Paul Vitols's Blog, page 20

the Age of Pisces: what is it?

In W. W. Tarn’s 1927 classic, Hellenistic Civilisation, which I recently reviewed in this blog, one of the things condemned by the author in his inventory of the philosophies and religions of that age (ca. 320 BC to 30 BC) was the rise in popularity of astrology. He saw it as arising from Babylonia’s ancient practice of star-worship. The belief that there was a correspondence between what happened in the heavens and what happened on Earth, combined with the observation that the movements of the stars could be determined in advance by the intelligent, gave rise to the idea of Fate, which Tarn called

one of the most terrible doctrines which ever oppressed humanity . . .

He goes on to say

By the first century Fate was in a fair way to oust the more kindly Fortune as the arbiter of men’s lives. Later, probably under Stoic influence, some were to welcome Fate as an escape from the caprices of Fortune and the deceptions of Hope; but to the majority Fate was the negation of freedom, an impossible tyranny, and the pressure on men’s minds would have become unbearable but for certain ways of escape. . . .

Tarn laments that astrology “killed” astronomy in the 1st century BC; and astronomy was not to recover until the time of Copernicus and the rise of modern science. In the meantime people’s superstitious need to learn about their own private fates would tie up intellectual capacity that could otherwise have been spent learning more about the objective world.

Many commentators before Tarn and after him have shared his disgust at the refusal of this ancient superstition to die. I recall years ago reading about how a large number of prominent scientists had prepared a declaration that astrology was a conscience and an erroneous view of the world. The story was being told by the noted astronomer Carl Sagan, who said that he himself had refused to sign the document, not, as he put it, because he thought there was any validity whatsoever in astrology, but because the document itself was authoritarian, and not evidence-based. I admired his integrity in this refusal.

As I recall, that anecdote occurs in Intelligent Life in the Universe, which Sagan cowrote with the Russian astronomer I. S. Shklovskii, and which I read when I was about 17. By that time my own views on astrology were starting to change, or were about to do so. As a teenage would-be scientist I had no use for it; but by the time I was 20 I had started to study it myself. Before long I had learned how to cast horoscopes, and over the years I have studied how to interpret them. My personal astrological library runs to about 50 volumes. In the 1980s I studied briefly with Brian Giles, a prominent Vancouver astrologer. I have to assume that W. W. Tarn and Carl Sagan, had they known me, would have been disappointed in me. What had happened? How could a rational young man turn to a bunch of superstitious hocus-pocus, not merely as an object of study, but as something that he took seriously—something that he, well, believed in?

The question is interesting on its own, but it has special relevance for the author of a work that is called The Age of Pisces. For me the Age of Pisces, the astrological age that is now drawing to a close, is no mere poetic allusion; in some way it denotes something real. The exact nature of that reality, though, is not easy to pin down.

Two or three of the books in my astrology library are works by Michel Gauquelin, a French researcher who investigated astrology using the mathematical tools of statistics and probability. Making use of France’s extensive records of vital statistics going back to the French Revolution, he established criteria for determining whether people’s lives matched the data in their horoscopes in measurable ways, and looked at a lot of data. He found that there was a significant correlation between certain planetary placements in individual horoscopes and, for example, people’s professions. Although many have challenged Gauquelin’s methods and conclusions, to me it seemed beyond doubt that he had shown that there was indeed a correlation between planetary placements and people’s lives.

For my part, while I found this interesting, it was a relatively minor point compared to the deeper question, why is there a correlation? If there is validity to astrology, what is the cause of it?

I remember putting this question to my teacher, Brian Giles. He thought that there is indeed a physical influence that comes to us from the planets and stars. He thought that scientists dismissed this because these influences are so small. “They see one force and they put it together with another force,” he said, laying one finger alongside another in demonstration, “and they see one is bigger than the other, and that’s it, the small one doesn’t count!” The quality of the force in question needs to be taken into consideration.

I wasn’t happy with this explanation. I was with the boring scientists on this one. I didn’t think that a physical, quantitative explanation would be the answer. But what else was there? And if a prominent practicing astrologer didn’t know, who would?

As far as I know, even among astrologers there is no generally accepted explanation for why astrology works. My theory is probably as good as anyone’s. I won’t go into it fully here, but the core of it is that multiple meanings are inherent in reality. Just as the ancient Alexandrian grammarians developed a system of literary analysis that examined a poem according to four separate aspects, namely the literal, the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogic, so can the real, physical world be examined according to these same aspects. I believe that a poem—which means any creative literary work—affects us because of its resemblance to reality; so if a poem has these four aspects, then so does reality. Astrology is a reading of the heavens mainly on an allegorical or symbolic level. It works to the extent that our ability to read and understand symbols works. As for what this implies about reality itself and its nature, well, it implies a lot; but let’s leave that for now.

So: The Age of Pisces. In my own poem it’s a poetic image; but it’s more than that. It’s something objectively real. Anyway, it’s as real as anything else that we call real. It was born at about the same time as Jesus Christ, and it is in its dying years today. It’s been quite an age, wouldn’t you agree?

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes: bow down before thy sovereign!

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wide-ranging, perceptive, and hard-nosed, this book seeks to establish the basis of the legitimacy of national governments, and to show why it is not only just that each of us should be under the absolute and arbitrary power of a sovereign, but that this is also necessary and good.

I came to this book not as one trained in philosophy or political science, but as one continuing to work out his own liberal education. So I had only the roughest idea of what Hobbes’s philosophy was, or how he fit into the world of political philosophy. I knew him mainly as the author of the famous description of the condition of man in the “state of nature”:

solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Well. I guess they don’t call him “Chuckles” Hobbes for nothing.

The state of nature, for Hobbes, is a state of war of every man with every other man. Each looks to his own survival as best he can, and protects himself against the depredations of others as best he can. Everyone has an equal right to everything in the world that he, in his own opinion, thinks might help him in these aims, and if conflict arises between men for any reason, there is no final recourse except to violence. Each issue is resolved with the submission or death of the weaker party in the conflict. Then you hope for a bit of peace before your next conflict. In the state of nature there is no such thing as justice or injustice; there is only survival or death.

In this, it seemed to me, Hobbes was describing the behavior of animals, and in the state of nature he sees the human animal as no different from any other. What does make the human animal different is his capacity for reason and language, which, together, enable him to understand his world better than other animals, and to enter into binding covenants with others of his kind. Our reason permits us to see that our peace and prosperity depend on people’s willingness to refrain from molesting each other, but there is no way to realize this condition except that everyone involved make a mutual covenant to respect this rule. But the covenant alone is not enough; it must be enforced; and for this task the sovereignty of the group must be placed in the hands of one person, and everyone must agree to defer to him as a condition of belonging. And thus the state is born.

This is the “social contract” theory of the state, and, according to Wikipedia, Hobbes was the originator of this theory. This sovereign, who may be an assembly as well as an individual, actually personates the group: he embodies the power of the group. And this is the source of Hobbes’s metaphorical title, for the commonwealth of individuals is compacted into the single great creature Leviathan, embodied in the sovereign. Whatever he does, he does by the will of the group, and this is by the explicit or implicit consent of each person in it. When he makes the rules, it is the group making the rules; when he punishes miscreants, it is the group doing the punishing. It boils down to this: no one can complain of anything the sovereign does, for everything the sovereign does is done with the prior consent of each subject. If I object, I am in effect objecting to my own will, which is an absurdity.

There are all kinds of problems with this idea, and I know that Mortimer Adler, among many other philosophers, rejected the social-contract theory outright. But Hobbes, no doubt conscious of the objections that could be raised against his idea, prepares his case with care and depth.

The first of the many surprises I got in reading this book was in discovering its structure when I opened the table of contents. The work is divided into four parts:

Of Man
Of Commonwealth
Of a Christian Commonwealth
Of The Kingdom of Darkness

I was surprised at the theological tone, and as I read the book I discovered that Hobbes was, among other things, a theologian, and that he had studied the Bible deeply, and drawn his own conclusions from it. These conclusions are key to his argument, for the question of the existence of God is all-important for the political philosopher as it is for any other kind of thinker. Hobbes believed that the existence of God was discoverable by human reason, but that the specific will of God was knowable only through revelation, which had been vouchsafed only to certain individuals, and then made generally known via the Bible. God’s laws are divided into two classes: natural laws, which are discoverable by reason; and positive laws, which are encoded in the Bible. His natural laws apply to everyone, but his positive laws were given to his chosen people, the Israelites, when they accepted him as their sovereign at Mount Sinai. At that time every Israelite covenanted to accept the sovereignty of God, and thus bound himself to accept all of God’s commandments; and this covenant is the type of the social contract. Thus God himself was the King of the Jews until they repudiated him at the time of Saul, when they demanded an earthly king of the same kind as other nations, and God acquiesced in their rejection of him. Then Saul became their sovereign, and the people were bound to him by the same kind of covenant they had made with God.

One of the important consequences of the existence of God for political philosophy is that it makes oaths binding. According to Hobbes, the oath of an atheist or heathen is worthless, because the atheist does not believe that he will be held to account by a supreme cosmic power. He will be tempted to renege if it suits him. The God-fearer, on the other hand, expects to face the consequences of his bad faith, even if no human catches him in it. It’s an important point, because it is of oaths that covenants are made; and covenant is the indispensable basis of any commonwealth.

But this seems to be more of a practical matter than a theoretical one, for Hobbes holds that all covenants are binding, even in the state of nature, and this is due to natural law. As far as I can understand and recall, Hobbes believes that our natural reason can perceive the logic of the covenant, and the necessity that it remain unbroken. But here I’m getting into an area that I find obscure and difficult. For Hobbes is emphatic that there is no such thing as justice or injustice until you have a commonwealth with a positive law given by its sovereign; then, any breaking of that law is an injustice. And anything else whatever is not. The principle by which covenants are to hold even in the state of nature is “equity,” which boils down to the Golden Rule. As far as I can make out, Hobbes is saying that if you break your covenant in the state of nature, you have violated equity, but you have not committed an injustice. To me this seems like a quibbling distinction, but to Hobbes it’s a big deal.

Does this mean that the only valid commonwealth is a Christian commonwealth? Interestingly, no, it does not. For the validity of covenants being applicable in the state of nature, any commonwealth is equally valid as a civil entity. And Hobbes is at pains to show how God in the Old Testament, and Jesus in the New, enjoined us to obey our worldly masters. Both our natural reason and the Bible tell us we should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. According to Hobbes, we each owe unswerving and even unquestioning allegiance to the civil power over us, whatsoever it may be.

This sticks in my gorge, and no doubt in that of almost every modern person. What would Hobbes have made of apartheid, or the Soviet gulag, or other forms of entrenched, “legal” injustice? His view is that whatever the “inconveniences” of one’s existing commonwealth, it is preferable to the condition of civil war, which is the inevitable result of a rip in the sovereignty of the state. For civil war is exactly the condition of divided sovereignty, and it inevitably produces great and undeserved suffering.

He may well have a point. Most of us enjoy the luxury of not having lived through a civil war—a luxury that Hobbes himself did not enjoy, since he was writing at the time of the English civil war, and lived in self-imposed exile for 11 years. As far as Hobbes is concerned, there will always be people who have complaints about the government; these complaints never constitute a reason to overthrow that government. The complainer is underestimating the benefit he continually draws from the state: namely, protection from his criminal neighbors, and protection from invading armies. Taking these protections for granted, he sets them at no value, but in this he is gravely mistaken.

Leviathan is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read; my Great Books copy is now heavily highlighted. Hobbes, while a devout Christian, is also a realist with a modern and scientific outlook. His thinking is rigorous and uncompromising, and he takes great care to work his argument up from basic principles and definitions. As an intellectual achievement it has few peers. Part of my discomfort with the book is due to my sense that many of his assertions, while uncongenial or even distressing, may be difficult to refute. Certainly, if we believe that the universe has an absolute Sovereign, then we can hardly have any fundamental objection to the notion of absolute sovereignty; and Hobbes shows how in bowing to that sovereignty we are most surely following God’s will.

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Hellenistic Civilisation by W. W. Tarn: when East and West first moshed

Hellenistic Civilisation by W.W. Tarn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A keen-sighted overview of a turning-point in the development of Western civilization, by an author with deep knowledge of the period.

I wish I’d got this book sooner, for it has provided me with a better orientation than any other work I’ve consulted for the period in which my own work in progress is set: the Hellenistic age. The name itself is not ancient; it was coined by the German historian J. G. Droysen in 1836 to denote the period following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, and ending about three centuries later. Scholars differ as to when to place that end-date, but a commonly accepted one is the date of the Battle of Actium, 31 BC, when Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and gained supremacy of the Roman world, making it effectively into an empire. From that point on, historians speak of the “Roman” period.

I can’t remember what made me decide to buy this book, even though that was only two months ago. I got a sturdy, well-worn, burgundy-bound ex-library book from London, the original 1927 edition, withdrawn from circulation after a meager record of borrowings (most recent date-due stamp: 19 Feb 1982). But as soon as I started reading I knew I was in the hands of a master—one who was passionate about his topic.

Tarn himself, in his 1-page preface, states that his book

is neither a history nor a textbook, but an attempt to get a general picture of the civilisation of the Hellenistic period, covering all the main subjects and as detailed as space permits.

And that is an excellent encapsulation of what he achieved. The book comprises 10 chapters, the first of which is a 42-page outline of the history of the period. I skipped most of this, because I had a rough idea of the history to begin with, and because the details of the history are mind-numbing. For while the history of the life and campaigns of Alexander can be told more or less coherently as “one thing,” the events following his death were the international equivalent of a riot.

Part of the reason for this was the inevitable scramble by Alexander’s successors—he had no clearly qualified heir—to gain as much of his legacy as they could. But the bigger part of the reason stemmed from the nature of Alexander’s project itself: to unite the entire known world, West and East, under a single government—his own. Alexander’s great army exploded into Asia, violently bringing two (or more) formerly separate civilizations into intimate contact like lava hitting the sea. Whole populations were torn up, mixed, and reorganized, and the resulting shock-waves and eventual backlash formed what Droysen finally called the Hellenistic age.

Tarn delves into these consequences with great authority. He examines the changes in political structures; he looks at changes in the Greek cities, Asia, and Egypt; he devotes a chapter to Hellenism and the Jews; he covers trade and exploration; and he devotes the last 3 chapters to the cultural topics of literature and learning, science and art, and finally philosophy and religion. After 298 pages, I felt I’d had a thorough and also absorbing briefing.

It was an age of transition; the classical world was dying. Greek-style city-states still existed, but, as Tarn shows, the old ethos and philosophy of the city-state was gone. Cities were increasingly full of foreigners, either resident aliens or, in time, citizens. Some cities remained independent, but many were engulfed by the kingdoms into which Alexander’s brief empire was torn. The Western invention of democracy became submerged under the Eastern tide of absolute monarchy. It was a time of rising individualism: the old cultural and national loyalties, the worship of the local god, fell by the wayside as people sought their own personal welfare and spiritual salvation.

When the wars of Alexander’s Successors had finally played themselves out, the Hellenistic world became a relatively peaceful and mainly prosperous place, with great increases in trade and travel. There was an explosion of cultural forms; people started reading and writing books on a much greater scale. Alexander’s general Ptolemy, and his son Ptolemy II, created the great Museum and Library at Alexandria, prototype of the modern university.

Tarn’s prose is very readable, the more so because his passion carries one along. And although the book was all interesting, for me it kept getting better and better, culminating with his final chapter on philosophy and religion, in which he tries to look into the worldviews of that age. By far the dominant philosophy was that of Stoicism, with its emphasis on virtue and duty. But the bigger story was the spiritual ferment within the soul of almost everyone. Religions of salvation, all from the East, beckoned with the promise of salvation from the crushing wheel of Fate, and of eternal life beyond the grave. The winner in that great sweepstakes would eventually prove to be Christianity.

While Tarn does not emphasize this, the great interest of the Hellenistic age is in its resemblance to our own. We too live in a time when East and West have been stirred together; only now on a scale that is truly global. Cities all over the world teem with foreigners and with the dispossessed; old spiritual traditions are dying, combining, and finding new life with adherents on new continents. People still yearn for peace and universal brotherhood, even as the world is ripped with vicious conflict. We are individuals seeking our way.

That’s the real interest of that age and of this book: the problems of the Hellenistic world are our problems. And for that reason I think it’s a book of general interest and not just for specialists. I believe that thinking people in the Hellenistic world, if they had been shown a panel from Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo, would have understood it perfectly. In it, one character says: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

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back to the way I was

Well, I’ve tussled with my website’s underlying code, and it is mostly back to the way it was before the latest WordPress update. I have tried to follow the procedures for safeguarding one’s stylistic tweaks from future updates. Some things remain to be done, but in all I’m pleased with my progress, and I’m glad for what I’ve learned along the way. I intend to continue working on it in the coming days and weeks.

Meanwhile, happy new year. Something tells me that 2014 is going to be a wild ride.

do not adjust your set

“Is this Paul’s new look?”

No, I have not changed the layout of my website. WordPress has done that for me with an automated update that I can’t undo. I’m on the learning curve to discover how to get my design back to the way it was. In the meantime, the site should work and its content is available.

Now it’s time to wade through WordPress documentation and fiddle with PHP coding and other things I barely understand. Let’s see how I do.

Merry Christmas.

how can you read such rubbish?

Do you feel guilty about some of your reading? All of it, maybe?

I don’t recall being judged for my reading as I was growing up. The first instance I can remember was when I was about 16, and reading a paperback called The Possession of Joel Delaney, a horror story set in New York, no doubt part of a flood of such stories that appeared in the wake of The Exorcist. I was enjoying it, and an adult not of my household said something like, “What is that horrible thing you’re reading?”

I either didn’t respond or simply spoke the title. I resented someone making free to comment, that is, pass judgment, on what I was reading. What the hell do you care what I’m reading? I thought. Mind your own business.

I’ve also been praised for what I was reading. A few years later, when I was working as a janitor at Vancouver General Hospital, I would bring a book with me every night to read on my breaks. John, a middle-aged English orderly who came on shift at the same time, noticed the big blue paperback I was carrying one night and asked me what it was. I held it up: Art and Visual Perception by Rudolf Arnheim.

“Good book!” he said, shaking his head, impressed, then went on his way.

I felt pleasure at being praised, but at the same time wondered how he knew that it was good. Had he read it? Probably not. He was impressed by what the book was about, which I supposed was fair enough. But it still felt odd to me for someone to praise a book he hadn’t read.

These memories surfaced for me recently when I exchanged a few tweets on Twitter with someone who had mentioned her “guilty pleasure” in reading certain books (apocalyptic fiction, in her case). I knew exactly what she meant because I’ve had many guilty pleasures in my life, although seldom to do with my reading. But this whole idea of criticizing what other people read on the basis of its supposed intellectual or artistic or cultural worthlessness is an intrusion on the rights of a fellow human being, and in my opinion there is no place for it in a society that respects freedom and mutual respect. Except for the special case of a parent’s or teacher’s responsibility to protect children from harm, and even here the lightest of touches is all that is called for, we simply have no business expressing our unsolicited opinion of other people’s reading material. I’ll go further: we have no business forming any judgment about it at all, even in the privacy of our own thoughts, or in the most secret chamber of our soul. Even if we merely think smug or scoffing thoughts about another’s reading, we are doing that person an injustice.

Why do I feel this way? For one thing, if I really do prize individual freedom and mutual respect, then how another person enjoys himself is no concern of mine, if it does not affect me. I might think, “I don’t like the kind of stuff that person’s reading”—but who cares? No one’s asking me to read it. Have I forgotten that people are not all the same, that preferences differ? Apparently I have, and someone should be correcting me.

Then there’s the arrogance aspect: it’s presumptuous of me to assert or imply my superiority to others. This is the sin and vice of pride, which in no way reflects well on me. Indeed, pride is the first deadly sin; shouldn’t I be more concerned about getting this weed out of my own garden than about feeling smug about my reading?

Another thought is that people’s reading develops along different paths. This relates to the point about individual differences mentioned above, but it stresses the time element more: this person might share your tastes completely—but at a future date, not now, not yet. I remember talking to a Tarot reader years ago on Granville Street, a woman well into middle age, and in the course of the conversation she said that she had just recently read her first novel—until then she had only ever read nonfiction. She had found it to be a wondrous and mind-expanding experience. I don’t know what the novel was, but whatever it was, would it have been appropriate for me or for anyone to have judged her for reading it? Her reading path in life was much different than mine; does that difference in some way entitle me to judge?

But I’ve saved my most important point for last. And it is this: we can’t help what we enjoy. Enjoyment is something that happens to us. We can profess to enjoy things that we don’t really enjoy, for the sake of getting along with others whose good opinion we desire; but that’s not the same thing as actually enjoying them. While we can seek out things that please us, the pleasure itself arises spontaneously and can’t be willed into being, any more than sunshine or rain can be so willed. It simply happens. And criticizing or judging someone for the arising of pleasure in his life is worse than wrong; it seems to stem from a motive in envy and spite. And how well do those things reflect on the judge?

But even if we assume the highest motives on the judge’s part, what is the benefit of judging someone’s reading? Do we hope to shame someone into taking up reading that is, in our opinion, more edifying, and in that way do them a service? Doesn’t this rather reveal our own psychological crudity and ineptitude? Could we possibly imagine that such a clumsy approach would be successful? If we wanted to manipulate someone into reading things that we approve of, couldn’t we find a shrewder way of going about it?

Between the ages of about 11 and 14 I read all the James Bond books. They were in my dad’s library so I just went through them. I enjoyed them a lot; they were “adult” but at the same time easy for me to understand. No one criticized me or tried to stop me; my father didn’t care. I enjoyed them but I moved on to other things as I got older and my tastes changed. Within 5 years I was reading Art and Visual Perception. My tastes changed spontaneously as I read more things; it wasn’t due to being judged, criticized, or otherwise “helped” by those who thought they knew better. It was a natural process.

So I ask you earnestly, on behalf of all readers of all ages: if you’re ever tempted to criticize or judge someone’s, anyone’s, reading, please refrain. Instead, reflect on your own motives, and let nature take its course.

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell: the bloody birth of England

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like its fledgling-warrior hero, this book is easygoing—until battle is joined, and then it packs a punch.

My introduction to the writing of Bernard Cornwell was via the TV productions of his Sharpe novels. I came across these in DVD form at the library and have watched them, I think, three times. With Sean Bean as the title character, a soldier from Yorkshire (I think) who, through his street smarts and physical courage, finds himself rising Horatio Alger-style through the ranks of the British army during the Napoleonic wars, the series delivers a lot of action, strategy, tactics, and soldierly bonding and enmity. Along the way, beautiful women of various nationalities also have a hard time resisting Sharpe’s charms. This mixture of action, adventure, enmity, and love kept me coming back for more, even though I am not usually a consumer of male-action stories.

Now, working on a historical epic of my own, I’m surveying the work of other writers to see how they’re handling their historical and literary themes, and I thought again of Bernard Cornwell. I decided to try the Kindle edition of The Last Kingdom, volume 1 of his series The Saxon Stories. The story plunges us into late-9th-century-AD England, or anyway the land that might one day become England if its native residents can survive the onslaught of the invading Danes. As the story opens, this is looking doubtful, for the handful of minor kingdoms that make up the more or less organized remnant of post-Roman Britain are weak, divided, and besotted with a religion—Christianity—that seems to put them at a disadvantage when compared with their fierce, pragmatic, and fearless opponents.

The story is the tale, told in first person, of one Uhtred son of Uhtred, who in 866 is age 9 and part of a noble family that has owned and held the castle of Bebbanburg in Northumbria for generations. Since Bebbanburg is thought to be impregnable, it seems they don’t have much to worry about, but that view proves to be naive, for a series of events causes young Uhtred to be ripped from the bosom of his family and thrust instead into the care of a Danish warlord named Ragnar. Ragnar, jovial and appreciative of Uhtred’s feisty spirit, takes a shine to the British boy and decides to let him live as part of his own family. In this way Uhtred gains a unique cross-cultural upbringing, and among the Danes he receives probably more warrior training than he would have as the younger son of a British lord.

The Danes, finding nothing among the priest-ridden British to make them doubt their own superiority and their right to rule, knock down one kingdom after another until only Wessex in the far south, under a young king named Alfred, remains free. He and his followers are all that stands between the Danes and complete conquest.

By this time Uhtred has mostly grown up and is able to take an active part in some of the decisive action. And in the process, his boyhood dream of becoming a real warrior becomes progressively realized. He also forms his first relationships with women—”women” in this period meaning girls over the age of 12. In short, Uhtred becomes a man.

The story flows in a conversational style of Uhtred’s own telling at a much later, unspecified, date. Only reluctantly did the boy learn how to read and write; and in more than one aside the adult narrator expresses contempt for the poets that he himself pays to write and sing about him. But now he has a command of language, and if the work is indeed supposed to be a written one, then he has learned his letters well.

In an afterword the author, Cornwell, discusses the historical aspects of the story, and how he has done his best to remain true to the known facts (making only a couple of adjustments). Because history is messy, sometimes I had difficulty following the flow of political and strategic events, the vicissitudes of war and allegiance. There was some quality of “one damn thing after another.”

In addition, I noticed that Uhtred’s relationships with women were not addressed in much detail. Early on Uhtred befriends a British girl, Brida, who is a fellow captive and a daring, unconventional tomboy, and their relationship becomes intimate, but Uhtred does not dwell on it. It’s as though he takes such things for granted; his soldier’s mind is much more excited by war. That view is plausible and in character, but this reader missed a fuller telling of his love life.

As for the depictions of war, here too there is a real sense of the “hurry up and wait” quality described by soldiers: much planning, moving of troops, mishaps, and a few skirmishes, but only a few big, decisive battles. But what battles! There are not many scenes of fighting in the book, but in these Uhtred comes alive, both as a narrator and as character. One senses that this grim part of the human terrain, the desire of some men, maybe all men, to fight and to kill, is of special interest to Bernard Cornwell. Whatever his sources, he writes with insight and feeling about the feelings and attitudes that surround combat. I found myself feeling surges of primal emotion during his fight scenes, and certain other scenes as well. The feelings that arise from the unremitting brutality of the melee were evoked in a way that I hadn’t felt since I read the Iliad a few years ago.

There were other aspects of the story as well, notably the clash, usually handled with humor, between Christianity and the Norse pantheon, for the souls of the people on battlefield Britain, that rang of epic. For this book and this series is epic in the proper sense, that is, it deals with the birth of a society, in this case the society that will be called England. By the end of The Last Kingdom that parturition is still under way; but there are more books, and Uhtred’s story continues.

Like the swords that form part of the imagery of this story, Uhtred himself is formed of two contrasting elements, the English and the Danish. He is a type of the warlike race that will emerge from the blending of these peoples. I sense that where he goes, England will go.

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what’s my genre?

Both practically and theoretically I’m vexed by the question of genre. Practically, because as a writer of fiction I have to be able to categorize my work in order to offer it to readers, viz., to sell it; theoretically, because the more I investigate the question, the more it branches into galleries running ever deeper underground, like a network of unexplored caves.

I’ve written about this before. I know I’ve mentioned that my curiosity was first sparked by reading a bootleg set of notes of a Robert McKee seminar on storytelling, which spark was already a small flame by the time I got my own copy of his book, Story. Somewhere he makes the point (I can’t find the exact place) that no story is so original that it doesn’t resemble anything that’s been written before. Every story will bear a family resemblance to other stories.

In the lecture notes, McKee defines story simply as “traditional story type: war, crime, Western, domestic, love, musical, horror.” This is just a sample list, but there is already a problem in that it mixes categories. The category of, say, action (crime) is mixed with the categories of setting (Western) and mood (horror). The word genre is derived from the Latin genus, which is a class or set that contains a number of species. Sister Miriam Joseph, in her book The Trivium, defines genus this way:

Genus is that part of essence which is common to all the species that constitute the genus. For example, animality is that part of his essence which man shares with other species of his genus, such as horse, sparrow, oyster.

Essence, in turn, is that which makes a thing what it is. Take away the essence, and that thing ceases to be that thing. Take away his animality, and a man ceases to be a man. He becomes a spirit perhaps, an angel, or a corpse. But no longer a man.

The process of analyzing a genus into its constituent species is known as logical division. Here’s what Sister Miriam has to say about that:

Logical division includes three elements: the logical whole, the basis of division, and the dividing members. The logical whole, which is to be divided, is the genus. The basis of division is the metaphysical aspect, the point of view from which a division is made. The dividing members are the species resulting from the logical division.

She goes on to say that

A shift in the basis of division is the error of applying simultaneously, but incompletely, two or more different bases of division, for example, the division of books into Latin, English, French, poetry, history. A shift in the basis of division is the prime error in division, creating confusion and disorder. It makes it impossible to achieve what logical division aims at—a division that is collectively exhaustive (complete) and mutually exclusive (with no overlapping).

So there we have it: the story genres are a mixed bag resulting from a shift in the basis of division.

Does this matter? Who cares?

Well, rightly or wrongly, I do. If genre really is important, as McKee stresses, then it should be addressed properly, should it not? Or is it that stories are so complex and varied that it is impossible to categorize them accurately? A mixed bag is the best that anyone can do.

To me that’s too defeatist. So I’ve been applying my mind to this problem, intermittently, and I think I’ve made some progress. But that all refers to the theoretical aspect of the problem, and maybe that’s not the most important aspect, at least from the point of view of marketing one’s work. To what section of the mixed bag does my own work belong?

The work I’m referring to is my work in progress, The Age of Pisces, which I’ve given the tag-line “an epic of the birth of Christianity.” In the label I see three possible genre handles:

epic (story type or scope)
birth of (in the past—history)
Christianity (religion)

Now epic is a genre that goes right back to the earliest authority on the topic, Aristotle, and so you might think it would provide a solid footing. But epic is not an accepted genre label nowadays. We describe books as epics—:Paradise Lost, War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire—but there is no bookstore shelf labeled “epic.” It seems to be a kind of accidental or transcendental category that books of different genres can all belong to.

What about the “birth of” part—for historical fiction is certainly an accepted genre label. My work, set in the 1st century BC, meets the basic criterion for inclusion. I even have the good fortune to fit into a subgenre within the genre, namely, ancient-historical fiction. But as I look at works in this genre, and at what fans of the genre enjoy about it, I start to have qualms. At Goodreads, the Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction group (2,360 members) describes its bent in the following way:

Preference is given to escapist themes of epic proportions: engaging politics, sprawling battles, drugs (errr … mead) and debauchery.

Hmm. I see the word epic—so far, so good. But as for “escapist themes,” there I don’t feel quite comfortable. Although I believe in strong, fluid storytelling, I would never describe my work as escapist, although I might sneak in through the “engaging politics” doorway.

Finally we have religion. In genre terms, this might reflect the label devotional. To me, this brings to mind the large and very popular literature of Christian fiction. I understand that in the U.S., novels about the Rapture have been massive bestsellers. While I applaud the success of such works, my own is 6,811 parsecs removed from what they’re doing. The Age of Pisces is not a devotional work. Its author is not a Christian and will never become one. My work is about Christianity because Christianity is the spine of the civilization in which I write. I’ll go further: I believe that the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is the DNA of Western civilization. I’m writing about the time and place in which that DNA was first assembled.

So what genre does that put my work in?

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin: who needs reality?

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A massive fantasy series kicks off with a story that is light on magic, heavy on politics.

Having finished the “poetic works” in the Britannica Great Books set—a project that occupied me for the last 3 years or so—I felt ready to relax with some lighter reading. It struck me that A Game of Thrones might be just the thing, for not only am I especially interested in epic as a genre, but my own work in progress, The Age of Pisces, is also conceived as a vast narrative told from multiple points of view. Accordingly, I asked my wife Kimmie to pick up a copy of GOT while she did the grocery shopping one week, and voila, the mass-market paperback came into my hands.

It happened that I had already seen season 1 of the HBO miniseries, so I already knew the plot of this book, and that knowledge did diminish my enjoyment of it slightly. The big story is well designed, and there are a number of surprising twists along the way. Nonetheless, I found I still enjoyed reading the book, and felt that the TV show had not really realized its potential in some ways, even while striving to follow the book so closely.

If you’re one of the 60 or 70 people in the world who have not read this book, it’s a medieval-style fantasy set in a land that looks vaguely like Great Britain, complete with a large wall across a pinch-point that cuts off the frozen wilderness of the north. The map, I’m afraid, is only so-so; it lacks a scale, and many of the places mentioned in the text do not show up on the map. This land comprises the Seven Kingdoms of the story—places run by lords who are no longer kings, but serve a great king in the southern capital of King’s Landing. It’s a world in tension, because the current king, Robert, is a usurper in many people’s eyes, and so there are those who wish to right the wrong of his unlawful accession.

The seven great families are all structured alike in the sense that they each have some dominant trait for which they’re known, and they all identify themselves with a characteristic sigil that symbolizes their identity. In this I felt that they resembled characters in a board game or video game; it felt a bit tidy and symmetrical to me.

The narrative is presented from the point of view of no fewer than eight characters: four male and four female, four adults and four children. This too struck me as being symmetrical, and maybe done partly for commercial purposes, to maximize the appeal across audiences. It’s a lot of point-of-view characters to manage, but George R. R. Martin does a good job of making them stand out from each other and giving each a strong story of his own. Some of the stories were slower to get going, but the author succeeded in involving me in all of them eventually.

And at least one character stands out as a truly striking and interesting creation: Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf brother of the queen. Tyrion is played excellently by Peter Dinklage in the TV series, but the character is already fully formed in the book: intelligent, insouciant, flippant, and toughened by being despised. I was always glad when Tyrion’s turn came around to star in a chapter.

The prose itself is easily readable, but tends to be workmanlike rather than poetic. In the opening chapter (not the prologue) I went looking for figures of speech, but apart from a few stock ones, I didn’t find any to evoke a vivid image in my mind until this on the third page, in a description of blood pouring from the neck of a beheaded man:

The snows around the stump drank it eagerly, reddening as he watched.

But the world itself is exotic, so even straightforward reportage creates an impression in the imagination, and there are many descriptions of the kit and clothing of characters; indeed, I could have done with less of this.

One problem with fantasy as a genre is its relationship to our real world. A Game of Thrones is set in a nonexistent but Britain-like realm, where characters have names that are similar to real-world names, without being quite the same. The point-of-view characters, for instance, are named (in order of appearance) Bran, Catelyn, Daenerys, Eddard (Ned), Jon, Arya, Tyrion, and Sansa. But among the minor characters (and there are many, many of these) I noted the name Bethany, which is a biblical town. The book contains other echoes of the Bible as well: Ned, confronted with the machinations of the royal court, thinks of “wheels within wheels within wheels,” an image from the Book of Ezekiel. Elsewhere a character refers to “beating swords into plowshares,” an image from the Book of Isaiah. Such references point to the difficult balancing act of presenting a world that is like our own, while not being formally connected with it in any way.

It’s almost impossible to come up with an entirely made-up world that has any of the richness of our own world. J.R.R. Tolkien set the standard by working for years purely on the structure and lore of his fantasy world. While A Game of Thrones does not have the imaginative richness of Lord of the Rings, Martin has shown great creative power in creating his world, which does have many surprising and believable details.

My impression is that George R. R. Martin is one of those rare people who has inborn storytelling talent. I think Stephen King is another. Such people can take a few elements and quickly start building a narrative that can capture one’s attention. And I think that only inborn talent can explain Martin’s prodigious ability to put out so much work so quickly. He’s a natural.

I will probably go on to read book 2 of A Song of Ice and Fire—the series of which A Game of Thrones is the first part—even though I don’t find the material fully satisfying as a literary experience. I realized as I read that in being cut off from the real world, a fantasy loses much of the power of association and symbol that a work possesses by being located in it. The author has to provide all the context, and that’s a job too big for anyone. Sometimes I felt I was reading a soap opera: it was involving without being nourishing.

But that’s too unkind. I did, at several points in the narrative, have true surges of feeling as I read—something that never happens with soap opera. That’s a sign that the story is touching me. Heck, I tend to lose interest in books quickly, and I stuck it out for all 807 pages of this. So George R. R. Martin is doing something right, even for this fussy, critical reader. Bring on the dragons!

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The Ultimate Book of the Horse and Rider by Judith Draper, Debby Sly, and Sarah Muir: an equine treasure trove

The Ultimate Book of the Horse and Rider by Judith Draper

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’re thinking about acquiring or riding a horse, this lavishly illustrated book tells you just about everything you need to know before climbing aboard that first time.

For my own part, the number of times I’ve been astride a horse can be counted on one hand, and as far as I can remember every occasion was more or less traumatic for rider and mount. The last time was in January 1982 at the Great Pyramid of Giza, when some Quebecoise girls I had fallen in with took it into their heads they wanted to tour the site on horseback. Against my will, I found myself cantering over uneven ground, acutely conscious that, in the event of a fall, there was no place to land that was not covered with stones of different sizes and degrees of jaggedness.

I survived that ride, and hung up my spurs. But if I’d read The Ultimate Book of the Horse and Rider, I would have been much better prepared; and I would have realized that riding a horse with confidence is a skill that takes time, patience, and determination to develop.

More recently, I wanted to learn about horses and riding as part of the research for my mighty work in progress. Back in the time of my story, the 1st century BC, the horse was a primary means of transportation on land, possibly equivalent to the automobile in, say, the 1920s: a time when it was known to be the best way to get around, but only the well-off could afford them. Looking to gain more authority, I went to the library, browsed the horse shelves, and quickly lighted on this hefty book. Yes, it looked just the thing.

The book is divided into 5 sections:

Breeds of the World
Horse and Pony Care
Learning to Ride
World of the Horse (about competition and racing
Saddlery and Equipment

In Breeds of the World, the authors begin with a brief history of the horse, a description of the anatomy of “conformation” of the horse, and a guide to colors and markings. Then it’s on to an illustrated look at the breeds, broken down into different regions of the world. Each breed is described with a short article accompanied by a large photo portrait and a few action photos of the horse at work or play. From my standing start in the subject, I learned plenty, such as that most of the breeds have been developed in just the last few centuries. For example, the Thoroughbred, the only breed I’ve seen very much of in my life, was the product of a breeding program that was set in motion by England’s King Henry VIII when he founded the Royal Paddocks at Hampton Court. His daughter Elizabeth I founded a stud at Tutbury, Staffordshire, and imported horses from Spain and Italy to cross with native stock. Horse breeding and racing was pursued further by subsequent monarchs, giving rise to the phenomena of regular race meetings and of the Thoroughbred racehorse.

Modern breeds stem from just a few ancient varieties, notably the Arab, a fast, hardy, and beautiful animal that is still considered the gold standard among horses. Other ancient breeds include the North African Barb and the Akhal-Teke of Turkmenistan.

I was interested to discover that, apart from breeds, horses are also categorized in types, which may reflect their coloring, as with Palominos and Appaloosas, or their function, as with hunters and cobs. Any of these may occur across multiple breeds or combinations of breeds.

The rest of the book is laid out in the same way, as a richly illustrated guide to riding, caring for, and competing with horses. There’s a 2-page section, for example, on common horse injuries, complete with a sidebar listing the contents of a horse first-aid kit. The authors discuss how and what to feed a horse, how to manage the bedding in a stable, how to mount and dismount, what the different paces are, what the proper posture is for different kinds of riding—and much else. Toward the back there is a lavishly illustrated section on tack.

The book is well organized, with just about all the chapters falling in neat 1- or 2-page units for easy consumption, with lots of text boxes and bullet lists of key points. It’s clear that the authors love horses and are trying to instill the same love and respect in the reader. And for this “non-horse” person, they’ve pretty much succeeded.

I would certainly say that if you’re thinking of acquiring a horse, your first purchase should be a copy of this book. You’ll know what you’re getting into. And if you decide not to get into it, you’ll still have a handsome volume filled with excellent photos of all kinds of horses and ponies.

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