Manly Library Book Discussion Group

We’re a little different from other book groups because our emphasis is on the joy of reading, where we provide a monthly list of suggested reading to challenge and broaden the horizons of our members. We also offer access to the latest acquisitions at the Library. We do not restrict ourselves to one book to critique and avoid a classroom style experience. We are quite unique in the world of book groups.

We work on the premise that life is too short to read something you don’t enjoy – so don’t read it – go and find something you do like – but tell us about it so we won’t make the same mistake as well. We have lots of suggestions about books to read, and if variety is the spice of life, we can be very spicy.

Our Book discussion group meets on the 2nd Wednesday of each month at 6pm, in the Library Meeting room. If you would like further information about the Library Book Discussion Group, please contact Fran Inkster at Manly Library on 9976 1732 or email fran.inkster@manly.nsw.gov.au

The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany

by Graeme Gibson. Bloomsbury, 2009.

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com)

This is a gorgeous and a curious book. A magnificent sad-looking leopard stalks across its dust-jacket and many other beasts and prey lurk in the forest of its pages. It is richly and colourfully illustrated with drawings, photographs, paintings and objects from many artists, countries and cultures. There are beasts from prehistoric wall paintings and ancient manuscripts, there are tigers, panthers, foxes, wolves, deer, bison and bunyips, and there is an Inuit drawing of a shaman and a Phoenician carving, there is also a photograph of a 'reclining demimonde' who is clearly a beast of a very different sort. Some of the most beautiful paintings of beasts are by J.J.Audubon, who is better known for his birds. Altogether, this is a gorgeous bedtime book for dipping into and finding creatures which might readily stalk through your dreams.

Which brings me to the 'curious' part. This is a curious book in the Alice-in-Wonderland sense. Its text is full of strange and unusual poems, parables, folk-tales, brief quotations, fabulous and imaginative stories, plus extracts from the diaries of hunters and explorers, and writing by scientists and ecologists. It is an eclectic mixture of curiosities in which Graeme Gibson' s introduction to each section of the book are, perhaps, the most curious.Gibson writes of his own experiences with wild animals - a childhood encounter with sharks, the thrill of listening to wolves, the strange experience of being unknowingly stalked by a bear. But he also writes about animal behaviour, about the encounter between the hunter and the hunted, and about our own history as both predator and prey. His accounts do not always make comfortable reading, especially as they describe the increasing alienation of human beings from the natural world. In fact, reading this book, as I did, from cover to cover, rather than dipping into it at random, can be an increasingly depressing experience. Not only have we humans managed to by-pass natural selection and so undermine the natural process which improves the survival chances of any species, we are also increasingly cut off from any direct contact with the beasts on which we feed, and from the natural world in general. As a bedtime story, this is more likely to give you nightmares than pleasant dreams.

However, and this is a big HOWEVER, dipping into this book is a delight. And if Gibson's underlying theme does penetrate our consciousness (and subconsciousness) and reinforce our love and understanding of beasts through the many curiosities he has collected in it, then it should be on everybody's bedside table.

A selection of sample pages is available at http://knopfdoubleday.com/bedsidebookofbeasts/

Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing

by Janine Burke. Allen & Unwin, 2009.

Reviewed by Ann Skea ann@skea.com

"Creativity is place", says Janine Burke in the introduction to Source. And that place, she believes, is the beginning and end of every artist's journey. It is the childhood realm, "the original source of inspiration and identity". For all but one of the artists and writers in this book, however, it was not their birthplace but a found location in which they produced their major works. As the chapter titles in Source indicate, Burke has chosen a wide and disparate range of artists through which to explore this idea: 'Georgia O'Keeffe and the Desert', 'Picasso's Provence', 'Karen Blixen's Homelands', 'Jackson Pollock on Long Island', 'Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in Sussex', 'Ernest Hemingway in Key West', 'Monet, Blanche Hochedé and Giverny' and 'Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Utopia'. She outlines the creative lives of each of these men and women, discusses their desires and disaffections, their marriages, passions, strengths and weaknesses, and their work. She also visits the places in which they were most creative and offers her own vision of what inspired them. Inevitably, given the very unusual lives of all of her subjects, their stories involve "mourning and regeneration", and "patterns of illness, alcoholism, syphilis, breakdowns and suicide". But these are also stories of achievement and rebirth.

Source is an interesting book, not just because of the lives it documents but also because of the similarities which Burke traces between these creative lives. Sadly, the book cannot reproduce all the artistic work she discusses, but there is a good range of full-colour plates which help to illustrate her themes.Of particular interest, is her account of the work of Blanche Hochedé, the daughter of Alice Hochedé who became Monet's lover and, later, his wife. Blanche was part of Monet's household almost constantly, from the time he first took her family into his Vétheuil home when they were declared bankrupt, until his death at Giverny in 1926. As a teenager, Blanche decided to become an artist and she began to work beside Monet, learning all that she could from him. He, in turn, encouraged her and also painted her at work. Eventually, she became his studio-assistant and, as well as exhibiting her own work professionally, it is very likely that she helped Monet with his when he became older and less active. There is some debate over whether she actually worked on any of Monet's canvasses, but Burke makes a good case for her having done so, and she deplores the fact that Blanche has been given little recognition for the help and support which she certainly provided for Monet for much of his creative life.

The last of Burke's subjects, the Australian Aboriginal artist, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, is the least known to most people. Emily began to create batik art work when she was sixty-six years old and she did not paint her first picture until twelve years after that. Her first paintings immediately won critical acclaim and in 1997 she was a chosen representative of Australia at the Venice Biennale. Her work now hangs in major art galleries around the world. She died in 1996. Emily's painting grew from her kinship with the land of the Central Desert in the Northern Territories of Australia. She was a tribal elder, guardian of a particular Aboriginal food plant, and an important senior woman in her tribe. Her place of inspiration was the desert land on which she lived, and Burke visited this land as part of her research for Source. Faced with the reality of Aboriginal life in a remote part of the Central Desert, she struggles to come to terms with the "schismatic vision" of tribal people who produce "subtle and sophisticated art", who are intimately connected to the land of which they are the "spiritual custodians", and yet live in squalor and seemingly have "scant regard for their environment".Emily's Utopia (that is the name of the area where she lived and worked) is not the Utopia we might imagine. Burke's initial impression is that she has descended into "one of the circles of hell". She is shocked by the snotty-nosed children, the desecrated houses, the rubbish and the plastic bags festooning the desert; and she is angered by the unreproved cruelty that a young boy inflicts on a dog. Yet, from this seeming neglect comes delicate art based on tribal beliefs and stories. She recognizes her desire to impose her own cultural standards and she tries to come to terms with her own lack of understanding.

No such shock is produced by the creative utopias of Burke's other artists and writers. She visits their houses with delight and describes them and the landscape around them glowingly. Perhaps too glowingly at times. It is interesting to compare her description of Jackson Pollock's studio at Springs on Long Island with that of art historian Robert Hughes. Burke's visitor stands, as she has done, in Pollock's paint spattered studio and "feels energy rushing up from the floor, from the web of painted lines, so fast and intense it seems she is lifted off the floor". Hughes, in his vast and impressive book American Visions, describes the "shrine" of "Jack the Dripper" (a title he borrowed from an early Time magazine feature on Pollock). He sees only the "Miraculous brushes", the "Sanctified Shoes" and the "surplus drips of the Master, the sacramental ichor" that went off the edges of his great works.Nevertheless, Source is an interesting and absorbing book. The illustration are beautiful, the photographs of her subjects are unusual, and Burke makes a very pleasant, relaxed and informed companion and guide to the lives and work of her chosen artists and writers.

The Selected Works of T.S.Spivet: A novel

by Reif Larsen. 2009

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).

T.S.Spivet is a twelve-year-old genius maker of maps, plans and illustrations. "I think". he tells a CNN interviewer, "we are born with a map of the entire world in our heads...the patterns are already there and I see the map in my head and then just draw it". This is a simplified version of what he tells the scientists at the Smithsonian, but they are cleverer than a CNN man trying to entertain an audience. T.S., however, is still just a child and his Selected Works are a wonderful grab-bag collection of his notes, drawings, maps and stories, as well as a vivid, funny and sometimes terrifying tale of how he came to be at the Smithsonian that night and the adventures he had getting there.T.S. (the initials stand for 'Tecumseh Sparrow', and how he came by them is a story in itself) lives with his family on a ranch in Montana. He can recite the latitude and longitude of his address to the nearest second, but he is not so certain about the thoughts and feelings of his family. His sister, Gracie, is sixteen and T.S. regards her as "the most together member of the family". She is smart, sassy, and, when the family exasperates her, is inclined to a behaviour which T.S. has labelled 'Dork Retreat': i.e. she will plug in her earphones and/or retreat to her room with her music. If T.S. is the cause, he knows he can mollify her with 500 grams of chewy tape. T.S's mother, Dr Clare, is, so he says, "a misguided coleopterist" who has spent her entire adult life studying and classifying beetles. She can't cook, is a champion blower-up of toasters, and she is "the kind of mother who would teach you the periodic table while feeding your porridge as an infant". T.S. feels close to his mother and shares some of her interests but doesn't understand her continuing obsession with finding a particular species of moth. He is much less close to his father, who is a taciturn farmer: "the sort of man who will walk into a room and say something like 'you can't bullshit a cricket', and then just leave". No longer part of the family, but still very much a part of T.S's notebooks, is Layton, his younger brother who has only recently died in a shooting accident which none of the family will talk about and which T.S. fears may have been his fault.T.S. makes sense of his life by charting it in diagrams, maps and plans which he keeps in the colour-coded notebooks lining the walls of his room The extent of his curiosity and the huge variety of his work is apparent in the Selected Works, where panels alongside the text show (in a random selection) detailed botanical drawings; plans for corn-shucking; stages of male pattern baldness; "My first Inertia Experiment...a disaster"; his brother's rocking horse; a map of the locations of the 26 McDonalds restaurants in North Dakota and much, much more. Some of this work has been sent by a family friend to the Smithsonian, Scientific American, Science, Discovery and Sport Illustrated for Kids, and some (in particular, his meticulous illustration of how the Bombardier Beetle mixes and expels boiling secretions from its abdomen) has been published.

T.S's Smithsonian adventure begins with a phone call from an official who tells him that he has won the prestigious Baird Award for the popular advancement of science. Unaware of T.S's age, he invites him to attend the Smithsonian's hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary celebration dinner in Washington in order to accept the award and to give a keynote address. T.S. initially declines the invitation, but after a really scary day failing to help his father free 'Old Stinky', the bad-tempered goat, from some barbed wire on the farm and almost being bitten by a rattlesnake into the bargain, he changes his mind. To get to Washington, however, without talking to the Smithsonian official again and disclosing his age, is a problem. T.S. decides to make it a true adventure and, like Hanky the Hobo of a story he once heard, he decides to jump a freight train.

A large part of the Selected Works tells of T.S's adventures, some of which are terrifying. Interspersed with these, however, are extracts from a notebook which he stole from his mother's study as he was leaving. These tell the story of Emma Osterville, who married Tecumseh Tearho Spivet, T.S's great, great, grandfather. Emma's life and her struggles to be accepted as a geologist in the conservative, male-dominated scientific world of America in the 1800s, make fascinating reading. Nevertheless, I was so taken up with T.S's adventures that I began to skip over them to find out what happened to T.S. and then came back to them later.


Whichever way you read this book, it is a wonderfully imaginative work of art and literature. Reif Larson captures the spirit of a twelve-year-old boy, but also manages to tell a story, or stories, which will appeal to a many age-groups. Many of T.S's observations are very acute and very funny, although only an adult might see the humour of some of them. Larson's publishers, too, have done him proud. The book itself is innovative and inventive and a delight. Even T.S's thanks page and Reif Larson's own acknowledgements are worth reading, and I particularly liked T.S's additions to the publisher's information page at the front of the book - a page which only publishers, booksellers, librarians and reviewers would normally read. Added to the CIP Catalogue information is a note: "This book is about"- and a list of 27 entries, which includes "7. WHISKEY DRINKING - FICTION", " 12. HOBO SIGNS - FICTION", "16. HONEY NUT CHEERIOS - FICTION", and even an entry for "MIDWESTERN WORMHOLES", which is also Fiction. That should make shelving the book in any particular section of a bookshop difficult! This is a truly inspired, inspiring, imaginative and novel novel, and you can see more about it at http://www.tsspivet.com/.

How to paint a dead man

by Sarah Hall, 2009

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com)

The curious title of this book gives no clues to its contents other than to suggest that art is the link which binds this book together. Even the quotation from Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, from which the title is taken and which is included at the end of this book, only confirms that subtlety, colour, light and shadow are a necessary part of the way in which Sarah Hall paints her characters.Signor Giorgio is an Italian artist famous for his obsessive depictions of a small group of bottles. Dying of cancer in a small town in Umbria, he looks back on his life and work, meditates on the meaning of art, remembers a past troubled by war and loss, and has daily battles with Theresa, his housekeeper, to maintain his smoking habit. One of his fond memories is of a young English artist, Peter, who once wrote him stimulating letters about art but who never included his address, so could not be answered. Thirty years later, Peter Caldicutt, successful, middle-aged and described by his daughter as "one of his generation's formidable eccentrics", still struggles with the demands of art, both philosophically and literally. Trudging the rugged Cumbrian landscape which is his inspiration, he slips and becomes trapped. So begins his own musing on life, death and art, as he also contemplates the irony of being so unpredictable and unreliable that no-one will immediately miss him or know where he is and he may well die of exposure.

A little later again, Sue, Peter's daughter, is also an artist. Her own field is photography but she is currently curator of an exhibition of objects which have had close personal significance for famous artists. A bottle given to her for the exhibition by her father forms a link with Signor Giorgio. Sue is reeling from the sudden, accidental death of her twin brother. Her sense of self has been fragile since childhood, but now, again, she is distanced from everything around her. She talks of herself as 'you', struggles to feel present, and discovers that only in the dangerous and illicit affair with her close friend's husband can she feel alive and human. Sex, described in graphic detail by Sue, is voyeuristic and coldly un-erotic in spite of shared lust and passion, but only through this sex can she find relief from the numbing separation from reality which she feels.The fourth person whose life we enter in this book is a young Italian girl, Annette Tambroni, whose growing, congenital blindness has given her a special quality of imaginative vision which Signor Giorgio, who briefly met her whilst teaching art to local schoolchildren, describes as a gift for discovering invisible things. As readers, we experience Annette's world through that vision, and Sarah Hall's exceptional ability to convey the experiences and personality of each of her characters is at its best in Annette's story.

Annette is innocent and vulnerable. She vaguely remembers a painting in her church which depicts 'the Bestia' but cannot describe it exactly and in her imagination it comes to represent all the unspeakable things which her obsessively religious mother fears for her but will not discuss. The atmosphere of suppressed sexual tension, especially associated with the men in Annette's family, is palpable, but Sarah Hall also manages to create incredible beauty, even in the final horror that enters Annette's life.

Four different characters, four different stories, four different ways of telling the stories and a shifting pattern of time-frames throughout the book, all make this an ambitious novel which poses challenges for both the author and the reader. But Sarah Hall writes beautifully, intelligently and, at times, with simple poetic flair. The chapter titles, 'The Mirror Crisis', 'Translated from the Bottle Journals', 'The Fool on the Hill', and 'The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni', repeat in that order throughout the book as each character's story develops; and inevitably, perhaps, some stories are more gripping than others. I must admit that Peter's dilemma caused me to skip chapters in order to discover whether he escaped and survived. But I did go back and finish the other chapters, and Signor Giorgio, Sue and Annette each held my attention in different ways.Structurally, and in some of its content, this is not an easy book to read but it is absorbing, interesting, innovative and a thought-provoking way of considering some of the many aspects of art.

American rust

Philipp Meyer. A&U, 2009.

What to read after Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? American Rust might be a good choice. Less bleak than the McCarthy – everything is – but with the same concern for the decay of American life, it’s a fine piece of writing. Two young men living in a town in Pennsylvania where all the steel-mills have closed, or are closing, find that they are already running out of options. Meyer is very good at conveying the inner voices of his characters, in particular the two young men, Isaac and Poe. The main narrative, involving a sudden killing, is compelling reading, but it is Meyer’s portrayal of the underlying corrosion of contemporary American society which stays with you when the book is done.

"You could not have a country, not this big, that didn’t make things for
itself. There would be ramifications eventually".

- John

The city and the city

by China Miéville. Macmillan, 2009.

It’s difficult to pigeonhole Miéville. He writes cutting-edge genre-bending fiction, not quite crime, not quite science-fiction or fantasy. The City and The City could as easily be short-listed for a Gold Dagger for best crime novel, or a Hugo award for best science-fiction, as for a Booker prize for best novel. It explores the idea of the divided city, like Berlin or Jerusalem, and in heightening the idea, he says something worthwhile and interesting about sectarianism and ethnic cleansing.

A body is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere in eastern Europe, and it becomes a case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. To unravel the mystery, Borlu must journey to Ul Qoma, a city which shares the same boundaries as Beszel, but which it is forbidden to see. Residents of either city routinely ‘unsee’ the other, (perhaps in the way that we often fail to notice some residents of our own city?) and a shadowy third force ensures that no breaches of this etiquette occur. Borlu’s investigations unearth a powerful conspiracy.

- John

Man Booker longlist 2009

The longlist for the Man Booker prize 2009 has been announced.

Britain's best book borrower?

The Guardian reports that a 91-year-old library member in Scotland is probably Britain's most prolific book borrower. Staff noticed that she was up to her 25 000th loan! She now reads about 12 books per week, mostly romance, and first borrowed in 1946.

The Pearls of reading

Nancy (BookLust) Pearl’s approach to helping people find books they like, is to elucidate from readers the characteristics they find especially appealing about books they already know. She delineates these “appeal characteristics” as:

· Character Example: A Prayer for Owen Meany
· Setting Example: The Shipping News
· Story Example: The Pelican Brief
· Language Example: Possession
Embracing all four (the blockbusters) Example: Lonesome Dove

http://www.nancypearl.com/

By looking at these examples and other books you have read, people can delve within themselves to determine what characteristics they find most appealing. Of course, different people respond in distinct ways, loving certain books for totally unique reasons. Many are surprised when they analyze their reading pleasures in this manner.

A little exercise to try –
Write down your all time five favourite books.
Look at what is common to all of them – is it the story line, characterization, the setting or the way it is written?
Is one different? If so consider what type of mood you were in when you read this. Sometimes your mood may change what most appeals to you at that time.

Happy Reading!!

- Fran

The book is dead, long live the book

by Sherman Young. USW Press, 2008.

Sydney academic Sherman Young believes that, as an influence in society the importance of the book has declined almost to the point where it is dead as an object. He chooses to convey this message in a book, so I suppose there’s life in the old format yet, but he makes a strong case all the same. In many ways books have been overtaken by newer formats. Older texts can be found on sites such as Project Gutenberg, and newer books are increasingly available in e-book format. In due course, a sufficiently attractive e-book reader will be on the market, and then we can expect the book to go the way of the vinyl record, becoming little more than a niche market. Young points out that this is not altogether a bad thing. For instance, there is much more likelihood of specialist texts being found by their target audience in an electronic format – no more haphazard ordering from book-shops which can only carry a fraction of the material being published. Young’s argument is persuasive, and spells a worrying message for booksellers, which will have to reinvent themselves, perhaps carrying a smaller range of stock and selling more coffee. But what does it imply for public libraries? Can we carry on buying and shelving books as we have done for the last hundred and fifty years, or do we move into e-books in a bigger way before it’s too late? Should we blog a bit more? Young has an entertaining style, and his book can be digested fairly rapidly. I recommend it to anybody who likes reading; we’re still just about in the majority.

- John

(Update: Sherman Young also has a companion blog for his book)

Revolutionary road

By Richard Yates. Vintage, 2008.

Richard Yates Revolutionary Road is now a movie, but the book, published in 1961, is a work of serious moral intent - about the shortcomings of its characters. Frank and April Wheeler are a living as a dysfunctional couple so she devises an escape plan, one that will enable Frank to realise his potential while she works, at least until her husband finds an occupation more suited to a literate war veteran. As Richard Yates's novel unfolds, however, it becomes apparent that though Frank might rail against the suburbs, he lacks the imagination or boldness for change and so his marriage rapidly unravels.

- Wendy

The book of Emmett

by Deborah Forster. Random House, 2009.

Deborah Forster’s novel, The book of Emmett is a powerful and emotional work that begins with the funeral of Emmett, the father in the story. Forster has written an emotional tale of domestic violence with simple yet engaging language. Set in the western suburbs of Melbourne, where Forster grew up, the novel traces the complex relationships between brothers and sisters and the love and pain that evolves between them in this house of violence. It brings together some strong images of growing up in this period and how children forgive but are still damaged by a violent upbringing

- Wendy

Another time past created

by Brett Hilder. Pier 9, 2008.

A layered design recreates the intricate, collage nature of a journal, where words, quotes from philosophers, poets and authors, ponderings, experiences, travel observations and astonishing photographs of landscapes and people are interwoven.
This is a book of a journey showing the lands of Spanish culture in the Mediterranean and Latin America, made with notations of memory
Absolutely beautiful.

- Wendy

Update - From Pier 9's website: 'The winners of the 2009 Australian Publishers' Association Book Design Awards were announced as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival on Thursday 21st May. Another Time Past Created, designed by Toyoko Sugiwaka, won Best Designed General Illustrated Book and this beautiful, captivating book was also awarded Best Designed Book of the Year overall!'

Manly Library Author Talk: Bob Ellis

Bob Ellis is the author of more than eighteen books.

His most recent work is And So It Went: Night Thoughts in a Year of Change and other recent titles include the bestselling Goodbye Jerusalem,

Goodbye Babylon and First Abolish the Customer.

Bob Ellis will be speaking at Manly Library:

Wednesday 24th June 7pm
Manly Library Meeting Room

Market Place, Manly NSW
$5 entry light refreshments provided
Bookings essential call 9976 1722

Deaf sentence

by David Lodge. Harvill Secker, 2008.

David Lodge’s books include comic gems such as the campus comedy Changing Places, as well as more serious works such as Author, Author. Deaf Sentence is a bit of a mixture. It has comic elements, but the overall tone is darker, even alarming. Retired Professor, Desmond Bates, finds that life has become tiresome and embarrassing due to the onset of hearing loss. While blindness is commonly regarded as tragic, he observes, deafness is often the source of amusement, though not for the deaf person himself. Desmond’s ageing father is a source of further disquiet for him, as the start of some sort of dementia makes itself known. Set against these two strands of plot is a third, less successful element, involving a young, erratic student who is supposedly researching the language used in suicide notes. This plot element is not fully worked out, and is somehow reminiscent of the movie Fatal Attraction, (though no bunnies are harmed). Altogether, though, the novel is written with Lodge’s customary elegance, and successfully draws attention to the under-appreciated struggle many people have with deafness.

- John

Alice Munro wins 2009 Man Booker International

Alice Munro, known for her short stories, has won the 2009 Man Booker International prize (different from the Man Booker Prize). Her new collection is due to be released at the end of 2009, entitled Too much happiness. Her most recent titles include Away from her (which was made into a movie of the same name) and a collection called The view from Castle Rock.

The women

by T C Boyle. Viking, 2009.

T C Boyle’s mastery of the short story is at odds with his ability as a novelist. Having raised expectations with his marvellous early novel, Water Music, about the explorer Mungo Park, he has disappointed on several occasions since. The Women is an ambitious portrayal of the women who loved Frank Lloyd Wright, and it’s another frustrating read. Boyle is capable of enviable sentences and description, but there are many paragraphs here which could be struck out without loss. The novel is supposedly told through the recollections of one of Wright’s students, Tadashi, via an Irish American translator, but the various ironical effects achieved by this method are submerged by the suspicion that the author is being a clever-clogs. The characters of the three wives/mistresses of Wright are comprehensively detailed, but are of minor historical interest compared to the architect himself. With the exception of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, novelists have seldom been up to the challenge of putting themselves in the mind of an architect, and Boyle does little to show how Wright’s genius operated. And call me picky, but would people have fed coins into a jukebox in the early 1930s? Did the term ‘jukebox’ exist then? If you haven’t read Boyle before, I’d suggest looking for a collection of his stories first.

- John.

Burnt shadows

by Kamila Shamsie. Bloomsbury, 2009.

"Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey, but on the morning of 9 August itself both the man from Berlin, Konrad Weiss, and the schoolteacher, Hiroko Tanaka, step out of their houses and notice the perfect
blueness of the sky..."

The day is 9 August 1945, and the place Nagasaki. It is the morning on which the second Atomic Bomb was dropped, and the one that survives, in this story, is Hiroko Tanaka.

Right from the Prologue of Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie makes it clear that this book will have no happy endings. Yet it is a book full of love and life, humour and strength.

Hiroko is a likeable heroine and as we follow her though the event-filled fifty-seven years which this book covers she matures into a strong, independent, resilient and loving woman. Yet, even before the bomb dropped and burned the embroidered birds of her kimono into her back, her life was shadowed. The earliest shadow is reflected from her father, who was branded a traitor by the local community for an act of protest against the glorification of a young man's death in war. On the day of the bomb, Hiroko feels the suspicion of the people around her in an air-raid shelter, even of those she has know as friends for many years, and so she leaves. Konrad Weiss's death on that day, too, throws a deep shadow over her life. Not just because of her grief for the man she loved and was going to marry, but because it sets in motion a train of events which take her from Japan, to India, then to Pakistan and, eventually, to America. Each move brings her new joys and new sorrows.Kamila Shamsie is a superb story-teller. The people in her book are human and believable, and she draws the reader into their lives in such a way that you warm to them and care about them. In some ways the lives of these fictitious characters become more real than the horrors of the non-fictional history that they live through. It is hard to believe, for example, that sane human beings can perpetrate the acts which have led to the family divisions, bloodshed and trauma of Partition in India; the growing power and the influence on young Afghan boys of the mujahideen in Pakistan; the war in Afghanistan; the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York; the growing power of the CIA and private militia; Guantanamo Bay; and the resulting spread of xenophobia, religious fanaticism, and everyday suspicion of strangers who are not "like us". The lives of Hiroko and her family and close friends are influenced by all of these. And, as Hiroko's story moves into the present-day, Kamila Shamsie makes us aware of the way in which these things have changed all our lives, prompting, especially, the suspicion of strangers, the resulting spread of surveillance and the erosion of individual rights.

Yet in spite of its thought-provoking portrayal of recent history and the frightening, unresolved, seemingly unresolvable situation with which the book ends, there is nothing polemic about it. There are good times as well as bad. For long periods, as one section heading suggests, the shadows are veiled and the book celebrates comfortable, loving, family relationships. Hiroko faces the worst that can happen and, as she did at Nagasaki, she survives - because she has to, and because, as she says at the end of the book "the world goes on". And the shadows, for all of us, are always there.

Burnt Shadows, like the two fragments of poetry which Shamsie chose to set at the front of her book, is an elegy for all that the earth has lost and is still losing. But it is also a powerful and moving story.

********************************
Copyright Ann Skea 2009

The house of wisdom

by Jonathan Lyons. Bloomsbury, 2009.

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).

Baghdad: 'The Round City', 'The City of Peace'. This doesn't sound much like the city we hear of today. Nor do we think of Baghdad as one of the most important centres of learning in the world. So it is timely for Jonathan Lyons to remind us that all this was once true of Baghdad and to demonstrate how much the ancient Arabic-speaking world influenced the development of Western, non-Arabic-speaking, knowledge and culture.

In 762, the Abbasid Caliph, Abu Jafar al-Mansur, influenced by the geometrical teachings of the Ancient Greek, Euclid, set about designing the new capital city of his empire as a perfect circle. Learned astrologers (one a Zoroastrian, the other a Jewish convert to the Muslim religion) were consulted; a mathematically gifted overseer was appointed; various rites were performed, and The Round City grew up on the site of the old Persian city of Baghdad. Al-Mansur and his scholars then began to collect knowledge from wherever in the world they could find it. Persian, Greek and Indian knowledge was searched out, translated, studied copied and disseminated, and the city grew into a rich and important place which, according to one traveller, had "no equal on earth" for prosperity, luxury and learning. The great library of Baghdad, which housed the accumulated knowledge of the Empire also housed an academy of scholars and translators, and it was the resort of experts in astrology and scientific experiment. It became known as 'The House of Wisdom', and large sums of money were devoted to expanding its endeavors, accumulating valuable texts, and undertaking related cultural and intellectual projects.

Al-Mansur was not the first to so value knowledge and learning. The Umayyad dynasty, whose armies al-Mansur's brother had defeated in 750, were equally interested in 'scientific' enquiry. Astrology, logic, law, philosophy and medicine, all were studied, and when the most important surviving Umayyad Prince, Abd al-Rhaman, fled to Southern Spain, he took this love of scholarship with him. So Muslim Spain, too, became a important centre of learning.

Meanwhile, the Western non-Arabic-speaking world had lost the language skills which would have allowed them to learn from the Ancient Greeks. Latin had become the language of scholars in the few centres of learning. And Christianity suppressed Greek philosophy and independent thinking to such an extent, that only Aristotle's influence survived in the formal teaching and practice of logic and rhetoric. The Crusades soon made the free exchange of knowledge between Muslims and Christians almost impossible. However, contact with the Arab world, however bloody, did expose some Western men to Arab culture and a few, like Adelard of Bath, set out to learn more. Adelard is one of the heroes of Lyons's book. Born in about 1080, he had influential church patrons, a thirst for knowledge, a flair for languages and, apparently, a penchant for flowing green capes, green being a new dye colour discovered by the Alchemists. In about 1100, Adelard left his native England for a cathedral school in France. From there, he headed East, possibly by way of Spain and Sicily, spending at least seven years studying in and around crusader lands before returning home. He learned Arabic well enough to communicate with other scholars, and he read and translated (from the Arabic) the works of Classical Greek philosophers and mathematicians. When he finally returned to England, he brought back with him knowledge of geography, astronomy and astrology, as well as his own translations of a work on the use of the astrolabe and, most importantly, Euclid's Elements. Euclid's work was of seminal importance in the West. It covered geometry, number theory and such sophisticated mathematical concepts as irrational numbers, plus the logical method of stating a problem, hypothesizing a solution, demonstrating proof, and presenting a final conclusion. This 'scientific' method was, and still is, applied to every aspect of the search for knowledge. Adelard's work, Lyons notes, became the benchmark for Twelfth-century learning.Other scholars similarly sought out Arab knowledge and brought it back to the West. In 1230, the Scotsman, Michael Scot, brought back the medical work of Avicenna, and the philosophical work of Averroes. In twelfth-century Italy, Leonardo of Pisa, better know as Fibonacci, produced his Book of Calculations, which provided a detailed account of the use of the Arabic numbering system (which had, in turn, been learned from India) and so the nine figures 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 and the sign 0 (which we still call by the Arab name 'zero') came to the western world. In the thirteenth century, English scientist and philosopher, Roger Bacon, brought from the East the knowledge of alchemy, which was the precursor of chemistry. Lyons's charting of these changes gives us an important insight into the major sources of our knowledge today, and the strong influence of Arab learning is still clear in every aspect of our lives. Music, manners, gardening, geography, religious debate, magic, all were strongly influenced by Arab learning. They gave us not only our number system but also many of the words which are in everyday use: 'alcohol', 'tariff', 'monsoon', 'algebra', and many more. The House of Wisdom is a timely reminder of the debt we owe to these early lovers of learning: the Arabs who searched for it, treasured it and transmitted it so freely, and the adventurous Western scholars who were fascinated by it, saw its value, and brought it back with them from their travels. Lyons writes well and his knowledge of the Muslim world is extensive. My only quibble, is that he tends to jump around in time in his book and, since history and dates were never my strong point, I often lost track of which century I was in.

However, this was a small price to pay for the knowledge I gained.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2009