#30: No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo, by Redmond O’Hanlon

Just what was Redmond O’Hanlon doing in the Congo? He’s not an explorer—the missionaries and the corporate resource scouts had been all over the remote northern jungles of the Republic of the Congo well before him. He’s not a scientist, though he feels duty bound to ID just about every bird species he encounters, infallibly giving us a couple of sentences describing plumage and behavior. (The hammerkop, with and its huge ungainly nest did make an impression.) In fact, O’Hanlon is curiously lax when it comes to justifying his expedition. He claims to be searching for a dinosaur that has been sighted in a remote lake—a kind of African Loch Ness monster. But he never really does anything with this pretext—neither exploits its farcical potential nor pretends to take it seriously. The lake in question, we later find, is essentially a wide, shallow pond which is in the process of drying up.

If nothing else, of course, he’s gathering material for this book, and the result is a strange mixture of ignorance and incompetence on the one hand, and empathy and insight on the other. There’s a kind of brinksmanship at work, as though O’Hanlon were flaunting his amateurism, demonstrating that the purest motive is no motive at all. How terribly British.

No Mercy is the third book O’Hanlon has written of this type—the first was Into the Heart of Borneo, the second, In Trouble Again, about an expedition to the Amazon jungle. After No Mercy, he wrote one more book—about spending time on a fishing trawler in the North Atlantic—and has been silent since. His modus operandi is to recruit a fellow academic as a companion and then set off for the most inhospitable place possible. I read the Borneo book almost 20 years ago and liked it—I don’t remember a great deal, except that his companion was the poet James Fenton, and that Fenton was reading Anna Karenina as they waded through the swamps of Borneo. This time his companion is an American zoologist named Lary Shaffer. Shaffer is reading Martin Chuzzlewit as they wade through the swamps of Africa. Hmm…

O’Hanlon essentially disregards the history, anthropology, and politics of central Africa. Everything we learn from this book is anecdotal, incidental. Fortunately, the incidents are often astonishing, and O’Hanlon is a good enough writer to capture them in their profound weirdness. O’Hanlon is sort of a myopic writer—he’s good on things that happen within 10 feet of him, not so good on the larger context.

He hires a sort of entourage to squire him around the jungle. The main guide is a man named Marcellin Agnagna, who is both a biologist with an advanced degree (obtained in Cuba) and a native son of the remote country that O’Hanlon and his party traverse. The rest of the posse is composed mostly of Marcellin’s siblings, cousins, and associates (all men). O’Hanlon is a big, rich fish that Marcellin has landed, and it’s appropriate that he share this bounty with his kin.

O’Hanlon devotes many pages to his observations of Marcellin and family. As they make their way first up river from the capital and then through remote outposts and into the jungle, we read about how the members of this crew are constantly searching for young women to have sex with. There may be some insights into the ways and means of Africa in these observations, but mostly they read like a letter home from a shy young university freshman describing dormitory shenanigans. He is also fascinated by the Africans’ obsession with sorcery—he is at times amazed by their superstitiousness, but then manages to acquire his own “fetish” at one point and keeps it on his person at all times. This fetish is a small fur pouch containing what O’Hanlon assumes is part of a human finger.

O’Hanlon writes about his companions as though they were characters in a novel—because he is not in Africa to accomplish or discover anything, his companions are his work, and he depicts them with a novelist’s eye: there is Nze, the great lover, and Manou the sensitive lad with self-esteem issues. But most of all there is Marcellin who is by turns erudite, haughty, whimsical, frightened, and angry. It’s amazing to consider that this is a real person and not just a character in a book—I can even google him and see what he looks like. (He is only ever mentioned online in connection with the mythical dinosaur, the Mokèlé-mbèmbé.) I wonder what kind of book Marcellin himself would write about the months he spent squiring Redmond O’Hanlon around the jungle? Marcellin would seem to have much more at stake than O’Hanlon. O’Hanlon has to worry about keeping good notes, and not running out of supplies or money. Marcellin has to worry about keeping his extended family employed and fed, about his career as a government official and academic, and about keeping the crazy white man alive.

O’Hanlon adopts a baby gorilla in the final part of the book, and in his role as surrogate momma he lets the gorilla cling to him 24 hours a day. O’Hanlon’s clothes are perpetually soiled with gorilla shit as he makes his way back out to the outposts of civilization. Clearly, O’Hanlon is as close to losing his mind by this point as are most of his companions.

No Mercy reminds me of one of those documentaries about a project gone off the tracks—Lost in La Mancha, for example. Except that Redmond O’Hanlon is both the perpetrator of the disaster that we are witnessing, and the witness who is capturing this disaster for us. Depending on which Redmond O’Hanlon you are talking about, the book is either a fiasco or a skillful depiction of a fiasco. Either way, I was ready for this book to end well before it did.

#29: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by George Meredith

The past is another country, and after stepping off the train in England in 1859, it took me about 150 pages to get my bearings in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Dickens is easier, because his writing is so visual, and he gives us a careful portrait of each character. Meredith is ironic and allusive; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is almost more Milton than Dickens—metaphors and allusion are frequently extended and elliptical:

You are amazons, ladies, at Saragossa, and a thousand citadels—wherever there is strife, and Time is to be taken by the throat. Then shall few men match your sublime fury. But what if you see a vulture, visible only to yourselves, hovering over the house you are gaily led by the torch to inhabit? Will you not crouch and be cowards?

Without context, I realize, this is incomprehensible. With context—that is, in the course of reading this book, it was pretty close to incomprehensible. Amazons? Saragossa? He’s saying that sometimes women are bold, and sometimes not. There may be more to it than that—I’m not sure. It’s a kind of “mock epic,” where the trials and tribulations of modern men and women are presented as through in a Homeric epic—the contrast is supposed to be humorous. You can still amuse modern audiences by presenting mundane affairs in exalted language, provided your epic is one that is familiar to your readers, such as the Bible. Shakespeare would probably work too. Beyond that, you wouldn't have much of an audience.

Anyway, after 100 pages or so I was able to tune in the signal more or less, and found the book somewhat engaging. Richard Feverel is the son of Sir Austin Feverel, a wealthy landowner. Soon after Richard is born, Sir Austin’s best friend and wife take up together:

A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband’s friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

A rather disdainful appraisal. The reference is to a David Rizzio, a presumed lover of Mary, Queen of Scots (thank you, wikipedia). Sir Austin banishes the pair, and raises his son alone, according to a strict educational program. Richard thrives, but eventually falls in love with a young girl of the neighborhood without family or money, and marries her without consulting his father. Sir Austin reacts as he did to the earlier betrayal—he adopts a mask of indifference, neither reproaching his son nor cutting off his generous allowance, but refusing to see either his son or his new daughter-in-law.

Richard comes to London without his wife to seek an audience with his father. Months pass during which Richard sees neither his father nor his wife. Meredith’s true subject is the relations between people, how when we are offended or hurt, we isolate ourselves, thereby weakening ourselves and leaving ourselves vulnerable to intrigue and misunderstanding.

To me, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel seemed very uneven. There was much that I found tiresome—like the exalted rhetoric, or the extended passages featuring a wise but uneducated older woman who spouts homely wisdom in dialect (“Ha! ha! say that little women ain’t got art ekal to the cuningest of ‘em.”). But other parts were terrific—my favorite was a long chapter in which Richard, hanging out in London waiting for something to happen, is made the victim of a plot intent on shipwrecking his marriage before Sir Austin can make up his mind whether to give it his blessing. Richard is introduced to a courtesan who has been instructed to seduce him. Richard is under the impression that he is helping to rehabilitate her. She lets him believe this, of course, but she also begins to half believe it herself. One of the themes running through The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is masks—how we become the role that we play. For Sir Austin Feverel, the mask of aloof indifference he assumes when his son hurts his feelings proves damaging for both himself and his son. For the courtesan it is the reverse—her mask of repentance brings her to a kind of moral rebirth, even as her prey ultimately falls into her hands.

The long chapter that culminates with Richard’s seduction begins “Was ever hero in this fashion wooed”? Twenty pages later, when the deed has been accomplished, the chapter ends with the line “Was ever hero in this fashion won?” While I don’t really have the education Meredith would like his audience to have, I have read Shakespeare, and upon reading that line I remembered Richard III, and the scene where that earlier Richard exulted after seducing (verbally) his brother’s widow just days after murdering that very brother:

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?

Was ever woman in this humour won?

Still, it is a very different kind of seduction, with none of the sardonic cunning of the earlier work. In fact, it is a rather weepy affair for both parties.

In the end, all parties are reconciled after all possible anguish is wrung out of them.

This is the third Victorian novel I have written about in this blog—the first two were The Pickwick Papers and Middlemarch. I have not really been completely won over by any of them. Perhaps I have yet to find the Victorian novelist that I can really relate to. or maybe this period just isn’t my period, period.

#28: Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner

This book describes a year in the life of Adam Gordon, a young American poet living in Madrid on a fellowship, who is supposed to be “composing a long and research-driven poem … about the literary response to the [Spanish] Civil War.” We quickly discover that Adam is a thoroughly feckless fellow who spends his days smoking hash and then taking tranquilizers to cope with the resulting panic attacks. Early on, Adam’s Spanish isn’t very good, and so he relies on a kind of personal performance art based on guessing and acting to keep things moving along:

I wanted to know what she had been crying about and I managed to communicate that desire mainly by repeating the words for “fire” and “before.” She paused for a long moment and then began to speak; something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn’t tell; I heard the names of streets and months; a list of things I thought were books or songs; hard times or hard weather, epoch, uncle, change, an analogy involving summer, something about buying and/or crashing a red car. I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds. … I kept quiet, modeling my face on the San Leocadio.

I suspect that anyone who is approaching a certain threshold in foreign language competence will do something similar—you can’t keep asking “What?” and you can’t just stare blankly. So you improvise.

Adam begins a relationship with Isabel, the woman who has unburdened her soul to him. As they begin an affair, he exploits and exaggerates his linguistic difficulties by speaking in vague, oracular platitudes and playing the part of a detached genius. This actually works for a while. To heighten the pathos, he tells her that his mother has died. At the same time, Adam takes up with Theresa, a poet and translator who is helping him make inroads into the Madrid literary world. Adam has a harder time reading Theresa, who may or may not be on to Adam’s game, but who at least seems to accept that there is some sort of game going on.

Adam visits Granada with Isabel, and Barcelona with Theresa. Spain, women, booze—this might almost be Hemingway territory—except that the hero is trying to muster his courage to do poetry readings, instead of blowing up fascist fortifications.

I guess it isn’t hard to make fun of Adam Gordon, and there certainly isn’t a great deal at stake here beyond his self-respect. The reader is expecting to see him ultimately exposed, shamed, chastized. But while there are dicey moments, he never quite tips over. His work begins to attract attention, as Theresa works furiously to translate his poetry into Spanish. Adam may think his success is just a result of luck and bluffing, but we begin to realize that Adam’s friends in the literary world are not being duped and are not acting out of pity—they see value in his work, even if Adam himself advances no such claim on his own behalf.

And we see it too, because it is Adam’s voice that we hear in Leaving the Atocha Station, a voice that is quick, funny, acute, and occasionally profound:

My research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.

Never has existentialism been quite so much fun.

#27: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

It took me almost three months to read this 1078-page behemoth. It’s the size of a lunchbox. I have written elsewhere in this blog about my predeliction for big books—to quote myself: “I love books that are worlds unto themselves, places were I can go to live for a while. That have their own rules, customs, and logic.” That description fits Infinite Jest very well, and yet it is a hard book to love.

Infinite Jest is about a lot of things, but more than anything it is about drugs and alcohol—“substances”—and the way they damage lives. It is encyclopaedic in its depiction of the misery, degredation, and delusion attendant on substance abuse, positively mediaeval in its relentless focus on the varieties of human suffering. There is also a fair amount of humor along the way, and even a bit of speculative near-future dystopian stuff, but we never stray far from the spectacle of people destroying themselves.

When we think of sin and suffering in the world, we often think of evil, yet we do not witness any deliberate evil in Infinite Jest. Most of the losers in this book harm nobody but themselves, except accidentally—they abdicate all moral responsibilities, empty themselves out, become zombies. Like the crack-addicted mother who carries her dead infant around in a bundle for weeks. It’s been a long time since I read William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, but I have a hunch there might be some interesting parallels between that book and this one. A particular phrase from Naked Lunch kept occurring to me as I read Infinite Jest—“the algebra of need.” It’s the peculiar kind of savagery that possesses a person who becomes enslaved to a substance. The negation of all moral sense. I suppose that is a kind of evil, just not the sadistic, malevolent kind.

Normal life brings both pleasure and misery by turns, but when this balance is disturbed by substances, the result is that all pleasure becomes concentrated in the experience of the substance, and is thereby vacuumed out of everyday life. Wallace obviously knew quite a bit about depression, and writes about it in a manner that is terrifying and vivid. In one passage he makes a distinction between the garden-variety anhedonia and a more profound type of depression:

Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that … numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. … It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self…

This amazing description goes on for several pages.

Have I written anything to this point that would actually make you want to read Infinite Jest? Perhaps not. But when I say it is a difficult book to love I do not mean to say that it is a difficult book to be engrossed and amazed by. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting it is a vast canvas filled with incident, color, and character. There are two main spheres of action—the first is the Enfield Tennis Academy, founded by James O. Incandenza, a man of many talents who ultimate takes his own life by sticking his head in a microwave oven. If you’re wondering how one could do that, we learn that the secret is to remove the glass from the door. (You have to be impressed by a mind that can come up with such things—and then be glad that it isn’t yours.) Incandenza starts out as a tennis prodigy, becomes a scientist specializing in optics, founds a tennis academy, and then in his final years becomes an avant-garde filmmaker. One of his films, also named Infinite Jest, can effectively lobotomize anyone who sees it, apparently by overloading their neural circuitry with pleasure. Once someone has seen even a few frames of this film, they become permanantly vegetative—unable to speak, move or dress themselves. It is the ultimate substance, and thus do we discover the moral of our story. It’s spelled out on the back cover: “Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to dominate our lives, about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people, and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.” Fair enough in a way, but I think this moral is a bit of a Macguffin, because the book doesn’t really have much else to say about entertainment and its dangers. Entertainment may deplete meaning and richness from our lives, but not like drugs can. It’s just not a convincing comparison.

Two of James Incandenza’s three sons attend the academy he founded and one of them—Hal Incandenza—is for lack of a better candidate the “main” character of the Incandenza/tennis part of the book. He’s a very good tennis player but needs to smoke a little dope every day to maintain his equilibrium. Hal’s a decent enough fellow, but he’s mostly just a pair of eyes through which we view his world, and his thoughts are perhaps not much different from Wallace’s. He’s kind of a depressed dude, though with a ridiculously high IQ.

The other main sphere is action is the “Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House” where we encounter a large cast of characters attempting to resuscitate their lives. There is Randy Lenz, the recovering coke addict who relieves his feelings of powerlessness by torturing animals. And Kate Gompert, whose dependency on marijuana has left her subject to the “bad” kind of depression—the great white shark kind. (Gompert is not the only Ennet House resident who is there because of marijuana—Wallace posits that if you’re the right sort of person, any mind-altering substance, no matter how seemingly minor-league, can take you down.)

The hero of the Ennet House crowd is one Don Gately, who has made enough of a recovery to become a resident employee, responsible for verifying everyone’s comings and goings. Gately also serves as cook, and his special meat loaf (covered in corn flakes, for crispyness), is perhaps the least of the inmates’ trials. A former burglar and Demerol addict, Gately has had the misfortune to tie a gag into the mouth of someone he came across in a house he was burgling, who just happens to have a headcold, and who suffocates as a result. There is a wealth of wonderful and fascinating detail about Gateley’s upbringing and career in Infinite Jest, and if Wallace had wanted himself a tidy little success, he could have quarried himself a nice little 250-page Gately novel.

If I were to re-read Infinite Jest I’m sure I would discover all sorts of profound things—but I’m probably never going to re-read it. it’s a great book, but a harsh one. I get the sense that Wallace was waging a kind of war against his own wit and ebullience as he wrote Infinite Jest—nobody was ever going to accuse him of peddling entertainment. Thus we get 100 pages of footnotes to serve as a kind of ballast, to make the book less of a joy and more of a labor. Wallace was quoted as saying the footnotes were intended to “slow the reader down.” Mission accomplished. I hated the footnotes, which were usually just bits of text that could easily have been incorporated into the body of the novel—or discarded completely.

Maybe this war against entertainment is just a trick—an illusion, like a mime walking against the wind. In any case, there is a certain amount of reassurance to be found in the pages of Infinite Jest—flowers among the rubble. There are noble characters like Michael Pemulis, a working-class scholarship student at the tennis academy who incriminates himself (and therefore faces expulsion) to save Hal. And there is the third Incandenza brother—Mario, born with numerous birth defects who, after apprenticing under his father, manages to become a documentary filmmaker (of a sort), and is the conscience of the Incandenza family.

Finally, there is the aforementioned Don Gately, who despite an endless series of setbacks and disasters is able to persevere in his recovery and is perhaps even falling in love with a fellow recovering addict as the book draws to a close. (Recovering addicts are required to avoid intimate relationships for one year after cleaning up, because romance will distract them from the relentless focus and determination required to stay sober.) Gately is not supposed to be very bright, but as he looks back on the ruins of his first 30 years of life, he begins to understand how he might be able to make a go of things without substances. Of course, Gately is lying in a hospital with a gunshot wound as he reviews his life, and while there are no clear indications either way, I feel pretty sure he is about to die of his wound. Because that’s what kind of book this is, folks.

Here is a passage that captures some of the essential flavor of Infinite Jest for me. Two pages from the end of the novel, as one last character’s life ends in a characteristically gruesome and revolting auto-de-fé, Wallace (or more precisely, Gately) has a few thoughts to share about Linda McCartney:

…somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings—as in the historical Beatles’s McCartney—taken it and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. … Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing—her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups’ voices. Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney…imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband’s pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tanbourine: [the] depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.

Ladies and gentlemen, Infinite Jest.

#26: Maphead, by Ken Jennings

I read this book because I, myself, am a maphead—like the author, who gained fame by winning for 20-some-odd straight weeks on Jeopardy, I’ve had a keen passion for maps since I was a kid. When I was in the third grade, I wallpapered my bedroom with National Geographic maps, which I loved in a way that is hard to recall, much less explain.

In the early part of the book, Jennings posits a connection between love of maps and a more general spatial orientation, a love of space or places.

The word “topophilia,” from the Greek for “love of place,” was popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan… When I first read about the concept, I experienced a jolt of recognition and validation, like a patient finally getting a diagnosis for an obscure malady. I had felt this weirdly intense connection to landscape my whole life, but it was a relief to finally have a fancy Greek name to hang on it.

This connection holds true for me, as well. One unremarkable day many years ago I discovered a new way to bicycle home from where I was working, and I remember the sense of exultation I experienced as a result of navigating through new, previously unseen places, even though they were places composed of the same suburban streets, houses, and stores that I had passed on other, more familiar routes.

So I am a person with heightened spatial awareness, and how far that may go toward explaining myself, to myself or to anyone else, I can’t say. I would be embarrassed to say how much time I fritter away inventing idle games with Google maps. Here’s one: I start from a familiar location, and then hold down one of the arrow keys for a period of time—say 60 seconds. While I’m holding down the key, I avoid looking at the screen, on which terrain is scrolling steadily away. Then when the time is up I zoom in and pretend that I have been dropped at that point on the map, perhaps after a long drive, blindfolded. With some money and credit cards in my wallet, how would I get from that place back home? Have I landed near a road or town, or am I in a roadless forest deep in the mountains? Or, worst case, in the water. Perhaps close enough to swim to shore?

The first part of Maphead is about people who love maps and what loving maps says about the way their minds work. The second part delves into the history of maps and the world of map collectors. The book began to flatten a bit for me in the second part—it was unremarkable, workmanlike expository journalism. Waiting-room prose. The third part was my least favorite—it deals with map and GPS hobbyists, people who participate in elaborate and complex mapping games. For example, some people play a game that combines scavenger hunting with maps. Someone creates a kind of puzzle and then disseminates it to the players, who interpret clues and follow along in their road atlases. Despite my own peculiar mapping daydreams, this sort of activity strikes me as being acutely dull. Activities for individuals lacking a capacity for boredom. But I guess it’s a bit high-handed to denounce an activity that scratches someone else’s itch just because it doesn’t happen to scratch mine.

#25: The Discovery of Slowness, by Sten Nadolny

Suppose someone offers to loan you a book. “It’s called The Discovery of Slowness, and it’s translated from the German.” You probably decline politely, citing a prior commitment to read epic poetry in the original Icelandic. But maybe it’s not what you think.

The Discovery of Slowness is a biography of Sir John Franklin, one of the most famous and unsuccessful English explorers of the 19th century. It’s easy reading, and you would never guess that it was a translation just from reading it—especially since most of the surnames and place names are English. The author is very solicitous of his protagonist, generally referring to him as John. The book is written in a simple straightforward style that almost suggests “young adult” fiction. It was, according to the back cover, “a stunning success all across Europe” back in the 1980s.

So what makes this book unique? Nadolny has two agendas. He is telling Franklin’s story, but he is also telling the story of a “slow” person. Slow, in this case, is not the same thing as stupid, though in his childhood Franklin is frequently taken for a dolt—or at least Nadolny’s Franklin is. I have not done the research to determine if or to what extent Franklin was considered to be slow in real life.

Nadolny’s Franklin does not perform task in “real time” very well. He cannot catch a thrown ball or engage in repartee or know how to react when his ship goes into battle. But he is able to “capture” sensory input and then process it thoroughly at his own pace. He has a unique cognitive style, and part of the pleasure of reading The Discovery of Slowness is watching how Franklin compensates for his deficiency and even prevails over quicker-witted colleagues by analyzing and preparing. He’s a tortoise who learns how to beat the hares. Early on, one of his teachers comes to appreciate Franklin’s unique abilities and writes an essay about him, in which he proposes that different kinds of people take up different kinds of occupations:

One should let the quick live quickly and the slow slowly, each by his distinct temporal measure. The quick can be put into synoptic professions, which are exposed to the accelerations of the age: they will be able to bear up well and perform their best service as coachmen or members of Parliament. Slow people, on the other hand, should learn professions requiring detailed application, such as craftsmanship, the medical arts, or painting. From their withdrawn position they can follow gradual change and judge carefully the labor of the quick and the governing.

The author of this essay goes on to propose that candidates for office should only be drawn from the quick, but that only the slow should be allowed to vote!

Franklin’s slow style turns out to be well suited to life at sea. He studies and ultimately masters the limited repertoire of possible events one can encounter on board one of his majesty’s ships by observing, processing, and planning. Through preparation, he is able to appear nimble and spontaneous.

He becomes a captain and leads expeditions to the North American arctic. Here we are in the territory of Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton. There is adventure, there is adversity—oh, Lord, is there adversity. And then there is the final enigmatic journey that captivated England in the middle of the 19th century. You can go on youtube to this day and hear renditions of the beautiful ballad “Lady Franklin’s Lament”: Bob Dylan appropriated the melody for one of his early songs (“Bob Dylan’s Dream”).

During the most exciting parts of the book I was not really aware of Franklin’s alleged slowness, and my one complaint about this book is that its two themes—the life of Franklin and the advantages of being slow—do not always mesh so well. The book’s forward was written by one Carl Honoré, “author of the international bestseller In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed.” I think there is a lot to be said for slowness. When you go over things, break them down, think about them, they sometimes reveal themselves in amazing ways. I don’t often read books twice, but I try to pick books that I think would show me something different if I re-read them. I’m not sure if In Praise of Slowness is such a book, but it was nice spending time with John and reading about the remarkable events in his life.

#24: The Corn King and the Spring Queen, by Naomi Mitchison

The time: 200 B.C. The settings: The Scythian town of Marob on the west shores of the Black Sea; Sparta, Greece; and Alexandria, Egypt. We begin with Erif Der, the Spring Queen of the title. She is a witch. She marries Tarrik, who is the Corn King, and together they manage the seasons in Marob, from Plowing Eve in the spring to Midsummer Eve to the Harvest Play. Erif and Tarrik are presented as real people, with hopes, worries, and conflicts, but they are also gods who perform the rituals that assure the harvests and continued prosperity. Naomi Mitchison does her best to give us their world in their terms. So Erif’s magic is not presented as sleight-of-hand or hypnotic suggestion but as a real power, because this is how Erif and her tribe would have understood it.

But Erif’s witchcraft is neutralized when she travels by ship, down the coast of the Black Sea, through the Bosporus, to Greece. A stoic philosopher, Sphaeros, has shipwrecked in Marob and become friends with Erif and Tarrik. When Sphaeros departs for Sparta to answer the summons of his former pupil, King Kleomenes of Sparta, Erif and Tarrik go with him. The Scythians know that Greece is the center of the world—Tarrik even has an alternate Greek name, Charmantides, which he assumes like a formal suit of clothing when he must interact with sophisticated Hellenes.

Neither Erif nor Tarrik is completely at ease in their dual roles as leading citizens and gods. They have become a little bit self-conscious and can no longer completely turn off their Greek-ified rational minds when they assume their mythic identities.

I learned about The Corn King and the Spring Queen when I was reading Black Sea by Neal Ascherson. Here is how Ascherson described Mitchison’s book:

Naomi Michison’s astonishing historical novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen is concerned not with ‘otherness’ but with multiple identity—with culture switching. She introduces an elite of semi-Grecianised Scythians, living in the third century BC in a Black Sea village…. They still take the lead in the fertility rites which their tribe requires (the ritual death of the king, mass copulation the fresh-sown furrows )… but they also venture confidently into the Greek world.

I was impressed enough with Ascherson’s book that I tracked down a copy of Mitchison’s book online. Mitchison wrote The Corn King and the Spring Queen in 1931. A fascinating figure in her own right, Mitchison wrote historical novels in the 20s and 30s, science fiction in the 50s and 60s, and memoirs in the 70s and 80s. She died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was also a prominent social activist in Scotland as well as a good friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, for whom she proofread The Lord of the Rings.

Pushing further into The Corn King and the Spring Queen, we spend less and less time with the Scythians and more and more time with the Spartan king Kleomenes and his circle. Kleomenes seeks to restore the purity of Spartan society, and he pursues this goal by slaughtering the bureaucrats, elevating former slaves to full citizenship, and redistributing wealth evenly among all citizens. But just as Mitchison presents Erif and Tarrik on their own terms, she presents Kleomenes and his advisors without any apparent misgivings about his rather extreme methods. If 200 B.C. is a long time ago, so is 1931 A.D., when the idea of radical economic reforms and redistributions of wealth were not yet a red flag, so to speak.

Another remarkable thing about The Corn King and the Spring Queen is its depiction of sexual love between men as a natural and wholesome aspect of life. In Mitchison’s Sparta (as perhaps in the historical Sparta), older men took older adolescent boys as protegés—and lovers. As these protegés matured and came into full adulthood they typically transitioned into heterosexual relationships, though some seem to have transitioned more completely than others. Mitchison gives us no graphic descriptions of sex, heterosexual or homosexual, but she does give us a very frank and convincing sense of a different and less constraining sexual morality.

In The Corn King and the Spring Queen, Mitchison gives us a Tolstoyan canvas of wars and empires, friendships, romances, and adventures. Cecil B. DeMille could have made a great five-hour technicolor extravaganza out of The Corn King and the Spring Queen, only with a few rewrites to avoid any offense to the moral sensibilities of the moviegoing public.

#23: Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell

The gamble with a book like this is that it will be as weird, sinister, and original as the blurbs on the back cover promise. The cover art reminded me of exotic illustrations from early 20th century children’s literature—for example, the original illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. I was hoping for something eerie and peculiar. Swamps, alligators, amusement parks—the setup was promising.

But the weirdness in Swamplandia! loses out to a more latter-day template for Young Adult fiction—the wounded family. The mother of the alligator-wrestling Bigtree clan dies of cancer, and the father and three children must each depart their watery Eden to find a lesser but more viable reality. It’s a fine book with some interesting parts, but it didn’t convince me. It tends to hug the shore instead of sailing off into the unfathomable.

#22: Black Sea, by Neal Ascherson

I could be entertained by a book that was about the Black Sea in the literal nautical sense, but I was glad to discover that Neal Ascherson’s subject was the Black Sea in the largest possible sense—this isn’t a book about a body of water so much as it is a history of the surrounding lands and people over the past three millenia. Ascherson is Scottish, and I have no idea how or why he came to be so passionate about the Black Sea region. But he combines a love for the region with deep and wide learning, and the result is this marvelous book.

In recent history, the Black Sea region is where Russians and Turks have clashed. But two thousand years ago there were no Russians, and what Turks there were were way off to the east grazing their ponies on the steppes of central Asia. The lands around the Black Sea were home to strange peoples and tribes such as the Scythians and the Sarmatians, known today only from footnotes in weighty history books.

And also the Greeks. During the Golden Age, Greek merchants established a string of outposts along the shores of the Black Sea. As much trading posts as colonies, these were places where the Greeks exchanged natural resources (grain, fish) for finished goods (jewelry). As such the Black Sea was the birthplace of imperialism, where the difference between “civilization” vs. “barbarism” first seemed to make sense.

Known as “Pontic Greeks,” the descendants of these settlers exist in small pockets to this day:

Apart from the cities, this rural Pontic society amounted to far the greatest concentration of Greek-speaking population in the Hellenic or Byzantine worlds--much more numerous than that of the Peloponnese. Constantinople finally fell to Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453, and Trebizond was captured by the Turks in 1461 after a siege of forty-two days. But the Pontic Greeks remained in their valleys and villages, and the monasteries clung to their wealth and most of their estates for many more centuries. Many people, including some of the great families of Trebizond, converted in a superficial way to Islam, but continued to speak Pontic Greek--a language which over the millennia had steadily diverged from the tongue spoken in the Aegean or in the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

Who did they think they were, in this pre-nationalist age? In the first place, they did not think of themselves as "Greek" or as a people in some way rooted in the peninsula and islands we now call "Greece." Sophisticates in Trebizond might address one another in the fifteenth century as "Hellenes," but this was a cultural fancy rather than an ethnic description. Outsiders, whether Turks or northern Europeans, referred to them and to all the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire as "Rom" or "Rum" people, or as "Romanians"-citizens of the Roman Empire, in other words, who were also distinguished by their Orthodox Christian faith. Struggling with these categories, a Pontic Turk whose village had once been Greek told Anthony Bryer: "This is Roman (Rum) country; they spoke Christian here..."

The people of the Pontic valleys and cities themselves seemed to find identity in three things: in belonging to a place or patris which could be as small as a village, in not being Western (Roman Catholic) Christians, and in feeling themselves to be members of a polity which was so ancient, so sacred and superior to all others that it scarcely required a name. We call this community, weakly enough, "the Eastern Empire," or "Byzantium." That cannot convey the almost Chinese degree of significance which the "Rom" people attached to the Empire even long after it had been overthrown, as if it were the eternal essence of all political community in comparison to which other states and realms were only transient realities.

Tragically, most Pontic Greeks were expelled from Turkey in 1923 during an event known to diplomats as “The Exchange.” The Pontic Greeks themselves have a different name for it: the Katastrofe. Finding themselves relocated to the modern state of Greece, the Pontics discovered that 2500 years out in the hinterlands had substantially differentiated them from their long lost cousins. Really they are a people without a land, weeping in their trailers as they remember their Zion. But they are perhaps luckier than the Pontic Greeks who lived on the northern and eastern sides of the Black Sea, who eventually had to contend with Joseph Stalin. Uncle Joe didn’t really like folks who thought of themselves as different. I won’t go into details.

Pontic Greeks are one chapter in Black Sea. There is also a wonderful episode about politics and intrigue in 19th century Odessa, featuring the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz and the mata hari with whom he had a passionate affair. And another about Cossacks—I’d always wondered exactly what a Cossack was. Now I know. In Putin’s Russia they are making a comeback, filling the niche that the Hell’s Angels occupy in our part of the world. Complete with motorcycles.

These various excursions are unified by certain clear themes. One is the inescapable fact that these lands cannot truly be possessed. They can only be conquered and held for a few brief centuries. Where a current map shows only nation states like Turkey and Russia and Georgia, small remote enclaves of ancient peoples linger in remote valleys, taking on the religions and some customs of their current landlords, but retaining crucial traditions and differences. I'm glad that this is so.

Another is the corrosive and destructive power of nationalism. In the beginning there was romantic nationalism—the revival of ancient customs and languages. Kilts and bagpipes and epic poetry. Nothing wrong with all of that. But then there was the phase of redrawing the map to align with the newly revived tribal identities. And finally there was the third stage—getting rid of the outsiders. All around the world we see populations being separated, Muslims, Christians and Jews getting away from each other. Lands that once supported peoples of multiple religions and ethnicities are becoming ever more homogenous. Just look at Egypt, or Palestine, or India, or the Balkans. As a result, the world becomes a duller and more dangerous place.

#21: As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

Faulker was just 33 years old in 1930 when he wrote As I Lay Dying while working nights at the University of Mississippi power plant. The Sound and the Fury had attracted some attention from the critics, but Faulkner was still largely unknown. He wrote As I Lay Dying in about six weeks, between October 29 and December 11, 1929. He felt he was at the height of his powers: “I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.”

The book tells of a family—the Bundrens: mother Addie, father Anse, and five children ranging in age from about 28 to about 8. As the book opens, Addie Bundren is on her deathbed, and after she dies, about 40 pages in, the remainder of the story deals with the family’s attempt to transport her corpse and coffin to the town of Jefferson for burial. Anse has promised Addie he would bury her “with her people” in the Jefferson cemetary, but a series of obstacles, delays, and setbacks stand in the way, the greatest of which is that the countryside has been hit by torrential rains that have washed out all the bridges.

You think of Faulkner as a modernist and you think James Joyce, “stream of consciousness,” and all that. And while there is consciousness aplenty in As I Lay Dying, it is also a highly visual, immediate, and intense book, one that I imagine would be very tempting to filmmakers—a quick check of imdb.com reveals that actor James Franco is currently working on an adaption.

Different characters take turns narrating the book in short chapters. We hear their thoughts but we also see what they see—Faulkner deploys his narrators almost as a director might deploy his cameras. Sometimes as one narrator leaves off another takes up the action, possibly even recapitulating the last line of dialog. It’s all rather splicey. Perhaps Faulkner was deliberately mimicking the stylized visual transitions of the movies.

It would be interesting to know how Hollywood would sell this story. There’s the heroic angle: “He made a promise, and now he will move heaven and earth to fulfill it.” But there are other angles. Anse Burden is a craven, self-pitying and stubborn character who is idle and incompetent on the one hand and too proud on the other to spare his children all kinds of pain and humiliation by just burying the old lady at the local churchyard. So maybe the tag line could be “His wife was already dead. Who else would he kill to get his way?” It all gets quite lurid and fantastical in places. The youngest child drills holes in the top of his mother’s coffin because he is not quite sure she is really dead and accidentially drills down a little too far. An ever-growing flock of vultures follows the Bundren procession as it struggles along, lured by the aroma. You could pitch it as a midnight movie and maybe ask Quentin Tarantino to direct: “Grotesque horror, outlandish humor, riveting action.”

As I Lay Dying is all these things and many more—each character has a secret, a mission, or an obsession. I had to read the book twice to become completely familiar with all these crosscurrents. The first time through I often didn’t know what was going on. The reader is definitely expected to do some work. It mostly all comes into focus eventually, though I could read the following paragraph 100 times and never figure it out:

When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring; you’ve got to have a tight jar or you’ll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that won’t, because you are a man.

I don’t think Bill was drinking milk when he wrote that.

The Library of America publishes Faulkners four to the volume, and I would gladly have plowed through Sanctuary, Light in August, and Pylon—except perhaps for the prospect of having to try to write something about them afterwards. I’ve noticed a spate of Faulker articles in recent weeks—John Jeremiah Sullivan (see the previous entry in this blog) wrote a piece about Absalom Absalom for the New York Times Magazine and the Daily Beast proclaimed Light in August “Faulkner’s Great American Novel”. There was an Oprah selection and there are rumors of an HBO miniseries. It’s reassuring that America has retained a taste for the ornery old cuss.