The Books I Read In June

 As the two books I read this month had a total of 1,295 pages, I unfortunately only got through them and no more.

Fiction

'The Interpretation of Murder' by Jed Rubenfeld

I remember this book being everywhere when it came out in 2006 but I being passed a copy I only got round to reading it. Rubenfeld is a US law academic. The book is set during the genuine visit of the psychology pioneers Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to New York in 1909 to give various lectures. They are fictional characters get mixed up in a murder of a young society woman and an attack on another both involving sado-masochist elements. There are a couple of protagonists, Dr. Stratham Younger, a fictional young US psychologist who is one of the hosts of Freud and Jung but is asked to counsel the second victim, Nora Acton. He tells his elements in the first person. The second is a New York detective, James Littlemore who struggles to get the cases investigated against the resistance of influential men in the city.

As you might expect the story involves a lot of psychological aspects and is a bit of a primer into Freud's thinking and how he an Jung began to diverge. It also features historically true opposition to the whole practice of psychologists by neurologists who believed that the treatment of mental health issues they believed to be solely neurological would be set back by 'talking cures'. Freud and Jung do not come off too well from this story. Freud is portrayed as an amiable incontinent old man and Jung a disturbed philanderer. Certainly Freud is shown as dogmatic and his insistence of just one approach to the sexual perceptions of children of their parents is shown to lead him astray in interpretations of what is going on and to be honest the reader is liable to agree with Rubenfeld's take on Freud's approach if not embracing the hostility of the neurologists.

There are strengths to this novel. The portrayal of New York in the era and the kind of society it had is very well done with lots of rich descriptions of various buildings and locales in the city and the surrounding countryside and of the corrupt, privileged and poverty-struck social picture. The plot is very twisty which I guess you would expect from a crime novel with psychology at the centre. However, you do feel that it is all wrapped up rather pat at the end and the psychological issues resolved too smoothly while resolution of another murder which comes to light is rather swept aside. I know as much about Freud's theories as the average general reader, but they seem to simply add weight to the patronising misogynistic attitude towards women and their 'neuroses' to the extent of repeatedly victim blaming. Though a pioneer Freud was very much of his time. However, you do feel that as a result Nora Acton's genuine feelings, especially her sexuality, is simply dismissed as something that could be quickly and easily 'resolved'. A romance is levered in too. Thus, I came to the end feeling that despite the involvement of this different aspect it simply reinforced what we would have seen in a novel set in that context without psychology featuring.

There are some good action scenes and as I say some fair twists. However, the narrative is very fragmented and we jump between various characters very rapidly even within a single chapter. There is a constant gear shifting especially as only Younger's narrative is in the first person whereas all the others that actually make up the bulk of the text, are in the third. I can see why the novel appealed at the time. However, you come away rather feeling it is 'ragged' and while the jerking about certainly adds dynamism, it does mean the book is not as strong as it might have been. In addition, while I am personally a fan of historical notes, Rubenfeld really undermines his own novel by extensively going into all the things he altered from the genuine history or simply invented. I imagine this comes from him being an academic but I felt it really undermined the reader's faith in the novel and could have been contained but handled without that undercutting of what had been written.

Non-Fiction

'The Benn Diaries. New Single Volume' ed. by Ruth Winstone

This is a single volume edition of the first six volumes of Tony Benn's diaries, for the most part focused on his political career 1964-1990. The compression does cause some issues as so many issues of the era when he was an MP and especially those when he was a minister too, are covered very quickly and at times you want to find out more. His 'journey' from being a technocratic Gaitskellite who actually socialised with Enoch Powell, to an outspoken anti-racist and opponent of nuclear power is hard to track in this book. You see it taking place, but there is less sense of why and what brought it about. You can certainly see him losing faith in technology as a solution to Britain's and the world's problems, certainly by the mid-1970s. His anti-royalist outlook is clearer throughout, though he remains polite to the Queen. To some degree only as a result of seeing him speak in the 1990s and 2000s, rather than from this book, could I tell why he moved so far on the European communities as he saw what became the EU as a defender of workers' and indeed simply citizens' rights. His sense that the structure especially the European Commission lacked the necessary democracy, is apparent from the outset and made him in the 1970s and into the 1980s hostile to what was at the time the EEC, per se.

One puzzle remains how so many of the newspapers were able to portray Benn as being a hardcore radical Socialist, indeed even a Communist. While he could see some elements of note in the Soviet bloc countries he visited, he is far from being a flag waver for those regimes and was critical of their behaviour especially over Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In addition while he portrays himself as being on the Left of the Labour Party, he does not go along with Militant Tendency, though he likewise is unhappy with Neil Kinnock's steps against them.

I accept this is an edited and curated version of his life, but the policies featured here actually come across as often more Christian Socialist and indeed Liberal of the early 20th Century, like his grandfather. I suppose especially in the 1970s and 1980s he was an easy person to beat in the media, to portray as some crazed monster because he was unapologetic for his views. I think the fact that he spoke amiably though at times with anger behind it, made him very slippery to challenge than if he had been a ranter. Still, his candid views of some politicians do expose a harder side.

It is interesting that like Richard Crossman who Benn served alongside: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-books-i-read-in-april.html  Benn sees Harold Wilson as both nasty and ineffectual to a much greater extent that he was perceived by the public. The successive Labour leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock are excoriated in this book, contrary to Benn's interactions with them in public. While he did not press party unity over everything, it is clear he would go a long way to try not to give ammunition to their opponents. To some degree given plans to overthrow Wilson were mooted it does show actually how little tolerance privileged figures were willing to give any policies which looked as if they were moving to a genuine meritocracy and even these have been clawed back since. Benn like Crossman has quite a dim view of many of the ministers of the time, but is fulsome in his praise of those he approved of, many of them now forgotten names of the Labour movement. He was also staunch in his attendance at working class events up and down the country.

The one aspect which perhaps is not a surprise is the personal side. His wife Caroline to whom he was married for 51 years until her death, was very capable and stalwart, but also critical when needed. She correctly predicted Benn's attempt to become deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1981 was a grave error for him and he grudgingly recognises it. Naturally as a father of four children he comes over as a family man, an aspect not referenced in the media as they were seeking to portray him as a monster, rather than anything like someone who might be your neighbour. In fact when people speak about political dynasties especially in the USA but also in the UK, no-one ever seems to mention that four generations of Benns have been MPs: Sir John Benn (1850-1922; MP 1892-1910), William Wedgwood Benn (1877-1960; MP 1906-42); Anthony Wedgwood Benn (1925-2014; MP 1950-60 and 1963-2001) and Hilary Benn (1953-; MP 1999-) again because they may worry it normalises them, perhaps makes them look like the Kennedys or the Bushes.

Overall this was an engaging read, but I think if I wanted to dig into any particular phase again I would go back to the original six volumes for the detail. I came away feeling that Benn had been normal though with a prickliness I had not picked up before. In many ways he comes over as an ordinary man granted insight to the top levels of politics and seeing how divorced so much of it is from the bulk of the population but with a massive and frightening impact on their lives. Even more than the troubles of the Cold War the utter bleakness of the early years of the Thatcher governments come out raw in the diary entries.