, aroused by the irruption of people of other races into his life. Bernard typified the belief that the cure was for immigrants from other races to go back. It is easier to put other people out than to change ones out-look.

And thru minor characters, racial prejudice is so common-place as to form a theme of this novel of the nineteen-thirties and forties. Fighting for a common cause was not enough to remove condescension, when it came to training for qualifications and employment.

Racial antagonism may have something to do with the animal fear of the unknown. Animals panic at the slightest unusual thing in their environment. Recently, I had to stand up so that a young mare, spooked by the wind, could see who was lurking on the ground.   
"Hello Poppy, Hello Poppy", I urged her past.

I grew up in a one-color society. Many years after this began to change, the unexpected sight of another racial color could still make me jump out of my skin.   
"Get used to it," as they say.

Naturally, this reader would relate mostly to Bernard, the greyy dull little man - except he turns out not that little. That doesn't mean to say I don't know convincing if exotic characterisation. Tho, not until a minor character speaks with politely sly sarcasm, to Bernard of British rule in India, did I re-assess the writers gift for conversation. Another minor character, a "ruffian" and "buffoon," Kenneth, the twin, that cannot be told physically from his better self, is nicely voiced out.

> Kenneth, finishing his story, look on me for some response. Oh boy. I lift me head and think to make a joke when I ask him, "Is that all?"
> 
> My heart take up residence in me boots when he tell me, "Well, I maybe have told him that his wife seem to like the company of black men. Maybe. I cannot remember. Plenty things said in the heat of the situation."...
> 
> "Why you do that, Kenneth?"
> 
> "Is what I do?"

Kenneth is talking to Gilbert. He and Hortense, from Jamaica, are the other partners in the first-person narration, besides Queenie and Bernard. Both partnerships are marriages of convenience that try to make a go of it. I don't want to say too much about that, because it is part of the enjoyment of the novel to see how the relationships are going to turn out. We see how first impressions can be influential but misleading, in the case of Gilbert. Hortense is held up like a colonial mirror to the British Empire. An intelligent, capable pupil of its instruction, she naively takes in its values. So, her "insufferable" snootiness is comical rather than really dislikable.

All the same it is a relief sometimes to switch to another narrator. And perhaps the most enjoyable part of the story is how the author develops her character, especially in relation to Gilberts genial nature, as she goes thru the lessons of life, rather than the class-room of an imperial out-post. The meeting with English education authority will evoke none of the surprise from readers that we can see is coming for Hortense. It is too pitiable to relish her come-uppance.

One of my main grumbles to a readers group is that modern novels don't know how to create characters or do big themes. "Small Island" is one of the exceptions.

_October 2005._

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# Marina Lewycka: a Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

Table of contents.

Brian Aldiss wrote a luxuriantly poetic science fiction called "Hothouse". His American publisher was mindful of it ending in the horticultural book lists. So, in the US, it appeared as something like: The long afternoon of the Earth. You can see that Lewycka might have a similar problem with mistaken identity, not beneficial to sales. The joke might be at the expense of her royalties.

If you are in on the joke that this is really a novel, you are still not spared some Ukrainian history, political as well as technical. This is perhaps the burden of the joke. The author is making as light as she can of it, but Ukrainian history just weighs too heavily to forget. At almost the novels last gasp (when it's too late to put it down) the fact gets spat out, at last, that the Stalin-Churchill pact let Poles stay in Britain, while Ukrainians were deported.

(The Poles in Britain were not made a part of the Victory in Europe celebrations, so as not to upset Stalin. That certainly upset the Poles.)

On the way, there is much more demoralising information, in the Ukrainian context, about mans inhumanity to man. I found it interesting, tho still depressing, even after having long since waded thru all three volumes of "The Gulag Archipelago." Not to mention other dissident works.

The novels Ukrainian professor, Dubov brings us up to date:

> But Ukrainia must find her own way. At present, alas, we accept unquestioningly everything from the West. Some of course is good; some is rubbish...When we can put behind us the terrible memories of the gulag, then we will begin to rediscover those things which were good in our former socialist society. Then these advisers will be seen for what they are - truly robber-barons who plunder our national assets and install American-owned factories where our people will work for miserable wages. Russians, Germans, Americans - all of them - when they look at Ukrainia what do they see? Nothing but a source of cheap labour.

Before that, Dubov talked of the Scandinavian model, which sounds more promising than rediscovering virtues in Leninism or Stalinism.

An exchange between father Nikolai and younger daughter Nadia, the narrative character, is more to the point:

> "You were a terrible father, Pappa. A tyrant."
> 
> He clears his throat. "Sometimes tyranny is preferable to anarchy."
> 
> "Why have either? Why not have negotiation and democracy?" Suddenly this conversation has become too serious.

From my point of view, that's just the point that the conversation gets interesting. It doesn't take much more thought to see what is basicly wrong with political economy in the East and in the West. To put the situation in its simplest terms, the Soviet experiment failed because it replaced the anarchy of capitalism with a state monopoly on the economy. This destroyed the competitiveness of free enterprise. The ending of individual or private initiative contributed to the backwardness and collapse of the Soviet system.

Even those controling the commanding heights of the economy privately admitted the experiment had been a failure. And it remained an irreversible failure because, the Communists had monopolised political power and there was no legitimate means of handing over power to a different ideology that might improve the system, before it collapsed or exploded in aggression against its neighbors.

This tremendous concentration of both political and economic power brought the so-called Soviet system unprecedentedly close to the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. As CS Lewis said, he was a democrat because no man is good enough to be another mans master. A one-party state in a war of suppression against its own people is more likely to try to channel popular reaction against other nations.

A governing habit of war occupation, practised at home, self-conditions for a bellicose attitude to foreigners. Rulers, who keep down a nation, find a safety vent for the aggression they impose, in aggression towards other nations. This leads to an arms race, making war more likely. A security for a peaceful world is that human rights are internationly observed.

Old insecurities between East and West have no doubt done much to bring the present Ukraine into the misery of civil war of brother against brother. Ukraine may be divided in ideological allegiance but as a people they are essentially of the same stock.

On similar lines to Peter Hitchens, investigative historian, Eric Zuesse blames the West for the over-throw of an elected non-aligned president, corrupt, no doubt, but perhaps no more so than his predecessors.

Whatever the truth of their assessments, there is no doubt that such a divided country should be non-aligned. Any Western attempts to include the Ukraine in NATO or the EU, any more than a renewed Warsaw Pact, have proved to be disasterous meddling, harmful to the Ukrainean people as a whole, and a threat to world peace itself.

Meanwhile, the world has been going to waste because of economic anarchy, freedom in the unregulated sense of freebooting or plunder and destruction of world ecology and legacy of resources to future mankind. This was true of the Communist monopoly of anarchy, as it is true of the private corporations hegemony in anarchy, waste and pollution. Corporate capitalism is destroying the planet as a fit place for humans and our fellow creatures to live in.

In short, political democracy and economic democracy (essentially effectively elected occupational second chambers as well as political first chambers, at every level from the UN Economic Security Council to local chambers of commerce) are both needed to save your childrens future and that of fellow creatures, whose survival is threatened.

I admit that to make that democracy effective, education is needed in how to think, such as that extended common sense called scientific method. And beyond that, there must be a religious respect for others, which ones self-respect does not allow one to transgress.   
In a literature review, the problem of good government can only be given sketchy solutions.

It is just this respect that the villain of the Lewycka novel, Valentina lacks. It is what makes her such "a monster." She is a "robber bride" of a much cruder cut than Margaret Atwood portrays. You couldn't laugh at Zenia. She was too deadly. She doesn't haul her pirate flag till there is no escape.

Valentina is more serious a problem, representing something like a new invasion of the Danes into a Saxon England of settled marauders. Vera and Nadia are the first generation settlers, who even have occasion to reproach their family situation as also being one of "economic migrants."

Valentina lacks restraint. Her greed is her ultimate undoing but not before she has made havoc. She finds every way to seduce and bully Nikolai out of his income and capital, such as it is. Her highwayman tactics appear to be based on real happenings. Just the other day, a young woman from one of the Baltic states was convicted of murdering the old man, she married, and who falsely claimed he was a millionaire.

Valentina out-rages the Nikolai daughters at the rapacity of her egotism. Her desire to triumph cannot keep quiet when she suffers a set-back. She is a creature possessed by the devils bargain of the affluent society. It gives her a demonic power in attaining its ends, but she finds herself in the cheap labour market.

In chapter three, the lonely old man Nikolai deceives himself he is saving Valentina from "the horrors" of modern Ukrainia. The catalog includes the selling of furniture made from Chernobyl-polluted forests, "so that people are irradiated in their own homes." The passage concludes:

> Worse than the external collapse of law and order is the collapse of any rational or moral principles. Some people run to the old Church, but more run to the new fantasy Churches they are bringing in from the West, or to soothsayers, millenarians, out-for-a-quick-buck visionaries, self flagellants. Nobody knows what to believe or whom to trust.

The novel continues with a further twist to this argument but I don't want to make the quotation too long. In any case, the out-come is inconclusive. It turns out that Valentina is a slut, because she always had someone to clean up after her, as one of the old official elite. It is difficult to tell whether the author despairs or hopes for the British legal system, or for human nature. She has a Dickensian tolerance for her villains without mitigating their obnoxiousness. Her novel is no routine Hollywood revenge saga.

The "collapse of any rational or moral principles" is not just a problem of the collapse of the Communist ideology in Eastern Europe. It is just as much the sickness of the West, where politicians, in monopolising democracy, are destroying it, even as they defend their world interventions in its name.

In practical terms, to be truly democratic, the West must have effective elections, without monopolistic safe seats and with freely transferable voting. This would allow representatives freedom to think from controling party vested interests. Just as education might teach children to think freely, rather than to be corporation fodder.

Elections should not be the monopoly of politicians. There has to be an economic or occupational franchise, democracys second dimension, in government levels second chambers, to representatively test political theory with economic practise, to bring scientific progress to the public interest, instead of greedily destructive vested interests.

The hard-back edition of the novel comes in an artily reconstructed Soviet-era dust-jacket, made of low grade re-cycled paper with primitive two-tone ink format. The period effect is spoiled by two commendatory corporation stickers, which give the game away as to the real power that holds sway, today, even in literary taste. Capitalism, regretably, will survive this novels nip of the hand that feeds it.

One of the stickers says: Picked as a BBC Page Turner. It kept me turning the pages. This is better recommendation than being short-listed by some committee (the other sticker), however the author might miss the fortune from winning.

_25 march 2006._

* * *

# Ian McEwan: _Atonement._

Table of contents

_The road to Damascus._

A world religion is founded on atonement: "At-one-ment." The Christian god makes himself at one with his creations, so Gods creatures may become at one with God.

The novel, Atonement, by Ian McEwan, is also about reconciliation. His main character, Briony seeks a reconciliation with those she wronged, as a thirteen year old girl. The nearest to God, she wishes to accommodate, is her conscience. Atoning for her personal "crime" proves beyond her.

One is driven to wonder, by the end of the book, whether the intractable nature of Brionys problem is determined by the limitations of its secular bounds. Whether or not we believe in redemption in another existence - or many existences - we can safely say that this world won't get us far.

Given this dismal conclusion, it may come as a surprise, that this readers club book was so far the one most avidly read by me. It is perhaps worth asking myself why. Not because of the period and place the novel was set in: an English country house of the vulgar new rich just before the second world war.

The impression is given that this small upper class _was_ England. The masses are marginal to the story. No doubt this is how things were. The author absents himself and his modern view-point by making the main narrative character, Briony into a budding author. The effect is as if a nineteen-thirties novel were being written at the turn of the millenium.

Is that really possible? Each period has its unique character that can never quite be caught by those of another age, especially once the passing on of personal experience between the generations has been lost. I admit that there may be periods and places far apart that have common outlooks, so that something of the spirit of the former age may be revived. But shared themes are bound to come with variations.

The author of the period novel tries to put you imaginatively on the spot with a fund of authentic detail introduced spontaneously in the course of the narrative. If he does his job well, he may create sufficient illusion to make readers feel they have escaped from their captivity in the present.

Older people are still close enough to pre-war England to critically assess how well McEwan did this short time-machine trip. The author is on not too adventurous ground. Later in the story, he compensates, for the lack of action, by carrying the reader off to the British army retreat to Dunkirk. This has none of the propaganda heroics that would mark it out as contemporary desperation or relief. It's detached objectivity marks it out as well after the event.

This seems to be the opposite to what I've just been arguing. Getting further away from a conflict, in which we had an interest in winning, we see it with more truthful detachment. McEwan used unpublished documents, in the Imperial War Museum, of soldiers and nurses in 1940. These were valuable precisely because they were not trying to create a public effect, merely to tell their families and friends how it was with them.   
Here the novelist is actually assimilating contemporary private literature. For authenticity, if you can't beat them, join them.

Social history, at its more arduous, certainly sustained a lengthy novel. The earlier bulk of the story was carried by McEwan living the private thoughts of his characters, so the reader enters their fields of consciousness. This is "psychological realism," a term Briony, as mature novelist, herself uses.

One wonders how much her theories of writing drama and novel belong to McEwan. One wonders how much the award-laden author feels the same way as his portrayal of the ageing Briony with her professional success and private self-reproach.

However, the story really has a message for us all. From childhood to old age, Briony has tried to live in an imaginary world which she can control to her satisfaction, to compensate for the real world in which she has only her conscience to tell her she has let others down.   
Did that ring a bell with me? It certainly did.

When the thirteen year old girl writes a drama, she fails to direct it. She makes a drama of events at the country house, which she is too young to understand but not too young to start off a train of prejudices, from older members of her family, who should know better.

This is especially so, as Brionys elder sister vehemently rejects the accusation against Robbie, the young man, the son of a domestic servant, who had become a helped friend of the family. He is a thirties working class hero, too clever for his own good, and effectively isolated amidst class enemies, when it is time to take sides.

The most touching part of the story is when Cecilia stands by Robbie, in his disgrace. She even disowns her family in its disgraceful prejudice, rather than let it ruin someone she knows to be of good character. Up till then, she had not been an attractive character. She seemed to be careless, directionless, lost in a haze of cigaret smoke. Her new-found determination redeems her and redeems Robbie.

Cecilia became a nurse and Briony followed her example during the war, in effect a penance.

McEwan eventually finds a way to ruin even Cecilias saving grace, after war did its worst and Brionys illusionism is fully exposed.

* * *

## Ian McEwan: _Saturday_.

To top.

This novel is obviously the work of a writer whose powers of observation and reflection are of the first rank. Likewise, his skill in organising his material, so that he says everything he wants to say without causing traffic pile-ups in the narrative. The reader doesn't have to face up to a literary version of the trials of a London commuter.

This is perhaps as well, since the story takes place in the span of a days very special commute into London. This was the mass march of up to two million people into the capital to protest "Don't attack Iraq." At any rate, it was supposed to be the biggest mass demonstration in the countrys history.

Like James Joyce, with _Ulysses_ , the novel sets out to make an epic of a single day. As in _Ulysses_ , there is a march, tho it is a funeral march. McEwan narrative is not Joyce stream of consciousness. He is not really trying to follow the thoughts of his character, as they tumble out. The method is much more traditional and systematic. It would be better compared to a meticulous diary of the days events carried to novel length.

That makes it more rather than less thoughtful, because the thoughts are organised. _Ulysses_ and _Saturday_ is the difference between tumbling out a jig-saw puzzle and one of those contests, in which an audience watches someone try to join the pieces within a time limit. The narrator fails, because lifes complexity defeats him, especially within the novels limit of an eventful day.

Actually, the London march stays firmly in the back-ground. I cannot imagine Dickens having been able to keep away from such a spectacle. But then McEwan doesnt sound a Cockney name! It seems unfair to keep mentioning Dickens in discussing other authors, an act that cannot be followed. Bernard Shaws early appreciation of Dickens didn't prevent him from noticing the great mans short-comings.

Lack of formal education can be a blessing, as academic confinement breaks the appetite for life outside a class-room or office. Dickens obviously never suffered that. He was thrown or had to throw himself into a literary living, starting off as a court and parliamentary reporter. There never was such a short-hand writer!

Life itself was Dickens research. The McEwan narrative character could never have been learned from pure observation. He had to consult with practising neuro-surgeons. A glossary of medical Latin would not have come amiss.   
At any event, the author lives his character, in a way this reader found convincing. Knowing the author is not this character, one is impressed how much work had to go into learning to comfortably take the part. Such an author is not like an actor carrying off a part he knows nothing about.

When the back-ground work comes off, it does make the novel more worth-while to read. There are too many novels that rely on the personalities of authors, who haven't much to tell the reader that he doesn't know. That doesn't usually suit an impatient reader like myself. In this novel, I felt the authors authority and respectfully followed the trail of print to the end.

Finally, the neuro-surgeon, having dazzled us with his expertise, admits modestly and honestly enough that we still don't know much about the brain itself, and characterises his profession as still at the level of plumbing, in that operations are largely about correcting more or less obvious damage or intrusion to the brain, rather than any real understanding, as yet.   
Nevertheless, he has faith in the progress science and greatly advancing technique is making. Nowadays, scientists can scan where the brain lights up for every task performed. The brain will soon be mapped in a way that was never possible before.

What comes out from the novel, whether intentionally or not, is the progress of medical science, compared to the complete confusion of politics. Generally speaking, new sciences always are the subject of a lot of argument and disagreement, simply because not much is yet known about the subject in question. Mature sciences are more conspicuous by the amount of consensus has grown about the subject.

The doctor and his colleague and daughter go thru all the arguments for or against war with Iraq and come to a dead-lock. That is the classic sign of insufficient evidence, and so it proved in subsequent months to the time of this story, which is set on a real day in which real events were transmitted by the media and indeed outside the narrators window.

Essential Arab opinion may not have been well represented by the Western media, but then it may not be well represented in their own countries. Memory plays one false but my impressions are that decisions in the United Nations towards Iraq seemed largely to leave out the Islamic world. But then it may not be united enough to make itself felt, as it certainly could, on the world stage. Maybe I'm wrong but it seemed what mainly counted was American government determination to topple an allegedly dangerous and undoubtedly Stalinist state, supported by the British government. Europe, on this occasion, was more in tune with anti-war public opinion, led by France and Germany, with Russia and China.

The topicality of the novel has already dated it, by-passed it. That may not be a disadvantage. It remains a genuine period piece that catches, at the time, people's feelings, which are liable to be revised with subsequent events.  
_Atonement_ , to my mind, has the comparitive disadvantage of trying to recreate a period and a life-style. It was rather too well worn a setting, and has also been vividly and inimitably done by contemporaries.

I must admit I have grumbled at the local readers group at the lack of big political novels that touch national events and beyond, rather than stay in the family. _Saturday_ only really stands or falls as a family portrait. As others in the group said, this family belonged to a small elite. In London, not many people would have a whole town house to themselves. It would have been split into flats. In a way, the story is Jane Austen with a mass media back-ground that leaves McEwan characters just as passive as in an eighteenth century rural back-water.

More-over, the essential drama of the novel is not historic but personal. You might be vaguely aware in an Austen novel that there is something called the Napoleonic wars going on in the back-ground, but the main conflict is supplied by unwanted suitors of the heroine. Likewise, in _Saturday_ , the confrontation and pursuit by Baxter and co is the immediate reality.

The characters make no more difference to the politics of their day, tho they attempt to discuss them in a way both passionate and enlightened. We are back to the close character studies. Only the mother, in a nursing home, who has lost her mind, contrasts with the individual success stories of the other members of the family.

The father-in-law, the poet, is reminiscent of the sour grapes poem by Larkin about an imagined colleague in a chateau with booze and birds and a very undemanding work schedule! Indeed, Larkin poetry is a favorite with this character, called Grammaticus. The poet is rather unsparingly analysed in his behavior patterns, programmed by rate of alcohol input and literary pre-occupations.

His influence on his grand-children shows-up the tremendous advantages that the professional classes offspring can have by way of family help in finding and securing their futures.

In contrast to this fortunate family of achievers, is the Baxter character, with Huntington's disease, that the narrator falls foul of. The plot hinges on there being no cure but one perhaps turning up. Reality has out-paced fiction, because just the other day, medicine announced a treatment advance.

This almost tangible progress of science against the most intractible illnesses contrasts with the chronic reaction of politicians against progress, in the public interest from more power to the people, that might leave them out.   
This novel is a symptom of public powerlessness, whether in private consciousness or mass action.

_25 march 2006._

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# Toni Morrison: _Beloved._

Table of contents

Was the Haunted House meant to kick-start the novel? When the spiteful spirit was exorcised, it seemed so. Maybe the author was making up a fairy tale about things she didn't really know. And a woman with a tree growing out of her back belonged to folk lore! So, the novelist soon got rid of the ghost because she couldn't do much more with it?

Wrong again! Right off, the spirit came back in the flesh, and was called "Beloved."   
The woman, Sethe, with a back as hard as bark split and charred by lightning, had been viciously whipped. The flayed meat is described by Amy, the white trash who spots Sethe (alias Lu) on the run - by that time scarcely a crawl:

> It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here's the trunk -- it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don't remember nothing like this.

This beautiful metaphor for a hideous torture, that could only be sadism, would have made an unforgettable poem. As it is, the image dominates the story, like the Norse myth of Yggdrasil, the tree that bound earth to heaven above and hell below. The idea is thought to be a mutation of the cross, the tree of Christs martyrdom.

Sethe is long-suffering strength. She is the arbor whose branches embrace her children. The Eden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, also harbors a serpent.   
When Amy asks who's in the bush, Sethe thinks it's a white boys voice. Expecting no mercy, she bares her fangs like a snake in the under-growth.

This is an omen of someone who has been driven too far. When the slave-catchers find her, she takes upon herself that her children must have liberty or death.   
Toni Morrison works out the practical consequences of this principle. Beloved becomes the unquiet spirit, at having this decision made for her, by her mother. This _supposedly_ spiritualist decision is imaginatively tested in a plot. Beloved is an idea made flesh, and see how you like it.

The negro spiritualist community believe in death as the other side, from which spirits may re-incarnate. However, they shun Sethe for her desperate act.

Their beliefs appear similar to the Christian spiritualists of Brazil. There is evidence in the Gospels that Jesus and his contemporaries believed in re-incarnation. Revisionist scholars have much more to say on such controversies. In the West, there is more tolerance again of mediums, once suppressed with the many charlatans among them.

Whether or not spiritualism, as such, is true, it may be believed to be true. And those spiritualist beliefs have certain consequences in the behavior of believers. Morrison follows the subtle or crude effects on the thoughts and actions of her characters.

William James adapted the philosophy of pragmatism, as a test of truth, to religion. A religion was "true" if its beliefs were good for the community. The belief is true in the sense of truly working to make for a good society.   
Beliefs of principle have qualifiers, as to the conditions in which they truly apply or hold good.

Without evidence, independent of ones opinions, religious belief can become authoritarian. That is not the good society. So, what evidence is there for spiritualism or "super-nature"? The scientific community has only recently accepted it as a legitimate study. Its academic cause has not been helped by power politics. Those with the research funds may be secretive about their results.

There is much legendary and anecdotal evidence, which cannot be entirely discounted. Chance can not quite be ruled out for odd coincidences, that make no ordinary sense, however disturbing. The best evidence I could offer for ghosts or spirits is a reliable witness at two removes!

An acquiantances friend has a relative, who can perceive ghosts. She was aware of one in someones house. She asked the owners if they knew. They checked the Sensitives description of the haunter, and corroborated it as a late inhabitant. The seer is usually right, allegedly.

(After writing this, I remembered a ships engineer recently telling me of a ghost that disappeared. He appeared regularly at 10 o'clock, between the cylinders of the diesel engine, which was about three stories high. The ghost was a man of about forty, who looked at him and then moved on. The atmosphere seemed to change.   
At the end of the watch, at midnight, he reported to the chief and asked had he been killed. But the chief wouldn't say.)

Such anecdotes aren't proof but they are a starting point for rigorous investigation. Therefore, I have an open mind about spiritualism.

Negro spiritualism offers an extra dimension to another anti-slavery novel. This cry for freedom should be welcome. Our own liberty depends on the liberty of others. "Liberty is indivisible."   
Most readers will identify with the slaves making a break, because most of us are tied to our places of shelter and work. The cross-country flights are among the most memorable parts of the book: for instance, Paul D's escape with the chain gang.

_Beloved_ is a counter to the romanticised role of the domestic slave in the southern states. The good masters are outweighed by the bad masters, because "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

As in the biopic, Malcolm X held an inter-view, when he mimicked the in-house slave, who identifies his interests with the master: Is we alright, massa?   
But plantation work was done by negro slaves, simply because it was so hard.

(Also, a different-colored minority could have their race used as an identifying prison uniform. Segregation is a policy of not mixing with the prisoners, lest that subordinate identity be lost.)

Anyone who looks into his heart, when tired, may see the cruelty one contemplates rather than drive oneself on. That natural selfishness sums up the temptation of slavery. In making others do work, we hate to do, we make ourselves hateful towards them.

For that matter, cotton and tobacco exhaust the soil. This pushed slavery westward, one of the tensions that broke out in the American civil war.

_Beloved_ is more about liberty than an after-life. But, as the title tells, love comes first. This review has expressed some common-place sentiments about liberty. The moral of a story may be a truism. It is no less true or important for that. Such first principles form an insignificant part of the novel. Its purpose is to make us feel the truths that are otherwise dismissed as platitudes.   
Tho, Morrison does state the obvious, so it may not be over-looked. Contrasting freedom with slavery:

> "...when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon -- there wasn't nobody in the world I couldn't love if I wanted to. You know what I mean?" 
> 
> (But when) everything belonged to the men who had guns...you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother -- big love like that would split you wide open... He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose -- not to need permission for desire -- well now, _that_ was freedom.

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# Bernice Rubens:

## _Yesterday in the Back Lane_.

Table of contents

_The three fates_.

This is a "What if..." novel. What if a girl commits man-slaughter defending herself against rape, in the back lane? The authors logic assures us lives will be blighted. The girl herself leaves the victim with a life of her own lost forever.

The consequences of the fateful encounter are clearly thought and simply written. One is inspired to write ones own analytic novel.   
It is not so easy as it looks.   
A comparable work by Kurt Vonnegut is _Dead-eye Dick_. A boy takes an "impossible" aim, that goes off, at a pregnant woman.

I have a feeling that Joseph Heller, in _Something Happened_ , tried to emulate his genial fireside chat. Unlike _Catch 22_ , it couldn't compel my attention. Vonnegut may be easy-going in manner but far from effortless.

Likewise, Bernice Rubens relies on imagination rather than special knowledge to tell her tale. As Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." The novelist merely draws on her home territory of war-time working-class Wales. Perhaps, that's how the story gets its leavening of chirpy quips, its ready wit in adversity.

Rubens doesn't turn her novel into a stand-up comedy routine, like _Mr Wakefield's Crusade_ , which tries too hard to be funny.

Reading a novel is a matching of wits with the author. Some writers are like sparring partners, dealing the reader all sorts of feints in the plot before delivering surprises, as complete as a knock-out.   
This doesn't seem to be Bernice Rubens purpose here. Rather, windows of opportunity open for the plot to go in new directions. Then, doors are opened on other paths. The unexpected does happen but one can see that human nature really demanded it.

Bronwen, the man-killer (literally), has an aunt who says: "The Welsh are different...A very hospitable people they are. Quite different from the English." Yet, the communal life of the terrace seems to be no more than an example of working class solidarity.

And Bronwen, narrating, betrays that her mam and dad and auntie are the only important considerations - at least until they are no longer there. Her horizons are as tightly bound as in any middle class English nuclear family.   
She fears their death more than her own. Hence, the power of her sentimental dependence, under the usual British diffidence.

Bronwen wins scholarships to become a teacher. She claims she loves her work but talks later of it, as a routine. Indeed, it is as insulated from her home life, as her fathers blue-collar job.

The absence of culture and the social boredom resemble the episode about what to do on Sunday, from _Hancock's Half Hour._   
Listening to the King, radio his Christmas message, is religiously observed. The king's there by divine right, Dad says.   
(The monarchy was restored on the understanding it was _not_ there by divine right.)

Still, Rubens may have been rubbing our noses in the fact that, British subjects had something more important than themselves to look up to, however deficient.

Talking about screaming for help, against rape, Bronwen comments: "And perhaps in those days, someone would have come to my aid." In this throw-away remark, she consigns Britain circa 1995 to the dust-bin of history.

Bronwen, lacking presence of mind, is plausibly explained. But it remains a point against her.  
Learning by our and others mistakes is our only hope for humanitys gradual over-coming even the worst of predicaments.

Faith in British justice is all too plausibly shaken.  
Whether or not the courts are judging mere unfortunates guilty, others may judge them for the ill effect they had on their lives. This happens in the novel, not to give away the plot. But the judger does comparable harm, just by ill judgment. This was not an innocent mistake, if prejudice and vanity are culpable.

In part two, after the war, royalty-worship vanishes, replaced, maybe, by the heaven of an annual holiday in Spain. The reader is relieved of immediate apprehension for Bronwens crime. The years now fairly sail along. Bronwen briefly bid for happiness, of her family if not herself, to be rebeled against, by her own implacable body.

The generations of needle-working skill will die with Bronwens mother. And the fate of the home-made wedding dress symbolises that is not all to be missed.

As the facts emerged, Bronwen came to feel for her assailants frustration. She believed no-one was to blame for the pile-up of misfortunes, resulting from their collision in the back lane. She lays the chaos at Gods door.   
This is as Job complained against a seemingly capricious God. Christs mission is echoed by Alexander Pope, attempting to justify the ways of God to man. As the son of God, become man, the crucified Christ atones for mans suffering.

One might ask what good does that do?   
God becomes responsible for his leadership. He is no longer the jealous patriarch of the Old Testament. He is more like a democratic representative, who recognises he has to be accountable to his creations.   
A rigid barrier between heaven and earth, ruler and ruled, has been crossed. In becoming man, God also shares His divinity with mankind. By the same token, the created, to some extent, may become empowered as creators, free creatures.

This atonement (at-one-ment) is discussed in the first book of RG Collingwood: Speculum Mentis. He traces a secular evolution of religion, into art, science and history. As a young man, I had not thought of looking at human culture, in this connected way before. There had been an unbridgable gap, in my mind, between sacred and profane.

A poem by Kingsley Amis, about a new approach needed, treats the Christian God rather like a politician, whose leadership has failed human history. There is a resentful challenge to try again, presumably on a Second Coming. It is rather like persecuting Christ all over again, by absolving ourselves of responsibility and blaming Him.

Such fatalism seems to be encouraged by the extreme doctrine that people cannot redeem themselves but must put their faith entirely in God. This might shut out a divine evolution of Gods creatures, thru progress in realising responsible freedom.

To top.

# William Trevor: _Felicia's Journey_.

Table of contents.

A young Irish girl, Felicia has her romantic illusions fed by deceivers, the romance in their natures perverted into mean, even deadly, adventures, for what we know thru-out much of the book. Led into a journey, made dangerous by her own incredible naivety, Felicia searches for the lover she still believes loved her.

The story seems to start out fairly hopefully. It's not exactly _The Good Companions_ , who are shown unknowingly converging on each others travails. At least, Felicia is striking out on her own. Crisis also means opportunity. Mr Hilditch, of a quiet life, with its soothing routines, is about to be involved with her problems.

Gradually, the reader, like the main character, loses hope. One realises those she meets do not have a redeeming character, nor can she redeem herself.

Her father is still too exercised by "the troubles" to consider that his daughter, as well as his country, may have been betrayed. He rushes to condemn and put a slur on the girls character. When he finds out his mistake, it is too late to atone. He cannot be "at one" with her again.  
However, heady patriotism and its follies here is only a distant echo of classic treatments, such as Sean O'Casey, with _Juno and the paycock._

Recently, an Irish referendum, on abortion law, was close run. Abortion as murder is used to chilling effect, by Trevor.

The author does not preach on this contentious issue, which has another side to it, in womens rights not to endure unwanted pregnancies. When a judgment is expressed, it comes naturally thru the thoughts of a character. Felicia belatedly wises-up to her pathetic persecutors. Ill deeds are not sensationalised. Trevor keeps a low profile, letting you forget about the story-teller. He sooner introduces a stray cat, as an observer, than himself.

Just the odd time do you seem to hear his voice. Who else but the author says Mr Hilditch was trying to show off that he is with a young woman. He was trying to be one-up on a man he imagined was the one who kept him out of the army. Then, he realises this was just his proneness to fantasy, his mother remarked-on.

Mr Hilditch lives on day-to-day superficialities. If the reader takes long to get to know him, that may be because he doesn't know himself. The point of psychology is to know oneself, so one isn't moved by emotional forces out-side ones understanding and control.

Felicia is worn down by her doomed and lonely quest. Those who cross her path are too wrapped up in their own illusions to change her fate. It is not that all the people she comes across are bad or that there is absolutely no such thing as kindness and succour.   
She becomes a random element lost in the atomised masses.

Gone are the rustic folk stories of endless dark woods crowding pinnacled castles. The urban fairy tale is under its own evil enchantment of a throw-away society, that includes people as well as things. The story-teller may be likened to a trash sculptor, who uses the material to hand. His work does not degrade art, as is sometimes claimed. Rather, he shows society, in so far as it still exists as a society, has degraded itself. And society, in so far as it still exists, may prefer to blame him.

Not that this can be said of William Trevor. He is one of an abundance of authors, it seems, whose c.v. or track record, the book blurb pains-takingly recounts for its literary prizes. Trevor may be more afflicted by this patronage than most.   
In the golden age of literature (we all have our illusions) before television, corporate funding and arts officialdom, a writer existed in his own write, rather than being propped-up by prizes from well-endowed and self-appointed elites.

The complaints rumble on about the low level of functional English literacy. The Irish are even worse off, with their two most foneticly mis-spelt languages, Gaelic and English. But the complainers, like futile neurotics, stubbornly refuse to recognise this root of the problem. It's easier to indulge a grumble than inconveniently disturb "correct" spelling.

Nevertheless, a century of popular education seems to have had some effect. We cannot agree with Bernard Shaw that literature is confined to the middle classes (the clerical classes) rather than dukes or dustmen. While literary genius remains rare to vanishing, there is an abundance of talent.

Wearing his critics hat, JB Priestley once expressed his tiredness with the obsession with genius. He was prepared to make do with some talent. The literature industry has surely granted his wish to excess, as in a tale of some over-zealous genie.

Being able to write well is almost like a social grace that, in former times, was expected of one. Corporate spending other peoples money, from their taxes or savings, on hand-outs to the deserving literati, sometimes promotes books that are duds - in my opinion. Others disagree. The question is: who are the popular writers of today, bar the book prizes? At the moment, I can only think of childrens authors.

Story-telling William Trevor makes good, if unobtrusive, company, in contrast to some of his bad, if unobtrusive, characters.

* * *

# Ben Elton: _Blast from the past._

Table of contents.

#### Dido and Aeneas

Ben Elton has constructed his most taut novel to date. It may be a while before he writes a better. _Blast from the past_ relies on his strength as a playwright. It is really a play written-up as a novel. And if he produces the story as both (he did), it won't be the first time.  
Like JB Priestley, the novelist is secondary to the playwright.

In his early ecological disaster novels, his talents get in the way of each other. Elton the novelist as doom-sayer keeps getting elbowed aside by Elton the stand-up comedian. This appears to happen a little in _Blast from the past_.   
That is deceptive. When he goes on jokily about American military might, his purpose is really to plant a motive for a characters surprising behavior, on which the powering-up of the plot depends.  
The book held me, whereas in a theater, like it or not, one is a captive audience, short of walking out on everyone.

By contrast, William Trevor goes, with the main character, down hill into disintegration. Elton focuses at last on the heroines attic, a classic stage set. From set purpose, Felicity dissipates into an aimless wandering the streets. Both women are victims of "the pretense of love." Had they known, they were going to be loved and left, they would never have consented to sex.

When her old flame returns - the blast from the past - the heroine makes the point that this betrayal of trust is rape. Just as it is rape to force sex upon a woman, so it is rape to engage in sex by fraud.

The triangle, in _Blast from the past_ , is made up by a stalker, before the laws against this kind of harassment were tightened up. Like a dictator, the stalker lacks self-control. He knows no respect for the desired females freedom. In truth he has no self-respect to tell him he does not need to rely on someone else to make life endurable.

His obsession for the heroine is merely fed by her frustrated fury that he won't go away. For him, at least it is an emotional response of some sort. He can deceive himself of a grand passion and enjoy taunting her over it. "Love" is really subordinated to self-love.

As with Trevor, Elton explores the disenchanting worlds of certain kinds of male inadequacy towards women. (This reviewer makes no pretense to be exempt from them.)

This is where Ben Elton makes good use of the extra subjective dimension a novel affords to the objective scene set by a play. For instance, the stalkers mother typifies the absence of parental sense of responsibility towards their offsprings crimes, which we hear so much about, nowadays. As her sons persecution goes from bad to worse, even she wonders to herself where things began to go wrong for his degradation to go so far.

To top.

* * *

# Alan Ayckbourn on plays.

Table of contents.

_Page from fifteenth century Comedies of Terence,  
in the library of the Arsenal, Paris._

Quite early in his play-writing career, Alan Ayckbourn became the worlds most performed playwright. There was a decades resistance from the literati, refusing to publish his work because it was "not literature." He has over-come such hiccups. Recently, a knighthood officially confirmed the long-standing popularity. Currently, he is about to publish another book.

He has arrived -- from a journey that began in his boyhood, when it was possible to see thirteen films a week, in town. And he did -- usually twice over. (His mother didn't mind this, because she knew where he was all the time.) When you are that age, you cannot judge between good and bad. You may prefer the worse films. The good ones tend to have more talk in them.

At school, he was lucky enough to have a teacher who was a theatre nut, taking them to see plays. Ayckbourn remarks on how the class-room teaching of Shakespear can put children off. His teacher used a tacky model theatre, in which he moved figures on and off stage, while the children read the parts, so they got a real sense of what was going on.   
It was Ayckbourn lesson one, in the importance of how that space on the stage is used.

Not surprisingly, the young cinema addict wanted to be an actor. He left school frustrating his teachers ambitions for him to go to university. Instead, he joined a theatrical company directed by Donald Wolfitt.

Looking back, he does not know why he went into theatre rather than films. (It may have had something to do with school not yet recognising cinema as a curriculum subject. But that is only this writers guess.) Tho films started off Ayckbourn, he has had very little to do with them. Little has been made of his plays by the movie industry.   
He wryly admits that the only time he wrote anything for television coincided with a hiatus that broadcasters used to describe as: due to circumstances beyond our control.

A theatrical apprentice often has to stand in for all the back-stage jobs, like lights and props, as well as the on-stage job. This would stand him in good stead for the further unforseen job of writing plays. Altho he wouldn't remember the exact details of his days when he worked on the lights, he would recall enough to know how to create his effects.

Stephen Joseph pioneered the Theatre In The Round, which is famously named after him. Its first of three Scarborough locations was in the hall above the public library, which the chief librarian offered Joseph. In those days, the idea of an audience surrounding the actors was not approved in theatrical circles. Tho, it is now common enough, at least, for stages to be built forward into the audience on three sides.

Joseph didn't just have radical ideas in audience involvement, at a time when theatres were closing down from the impact of the cinema and television. He also believed that a theatre company should write its own plays.

Typicly, plays were taken from outside without author involvement. The author would variously react to the ensuing production with horror, bewilderment or gratitude, and sometimes all three.

Joseph believed in uniting writing and acting into a single process. That is why Ayckbourn follows the tradition of those who say they are playwrights not writers. He does not merely write for the theatre, he directs every stage of production, of which the writing is just one part. He compares his role to a conductor of an orchestra, not a commander.

Being a playwright is not for those who want total control of their work. The novel is more suited for that. The writer as control freak is the wrong person for a theatrical production, which is a collaberation of dramatic skills.   
(Perhaps it compares to science, in its "adaptation" of theory to practise.)

When Joseph started Ayckbourn on plays, the latters motivation was to write incredibly good parts for himself. Like Shakespear, he started as an actor. After eight years or so, he began to realise that he wasn't the out-standing performer he had hoped to be. So, Ayckbourn says, he sacked himself as an actor, and found better ones for his plays.

It wasn't that he was a bad actor. He was good enough. But that wasn't enough. How did he know?  
Gradually, an actor such as himself finds out his limitations compared with other actors. It can take some time, as it took Ayckbourn. The luckiest, who haven't got what it takes, find out after only a few years and can move on. Then again, some actors say they only came into their own by the time they were forty.

What is it that makes a great actor?  
In company, some personalities "hold the stage" when they are off-stage. Maybe, as soon as they appear before an audience, they go "blup." (This reminds one of a Yorkshire pudding, made without skill in the traditional recipe.) Others may become totally dull as soon as they get back in the dressing room: they go "blup." On stage, they just seem to light up. It isn't necessarily beauty that they possess. One could call it charisma, as Ayckbourn does. That is to say it is the mystery of a divine gift.

Much the same may be said of writing plays. People sometimes ask Alan Ayckbourn: Where do you get your ideas?  
He doesn't know. He has written sixty two plays, to date. And he can never be sure whether his latest play is his last. He would certainly miss the inspiration. And if he did know where his ideas came from, he adds, he wouldn't tell you!

The playwright first gained his reputation as a writer of comedies. But the public soon became aware his plays never seemed to have happy marriages. He no longer classifies his works as comedies or tragedies. He just calls them plays.

A transition, in his early comedies, was marked by a woman of mistaken intentions. While a party is going on, she is in the kitchen quietly trying to do away with herself. A couple, coming in, rightly perceive, but in the most superficial way, that she needs help. So, they mend the ceiling fitting, when she fails to hang herself on it. And so on.   
This is hardly a comic subject, Ayckbourn concedes. It foreshadows his out-look on a world where comedy and tragedy are as intimate as light and shade.

He was surprised to find his insight anticipated by the post-Shakespearian playwright John Ford, while treating themes of incest and murder.   
The Theatre In The Round doesn't often do classical plays, tho. They don't have the resources.

Besides light and shade, Ayckbourn further compares play-writing to painting. You know those old masters, with foreground figures in the most richly textured and ornamented dress. Perspective is shown by the scene becoming more blurred, until a back-ground figure is described by a few simple strokes.

Plays also have a perspective on character. The walk-on part, such as a post-man should likewise be scripted with the utmost economy. That doesn't mean the part is unimportant. Never tell an actor that, or he will walk out on you. But the writer wouldn't want the walk-on actor to take a couple of weeks to build up an elaborate study, any more than the writer would interrupt the story by having the post-man launching into a long speech about himself. The audience would wonder what this was all about. The playwright does not want to confuse people, who are there to be put in the picture.

Sometimes a playwrights characters do take over. But this creativity has to be kept in check, if it is a red herring. Superfluous passages should be cut before being shown to the actor, who will want to run away with all those lovely lines. Otherwise, it will be difficult to withdraw the verbiage later.   
Chekov knew how to get away with this, but not everyone has his tact all the time. An actress was reading one of his parts, when he realised that her performance had summed-up everything in the first sentence. He congratulated her and put a line thru the rest of the passage.

Still more economy is possible. Characters may be alluded-to, and created in the audiences mind without them ever coming on stage. A couple, who are at the party in the next room, are innocently talked about. Tho a few laughs, from next door, are all we hear from them, we are able to form our own impression of them: they are a horrible couple.

In general, the playwright doesn't use more actors than are needed for the story. If he did, the actors would wonder what they were doing here. To the same purpose, Ayckbourn follows Aristotle on the unities of space and time in a play. Only as many scenes are used as are necessary to the story.

It is seldom possible for the action of a play to take place wholly in real time, or for as little as two hours. A two-hour performance, also the length of time portrayed on stage, invests every action with a heavy significance, down to lifting each spoon of sugar into a cup.

Moreover, cinema and even television can beat theatre hollow, in the staging of a spectacle. In the nineteenth century, theatre tried to do that. But it's not worth it now. The one thing that the stage is really good at is the portrayal of the human.

Generally, a play follows the development of character, which implies that the acts will have to cover several periods of time. Sometimes, the characters don't learn anything. And that is the point of the play: that they never learn. But that is really only the exception that proves the rule. A play is like a journey, in which a character gets from X to Y. If your character is the same at the end, as he was at the beginning, then your play hasn't really got anywhere.

For a brief while, Ayckbourn was a university tutor. He found that students would come to him with good work, which they had no idea of how to finish.   
(My friend, Dorothy Cowlin confirmed the truth of this. Her first two attempts at novels were started without a plan, more in hope of getting somewhere than knowing where she was going. She couldn't finish them and it was a great waste of time.)

Ayckbourn likes to have the shape of a play in mind first.

The playwright was approached by two veteran writers of tv comedies. They said they were tired of writing for television and would he advise them how to write for the theatre. Reading a proposed script, he found they were still turning out a stream of gags. He thought this would exhaust the audience in minutes.

In Oscar Wilde plays, everyone is always saying witty things to each other and no-one ever laughs. Ayckbourn says one of his funniest lines was: "No." For him, comedy comes out of the characters inter-action.   
Ayckbourn is less concerned that the audience should find the characters amusing than come to see into their natures. Humor does not depend on the dialog.

Play construction has priority. The last thing Ayckbourn concerns himself with in a new play is the dialog. He knows dialog is his forte. He doesn't do scripts, he does dialog. His style is not literary, if avoiding bad grammar, like ending a sentence with a preposition. He writes as people talk. It expresses their character. A play that stops there is purely a radio play. That's fine in itself but doesn't use the full range of expression on view in a theatre.   
Not to consider the visual impact of ones play is simply to leave the job to the director.

He is a great believer in filling in the spaces between the words. Merely asking an actress to pause in a speech can attract attention to the meaning. One should not under-estimate the many ways actors and actresses have, their whole body language, other than merely speaking, to convey the spirit of a part.

An actor has to be both subjective and objective in his or her part. Actors are not acting alone but reacting to each other. In rehearsals, the company will decide where they want audience attention to be at any one moment. There will always be someone who is looking in the wrong place but, mostly, the effect is achieved.

Children are the most testing audiences for having their attention held. Adults may give a slow play fifteen minutes or so, to warm up. It takes kids about three seconds to decide: "Boring!" and start talking among themselves.   
American televisors decided that childrens maximum attention spanned eleven seconds. The changes of camera scene were tailored to that. Obviously, theatre cannot do that. You are stuck with the current set. Film technique may not learn from theatre but Ayckbourn says he learns from films.

One means of directing attention was to have the stage action followed by someone carrying a video camera. Conveying a strangers sense of detachment, one lead character moves thru two worlds. One is the real world of her depressing family. Her imagination compensates her with a happy family, that is in every way delightful.

A woman may think she can be what she likes but it will take its toll of her system, till she finds out that she cannot, to be greeted by the response: Whoever thought you could?  
In the schizophrenic play, the fantasist starts to confuse her two sets. The characters of her real and imaginary life begin to mingle on stage. Ayckbourn could see the audience stirring, wondering what was happening here. As a rule, he would avoid this incomprehension. Here, it reflected the fantasists losing _her_ own sense of the difference between the real and the imaginary.

Like a carnival or burlesque, the mounting chaos at last explodes. As a super-nova leaves a black hole at its core, so the fantasists mind shuts down into catatonia.   
Basically, Ayckbourn rules play-writing must develop character. This is qualified with a case of character regression.

Perhaps a more representative work began as a public interest question, that a play could illustrate thru the relations of a small group in the appropriate setting. Ayckbourn asked himself why do we have a political system, in which councillors and MPs are selected from those who put themselves forward? The very fact, that they do, seems almost a disqualification for the job. The most suitable may be those who don't impose themselves on others. The play is based on this premise.

Ayckbourn used to go on boating holidays, once with his children, he doubted would forgive him. Manning a boat does not require a license. Boats don't have brakes. The consequences can be imagined. He had seen a boat trapped sideways in a lock gate blocking everyone else.

A family on a boat will have its "captain," usually Dad. Mum is stuck down in the galley, doing the same job she has been doing all year, on what is supposed to be her holiday. The children are press-ganged as deck hands.

In the play, the complement is, at first, two couples. One man puts himself forward as the leader. But another couple join and there is a coup leading to a dictatorship. It turns out that the couple who never assumed control were really the most suited to do so.

The setting is surely the most famous of all Ayckbourn plays, the cabin cruiser in the fibre glass tank, that inevitably leaked thousands of gallons of water, causing chaos both at the usual premier venue in Scarborough and when the play moved to London.  
At the latter fused theatre, Ayckbourn found himself alone in the dark, guiltily pondering the damage and thousands of canceled tickets.

He cheers up at the thought that they must have forgiven him, because, years later, two of his plays were staged, at the same time, in two leading London theatres. As they were nearby, Ayckbourn confesses to a rare bout of vanity, waiting for the two audiences to stream out into the sun-shine and rhapsodising: They're mine...all mine!

To top.

# Mars Attacks!

### Directed by Tim Burton (1996).

Table of contents.

800 centuries, in the canyons of Mars, has yielded a race of monster brains. They set off, to invade Earth, in a massive fleet of flying saucers. Tho you can't see the strings, these carefully re-create the pendulous models from 1950s SF B-movies.

Tim Burton got his plot from 1950s bubble gum cards. As a child, I collected tea cards. Only one card from Bubbles Inc. found its way into my possession. I'm missing the other 54 cards, in the series. And I don't have any swops!

Card 11 is _Destroy The City_ :

> The flying saucers descended, landing on the outskirts of the city. Carrying powerful atomic weapons, the invaders stalked through the streets. Citizens trying to hide were wiped out with one blast from the alien heat guns.

The card pictures the attacking brain-heads, in spacemen swim-suits. In front of them is a pile of burning skeletons, like the concentration camps. This childs souvenir is no post-Cold-War spoof. This is the era of total terror and total insanity. The madness has not quite got into the mothers milk (or cows milk) as suicidal pollution threatens. But it is re-cycled with the bubble gum as entertainment.

There is no doubt, tho, that the movie, as a spoof, has humor to satisfy the most aggressive of small boys in us. Visualised is the instant slicing sweep of conflagration, from the heat rays, as from HG Wells, in _The War of the Worlds_.

The enlarged brain is also featured, as the Grand Lunar, from Wells _First Men In The Moon_.  
In the nineteen fifties, something like him becomes the chief adversary of Dan Dare, the _Eagle_ comics "pilot of the future."

Braininess is virtually the first and last idea, from a student of Thomas Huxley. Wells article, _Man of the Year Million_ (1887) was perhaps his first sweet taste of success.   
In _The War of the Worlds_ , Wells mocks himself as the forgotten author of that article, which hazarded the likely evolution of the Martians.

Close on the end of his life, in _The Conquest of Time_ (1942) Wells admits he played evolutions helping hand-maid:

> Long years ago I had a conversation with Sir Michael Foster about the possibility of delaying the closing-up of the sutures of the human skull and so permitting the grey matter of the brain a longer period of expansion, with a consequent prolongation of mental development.  
>  " _You_ can write about this sort of thing," he said, "because you need not seem to believe in it, but I dare not say a word about it if I am to remain Member of Parliament for the University of London." And so our learned mandarins do their best to emulate the brontosaurus and stick themselves (and us) in the mud until the stars in their courses turn against (us and) them.

Despite the last sentences fanatical comment, this is "a modest proposal" compared to the potential of genetic engineering, allowed to run riot for private profit.   
In the movie space-ships, the depraved aliens amuse themselves with experiments, that appear to have been on human minds, since the minotaur and the griffin.

It's time to put my cards on the table. The martial Martians are, of course, our brain-evolved selves. They may have better brains but are they better people? Goodness itself must still do what it can to over-come evil, however fiendishly clever.

At the movies end, in the crashing saucer, rolling like a Salome platter, the disembodied heads, of two human samples, kiss. We may take this as biblical symbolism that you don't have to be all head and no heart.

The movie is more than a horrific nostalgia, a skit on science without conscience or a laf at politics as usual. That would make it worth watching but hardly worth reviewing.

A physicist said that the extraordinary arguments, by colleagues against extra-terrestial life, reminded him of twelve year olds, who don't believe in sex. Margaret Atwood, in _Cat's Eye_ , recalls that state of mind in pre-pubescent girls.   
Females are drastically taken over by the burgeoning of an alien body.   
In _Mars Attacks_ , a Martian assassin is disguised as a woman. Women have been expected to keep quiet, which only adds to their mystery. The alien keeps quiet, because speaking would blow its cover.

The bodys cones and spheres are a walking geometry lesson, that cannot move "naturally" because of all their gravitational distortions on its orbit. And that's just woman, not an alien in disguise. This scene really celebrates the eerie fascination of woman.   
Under the pull of these forces, man, too, changes from the orbit of his native self to an alien one.

When the alien does throw off the female disguise completely, it is almost a statement that beauty is only skin deep. As if to dispel anything sacred about the marital relationship, the would-be assassin, of the night, electrically blasts the bed-head between the recumbent president and his first lady.

This is, perhaps, one of those rare movies that will bear coming back to. There are plenty of other "subtle" touches. For instance, the mechanical giant, operated with levers, by a sort of glorified crane driver, in its domed head. From there, a malevolent martian, with disjointed thumping strides, runs down a mere van, like the giant giving Jack nightmares, in the fairy tale.

_Mars Attacks_ departs from the convention, I grew-up with, in cinemas, that the beautiful people come thru, to live happily ever after. Of this star-studded cast, expect them to be skeletised. The presidents last speech of reconciliation is as masterful as that character always fancied himself to be. The enemy ambassador is assailed by intolerable remorse.

It is not the purpose of this review to single out the actors. I thought it was clever casting to make Don Johnson look like his younger self, in an early film, before he became famous.   
But the nineteen fifties and sixties are quite different atmospheres.   
The SF B-movie, this film takes-off, belongs to the fifties. To bring this down on the head of Tom Jones, singing in Las Vegas, or wherever, brings in the sixties. Tom Jones helped put the swing in the swinging sixties. To mix up these and other decades, in the production, may lose it distinction.

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# War Of The Worlds

### Directed by Steven Spielberg

Table of contents

_The War Of The Worlds (1897).  
Illustration by Warwick Goble._

The Steven Speilberg re-make pays tribute to the 1950s movie Martians. Here, the origin of the aliens has to be fudged. Martians have lost credibility since HG Wells chillingly portrayed their surveillance upon this planet, at the end of the 19th century.

Even by the 1950s, you could believe nearly as much as Wells about the planets of the solar system, so little was known about them. CS Lewis said he might have known the Mars canals were sheer fancy but he used them, anyway, in his fantasy.

My childhood encyclopedia devoted all of one side of a page to fotos and info. How my imagination lingered on those few fuzzy blobs taken by earth-bound telescopes, without the sophisticated atmospheric corrections available today. And, of course, there were no satellite probes, taking many months or years to reach their objectives and send back such awe-inspiring technicolor.

However, this movie gives no attention to a world warring with this one. Inter-planetary flight gives way to some mysterious lightning strikes that merely serve to conceive the tripods out of the womb of the earth.   
This makes one suspect that what we have here is not only SF but psychological symbolism, rather as CG Jung would look at the UFOs.

The Martian fighting machines, as they are called in the novel, The War of the Worlds, are more than passably realised. Wells uncannily futuristic vision was such that on seeing the special effects, one thinks, yes, that's them: theyve arrived! After all, the robotic legs, the heat rays, the probes, like tentacles, have already been transformed from science fiction to familiarity.

One might hazard a guess that robotics, which has concentrated on human bipedalism, will see the Wellsian wisdom of the tripod, which gives much greater stability (as people find with so much as a walking stick) not to mention the useful redundancy of a third leg for mobile computers.

When the tripod towering up to the sky-scrapers, pauses, in its heat-raying of humanity, with an eerie fog-horn of a warning, we know the real stars of the movie have arrived. We expected no less.

It didn't have much of a plot, as the Everly Brothers sing in Wake Up Little Suzie. Obviously, they would have had a hard time slumbering their way thru this movie, as the aliens noisily destroy or consume all humanity and their habitations before them. This is familiar disaster movie territory. The denouement is the same as the novel, and an eloquent passage from Wells is quoted at the end.

The setting has been changed from Victorian England to contemporary USA, as in the Orson Welles radio broadcast, which panicked America. HG Wells was furious with this stunt. He traveled to America, shortly after, in his old age, when he met Welles on friendly terms.

Wells was a pioneer of the ordinary persons point of view. Dickens wrote about the poor, but good fortune depended on establishing some connection with the aristocracy. Walter Scott aspired to aristocracy. Tono-Bungay has Wells novelise the commercial adventurer gate-crashing the old feudal system.

In the science fiction, scientific and technical advances typicly take hold of some insignificant mortal, often some Cockney little man like Wells himself, and hurl him, thru cataclysmic changes, across the world (or even off it).

We take for granted that mass man, who funds mass entertainment, will be our kinematic concern. It wasn't always so. In Britain, the royals once had a mass media monopoly and poor people vicariously looked to these gods for better living in a more gracious world. Now, the field has been opened to competition from the celeb culture.

From the height of royalist imperialism, Wells was an unfashionable English republican. The Martian invasion is imperialism unleashed on the British Empire. For good measure, he includes his radical anti-clericalism, in the form of the cleric that the narrator finds himself with, hiding in the cellar from the invaders, who, unluckily, have decided to set-up base over-head.

This worms eye view is carried-over into the two US movies. In the first, a clergy-man is presented as a saintly but (as the movie fails to appreciate) foolhardy intermediary. The Spielberg film prudently leaves religion out of it.

In Wells novel, the cellar scene is one of the few personal encounters that the narrative on-looker has. So, the movie script takes his idea of its inhabitant going mad and giving them away to the occupiers over-head. The ideas of the artillery-man, near the end of the novel, about an under-ground militia, are also thrown-in, for good measure.

The result is not satisfactory. I don't believe in the character. The cleric, regardless of Wells anti-clericalism, is a psychologicly convincing study of the parasitic personality of an intimidator, whose power complex gradually over-rides even his own survival instinct.

Generally the term SF is earned when applied to Wells, who knew his science. Wells studied the classics of crowd psychology, such as those of Gustave Le Bon, and the scenes of mass panic are more ferocious than those indulged by the movie. Tho, the crowd attack on the narrators car is reasonably savage, in the circumstances.

By the way, the script writers have borrowed an idea from other SF movies, such as The day the world stood still, where virtually all transport is brought to a halt. This is just a plot contrivance for the car attack.

Not for the first time in Spielberg movies, an aircraft is trashed. Here, he really goes to town with a Boeing airliner for a fairly short crash scene, in which a couple of standard Spielberg characters, the savvy survivalists fill-in the narrator, and so the audience, on the progress of the invasion, with the help of the dismantled planes communications devices, miraculously intact.

At another point, barriers come down, to let race, past the crowds, an inter-continental train, which is a blazing furnace from end to end. Surely not cremated hardware but CGI! No?

Shortly after, a whole ferry is tipped-over, as if in the interests of some unwritten law of impartiality of transport disruption.   
Not to mention all the exploding buildings.

If there is religion in this movie, and countless others, it is the religion of family values. My few encounters with modern novels give me the impression that keeping families together is now the ultimate in human wisdom and endeavor.   
It is not altogether New Testament, tho Christian evangelism be ever so strident. Perhaps the religion of the hearth is all that novels, sustained by corporate publishers and committee prizes in the name of literature, can aspire to.

War of the Worlds, about the mass slaughter of mankind, is not exactly family movie material but the Hollywood producer makes it so, by afflicting the plot with cute little girl syndrome. The aliens are quite terrifying, too. (Only joking.) Everyone knows that children are Spielberg strong suit, when it comes to directing.

In fact, he flouts WC Fields warning, Never act with children or animals...or fish, by producing all three categories, with aliens thrown in, for good measure. What does not suit actors may suit the box office.

The child is confronted by a river of the dead, her gaze, lit by the reflected dazzle, nearly carried away with them, before her eyes are covered.

The son of the central character (actor Tom Cruise) is the dramatic tension, who pulls away from the family. He wants to go with the army and eventually has to be allowed to see their catastrophic set-to with the tripods.

Here then is the films unspoken, unpreachy balance to family values, namely, national service and self-sacrifice. This is not a movie, one would call under-stated. Except perhaps, in this respect: When civilians panic, it is the soldiers, doing their duty, who hold the last line of civility.

However, from Jaws to Jurassic World, by way of War of the Worlds, this director may be adrift of winning a low profile characterisation award.

_  
August 2009+._

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# Have you an Erdös number from working with the great and the good?

Table of contents

### Paul Erdös style networking

Back in the nineties, the Guardian science supple

ment, Guardian Online, reported that every site on the web was no more than sixteen links away from any other. It won't be much more than sixteen now. The web has become far bigger but the diversity of links will nearly match the increase in sites.

The same applies to meeting people personly, or direct social networking, as to the Net itself. We are only a few hand-shakes away from a surprising number of people, even if you have led as private a life as myself.

I appreciate that I am probably at the extreme lower end of socialisation. Sociable people will have many more ties. However, the point is that a trail of social connections be consistently significant or meaningful, in some way.

The biographer of Paul Erdös said his surname was pronounced: air-dish. My father, who spoke Hungarian, said the correct pronunciation is: err-desh. Anyway, he was the most collaborative mathematician in history. And only Euler was more prolific. Anyone who wrote a paper with him was ranked an Erdös number one. Any one who wrote a paper with one of his collaborators was ranked an Erdös number two. A collaborator of a collaborator of a collaborator was an Erdös number three. So, an Erdös number is a collaboration ranking.

Marital collaboration was denied to Erdös but it is certainly as hard work in its way as any other employment. In a monogamous society, there is only a number one ranking. Blondie sings: I wanna be your number one. (Tide Is High). That and only that ranking is normally sanctioned, as is plain from the song.   
Permitting divorce has meant some rankings over time: spouse number one, two, etc. But that is a different number order, representing a sequence in time.

I gave a little talk to our reading group on the Paul Erdös biography by Paul Hoffmann: The man who loved only numbers. One of the women there had a brother mathematician who met Erdös. Her brother used to help her with her homework, so she wondered whether she was an Erdös number two.

I regret my pedantic meanness in saying: Afraid not.   
After all, that would make me, with my little talk to her, an Erdös number three. But as this link was not a professional published collaboration, it would be better to describe myself as an Erdös pseudo-number three.

(There are actually things called pseudo-numbers but I haven't sought what they are!)

It's worth mentioning, in this context, that Erdös didn't just collaborate with professionals. He would set non-mathematicians - just people he met - problems, he thought they could solve according to their abilities.   
He once warned off a graduate against a certain thesis, as much too difficult. It was a lucky encounter for the graduate. Twenty years later, the problem still hadn't been solved by the world mathematics community!

There's a foto of Erdös apparently asleep at a meeting. He still went on listening and calculating even in his sleep. He must have been like a dolphin, that can sleep with one half of its brain, while the other half stays awake!

### HG Wells

Erdös numbers can be applied to other distinguished peoples collaborations. The woman, Erdös pseudo-number two, was also a link at two removes to HG Wells. Thanks to her friends kindness, she gave me copies of previously unpublished snaps of Wells and James Barrie at croquet.

This is but a shadow of a work collaboration. It is more like a play collaboration. Wells and Barrie played the game. I passed on or collaborated on someones picture-taking hobby. What might that be? A Wells and Barrie play-number three?

I have a closer more genuine link to Wells. Campaigning for electoral reform, I had contact with Major Frank Britton, himself a distinguished man, with a military MBE.

Of army folklore, Dennis Healey said that an OBE stood for Our Bloody Efforts. An MBE stood for My Bloody Efforts.

Frank was secretary and in command of the Ballot Services at the Electoral Reform Society. His experience of counting the single transferable vote led him to announce that the Droop quota count could simply be left at: quota, or elective proportion of votes in a multi-member constituency, equals total votes divide by (number of seats plus one). No need to add a vote, as was done till then and is often still seen in texts, which are out-of-date, in that respect.

That is to say the Britton-corrected Droop quota is: (votes)/(seats + 1). The obsolete version is: {(votes)/(seats +1)} + 1.

As a young man, Frank had met Wells, and other famous Fabians including Bernard Shaw and the Webbs. He knew of Wells views (for STV/PR) he came to share.

I did suggest a collaboration with Frank on Wells electoral reform writings but he was hospitalised by then. That was long before the web would have seemed even credible to the general run of out-siders like myself. And I discovered more good Wells sources later, which I cataloged. No payment but then Erdös never kept payments, for maths prizes he received, but gave them away to charity.   
So there you have it. I am just about a (failed) number two _and_ three Wells!

### Reg Deans and Bernard Shaw

Similarly, I had a spelling reform friend, Dr Reginald Deans. He visited me twice, on holiday, when he was 89 and 90. Like Bernard Shaw, he died in a fall, when in his nineties. I wrote a brief memoir for The Simplified Spelling Society, to be found in their web archive.

Reg went to see Shaw to try to convert him to his own system of "Britic." This was 1950, the last year of Shaws life. It was characteristic of his personal thoughtfulness that Shaw sent him a postcard afterwards to acknowledge the visit. Reg brought this for me to see.

I recognized Shaws handwriting from the facsimiles, in books, of his famous postcards. That was not like seeing the real thing, which seemed to bring the great man closer, as tho he, as well as his penmanship, was still around somewhere.   
I have no doubt that this impressive material proof was the feeling that pilgrims get from seeing a religious relic.

Shaw, with his acute religious sensibility, would have understood that.

There was no obvious productive out-come to this pair sequence of meetings, between three people on their common commitment to spelling reform. But I feel justified in rating these specially purposeful encounters as making me a pseudo-number three Shaw.

### Mother Teresa

A severely handicapped friend wrote a play which Mother Teresa attended. And I wrote a play, about the saint in waiting, dedicated to the friend playwright. I also dedicated any performance royalties to the Mother Teresa Mission of Charity.

So, for fun, I can claim to be a Teresa number two or, rather, potential number two.

The Erdos biography review and the Mother Teresa play remain on my Dorothy Cowlin web-site, which I can no longer access. I have since included the play in another e-book.

### Dorothy Cowlin and CG Jung

Dorothy is the last of the links I have to tell you about here. Her friend was the second wife of a doctor who attended a course in Switzerland at the Jung Institute.

When he attended a lecture by Jung in England, the great man recognized him and came to shake his hand. He had a number of Jung books and, thru Dorothy, the doctors wife offered me a selection of these.

Jung gave four superb lectures to the Tavistock Institute in London, about his analytic psychology. These have nothing of the legendary Jung inaccessibility about them. Later, the disciple doctors wife still remembered my advice to start with this book as an introduction to Jungs work.

She was even deafer than Dorothy, and she lived, as if this insulation had also insulated her against the worlds harm.

Dorothy told me that when they were on holiday together, and her friend was asleep, she touched her to try to wake her. In her sleep, a hand pushed her away.

Dorothy commented that she was glad to see she had some fight in her.

The doctors wifes books have given me some hours of study and I hope a good few more. Hence, I claim to be a pseudo-number three Jung.

Strictly speaking, all my Erdos numbers, so far, are pseudo-numbers. But I have one number that is (perhaps or maybe not) a genuine Erdös number. Dorothy Cowlin was a professional writer, at a time when a news-paper editor could tell her: I'm not having a woman on my staff.

We long worked together and I published web pages about her work, with her help and guidance.  
In fact, my Dorothy Cowlin website, about her writings was picked up by the BBC. That was how her poem, The Sound Of Rain, was broadcast four times on two different programs on national radio.

Later, I combined my reviews of her work, with my second e-book collection of verse, Dates and Dorothy, which included a section on our friendship.  
So, I am a Cowlin number one.

_Dorothy Cowlin, novelist and poet, complete with CND badge._

_15 december 2010._

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## Origins of UK internet elections.

Table of contents

STV computer counts.

At the time of the 2000 US presidential crisis for the constitution, election lawyers feverishly discussed possible redress for those voters whose express intentions may have been frustrated. They turned-up an amazing range of likely miscarriages of voters rights, one way or another. (Americans are unwilling to compound all this with possible internet voting fraud.)

"The Florida mess" created the high drama and low comedy of the Bush-Gore stand-off, provoking some leading technologists, including MIT, to pledge a best new system of vote casting. The commitment was renewed that all have equal right to express their voting intentions.   
Everyone has, in the same measure, of one person one vote, the right to cast their vote.

In 2001, a UK general election featured an alarming drop in turn-out from over 71% to 59%. The British electorate find themselves well within range of American, and Canadian, levels of uninvolvement.  
The UK government response seems surprising and should give pause to American designers of special-purpose ballot machines. Robin Cook proposed the "tough task" of making Britain the first country to hold internet elections, by the next general election. Electronic voting was on trial at thirty councils in the may 2002 local elections.

Ironically, the big success of the experiments in increasing turn-out was with the snail-mail delivery of ballot papers. Generally, the turn-out increased from 30 per cent to 35 per cent. But low-polling traditional Labour areas, Gateshead and South Tyneside managed over 50 per cent turn-out with all-postal voting.

This seems certain to be followed more widely in future elections. The gain, however, may be more apparent than real, if it compromises the secret ballot, the wisdom of which was only learned after a history of electoral corruption.

Electronic voting booths of the touch-screen type have become an option: Sheffield had 25 in place. (These were featured on BBC tv _North of Westminster._ ) As well as a few wards in Liverpool and St Albans, three Sheffield wards employed internet voting via personal computer or mobile phone text messaging. Previous pilot schemes have only seen a one or two per cent increase in the turn-out. The present trials have far more publicity. This may be offset when the novelty wears off.

The Electoral Reform Society (of Britain and Ireland) has reported to the government on maintaining security and the secret ballot. It recommended Personal Identity Numbers, allowing only one vote per person, but with storage of the voters names separate from the votes they've cast.

A Member of Parliament was concerned that unsupervised voting via the internet made possible pressuring people against their wishes.   
Bribery seems a more practical fraud amongst an apathetic electorate, especially the poor. American election lawyers have even discussed whether vote buying could be defended, as legitimate practice. This, in itself, is a comment on how little politics is perceived as in the national interest, as distinct from a career investment or corporate insurance politics.

To safeguard against bribery, a vote cast by computer should not be authenticated. Then, the briber would not know whether the person bribed had already voted, and was just going thru the motions again, to collect the bribe! After all, traditional votes are not authenticated. We presume the tellers will get their sums right, by re-counts if necessary.

This does not answer the worry posed by Roger Penrose in _Shadows of the Mind._ Suppose a campaign scenario like the 1992 general election, when Labour was consistently ahead in the opinion polls. In the event, John Major led the Conservatives to snatch victory.

Penrose suggests, had the election been conducted electronically, that result might have been suspect. Hackers, or inside personnel, might nudge a percentage of the votes from one party to another, creating a plausible result, no-one could disprove, that fraudulently put the less popular party in power.

Nevertheless, Labour government resolve should not be under-estimated. An ICM poll for BBC radio 4 "Today" program (8 august 2001) showed: of those not voting on 6 june 2001, 19% would have supported the Tories; 53% stay-at-homes would have voted Labour. This unexpected finding meant that a return to previous turn-out levels might have boosted a Labour majority from 167 seats to 200 or 215.

The British trend is towards American turn-out levels. If Britain only has a half-hearted fifty per cent turn-out for the ensuing election, Labour stands to further lose a disproportionate number of supporters to civic apathy. A determined attempt at internet voting is an obvious option for staying in power. If Labour gained only a one per cent edge on their party rivals, from internet voting, that would be enough to retain them quite a large number of marginal seats.

Labour put feelers out to the Liberal Democrats for the alternative vote (instant run-off voting). But the Lib Dems wanted a proportional system and weren't having it. So, Labour are in a typical center-left position, like Al Gore having his presidential vote split by Ralph Nader.

Notwithstanding Penrose, warning about electronic election fraud, the fact is that computers were meant for counting. British banks were behind the times for only computerising their financial operations by about 1970. If assets were registered solely electronically, the pirating or accidental deleting of ones account could make one destitute, over-night.   
This was the story line of a film with Robert Redford and Ben Kingsley. Naturally, the banks aren't keen to advertise just how much computer crime goes on against them.

The British perceive trading on the internet as insecure. Business has an interest in internet elections that can be conducted with confidence, so that transactions on the web become as normal as phoning. (Voting by phone has also been made available on a trial basis.)

So, on-line business, rather than politics, may be the main beneficiary of a demonstrably secure internet voting set-up. Internet opinion polls may proliferate and, eventually but inevitably, referendums and initiatives.

The UK government intends to expand free provision of internet access at public libraries. This may encourage the private sector to provide the internet as a free accessory to television, like a glorified teletext service. Like some tv channels, the web would just be advert-sponsored.   
Other telecommunication advances will increase the competition to the consumers benefit.

The traditional polling station could look like the anachronism it is, in a couple of general elections time. Opinion polls show politicians are by far the least trusted profession. The polling station is one institution the British are unlikely to shed any tears, of democratic sentiment, for.

The thing will have to be kept going for old fogeys like me. There, in the door-way is some career activist pretending to be an official who won't let you in, unless you answer his question. He wants to note, on the roll, all who've voted, so his party can concentrate on turning out supporters who haven't yet voted.

To hold you up, some of his fellow partisans are conversing in a group, crowding the entrance, as if they don't know anyone else has any business there but themselves.   
Don't stand in the door-ways, dont block up the hall: the scene reminds me of a Bob Dylan line, in _The times they are a changin'._

These pretenders, at the polls, symbolise the usurpation of the people by the parties, as the pitiful numbers arriving testifies. I career past the careerist, approaching in a loud voice, as if he wasn't there. And sweep into the blockade. That's right, out of my way. I am a voter.

### STV computer counts.

To top.

Britain first tried the electronic counting of ballot papers, with a bar-code system, in 2000, at the London mayor elections. Trials were repeated in the May 2002 local elections.

Given time, internet voting and computer counting will be integrated into a seamless automation.

One of the first signs of politicians testing such technological developments comes from New Zealand, which has passed legislation for the computer counting of choice voting or the single transferable vote (STV by Meek method) for area health authorities, and in local elections at the discretion of councils.  
In the USA, Cambridge local government, too, computerised the counting of the single transferable vote. This is the home of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, commited to a new standard of voting machine.

Meek version is used by some of Britains most exacting professions: the London Mathematical Society, the Royal Statistical Society and recently the British Computer Society.

Some few million British peoples occupational elections have used the traditional hand count of STV, if with the help of a calculator. Professions may rapidly change to the much easier option. Nowadays, a program of the STV count can be downloaded from the Electoral Reform Society, and, I believe, from Cambridge local government web-site.

Northern Ireland political elections use hand-counted STV, except for first past the post general elections. A computer-counted STV is unlikely to come to Northern Ireland, because its lack of transparency could cause deep suspicion across the sectarian divide.   
At the end of 2001, the executive of the Scottish parliament welcomed the Kerley report for renewing local democracy. Kerley recommended STV, citing Northern Irelands use.

Before he got expelled from his party for daring to become the first elected London mayor against their official candidate, Ken Livingstone once said that the key to understanding politics is that it doesn't attract the best people.

Some British politicians have brought about a "Copernican revolution" in outlook toward electoral reform. Compare the Plant report to the Kerley report. Both are concerned with the job security of politicians. But the Plant report dealt with the problem by ensuring that only safe seat systems were included in their options. Of those systems (as an academic commented on television at the time) the Plant committee opted for the one reckoned to most favor their party.   
This was a Supplementary Vote for the rest of the Left to vote Labour to keep out the Tories. The Supplementary Vote is an Alternative Vote that only allows one alternative (or an instant run-off vote that only allows one run-off).

The Kerley report tackled job security, not on the basis of giving politicians an electorally safe career, but in order to attract more people into local Scottish politics, while admitting that they may lose their seats. Kerley got over the difficulty this presented, by offering the chance for elected candidates to gain recognised qualifications that would be valuable in or out of politics.

The Kerley committee found that politicians wanted this, in the face of all the complex problems of government.   
Kerley had many other modern ideas, including electronic systems for more efficient service and improving communications with the electorate, making part time work possible, etc.

Kerley is a new deal both for representatives and the represented. (Talking of new deals, Franklin Rooseveldt was a quiet supporter of proportional representation.)

Europe generally adopted proportional counts without preference votes. And this practise has been the trend lately in English speaking countries, including Britain. Contrarily, the Labour government also tried to settle for the alternative vote in general elections. That is preference voting without proportional counting, as used in Australian general elections.

The political adoption of the transferable vote has been modest compared to the global spread of party list systems, often combined with single member systems. But some of the most rigorous and critical minds have decided to use transferable voting, and their technical knowledge to further it.

However, this discussion is about electronic elections rather than competing electoral systems, so I say no more about the latter, here.

[P.S. 2015:  
An important point, that I have not heard mentioned but come to realise since, is that transferable voting may be much harder to defraud than all the non-transferable voting systems. Spot votes might be moved, electronicly, from the "spot" for one candidate, or party, to the spot for another, without leaving any trace, so that no-one is any the wiser.

The simplest fraud would be on party list systems, by simply switching party totals.   
STV is not a list system and so is not vulnerable to that dodge.

Better still, transferable voting allows voters to use only so much of ones vote on each prefered candidates, as will elect them. Transferable voting means votes are fractioned out over ones preferences.   
So, a fraudster cannot simply switch so many votes from one candidate to another, without the trick being exposed, by its giving the wrong answer, to the way that the result was reached, after each round of transferable voting.]

_This essay was written in 2002, at the request of US election lawyers, tho they didn't use it._

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# HG Wells political writings & forty years of unfair votes

Table of contents

#### Sections:

The under-rated Mr Wells.

The Sankey declaration.

Right or Left losing elections is unfair.

Super-majority vetoed Citizens Assemblies.

Partisan electoral reform.

Party Lists as ruling class elections.

Electoral reform basics.

### The under-rated Mr Wells

Forty years ago, in 1975, was founded The National Campaign For Fair Votes. Later, it just went by the name of Fair Votes. This was in the aftermath of the two 1974 British general elections. In February, the Liberals won 14 seats for 6 million votes. For the first time in half a century, proportional representation was back on the agenda.

At first-year college, a set essay on PR and the Alternative Vote had found me a most unwilling student. Falling on Elections and Electors, by JFS Ross, woke me up for a moment to the possibility of a rational count (by the Droop quota) of transferable votes. I owed my college course the debt of getting my lazy head round proportional representation. Then, like the public in general, I returned to "sweet oblivion," as DH Lawrence would say.

The pugnacious John Pardoe MP fumed against the 1974 injustice to Liberals. The Fair Votes campaign also characterised PR in terms of justice between parties. As long as the voting system had a proportional count, they were not otherwise concerned. In fact, they would not tolerate any disputes about the relative merits between proportional systems.

They regarded this as the route to dogma, dissension and defeat. Yet it didn't seem to bother them that they could criticise the existing First Past The Post system without any obligation to be criticised for a particular replacement.

They wouldn't commit to the system of The Electoral Reform Society, the Single Transferable Vote. That was too competitive for the politicians. Fair Votes would just as well support some safe seat proportional elections.

I must have been one of natures dissenters. At the end of second year college interview, I was asked what school of sociology I followed. Was it the Marx-Weber synthesis or was I eclectic? Max Weber believed in "value-neutral" scholarship. The course was like a diet of cereals less nourishing than the corn-flake box. It was knowledge without freedom.

I settled for "eclectic." The lecturers question must have worked unconsciously on my mind, because I became an enthusiastic proponent of HG Wells, as a sociologist.

The irony was that the required reading lists, which amounted to a fair-sized folio in themselves, were not the source of my discovery, which perhaps doomed it to dismissal. Instead, books by Wells were picked up on a second-hand open-air bookstall.

Back home, I continued to forage the second-hand shops. On the very day, I received letter of my well-deserved mere token pass in social science, I stopped outside an antique shop, shut at dinner-time. In the passage-way, was a book-case of cheap second-hand books. I put the money thru the letter-box, for a collection of essays called An Englishman Looks At The World.

Four years later, I felt a curious prompting, to check amongst all my volumes, for any pronouncements by Wells on electoral reform. To my incredulity, the above collection contained a great essay: The Disease Of Parliaments. (1914)

I made foto copies at the local library, and dutifully sent them off to the various reform campaigns within the parties, as well as the so-called National Campaign. This was backed by big business money and had its own A3 sized news-paper. They reprinted half a page of the Wells essay.

In accord with the campaigns pan-proportional policy, their excerpts were confined to rhetorical flourishes. It was like being offered the icing off the cake, instead of a wholesome slice of the cake itself.

The editor had the courtesy to acknowledge who sent the essay, but didn't reply to my objection that they had not mentioned the voting system which Wells had been at some pains to explain.

It says something of the times, that I was not really surprised by the ways of power and wealth. Not till many years later did I find out that Wells had surprisingly more to say on the subject. I had been lucky to even light upon one of his essay collections. Much of it was fine quality journalism, combining an advanced scientific education with a comprehensive participation in the human conversation. Wells may have had many thousands or even millions of readers in the Press but this non-fiction was confined in book form, to small print runs and low sales.

A case in point is A Year Of Prophesying, written mainly in 1923. Some examples are cited by Michael Foot in his Wells biography, The History Of Mr Wells:

US immigration policy was likely to lead to a war with Japan. Lack of global conservation policy was leading to the extinction of weird and wonderful creatures like gorillas, whales and elephants.

I can give examples from my own memory, without even trying to winkle them out of the text. Wells condemns the too lenient treatment of Hitler for his attempted putsch. This was in the early 1920s when hardly any-one had even heard of him. He would go on to psychologically diagnose his pathological racism.

Winston Churchill is credited as the man who foresaw the threat of Hitler before anyone else. And who had Churchill read all the works of, twice over, by 1930?

Wells realised already the rising dissatisfaction of women with their lot in life, and predicted that it would require what amounted to a new treaty, between the sexes, to meet their burgeoning expectations.

Wells lamented that he would never see the great Wall of China, thru a keen awareness of the servicing short-cuts that the new airliner industries were taking, all for the most excellent reasons.

He foresaw the real possibility of Asia adopting the techniques of science and overtaking the complacently inefficient West, which, as we now all know, is what has happened.

Indias political problems, outlined by Kailash Chand, in The Guardian, are also the worlds. Making all due allowances, many will instantly recognise the same malaise that pervades our own country.

And it is clear from commenters, here and elsewhere, that the problem is well understood. It might be summed up as regulatory capture. That is the people in government, who are supposed to take up our problems, are part of the problem.

Worse than that, how many of us could fare any better, if put to the test of political office or any other position of responsibility?

HG Wells understood, as well as anyone since, the required constitutional reforms, such as free voters proportional representation (the single transferable vote), including of a second chamber of all specialities. The need to take staple products out of the hands of parasitic speculation, and so on.

I think of Wells remark, in 1912 (the novel "Marriage") that life is a scramble and will be for hundreds of years yet.

The scramble makes matters worse, like a panic for the exits in a blazing building, which might be a metafor for earths overtaxed resources. Even greed might be likened to a sort of panic of acquisitiveness.

Perhaps we need, as much as anything, some country or countries to set a good example in putting their house in order. Economists recognise that badly run countries are those unduly influenced by private interests. A Year Of Prophesying made precisely this objection to partisan nationalism and partisan politics and their string-pullers.

An effective democracy, when we get one, that nurtures the public interest, and brings the whole intelligence and energy of its people to bear on their problems, will be a world beater, so that other nations can ill afford to ignore best practice any longer.

In partial ways, this is already true. Indeed (as Wells in A Year Of Prophesying, 1923, suggested might happen) the rise of the scientific and technical prowess of Asia, India included, has already shaken the United States out of its complacency. Tho I fear the British Mandarinate will never learn.

Wells knew that science is a discipline of honesty against deception, which incurs self-deception, whereas politics remains Realpolitik of force and fraud, where the stupider, the better the lies and the better over-looked ensuing disasters.

Unlock Democracy (itself a lobby group) complained that the Cabinet Office downplayed public demand for a transparent lobbying register.

My Weberian social science course might be summed up as: How the West won. Its mountain of esoteric scholarship might be unkindly summed up as: they prevailed because they did, and that's the end of it.

But it wasn't. The studiously unpromoted, but eventually worlds most cited sociologist, Piterim Sorokin saw the rest of the world was coming out of a subordinate condition. So much for "The mighty continent" of Europe.

Michael Foots cited examples of Wells prophesying are more conspicuous for their omissions, to anyone who has read that book. Wells continually returns to the topic of electoral reform, which politicians continually sabotaged, when it had a real chance of being implemented, due to the three-way split, both in voters support and seats, in Parliament between the Tory, Liberal, and Labour parties.

Of this, Foot said not a word.

### The Sankey declaration.

To top.

Like other politicians, Michael Foot had generous personal qualities that did not extend to his professional partisanship. Round about 1940, he mentions that one of the things they did, was to see what HG was up to.   
Altho this sounds like bonhomie, I have the uncharitable suspicion, certain limited sympathies were trying to make sure he didn't rock their boat.

By 1940, Wells was an old man, with his great works long behind him. And yet what did he do? He came up with the idea of a new declaration of the rights of man. It was as if, in the midst of world dictatorship and destruction, Tom Paine had risen up from the dead to champion the common man.

What is more surprising is that Wells saw it thru. He got the Labour lawyer Sankey into the chairmanship. Expert witnesses were called. The draft was requested for deliberation from all corners of the land. Occupied Europe held under-ground "the Wells debate."

Churchills initial dismissal of "pious platitudes" took only a year to produce his own. In 1941, the Atlantic Charter between Churchill and Roosevelt was co-signed on the battleship Prince of Wales, symbolising how far removed the ways of power from doing things, for the people, but not of or by the people.

When the war was over, the Sankey declaration would influence the UN Charter.

If these charters for humanity are to be effective, they must secure, at least, the engine of democracy, that is elections. The UN Charter calls for "freely chosen representatives." That is already a step back from the Sankey declaration, which calls for "electoral methods which give effective expression to individual choice."

This was in the controversial section 11, which, in some early drafts, was watered down, against the objections of inevitably less enlightened participants, if they were to participate at all.

'42 to '44, A Contemporary Memoir, by Wells, says that quoted provision was a nod to proportional representation. When Wells used that phrase, he always meant what JS Mill meant by Personal Representation. Indeed, the phrase in question would not make sense otherwise.

His writings on electoral reform usually were in terms of, what I call, "the HG Wells formula:" "Proportional representation by the single transferable vote in large constituencies." As he also usually explained, this was to distinguish the right and indeed original principle, of proportional counting a preference vote, from all the subsequent dismemberings of this independent invention of mathematician, Carl Andrae and lawyer, Thomas Hare.

STV has been resisted for over a century by BOSS government. That is "Bums On Safe Seats" government, to quote the commendably vulgar Australian phrase. Despite the fact that STV was agreed by the 1916 Speakers Conference, the government reneged on its promise to honor this threat to BOSS.

John Stuart Mill was elected to parliament for two avowed reasons, the legal equality of women, including the suffrage, and "Mr Hare's system" of Personal Representation, being what we now call proportional representation by the single transferable vote.

When the latter objective was defeated by betraying the 1916 Speakers Conference compromise agreement, HG Wells began his commentary on the disgrace by saying, In The Fourth Year (1918): "British political life resists cleansing with all the vigour of a dirty little boy."

The Jenkins report on voting systems, which The Guardian reprinted in full (on 30 october 1998), chose a nowhere used nowhere wanted system called AV plus, because behind the scenes premier Blair told Jenkins, he would not give STV. (The Ashdown Diaries, vol. 2.)

The very idea, asking for elections that actually elect!

All the submissions, to Jenkins so-called "Independent" Commission on Voting Methods, that were the legacy of Mills case for a mature representative democracy, in his speeches on Parliamentary Reform 150 years ago, were just wasting their time.

Since 2010 election, the same dreary anti-democratic dishonesty of British politics: the straw-man referendum on the alternative vote, which nobody wanted, smothered in an avalanche of lying, prejudice, scare-mongering, grossly unequal campaign spending and hysterical media bias.

Then, STV, in the first draft, was replaced for a party list reform proposal in the Lords, so that personally unpopular candidates could in principle be elected without a single vote to their party list.

I have a theory that there is an opposition instinct, from insect to intellectual, against novel approaches, as possible attempts to make a meal of them or otherwise enslave or exploit them. What is more, the history of idealism, gone wrong, re-inforces that suspicion.

It seems like meaness, it probably is instinctive fear of competitors.

I met on the internet, a censorious Wells expert, who claimed Wells didn't believe in elections. This was calculated to short-circuit references, made by any-one such as myself, to his innumerable attempts to promote STV/PR. I compiled a catalog of them (in my second book on elections).

As with the afore-mentioned Labour politician, there was this over-mastering desire to nullify such of Wells beliefs he didn't want believed.

What is more, he accused me of being ignorant of all the scholarship, he listed, on the Sankey declaration.

As a matter of fact, I was, apart from the 1968 Ritchie Calder pamflet celebrating its genesis of the 1948 UN Charter.

But the Wells scholar was ignoring what he didn't want people to know, by pointing out my ignorance of something I didn't pretend to know.

It was an impudence but I didn't start an argument about it. You cannot show someone, who won't be shown.

### Right or Left losing elections is unfair.

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The injustice to Britains third party support reached a crescendo in the 1983 general election. The Labour Party had lost its "gang of four" one-time ministers to found a new Social Democratic Party, which allied with the Liberals. In February 1974, the Liberals had won nearly a fifth of the votes. In 1983, the Liberal-SDP Alliance won over a quarter (26%) of the votes for three and a half per cent of the seats.

A reasonable person might have thought that the Fair Votes campaign would never rest till this exacerbated injustice was resolved.   
Instead, it disappeared without a trace. It's only legacy would be its name, taken up by later movements in the United States and Canada. And something of its over-generous attitude to any election method that used a proportional count.

You could say that when the UK Fair Votes campaign sank into obscurity, it wrote its (now redundant) motives in the sky. The electoral injustice to the third party was greater than ever, but since it had also split a leftwards Labour Party, there was no longer a credible threat of its determination to nationalise the banks. Presumably, big business withdrew its financial support, pulling the plug on Fair Votes.

Meanwhile, the century-old Electoral Reform Society, without all that funding, was still working, in the background. In 1979, the General Medical Council were persuaded by Major Frank Britton and Robert Newland to adopt the single transferable vote, which beautifully mirrored in miniature the composition of the National Health Service, much to the appreciation of the profession.

Following that, STV was used for Health Boards, also in New Zealand.

Labour would not regain office for eighteen years, until it had made itself agreeable to the power of wealth and its mass media, which it obsessively courted. Margaret Thatcher called this so-called moderating influence her greatest achievement.

Even as Fair Votes mysteriously disappeared, a rightward source of discontent was replaced by a leftward one. This went by the name Charter '88, mimicking the Czech dissidents, from Communist Party domination, Charter '77. They may have been dissidents but they were still socialistic in their outlook. And the idea of Charter '88 originated with the New Statesman, originally founded by the Fabian Society, which gave the Labour party its socialist ideology.

Their intended popular movement for constitutional reform, it is my unkind observation, might more truly have been called Charter '87. Because that was the year of Thatchers third victory in a row, on just over 40% of the votes. And the Left were beginning to despair of when they were ever going to get another turn in power, another bite at the apple.

Like their defunct right wing counterpart, Charter 88 would not or could not decide on the method of proportional representation. When they eventually did, it was the wrong one. This organisation has gone thru some changes of name, if not of out-look. It was avowedly party-friendly and currently goes under the name of Unlock Democracy. And it still urges support for party-based election methods, for example, when proposed for the House of Lords.

Unlock Democracy and other pressure groups do support necessary constitutional reforms. But that is no excuse for loading politics with dysfunctional engines of election systems.

### Super-majority vetoed Citizens Assemblies.

To top.

A Canadian electoral reformer, who worked very hard for passing the BC Citizens Assembly recommendation, expressed misgiving at having to work against the double 60% super-majority requirement, again.

I didn't understand the implications of this, until I saw that the policy of Fair Vote Canada is for a federal Citizens Assembly on electoral reform.

If there would be an ensuing referendum, a majority of just over 50% is the democratic requirement.

Patrick Boyer QC gave his opinion that the 60% threshold was unconstitutional in a Canada based on democratic principles.

The BC government insulated itself from the illegality of the double 60% threshold, in the first electoral reform referendum, by holding another, which reversed the initial result in favour of BC STV.

Unlike the first referendum, which was objectively factual and impartial, the second referendum was held under partisan conditions, which would not hold up in a court of law.

The latter referendum was conducted by preying on peoples instincts of fear and conformity.

A supporter, of first past the post elections, complained to the head of No-to-STV, for his negative campaigning. But the latter disagreed in favor of this tactic, correctly, as it turned out. He was himself a lawyer and stuck to the end to the legal malpractice of intimidation: too big, too complicated, too expensive...

This has become a tried and tested referendum put-down, no matter how ridiculous its application.

### Partisan electoral reform.

To top.

In Britain, when Labour no longer threatened state control of big business, the Right lost interest in Fair Votes. But the Left became aware of the need for a charter of rights. In 2015, a similar situation arose in Canada, with its own Fair Votes campaign, supporting the New Democratic Party and the Greens, favoring the Mixed Member Proportional system of party-based voting.

The additional member system (AMS) is usually recommended to prop up the first past the post system, because it exaggerates the existing follies with all its split voting handicaps in favour of the two main parties.

A Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system, reducing the number of single-member constituencies, makes these safe seats even safer.

And the party lists make a second safety net of safe seats for those high on the lists.

This doubly safe seat system, called AMS or MMP, in Canada, was condemned for precisely this reason, in the Richard report, which said that AMS denies the fundamental democratic right to reject candidates, citing the Welsh assembly experience.

Westminster, of course, cracked down on this outrageous threat to BOSS government (Bums On Safe Seats) government.

A half a dozen official reports, which have actually studied the subject of election method, all more or less favored the single transferable vote, (STV) the democratic and scientific method of elections.

The first decade of the 21st century produced the Kerley, Sunderland, Richard, Arbuthnott, Tyler and (Helena Kennedy) Power reports, as well as the report of the Councillors Commission.

Back in 1974, the Royal Commission on the Constitution, the Kilbrandon report was unanimous for STV.

The Jenkins report, for a form of additional member system, AV top-up, was a bungled attempt at an ersatz STV, after Prime Minister Blair secretly wouldn't let Jenkins have STV, as told in the Ashdown diaries 1997-9.

Politicians PR of MMP amounts to a ploy, by which two parties can gather enough seats to reverse the Conservatives seats majority. Arguments of majority principle, in votes, are deployed but they don't necessarily stand up to scrutiny, as far as using that defective MMP system is concerned.  
Only transferable voting, across parties, can give democratic legitimacy to coalitions.

The Canadian Liberals favor preferential voting, without a proportional count, in the belief they would benefit, as the second preference of both right and left party opponents.

Campbell Clark observed, in The Globe and Mail: In reforming voting system, parties favour what benefits them most. (28 july 2015.)

Britains Tories have been in a similar position to their Canadian counter-parts. Let's just nail up the odd lie as an example.

On 28th of January 2013 in The Guardian, a Tory writer claimed boundary changes would give equal weight to votes.

What she meant was that it equalises the single-member monopoly patronages over most voters, in each constituency, who didn't want them elected.

For, you cannot have equal representation in single-member constituencies. That's the whole point of them: disenfranchisement by the Labor-Tory duopoly.

In this community identity-destroying single-member gerrymander system, the Labour and Tory parties are engaged in a permanent distribution tug of war to maximise the disproportionate representations of their respective parties.

The Tory party believes in equal constituencies which is a proportional representation between single-member constituencies. It is the only kind, a minimal kind, of proportional representation these politicos believe in, because it is the only kind that rigs the system to their own benefit.

That is to say a superficially proportional arrangement which disproportionately maximises the number of Tory seats for Tory votes at the expense of everybody else. That is the childishly hypocritical point of Tory boundary changes.

This example is merely a minor illustration of what's wrong with politics and political commentators. It cares only for low cunning. If you really wanted fair distribution, instead of being accidentally and trivially honest in dishonesty, you would use the fair election system that achieves genuinely representative democracy.

Namely the system used in Cambridge Massachusetts, which, by the way, the state government has banned any other local government from using.

Why? Because they deem it necessary to quarantine intelligent politics, required of the proportional representation (single transferable vote), which means council members have to address each others concerns, instead of arrogantly steamrolling opinions over minorities – when they themselves are only a fictional majority thru the first past the post voting system – which by the way has no "post" of an election quota.

The much cheaper and more stable and flexible and hugely more representative system is that of proportional representation by the single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies, permanently drawn round the real boundaries of urban and shire communities.

When the population changes, all you need do is proportionately change the number of seats in the constituency. Cheap and simple and genuine and fair.

Even the modestly sized three or four member constituencies in Scottish local government, with STV/PR, gave a proportional representation of three quarters of the electorate. And power-sharing in the councils.

Whereas Tory and Labour are coming in to government and total power with about 35% of the votes (on lowering turn-outs).

The Liberal Democrats did not do nearly enough to justify the necessary compromise of a Tory coalition, which they should not have rushed into in five days, to by-pass proper consultation, which might have held back their chances of gaining office.

Their leaders failed secure even one definite change in the balance of power between rulers and ruled. For instance, STV elections for English local government, would show them work as well in England as they do in Scotland, as advocated by Lib Dem party members.

As someone commented of the Lib Dem leaders, in talks with the Tories: Did they even ask?

Nor did the Lib Dems secure changes, as the smaller German Greens did in coalition, like reducing the energy cost of living, thru up-graded housing and domestically and locally owned renewable power generation, instead of short and long term radioactive pollution from more nuclear power stations.

Instead, what strikes me about the Liberal Democrats is their hope of becoming accepted as part of the electoral scenery by the non-political masses.

I guess what the polls show, and the Lib Dems have not come to terms with, is that deserting their reform support will be disastrous for their party. (PS: They were well warned and it proved to be the case, in the 2015 election, as well as local and European elections before-hand.)

The Liberal Democrats, effectively turning into another party in office, dramaticly deepened the crisis of confidence of a country, that appears to have few politicians they can trust.

The truth is that party politics doesn't work.  
So says, David Green, on his web-site: Our voting system's knackered!

Only Personal Representation, originally envisaged by John Stuart Mill MP in his speeches on parliamentary reform, can secure the election of candidates of trustworthy character.

That is instead of the blank cheques that single-member monopolies and party list systems hand out to slaves of the party donors.

In a society where science is subservient to politics, truth is subservient to lies. For example, despite Mills recognition 150 years ago that Hare system is essentially the right method of conducting elections, Parliament yet again deviously sabotaged election method, firstly by proposing a voting system with preference voting but without proportional counting (the alternative vote referendum), and secondly by proposing a voting system with proportional counting but without preference voting (party lists proposed for the House of Lords).

It is like offering a car without the engine and then offering another car without chassis and steerage. This is just one example of how politics is completely fraudulent. To paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, from his novel, August 1914, tho he says it of Russia: Britain is doomed to be ruled by fools.

### Party Lists as ruling class elections.

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This last 40 years experience of electoral reform campaigns has helped me to the conclusion that party-based systems of proportional representation cannot be based on principle. In principle, they claim fairness between all parties. In practice, they are timed to serve some partisan interest.

The Right only remained interested in Fair Votes, while they thought the Liberals could be used as a buffer, to prevent a Labour government implementing nationalisation of the banks, after winning a majority of seats first past the post with as little as 35% of the votes. I remember a leaflet at the time, to my parents shop, warning of exactly that.

I cannot resist repeating that in the credit crunch of 2008, that is exactly what did happen. Labour had won a 60 seat majority on 35% of the votes. The only difference is that it was the banks that begged government to nationalise them, to save them from collapse. In thanks, they went on giving themselves, for their mismanagment, obscene bonuses funded by the taxpayers, whose savings they already had made magicly disappear.

Party-based election methods invite the parties to rig the rules in their favor, going above the voters heads, because these elections are for parties, not for voters. Party-based election systems are a ruling class charter. Democracy requires an elector-based election system.

Party warfare cannot offer a constitutional settlement for a civilised society. This depends on a principled agreement on right method of elections.

So, it need not be a surprise that an army of politicians and academics have pretended no such thing is possible. Social choice theory holds an Impossibility theorem of fully meeting the conditions of democracy.

I have discussed the details, in the second of my e-books on elections. Suffice it to say, here, that common sense says otherwise.

### Electoral reform basics.

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We have only to look to a few conditions of election system.

With regard to the vote, for more than two candidates, it must be a preference vote, so that the candidates are elected only in order of popularity. Otherwise, a single vacancy has been known to elect a candidate with less than one quarter of the votes.

With regard to the count, democratic sharing, rather than factional domination, depends on a proportional count. But it is not for the counting system to do the voters voting for them, by presuming them partisans, or any other sort of loyalists, for instance, to their language or gender.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, parties only stand for a part of the nation.

The only electoral way to transcend partisanship is for a transferable vote, across party lines, to establish any and all forms of national consensus, that may exist in the hearts and minds of the populace.

To top.

# Solzhenitsyn, the spiritual sickness of the West, and Constitution healing.

Table of contents.

#### Sections:

Bolshevism.

Religion, science and socialism.

Capitalism as hedonism.

Realpolitik.

Democracy stalled.

A good Constitution is a power of habit for good.

### Bolshevism.

The purpose of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in compiling _The Gulag Archipelago_ , was to reclaim history. He secretly gathered well over a hundred sources on the slave labor regime.   
Before "the Wall" was pulled down between East and West Europe, Andrei Sakharov, "the father of the Russian H-bomb," stated publicly that the Soviet regime was like one vast prison camp.   
Solzhenitsyn admitted he never dared say that.

Solzhenitsyn, especially, complained about the West condoning human rights abuses under communism. The rabid Right were not credible critics because the wealthy obviously were passionately opposed to being expropriated, by some other elite, in the name of "the state." US foreign policy was dominated by a hatred of communism, instead of a love of democracy, with deplorable consequences for poor countries caught-up in the world power struggle.

In his three-volume master-piece on the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn jeered: all you Western Lefties think this is just a waste of time.   
He gives only an unexplained mention to "the Kravchenko trial." Yet this anticipates his mission. Viktor Kravchenko was the Soviets most senior defector after the second world war. In _I Chose Freedom_ , his story of the regime anticipates Solzhenitsyn works in all important details.

The Kravchenko book was said, by communist propagandists, to have been written by the CIA (the US Cental Intelligence Agency). So, he used the proceeeds of the book sales to hold a trial in Paris to prove its truth. It was an opportune time because there were many post-war refugees, who testified as witnesses. This provided independent evidence and documentation, later published in _I Chose Justice_.

A well-used simile, for opposing historical forces, is the ebb and flow of human fortunes. A tide is predictable, but the ebb and flow of human fortunes is not. It is apparent now that the 18th century saw a great out-burst of popular rule. The momentum continued into the 19th and even the 20th century. Increasingly, there were counter-flows. And no-one can say for sure whether democracy, or even the human race and our fellow creatures, will prevail and prosper.

The 20th century has taught that dictatorships are disasterous but it is remarkable how many people refuse the alternative of democracy. This leads to stagnation from neurotic ambivalence.

It is noticable that even a foremost detractor agreed that the Enlightenment was a determinant of our present predicament. I gather that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a book, which blamed the Enlightenment as the harbinger of a real Dark Ages. It is allegedly so virulent that it was not published in the West.

If true, this is a pity. Even as a devils advocacy, such a debate would be valuable. The ethic of Voltaire was that those, who disagree, must also be heard. George Orwell said that if democracy means anything, it is the right to say what other people don't want to hear.

A book review by Boris Johnson (dec. 2009, Mail on Sunday) gave examples of basic scientific principles of the so-called Renaissance, being anticipated in the so-called Dark Ages. The moral seems to be that the truth didn't come all at once but bit by bit.

As a reader of Solzhenitsyn, all I can say is, he is a very competant son of the Enlightenment, which I don't pretend to be. He was educated in mathematical physics and an inspiringly practical teacher of it, by accounts.

In any case, I read "Rebuilding Russia" (1990), some time after reading his earlier works, and recognised the same sympathetic concerns as the author of the Letter to Soviet Leaders.

Solzhenitsyn believed there was no worse state in history than the Soviet Union. He gives certain historical parallels to show how soviet atrocities exceeded them all. It is perfectly natural that he should hold this opinion, having lived thru the horrors of the Bolshevik regime.

John Spargo wrote an early classic, Bolshevism. The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy (available from Project Gutenberg).

He gave evidence from its inception of his claim. He concluded that Bolshevism was merely a class-war version of nationalist Prussian militarism, governed by the same Realpolitik of force and fraud.

Bolshevik, just means the majority, as Menshevik meant minority. But these names actually stemmed from an untypical vote. The reality was rather the reverse.

And from there, it is an easy step to blame the Russian Westernisers, culminating in the godless revolutionaries. Solzhenitsyn looked to Christianity for salvation of morality from the spiritual sickness of senselessly violent opposition.

### Religion, science and socialism.

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Yet institutional Christianity set some barbarous precedents for the Communist state. It had the same dogmatic intolerance of all opposition, as heresy, within and out-side Christendom. Crusades were launched against Christian opponents, before and after being launched against Islam, during which they sacked Orthodox Christian Constantinople.

In so far as it had the power to exert its will, the Papacy could do so with the utmost cruelty. Hence, Voltaire famously remarked: Ecrasez l'infame. It was left to this Deist to plead for toleration, as Jesus did.

The religious rationalist Leo Tolstoy couldn't walk the streets without people saying: There he goes, the old devil.   
He expurgated the miracles from the gospels in his teachings of children (for which he had a genius). But that is to over-look the power of faith-healing, which Jesus both practised and preached.

It is true that the Enlightenment, so-called, could be guilty of a naive rationalism that was just a dogmatic reaction to dogmatism. There's the example of Voltaire dismissing the presence of sea shells on mountains as having been dropped there by travelers! Perhaps he was anxious to dismiss the Bible story of The Flood. He could not have any more idea than the Bible about the age and evolution of the Earth.

Well, we make wrong guesses, perhaps the more so, the more we are thinking people. Even that wrong-headed Communist apologist, Bernard Shaw, in the preface to Too True To Be Good, expresses his disappointment that the Soviet hierarchy mimics the offices of the Catholic hierarchy, so that it is not really a new and more promising departure from old errors.

On the contrary, the Enlightenment philosophy was of toleration of other opinions. The teachings of Christ no doubt contributed to their out-look, and, it is claimed, the emergence of democracy: Do as you would be done by.

One may believe the ethical principles of a Kung Fu-tse (Confucius) or a Christ. One may agree with Solzhenitsyn that we need such principles belonging to the democratic religions and philosophies. Yes, we are all actors that have to contend with our own hypocrisies. CG Jung knew it, as well as Solzhenitsyn.   
The monotheist Zoroaster would have the priesthood of his avowedly progressive religion wrestle with their demons.

Like many Western academics, Solzhenitsyn denied that science could be applied to society as to nature. The approach to social science was exemplified by his countrys ideology of Communism. With the power of the Soviet Union behind his name, Karl Marx was also fashionable in the West.   
Marx hoped to find the laws of motion of societies, analgous to Newtonian laws of motion. His historical stages of society might be related to a succession of improved machines of economic production.

The trouble with this mechanistic sociology was that it treats people as cogs in a machine, like the clones, Aldous Huxley foresaw, in Brave New World. People are reduced from free individuals, whose creativity cannot be predicted, to identical and replacable parts in a planned means of production.

Marx and other pioneers of a science of society could be justified on the assumption that human individuality did not count in mass movements, which show statistical regularities. Bernard Shaw (The Intelligent Womans Guide To Socialism and Capitalism) assumes that only a few people are disturbingly inventive, and that their innovations can be assimilated by the occasional further nationalisation.

Shaw, the Fabian revisionist favored progressive (and compensatory) nationalisation, rather than revolutionary, means of replacing big business with big government. Shaw even pin-pointed the weakness of his policy, namely that officials are no more accountable than businessmen for their actions.

Likewise, Marxes empty belief in "the withering away of the state" left a potential for tyranny. Both Marx and Shaw were slighting of John Stuart Mill, who knew how to make scientific method work to realise representative government. Mill had the scientific out-look to promote electoral method, which is a fundamental use of knowledge to promote freedom of choice.

State socialism imposed bureucratic regulations, under a Marxist ideology that they were realising natural laws of society.

### Capitalism as hedonism.

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If Russian communism was akin to a Pavlovian conditioning to obedience, the plutocracy of capitalism was more akin to the hedonism of operant conditioning.

The American Behaviorist, JB Watson went into advertising. And a relative of Sigmund Freud evangelised depth psychology in America for advertising. This was a perversion of Freuds purpose.

Freud was an ambitious but gifted thinker, who wanted to continue the heroic progress of science in emancipating the human mind.   
It is said that "knowledge is power." The greatness of Freud appreciated that knowledge is freedom, particularly self-knowledge is freedom.

The way he put it was that Copernicus had shown man is not the lord of the universe. Darwin showed that man is not the lord of creation. Psychoanalysis showed that man is not even the lord of his own mind.

Freud showed how we are governed by our instincts, especially the sex instinct, which civilised relations check. Reason offers a realistic assessment of the situation and perhaps a working compromise between ones own and other peoples wishes.

The consumer society ignores reason for fantasies of wealth and possessions. Fantasies tend to run, unchecked by the understanding that they may not be realised, at least not without taking liberties with others.

Fantasy-mongering can encourage passive withdrawal, as well as active transgression, without the mediation of reason in human relations. The hedonism of the consumer society encourages the excesses in the intake of alcohol and drugs, that are so anti-social. The damage to peoples lives is compounded by stubbornly refusing to learn the lesson of Prohibition failng in America, to turn another hugely profitable sector of capitalism over to organised crime.

In general, the fantastic inequalities of a corrupt capitalism are unchecked by reasonable standards of decency to others, that one would wish for oneself. RH Tawney condemned inequality for the rich living three or four other peoples lives. Today, you would have to say that the super-rich are living hundreds or even thousands of other peoples lives.

We show our toleration of financial inequality with lotteries. Should we not rather tolerate every-one having a subsistence? Well, we show our tolerance of that with innumerable charities. Unfortunately, as a Times journalist repeated on tv news: Charity has seen poor people in rich countries paying rich people in poor countries.   
To make charity practicable requires democracy both political and economic. Economic democracy seems to be a forbidden subject, nowadays. Even educational democracy, the right for every child in the world to be taught, or a universal suffrage of learning, seems to have more acceptance.

### Realpolitik

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This is still an age when politics is regarded as above morality, as recent events, in the so-called democracies, could easily show.   
There have been changes. It was considered wrong, or at best unrealistic, to condemn international transgressions as crimes. They were the acts of individuals against society.

Even the existence of organised crime was denied by the FBI. After all, society is run by the power of organisations, and the concept of organised crime is a precedent for investigating the wrongful behavior of ruling organisations.

Crime may be defined as the use of force and fraud or bullying and cheating. A double standard about crime made war crimes a novel concept. Imperialism or empire-building, the Great Game, of rulers aggrandising their nations at other countries expense or even conquering the world, was glorious to the Caesars, Kaisers and Tzars thru-out history.

Frederick the Great was regarded, by Thorstein Veblen, as Frederick the Great Pickpocket. Prussian militarism followed Realpolitik. The only realistic way of gaining ones ends was supposed to be by force and fraud.

Hence, the Frankfort Parliament, uniting Germany by peaceful means of representative democracy in 1848, was an abomination to Bismarck, who disbanded it by force, so that his feudal monarchy could achieve it a quarter century later, thru "blood and iron" and diplomatic deceit.

Peter Hitchens observes Edward Kennedy was afflicted with romantic Irish nationalism. This is not unconnected with the romanticised British Imperialism with which he afflicted several pages of The Mail on Sunday (2009). (The British Empire pursued as relentless a subjugation of the Irish, as the Normans pursued over Britain.)

His article's like an answer to Horrible Histories: Unhorrible histories with the horrible bits for the British Empire left out. It's rather like the Democrats "Happy days are here again." (Their turn at the pork barrel.) As Democrats could claim themselves better than Republicans and vice versa, Bismarck could have said as much for German Imperialism as Hitchens says for British: namely, just look after imperial interests - with a bit of paternalist socialism thrown-in to keep the workers quiet.

Realpolitik is the absence of principle, just as the New Labour Project declared for an absence of principles in favor of "pragmatism," as the Lobbygate scandal showed from the start of their reign.  
(This came about from a sting by Greg Palast: The Best Democracy That Money Can Buy.)

In the first world war, the Allies stood up to the Prussian bully. In 1917, when the Americans were coming, the bully knew it was beaten and asked for a peaceful settlement. They had learned their lesson. Unfortunately, the Allies forgot, if they ever knew, the lesson they were teaching. The Allies thought only of a revenge victory by force. Thus they sowed what they reaped in the second world war.

The choice between Realpolitik or democracy applies not only to armed nations but within civil society. In 1908 (The War In The Air), HG Wells said of the Englishman that he would "neither drill nor be a democrat." He was half way between a Prussian-type German and an American.

### Democracy stalled.

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Lacking, today, is the idea that democracy, like science, or a science of democracy, can progress. Consequently, Britain has been slipping into the barbarism of Realpolitik: force and fraud or wars and spin, Prussian authoritarianism or Soviet target-setting, as well as parastic profiteering on the masses.

But what happened to that great Puritan republic, the United States?  
Well, the corporation happened to it, as it has to all. Andrew Jackson tried and failed to abolish this fib or fiction of an organisation as a legal individual. Equality before the law was fatally under-mined. And mankinds supposed recompense was official regulation.

So, between plutocracy and bureaucracy, between capitalism and socialism, this is not the era of the common man, but as Quintin Hogg said, in The Case For Conservatism, the era of the crucifixion of the common man.

Nikita Khrushchev told JF Kennedy that your system of government is not so different from ours. You have a choice of two candidates and we have a choice of one.   
In his country, Khrushchev did launch liberalisation, with the publication of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. And when he was under-mined for liberalism, with the virulence of a Mail comment column, he eventually re-canted with not a good word for any departure, from the party line, but Solzhenitsyns first book.

Khrushchevs rule contemplated elections with a choice of candidates, before he fell. In retirement, he regreted some of his more hard-line reactions, if not the invasion of Hungary, which left a stigma on his regime.

What have Britains so-called elite done to justify their being called Liberal? There's not a peep from either of the two main parties about offering more choice than themselves.

Since the Wall came down, the super-power deadlock, the Cold War, the depressing ice-age of international non-co-operation abated, for a while.   
The conflict between governments and their peoples is still very much with us. It is becoming as dense as an iron curtain. The Berlin wall symbolised a divided world.   
The attitude to science betrays a divided mind in the human race. On the one hand, scientists demand a professional freedom to study nature without ideological prejudices imposed by government. On the other hand, the freedom to know remains largely forbidden for a science of society.

For example, the ideological prejudices of so-called scientific socialism dismissed political parliaments as "the executive committee of the bourgeoise" (Marx) or a "talking shop" (Shaw). The result was the Major Barbara model of socialism, ruled by a kingly or able magnate, over-seeing a workers utopia complete with occupational assemblies - that the Soviets were intended to be.  
Sincere believers like Tito and Castro made some approach to this ideal, admittedly under adverse circumstances.

It is interesting that Solzhenitsyn, in his Letter to Soviet leaders, advocated the revival of the Soviets, originally intended as workers assemblies, before the Communist party took total command of the State, and with it, total power that totally corrupts.

Eduard Schevardnadze said, in The Future Belongs To Freedom, that soviet leaders privately agreed that the command economy had failed.   
He was turfed out, as leader of post-Soviet Georgia, by mass protests. But his supplanters were thankful he had not resorted to force against them.

Like Lenin before him, Michael Gorbachev realised that they had to return to the New Economic Policy, allowing private initiative in economic activity, namely the derided free market.

The new Russia brought back the Duma as well as a Soviet. A bicameral legislature can be justified, if it fulfills the complementary scientific roles of theory and practise. Ideally, the first chamber of political representatives should make general laws for the community. The second chamber of occupational representatives applies the test of special experience, as to how well or badly the political principles would serve the community, in all particular stations of society.

It was heartening to read, in Rebuilding Russia, that Solzhenitsyn appreciates the need for occupational representation. Professions form cohesive constituencies and their expertise would be a welcome change, he believed, from too much government not knowing what it's doing.

In this book, like the BBC film of his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn comes over as a conciliator as well as a critic. As he well realised, the worst excesses of predatory capitalism have flourished, not only in the former Soviet Union, where excesses were monopolised by a corrupt state bureaucracy, but thru-out the so-called Free World.  
(Free but broke.)

Solzhenitsyn had great indeed essential qualities. His public-spirited concern for the quality of the environment and peaceful inter-national relations. This was furthered by his heroic hard work for the freedom to tell the truth about dictatorship.  
He realised that enduring political progress was made by agreements between majorities with minorities.  
And he had the religious humility to realise improvement begins with self-improvement. He became a conciliator, as well as a critic.

### A good Constitution is a power of habit for good.

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It is true, each person is responsible for the spiritual renewal of society as a whole. It is also true that many people are no better and no worse than the laws of the land. If you make good democratic rules of the game, in a constitution, then most people will act in accordance with them, and become accustomed-to and internalise their civilised standards.

Good laws habituate people to good behavior, nowhere more so than in the constitutional rules of the game. If you agree on the basic code of conduct, then progress is possible, without social collapse into conflict.

While I cannot claim to be an evangelist, I can rehearse a few practical means of implementing decent behavior in mass society. To take a crude analogy, it is one thing to know the laws of motion that in principle can take you on a journey to the moon and back. It is another thing to devise the practical means, without calamitous mechanical failures, or ever getting off the ground.

Some practical means of achieving ethical principles, in large impersonal societies, have been devised but remain poorly known. Continental Europe, including Solzhenitsyn, remained oblivious of them.

Among the English-speaking peoples, power and influence have been used to resist the tradition of John Milton and John Stuart Mill that offers practical means of uniting popular freedom with knowledge, or uniting democracy with science.

Reason and freedom stand together. The 20th century witnessed the over-riding of both by the dictators. Feeble parliamentary democracies were over-thrown. They were lacking in the (proportional representation as) "personal representation" Mill presciently believed essential for the survival of democracy. This meant that the dictators had a clear field to claiming personal responsibility to the people.

Whereas party list systems lacked individual choice at elections: mere proportional partisanship pretending to be proportional representation. Solzhenitsyn noted that dictator of the proletariat, Lenin favored party lists. And pointed out that parties only stand for a part of society.

But proportional representation by the single transferable vote allows voters to choose an order of individual candidates both within parties and across parties, thus establishing the degree and kind of unity that the nation wants to be governed by.

In the new millenium, US political scientists celebrated fifty years of democratic skepticism in social choice theory. That is to say, the academic establishment has chronicly missed the point that there is a democratic method of elections, which is the scientific method of elections. Their failure serves to marginalise the publics vital role in representing the whole truth of the whole community in all its useful diversity.

Reasonably scientific standards of representation do exist (on the rare occasions when its remarkable potential is allowed to be realised) in the single transferable vote. STV is to representation what measurement is to science.

A discipline of honesty is long over-due for politics, much as science, when independent, achieves by its rules of method. This means opening parliaments to free speech, allowing the whole nations knowledge to criticly test laws, rather than having them forced on us by party backers and the whipping system.

Manifestos present us with a job lot of policies like poison chalices, and then they deceive on intended policies they used to gain votes by.   
The day before the 2005 election, The Independent leaked Labours intention to go back on its 2003 renewable energies policy for a Blair-Brown nuclear power pollution.

And after the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with the Tories, without managing to implement one major policy promise. They ignored how passionately opposed to more nuclear power stations many of their former voters are.   
They couldn't have done worse over constitutional reform if they had tried.

In his book, The Trouble With Physics, Lee Smolin characterised scientists as abiding by democratic standards. Science is open to all. It does not defer to authority but to objective standards of reasonable evidence. Science seeks consensus. Smolin thought that democracy is not consensual, because he shared the popular misunderstanding that democracy means tyranny of the majority.

J S Mill refuted maiorocracy as democracy, and even justified philosophicly, in its essentials, the scientific method of elections, designed by Thomas Hare, that he believed could save representative democracy.

Representation is to democracy what measurement is to science. It enables the fullest range of views to be heard and the greatest likelihood of innovation and progress. Politics should be scientific progress thru democracy. We need the honesty of scientific method in politics, thru freedom of information, freedom of speech and assembly...

Scientists and academics need to be independent of government, so that they have the freedom to be honest. In her book, The Woman Who Knew Too Much. Alice Stewart and the secrets of radiation, Gayle Greene showed how oppressive and deceitful the nuclear establishment has been, when it came to freedom of information about government radiation data.

A second or complementary chamber representing the division of labor in society, would be independent of departmental appointments, in making their voices heard to the public, from where they could not be sacked or have their grants stopped.

Not to forget, when money talks over the needs of the poor and the middling classes, the argument is dishonestly skewed. Reason must be allowed a full hearing against promotions of fear and ignorance.

Monopolising the mainstream media has allowed vested interests to easily deceive the majority of voters, who seem to believe anything they are told, without bothering to check.  
A Fairness Doctrine, which the USA had till president Reagan abolished it, could educate the public against a habit of credulity.

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# Peter Oborne: The Triumph of the Political Class.

### A monarchic premier or elected first among equals?

Table of contents

#### Sections:

Peter Oborne: The triumph of the Political Class.

The political class as a hereditary monarchy.

Prime Ministerial government.

The Cabinet misreads the writing on the wall.

"Blairs heir."

### Peter Oborne: The triumph of the Political Class.

The Triumph Of The Political Class, by Peter Oborne, is only one side of a political debate without being aware of the fact. If Oborne had said: this is a modern version of the Case for Conservatism, he couldn't have been criticised for what he didn't attempt. His political philosphy is of conserving Britains historic institutions. That is the old philosophy of Conservatism. It is the doctrine of a constitutional monarchy.

Mr Oborne, and more so, some other conservative Press critics fail to appreciate that the will to power is not some disease of the sixties generation, but a besetting sin of absolutism under an improvised system of vexing restraints.   
A millenium ago, this was a conquered nation in the gift of a feudal monarch.

Half a millenium ago, the Tudor absolutism of Henry VIII was not content with having subjects to control, if he could not control their souls as well.   
Such are the extremes to which monarchy will go. It is the wrong way.

In the nineteenth century, the Conservative party believed that all the social classes should be well represented in Parliament. Progressive Tories, like Disraeli, were determined to extend the franchise to the working class and generally earn their support.

In support of the Tory Democrats, John Stuart Mill MP argued: Since the working class was the greatest class but wholly unrepresented, then it was in line with Conservative principles to bring about worker representation in Parliament. Mill said this, without attempting to contradict those Conservatives, who held that individuals didnt count, only classes of people according to their social functions.

Today, the Prime Minister is the monarch in all but name. Restraints on a ruler are vexing when the system gives sweeping power and then attempts to take it away by insecure means. Oborne well describes these limited safeguards, or the boundaries to preserve independence from politicians monopoly of power, that must not be crossed by state functionaries or any inter-mediaries, wherever applicable: judges, police, armed forces, civil servants, journalists, or whoever.

Oborne then shows how these boundaries have been "smashed." Oborne is an insider (compared to most) but his revelations are all the better for that. I got new insights into the changing balance of power in the Westminster village. I realised some of my ideas had become as out-dated, as Oborne suggested. For example, the whips have been supplanted by the press officers.

Oborne seems to share the political classes ignorance of science and technology, that new institution no nation nowadays can do without. The blurb or book-cover notes use the phrase "crony capitalism." If I am not mistaken, the book itself never uses this phrase. However, an example of the rule by "crony capitalism," Oborne doesnt mention, is the Labour governments "nuclear cronyism," as the Tories called it, before they found supporting that lobby irresistable again.

Moreover, The Times reported, in january 2006, powerful industries, such as nuclear power and pharmeceuticals, are funding policy reports of supposedly independent groups of MPs.

The only debate, being conducted in the media, confines itself to the question of restraints on the monarchy or autocracy, that the political class has inherited from the feudal kings. Oborne talks of the political class having usurped the constitution for a "post-democratic" society.

He comes to the clear evidence that the two dominant political parties are abusing First Past The Post elections with a computer tracking program of marginal voters to concentrate on 2% of voters, who swing general elections.

The best response, Oborne can offer, is a "hint" by the newly appointed PM, Gordon Brown, that he might consider proportional representation. This proposal was conspicuous by its absence from his list of constitutional reforms. Such a hint actually means, if anything, he has no intention of it, if he can get away without it. Otto von Bismarck was full of hints.

(As I write, in january 2010, some Labour faction is wresting away the PR commitment from their leader, fittingly called, in a Mail on Sunday editorial, Mr Toad.)

Oborne and the general Press don't consider more effective means of preserving liberty, by institutionalising it in power-sharing democracy. This is the JS Mill conception of democracy, Proportional Representation which is consistent with Personal Representation. Mill belonged to a distinct tradition of liberalism and radical democracy.

The default position of the conservative or traditionalist critics is that democracy oppresses minorities. But when you talk of power-sharing democracy, they say it is indecisive by preventing majorities. As far as the constitutional monarchs are concerned, democracy can do no right: it is heads you lose, tails I win.

Constitutional monarchy is like the Lilliputians futile attempt to tie down Gulliver when he was washed ashore on their territory. Maybe, the Tory, Swift used this image because he believed monarchy couldnt be constitutionly restrained. That would be the thinking of the more traditional Tory that didn't help to make "the Whig compromise."

Swift was right that monarchy cannot be restrained, which is what Oborne shows of modern British politics, whether he means to, or not.. The compromise of a constitutional monarchy, between rule of the one or few and rule of the many, made sense as a transition from rule by the one to rule by the many. But it makes no sense as a swing back to rule by the one and the few: the PM and the political class.

### The political class as a hereditary monarchy.

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By about 1700, the Constitutional Settlement subjected the British monarch to constitutional restraint, in contrast to the prevailing continental despotism, primarily the absolute rule of Le roi soleil.  
Current politics reveals the constitutional monarchy to be a transitional state. We can progress from the rule of one to the rule of the many. A fully fledged constitution would enshrine democracy in a new Bill of Rights. Or Britain can regress, as we have been doing, to a new monarchy, throwing off constitutional restraints.

Peter Hitchens believed government so futile ("teenage politicians") that we need to return to the paternalism of a hereditary ruler and hereditary ruling class, that is, King and Lords.   
Lord John Russell told Queen Victoria that if the people decide you should abdicate, then you will have to go. Prince Philip re-affirmed this "Whig compromise" round about 1970, during a visit to Canada. Prince Charles has already made clear that he will cease to be political, when he becomes King.

Thus, the foundation of the British Constitution, the political rules of the game, are democratic. It is the wishes of the people, that is to be looked-to, rather than those who are on sufferance in their name. The constitutional reason why Queen Elizabeth or any king could not take the policy stances, good or bad, traditionalists suggest, is lack of democratic legitimacy.

Lack of democratic legitimacy, like it or not, also sums up Hitchens case against the political parties: "The major political parties are closed clubs kept alive by State funding and dodgy millionaires, speaking only for themselves." Hitchens may well be right that the politicians will further marginalise the royal role in the constitution. After all, they marginalise everybody, who are not their pay-masters.

It is certainly not the politicians intention to abolish monarchy, as such. The political leaders inherit monarchy. The bolsheviks abolished the royal family and became monarchy without restraint, by their paper constitution. A paternalist, like Castro, gets his brother to succeed him. Hugo Chavez did much for the poor and tolerated unscrupulous and privileged opponents. But he, too, appeared to know no better than to try to take more power to himself as a life-time president.

Peter Hitchens could only offer, on The Sunday Times (january 2009) sting of Labour peers, that this is what comes of "democracy" (his quotes) and that the country ought to revert to "incorruptible" hereditary peers. This, from a fine Foreign Correspondent, who said it was his duty to try to prevent his own country sinking into tyranny.

With respect to Peter Hitchens, I am reminded of what Denis Healey said about George Brown. He was like the little girl, who, when she was good, she was very very good. But when she was naughty, she was very very naughty.

In other words, that journalist would solve the corruption problem by replacing "The New Olympians" with the old ones. That is the typical ruling class offer, to the ruled, of a two-party choice: the new masters or the old. (Gordon Brown, at an economic summit, compared himself to an old master: Titian. The critics choice of comparison is Nero the fiddler.)

The notion that Britains liberties are under threat is a commonplace. Peter Porter of The Guardian has made it a standing cause. Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne proposed a Freedom Bill to dismantle a whole battery of New Labour legislative abuses.   
An article in The Mail on Sunday (17 jan. 2010) by a constitutional historian, James Adamson suggested that Britains over-bearing government was the closest in attitude to a divine right of kings, since Charles I.

### Prime Ministerial government.

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In the late 1960s, John Mackintosh ended his book "The British Cabinet" with the claim that Britain now has Prime Ministerial government. The real significance of his thesis is the throwing-off of constitutional restraint on the old monarchism in prime ministerial disguise.

In the Common Market referendum in the mid-seventies, the PM and his allies in a divided Cabinet gave themselves an extra leaflet to put "the government's case." So, there were two YES leaflets to one NO leaflet thru everyones letter box. Business also ensured twice the money spent on YES to entry. The Prime Ministerial government also got its way on allowing twice as much spending for YES.

The two-to-one referendum vote for YES followed a two-to-one spending for YES and a two-to-one publicity for YES.   
Science uses the jargon of an experimental control, which means leveling the playing field. A scientific test would have leveled the spending and publicity to ensure that the result, of a supposedly reasoned debate, was not simply a function of differences in spending and publicity.

Of course, this correlation does not prove a cause. But the stronger the correlation, the more likely the cause, short of assuming the richest are always right. Generally, US presidencies are won by the bigger spender.

There is no proof either way. If money really does not make a difference, as claimed, there should be no objection to removing it, as a possible factor. This case is unanswerable. Money interests, to others possible disadvantage, shouldn't even be interfering with a question of national destiny. There should simply be free facilities for publicity and debate, with each side fairly alloted equal time and resources.

This is also the answer to the parties desire to be given (more) public funds. They have no more claim to be heard than anyone else. All have an equal right to be heard. You might as well give state funding to you, me and everyone to prosecute our policies.  
If there is a free media, it then becomes possible for the public to initiate any debate of sufficient public concern, and so to hold an Initiative or Referendum. Initiatives, powered by private money interests, are said to mis-govern California.

The power of the premier is seen to over-bear a whole series of other democratic considerations. Not only the Cabinet was thrown-off but proper funding and publicity procedures for an impartial referendum. And this is only the start.

Not having to be elected as leaders, arguably, made premiers less democraticly minded.

Please note the undemocratic mentality of the British elite, who lost their nerve, thru perceiving themselves as losers in an economic war of competition. If they had been democrats, they would have made sure that any agreement with Europe was a just and equitable one, without handicaps imposed on their own people, friendly nations and mankind in general.

The mentality, of the British Establishment towards the Common Market, was a panic that Britain had lost the peace and must get on the winning side, as they supposed it to be, at all costs to this nation or any other, outside its tariff wall. They wanted to be in with the in-crowd. Justice and humanity were nowhere in it.

PM, Margaret Thatcher intimated that she didn't have time to argue in Cabinet. All she could do was stamp her foot and get her way. The paranoid and self-defeating persecution of the insignificant Spycatcher book was a symptom of how the powerful end-up in the grip of their own power.

She over-estimated her power. In the early nineties, the British Cabinet could still remove Margaret Thatcher after she won three elections and retained the support of party activists. The disasterous by-election results showed that the poll tax was a suicidal policy for the Tory party. The PM would not abandon it and so had to be abandoned.   
The partisan monarch had not yet divine right over the party elite.

Tony Blair presided over sofa decision-making, without minute-taking. This lacked civil-service professionalism and the mastery of detail, on which practical programs depend for their success. It must be admitted also that sofa government lacked the Teutonic aptitude for meticulous detail. This may be the exception that proves the rule. New Labour leadership tied up everyone else with red tape but would suffer scant self-restraint. British government has been headed towards the old continental absolutism.

The Prussians made an ideology of Realpolitik, the politics of force and fraud. New Labour embarked on half a dozen wars and was thoroly compromised for "spin," or misleading the public, from the start, as shown by the Ecclestone affair and Lobbygate.

There are other comparisons with Boss states. "Britain leads the world ..." in CCTV surveillance, tho it's researched to be of little deterance for law and order. School indiscipline excused an attempt to intrude surveillance into the class-room. Big Brother is watching you.

The Lenin-Stalin target-settings, of New Labour officialdom, have turned children off education. By university, they have "assessment burn-out." This was a continuation of Tory enthusiasm for testing that took-up two years of teaching (as a teacher once told me). Other sectors such as business, the police and the health service have likewise been persecuted by paper-work.

### The Labour Cabinet misreads the writing on the wall.

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All this may explain the limp-wristed response of the Labour Cabinet to Labours worst ever election results, on 4 june 2009, since becoming a national party, nearly a century ago. Clearly, they were on the way out. If Cabinet couldn't show PM Brown the door, then Presidential government is here in all but name. The PM faced no direct election, presidential or otherwise for his post. That was another reason that would have made it easy for the Cabinet to insist on one, and prise him out.

Subordination of the executive and the legislature to the governing party leader produced an impotent parliamentary Labour party. This suited Blair successor, Gordon Brown, who failed to re-route power. The failure, to replace another top-down leader, must have been demoralising for the grass roots Labour party.

The Parliamentary Labour Partys pathetic acceptance of their glorious leader, after their 4 june 2009 electoral disasters, is an argument for an elected premier, as well as another argument for replacing First Past The Post with democratic voting method.

Likewise, the refusal of David Cameron to consider Proportional Representation is itself a symptom of the same malaise. Namely, that FPTP so insulates the beneficiaries of its two party system that they have become incapable of taking seriously any seige of hostile public opinion upon their entrenched positions. The unresponsive safe seat system has created unresponsive politicians. A government without proper electoral steerage is a menace to the country.

The june 2009 elections showed that the politicians, Labour ones at least, are even a menace to themselves. One of the women MPs, apparently called out to make a women-are-friendly-to-Gordon-Brown-impression, spoke of a protest vote, a dismissive term the public seems to have been treated-to forever. Most Labour politicians don't seem to realise how much they are really pushing their luck.

This could easily be the end of Labour governments. From insulating Labour, FPTP could help the Labour party, dangerously close to a point of no return, to a speedy disappearance. In the face of public opprobrium, there is nothing to stop the unions creating new parties of their own devising, like Socialist Greens or No2EU in the Euro-elections.

### "Blair's heir."

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After Neil Kinnock kicked out the Trotskyists, enter New Labour, the Corporation and Quango party. Meanwhile, the Tories have been reduced from shouting to whispering capitalists, with a quango-reducing program gifted to them, and the Lib-Dems. The Tories wax and wane liberal, Green, social democrat, not to forget Conservative, or any other stray voter they can lay their hands on.

Dylan Jones (17 august 2008) on David Cameron: "For some, I think there was still a worrying sense that he was the default option for the electorate - literally the only alternative. But if my year with Cameron had taught me anything, it was that he not only had genuine political principles - and policies - but also that, when he needed to, he had the ability to articulate them. Social reform, social responsibility and the breaking up of top-down government..."

The falsehood of Cameron being a liberal "breaking up ...top-down government" can easily be shown. Cameron "A list" of candidates was meant to impose a national list of candidates on the local Tory constituency parties.   
Labour leader, Neil Kinnock had more success as a tough party boss rooting out local parties Trotskyist selections.   
The Tory situation is more delicate, as the single member system tendency, to make candidates, in disproportionate numbers, middle-aged white professional men, is not political heresy with the party.

Cameron repeatedly tried and failed to meet this challenge with his A list proportional appointment of women and minorities. This was like a closed national list system of PR imposed on the single member system. This was the most illiberal and undemocratic way possible to make the Tory party seem representative of modern Britain. It was sheer authoritarian window-dressing.

To add insult to injury, the Jones article adds: "Not everyone warmed to him \- there was still an element of inverted snobbery running through the country - but more importantly, people were now saying they were prepared to give him a chance."

When are people going to get the chance of having effective voting method, and many other democratic reforms?

In this new monarchy, the opposition leader is merely the prince regent or heir - "Blair's heir" as David Cameron called himself.  
As in the Jones article, the present Tories make a show of cosmetic reforms, more than anything else. Their only real power is in keeping the public interest weak, against the Labour-Tory constitution of the two-party system.

An incited hatred is the tactic of divide and rule. However the Labour government deserved to be kicked out of office, in 2010, this would ensure the election contest a crowning of the heir apparent as King Cameron. For the two party leaders are Kings and crown princes of the old monarchy, in whose name they exercise their authority.

"A Britain that lives within its means" set the tone of sanctimonious propaganda from the Tory Premier in the 2015 general election.

This translates as: a government that covers for bankers gambling away Britain.

They did so, about 1931, making the miners take wage cuts for their failed speculations. See Catherine Bailey: "Dark Diamonds."

Britain should have made the anti-speculative 1940 Declaration of Human Rights, upheld by a constitutional court, the basis for a new Magna Carta.

The Sankey declaration justified its existence as the reassertion of individual rights against the expanding role of government.

Instead Lobbygate New Labour bureaucracy staged a Prussian rule book war on intelligence and initiative (they'd presumably destroyed in themselves) for an "only obeying orders" Britain.

Derelict electoral systems, which give so little effective choice to the people, ensure that democratic authority remains largely nominal. MPs have become the counters in an electoral college vote that decides the effectively presidential PM.  
Britain already has a presidential system but it is primitive and unresponsive to the wishes of the public.

A free country works with the grain of human nature, harnessing the natural desire of people to work for their familys future, unlike the failed practise of many of the Communist countries. But the hereditary principle makes keeping it in the family a privilege, that renders all considerations of public welfare secondary. Even if the second chamber is limited to a revising role (much abused, if The Sunday Times report is true) the hereditary peers have their brats in the Commons as MPs and PMs.

The hereditary principle is still tacitly the operating principle of the political class, who, as the term implies, practise keeping it in the family. The hereditary principle still thrives and is at the root of the mischief to the public good. British politicians are less democrats than dynasts.

A constitutional monarchy (formerly the royal prerogative) is also wrong because political leaders only consider themselves as inheritors of a monarchy, with certain irritating constitutional checks, which they are always chafing at.   
Most journalists think it is enough to keep the checks in place.   
It isn't and they cannot.

Hereditary class and monarchy must be replaced by representation and democracy as the ruling principle of the constitution. That is to put the constitution on a footing of truly representative democracy, perhaps with a new Bill of Rights building on the 1940 Sankey Declaration. A power-sharing and consensual government, based on free discussion in Parliament for a knowledgable arrival at policies, could bring the honesty to politics that makes science work when it is true to it.

Granted that party leaders are too much in the pockets of their parties to be trusted as national leaders, there should be national leadership elections. We need a really well-researched modern history of all the other cliques and freebooters, besides the Trotskyists, who have wormed their way into the party duopoly of First Past The Post.

A great book, a stunning indictment, could be written on a history of the safe seat cheat. Journalists report it on a day-to-day basis, like the gradual formation of a reef on which the ship of state founders. We need a proper political map of all the privileged ploys that exploit the safe seat cheat, by which democracy is looted and comes to grief. Peter Watt, in serialised memoirs (Mail on Sunday, 10 january 2010), as general secretary of the Labour Party, mentioned a union demand to be put on "the safe seat list."   
H G Wells said "electoral honesty" is "Proportional Representation by the single transferable vote in large constituencies."

As Vernon Bogdanor said, STV for leadership elections would be much more efficient and democratic than FPTP in the US or the second ballet in France.   
For example, an STV primary could nationally elect, say, 8 candidates out of a field of maybe twice that number. After that primary were held, a successive election might elect 5 candidates. Strong runners up would be eligible for cabinet posts. Two candidates could be elected, say, at start of october. And the final contest might take place, say, next april, with the loser as vice-president, on the power-sharing principle.

### Peerages for Parties: perverting the course of democracy.

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The 2007 Bill for House of Lords reform came out amidst police questioning members of the Labour government, on suspicion of selling honors and peerages, and on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. Labour MP Frank Field is thought to have some allegiance to the human race as well as his party. But he deplored police interference in practises which he said have been going on for hundreds of years.

If the politicians get their way, they would go on for hundreds of years more. A tv reporter did pass on a general acknowledgment among politicians that party funding wasn't exactly as it should be.   
This shouldn't be taken as a token of repentance. Most of them can scarcely be restrained from getting their hands on public money to over-fund their organisations beyond the twenty million pounds political parties were already lifting from the public purse.

It still isn't enough for them to stem the hemoraging of popular support from the parties local constituency associations. Consequently, the parties have been relying on big donations from the firms of the rich, who need political influence to push thru their money-raising against business competition, social and environmental legislation or local opposition to invasive projects.

As Rick Maynall said, in his serious satire of a column in _The Telegraph_ , the parties want C.A.S.H. or Conservative And Socialist Hand-outs. State funding of political parties means that they can go on ignoring the public view at public expense. Adding insult to injury, politicians and their apologists then present their sponging on the public, as a democracy, which they cannot have without paying for. Maynall as much as says, it is really an oligarchy that couldn't stand without privileged payments.

The House of Lords reform, scheduled for 2007, is a political parties take-over, of the second, as well as the first chamber of the nations government. This was always going to be on the cards, whilst experts to the second chamber were appointed rather than elected.

The idea of democracy is so intolerable to the Establishment that it just wasn't to be thought of that the people could have a representative government of its economic interests in the Lords. The Lords has always represented interests but vested interests rather than everyones interests in due proportion.

As far as the political class is concerned, the Lords was just an arena for removing the old class for the new class. It's mainly been a party struggle, as the old Commonwealth critic of parliament said, about whose slaves the people shall be. Labour wants to replace the Tory majority, based primarily on the old land-owners. And that meant cutting back the hereditary peers, down to a still formidable 92 members or so.

From 2010, David Cameron created new peers at record rates, to return the old Tory dominance of the Lords. In 2015, and his second premiership, on less than 37% of votes in the first chamber, he was still at it: packing the Lords, to reflect his inflated majority of seats in the Commons. The Lords is the second largest parliament in the world, after the Chinese chamber of government over a population twenty times larger than that of the UK.

Other over-represented interests, besides the estates, dating back to medieval times are the clerics and the lawyers. Nevertheless, their historical presence indicates the true function of the Lords. Indeed, such specialists representation is sometimes called functional representation. A true representation of functions should take account of the division of labor in modern society, rather than in the middle ages.

_  
Mainly 2008-9.  
_

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# The social violence offer of a death penalty referendum

Table of contents.

_Leo Tolstoy_

#### Links to sections:

Introduction.

To be representative includes taking minorities into account.

Popular pardons?

The social context of guilt.

Deterence and destabilisation.

Deterence and mediation by the state.

Non-violence and self-defense.

Personal instability: violence and emotional dependence.

Mature relationships.

After-note.

### Introduction

Violence upsets people from forming steady relationships. The bitterness, from lacking the happiness of a loving partnership, may frustrate the most well-meaning in being useful citizens, to say nothing of the self-pitying and soured.

Britain has a classic case of Members of Parliament being at odds with popular opinion. Polls have shown large majorities want the return of capital punishment. Politicians, against hanging, have used this issue to urge the value of representative democracy for mature parliamentary debate, over referendum democracy by gut instinct.

When the Tories returned to power, in 1979, the populist leader Margaret Thatcher successively, but not successfully, put the Commons to the test of a vote on the death penalty. There was talk of right wing caucuses selecting hanging candidates, as well as the fact that the rightward moving Tory party grew more disproportionately represented.

I remember a former MP, of the local single member Tory fiefdom, speaking out for capital punishment, as soon as the caucus selected him. So, it was clear, who his masters were and what their mind-set was.

One of their new MPs declared that if it was against his colleagues consciences to be responsible for sending convicted killers to their deaths, he was quite prepared to be the hangman.   
Edward Heath replied: That wasnt the test, the test was whether he was prepared to be hanged for a murder he didn't commit.

Capital punishers had to give up on parliament to represent the people, fastening their hopes on a referendum to redeem democracy.

### To be representative includes taking minorities into account.

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A referendum on capital punishment may be refuted for the same reason that referendums cannot legitimately be used to effect censorship. Namely, minority rights, which a genuine democracy must take into proportionate account.   
Suppose a referendum on capital punishment is passed by over half the voters. At least twenty per cent and perhaps nearly half of the public may be against the law. There may even be local majorities of objectors.

Yet conscientious objectors will be called up for jury service. If they follow their consciences, the law is subverted. In such cases, not innocence or guilt is established but public tolerance of so terrible a sentence or indeed any barbaric sentence.

Objectors may be made legally exempt. They have a democratic right to be, in that British MPs have claimed the right to a free vote from any party whip on hanging. (Tho, this affords an excuse to those wanting to avoid jury duty.)   
Then the law would not be upheld by a representative sample of the population, but by people who believe in execution on principle. If you were a defendant, which kind of jurors would you rather have? As a defendant, one has a right to a fair sample of human sympathy.

Abolishing this democratic practise of the jury, rooted in ancient English law, wouldn't remove the problem. The selection of judges has to be representative, too, in a democracy.   
John Stuart Mill admitted capital punishment would become unworkable, if public opinion turned enough against it.

Still, there is no denying that a majority, and perhaps a large majority, of the public could persevere with capital punishment. If so, their desire for a referendum on the subject doesn't have the democratic purity they thought it did. Really they would be pursuing maiorocracy, a tyranny of the majority.

Is not giving up hopes of capital punishment, because of a minoritys conscience, simply a worse tyranny of the minority?   
Not necessarily; all it implies is the need to find effective sentences or commitments, that are not so offensive to a substantial minority, as is putting defendants to death. That would be a maturer kind of democracy.

There is US polling evidence that public opinion would prefer such a compromise. Majorities for the death penalty sometimes disappear with the offered alternative of a life sentence without parole. The further offer of restitution to the victims family also modifies opinion on the issue.   
Is it too much to ask for an effective deterence against murderers, without judicially endangering innocent lives?   
Granted restraint, of the vicious, is necessary, prison is not a weak compromise with do-gooders, when fugitives from justice risk death rather than go to jail.

John Stuart Mill even defended capital punishment as more merciful than life imprisonment. But he tries to have it both ways by saying it still _seems_ the more terrible deterent to potential wrong-doers - while admitting there is no way of knowing, who the death penalty might have detered.

Mill believed that English law, resting on presumption of innocence, made wrongful convictions rare. But all law enforcement comes under pressure to get results with the attendant risks to justice. Mill might well have admitted that the number of miscarriages of British justice, that have come to light, disqualified the death penalty.

Moreover, Mill qualified the use of capital punishments, so stringently, that they amount to the exception that proves the rule.   
In fact, Mill was a convert to capital punishment by his wife, whom he idolised and defered to.

One trembles at the thought of what would have happened to the history of democracy, sorely enough afflicted, if Mrs Harriet Taylor, later Mrs Mill, had been living to set her beautiful eyes disapprovingly on Mr Hare's system.

### Popular pardons?

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If the death penalty is to be decreed by popular vote, what about the power of pardon? A democratic right, for the British people to have the former, implies a right to have the latter. No problem, with the interactive media! Tho, the way the people treated Socrates and Christ suggests the mob or the mass, gone electronic, might pass adverse judgment on folk too good for them, rather than too bad.

These popular judicial murders did not help the historic standing of democracy. Perhaps popular power would do itself a service by looking for some honorable way out of a prerogative exercised from the times of debauched emperors to Home Secretaries?

Democracy is accepted because no man is good enough to be another mans master. What man is good enough to be anothers executioner? A persecutor, like St Paul, may have deserved to die - before he redeemed himself. After Christs own sacrifice on the cross for a convicted murderer, there was the forgiveness of Paul.

Democracy is about allowing a society to regulate its affairs by popular consent. It is not about airing prejudices on whether ones fellows deserve to live or die. For, this is the sociological instruction that the statistics on popular pardons would afford - just as statistical evidence relates capital crime and punishment to sociological factors.

In the film, _Schindler's List_ , Schindler tries to teach the camp commandant a sense of the power of pardon, but he hasn't the self-control to stop taking pot-shots at the inmates.   
You see, this power is as much a judgment on who weilds it, as who is subject to it. And so, societies (an increasing number) that abolish the death penalty have done the utmost in their power to pardon.

The power of forgiveness is perhaps the hardest to achieve. To forgive is not to be distracted, by self-righteousness, from mending ones own faults. Forgiveness may be beyond many who suffer from others wickedness. That is forgivable. But it doesn't have to be beyond the law, instituted by a reflective people, who bear each others afflictions.

The death penalty may kill an enemy (besides possibly creating others) but forgiveness can exorcise an imagination haunted by enmity, the only hope for peace of mind.

### The social context of guilt.

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_Madame de Staël._

Philosophers have suggested that a utopia would be immoral if it depended on so much as the suffering of one child. How then can a society justify irreversible sentences to death? The reason cannot be that the guilty deserve to die. That may be true but God only knows it. And fallible humans cannot compensate for wrongful convictions.

It is not rare to hear news of judicial mistakes - the ones that are found out - usually after a long time. And if we cannot always even get the verdict right, it's a bit much supposing we are omniscient enough to know who should be done away with.

All the court tries to establish is whether the accused is guilty. That doesn't establish whether he is responsible for his whole life history that led up to the crime. That issue was traditionally left to the Day of Judgment, which is beyond the resources of any human court. When human beings take upon themselves god-like powers of presiding over life and death, their consciences have to be assuaged with the comforting lie that they _know_ the executed deserved to die.

The courts have come to consider mitigating pleas. Cases may be refered to the social services or for a psychiatric report. The tough-minded regard this as a chance for the guilty to escape justice. That is the price of being able to hear stories of "the worm that finally turned."

The correctional system is all so makeshift. Being tried with the help of an impersonal administration of experts is not like coming before the village meeting place of the local community that knows one.   
But Western society is based on impersonal market relations, rather than social relations of the extended family and tribe.

This is the sociological distinction that Ferdinand Tönnies developed in _Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft_ (translated unhelpfully as _Community and Society_ ).   
As Emile Durkheim said, relations, based on the division of labor, resemble an ecology of different species, or interaction of strangers rather than familiars.

Villages may once have been pockets of conformity and xenophobia policed by censorious snoopers. But a random check, of social events in the provinces, shows England "has gone cosmopolitan," as Martin Jacques put it. Asian philosophies and life-styles are prominent. Marshall McLuhan made "the global village" a fashionable idea long before the internet.

Madame de Staël found the English shut you out of their houses, long before they were fortified by television, an isolating as well as a globalising medium.   
Nowadays, people should be able to live in genuine communities without sacrificing their individuality. As well as personal fulfillment, there needs to be mutual support. Everyday help between people, potential offenders and victims, would be a basis for prevention of a high social casualty rate.

Only a supportive society, in effect, an extended family cares enough for firmness to be respected, when teaching to "do as you would be done by." Once that religious and social ethic is lost on youngsters, then the law really is reduced to fighting a "war on crime" that no-one wins. It's a global war that's being lost against board-room hooligans.

People must find their own ways to come together. We reformers can't be expected to know all the answers!   
But the more one questions, the less does the death penalty seem an answer.

The typical supporter of lethal sentencing is not noted for a social reforming zeal to help the disadvantaged. Reforms for a peaceful and pleasant environment, from population control to noise abatement, are going to be needed to make life endurable even for the most privileged.

### Deterence and destabilisation.

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Granted that we are not avenging angels, the only defense for the oldest law (and latest movie) of measured revenge, is deterence. This is to put fear in the hearts of wrong-doers, so they know that if they kill they will be killed.

The innocent also have cause to fear a system ruthless enough not to be detered by the certain knowledge that mistakes are made. Worse still, that system is given a vested interest in suppressing the truth, to appear infallible to society, so that it will not be discredited.  
Believing in capital punishment, it helps to worship the state.

One can understand why Amnesty International are opposed to capital punishment. In the real world, justice becomes confused with political expediency by governments. (Tho, AI reasons are broader than this, and more forthright and informed than the case given here.)   
There is always likely to be a tendency to judicial murder, because capital punishment is, by its nature, an expedient to get rid of the dangerous to society. And governments show obsessive concern with dangers to their own continuance.

One has to bear in mind that the general attitude of the "hangers and floggers" is one of repression, with calls for more police, more prisons (criminal boarding schools) and longer sentencing (further "education").

The police are under pressure to show they are not falling down on the job. In turn, likely suspects may be pressured, evidence distorted and extorted, so that _someone_ is made an example of. The public conscience may still be left in a turmoil as to whether or not the convicted was really guilty. And if public morality can be expedient about this life and death issue, how much more so about less serious matters?

US police killed more innocent by-standers than those escaping arrest, according to a statistic from Almond and Verba in _The Civic Culture_.   
(For verisimilitude, the movies epic shoot-outs should show more citizens, caught in the cross-fire, than gangsters left lying about the streets.)

Is this the result of public pressure on the police to catch the guilty, regardless of endangering the innocent? And is it not a similar mentality to that of exacting the death penalty, regardless of the hazards of guilt by association or the frame-up?   
Might it not pay, in terms of lives supposed to be saved, to be _less_ single-mindedly zealous, not to say vindictive?

Social conformity is a strong influence, no less so for being unconscious. The state sets the example that killing is an acceptable punishment. From this social belief, that some people deserve to die, may come the belief that ones former partner deserves to die for deserting one - a sort of family treason.  
Indeed, someone, who fancies themself to be intolerably wronged in any way, might be tempted to take lethal law into their own hands.

It is only too obvious from frightful massacres that some disturbed persons are not detered from executing themselves after their crimes. They show how futile the death penalty can be. Murderous suicide seems an extreme example of so-called manic-depressive behavior.

Any who are tired of their lives and want to make some violent statement of disgust, on their way out, are not cowed by the full majesty of the law. It may have a fatal fascination for those with an unconscious death wish.

### Deterence and mediation by the state.

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Giving the state special powers is bound to be self-defeating. Other groups go into competition for those state monopolies. Some political gang, that wants to set up in competition with the state, might adopt, as legitimate, the usual powers to punish, execute and make war.   
To avoid causing social quarrels, instead of mending them, the state must confine itself to being a mediator.

This appears to be the real purpose of ancient law of Hammurabi: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth - a life for a life. It wisely limited the damage to society of uncontroled feuding. (Even so, restitutions would be incomparably better, if they could be agreed to.)   
Some people, derided as the hangers and floggers, are still consistent in advocating these tortures. They believe that those who commit physical violence should be given a violent punishment. See how you like it!

Deterence perhaps misses the main point of an original rough justice to contain the devastations of the vendetta or blood feud. This was a pioneering measure for equitable settlements of wrongs between clans.   
Whereas, the belief, that violence is discouraged by counter-violence is more a dubious psychology of how to prevent further aggression, in a modern dissociated society - however prominent blood brotherhood and family vengeance are in the movies.

It seems that violence for violence brings only more violence. It overlooks that the violent were probably themselves violently treated and that violence, in the name of the law, only degrades society the more to its level. This vicious circle of violence has to be broken out of. The addiction to hatred has to be cured, because it is life- and soul-destroying.

When animals and humans are upset, they tend to upset others, usually of lower status. This somehow is supposed to relieve one. Religions try to combat this self-centred attitude. It is not based on making oneself happier, only making others more miserable. It is a steep route to hell.

Christopher Hibbert, on _The Roots of Evil_ , a history, of crime and punishment, shows a correlation between their level of cruelty.

The US Supreme Court once ruled capital punishment as unconstitutional, because coming under the category of "cruel and unusual punishments." This verdict was later over-turned and the death penalty returned to some states.   
If it had been a success, wouldn't we have heard so, from its advocates?

US evidence shows, both on the whole and between neighboring States, there are less murders in states that don't use the death penalty than states that do. There is even evidence to suggest that state executions have a brutalising effect that increases murders.

The source, for this, is from the highly rated site, the Death Penalty Information Center. A review, here, would not do justice to their case. DPIC statistical evidence has more claim to be "scientific" than this discussion.

### Non-violence and self-defense.

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Some more positive achievements of the horrific twentieth century stem from Leo Tolstoy. Shaw exhalted the wisdom of Tolstoy above all the courts of Europe. I had a Tolstoy phase. Tho, I thought he had a reactionary streak, with regard to science. He decried the telegraph, that literally went over peoples heads from one end of the Russian empire to the other, and the trains that sped past the toilers on the land without alleviating their condition.   
Now I realise how prescient he was of technological bias in favor of a few.

He mocked himself, as much as his wealthy class, for being willing to do anything for the peasant but get off his back. After Tolstoy, Gandhi advised that every law should be framed with a consideraton to its effect on the poor. This in turn inspired the Catholic mission in India. The teachings of Jesus came full circle from Tolstoy to Mother Teresa.

The harnessing of small scale technology, like the spinning wheel, for the masses, was a Tolstoyan corrective Gandhi made, to heavy industry concentrating power and wealth. This in turn inspired EF Schumacher to stress the importance of "inter-mediate technology" for native populations to develop their own industries, without having to rely on foreign capital and expertise creaming off the profits.

As a counter-example to the grievous carnage of endless feuding, the non-violence, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, left impressive achievements in liberating their people. The pacifism of the African National Congress fared less well in South Africa, already a fearfully violent society, in Alan Paton novel, _Cry, The Beloved Country_.   
The humane and conciliatory policies of opposing leaders, de Clerk and Mandela offered a way out of the rising conflict.

Leo Tolstoy seems too dogmatic or unconditional a pacifist. The reason for this comes from Christs admonition not to fear those who would destroy the body but to fear that which is soul-destroying. This is the real fear, illustrated by Harriet Beecher Stowe, when Uncle Tom is put in the gulag of the slave plantation.

Life is a weighing of risks. Not to defend oneself, at all, is to "invite aggression," as Bernard Shaw said. The good shepherd is all very well. But who wants to be a sheep! Yet, defending oneself degrades one to match the ruthless behavior of a conqueror. This was the situation Nelson Mandela and his movement found themselves in.

Whether or not soldiers are from a pacific democracy, they may bring the war home to their families. Vera Brittain hides, in a foot-note to _Testament of Youth,_ a charity appeal for those suffering from the mental and moral instabilities stamped upon first world war veterans.   
War, coming home to roost, perhaps didn't receive adequate publicity till after the Vietnam war, as in movies of Oliver Stone. The moral is to avoid, so far as possible, a culture of violence, including the death penalty.

The First World War revealed that war caused physiological, as well as physical damage, making nervous wrecks of some veterans and, no doubt, profoundly affecting many more.  
I suspect, tho, that peoples, and especially their leaders need to appreciate that wars don't just leave wrecked lives, they leave wrecking lives. War conditions mankind to its unrestrained aggression. As the mass movement, in Britain, against the second Iraqi war said: "Peace does not come from the barrel of a gun." If anything, the depravity of war in the Middle East, has escalated destruction and degradation of character.

CS Lewis went thru an encyclopedia of ethics to find that mercy is a universal recommendation.   
Those tortured beyond endurance (described for instance by Slavomir Rawicz, in _The Long Walk_ ) might well have no compunction in killing the torturer, on the spot, if met again. (Even fear has its limits as a restraint.) That just goes to say we can only take so much abuse. A court, tho it might not condone such revenge, would have to be merciful towards it.

Sri Ramakrishna parable, of the converted snake, points a moral for the stability of individuals or nations.  
A poisonous snake changes his murderous ways after meeting the gentleness of a holy man. Whereupon, the villagers think the snake has lost his venom, and abuse him mercilessly. Fortunately, the Mahatman (high-souled one) comes back that way and notices the battered snakes sorry condition. He says: I simply advised you not to bite anyone. I didn't say you shouldn't make them keep their distance. In short, injure no one and be not injured by others.

It does have to be taken into account that a sudden lifting of fear, such as by abolishing capital punishment or other severe penalties, may encourage an upsurge of repressed hatred, which provokes a return to violent suppression. Not just individuals, but societies, may become destabilised.

To be sure, the Chinese Communist government didn't want the chaos, in some regions, that was to follow the break-up of their European Communist counter-parts control. Unprovoked violent suppression, such as of the moderate Tienanmen square demonstrations for free speech, and its aftermath, must be counted as itself destabilising.

If it were true that some of the allegations, made against corruption on the former "Democracy Wall," were slanderous, the normal way to deal with that is by independent courts open for reporting.   
That is a tried technique of preserving freedom with order.

It must be said, Chairman Mao wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. He wanted to let a thousand flowers of speech to flourish and yet retain the leading role of the party. This again is the old problem of freedom with order.   
John Stuart Mill was one of the first to appreciate one technical means to achieve it: (Thomas Hare) electoral method that effects democracy rather than maiorocracy.

### Personal instability: violence and emotional dependance.

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Psychological theories, as from Eysenck, put human personality on a scale from more or less stable to unstable.  
In general, stable behavior is a bit like a tight-rope walk. Once the balancing pole, one is holding, tilts up, on one side, it tilts down on the other. In other words, getting high on hatred will bring one low with anxiety.

Even fantasies, of vanquishing enemies, are liable to worry one with thoughts of the revenge they might take, if they discern ones ill will towards them. Thus one destabilises oneself with a self-reinforcing neurosis.

Using such a difficult example as tight-rope walking might make one wonder how anyone remains stable. To change the metafor, it is like "keeping on an even keel." For that, one must balance the storage of cargo, ones "emotional baggage," if you like.

Some idea, of what this means, may be required. So, I put myself, for a change, on the couch, so to speak. Most people are too involved, happily or unhappily, in their personal problems to take much notice of the effects of wider issues upon them. That is one kind of imbalance.

My problem, if you'll forgive me for mentioning it, for illustrative purposes, is the opposite. I don't have an emotionally satisfying life, rich in personal relationships. This means that I fall back unduly on matters of public interest.   
Such a person as myself is liable to invest too much emotion in impersonal causes, simply because he has few personal ones. This is the danger of fanaticism, as distinct from the equal and opposite danger of public apathy.

William Whitelaw once said of a British political colleague that he was going round the country, stirring up apathy.

Fanaticism is an over-dependence on a bigger cause than ones self. It can be bad, if it infringes other peoples just expectations.

Nor are addictions just ones personal problems in over-dependence. Because, crime often results from trying to pay for drugs or gambling.

Over-dependence comes from seeking substitute satisfactions for an emotional hole in ones life. In Britain, education seems to be about school league tables of qualifications and teachers performance pay.   
Personal relationships are an end in themselves and don't need scores to out-do others. If life is to be worth living now (which means always) knowing how to get on with people must be learned.

### Mature relationships.

To top.

John Cleese asks about good relators, in _Life And How To Survive It_. (A later chapter on the politics of moderation is naive and risible but that shouldn't detract from the popular psychology.) He is the co-author being briefed by psychologist, Robin Skynner, who has studied the personal qualities of those successful in relationships.

The psychologist points out that Freud and his school were immersed in cases of ill-adapted individuals. Usually, their behavior patterns were still locked in responses to traumas, of which they were not even aware. They couldn't come to terms with unpleasant memories. So, they were repressed, locking them into the old reactions to them.

Shortly before 2000, European law banned violence against children, including by parents and teachers. Violence is a hateful imposition of ones will that humiliates, if it does not physically injure. Children, being dependants, cannot just leave a domestic reign of terror. They are liable to be too emotionally destabilised to form loving relationships.

The violent are unable to tolerate the independence that children need to develop to become able to form adult relationships. The studies of the socially well-adapted showed they have a self-respecting maturity that doesn't form clinging relationships. They don't have to emotionally blackmail or threaten their partner to _make_ them stay. Love makes them stay.

An emotional dependant can put the partner, treated as a possession, thru hell. It is not uncommon to hear of this hatred ending in murder, sometimes followed by suicide.

Should the partner want to leave, the mature can accept that. They would rather find someone else to love with, than derive a perverse pleasure from nursing a grievance over a love that has faded or been supplanted. The mature are not afraid that by losing their partner, they will lose love. They are not dependent on their partner for love. They can give as well as take love.

That independence of the mature does not make them less loving. It doesn't mean they don't care whether the partner comes or goes. Rather, they offer their love unselfishly, and not only on condition that the partner be bound loyally to them for ever.   
That is not to say that marriage contracts should not be made. They serve the purpose of ensuring emotional and economic security for raising a family.

That doesn't alter the point at issue. Maturity is a loving independence, that recognises the independence of others. It is not an infantile belief that the world exists to administer to ones needs, and kicks up a fuss should it dare cease to do so.

In this respect, of not seeing the world revolve round themselves, psychology found the mature to be essentially "religious." Nor do they idolise partners, only to revile these gods for deserting them. It does seem there is something in a religion of universal love.

The trouble with using fear as a check, even if only on the wicked, is that it becomes a mastering as well as a servicable emotion. Fear, like fire raging out of control, takes on a life of its own, for which we are just the fodder. Hence, "consumed by fear." Fear, no longer wisely warns that a hardened wrong-doer won't repent, but makes us forget that, equally, anyone might repent.

The only emotion tolerable, both as a servant and a master, is love. For instance, Christ messaged love to go beyond the old law of a balance of terror.

Holding a referendum on capital punishment could be contested, from a constitutional point of view, as an abuse of democratic rights, for giving too much power to the state, or to men over their fellow man, as well as being unwise, from the point of view of our religious civilisation.

### After-note

_(22 june 2008)_

The former shadow home secretary, David Davis resigned, to hold a by-election on the issue of civil liberties. Many believe that 42 days detention without trial is a breach too far against the right of habeas corpus. Tony Benn, who has shared a cross-party platform with him, said he never thought he would live to see the parliament that abolished Magna Carta.

Never the less, Davis is a believer also in capital punishment. I would just like to re-affirm my own belief that the state should not have the privilege of capital punishment. For one thing, others come to believe they should be able to share this privilege. So it is an incitement to taking the law into ones own hands and a decline into anarchy. Everyone should stand by the law not to kill, including officers of state.

Moreover, state privilege of capital punishment makes the state an enemy of progress and the people. Giving capital punishment to the state is also giving it a brief to be infallible, which means in practise to cover-up mistakes and deceive the public.

Officials are encouraged to be arrogant and incapable of learning from mistakes. Progress is not made this way. And this mind-set, entrenched in one department of state, is given precedent or license to extend to all public business of the government.

On the other hand, mistakes may be admitted, perhaps being likened to so many casualties in a war against crime. We know that wars are generally conducted with or without regard to an acceptable level of casualties to civilian populations. Civilian casualties can reach genocidal levels.

A war against crime, like any other war, suspending the civil law of engagement, puts the state in danger of engaging in a war against its own people.

In sum, entrusting the state with capital punishment is an inducement to fraud and force against the people. This is the nature of a military society under military law, a society of conquerors and manipulators.

This is the condition that John Locke said was justification for revolution, in the sense of popular self-defense against an oppressive government. This doctrine is enshrined in the American declaration of Independence. Its purpose is a civil society enjoying liberty and equality, which define a democracy.

The death penalty is not so much an ultimate deterant against evil, as an imbalance of power that ensures government supremacy over the governed. In some cases, a life penalty is more abhorrent to criminals whose crimes have caught up with them, because they can no longer live with themselves.

For that matter, relatively innocent criminals may not be able to endure life in captivity, as cannot some wild animals.

To top.

# Draconian sentencing: 20 years for an intimacy.

Table of contents

Christopher Hibbert (History of Crime and Punishment) shows that the savagery of the punishments is proportional to the savagery of the crimes, not inversely proportional: the savagery of the crimes have not decreased with an increase in the savagery of the punishments.

That is the general picture. I admit that instances may show the opposite. One Glasgow judge inflicted savage penalties, fitting for the truly savage offense of razor slashings, and soon put a stop to them.   
How does one reconcile these apparent contradictions?  
The answer could be that savage penalties are emergency measures that sometimes can win battles but don't end the war.

There is a wonderful tirade by Alessandro Manzoni, that opens The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi). This novel is to Italy, what Robinson Crusoe is to England: amongst the first and greatest of its kind. It is to the effect that the direst threats of the law against the bravoes, in the seventeenth century, went unheeded by all the "little oligarchies" of special interests and their hangers-on, vexing only the peaceful and unprotected.

In an impotent regime, the savagery of the sentencing is liable to be inversely proportional to the seriousness of the offense. A judges ruling may be more an unwitting exposure of the government than one of its citizens.

2010 started inauspiciously with news of an Idaho judge sentencing a 37 year old teacher to 20 years in prison for having sex with a 13 year-old pupil. (Paul Thompson; The Mail, 31 december 2009. Some on-line commenters, on this article, are refered here.)

Does it make a difference what their genders were?  
Transatlantic opinion evidently thinks it does. There was much sympathy for a woman (one Ashley Jo Beach) given such a savage penalty. There was probably more condemnation and calls for harsher sentences.   
How much harsher can you get? What is there left to throw at crimes of evident harm?

Perhaps that is the point of someone being made suspiciously like a scapegoat for a minor sexual transgression compared to the vast military and financial transgressions and entanglements that have reduced the reputation and prosperity of the Republic, not to mention the United Kingdom.

Much of the hostility to the woman teacher, in question, was based on the fact that a man would have been vilified for preying on a girl pupil. John Mortimor did a sympathetic treatment of a male teachers affair with a female pupil, in one of the Rumpole of the Bailey stories. He mentioned that Romeos Juliet was 13. Who doubted that was a passionate relationship? The worst motives cannot be assumed. The facts have to be examined in each case. That is why English and American law is so much Case Law.

What are the worst motives?   
Good policy insists on the vastly different consequences for boys and girls. A girl should not be burdened with child-bearing, while she is still a child herself. That is to inflict a twenty year sentence of child-rearing on her, as the Idaho judge inflicted a twenty year sentence on the teacher - except to prevent her doing her job of bringing-up her children. What do they have to say of the matter?

We cannot afford the luxury of self-righteous indignation over the rights of the children to a mother they presumably need and want, if they could make themselves heard over the howls of their elders.

If this (literally) exposed woman has been chastened, what is the point of clogging-up a prison with her? There is such a thing as probation and community service. I cannot understand why punishment is so much prefered to restitution. Why injure oneself with the expense of keeping offenders in custodial idleness, instead of making themselves useful?

To top

The man who has made a child bring another child into the world, must help to bear that burden for twenty years, indeed. And if he is not amenable to being a helpful citizen, then custodial treatment is an option.

Prison should be only the necessary evil of having to restrain those who would otherwise harm people. It is to be avoided as the most extreme form of institution, whose unthinking routines take away the independence of its inmates, rendering them unfit for self-reliance in a free society.

It is strange that a nation with an ideology of liberty, the land of the free, should have expanded arrests and incarceration to a common-place.

Yes, community service, that despised remedy for anti-social offenders, is recommended. I'd go further and say that the whole community should do community service for two years of their lives, genuine work for the disadvantaged and those fallen on hard times, such as in housing improvements for the poor, and taking care of the elderly and incapacitated.   
In other words, there should be national service again but a civil service, if with a military service option. Brat Camps work for delinquents (or vice versa).

This would be a good discipline for learning to lead a useful life to others. And it would entitle the young, when grown old to benefit by the same service.   
A life of service can be appreciated by others. Who can appreciate a life of self-indulgence? One may become a bore even to oneself. And the promiscuous may come to realise that they are merely using each other for their own gratification, with little lasting affection, trust or companionship.

The self-indulgent West can say what it likes about the Chinese government. (Their failure to come to terms with civil liberties is a rather more extreme instance of the general failure of governments, notably my own.) At least the Chinese understood individual obligation to the community, in restricting the birth-rate to managable levels. The whole world will have to do that or suffer a population explosion with the ensuing crash, from the collapse of world ecology, the dissolution of a planetary house-hold living beyond its means.

The single most important means, to a sustainable population, is known to be womens education. Sir David Attenborough, as chairman of an optimum population organisation, repeated that wisdom, in a recent tv program. Educated women want to make use of their abilities, which means that they cannot do-with and do not want many children.

When I read a 2009 report in The Mail on Sunday of an encounter with the Taliban that women are now being encouraged into education, I hope it is true. The whole human race of every country, more or less weakens itself by not making full use of the intelligence of half its population.

To top

The potential harm of impregnation to a girl, in lost opportunities for a life of her own, is obvious enough. It is a grave offense to put a female in the dilemma of whether or not to have an abortion. Girls and women need protecting against sexually motivated aggression. In such cases, there is still a tendency for some men to think they own women, especially if they had a relationship. Any resulting children might also be misused as property.

Men enslaved by sexuality are liable to treat their women and children as slaves. And, there, prison, the ultimate enslavement, may be the only option. That is part of keeping the peace, in the home as well as in society. Not to forget the disturbing fashion of ladettes: girls behaving badly as boys, perhaps inspired by commercial role models.  
But what of a womans sexual relation to a boy?

Some commenters, and the judge, who sentenced the teacher, regarded her as a ruthless predator. Little as could be learned from the Daily Mail article, it would appear she was a prey to her infatuation. A woman of mature age, who gets caught in the bushes, hardly seems in full possession of herself, and by that token, less pitiless victimiser than a pitiful victim.

The judges extremist ruling throws in doubt his over-all judgment of the defendants character. Without going into the case, which is none of my business, there is little to go-on to form a balanced opinion of ones own. And it becomes hard not just to react against the judgment.

One doesn't like to see such a miscarriage of justice and the ship of state lose its bearings so hopelessly, as if some sexual magnet was dizzying a moral compass away from magnetic north and an accurate course.   
Personally, I am old and indifferent, tho, I dare say, had I been a 13 year old nowadays, he might have thought of the rogue school mistress as "Wicked!" "Radical!"

Brian Aldiss got distracted from discussing science fiction to rhapsodise over his good fortune, as a minor, with an older woman, who treated him privately with a startlingly generous estimate of her duties.

That's another caution to zealous magistrates not to stir a self-defeating sensation.  
Among commenters, there was some honest male expression of envy for a lad so favored by his glamorous teacher. It gives a whole new meaning to the old phrase "teachers pet."

In fact, this school-child condemnation comes close to this teachers real offense. Teachers, I am sure, generally know they are falling down on their duty if they show any preference for any member of their class. All should be equally important to them, whether they like them or not; whether they are charming or obnoxious. The good teacher tries to give all her charges the best future she can, regardless of their natural and social advantages or disadvantages.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, it would be interesting to know the results of a secret ballot of the children (if broken-down by gender) on whether this was a good teacher and whether they wanted her to stay or be dismissed. It would be worth knowing whether she actually taught her (official) lessons well, rather than automaticly assume otherwise.

This question is quite apart from whether children should or should not have a deciding voice in who their teachers are. An English school voted on whether to accept their new head-mistress.   
Incidently, my school-days led me to believe that choice of teachers, who you can best learn from, is crucial to success or failure.

In some societies "the older woman" might well be a respected initiator of the adolescent into manhood. The conventional people who cry "paedophile," might be likened to folk in other societies, who would be out-raged by any slur on such rites of passage. Western societies, lacking such customs, cannot place those who improvise them. So, public opinion sways from the sexual hysteria of a Salem witch hunt to discounting a misdemeanor. While others think of the seduction: some people have all the luck.

Making an institution of the rite of the older woman, however, would make it so respectably dull, that future ages would wonder what all the fuss was about, like British queues, in 1963, to read Lady Chatterley's Lover, after the censorship trial.

Some commenters pointed out that in countries like Spain, 13 years is the age of consent. Recently, in Britain, a boy had the courage to say that he had no objection to a sexually-charged woman, who did him no harm. She was, nevertheless, imprisoned.

Commentators, who said Britain is easy on such unfortunates, were wrong in that and, I believe, other cases, one sees from time to time.  
I have the uncharitable suspicion that some self-righteous or vindictive people get their kicks from persecuting and stigmatising and putting-away those they disapprove-of, without the necessary safe-guard of presumption of innocence to their irregular relations, in this cold country.

The law cannot presume such liaisons bad, and really should not automaticly prosecute them. "If they are big enough, they are old enough." The ancient Roman boy took the toga of manhood at 14. Of course, adults can bring charges but their case is weakened if the alleged victim does not feel he is a victim. And if he is pressured into declaring himself a victim, that tips the balance of offense against the prosecution. One commenter admitted that in old age, he still had fond memories of one such liaison.

To top

For that matter, there have been and still are societies that accept as normal sexual preferences that mainstream Western society regards as deviant. Many people are still opposed to the legalising of same-sex marriages. [P.S. Validated in 2015 by the US Supreme Court.]

In Biblical times, struggling small tribes could not tolerate abstention from child-bearing because it threatened their very continuance. Your sexual preferences, indeed romantic preferences of any sexual stripe were an unimaginable luxury in the struggle for survival.

Because mankind has always lived in competition for resources available, life has always been cheap. The Black Death considerably raised the value of the working man. Today, the degradation of human life is shown not least in all kinds of sexual exploitation: child trafficking, kidnapping, prostitution, gold-digging, and thence onto all the worlds wrongs, motivated by base passions or forced out of desperation.

In this era, over-population, rather than under-population, is the threat to survival. Same-sex marriages are no longer dysfunctional. There is a public interest in promoting loving relationships, gay or straight, because loving people are altruistic. When a couple declare their love to the world, they deserve respect in return. That's good relations. And a sign of a civilised society.

People still will not tolerate the prospects, of their children raising children of their own, being blighted by homosexual interference with their sexuality. Nor, for that matter, will people tolerate religious seduction of their childrens minds, any more than physical seduction of their bodies.

The difficulty with gay adoptions, tho their intention may be loving, is part of a general problem of atomised Western society. When children are confined to a nuclear family, they don't get a representative sample of role models, as they would from a traditional extended family.

It is not just the problem of a child having parents, or close relatives living-in, of only one sex. That happened anyway when men were away to war and often never came back. It is also the problem of children having just two possibly unsuitable parents, whatever their sex. If you live in an extended family, parents and children can get some relief from each other and welcome company from the outer family and friendship relations.

The atomisation of society and the unsatisfactory replacement of local community with national bureaucracy is a big problem, which needs communities to come together to begin to solve. This would be more healthy than living alone in dormitory towns, so long as people are content to live and let live.

I believe that peaceful relations, from the smallest to the largest scale of organisation, depend on knowing effectively democratic rules (of power-sharing, not the tyranny of the majority).

It seems that both men and women, in different ways, are suffering unjustly in their relations with each other, as a result of the unintelligent enforcement of supposedly enlightened laws. This seems to be behind some commenters revengeful satisfaction. There are always folk who embrace every draconian measure. I suppose it's too much to hope that they could be persuaded to moderate their animus, at least, against those who have done little, if any, evident harm.

The real harm done here is by the "obscenely disproportionate" sentence, as one commenter put it. Someone else said the Idaho judge surely should be "sectioned." The judges barbaric ruling, of 20 years prison for a sexual intimacy, may back-fire. An indiscriminate judicial reign of terror, as all reigns of terror are indiscriminate, has totally failed to give a sense of societys priorities in tackling the worst crimes. As some commenters said, murderers are routinely treated better.

To top

One word I don't remember being used was "adultery." This was once a much over-used word. Every fling was branded with the word, adultery, which had the force of a tabu.

There is bound to be the suspicion that this affair was an intended adultery, in the real sense of a husband being cuckolded. The cuckoo substitutes its egg for those of other birds, who are unknowingly left to hatch the infant that is not theirs.  
No wonder the husband reacted badly. Two wrongs don't make a right, but he was sorely tried. Adultery is not a criminal offense. But breach of marital contract certainly is afforded legal redress, in the civil courts.

However, British law can be vicious towards men. One woman wrote an article asking: why do we hate men so? Divorced men have held high-profile protests against their being denied access to their children. A woman novelist prefaced her book with a bitter quotation from a man, who said: I don't think I'll bother to marry. I'll just find a woman I don't like and give her my house.

The law appears to be so biased that when a marriage goes wrong, the man dispossesses himself from his hard-earned home, turned-out by a wife-come-lately, without the crippling costs of a court case, which he would lose, anyway.   
I knew of such a misfortune and had no doubts where my sympathies were.

Like myself, he had passed the age of expecting to get married. (And this was a long time ago!) He came in, beaming that he'd got himself a wife, a good-looking young woman, at that.   
I couldn't begrudge him his happiness.

Not too long after, shaking off a moments despondancy, he made an off-hand remark. I can't remember the exact words. It went something like: Do you want a wife, Richard?

The enslavement to sexuality will not be lifted by judicial enslavement to fear. That just reinforces a condition of enslavement.

_5 jan. 2010._

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## Notice of this authors books in the Democracy Science series.

To table of contents.

The Democracy Science series of books, by Richard Lung, is edited from this authors material on the Democracy Science web-site.

### Book 1: Peace-making Power-sharing.

The first, of two books on voting method, has more to do with electoral reform. (The second is more about electoral research.)

"Peace-making Power-sharing" features new approaches to electoral reform, like the Canadian Citizens Assemblies and referendums. I followed and took part in the Canadian debate from before the assemblies were set-up, right thru the referendums.  
This was a democratic tragedy and an epic in the dashing of idealistic hopes.

Some developments in America are reviewed.

The anarchy of voting methods, from the power struggle in Britain, is investigated over a century of ruling class resistance to electoral reform.

A penultimate chapter gives the simplest way to explain transferable voting, on to the more formal treatment of a small club election.

The last chapter is the earliest extant version of my work on scientific measurement of elections (in French).

#### Peace-making Power-sharing

_from Smashwords in epub format:here free._

_It is also available for Amazon kindle,here.  
(Amazon charge a nominal amount, which may reduce to free, to match Smashwords.)_

* * *

### Book 2: Scientific Method of Elections.

The previous book had a last chapter in French, which is the earliest surviving version of the foundation of this sequel, Scientific Method of Elections. I base voting method on a widely accepted logic of measurement, to be found in the sciences. This is supported by reflections on the philosophy of science.

The more familiar approach, of judging voting methods by (questionable) selections of basic rules or criteria, is critically examined.

This author is a researcher, as well as a reformer, and my innovations of Binomial STV and the Harmonic Mean quota are explained.  
This second book has more emphasis on electoral research, to progress freedom thru knowledge.

Two great pioneers of electoral reform are represented here, in speeches (also letters) of John Stuart Mill on parliamentary reform (obtained from Hansard on-line). And there is commentary and bibliography of HG Wells on proportional representation (mainly).

Official reports of British commissions on election systems are assessed. These reports are of Plant, Jenkins, Kerley, Sunderland, Arbuthnott, Richard, and (Helena Kennedy) Power report.

The work begins with a short history on the sheer difficulty of genuine electoral reform. The defeat of democracy is also a defeat for science. Freedom and knowledge depend on each other.   
Therein is the remedy.

* * *

### Book 3: Science is ethics as electics.

Political elections, that absorbed the first two books in this series, are only the tip of the iceberg, where choice is concerned. Book three, in preparation, intends to take an electoral perspective on the social sciences and natural sciences, from physics to metaphysics of a free universe within limits of determinism and chance.

* * *

## A series of Commentaries

#### Commentaries book one:

### Literary Liberties

Literary Liberties with reality allow us to do the impossible of being other people, from all over the world. Our imagined other lives make the many worlds theory a fact thru fiction.

This book of books or illustrated reviews span fiction, faction and non-fiction.  
It goes some way to substantiate the belief of Benedetto Croce that history is the history of liberty.

I only wrote of books that I appreciated, so that I could pass on that appreciation to others. It must be admitted that I went with novels that looked over horizons confined to family values. (Family is, of course, a basic trial of liberty, compromised by obligations to partner and children.)

Likewise, these reviews themselves need not be bounded by the horizons of literary criticism but reach out to solutions for the problem novel or the non-fiction book with a cause.

In promoting others writings, I hoped to promote my own, or rather the liberal values that inform my writings. It took a lot more preparation than I had anticipated. This is usually the case with my books.

Literary Liberties is the first of a short series of Commentaries. This author also has a Democracy Science series. The series of Collected Verse was the first to be completed.

* * *

#### Commentaries book two:

### Science and democracy reviews

Forth-coming book of books, on science, mainly physics, and democratic causes old and new.

* * *

## guide to five volume Collected Verse by Richard Lung

To table of contents.

#### The Valesman.

_Published, 3 august 2014,  
with ten per cent free sample, and available at Amazon here._

#### Dates and Dorothy.

_Published on 2nd september 2014.  
And is available here for the Kindle version._

_Also available from Smashwordshere, in epub format _

#### He's a good dog. (He just doesnt like you to laf.)

_Published on 14 november 2014.  
And is available from Amazon here._

#### In the meadow of night.

_Published on 26 january 2015.  
And is available from Amazon here. _

#### Radical!

_Published on 3 march 2015.  
And is available from Amazon here.   
Also available from Smashwords in epub format here._

_If you read and enjoy any of these books of collected verse, please post on-line a review of why you liked the work._

_While preparing this series, I made minor changes to arrangement and content of the material, so the descriptions of companion volumes, at the end of each book, might not always quite tally._

* * *

### The Valesman

The first volume is mainly traditional nature poetry.   
(160 poems, including longer narrative verse in section three.)  
The nature poet Dorothy Cowlin re-connected me with my rural origins. Many of the poems, about animals and birds and the environs, could never have been written without her companionship.

The unity of themes, especially across the first two sections, as well as within the third section, makes this volume my most strongly constructed collection. I guess most people would think it my best. Moreover, there is something for all ages here.

1. How we lived for thousands of years.

Dorothy thought my best poems were those of the farming grand-father, the Valesman.

2. Flash-backs from the early train.

More memories of early childhood on the farm and first year at the village school.

3. Trickster.

Narrative verse about boyish pranks and prat-falls.

4. Oyh! Old Yorkshire Holidays.

Features playtime aspects of old rural and sea-side Yorkshire.

* * *

### Dates and Dorothy

Book two begins with eight-chapter review of works, plus list of publications & prizes by Dorothy Cowlin.  
(Seven of these chapters are currently freely available as web pages.)

This second volume continues with the second instalment of my own poems, classed as life and love poetry.  
The Dates are historical and romantic plus the friendship of Dorothy and the romance of religion.  
169 poems plus two short essays.

Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin.

Dates, historical and romantic, and Dorothy:  
1. dates.  
2. the Dorothy poems.  
3. loves loneliness loves company.  
4. the romance of religion.

The hidden influence of Dorothy, in the first volume, shows in this second volume. The first two sections were written mostly after she died. Thus, the first section, Dates, reads like a count-down before meeting her, in the second section, as prentice poet.

She was warmly responsive to the romantic lyrics of the third section. This was reassuring because some originated in my twenties. (I gave-up writing formal poetry during my thirties, to all practical purposes. There were only about three exceptions.) These surviving early poems, like most of my out-put, under-went intensive revision.

The fourth section probably stems from the importance attached to religion at primary school. Here humanitarian Dorothys influence only slightly made itself felt by her liking to visit churches.

The prelude review of Dorothy as a professional writer is freely available, at present, on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin.   
Nearly all the text is there, except a preface and last section, which I didnt up-load before losing access to the site in 2007.  
The fotos, I took of Dorothy, are published for the first time.

The continued availability of my Dorothy Cowlin website is not guaranteed, so I welcome this opportunity to publish my literary review of her work, as an extra to volume 2.

* * *

### He's a good dog. (He just doesnt like you to laf.)

The third book is a miscellaneous collection of 163 poems/pieces, with the arts and politics the strongest themes, as well as themes found in the companion books. There is also a story in section one, and a final short essay.

1. with children  
2. or animals  
3. never act  
4. the political malaise  
5. the lost  
6. short essay:  
Proportional Representation for peace-making power-sharing.

"A boot boy in the Great War," in the first section, is a sort of verse novela and dramatic poem with an eye on the centenary of the First World War. The idea stemmed from an incident related by Dorothy Cowlin (yet again). Her uncle was stopped flying a kite on the beach, because he might be signaling to the enemy battle fleet.   
No kidding!

In this miscellany, previous themes appear, such as children, animals and birds. Verse on the arts comes in. I've organised these poems on the WC Fields principle: Never act with children or animals.  
The fourth section collects political satires from over the years. The fifth section reflects on loneliness.

This volume is classed as of "presentatives" because largely about politics and the arts, with politicians acting like performing artists or representatives degenerating into presentatives on behalf of the few rather than the many.

However, the title poem, He's a good dog..., hints how eccentric and resistent to classification is this third volume. This title poem is based on a true war-time air incident. The good dog is also derived from a true dog, whose own story is told in the poem, the bleat dog (part of the free sample in volume 1).

* * *

### In the meadow of night

The fourth volume is of 160 poems and two short stories on the theme of progress or lack of it.

part one: allure.

The allure of astronomy and the glamor of the stars.

part two: endeavor.

The romance and the terror of the onset of the space age and the cold war.

part three: fate.

An uncertain future of technologies and possible dystopias. Ultimate questions of reality.

This fourth volume is of SF poetry. SF stands for science fiction, or, more recently, speculative fiction. The verse ranges from hard science to fantasy.  
The literary tradition of HG Wells and other futurists exert a strong influence.  
Otherwise, I have followed my own star, neither of my nature poet friends, Dorothy and Nikki, having a regard for SF poetry.   
Yet science fiction poetry is a continuation of nature poetry by other means.  
This may be my most imaginative collection. Its very diversity discourages summary.

* * *

### Radical!

Volume 5 opens with a play about the most radical of us all, Mother Teresa: If the poor are on the moon...  
This is freely available, for the time being, on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin. (Performers are asked to give author royalties to the Mother Teresa Mission of Charity.)

The previously unpublished content consists largely of fairly long verse monologs, starting with artistic radicals, in "Symfonic Dreams," which is a sequence of The Impresario Berlioz, and The Senses of Sibelius.

Next, the intellectual radical, Sigmund Freud, followed by short poems on a sprinkling of more great names, who no doubt deserved longer. (Art is long, life is short.)

The title sequence, Radical! is made-up of verse about John Stuart Mill, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, George Orwell and JB Priestley.

Volume five ends with an environmental collection, largely available on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin. However, those available verses have been more or less revised.  
Should that website close down, I hope the green verses and the Mother Teresa play can still be obtained in this volume five.

