This is one of several Tintin adventures which gives Thomson and Thompson more prominent roles. Opening with an episode that culminates in their car blowing up, the stage is set for an adventure that will take Tintin to the Middle-East.
Tintin soon encounters an old adversary, Müller, first encountered in The Black island, who is involved in nefarious paramilitary oil-related activities. Müller eventually kidnaps the wonderfully appalling oily little tyke Abdullah, hugely irritating much loved son of Ben Kalish Ezab, in an attempt to fuel conflict between Ezab and Sheikh Bab El Ehr. Abdullah, rather like Jolyon Wagg, or Castafiore (who has a small cameo in the adventure), is one of Hergé’s great irritating characters, and gives him the chance for some excellent character development, not only in terms of Abdullah himself, but also in the way adults react to him, alongside some good old-fashioned simple slapstick.
So, Tintin must rescue Abdullah – not at all easy when one takes Abdullah’s mischievous temperament into account – and get to the bottom of the exploding fuel mystery to prevent WWIII, and reunite Abdullah with his doting ‘papa’. All in a days work for our plucky ‘boy reporter’ hero! Rather unusually for a later period Tintin adventure, Captain haddock is virtually absent. When he does, rather fortuitously, show up, towards the end of the story, Hergé turns his ever-delayed explanation of his sudden and unexpected re-appearance into an enjoyable running-gag.
Thompson and Thomson, on the other hand, take up the role of being Tintin’s foil, and provide a lot of fun. From sticking out like sore thumbs on board the Speedol Star, to getting lost and suffering from an inability to discern between reality and mirages in the desert, they annoy everyone from pump attendents to worshippers at a mosque along the way. This is also the adventure in which they pick up the strange hair and skin condition that recurs during Explorers On The Moon.
At this point in his career Hergé and his team are really flying, and this is an excellent adventure, jam-packed with character, wit, slapstick, action, intrigue and all-round fun. It’s superbly written, and beautifully drawn. An absolute pleasure from start to finish.
This was amongst my favourites as a kid, and remains a favourite even now, all these years later.
The combination of flawless and fantastically evocative art with a really good story, it’s a winner. Not only is the drawing amongst Hergé’s very best, but also the colouring is fabulous; the palettes used are phenomenal: the campfire meal in the evening above the snowline, the muted tones of the ice-cave, or during the snowstorm.
Haddock’s on top curmudgeonly form, at his peak as the irascible sidekick, grouchy yet dependable. Tharkey’s a strong character as well, and by this stage Herge’s nuanced and sympathetic depictions of various ethnic types have come a long, long way from his In The Congo days.
The narrative threads of Tintin’s attachment to Chang and the role of the yeti, whilst non-naturalistic are great storytelling ploys, rich in emotional power. Having learned as an adult of how Herge’s real-life ‘Chang’ relationship didn’t measure up to this dreamlike idealisation. Well, like the book itself, whilst undoubtedly sentimental, there’s something very poignant about it all.
I like all the Tintin stories a lot, but there are a few I really love, and this is one of them, and possibly my very favourite. It’s beautiful in so many enchanting ways.
From the peak period of Hergé’s latter career, The Calculus Affair is definitely amongst my personal favourites.
Ever since he first appeared on page five of Red Rackham’s Treasure, professor Cuthbert Calculus bumbled right into this Tintin reader’s heart. Unlike some Tintin characters (Haddock being a notable example) who take a tale or two to ‘settle in’, Cuthbert arrives fully formed, combining elements Hergé had previously dabbled with in other characters, notably the scientists and academics like Professor Alembick in King Ottokar’s Sceptre, or several of the characters in Tintin and the Shooting Star.
Cuthbert’s place in Hergé’s own heart is clearly evidenced by his central roles in all three of his ‘double-bill’ adventures: having introduced him in the sequel to The Secret Of The Unicorn (the aforementioned Red Rackham’s Treasure), he is a key character in both the strangely occult-themed south-American adventures of The Seven Crystal Balls & Prisoners Of The Sun, and the absolutely brilliant and more scientifically-themed Destination Moon & Explorers On The Moon, in which he really comes into his own as a fully-fledged central character.
Having already been abducted once before, in the South American double-bill, Calculus is again ‘disappeared’, in the magnificent Calculus Affair, this time not for ‘meddling’ in the traditions of a primitive superstitious culture through his archaeological and anthropological work, but because he discovers a technology with a military application.
Hergé gets to return his characters to a former theatre of operations, that of King Ottokar’s Sceptre, only this time it’s Borduria instead of Syldavia, and he’s freer, post WWII, to make the ‘Taschist’ regime a blatant critique of dictatorship, combining elements of both left and right-wing forms of absolutism (as exemplified by the Nazi style arm bands worn by ‘Taschists’, and the sinister Eastern block vibes of Col. Sponsz’s secret police, the ZEP, dressed in Green like Soviet troops, whose very name as well behaviour suggests the KGB).
Almost every frame can be admired as a work of great art, making this a sublime visual feast, and the story flows beautifully, disguising well it’s episodic structure. By this stage even the incidental characters are well fleshed out, meaning cameos such as that of Italian motoring-enthusiast Arturo de Milano are thoroughly engaging.
Over the years Hergé experimented with occasional full page artworks or frames, or sometimes, as in this instance, and very successfully, with ‘oversize’ frames. In The Calculus Affair, already one of his best drawn Tintin adventures, there are two such frames, both of which are delightfully detailed, full of wit, character and invention, capable of sustaining long attention and admiration.
Full of incident, action, humour and humanity, this is – for my money – one of the very best of a series which is itself of an unusually high and overall consistent standard.
Hugely fascinating, from the days when even commercial channels might occasionally make a great documentary series.
First reviewed for Amazon UK, 2013.
Bamber’s sledgehammer, made for Granada, is modelled on such BBC classics as Civilisation, from the globe-trotting location filming and portentous music, right down to the 13 episode format. I have to say that the scope and scale of this series was what I’d hoped for from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History Of Christianity, but that (unlike his enormous book) was way too short.
This opulent and detailed extravaganza finds Bamber Gascoigne in full ’70s fig, in flares, sporting jackets with improbably wide collars, regaling us with his distinctive and almost sardonic delivery. It’s not quite as well done as Civilisation, and if you’ve seen K Clark’s fabulous series you’ll note that BG visits many of the places Clark had shown us almost a decade earlier, but it is nonetheless very good. Made for a commercial channel, each episode is slightly shorter than a BBC equivalent, in order to accommodate the ads. The DVDs preserve the 1/2 episode break titles, and even the end of episode ‘next week we’ll be…’ notices.
As BG points out in his intro, this is the story of The Christians, i.e. the people who have called themselves Christian throughout history, and therefore most definitely not an examination of theology as such. And as Bamber himself observes, what a diverse bunch they’ve proven to be! As a group they’ve evolved from the obscurity of an outsider cult, a ‘peculiar people’ suspected of cannibalism, to the official religion of the Roman Empire, and beyond.
Beside the monumental Constantine fragments, in restrained yet flamboyant ’70s duds.
As presented here these great ‘saltation’ moments – Constantine’s adoption of Christianity, and the massive expansion of Catholicism into the New World, especially via Spain in South America – all of which are admirably covered within this four disc set, appear (and quite rightly so) more as contingent and political, i.e. what the venerable Edward Gibbon would term historical – rather than spiritual. Once more this echoes Clark’s manner of dealing with the church in Civilisation, as ‘Ekklesia’, i.e. as a cultural and political force, as opposed to engaging with ideas of theology, or any other aspect of the spiritual or supernatural.
The lifestyles of the Christians have included everything from the ascetic poverty of St Francis to the wealth and debauchery of the Popes. Their sites, rites and beliefs have sometimes been flexible, sometimes rigid, at one moment absorbing ancient pagan tribal customs, or co-opting their sites and symbols, at another evolving bizarrely complex and convoluted syntheses of classical thought and medieval theology; sometimes peacefully coexisting with other cultures and beliefs, at others committing atrocities to those with different beliefs (or even to their own kind, often over what might well appear to us seemingly obscure and arcane details of theology). All of this is addressed in numerous ways over the various episodes.
The proliferation of and diversity amongst Christians is something of a key note theme. As well as considering many vanished types, such as the pole-dwelling mystics known as Stylites, Bamber and his team show us all kinds of contemporary Christians. Some, like the island-dwelling Coptic monks in Ethiopia, lead lives that have barely changed in two millennia, whilst others – including Catholic and Protestant sects of bewildering diversity – enjoy varying degrees of familiarity and modernity. This proliferation, multiplication and diversification is certainly fascinating, as well as being pretty mind boggling!
Having observed in the final episode how resilient Christianity has proven to be, even in Communist Russia, Bamber sums up thus in his closing statement: ‘The variety of Christians in the world today are like a record of the complex evolution of their faith.’ Well, yes, Amen to that!
As several other reviewers elsewhere point out – I love the comment one particular reviewer (at Amazon UK) made, about it looking like the series was ‘filmed though a sock’! – the film quality has, in places, deteriorated markedly. This is obviously a shame, especially as this is a great series, and really merits a decent digital restoration. But even as it is (or at least as my edition is) it’s well worth seeing.
Arrian’s Anabasis is a fantastic read, exactly the kind of book that might get generally interested readers hooked on history. The central character, Alexander The Great, is indeed something of a Titan.
We might think him a power-crazed warmonger, but Arrian pulls no punches when he says ‘Anyone who vilifies Alexander … should first make some comparisons and reflect on them. Who is he, and what has he achieved… ? By comparison the critic is an insignificant creature, toiling away at some insignificant work, and not even master of that.’ Woah… that’s told us!
Arrian’s is primarily a military tale, of travel, adventure and conquest. This does, to some degree, give it a certain vintage feel, but in many other ways Arrian feels remarkably modern. Part of this must be down to a good translation, that renders Arrian in easy to read and immediate English. But surely this must also be down to Arrian’s writing style itself, which is excellent (‘fast moving like it’s subject’ as the back cover notes aptly observe).
Arrian is very clear about the sources he is mainly dependant upon, and his view on the dubious nature of many tales – that he nonetheless relates – from less reliable sources. ‘I have no evidence… and I see no point in speculation’ is a typical phrase, giving a characteristic flavour of Arrian’s basically rational approach.
Whilst he clearly admire’s Alexander, he can be, and indeed is, critical. His position is perfectly summed up in his own closing words: ‘although I too have censured some of Alexanders actions in my history, I make no apology for my admiration of the man himself.’
As an avid reader of Napoleonic history I could see many parallels between Bonaparte and Alexander: the quick thinking, quick moving, intuitive approach, the charisma and ability to lead an army as much by force of personality as by skill. Alexander even has his own 1812 moment, as his army is thinned out during the crossing of the deserts of southern Iraq.
Without giving away too much for interested readers who don’t know the story (and great history like this is, to my mind, at least as – and arguably way more – exciting than fiction), I will note that there are some fascinating moments when Alexander encounters dissent and views different from his own.
Many great military leaders fail to circumscribe their own ambition, and bring about their own downfall and the ruination of huge swathes of humanity with them, and such views were put to Alexander at several points. What did he make of such arguments, and how did he respond? Read this book if you’re interested to find out.
This is a classic ‘great man’ story, and suitably exciting. Modern historians can sometimes be dry as dust and neither very compelling or interesting, even whilst they may quite admirably be seeking after a truer picture of history. It’s difficult for a general reader like me to evaluate the veracity of Arrian’s account, but I can certainly tell you that it’s a corking good read.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is clearly very erudite, and capable of being quite disarmingly charming and witty. But does this make him the best reporter of Christian history? I have to say that I think perhaps not. A superbly well informed voice within the discussion yes, but not necessarily the best, nor even, despite the enormity of his much lauded History of Christianity, necessarily the most authoritative.
For me the central issue is his own apparent attachment to the religion, quite literally, of his fathers. He comes from a long line of ‘men of the cloth’. One might have hoped his homosexuality and his historical awareness might’ve meant that by now he’d have had his own Damascene conversion experience, and finally have fallen off the supposedly high horse of theology.
In his TV series he called himself a ‘candid friend of Christianity’, so perhaps he has? But he’s frequently surprised and disappointed – despite playing the role of whistle-blowing ‘little boy’, telling the emperor he’s butt naked – that his theological heroes have feet of clay.
As, for example, when he ruefully recounts how a fellow theologian showed Paul Tillich, and another couple of German theologians of Tillich’s era, to be the type of ‘saint’ (I’m deliberately conflating his discussions of saints and theologians here) who transpires simply to be ‘someone who has not been researched well enough’.
The revelations about Tillich and co., along with a brief reflection on how the facts of their lives might compromise their authority, are then followed by a frankly comically maudlin note of disappointment, as DM opines that ‘the stock in trade of theologians is honesty’.
I’ve always held, since ditching Christianity – as soon as my mind matured enough to begin apprehending reality more clearly – that theologians’ stock in trade is, at best, conjuring some kind of meaning from a disparate set of strangely aggregated ideas – conjuring the semblance of the Divine spirit from the ‘facts’ of a haphazard evolution – and at worst deliberate obscurantism with intent to exploit.
The suggestion is, re DM’s disappointment in Tillich, I suppose, that theologians should know and behave better. But funnily enough DM’s book itself offers endless examples of how this isn’t the reality.
This doesn’t stop this from being in many ways a very well-written book, full of interesting information (tax-dodging Egyptians fundamental to the founding of monasticism; the casuistry that allows clerical approval for burning at the stake because it doesn’t obviously contravene the injunction on the spilling of blood), which approaches many types of silence, and spans, rather like his massive tome on Christianity, a period beginning with Jewish culture (and others) in the millennium before the time of Jesus and his followers’ religion, right through to present times.
His attempts to cover certain topics, such as Christianity’s many forms of collusion with worldly power, including the subjugation of women, acceptance of slavery, and more recently the failure to effectively oppose fascism, whilst part of a laudable effort at ending the silence of forgetfulness or denial within and around Christianity, felt rather token to me.
By contrast, in the section dealing with the Anglo-Catholic church and the place of homosexuals within it, I felt I could really sense DM’s personal passion, his quote of the phrase ‘gin, lace, and backbiting’ hanging in the air with a certain frisson.
I have to say that despite DM’s trumpeting his own outsider status as a gay man in a Christian world – what’s unusual is not the sexuality, but rather the honesty in admitting to it – and the observation elsewhere (made in reference to Quakers’ anti-slavery stance) that ‘It took original minds to kick against the authority of sacred scripture’, he seems on the whole to take a largely conservative stance.
This is particularly clear in his view that the Catholic mainstream tradition represents some kind of order and continuity, the disruption of which, by what he terms ‘the inveterate Word-centred noisiness of Evangelical Protestantism’, he clearly sees as a tragedy for the church (and so it follows that an attempted historical reconciliation/fudge such as Chalcedon ‘should be seen as one of the great disasters of Christian history, not one of its triumphs.’).
I don’t for one minute buy into this polarity of contemplative Catholicism verses noisy Protestantism, with its undercurrents of political and social snobbery. These are traits so often combined in English academics, as can be detected here, with an obvious distaste for the French Revolution as symbol of un-Godly disruption of the prevailing social order. I sense a brotherly love here for the Stripping of the Altars line taken by Eamon Duffy.
I’m struggling to complete, or rather I should say continue, MacCulloch’s enormous History of Christianity, and his equally detailed if somewhat shorter work on the Reformation. For all that his writing has been lionised, I find it nowhere near as compelling as the copiously effusive praise it receives on the book jacket blurbs suggest it ought to be.
I started those two books ages ago, got bogged down in them, and feel no great urge to resume. And I was deeply disappointed at the meagreness of the TV version of his History of Christianity, far preferring Bamber Gascoigne’s proper 13 episode ‘sledgehammer’ The Christians.
For all his criticisms, and the occasional flashes of clarity, MacCulloch equivocates and fudges too much. And he is so smitten with as to become mired in the nomenclature and jargon of theology, such that sometimes his seductive language glosses over strangely silent lacunae of his own. He ultimately appears, as Buddhists might put it, overly ‘attached’ to Christianity.
It seems he wants to have his cake and eat it, to be historical and critical, even sceptical, but not to offend the faithful. Well, more accurately, he doesn’t seem overly bothered about offending Protestants, but very definitely seems placatory and more than just sympathetic to Catholics. In some ways his soothing tone towards the faithful, or some of them, might be construed as a commendable show of tact. But considered from another angle it’s pandering to a group who, for vast stretches of time, have been domineering bullies.
Fairly early on in this book DM suggests that much post-Enlightenment historical awareness more or less amounts to ‘sneering’ at the beIiefs of our antecedents, and admonishes us against this,just as Melvyn Bragg did in his book on the King James Bible.
Well, one can feel sympathy/empathy, as regards the lamentable ignorance of our forbears, struggling to understand and explain life to themselves and each other – just as we do – whilst remaining acutely aware of our own shortcomings. These are not two mutually exclusive positions, as Bragg and MacCulloch occasionally seem to suggest. Nor should such awareness stop us from seeing where they got it wrong, or even expressing such insights with vigour.
Very early in the book he gets in a bit of a muddle regarding all this over the issue of textual reliability, veering between commending the recent trend towards more rigorous scholarly historical analysis – the tradition to which he belongs – and sniping at it, as when he says ‘corruption of the text is always a rather desparate last throw for biblical or literary commentators’.
What, and making a muddled text (The Bible) say whatever one wants it to say isn’t ‘a rather desperate last throw’? It all depends on the text, and the one under discussion is, as DM himself concedes, ‘manifestly in a state of some corruption’. Is this ‘desperate last throw’ not very much part of the same recent phenomenon DM elsewhere describes as ‘this triumph of Western scholarly patience’?
Although I have yet to properly read either of them, I sense from my slight familiarity with some of their content that I will much prefer Isaac Asimov’s works on Jewish and Christian religious history. He has MacCulloch’s breadth, depth, and fascination with detail, but is both more impartial and yet forthrightly judgemental.
This is the first of MacCulloch’s books I’ve succeeded in finishing, thus far; whilst informative and interesting, I found it overall disappointing and even somewhat frustrating. I can’t honestly say I’d recommend reading this.
In this Oxford World Classics edition of books 6-10 of Livy’s chronicle of the rise of Rome we learn much about an interesting time: fighting constant wars with her neighbours, whilst also undergoing continual class struggle at home (between the plebs and the patricians), Rome’s military might somehow transcends the vagaries of the Republican system – dictators in this era were appointed, and would resign once their work (the particular task for which they were appointed) was done: a very different conception from the modern dictator! – allowing Rome to dominate and gradually unify Italy under her rule.
The annalistic style makes, at times, for repetitive and rather dry reading, with regular lists of who was consul, dictator, or ‘master of horse’. Although there’s a strong temptation to skip all this naming, the formula has, for me at any rate, the unexpected humour value of throwing up some rather entertaining names: there are a number of amusing individual names, such as Furius, Manlius, & Postumius, and occasionally even a prize pairing, as in Spurius Furius! No doubt an awareness of such nominal nonsense inspired Python’s infamous ‘Biggus Dickus’ scene in life of Brian. The constant conflicts can perhaps likewise lose their edge through sheer exhaustion, something Livy tacitly concedes himself in places.
Even though the practice of history has evolved a lot, one sees with writers like Livy (and Arrian, Tacitus, etc.) the desire to relate history as faithfully as they are able. So Livy often gives several variant accounts, expressing his reasons for favouring one particular version over another. Two things, however, that date this relative to someone more modern, even someone as far back as Gibbon, for example, are that firstly, Livy already looks back to former times as being better than the present: the old ‘golden age fallacy’ again! One doesn’t even have to read between Livy’s own lines to see that, in our view (well, mine, at any rate) this was hardly a idyllic period: quite apart from the constant wars, they were a very superstitious and fickle lot!
Superstition is the second dating factor: for superstition, there’s such things as the auguries, the ‘hammering in of a nail’ ceremony, and at one point what sounds suspiciously like a witch hunt. For early Roman fickleness, try the fate of Marcus Manlius Capitolinus: once hailed as Rome’s protector, his championing of the plebs finds him recast as seditious, leading to a grisly end. Livy even notes at one point, showing that there was an awareness of such things even at the time, that religion was kept within the patrician class as a means of controlling the ignorant masses: ‘mainly so they could use superstition to keep the mind of the common people in check’ (p. 4). Some things don’t change!
All in all, very interesting in giving a picture, in part contemporaneous with Alexander the Great (about whom he makes a digression to consider how Rome would have fared against him) of the rise of republican Rome. But it does suffer from a certain dryness and repetition, mostly due to the annalistic form adopted.
In telling the story of A. Lincoln, Ronald C White, (Jr!) has given us a beautifully drawn if rather reverential rendering of a fascinating man. A man whose life manages to be almost prismatic, telescoping hundreds of years of cultural history into one short lifespan. A lifespan tragically shortened, at that.
The story begins with roots: Lincoln himself, though fascinated by his family history, was unable to trace it back far, and saw himself as descended from ‘undistinguished’ stock. White’s fuller picture reveals the Lincoln family odyssey, from fleeing England to seek religious and economic freedom, to Abe’s eventual sojourn in the Executive Mansion (as the Whitehouse was then known), to be a fascinating microcosm of the much larger American experience.
Lincoln’s limited rural childhood education didn’t stop this ambitious autodidact from achieving a dizzying ascent. His critics often chided him for his slow progress. But, as he himself said, though he walked slowly, he never walked backwards!
It’s perhaps a sad reflection of the political disillusionment of our times, but I’d generally actively avoid contemporary political biography, expecting it to be deadly dull. Lincoln’s path to power, via the worlds of law and politics, two fields of human endeavour which remain relatively obscure and cold to me, is, fortunately, sufficiently interesting to maintain our avid attention. And in his legal career seeds of Lincoln’s future presidential skills can be seen growing. The images that White conjures, of Lincoln riding the legal circuit, as a ‘Prairie Lawyer’, are also highly evocative.
As politics takes over from law we get a portrait not just of Lincoln the man, but of how American politics was itself evolving. Initially a Whig (whatever that is; one of the few quibbles I have with this book is that White doesn’t define this, assuming his readership will know*), Lincoln became a Republican. Rather strangely, to some modern readers, perhaps, the differences and similarities between Republicans and Democrats have evolved somewhat: in our time we’ve had a Democrat president of African American heritage; back in Lincoln’s days Republican ‘radicals’ were more frequently abolitionists, with Democrats more often the reactionary conservatives (or, to put it more bluntly, racists).
White skilfully tells the potentially dull tale of how Lincoln finally gets into power, not as the clear favourite, but at a time of muddled, fractious sectionalism, with enough verve to make it compelling. Once in power, it may surprise some readers – I think it surprised me – how cautiously Lincoln initially proceeded, clearly feeling his want of education and political office-holding experience. As he grows in experience in power, White shows Lincoln as becoming more confident of his own shrewd judgments: Lincoln’s inner moral compass – a pet theme of White’s – is already well developed. His faith that it will win the day takes time to grow.
Another favoured theme of White’s is Lincoln’s religious evolution (White has written other titles on more overtly religious subjects). I was fascinated by this aspect of the biography, despite coming at it – I’m guessing – from a really quite different perspective. Certainly it’s a very valid and important aspect of the portrait, Lincoln, like so many in America at that time (and even now, perhaps?), being thoroughly soused in a deeply Christian culture.
It could probably be argued – by those who know more on the subject than I do – that White’s portrait of Lincoln is perhaps hagiographic. Certainly it’s a work written by an author who clearly loves his subject. That might not be all good, in that it may contribute to an over-idealised portrait. But from the viewpoint of supplying a cracking good read, the author’s passion for his subject is a clear boon.
I come to this primarily via an interest in the ACW (American Civil War). As a prime player in that epic drama, one can’t help but be drawn to Lincoln’s part in it all. Seeing Spielberg’s Lincoln only added to the desire to know more. First I bought a slim Penguin volume, which I can recommend, which collates some of Lincoln’s famously sonorous and memorable speeches and letters, etc. Good as that is, the hunger for more and deeper knowledge of this fascinating man ultimately lead me here.
And I’m glad it did. This is an excellent book, about an uncommonly inspiring man. Lincoln’s facility with language and ideas is remarkable. And one of his many attractive qualities, both as lawyer and politician, and that despite presiding over a terrible civil war (assuredly not of his making), is his sagaciously conciliatory approach. Napoleon was said to have had great charisma. Lincoln appears to have had it also. But of an entirely different sort. One quickly loses count of the number of times one reads in this book of people coming to Lincoln, dead set against him, and seeking to alter both his outward course and inner mind – they arrive contentious, as enemies – only to depart with their minds changed, as admirers.
I found this book fascinating, informative, occasionally thrilling, and often – esp. when reading Lincoln’s masterfully crafted words – moving. A study of Lincoln’s life and times remains salutary. And I’m grateful to White for supplying us with a highly readable account of an inspiring American president.
* And in case you don’t know either, here’s Wikipedia’s definition: Whiggism.
I came to this odd little gem via Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series. In an episode of that superb series Sagan uses an apple – gleefully slicing and printing circular sections, rather poorly, with it – to illustrate Abbot’s ideas on how one might begin to think extra-dimensionally.
A clergyman and teacher, Abbot’s Flatland is a modern philosophical/religious parable. As an atheist, I felt that I might find this troublesome. But, to my mind at least, Abbot’s ideas tap deeper roots than mere allegories for Christian religion (such as C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series, which don’t). As a philosophical nugget, this tiny book packs a powerful punch, reminding us – like Hume’s Dialogue & History of Natural Religion that – if we take ourselves as the measure of everything, we’re likely to severely miscalculate in many important areas. I’m not sure what Abbott would make of my reading of his work, but I find it stimulates my mind rather towards scientific paradigm shifts, like the cosmological re-orderings of Copernicus and Galileo, or Darwin’s fundamental rewriting of the history of life on earth, than religious ones.
It’s tricky territory, and, rather like the pervasive fogs that fill Flatland, it can be hard to keep the bigger philosophical ideas that lurk here in focus. On one level (which of Abbot’s levels this might correspond to I can’t be sure) this can be read as a Victorian appeal to retain a religious sense of ‘our place’ in ‘creation’, but on another, and to my mind deeper (or more dimensional) level, it’s also a thought experiment concerning how humans are stuck in the matrix of their own physical/mental modes of perception, and that’s an exciting area for thought.
There’s a point in the book (the pun’s unavoidable), where the Sphere shows the Square a view of Pointland, where there are no dimensions, in which a single consciousness buzzes continuously to itself: able only to perceive itself, all else is merely an aspect of it’s self. The square and the sphere are horrified by the introspective solipsism of the point*, the Sphere sternly declaiming, somewhat contradictorily: “Behold yon miserable creature… mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson… to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant… to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy”. This passage puts contemporary aspirations to contentment, which most if not all of us no doubt pursue in much of our lives, however ineffectually, in an interesting light.
A very short but stimulating and pleasurable read, highly recommended.
* to misuse an art historical term, such pointillism brings to mind the horrific cognitive aberration that is that is Postodernism (‘there is nothing outside the text’!), a mode of ‘thinking’ that is ultimately, irony of ironies, utterly pointless.
Lost on the quest, or lost in translation? Either way… lost.
I first reviewed this, for Amazon UK, in 2010. This is a complete rewrite, or different review, however (same rating though).
This is my first taste of Ackroyd’s writing, and I must confess, it was a slog getting through this book. Ackroyd mentions trying to retain the “plangent and sonorous” language of Malory’s original – although from what I can tell this was in itself a somewhat patchy synthesis of older tales – but this is an aspect that, for me at any rate, is lost in translation.
The stories making up this book feel like small tales from an oral tradition, one in which any one of the many small adventures described might plausibly be little gems, when taken individually. Or perhaps they were simply tall tales told to pass a cold night huddled round the fire? Sometimes with a moral, sometimes just for the thrill of the adventure.
The trouble is that in this version, the sense of homogeneity is not one of an overarching larger story, or even the charismatic voice of one particular storyteller, but rather instead, a patchwork of oft-repeated formulae – a hunt, a jousting tournament, the discovery of a chapel/hermit – which to me were dull rather than exciting.
And there are times when different narrative voices seem to intrude, with no real consistency, such as when the narrator momentarily refers to the reader’s potential doubts regarding a particular miraculous occurence. Such a note really jars, as almost nowhere else are the many such occurrences in any way questioned. A similar but different moment is a reflection on the bizarre theme of courtly love, that does run like a thread throughout these tales: again, out of the blue, the narrator suddenly addresses the reader, and again, it jars somewhat.
Ackroyd may well be right in thinking that some modern readers (perhaps some of the people he had in mind are more watchers than readers?) might not have the palate for Malory’s version, but, in this age of visual recycling – I’m thinking of all the cinema and TV remakes of older books/films and so on – this smacks somewhat of a literary equivalent, so I think the dumbing-down charge made elsewhere, by other reviewers, rings true.
It’s been said that Tennyson’s version of this material (The Idylls of The King) says more about Victorian England than it does about the times from which the mytho-poetic subject allegedly springs. I think perhaps the same could be said of this version, and, sadly, it reflects rather poorly on our times, as lacking in either depth or a grand vision. Dare I even suggest that this may have been a project motivated more by a desire for profit from an ever popular subject, than the pure love of it?
By way of contrast, I’d like to refer the potential reader of this book to Tolkein’s fabulous book The Legend of Sigurd And Gudrun. Arising from Professor Tolkein’s work as an academic philologist, this posthumous publication is, by contrast, very clearly a work driven by a deep and abiding love of his subject, a subject ostensibly similar or parallel to Arthurian legend (the Celtic and Nordic myths even connecting at points, through characters such as Tristan and Isolde), including similar aspects of storytelling: warring clans, betrayal, revenge, shifting alliances, feats of arms, love and honour, portents, omens, charms and potions.
But where Ackroyd loses the magic, Tolkien succeeds in retaining it, perhaps even enhancing it, so that the story remains compelling and exciting, as opposed to the rambling hotch-potch on offer here. I couldn’t in all honesty recommend this.
