peteg's blog - noise - books

Kindle. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. An imagining of the day Hernán Cortés encountered Moctezuma II. The characters serve mostly to explore the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and the culture clash between the imperials/conquerors. Most of the book is setup, explaining how we got here and to an extent the prevailing politics. Most of the plot development occurs in the final pages where a drug reveals how (future) history actually went. It was hard to parse what impact Cortés's account of Christianity had on Moctezuma or its import to this story. Psychedelics feature prominently. There are two princesses who lack volition and much characterisation beyond their regality.

I enjoyed it on its own terms; more familiarity with the actual history may've yielded a richer experience but probably also an oversensitivity to Enrigue's infidelities and confabulations. It sort-of lays the groundwork for Francis Spufford's alt-history Cahokia Jazz (with some points of similarly like the emperor-of-the-sun and mayor-of-the-moon for instance). The horses here stand in for the variant strain of smallpox there.

Dwight Garner: quotidian. Quite. Anthony Cummins. Adam Mars-Jones summarises at vast length. (I don't think ant colonies are hierarchical.) Goodreads did not exactly love it.

Kindle. Pre-ordered for 12.99 AUD from Amazon way back in October. I see they've jacked the price to 16.99 AUD for the stragglers. I felt I owed Morton a read after One Hundred Years of Dirt and for avoiding his week-to-week coverage of this epic fiasco which I didn't have the stomach for; I still don't but Morton commands respect for busting his guts. I read elsewhere that the actual report is about 1k pages, barely twice the length of this book. I wonder how many people will actually read either.

There's a lot going on and it's difficult to summarise in a way that incorporates all the smelly bits, so instead of digging where angels have already trod I'll just focus on what I wanted from this text. Most egregiously absent is an easy-to-follow timeline of who knew what when (as Morton understood it) and an org chart, or at least a commitment to attach a position to every name. An evaluation of the plausibility of all dollar figures would've helped immensely. There's not enough (could never be enough) of what Morton does best: capsule bios of humans as humans, of how the public servants fitted with their positions in the machinery of government, the lives of the individuals who had debts raised and the leaf-node Centrelink operatives like Colleen Taylor. I wanted things situated in the greater context of an increasingly robotised-without-the-robots society. ("Robo" connotes the lack of human discretion and not the means of implementation, but note that scalability was a core requisite; this commodified debt scheme was inconceivable in the 1980s and even into the 1990s.)

I think I could reasonably ask that of Morton. Other things require a broader view and another book. Just how big a deal was robodebt within the Department of Human Services while it was chugging along on the sly? Why did people just let it go? (I suspect that the essence of some middle management positions, like the one occupied by "didn't even try" Serena Wilson, is to smooth things between the political and the operational; what else did she smooth?) What does accountability look like in the Australian Public Service? Has anyone, you know, ever been held accountable for anything?

Having dispensed with the human element I can focus on what I'm really interested in: the systemic issues. The manoeuvring recounted by Morton suggests these tactics have worked in the past; perhaps some enterprising journalist can dig into reports ordered by the APS but not delivered for instance. I see it as inevitable that people will not write things down given the risks of a litigious society: witness the entire purpose of using Snapchat in finance. It also helps to mitigate the risk of data theft, and is a common strategy for gaining competitive advantage over workplace frenemies, especially when knowledge (domain specific, useless outside the organisation) is all the power available. I think Morton is being too naive here by chaffing against something so thoroughly incentive compatible. Perhaps he didn't spend much time in the office when he was with The Australian and yet he shows awareness of this issue by recounting some advice he got from a mentor (a senior reporter) about saying little to his editors until an article was ready to go.

He's also asking too much of the great unwashed masses of bureaucrats. I doubt many chose to work at the DHS (leaving Centrelink aside) except for careerist reasons and I expect it would take many a blind eye to survive long enough to progress. This also means that few remained there long enough to get a sense of how things really work, with those who experienced moral repugnance likely to have bombed out or moved on ASAP. People have mortgages, fearfully large mortgages, and we all know what a great motivator that is. Institutional knowledge was therefore unlikely to thrive.

Returning to the book: it seems amazingly, improbably fortunate that some aspect of the scheme proved to be illegal. The mind boggles at how it may have gone otherwise. The included responses boil down to: don't blame me, I would have stopped it if I'd known it was illegal. Long live the great Australian incuriosity! Along related lines, I had to wonder why the Victorian coroner enquiring into a robdebt-related suicide did not simply request the entirety of his data from Centrelink. I guess one of the key features of robodebt was the enforced amnesia: throughout this book I kept thinking that if I was to receive a notification of such a debt then I would assume with high confidence that it was based on all the data I had ever provided to Centrelink. Anything else simply does not make sense. Similarly the fact that debts were raised but nobody got any moneys owing to them puts the lie to it being about the integrity of the system. What a farce.

Perhaps perversely I came away with some sympathy for John Howard's sack-them-all policy towards Commonwealth mandarins in 1996. Back when I read Quarterly Essays I only considered the subject matter experts in the public service (people like Glyn Fiveash in this instance) and not the crazy politicking that occurs at the top end. But without a culture of documentation this leads only to amnesia and more politicking and here we are.

Overall the book sits uncomfortably between journalism and a permanent record: a premature second cut at history? The ebook needed another round of proofing and editing to eradicate a few too many typos and inscrutable locutions. It is occasionally discursive and overly repetitive; at some points there is an almost fog-of-war muddying of the waters, a looseness of language that obscures meaning. Separating this from my usual serious fare is the lack of citations and references for further pursuit.

Morton is now digging into the reshaping of NDIS. I hope he left enough gas in the tank for that one. There is also the enduring scandal of the NACC that requires his continuing attention. Eventually he'll learn that good work is it's own punishment but hopefully not before time.

Widely reviewed in the local press. Goodreads has some less polished and therefore probably more valuable opinions.

Kindle. I was hoping to get some understanding of Penrose's big ideas but the vast bulk of this biography is about his personal life. It is annoyingly repetitive at all scales. I found it hard to track where we were in time; often a few decades slid past, content-free apart from a change of wife/muse. Apparently Penrose slid into crankdom from the late 1980s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". This work was done by 1964.

Barss was obviously the wrong person for this job as he has very little grip on most of the concepts he throws around. This is disappointing as there are a few that he provides very helpful intuition for, and there is a vast literature of engagement with Penrose's ideas from all angles. (See, for instance, John McCarthy on The Emperor's New Mind.) I was bewildered by why anyone who grasps Gödel's theorem would think that it implies machines are incapable of human-level insight and reasoning; as Alan Turing observed in 1950 we are so obviously inconsistent and so often unwilling to extend the benefits of inconsistency to machines. McCarthy also argues for non-monotonicity. This book is no help on those or any other front. I expected more imagery in a biography of a geometer.

The overly brief coverage of Penrose tiles is poor for something published this recently. Barss overstates their merits:

Two simple shapes cracked and divided the infinite plane, exploding ever outwards in unending variety. No tile set could approach their extraordinary, unexpected simplicity.

How could any science journalist/writer be oblivious to the hat and the sceptre of 2023?

Prompted by Jennifer Szalai's review in the New York Times. Their book reviews have been more miss than hit for so long now. She made it seem that there is a lot more science in it than there is. Goodreads is divided into those looking for the ideas and those who like pop psychoanalytic takes on geniuses. Peter Woit: exploitative of an elderly man with failing eyesight. Just read the Wikipedia page on Penrose.

Kindle. Prompted by David Trotter's review in the London Review of Books. Indeed the review is superior to the book. I've already exhausted its movie suggestions; Bitter Victory was a bust and Black Hawk Down left little impression. Thomson expresses much childish glee in pointing to obscure things like Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition but he's very late to that and all other parties. I could reasonably have have expected more of him as he ably juiced Spektor's book at the same venue.

What is this? The label on the tin suggests we're going to be told about the mutualism of the various war machines and cinema. That might involve recruiting flicks (The Last Detail), spycraft and exoticism in occupied cities (Zwartboek yes, Lust, Caution no), exploring command-and-control (Dr. Strangelove, Failsafe, Wargames, Sneakers), intelligence (The Imitation Game), colonial activities (The Man Who Would Be King, Three Kings), revolutionaries (Doctor Zhivago no, The Leopard no, Reds yes, Che no, Braveheart yes), post war (Le Samouraï yes?!?, On the Beach no) and relitigating past battles (The Deer Hunter, Rambo), the militarisation of police (Sicario) or even satire (Team America, Army of Darkness, Mars Attacks!). None of these topics gets much if any attention. Some indispensable films (Das Boot, Downfall) — some of which refute the canard that only the winners make (most of the) movies of the conflict! — go entirely unmentioned. (Note to future authors: that proposition is impossible to endorse when your book has an entire chapter titled 'Nam.) How about docos like Hearts and Minds? Ah yes, "proper credit" should accrue to those.

Thomson makes it abundantly clear that he's into war movies for graphic battle scenes and considers this a moral defect in himself and all of us. Perhaps he should watch more scifi (Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Edge of Tomorrow, Ender's Game) with its often bloodless, victimless violence. Aliens is all he's got as Thomson is of the old school that considers scifi a lesser genre.

This means we get lengthy explorations of Saving Private Ryan, Fury and Mel Gibson with a fixation on the World Wars and (of course) Việt Nam. Thomson's Eurocentrism (and often parochial Englishness) blinkers the coverage and his repetitive hand wringing sours the deal when he could be digging into the military-cinema complex and analysing how the concerns of this genre have shifted over the period. There are too many dodgy assertions. I did not notice much discussion of the motivations, causes and objectives of war.

For all that I heartily agree with him (Chapter 30, 'Nam) that someone should make a movie based on David Marr's 1945, about the OSS, Hồ Chí Minh and everything else. It would have it all. I wonder why it hasn't happened.

Goodreads was generally unimpressed and picked it to death.

Kindle. Tim Winton's latest. He seems to be slowing down; it's been six years since The Shepherd's Hut.

Winton takes on all the themes of the moment. Apparently the only genre sufficiently capacious is scifi. I felt I'd read or seen every ingredient before but not in this particular mix, making me wonder if this was what John Birmingham has been doing since He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. I was concerned that the fixation on externalities would come at the cost of Winton's deft handling of relationships, character and dialogue; I was less bothered about the plot as I can't remember him ever being great at it.

We're taken immediately to a familiar Mad Max post-apocalyptic setting, lightly exoticised with salt pans and littoral zones. Our first person narrator, a man with no name, starts in the present time but the bulk is recounted in overly detailed flashback to a mostly passive interlocutor/incarcerator, just like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This structure has little impact on the tale beyond enabling ample foreshadowing.

In this world the people survive by homesteading and barter (money is implicitly absent) while the billionaires (who implicitly did not succeed in relocating to Mars) and Exxon-related parties hole up in remote, underdeveloped luxe fortresses. There's no zany or delicious ethical exploration ala Ned Beauman (here the Hermit Kingdom appears to be, well, the Hermit Kingdom) — just straight out rage and revenge against the dynastic wealth that caused the underspecified apocalypse. Everyone everywhere always wants to kill their bin Laden at any cost. I didn't understand what difference this could ever make and it didn't strike me as particularly Christian or in dialogue with a sins-of-the-father doctrine. Elements of Dune I guess.

The vector for this rectification is a covert society (the Service) that rapidly trains SAS-like operators. There's a a cell structure that is underexplored and I got wondering how these organisations correct themselves, especially in a world without mechanisms for broadcasting ideology and propaganda. How do they know they're killing the right people? Why is killing with gas (a contravention of an early Geneva protocol) so much less contentious than fire? Why is there no artillery or bombing? Whatever happened to drones and AUKUS? The Service provides material favours in return for service, and while his mother knows better than to ask the provenance of the providence, we're left to wonder if this is so very different to the dynastic patronage networks they’re removing or merely displacing. (For all we know the Service could be how the Musk clan takes out the Tillerson clan in a world bereft of Wintermute.) These rugged Australian revolutionaries (or reactionaries?) are a dead serious version of McGahan's "Oz Underground" mob of misfits.

Against John Brunner, infotech as we know it is broadly inaccessible and not directly responsible for the immiseration; it looks instead that we were done in by old-school rapacious fossil fuel capitalists. I guess that's one way to solve the mobile phone plot problem while allowing the persistence of night vision goggles and solar power. Very late in the day we get a glimpse of some "sims" which are pretty much those of Bladerunner; the (cinematographic) gas platforms on fire off the west coast of Australia (approximately Exmouth) are also appropriated.

Winton seems to have a shallow faith in artificially-intelligent robots being morally superior to men which perhaps reflects his shaky grasp (or wise avoidance?) of technology and innate optimism. He should have considered what happens when a sim needs parts and there's a shortage though. At all times he keeps the view small and tight, that of a person carried along by history who cannot learn from it no matter how much they see. We also get a woman who departs (shades of The Riders, shades of Dirt Music) and absent children. (I didn't understand why the narrator went looking for his wife, given she fled him under her own volition.)

There's the odd arresting sentence ("the dead stand on us too"), a bit of homage ("It went the way of every cataclysm. Slowly. Imperceptibly. Then all of a sudden.") and some overdressed cliche (“perform a role until you inhabit it naturally” is just fake-it-till-you-make-it) in the punchy prose. The vocabulary is overdone as it's a random jumble and not the specialised argot of a vocation (consider roofing or how farmers talk). For instance, Winton's tic of calling a sky "nacreous" only has a sniff of a chance of making sense if his narrator was a pearl diver rather than a plainsman. Overall the writing aims for Hemingway: long on the assertion, a bit short on the thought. I would have preferred less outrage and more conceptual outrageousness. He should've consulted with fellow Westralian Greg Egan.

Widely anticipated and reviewed in the Australian press. James Ley at the Smage. Overly familiar to long-time Winton readers. I haven't read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the movie left no impression. Scheherazade. Cli-fi! — like McGahan's The Rich Man's House. He doesn't clock that the collectivism here is seriously flawed. "Staunch", 500 times. He avoids appraisal. Goodreads. The ending just happens. Most MSM reviews read like their livelihoods depend on saying positive things; Winton, at least, paid attention to UniKitty.

Kindle. I got suckered by a skim read of Adam Sternbergh's indulgent review at the New York Times. Ascribing the infirmity of the age to "the postindustrial air we breathe" on the first page helped me commit. Soon enough the funny bits fell away and the author showed he had no idea what to do with his genetically-determined plot. Baxter tried to make it topical by referring to technology he clearly has no experience or knowledge of, and retreated to talking about the Midwest in general terms (table manners!) while sinking the boot into the ever kickable Confederate South. The final 20% went completely off the rails with our narrator indulging his ex-wife and her paramour in a rustic duel. Reasons, who needs them.

The writing is fine, the grammatical nitpicking boring, and there is the odd funny thing amongst the repetition and unoriginal, inadequate character development. The denouement reminded me of Ann Patchett: the author was so invested in his people that he needed to give them a decent sendoff.

Goodreads. Aiming for absurd and missing. He got scammed! — and so did we. Courageless.

Well the time did come to read Marr's magnum opus. I scored a brand new hardcover for the bargain price of 33.98 AUD from Amazon U.S. via their AU store. Their pricing algorithm put up a fight but I feel like I came out on top.

This is the first piece of serious history I've tried to read. The effort, skill and care involved in its assembly is obvious even to a non-specialist. The writing is excellent; my only beef was that I felt the footnotes often contained substantive information that could've been inlined in the main text. It would've helped if I'd known more about the specifics of World War II and pre-revolutionary China. I was perplexed that the Vietnamese phrases and titles were translated but not the French; perhaps it's the case that anyone serious about Vietnamese history knows enough to get by, but surely they'd be fluent in Vietnamese. The separate appendix of words with diacritics attached is so archaic now. (The text has apparently been updated for the ebook.) The worst part is the section on French metropole politics which was dull and obscure — as French party politics so often is — and somewhat irrelevant as all sides (Vichy included) agreed on the need to recover their imperial jewel after the war. Overall the book was as good as promised.

The causes of the major famine in 1945 are laid out early on. As I understand it now, and coarsely put, the French ran the colony in a sustainable way (or at least weren't so heavy-handed as to starve the peasantry) but the extraction of resources by the Japanese war machine from 1940 to 1945 put more strain on supply than could be borne. News to me was the narrow avoidance of a second major famine later in 1945 after the Red River dikes failed mid-year; as Marr puts it so well, restoring the dikes was a test of legitimacy that the new revolutionary regime passed, though the river didn't get that high again until 1970.

The latter situation obviously pushed any remaining fence sitters in the North to stand against all occupying powers. The British in the South, there to take the surrender of the Japanese troops and repatriate them, compounded the situation by stifling the flow of rice northward and releasing and arming the French colonists incarcerated by the Japanese after their coup on March 9. (This coup was pivotal — it precipitated the revolution — but undertaken somewhat reluctantly by the Japanese after the liberation of Paris/installation of the de Gaulle regime/imminent cessation of the Japan-France alliance meant they lost trust in the Vichy colonial administrators.) Marr provides some clues as to why things didn't stick in Sài Gòn: the poor communication channels with the North, the competition amongst "Viet Minh" groups that refused to resolve their differences, the attitude of the Japanese governor (Fujio Minoda) after the coup. Inaugural Independence Day (September 2) was a total fiasco in Sài Gòn.

I wish I had known more about the China of the day as the détente between the Nationalist and Communist forces, facilitated by the U.S., as faced by the Vietnamese was complex and fascinating. Marr had good access to senior O.S.S. operatives and provides ample context for the U.S.'s schizophrenic policy toward Indochina. (Roughly Roosevelt was ambiguously keen to move past empires but Truman was more concerned about Cold War imperatives and keeping a deeply wounded France sweet.)

Against this Marr is a bit light on for structural analysis. I wanted to know how the Viet Minh (eventually) got organised over such vast distances — did Hồ Chí Minh learn anything from the Irish? — and why they were so strong so early in (remote) Quảng Ngãi. Similarly the competing (and enduring) power bases of the Hòa Hảo (what a flag) and Cao Đài are inadequately explored, perhaps because they are so far from the epochal events in Hà Nội. The Catholic Church's support of the nascent DRV is not justified beyond an appeal to the broad shoulders of Hồ Chí Minh's charisma. It's still unclear to me how Ngô Đình Diệm and brothers came to power in the South, and Marr leaves us hanging about Bảo Đại (last seen in closeup meeting Hồ Chí Minh in Hà Nội). The role of the party (the Indochinese Communist Party) is sometimes brought to the fore and sometimes omitted; often I was wondering what General Secretary Trường Chinh was up to as events unwound, especially after the big ICP meeting at Tân Trào in August. This may've helped clarify whether the Viet Minh intended to be a broad tent in the longer term (incorporating other independence-seeking political organisations) or was just flushing out the competition. And so on and on.

Marr was fortunate to interview many of the players between 1967 and 1992 and his love for archival work shines through. The colour is sometimes epic, leaving me wondering what happened to this person or that who earnt a sentence or two in one of his footnotes. At various points Marr seemed to be steering me to Stein Tønnesson's The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War (1991) and I felt he stopped short on delivering on his promise to cover 1945: the text fades into a zoomed-out Epilogue after Hồ Chí Minh reads the declaration of independence on September 2. I guess Marr knew the best writers and best works always leave the reader wanting more.

Goodreads. Greg Lockhart reviewed it for JSEAS (1996), Mark W. McLeod for the American Historical Review (1997).

Kindle. Billed as a spy thriller but really it's a discursive research dump. Quite often I wanted to throw the Kindle across the room as I waited for it to get good. It didn't; the final 10% or so does get moving but by then it's too late, and the concluding farce can't make up for what came before.

Our Californian narrator "Sadie Smith" bills herself as a spy. She's more of an agent provocateur though. The task which she chose to accept was to infiltrate a pseudo-kibbutz in the Guyenne region in southwestern France via the pants of a minor Parisian film auteur in ballpark 2010. Her actual job is to bore us witless at length with trivial observations about early hominids and excessive but inconsequential drinking. Does she (or Kushner?) really think that archeologists and anthropologists are so stupid that they do not understand survivorship bias? Everyone knows that left-wing French politics has been dead boring since 1968, and there's a lot of glory but not much substance in theory; I mean, it's just free association.

The early flashback structure demonstrates that Kushner put more value in finding homes for her research/notes from a holiday in France than in telling a good story; I tend to feel that if the narrative and characters have any strength then they can be presented linearly, from start to finish. If they don't, no amount of faux intellectualism is going to save things.

While chugging through this (in lengthier bouts as I realised there was nothing memorable in the offing) it struck me as mostly derivative of other works. Fundamentally there's Adam Johnson's Parasites Like Us but without its humour or actual erudition, and the entrapment of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. The tendentious and shallow concept of a person's "salt" struck me as a pale imitation of Persig's grappling with quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Perhaps, like in Gone Girl, someone found the sex sexy, maybe even including the repugnant bits. Ultimately I couldn't tell if Kushner was patronising her readers or actually intended her narrator to present as patronising and stupid. Or was it all an accident?

Widely reviewed. Like me, Brandon Taylor was completely unimpressed. Reading his article now, after the book, I see my beefs are a subset of his. The vacuity is laid bare by how "Sadie Smith" chooses to spend her retirement, by doing nothing much of anything. Dwight Garner gushed and also liked the bit about cave-dwelling Bruno getting head lice from a dead German soldier during the occupation of France. And so on. Hats off to the marketing team once again.

Kindle. George Mackay Brown's first novel. He certainly wrote about what he knew. Set in a fictional town (Greenvoe) on a fictional island (Hellya) in the Orkneys, he ably documents a dying way of life in an isolated community. The characters and their proclivities are closely and sympathetically observed. I got the feeling he split his own into a few people here. He does not shy away from the ugly things in life but greets them with gentleness. The nested and shifting story frames are smoothly and deftly handled. The writing is quite fine and the specialised vocabulary is a necessary part of the requiem. Far more engaging than you'd expect from what is structurally a soap opera.

As with Fankle-the-cat the outro here rails against the destruction of nature and deep history, the displacement of the locals, for expedient and withheld reasons. (Just what was Black Star?) It comes with a rush and a change of style and voice, a simplification of language, like he's explaining himself to a bureaucrat from London.

Goodreads. Calm, entertaining, thoughtful. Mystical. Robert Crawford on Mackay Brown.

Kindle. Inevitable after Andrina. Billed as stories for kids, and indeed the writing is direct and fine but the vocabulary requires an adult. The cat of the title is black (of course) and comes to live with a young school girl on an island in Orkney. The stories are in the vein of Oscar Wilde: gentle moral fables garbed in fantasy and magic realism. We visit ancient Egypt, imperial China, a pirate ship and the island itself in the present time. Fankle hates the snow. The coda is an acerbic take on man's relationship with creation.

Goodreads.

Kindle. It's been more than a decade since Pham released A Theory of Flight and even longer since he has had a book traditionally published (Catfish and Mandala, The Eaves of Heaven). This is pitched as his first novel ("... a work of fiction inspired by some events in the life of the author's maternal grandmother") but of course he has been spinning yarns all the way along.

The story is set in paradisaical Phan Thiết, one of Việt Nam's fish sauce capitals, a common place for post-war refugees to depart from (in fact, fiction and memoir) and Pham's birthplace. The Japanese have displaced colonial power France in 1942 which allows for social mobility amongst the Vietnamese before the occupiers cause famine and chaos as their war machine becomes chaotically rapacious. Main character Thuyet therefore oscillates between wearing silk gowns to supper clubs in Sài Gòn and poverty and ultraviolence by being married first to a football star and then Japanese Major Takeshi who is often unaccountably absent, especially at critical moments. The latter pairing leads, perhaps inevitably, to a shallow take on the blood and soil trope.

There's some effective foreshadowing through dreams but things are a bit overdetermined, and some plot moves needed more development; for instance, why does Tuyet's Aunt Coi want Tuyet's daughter Anh to return when she's (presumably) safe and thriving in the rebel (genericised as "Viet Minh") camp? There are also some loose threads: Tuyet's palm implies she'll have another two children but her trauma and the abrupt ending makes that seem unlikely. More bemusing is the incorrect geography: tourist mecca Chợ Bến Thành (market) is nowhere close Ga Sài Gòn (railway station), southeast of Phan Thiet is sea, and so on.

It's a page turner, a rollicking romance in the mode of Doctor Zhivago. The punchy Hemingway prose with lots of action begs for a movie deal. It does not try to be clever like The Sympathizer or get bogged in analysis like The Moon of Hoa Binh but instead flounders in the rapid exposition of actual events that provide temporal anchors. My grasp of history was not up to it — while I knew the Japanese in the south surrendered to the British after World War II I did not know about the Japanese-induced famine that killed a million people (Pham asserts) in 1944/1945. Perhaps it is time I read David G. Marr.

Violet Kupersmith at the New York Times. Briefly noted at the New Yorker. Goodreads. Pham in Sihanoukville recently.

Kindle. I've had a soft spot for Theroux since reading his Dark Star Safari a long time ago and more recently about his gaggle on Hawaii. I was wondering what he would do with George Orwell's early life after Dennis Glover's take on the other end. I haven't read Burmese Days and have long forgotten the famous essays about shooting an elephant and hanging a man.

Theroux does a decent and unsentimental job of showing how Blair may have survived and passed his time in Burma as a policeman but there are many loose threads. What motivated him to join the imperial police service in the first place? Did he have a choice of destination? How did he get into Eton and how did that affect his social relations? Most perplexing to me was how his Uncle Frank could spend a lifetime in Burma and not realise how socially unacceptable (Theroux asserts) his Eurasian daughter is.

As you'd expect it's mostly well written but there are a few bits that needed another round of editing and tightening up. It's mostly engrossing; the repetition and sense of going nowhere evokes tedium quite effectively. Some themes — the half-castes, the commercial morality of the British Raj, a loneliness assuaged only by sex (and later writing) — are overdone. It's not entirely clear why Blair needed to experience the pointy end of colonialism to understand its essential bankruptcy or what exactly caused him to pivot from complicit servant to critic. The concluding segue into the slums of Paris and London made far more immediate sense. I struggled with Blair's mortification at not participating in the Great War: surely he was too young.

William Boyd at the New York Times. Darcy Moore, more critically, nails down what's fact, what's fiction and what's erroneous. Lara Feigel: let's hear from the minor/marginalised players. Goodreads. Orwell has roared back into the cultural consciousness since (at least) 2016 and there's no sign of a let up yet.

Kindle. Prompted by Francine Prose's review in the New York Review of Books.

Briefly Iranian-American poet Cyrus Shams goes from his squalid bedroom in an Indiana college town to NYC in the hope of drawing artistic inspiration from a terminally-ill Iranian-American woman's dying-in-public installation. Unfortunately there's just too much repetition, too much unnecessary fleshing out and recycling of well-known-from-the-internet tropes (e.g. the Overton window, Marina Abramović's performance art). It's very much of the U.S. East Coast: art galleries, openings, pan sexuality, addiction, everyone everywhere pining for NYC. We're shown a woman on a plane that is shot down by the USA but we later realise that this was only for the purpose of actively misleading us. The pivotal loss of cabin pressure is ineffective when it comes; the critical moment is blown by excessive preceding dithering and would've been better left ambiguous. Too many assertions are tendentious and weak: "a meaningless life meant a meaningless death" is feebly proffered and immediately retracted. I guess it sounded too good to be killed.

I did enjoy this one specific observation (leaving aside its crass inaccuracy):

The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not.

The other two involve keeping the sabbath and honouring one's forebears. Arguably only the latter has a liveness aspect and the rest are safety properties.

Prose was far more forgiving of Akbar's structure and writing, positing "we have probably not been reading Martyr! for its mysteries and its plot [...] but rather for the immersion in his enjoyably hyperactive sensibility." Goodreads. I'm still waiting to extend the addiction lit canon beyond Trainspotting and White Out. Humour is key.

Kindle. Inevitable after listening to Pendulum's Coma too many times. One day I'll get around to watching Coming to America.

Not what I expected. It seemed to echo Swift by satirising utopianism in the style of early earnest scifi (e.g. H. G. Wells). I thought it'd be more incisive. Defending the production of high art by pointing to Shakespeare as the English zenith made no sense as it implies nothing of significant value was created between 1616 and 1932, and if that's the case it cannot motivate getting off the happy-masses path. Huxley's take on man's relationship with God is crap, mere reductive teleology. Most of the scenarios are so shallowly drawn I couldn't think of it as a dystopia. The characters' emotional infantility is appropriate but also a cop out.

The book sits strangely high on many best-novels-of-the-twentieth-century lists and is more interesting to read about. Wikipedia: there were many charges of plagiarism, the moving-picture adaptations all suck, it got censored (obviously for the sex; the call-to-arms as such is inoffensive pap), how it compares to George Orwell's timeless 1984.

Kindle. Towles's followup to The Lincoln Highway. The writing is often as elegant as his earlier efforts but none of these shorts are fantastic. In order:

• The Line. Queuing was a big part of life in Moscow after the revolution and looking at how people queue can tell us a lot about a society. (Similarly for toilets and therefore for toilet queues.) Things get confusing as the bloke eventually waits multiple days for an exit visa interview and somehow communicates with the bloke he's in the queue for which presumably calls for another placeholding queuer. (Initially Towles takes care of these kinds of details but steadily loses resolution as Manhattan approaches.)
• The Ballad of Timothy Touchett. Poor behaviour in the NYC rare books market. The resolution involves Paul Auster who died recently.
• Hasta Luego. Community-supported alcoholism in NYC.
• I Will Survive. A prolix domestic drama with a very minor payoff; at 20% of the length it would've been punchy. This is perhaps Towles expressing some permissible doubt about the totalitarianism of human centricity (in cities).
• The Bootlegger. Social mores come unstuck and a moralising/OCD Wall St money man gets some comeuppance at a concert series in Carnegie Hall. Bach's Cello suites star; these had a moment a few years back.
• The DiDomenico Fragment. An American dynasty has been parting out a DiDeminico masterpiece (of the Annunciation) for generations until one member decides it's time for a heist.

The hard-boiled novella Eve in Hollywood (a mild reworking of what I read previously) is superior to the shorts. I conclude Towles is better at length and just maybe his new stuff is not as good as his old stuff.

Hamilton Cain at the New York Times. Goodreads.

Kindle. Some days you just want to read a competently-executed airport novel and instead you pick up a sequel significantly worse than its predecessor. Ackerman is deep into negative rewards now.

I've forgotten the specifics of what happened in 2034 but that turned out not to matter. What's at stake in 2054 is more-or-less what's at stake in 2024: a presidential assassination sets off January 6 militia activity and the military fragments along ideological lines. Kurzweil and his one-man creation of "The Singularity" are mentioned regularly but not analysed. Its use as a plot device is woefully underbaked. A major character from 2034 presents as Wintermute and these authors have all the problems William Gibson faced in the early 1980s: cyberspace can be accessed from everywhere but these guys only understand zooming around in meatspace. Just go read Permutation City already.

Perhaps it's supposed to be more about the themes or what isn't explicitly spelt out; they make and repeat many assertions unsupported by argument. The "blood and soil" trope is deployed to explain the recruiting of an ethnic Chinese/American citizen corporate woman by the Chinese Communist regime via a redundant Nigerian cutout and yet the same essentialism does not apply to the American or Indian characters. This isn't plausible for people whose parents were killed or bullied by the state — just look at the huge Chinese diaspora, especially the departure of so many from Hong Kong over the last 30 years, the Irish, the Russian emigres, the Poles and Nordics. Consider the name Hendrickson! In any case there's a far more sophisticated take on national and political loyalties in The Sympathizer. Are the authors demonstrating the inability of America to understand Asia or learn from history?

Their history is all key man, that there are a few choke points that can control the application of knowledge. At scale this may be so (developing nuclear technology for instance) but as the army of digital nomads and the hackers working for nation-states well know, much can be done remotely with widely distributed teams and hardware. The future may have no locus to nuke, no individual or tractable group to assassinate, no Assange to serve as a warning to the others. Perhaps that's what happens in 2074.

Their solution to America's problems is to install a wise military man (an Eisenhower?) for a limited-duration reset and (literally) marry China and move to Vermont. (The whole process is undemocratic but somehow placates the various mobs.) The Supreme Court is totally absent and they don't explain how the power-mad institution was tamed between now and then. The veteran in a wheelchair is an obvious nod to Oliver Stone (a plea to direct the movie version?) and Ron Kovic. The rising country of India (so important in 2034) does not feature. There's some Herzogian madness on the Amazon ... and a touch of The Boys from Brazil as they approach their heart of darkness/enlightenment. The gambling is tiresome.

Hari Kunzru at the New York Times did say it wasn't much chop. Goodreads was generally disappointed.

Kindle. Having read all his novels it was time to plough through the shorts and these proved as addictive as I expected. The Continental Op ones did get a bit shallow at times but you have to admire his stamina. The final The First Thin Man ends on a cliffhanger which makes complete sense when you read at Wikipedia that's it an early draft of The Thin Man.

Most anomalous is the short Tulip apparently first published in 1966. Hammett put all his styles into it and something new; the scattered autobiographical elements, the sharp observations and lack of sleuths suggest an attempt at renewal that didn't eventuate.

Dick Locthe in 2000. A lengthy biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont in 2002: beyond the well-known stuff much is disappointing.

Kindle. Private dick Nick Charles retires to San Francisco upon marrying sassy west-coast lumber heiress Nora but returns to NYC to dodge Christmas social obligations. There, of course, old entanglements suck him into a murder mystery and you've got to wonder if these people are any better than those the couple were avoiding. Hammett uses very effective first person narration and gets in some cracking lines. Nora is a fun interlocutor but I felt her character could've been rounded out some more. I'd say it's the best written of his novels but that might be sacrilegious as it's not in his signature hard-boiled style. It struck me as wildly inventive at times and then I remembered The Maltese Falcon.

Having completed his novels I took a look at his biographical details at Wikipedia. I'd just say I didn't see a lot of politics in these books.

Goodreads. I saw the contemporaneous film a decade ago but don't remember a thing. Roger Ebert gave it four stars as a "great movie". Apparently it has five successors.

Kindle. Again Hammett adopts and is more successful with third-person narration. This time around the main character, always addressed by his creator using his full moniker "Ned Beaumont", is a political svengali / consigliere who outsources the private dickery. His boss Paul Madvig runs a city somewhere not too far from NYC. There's some extreme violence in and around the speakeasies of the day. The central thread — the killing of a Senator's son — seems tepid in comparison to the other events and its resolution is icy cold. He gets off the odd cracker of a line but I wish he'd found room for an interlocutor as he did in The Dain Curse; we get a bit too much mouthing off by drongos.

Goodreads. Wikipedia tells me the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing drew on it.

Kindle. The second and last of the "Continental Op" series, inevitable after Red Harvest.

Our private-dick first-person narrator stays local to San Francisco for the first two thirds and then relocates to Quesada which Google Maps suggests is a long way south. It's a bit more Holmes and Watson with an interlocutor who presents as smarter than our main man. He gets off some snappy lines. There's also the Doyle-ish (and unconvincing) theme of a family or blood curse that centres on a young lady of odd appearance; I didn't know what to make of her pointed lobeless ears, small teeth and pastiness. Was this some image of a demon? One might expect that to make her less effective as a femme fatale but Hammett has it otherwise.

There's a bit of everything here: the lethal cults of California, the drugs, the guns, the vapid lifestyles, the Mexicans — it feels so modern! There's even a Trainspotting-esque relinquishing junk (morphine) sequence. Hammett must've felt the plot got away from him as he spends a final chapter explaining it all back to us. Be that as it may he didn't obfuscate the perp too well as I picked them out by about the halfway point without much effort.

Goodreads.