2012, here we come.... (#18)

In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks — Michael Lewis, Boomerang.

Greece's bankers were amongst the most conservative in the Eurozone during the last decade. They somehow neglected to award themselves huge sums of money and stayed well away from the American subprime scene. (In fact the worst bet they made was on their own government.)

Instead you could say that the people earning whopping, unjustifiable bonuses over there can mostly be found working for the state: the average public sector worker in fact earns three times as much as the average private sector one, and has seen his or her pay double in real terms over the past 12 years — bribes not included, as Lewis helpfully points out.

The state-owned railway company has to offset a wage bill of €400m and other outgoings totalling €300m against its annual revenues of €100m. Meanwhile its average employee earns €65,000 a year and expects to retire at 55.

So it's not just the lenders who are going to need to take a 'haircut' if the Greek situation is to have any meaningful resolution. To those who say that austerity is the not the right approach the current global financial crisis, I would say that in the case of the Greeks, oh yes it is.

So, while one can begin to sympathise with the Germans when they peevishly suggest that Greece should sell a few of its islands to help meet its obligations, all this would really achieve is leave them with fewer assets and a reduced 'export' income from tourism next time the debt gets out of control, as it most surely will, unless significant adjustments are made to the corrupt and wasteful Greek state.

Anyway, Lewis's excellent new book serves as a reminder that it is too easy to blame the bankers for this whole mess we're in (even the ones who were fishermen just a few years previously). Cheap credit created temptations and exaggerated behavious across whole sectors of society.

He likens it to locking whole nations in a dark room with a pile of borrowed money. Each succumbed to a different temptation...

"What the Greeks wanted to do once the lights went out..was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it."

The Immortalisation Commission (Part One)

A history in three parts, John Gray's latest book relates how sophisticated humanity has attempted to think its way around the prospect of personal oblivion in the century and a half following Darwin's removal of the glass ceiling, which had been thought to separate mankind from the rest of the beasts.

In the first part, Cross-Correspondences, Gray looks at the Spiritualist movement in Britain, which was the most immediate of his 'rebellions against death'. Unlike the now more familiar response — that if science comes into conflict with personal conviction, there must be something fundamentally wrong with science, darnit — these late Victorian men and women turned to science itself to protect themselves from the most up-to-date conclusions it had to offer.

One of the leading figures in the movement was Henry Sidgwick, who professed that if death really was the end, then the world was truly chaotic and therefore not especially friendly to human values — or rather the specific elite Victorian values which invited him to repress the impulses that conflicted with his sense of duty.

Why would these people care more than we seem to about the existential pain of living in a world where the human mind is a localised after-effect of trajectory of matter? Gray doesn't state this directly, but it does seem to be the case that the likes of Sidgwick and Frederick Myers is that theirs was not a simplistic piety which Darwinism had confounded, instead it was the age-old conflict between morality and self-interest which had seemingly been reinvigorated by On the Origins of Species.

The chaos most feared by Myers was the threat of 'insistent desire', for Myers like Sidgwick and others was a Victorian gentleman of the sexually ambiguous sort. The self Sidgwick wanted to take with him into eternity was clearly an idealised version of himself; in other words the self he had failed to be in life.

Gray goes on to suggest that these intellectuals fitted into a milieu which sought to extend the naturalistic outlook into an invisible world in order to purge itself of its defects as a whole. One of the more bizarre secondary anecdotes in this section of the book is the tale of August Henry Coombe Tennant, conceived in the Biblical sense as part of a planned out-of-wedlock tryst between a medium and one of the leading lights of the Spiritualist clique, and in the cereberal sense as part of a whacko scheme to create a made-to-order messiah who would save humanity from chaos. This attempt to manipulate the afterlife using techniques that called themselves scientific, went by the name of spiritual eugenics.

One of the ironies of Myers's research into the survival of the human personality after death was his realisation that the personalities we exhibit on this side of the grave are far from fixed. Everyday identities are in fact rather fluid impersonations spun off by our primary psychological reality, the 'subliminal self'. And, as Gray notes, if each of us is "no more than a bundle of sensations, egoism may be no more rational than universal benevolence." Myers did however believe that his subliminal self might have access to knowledge beyond the reach of our more chimerical personas.

The notion of the subliminal mind may also help us understand the automatic writings which the Spiritualists practiced as long as their movement persisted. They endlessly poured over these scripts, authored they believed by lost friends and lovers (some of them secret), although it was their own hands holding the pen. The texts reflected a shared high cultural lexicon and were encoded in an outlook which no longer exists, and to some extent never existed, because the human relationships revealed are those of Victorian England "not as it was, but as it imagined itself to be."

This consciously (or subliminally) fictive elite lifestyle, was one where death was understood not as the final calamity at the end of a long struggle against poverty, disease and insecurity, but rather as "a move from one wing of a great country house to another, a shift in which nothing was lost."

Public Enemies (1)

I spotted this enticing little volume in Oaxaca in its Spanish translation back in January and decided to hold out for a Kindle/English version. It's been worth the wait...

These two giants/pigmies of the French cultural vanguard/rearguard (delete appropriate to taste) waste no time in establishing their lack of mutual admiration*, except perhaps in as much as they congratulate each other on having dealt rather admirably with not being all that admirable in the first place.

I've just passed the section where Houellebecq speaks movingly of his fear of succumbing to misanthropic apathy, "that bleating sterile sulkiness that makes one hole up in a corner constantly muttering 'arseholes the lot of them' and, quite literally do nothing else." This might not be the "greatest danger" for me, but I recognise the threat nonetheless.

* Addressing Bernard-Henri, Michel waggishly observes that "you dishonour even the white shirts you always wear."

The 10,000 Year Explosion, How Civilisation Accelerated Human Evolution

There is more genetic variation within human groups than between them.

This statement has always struck me as less of a hard scientific truth than a hazard warning, an expedient intellectual Here Be Dragons. Surely it was only a matter of time before the 'controversial' thoughts it was planted to ward off would be being thought again?

Cochran and Harpending appear to give it short shrift. There's a similarly sizeable variation within dog breeds than between them, but does that mean that the differences between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are 'skin deep' too?

Their book sets out to inform us how, far from arriving on an evolutionary plateau, our first modern ancestors to break out from Africa were about to embark on one of the most accelerated phases of human biological change. Through a process of genetic introgression they began by stealing some genes from the European natives, the Neanderthals, an exchange which the pair believe may have kick-started the sudden leap-forward in artistic and technological capabilities which ensued.

Yet it was the advent of agriculture which heralded a whole new set of selection pressures, such as new diets and disease risks. Cochran and Harpender duly map the spread of lactose tolerance to the ascendency of the Proto-Indo-European language and show how new patterns of social organisation favoured alternative heritable psychologies.

So far so credible. Indeed I have a great deal of sympathy for the book's broad analysis, it's just that some of the detailed explanation is at best flimsy and at worst blood-pressure raising. This is a complex web of may haves and could haves, with the occasional must have thrown in for good measure, and one is never quite sure how the dependencies work. In other words, how long a string of may haves is holding up that must have.

We're told that humans who have been growing stuff for longer have had more time to hard code an understanding of the underlying economics into their wetware. So, it's hardly surprising, we're then informed, that 'Amerindians' find it harder to get their heads around the benefits of neo-liberalism when it comes to wealth generation.

Aside from the gobsmacking political bias behind this little hypothesis, everything we know about the Maya surely gives the lie to any notion that America's indigenes are somehow congenitally soft-headed when it comes to numbers. The Maya might have domesticated corn rather later than Europe's classical cultures had access to wheat, but it was the Romans, ingenious as they were, who had to make do without a zero, wasn't it?

I take no issue with the data showing that Jews of European origin win more Nobel prizes and score higher in IQ tests than any other distinct group of people on the planet. But Cochran and Harpender's explanation for how this state of affairs might have come about is also neither quite good science nor good history.

Yes, the Ashkenazim were a closed community forced by their host culture to specialise in finance and management. But how exactly would the selection pressure have worked in practice? Unless the less brainy Jews were somehow more prone to die off before marriage, or indeed were comparatively less likely to marry, then the whole process would depend on the cleverer sort having more children than both the intellectually-mediocre and outright dumb, something which we know to be generally counter-factual from contemporary research. (It also rather depends on intelligence being something that is passed down the male line only!)

And as ever with these retrospective arguments from natural selection, I can all too easily concoct an alternative model of my own: in the middle ages Christian education was controlled by the Church and the most promising pupils would naturally have been siphoned off into a profession which would (mostly) take them out of the procreation business. So instead of the Jews getting smarter, the rest of Europe was steadily becoming thicker!

Anyway, as ever the real problem here is the term Evolution itself. We might be able to move beyond seeing Great Danes and Chihuahuas as only superficially different, but which one is more evolved? While Cochran and Harpender are surely right to question the conventional wisdom of human evolutionary stasis, can we really say that the various detectable adaptations to the multiplicity of different environments that human beings have taken up residence within over the course of the last 10,000 years, are qualitatively the same thing as the series of species transformations which occurred before the emergence from Africa?

Death and the Idea of Mexico: Claudio Lomnitz (4)

Modern historians have a lot to thank Karl Marx for really. Not only did he provide them with not one, but two suggested explanations for the underlying course of history, but also — rather less obviously, because the impact has been felt across the political spectrum of academia — he popularised dialectical thinking, which suits the sort of commentator who likes to deal in coherent paradigms rather than potentially more disjointed facts and ideas.

So you might — as I did — come to Lomnitz's book expecting to find a comprehensive answer to the question 'what is it about these Mexicans and death?', but instead what you get is a response to two alternative and largely competing previous answers to that question.

Undergrad historians, typically one step removed from original research, learn this trick early on. So-and-so said this, but so-and-so said that, and so my own interpretation is either going to be a gutless hedge (aka "fence sitting") or an attempt to create some new and distinct synthetic third position using bits of both.

Faced with a dense literature on the Mexican death-obsession falling into two broad churches — that it descends from pre-Colombian roots in either ancient Mesoamerica or medieval Iberia — Lomnitz contends that it was in fact the cataclysmic meeting of these two cultures and the need to re-establish the hegemonic order after the holocaust which resulted in an apparently unique nationalisation of the death-cult in Mexico.

There is much that is compelling in Lomnitz's argument, but there are always going to be gaps when your answer to a specific question is essentially a response to earlier viewpoints. For instance, my friend Antonio in Brazil believes the candy skulls on sale at the start of November in Mexico must somehow descend from Aztec tzompantli (skull racks), for if there wasn't something very specific in the native culture squished by Cortés and co, why would Mexicans be any more death-obsessed than the rest of Latin America? Lomnitz's hegemonic whiplash argument can only provide the most indirect sort of parry to the thrust of Antonio's intuition.

And frankly, the greater issue for me is that I did not pick up this hefty volume in search of a sociological history of the Days of the Dead in Mexico. I really did want a comprehensive answer the question 'what is it about these Mexicans and death?' — one that delved a bit more into popular psychology and its localised peculiarities for this, at least as far as the topic of mortality is concerned, is my current topic of greatest interest.

Poor Surrender Monkeys

Two of the books in yesterday's top five repeatedly reference the French experience of WWII and the apparent debt owed by France to the Allies and the US in particular.

You will hardly be surprised to learn that one of these is Anthony Beevor's D-Day. But the other Anthony, whose grandparents with the Bourdain surname were what he on several occasions refers to as "surrender monkeys", is worried how the debt he and his colleagues owe to the French for their culinary tradition stacks up against the 'big one' of Omaha beach.

Beevor helpfully provides some context. During the first 24 hours of the Normandy invasion almost twice as many French civilians died as American soldiers. Overall, across the war, more surrender monkeys died as a result of Allied bombing raids than plucky Brits died as a result of German ones. That's 70,000 people.

In the liberation of Paris, a comparative non-battle, in which Leclerc's Free French-led division forced the capitulation of the scattered remnants of Choltitz's garrison, more than 2000 citizens of the French capital et environs perished; an equivalent of American sacrifice on Omaha beach.

The casual waste of life in this conflict is one of the most striking and chastening aspects of Beevor's book. 19,890 French civilians were killed as a result of the battle of Normandy (with a similar number seriously injured). If one includes the months leading up to Overlord, the figure gets closer to 35,000.

Review of 2010: Non-fiction

For the second year in a row, I read less non-fiction than has been my wont, and am actually struggling to even come up with a top five for 2010. Part of the problem is that I took on several weighty tomes, one apiece on the English and American civil wars and Jon Lee Anderson's bio of Che Guevara, with which I have yet to make enough progress for them to feature here. The order isn't all that important here, as I enjoyed all these books to a roughly equal extent.

Kitchen Confidential was a fortuitous find at the Aware bookshop attached to Revue magazine. Mezrich's highly readable account of the founding of Facebook (review in the pipeline) was fascinating, not least for its occasional divergences from the version filmed as The Social Network.

I took on Out of Captivity, Surviving 1967 Days in the Colombian Jungle largely because I'd heard it has plenty of unflattering things to say about Ingrid Betancourt, possibly our least favourite Latin American of the 2009-10 season. I was soon however in the grip of a hefty loathing of these oafish gringos metiches and couldn't wait for the FARC to start making their lives a total misery. In the end, all three, even the seemingly unreconstructable Keith Stansell earned more than a grudging respect and a good deal of compassion. There were even moments when I felt for Betancourt. However, their FARC captors, jungle carpentry skills aside, don't come out of this too well. One can certainly learn almost as much about human psychology under duress from this book as one can from spending an entire summer glued to Big Brother ...which isn't an option any more.

Douglas Preston's The Monster of Florence was this year's Mr Whicher, a gripping investigation into an unsolved series of brutal 80s killings in the Tuscan countryside, an insight not just into the twisted mind of a murderer, but also that of a fairly loopy prosecutor from Perugia, who would later be let loose on poor Amanda Knox.

I've had plenty to say already about Beevor's latest; in many ways a solid example of his best and worst work, pockets of incredible detail and narrative incisiveness, followed by pages of drift with ill-selected (and occasionally oddly withheld) information.

1. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
2. The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
3. Out of Captivity, Surviving... by Howes, Gonsalves and Stansell
4. The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston
5. D-Day, The Battle for Normandy, by Anthony Beevor

Cult of the Warrior

I caught the wave of adultation for Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn when it was published earlier this year and inserted it into the mid-section of my reading list. It was, according to many critics, the definitive novel of the Vietnam war and a "final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American History" (Sebastian Junger)

So I fascinated to come across Jackson Lears's more lukewarm response in the LRB. Like Marlantes, Lears is a veteran of the conflict in question, but unlike the much decorated author, also went on to serve in the peace movement.

He begins by noting that "since 9-11, a cult of the warrior has settled over America like the morning fog over the Mekong Delta." He takes particular issue against the now familiar (and worryingly empty) ethos of the combat soldier in contemporary film and fiction where war, however absurd on the political level, is somehow redeemed as the portal to a supremely deep and authentic male bonding experience.

"War as authentic experience: this is the nihilist edge of modern militarism, unalloyed by moral pretension. Marlantes sidesteps the nihilism by coupling it with communal redemption."

Marlantes might take pains to depict the unwinnability of this war, but this doesn't deter his lead protagonist Lieutenant Mellas from the conviction that he and his comrades are somehow "better people" as a result of participating in it; specifically better than all those insulated folk back home in civie-land, of whom women are represented as perhaps the most clueless.

Lears also objects to the notion suggested by one of Mellas's NCOs that boot camp "doesn't make us killers it's just a fucking finishing school". No, he concludes:

"Boot camp is less a finishing school than a remaking of the self. And the kinds of killing military men learn to do cannot be sublimated into a universal ‘destructive element’, a phrase Conrad intended to refer to human experience in all its tragic dimensions. War is not simply an expression of the beast within. Nor is it merely an opportunity for intense male experiences unavailable in civilian life – physical testing, the creation of community. It is also a product of policy decisions that can be challenged, changed or reversed. "

The end result of considering this article is that Matterhorn has slipped a little further down my reading list. It has also reminded me of one of the best and ultimately truest books I ever read about the grunt's-eye view of war: Joanna Bourke's An Intimate History of Killing, which goes some way to support Lears's position that not all men are natural born killers.

Pepys 1660 (1)

The year kicks off for Sam with an atmosphere of desperate political uncertainty and re-heated turkey. (Except that the year didn't begin legally in England until March 25th — a procedure which was not to be adjusted until 1752 — which means for adminstrative purposes at least, it's still 1659.)

"My own private condition very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor, besides my goods of my house [in Axe Yard], and my office, which at present is somewhat uncertain," he writes on January 1st.

Perhaps a sense of the potential significance of his own personal uncertainty within the universal uncertainty across the land, prompted Sam to commence his secret shorthand diary that wintry January.

He is what we'd call a white collar worker, but tied by lines of patronage to an older social system, which was very much in flux at that time, there being neither a King nor a Parliament, and all the big players in this post-Cromwellian instant jostling noisily for position.

Whenever he has a spare moment (seemingly quite often) Sam heads across to Westminster Hall or checks out the posts on Fleet Street, where the twitterers of the day serve up the latest rumours about the movements of Monk, Fairfax, Lambert et al. Mass personal publishing is not entirely a novelty of the Internet age.

"Great talk that many places have declared for a free Parliament," he wrote on January 2nd, an indication that many were yet willing to persevere with England's brief experiment in republican government. (Two days later Sam is reporting how MPs have locked themselves away in a state of fasting and prayer.)

Sam works as a clerk for George Downing, one of the four tellers of the Receipt of the Exchequer, and his principal responsibility in that office is to deliver pay to the soldiers of the standing army which may yet play a crucial role.

The rest of the time he wanders around town rather like I used to in Cambridge, looking for acquaintances to interact with. Once tacked onto suitable company, Sam likes to participate in the pastimes of the era, such as cribbage and playing the viol, as well as the consumption of turkey-pie, 'brave cake' and sack (vino).

Breakfast for a Londoner in 1659/60 consisted of a swift pint at a local tavern, it being ill-advisable to drink the local water and just a couple of years before the big coffee shop craze gets going.

Although at this moment Sam apparently considers himself to be in good health, he informs us on the 4th of January that "It snowed hard all this morning, and was very cold, and my nose was much swelled with cold." The next day he consults with a certain Mr Page about his nasal discomfort, who tells him it's just a case of the common sniffles. And so they move on to discuss current affairs.

We know that, especially for a member of the Pepys family, Sam will live to a comparatively ripe old age, but a close attention to every niggling ache and pain will be an abiding characteristic of his night-time notes, until the end of the decade when an unspecified eye problem will put him out of the diary-writing business altogether.

TBC

D-Day by Anthony Beevor (4)

The Brits might have had Vicount Weymouth, liaison officer of XIX Corps — who was wont to wander around the battlefield leading two ducks around on a leash — but the French could count on General Phillipe de Hautecloque, instantly recognisable atop his tank, because of the malacca cane he waved around and the goggles he wore around his kepi.

Better known by his nomme de guerre 'Leclerc', de Hautecloque led the French 2nd Armoured Division in Normandy, famed in his homeland as the Deuxième Division Blindée (2ème DB).

Something of a Catholic nutjob, Leclerc recruited a dozen members of the White Fathers — a nineteenth century order established to take the true faith to the Tuaregs — as his divisional chaplains. They must have looked a bit like Gaulish druids with their white habits and flowing white beards.

Beevor ticks off the brave general for his Francocentric outlook, not entirely unlike that of his commander-in-chief:

"Like de Gaulle, he felt bitter that, since the disaster of 1940, the British had accumulated so much power while France had declined drastically. Both were inclined to suspect that the British took every opportunity to exploit this. In their resentment, they could not see that Britain, despite her apparent strength, had bankrupted herself, physically and economically, during five years of war."

The resistance were extremely sceptical about other French officers who donned their uniforms in order to greet the newcomers. "Mothballs" was the nickname soon applied to these former enthusiasts for the Vichy regime.

Many of the resistance fighters had communist sympathies but had apparently received almost no assistance from Stalin, who remained sore about the speed of the French collapse in 1940, which had left the USSR exposed to a Nazi double-cross sooner than he might have anticipated.

D-Day by Anthony Beevor (3)

Beevor reports that "Both Canadians and Americans were bemused by the British Army's apparent inability to complete a task without a tea break."

"When in doubt... brew up" was indeed the motto of my uncle's unit. Brewing up was also how they referred to what happened to the occupants of tanks which took a direct hit.

The Cromwell tank that my uncle commanded was incapable of taking out a German Tiger tank even at point-blank range, and wasn't able to compensate for this with some handy acceleration in reverse gear.

"After four years of preparation for the invasion, why are our machines inferior?," griped one of the officers of the 22nd Armoured commanded by Brigadier 'Loony' Hinde.

American equipment had its failings too, as the men storming Omaha were to note when their rifles, radios and scaling ropes were rendered useless by seawater. Their tank ammunition was also inferior and gave off more smoke, a disadvantage in the fighting amongst the high hedges of Normandy.

German small arms, especially the MG 42, were demonstrably superior to anything the Allies had.

Recently a former Guards officer told me how he'd been impressed by the words of a former Afghan princeling, who has written that the British have been the very worst nation in the world for making adequate preparations for anything but also, as a consequence, the very best to have around in a crisis.

The combination of characteristic British ingenuity combined with insufficient forethought is perhaps best illustrated by Major General Percy Hobart's floating tanks, deployed with mixed results on the choppy seas of June 6, 1944.

D-Day by Anthony Beevor (2 )

The invasion was a truly multinational enterprise. The fleet consisted of 5000 landing ships, 6 battleships, 4 monitors, 23 cruisers, 104 destroyers, 152 escort vessels and 277 minesweepers. Amongst it were warships from France, Poland, The Netherlands and Norway as well as Britain, Canada and the United States.

The air campaign included 5 squadrons from New Zealand, 7 from Australia, 14 from Poland, 6 from France, 3 from Czechoslovakia, plus 2 each from Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway.

Meanwhile a fifth of the German 7th Army were Osttruppen (Poles by birth in the main.) On D-Day itself the US 4th Division fought a bizarre battle with a German cavalry unit consisting of former Red Army prisoners.

Captured Red Army hiwis in German uniform were sent back to the Soviet Union, where many were executed, but the majority were dispatched to slave labour camps.

Roughly 1m of them served under Wehrmacht command under varying degrees of duress. Americans coming across Soviet troops with central Asian or Mongolian features often mistook them for Japanese.

3 Troop of 6 Commando (Sword) included Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians and Poles. Meanwhile X Troop consisted almost entirely of German Jewish refugees. They had been issued with English names and issued with identity discs marking their religion as C of E in case they were captured. (Some RAF pilots reportedly also wore the khaki uniforms of the infantrymen they referred to as 'brown jobs' in order to avoid being shot when captured.)

On June 7 some French civilians near Saint-Marcouf found with German weapons were executed on the spot by Allied soldiers unable to conceive that they might have been accumulating these weapons in order to hand them over to the Resistance.

"Many had never been to another country where a foreign language was spoken and found it hard to see a difference between 'enemy-occupied' and just 'enemy'," Beevor notes. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the locals might say.

The greatest achievement of the Resistance was to delay the deployment of the Das Reich Division to Normandy: it took 17 days in all, 14 more than anticipated. SS reprisals were severe. At Oradour-sur-Glane 642 people were massacred.

D-Day by Anthony Beevor (1 )

"I had no idea it was so violent," my father said of the battle for Normandy after reading Beevor's latest bestseller. D-Day took place four days after his seventeenth birthday.

His brother landed on the beaches six days later with the 7th Armoured Division. He never spoke much about his experiences in Normandy.

Average German losses on the Eastern Front were 1000 per division per month in 1944, while the Red Army's were probably under 1500 per month.

In Normandy the Germans suffered 2300 losses per division per month and the Allies 2000. It was VERY violent.

Casualties on D-Day itself were lighter than expected, but by the end of the month the British had suffered 24,698 casualties, the Americans 34,034 and the Germans 80,783.

15,000 French civilians died in the pre-invasion bombing campaign. 3,000 more died on the first day, double the number of American dead. (1,465).

It is said that the people of Caen couldn't "face a ripe Camembert for a long time because of the terrible memories evoked by the smell." Red crosses made by soaking blood onto linen were placed outside the refuge at the Convent of Bon Sauvuer in the city to alert approaching aircraft. The Allies mistakenly believed that most of the population had heeded warnings to depart before the bombardment and the British assault.

Review of 2009: Non-Fiction and Film

I spent a full ten months in Antigua this year, compared to just six in 2009. It's a record for me and one I can already see myself falling short of next year.

I still don't really consider myself an ex-pat. Though I share some of my wife's interests here in Guatemala I still make my own living predominantly outside the country and haven't felt that reversing out the time I spend in the UK and Guatemala has resulted in such a massive lifestyle change as others who more consciously emigrate or indeed ex-patriate themselves.

Having such a long association with this lovely town and my local relatives by marriage, I also feel a good deal more assimilated when I'm here than other foreign residents I could mention. So call me a tourist if you like...albeit one who spends a bit more time here than most. (You most certainly won't find me calling myself a 'citizen of the world' however. Last time I overheard someone doing that, I thought what a twat! )

What's the difference between an ex-pat and an immigrant, I've had cause to ask myself a few times this year? That an ex-pat generally won't fight for his or her adopted country seems like an obvious one; in fact they generally run for their embassies at the first sign of trouble. (Though, the distinctions are very often more subtle. For example, your average American in Florence will occasionally wander around fantasising about being Italian in a way that can be contrasted with their equivalents over here, who will almost never dream of being Guatemalan.)

Anyway, 2008 was memorable in that I made good on the decision to spend more time out here and in the way that the departing Bush administration almost took the entire global economy out with them when they fumbled the winding up of Lehman Brothers.

Yet I believe that it is the contents of this year which will stick with me for longer. It's had one grim personal moment in particular, but also plenty of uplifting ones as the general sense of circling the drain eased from the late spring onwards. It has been the year that I finally found my way to Oaxaca and discovered the uncomplicated pleasures of Mazunte.

I then spent a good part of the summer back at the farm in Berkshire and was glad to be around when most needed. I've also felt personally rewarded (and useful) in the various roles I have undertaken for Commetric this year.

V and I have avoided making any major changes to the house over the last twelve months but have stored up a few biggies for Q1 2010. The local cat population has fluctuated, but we're steady on the chuchos.

Meanwhile, my investment in Amazon seven months ago has worked out so well that I don't know how much longer I can continue to deny myself a Kindle. Nevertheless I've rather scaled down my non-fiction reading this year so I've settled on a top 5 rather than a top 10:

1) The Berlin Diaries Of Marie Vasiltchikov — MARIE 'MISSIE' VASILTCHIKOV
2) The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher — KATE SUMMERSCALE
3) Agincourt — JULIET BARKER
4) Henry, Virtuous Prince — DAVID STARKEY
5) D-Day — ANTHONY BEEVOR

The opposite problem applies with my favourite films of 2009, as there were 20+ to which I accorded at least an A grade. Anyway, here — in no particular order — are the twelve I picked for my year-end chart in ultimately undisciplined fashion:

— Tony Manero
— A Perfect Getaway
— Che, Part 1
— Thirst
— The Hurt Locker
— There Will Be Blood
— Vicky Cristina Barcelona
— Gran Torino
— Moon
— Drag Me to Hell
— The Damned United
— Let the Right One In

There was also a pair of very memorable feature-lenth documentaries:
— Man on Wire
— Encounters at the End of the World

These are all 2008/9 releases. Of the comparative oldies, we also greatly enjoyed...
— The Quiet Family

BTW, one night very soon we're going to be watching The White Ribbon, Haneke's Palm D'Or winner and a movie I suspect might have made it onto this list if we'd seen it in time,.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

An enthralling account of the Victorian crime that became a cultural phenomenon. The slaying of young Saville Kent in 1860 was to become the model country house murder and Jack Whicher, the prototype Scotland Yard detective sent to resolve it, the model sleuth for a generation just beginning to experiment with the genre of investigative fiction. (Dickens was very much a detective groupie it would seem.)

Now, I've not read it myself, but the good folk at the NYT Book Review have tipped me off that Truman Capote's In Cold Blood set the stanadrd for narrative non-fiction works based around a single incident which is used to explore bigger ideas about the time in which it occurred.

Summerscale does seem to sense the need to pan out beyond the crime scene into the realities of Victorian life and the sub-plots which spin off towards the turn of the century and on the whole I think, achieves this successfully.

Yet the author admits in the afterward that in writing this book, she herself almost lost sight of the victim. I think the problem she had to grapple with is not unlike the central difficulty at the scene itself, which for a while unhinged the career of Jack Whicher himself — the limitations of Victorian-era CSI meant not only that there wasn't quite enough evidence to get a successful conviction first time round, but also that there isn't quite enough detail in the core crime story to drive the narrative from cover to cover, and just occasionally one really can feel the padding being applied.

Still I can wholeheartedly recommend this book, even though I know Richard and Judy have already done the honours!

Henry, Virtuous Prince

A book that could handle the strapline A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man..when he was perhaps a bit more of an artist.

In a radio interview earlier in the year, I heard its author observe that: "Had Henry died in 1529 he would have been forgotten, just another tedious late medieval king who tried to be Henry V."

And perhaps the worst thing that could be said about part one of Starkey's biography of the man he sees as the plus-sized axis of English history, is that it is very much the story of that king; appropriately unremarkable in places to the point of being a tad humdrum. Not the Henry VIII Part I that a less circumspect Shakespeare might have penned.

But Starkey makes no apology for refusing to read Henry backwards from what he was to become, and thus clearing himself of the unforgiveable academic sin of "whiggishness". (To be honest, you might not find this link especially illuminating). And so we have to content ourselves with this patchily intriguing account of a future tyrant's tutelage...

The second son of Henry VII, remote heir of Lancaster and king by virtue of his unlikely victory on Bosworth field, Henry junior was an auxilliary element of the solution his father had fashioned to a fifty-year-old problem: the cousins' war, known to us today as the war of the roses.

He was born in Greenwich — then known by its latin name placentia (pleasure) — and brought up at nearby Eltham palace, favourite home of his Yorkist grandfather Edward IV, whom he is said to have much resembled. His mother was Elizabeth of York, Edward's daughter with the beauteous Elizabeth Woodville and thus sister to the princes in the tower. It was she, Starkey suggests, who taught Henry how to read and write. Unlike his elder brother Arthur Henry was to pass his boyhood — García Márquez-style — in a household made up almost exclusively of strong-willed women, something which may account for his later tendency to marry for love...on several occasions.

In the early days Henry's piety was of the conventional late-medieval kind, but his formative association with the likes of Moore, Erasmus and Mountjoy would produce an unusually latinate monarch and one uniquely in touch with the new compositional style. The Reformation in England could not have developed in the way it did if this had not been the case, Starkey insists.

This poetical, musical and undoubtedly learned young prince was destined, once elevated to the throne, to become the greatest disappointment of his mentors' lives. As Starkey puts it, perhaps anticipating that contemporary history will quickly supply the necessary irony, "It was not the first time that the advent of a young, able, good looking and charismatic leader had provoked an outbreak of messianic joy. Nor would it be the last."

Henry VII survived numerous attempts to reverse out the Tudor takeover. One Yorkist pretender, defeated at the battle of Stoke in 1486 was, in what Starkey describes as an act of "ironic mercy"condemned to spend the rest of his life working in the royal kitchens. Something of a "fiscal terrorist" the young Henry's father was never to achieve genuine mass popularity and indeed was never 'one of us' as far as the English nobility were concerned.

He had invested his second son at a very young age as a knight and Duke of York in order to counter the pretensions of Perkin Warbeck (then posing at a distance as the missing Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York) and seemed inclined to tolerate Henry's laddish counterside which found a natural outlet in the tournament.

Jousting was then the almost exclusive preserve of disruptive, ne'er-do-well knights with distinctively Yorkist sympathies. Henry inserted himself into this potentially insurgent subculture of high-status hoodlums with relish. While his father yet lived he would be prevented from taking part in full-on jousts, but soon after replacing him on the throne was, along with his then wing man William Compton, competing incognito as a 'stranger knight' in manner familiar to readers of medieval romance.

Around this time in his life there occurred a couple of stand-out incidents. Firstly the adroit counter-coup effected at the time of his father's death.

Such was the unprecedented level of privacy that Henry VII had established at court that the fact of his expiry could be covered-up for several days, allowing Henry and his closest advisors to dispense with the dead king's least likeable cronies and to shore up their position before anyone else got a whiff of dynastic weakness. Starkey also provides a vivid commentary of Henry VII's funeral at Westminster Abbey, outlining how there were in effect two kings in England up until the moment that the coffin was ritually divested of all its royal and knightly insignia and lowered into the tomb.

The other notable circumstance was a misadventure presaging future upheavals. Catherine of Aragon, youngest child of Reyes Catolicos Ferdinand and Isabella and the Spanish infanta who had apparently shagged Henry's older brother Arthur to death, would eventually be passed on to him after being declared technically unblemished for the purposes of international and well as marital relations.

Catherine's first pregnancy with her second husband was to conclude prematurely with a miscarriage, but her physician misinterpreted her persistently swollen belly as another child in the uterus and the Queen was to retire into a ritual confinement, a PR mis-step which would ultimately cause considerable embarrassment to all concerned, and put her husband into a sustained filth.

Part 2 will no doubt feature all the juicy stuff of legend. I am still of the suspicion though that Henry VIII, unlike say the Henry V of Juliet Barker's Agincourt, is somehow a lesser figure than his myth would have us believe.

Starkey however has no doubt of his enduring importance: "He is my Cleopatra," he confessed in that same radio interview. The king who Charles Dickens famously described as "a spot of blood and grease on the history of England" was, he avers, the real driving force behind the burst of creativity which would follow in his daughter's reign (Shalespeare et al.) and the first to visualise the British Isles as a single political unit.

A bit of an old-school Tory himself, Starkey tends to liken Henry VIII's momentous rejection of the Roman Catholic church as an early expression of euro-scepticism, where the issue of the king's divorce is recast as a debate about whether the Vatican has the authority to decide on matters of significant national importance such as the Tudor succession.

Anyway, with the sequel yet to be published Starkey took on the complete story with his Channel 4 series earlier in the summer and it is to this that I shall now turn...

Agincourt

Is the battle of Hastings was famously a victory for the equestrian over the pedestrian classes, Agincourt, at the opposite end of the Middle Ages, produced an unlikely reverse result...for every Englishman on that autumn day in 1415 fought on foot, the King included. And although the English upper classes had embarked on this cross-channel escapade in order to enforce a union of states already suggested by the Lancastrian monarch's coat of arms, their victory would unleash English political and cultural life from the francophonic hegemony originally applied by the Normans. 

As soon as I finished Juliet Barker's account of Hank Cinq's epochal gamble, I handed it to my father, who in turn found it un-putdownable. He did however note that the battle itself plays a rather small part in this often dense account of Henry V's first continental campaign. Indeed, if logistics are your thing, there's plenty to get excited about here. Personally I liked the sound of the 'job bag' system that Henry set up so that he could keep an accurate track on the sums 'indented' by those boarding the ships of the invasion fleet he had hastily put together (in part by pawning his own jewels), and was surprised to find that the process of haggling between crown and parliament for the necessary war-chest was already reminiscent of the separation of powers that characterises American government today. 

It would take Henry's expedition three days to disembark in Normandy, and so frustrated were the French at their Constable's inability to defeat this D-Day precursor on the beaches that they later accused him of treachery. In fact it seems that D'Albret had simply had the bad luck to position himself on the wrong shore of the Seine in advance of the landing. Henry certainly made a number of crucial tactical decisions after the capture of Harfleur which prevented his cause experiencing a bloody letdown, such as the short-cut taken between Corbie and Nesle which allowed the English to cross the Somme unhindered. They were also helped by the fact that the French were obliged under the rules of chivalry to give their enemies the choice of battleground, and that subsequently — and more mysteriously — they permitted them to advance on the eve of battle to the narrowest part of the chosen field, thus spannering the home team's pre-battle strategy of outflanking Henry's longbowmen. 

It seems however that the flower of French aristcracy had a perfectly viable plan for overcoming Henry's smaller, dysentry-ridden force (archers included), and might have carried the day but for their comparative lack of centralised leadership. They had set aside many of their factional differences in order to gather there in such large numbers, but it appears that every senior lord present was determined to take up a position in the van, and some accounts tell of so many heraldic banners in the French ranks, that they ended up becoming an obstruction. 

My father remains 'amazed' that Henry, strutting around in full royal battle regalia, wasn't singled out and whacked by a dedicated hit squad of French knights fairly early on. (Someone did however manage to lop the fleur-de-lis off the top of his helm with a well-aimed swipe.) He also expressed astonishment at the levels of sophistication which prevailed in higher-end European life in this period. 

I somehow managed to skip the later middle ages at both school and university, and it is less the incipient modernity than the post-medievality that fascinates me now — post used here in the same sense as post-modern, for all over Barker's book there is evidence of the courtly culture of the Middle Ages disappearing up its own rear end. 

The Monty Pythonesque qualities of fifteenth century warfare are here epitomised by Raoul, sire de Gaucourt, defender of Harfleur and founder member of the Order of The White Lady on a Green Shield and the slightly kinkier Order of the Fer de Prisonnier. For men such as these there was no better way to settle the issue of a siege than underground mounted combat a l'outrance in the narrow tunnels dug by humbler-class (and in this instance Welsh) miners. 

Yet it was realpolitik driving Henry's decision to postpone for years the release of de Gaucourt — in spite of the fact that this colourful knight had successfully completed the quest mandated by his captor to recover Henry's crown, coronation orb and assorted fragments of the true cross: all pinched by light-fingered Frenchies during the course of the battle. 

Barker's book nevertheless also serves as a reminder that when we describe the Saudis as 'medieval' we are in fact doing a an injustice to the men-at-arms who faced up to each other near the village of Azincourt. Theirs was indeed a maculine, chauvinistic ethos, but the special courts of morality they set up, were there not to try adulterers for capital crimes but rather to shame those male members of their class who had committed "offences of chivalry against ladies." 

Most memorable character? French man of the cloth and possible double-agent Raoul le Gay, who after 'escaping' from captivity at Harfleur reported to the local Normandy authorities that the worst part of his experience had been the English beer.

The Berlin Diaries of Marie 'Missie' Vasiltchikov (2)

There's a new book out about the Nazis' relationship with Germany's blue-blood elite: High Society in the Third Reich by Fabrice d'Almeida. 

This review of it by Christopher Clark would seem to indicate that d'Almeida's argument potentially debunks one of my biggest take-outs so far from Missie's diary - that upper class Germans generally regarded the Nazis as creepy and rather preposterous parvenus.

For it appears that by 1938 nearly a fifth of all senior SS officers were titled noblemen and after physicians (43% were party members in '37), aristocrats were in fact the most Nazified sector of German society. Berlin's nightclubs reportedly  'heaved' with members of the minor rural nobility in black SS uniforms. 

d'Almeida explains how the regime co-opted the elites, buying off senior army officers with lavish gifts and associating themselves heavily with toff pastimes such as horse racing (the use of selective breeding here appealed strongly) and bash throwing. 

Missie on the other hand gives the impression that the refined circles she moved in were practically an opposition in waiting. There has to be some truth in this because many in her immediate circle were key participants in the failed July 20 plot. (see Tom Cruise in Valkyrie...or rather don't.) and in reading her diaries I was genuinely surprised at how much of pre-1918 European high society continued to function within what was clearly a far completely totalitarian regime than that of Stalin's Soviet Union...at least prior to 1942 when Goebbels was to declare that "the bourgeois era with its false and misleading notion of humaneness is over." (One is perhaps led to re-consider the controversial — and clearly distorted — view recently expressed by Nicholson Baker in Human Smoke, that the course of the early years of the war contributed to making Nazi Germany a more single-mindedly murderous place. ) 

A week or so ago I listened to Jason Isaacs being interviewed by Simon Mayo on R5 prior to the release of Good. Mayo expressed the opinion that he found it hard to believe that Viggo Mortensen's character John Halder wasn't on some level aware that SS membership would make him an accessory to the crime of the century. Isaacs response was fairly credible I thought: that in the early 30s at least, German citizens could have had only a limited notion of what the regime was capable of in the context of 'total war', and that many people tend to compartmentalise their political likes and dislikes. 

Missie's diary makes it pretty clear that 30s Germany was a very different kind of political society. Resistance to the fascist programme was far less likely to come in this instance from a mass of informed citzens whose views were tempered by an uncensored media. (Isaacs made the point too that when the film was shown in Eastern Europe people there had much less trouble understanding the absence of conserted protest.)  

Two groups might have put up more of a fight, but were inherently more likely to take to the salon than to the street. The bourgeoisie (rather like the Chinese middle classes today) had anyway largely sold their souls to authoritarianism in return for economic prosperity, and the upper classes meanwhile were rather too committed to the dream of a German military resurgence. 

The diaries do give a tantalising glimpse of what a lone, high-born individual might have achieved. On Tuesday January 25th 1944 Missie learned of the death in aerial combat of her friend Major Prince Heinrich von Sayn-Wittgenstein (pictured), Germany's leading night-fighter ace at the time with 83 victories to his name. 

"Only a few days ago Heinrich had rung me up at the office. He had been to Hitler's HQ to receive from the hands of  'the Almighty' the Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross. He said on the phone "Ich war bei unseren Liebling" ['I have been to see our Darling'] and added that, to his surprise, his hand gun had not been removed before he entered 'the Presence' (as is customary nowadays) so that it might have been possible to 'bump him off' right then and there. He went on to elaborate on the subject until I remarked that it might be preferable to continue the conversation elsewhere. When we met a little later, he started to speculate about the possibility of blowing himself up with Hitler when they shook hands. Poor boy, little did he suspect that he had only a few more days to live! And yet he seemed so fragile that I always worried about him. He had become Germany's most successful night fighter, was constantly in action and was clearly worn out. He often spoke of the agony he felt about having to kill people and how, whenever possible, he tried to hit the enemy plane in such a way that the crew could bail out."

And on Sunday February 6: 

"Melanie [Bismark] brought back some earth and odd bits of his plane, such as the windshield and parts of the motor. She thought his parents in Switzerland might wants some relics. I hardly think so. It only makes things worse. If only they had not sent the three boys back to Germany when the war started! What with their Russian and French ancestors they were barely German in the first place. It is thought that Heinrich was unconscious when he hit the ground, as his parachute never opened and he was found, shoeless, quite some distance from the plane. He usually wore light pumps, with just a coat thrown over his civilian clothes. I remember him going up once in a raincoat thrown over a dinner jacket. He had become such an ace that he did whatever he pleased. The rest of his crew survived, as he made them jump when the plane was hit. Either he injured his head jumping out last or else he was wounded and could not pull open his parachute. Melanie gave me some scraps of metal as a keepsake. Maybe this will make me realise at last that we have lost him."

 

The Berlin Diaries of Marie "Missie" Vasiltchikov (1)

Missie's diary takes one back immediately to an era when people could put up with quite a lot in terms of chaos and destruction, not to mention insane and incompetent politicians. 

Our generation in comparison is a bit pathetic. A couple of banks go tits up and we lose the will to live. Bomber Harris might have saved himself the hassle of months of day and night bombing raids (which ultimately seemed to have had little impact on German morale) and just parachuted a sneezing Mexican into the Third Reich's capital. 

Sunday Feb. 6, 1944: "Much of the Kufürstendamm is now destroyed. Tried to look up Sigrid Görtz who lived just behind it. Her house was the only one still standing. I went up the stairs but they stopped in mid-air and her flat at the top was gone; nobody knew where she was."

The Bible, The Biography (1)

Whatever one's views on religion, this fascinating book provides considerable insight into one of the abiding dichotomies in human psychology — that some people see the wood while others can only spot the trees.

Karen Armstrong was briefly a member of a teaching order of Catholic nuns before ducking out of it as an undergrad. She has since become a leading academic voice in the field of "comparative religion", an admirable but probably pointless effort to demonstrate that we can all be made to see the trees.

Three pages in and the lapsed monja delivers the the eye-catching statement that "until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life," one of those over-broad and actually rather falsifiable historical generalisations - like 'before Colombus hardly anyone suspected that the world was spherical' - which here serves to announce her broader intention of taking on those perennial wood-seers, the fundamentalists, and perhaps also the very notion that all we can ask of the Bible is how much factual information it might contain.

She insists that the holy book's earliest writers and readers saw it as a handy gadget for assisting exegesis, then considered "a spiritual discipline rather than an academic pursuit." Their goal was a glimpse of transcendence, the so-called coincidentia oppositorum, an ecstatic sense of wholeness.

Students of comparative religion will no doubt thus start pondering whether Eastern and Western spiritual traditions can be reconciled as easily as the wood and the trees. But then they might also recall that this is a Latin term deriving from Platonism, itself not to be taken up once more by Western monotheists until Christendom's re-encounter with ancient wisdom via Islamic scholarship...but Armstrong isn't really interested in these sort of historical niceties.

She explains that the ancient Israelites appear to have had two separate monarchies each with its own scriptural tradition. Israel called its principal deity Elohim, while Judah in the south referred to Him as Yahweh. The former presided over a more 'transcendent' kind of religion but was ultimately to be ousted by Yahweh as chairman of the Divine Assembly. "But the Bible shows that right up to the destruction of the temple by Nebudchadnezzar in 586BC Israelites also worshipped a host of other deities", Armstrong asserts. These included the fertility god Baal and his sister-spouse Anat, agricultural experts who effectively compensated for Yahweh's over-specialisation in the martial arts.

And, Fundamentalists please note, Genesis wasn't the part of the Bible that was written first.

After the destruction of the temple a priest (or maybe en entire new school of priests) emerged that scholars have dubbed "P". He revised the Israelites' concept of God to permit Him to reside wherever his people were, and not just in a purpose-built place of worship. Unlike the Deuteronomists before him P's religious vision was inclusive with a strong stress on reconciliation.

Armstrong feels that P deliberately contrasted Yahweh's creation of the cosmos with that of Marduk, God of the then gloatingly victorious Babylonians. Instead of creation emerging from conflict - and needing to be renewed annually - P insisted that it was all done and dusted in six days.

Creation myths had a practical value for the Bible-bashers of antiquity, Armstrong advises, tending to be recited at the start of the new year or when individuals undertook a new project. "In the ancient world cosmogony was a therapeutic rather than a factual genre". There she goes again.

More to follow....