At your Service

By request: my review is written, but only about 700 words, I don't think the subject warrants more.

On the question of errors, it is error strewn. Petty, stupid things, yes, he gets Trotsky's partner's date of death wrong (by two years), he claims that Oslo and St. Petersburg are on the same longitude 59N (think about it), square brackets close round, in one paragraph A sacks B and then Trotsky regrets the sacking of A - they're names were mysteriously transposed, names even change spelling mid-paragraph.

Service names and thanks his proof reader and editor - but maybe he shouldn't have.

Anyway, I need to tidy my review, I had to check it wasn't just my copy that was error strewn, and I'll submit to the Socialist Standard.

I'll say here I think the errors are being used as a distraction tactic, they're big complaint is despite all the praise he heaps on Trotsky as a writer, orator and individually brave man, he clearly just didn't like him.

Warrrrrr!

Just finished reading Rolling Hot by David Drake, from his Hammers Slammers universe.

I was actually expecting a rather turgid future war story, but what I got was a relatively humane story of combat, gore, bravery and sacrifice. It was the point at which the peacenik joins the hawk in their contempt for the hypocrisies of the liberal who wants a clean, nice war - Drake, a veteran, presented war in all it's random insanity, the dissociation, the noise, the despair, the cock-ups and the bravery. He is noted as saying that behind the glittering tech he is interested in the basic balls of the men and women who make a war machine go.

My point is that the same story can be read in two ways, it isn't a screed in favour of war, but a toned down description of events - he even masterfully manages to put the metabackground of the war to one side, his mercenaries fight because they fight, and the framework of causation is irrelevant to them - much like the films Saving Private Ryan or Zulu, the point of which is the glory of the pointless battle, the fight which soldiers put up without a deep personal motive, because then can and they must.

It is not, as such science fiction, it is the reality of war masked by some shiny technology and transposed out of our immediate cultural context - more fantasy than SF I'd say, but then, I'm developing a hardline on such things.

Literature, anthropology and socialism

Thanks to Many books and my e-reader, I've just finished reading Grant Allen's The british barbarians.

Stuart may enjoy this one - the conceit (and I am going to spoil the plot) is that a time traveller goes back to the time of writing (the 1890's) on an ethnographic tour of British taboos from the perspective of the 25th century - it anthropologises Victorian Britain, and compares the mores of that society with primitive taboos, and finds that society unenlightened and primitive (having things like private property in land, and marriage).

Now, the central motor of the plot is a free love romance (a married woman flees her husband, no less), but which in classic liberal romantic style pictures this as the woman's emancipation (the protagonist proclaims her to be his, and she naturally subordinates herself to him).

The interesting part is that the author is so sure of the truth of his wares, and yet, so far as I can see from my own scant reading, his examples from 'primitive' tribes are fallacious, and his own points about the natural purity of women are now exploded.

Finally, of interest is the brave exposure of prostitution as a constituent part of marriage relations. Also of intriguing note is the defence of the idea that we are alone in the universe, and that there is no extra-terrestrial life.

Well worth the read.

Preeching the Peace

A book review the Ingrate may well enjoy - David Peace's The Damned United (see write up from the Absurder).

It's Peace's account of the 44 turbulent days for which Brian Howard Clough (Cloughie, old Big Mouth) was manager of Leeds United back in the '70's (Dirty, dirty Leeds). I've recently read peace's Red Riding Quartet - a story set around and between a fictionalised account of the Yorkshire Ripper (to my chagrin, after I read it I thought, well, nowt like that's happened for a few years, and then Ipswich). He also wrote a fictionalised account of the '84 Miners' Strike, GB84.

Anyway, Peace's prose style is very much of the post-modern bent - sparse internal monologues (daringly, even, written in large part in the second person). We experience a stream of consciousness from his id driven screaming, shitting, terrified and obsessed protagonists. God is very much dead, there is no meaning, and no narrative, just fragments from which the reader must wrestle meaning.

In many ways, that is the theme of The Damned United - as the ambiguous, punning title suggests - Clough believes in nothing and no-one other than Brian Howard Clough - not luck, not superstition, no God. Only Clough. Clough and football. Obsessive, drunken, monomaniacal one slip and you're gone football (literally for Clough, whose playing careering was cut short by a severe knee injury).

This is appropriate for the modern secular religion - the real sectarian divide in the UK. This is no boy's own stuff of last minute reversals, but a battle of ego and meaning in a chaotic world in which an individual is seemingly powerless - Clough's determined egoism being driven into superstition as the environment of Dirty Dirty Leeds coupled with a shaky start to the season starts to get to him. Peace's Old Big Mouth is a worth sucessor to Coriolanus. Boro lad done good.