All Steak, No Sizzle

The Man Who Recorded the World

by John Szwed

As a musician and music lover with a strongly developed sense of history, I have great respect for the late Alan Lomax and his work as a musicologist. This one man studied, recorded and preserved an improbably large share of the extant corpus of American folk music. The influence of his recordings and writings on the development of popular music in the late twentieth century is matched by no-one else, not even Bob Dylan. Without Lomax, Dylan might never have existed. More broadly still, black American music might have had a harder struggle and possibly even failed to find a mass white audience without his efforts, which means the great musical explosion that resulted from this cultural conjunction couldn’t have happened without him either. The world owes Alan Lomax an incommensurable artistic debt.

I was excited when I picked up this book. The little I knew about Lomax – his shoestring travels across America with a recording machine in the trunk of his car, his risky encounters with redneck cops, prison wardens and the suspicious poor, his adoption of the blues singer Leadbelly, his tireless championship of black causes, his troubles with Senator McCarthy and the FBI, his purist rejection of artists like Dylan who put the material he had discovered and preserved to their own artistic uses – made it plain that he had been a thoroughly fascinating character, the sort of man about whom it would be impossible to write a dull book. This, after all, was the fellow who ended up rolling in the dirt with Albert Grossman at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 after Grossman caught him and Pete Seeger trying to take an axe to a power cable while Dylan and his band were on stage. How could a book about a man like that be boring?

Oh, easy. Just leave it to John Szwed. An associate of Lomax during the great man’s later years, his attitude towards his subject is adoringly, obsessively hagiographic. In this plodding, barely readable book, the arc of Lomax’s life-story is lost to view under a leaden mass of irrelevant detail. It seems that Szwed was determined to capture every move and gesture made by his subject, to describe and comment upon every essay, article, letter, postcard or shopping-list that Lomax ever wrote, regardless of its relative importance or thematic value. This suffocating mass of fact completely obscures what is really important in Lomax’s story. One of the most important traits of a biographer or historian is selectivity. Szwed appears quite incapable of it.

He is also incapable of admitting any serious faults in his hero, despite the evidence – given to us here in as much tedious detail as everything else – that Lomax was manipulative, selfish and self-serving, and tended to exploit and betray the women in his life. The author finds excuses for it all. Lomax was academically and politically quarrelsome – but in this book it’s always the other guy’s fault. Szwed does not even scruple to slap on a coat or two of whitewash if the occasion demands it. Having abandoned sequential reading about three-fifths of the way through the book, I skipped forward to see what the author had to say about the Newport incident and found that he barely mentions it, and then only to dismiss it as ‘apocryphal’. This is simply untrue; several eyewitnesses have gone down in print with their descriptions of the incident and there is no doubt that it happened.

This dreary, misleading book has only one redeeming quality: the obsessive depth of its scholarship with respect to matters concerning its subject. Perhaps one day a real historian or biographer will find it useful as a map to the territory and produce a really good biography of Alan Lomax. There’s no doubt that one is needed. This isn’t it.

Home Never Looked So Good

The New Granta Book of Travel
Edited by Liz Jobey

This was a considerable disappointment. I enjoy superior travel writing, by which I mean the work of authors like Sir Richard Burton, Robert Byron, Jan Morris, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban. The last three are collected here, and Raban also contributes an introduction. Seeing their names on the contents page were, for me, part of the incentive for picking up this anthology.

Which turns out to be, largely, a collection of pieces by Oxbridge alumni about their travels in some of the world’s nastier places. Disaster and woe are pervasive: there are accounts here of a devastating flood on the Mississippi (Raban), the way of life of an Iraqi insurgent (Wendell Steavenson), the 2004 Asian tsunami as experienced in Sri Lanka (John Bornemon), and life under the gun in Kashmir (Basharat Peer). Even when external circumstances are not as overtly threatening as these, the quantum of misery in most of the pieces is high.

Thus we are privy to the anxieties and feelings of dislocation suffered by a newly arrived Ugandan refugee in England (Albino Ochero-Okello), the trials of a homosexual in a primitive tribal culture (Pierre Clastres), the collapse of the Bengal jute industry (Ian Jack), and the mutual exploitation of locals and foreign tourists at Thai holiday resorts (Decca Aitkenhead). Paul Theroux contributes a short, shameful confession of a similar kind, and W.G. Sebald writes of his compulsive, neurotic and possibly metafictional travels round Europe. Redmond O’Hanlon fails to find the Congo Dinosaur but worries about picking up AIDS instead. Rory Stewart gives us Pakistan as a failed state in thrall to a failed religion. I kept the tsunami story for last, because I am Sri Lankan, and found it a thorough disappointment — dull, culturally blinkered and poorly observed.

Essentially, this is a book of travel writing featuring places nobody in their right mind would ever want to visit. I suppose the editor was trying to be edgy and original, or something, but surely one of the great pleasures of travel writing is that of sharing an accomplished author’s experience of a place one dreams of visiting. There’s barely a smidgen of that here. Most of the non-awful locations visited are in the British Isles. Of the exceptions to this rule, Bruce Chatwin’s contribution is just a notebook excerpt, while James Buchan’s portrait of a small Iowa town is sapless and full of boring statistics.

There were three pieces I liked. O’Hanlon’s contribution, depressing as it was, was nevertheless meaty and full of human and natural interest; I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I greatly admired it. Colin Thubron’s memoir of a journey through Siberia was also excellent. The best essay in the book for me was the least pretentiously written: Decca Aitkenhead’s ‘Lovely Girls, Very Cheap’, which offers a devastatingly accurate account of sex and drugs tourism in Thailand. It kept me reading and nodding my head all the way to the end. This woman is a brilliant, empathetic observer.

Apart from these three fine pieces, though, this anthology is rubbish. Its character is perfectly distilled in one of the shorter essays, Andrew O’Hagen’s description of a voyage down the Clyde in a sewage scow in the company of a group of gluttonous old-age pensioners. This particular piece can stand as a metaphor for the whole book.

Be My Enemy
by Ian McDonald

I loved the first book in this series, Planesrunner. I loved this one too, because it kept me hooked all the way through and left me bereft and disappointed when I turned the last page.

Yes, the basic conceit and the plot are a bit too close to those of Iain M. Banks’s Transition for comfort — down to the mantis-like sexiness of the Chief Villainess — but the concept of a chase across parallel timelines in different universes is big enough to accommodate both novels and a few dozen others as well. McDonald’s narrative and imaginative powers are strong enough that the comparison with Banks, one of the best writers who ever took up science fiction, does not shame him.

Unfortunately, there is a great big hole in the plot of this sequel, which rather spoils the fun. I won’t reveal it here, except to say it concerns electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs. It’s not a scientific booboo. It’s a storytelling booboo — a very bad one, which seriously spoils an otherwise great read.

Less devastatingly, but rather annoyingly, I found Mr McDonald, whose intelligence I have always heretofore admired, talking utter rubbish in places here. At one point our juvenile hero, Everett Singh, ‘discovers’ that you can’t be afraid on your own because ‘fear needs an audience’. Really? I can’t count the times I’ve been afraid and alone. Another time, Everett says that ‘guns don’t make people feel powerful’. Try telling that to the sick losers who take their revenge against society through mass shootings.

A brilliant read all the same, and a superbly poised transition-point ending.
Can’t wait for Everness #3.

Planesrunner
by Ian McDonald

I found this great juvenile while looking in the library for more books by Ian McDonald, whose The Dervish House I recently finished and thoroughly enjoyed.

This book isn’t a complex interweaving of plot-lines and cultures like The Dervish House, although there is some of the latter. It’s a ‘straightforward’ tale about a mentally gifted but otherwise normal adolescent boy who follows his kidnapped physicist father into a parallel universe — the book takes Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ hypothesis of quantum mechanics as fact — in order to rescue him. It features a fabulous airship piloted by a teenage girl runaway with snow-white hair, a sexy evil villainess and a device that allows them, as well as various other props and characters, to jump from one universe to another.

Although written for young people, I found the book compelling and convincing as an adult reader. The scientific speculation is credible and so is the psychology, the characters are vivid and easy to identify with, the level of tension and excitement is perfectly maintained and the whole thing is thoroughly believable. It also drew me right in.

Congratulations to Mr McDonald on a modest but perfectly realized achievement. Now to find the other books in the series.

The Poet Has Come Down to Earth

The Book of My Enemy

by Clive James

I love a good poem, which is why I so rarely read any poetry. But there are no stinkers – none that I found, anyway – and few clunkers in this collection of Clive James’s career in verse. 

Mr James is often cleverer than many readers will be willing to tolerate, and his Ian Flemingish love of scientific and technical terminology, and of unpoetic objects like Focke-Wulf Fw. 152s, will put some readers off – especially if they happen to be female. I don’t suppose his general view of things would appeal to many women, anyway. Clive’s a man’s man. That’s okay with me.

Since most of these poems were written in the Seventies and Eighties, there’s a Cold War day-before-Doomsday air about many of them. Reading them today almost makes one nostalgic:

Snow falls again. The atmosphere turns white.
The airfields of East Anglia are socked in.
The atom bombers will not fly tonight.
Tonight the Third World War will not begin.

The earlier verse tends to be shorter, less ambitious and more involved with traditional poetical concerns — that is, with what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. I didn’t care for it so much. The later verse, in James’s mature style, is about just about everything, and it’s brilliant.

A generation ago, London literary pundits debated whether James was even a poet. Hadn’t he started out as a pop songwriter (and a not very successful one at that)? Didn’t his embrace of old Italian rhyme-schemes (ottava, terza rima) suggest an unhealthy obsession with technical matters, and perhaps an agoraphobic recoil from the wide open spaces of Modernism? The self-consciousness with which he deployed these metres suggests that he wasn’t too sure about it himself. Being Australian didn’t help, of course. 

Still, a poet and a good one is what Mr James indubitably is. And now that he’s translated the whole of Dante’s Commedia, it seems people are willing to accept him as one. Good on old Clive; those laurels were hard-earned. Here’s a collection of the work he did to earn them, and it’s brilliant. Buy. Read. Enjoy.

Deliquescent

The Gift of Rain

by Tan Twan Eng

Mr Tan starts out with a brilliant set of ingredients: the island of Penang immediately before and during the Second World War and the Japanese occupation; a handsome Eurasian boy, just coming of age, who unlike most of his kind is from the highest ranks of both English and Chinese society; a mysterious Japanese diplomat who rents a small island belonging to the boy’s father and proceeds to teach the boy Aikido (he is, of course, a Japanese advance agent and spy); tropical gardens and jungles, misty hillsides, exotic food and culture, strange Oriental faiths and philosophies; the Straits of Malacca; the shades of Conrad and Maugham and Theroux. It should be a recipe for dynamite.

Instead we get a damp squib. And no wonder, because Mr Tan is as weepy as a girl. He’s great on evoking the more conventionally exotic elements of Malaysia’s multi-ethnic culture, a whiz at describing old Chinese temples and picturesque Penang houses, excels at creating pretty little Merchant-Ivory images (handsome English boy going off to war in his sailor suit and the family Rolls, that kind of thing), but when he gets on to dialogue and character he’s a drip.

His drippiness is somewhat restrained in the first few chapters. His descriptions of the boy and his sensei at practice, and the martial-arts content in general, are workmanlike and quite vivid; apparently Mr Tan is some kind of Aikido master himself. But after a while his intially strong and elegant writing degenerates into something that resembles airline-magazine travelogue crossed with chick-lit, and there it stays. His hero is a sentimental young bore, much given to introspection of a rather pathetic sort, and forever melting with love for his father, his late mother, his grandfather, his siblings and above all for his sensei, for whom he seems to nurse a strong but unconscious homosexual crush (one which seems to be reciprocated, though as at page 278, where I stopped reading, all they’d done was beat each other up and then get misty at each other). It isn’t at all clear that Mr Tan intends us to take his hero as gay, though since the story is about a youth on the verge of manhood and there are lots of personable men around him but no female interest in his life whatsoever, one is entitled draw one’s own conclusons.

It’s a pity the author couldn’t have been a little braver about this; it would have helped the book a lot. Perhaps there’s a revelation at the end — big deal, if so. What really makes The Gift of Rain a drag is that Mr Tan doesn’t know how to tell a story, and his writing slowly collapses into a flabby, cliché-strewn mess.

Just before I gave up reading, the author had attempted a grand set-piece: a party thrown by the hero’s father, who is one of the biggest English tycoons in Malaya, and to which all the active characters in the story so far are invited, along with most of the rest of Penang society. This is where the author’s powers of description, so puissant when it comes to delineating marble fountains and places of worship with snakes in the rafters, should have been working overtime; instead, the party is given short shrift, turned into a hunt by our doughty heroes for a Man with a Bomb, who turns out, in true Boy’s Own Paper style, to be a cowardly Indian Communist with greasy hair whom everyone happily beats up, to the evident approval of the author. At one point he does give us a brief look at the other guests diverting themselves (in the absence of their saboteur-hunting hosts) with a drunken brawl, which is broken up by the daughter of the house firing a gun into the air – at which the various diplomats, tycoons, newspaper editors and other pillars of society stop hitting each other and go home.

I thought the real action (the Japanese invasion) would start after that — I was already more than halfway through the book — but instead the author took me strolling down Armenian Street to show me at yet another exquisite Penang house. I left him and his grandfather at the gate, and tiptoed away to write this review.

Apparently this was longlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize. Must have been a bloody long list. 

A Travesty

The Science Fiction Handbook

Edited by Nick Hubble & Aris Mousoutzanis

This book is a travesty, an act of politically-correct academic deceit.

Published by Bloomsbury as part of its Literature & Culture Handbooks series, it is intended as a textbook for use by people following ‘science fiction studies’ courses at university level. However, it completely misrepresents the history, ethos and spirit of science fiction.

The history and content of SF makes it a largely male literature. Its conventional subject matter — new technology, space exploration, electronic brains, future societies — was of the kind that attracts more male than female interest. SF began as, and largely continues to be, a thoroughly male-dominated field, though with increasing female participation since the late Sixties. To this day, most science-fiction writers (including most of the best ones) and most science-fiction readers are male.

Maybe this is unfair. Maybe science fiction would be much better if it were written by women as often and as successfully as men, or was read by as many women as men. I don't know and, for the purposes of this review, I don't care.

What I care about is that a book claiming to provide ‘a comprehensive guide to the genre and how to study it for students new to the field’ (I'm quoting the publisher's introduction on the back cover) should provide an accurate and representative survey of the field. This The Science Fiction Handbook conspicuously fails to do, because its editors have fallen down before the baleful academic idol of Political Correctness and done obeisance.

On Page 31, they offer a list of 21 'major science fiction authors', whose works are discussed later in the book. Eight of them, or nearly two-fifths of the number, are women. Among them are 

• Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing, two conventional literary authors who have dabbled in science-fiction tropes (future societies, alien visitations) without actually doing justice either to science (Lessing, in particular, was a scientific illiterate) or the conventions of the genre;
• Naomi Mitchison, the author of one great SF novel, Memoirs of A Spacewoman, but far better known as an author of general fiction, with over 70 books in various genres and styles to her credit; 
• Gwynneth Jones, best known as a fantasy writer; 
• Octavia E. Butler, a moderately successful SF writer who happens to be not only female, but black.

None of them would make most readers' lists of 21 great SF writers. They have been chosen only in order to flesh out the feminine side of the list. Because female representation at the top table of SF is so scanty, the editors chose to pick this bunch of also-rans over male authors who were true giants in the field.

Here are some of the authors the book leaves out.:

– Isaac Asimov
– Greg Bear
– Orson Scott Card
– Arthur C. Clarke
– Frank Herbert
– Larry Niven
– Frederik Pohl
– Gene Wolfe

I could go on in that vein for several pages, but you get the idea.

You can see what's happening here: authors of hard, ie technical SF and authors whose politics don't conform to the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy of nonscientific academia have been discriminated against. There is also an excess of British representation, doubtless because the editors are British academics.

Students unfamiliar with SF (the stated target audience) will receive a completely distorted idea of the field from this book. I need not say that the feminist/left-wing/arts over science bias continues throughout; every page drips with it. As a lifelong SF aficionado, I call it a travesty.

The editors, Nick Hubble and Aris Moustoutzanis, have Ph.D's and all, but they are mountebanks and deceivers nonetheless. Spurn them.

If you want to read a good book about science fiction, I recommend Brian W. Aldiss's Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction.