Recently Reviewed Books…
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a history book that reads like a novel, depicting the founding of the penal colony of New South Wales, which went onto become the prosperous nation-continent it now is, Australia.
Before taking us on that momentous journey with the First Fleet of 11 ships and 1500 people in 1787, the author takes us behind the scenes to England in the late 18th century and the fallout from the Industrial Revolution that was denuding farms, swelling cities, causing huge income disparities, and fostering crime on an unprecedented scale. The crimes were mainly petty stuff, like theft, to allow people at the bottom of the ladder survive. Yet the intolerance to any crime against property, be it stealing a loaf of bread or a ream of cloth, led to harsh sentences of seven years or more. With only private jails available, and those such as Newgate overflowing, prisoners were housed on old ships, called hulks, on the Thames. When this situation too became intolerable, transportation to the colonies was sought. Up until then, transportation of prisoners had been to the 13 colonies in America, where prisoners would be absorbed into a settler population. But with the loss of America in the recent War of Independence, a new destination, was needed – a colony of the convict, by the convict, for the convict – Botany Bay in Terra Australis or New Holland as it was called at the time.
The journey and the early life in the colony for its first fifty years is one of misery for the convict. Lashings were standard (500 was the number, given in installments if the convict couldn’t take it all in one dose), the ball and chain were one’s only companions, and being indentured for the rest of their sentence to a military or non-convict settler was the lot of this poor soul. Scars on one’s back and mangled legs that dragged were marks of the early Australian. Some escaped only to return or die, being unable to survive in this hostile land among the local Aborigines who were curious but hostile too, and who for rich rewards from the jailers were happy to capture the escapees and return them for further punishment.
The book covers the lives of notable early settlers, like Mary Bryant, who with her family escaped by open boat from Sydney, travelled all the way to Timor, only to be recaptured, and taken via a series of boats back to England,
and then lose her husband and two young children enroute. Darcy Wentwoth, highwayman, who become a doctor in Norfolk Island, the other penal colony 1000 miles away from Sydney, that was reputed for even more unspeakable treatment to convicts. Whole chapters are dedicated to Norfolk Island and Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) that became the “jails of jails” in the colony. Other notables are John McCarthur, who became the richest man in Australia with his development of the wool industry and his lock on the rum trade that led to the Rum Rebellion in 1808. McCarthur is arrayed against the governor of the time, William Bligh (of the Mutiny on the Bounty fame) another arrogant and cruel man.
The book sheds light on the evolution of the class system in Australia: the military class that usurped the rum business after first governor Arthur Philip departed in 1792, the gentleman class that arrived from England at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and was given land and slave labour (convicts) to develop vast farms, and the poor convict class who upon completing of sentence was granted a small plot of land to cultivate and eke out a living or offer services to a gentleman; and trailing behind them all are the Aborigines, displaced from a land they were supposed to have no claim to because they did not believe in private property and were nomadic, and because their customs were vilified by the white settlers (like acts of daubing themselves in fish oil and sand to protect from insects, and killing sick babies who slowed down their peregrinations).
The one downside with this book, despite the many interesting anecdotes and personal stories it covers, is that the narrative does not flow in chronological order for us to see the evolution of the colony – we go back and forth in time as the author tackles each aspect of the settlement and shows us how it either develops or peters out over time. Reading it as a research document, therefore, was difficult for me. After a while, I just let go and enjoyed the stories.
Overall, I came away with the impression that Australia had a painful and sad beginning, seeped in human misery. Yet this genesis speaks to the indomitability of the human spirit, especially the human spirit under adversity. From this barren land, those convicts carved out a country that is now the envy of the world and bears the moniker of “The Lucky Country.”
View all my reviews
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Many tales within a tale that reach out from Central Asia to embrace India in the east and Florence in the west over a hundred-year span. Covering such an expanse of time and geography, as much as it is always entertaining and fabulous, also leads to an inherent weakness in this novel—clutter.
A Florentine, 20-year-old adventurer, magician, and stowaway arrives in the court of Akbar the Great on board a Scottish vessel bearing a letter from Queen Elizabeth I suggesting an alliance with the Mughal Empire to fight Pope Gregory XIII and his catholic kings of Europe arrayed against her. To boot, the messenger—variously known as Ucello de Firenze, Mogor del L’Amore, and Nicolo Antonio Vespucci—claims that he is the uncle of Akbar, who is more than twice his age. The unravelling of this lineage is the central mystery of the novel, replete with a final denouement.
Two storylines merge from west to east (or is it the other way?) over the course of the novel: the Florentine story of three friends—Antonino (Nino) Agalia, Nicolo il Machia, and Agostino (Ago) Vespucci—each of whom donates one of their names to our Florentine messenger Ucello alias Nicolo Antonio Vespucci, and the Indian story of Akbar and his ancestors who went on to found the Mughal Empire in its original capital of Sikri in India. Joining the two stories is the mysterious enchantress who is also known by two names: Angelique (Florentine) and Qara Koz (Mughal). Angelique, too, has a servant called Angelique who is a mirror image of her (albeit slightly lower in beauty to denote the mistress-servant relationship), and when they have a baby, she is called Angelique, Angelique. Confused already? There is more… for the mirror motif plays throughout.
The stories within the story are equally fantastic: Agalia of the Ottomans taking on Vlad the Impaler; The women of Sikri going naked to show they have no secrets from each other; Angelique Coeur (unrelated to the other Angeliques mentioned so far) jumping to her death after revealing Agalia’s travels in the Palace of Memories; the Swiss giants Ortho, Botho, Clotho and D’Artagnan; the 1001 Bostancis (gardeners) who can outrace anyone; the mysterious drying-up of the river that renders Sikri uninhabitable, and more. Rushdie’s desire to dump all the stories collected from his very substantial reference list (see back of the book) into the novel amounts to a very rushed, “told” format, where many characters and side-stories are introduced all at once, making it hard to keep track as a reader. It took the first 70 pages to introduce all the characters in Akbar’s story, and when we got to the Florentine part with the three friends, I got lost. It also didn’t help when a character could be alternately called Antonio or Nino or Agalia, or when Angelique, the servant, is called the Mirror. Saving me from throwing the book away in despair was Rushdie’s caustic humour, which is never in short supply.
By having Angelique, or Qara Koz, be taken hostage (or voluntarily switch sides) from Mughal to Uzbek to Persian to Ottoman emperors, before finally landing up in the hands of the Florentine Medici, gives us an insight into those powerful empires and their politics in the 15th and 16th centuries. And just to add a bit more spice, Rushdie then sends our enchantress and her mirror off to the new world in the company of Agalia – to Mondus Novus, soon to be renamed after another Vespucci, Amerigo – where, through some questionable sexual practices, the 20-year age difference between old Nephew Akbar and young Uncle Ucello is explained.
This is not one of my better Rushdie novels. I place this one in his early-period writing, circa Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, when he was grappling with simplifying his storytelling and only dazzling us with his brilliance. He got better with sequencing the fantastical and being considerate of the reader between Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) and Victory City (2023). Yet his characters remain cardboard cutouts – blame it on magic realism.
View all my reviews
Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013 by Philip Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a literary feast of insights from a writer, glorified and vilified in equal measure, who plumbed the depths of the one safe literary subject area – himself, and who retired and had a brief period to look back on his 31 books and say, in Joe Louis’s words, “I did the best with what I had.”
This book is divided into sections of Roth’s essays; interviews of the author; interviews by Roth of other literary writers and those from Czechoslovakia living under Iron Curtain censorship (Primo Levi, Aaron Apelfeld, Ivan Klima, Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, Ira Bashevis Singer et al, and a cameo by Edna O’Brien who battled another kind of censorship for being a female Irish writer writing in England); dissections of the works of prominent Jewish writers such as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow; and celebratory speeches in his later years when the awards and plaudits began to pile up.
Roth battled twin nemeses during his writing career: being labelled an an-Semite, even though he was Jewish, and being called “the misogynist writer who masturbates” (post-Portnoy). His counter argument was that misogyny was not dissimilar to anti-Semitism, and he eschewed both. He chose to portray Jews with their “warts and all” and to plumb human sexuality because it was the life force that drove motivation and action. He says that the only time his preoccupation with sex saved him was when the Czech police came calling as to why this Yankee was visiting their country every year and hanging out with dissident writers, and his believable answer given was, “I come for the girls.”
There are interesting pearls of wisdom that drop from him and the other writers whom he interviews. Here are some of Roth’s:
a. Is Language in the service of narrative or literary regression in the service of ego? – the latter comment was made in direct reference to Saul Bellow’s and Harry Golden’s pompous prose that did not reveal characters but only flaunted the author’s verbosity.
b. Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everyone holds. It should allow us to explore alternate sensibilities.
c. The novelist reaches regions of feeling and consciousness that cannot be reached by an oratory of self-congratulation and self-pity.
d. In free societies, everything goes and nothing matters; in repressive societies (Eastern Bloc), nothing goes and everything matters.
e. Popular media has usurped and trivialized the scrutinizing function of books.
His life, despite his fame was one of solitude. After the notoriety of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth fled New York to live in the country where his routine was to write for eight hours a day, seven days a week, take walks at the end of the afternoon, read at night, and teach writing for one semester a year. To start a new book, he would write a hundred pages before redeeming a solitary paragraph with enough meat to commence the book. He took 2-3 years to finish a manuscript and after that he hated the book. He does not hold stock in structure, form, and symbol, and forbids his students from using those words in class.
Despite his deep commitment to writing, he does not believe a writer can change anyone except himself.
When asked why his generation of literary writers were successful, his answer is,” There was no writing school, no political agenda, no single national character, and because writers don’t mean a goddamn thing to nine-tenths of the population.”
He certainly was a bold writer who stretched the edges of literary tolerance and got away with it.
View all my reviews
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A year in the life of the Bard, 1599, a pivotal one for him when he reached the height of his prolificacy, and when England hovered on the borders of invasion and civil war.
In 1599, the subjugated Irish were rebelling against the aging Queen Elizabeth I, Spain was threatening an invasion to revenge the defeat of their Armada 11 years ago, and Shakespeare and his fellow shareholders of the theatre company, The Chamberlaine’s Men, were building their permanent home, the Globe Theatre, with props and gear lifted at night from their previous rented home, The Theatre, and unknown to their landlord.
In this year, Shakespeare wrote four plays: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. He transitioned from romance-comedies (which were very popular) and histories, into tragedy, with Hamlet being the longest and greatest of his plays, and one with the most complex and nuanced characters. Hamlet, originally running well over 4 hours, and too long for matinees, was re-written down to three hours. Subsequent adaptations of the play by various playwrights and publishers through the years have made mash-ups of various versions and it is difficult to isolate Shakespeare’s original writing. In fact, that was true of much of his work; a collection of poetry was published by his publisher under the title of The Passionate Pilgrim with 10 poems written by unattributed authors, and included some of the Bard’s jealously guarded sonnets that had been hitherto unauthorized for publication – publishers held copyright in those days, not authors.
The book critiques the four plays of that year in detail, contrasting them to political developments in Elizabeth’s court. All plays had to be “approved” in order to be played before the queen, and The Chamberlaine’s Men were frequent performers at court. Shakespeare was clever to skirt the edges of censorship: one could argue that Julius Caesar was indeed about censorship, especially with reference to the murdered poet Cinna; Rome and Denmark in Hamlet were about the dissolute happenings in a dysfunctional court, similar to Elizabeth’s.
Shakespeare lifted his plots from other works, primarily that of Plutarch, and through the many bookshops he visited. He cared less for plot and historical accuracy and more for the exploration and creation of words – he is reputed to have used 18,000 unique words in his career. He also perfected the art of the soliloquy (“To be or not to be…”) as a response to the personal essay form that was gaining traction in his day.
Another pivotal but tragic actor during this year is the Earl of Essex, once Elizabeth’s darling and trusted courtier. She even sends him to quell the riot in Ireland as she could trust no other. However, due to a string of strategically bad moves, Essex ends up a pariah by the end of that year and literally loses his head.
The book is loaded with trivia on the Bard and of the customs of Elizabethan England, too many to record here, and I’m surprised and impressed with the wealth of research material used, all listed at the back in a 40-page Biographical Essay. Author James Shapiro literally gets us into the mind of Shakespeare, about whom we lament that not enough is known. Yet in the course of this seminal year, much of his personality and character emerges through this book.
Shakespeare comes across as a modest but wealthy man, a hard worker who wrote and re-wrote extensively, who had a dysfunctional marriage (he lived apart from Anne for most of their marriage), who amassed a modest fortune in his artistic activities to afford the grandest house in Stratford, who was conservative in his investments (he did not buy shares in the newly formed East India Company, but preferred to buy real estate and hoard malt instead), and who chose to be buried in his hometown unlike his contemporary poet Edmund Spencer who commandeered 600,000 acres of Irish land and demanded an interment in Westminster. Yet, who remembers Spencer today, and who does not know Shakespeare?
View all my reviews
Sharpe’s Tiger by Bernard Cornwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A rip-roaring yarn based on true events
This was the second Richard Sharpe novel I read, although it is the first in this long series of 27 books. I gather that the modus operandi for this series is to pick a battle fought by Britain anywhere in its dominions during the Napoleonic period and inject Sharpe into the mix to spice it up.
In this one, Private Sharpe is 22, illiterate, but a 6-year veteran already, having fought in Flanders; he is now in India with the 33rd regiment commandeered by Colonel Arthur Wellesley, soon to be known as the Duke of Wellington. The battle is for the siege of Seringapatam and the overthrow of Tipu (known in the book as Tipoo) Sultan, the ruler of Mysore who is aligned with Napoleon to overthrow the British in India. Arrayed against Sharpe is the evil Sergeant Hakeswill, and corrupt officers Morris and Shee, who are determined to thwart our boy, punish him, and steal the woman he has feelings for—the mixed race widow, Mary. The only good guy appears to be Lieutenant Lawford who acts like a gentleman but is weak and inexperienced. All those above the rank of Colonel are real-life historical figures and therefore are portrayed as noble, although they are ready to sacrifice their men to win this battle at any cost.
The events leading to the siege and the ultimate battle are nail biting and described in as historically accurate detail as possible, with a few creative carveouts: for example, Sharpe saves the British army by blowing up a mine of explosives, when in reality that explosion is attributed to a stray howitzer shell that fell into a storage supply of Tipu’s rockets and set off the pyrotechnics display. There is also the unsolved mystery to date of who killed Tipu Sultan and stole his personal jewellery. The historical record attributes the “kill” to “an unknown British Grenadier,” but it does not need much imagination, nor would it be a spoiler, to say that the reader will know whodunit before they get through the first few pages of the book.
I would like to mention the elements of this book that interested me:
1. The disparity between commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers. Hakeswill describes it best: “Officers are men of property and breeding while soldiers are ‘broken potboys and scarlet-coated pickpockets.’” There is no love lost between the two classes. The private joins the army because he has no other choice, and his goal is plunder. When Sharpe has killed enough, he settles down to rob the bodies of the enemy, because each soldier carries his plunder on his person.
2. 19th century warfare was comprised of throwing massive numbers of men into the line of fire and “into the breach” until a few got through to break down the enemy defence and turn the tide. In fact, there is a regiment called the Forlorn Hopes who lead the advance charge; their reward is a promotion up the military hierarchy if they survive.
3. Victors rape and pillage, and the women among the defeated make themselves ragged and dirty not to attract the attackers’ attention.
4. Vultures and Tigers are strong motifs in this book. The vultures symbolize death following the battling forces. The tiger symbolizes strength, and the animal is an obsession of Tipu’s, who has real live ones running around his palace, guarding his dungeons; symbols of tigers adorn his weapons, furniture, and regalia.
5. Troop movements extended several miles on their march, eating up all available food in the area. Tipu practiced a scorched earth policy to slow down the British/Hydrabadi enemy coalition and deprive them of supplies. Once ensconced outside the Fort of Seringapatam, it was over to the engineers to build batteries and roads to move in the heavy guns to break down the walls at their weakest point.
6. The fog of war is terrible. Muskets are horribly bad in their aim, and so are cannon and rockets. Communications get snarled. And the weather is all important for the success of a campaign; if the British had delayed by a day, the storm that swept through would have brought about a different result.
Sharpe rises to superhuman status, able to endure 200 lashes and several beatings to continue fighting for a British army that does much to put him down and humiliate him. He is the only one who can take down Tipu’s elite troops, the Jettis, giant killers who revel in crushing their victims and ripping off their necks. And he does tigers too, with those awfully inaccurate muskets.
It’s a rip-roaring yarn, based on true events, and Cornwell has done great service in bringing this battle to life in as vivid a fashion through the mercurial but honest character of Richard Sharpe
View all my reviews
Shane actively reads and reviews books by other authors. Below are his most recent reviews.