Books I Read In March

Fiction

 'Chasing Embers' by James Bennett

Somehow I managed to get a review copy of this book, second hand. Consequently some of the issues like repetition of words may not have turned up in the finally published version of the book. It is not a bad book. It is the first in the Ben Garston series about the only dragon permitted to survive outside of a sleep following a deal between humans and various magical beings in 1215. At times it reminds me of the books by Cassandra Clare, especially the opening scenes in New York and Garston's questions about relations with a human. (Why do authors assume we all have an encyclopaedic knowledge of New York's districts, bridges, etc. in our heads?) Witches, fairies and knightly families turn up. Ben fortunately can morph into a human and or a kind of humanoid dragon, is very strong and armoured and can fly. Being given clothes half-way through the book which adjust to his changes does make him a little like a superhero. There are cliches, not just around New York but a confrontation smashing up the British Museum. The poor place is overused in fantasy stories.

Aside from Garston's hang-ups, the release of another older dragon in Somaliland breaks all the agreements between the different beings. Furthermore in turns out this dragon is being used as a portal to permit an evil priest/would-be god back into the world. The action goes from the USA to Britain to the Alps and on to Egypt. While as others have commentated, Bennett seems to throw absolutely everything from fantasy into the novel, there are reasonable set-piece scenes such as Garston escaping the witches in New York and battling the other dragon in the Alps. The climax at a power station south of Cairo, suffers from the same problems as some of these scenes in fantasy stories, that it drags on far too long. By the end of it, you are not really concerned who is trying to achieve what power or who has been defeated. Trimming down that section would have helped maintain the momentum of what was a fast-paced novel up until then. While Bennett uses mounds of tropes from fantasy, I am glad he tried some things a little different and brought in, carefully, myths from Egypt and Somaliland, to give a slightly different perspective. While I would not rush out to buy the next Garston book, if I saw it in my local charity shop, I would pick it up.

'Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates' by Tom Robbins

This is the prime reason why I have read so few books this month. It was 416 pages long in the edition I had but the print was so small that in a normal print it would probably be 2-300 pages longer; it certainly felt it. While I am often disappointed by what I read, there are few occasions when I really regret buying a book. I think 'Chimera' (1972) by John Barth and 'Ostland' (2013) by Tom Cain have been the two up until now that I would have put in that category. This book by Robbins has become the third. This was his seventh book at the time (2000), but I cannot really understand how he ever got published in the first place, let alone repeatedly. Robbins uses a sentence where a word would do. His writing is incredibly laboured with incessant feeble attempts to make humour. It is actually quite painful to read while he pfaffs around with silly narrative and diversions.

The title comes from a line by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud and has some tangential relevance to the story. This book is about a CIA agent simply known as Switters who is blackmailed by his hacker grandmother in taking her aged parrot to the Amazon jungle in Peru. While there he is persuaded to meet with a tribal leader whose head has been distorted into a pyramid shape. This man then curses Switters that if he ever sets his feet on the ground again he will die instantly. Switters spends almost all the rest of the book in a wheelchair or on stilts. He is then sent by the CIA (in his wheelchair) to Syria to work with a Kurdish group. Returning from that mission he encounters a small group of nuns in a convent built around an oasis and aids them in seeing off intruders and trying to get their order reinstated. The book sounds ridiculous and lives up to that. It is a massive conceit by Robbins who seems to believe he is witty, even, perhaps funny.

These problems would be bad enough, but there is an unpleasant sexual element in there too. Switters who is in his mid-thirties obsesses over his teenaged step-sister. She is only 12 when he first sees her naked and while 16 by the time of the novel, he keeps wanting to have sex with her and effectively browbeats her into offering her virginity to him. He also lusts after any girl he encounters in South America and the Middle East, making this book really be about a paedophile. Later, in the convent, Switters falls for one of the nuns, ten years his senior. Through a miracle, despite having sex as a young woman, her hymen has regrown and she will only have anal sex with him. The willingness of these women to comply with such a misogynistic, paedophilic man for some unknown reason, stretches credulity to breaking point. Robbins finally tires of the whole project and abruptly ends it. The book looks interesting and has good reviews on the cover (though I should have suspected something was wrong when I saw one was written by Thomas Pynchon). However, I really feel dirtied by buying and reading this book. While I do not believe in censorship, I would certainly encourage you to stay away from anything by Robbins.

Non-Fiction

'Ten Days that Shook the World' by John Reed

I have been very poor in selecting what to read this month. While not as offensive as the Robbins book, I was very frustrated by this one too. Reed was an American Communist who was in Russia at the time of the revolutions of 1917. While he witnessed a great deal of what happened during the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, his ardent support from them makes this a highly unreliable book. I bought it second hand when studying modern history more than thirty years ago and did not read the warnings on the cover about how poor it was. The book is useful in some respects. Reed identifies the multiple parties active in Petrograd [St. Petersburg] during 1917 and includes transcripts of speeches, various regulations that were passed, articles and propaganda from them. He hared around all the various locations of the different groups and later went to Tsarskoye Selo which the revolutionary forces opposed to the Bolshevik coup d'etat were able to briefly hold and to Moscow where the fighting between different factions was fiercer than in the capital, Petrograd.

What is so infuriating about this book is how Reed's zealotry blinds him even to things that he reports. Like the Bolsheviks himself, he lumps all of the other parties, no matter whether they were revolutionary parties like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs) in with the Tsar and his military; landowners and other rich people. This is despite the fact that the Bolsheviks took the land reform policies of the SRs as their own and even saw value in continuing the education body that the coalition Provisional Government had established after the February/March revolution which had seen the removal of the Tsar. Thus, even these Socialist and revolutionary groups are portrayed as being traitors to the ordinary people, whereas in fact they had worked hard to try to sort out the situation in Russia for them.

Reed's view is that anyone apart from the Bolsheviks (and when even that party began to split, just Lenin's faction of it) is complicit with the old regime. He sees conspiracies everywhere to a ridiculous degree. The maddest of these is his insistence that Russia went to war in 1914 so that it could be defeated and the Germans occupy large areas of the country. He believes that there were no genuine shortages despite the dysfunctional nature of Russia's agriculture and the exhaustion of peasants and of the transport system. No, for Reed, any shortages must be because everyone in Russia, aside from the Bolsheviks, was deliberately hoarding and sabotaging the country to starve and freeze the Russian people. Despite apparently supporting self-determination, any national groupings that appeared are condemned as simply tools of the landowners. He will not accept any other view than narrow Bolshevism interpreted by Lenin as legitimate.

Reed keeps on insisting that the Bolsheviks had some miraculous support right across Russia from the 'decent' working people. However, even the documents he includes shows how narrow their support and how unwilling so many even workers and soldiers were to support the Bolsheviks. Quite rightly after the partially successful coup in early November 1917, they accuse the Bolsheviks of stealing the revolution. Yet, for Reed, overnight things magically changed and with the Bolsheviks setting up their own government, things like crime abruptly stopped and people though cold and starving are marching around the city in ecstasy at the change which in fact did nothing to improve their circumstances. Support for the Bolsheviks largely stemmed from a wish to end the war, but as the Bolsheviks' revolutionary opponents highlighted, they continued the war and opened the gates to the Germans to occupy vast areas of the country.

People forget that Russia lost the First World War as was made clear by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Naively the Bolsheviks felt that somehow if they declared peace every other country was cease fighting and their workers would rise up. This delusion meant that rather than end the fighting Russia was plagued by wars, a civil war then a war against Poland, lasting into 1921. Reed had died of typhus in 1920 so missed how accurate many of the predictions of an enduring conflict he includes in his book, actually came true. He ridicules them but is really shown to be the fool.

The book does show how many people tried to prevent a civil war and to have a democratic or Socialist government deal with the country. Important examples are the powerful railway workers trade union which refused to move any soldiers going to fight any other Russians. The peasants too, neglected by the Bolsheviks sought a coalition government and to bring about measured reform. However, as they did throughout the Bolsheviks removed all these more sober representatives. What we see is a criminal clique establishing itself, referring to some fantasy of a workers' and later peasants' movement supporting them and shutting down anyone not whole heartedly supporting their very specific line.

It is galling to read how Reed perpetuated so many myths to the English-speaking world about the Bolshevik seizure of power. It is horrendous that those who genuinely sought to improve Russia and keep it from further years of war were outmanoeuvred through violence and terror, even before the civil war had properly begun. Reed ignoring the evidence he provides himself shows he was no genuine eyewitness, instead he just produced a piece of propaganda which is so pathetic as to invite ridicule. There are some useful details in this book if you are looking at the Bolshevik seizure of power, but the narrative around it, simply illustrates how a man can let himself be so led astray by fanaticism that he misrepresents even the information he might include in a book.