Rasdhar

Susan Casey's The Underworld, a book about deep sea exploration, has received rave reviews, but I found myself underwhelmed. Substantively, her book contains very little information that isn't already online: this is not new information, but old material, presented newly. Unfortunately, this leads to two major shortcomings.

First, the chief value she adds to existing information is a series of in-depth interviews with people engaged in exploring and studying the deep sea. Her interviews, however, border on hagiographic - in fact, she goes out of her way to dismiss and defend some of them against serious concerns about the colonial nature of their endeavours, instead of taking these arguments seriously, as they ought to be. It feels as though she uncritically accepts and believes anything she's told: her scepticism is reserved only for a museum docent who mansplains, she says, and has nothing to do with the subject material of the book. I'm not the only one to feel this way: in the Scientific American, a review notes that “Although Casey pays lip service to Vescovo's critics, The Underworld would have benefited from a more thorough examination of ocean exploration's politics and power dynamics. In the 21st century, must our most celebrated adventurers remain impossibly rich white guys?” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/todays-deep-sea-explorers-are-mineral... It is particularly acute when you realise that Vescovo, a rich hobbyist explorer who receives fulsome praise from Casey, is also known for doing reckless solo dives and freewheeling on safety precautions. After the Triton sub incident, and the vast amount of public funds expended on attempting to rescue the rich and reckless, can we afford to be so flippant about the subject? 

Second, when you have no new research to contribute, but you write an essay, the expectation is that you write in a manner that presents the information lucidly, in a way that is engaging to the reader, and a pleasure to read. Otherwise, you're writing a high school science report. I found her writing passable at best, and often amateurish, bordering on egregious. Debris around the wreck of the Titanic is described as a “pi??ata of tragedy”. When she's not being flippantly funny, she's buried deep in the purplest of prose, as though she had never come across an adjective or a cliche she didn't immediately want to insert in her book. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh - it's clear that she's passionate about the ocean, cares deeply about conservation, and loves the water. Still, when the quality of nature writing is set to a high bar by authors like Helen MacDonald, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or Camille Dungy, it's hard to accept this level of glib, uncritical pedestrian prose.
 

 When I had hit chapter 7 of this book, I went back to the front page to check the title. The author calls her book a “mind-bending journey”, but halfway through the book, my mind was not only unbent, but actively bored. A full half of this book is dedicated to chronicling the author allowing herself to be ritually humiliated in new and inventive ways by a young, spoiled, insufferable, trust-fund brat who runs a gallery, doesn't want the average “schmoe” to have access to the art world, talks about everything around art except the art itself, and will spend entire hours criticising her appearance, writing, ethics, clothing, and marriage. I don't know what she gained from this experience; fortunately, she doesn't either - and it hardly needs to be said, it tells neither the author nor the reader anything about understanding art. There's a pervasive internet myth that all of art (not some of it, but all of it) is an elitist conspiracy to launder money, prevalent among people who have access to an unprecedented amount of information on art at their fingertips without any inclination to ever exercise that access. Bianca Bosker's book is for them. It is not for me. 

Here are the insights that bent her mind, apparently. There many rich white male people in the art world. Some of them are sexist and racist. Money determines a great deal of things. Elitism is not uncommon. Bullying is not uncommon. I defy you to find anyone who spent five minutes on the subject and did not figure this out for themselves without having to turn one lousy internship into seven chapters of excruciatingly dull complaining. All of this true. None of it is surprising, and it is not at all mind-bending. If she wanted a famous artist to sit on her face for the experience, she could have done so without trying to convince the rest of us we'd get our minds bent by the experience too. Towards the end of the book, having failed the ‘mind-bending' bit of the title, she finally turns her attention to the ‘learning how to see' art aspect. It turns out you have to look at it. She learns this by working as a security guard in a museum. It's an insight that apparently could not have been gained by simply going to the museum and looking at art. Some pop science detours later, she concludes that the meaning lies in what you draw from it. This is a very roundabout way of saying, “I don't know anything about art but I know what I like.” Yawn. 

I read and reviewed Sim's other book Let's Give it Up for Gimme Lao! earlier this year. I quite enjoyed that book; it was a fun read, with sharp satire and humour. I was therefore looking forward to this book, but I feel rather let down. I don't think it lived up to the promise of its predecessor, and despite the fact that it won the Epigram Prize in 2018, I didn't think it was particularly good. 

The Riot Act presents a fictionalised account of the 2013 Little India riot in Singapore, where migrant workers, primarily from India, attacked a bus after it fatally struck a migrant labourer. The event and its aftermath not only displayed the powerful control and censorship exercised by the Singapore government, but also the terrible plight of migrant workers, who build the city's infrastructure but are treated with disparate, exploitative, and often cruel regulations and behavior. T

The events that followed (a targeted alcohol ban, heavy fees to be paid by political bloggers, a public protest, scandals concerning the rich and powerful) are all well known in Singaporean politics, but Sim deals with these issues with a tone that isn't sharp, satirical,or even particularly funny. The tone instead is of a sniggering schoolboy who has yet to outgrow his fear of girls. The book is narrated from the perspective of three women, and while I don't think that men should not write from the perspective of women (or vice versa), this book is a great example of how some men are unable to write about women at all. Each woman in a book that focuses on women is depicted as malicious, manipulative, cowardly, and stupid; the only characters positively depicted are gay men or dead migrant labourers. It certainly says a great deal about the author; I don't think it says very much about the events he is claiming to portray. This is a mean-spirited, unpleasant little book and I did not care for it. 

 Ambedkar is one of India's most significant legal and political scholars, and an icon of social transformation. A member of the historically oppressed Dalit castes, at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, he surmounted incredible challenges to achieve education, then higher education, and then political power. He is best known for the vital role he played in drafting India's Constitution (as a qualified lawyer, and also a well-regarded economist). Many know of Gandhi; not as many know of Ambedkar outside in India, and particularly of Ambedkar's criticism of Gandhi for his failure to tackle caste discrimination coherently. To many belonging to the oppressed castes, he is known affectionately as ‘Baba Sahib' - a term of respect and endearment. Columbia University in the US has a significant Ambedkar archive, because he studied there, and was a student of John Dewey, who influenced him greatly. His work in the US, therefore, is comparatively better documented, including his correspondence with civil rights activists there, and their common understanding of the situation of oppressed castes and Black people across nations. But, he also studied in London, at the London School of Economics, later joining the Bar, and building support for his activism. This book fills a vital gap in the Ambedkar canon by examining his time in London, his work as a lawyer, and the society he lived in. It's an edited volume, consisting of chapters by various scholars. 

The last few years have seen a resurgence of Ambedkar scholarship. I made a list of ten books recently released that I wanted to read, and this is the first one. I think it's a great collection. The first three chapters study his time at LSE: the curriculum he covered, his contemporaries and friends, and his legal education at Gray's Inn. The next two cover his involvement in political efforts towards independence in the 1920s, engaging in the round table debates that brought India partial franchise at this time, under colonial rule and his particular advocacy for representation for the Dalits. Jaffrelot's chapter in particular, is really good: he examines how Ambedkar went from seeking reform in the Hindu religion to rejecting it altogether on the basis of caste. Ambedkar later converted to Buddhism, and even today it is not uncommon for Dalits to engage in conversion en masse, in response to ongoing caste violence. The second half of the book is really new material, documenting his engagement with international activists. 
 

Her characters remain absolutely insufferable as usual - they are largely one-dimensional (her heroines all have anxiety and complain a lot, her heroes have no personality but nice voices and nice eyes and many muscles). Look, I understand that the function of books like this is to let the reader project their own fantasies onto the minimally-developed characters, but having read good romance, I have a very low tolerance for bad romance. However, I have no one but myself to thank for subjecting myself to this, and cannot in all fairness, accuse her books of excessive whining (whinery?) if I am here whining about them too. 

I do think that she did try to tackle the typical ‘city girl goes to small town, falls in love with local carpenter, abandons evil career, discovers love and babies' trope, but the problem is that she keeps telling you how she's about to subvert it, and then she barely manages to. It would be really interesting to see the trope actually subverted by an author who understood that you can show without telling.