TJ

It's hard to think of a more tired, stale, boring, clapped-out premise than “famous historical tale told from the perspective of the women involved”, which has been done to death and far past it in the last 20 years, mostly by authors who unfortunately think that the premise is somehow so inherently interesting that they don't have to do any more work.

So the only reason I read this book is it's by Pat Barker, who is a genius, and my god she did not disappoint.

This is better than Homer. Really. The story lives and breathes with a visceral reality and enormous compassion, both completely typical of Barker's work, who I swear understands men at war better than any living writer.

This is the story of the Illiad as told in the voice of the female captive whose seizure by Agamemnon is the source of the “rage of Achilles” in the first place. Briseis was born a princess whose city fell the marauding Achaeans as they set siege to Troy. Chosen by Achilles as a prize, taken from him by a churlish commander, she sees the relations of power and love and lust and pride and honour that drive these men to the pursuit of glory, and their doom.

The brilliance of Barker's work is we both feel for Briseis's plight while somehow also finding sympathy for her captors, who are no less trapped in the same system of power and violence.

One really notable feature of her telling is the linear modernity of the narrative structure: Homer frequently introduces characters and only much later tells us important information about them–I swear he was making it up as he went along–which can make the Illiad challenging for modern audiences who don't already know who everyone is. Barker isn't having any of that, and uses all the lessons we have learned in the past two thousand years to tell the story more fluently and effectively than Homer did.

Lem is a weirdly two-sided writer: he can be a stuffy, high-flown intellectual or a playful, quizzical fumbler. Reading this memoir of his childhood, the deep foundations of his playfulness are clear. He was a strange, unbridled child, with a penchant for destruction and desecration–which reminds one of Hogarth from “His Master's Voice”–that the adult author finds horrifying but is by no means willing to disown.

The book was written in 1965, when Lem was 45 and becoming well-established as an author of science fiction. He claims in the opening that it was an attempt at letting his child-self speak for himself, and that he feels he failed to do this, but while there are certainly adult ruminations scattered throughout, he seems at least to an outside observer to do a tolerable job of showing us scattered fragments of his childhood, which are likely all that remain. There is less coherent narrative than he seems to think, and that's just fine: memory is a series of glimpses of the past seen through the guard-rails of the present.

One odd missing feature, though, is religion, which gets almost no mention. He was of Jewish descent, had some Jewish education, but once said he was raised Roman Catholic... it may be that opening that box would have resulted in something impossibly complex in the context of a relatively short memoir, but it would have been fascinating to see it, never-the-less.

The long stern chase in this book is one of the most dramatic and compelling stories of war at sea ever told, and of all the Aubrey/Maturin novels its final resolution is probably the scene that sticks with me most strongly and clearly.

The whole book is one long, slow, build, with enough sources of tension and interest to remain engrossing throughout. The whole series is worthwhile (this was a read-read for me) but this book is definitely one of the highlights.

As a walking tour of a particular era in the Atlantic slave trade this is a very good book. The degree of awfulness on the part of participants in the slave industry is unfathomable, and the degree of incomprehension, hypocrisy, and wilful ignorance on the part of “civilized” beneficiaries of the slave industry is uncomfortably close to home in a world where Chinese labour toiling under conditions that are not at times very far from slavery dominates the world's productive capacity.

The book is very descriptive. This was probably a wise choice on the part of the author: really inhabiting the lived sensations of the narrator would have made almost impossible reading, but I still wish some of the scenes were more visceral in their impact. I felt like I was seeing into the past, but not inhabiting it in the way some historical fiction manages to achieve (read the opening chapter of Patricia Finney's “The Firedrake's Eye” and you'll know how it feels to come awake lying in an Elizabethan gutter, for example.)

Events are at times too clearly a result of the need to move the characters across the landscape and through time in a particular way, which makes them predictable, which also reduces the emotional impact of their eventual resolution.

But still: a solid, well-researched, and readable historical novel that covers the trans-Atlantic slave industry extremely well.

Ever wonder why politicians behave the way they do?

This book will go a long way toward answering that question. It isn't a work of “political theory” in the traditional sense so much as a presentation of a theory of practical politics. It doesn't focus on lofty ideals or just states, it focuses on what people in various political systems have to do to gain and keep power, and how broadening the required footprint of support tends to produce better public policy, while narrowing it tends to produce autocrats who are propped up by a relatively small circle of essential supporters (often in the military/security forces) who are bought off with bribes, favours, and privileges.

It isn't just about dictators, though. The principles of practical analysis can be applied to any political leader in any system of government by asking whose needs they have to really satisfy to achieve power and retain power. I've found it has enhanced my understanding of–and ability to predict the behaviour of–Canadian and American political leaders.

It falls short of five stars because I think the authors sometimes are muddy in their use of their own conceptual framework, but that is a small quibble against a very good book.