In brief: The first of the twenty Aubrey-Maturin novels is more of an opening salvo than a completely satisfying story unto itself, but immerse yourself in the music of its naval jargon and you will find it a rich, endearing overture of neo-Romantic escape.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Master and Commander, keep reading below.)

1.

Astute followers of my as-weekly-as-I-can-manage-it book feature will have noticed by now that I make an effort to direct each review at an author I have not written about before. I do not write about everything I read, but it has been some time since I have made any attempt to absorb an author’s oeuvre all at once. Sooner or later, I expect to relax my self-imposed restriction and explore select writers in greater depth.

I say this now because having read Master and Commander, I would like to get through the rest of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series of Regency naval adventures—twenty books in all—sometime within the next twenty years. Or better yet, within the next five. It’s not happening this year, I can guarantee you that much.

What piques my curiosity is the sense throughout Master and Commander, without having read the books that follow it or even acknowledging their existence, that it is merely the germ of something much bigger. Part of this certainly comes from history. O’Brian’s saga opens in 1800, and like any naval story set in the era of Lord Nelson, the modern reader cannot help receiving it as a cautious prelude to the inevitable escalation of what you might call the Napoleon problem.

That is perhaps the best way to understand Master and Commander: as preparation, as an appetizer. By itself it is a rich historical novel that promises no more than to introduce us to the bellicose sailor Jack Aubrey and the effete physician Stephen Maturin, put them together on a sloop (the Sophie, Aubrey’s first command), and drive them through a series of breathtaking ship-to-ship rencounters until it is convenient to stop.

2.

Every time I review a twentieth-century novel written in nineteenth-century English, I make a point of my habit of reading a great many twentieth-century novels written in nineteenth-century English. Master and Commander belongs to this lot, but the formal features of its Regency nostalgia extend well beyond the style of narration.

Like many novels of the era it depicts, it is highly serial, organized in chronological episodes with negligible concern for lengthy threads of character and plot development or sweeping gestures of dramatic unity. (The one continuing subplot of note—Maturin’s past involvement in the Irish insurgency along with Aubrey’s lieutenant, James Dillon—exits the stage so abruptly as to ring literarily hollow but historically true.) It is also rife with tactical detail of a definition that virtually begs for an accompanying map. If we are at any point not aware of the precise number of guns and the condition of the sails on every ship in an engagement, O’Brian has not finished with us yet.

Neither characteristic is likely to arise in the current climate of fiction publishing, least of all in the debut novel of a series. This is partly due to the ascension of motion pictures as the predominant vehicle of action-packed entertainment, as the medium permits a great richness of scene-setting activity without incurring a proportional expense of time. Nowadays, written fiction usually compensates for declining attention spans by jettisoning some of its descriptive powers. Words alone are no longer the prime stewards of the excitement of combat, not because films convey it better, but because they deliver it faster.

To be honest, even I found O’Brian’s depth of vision to test my patience from time to time. I thankfully went into Master and Commander with a working literacy in naval terms, having read my share of naval histories and travel writings by explorers like William Dampier (combined with far, far too many hours of Sid Meier’s Pirates!). I cannot imagine how opaque some of the lexicon must seem to an unseasoned reader, especially if it is the sort of reader accustomed to skimming along and translating paragraphs into clear mental pictures without the aid of a dictionary. To that I say, good luck.

O’Brian is not unaware of the difficulty of naval jargon, even as he indulges in it—and it is hard to blame him for indulging in it when the language sings for itself. Like a foreign-language opera with the supertitles shorn off, it is sufficient to listen to the musicality of the sentences without comprehending everything they depict. You could isolate any of O’Brian’s paragraphs and imagine it hanging in a gallery of Romantic art, even if you have no idea how the picture would look.

3.

In fact, one of the most prevalent thematic undercurrents in Master and Commander is that of language acquisition. We come to know Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin initially through their facility with communication. Aubrey clumsily flubs his way through a patois of French and Spanish malaprops, but is perfectly at home at sea; Maturin speaks several languages and is fluent in the current terminology of science and natural history, but doesn’t know his foresail from his mizzenmast.

Most readers will find themselves in Maturin’s place, for he is himself a reader with no experience of life at sea. O’Brian commands our trust because he is fluent in both languages, that of the sailor and that of what we conventionally think of as the educated man. He writes capably in their respective forms, be it the songs that deckhands sing about the officers who have wronged them, or the objective detachment of official correspondence. Sometimes he writes in both at once, as when Aubrey struggles with written formalities in his communiqués to those superior in rank.

If O’Brian makes an argument with especial persuasive force, it is for the nobility of seamanship as a challenging and rigorous profession as developed as any other; that the brave men of the Royal Navy were highly trained specialists with a unique language, customs, and body of knowledge—all of which is worth preserving, but most of which is lost to us as an experience now that apprenticeship is no longer central to the educational organization of society.

And this is but a fragment of what Master and Commander displays. It is a paradoxical novel, a work of historical fiction so particular about historical accuracy, so intent on recapturing the grandiose ethos of the Royal Navy and the granular rituals of shipboard action, that one has to ask how it differs, really, from a history book of the documentary type. The question of how we choose a prose style to present history—of “genres” of historical writing—was of considerable interest to the historiographer Hayden White, whose most influential work arrived not long after the Aubrey-Maturin series began. O’Brian, however, was hardly one to take the varieties of historical representation as a mask occluding the empirical reality underneath. What he has done is command a romantic genre as the most personable way to present a romantic age.

In brief: Murakami’s surrealist epic is a colourful story full of unique interactions between minds and the outside world. Its defiance of storytelling conventions of cause and effect is so extreme as to deny entry to typical reading habits, but it approximates the sense of faded memory better than perhaps any other novel I have read.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, keep reading below.)

1.

Fiction is a lie. Not everyone agrees on what the lie is meant to accomplish—to entertain, to perfect the craft of lying, to take us to the truth—but the common consensus is to define fiction as the kind of lie that acknowledges its own constructedness but aims for plausibility nonetheless.

There is something inherently elegant about lying, and often admitting to the lie in the act of telling it, as a way of getting to the truth. It compels us to ask what advantage fiction has over other forms of truth-seeking, be it the empirical disciplines of science and history or the human constructions of philosophy and religion. Fiction seems especially well suited to explore something that we do not often consider part of reality at all: the truth about dreams, and about our experience of dreaming.

Properly speaking, “our experience of dreaming” is a nonsensical phrase. Dreams defy empirical study because the sensory data are available to one and only one direct observer; we may only collect them via testimony that we know to be unreliable. They equally defy constructed systems of explication like Freudian psychoanalysis, schemas that ultimately fail to capture the infinite diversity of human experience. Vladimir Nabokov, who was famous for his virulent hatred of Freud, once had this to say about the thinker most associated with the interpretation of dreams: “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.”

What an author can do in fiction, and not in the other schemes, is consciously create new dreams that remind us of what dreaming is like. An author of dreams does this in the same way a historical novelist creates past events that remind us of what history is like.

2.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a 600-page fiction about an unemployed thirty-year-old named Toru Okada who loses his cat and, before long, his wife Kumiko. It openly defies the causal logic we expect from stories and the tangible experience we expect from life. It tells us less about the consensus reality of the lives we lead outside of books than it does about the literary reality of how we connect symbols in our mind. It is a novel of dreams.

I would not hesitate to refer to its author, Haruki Murakami, as a pop Nabokov. The prose is less dense than that of Nabokov’s own 600-page chronicle, Ada, or Ardor, but the two novels cover similar intellectual ground. Murakami draws more attention to stories than sentences, and his novel is the smoother one by far. It is at times a chore to follow, but never a bore to read.

If we go with E.M. Forster’s dictum—that “the king died and then the queen died” is a story, while “the king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot—then The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has very little plot and a heck of a lot of story. No, it’s not just about a missing cat. To describe the novel that way would do injustice to the story of Noboru Wataya, Toru’s brother-in-law, an ascendant politician who is unambiguously evil but for reasons unknown; the story of May Kasahara, the lively teenage girl across the alley who harbours a playful fascination with matters of fate and death; the story of the sisters Malta and Creta Kano, one a psychic obsessed with water, the other a former prostitute with a complicated sensitivity to pain; the story of Nutmeg and her mute son Cinnamon, who perform miracle healing for a rich and powerful clientele; and the one I found most compelling—the story of Lieutenant Mamiya, a veteran of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, captured by the Soviets and left for dead in a well with the foreknowledge that he would live a long and lonely life.

But as is the case with many literary novels that tell many stories at once, it is much easier to talk about recurrent ideas than story events. This is especially true of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where all sorts of things happen for no reason and with no explanation. When he is not listening to others who show up and tell their stories in pieces, Toru Okada spends most of the novel secluding himself in the total darkness of a dried-up well, in a compulsive effort to reenter the mysterious subconscious otherworld into which he once slipped. It is through this dream, he figures, that he will come to know the truth about his wife. Rarely do any of the characters take concrete actions that lead to direct consequences, least of all Toru Okada. Instead, they passively await the spontaneous reappearance of familiar faces and voices, taking no action to bring them back.

Most of the thematic ideas about dreams I already mentioned at the head of this review appear in the novel in some form. As in Nabokov’s Ada, the world of the hungering subconscious is a sea of ostensible metaphors (a baseball bat, a blue-black mark that appears on Toru’s cheek, the titular bird with a cry that sounds like the winding of a spring) that do not symbolize or displace something real and concrete, but form a system of connections amongst themselves. As motifs that do not turn out to mean any specific thing, they serve less as metaphors than as conduits for some stories to remind us of others.

3.

One of the common threads in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the idea of traumatic experience severing a person from his or her former self. This is why Cinnamon stops speaking at the age of six, why Creta Kano goes from feeling excruciating pain in every aspect of life to feeling no pain at all, and why Kumiko’s disappearance makes no sense to Toru in light of what he knows about her from six years of marriage. This is a novel where characters undergo abrupt metamorphosis, not gradual change. But it is in the act of storytelling that the characters endeavour to make sense of nonsense. For May Kasahara, it is the nonsense of death. For Lieutenant Mamiya, it is the nonsense of war.

The heart of the nonsense, it seems, is in how the fatalism embedded in war and death alike are antithetical to the very idea of the imagination. What is fate, after all, than a prohibition against imagining that things might turn out otherwise?

The crucial passage is near the end of the book, when Toru arrives at Cinnamon’s story. As Cinnamon refuses to speak, his story is only available through a series of files on his computer, short pieces belonging to a work entitled—wait for it—”The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”. The story that Toru reads is a retelling of what happened to Cinnamon’s grandfather, a veterinarian in Manchukuo during the war. It is, for all intents and purposes, historical fiction. Why fiction? Because Cinnamon aimed to fill in the blanks of his family history, through which he may come to understand himself:

He inherited from his mother’s stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of a story were factual and which parts were not was probably not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.

This observation should be nothing new to anyone who has given serious thought to fiction. But the crux of it lies further down the page:

Whether by chance conjunction or not, the “wind-up bird” was a powerful presence in Cinnamon’s story. The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin. The will of human beings meant nothing, then, as the veterinarian always seemed to feel. People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose. Nearly all within range of the wind-up bird’s cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.

The reason this is critical is because Toru Okada has heard the cry of the wind-up bird. And in his effort to seclude himself in the well, he develops an attachment to the cursed property in which it resides, a lot where every former resident met a tragic end. The central interest in the plot is in how Toru embraces the tried and tested path to self-destruction in order to save Kumiko from god knows what, if indeed she can be saved.

So does he destroy himself or not? That I will not reveal. But my description of the novel hopefully conveys a sense of its oneiric logic, which will delight some readers and rightly frustrate many others. Readers who believe the advantage of fiction lies in dramatic unity, closure, or cause and effect are bound to pull their hair out at Murakami’s insistence on open-endedness and his deliberate resistance to answering a five-alarm fire of burning questions—why characters behave in certain ways, what is fundamentally at work in the sinister supernatural underbelly of Toru Okada’s Tokyo, or even “what happened” on the basic level of plot.

For a book with such a fatalistic air about it, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is suffused with arbitrariness. Why do things happen? Because they do. That is the sort of explanation that tells us next to nothing about reality, but it sure tells us a lot about dreams. Murakami’s trick is to make the conscious world behave like the dream world, then shove the two against each other in a mutual collision of yin and yang. What can symbols do but slip and slide?

In brief: Part biography and part catalogue of Charles Dodgson’s mathematical interests, Numberland is a crisp introduction to Dodgson’s professional work outside of the classic literary diversions he penned as Lewis Carroll. Wilson is content to explicate mathematical puzzles and present collections of facts rather than weave them into a story or thesis, but does so admirably enough to produce a fine survey of what captivated the man.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Lewis Carroll in Numberland, keep reading below.)

Avid readers of Lewis Carroll are likely familiar with the story of how Queen Victoria received Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Send me the next book Mr Carroll produces,” the Queen demanded—hardly expecting that Carroll, who was a lecturer in mathematics by the name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, would then present her with a copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, with Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry.

Dodgson later denied this story, but the tenor of the anecdote befits his reputation as a master of wordplay who often toyed with miscommunication and the boundary between the figurative and the literal. Examples abound in Robin Wilson’s biography, Lewis Carroll in Numberland, most of them drawn not from Alice but from Dodgson’s lesser-known works, private correspondence, and mathematical puzzles.

Wilson’s book begins with a sample of scenes from Dodgson’s writings as Lewis Carroll that draw on curiosities in arithmetic, geometry, and logic, but otherwise pays little attention to his literary work. The composition of Alice is a story that here occupies no more than two pages. The bulk of Numberland considers Dodgson as a pioneer of recreational mathematics; as a consummate scholar and educator who composed riddles for students and family members alike, devised shortcuts for arithmetic and instructional games for visualizing symbolic logic, and dabbled in everything from tennis tournament seeding to schemata for electoral reform.

Half of Numberland is straightforward biography, offering a portrait of what life was like for Dodgson as a clergyman’s son, model student, and Oxford scholar. Much of the evidence is drawn from letters and diary entries. Wilson exposes us to Dodgson’s England by way of the mathematical culture of the day, be it in the form of representative examination questions or the debate surrounding whether geometry ought to be taught directly from Euclid’s Elements or through new instructional texts. (Dodgson was a staunch advocate of adhering to a classical education in Euclidean geometry, insisting the order and numbering of Euclid’s axioms and propositions were themselves part of standard mathematical literacy. This was a battle he ultimately lost.)

The remainder of the book presents an eclectic sample of problems and other oddities, many of which Wilson leaves for the reader to solve (though solutions are provided in the endnotes). The mathematical content is undemanding and should be accessible to any reader with at least vague memories of middle-school algebra and geometry, though a few of the puzzles will take some thought. Conceptually, there is nothing here more advanced than Dodgson’s condensation method to quickly compute the determinants of large matrices, and Wilson explains it all with clear examples and easy-to-follow diagrams.

This is all that Wilson aspires to do in this book, and he does it well. All the same, the breakneck pace with which he hops from one curiosity to the next, coupled with the wholly expository nature of the text, leaves the impression that we are only receiving a cursory tour of the subject. The narrative frequently tantalizes us with breadcrumbs of fascinating connections only to move on to the next unrelated specimen.

I attribute this to Wilson’s marked distaste for deviating from documented historical fact. While this decision renders Numberland a cautious book that dares not synthesize its anecdotes, it may have its roots in what Wilson sees as the grave injustice that present-day revisionism has done to Dodgson’s reputation, notably with respect to his relations with children. As someone who spent a great deal of time with young girls (including Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and a noted amateur photographer who specialized in child subjects, Dodgson’s history raises some eyebrows today. Wilson only broaches the subject once, dismissing any unsavoury suspicions wholesale:

Sadly, much nonsense has been written about Dodgson’s friendships with children. In common with many of his generation, he regarded young children as the embodiment of purity and he delighted in their innocence. His vows of celibacy, which he took very seriously, would have outlawed any inappropriate behaviour, and there has never been a shred of evidence of anything untoward. Subjecting him to a modern ‘analysis’, rather than judging him in the context of his time, is bad history and bad psychology, and often tells us more about the writer than about Dodgson.

I have no reason to doubt that Wilson is correct. Similar controversies persist in fields like Shakespeare scholarship, where modern readings of pederasty and homosexuality in the plays often fail to account for what was a fundamentally different culture of social bonds and normative sexual desire. Psychoanalysis on the whole has proven more relevant to fiction and myth than to real people. But Wilson is unlikely to persuade anyone who believes Dodgson’s relations with children are circumstantially suspect—certainly not by abandoning the subject almost as soon as he brings it up. We all know how moral conservatism and vows of celibacy make for a flimsy defence nowadays.

My point remains that Wilson does little to make arguments and broad connections, even when it is within the scope of the book’s mathematical focus. Personally, I would have liked to see more direct discussion of how Dodgson’s multifarious interests influenced his literary output as Lewis Carroll. The knowledge that Dodgson was an early advocate for proportional representation—specifically, a variant of PR that would replace single-member constituencies with fewer electoral districts consisting of multiple, proportionally distributed representatives—seems to bear directly on the scene of the Caucus-race in Alice. Similarly, Dodgson’s advocacy for continued mathematical education through classical texts in polemics like Euclid and his Modern Rivals instantly reminds us of his frequent satires of British schooling and begs us to seek out a coherent thread of pedagogical beliefs.

This is not to say that Wilson neglects these connections entirely. One passage in Numberland calls attention to the recurring appearances of the number forty-two in the Carroll literature—the most intriguing example being this passage from Alice:

I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn’t signify…

Wilson notes that 4 × 5 = 12 in base 18, 4 × 6 = 13 in base 21, and so on as we increment the base in threes up to base 39, where 4 × 12 = 19—after which we reach base 42, where 4 × 13 yields not 20, but 1X (X being the digit in base 42 equivalent to 10 in decimal). In a twisted way, Alice was right.

This reminds me of another story about numbers in amusing books. No mention of the number forty-two goes very far without bringing Douglas Adams to mind, since the number appears in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. What the Question is, we’re not exactly sure, but in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent draws Scrabble tiles out of a bag and randomly generates the question, “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?” As 6 × 9 = 54, the point is that the universe makes no sense.

It has been observed, however, that 6 × 9 = 42 in base 13. Despite circumstantial oddities like how Arthur’s handmade Scrabble board is 13×13 instead of the standard 15×15, Adams vigorously denied that this was anything but coincidence. “I may be a sorry case,” he said, “but I don’t write jokes in base 13.” Evidently, Lewis Carroll did him one better.

In brief: This collection of book reviews, lectures, and other essays by one of the great twentieth-century physicists is an outstanding guide to his thought, most notably on the ethics of science and the nature of war. Dyson makes a persuasive case for optimism about the future of our species, provided we learn from our past.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Scientist as Rebel, keep reading below.)

1.

I was first aware of Freeman Dyson as a child because of his association with the Dyson sphere, a hypothetical energy-harnessing shell constructed around a star. If sci-fi is a speculative fiction, then Dyson is a speculative essayist, dreaming up solutions for the engineering problems that will necessarily face an ever-expanding humanity and fine-tuning the mechanical details with his lifetime of experience in leading-edge physical science.

The selections in The Scientist as Rebel, drawn primarily from his contributions to The New York Review of Books, show a different side of Dyson, as an ethicist and historian. Most of these are in the form of book reviews that have appeared in the NYRB regarding works of every stripe, be it fiction (Michael Crichton’s Prey), history (Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps), posthumous documents (Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman), or popular science (Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos).

The only representative of Dyson’s speculative classics is his 1972 lecture on John Desmond Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil, named for what Bernal saw as the three enemies of man’s rational nature. What begins as a meditation on the obstacles to humanity’s ability to sustain its own development without bringing about its own irrational collapse blossoms into a theory of how we might go about colonizing comets.

If we look to comets instead of planets, says Dyson, the chances of human expansion into the cosmos look decidedly less bleak. And if we think of genetic engineering not in terms of moral eugenic scares, but as a way of designing special-purpose plants and microorganisms to make hostile environments more hospitable, we can grow trees on comets to make them livable, and perhaps even clean up some of our mess here on Earth.

Is this the stuff of science fiction? Yes, it is. The Dyson tree, like the Dyson sphere, has recurrently appeared in fiction since. The Bernal lecture nevertheless fits seamlessly into this collection. It shares with the other essays an appreciation for grand theories of civilization and human nature as well as the role of science and scientists in shaping our society.

Not every piece in the book concerns science. Among the finest chapters in The Scientist as Rebel are the revised and updated excerpts from Dyson’s Weapons and Hope, originally published in 1984. Dyson, a lifelong pacifist, relates how every prognostication in 1939 foretold the collapse of Great Britain in the Second World War in the same manner as Germany in the first. This happily turned out to be wrong, and Dyson muses at length as to why. He looks to the self-destructive cults of soldiery in Germany, Russia, and the American South and contrasts them with the British ideal of seamanship—which, by the very nature of naval warfare, commits itself to limited tactical warfare. (The Allied aerial firebombing of German civilians, on the other hand, showed us that no country is above mass asymmetrical brutality when twentieth-century weapons are in play.)

Dyson’s portraits of national cultures of war draw on literature, letters of convicted war criminals, and his own work as an operational analyst for Bomber Command. He writes with an authority that is instantly apparent from the rigour of his readings and the breadth of his erudition. It is perhaps no coincidence that he locates the darkness of human nature in its insular national sentiments, but finds hope in the reason we share.

2.

I have spoken too briefly of Freeman Dyson, the thinker. I now turn my attention to Dyson, the book reviewer. As a casual book reviewer myself, the experience of reading The Scientist as Rebel was an exercise in witnessing a command performance by a master of the form. I hardly feel qualified to assess it.

My habit as a reader is to think about a book in terms of its internal logic. I like to abstract a structure of ideas from the text, inspect it for coherence, and align it with other abstractions—myths, ideologies, beliefs—to see how they interact in a grand scheme of thought. In fiction, I try to locate aesthetic pleasures that are in the text itself and not wholly a product of my personal emotional response. In non-fiction, I consider whether the rhetoric makes sense provided the supporting facts are true, unless I am in a position to deem them incomplete or false. (Whether I conduct any of this successfully is an exercise I leave to the reader.)

Crucially, I do this because it is often the best I can manage as an inexpert reader. It frightens me somewhat that this is how a lot of decisions in society are made, whether you are a student volunteer adjudicating a contest of impromptu debate or a Supreme Court justice weighing the testimonies of equally credentialed specialists. We always take some knowledge for granted and derive some facts from authority.

The defining characteristic of science is its accompanying disclaimer that we need not take anything for granted or from authority; that there is a paper trail of observables and methodologies challenging us to check the facts ourselves. One could equally say this of history, but only once we admit human actions and man-made records as evidence, and make allowances for non-predictive theories, the disappearance of evidence, and fundamentally unrepeatable controls.

Freeman Dyson is a scientist, historian, and expert reader. There are some things he can say about books that I cannot.

Of the pieces in The Scientist as Rebel, the first example that comes to mind is Dyson’s review of Edward Teller’s Memoirs. There is arguably no giant of twentieth-century physics as vilified as Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and the man most singly responsible for advocating its proliferation. Dyson is steadfastly opposed to technology as an instrument of death and destruction—the misuse of science, as distinct from science itself—but is no less clear about what he remembers of Edward Teller as a colleague, friend, and human being: one who made mistakes and regretted them, as when he testified against Robert Oppenheimer before the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, and made other mistakes he never recanted to anyone’s satisfaction, like his instrumental role in H-bomb development; but a human being nonetheless.

Dyson engages other reviewers and historians in open debate about Teller’s legacy, drawing attention to Teller’s earnest helpfulness to colleagues and students alike, yet relying in equal measure on what he personally knew of the man. The latter is never by itself a persuasive argument, but to the extent that it relies on what we think of Dyson’s own sense of principle and his judgment of character, it succeeds. Dyson’s extensive personal collaboration with many of the leading figures in physics lends him credibility as a character witness, and a position of reasoned authority that few others can say they share.

3.

A second example is Dyson’s review of Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, a popular exposition of string theory by one of its leading exponents. Dyson speaks favourably of Greene’s book as an illuminating example of how theoretical physicists think, for the purposes of an inexpert audience. At the same time, he advises strongly against taking string theory as accepted or even necessary. There are scientific revolutions like Einstein’s relativity, but they are exceptions to the rule. Often, the theoretical foundations are strong enough that physicists need only build conservatively upon the existing body of knowledge, as Richard Feynman did with quantum electrodynamics.

Dyson goes on to declare that he sees no need to reconcile the mutually contradictory mathematics of relativity, which works on the scale of the very large, and quantum mechanics, which works on the scale of the very small. String theory is presently the dominant attempt to unify the two into a Theory of Everything, a single coherent mathematical description of both matter and the fundamental forces. According to Dyson, such a theory is physically meaningless so long as it depends on entities that are, in principle, apparently undetectable—in this case, gravitons, quanta of gravity analogous to how photons are quanta of light. Dyson postulates that gravitons are unobservable by any method or experiment, and that they may as well not exist.

Barring the development of a way to observe gravitons, this is a dispute that is unlikely to be decided by facts. It is a disagreement emblematic of one of the core debates in the philosophy of science: the question of whether unobservable entities are “real”, and with it, the related question of whether theories get to the truth. Theories that rely on unobservables often provide their own justification in the form of predictive success, or in explaining observable consequences better than any known alternatives. What Dyson suggests is that gravitons contribute to neither, and that a unified theory provides only mathematical neatness while adding nothing to the predictive value already supplied by relativity and quantum mechanics in separate domains.

While he likens gravitons to the theory of luminiferous aether that died at turn of the twentieth century, it does not seem as though Dyson’s critique extends to all unobservables broadly. He aims it instead at the frills that come with assuming that the laws of nature fit into an elegant mathematical closure simply because we wish it to be so. As we know from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, even mathematics does not have mathematical closure.

In any case, I highlight Dyson’s review of Greene because it demonstrates how meaningful the general-audience book review can be when it aims for deep engagement with the content of a text and its wider implications. It marks a distinction between a book-as-object’s value as a product of human thought and a book-as-subject’s adequacy in telling us something about the world. The dynamic between these two flavours of criticism govern the many collected essays in which Dyson reviews books in contrast with their peers and antecedents, particularly in the case of histories and biographies on the same subject.

What makes Dyson a book reviewer par excellence is not his unique expertise and life story, nor simply that he has read more books. These are important factors that inform his thinking in a manner unavailable to most people, but ancillary to the task that puts them together: the illumination of a context that grants us access to the issues of the day. As a book for the general public, The Scientist as Rebel eschews technical detail in favour of the big picture. Dyson’s background instills in us a great measure of trust in his knowledge’s basis in fact, allowing us to rest comfortably in the literary habits of the amateur who reads to learn. It is sensible for us to debate the ramifications because we trust the facts.

I often state as an axiom that good criticism ought to make its object more interesting, not less. The Scientist As Rebel is at no loss for objects, and Dyson is at no loss for interesting things to say.

In brief: The book’s alternate subtitle—”How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain”—offers a hint of Shenk’s scope of thought. Full of colourful stories and painstaking research, this thoroughly accessible work probes into the mystery of how chess has endured for 1400 years and why it delights us still. Shenk guides us on a tour through everything from the intrigue of warring nations to the play-by-play thrill of a historic game, and muses as much about how chess has shaped humanity as how humanity has shaped chess. A must-read for hobbyists and serious players alike.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Immortal Game, keep reading below.)

The Immortal Game is a book so bubbly with intellectual excitement that it can’t seem to decide what to be about. I say this as a compliment. There’s an old Indian proverb that chess is an ocean where a gnat may drink and an elephant bathe (or drown—I’ve seen it rendered both ways, and both make sense for different reasons). To boil it down to one thesis, or one narrative thread, would fail to capture the bottomless complexity at the core of the game’s appeal.

Not for lack of trying, though. There’s a paragraph four chapters into the book where the author, David Shenk, attempts to bind his entire project together into a single statement. It’s a pretty long statement:

How could one game symbolize so many different entities, structures, relationships, notions? It largely came down to the fact that chess had been designed as a symbol to begin with. Out of the box, it came furnished with a wide variety of generic attributes that lent themselves to an even wider variety of metaphorical applications: chess was a battle between two groups, each stratified by social ranking, contesting for dominance over a finite piece of geography, interacting in a dynamic so complex it seemed to take on a life of its own, each army manipulated by a player, battling each other with wits rather than brawn, employing both tactics (short-term planning) and strategy (long-term planning), in a game that could never truly be mastered.

This passage provides a decent summary of what The Immortal Game tries to do. It isn’t a history of chess in a dry, chronological sense. Rather, it asks why chess has recognizably survived for over fourteen centuries, why it has evolved into its current standardized form with respect to game mechanics as well as strategic wisdom, and why it has repeatedly taken a central role as the exemplary specimen in studies of the mind (as the fruit fly is to genetics)—and answers these questions by placing chess in the context of not only its own history, but the intellectual history of human civilization.

Why is chess special? It incontrovertibly is, but why? To answer this, it is not sufficient to look at the appeal of chess on its own, or its relevance to the world outside the board—the thinking skills Benjamin Franklin identified as foresight, circumspection, and caution in “The Morals of Chess”, his lesson in gentlemanly chess etiquette (reproduced in full in The Immortal Game‘s appendices). One must show why chess has inspired the human imagination in countless ways while other board games have not: not checkers, despite its game-theoretic similarities and the likeness of the board; not Go, which is mathematically on a whole other plane of complexity; not backgammon, the prototype of which (nard) was contemporaneous with chess’s Persian ancestor, shatranj.

Shenk rises to the challenge, and his answers are often inventive on top of being sensible. There is more to chess, we learn, than its nature as a deterministic abstraction—a bloodless battlefield with no dice and no rotting corpses, no fates to answer to but the aims of sparring minds. It also possesses the qualities of representational art. (This is very interesting as chess spreads via the Islamic Renaissance, given Islam’s prohibition on representational imagery; the solution, in those times, was to carve pieces that were almost abstract but not quite.) The class stratification of the pieces—a king that must be protected, pawns that are weak by themselves but powerful as a structured whole, knights that hop around and do their own thing to throw everyone off—is a reflection of our society. The pieces work collectively towards a common goal, but they do it with their own unique abilities.

No wonder chess is a wellspring of political and literary rhetoric: the game is directly a metaphor for war, and indirectly a metaphor for life. One may object that chess players don’t really imagine themselves as generals commanding armies on the other side of Alice’s looking-glass: they see positions and geometries, not romantic battles, right? But as Shenk shows us in one colourful anecdote after another, they often do. A French ambassador used chess to advise Elizabeth I of the political threat from the Stuarts. Benjamin Franklin’s chess games in England segued into last-ditch diplomatic talks to avoid the Revolutionary War. Nazi Germany trained its children on sets with the pieces replaced by modern artillery, and hired the Russian legend Alexander Alekhine to write anti-Semitic tracts on the cowardice of Jewish chess strategy.

Shenk tells these stories so vividly that one is inclined to disbelieve them. This says more about his gift as a writer than it does about his research, which is extensively corroborated. His presentation of how computers have tackled the game is a superb introduction to minimax algorithms, better than the explanations in many computing science texts.

As a responsible journalist, Shenk is judicious about consulting multiple professional opinions from different fields. Heaven knows he has a stunning range of sources to draw upon. In one of The Immortal Game‘s most compelling chapters, Shenk confronts the uncomfortable but undeniable quandary of the high incidence of mental illness among serious chess players. The Freudians, quaint as they seem now, regarded chess as an outlet for the patricidal impulse of the Oedipus complex. A short story by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig links the simulation of games against oneself to a “self-produced schizophrenia”. As for the delusional paranoia best known to us through the story of Bobby Fischer, literature professor and United States Chess Federation past president Tim Redman offers this choice quotation:

“A chess tournament is, by definition, an activity in which you spend many hours each day, using your best intellectual and imaginative abilities to figure out how the other player is out to get you.”

In between chapters, Shenk tells the story of one of chess’s most iconic moments, the game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzsky known as the Immortal Game, from which the book takes its title. There is something here for everyone. A novice player is likely unable to distinguish a good chess game from a bad one, but will still be able to appreciate the drama of every thrust, the excitement of every parry, as fortunes reverse this way and that. A developing player, familiar with rules and tactics but unable or unwilling to rise to the next level with hundreds of hours of study, will have fun stepping through the game and predicting every move, only to have Anderssen and Kieseritzsky shatter all expectations. An expert player will have seen it all before and may even be frustrated at the finer strategic minutiae that Shenk’s annotation omits, but should appreciate the uniqueness of this game all the more—especially given the way Shenk contextualizes it as the definitive example of the daring Romantic style.

Shenk is of that second class of player, thrilled with the game but intimidated by the thought of being straitjacketed into a regimen of study. (There is a personal attraction there too: Shenk is a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century master Samuel Rosenthal.) Like most disciplines in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the wealth of accumulated expertise in chess raised the bar of entry to seemingly insurmountable heights. One can no longer be a Benjamin Franklin these days, dabbling here and there; not in medicine, physics, and diplomacy, and not in chess.

In Shenk’s words, here’s the truth of it—the truth I, for one, had begrudgingly learned about too many of my own exploits to name:

Playing well requires study—period. There are more and less sophisticated ways to play the game, and those unwilling to face up to the reality of chess knowledge will be consigned forever to be ineffective, ignorant underachievers.

[...]

One learns from past play; one does not start from scratch. Every notable game is entered into the historical record, studied by humans—and now computers—until it becomes an essential part of the foundation of knowledge that future games will be built on. In not wanting to study openings, I was the equivalent of an unenlightened medieval cleric ranting against intellectual discovery.

Humbling, to be sure. But, to be honest, that still didn’t make me want to study opening theory.

Which is the central problem of human creativity, isn’t it: the search for something new when it seems like everything has already been done. We all get into the business hoping to innovate, but without an extensive literacy in the form—which, in chess, is an art form with evolutions and revolutions in aesthetic thought, from the Romantic to the Scientific era, from the Hypermodern school to the New Dynamism—you’re just wanking. And therein lies the constant struggle of our finite existences: to find that elusive balance between the desire to improve and the reluctance to give up one’s life.

Then again, you could always surrender to your limitations and write a good book instead—a book like The Immortal Game.

In brief: In the height of the Napoleonic Wars, two magicians appear in England and strive to restore its long-lost tradition of wonders, but disagree on whether fairies have any role to play. On one thing we can all agree: this epic love letter to England herself is fantastic, and shouldn’t be missed.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, keep reading below.)

1.

I’ve been writing casually about books here for a little short of a year now, and I am still not acclimatized to the habit of making value judgments about literature. Value-judgment criticism seems to take two rhetorical forms. Naïvely one begins with an argument from taste: I responded well to this; I didn’t respond to well to that; I like the tomato. Thenceforth the reader who wishes to justify that taste with something persuasive turns to the argument from principle: I liked this because it exemplifies something that literature ought to be; I hated this because it was contrary to those ideals. (Literature ought to be “true”, literature ought to be “entertaining”, literature ought to make “money”, etc., etc.) The determination of whether a book is any good, even in the most professional and well-regarded publications aimed at the literate public, appears to involve a simple process: the application of an argument from principle to disguise and justify an argument from taste.

My discomfort with the idea that literature ought to ascribe to a single set of principles, an ideology in the most pejorative sense, comes from a belief that a world of creative activity that directed itself towards one set of ideals would be very dreary indeed. It is wholly unreasonable to expect a single book to capture the essence of Literature when some principles inevitably take precedence over others in any given work.

Nevertheless, I think there is always room to say that it would be very interesting to encounter certain ideals, or combinations of ideals, that have yet to appear in one’s personal reading history. And for some time now, I’ve unconsciously converged on a mental picture of what I would like to see in a novel—not every novel, but at least one. An eloquent and witty prose style that doesn’t mire the plot; convincing world-building full of both imaginative and historical interest; demonstrable literacy within and outside of its genre, but not at the expense of being independently comprehensible; events and images that linger in the mind; a meaningful contribution to the world of ideas; total synergy of content and form.

So now I’m staring at the Real Thing—roundabout 1000 gobsmacking pages of the Real Thing, boxed in a lavish three-volume edition—and I’m not sure what to say.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Damn, what a novel.

2.

No synopsis would do this book justice. The problem isn’t with its complexity, but its girth. Whether your edition is bound as one book or three, there is no doubt that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell recalls the print culture of Regency England, when novels were parcelled out into separate volumes for smoother distribution in the circulating libraries. Novelists adjusted to match, writing immense tapestries with plots of a serial structure. It would be easy to dismiss the sheer enormity of Susanna Clarke’s magisterial debut novel as one of her many period gimmicks, but she has more than enough material to fill it.

The novel takes place in the years 1806 to 1817 in an England not quite like our own: in medieval times, its northern half was ruled out of Newcastle by a legendary magician known as the Raven King. When the novel begins, magic has long faded from England and become a theoretical, almost philological discipline. Scholars and dilettantes band together in gentlemen’s societies and exhume what they can of it, as they would a dead language.

Enter Gilbert Norrell, a man who shut himself up in his veritable shrine of a library to teach himself magic out of books and restore it to England in the form of respectable practical use. Norrell is at once a technologist and monopolist. His aim is to reestablish magic as a study worthy of the age of reason (with none of that nonsense about fairies and ravens), while buying up all the books of magic in the country and driving everyone else out of the business. But as we see in the most fascinating characters in fiction, principles are no match for secret personal hypocrisies; and soon enough Mr Norrell, desperate to forge political connections that will allow him to deploy magic in the nation’s service, finds himself bargaining with a fairy trickster to resurrect a Cabinet minister’s fiancée.

Norrell elects to conveniently forget about this and go about his merry, contradictory way, returning magic to national prominence while restricting the flow of information so as to create an orthodoxy that will have absolutely nothing to do with English magic’s wild and folksy side, the England still under the Raven King’s banner in spirit if not in name. And so magic prospers in England under a dictum of good sense, although it predictably runs aground of the same problem I identified with ideologies of sensible literature: a successfully established orthodoxy denies the exploration of a field of vast interest, and inevitably stagnates.

That’s where Jonathan Strange enters the fray, as we move into the autumn of 1809 and the second act of the book. Strange is a talented, if distractible young fellow who turns to magic because no other vocation holds his curiosity for long, and Romantic to the core. Strange’s creativity is his greatest asset, and it isn’t long before Norrell begrudgingly takes him as a pupil. Then it’s no time at all before Strange tires of Norrell’s tutelage and goes off on his own wild adventure, which takes him through the Peninsular War at Wellington’s side and, irresistibly, to Waterloo.

Clarke’s vision of the Napoleonic Wars with magic is nothing short of triumphant, and every indulgence justifies itself with sheer wonder. Every occasion Norrell and Strange pull out their magic makes for a showstopper of narrative fireworks. It may look as if I am verging on hyperbole, but it truly must be read to be believed. Not common these days is the novel that excites the senses as well as the mind; I’ve found one, and I’ll treasure it.

Once Napoleon is out of the picture and you realize there is still a third of the book to go, one almost wonders if Clarke has anywhere left to take it. And it’s true that in the book’s final act, it begins to buckle under the weight of its own mythology as the widening philosophical gulf between Strange and Norrell turns into an all-out rivalry, where Strange is enraptured by the enduring mysteries of the Raven King and England’s folkloric fairy-magic (through, of all catalysts, the madness of George III), and Norrell is destroying Strange’s publications to censor his fantastic notions from the public. It is to Clarke’s credit that, having exhausted raw spectacle, she turns the novel inward to the characters’ personal journeys. Norrell seems oddly neglected throughout the final stretch, as Strange has clearly taken centre stage; then again, that is easily explained as the end result of how Norrell has rendered himself powerless, after years of delegating his decisions and his interaction with society as a whole to a Dickensian pair of scoundrels.

And throughout all this, one shouldn’t forget about the gentleman with the thistle-down hair—the fairy villain that Norrell unleashed with his ill-thought resurrection contract, who causes everyone a copious share of grief.

That is, in a nutshell, the plot. Its ambition speaks for itself.

3.

One would be remiss in calling Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell an alternate history of England. In so many ways, it is the history of England, but with the exciting, imaginative bits blown up under a magnifying glass, and given voice and shape.

Clarke documents her novel with extensive footnotes, some of which stretch for pages of exposition in small print, establishing an entire history of England’s magical roots. Yet the Raven King and the otherworld of Faerie, which courses through the rivers and woodlands and the interconnected halls on the other side of mirrors, are manifestations of a folkloric tradition that, if we were to trace it properly, stretches back before the Norman conquest.

In literature we are most familiar with it through every Shakespeare play that involves a forest, although the nostalgia for a feral, pre-Norman Britain was also a subject of intense interest for Walter Scott, who wrote in the era in which Strange & Norrell is set: one recalls the court of Cedric of Rotherwood in Ivanhoe. And in the history of the English imagination, the place of the woodland fantasy is difficult to pinpoint. In Clarke, as in history, it isn’t magic of the Arthurian sort: Merlin is explained away as a half-man, half-demon, and we are informed that the Raven King began a separate tradition of magic that was wholly his own. But folklore survives in a wholly different fashion once it is under the pressure of civilized reason, and England’s pre-Christian mythology has always had an odd way of surviving in spite of every effort to wash it away and pretend it never was.

And all that is a precursor to the action that is in front of us for most of Clarke’s novel, which easily claims the latent intrigue of the England of the Duke of Wellington, Lord Byron, and the memory of William Pitt the Younger simply by naming them. It only gets better once we see what Clarke does with the wealth of modern English mythology in front of her. The government implores Norrell to resurrect William Pitt, Wellington barks impatient commands with a no-nonsense voice that is in every way how one would imagine him to speak, and Strange crosses paths with the legendary poet only to find the Byronic brand of romance not exactly compatible with his own:

Having taken an immediate dislike to each other, they progressed smoothly to quarrelling about politics. Strange wrote: “I do not quite know how it happened, but we immediately fell to talking of the battle of Waterloo—an unhappy subject since I am the Duke of Wellington’s magician and they all hate Wellington and idolize Buonaparte. Mrs Clairmont, with all the impertinence of eighteen, asked me if I was not ashamed to be an instrument in the fall of so sublime a man. No, said I.”

This is a cunning observation, and one of countless indications that Clarke is well aware of her target audience. In my experience, present-day Anglophiles are most likely to disagree with their beloved country in their reverence of Napoleon, who is an attractive historical figure for many of the same reasons as England herself.

4.

I can hardly exaggerate how rewarding this novel is to people who read books. This is an English novel for people who read English novels, and nowhere is it more evident than in the nineteenth-century prose style, which is true to the period in orthography as well as syntax.

By now I’ve read so many modern novels that replicate nineteenth-century English prose that the aesthetic choice has ceased to surprise me, or even surprize me. Counting only the ones that I have read in the past year and reviewed, I can spot The Ruby in the Smoke, The Siege of Krishnapur, and Watership Down—each of which appropriated the Victorian style to convey something about genre without crossing the line into parody. (Respectively: the penny dreadful, the colonial novel, the rustic adventure.) Add Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to the list.

Clarke’s style, in sentence construction, tone, and attention to detail, is perhaps best described as an amalgam of Jane Austen’s sense and Robert Louis Stevenson’s sensibility. It is to the novel’s credit that one quickly becomes accustomed to the narrative voice as part of the texture, and it recedes into the background without drawing too much attention to itself. With the ideas and images in the foreground, the connections to the English literature of the period become even sharper. At heart the novel delights in taking every opportunity to be a comedy of manners, rife with upstairs-downstairs social satire, class snobbery, and myopic sexism. One would think that Clarke was bringing a revisionist present-day sensibility into the fold if Austen hadn’t done a good share of it already.

In our contemporary reading environment, where the novel format has its own elaborate hierarchy of class stratification in all its wonderful, arbitrary instability (and frankly, we’re relieved if we can get the kids to read at all), one is liable to forget that the worth of prose fiction was hotly debated in Austen’s time. In the age of the circulating library, novels had a nasty public reputation as silly diversions by silly girls, for silly girls. Technological causes aside, the English novel’s ascent in status is a story of negotiating a shifting balance of escapism and good sense, an arduous metamorphosis that invariably led novels to jibe about themselves. The model for this is Austen’s own Northanger Abbey, an extended Quixotic subversion of Ann Radcliffe. (Austen is far from alone: the infamous seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede saw George Eliot stop her novel dead in its tracks to deliver a realist manifesto.) Now here comes Susanna Clarke, dreaming up an England where magic is an accepted part of life, but where novels are no more respectable:

The King’s Ministers had long treasured a plan to send the enemies of Britain bad dreams. The Foreign Secretary had first proposed it in January 1808 and for over a year Mr Norrell had industriously sent the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte a bad dream each night, as a result of which nothing had happened. Buonaparte’s empire had not foundered and Buonaparte himself had ridden into battle as coolly as ever. And so eventually Mr Norrell was instructed to leave off. Privately Sir Walter and Mr Channing thought that the plan had failed because Mr Norrell had no talent for creating horrors. Mr Canning complained that the nightmares Mr Norrell had sent the Emperor (which chiefly concerned a captain of Dragoons hiding in Buonaparte’s wardrobe) would scarcely frighten his children’s governess let alone the conqueror of half of Europe. For a while he had tried to persuade the other Ministers that they should commission Mr Beckford, Mr Lewis and Mrs Radcliffe to create dreams of vivid horror that Mr Norrell could then pop into Buonaparte’s head. But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.

5.

More must also be said of the footnotes, which here serve the function of shoving unsightly bricks of exposition off to the side for the reader’s leisurely perusal and giving the whole affair a mock-historical air of factual credibility. Novels with footnotes are nothing new, but Clarke puts a spin on the ones in Strange & Norrell that I may not have seen elsewhere. Strange, Norrell, and their various acolytes and collaborators are all involved in publishing scholarship about magic, and it is often to their works that the footnotes refer.

What this allows Clarke to do is use the footnotes as a foreshadowing mechanism. Jonathan Strange does not appear until the end of Volume I, yet by that point we already know, from publication credits alone, that he is to become a pupil of Mr Norrell’s, a rival following some disagreement, and later a historian with an interest in the Raven King. On the flipside, one begins to sense that the novel is growing too big for its britches near the end when the footnotes start referring to earlier chapters (or even earlier footnotes), in case the reader has already forgotten most of what has already happened.

Most impressive, however, is how Clarke seems to be an endless fount of stories within stories. There are times when Norrell will casually spout off references to incidents he read about in assorted books, and Clarke will footnote every single one of them with a tale complete with beginning, middle, and end. If you can imagine J.K. Rowling cramming the complete text of The Tales of Beedle the Bard into footnotes annotating the chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that names the various stories, then you might begin to get the idea. I do not imagine that many authors could get away with this; Clarke does only because she finds a way to make almost every story an interesting part of English magical history. The footnote markers are almost there to say, “You can skip us if you like—but you won’t.”

I do not wish to leave anyone with the impression that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a perfect novel (should such a thing even exist). Not everyone will have the same tolerance for its scope. It is also worth noting that as the novel progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that the acts of magic are so without rules and boundaries that anything can happen for the sake of having to happen: no conundrum appears impervious to Norrell consulting the right book or Strange taking the right risk. The actual problems to be solved via magic are hardly challenging at all.

But as an intelligent entertainment, Strange & Norrell is a novel of the most exquisite quality, a fiction that thinks about the England we know through depicting the England we love. My highest recommendation.

In brief: Ratliff’s carefully organized history of John Coltrane’s diverse musical stylings and its legacy in post-1960s jazz is a concise work of criticism that wisely puts the musical evidence front and centre. Its great success is its insistence on establishing Coltrane’s monumental importance instead of merely asserting it as the truth.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Coltrane, keep reading below.)

1.

I have never cared for biography. Biographies of creative individuals in particular have an alarming tendency to creep over the line into hagiography, resting as they often do on an unquestioned premise that the subject’s work and legacy—the meat and potatoes that make the subject worthy of adulation in a manner that is, strangely, a priori and ex post facto at once—were causal products of how he or she lived.

Creative works compel me far more than the persons behind them, not least because art draws it longevity from a boundless, renewable fount of meaning. Little of the meaning is put there by the author’s conscious design; most of it lies in the intrinsic structure of the work, its place as a data point in a grander corpus of social evidence, or its personal significance to a member of the audience who perceives it as analogical to a private experience (or that cushiest and most ineffable of words, “feeling”).

But jazz has a peculiar relationship to the Author. As a form of music predominantly built on improvisation, its creation is especially susceptible to claims of individual genius. Its most revered practitioners achieved a level of mastery over their instruments, both technical and conceptual, that seems well out of reach for the average or even above-average mortal. In jazz, the masters are the virtuosos who leave us most convinced that the mechanics of their instruments are no impediment to their musical imagination—and the imagination, it seems, is definitionally the personal property of an individual mind. To dispense with the Author is a manoeuvre that comes off as silly, sophistic, and antithetical to good sense.

With that in mind, John Coltrane’s enormous biographical appeal is hardly surprising. The range of his discography suggests a titanic figure who stepped out of a musical creation myth, a one-man microcosm of the history of jazz as we like to imagine it.

Here is a man who, within the span of a decade, progressed from the total assimilation of bebop’s chord-scale language to a point of supersaturation—chords upon chords, substitutions within substitutions—and delivered it as melody on a linear instrument; who nevertheless evolved in parallel to be his instrument’s immaculate ballad reader, with a midrange cleanliness of tone completely distinct from the flavour of the great tenorists before him; who then tapped into some ancient musical wisdom of modes and drones preceding the age of western reason, and reframed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” within that concept to produce a signature tune and radio hit; who turned days of solitary meditation on his purification from drugs into a devotional suite to God; who ultimately decided to shove it all aside to go on a cosmic vision quest, put his lips together and blow. There was something impossible about this man, the very idea of a man in whom the baroque, classical, romantic, and avant-garde could simultaneously fit.

I speculate that for most people who dare to think about Coltrane, the instinct is to seize upon the part they like and build the rest of the story around it. For Stanley Crouch, who sees jazz as a self-sustaining genre defined by rich formal elements (and whose book, Considering Genius, I previously reviewed), Coltrane was a tragic figure who fulfilled the promise of the music only to be seduced by some weird cacophonous devilry. For LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, whose jazz poetry of the period reflects no ear for musical structure but an honest passion for honking, Coltrane embodied a raw and unfettered explosion of blackness free from the chains of the western mind. For the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, hagiography is a perfectly measured approach.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe that everyone needs to take a cold shower and get back to the music itself.

That’s where Ben Ratliff comes in.

2.

I was previously familiar with Ratliff through his work as the house jazz writer at The New York Times. Nevertheless, it was with no small relief that I opened Coltrane: The Story of a Sound to see the following introductory remarks:

This is not a book about Coltrane’s life, but the story of his sound. [...] This is a book about jazz as sound. I mean “sound” as it has long functioned among jazz players, as a mystical term of art: as in, every musician finally needs a sound, a full and sensible embodiment of his artistic personality, such that it can be heard, at best, in a single note. Miles Davis’s was fragile and pointed. Coleman Hawkins’s was ripe and mellow and generous. John Coltrane’s was large and dry, slightly undercooked, and urgent.

But I also mean sound as a balanced block of music emanating from a whole band. How important is this? With Coltrane, sound ruled over everything. It eventually superseded composition: his later records present one track after another of increasing similarity, in which the search for sound superseded solos and structure.

The introduction’s promise is far more ambitious than the modesty of the text suggests. It is a promise to pull back from Coltrane, the saint, and look at Coltrane, the bag of musical ideas that assembled its contents over a laborious procedure of practice and interaction before spilling them all over everyone everywhere. It is a call for an objective appraisal of his transformative influence on the music—which has long been reified as a concrete historical fact—and assess his search for a “sound” near the end of his life as something that ought to be explained, independently of any preformed value judgments. Yes, it’s very interesting that Coltrane either tears into your very soul or sends you running for the hills with your fingers plugging your ears (sometimes both), but we should be asking why.

Ratliff divides Coltrane into two compartments. The first recounts the story of Coltrane’s sound as it developed through his life. It is a history of music in the most literal sense: picking out a chronological series of performances—some commercially recorded and released, others only extant as bootlegs in private hands—Ratliff listens to Coltrane’s improvisations (and later, the “sound” of his assembled bands) with a keen ear for nuance, marking them as data points to interpolate the development that must have happened in between. There are, for example, ideas that Coltrane seems to have distinctly picked up during his time with Thelonious Monk. Similarly, there is a pattern of individual adjustment and fine-tuning in his playing after he left Miles Davis, with every addition to or subtraction from his own band as he converged on the “classic quartet”: a particular way he sounded while next to Eric Dolphy, and after; with McCoy Tyner, and without. It’s a concise and empirical narrative with a clear methodology: at point A, Coltrane sounded like this; at point B, Coltrane sounded like that; what changed?

The second part of Coltrane is exclusively concerned with the the shape of jazz in the wake of Coltrane’s death in 1967. While Ratliff devotes a few paragraphs to Coltrane’s influence on everyone from Carlos Santana to Steve Reich, Ratliff’s focus remains squarely fixed on jazz in the American context: the jazz that splintered into a dying New York club scene, on one hand, and the embalmment offered by respected institutions of performance and education, on the other. Here, Ratliff draws extensively from quotations, interviews, and anecdotes. Not all of them are adulatory: critics and musicians opposed to (or, at least, suspicious of) the legacy of Coltrane’s late period are given equal time.

3.

Ratliff is, quite refreshingly, a critic with a mature appreciation for the difficulty of absorbing Coltrane into any singular ideology of how jazz ought to be discussed.

There are those who admire Coltrane for his spontaneous and necessarily intuitive grasp of theoretical patterns that, upon inspection, turn out to be incredibly ornate on both the micro level of the note selection in a lick and the macro level of a solo spread out over multiple seamless choruses. Yet even they must come to recognize that chord-scale dissection, while revelatory, can never produce a generative formula that yields anything other than a highly technical gaggle of Coltrane clones running “Giant Steps” at breakneck speeds.

Then there are those attracted to Coltrane, particularly late-period Coltrane, for the priority he places on unpremeditated feeling over form. (As many musicians will profess, this seems to be the most accurate reflection of how improvised music is actually created—never mind how intricate it looks when it’s finished.) In the most militant case, you may have observed the posse you see ambushing the comments section of every YouTube video of a classic performance, playing favourites and shutting out any and all rational analysis on the premise—I dare call it a religious one—that to think about something, rather than feel it, is to destroy its beauty. This is intellectually limiting for the obvious reasons.

Somehow, the enthusiasts at either extremity all miss the point. Neither the theory-centric schema of Coltrane-as-changes nor the empathy-driven portrait of Coltrane-as-catharsis capture the totality of his oeuvre with a perspective that feels complete. Ratliff, always the consummate journalist, acknowledges the inadequacy of either and the necessity of both.

And that isn’t even getting into the sensitive and uncomfortable realization that for many listeners, the debate is racially coded: the white man’s reason, the black man’s passion. On an essential level I find this distinction silly and degrading to everybody involved, but one has to account for a history of oppression that has made it true, and has constructed particular aesthetic values as a community’s cry for freedom. The prevalence of this justification for Coltrane’s later explorations, whether he intended it or not, renders it of paramount relevance to the story of how his music affected people in the way it did.

But that, in turn, has led to the excessive sanctification of Coltrane in some critical circles, which has rendered his music unimpeachable on account of who created it—a fallacious appeal to authority. Ratliff reacts with scepticism in this cutting summary, which it is my great pleasure to quote at length:

Let’s put these ideas in concentrated form. This is their essence: Coltrane’s loud and dense late-period music cannot be separated from the path toward racial tolerance and absolute worldwide human equality. [...] Resistance or intolerance toward this music is a kind of sclerosis; to open oneself ot it is to admit honesty and greater feeling. “Understanding it” is empirical Western foolishness; the will to understand is just more sclerosis. [...] The music separates itself from jazz of the past (if it is relevant at all to reduce it to “jazz”) by its call for freedom from oppression; by extension, to pine for the jazz of the past is to pine for oppression.

No art can hold up under the weight of these hopes. They mystify and sanctify the art beyond possibility, and do damage to all that lies in propinquity to it. Giving Coltrane such thunderous credence, too, automatically minimized the work of others around him.

[...]

In claiming the music was beyond language and understanding, writing like this used a specific language. It is the language of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and it tended to be used vestigially, mostly about three things: deities, psychedelic drugs, and music.

4.

The sobriety of this book is its greatest strength. Coltrane is in no way a didactic work, but Ratliff leaves us with a few messages that, the way I read them, sound a call for restraint that in no way devalues Coltrane’s musical accomplishments. Here’s a limited sample:

• John Coltrane didn’t arrive fully-formed, and couldn’t have gotten where he was without strenuous practice. This is a musician who would drill quarter notes for an hour. This is a saxophonist who slogged through exercise books designed for harps.
• Coltrane’s erratic shifts in style were not an exclusive product of his wandering interests, but considerably affected by the time and opportunities that other, more established musicians afforded him. Miles Davis had to find room for Coltrane’s busy playing, and cautiously let him in on ballads bit by bit; and even then, there came a point when Coltrane’s direction expanded in a different trajectory than where Davis’s bands wanted to go.
• The Coltrane “sound”, in its various permutations, developed over time in a performance environment that no longer exists for most musicians today: one that facilitated the development of a band sound, where the leader’s playing left a space for his sidemen to explore in their own specific fashion. (Ratliff’s closing statement: “The truth of jazz is in its bands.”) Studios and club bookings now rarely permit a band to discover that texture over a process of gradual refinement, night after night, session after session.

None of this is to say that Coltrane was anything less than a phenomenal musician. But what Ratliff deftly avoids is the trap of asserting Coltrane’s ingenuity as a founding presumption, and only then considering the music within the context of a Great Artist. His interest in Coltrane’s music is invested in why it developed into an earth-moving influence the way it did, and that question of perpetual historical interest: will it happen again? In the end, Coltrane is a book that is subtly about the how-and-why of mythmaking, the process behind the genesis of so many competing narratives of who Coltrane was and what he meant to the music in the long run. As we are reminded time and again, he did not live in a vacuum.

5.

Coltrane is a terse volume that never pretends to be exhaustive: as one would expect given its author, it reads like a series of New York Times articles that happen to be united beneath the umbrella of one common subject, and two overarching narrative threads. It is never too theoretical, but with just enough suggestion of technical material to keep trained musicians involved in the argument.

But this also means that the book is very often a digest, and one that may leave readers wanting more. The ardent Coltrane connoisseur will no doubt find sins of omission; the genre-hopping internationalist will find Ratliff’s token overview of Coltrane’s influence outside American jazz too cursory an afterthought; the passionate theoretician will immediately trawl the Jazz Review archives from 1959 for Zita Carno’s transcription-laden two-part feature, “The Style of John Coltrane.” (And demagogues opposed to any objective detachment in the appreciation of jazz music may never accept the book’s very existence. Their loss.)

I strongly recommend that anyone approaching Coltrane does so with some recordings on hand; words only go so far when it comes to supplying suitable analogies for what the ear perceives. One of Ratliff’s most fulfilling tactics, especially in the first half, is the isolation of nuances in solos that one may not have paid any mind to before.

Thankfully, many of the classic concert performances discussed in the book have now resurfaced on YouTube, like the Düsseldorf concert of 28 March, 1960, when Miles took a night off and let Coltrane have the stage with Stan Getz and Oscar Peterson:

I personally wish Ben Ratliff had the time, resources, and publisher support to supply an extensive a companion audio guide on the Internet rife with samples of fair-use length, like the one Alex Ross provided for The Rest Is Noise (reviewed here). Jazz writing for the public, especially that which depends on close, excerpted listening to defend its claims, can only benefit from laying out the audio for everyone to hear. Coltrane is readable without it, but more convincing with it.

In brief: Smith’s comedy of intellectual warfare in a New England college town dazzles with its ventriloquial feats of dialogue. Yet the novel is more insightful as a study of personal aesthetics, and how artistic principles motivate individual actions, than of American politics, which here seem oddly transplanted from a British sensibility.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on On Beauty, keep reading below.)

1.

On Beauty is the kind of novel that would be nothing without its prose. This probably comes off as an absurd tautology—of course there’s no book without the words—but I think it is a good way to put it. Here is a character-driven slice-of-life/spice-of-life comedy in the extreme: its plot, if you wish to call it that, comprises a disjointed series of unlikely coincidences that exist solely to dump the players in a pot and stir. It’s Smith’s lively narration that keeps the novel afloat, making it that uncommon literary pleasure that leaves no page without a sentence to fall in love with or giggle at, but is never pretentious and rarely boring over its distended length of 443 pages.

It’s the same trick Smith pulled in White Teeth, the joyous breakout debut that destroyed the self-esteem of budding writers everywhere when they discovered it was written by a twenty-something wunderkind. Beautiful sentences that propel you forward instead of slowing you down; light, fluffy, but smart.

Unlike White Teeth, On Beauty is not a multigenerational family saga of thunderous ambition, but a more restrained and collected Kulturkampf comedy set in Wellington College, a fictitious liberal arts university for overachievers that bears an uncanny resemblance to Harvard. Its central characters are the families Belsey and Kipps, whose professorial patriarchs take their Rembrandt very, very seriously and fight over it in public.

In one corner you have the art historian Howard Belsey, stodgy Englishman and voice of the proud left-wing establishment called the Humanities department, whose erudite denunciations of humanism, genius myths, and representational art are no help at all when it comes to keeping his dick in his pants around women who aren’t his wife. In the opposite corner is Monty Kipps, populist conservative Christian aesthete of West Indian extraction, who (unlike Howard) actually finished his book about Rembrandt, and whose proposed lecture series entitled “Taking the ‘Liberal’ Out of the Liberal Arts” offers some clue as to his agenda.

On Beauty is Howard’s book, or at the very least a book about the Belseys, which leaves Monty cast in the background as a distant ideological villain. This is not to say that Monty doesn’t get a fair hearing: while his appeal to commonsense presumptions about Great Art and his opposition to affirmative action on the grounds that it patronizes minorities add little to the bag of worn-out talking points, there is no suggestion that they are, on principle, wrong. Both men undermine themselves with an equal share of moral hypocrisies; it’s merely easier to root for Howard because we bear witness to more of his foibles.

2.

One’s mileage with this novel will vary as a function of one’s tolerance for outrageous contrivances in the plot.

We are meant to believe that Howard’s son rebels against his father by converting to Christianity, taking up practical studies like economics, and very nearly running off with Monty’s temptress daughter, which is a pleasant way to get the book started, even if the incident ends almost as soon as it has begun.

Then we are meant to believe that Monty joins the faculty of Wellington College, moves into the same neighbourhood as the Belseys, and engages in ship-to-ship combat with Howard in various publications of note while their spouses become friends. This is an interesting turn of events, though it stays behind the scenes from that point on and doesn’t go anywhere until the inevitable verbal showdown near the end.

Then we are told that their children just happen to take courses with their parents and each other’s parents; that both families wind up in London for Christmas and converge on a conveniently placed funeral; that Howard accompanies Monty’s daughter to a college formal the same day as the aforementioned verbal showdown (with no apparent conflict). This is pushing it.

Thank goodness the writing is superb. It doesn’t make any of the setups plausible, but it does make every scene fun. Nothing will stop me from wishing that Smith gave her readers a thread of continuity instead of flitting about from one incident to the next, dropping in on her characters only when they gather under the same roof in volatile combinations. But it’s a testament to her gift for building characters and letting their voices leak out all over the narration that one doesn’t much care how they survived the empty space from one predicament to the next. What matters is that they’re in the scene and perpetually ready to explode in a shower of repressed anxieties.

3.

On Beauty is a masterclass in dialogue writing. Every character has a manner of speech imprisoned by the way they think; some of them try to escape it, and none of them succeed. Howard fumbles his way through his marital difficulties in his personal comfort zone of semiotic jargon; Claire Malcolm, the university’s resident distinguished poet (and other half of Harold’s onetime conference tryst), has a head so lost in the clouds that she inflects everything with italics; Zora, Howard’s sophomore daughter, who calls upon her unhealthy enthusiasm for university policy to muscle her way into Claire’s poetry class to pad her grad school profile, speaks as if life is one big job interview.

The characters have a natural habit of trailing off when they tiptoe around uncomfortable truths, but the reader gets a chance to know them well enough to read into every ellipsis with astonishing accuracy and figure out exactly what someone is afraid to say. That’s when you know the characters in a book have become your friends: when you can peer into their souls. (No authorial spoon-feeding required.)

Many of them do it to each other, too, getting to the bottom of things by reading faces instead of having to hear the truth. Faces are important in this novel: the debate over the value of Rembrandt is the centre of gravity for the book because it is, on a greater level, a question of whether there is anything behind a face—whether it provides access to a human behind the canvas, or leads nowhere at all.

Some of the characters are in on Smith’s impersonation game. One of the book’s most memorable passages is when Victoria Kipps, Monty’s daughter, provides us with a way to parody a given arts course’s particular ideological schtick. She challenges Howard to say the words, “I like the tomato”—then explains what the game is about:

“It’s our shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon’s class is ‘The tomato’s nature versus the tomato’s nurture’, and Jane Colman’s class is ‘To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory’—she’s such a silly bitch that woman—and Professor Kellas’s class is basically ‘There is no way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself’, and Erskine Jegede’s class is ‘The post-colonial tomato as eaten by Naipaul’. And so on. So you say, ‘What class have you got coming up?’ and the person says ‘Tomatoes 1670-1900.’ Or whatever.”

[...]

“But your class—your class is a cult classic. I love your class. Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato. That’s why so few people take it—I mean, no offence, it’s a compliment. They can’t handle the rigour of never saying I like the tomato. Because that’s the worst thing you could ever do in your class, right? Because the tomato’s not there to be liked. [...]“

And that is the heart of the book: the problem of whether acknowledging the beauty in something is compatible with the task of intellectualizing it.

The sheer exuberance of the novel leaves Howard’s deconstructionist posture with a lot of egg on its face. Smith’s prose bubbles over with eagerness to show us what happens when her characters make cautious contact with the sublime, and as far as we can tell, there’s beauty everywhere.

4.

Not that anyone knows what to do with it. An early scene finds the Belsey family in a Mozart concert, where Kiki, Howard’s wife, doesn’t quite know what to make of the Requiem, first electing to let it consume her before retreating to the safety of the programme notes and wondering if she really gets it. It’s a majestic three pages of writing that opens with an impression of uncertainty for an indefinite, universal “you”:

Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the sense that what awaits you there will be terrifying.

Then it seamlessly narrows the experience to the meaning particular to Kiki as a listener:

In the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined for two months in Wellington in which you were the only black woman. This choir is the heavenly host and simultaneously the devil’s army. It is also every person who has changed you during your time on this earth: your many lovers; your family; your enemies, the nameless, faceless woman who slept with your husband; the man you thought you were going to marry; the man you did.

And then there’s Smith’s own peculiar spin on what it’s like for Kiki to drift in and out of focus and understanding:

It is surprising how dramatic the fight for your measly soul turns out to be. Also surprising are the mermaids and the apes that persist on dancing around each other and sliding down an ornate staircase during the Kyrie, which, according to the programme notes, features no such action, even in the metaphorical sense.

I call attention to this passage because it is, in my limited experience, an excellent account of what it must be like to grapple with something that you are pretty sure is Great Art, without having the toolkit to explain why that is so. Kiki’s solution is to concede that her practical, middle-class mind may not understand the Requiem, but she can fantasize all day long about telling black mothers everywhere how proud she is of raising sophisticated children who can.

And to follow this train of thought to its recursive conclusion, it doesn’t take a literary scholar integrating Zadie Smith by parts to recognize that the Mozart passage is a stunning piece of writing.

5.

The last thing I want to draw attention to in On Beauty is the political landscape of Zadie Smith’s America, which is a strange beast indeed.

Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, will be best remembered (in political histories of literature, anyway) as an optimistic paean to late-twentieth-century British multiculturalism, all too happy to report that in a diaspora a generation or two removed from the landing of the Windrush, the myth of cultural authenticity has become so meaningless that we are all safe to cast it aside. Some called it naïve, but I liked its vision.

On Beauty, published five years and two fewer World Trade Center towers after White Teeth, is a tamer, more collected book; yet there is no escaping this pervasive feeling that the New England of Wellington College is really Old England displaced. America may be the most suitable battleground for liberal academics to spar with conservative pundits, but Zadie Smith gives us the digested America of Economist headlines rather than showing us something new about the country, something we might not have observed. The treatment of racial tension is a sack of Windrush politics airlifted from London and dumped on American soil, being entirely concerned as it is with Caribbean immigration and the odd bit of urban poverty.

My complaint may here sound as spurious as the absurd claims that Barack Obama isn’t really black because he wasn’t descended from slaves, but I maintain that my argument is different in substance. For a book that apparently aspires to be about America’s culture war, On Beauty comes off as a cop-out.

Now, let me emphasize that I like how the characters are very rarely conscious of race: in the educated class, colour-blindness is a perfectly believable norm. It’s real, but at the cost of robbing the political tension of its power. White liberals like Howard and black conservatives like Monty are long past the point of being subversive or surprising characters. Levi, the youngest Belsey child and the one who escapes into the hip-hop mythology that there is something authentic about being an impoverished urbanite (and attaches himself to some Haitian activism along the way), does so out of an identity crisis over socio-economic class more than colour. Debates over values boil down to established talking points. In short: this is not a politically daring book.

There is another novel, also from the 2005 crop, that does a far better job of using art history and canonical Western culture to appraise the situation of American mixed-race children. It is by Richard Powers, and it is called The Time of Our Singing.

Let me be clear that I do not think there was any obligation on Zadie Smith to perform the same task simply because she built On Beauty around a family of mixed-race characters: in the generation that she depicts, the Zadie Smith ethos is that heredity doesn’t really matter, nor should it. It is merely a disappointment to see the issue flagged, then glossed over.

The abstract sparring over the nature and existence of Beauty Itself sees far more development, and that is what the book presents best. On Beauty isn’t perfect, but I like the tomato.

In brief: This collection of a dozen variegated essays—some broadly accessible, others strictly for the interest of literary scholars—is a grab bag of erudite criticism that serves as thorough sampling of Frye’s one-man theory show. The academic pieces, which attempt to deduce overarching mythic cosmologies from the poetic output of writers such as Milton and Blake, are an ample demonstration of Frye’s method. Far more compelling, however, are the pieces that argue for the continued relevance of the imagination following its dislodgment from the objective world of science and history.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Spiritus Mundi, keep reading below.)

Northrop Frye is possibly literature’s most readable theorist, and definitely so, should we confine ourselves to the critical morass that is the latter half of the twentieth century. I attribute this to two factors.

First, there’s his predilection to file the entirety of Western literature into neat analogical boxes like a Victorian lepidopterist, where everything fits into a grand ur-structure of isomorphisms between the four seasons, the genres of drama, the phases of man, the Biblical mythos, and everything else. There’s a clarity to Frye’s writing that doubtless originates in the orderliness of his thought, in stark contrast to the pluralistic mess of postmodernism at its most extreme, where everything means anything and therefore nothing.

Second, there’s his singular insistence on departing from the critical orthodoxy of “schools of thought” derived from preexisting -isms, and developing an independent theory of literature that grows out of the empirical data before asserting its own autonomy—a theory that is to literature as mathematics is to physics, or as chord-scale theory is to music. Reading Frye leaves an encouraging impression that one is, in fact, learning something; again, not something that can be said for your average theorist.

Most of this was explained better in Anatomy of Criticism, a theoretical masterwork that qualifies as desert-island reading for the literary scholar. But there is something to be said for the versatility of a thinker who just as happily boils down his discipline into the basic introductory questions of why we bother with it at all, as Frye does with the utmost commitment to accessibility in the Massey Lectures published as The Educated Imagination.

The twelve essays in Spiritus Mundi cover the spectrum between the two extremes, the Northrop Frye who muses about grand mythological archetypes in case anyone is incidentally listening, and the Northrop Frye who stands as a plainspoken advocate for literary criticism as a dignified, valuable discipline. They are cordoned off into three parts:

1. “Contexts of Literature”—essays concerning the place of literate culture in the intellectual and political environment of academia, the enduring relevance of books, and the coexistence of mythological and scientific ways of thinking.
2. “The Mythological Universe”—studies in genres as diverse as literary criticism, charms and riddles, masques, and grand unified theories of history.
3. “Four Poets”—readings of Milton, Blake, Yeats, and Stevens that attempt to deduce a cosmology, or symbolic universe, from the works of each poet.

It’s hard to summarize any of the essays individually, as Frye has a tendency to meander from one thought to another instead of pursuing a single line of argument at a time. He makes it clear that he doesn’t believe in the “position paper” as a format, as he finds that it enslaves the study of a work of literature to demonstrate an ideology that has already been assumed. Indeed, it is quite easy to get very lost in the essays that rely on close poetic analysis, not because of any obscurity in Frye’s writing, but because he presumes a thorough holistic knowledge of the works he is analyzing in isolated parcels. You might think you know Milton, but then you see Frye go on for pages about a lesser-known work like Samson Agonistes and all you end up absorbing are the occasional conclusive paragraphs that jump out with an “aha”.

So there’s not much I can say about the arguments themselves: I don’t have the literary (or, in many cases, theological) background to follow every logical step and refute them if necessary. What’s interesting to see here is how a writer can dedicate himself to clarity in a syntactic, lexical sense, and still produce essays that are distinctly academic. There remains an irreducible difference between academic and popular writing: the prerequisite of pure knowledge. And as much as Frye would like criticism to be a study that has something to show for itself as a closed system, the evidence underlying his grand mythological constructions—the close analysis of the literature itself—often only makes sense to the degree you are aware of the literature.

But the essays that take a more holistic approach, predominantly those in the first part, are sublime. Some of them are a product of their time, but are food for thought nonetheless. In “The Renaissance of Books”, Frye shows off his healthy conservative scepticism towards the oft-announced death of books at the hands of emergent media, contending that the permanence of written documents (contrary to the “linearity” suggested by McLuhan) makes them the enabling artifacts of democracy. Well, sure, but what do we make of that argument today, in the age of mass digitization of texts—where we have impermanent digital media that are simultaneously more accessible to the public? We’re still at least a generation away from assessing what effect digitization will actually have on our cultural memory, but it currently looks as though Frye’s defence of the book could apply as well to the e-book.

Equally fun is “The University and Personal Life”, Frye’s thorough dissection of late-sixties hippie leftism that exposes it as a far and purposeless cry from the old guard of intellectual social movements, which were fundamentally driven by a teleological vision of history. Frye has a taste for grand theories of history, even if they have been thoroughly discredited in practice: he repeatedly insists that mythologies never become wholly obsolete, since they remain interesting as mythologies—a view he takes of Oswald Spengler’s four-seasons model of the rise and fall of civilizations in “Spengler Revisited”.

One of Frye’s contentions in Spengler’s defence is that his critics, who showed with the obvious means that Spengler ended up being flat-out wrong, never proposed any elegant models of civilization as a replacement. This is understandable in light of Frye’s viewpoint that criticism should learn a few lessons from science, where the refutation of a theory leaves a vacuum that can and must be filled by a new theory that offers a better explanation accounting for the evidence of its predecessor, and then some. However, since the publication of Spiritus Mundi in the 1970s, postmodernism has driven much of literary “theory” off into a different corner entirely—one that rejects grand narratives outright, and aims precisely to take them apart without constructing anything in their place. I do not imagine Frye would be very pleased with the state of affairs today.

The most compelling essay of the lot is “The Times of the Signs”, a mind-blowing address delivered to the Royal Society of Canada in 1973 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Copernicus. If one were to compile an introductory package of Northrop Frye essays that offer a grand tour of the full spectrum of his thought, this would surely be among them.

Here, Frye illustrates, through a miniature history of Western poetry, the effect that developments in the natural sciences had on the imagination—primarily, but not exclusively, the realignment of our place in the world from a Ptolemaic centre to a heliocentric orbit. What did it do to a Christian consciousness? Or a Renaissance consciousness? And what the heck is Galileo doing in Paradise Lost, anyway?

Frye’s romantic schema, where our natural knowledge of the world that is coexists with an imaginative culture expressing the world as we would like it to be, is as mature an assessment of the interaction of science and myth as one is likely to find. We may be living in times when the common poetic impulse is to retreat into a vehemently unscientific symbol-set—observe the resurgence of astrology—but that wasn’t always so, and it hopefully won’t always be that way. In an apathetic environment, our imaginative response, which takes the form of our cultural production, is the source of human ideals and desires.

As a complete volume, I do not suggest Spiritus Mundi as an introduction to what Frye is all about: a student of literature is better served with Anatomy of Criticism, and a layperson with The Educated Imagination. But it is in Frye’s short works that the extremes meet in the middle, and one gets to witness a fine demonstration of his method, which takes collected morsels of literature as evidence for a grand pattern to the universe of human dreams.

In brief: Vonnegut’s apocalyptic Cold War satire is an easily digestible exercise in absurdist humour, though the whole is scarcely greater than the sum of its parts. The novel, while consistently amusing, stops short of delivering on its thematic promise to examine science and religion at the end of the world in moral, humanistic terms.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Cat’s Cradle, keep reading below.)

Cat’s Cradle begins as one writer’s inquiry into the life of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, fictitious co-inventor of the atomic bomb, and what he and his family were doing the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima. Somewhere along the way, this writer ends up in the Caribbean banana republic of San Lorenzo, an impoverished island with no export market, a dictatorship hell-bent on demonstrating its loyalty to the United States, and an outlawed but universal calypso religion called Bokononism.

This is a Kurt Vonnegut novel, so I am simplifying things by the very nature of trying to wrap everything neatly in a summary of events. Cat’s Cradle may be alternatively, and perhaps more accurately, described as a series of 127 vignettes, each one or two pages in length, that sketch absurd little scenes that invariably finish with an ironic or anticlimactic punch line. That’s just how Vonnegut works: the identity of a given novel of his is really all a matter of degree, lying somewhere along a spectrum of sociopolitical relevance that extends from the historical consciousness of a Slaughterhouse-Five to the shallow but gratifying hilarity of a Breakfast of Champions.

Cat’s Cradle lies somewhere in the middle. It has the typical plainspoken charm of a Vonnegut farce, but intellectually speaking, it seems more content to flag certain ideas than explore them in full.

Nominally, this is a book about scientific ethics that delves into the familial legacy of a researcher completely detached from human affairs, when it’s not busy being a book about the consolation offered by a made-up religion proud to be an opiate of the masses.

So on one hand, we encounter scientists in the purest sense—dedicated to research unguided by any force other than individual curiosity—like Asa Breed, who says: “New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” (I’m quite sympathetic to this belief, to tell the truth.) Bokonon, the elusive spiritual father of Bokononism, will have none of it: his religion admits to being an outright lie (to the point where its persecution by the San Lorenzo government is also fabricated), and doesn’t much care.

Bokononism, by the way, revolves around the idea that everyone has a teleological social network consisting of members that lead each other to their common destiny, “teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.” A genuine one is called a karass; a false one, like a nation-state, is called a granfalloon. Bokononists bond by kicking off their sandals and playing footsie.

All of this is well and good up to a point, but what that point is, I’m not sure. As far as I can tell, there isn’t much of a lesson to be drawn from all the satirical digressions, unless that grand observation is, in simple terms, the wackiness of any and all competing presumptions that human existence has a knowable, dedicated purpose. One could argue that this insight is the very heart of absurdism, but Vonnegut’s application of the absurdist method to the motivations behind scientific and religious thought has long since been outstripped by the likes of Douglas Adams, if not by Vonnegut himself in his later works.

It seems as though the properties that make Cat’s Cradle a fun read are also responsible for its inherent limitations. The book moves along quickly due to its condensation of action and exposition alike into rapid-fire packets of cleverness arranged in bite-sized scenes. Memorable witticisms stand out on every page because isolated sentences routinely take centre stage. The tradeoff, however, is that this leaves most of the characters reduced to concentrated balls of neuroses, their speech so terse that it exudes a suffocating odour of apathy. As the story barrels towards its inevitable Strangelovian apocalypse, nobody seems to care—so why should we?

On the upside, a lot of Vonnegut’s Cold War humour remains refreshingly intact and applicable to the present day. The idea of a state of absolutely no international consequence bending over backwards to befriend the nearest superpower is something we can all imagine without trouble, even though most don’t go quite as far as declaring war on Japan and Nazi Germany hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, piling a hundred conscripts into a boat that sinks before it ever leaves port, and from then on memorializing the sacrifice of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy. The developing world’s desperation for foreign investment and the lip-service buzzword treatment of the democratic ideal have as strong a partnership today as they did in the 1960s, and San Lorenzos are everywhere to be found.

One only wishes that the exuberant cleverness of Cat’s Cradle appeared on a scale grander than that of the sentence, paragraph, or page. Certainly it aspired to be more than yet another dramatic reenactment of how amoral truth-seekers bring about the destruction of the planet, and how moral liars condition us to accept it.