Category: Book Reviews

Berlin Game by Len Deighton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first arrived in Berlin in 1991, having hitchhiked through East Germany in a series of old Trabants and the odd Mercedes. It was the day the telephone company was ripping out all the old GDR public phones and replacing them with Wessie ones, and as I crossed from the lights and noise of West Berlin into East Berlin, I realised I was going to have a hard time making a phone call. In the following years, I would work (and even have one notable flirtation) with East Germans as they struggled to adjust to life in a West that had swallowed their country.

So when I picked up Len Deighton’s Berlin Game, I hoped to revisit a little bit of that intangible sense of Cold War Germany – the clash of cultures and the deeper German culture that lay underneath; the fear and hatred of the Stasi; the casual bigotry of the Wessies against the Ossies; the dull tastelessness of Communism braced against the glitzy degeneracy of Capitalism.

To his credit, Deighton tries hard to fill the book with enough details to create that mood. But that is just the problem: he tries too hard. The details are too studied to feel credible. It contrasts well with the movie Goodbye Lenin, a beautiful and compelling sketch of East Germanness that draws from the artists’ resevoir of details with the natural ease of true natives.

The other major problem is with the book’s protagonist – whose name I have (tellingly) already forgotten two weeks after reading. Who is this man? Is he the pensive, understated and soft-spoken antihero the dialogue suggests? Or is he the scary hard man, prone to outbursts of violence, whom the narrator goes to great pains to describe? After reading the book, I still cannot really say and I’m sure Deighton had no real idea.

This points to a wider weakness in Deighton’s writing. His highly stylistic descriptions are used as a sticking plaster to cover over the shallowness of his characters. I paraphrase a sample here: “She flashed him the kind of smile that said she wanted to know more about his past, but was slightly afraid to ask the question.” There are dozens of these kinds of ‘smiles’ peppered throughout the text, and I’m sure if Deighton sat down with a police sketch artist he would be unable to create a drawing of a single one of them.

Of course, the book is ultimately a spy novel, and therefore should be judged by its compelling, racy plot. But here I have to give it only middling marks. In fact, very little happens, and although the ending is somewhat surprising, it achieves this ‘twist effect’ only by sacrificing the gritty realism that kept the action credible but slow the rest of the way through.

Ultimately the most interesting thing about Berlin Game has nothing to do with spies and little to do with the Cold War. It is what the story tells us about the very English author and his own country. Deighton, son of a working class man, struggled to find a place in a Britain that had faded from power. He wrote the book at the dawn of Thatcherism, at a time when his country had been humiliated by an IMF economic programme, shocked by race relations and bruised by the paramilitary consequences of Britain’s occupation of Northern Ireland.

The result is a well-wrought tale of bureaucratic London, pervaded by wry cynicism and divisions of social class, all washed down by copious glasses of neat gin. The details are sparse, but authentic. In this, we see that Deighton is truly writing what he knew.



View all my reviews

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There are some rules to good writing that, if followed, tend to improve the reader’s experience and make the text seem more professional. Here are four examples that are often given to would-be writers in creative writing courses: (1) avoid adverbs, (2) avoid arbitrary changes to character point-of-view, (3) show-don’t-tell, (4) keep the ‘voice’ consistent.
Of course, rules are made to be broken. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer isn’t just good writing, it’s great writing. And yet, it breaks all of these rules, liberally and willfully. Twain’s literary dance is freestyle, the joyous rhythm of pure storytelling, which casts his narrator’s gaze across an expanse of adverbs, ‘author-splaining’ and character points-of-view as wide as the Mississippi River; all in a literary voice that changes – practically mid-sentence – from the Southern soprano of a Missouri boy to the often ironic tenor of a Yankee intellectual.
Never do you get the sense that Twain takes these literary liberties out of amateurish necessity, as cover for having been a bad student in dance class. He shows you just enough flashes of clever convention to assure you he could, if he wanted, write the whole thing in the elegant ballroom waltz of his (very English and much admired) literary predecessors: Dickens and Thackery.
But Twain’s ambition is not just to tell great stories; it is to tell great American stories. This Americanness, fresh and unburdened by convention, makes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer such an interesting read. The style is raw, because it must be raw, if it is to tell of a country still in its adolescence.
So too the eponymous central character. Tom is a flawed hero, a shabby scholar, and an undisciplined and ofttimes ungrateful nephew to his long-suffering Aunt Polly. His boyish play at piracy or robbery makes no moral distinction between good and evil, and in that, he displays not badness, but the amorality of those who have not yet tasted forbidden fruit. Equally, though, he is bursting with vital energy, courage and shows us throughout the book’s pages glimpses of the American Smooth of goodness, which his manly future self will one day master.
Most of all, Sawyer is free. Free to fight with or befriend other boys, to smoke, to break out of his house at midnight and explore distant river islands, unconventional ideas or “h’anted houses”. He is the Lord of the Dance.
In all of these ways, Tom Sawyer is not a character at all. He is the personification of this juvenile America. His Adventures, set purposefully at the dawn of the civil war, are an allegory for the rise of the United States as it shuffles forward in an awkward, uncharted yet somehow inevitable dance towards greatness.
No wonder this book has entranced generations of American readers. When they read Tom Sawyer’s Adventures, they are not just being told a story, they are being told their own nation’s biography.
Tom’s flaws are their flaws; Tom’s accomplishments are theirs too. And while this ‘Nation-State Tom’ has long since grown up, and the Republic of his manhood long since turned into an Empire frail with decay, still there remains something of that unconquerable American spirit that makes this book important.
As the rock band Rush sang of Tom Sawyer, a 105 years later:
“What you say about his company, is what you say about society.”



View all my reviews

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Some books are so badly written, you can hear the author’s fingers banging on the keyboard, pounding out clumsy phrase after clumsy phrase so loudly it distracts from, rather than reinforces, what the author is trying to say.

The Psychology of Money is not one of those books. Actually, the writing is acceptable enough to avoid being a major distraction. Not good, mind you, but acceptable. Instead I found myself distracted by something else: the complete lack of substance. I wondered how a book so short could still feel so padded out. It was peppered with unnecessary examples and anecdotes that tangentially supported the core point of the chapter – like when he takes you back a hundred years into some semi-famous financier’s boyhood in order to illustrate the point that it is good to leave your investments to ripen, instead of harvesting them too early.

For all the padding, what was missing were any profound insights into … the psychology of money. In fact, the title ought to have been A Few Obvious, Practical Ideas for Managing your Personal Finances. But what I wanted from the book was some deeper psychology. For example, one thing that always fascinates me about money management is what I’ll call the ‘scale paradox’. Back when I was a real estate agent, I observed more than a few times how people would fight and claw to avoid paying an extra 50 cents for a dozen eggs, yet fail to put in the same effort to add an extra ten thousand dollars to the sales price of their house.

Is this because large numbers are simply inconceivable to us?
Is it because we are preprogrammed to care more about tangible, basic transactions than intangible, complex ones?

I don’t really know, because this is one of many, many interesting aspects of the psychology of money Hausel had nothing to say about.

Instead, he informed me that investors are all different, so no single investment strategy can be considered ‘best’, and that he and his wife paid off their mortgage because they like the feeling of ‘owning’ their own home.

Maybe the deepest insight from The Psychology of Money has nothing to do with the content, and more to do with the psychology of book publishing and sales. I.e. how such a shallow, pointless collection of air could sell over six million copies. Figuring that one out – at least for authors like me – would be a true insight into making money.



View all my reviews

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time is relative.

You don’t need a beautifully-bound, poetry-studded hardback book to tell you that. You need only compare two very different pieces of reading material to see the principle play out – a 500 page John Grisham paperback novel, versus this above-mentioned hardback: The Order of Time, a 150 page treatise on the meaning of time and the universe, written by one of the most famous physicists alive. The Grisham you will breeze through, barely noticing as the formulaic plot unfolds effortlessly. The day and a half of reading will seem like no time at all.

The Rovelli, on the other hand, you will labour and struggle through, slowly reading and re-reading whole paragraphs, with a mounting sense of desperation as everything you thought you knew about time is methodically picked apart, and you’re not even completely sure you understand why. The weeks it takes you to finish it will feel like months.

I take pride in the fact that I did, ultimately, finish The Order of Time while on holidays on a Grecian island. It was a place where the sun bleaches out of your brain the ability to comprehend anything weightier than a young, ambulance-chasing lawyer from Mississippi cracking his first big case against an evil corporation, while saving the trailer-trashy blonde from her alcoholic, abusive husband. And yet despite the tides, tsatsiki and tarama, I managed to read and, I think, gain insights into something that is nearly as compact and dense as was the universe at the moment of the Big Bang.

I don’t claim to have fully, deeply, understood everything Rovelli sets out, so I won’t do the injustice of attempting a thorough ‘plot’ summary. In rough terms, he begins by picking apart all of our preconceived notions of how time works. He starts with the simple observation that time moves faster the closer you are to a surface of the earth, and from there gets you to a place where time, whether past, present or future, does not really exist at all, except as a cognitive dysfunction of our limited brains, linked somehow to this vague concept called ‘thermal time’ that is in turn linked to the second law of thermodynamics. Much of the details are blurry to me already, but that is probably okay because at the end, Rovelli admits that much of it is blurry even to him.

His thoughts on time take you to the very intersection of physics and philosophy, where the answers are no more solid than the baseball bat that Grisham’s hero uses on page 425 to whack the drunken husband. (Despite the six beers he’s drunk, the bat feels ‘hard’ against his skull, but Rovelli reliably informs us that both the bat and his head are in fact nothing more than a coincidence of quantum events, at some primitive stage of entropy.)

It is this blend with philosophy that also allowed me to forgive Rovelli his indulgent inclusion of poetry quotes and many tangential references to the arts. He is Italian, after all.

My only significant disagreements came later in the book. First, where Rovelli goes head-to-head with Descartes on the ‘Cogito argument’. He does not like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” very much, since for him there is some distinction between doubting and thinking, which Descartes does not allow in his first principle. I’m with Descartes, because I see doubt as a subset of thought.

My second bone of contention is that his whole treatise on time does not allow for any discussion of probability and determinism. This seems to me a glaring omission, because the fundamental question – it’s also a question situated at the intersection of physics and philosophy – is whether the universe is deterministic or probabilistic. This has important implications for the separation of future from present. With probabilism, the future is uncertain and must always be considered distinct from the present or past, because ex ante it is ‘unknowable’. With determinism, the only thing that makes the future uncertain is the same veil of ignorance that, in Rovelli’s reckoning, makes the past ‘blurry’ and therefore meaningfully different to the present. In other words, in a deterministic universe it is theoretically possible to know exactly what will happen, everywhere and always, from now until the end of time. ‘Future’ exists only because the supercomputers in our brains are not ‘super’ enough to do all the necessary calculations.

There is of course a third philosophical possibility, which sits between probability and determinism. It is what theologians refer to as ‘free will’ – the idea that the human soul is something special precisely because, in an otherwise deterministic universe, we humans – having been made in the image of God – are the sole entities capable of making meaningful choices. Therefore the future, and time itself, exist because humans have souls, and souls allow for choices, and not even God can predetermine what those choices will be.

If you are still reading this review, my guess is it’s felt like a relatively long read. Grisham’s protagonist would probably already have called his third witness by now.







View all my reviews

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Graham Greene is a desperately good writer. He can’t help but write well, even on an off day. Even when attempting a literary loop de loop that goes slightly wrong. And because he has that magic gift to turn even his stumbles into artistry, there is extra deliciousness in the very imperfections we observe.

So it is with Our Man in Havana. Having read other of Greene’s work, you start this one with a comfortable expectation that he will deliver scene and structure. He does not disappoint. Right away, we are plunged into pre-Castro Cuba, and become acquainted with a typical Greeneian underdog protagonist – an impoverished English vacuum cleaner salesman with a limp named Wormold, whose wife, we learn, has already left him for another man.

But as the plot accelerates, we realise this is not The Power and the Glory. Greene is giving us a rather comic tour of the brothels, bars and casinos. As Wormold becomes embroiled in a world of medium-stakes espionage, the novel veers close to farce.

It is here that he misses a step on the balance beam. Without revealing too much, a few of the plot elements fail to land on the fine line between comedy and hyperrealism that he so carefully treads for much of the story. There is also a missed opportunity late in the story to create a dramatic counterpoint around the death of one of the characters.

But for everything else this book achieves – laugh-out-loud comedy, incredible sense of place and masterfully crafted characters – Greene shows in Havana that he is, yet again, one of the 20th Century’s finest.



View all my reviews

Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero by Charles Sprawson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction. I find much of it to be clunky, badly organised and badly written. It favours substance over form, as if there were ever a trade-off between the two! Non-fiction tends to pay little attention to the beauty and flow of words and sentences or the cadence of ideas. Worst of all, it lacks kindness to the reader. As in, ‘if you want to know what happens, mate, you will be forced to suffer through my clunky prose’.
At first glance, Sprawson’s watery account of the literature and history of swimming and all things wet appears to be no exception. By page 100, you realise you have been thrown in at the deep end of a self-indulgent pool of random facts, written by a man whose sole purpose in authorship is to free his head of as much aquatic trivia as he can, so that he might go back to his preferred lake or river and have another dip. Sprawson doesn’t even attempt to adhere to his own loose chapter structure – to wit, a big chunk of the final chapter, which purports to tell us about the decade Japan dominated competitive swimming, veers off into an impossibly long tangent about the effeminate French writer André Gide’s favourite Gallic watering holes. The hook is that writer Yukio Mishima liked Gide’s work.
But beneath this eddied surface, Haunts of the Black Masseur has hidden depths. The very self-indulgence that defines his writing style, is mirrored in the book’s theme – the swimmer is submersed, alone, embraced by nature, without the lifeline that tethers us to bourgeois morality. The point is, he does not have to be coherent, sensible or clear. He is free. This is the Masseur’s common current; the love of swimming as subversive counterculture or escape, which binds Ancient Greece, the English classicists of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the German Romantics, the Americans and finally (if only briefly) the Japanese.
So if you are prepared to forgive Sprawson his contempt for good writing and allow yourself to be swept up in a riptide of delicious, random and sometimes surprising anecdotes, you may just reemerge from the experience refreshed.




View all my reviews

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


We all remember the pain of reading Shakespearean plays in school. Sadistic English teachers with shattered dreams of being something better forcing us to learn whole passages by rote …the quality of mercy is not strained…, without once reflecting on the irony of their own lack of mercy.
If you had intellectually snobby parents like mine, the closest to sympathy their innate veneration of the Bard would allow, would be the grudging admission that, “well, really Shakespeare is not meant to be read. It’s meant to be performed.”
Actually, during the later years in which my own intellectual snobbery got me reading his plays autonomously, I never found this to be true. Unless you’d already studied Henry CXXII part VI, live performances went too fast; you missed too much of the subtle word play or the historical context. Idem for Ibsen. As for my favourite playwright Miller, I always found the dialogue to be so supremely evocative of the scene that if anything a live performance introduced risks of spoiling the perfect acting I imagined in my own head.
However, for Tennessee Williams, I don’t think this is the case – at least not as far as ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof‘ is concerned. I read the play, never having seen it staged nor having watched the film. My first impression was the dialogue came across as hammy, overdone and at times (needlessly and repetitively) redundant, (such that the point could have been made with fewer lines and more subtext). To wit, the titular feline metaphor is hammered into the reader’s ears in Act I. Not once, but twice.
Moreover, if you are looking for an entertaining plot or clever character arcs, you have come to the wrong place. Williams is writing as an American realist – he sees little scope for moral progression, at least not in a story that takes place over one steamy night in the big house of a Southern plantation. This left me wondering what the big deal with Cat might be, whether it wasn’t just a mediocre script that benefited unduly from good timing and a nascent American Empire, hungry to grow cultural roots in the fertile soil of its burgeoning economy.
On reflection, though, it occurs to me that these shortcomings would be somewhat attenuated in a live performance. There, we can imagine how strong performances might make the Southern nouveaux riches sparkle: the droll alcoholism in the fallen favourite son Brick, the desperate aching of womanhood in his wife Margaret. The bellicose, base honesty in his father, Big Daddy.
Indeed, Cat might be as much about the atmosphere as the story. It evokes a particular mood and feeling; which perforce comes alive not in the words themselves, but in how they are spoken and in the silences that can unshroud a deeper meaning. This is not a finished piece of literature. Rather, it is a set of instructions to the actors and director, and should perhaps be read by them and them alone.



View all my reviews