ADMIN: A Bit of Spring Cleaning

I’ve been doing some tweaking of site pages lately, and in the process I inadvertently stripped the About This Site and Current Reading List pages out of the sidebar. They’ve been restored, and a new page has been added — Research Notes, which will feature bits and pieces of files that I am currently using for my research projects. Most of these files will be password-protected, but if you leave a comment and ask for the password I’ll generally be more than willing to provide it by e-mail.

I haven’t done much in the way of updating lately, but now that a few of my current projects are starting to pick up speed, I ought to have a few more things to post about very soon. Many thanks to those who’ve come across my blog and started reading — I intend to build up momentum again in the very near future!

Library Research Models: A Guide to Classification, Cataloging, and Computers by Thomas Mann

I’ve long had an interest in libraries and how they work, so when I saw this book on a research trip to the Library of Congress, I thought it would be sensible to do a bit of reading to learn more about the theoretical side of library work.

Library Research Models: A Guide to Classification, Cataloging, and Computers by Thomas Mann

Most people who do research (myself most definitely included) tend to have set ways in which they search for information. I grew up at a time when the standard card catalogue was on its way out, but I can still remember going to the library in my childhood and learning how to search for the books I wanted by flipping through the racks and racks of little off-white, typewritten cards. As I grew older, searching for journal articles involved several large volumes entitled The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, or larger guidebooks on similar subjects. With the advent of computerised and finally online catalogues, searching for books and information became a matter of typing in specific words. But searching in these set ways often restricts the amount of information one can locate, and leaves entire avenues of available information unexplored.

The author of this book worked as a general reference librarian in the Main Reading Room in the Library of Congress, and his experience with how people go about their research seems to be put to good use in this book. Library Research Models describes several different set ways of thinking often used by researchers, examining and weighing the pros and cons of using each library research model. In doing so, Mann also explains how libraries are organised and books are arranged on shelves — understandably, the bulk of the explanation is given over to the organisation methods used by the Library of Congress and other large libraries that operate on the same principle. The different ways of conducting research can produce rather different results, and Mann takes the time to show just how a individual researcher’s mind might work, and what alternate methods might be tried to produce improved research results.

The only fault I can find with the book is really no fault of its own; having been written in 1993, there are more than a few sections that are…well, more than a little out of date. The sections that deal with computer technology reflect the fact that the book was written in the early 1990s, and a revised edition would surely have quite a bit more to say about the use of the online catalogues and the use of the Internet in information location. A revised edition might even have to split into two parts, one to deal with traditional methods of searching and one to focus solely on the use of the Internet as a point of reference. But as an introductory point of reference, without getting into the changes caused by the computer and the use of the Internet, Library Research Models seems a decent place to start. It certainly made me think more closely about how I go about looking something up in a list or a catalogue, and what kind of productive use I make of my time when I’m actually browsing deep in the stacks.

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.

Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism by Andrew Sparrow

For additional reading that presents a slightly more critical view of today’s book review subject, I recommend John Lanchester’s review of Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News in the 6 March 2008 edition of the London Review of Books (no subscription required).

Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism by Andrew Sparrow

Dr Samuel Johnson did it, and towards the end of his life he expressed regret, remorse, and some embarrassment that he had ever tried it in the first place. A little less than a century later, Charles Dickens started to do it, too, and according to his contemporaries he had a very real talent for it. Governments have tried to ban it, or restrict it with tough legislation and harsh criticism of its practices, but as public opinion has become more permissive and social standards are less strictly upheld, its most ardent practitioners are getting away with a lot more than they would have been able to dream of even a generation ago.

The ‘it’ in question, of course, is parliamentary journalism.

Andrew Sparrow is a political correspondent with the Daily Telegraph, and in Obscure Scribblers he has compiled a compact history of political journalism in Britain, from illicitly printed political pamphlets distributed in the days of Oliver Cromwell to the spin doctors and breaking-news approach of the modern newsroom. The book’s title comes from an epithet used by Sir William Meredith, a baronet who sat in Parliament in the mid-1700s. Sir William denounced the ambitious young men who would fight to claim a seat in the public galleries and dash off reports of parliamentary proceedings for the various newspapers and gazettes that were published in London. He claimed that popular reporting of parliamentary debates would sully the quality of debate and lead to inaccurate and contradictory reporting on the substance of the issues being discussed. As Sparrow’s book clearly shows, mutual hostilities between politicians and the press are certainly nothing new — even three centuries ago, MPs and peers seemed to either moan about how the reporters make too much of every trivial thing that happens in Westminster or sulk about how their stunning speeches and thrilling debates are being ignored by the press. Yet the journalists themselves do not always come away from Sparrow’s history covered in glory; the practices of parliamentary journalism, particularly with regard to ‘off the record’ or ‘lobby’ briefings, are often as restrictive, insular, and narrow-minded as those of the politicians who are put on the spot. Unsurprisingly, the ‘obscure scribbers’ who have clawed their way into Westminster are very jealous of their proximity to the people in power. (To take just one example, not all of the protests against the radio broadcasting and later televising of Parliament have come from the politicians.) But as journalism as a profession continues to evolve, political reporting will evolve with it, and traditions that have worked well enough in the past may not be so applicable even in the near future.

The main strength of Obscure Scribblers comes from the fact that Sparrow keeps closely to his subject and resists the temptation to try to broaden his scope too greatly. In some ways, this strength contributes to the book’s only real weakness, in that the reader would definitely benefit from some prior knowledge of modern political history to better understand the importance of some of the less well-known historical incidents Sparrow mentions. The book could be a little longer in some respects, but the pace and tone seldom slacken and the writing, if a little dry, is far from dull. There are plenty of amusing anecdotes, the history writing is solid without ending up bogged down in petty details, and Alastair Campbell gets a thorough kicking by the end of it. Few bad things can be said about that.