Commentary: Politico’s Great Statesmen Series

I’m sitting on a backlog of not-quite finished reviews at the moment, so in lieu of rushing through the first one in the queue (which is likely to be about Edmund Burke), I’m going to slip in a bit of commentary about Politico’s Great Statesmen book series.

The Great Statesmen series is a line of reissued political memoirs and biographies of various British politicians. I’ve acquired four Great Statesmen titles in the past year, two biography (Francis Beckett on Clement Attlee and D.R. Thorpe on Alec Douglas-Home) and two autobiography (Geoffrey Howe’s Conflict of Loyalty and Denis Healey’s Time of My Life), and I’ve been very satisfied with the series’ production quality and appearance. I do quibble somewhat with the inclusion of Francis Beckett’s biography, which may be one of the more recent Attlee biographies but is by no means the most well-written. (My arguments on this front are set out in a review I wrote for the May 2008 issue of Political Studies Review.) Yet on the whole, it is very good to see a publisher taking the time and effort to put together a quality series of this nature, almost made for collecting by those who are fond of modern political history.

At the time of this writing, the main Politico’s Publishing Web site is not working very well for me. It’s a pity that the Politico’s Web site maintainers haven’t set up a separate section to show off this line, because it’s well worth the Web space. I’ve been able to compile a partial list of the titles currently available in the Great Statesmen line — I may have left out one or two, but these are the ones I have seen offered for sale online and in some bookshops.

Biography
Clem Attlee - Francis Beckett
Anthony Crosland - Kevin Jefferys
Alec Douglas-Home - D.R. Thorpe
Hugh Gaitskell - Brian Brivati

Autobiography/Memoirs
Time and Chance - James Callaghan
Time of My Life - Denis Healey
The Course of My Life - Edward Heath
Conflict of Loyalty - Geoffrey Howe
A Life at the Centre - Roy Jenkins (which I have reviewed here)

Reviews of both the Thorpe and Beckett biographies are in the abovementioned review article, and I’ll be writing a review of Geoffrey Howe’s biography for Political Studies Review in the near future. I’ve yet to start Healey’s memoirs, but when I finish that, I’ll be sure to post a review of it here.

Orwell and Politics (edited by Peter Davison)

The fourth and final review of the Penguin Press editions of selected writings by George Orwell, following on from Orwell in Spain, Orwell and the Dispossessed, and Orwell’s England.

(On a fun note, a friend of mine sent me a link to Kate Beaton’s marvellous comic strip about George Orwell, which I simply have to share.)

Orwell and Politics (edited by Peter Davison)

The main text in Orwell and Politics is Animal Farm — not 1984, which is what one might expect as the text of choice for a book that focuses primarily on Orwell’s political writings. Either book works, in whatever context, and the choice to look at Animal Farm allowed editor Peter Davison to bring in some letters that deserve to be reprinted in connection with the text. But both books were written relatively late in Orwell’s life, not many years before his death. The bulk of his other political writings deserve just as much attention, if for no other reason than the fact that the essays, review articles, and letters contained in this volume illustrate the formation and development of the ideas that eventually found their expression in his two best-known novels.

Several of the selections in this book explore incidents from Orwell’s time in Burma, serving as a member of the police force that kept colonial rule firmly in place in this outpost of the British Empire. Orwell’s experiences in Burma provided a strong foundation for his interest in socialism and eventually found their way into print in his book Burmese Days. Orwell and Politics also contains the second and third parts of ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ — the first part of which was reprinted in Orwell’s England — which look at how a uniquely ‘English Socialism’ might form a socialist identity free of the ideological weight of Soviet-dictated communism. (Rather interesting that the ‘Ingsoc’ of 1984 would have its roots in a perversion of this idea.) ‘Why I Write’ and ‘Politics and the English Language’, two of Orwell’s finest essays on the uses and abuses of language and political writing, are a notable part of this volume. Several other articles included come from Orwell’s regular column in the left-leaning Tribune newspaper. A number of letters to friends and colleagues round out the book.

One final thing deserves to be mentioned. Towards the end of Orwell and Politics is a particularly fascinating little fragment of writing, penned in May 1949 when Orwell was lying ill with tuberculosis. On it were the names of three dozen writers and artists who he considered to be ‘crypto-communists’ or ‘fellow travellers’, and therefore unsuitable for any work having to do with the creation of anticommunist propaganda. Orwell had written the list for his friend Celia Kirwan, who worked at the Foreign Office — it is now available at the National Archives at Kew in file FO 1110/189. (This New York Review of Books article by Timothy Garton Ash provides more information on the list itself and the circumstances surrounding its creation.) The little snip of information provides a fitting conclusion to Orwell and Politics, a glimpse of one man’s attempt to practise the beliefs he wrote about with such passion and consideration.

Orwell’s England (edited by Peter Davison)

Continuing from the previous post on Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed, this post looks at another book in the Penguin Press series that place George Orwell’s works in the context of his other letters and essays on a general subject.

Originally, I’d intended to combine this review with the one for Orwell and Politics, but the reviews were a little too long to cram them both into one post. That review will follow soon.

Orwell’s England (edited by Peter Davison)

For all that George Orwell wrote about broad, international issues such as fascism and totalitarianism, the bulk of his published work has a very domestic core. Several of his novels, such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman’s Daughter, dwell on the particular conditions of the lower middle class and working class of England. He is often at his most eloquent when attempting to come to terms with the civilisation that he seems to love and loathe in equal measure. He summarises it in the essay ‘England Your England‘ as ‘a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons….It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks‘. It is this family, with all of its foibles and flaws, that is the focus of the writings collected in Orwell’s England.

The main book in Orwell’s England is The Road to Wigan Pier, a sociological study commissioned by Victor Gollancz and the Left Book Club and published in 1937 as a report on the grim living and working conditions in England’s industrial north. ‘Wigan Pier’ was a standard music hall joke of the time — a reference to the small offloading pier that serviced the mill town of Wigan, near Manchester — which comedians used to play on the thought of as a dingy northern mill town that possessed its own ’seaside resort’ to rival Brighton or Blackpool. Orwell, in his account, used the image of Wigan Pier as a symbol of the deprivation, and destitution of the working classes in the north of England. The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier covers the inadequate wages, substandard housing, dangerous workplaces, and chronic unemployment characteristic of England’s working classes, drawing upon Orwell’s experiences living amongst the subjects he was studying. The second half of the book is more theoretical than sociological, as Orwell considers why so many people are reluctant to entertain the possibility that socialism might ameliorate the appalling and intolerable conditions he had just described.

The second half of Wigan Pier is a sudden sharp shift, as Orwell unleashes the full force of his pen in criticising the complacency of his fellow middle-class socialists. Before the Left Book Club edition was published, Gollancz actually felt compelled to add a foreword that attempted to placate those who might be offended by Orwell’s statements. Orwell sketches out several bold arguments to explain why socialism remains unattractive to many who would benefit from it, such as residual class prejudice (the ‘genteel poor’, as poor as they are, would shrink from being lumped together with servants and millworkers) and the prevalence of ‘earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers‘ (in other words, cranks) who alienate the more conventional types. The disagreement between Gollancz and Orwell over the second half of the book played a part in the former’s refusal to publish Homage to Catalonia, and reinforced Orwell’s dim opinions about many of his comrades on the left.

As with the other books in this series, Orwell’s England strings together writings on a collected theme. The book includes journalistic pieces on the conditions of the working poor; ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, an autobiographical essay describing his unpleasant schooldays at St. Cyprian’s prep school in Eastbourne; ‘The Decline of the English Murder’, which looks at the coverage of murder cases in the popular press; and selections from the diaries that Orwell kept in the months shortly before World War II and during the war itself. Orwell’s prose is as clear and lucid as ever, and Davison’s selections do a good job of supporting the overall theme. In the context of this book, it seems hardly surprising that George Orwell’s collected thoughts on the English character have done much to shape the national consciousness ever since.

Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain by Donald Thomas

I’m finding it a bit rough going after a holiday weekend, but I think this review will suffice.

Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain by Donald Thomas

Nearly 40 years ago, a young scholar named Donald Thomas wrote a book called A Long Time Burning: A History of Literary Censorship in England. Based on Thomas’s PhD work, the book was a sweeping overview of four centuries of prosecutions for the publication of seditious, obscene, or blasphemous literature in England, spanning the late 1400s through the 1890s. Yet during the publication process of his own book, Thomas learned that he and his publishers might very well face charges under the Obscene Publications Act for reprinting some of the troublesome passages that had come up before the magistrates in the past. Even cited in their historical context and treated as scholarly material, some works were still not considered fit for public eyes. Although Thomas and Routledge Press were never brought to court for A Long Time Burning (a fact which actually surprised a few of the book’s reviewers), the possibility of a book on censorship itself being censored prompted Thomas to consider the history of censorship in a far more recent time.

As the title indicates, Freedom’s Frontier looks at the history of censorship in twentieth-century (and early twenty-first century) Britain. Thomas focuses primarily on the censorship of printed texts, from the attempts to ban Oscar Wilde’s various writings, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, to the classic case study of Regina v. Penguin Books (the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial) to the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Outside of the literary scene, Thomas occasionally broadens his scope to take in other kinds of censorship. He includes accounts of government-ordered prosecutions in the interests of national security, such as the banning of the Communist Daily Worker during World War II and various attempts to suppress the publication of news stories and political memoirs under the tenets of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and the Official Secrets Act. He also looks at theatre censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, the public outcry against the violence and sadism of American ‘pulp mags’ and horror comics, the creation of the British Board of Film Censors (later the British Board of Film Classification), and recent attempts to pass legislation against speech or writings that promote racial or religious hatred. Few details escape Thomas’s notice, particularly those that have a touch of humour or absurdity to them, and the wide variety of materials he covers provides a catalogue of the challenges to freedom of speech and expressions.

The research in Freedom’s Frontier is unquestionably good, solid and thorough and designed to pique the reader’s interest. One point of concern in the book’s organisation is that it starts to run into a few difficulties in the second half. Thomas begins Freedom’s Frontier by looking at the history in semi-chronological stages, breaking down his overviews into recognisable dividing lines — pre-World War I, World War I, the interwar period, the run-up to World War II. After World War II, though, he mostly shifts his approach into separate sections by genre (literature, government/defence, and so on), and then runs with the section almost up to the present day. The genre approach has its merits, particularly when there is a lot of material to cover, but after the smooth single narrative of the chronological sections it feels very jarring to have to break off and jump back half a century with each succeeding chapter in order to tackle the next genre.

The new censorship challenges of this century have much to do with the power of technology — such as the projects by China and other countries to restrict their citizens’ ability to view specific Internet sites — but the old arguments about the potential limits of the free expression of ideas have not greatly changed. The main targets of official censorship may have changed over the past century, but in many ways governments are still relying on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tactics used to implement it, rewriting old laws to tackle new foes. Freedom’s Frontier, more often than not, is the story of how modern legal battles over censorship have forced society to confront attitudes and values, matters of personal taste and individual judgment, that it had not thought to question. It is a story worth telling, and worth reading.

Home Guard Manual 1941

For those interested in seeing a bit of what today’s book review choice looks like, here’s an online edition of a similar but smaller manual.

Home Guard Manual 1941

In May 1940, as the British Expeditionary Force was being driven back through France to the beaches at Dunkirk, Minister for War Anthony Eden made a radio broadcast that called for all British men between the ages of 17 and 65 to volunteer to join an organisation that would be known as the Local Defence Volunteers. Volunteers would not be paid, but they would be able to stay in their current jobs and homes as part of a civilian army formed for the defence of the British Isles in the event of an attempted invasion. The LDV, soon known as the Home Guard, focused its efforts on the defence of the coastal towns and key manufacturing cities that would be targets for the enemy. Despite the problems that the Home Guard had with organisation and training in the early days of its creation, its purpose was taken quite seriously by the military and civilian authorities. The War Office did its part to provide information for the volunteers by churning out instruction books, pamphlets, manuals, and field guides. Not many of these materials survive today, but those that do are interesting, informative, and often sobering primary sources about a time period in which the struggle for survival was a very pressing and immediate concern in most everyone’s mind.

This edition of the Home Guard Manual was prepared for the New Zealand Home Guard, drawing on the publications issued by the British War Office. The sections of the manual break down the different aspects of training, describing proper drill formations; appropriate handling of firearms, bayonets, grenades, and high explosives; guidelines for shooting from different positions and at different kinds of targets, tactics for maintaining cover and setting up firing positions; and instructions on open combat in situations ranging from anti-tank expeditions to street fighting at the most basic levels. Useful bits of fieldcraft are scattered throughout the book, such as the suggestion that on hard ground, ‘a knife blade inserted in the earth to its full extent will, if the ear is placed to the handle, record the footsteps of persons approaching up to quite an appreciable distance‘. Homemade and makeshift weapons, ranging from crude grenades and pipe bombs to Molotov cocktails — the last described as ‘an improvement devised by the Finns on the Petrol Bottle used in the Spanish [Civil] War‘ — suggest the likelihood that a soldier would have to improvise a weapon out of very little equipment. The general tone is pragmatic and straightforward, written to be read in short chunks and consulted as necessary, with occasional mnemonic devices given to help the reader remember the most important bits of information and procedure.

All of the technical specifications will be of interest to those with a military bent, but the manual also provides details that bring the human side of warfare closer to the forefront. Instructions for officers, both commissioned and non-commissioned, strongly stress the importance of keeping up morale and providing care for the soldiers under their command. Officers are expected to remember the importance of hygiene and personal cleanliness in keeping everyone fit and healthy, and are reminded to encourage the men to come to them with grievances and differences of opinion to settle small problems before they affect the rest of the company. NCOs are advised that after a tiring day, they should ensure that their men are settled and comfortable before settling down themselves — a small gesture that the men are likely to notice, remember, and possibly even appreciate.

The wartime invasion never actually happened, and the Home Guard finally stood down in late 1944. A few decades later, the popular TV sitcom Dad’s Army drew much of its humour from stock jokes and folk memories of ill-equipped, unevenly formed units of ageing men who had fought in the Great War and younger, untrained civilians, bank managers and bricklayers struggling with ranks and orders and military discipline. The reprint of this manual gives a much better idea of the real people behind the comic history by showing a glimpse of what these bank managers and bricklayers were expected to know and do…or rather, what they knew, but what they likely hoped that they would never have to do.

Commentary: John Prescott…and George Brown

I’ve been meaning to write about a few non-book review subjects for a while now, but have had a difficult time trying to determine precisely what kind of commentary I want this blog to contain. It may seem a little odd to open with this particular topic, especially now that other pieces of news have supplanted this topic in the public mind, but of late my thoughts have been drifting back to John Prescott’s recent admission that he has been struggling with an eating disorder.

Further information appears here from the Guardian and the Independent, along with marginally sympathetic commentary by Armando Iannucci.) Although these articles only hint at it, much of the general political blogosphere seemed to think that this ‘confession’ is part of a publicity stunt designed to sell copies of Prescott’s forthcoming memoirs. More generally, the responses tended to degenerate into snide, crude, or openly hostile comments about Prescott’s weight, appearance, intelligence, political leanings, sexual appetites, and so forth. Yet the more I read about Prescott, more my thoughts kept coming back to another Labour politician who engaged in similarly self-destructive behaviours.

John Prescott entered the House as the Member for Hull East in 1970, a General Election in which more than a few Labour MPs lost their seats. One of those lost seats was Belper, where a 5 percent swing to the Tories turfed out the MP who’d represented the constituency since 1945: George Brown.

George Brown’s been all but forgotten by the history books, except for perhaps a dozen winceworthy anecdotes of slurred speeches and drunken rages. In truth, he seemed to vanish from the public consciousness almost from the moment Harold Wilson finally got fed up with him and accepted the last of his many resignations in March 1968. Yet there are a number of repeated patterns — unsettling echoes, if you like — in both men’s behaviours, in the way they were treated by the political press, and in the way that they were regarded inside and outside their party. (One Telegraph writer even made the comparison rather more explicit by describing Prescott as ‘a kind of George Brown without the charm.’) And although some commentators may remark that at least George Brown had the excuse of his horrible addiction to alcohol to explain his temperament, a comparative look at the two men reveals some points to ponder.

Both George Brown and John Prescott occupied the unenviable symbolic sinecure of First Secretary of State (Brown as Minister for the short-lived conglomerate Department of Economic Affairs, Prescott as deputy PM and as the head of another cobbled-together superdepartment now known as Defra). Both garnered the reputation of aggressive, deal-brokering, pull-no-punches politicians, repelling many of their colleagues and often embarrassing or exasperating their few patient supporters in the process. Going back further in their political careers, the similarities keep cropping up. Education was a sore point with both of them — Brown went to a junior grammar school, but left school at 15 to start working, while Prescott’s poor showing in the eleven-plus sent him to a secondary modern — and both ended up supplementing their schooling with further education (Brown at night schools and Workers’ Education Association classes, Prescott at Ruskin College in Oxford). Both came from trade union backgrounds, and made much of their links to the trade union movement as a badge of Labour Party authenticity. Both had turbulent marriages: George Brown ended up leaving his wife for his secretary, and although Prescott may have stayed with his wife he nonetheless owned up to his own infidelity. And on the whole, both do not seem to have been truly capable of dealing with the pressures of political life, particularly towards the end of their careers in the House.

I think a full and properly considered comparative study of Brown and Prescott would require in-depth research into press coverage of both men, with appropriate weight given to the general changes in the timbre and focus of political reporting since the 1960s. Private Eye immortalised the phrase ‘tired and emotional’ in connection with George Brown, and Simon Hoggart’s political sketches seldom failed to take advantage of Prescott’s struggles with public speaking — not to mention Jeremy Paxman’s The Political Animal, with its apocryphal quip that in recent years, prospective Hansard editors had to ‘translate’ a John Prescott speech into intelligible text as part of the application and vetting process. Apart from the official press coverage, George Brown’s antics often cropped up in the diaries of Richard Crossman and Tony Benn, and perhaps a forthcoming crop of diaries and memoirs from politicians of the Blair years (in addition to the ones that are available now) will reveal more stories about Prescott. It’s a study worth conducting, I think, if only because I would hate to see another Labour politician conveniently forgotten by those who prefer to distance themselves from history.

Autobiography by Bertrand Russell

I actually finished this book almost two months ago, but tackling the review for it was more difficult than I thought it would be. Partly because of the book’s length and scope, but also because it’s tricky to review an autobiography without simply summarising the author’s life. I think I’ve done well enough out of this one, for the most part.

Autobiography by Bertrand Russell

Mathematician, philosopher, social reformer, conscientious objector, writer, lecturer, anti-nuclear protestor — Bertrand Russell’s life is remarkably difficult to summarise in a few words, not least because it spanned nearly a century of constant political and social change. His grandfather was Lord John Russell, later the first Earl Russell, two-time Whig prime minister in the mid-nineteenth century and a son of one of the most well-connected aristocratic families in Britain. His parents, Lord and Lady Amberley, held radical views on atheism, birth control, and other moral values which were not far short of a scandal in the socially conservative late Victorian era. This mixture of orthodox and unorthodox influences formed the background of young Bertrand Russell’s life, and at times appeared to surface in the few scandals he managed to produce alongside his publications and lecture tours.

Russell’s parents died early in his childhood, and he and his older brother Frank were raised at their grandparents’ estate in Richmond Park. Like many well-to-do young men of his age, he was educated at home by a series of tutors, who encouraged his natural aptitude for the study of mathematics. Yet Russell also spent much of his adolescence fighting off depression, worries about his sexual desires and the loss of his religious faith, and suicidal thoughts — indeed, he admits that the thought of not being able to learn more mathematics was one of the few things that kept him from taking his own life. He passed the entrance examinations for Cambridge and began to work on mathematics at Trinity College, soon expanding his work into philosophy and eventually taking a philosophy fellowship at Trinity shortly after he graduated. The connections between mathematics, logic, and philosophy formed the basis of much of Russell’s work for the rest of his life, and his influence appears in the writings of later logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers such as Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Even after he became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his elder brother in the early 1930s, he carried on much as before, though he wryly notes in the autobiography that he found the title occasionally useful for securing hotel rooms. He published numerous essays, articles, and works of short fiction; worked on sweeping surveys of the history of social thought and Western philosophy; and maintained an exhausting lecture circuit. And in 1950, his contributions to ‘humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought’ were considered of sufficient merit to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Apart from his academic career, Russell became more and more involved in political and social causes as he grew older. He was an active participant in the markedly unpopular pacifist and conscientious objection movement during World War I, a cause that alienated him from formerly close friends and colleagues and eventually ended in a six-month stretch of imprisonment in 1918. He was interested in the mechanics of socialism and communism, though he became one of the more strident critics of the Soviet Union, something which did not endear him to other left-leaning associates like Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He was an advocate of women’s suffrage, contraception, sex education, and homosexuality and divorce law reform, all of which feature prominently in the pages of his autobiography — particularly in the sections in which he frankly and unashamedly describes the ups and downs of his various marriages (a total of four, of which three ended in separation and divorce) and occasional affairs with other women. After World War II, he became associated with the world government and nuclear disarmament movements. In 1957, at the age of 85, he served as the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and participated in marches and demonstrations for several years afterwards. Well into his 90s, he worked on his autobiography, and continued to write public letters and editorials almost up until the day of his death in early February 1970, at age 98.

Covering more than 700 pages, Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography is an expansive text that is as much a work of social history as it is an individual’s life story. Each chapter contains a selection of personal letters, notes, and short articles that round out the written recollections. Although Russell writes engagingly of his adventures and travels, and is willing to admit his own faults and failings in retrospect, he does not always come across as an easy person to know or to live with — as a friend and colleague, he could be warm and disapproving, generous and chill, caring and frustrating by turns. Yet the book quite clearly presents the human being behind the careful mathematician, introspective philosopher, and active elder statesman, a life lived fully and as best as anyone might be able to live. In the end, it is unsurprising that Russell would preface the account of his life by saying, ‘This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.‘

Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed (edited by Peter Davison)

A few years ago, Penguin Press released a series of four books that each take one of George Orwell’s works and place it in the context of selected letters, articles, essays written by Orwell which relate to the subject of the book. I’ve split this review of the four books into two parts, with this one focusing on Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed.

Orwell in Spain

The central text in Orwell in Spain is Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his time as a volunteer soldier in Barcelona and the Catalan area of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party’s contingent, a group of two dozen or so British volunteers who were allied with the Workers’ Part of Marxism Unification (given as POUM, the Spanish-language abbreviation, in the text). Orwell sent several months in the front line and was finally invalided away from the front when he was shot in the neck — the bullet just barely missed his carotid artery, and the only lasting effect of the wound was a paralysis of one of his vocal cords. (People often told him how lucky he was to have survived, but Orwell usually responded by saying something to the effect of how it would have been even luckier not to have been shot in the first place.) Even after being invalided away from the front, Orwell’s troubles were merely beginning. He was very nearly arrested for being part of a militia that had been declared ‘illegal’ by the anti-Franco forces — the Spanish Communist Party was in the sway of the Soviet Union and was attempting to eradicate rival communist and anarchist groups — and he and his wife Eileen (who had accompanied him) had to flee Spain only a few steps ahead of the Spanish police.

The Spanish Civil War is a very confusing period of 20th-century history, and Orwell was writing for an audience which often had only the most general knowledge of what was going on in Spain at the time. But as the letters and articles emphasise, Orwell’s intent in writing Homage to Catalonia was not merely to denounce Franco and the Fascists, but to criticise the Communist forces in Spain for what he saw as their betrayal of the working classes AND to castigate the press (particularly the English leftist press) for its refusal to entertain any possibility that the Spanish Communists and their Soviet allies could be just as guilty of betrayal and deceit as the monarchists and the Fascists. Orwell’s experiences in Spain also had a direct influence on the writing of 1984. On a personal level he was very concerned with the case of Georges Kopp, a fellow soldier and friend who had been imprisoned by the Spanish police, tortured in an attempt to get him to sign a false confession, and subjected to a special type of punishment which involved being locked in a confined space with a horde of large rats. On a literary level, Orwell’s writings on the Spanish Civil War reveal some of the ideas that would later end up in books like 1984 — one example being the famous ‘two and two are five’ equation that would become so crucial to Winston Smith’s fate in that particular book.

Orwell and the Dispossessed

The central story in this collection is Down and Out in Paris and London, a predominantly autobiographical account of Orwell’s time ’slumming it’ as a restaurant dishwasher (plongeur) in Paris and a tramp in London in the mid-1930s. The book is a grim account of a grim life, as Orwell describes in great detail the backbreaking labour and low wages of the staff at a fashionable hotel and his struggles in a small cafe — and includes stomach-turning accounts of the utter filthiness of the kitchens in which he worked. The writings that deal with his time in as a tramp in London and the Home Counties are equally grim, presenting a grinding, depressing life of poverty and homelessness in the capital city that still bears a strong resemblance to conditions that exist today. His criticisms of charitable organisations and city-run lodging houses for the poor and indigent are particularly trenchant, and remain so 70 years later.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a fascinating read in its own right, but this volume also contains some of Orwell’s articles, essays, and reviews on popular subjects of the time. He analysed boys’ school stories (such as the Greyfriairs stories that feature Billy Bunter), compared British detective fiction to American ‘pulp mags’, and examined the political leanings of the serial novels published in women’s magazines. There are also a few essays about Orwell’s other ’slumming journeys’, including one where he joined a group of East End residents who travelled out of London to pick hops for a fortnight and another where he attempted to get himself sentenced to prison for drunk and disorderly conduct. In general, the material collected in Orwell and the Dispossessed focuses on the author’s observations of those who for one reason or another are deprived of choices in their own lives and societies — with subjects as diverse as the poor of India and Morocco, British schoolchildren, and the unfairly persecuted P.G. Wodehouse. And although the theme of this volume is not quite as solid and unified as that of Orwell and Spain, the compilation is a good collection of some of Orwell’s nonfiction writing.

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

I hadn’t planned to post another work of fiction quite so soon, but this book jumped the queue on me. Mainly because I finished it in about two hours on a rainy day’s commute, and it made for a fast review.

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

In mid-1914, the London newspapers are full of ominous reports from the Continent, but Richard Hannay’s uneasiness has little to do with the problems of world affairs. Having made a small fortune in the mines of Rhodesia, he has come to London to see the ‘Old Country’ but finds himself more bored and restless as the days past. Finally, he resolves that he will give London one more day, but if nothing interesting happens to keep him in England then he will leave on the next boat for South Africa. As fortune would have it, upon returning to his flat that night Hannay runs into his upstairs neighbour, an American by the name of Franklin Scudder. Scudder seems badly shaken, and after Hannay gives him a drink to steady his nerves he reveals that he has just had to fake his own death in the flat upstairs — he is being pursued by a very dangerous anarchist group whose plans he has stumbled upon, and the little he reveals to Hannay indicates that this group intends to assassinate a high-ranking Greek politician and spark a massive war that will soon engulf all of Europe. Hannay, more intrigued by the American’s wild story than he initially lets on, agrees to let Scudder hide in his flat for the time being. But when he returns home a few days later and finds Scudder stabbed to death on the floor of his living room, he realises that he is now the anarchists’ next target. Hannay flees London, barely one step ahead of both the police and the anarchists, and sets off on a mission to prevent the assassination from taking place. Yet as he leads his pursuers on a grand chase across England and Scotland, the true nature of the plot becomes more and more clear to him…and, far from completing his mission, he soon finds that it will take all of his wits just to stay alive.

Every fiction genre has to start somewhere, and The Thirty-Nine Steps was one of the first modern adventure-espionage novels, the canonical ancestor of most anything written by Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Dan Brown, and others of their ilk. Modern readers with seemingly more sophisticated literary tastes may find Buchan’s plot conventions to be a little on the thin side, yet compared to some of the abovementioned authors, Buchan’s story is an utter paragon of brevity and fast pacing, with a constantly moving plot and not a shred of unnecessary information. Knowing readers may smirk a bit at how Richard Hannay seems to have just the appropriate combination of personality traits, skills, and knowledge to make him successful in his mission — from a knack for decoding secret messages to an awareness of how to set off dynamite — but again, the means by which Buchan works these character traits into the plot requires far less suspension of disbelief to keep reading than is required by some of the abovementioned authors. What matters most of all is the central theme: that Richard Hannay is a resourceful, clear-headed, extraordinary-ordinary man who alone can stand up to the faceless and unseen enemies and do what those in government and other positions of authority cannot.

When looking at early examples of a particular genre, it is worth noting the story aspects that would later become conventions — and in this case, one aspect that might be easily overlooked is the use of technology as a weapon against which the lone hero must strive. On multiple occasions, Hannay’s pursuers use an airplane (or rather, aeroplane) to hunt for him, and it’s worth considering just how new and thrilling this would have seemed to a reader who picked up a copy of this book in 1915. Airplanes had been invented scarcely more than a decade before the events of the novel, and were a very experimental form of combat even towards the end of World War I; this was advanced technology in Buchan’s day, as advanced as rockets and lasers and satellites and computers would be for the action heroes of a later era. As a forerunner of its kind, The Thirty-Nine Steps sets a particularly high standard to follow, one that has been imitated with varying degrees of success over the years. And though Buchan would later write further accounts of the increasingly fantastic exploits of Richard Hannay, this novel stands by itself as a classic thriller tale of pre-war intrigue.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Graham Greene is one of those authors whose works always hover somewhere in the background of my ‘to-read’ list but very seldom end up in my hands. Fortunately, a friend of mine had a copy of this particular book, and lent it to me after I’d expressed an interest in reading it. I had some good advice and feedback on this review from another friend — the third paragraph owes a good deal to her questions to me, and I’m quite grateful for the consideration.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

In the early 1950s, French colonial military forces are bogged down in an increasingly brutal war for control of French Indochina, and the possibility of a Viet Minh victory has begun to attract the attention of certain sectors of the American military and political establishment. But for Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged British journalist who has been living in Vietnam and reporting on the fighting between the Vietminh and the French, the grander political games are of relatively little interest. Fowler is mostly concerned with his ability to live as comfortable a life as possible in Saigon, filing the occasional piece of copy for his newspaper but preferring to spend his time smoking opium and enjoying the company of Phuong, the young Vietnamese woman he has taken as a lover. Fowler has no real ambitions (except to avoid being sent back to England and to the wife who will not give him the divorce he wants) and is more than content to take no part in the Indochina conflict, but his intentions go abruptly awry when he makes the acquaintance of Alden Pyle, a young Harvard-educated American of New England stock who arrives in Saigon as part of an American aid mission. Pyle, in contrast to many of his fellow countrymen in Saigon, is a ‘quiet American’: soft-spoken, idealistic, and earnestly interested in finding a solution to the war. He is convinced that a ‘Third Force’ will be able to form a legitimate government in Vietnam, routing both the colonial power and the left-leaning nationalists. Yet Fowler soon begins to suspect that Pyle’s presence in Vietnam has a sinister component to it, and his quasi-friendship with Pyle becomes all the more complicated when Phuong leaves him, seduced by the quiet American’s promise to marry her and take her back to America. As the violence in Saigon continues to escalate, Fowler begins to rethink his personal policy of not getting involved in the Indochina conflict — although he himself would have to admit that his motivations, in this instance, may have less than altruistic intentions.

The underlying plot of The Quiet American is drawn from Graham Greene’s experiences as a reporter in Saigon during the early 1950s and to a lesser extent on his time as a British intelligence agent in Sierra Leone in the 1940s. Upon publication, the book’s unflattering depiction of the Americans and American intervention in the early stages of the Vietnam conflict prompted some reviewers to denounce Greene as anti-American and to claim that he had used the character of Thomas Fowler as a mouthpiece for his own leftist sympathies. Though one might suspect that Greene took a bit of pleasure in using Fowler to skewer some of the more egregious behaviours and attitudes he had observed during his time in Saigon, a closer reading of the text suggests that Greene found Fowler an equally unsympathetic character, one among the many unsympathetic characters in the novel. The one character who even seems to come out as a mildly respectable figure is a very minor character: Phuong’s older sister, who clearly disapproves of both Fowler and Pyle as suitable partners but who sees in them a chance to provide her little sister with stability and protection, both of which are in short supply in war-torn Vietnam. Fowler is not necessarily more observant or ‘correct’ in his thinking than any of the other characters, though his standing as both the narrator and as a foil for Pyle’s radically different beliefs does give him a more authoritative (if not necessarily authorial) voice.

Most analyis of The Quiet American tends to focus on the broader moral questions related to Cold War politics, but other questions raised by the book deserve equal consideration. In particular, the character of Phuong raises several complicated points about gender issues and Orientalism, both topics that deserve greater consideration. The trouble with considering these issues is the fact that they are both so blatant, unsubtle almost to the point of caricature, that looking deeper into them is somehow made that much more difficult. One attempt to simplify the gender issues, for instance, would say that the women of The Quiet American seem to represent marked extremes of the virgin-whore spectrum, with Fowler’s wife and Phuong at opposite ends. Yet the very obviousness of the extent to which Phuong is objectified by both Fowler and Pyle (in different ways, but with the same result) and even by Phuong’s own sister makes it difficult to tell, I think, the extent to which it’s been done deliberately. Any thoughts on Orientalism would have to take into account the Chinese and other Vietnamese characters in the book, but again Phuong dominates this theme — as in Fowler’s description of how ‘[taking] an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow‘. Attempting to extract Greene’s message on Orientalism and gender issues is further complicated by the Greene-as-Fowler question, and the problem of separating Fowler’s voice from Greene’s. Awareness may be a poor substitute for analysis, but on these issues awareness is at least likely to provide some semi-satisfactory answers.

In both a Cold War and post-Cold War context, The Quiet American tends to be brought up in connection with the idea of American naïveté regarding foreign affairs, a blend of good intentions and ignorance that happens to prove particularly lethal over the course of the book. Yet Greene’s novel also brings up the question of individual moral choices and the difficulties that accompany a professed belief in remaining uninvolved in a conflict. The Quiet American isn’t one of Greene’s ‘Catholic novels’ (which include The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair), but those who simply treat it as a piece of topical political commentary and downplay everything else sadly ignore the complex moral questions that provide much of the driving force of the story.