Paul Vitols's Blog, page 39
June 26, 2011
A Study of History 1 by Arnold J. Toynbee
A Study of History 1: Introduction; The Geneses of Civilizations, Part One by Arnold J. Toynbee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This first volume of Toynbee's 10-volume investigation of how civilizations arise, flourish, and die provides a fresh and exciting panorama of the whole terrain of human history.
The first reference to Toynbee's work that I can recall was in Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God series, where Campbell, who as a young man had been a big fan of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, makes a rather dismissive remark about Toynbee, whom he sees as being too attached to a Christian viewpoint. Looking at other references and reviews, I see that dissing Toynbee seems to be an accepted practice, almost a consensus.
But so far, I disagree. Toynbee is a great thinker and a great writer, and his ideas deserve careful consideration.
I decided to read Toynbee when my own research into the epic genre (especially reading the excellent The Epic Cosmos edited by Larry Allums) had brought me to see epics as being essentially about the birth or transformation of societies. What exactly is a society or civilization? What are its boundaries, its defining features?
This is Toynbee's hunting ground. I started off by buying and reading D. C. Somervell's two-volume abridgement of the 10-volume work. I was excited and stimulated enough by that to decide to take the plunge on the original volumes.
At the outset Toynbee states that he was driven by his own dissatisfaction with the tendency of historians to focus on the history of nation-states, which in his view was an artificial and arbitrary way of slicing up the subject area. He sought the "natural" units of history: entities that could truly be regarded as individuals, cohesive and relatively self-contained. He determined that this unit is the "civilization": a collection of people who share a culture, the core of which is a spiritual system or faith. In volume 1 he sets out to defend this thesis, and to identify and inventory the civilizations that have been known to exist since the beginning of history. He comes up with a total of 21 (give or take–Toynbee recognizes that there are uncertainties of identification, especially as you get into the deep past), provides labels for them, and sketches an overview of each. (Not to keep you in suspense: our own civilization–that is, the one in which I sit right now as I type–he calls Western Christendom.)
In talking about the "geneses" of civilizations, he discusses the difference between primitive societies and civilizations, and speculates plausibly on how, very occasionally, a primitive society undergoes the transformation into a full-blown civilization with intricate institutions, arts, sciences, and a well-developed religion.
No matter how large a civilization is, its members feel relatively at home as long as they are within it. That means that as a Canadian, if I travel to places such as, say, the United States, or to France or Italy or Denmark, even while I'm in a foreign country I nonetheless feel myself in a culture that is congenial and familiar. But if I travel to, say, Egypt, part of what Toynbee calls the Arabic Society, I'm in a place where not only is the language unfamiliar, but the culture as a whole is very different and much more foreign to me. Its basic ideas and premises, its spiritual foundation, are fundamentally different from those of my own civilization. And when I traveled to Russia in 1982 it was the same again, and, Toynbee would say, not simply because it was then still the USSR, but rather because Russia itself is not part of Western Christendom, but part of Eastern Christendom, a zone that also includes Greece and other places built around Orthodox Christianity.
Toynbee in one sense takes his time in developing these ideas–the whole work is 10 big volumes–but in another sense it seems that he's speeding along, since his subject-matter is so vast. He's an excellent writer, with an arch, ironic, self-deprecating style, and makes many interesting asides, the longest of which he places as annexes at the back of the book. He's fond of homely extended metaphors, like regarding the notion of world "ages" (Ancient History vs. Medieval, etc.) as an extendable chimney-cleaning brush.
But his mind is deep and sharp: he likes getting to the root of things. His erudition is tremendous; his prose is salted with quotations from the classics and especially the Bible, usually in the original language. His knowledge of history is encyclopedic. One of the stretches for the reader is following Toynbee's shifts from discussing events in the history of, say, ancient India, to events in Precolumbian Mexico or medieval Hungary or the Khmers of Cambodia. He seems to know it all.
So while it seems that Toynbee's work has been deemed a safe target for criticism and even ridicule, I have to wonder how many of his critics have even 10% of his command of the subject area. Toynbee spent 20 years writing these volumes; they are the considered, mature work of a brilliant man. Reading them, to me, seems like the very opposite of a waste of time.
June 24, 2011
Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by Ludwig Von Mises
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of the most important books of the 20th century, not yet as influential as it deserves to be.
I was brought to this book in 2009 after a growing feeling of dissatisfaction with "expert" explanations being offered for the various financial and economic calamities that seemed to be happening worldwide. Economic commentary by journalists and pundits struck me as being opaque, partisan, and contradictory. Gradually I had become interested in the ideas of the so-called Austrian school of free-market economics, and eventually I decided to take the plunge and read its principal text, Human Action.
I was bowled over. In the first place, the title, Human Action, intrigued me. As a category this seemed to extend far beyond the bounds of what I thought of as economics, and indeed I was right. Von Mises founds his his argument on a little-known 19th-century discipline called praxeology, or the science of human behavior. While psychology is the study of human thoughts and feelings, praxeology is the study of human actions. To be alive is to be continually in action, doing things. Why do we do what we do? What guides our actions? What motivates us?
At the bottom of all our actions lies a specific feeling: a "felt unease" that prompts us to seek its lessening, its amelioration. It was easy for me to assent to this idea, since it accords well with my Buddhist training. Indeed, "human action" is a passable translation of the Sanskrit term karma, which according to Buddhists is the mechanism of action and reaction in which we all engage due to duhkha, usually translated as "suffering", although "felt unease" is probably a better translation. It is usually subtle and underlying rather than something that is consciously felt, and I think von Mises put his finger on this quality of experience, and it was a mark of his genius to do so and to build his analysis from it.
Part 1 of the book, the first 140 or so pages, deals only with the theory of human action and the categories intimately associated with it, such as time and uncertainty. Our lives are short, and therefore time presses and we have to choose some things and forgo others; the future is uncertain, so we have to use our experience and our smarts, whatever those might be, to make the best choices we can. Each one of us is in this situation, even as we are also unique individuals in unique circumstances. This uniqueness of constitution and circumstance means that we value things differently: differently from each other, and differently ourselves from day to day or moment to moment. Nothing whatsoever has any intrinsic, fixed value: all is subjective and situational.
Building out from these ideas, von Mises goes on to explain, logically and systematically, how the free actions of subjective individuals necessarily develop into the phenomena we call markets, and how, if allowed to follow their own course, material and social benefits necessarily flow from them.
I don't doubt that some people regard von Mises as dogmatic, and he does write in a forceful, declarative style, but it is not dogma any more than Euclid's Elements is dogma–and for the same reason. For von Mises insists that the fields of praxeology and catallactics–its extension into the realm of production and consumption–are purely logical: their laws, based on irreducible constants of experience such as time and uncertainty, are inexorable and not falsifiable by experiment. Praxeology and catallactics are built up by theorems, exactly like geometry.
Again and again while reading this book I found myself confronted with new, provocative ideas. In this respect von Mises has few peers. In my own reading I can think of only maybe Northrop Frye or Eric Hoffer or Erich Neumann as offering such a density of surprising ideas per page.
Is von Mises a capitalist? Absolutely. Capitalism, in its pure state, is the condition of free individuals engaging with each other without coercion. Von Mises deplores violence, and for him socialism is intrinsically violent and should be shunned because it leads inexorably to poverty and slavery–things that no human being seeks. At the same time, he's well aware that there is plenty of coercion and fraud in supposedly capitalist societies, and to the extent that this is the case, those societies are materially poorer and less free than they might be.
I do not feel competent to argue with anything that von Mises is saying, since the depth and range of his thought in these areas is so vastly greater than my own. But I did have a couple of questions or proto-critiques. One was in von Mises' assertion that military conscription is a justifiable intrusion on the liberty of individuals. Since this to me is a form of slavery, I find it hard to square with his dedication to individual liberty. Another issue was in his assertion that all values are subjective; he takes it as an axiom that no absolute value can be found. My intuition is that this point of view is one that ignores the spiritual dimension of human life. In Buddhism, for example, duhkha or "felt unease" is not the last word; in a sense it's only the first word. For like von Mises, the Buddha started there–but he took that notion in a much different, and a much deeper, direction. The Buddha taught liberation from that unease; von Mises is only teaching us how to get along with it.
But in all, my considered opinion is that Human Action is one of the greatest works of literature of all time. And as such it is, I believe, worthy of your time and attention.
June 23, 2011
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It's not how much you read, but how well–and this book gives you specific, step-by-step techniques to get you to read as well as possible.
First of all, who would be so presumptuous as to advise fellow adults on how to read–a skill notionally possessed by everyone who's made it through public school? Well, Mortimer J. Adler, philosopher, longtime editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and moving force behind the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series; and Charles Van Doren, Adler's colleague at the Institute for Philosophical Research and author of, among other works, The Idea of Progress. Observing that most of us don't get very much out of a book when we read it, they set about to help those of us who want to, to get more.
Their method applies mostly to reading nonfiction. While they devote 2 chapters out of 21 to reading "imaginative literature", and have useful things to say about such reading, I found these chapters to be the weakest, since imaginative literature lies outside the zone that is most conducive to their analytical approach.
But for nonfiction reading they set out a powerful, systematic method for getting the most out of a book.
Not all works deserve equally deep reading. Indeed, most books are simply bad according to the authors, and not worth reading at all. Many others might contain information or ideas that are useful, without being especially significant overall. A few–a very few–are the considered, mature works by the best minds in the history of recorded thought. These, the authors assert, merit our close attention and careful reading and rereading.
So the authors introduce us to the "levels of reading", of which they set out four:
1. Elementary reading: This is the basic skill of being able to read with comprehension. Do we have it? If not, we need to work on this.
2. Inspectional reading: This is how to assess a book's promise quickly by examining its table of contents, index, and flap blurbs, and by skimming key parts of the text.
3. Analytical reading: This section of 6 chapters forms the core of the book. Here you learn how to look for the key arguments of a book, summarize these, and discover any special meanings the book's author is giving certain terms, as well as how to criticize the book fairly and determine where you stand in relation to the author's main thesis.
4. Syntopical reading: This is the term the authors give to the highest, most demanding level of reading–the level required for serious research that requires the comparison of different texts. Syntopical reading is possible only for those who already have a decent grasp of analytical reading.
The authors admit that to follow their method completely is hard, time-consuming work, and appropriate only for the most worthy texts. That's why it's important to master the skills of inspectional reading, which allow us to gain a quick idea of which books deserve this deluxe treatment.
I myself have applied Adler and Van Doren's methods to only a few books so far, and have not completed the method for any one book (it is indeed a lot of work). The one I've gone furthest with so far is an analytical reading of A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy by James Macdonald, a book that, in my view, amply deserves such a reading. Even though I have not got to the end of my analytical reading, by following Adler and Van Doren's methods I have very much deepened and clarified my understanding of Macdonald's book, and I know that if I finish my analysis I will be able to say I have truly read it.
I'm currently reading the Organon of Aristotle, and I intend to apply the Adler-Van Doren method to these books when I'm done. I've already made a start with the Categories, and it's already bearing fruit in the form of increased comprehension.
If you're serious about reading, you owe it to yourself to read this book; and the more serious you are, the more important it is that you make an appointment with this book. Read it well.
June 22, 2011
Story by Robert McKee
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you're a writer of drama or fiction, you need to master these rules before you consider breaking them.
I knew from an early age that I wanted to write stories, but it wasn't till I was about 17 that I learned that there are actual methods, principles, and techniques involved in storytelling, when I received as a gift a copy of The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri. Wow! What a revelation! I read it greedily.
Fast-forward to 1990. I was 31 and now had my own TV series, The Odyssey, in development with the CBC in Canada. My writing partner Warren Easton and I were under pressure to come up with a pilot script and 12 more stories to flesh out a possible first season of the show. We'd bought a copy of The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves and The Complete Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm, Volume 1 to search for story ideas for our mythologically based fantasy series, but were not really finding stories that would fill our action-packed half hours. One of the CBC executives offered to let me have a photocopy of a set of notes from McKee's workshop, taken by a fellow participant. I'd heard of McKee and so I gratefully accepted them.
Back home I started reading, and was electrified. (The notes themselves were excellent, typed by this person on a laptop and capturing most of what McKee said.) Here was everything I wanted and needed to know: genre, character, structure, controlling idea, protagonist, acts, turning points, and much, much else. McKee came across as definite and authoritative. Here was no "well, some people say this, but on the other hand other people say this other thing…." As far as McKee is concerned, the principles of sound story design have long since been established; they are simply not widely known, and he sees his task as remedying that deficit as much as he can.
Years later I saw a copy of McKee's book in a store and snapped it up. It is well read and well highlighted. When I read Aristotle's Poetics I realized that McKee's work is essentially applied Aristotle. Aristotle regarded plot–story–as the most important element in contributing to the effects of the most powerful form of poetry at that time: tragic drama. He analyzed what makes for an effective story, and McKee has applied that analysis to the most powerful form of storytelling in our own time: motion pictures.
But while the book is aimed at screenwriters, the principles apply to all forms of storytelling, including prose fiction. I continue to study this book and keep striving to apply its principles. As observed by the late philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, it is knowledge of principles that transforms a knack into an art. This book provides such knowledge. As far as I'm concerned, if you're serious about telling stories, in whatever medium, you'll get much better results, much faster, if you get this book and apply its principles. This knowledge is what will separate you from the army of dilettantes.
June 21, 2011
on telling it like it (sort of) was
Yesterday I continued to explore Goodreads.com, a large social-networking site for readers of books. Seeking readers whom I might be able to interest in my own book Truth of the Python, I started looking at discussion groups on the topic of historical fiction. One interesting thread I came across was "History and Fiction: how much of which?" Here I stopped to read some of the posts.
I saw that the topic was important to both readers and writers of historical fiction, and that there doesn't seem to be much consensus even on the definitions of terms like history and historical fiction. One point made by a number of people was that they liked to include—or see included—an "author's note" in historical novels mentioning which historical facts had been changed or fudged by the author. They felt that this helps to keep the boundary between "history" and "fiction" clear, lets knowledgeable readers know that the changes are not errors, and lets less knowledgeable readers know which parts of the book they can disregard for educational purposes (for some readers admit that their primary source of education about history is reading historical fiction). But opinion is very divided on how much changing of history is allowable or reasonable in a historical novel. Some want only a strict minimum of change necessary to tell the story; others feel that anything goes if it makes the story better.
Where do I stand on this? One thing I know: I don't like "author's notes" in historical novels. For me they add nothing, and only detract from the enjoyment of the book. Why is that? Maybe it's because I can't think of any worthwhile motive for having them there. If you're trying to show the reader how much work you went through to research the book, it's a piece of marketing, and the reader has already acquired the book. It could be construed as bragging, or maybe complaining, neither of which helps the author's cause. Sometimes the note points out how little research the author has done, as with Mary Stewart and her excellent Arthurian novel The Crystal Cave. In this case it serves as a kind of apology, and again it's hard to see what good this does.
In general, I get the feeling that these author's notes exist in order to pump the authority of the writer by addressing technical matters that are likely to be appreciated only by historians familiar with the period in question. In this case there's a feeling of shop talk among experts, perhaps intended to let readers know, "don't worry—I know what I'm talking about." But this is, at best, redundant, because the reader senses the writer's authority very quickly and easily from the text itself; even as nonexperts we know when the writer knows what he's talking about.
But there's a deeper problem. The very notion that there is a clear distinction between historical fact and historical fiction is somewhat of an illusion, as noted by such authorities as Arnold J. Toynbee and Ludwig von Mises. The Greek word historia is the source of both the English words history and story. Even apart from the fact that historical "facts" are often not as sure as we like to think, history itself is storytelling, and makes use of "fictional" techniques. A good historian is always a good storyteller.
I arrive at what I think is my biggest problem with author's notes: they imply that, with the exceptions made in the note, the book can be regarded as historically accurate. That's a big claim, and an implausible one. To me, again, it seems safer to avoid making it. Tell your story, and let the reader be the judge.
My grade 5 classmate Don McCaskell came up with a mnemonic device to keep straight the difference between fiction and nonfiction: one was "bull", the other was "non-bull". With historical fiction, the writer is setting out to write "non-bull bull"; who's to say what the authority of the result is?
The author can hint that most of what he's written is gospel, but even the gospel writers don't agree with each other—although they do tell a pretty good story.
June 20, 2011
landmark books
Having posted to this blog so far only by way of writing book reviews at Goodreads.com, I'll now jump in and try writing a post from scratch. In trying to come up with where to start, the expression landmark books floated to mind. What do I mean by it?
My tentative definition of landmark book is: "a book that has changed or helped to form my main beliefs". (Here I'm speaking of nonfiction. I also have landmark works of fiction, for which I'd have to alter the definition a little.) These are books in which the authors have persuaded me of the validity of their ideas, and the topic has been important enough to me that the change has made a significant difference to my subsequent thinking and action.
Let me give an example. Five years ago I got a book called Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind by David Berreby. In it the author examines what creates our feelings of group identity, our feelings of belonging, or not belonging, in particular groups. One of the most important "groups" that any of us belongs to is our "race". The relationships between races, the way they view and treat each other, is one of the most important aspects of any multiracial society, affecting its perceived peace, harmony, and justice. In this book David Berreby, overcoming great resistance within me, persuaded me that race is an empty concept. That is, while we lay great stress on race and have strong feelings connected with it, there is in fact no such thing as race in reality, in nature. It is a purely invented concept, like Democrat or manager. In objective reality, there is no "white" race, there is no "black" race; there is no race of any kind.
Do you find that hard to accept? I did. But there's more. For if race is a purely invented concept, then what purpose does this invention serve? Why was it invented? Berreby concludes that the concept of human race exists for only one reason: to justify the systematic exploitation of one group of people by another. By putting you into a Them, I justify, in my own mind, treating you differently from the people I put in Us. And "differently" never means better; it means worse.
I don't expect you to take my word for this. I don't even expect you to think of it as being even possibly true. I didn't. I have a memory of being in a conversation about this when I was about 12 years old with our old family friend, the late Harvey Burt. It was at one of the dinner parties my mother used to throw back in our old rented house on Upper Lonsdale. Harvey had taken the position that race is an empty concept.
"Look at some of the people we call black," he said. "They have quite pale skin. While some of the people we call white, from the Eastern Mediterranean and so on, have darker skin than that."
I was annoyed with him because I thought he was just being contrary. Everyone knows that there are races–anyone can see it. Denying it is just a verbal trick, a bleeding-heart socialist trick!
Berreby persuaded me that Harvey was right. Harvey was not the one engaging in a verbal trick—I was, without knowing it. It was not an easy thing for Berreby to achieve in his book, because my mind was not very open. But it must have been just open enough, for he made his case. By the end of the book I'd seen the light; he'd changed my thinking.
At least with my conscious mind, I no longer believe in race as something real. I still have my emotional responses around race, which is a deeply programmed idea, and I realize that very few of my fellow citizens and human beings share my new viewpoint. And I understand that perfectly because I was in the same position. But my thinking and my actions are no longer based on the notion that race is real. And indeed I've had to amend my definition of the word racist as well. For me, now, the word racist can only mean "someone who believes that race is a real, natural category". Which means that, according to me, almost everyone is a racist, including those seeking "equality" or "justice" between the races, for they are seeking equality or justice between nonexistent things, which is an impossibility.
But my aim here is not to persuade of this idea. It's to explain what I mean by the term landmark book. I didn't regard Us and Them as a perfect book by any means; in fact I had some difficulties with the way Berreby tried to make his case. It was not argued in as straightforward a way as I would have liked, for one thing. But the bottom line is that he changed my thinking—that one thing, according to Albert Einstein, that we don't change. And having done that, he made his book a landmark in my life.
June 17, 2011
Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford & Robert Seidman
Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Indispensable for a thorough reading of Ulysses.
This is a reference book, with entries arranged in order of their occurrence in the text. Originally compiled to help students in Gifford's own classes on Ulysses, it sets out to answer just about anything you might want to "look up" while reading Ulysses–which is a lot, and this is a big book.
For example: you're reading the Lestrygonians episode, and you come across a mention of "lemon platt". What's that? Look it up in the Lestrygonians chapter of Ulysses Annotated, and you find: "Candy made of plaited sticks of lemon-flavored barley sugar." In the next line or so of Joyce's text you come across the mention of "a christian brother". What's that? It's right here: a paragraph on "a teaching brotherhood of Roman Catholic laymen, bound under temporary vows."
In a similar way, Gifford goes into references to the Bible, to Irish history, to Greek mythology, to references to Blake, Yeats, Wagner, and many others, to identifying the specific Dublin individuals and businesses named in the text, as well as giving full verses of the many poems and songs alluded to by Joyce, and much else besides these things.
This book is the result of someone's having done all the "looking up" that can be done with Ulysses, so you don't have to. It does not attempt to go into the meaning and symbolism of Ulysses very much; for that you need other works. But if you want to read Ulysses with anything more than a slight comprehension, you need this book–unless you already have an encyclopedic knowledge of 1904 Dublin and Ireland; Irish history, culture, and folklore; 19th-century poetry, fiction, opera, and popular music; the Bible; Homer's Odyssey; the life and works of Shakespeare; the works of Dante, Vico, Milton, Blake, Wilde, Swift, et al; the Catholic mass; Christian theology; Hinduism; and 17th-century English underworld cant. But if you don't have such knowledge, this book is for you.
June 16, 2011
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This classic on the experiential aspects of religion is as fresh, relevant, and authoritative as when it was published in 1902.
The qualities of James's mind made him superbly well equipped to write a book such as this, for as a thinker he was penetrating, perceptive, objective, skeptical, candid, courageous, and open-minded. He was also deeply read in philosophy and science, and expressed himself with clarity and humor.
The book is composed of a series of talks James gave as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh, and covers the key experiences and attitudes that we tend to call religious: the sense of the "reality of the unseen", for example, and the feelings of sin and beatitude, as well as conversion, saintliness, mysticism, and the relationship of philosophy to religion.
James treats all these phenomena with interest and respect. His attitude is scientific and impartial, and from these lectures it is not possible to tell where his own spiritual convictions lie.
In all, James demonstrates with a wide range of striking examples and case studies the breadth, depth, and power of the human experience of religion in its widest sense, and shows why scientific and philosophical critiques of "religion" invariably miss their target and never succeed. The experience of religious feeling is a distinct and powerful class of human emotions, and efforts to rationalize this away are never convincing, certainly not to those who have experienced the emotions. Rudolf Otto, in his landmark book The Idea of the Holy, even as he patronizes James as a "rationalist" and a "pragmatist", nonetheless leans on him for support in his own argument that the experience of the sacred is a unique and all-important aspect of human life.
This is one of the best books on religion or spirituality ever written, and it is all the better for not being written by a cleric, mystic, practitioner, or other apologist for any branded faith. One of the most important books of the 20th century.
June 12, 2011
You Shall Know Them by Vercors
You Shall Know Them by Vercors
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A fast-paced and sometimes provocative novel of ideas.
My attention was drawn to this book by a mention made of it by the late philosopher Mortimer J. Adler in some of his writing on the Great Idea of Man. Adler, who developed the list of 102 (later 103) Great Ideas that are presented as part of the Britannica Great Books series, taught that the Great Ideas are great because they are perennially controversial: their internal difficulties keep ramifying in new directions, opening up new avenues of debate in each generation. The idea of Man–what is human nature?–is still far from settled.
Vercors (the pen name of Jean Bruller, 1902-1991), evidently fascinated with the problem, found a story idea to bring it into sharp focus. A group of British archaeologists digging in New Guinea discover a community of previously unknown manlike apes, or apelike men, living in the forest. These cave-dwelling creatures, who come to be called "tropis," produce rudimentary tools and use a simple language. Soon word of the discovery gets out, and before long some Australian industrialists start scheming to "domesticate" the tropis and use them as "skilled" livestock to work in textile factories.
The idealistic young journalist Douglas Templemore, alarmed at the jeopardy these ape-men are now in, comes up with a shocking gambit to try to save the tropis from this fate: he causes one of the female tropis to be impregnated with some of his own sperm, and, when a child is born to her, Douglas murders the child. He immediately confesses the deed and thereby forces the British justice system to take up the question of the tropis' status.
While Vercors takes pains to present characters who are visually striking and different from each other, they are mainly involved with debating the ideas and morality of the situation. And although Douglas is the main character, the story is not really his, for many other characters are brought in as different aspects of the situation need treatment. Also, although the book was published in 1952, the presentation of the characters and action reminded me of reading a 19th-century novel, maybe something by Jules Verne or Bram Stoker or H. G. Wells: the characters are all well-bred, earnest, and polite.
The first half of the book is the stronger. In it I felt some strange chilling feelings around my heart, for Vercors did put his finger on the nub of the issue. Is someone you can mate with necessarily human? The focus on the cause celebre of the murder trial in the second half seemed to make the issue a purely cerebral one, and the emotional power of the idea evaporated away for me.
Still: interesting, original, and a pretty fast read.
