Book Review: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, by Julian Barnes

It's been well over a month since my last book review, coincidentally enough regarding another book by the same author: England, England by Julian Barnes. I was impressed by his skill in crafting an inventive satire as well as the philosophical depths he explored, though as a whole the book was not entirely satisfying. My wife had warned me it was not his best book. She suggested instead that I read A History of the World in 10 ^1/2 Chapters. And hey, it was already there on our bookshelf, so being the frugal person I am (and honestly wishing to explore more of his compelling style) I considered it a win-win situation.

The short version of this review follows: I really liked this book

The long version of this review, admittedly, I must approach with trepidation, the sort of which I have not had to experience in previous reviews. The reason I shall submit up-front: the very first chapter contains elements that I can only surmise (if I may craft this sentence in a way that is both fair while not attracting the undue curiosity of lawyers) were lifted from another author's book. I'm not going to go into great detail, as I don't wish to write a J'accuse, so much as innocently hope that someone - perhaps even Barnes himself - would clarify the situation. I shall touch upon this again, later.

A History of the World in 10 ^1/2 Chapters is not, strictly speaking, a formal history of the world, though it does shift throughout time. Essentially, it is a collection of stories and one or two essays, the whole of which makes some attempt to summarize the haphazard longings and deceits of humanity through history, with the recurring theme of Noah's Ark sprinkled throughout in variously literal and metaphorical techniques. Some narratives are light-hearted and satirical, others are solemn and erudite. It is a book which, as a whole, has something to say about mankind - the big and small picture of mankind - from various viewpoints, the majority of which is not flattering. Yet, Barnes is not a nihilist; he sees our faulty strengths and compelling weaknesses as part of the way humanity is wired.

This is illustrated with both striking description and considerate attention to detail, particularly in the series of "chapters" (which sometimes are really just separate, standalone stories) regarding the shipwreck of the French frigate Medusa off the coast of Mauritania in 1816. With this as the central focus, the author devotes three perspectives on the event: one which describes the horrific facts of the shipwreck and its survivors, another which takes an entirely different approach by offering a historical critique of Théodore Géricault's famous painting based on the shipwreck, and yet another - this time purely fictional - which touches upon the themes of representation vs. idolatry with the painting serving as an afflatus for its determinedly devout protagonist.

There are no prescriptions for mankind's delusions, no salve provided to alleviate our existential isolation, or our violent impulses. At the end of the day, summarized lovingly in the last chapter, we find ourselves compelled to go through the same motions, but not without circumspection which perhaps is our only saving grace. In Barnes' world, humanity will always, ultimately, shit the bed (a phrase my cousin passed on to me), but not without looking for a means to change, even if that change is perpetually out of reach. It is evident that Barnes' is one of us; he respects those, regardless of mental state, who are compelled to find the truth, particularly those truths which are only revealed to the individual and ignored by society-at-large.

And now, the bane of the book I mentioned earlier. In the very first chapter, a satirical narrative of Noah's Ark and the Biblical flood, Barnes' seems at first to take inspiration from Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage (Barnes' book was published in 1989, Findley's in 1984), a novel whose story is an equally slanted (and somewhat vicious) satire on the flood narrative. In both - told by a non-human passenger on the Ark - Noah is a drunken, abusive man whose pious subservience to God's will pushes him and his family to violent extremes. However, the similarities - particularly in two passages - became so blatantly identical that I had to throw up my hands in dismay (a perfect case in point being Barnes' use, in similar reference - just as Findley used in the prologue to his novel - the phrase "Not Wanted On The Voyage", with Findley upping the ante originally by putting this in full-caps). Again, I don't know what to do with this. After some research, I know that Findley was shocked by the similarities, however he decided not to pursue legal action because he didn't want A History of the World to gain any more publicity than it had. My hope is that - at some point - Barnes will address it, "it" being so blatant when you've read both the novel and the short chapter. The fact that I can still recommend Barnes' book is a testament to his skill as a writer, though this ethical discrepancy unsettles me.

A History of the World in 10 ^1/2 Chapters (ISBN: 978-0679731375) is available at any number of friendly, independently-owned bookstores. Or you can purchase it online. You can also find Timothy Findley's wonderful novel, Not Wanted on the Voyage (ISBN: 978-0140073065) as well.

A list...

Without going into great detail, my friend Simon got me hooked on a list-making exercise. The task: list your favourite albums (favoured for various personal or technical reasons) for every year you've been alive.

This posed many problems, as anyone who loves music would discover. Firstly, how does one pick only *one* album from, let's say 2004 when there were so many great releases ("Louden Up Now" by !!! being a notable casualty). What about albums that - while not "great" - represent a moment in time for the listener which can never be replaced (I'm thinking "Pod" by The Breeders).

As Simon later shared with me, after we'd posted our lists, there are Sophie's Choice moments: which albums do you choose to include and which do you decide to cast away? Heart-breaking, really. And then, of course, there are those years which for the individual are barren (mid-80s, mid-90s) of truly wonderful music...choosing between two or more great releases is one thing; at least you can make a choice. What do you do when there's nothing particularly good? (Hint: you hold your nose and spin the wheel.)

And of course, after you make these choices, you inevitably bolt out of your sleep in the middle of the night, screaming "Why didn't I pick The The? Nooo!". Oh, the horror. In any case, these are what I picked. Try it some day - it's hard, but sorta fun at the same time (he says).

The list:

1970 - Cosmo's Factory, Creedence Clearwater Revival
1971 - Pearl, Janis Joplin
1972 - Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones
1973 - Stranded, Roxy Music
1974 - 1969: Velvet Underground Live, The Velvet Underground *
1975 - Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin
1976 - Fly Like An Eagle, Steve Miller Band
1977 - Marquee Moon, Television
1978 - Street Hassle, Lou Reed
1979 - The Wall, Pink Floyd
1980 - Scary Monsters, David Bowie
1981 - Tattoo You, The Rolling Stones
1982 - Shoot Out The Lights, Richard and Linda Thompson
1983 - Rock 'n Soul, Pt. 1, Hall & Oates
1984 - Couldn't Stand The Weather, Stevie Ray Vaughan
1985 - This Nation's Saving Grace, The Fall
1986 - The Colour of Spring, Talk Talk
1987 - The Joshua Tree, U2 ***
1988 - If I Should Fall From Grace With God, The Pogues
1989 - tie: Girls Girls Girls, Elvis Costello **
1989 - tie: Doolittle, Pixies
1990 - Passages, Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass
1991 - Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, Henryk Gorecki
1992 - Whale Music, The Rheostatics
1993 - The Sound of Speed, The Jesus and Mary Chain**
1994 - Bee Thousand, Guided By Voices
1995 - Alien Lanes, Guided By Voices
1996 - Murder Ballads, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds ***
1997 - September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill, Various
1998 - The Italian Flag, Prolapse
1999 - Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, Godspeed You Black Emperor! ****
2000 - Kid A, Radiohead
2001 - Born Into Trouble As The Sparks Fly Upward, The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band
2002 - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco
2003 - tie:Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn, Do Make Say Think
2003 - tie: Fever To Tell, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2004 - N'Ecoutez Pas, Fly Pan Am
2005 - No Wow, The Kills ***
2006 - Glissandro 70, Glissandro 70
2007 - Tromatic Reflexxions, Von Südenfed
2008 - Au Contraire, Pas Chic Chic



* (technically, it came out in '74 even though it was recorded in '69)

** (compilations, but I say it's fair)

*** (arguably terrible years for albums, music, and mankind)

**** (of all the years, there was simply nothing I could slot in here that I was really happy with)

Love Letter To Canadian Telecommunication Monopolies

(for those outside of Canada wanting some context for this - click here)

On Bad Fiction

A very good discussion was had recently, prompted by an article on lit-blog Ward Six, called "What makes bad fiction bad?". Not only does the article itself reveal some very big culprits, but the comment board continues with some interesting add-ons (and yes, I had to chime in, though I am not the first "Matt" post - I can't get used to typing that. I always used to be the only "Matt" and now I have to share it!).

Enjoy.

The Lure of the Hammered Dulcimer

I must make an admission.

Even though I'm a writer, even though I work in film and television, even though I take pretty photos with pretty cameras, there is nothing that seeps faster through my skin, as someone who feels for art, as wholly as music. For me it is the ethyl alcohol of expression.

All it takes is a well-played scale in the right key, on the right day, in the right mood, and I'm sold. Here I am, cash in hand! What band is that? Who is that? Some songs attack me unawares with their brilliance, ignobly leaking out of someone's cheap computer speaker from some streaming internet radio station. It's like one of Homer's Sirens, and me without wax to plug my ears or spare hands on the ship's deck to strap me down.

I remember music with succinct precision and stalk it down, if only for information to complete the missing pieces of the what/who/when puzzle I carry with me. I remember being sixteen and regularly hounding the employees at a large record store in Edmonton, asking if they knew of the existence to the soundtrack for the film Brazil (and each time my enthusiasm was met with a resounding "no". It wasn't released until over a decade later, by which time - while thankful for its eventual existence, for sake of people to experience - I was over it, like a scorned lover).

Sometimes there's nothing worse than falling in love only to be separated without details of who or what it was that caught your passion. In the case of music, it's doubly hard because you don't even have the luxury of a face etched in your memory; you are left with something frustratingly abstract: what it sounds like, which by comparison makes paleontology seem straightforward. It's the rootsy, gypsy-sounding piece with the theremin!

A recent example is the not-so-recent film Kafka, by Steven Soderbergh. As a film, it's vivid and engaging, though it suffers from Soderbergh's serial emotionlessness. It was the soundtrack, however, which caught me off-guard. A beautiful piece of work by Cliff Martinez which incorporated Eastern European (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Western-interpreted flavours of Eastern European) motifs performed on a hammered dulcimer. As soon as I heard that instrument, in that evocative score, my attention was rapped. Done. Thank you. Unfortunately, and not unusually, there was no soundtrack issued (when you consider the type of film it was, released by a major Hollywood studio, and how miserably it must've performed in theatres, one can only imagine how the question of "Should we release a soundtrack?" was greeted). On this note, I feel bad for a lot of film and TV composers, or at least the ones whose work transcends the need to only be experienced whilst married to picture and sound effects. If you see a composer on the street, hug him or her. Then ask why the hell they're not in their studios, holding up the mix, working as they should. I digress...

Yesterday I chanced to search for the Kafka soundtrack again, and to my surprise, on Cliff Martinez' website, he has released his music cues for various soundtracks which were never commercially available before (for free, albeit with the proviso that they not be used professionally). I couldn't believe it. I found myself downloading his cues for Kafka in a single Zip file (just under 60 megabytes), and within no time, I'd transferred them to my "portable digital music player".

I ask what more fulfillment you need when you have a hammered dulcimer, its soft yet briskly percussive tones, reminiscent of a harp, in your headphones on the streetcar.

Bliss.

Update - July 7th

A slightly bitter-tasting but substantial smörgåsbord for you today, dear reader...

1. The last week and-a-bit has been a little hard on me. Found out over a week ago that a good work-friend I hadn't been in touch with for a couple of years had passed away in his sleep. By the time I'd found out, the memorial had already happened. Everything that could be done or said had been done and said. And so, one has no choice in this situation but to simply accept the fact that, like it or not, sad or happy, the last chapter in a sub-plot has been written without my consent or input. I think the thing which upsets me most about sudden deaths is the lack of control. I've had relatives who have died of cancer or carried on weakly after a stroke, and it was clear to everyone that the pen nib of fate was scratching out the last bits of their narrative; as the living bereaved, we had time to digest what was happening in our own way. With Trent - my friend and workmate - I was left with nothing but the unavoidable metric truth of his death.


2. Foolishly, perhaps owing to my Chinese astrological tendencies (Dog), I've been patiently waiting for a response from a Toronto lit mag to get back to me on a short fiction submission I'd mailed to them almost a year ago. Owing to fatigue, I finally emailed the editor last week, only to find out from his response that "We would have responded to that a very long time ago, so I'm assuming it got lost in the mail/E-mail. I'm also assuming it was our response that got lost, and not your submission, as the title sounds familiar. ". So, in other words, I'd wasted a year not submitting the (admittedly solid) piece elsewhere. This upset me to no end. Nobody likes to be rejected - something I've accustomed myself to - but in this case I was left wondering whether they'd actually bothered to send anything out. I don't lose incoming mail, nor is my email spam filter so prejudiced as to reject anything addressed directly to me (unless of course they put something like "rejection letter for Cialis" in the subject header). I drank a lot that night and complained bitterly to friends who consoled me, particularly those who caught my Facebook status message: "Matt wonders what could be worse than finding out a form rejection letter with your name on it got lost in the mail."


3. Not willing to let "the shit" (he says, in the collective sense) get me down, I continued to revise the novel, having finished going through to the (current) ending, thus completing my first full pass on the book as a whole. I immediately went back to the beginning, which I'd barely looked at in months, and started full-revision #2. I think it's coming together nicely, and the feedback I've received on excerpts given to my peers in the writing group I run have been very positive. I just wish there was someone I could bribe in order to get one of my short fiction pieces published, because it's a bit of a hindrance approaching an editor with a novel having a big fat "0" in the previously-published department. I'm also looking at doing more story submissions to non-Canadian publishers, as I find the atmosphere in this country a little stifling. Make of that what you will.


4. A good tonic for these doldrums was to be had when my wife and I took a drive through the Niagara peninsula (after an absurdist trip to Niagara Falls - don't bother asking - thankfully, we had two good friends to help us drink away the memories). We both love wine, and as firm supporters of Canadian wineries it was great to get out (only an hour's drive from the city) and see the vinyards, the countryside, and quaff vast amounts of the best vino North America has to offer. So much so, in fact, that I've considered starting a new blog specifically geared towards Canadian wine. We shall see.
   

Happy Canada Day

God Is In The Details

A new documentary, if it can be called that, has been recently released through a limited selection of venues in the U.S. and Canada. I'm not interested in naming it, though a cursory glimpse of recent newspapers will make it clear which I'm referring to. It takes the Michael Moore approach (in other words, disingenuously removing anything which does not conform to a frustratingly partisan point of view) in an attempt to prove its thesis that there is a systemic (nay conspiratorial) effort to discredit scientists who believe in creationism (more specifically, the recently-minted term "intelligent design" or "ID" for short) by those in the scientific establishment who extol the findings of Darwin.

Reading the paper Friday morning, my wife commented on an interview with the film's host and narrator, Ben Stein. She took note of his perspective on the debate and thought it was interesting. I was less than enthusiastic (if not hostile toward Stein), though to be honest his interview wasn't that bad (unlike the film, which has been almost universally derided with contempt outside of evangelical circles). What upset me is that I actually think there is a debate to be had (if not owed) between secularists and Creationists.

I'm not a religious person. I was raised a quasi-Catholic, but found myself too interested in other streams of thought to figure that any one system of belief - secular humanism being one in a series of legitimate choices - had the copyright on truth. I'm very comfortable calling myself Agnostic, though these days wary of those who would have the public believe that Agnosticism is simply a less-assured branch of Atheism. I respect Atheists. I just wish more Atheists would respect Agnostics.

For me, Science, Art, and Religion are the same; they each aim to spelunk the chasm between knowing and not knowing. To investigate the disparity between the I and the not I in the universe. I've never been prepared to declare that there is or isn't a higher intelligence/level of consciousness at play in the unfathomable orchestration we find ourselves surrounded by, whether it exists only for mankind to perceive or something more holistic and all-embracing.

I'm frustrated that, in this age of elaborate misinformation, the only time an interesting perspective is given publicity it's usually loaded with so much subjectivity and partisan half-truth that it's tainted with suspicion before it even comes to the table of debate. And this is my problem with this documentary. The dice of its argument are so loaded from the start that it negates intelligent discussion from the start.

One cannot talk about this without referring to previous unsuccessful efforts by the current United States government, endorsing "intelligent design" to be taught in science classrooms as a legitimate alternative, and that the theory of evolution be referred to as a "current theory". The problem being, procedurally speaking, there's nothing remotely scientific about "ID", whereas Darwinism and the theory of evolution are demonstrable, regardless that there are many disagreements on the details. As a result of this meddling on behalf of the Bush administration, scientists across America took to the streets (or the web, at least) denouncing the idea, aided by the burgeoning Atheist movement, driven by the likes of Richard Dawkins.

In other words, the water in this wading pool is poisoned.

The question of Darwinism's compatibility with the idea of a higher intelligence/consciousness, if such a thing exists, is not a zero sum game. One does not, theoretically, eliminate the other's existence. I would love nothing more than an open discussion on the subject, if only to highlight the limits of understanding in both Science and Religion and perhaps find perspectives which intelligently respect opposite approaches. Unfortunately, given the current climate, this isn't likely to happen outside of a university campus, and in the case of the documentary released last week, the prospects of we - the intelligent public, of which I include you, dear reader - being treated to such a thing without the deck being stacked by partisan ideologues of either side of the argument is slim.

Of Men and U-Boat Commanders

I was explaining to someone last week - a female friend who was stressed about a commitment she'd made, only to find afterwards that it was impossible to fulfil even though it was very important - how I would approach the problem. Yes, to be fair, I was drinking, just in case you think I speak this freely/condescendingly in general.

"There's a thing about guys. Some, not all. But, when men are under pressure, we immediately think we're U-Boat commanders."

"What?" she asked, understandably perplexed.

I explained what U-Boats are, particularly within the context of the classic German WWII film, Das Boot. You see, once a man over the age of 25 has seen that film (or, for that matter, similar films such as The Hunt For Red October, or quite frankly any movie involving a submersible military vessel with men yelling at each other inside of it) he has a perfectly tailored example which appeals to our testosterone-laden imaginations.

And thus, when men find themselves under pressure, it's easy for them to transpose the tense life/death struggle they've seen onto their comparatively mundane situations.

I told her that, as a U-Boat commander, your first responsibilities are to your country and your crew. This meant sacrificing one's honour, if need be. That, for the greater good (i.e. posterity) it would probably be best to own up to her inability to satisfy the terms of her commitment and either state this immediately to the other party, or, better still, come up with a ruse that is so ingenious that it fools everyone and saves both honour and embarrassment while preserving the integrity of country (you) and your crew (your reputation).

So, as a breezy aside, next time you find yourself being metaphorically torpedoed (whether by others or yourself), remember the stoic lessons of the heavily burdened U-Boat commander. Or, at the very least, run out and rent Das Boot or Master and Commander for inspiration.

Photo: Window View #2