Audiobook Month on Vulpes Libris

Audiobook Month on Vulpes hits the ground running with a fascinating and wide-ranging interview with Nicolas Soames, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Naxos AudioBooks.

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VL: Naxos has an amazing collection of work on offer – fiction, non-fiction, classic, history, biography – not to mention poetry and plays. Obviously plays are designed for performance, but other than these, what kinds of books lend themselves best to audio books in your opinion?

NS: Surprisingly, there seem to be very few books which don’t emerge with character on audio. After all, the writers are communicating. Books as different as Le Morte d’Arthur and Ulysses are spectacular. But I suppose multi-voice books lend themselves particularly well because the characters narrating are so clear – such as Dracula and The Woman in White or the more contemporary example of Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence.

VL: What are the best-selling audiobooks? Do they tend to be bestsellers in hardcopy also or are there some surprises in there – perhaps influenced by who’s reading the book?

NS: The best-sellers vary from publisher to publisher. Harry Potter was a best-seller! For our classics range, we have all been surprised that Anton Lesser’s exceptional reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost in both abridged and unabridged has done well, as have Joyce’s Ulysses (abridged and unabridged again), War and Peace unabridged (!!); most Jane Austen (despite the competition). And from our Junior Classics range, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Tales from the Greek Legends. Also. Romeo and Juliet with Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale.

VL: Naxos obviously has a wide-ranging market in mind with such an array on offer but is perhaps best known as a recorder of the classics. Is there a “typical” audio book listener? Do they tend towards a particular demographic?

NS: Well, I am an audiobook listener, and I tend to think I am pretty typical. I listen when in the car, when in the gym, when on the train or walking in the countryside…ie, basically on the move. As for age and other factors – the range is extraordinarily wide…I am in touch with a student (and actor) at Cambridge University who is a non-stop listener, and then with any number of 30s and upwards to 80 and beyond…and all over the world!

VL: In terms of classics – readers often have their own very strong ideas of characters and how a book should sound – how do you go about trying to meet those expectations and how do avid fans react to your recordings?

NS: In the end, it can only be a personal choice. I know most of the classics we do and I hear a voice, or a delivery. When I am not sure, I will discuss with my producers, and often ask for suggestions from them. Sometimes, when I don’t know the book or am stumped, I ask agents. I didn’t know a reader who would be a natural for D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and an agent put five voices in front of me…and we settled on Paul Slack, who had never done such a weighty book, but he came from Lawrence country…and he gave us a wonderful reading. Similarly, it was an agent who suggested Jim Norton for Ulysses. Sometimes I am lucky and brilliant readers fall into my lap so-to-speak, which is what happened with David Timson (Sherlock Holmes), Neville Jason (Proust and Tolstoy) and more recently Roy McMillan who started with us as a producer. Then there is the question of the series. Juliet Stevenson’s Jane Austen is so wonderful – would our listeners like to hear her reading them all, or most; or would they like a different voice. You have to go where your own heart is.

VL: Is it a growing market?

NS: If one looks around at the numbers of people with white wires hanging from their ears on trains and pavements, there is no doubt! The great advantage is that one can multi-task!

VL: How does the digital “revolution” affect audiobooks – if at all? I notice there are wonderful samples of many of your recordings on your site – do things like podcasts, etc encourage people to get into audiobooks or is it a completely different market?

NS: The quality of the reader is crucial. I may want to listen to a book, but if I can’t get on with the reader, I can stay the course! And this is true for many, many people. This is why it is so important for people to sample the reader beforehand. And the reader must match the book. We have one example of a reader who is peerless in one area of literature, but when we thought he could sidestep into another, it became a round peg in a square hole. There is no doubt that the digital revolution has benefited audiobooks. It is much easier carrying unabridged Tristram Shandy on the iPod than a box of CDs under your arm. And it is less expensive! Also, downloads has made so many more specialist titles available. The shops can’t be expected to invest in Bulgakov’s The Master and Magarita but you can get it as a download 24/7.

VL: The live literature scene is growing rapidly with literature festivals springing up all over the UK. There are performance poetry slams, readings from authors and performed flash fiction. Does this sort of thing whet appetites for the audio book experience? Do you tap into any of these trends at all?

NS: For two years running, we gave a variety of presentations at the Oxford Literary Festival. So, yes – after all, reading is a live experience and what better than to see your favourite reader do what he or she does best, and also talk about the book. Anton Lesser and Professor John Carey gave an unforgettable Milton experience (you can hear it on our website on the Milton page); and (Ulysses/Finnegans Wake producer) Roger Marsh’s lecture on James Joyce, which is on our website, was a revelation for many.

VL: The marriage of voice and words is so important. How do you go about picking the right actor for the right material?

NS: As I mentioned, it is by a variety of ways. But also I like to take risks. Audiobook reading is a highly developed skill and it is always a risk to use someone who has never read, or certainly not a classic. David Timson is preparing The Pickwick Papers at this very moment. He knows the book, of course, but he told me only yesterday he is reading it to himself, then he will read it aloud in his own room; and then hone and prepare certain passages before coming into the studio. New readers rarely do this…but it is good to have someone fresh. Michael Sheen had never read an audiobook when he came, just out of RADA, to read Crime and Punishment, but he was astounding. He turned up in black leather trousers and black leather shirt, and said he wanted to read standing up. OK, we said, and adjusted the studio. He stood there all day, delivering this brilliant performance. (It was an abridgement). Some months later we invited him back to read Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. We prepared the studio with a tall music stand and no chair. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Would you mind if I sat down.’

VL: Robert McCrum recently wrote on the Guardian Books blog:

“At their best, unabridged and read by an author who knows about reading aloud (John le Carré springs to mind) they can be distillations of pure magic; a lovely window on the author’s intentions. Read badly, or over-read by an out-of-work actor and horribly abridged, they can do a book a great disservice.“

Can you talk a bit about the difficulties of abridging and what qualities an actor needs to be a good audiobook narrator – how do you stop them over-acting?

NS: These are two questions in one. A skilful abridgement inevitably concentrates on the plot and a the description may have to be conveyed by the actor. Sometimes the abridger has to make real judgement calls in order to get the script to length (as with a TV adaptation). Sometimes, a very famous passage is in danger of being taken out because that particular scene is not really a crucial part of the plot. We nearly lost ‘the ineluctable modality of the visible’ from Ulysses….and, if I recall correctly, Micawber’s unforgettable ‘Annual income twenty pounds…etc..’ had to be reinstated. But I really think that listeners want to hear the best-known lines.

As for over-acting, the key thing here is that the actor must remember that he/she is speaking to one person…directly into the ear. Most understand this. The main danger is when an actor is on stage at night…and has to remember to make the big shift from projection to intimacy. However, there are also very different styles which are equally valid. William Hootkins (Moby Dick, unabridged. Amazing! Amazing!) and in a different way Bill Homewood (Dumas, Hugo, King’s Solomon’s Mines) hew their performances from big blocks of masonry and you just get carried away.

VL: A recent piece on Strictly Writing saw a few people saying that they found audio books very slow. People read at different speeds. Certainly many of the audiobooks I listened to seemed a lot slower than a radio play for example. What dictates the speed of reading?

NS: Again, that is down to the individual actor. I would rather someone read too slow rather than gabbled. But this is where the voice should suit the book. Sean Barrett, one of the great readers of his time with a remarkable range from Cormac McCarthy to Samuel Beckett and Dickens, has quite a fast reading speed, but you never notice. But generally we find that the book sets its own pace (if the actor has been well chosen).

VL: I was reading a rather entertaining post on your blog about diction. Argh. A total minefield if the postbag of Radio Four’s “Feedback” is anything to go by. Do you have any general policies on diction or does it depend on the book?

NS: I try not to be too grand, but I do like to hear English well spoken. I am not, I hope, rigid. Of course I am English but if Kerry Shale reading a great American classic says ‘the sun shone’ and pronounces it ‘shown’ I may blink, but I know it is right…However, if someone is just sloppy, then I am unhappy because I wouldn’t want to listen to it! All this is, in part, dictated by the fact that we do classics, and therefore we SHOULD reverence the language. Few kids on the block get on to Naxos AudioBooks only because the appropriate opportunity is not there!

VL: As a listener to Radio Four – I do get a bit fed up with the same-sounding voices you tend to hear on radio plays and short story readings. And, to me, the voices aren’t so much neutral as “Radio Four”! Apart from the obvious – Irish accents for Beckett for example – do you ever use regional accents for the “narrator” voice of a book? Isn’t RP as riddled with associations and precise placement as anything else these days?

NS: Ah! Right! A Debate! When we do a classic on audiobook, I feel we are putting down something a bit in stone. This is not the time to have a Bollywood actor to give Dickens a different spin. However, radio is another matter. It is a more ephemeral medium and so there is room for experimentation, as is the case on the stage where you can set Julius Caesar in Vietnam. I agree that Beckett, of all dramatists, can probably be set on Uluru…but I wouldn’t have asked a non-Irishman (!) to read the Trilogy for the world premiere unabridged recording.

VL: Poetry: some of it is meant to be read aloud and some of it exists very much first and foremost on the page – what are the main issues with recording poetry and what recordings do you think have worked the best?

NS: Poetry is perhaps the most subjective of all literary forms on audiobook because it is so personal. Clarity may be foremost; temperament is also absolutely key; but for me also the music of the performance is equally important. It has to flow unimpeded – I really don’t like editing poetry. Anton Lesser’s Paradise Lost is simply a marvel. It was broadcast unabridged on BBC Radio 3 over 12 days and I know that thousands of people were riveted. But also Samuel West’s Letters and Poems of John Keats, is exceptional. He came into the studio at 9am, discussed the use of the dash in 19th century literature with our literary advisor/abridger/compiler Perry Keenlyside, and sat down to record. He read a letter, and put the page to one side. He looked down and saw the poem which was next. He looked up to the microphone and recited it. One take. From memory. Then he stopped and sat in silence for a bit. Then he picked up the next letter and read it. Then glanced at the title of the poem that followed, looked up at the microphone and recited it. From memory. He did this with almost every poem. And as I remember, no slips. Unforgettable. And by the way, I know Keats was a cockney, and Sam West certainly isn’t. But listen to his Keats. You will not move.

VL: What are the biggest challenges in your job? And what is the part you find the most satisfying?

NS: I started Naxos AudioBooks in 1994, so I have been running it for 16 years. The challenge is to be fresh and excited and not to regard the forthcoming recording as No. 550. It is the nature of the world that some will work better than others, and there will be some failures along the way, and some interactions with actors and writers which are less than skilful. We are working intensely for so much of the time. But I have been fortunate in feeling personally enriched by so many years’ immersion in the classics – by definition, the greatest literature – and working with so many outstanding artists. What these readers do is absolutely amazing. Listen to David Timson’s podcast on the Our Mutual Friend page. He explains how he keeps 58 (I think that was the number) characters in his head. To be honest, I am not so interested in most stars. They have a charisma and their own talent. But, strewth, I see little-known actors performing miracles month after month. I have been informed, instructed, moved, elated and frightened more often then I care to remember. I was in the studio once and an actress (ok, Teresa Gallagher) was reading a short story (The Garden Party). Not a sentimental wallow at all. So, I have no idea why I suddenly found my eyes getting wet. Her performance must have touched an inside chord. Damn! Just so unprofessional! But, you know, like uncontrollable laughter, you simply can’t stop the tears. And there was Teresa, feet away from me on the other side of the glass. I thought: Please Miss, Just keep your eyes on your script. But there can be a curiously telepathy in these circumstances, and she looked up just at the worst moment. There was nothing I could do. Well. That’s life in classic audio.

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Nicolas Soames was answering questions put to him by Rosy Barnes.  Join us again tomorrow for the first of our audiobook reviews -  of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, read by Ralph Fiennes.

TALKING BOOKS: AUDIOBOOK MONTH ON VULPES LIBRIS

It all started quite innocuously.

“Let’s do a week on audiobooks”, we said.  “We can probably just about find enough stuff to fill five or six days.  We can review a couple of  them, have an opinion piece, some recommendations – and perhaps we can persuade one of the big publishers to talk to us – or maybe someone who narrates audiobooks?”…

Six interviews, nine reviews, a clutch of opinion pieces and special features, heaven alone knows how many emails and telephone calls, plus a whole universe of grey hairs later:-

Welcome to Audiobook Month on Vulpes Libris.

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Coming attractions include:

• Audiobook producers Nicolas Soames of Naxos AudioBooks and newcomer Barnaby Edwards of Textbook Stuff on the pains, pleasures and rewards of running an audiobook company.
• Actors Edward Petherbridge, Jay Benedict and Martin Jarvis (among others – we’re still working on it …) on the art of narrating audiobooks.
• An exclusive feature on Canongate‘s recent, intriguing acquisition of CSA Word and what this might mean for the future of publishing.
• An interview with The Royal National Institute for the Blind – who have been publishing audiobooks for an incredible 75 years – looking at the importance of the audiobook to the visually impaired and its growing importance to an aging population.

There will also be feature pieces, audiobook reviews and recommendations.  T S Eliot, Ralph Fiennes, Simon Brett, Stephen Fry, Charles Dickens, Trevor Byrne, J R R Tolkien, Richard Armitage, Harry Potter, Oscar Wilde, Rosy Thornton, David Eagleman and Strictly Writing‘s Caroline Green will be just some of the names to conjure with.

With two dozen interviews, reviews and features to organize, Audiobook Month is a work in progress and at the mercy of transatlantic flights, work commitments, technical glitches and the everyday functioning of Sod’s Law.  However,  every Sunday from now until the end of the month, we will announce the (more or less) settled line-up for the following week  …  so it’s very much a case of ‘Watch this Space”.

Coming up this week:

Monday: To open Audiobook Month, we talked to Nicolas Soames, founder and Managing Director of Naxos AudioBooks,  about leather trousers, talking proper and how an abridgement of Ulysses almost lost ‘the ineluctable modality of the visible’.

Tuesday: Jackie is enlightened by Ralph Fiennes’ reading of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Wednesday: Actor, writer and director Barnaby Edwards, founder of new-kid-on-the-audiobook-block Textbook Stuff tells us why he’s stepped from one side of the microphone to the other.

Thursday: Kirsty contemplates insecurity, instability and indestructible livers as she reviews Simon Brett’s Dead Room Farce (a Charles Paris novel).

Friday: Hilary has been meditating on the very great pleasure which a fine voice in an audiobook reader can bestow, as she contemplates Richard Armitage reading Bernard Cornwell’s The Lords of the North.

Saturday: Eve plays ‘Hero or Villain?’ as she considers whether audiobooks for children are A Good Thing.  Or not.

(Photo credit – dalydose on Flickr – Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.)

The Lubitz TrotskyanaNet: An invaluable Trotsky resource

The Lubitz TrotskyanaNet is a labour of love.  Online since 2004, the site is the product of forty years spent collecting and cataloguing anything to do with Trotsky.  Wolfgang and Petra Lubitz keep their site constantly updated with new information, or old information newly unearthed, producing a new edition of their Leon Trotsky Bibliography several times a year.

The breadth and depth of information available on the site is rendered less intimidating by the clear and helpful format.  You can check up on pretty much anything here, from Trotsky’s genealogy and pseudonyms to the contents of relevant archival collections (including the Lubitz’ extensive personal Trotskyana collection) and the location of useful research facilities all over the world.  There are also direct links to works both by and about Trotsky.

It goes without saying that this site is a treasure trove for any scholar of Trotsky or Trotskyism.  But it’s also very accessible: Wolfgang and Petra Lubitz provide abundant guidance in the form of introductory notes, and the Picture Gallery section is full of interesting and sometimes surprising material.  If you have any interest in getting to know Trotsky, I would advise visiting this site post-haste.

Wolfgang Lubitz Q&A

How did you first discover Trotsky?

I learnt about Trotsky when a school boy of 17, in the year 1968, first by reading the fascinating Isaac Deutscher trilogy (in German translation by Harry Maor) and by browsing through Trotsky’s “My life” and “Revolution betrayed” (both in German translation, too) These works and perhaps all the many other books by and about Trotsky deeply and sustainably influenced me and at the same time gave me a lifelong immunisation against capitalism and Stalinism (whether with or without a “human face”) .

When did you first begin to work on the bibliography?

I began collecting works about Trotsky and about the movement(s) which he created and inspired  around 1970, more intensively since 1977. My work with the “Trotsky bibliography” (and its forerunners, respectively) began in 1979. A first printed edition was published by a German publishing house in 1982. Since the work continued , another edition was published in 1988 and the third (and last one in printed form) in 1999. Since then I could intensify and perfectionate literature search and so on and a new field was opened up by the Internet and by the many possibilities created by automated data processing, data base systems and all that…

Why do you think people should engage with Trotsky now?

People (I mean those people who don’t consider capitalism as the “end of history” and who don’t consider the “real existing socialism” à la ex-USSR as an appropriate alternative) should study Trotsky because it was he who perhaps more than everybody else in the first half of the 20th century symbolized the very antithesis to both, i.e. on the one hand to capitalism which fouls the world up and which blesses this planet with enduring crises, hunger, world wars etc. and to Stalinism and all varieties of bureaucratic strangulation and anti-emancipatory tendencies within the workers and anti-imperialist movements. Since Trotsky was the very embodiment of the Russian revolution (both as the theoretician of permanent revolution and as the man of action) and since he was one of the most eminent and outstanding socialist thinkers in the tradition of Marx, Engels and Luxemburg in a time of decline (“Midnight of the century”), no one seeking genuine socialist answers on burning questions can ignore him. It goes without saying that working with Trotsky should always be done in a critical, not “orthodox”, quasi-religious way.

Many thanks, Wolfgang, for speaking to us today.

-oOo-

TROTSKY WEEK: CLOSING REMARKS

Kirsty McCluskey

I started to read Trotsky in my second year of University.  I believe the first thing I read was My Life, followed closely by The Year 1905 and Literature and Revolution.  I never did kick the Trotsky habit after that, but my relationship to him has evolved a great deal since then.

I started out as a fully signed-up, starry-eyed member of the Trotsky fan club.  I adored him.  I thought he understood everything, and was always ready to accord him the last, best word.  My supervisor, passing by as I sat by the departmental coffee machine re-reading My Life for the umpteenth time, was heard to remark: “You want to marry him, don’t you?  But you can’t.  He’s dead.”  (Thanks, Dr. Ward, for that dose of realism.)

When I subsequently decided to embark on a research project, of course it had to be about Trotsky.  This doomed the romance immediately.  You can’t maintain uncritical admiration for someone when you’re picking through their memoirs for omissions or getting in about their ghastly but interesting early journalism.  “She doesn’t want to marry him anymore,” said my supervisor to a colleague, “so her analysis has got a lot better.”

It goes without saying that this was a useful development.  Adulation is the enemy of good research.  It’s also very boring.  But the flip side of healthy academic detachment is that it becomes too easy to lose sight of the equally healthy enthusiasm that prompted the study in the first place.  Faced with the everyday drudgeries of research, the problems thrown up by the sources and hostile or judgmental responses from outside – and sometimes inside – the field, it’s easy to become jaded.  It’s also easy – and tempting – to become contrarian, defining yourself against the worst excesses of idolatry or vilification.  To maintain an independent position in the face of an ideological onslaught is both intellectually necessary and extremely hard.  To remember why you are doing so in the first place can be even harder.

In putting together this Trotsky Week for Vulpes Libris, my aim was very simple.  I wanted to get back to the appeal of Trotsky; his capacity to engage and enthuse.  Because if one thing is clear from the clamour of approving and angry voices around Robert Service’s recent biography (which has been so comprehensively taken apart – notably by Sheila Fitzpatrick in the LRB – that I have no need to review it here), it is that people still care about Trotsky.  Seventy years after his death and almost twenty after the fall of the USSR, he can still cause an uproar.

If we can take one conclusion from this week’s posts, it must be that this uproar is entirely warranted.  Whether you see Trotsky as a political figure, as a writer and commentator or as a historical actor – or any combination of these – his importance is undeniable.  He demands engagement, discussion, debate.  And he deserves study.

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to this week’s contributors – Geoffrey Swain, Ian Thatcher, Michael Carley, Chris Ward, Wolfgang Lubitz and Tariq Ali – for their generosity and candour, not to mention their time.   Talking to them has been an eye-opening experience for this fledgling researcher (not Trotskyist, but most definitely Trotskyish).

On that note, it’s time I handed Vulpes Libris back to the other Foxes, who have a stunning month of audiobook-related pieces starting on Monday.  Check in tomorrow for details of Week 1.  Many thanks for reading!

This 1936 photo of Trotsky at his desk comes from the Marxists Internet Archive.

Today’s guest contributor, Tariq Ali, is a writer, activist and political commentator.  A leading figure of the Trotskyist movement in the sixties and seventies, Ali’s engagement with Trotsky goes far beyond party politics.  I met up with him at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where he was presenting his new novel Night of the Golden Butterfly, to talk about old friends… and new strategies.

Tariq Ali in Edinburgh

You mentioned in Street Fighting Years that you first read Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky when you were ill in bed (and I wish I hadn’t known the rather TMI details of that… you’ve scarred me for life).  How, then, did you begin to read Trotsky?  What was your first contact with him?

After reading the Deutscher trilogy, I was just quite naturally drawn to read the writings of the subject of this amazing  biography, which has no precedent.  There’s nothing quite like it.  So then I read My Life, Trotsky’s own account of his life, which is beautifully written and almost reads like high quality fiction.  The literary quality of Trotsky appealed to me enormously.  Then I started reading his other writings.  For my generation he was very important, because he offered us an alternative to a system which we could see even then wasn’t working and was going very wrong.  It was reading him which finally led me to become a Trotskyist for that period of the sixties and seventies.  Ernest Mandel was another leading figure.  The strange thing was that one met people in that period who knew or had direct links with the Bolsheviks, and so it was like we were just continuing that tradition.  But Trotsky himself always stayed with me, and the prescience of some of his analyses… when I think back on it, in the book which he called What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?, which was mistranslated as The Revolution Betrayed – a very sober book – he said that, in the future, either the Soviet Union will move and advance and become a socialist democracy; or there will be a regression and it will revert to capitalism, and many of today’s bureaucrats will become tomorrow’s millionaires.  And his opponents said, “this is just crazy stuff”.  No-one else ever thought so far ahead and in that way.  He had a very fine mind, and I guess it was his qualities as an intellectual and as a revolutionary which combined to create this appeal, certainly for me, and for lots other people who were coming of age in the sixties as well.

So it was a natural progression for you to become a Trotskyist in that period?

In that period, certainly, because how could one not? The choices were limited.   And then slowly one realised that Trotsky was one thing, but many of the Trotskyist groups were something quite different. It was in response to one of these that Trotsky himself had declared “I’m not a Trotskyist”.

Since the sixties, which you wrote about so eloquently in Street Fighting Years, how has your relationship to Trotsky evolved?

People sometimes ask me: are you still a Trotskyist?  And I say no, because I’m not a member of any of those organisations.  I think most of them are pretty clapped out, to be honest.   But I say I am still Trotsky-ish, because the impact he had on me intellectually and many of his ideas have stayed with me, and the fact that we are going through a big, big period of defeat is something he knew very well.  Most of his life was lived like that.  So I find a lot in him still.  Sometimes when I pick up some essay of his which I haven’t read for twenty, twenty-five years and re-read it, I learn something again.  It’s quite, quite amazing.

You know, the thing about him was that he was incredibly contemptuous of fools; and it was a problem for him, because if you look at the Bolshevik Party there were lots of idiots in it, and he had no time for them.  These are the guys who finally mobilised against him.  The notion I used to love that he’s sitting in a Politburo meeting, he can’t bear the level of discussion, and he takes out a novel by Balzac or Stendhal and reads it.  It’s a very arrogant thing to do, but somehow it’s quite admirable.  So my attitude to him remains that he’s a central figure of the twentieth century – intellectually, politically, as a revolutionary – and his work will endure.  There are books which are now being written to rubbish him by professional Cold War historians, who hated the fact that there was one Bolshevik who understood the system better than they did at the time when they were sucking up to it, and are now writing books just to prove that nothing good came out of it: that they were all evil, all the same.  No difference between Lenin and Stalin, no difference between Trotsky and Stalin.  For [Robert] Service, Stalin might even have been better on some levels. And for many conservatives it was the same. Stalin was someone they could do business with, and did, and prospered and, small mercy, he wasn’t a Jew…  After all, Stalin scrupulously kept his side of the bargain after the Second World War. For his own people he was a disaster. Yevtushenko’s poem about doubling and trebling the guards at his grave spoke for many at the time.  I don’t take this Service stuff too seriously.  It’s an ideological fashion.  It comes nowhere near to doing what Deutscher did, really.  It’s not that Deutscher was totally uncritical, either, but he just… lifted that whole experience to a higher level.  The fashion now is to say that everything that happened in that period and in that time was altogether bad. I don’t accept that and never will. It belongs to the school of historians who worship accomplished facts and ignore the possibilities that are inherent in many situations. The French Revolution suffered the same fate, so that in Paris today there is a Metro station called Stalin, but no Rue Robespierre.

In your view, is this limited to academia or does it reflect a wider change in attitudes to Trotsky?

I think it’s restricted to academia.  The rest of the world, or the young generation, doesn’t particularly think about any of that.  That is the tragedy.  This is essentially designed within the academy, for academics making a name for themselves and showing that they are loyal servitors of the state and its needs, and no alternatives are to be permitted at all. There have been some other books too – equally bad – by younger academics, which I couldn’t even read.  They stayed on my desk but I didn’t look at them.

There’s a movement – Slavoj Žižek comes to mind – about “reloading” Lenin.  Do you think there’s a case to “reload” Trotsky as someone who should be read by a younger generation?

I think he certainly should be.  Žižek can’t do it because he’s never read any Trotsky.  What Žižek does brilliantly, which is quite funny: he shocks the bourgeoisie, he’s a contrarian in the real sense of  the word.  So he picks up Lenin, whom everyone hates, who is seen by the mainstream as a criminal and a murderer, and he picks him up and forces the reader to confront his ideas.  But, in fact, someone should do a similar exercise for Trotsky as well, before too long. We’re thinking about it at Verso.

Hilary Mantel’s novel on Robespierre was very good, I thought. Decades ago Alan Brien wrote a less successful and less accomplished novel on Lenin. It didn’t work, but the intention was good.

I can understand that perhaps in the sixties the link between what Trotsky was describing and what you were seeing was more direct.  But how do you think Trotsky should be approached now?  What is directly relevant, and what is more symbolic or encouraging of debate?

I think his History of the Russian Revolution remains one of the best accounts by a participant of a revolutionary upheaval.  His autobiography, his essays, his way of looking at the world globally, analysing the trends in that world, predicting the triumph of Fascism in Germany, warning the Jews of the fate that awaited them if Hitler triumphed: nobody else was writing with such lucidity at the time. This is something people could learn from today. Trotsky’s writings on how Fascism in Germany could be defeated are a very important corrective to sectarian ways of thinking.   The phase where he was mainly involved in arguing against one group of sectarians or another is not the most interesting thing about him. It was a period of defeat and it was not his forte. Trotsky’s intellectual strength exploded when it came into contact with mass social movements. His writings on the Jewish question are not without interest.  That’s a book which should be brought to light, because it’s very relevant.  He was the only thinker on the Left who understood that, in order to defeat Fascism, you have to unite with the Social Democrats and Liberals: make a real front to defeat it.  That is something which is almost relevant today, even though there are no Social Democrats left… This whole business of constructing little sects around leaders is very depressing, really, and it would be sad if this were the only legacy.

When I spoke to Geoffrey Swain earlier, he mentioned Trotsky’s work on economic planning in relation to South America.  Do you think that Trotsky would now be writing about South America, if he were active?  Would he see this as something of interest, where his ideas about planning could be useful?

Yes, without any doubt.  But the thing is: Trotsky would argue for taking control of the state and the state apparatuses, and that hasn’t happened. So what you have in South America today, using Trotsky’s own language is a situation of dual power.  You have these elected governments based on the masses; but the army remains the spinal cord of the state, and that army hasn’t been crushed or defeated or transformed.  So I think that’s what he would argue.  But in terms of giving advice on how to plan, etc., some of his writings are actually very good.

You spoke earlier about My Life as a literary artefact.  Has Trotsky influenced you, too, as a reader and writer – on a literary level?

There are some influences, but one can only aspire to write like him.  And, you know, we come from totally different generations.  English for me, anyway, is a second language; Trotsky wrote in Russian.  I think some of his ways of seeing the world have remained with me, but I don’t even try to write like him.  One can’t mimic that even if one wants to.  It used to be very funny to me, in the sixties, how people in some of the sects used to talk, trying to mimic Lenin and Marx and Trotsky in everyday debates, as if we were debating on the same level or the stakes were the same. And then mimicking how to remove dissidents and oppositionists from within their tiny organisations. For some this became an art-form: trials, expulsions, denunciations. Very bad art, of course. I never took it seriously at the time.  I did parody some of this stuff in one of my early novels, which made me very unpopular, but I just felt it had to be done and I don’t regret doing it.

The ongoing Trotskyist tradition in the UK… thinking about the distinction you drew earlier between Trotskyist and Trotskyish, what advice would you give these groups now?  What do you think they need to change in their relationship to Trotsky?

Well, I think it is slowly happening.  These great thinkers from the past – Marx or Lenin, Trotsky or Gramsci – all of them were important, and all of them offer stuff we can learn from, but none of them should be treated like gods.  That was a big, big problem in the Communist and Trotskyist movements: their style was very religious.  It was as if a quote from Marx or a quote from Trotsky was enough to settle the debate.  To be honest, I was never totally impressed by that even when I was a member, and now I’m not impressed by it at all.  People have to learn to argue on the merits of the arguments of those opposed to anything to do with the Left, and find ways of debating with them.  And they now have to do it, because all the references which were common in the sixties and seventies, and even in the eighties to a certain extent, have gone.  They’ve just gone.  So one can’t argue like that, although it was a very common style of argument.  “We are going to do this because Trotsky said it here”.  And then someone would go and find a different quote from Trotsky to prove the opposite; and the same with Marx.  It’s not a good way to argue, it’s a religious way, and these were not religious people.  On the contrary, they argued against all that and that style of doing things.  I think that this is a process which started with Stalin’s speech at Lenin’s funeral.  “We vow to thee, Comrade Lenin”… and you know, it’s sad.  I think one of the big problems with Trotsky’s own evolution is that, because he was constantly being accused of not being a Leninist, he himself became a sort of semireligious Leninist; whereas he had very real and accurate criticisms of Lenin in the past.  I always felt, and now I really feel it, that this was a real, real tragedy for that man.  Such a powerful intellect.  He must have known the mistakes they made and how these mistakes could or should have been avoided, but didn’t dare say it for fear of what his political opponents would do with it.  That must have been torture for him and I think, being who he was, he was very, very aware of that.

Imagine then a young person or, indeed, a person of any age, politically aware, discovering Trotsky and being inspired by him.  What would your advice to that person be now?  How can we be activist on that basis?

Well, I think you have to be activists who learn from many different traditions.  Certainly from Trotsky and Gramsci and Lenin; and Marx, for that matter.  One can learn a great deal from these great thinkers, but to put any of them on a pedestal is just wrong.  We have to create something new.  It can’t be totally new, because we can’t ignore the past and our history, but there are certain things which have to be done in a different way.  And that style of political organisation without any serious debates or discussions, where minorities are booted out, expelled… it was a parody in the sixties and seventies, but today it’s just a joke.  I really think that young people are not attracted to that at all.  What you’ve asked me is not an easy question, because the honest answer is that I am not 100 percent sure myself what the best way is to go about it.  But what I do know is that the old style is the wrong way to go.

Perhaps, as Deutscher said, sometimes one needs to retreat to one’s watchtower.

I think that’s very important, and Marx said it as well after the defeats of 1848.  You go, you think, you write.  But you can’t totally stop being active.  When atrocities happen, people make war, people are killed, you can’t stay still.  At the same time, I think one has to be hard headed.  When you look at those papers produced by far left groups… who can read them?  I mean, they’re little more than internal bulletins. Any serious Left that emerges from the ruins of the 20th century will have to both learn and unlearn. Otherwise much better to become a fishmonger than a dogmatic, religious-style leftist.

Tariq Ali has written a number of books about socialism and Communism, including his political memoir Street Fighting Years, Redemption (a satire on the Trotskyist movement), Trotsky for Beginners, Fear of Mirrors and The Idea of Communism. For more information, visit his official website.

Chris Ward is Senior Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge.  His contagious enthusiasm for Trotsky’s writing kick-started my own Trotsky obsession (so now you know who to blame).  I caught up with him recently to talk about the man himself, his literary merit and a few crucial results and prospects.

First of all, I’d like to ask you the obvious question: how did you discover Trotsky?

Many, many years ago, when I started to become interested in left wing politics and Russian history.  It’s as straightforward as that.  Anyone who is interested in these things (or was… it wouldn’t be quite the same today, but certainly in the 1960s and 1970s) couldn’t really avoid coming across him.

Which of his works did you read first?

I think the History of the Russian Revolution was the first thing.

In your lectures at Cambridge you were always eloquent about Trotsky’s literary merit.  What is it for you about Trotsky’s authorial voice that is so interesting?  What makes him different?

Well, most of the revolutionary intelligentsia are not great stylists.  Most of them are monomaniacs who write wholly about Party affairs.  Even Lenin, really.  Everything is refracted through Party affairs.  So the first thing that’s attractive about Trotsky is the breadth of his intellectual interests.  He’s interested, as you know, in all kinds of things.  He’s very interested in literature, very curious about other cultures.  Like all Marxists, he’s interested in history.  But although all this is refracted through Marxism, it isn’t quite as dogmatic – in fact, nothing like as dogmatic – as the other luminaries of the Bolshevik party; most of whom are, with the exception of perhaps Lenin and Lunacharskii, pretty narrow minded and often rather poorly educated.

So, for you, it’s the breadth of Trotsky’s interests and his stylistic abilities that distinguish him?

Yes.  If you look at something like the little essay he wrote after he was sentenced to Siberian exile in 1906 for his brief participation in the Petrograd Soviet, it’s a wonderful travelogue.  He has an eye for detail and he’s interested in everything he sees around him.  If you take someone like Lenin, for example, who spent most of his life abroad, you will search in vain for any vignettes of life on the Paris streets or what it’s like being in Vienna.  There’s just nothing there. He’s absolutely focussed on Party affairs and he doesn’t seem to notice other things in the same way.  Well, he certainly doesn’t.  Whereas Trotsky does notice these things, and manages to bring them to life.

Clearly you’re of the opinion that people should be reading Trotsky now.  Where would you recommend they start?

I would probably start with those essays written after 1905.  Then, if they want to tackle something longer, certainly History of the Russian Revolution, which is just full of wit and interest and lots of asides.

Somebody like Trotsky, precisely because of this very persuasive voice of his, poses a certain amount of historiographical problems.  For you, what are the challenges of working with Trotsky?

Well, he’s just wrong so many times!  He’s very, very strong, I think, when he’s at the height of his powers; when he’s confident and in command of the situation.  So that would be around 1905-1907, and then of course again when he’s at the peak of his influence in 1917-1921.  When he’s writing about that, it’s always interesting.  When you start to get into the later, more turgid stuff, which is really only of interest to specialists – his attempts to form a Fourth International, the arcane quarrels over the Chinese Revolution, his prognosis for revolution in the West – his style seems to desert him.  And he’s just wrong anyway, and to work out why he’s wrong you need to be a specialist; you need to know what it is that he’s getting wrong.  He isn’t always dreadful.  There are some wonderful passages in What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? But it’s much more fitful than his work that’s concentrated in the revolutionary period, when he’s recounting what’s going on, or his travelogues.  There’s also his journalism, some of which I’ve seen, some of which I haven’t, which is very interesting too.  But again it’s very topical and ephemeral, and perhaps wouldn’t be so interesting to a wider readership.

Do you think there are passages in Trotsky which are directly relevant to our political lives today?

That’s very hard to say.  If you take one single work, no, there aren’t.  But scattered throughout all the things I’ve mentioned are astonishing observations on human nature, or history, or the nature of politics, which would strike a chord in any age.  Just as if you were looking at a classical writer who might say something about the Roman Empire or the nature of power.  These things are always interesting, but it’s hard to pinpoint a single thing.  He was very much a man – like all men and women – of his time, and he was writing primarily about the things that were going on around him.

I suppose that’s an answer to the tendency that I’ve certainly seen, both in activism and in academia, to regard Trotsky as a fixed value.

It’s a pointless game, but we often do it.  I don’t know what he would be like now; I don’t even know if he’d be a Marxist.  If he had the same power, his mordant comments on contemporary politics would no doubt be just as lively as his comments on his own time.  But he was wrong: there wasn’t an international revolution, the kind of Communism he espoused didn’t turn out to be one that would sweep over Europe, and so on.  He was prescient about some things, the Nazi-Soviet war for example, but so were many, many other people.  It wasn’t a unique observation on his part that these two powers would set about each other sooner or later.

For you, then, is it perhaps more useful to see Trotsky as a writer, as an observer… as a historian?

Yes.  I think that, as a journalistic commentator on the world in which he found himself, he’s head and shoulders above any other member of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia.  Perhaps Sukhanov would be an equal; but certainly no other Bolshevik.  As a historian, I think that the sweep of History of the Russian Revolution bears comparison with Winston Churchill’s World Crisis; but it’s much better, because World Crisis isn’t informed by a theory.  There isn’t a proper theoretical structure: it’s just narrative. Whereas Trotsky has a strong theoretical structure – rightly or wrongly, it doesn’t matter – which gives the narrative enormous drive and a real shape.

Has Trotsky been useful to you in your work on Stalin and Stalinism?

Oh, of course.  Nobody could seriously tackle this stuff, even if one were hostile to Trotsky, without reading him.  He was there; he had so much to say.  Look at some of the theories that he generated: permanent revolution, but even more so the theory of Thermidorean reaction and the idea of a kind of bureaucratic ossification.  It may be oversimplistic. It may be the case that, as Max Weber suggested, bureaucracy was (from his point of view at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th) the future, and the idea that there could be a kind of anarchistic world was impossible.  But Trotsky’s idea of the bureaucratic deformation of the Soviet Union, even if you wouldn’t want to use that particular lexicon, is very, very suggestive and it’s very difficult – well, it would be wrong – to try to understand the Soviet Union without paying serious attention to what Trotsky had to say about it.

Since Trotsky has been a useful tool to you in your academic work, how has your relationship to him evolved over the course of your time as a Soviet historian?

Well, that’s about forty years now, isn’t it?  I would say that he has become much, much more a historical figure who has less to say about our world; but that’s because culture has changed as well.  Trotsky was very much a part of activism in the sixties and seventies, but it’s a long time ago now.  Trotsky is a figure like Robespierre or Cromwell or indeed Lenin, who are now firmly located historically.  That huge crisis coming out of the First World War, which then played itself out in the formation of the Soviet Union – that particular crisis, not all crises, of course – is now past. It’s gone.  It’s reconfigured in a way that Trotsky didn’t anticipate.  Well, he slightly anticipated it.  He did say that, if the Soviet Union remained isolated as a socialist power, it would eventually degenerate into capitalism.  But I don’t think he has anything to say to us directly about a modern political situation, except insofar as he makes striking comments, as many writers have done throughout history, about the nature of power, of politics and of revolution.  But as a guide to revolutionary activity, I think, he’s not a living figure any more than Robespierre is.

Do you have any last words for our readers today?  What would you suggest to them?

Well, just read him!  Just read him, because, as I already said at the beginning of this little interview, compared to some of the turgid writing of other revolutionaries he’s very lively.  He’s very, very funny, and he will just sweep you away on a wonderful narrative journey, with all kinds of asides about the contemporaries and situations he sees around him.  He has a lot to say to anybody who’s interested in late 19th and early 20th century socialism.

Chris Ward is the author of Stalin’s Russia in the Hodder Reading History series.

Join us tomorrow as Kirsty talks revolution, reductionism and reaction with Tariq Ali.

Like God and Orwell, Marx and Trotsky never enter an argument on any side other than that of the person introducing them. ‘Marx teaches us …’ is as clear an invitation to close the door as ‘Welcome Jesus into your life’. Like Jesus, however, neither Karl Marx nor Leon Trotsky should be blamed for those who knock on doors and preach their gospel.

The Trotskyist trend in European politics has long been an anglophone phenomenon: countries with strong Communist parties, such as France and Italy, had Trotskyist fringe groups of no great influence compared to the PC, although Trotskyist groups in France have recently taken a modest share of the vote. In Britain, and to a lesser degree Ireland, the major groups claiming Trotsky in their family tree, the Socialist Workers Party and the Militant Tendency (now the Socialist Party), have had an influence far greater than their numbers should have allowed them. The SWP was a major player in the anti-Fascist movement of the 1970s, while the Militant claims much of the credit for the anti-poll tax movement which led to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher. Today, the SWP is in the process of tearing itself apart, after involvement in a number of failed electoral alliances, while the Militant, after expulsion from the Labour Party in the 1980s, is a small, though unsplit, group with a number of elected officials in local politics and in the trade union movement. (Declaration of interest: I am a member.) The influence of other groups of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the International Marxist Group, is more diffuse but important in journalism, general campaigning and the universities. Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Robin Blackburn and others started their activism on the Trotskyist left of the late sixties and early seventies.

The various groups on the British Trotskyist left share certain positions which can be traced back to Trotsky: the orthodox Marxist view that revolutionary change is necessary; hostility to the Labour party, even on the part of those groups inside it; a distrust of other groups on, or claiming to be on, the left. Most of these positions can be found in some form in Leon Trotsky on Britain, containing his 1925 book, Where is Britain Going?, and some supplementary material: a series of articles on Britain written in 1925 and 1926, responses to the book from the press and figures such as Bertrand Russell and J. Ramsay MacDonald and writings from 1926-8 under the heading ‘After the General Strike’.

The first pleasure of the book, if you are expecting ‘running dogs’ and dreary Communist Party boilerplate (never done better than in Attilla the Stockbroker’s farewell to Mickey Finn of T-Rex) is how sharp it is. If the translation gets him right, Trotsky is a polemicist writing to excite an audience. He writes like a platform speaker, of the kind common in the days before politics became a game of mirrors played on television. His portraits of the leading British politicians of the time remain a pleasure to read, and easily adapted for other purposes: his objection to Ramsay MacDonald’s wearing court dress to meet the King is that the clothes match the politics of accommodation and gradual change that is no change at all.

A further joy is that this prophet prophesied: in a discussion of ‘England’s decline’, America is showing England her place at every step: on the one hand, by the methods of diplomatic pressure; on the other, by measures of a banking nature, always and everywhere a pressure of America’s gigantic economic preponderance. ["Thanks to Churchill'', writes the conservative Daily Express, "England falls under the heel of American bankers.''] Taking a clear view of the factual facts, Trotsky has seen how things are going and says so. We could imagine him seeing the ‘banking crisis’ years before it happened. Six years before the National Government, he could write of Ramsay MacDonald, and others, that even a slight acquaintance with their qualities ‘is quite sufficient to prove to us how catastrophically the contradictions between the demands of the masses and the obtuse conservatism of the leading upper circles of the Labour Party will grow, particularly if this party should come to power again.’ Indeed, with the possible exception of the Attlee government, which only points up the contrast with the rest, we might say this of most Labour leaders, and especially of the last two.

Polemic from the past can be entertaining, but that is not usually a good enough reason for reading it. Even Swift needs footnotes to be fun. Trotsky’s pamphleteering remains worth our consideration because so little has changed. His targets in Where is England Going? are the leaders of the Labour party and of the labour movement, who can be relied upon to betray their followers once they get a whiff of the appearance of power. Real power is in the hands of the bankers and any emancipatory project, whether or not it be revolutionary Communism, must take account of the real balance of forces. Reality may be brutal but self-delusion is worse.

In the last few years, as Labour has abandoned even social democracy, senior members have encouraged the banks and the financial services ‘industry’ to drag us into the hole we are in, and enrich themselves while doing it. It is not going too far to say that we are in a recession because social democrats stopped thinking of socialism and the renegade Trots in the cabinet threw out their old pamphlets. It is possible to now feel some sympathy for Gordon Brown, chronicler of Red Clydeside, if he is taking the time to look back on where he started and on what he became.

You need not have any sympathy with Trotsky, or Trotskyism, to enjoy reading his work, or to appreciate the insight. The curse of a prophet is to see his polemic turned into doctrine and his principles into metaphors, but we still have the original, unfiltered source. Trotsky was right, before the fact, about many things and his observations remain sound, as long as we do not try to make facile equations between past and present. The clarity of his expression is the clarity of his thought: ‘as radical as reality itself’.

Leon Trotsky on Britain, Pathfinder Press, ISBN 0-87348-850-4

Ian D. Thatcher is Professor in History at the University of Ulster, Coleraine. He previously worked at the universities of Auckland, Glasgow, Leicester, and Brunel. His interest in Trotsky goes back to his undergraduate dissertation, Perspectives on Stalinism: A Critical Assessment (1987). It continues to the present day with articles on Trotsky and Lenin’s Funeral, History, 2009 and on the Mezhraionka in Slavonic and East European Review, 2009.

How did you first discover Trotsky?

As part of O-level history that we studied at school between the ages of 14-16. I was so taken with the study of the Russian revolution. This was partly because my home town of Middlesbrough was suffering from the newly elected and much hated in my area Thatcher government. To be a socialist at that time meant an interest in the Russian Revolution that was still seen as the alternative to capitalism. I devoured the school texts and Miss Rowley, my History teacher, would send additional readings to my home address. Trotsky stood out for me as a Bolshevik who still believed in socialism even though the regime in Russia had exiled him. This intrigued me: a socialist alternative to the horrors of the Gulag. I had to learn more.

What are the particular rewards and challenges of working on Trotsky?

Trotsky is such a challenge because he wrote on just about everything – culture, high and low, economics, politics, society, international relations, the Russian and world workers’ movement. It is hard to keep up with him; one has to read very broadly to try to reconstruct his intellectual outlook. Here I recognise my limitations – I would love to know German, Polish, French, Latvian, Lithuanian at least! The rewards are immense though, even working mainly in Russian. I saw a real potential to re-evaluate Trotsky just by undertaking the basic task of trying to read all of his writings chronologically. It seemed to me that current studies had started at the other end and projected backwards. This gave a dominance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks that was not necessarily there and relegated Trotsky’s works that did not touch upon Bolshevik themes. There was the need to overcome both Trotskyist and Stalinist domination of Trotsky’s life and thought. I think that I have been able to shed new or fresh light on Trotsky’s career. The cost is lots of abuse! I am a little concerned that some see me as an anti-Trotsky scholar.

What are the criticisms you most consistently hear of your work, and from
which quarters?

The most vocal criticisms come from the Trotskyist left. The late Al Richardson of Revolutionary History wrote in a review that one should not write on historical characters one does not like. This contains many assumptions, including that I do not admire Trotsky and/or did not before I decided to spend considerable time trying to outline his thought. There are a host of Trotskyist groups who target my work. David North wrote a pamphlet attacking myself and Geoffrey Swain. I have not read it but friends who have tell me that I should take legal action. I prefer to ignore it. Within academia one comes across very odd statements. Paul Blackledge of Leeds Met University who writes on Marxism and History said my analysis of Trotsky as historian was confused since despite my criticisms I still declare Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to be essential reading. Well, one can think of something as flawed but compelling!

How has your perspective on Trotsky evolved in the course of your career?

My view on Trotsky has to be qualified by the statement that I do not consider myself to have ever captured the ‘whole’ Trotsky. I deliberately limited my ‘biography’ to a ‘political life’. This is partly because I consider Trotsky to have been an essentially political animal, and also because it is his thought that interests me most. In this sense the ‘evolution’ has involved a deepening of my acquaintance with Trotsky as thinker, as political analyst. The most striking thing is how his thought deteriorates as the 1930s progress. Everything is put into pre-determined categories. The writing is wooden and dull compared to earlier works. This is partly to be explained by the circumstances in which Trotsky is living and working. It is also an inability, refusal(?), to come to terms with the recent past, with what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. Viktor Serge commented on this in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Indeed I doubt whether biographers have presented a rounder Trotsky than Serge’s portrait.

Why do you think people should study Trotsky now – indeed, do you think they should?

If anyone has a keen interest in the history of the Russian Revolution, of the twentieth century, and the politics of Marxism, then Trotsky is still essential reading. I was struck, for example, by how modern scholarship on the 1905 Revolution confirms much of what Trotsky wrote at the time. It has never been my interest or task, and some see this as a real weakness, to try to apply Trotsky’s thought to the modern world.

Which work by Trotsky would you recommend to someone starting out?

For all of its flaws, I would still suggest the autobiography, My Life. It contains a insight into the young Trotsky and of the making of the man – the emphasis on the mind, the superiority of town over village, and a burning sense of self-worth as the champion of the oppressed. One cannot imagine Stalin ever producing such prose!

Ian Thatcher is the author of Trotsky (Routledge Historical Biographies).

Join us again tomorrow as Michael Carley reviews Leon Trotsky on Britain.

Hello and welcome to Trotsky Week!  By way of opening proceedings, I took my trusty voice recorder off to Glasgow University and asked Professor Geoffrey Swain to tell us why he studies Trotsky… and why he thinks Trotsky should be studied.

GS: There’s a difference between why I study Trotsky and why I think other people should study Trotsky, and I’m not sure how you reconcile the two.  Why I got interested in Trotsky was the mis-match between his post-revolutionary career and his pre-revolutionary career, and an ambition to see if the two could be matched up.  Before the Revolution, you have someone who is often described as a Menshevik; although he is not entirely a Menshevik, particularly on the issue of cooperating with Liberals.  But he has these huge clashes with Lenin.  And then suddenly, in the 1920s, he becomes the most loyal Leninist disciplinarian, particularly in exile, enforcing all this rigid party discipline; which is one of the mainstays of the various Trotskyist groups which have evolved and still exist, and still occasionally taunt people who write about Trotsky.

That apparent contradiction of someone who is lax on organisational questions and then hard on organisational questions, an apparent Menshevik and then the leading revolutionary… how do you match that up?  And that’s what interested me.  That’s why I started writing my biography.   My theory is that I do reconcile that in the book, but maybe others disagree.

So that’s what interested me, but why other people should be interested in Trotsky… I think now, for some of his writings of the 1920s, when he’s talking about the transition from capitalism to socialism.  Not the writings where he’s attacking Stalin and Bukharin, but when he’s still got some say in economic matters, and he’s thinking about how you get a planning system up and running.  And those articles of 1925-26 – by 1927 I suppose we’re getting into attacks -  when he’s posing the question of how you begin to accumulate, and direct, and plan; I think that these are interesting,  and often, when you look at them closely, far more flexible than they are portrayed.   The debates about planning in the 1920s tend to be caricatured as “Trotsky wants planning, and Bukharin and Stalin don’t”, but in fact there’s an awful lot of common ground.  Trotsky is always happy to combine elements of the market with planning in the transition period; he always sees that transition period as long-lasting, and there is a continuity when he starts to criticise Stalin’s zigzag policy.  If you look at some of the stuff Trotsky writes in the early 1930s, when he’s calling for Stalin’s policies to be moderated, he’s actually getting quite close to some of those writings of the 1920s.  As a theorist of how planning and the market can be developed, and a market economy gradually replaced by one that has more and more planning elements to it, I think he has a lot of things that are still of interest.  Perhaps only in Latin America these days, but nevertheless I think there are interesting things there for everybody who thinks in a vaguely socialist framework.

KM:  What would you recommend as a first point of contact with Trotsky’s writings?

GS: I would still recommend that people begin with his autobiography because it is such a captivating study, although obviously what he says at certain times does not entirely coincide with what happened: it’s his interpretation of what happened.  The strengths of it are in the emergence of his ideas, the power of his ideas, the description of his time in emigration and escaping from exile, his role during the Revolution and Civil War… that’s inspirational, and I think it’s still that which gets people interested in Trotsky and revolutionary ideas.  I think that you couldn’t begin with the economic problems of the 1920s, and you couldn’t really begin with his work on the Civil War.  When you look back at most of his writings on the Civil War – and very often all sorts of things that he wrote – written down, they sound rather banal.   You have to imagine the rhetoric.  So, many of his writings are not where I’d begin.   If someone wants to get a sense of who Trotsky was, I would go back to the obvious thing and that seems to be his autobiography.  Not the History of the Russian Revolution, because there you have far more problems of his own interpretation confusing what actually happened, but the autobiography gives you a sense of the man and his interests.

Many thanks, Geoffrey, for speaking to us and opening the floor for this week’s debate.  Tomorrow Kirsty asks Professor Ian Thatcher about Trotsky, critics and challenges.

Geoffrey Swain is the author of Trotsky in the Longman Profiles in Power series.  You can see VL’s review here.

We’ll be talking about Trotsky every day this week as our contributors give their opinions on everything from Trotsky’s literary merit and ideological influence to the value – or otherwise – of his ideas about economic planning.  Join us every day for another perspective on one of the most fascinating, eloquent and provocative characters in modern history.

On Monday, Geoffrey Swain opens the discussion with a few remarks about Trotsky.

On Tuesday, Ian Thatcher answer’s Kirsty’s questions about the rewards and challenges of being a Trotsky scholar.

On Wednesday, regular Bookfox Michael Carley reviews Leon Trotsky on Britain.

On Thursday, Kirsty speaks with Chris Ward about Trotsky’s literary value.

On Friday, in an exclusive interview, Tariq Ali tells us exactly what he thinks about Trotsky, Trotskyism and the tasks of the activist Left.

And on Saturday, Kirsty introduces a priceless resource for anyone interested in Trotsky – the Lubitz TrotskyanaNet – and gives her own closing remarks.

Trotsky’s 1915 passport photo courtesy of the Marxists Internet Archive.

This biography, timed to coincide with the seventieth birthday of Puffin Books, aims to tell us something of Kaye Webb, its most successful editor and her life outside publishing as well as her considerable successes in it. It is also, to some extent, a biography of Puffin itself.

Adults of a certain age, who grew up in the 1960s and 70s were a lucky lot, in at least one respect. We were the beneficiaries of an explosion in children’s literature. This was partly due to Kaye Webb’s work at Puffin, a paperback imprint which became synonymous with quality writing for children at an affordable price and a format that could go in a pocket or schoolbag. That this happened at a time when there was still a certain amount of snobbery in the book world regarding paperbacks is all the more impressive; Kaye Webb had to win over not only teachers and parents (most of whom will do anything if it encourages children to read) but also publishers and writers. Now, we tend to assume that they have their eyes on the bottom line; then, publishing was much more about prestige.

Valerie Grove paints a picture of a warm, energetic and intelligent woman who put her considerable talents into making a career out of what was then an underrated aspect of children’s emotional and intellectual development. Now, we are used to thinking of reading as pivotal in producing active citizens and productive workers; then, the subject was given little consideration. She did this at a time when working mothers were only acceptable if they worked part-time for low wages and out of the spotlight in a way that did not impinge on male sensibilities. She also did it in publishing, a world which was still, to a large extent, a gentleman’s club, at least in the UK.

Kaye Webb knew only too well that her career did not necessarily do much for her relationship with her husband, but given Ronald Searle’s experiences in the brutal Japanese P.O.W camp at Changi, perhaps nothing could have. He was and remains, a deeply complex man and the social side of the publishing business, with its hob-nobbing, and schmoozing must have been an ordeal for him. He was an artist (a not inconsiderable one, with his own toe-hold in children’s literature) which meant a lot of time alone. On top of that, a whole area of his life was unmentionable in polite society, which at that time meant everybody he knew. Their break-up caused Kaye considerable distress and a sense of failure that never really went away, despite her successes elsewhere in her life.
Children’s publishing at that time was not particularly engaged with life’s nastier aspects. The market for teenagers, where some of those issues might have been explored was still quite small and Kaye Webb was not particularly concerned with realism as such. Her priority when she took over as Puffin’s editor in 1961 was to build on its previous successes, but also shake off the must and fust in its culture. To begin with, she overturned her predecessor’s decision not to acquire the paperback rights for JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Eleanor Graham did not believe that The Hobbit was in keeping with Puffin’s mission to publish the best writing for young readers. Kaye Webb disagreed and under her watch, Puffin acquired a one year licence for The Hobbit.

Her overall philosophy on books for children was that fine writing was more important than fashionable concerns about gritty realism. She had a point, in that it led her to commission brilliant new writers, such as Alan Garner, Roald Dahl, Joan Aiken and Clive King. She acquired the paperback rights for established classics, by PL Travers, CS Lewis and Dodie Smith and she also brought on illustrators like Jan Pienkowski, Shirley Hughes and Quentin Blake, whose collaboration with Roald Dahl is one of Puffin’s great success stories. All of them are familiar names to those of us who grew up on Puffin books and their inclusion will greatly add to the pleasure of reading Valerie Grove’s study.

Grove also gives a lot of time and space to the Puffin Club and Puffin Post. In a time before the internet, they served a need for bookish children to have social networks of their own, the kind that did not depend on sociability, popularity and a bedroom full of the latest toys. The Puffin Club, which organised trips away for children, was of course, very middle-class; it depended on the parents of its young members having the money to send them to Lundy Island with a lot of other young Puffineers and a few adult helpers. But it was a home from home for geeks at a time when geekiness was largely frowned on and the sections discussing it are both hilarious and from a modern health and safety perspective, horrifying.

Although Kaye Webb’s personal life plays a major role in the narrative – it would hardly be a biography otherwise) I didn’t think it dominated to an unseemly, or intrusive degree. Grove is considerate and discreet in her dealings with Webb’s children and with Ronald Searle, who is still alive. However, I didn’t find the personal aspects of the biography as interesting as the publishing – both Webb’s early work as a journalist and her later work with Puffin. The nitty-gritty aspects of book culture in the 1960s, the many and complicated negotiations for paperback rights, the Puffin Club and the Puffin Annual (which gets a mention, but from my very biased point of view, not enough of one) were what made the book a good read for me.

There are omissions, some of them quite serious. Barbara Willard, one of Puffin’s bestselling writers gets more mentions in the text than her one entry in the index suggests. Less serious, but disappointing, is the fact that Grace Hogarth gets a mention as a publisher, but not for her status as a Puffin author. Also, those looking for a nostalgia-fest of familiar Puffin jackets will be disappointed as there are none. However, this can be catered to by Phil Baines’ Puffin By Design, which was also published this year and covers the period of Kaye Webb’s editorship very well.
Those who are interested in Kaye Webb’s life as a wife and mother and how she fitted these roles in with the demands of a full-time job at a time when that wasn’t the expectation will enjoy that side of the book most. I wonder though, if those who grew up at a time when children’s literature was flourishing will prefer that aspect of this very readable book and hanker for more of the same. I know I certainly did.

Viking Penguin, London. 2010. ISBN: 978-1-846-14200-0. 301pp

Jeremy Pauling is a bachelor with a passion for making sculptures out of odds and ends, and a terror of beautiful women. So, when his new lodger, Mary Tell, arrives, Jeremy is faced with a challenge he really can’t handle …

This is a quiet and lyrical novel which crept up on me and simply wouldn’t let go. I also have to say that it’s one of the most devastating and probably the best of the Anne Tyler novels I’ve read and I was weeping like a child at one or two moments throughout the story and then again at the end. Usually Tyler gives us some brightness and hope, but here she lets the difficulties and unhappy moments of life have their say, to the fullest effect. It’s powerful stuff, and I’m not usually one to weep, which just goes to show how darn powerful it is. After all, I thought Love Story was funny; but this is really not.

That said, there are lighter moments of pleasure in this multi-viewpoint book which are also well worth reading. I particularly loved the fact that Tyler had the courage to start off the novel with a family funeral and, far more importantly, with Amanda, Jeremy’s sister, who’s not a nice character at all, but who says some very rich and humorous things:

You hear people say at funerals, “How natural she looks! As though she were asleep.” And most of the time they are telling a falsehood, but in Mother’s case, it was absolutely true. Of course she looked natural; why not, when she went through life looking dead?

Amanda, though a nasty piece of work, does help to give us the outsider view – the context or environment where Tyler allows her two off-the-wall characters, Jeremy and Mary, to live – and we’re going to need that as the worlds of Mary and Jeremy are either offbeat or distinctly strange, in Jeremy’s case. Mind you, in a social context, what we see here in a novel set in the 1960s and early 1970s is the contrast of the old world view (Amanda) and the new changing mores (Mary), but even Mary has the new ways forced upon her due to circumstances and does not on the whole seek them out herself. We meet her as a runaway wife in the process of being deserted by another man, whilst all the time Jeremy is falling in love with her. Her voice is a very strong and achingly direct one and remains so throughout. Here she is recalling the time she met the man who would become her husband:

His kisses tasted of tobacco. I had never been kissed before and found it tiring; my neck ached and my mouth felt bruised. Drawing back from me, he would smile with his eyes half-veiled as if he had won some contest. I was the loser, and I didn’t even know I was in a contest.

In many ways, even though Jeremy, as one of the two main characters, has several sections to himself, this is a novel of the womenfolk. I didn’t feel entirely settled with Jeremy, though his sections are beautifully written and we see the inside world of mental illness and artistic genius very clearly. I suspect however that I’m supposed to feel edgy and strange (well, edgier and stranger than normal) as Jeremy is simply very odd and his worldview very unsettling:

That was the way his vision functioned: only in detail. Piece by piece. He had tried looking at the whole of things but it never worked out. He tried now, widening his eyes to take in the chilly white air below the skylight and the bare yellow plaster and splintery floors. The angles of the walls raced toward each other and collided. Gigantic hollow space loomed over him, echoing. The brightness made his lids ache.

In terms of the characters, I wasn’t really sure about the young girl, Olivia, as I felt she was too out-of-place in a novel which felt as if its focus was always on the older folk (though Mary is actually quite young in real terms). It’s also difficult as she’s introduced quite late on in the text and then isn’t seen again (much like the sister at the beginning though Olivia’s influence is less demanding) and I wondered if her section might have been better conveyed by elderly spinster Miss Vinton.

Speaking of which, I totally loved Miss Vinton, who has a heart for compassion and an astute eye for the ebbs and flows of the relationships between characters. Not only does she see things others don’t pick up on, but she tries to find ways to make them right again where they’ve gone wrong, in such a subtle way that no-one knows she’s doing it. I loved her, and would easily have welcomed several more sections in her viewpoint. And I can also of course very much sympathise with Miss Vinton’s thoughts about the necessity or not of company:

If you were to shake me awake in the middle of the night and say, “Quick, without thinking: What is the most important thing in the world?” I would say, “Privacy.” I know that’s not right; you don’t have to tell me. I know that the true answer is probably love, or understanding, or feeling needed – even for me. But I am telling you what comes to mind first, and that’s privacy. Sitting alone in a room reading a book, with no one to interrupt me. That is all I ever consciously wanted out of life.

Ah, a woman after my own heart indeed. But it’s the interplay between Mary and Jeremy that is the true centre of this book – the story of an unlikely but believable marriage of opposites, how it works, and how it does not, gripped my attention all the way through. Here is Jeremy just after he’s proposed, again:

“What hope do you have for a better life, if you keep on saying no to everything new?” But he was speaking mainly to himself now, offering himself consolation, and he had already turned to go. He saw the dining room lit into color from Mary’s doorway, a clump of dusty strawflowers turning orange on the table. Then her face appeared in his mind as it had looked at the moment of his turning – the smile fading, the eyes suddenly darker and more thoughtful. He turned back again. Mary took a breath, and he knew from the sudden shock and panic flooding through him that she was about to say yes.

Later in the novel, Mary’s final decisions about the relationship with Jeremy and what she does is both devastating and again totally believable, especially in the way Tyler shows how life-changing decisions are made not proactively but in reaction to other stimuli and without really wanting them to happen at all. Both when one looks at Mary and when one looks at Jeremy as well. These are two people drawn together by luck and timing and separated by the same.

Which is why the very downbeat and bleak ending is just so devastating. I’d invested time and energy in this story and it kept on making me think. In fact, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I still can’t. It’s one I can really recommend very highly indeed as quality Tyler but with a distinctively bitter and ultimately empty edge, but you do need to be emotionally strong in order to get the most out of it. Be prepared therefore, but do read it.

Celestial Navigation, Vintage 1996, ISBN: 0-09-948011-5

[Anne is a great admirer of any writers with Anne as a first name – spelled correctly of course – and only wishes she had as much style as The Great Tyler. For more edgy bitterness and despair, please click here.]

By Alan Cleaver

MY heart sank ever so slightly when I read that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger had found a new use for books – propping up his ebook.  Was this the death knell for the greatest invention ever? Was the product that had lasted for hundreds of years and helped mankind build civilization now doomed to nothing more than being a stand for iPads and Kindles?

I had visions of a whole new arts and crafts form being rolled out across the world. Just as LPs had been melted down into flower pots and ashtrays when the CD came along, I could see books being glued shut and varnished as decorative bookstands and table weights. Please God no.

Fortunately, having researched further and spoken to various ‘book experts’ I’ve changed my mind. Largely, it’s down to Doug Mitchell, book binder from the British Library, who helped me realise just how beautiful a book could be. Books can be bound by slapping some glue on the spine but they can also be lovingly crafted by hand. We’ve taken the book for granted for too long and it’s time to  rediscover this artform.

In mediaeval times, books were of such monetary and intellectual value that they were chained to the library. I wouldn’t want to return to the days when books only belonged to the elite but a return to books being as much works of art as they are a joy to possess is perhaps long overdue.

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” said William Morris and it strikes me that books can be both.

Perhaps the rot first set in when Allen Lane stood on Exeter station in 1935 and realised there were no good quality but cheaply-priced books available to buy. He launched Penguin books and sold them not just at bookshops but in railway stations, tobacconists and chain stories. It was a worthy goal – and a very successful one commercially – but the resultant flood of disposable cheap books (many of high quality) means we take them for granted.

And I was struck by something I stumbled upon the other day. It was a reference to an 18th century work by Cumbrian wizard Dr Fairer: The Book of Black Art.  A 19th century writer told how  “until very lately it was believed there was great danger in opening this book”. The idea that a book could be too dangerous to open made me immediately want a copy!  Sadly, it’s long since vanished without trace. But here was another element of books that we have lost: their magic.
I’ve always been very jealous of children’s books. I’ve stood in bookshops and glanced over the dreadfully dull bindings and covers in the main section – but then drooled ever the brightly-coloured, pop-up children’s books that come complete with secret compartments, free gifts and even sound effects. Why can’t adult books be like that?

The good news is, they can. Do a Google search of “book art” and you’ll be led to a magical world of modern bookbinding where the line between author and artist is blurred. You’ll find publishers like Old Stile Press – Frances and Nicolas McDowell, who live in Llandogo, Monmouthshire, and handprint, on an old letterpress, gobsmackingly beautiful books. They even make the paper for some of the books. And they talk about “an almost theatrical initial impact” and “a specific feel and appropriate ‘feel’ for each book”.

When did you last buy a book that had a ‘theatrical impact’? One wonders what they put down on forms as their job description: publisher, artist or magician?

Book artists like Frances and Nicolas are helping people rediscover a love for books. Handcrafted books are not cheap but you can buy cheap books anywhere. Besides, I suspect paying up to £100 for a handcrafted tome means you treat it with respect, read it slowly and are happy to leave it on the mantelpiece as an ornament rather than shove it back on a bookshelf.

I have a vision that Microsoft founder Bill Gates will wander down a backstreet and stumble across one of our modern book artists. He’ll pick up a handbound copy of a book, printed on handmade paper and, in a Eureka moment, declare: “Good grief, I have seen the future. The computer is dead, long live the book!”

~~~o~~~

Alan Cleaver is deputy editor of The Whitehaven News. He has worked in journalism all his life and pioneered newspapers publishing on the web as well as the UK’s first e-newspapers. He lives in Whitehaven with his partner Lesley.

(Copyright information:  top to bottom – andymangold, mrsjennyryan and olayab, all reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.  Photo of Alan – Mike McKenzie.)

Yevgeny Zamyatin completed We in 1921, only for it to gain the dubious honour of becoming the first book to be banned by Glavlit, the newly created Soviet censors. Yet while it remained unpublished in the USSR until Glasnost, a manuscript escaped and has had a lasting influence on literature ever since. It is considered one of the first dystopian novels, and George Orwell read and reviewed a French translation only eight months before starting Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are many parallels between the two: for Big Brother, We has the Benefactor, for the telescreen, Zamyatin creates the Table, a formula that constructs every second of every citizens time. Similar parallels are noticeable with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, though Huxley apparently hadn’t read it before publishing in 1932. Yet regardless of any comparisons, We is valuable in its own right: a compelling story of love and rebellion with a mathematical prose all of its own creation.

The One State is the pinnacle of human social evolution, a mathematically perfect machine in which every citizen – every cog in the machine – lives in a condition of “mathematically infallible happiness” for the first time since the Garden of Eden. It was foolish desire for freedom that resulted in mankind’s banishment from Eden and it is now by abolishing freedom that happiness has been restored. Life is organised to ensure maximum productive output through complete equality and the removal of strife. The sky is perfectly blue, every cipher (citizen) is entitled to sex with any other cipher – so long as it is within certain Table determined times of the day and requested with the use of a pink ticket – and no-one dreams at night. They live in a calm clean panopticon, known only by numbers and watched over at all times by the Guardians.

D-503 is one such cipher. A mathematician, he is the builder of the Integral, a spaceship which will soon enable the One State to export the “great flywheel of logic”, as he terms their way of life, to the “barbarians” in the rest of the solar system. Called on to create works dedicated to the beauty and majesty of the One State to form part of the cargo for that first voyage D-503 sets out to record what he sees and thinks, or, more exactly, “what we think” as his ode to rational utopia. But when he meets and falls for I-330, a rebel seeking to bring down the state, his rational and ordered world is thrown into turmoil. He discovers an imagination of his own, dreams rise unbidden, and he is placed on a collision course with that system he loves.

One of the things that makes We so compelling is that D-503 completely and implicitly believes in the One State and spends a great deal of time extolling its virtue. He is a rather Panglossian in his ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ attitude which can make him painfully blind to the abuses of the state – public torture, execution, and violence are common and merciless – and the rationale behind his arguments is indicative of this. They convey a certain clarity of thought which makes them somehow compelling, even while disagreeing completely. For instance, crime:

“Freedom and crime are so indissolubly connected to each other, like…well, like the movement of the aero and its velocity. When the velocity of the aero = 0, it doesn’t move; when the freedom of a person = 0, he doesn’t commit crime. This is clear. The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom.”

Mathematics is the language that underpins everything. Zamyatin, a mathematician himself, writes prose that reflects this. His sentences are exact and balanced, with colons used in a way that is almost like an = sign, to convey cause and effect. Furthermore, Zamyatin was synaesthetic – to him every letter and word has its own colour, its own visual representation – and in a book which relies so much on colour – the peaceful one state is blue, I-330 is yellow, O-90, D-503s former regular sex partner, is pink as are most other women – this provides an added texture through which to experience the increasingly impressionistic dreamscapes.

There are some beautiful phrases too, particularly those early on in which he observes the beauty of machines and order:

“And then I thought to myself: why?…The answer: because it is non-free movement, because the whole profound point of this dance lies precisely in its absolute, aesthetic subordination, its perfect non-freedom.”

I often perceived a similar ordered beauty while staring out of my university bedroom window and watching cars going round and around a roundabout, stopping at the traffic lights, awaiting their turn, continuing on, all in perfect order and harmony. Whereas in Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World we are expected to react with revulsion to the monstrous systems of state and industrial control, the responses of the reader are a little more nuanced in We. There are positives as well as negatives and this results in a compellingly three dimensional fictional world.

What is particularly interesting, is that while Winston Smith (in Nineteen Eighty-Four) finds rebellion through love attractive and liberating, an act of self-determinism worthy in its own right, it sends D-503 mad. He compares it to the time when Ö-1 “happened” to him, that is, when he discovered the existence of the imaginary or irrational number. Obsessively drawn to I-330 by a love he neither fully understands nor controls, he sees his newly found imagination as a sickness. It is an eyelash in his eye that he can’t ignore no matter how he wishes too. The dreams he has gradually overtake his daily life to the point where it becomes impossible to determine where reality stops and dreams begin.

Despite its ban in his homeland, the Soviet state is not the specific target of We, though there are inevitably aspects there. It is a rather wider critique of the colonising uniformity that he perceived as inherent in industrial civilisations the world over. As Orwell notes, it is primarily “a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again.” It is satire, but not limited solely to Soviet politics. Philosophical ideas are targeted, often in witty parodies of their original content. For example, Marxist thought on determinist historical progression is satirised in a conversation between D-503 and I-330.

“Do you realise that what you are suggesting is revolution?”
“Of course, it’s revolution. Why not?”
“Because there can’t be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.”
“My dear, you’re a mathematician: tell me, which is the last number?”
“But that’s absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can’t be a last one.”
“Then why do you talk about the last revolution?”

And there’s similar treatment for Rousseau’s Discourse on Equality and Dostoyevsky in general. We is playful, experimental satire of a fictional future state where individual liberty is of the lowest priority. It is exact and interesting and thought-provoking. For the first fifty pages I was convinced that it would go down as one of my favourite novels. But when the dreams begin it all became a little too unfocused for my liking. Although I am aware that this is a personal preference rather than a genuine criticism, the increasingly blurred boundaries between the real and the imagined proved disorientating to me. Although very different in content, the longer We went on, the more it reminded me of The Famished Road by Ben Okri with its endless blending of colour and dream. Many will love it for this reason, but it frustrated me somewhat and made the plot and characters slightly difficult to follow.

Nonetheless, it is a book that should be read. If you like dystopian literature which makes you think about the world and society you live in, We is a must read right up alongside the many other great works of dystopian writing from the first half of the twentieth century.

Vintage Classics, 2007, 9780099511434, 203pp

I LOVE libraries! There, I’ve said it.
It ought to be on a billboard, in neon or blinking from the Goodyear blimp. On a bumper sticker: I heart libraries. *blissful sigh*
Here’s a secret– I go to the library more often than I go to the grocery store. Obviously, I believe in the old adage that “man cannot live by bread alone”.
To me, libraries are places of possibilities. You can learn something that can change your life or just make it more pleasant, you can read old newspapers or magazines and travel back in time. You can look at a map or an oversized book of a far away land or one that only exists in someone’s imagination. You can find strange music, obscure movies, authors you never heard of, each can open your mind and make you think of things that never occurred to you. A library is like a treasure chest, just waiting to be opened. And best of all, everything in it is free!
In the U.S., it doesn’t cost anything to get a library card, which allows the holder to take out numerous books, CDs, videos, magazines and newspapers and keep them for several weeks. After that, one can usually renew those items to keep them longer. If a library doesn’t have what you’re looking for, they can order it from another local library or one elsewhere in the state. A poor nobody has as much access to everything as a rich well-connected person, the egalitarian spirit of libraries is to be admired.
Those who work in libraries are a type of guardian. They guard the treasures of the past, especially when authors donate their papers and correspondence or where there are actual old books and documents, sometimes centuries old. Librarians also guard your freedom to read, as the annual “Read a Banned Book” week shows. Or the fact that most libraries resist any form of censorship on their computers. So instead of the stereotype of a timid woman with a bun, librarians ought to really be portrayed with armor, defending your rights.
On a more personal level, I registered to vote at a library and taught myself to use a computer in one. I often hid from bullies in the school library and got materials there to block out the anxiety caused by my dysfunctional family, making libraries a literal sanctuary for me. To this day, whenever I bring home a stack of library books, it feels like I’ve got a bakery box of pastries and I can’t wait to gobble them up.
So forgive me for all of the gushing enthusiasm about the subject, it’s hard to control my passion for libraries. But I’d wager if you’re reading this, then you must have some warm feelings for libraries yourself.

Nifty graphic from Plattsburgh schools

This week finds the Foxes thinking Deep Thoughts. Some of those Thoughts are about two of our favorite subjects–computers and libraries. We’re cosmic, celestial and very vocal this week. It’s all terribly serious for late in the summertime, so we’re just going to have a tall glass of lemonade and chill for awhile.

Monday-Jackie tells us what she really thinks about libraries in a Monday Soapbox.

Tuesday-Sam takes a look at We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, one of the books that inspired 1984

Wednesday-journalist Alan Cleaver goes in to bat for beautiful books – and thinks Bill Gates may be missing a trick …

Thursday-Anne is surprised to find herself rather moved by the quiet lyricism of Anne Tyler’s Celestial Navigation.

Friday-Sharon enjoys reading about one of the most important people in children’s books . . .

Pitcher of lemonade from the Times Union blog

Okay… so I have so many other things I should be reading.  I have a ton of books at my back screaming that they have to be first, for so many different reasons.  I ignored them.  And why?  Hype. That’s why.  Pure hype. You can all call me a sucker now if you like… but I fell for it.

Usually I am fully armoured plated against these blockbuster type books, in fact I make a point of giving them body swerve.  (I will admit (under pressure) to reading The Passage by Justin Cronin as a very, very early proof well before the bandwagon wheels were turning.)  But I am Number Four was far too lauded and applauded and I had to see what all the fuss was about. Sucker!!

So here’s the blurb…

In the beginning we were nine. We left when we were very young, almost too young to remember. Almost. And now . . . Three are gone. We are here to keep our race alive, which was almost entirely obliterated. We’re just trying to survive. Six are left. But we are hunted, and the hunters won’t stop until they’ve killed us all. They caught Number One in Malaysia. Number Two in England. And Number Three in Kenya. I am Number Four. I know that I am next.

So, Number Four is now called John Smith and he’s an alien arrived as a refugee from a recently destroyed planet and he’s landed on earth.  He has superpowers but he hides them from humans and he’s being hunted by bad guys.  He has a special crystal thing that shows him what life used to be like on his planet… You know what kept going through my head the whole time I was reading this book?  Superman!  It’s bloody Superman!

To be honest, I’m really not one to diss books.  I’d rather keep my mouth shut (Twilight excepted, of course!) But I do feel that books that are intensely over-hyped need to be examined to find out exactly what the score is.  And I am Number Four is already in production for a movie starring Alex Pettyfur, due out in 2011 and it is all over the net in an almost viral way. So what’s going on?

The author, Pittacus Lore, according to Wikipedia is a collaboration between unknown Jobie Hughes and James Frey, disgraced auto-biographer of A Million Little Pieces. None of this accounts for the excess excitement over this book.  Seemingly it was shopped to Publishers anonymously.

The thing that I wonder about, not only as a Children’s Bookseller but also as a writer is why… why has there been so much attention on this particular book? Is it awesome?  I’ve read it, and I can’t see awesome.  But there’s nothing NOT to like, to be honest (except perhaps a shred of originality!).  A fair number of kids will probably quite like it since it’s very simple.  The characters are blah, the plot is blah, the setting is blah… it’s all a bit blah.  I made it to the end… hmmm. I’m not dissing it, it has it’s place, I’m sure.

What I’m wondering though, is why?  That’s all…  Why is this going to be so massive, when there are so many amazing books with vivid characters, superb writing, fantastical plots, outstanding all round entertainment that don’t get a fraction of this attention?

Answers on a postcard please…

(And I fully acknowledge that by talking about it… I am adding to the hype.  Oh… the irony!)

It is a rare delight to encounter a book of such apparent simplicity as Master Georgie. The narration – split between three voices – is compelling and smooth, the prose wonderfully uncluttered. It is overloaded neither with explicit themes or complicated ideas. There is no sense of a writer trying to be clever. Master Georgie is storytelling of the finest order.

And yet I use the phrase ‘apparent simplicity’ advisedly, for the simplicity of style masks a cunningly composed narrative which questions how one can ever know something simply by looking at it. In Master Georgie, Beryl Bainbridge confronts the reader with an oddly compelling statement: you cannot know these characters.

When war breaks out in the Crimea George Hardy, surgeon and photographer, sets off to provide whatever services he can offer in support of the British effort. With him travel his adoptive sister Myrtle, amateur geologist Dr Potter and photographer’s assistant and fire-eater Pompey Jones. The narration is split between them, starting in the cold back streets of 19th century Liverpool, travelling through sweltering Constantinople and on to the battlefields of the Crimea. As each seeks to shed light on Master Georgie (as Myrtle terms him) a picture begins to develop of everyone but him. He remains the dark spot on the plate.

The Crimean War was the first to be extensively documented by photography and one gets the impression that Bainbridge spent a great deal of time searching for inspiration for her characters by looking at these pictures, only to come up with more questions than answers. That is how the book reads: a snapshot of a long dead, anonymous person who can never be resurrected, not even through literature. Master Georgie is all about what lurks beneath the surface of a photograph: the context, facets of themselves people choose to hide from the world, the misinterpretations that people ascribe to surface images. At one point a fellow character enquires as to why Myrtle often looks sad. “It’s the way I am on the outside”, she replies. “Inside, I assure you I’m quite happy.” This seems to sum up Master Georgie nicely.

There is an element of satire here, too. There are two targets for this: specifically the bombast of Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and generally those who gallantly march off at the first hint of war assuming victory. It reminded me very much of The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell with its portrayal of out of place Britishness, a pompous sense of worth that is never fully punctured, even while confronted by death, disease and defeat. There are some absurdly funny moments. The wealthy British bring trunk -loads of possessions and are accompanied as far as the Constantinople by their spouses and children as though for a bit of a summer jaunt. There is a funny scene when, having arrived in Constantinople, they go to the opera only for it to descend into a brawl over a perceived indiscretion towards Myrtle.

The satire is not biting though, and surrounding it is a tender portrayal of life, war and the consequences of our actions. Like the best war books, one comes away feeling that it was all so bloody pointless.

Yet none of this is to say that Master Georgie is an easy book. It is slippery, never quite giving the reader what one wants or expects. The drama is quiet, unassuming. Some of the supposedly dramatic aspects – particularly the shared and mysterious guilt the synopsis promises – didn’t really resonate with me at all. The prime feeling I came away with was puzzlement: I knew I had enjoyed the prose and the journey without really engaging with any of the characters; without being able to identify why. Others I know have reacted to it with utter indifference. Yet the fact remains that I enjoyed reading it, and it continues to challenge and interest me a month later. This was my first Beryl Bainbridge novel but I’m certainly going to read more by her in the coming months.

Abacus, 1998, 9780349111698, 212pp

This is a novel for people with breeding. Only people with the right genes and the wrong impulses will find its marriage of bold ideas and deplorable characters irresistible. It is a novel that engages the mind while satisfying those that crave the thrill of a chase. There are riots and sex. There is love and murder. There is Darwinism and Fascism, nightclubs, invented languages and the dangerous bravado of youth. And there are lots of beetles. It is clever. It is distinctive. It is entertaining. We hope you are too.

Yes, well. As you can imagine, that irritating puff-blurb had me foaming at the mouth. Quite honestly, if I’d picked it up in a bookshop (rather than receiving it as a review copy from Sceptre) I’d have dropped it instantly back on the shelf with a groan. Which is a shame as this is a gripping and off-the-wall book from a young and talented author, and I can’t help feeling this sort of blurb can’t really be helping his new career much. Why not keep it simple, publishers? Give us a real blurb, with maybe some judicious and sensible review quotes, and we’ll be happy. Honest.

The good thing is however that on Ned Beauman’s website, there’s a very useful link to an article in The Bookseller which does give a decent, if short, blurb (scroll down to view). Thus giving you some kind of practical idea about the book. Phew. I wonder indeed, if this sort of marketing approach continues, whether in the future proper blurb-writing will in fact fall to the reviewer. Heck, someone has to do it …

Anyway, gripe over. Much to my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, though I frankly wasn’t expecting to. Mainly because of the subject matter – I’m not usually at my best with politics, or indeed fascism. Who is? But there’s something about the energy of the language here that slaps you in the face and demands your attention from the very first sentence. You’re instantly sucked into a larger-than-life world that’s strangely more-ish, and it doesn’t let you go until the very end either.

Beauman is also very skilled in depicting character, and very peculiar character at that. I found myself desperately wanting to learn more about Kevin, the present-day Nazi memorabilia collector with the genetic body odour problem and no friends, and the 1930s characters, Philip Erskine, the deeply confused fascist, and “Sinner”, the short-in-stature prize fighter, were hugely entertaining too. It’s a testament to the author’s undoubted talent that he takes three such unprepossessing people, and makes them completely endearing. Where many other more experienced writers have failed, Beauman also manages to take his political themes and humanise them with great subtlety and depth. Never, I suspect, has fascism been so entertaining and so bizarre. The author cleverly undermines the whole concept through the use of irony; really, it’s almost Byronic.

In addition, the difference in times between the 1930s and the present-day scenes is well handled, and the plots and connections dovetail together excellently. Part of this connection is structured by use of the crime that kick-ass (if smelly …) Kevin discovers, and which is linked with a crime committed in the 1930s, so in some sense the book becomes at the same time a historical and contemporary thriller, whilst being always more than the sum of its parts.

So. I can’t quote you anything unfortunately as I read a proof copy but trust me that the language used here is bright and sassy and brave, and absolutely fitted to the author’s purpose. As well as being incredibly gripping. I also learnt a lot about the world of Nazi memorabilia collectors and 1930s fascism. Not to mention prize fighting, beetles, how languages are created and exactly how many inventions you can include in a house. So my dinner party conversation topics in the future have been much enhanced (which will come as a relief to those of my friends who still dare to invite me out anywhere) and in a gloriously light way too. Oh and there are some truly great sections involving those marvellous beetles – who play a key role in the crime scenes. Say no more … It’s mad, it’s possibly crazed beyond belief, it’s very clever, very sharp, very human, all at the same time, and I loved it. What could be more enjoyable? So my wholehearted advice is ignore that pesky blurb, buy the book, sit back and enjoy. You’ll never look at fish in the same way again.

Boxer, Beetle, Sceptre Press 2010, ISBN: 978 034 0998 397

[Anne is rather suspicious of any kind of beetle but can’t help warming to quirkiness and sheer pizzazz. To discover an insect-free zone, please click here]

Netsuke have always intrigued me – or the idea of them, as I’d never get close to them without a pane of glass between me and them – they are far too precious and valuable, even though they are made to be appreciated by touch as well as sight. The potter (gosh, I’ve just realised – another one!) Edmund de Waal inherited a collection of 264 of them, and this inheritance unlocked an amazing family history, that crossed Europe and intersected with the history of the 19th and 20th centuries.

A netsuke is a tiny piece of intricate carving, an essential if minute component of Japanese formal dress until the end of the 19th century. It is a toggle on a cord, that attaches a small bag to the belt around a kimono. From the 18th century, the fashion was for these little utilitarian items to be wonderfully carved, out of ivory or boxwood mainly but other woods too. They are meant to be a tiny piece of tactile and visual pleasure. The carvings can be of animals, or people, or familiar objects, but always with a twist – they are exciting, full of movement and energy, or funny, or sly, or mischievous, or saucy. They are precious, and sought after, and immensely vulnerable – yet these survived.

Edumd de Waal grew up aware of the existence of this collection, and the family legend of its survival, even though the great European family that possessed it finally dispersed in the catastrophe of the Anschluss in 1938. He is a potter apprenticed in the tradition of Bernard Leach, and educated in the Japanese pottery villages that inspired Leach. In Japan, he spends time with his great-uncle Iggie, who has made his home there, by way of Vienna and the USA, and by a wild coincidence taken the netsuke back home. From Iggie, he gathers shreds of the netsuke collection’s journey through time and space, crafts it into what he calls a ‘smooth’ and ‘thin’ perfectly shaped anecdote; then, dissatisfied with that, he decides to find out as much as he can about the family that guarded the netsuke for so long.

What follows is a truly wonderful memoir of passion, warmth, love and pain. De Waal’s grandmother was born Baroness Elisabeth von Ephrussi in 1900, the daughter of a Viennese banker and scion of the sprawling, powerful Ephrussi family, originally from Odessa. In the middle of the 19th century, Ephrussis became some of the most powerful grain merchants in Europe, and set up business in Paris and in Vienna, dealing in the vast grain supplies coming from the Ukraine. From that beginning, they became merchants and financiers. In Paris and in Vienna they left architectural monuments, in the Rue Monceau, and on the Ringstrasse. In each generation, there were sons and daughters of exceptional gifts. The netsuke were acquired by the Parisian Charles Ephrussi in the 1870s, and this marks the beginning of the quest to commemorate the family. There are so many rich connections – Charles, younger son and dilettante, was a connoisseur and respected art critic, and the acquisition of the netsuke shows him at the cutting edge of the taste for Japonaiseries. He befriended some of the Impressionists – and commissioned work from them, and offered them access to the Japanese art that helped form their taste. And – the first of many Eureka moments for me in this book – Charles Ephrussi knew Proust and helped advance his career, and is one very strongly recognisable model for the character of Swann.

Charles gave the netsuke collection, complete with the vitrine in which it was displayed, as a wedding present to a younger member of the Viennese branch of the Ephrussis, to Viktor and his new wife Emmy, de Waal’s great-grandparents. There, the netsuke became domesticated, the beloved playthings of the children, including the author’s grandmother. The collection stayed there until the final disaster of the Nazi takeover of Austria. The three oldest children who had played with the netsuke had grown up and moved away from Vienna. The immense riches and possessions of Viktor and his family were wrecked or appropriated by the Nazis – apart from the netsuke that were overlooked, so that the servant Anna could rescue them, a few at a time in her apron pocket, while she was meant to be packing up the possessions to be taken away, and hide them in her mattress – until the war was over, and Elisabeth returned to Vienna, to the amazing fact that they had been rescued and kept safe by a loyal friend.

From there, they travelled with Iggie, Elisabeth’s younger brother, to Japan, were inherited by his partner, Jiro, then passed to the author and their current home in London. There Edmund de Waal has an intimate relationship with them, often naming them by their decriptions – the rat catcher, the ripe medlar, the barrel maker and his half-completed barrel, the bundle of kindling. He loves to carry them round with him, feeling their shape in his pocket (and almost losing a tiger in the London Library).

This is a fantastic enough story in itself – but there is more, so much more. De Waal structures the family history beautifully around this narrative thread. From time to time these tiny, exquisite objects surface from the density of an incredibly rich mix of family secrets and public history, to tell their own tale, then disappear again. I am a sucker for research, and de Waal has done so much, unearthed so many documents and pieces of evidence and marshalled them so well (though I’d have loved a few footnotes). His reflections are fascinating on the aesthetics of collecting, the cult of bibelots and what they mean to their owners, the significance of the vitrine that houses them, of locking it to protect and claim exclusivity, of opening it to share as a hospitable or didactic act.

I am shamed that, though I’ve heard of the Rothschilds, I had never heard of the Ephrussis, a pan-European Jewish dynasty that rivalled them in its day. The difference lies in survival, and choices made. Charles lived through the age of the Dreyfuss affair and yet died loved and admired; Viktor set too great a store by assimilation into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, finding out that this left him and his family vulnerable to the changes and upheavals of the period between the First and Second World Wars. The whole narrative, up to a shattering account of the Anschluss, is a story of anti-semitic straws in the wind, more and more of them, and the wind stronger and stronger, until it blew the Ephrussis away.

This book is one of the most original I have read for a long time, beautifully and movingly written, and so rich in its layers and themes. My one error (being such a Now and Happening sort of person), was to choose the Ebook version to read. This was a big mistake. Although I am a great advocate of Ebook readers (after all, my trusty Sony reader enabled me to pack some clothes to wear on holiday this year instead of busting my baggage allowance with paperbacks) they are not yet up to making the best of an illustrated memoir like this – and/or the publishers are not thinking through all the detail that needs to go into a fully functional Ebook version. The photos are tiny, and low resolution, and, the most annoying thing, the family tree image was tiny, would not zoom on the reader, and on the computer screen proved to be such low resolution that when blown up it was completely unreadable. That caused huge difficulty, because, if ever there is a book where you need to keep a bookmark or a handy finger in the page with the family tree, it is this one.

However, I couldn’t help reflecting – this serves me entirely right. What on earth made me think that I should enjoy reading a book inspired by sensual, tactile, visual objects, without giving myself the sensual, tactile and visual pleasure of handling the physical book? Silly me.

Edmund de Waal: The Hare With Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance. Chatto and Windus, 2010. 368pp
ISBN: 9780701184179 Ebook ISBN: 9781407052472

It seems like everyone’s a little bit disappointed with Lula, Son of Brazil.  The producers had hoped for more turnout, despite the massive PR campaigns and the half-priced tickets for unionised workers.  Critics at home and abroad question the squeaky-clean depiction of Lula’s personal life and the political motivations of the film’s producers.  (You can check out Lula’s daughter Lurian’s reply to the NY Times here).  The Economist declared the film “Lula, Sanitised”.  Rory Carroll announced (gleefully, I suspect) that Lula, Son of Brazil had “suffered the indignity of attracting fewer viewers than Alvin and the Chipmunks: the Squeakquel“ and labelled it “fawning, one-sided political propaganda”.   Those who praise the film, like Arnaldo Bloch in O Globo, seem to be defying a scornful majority.  And that scorn has a particular edge to it: contempt, with a distinct tinge of distrust and, paradoxically, of disappointed expectations.

As for me, I had very few expectations of Lula. I watched it partly out of curiosity and partly because it might be useful to my research.   I didn’t really expect to like the film, but I did.  In fact, I thought it was tremendous: a really engaging, viscerally affecting piece of drama.

It is true that you are not going to get to know Lula by watching this film.  You’re not going to find out anything the man does not want you to know.  The book won’t give you the whole picture, and that’s over 450 pages of interviews with Lula and 21 of his nearest and dearest.  A 128-minute feature film isn’t going to cut it.  And this film, with its heartfelt political bias, doesn’t even try.

This isn’t a film about Lula’s psychological motivations, or his family dynamics, or his evolving politics.  This is a film about the idea of Lula: a vulnerable child from a poor family who grew up, one day, to be President of Brazil.  An epic story on an epic scale.  Literally: the Brazilian landscapes (urban and rural) are astonishing all by themselves.  But nothing about this film is understated.  Mass scenes and intimate dialogues are recreated with the same symbolic verve.  Everything is urgent, important, historic.  Rui Ricardo Dias plays Lula as a bright young man with ordinary preoccupations who is swept up in the politics of the masses; as his mother Doña Lindu, Gloria Pires suffers majestically and upstages everyone.  The impact of it all is relentless.  I hesitate to call it melodrama, because that’s rarely a compliment, but I suppose it is.  Whatever it is, it’s a terrific piece of art and very enjoyable, in a gut-wrenching, emotionally exhausting kind of way.  As even Rory Carroll had to admit, this film is not a failure (although I think he was speaking in commercial terms).

Perhaps Lula, Son of Brazil has been the victim of expectation to some degree.  Perhaps, too, it has more impact for the non-Brazilian viewer for whom the events of this film are not a matter of recent memory, perhaps even recent experience.  And maybe the timing of it, so close to the elections and the candidacy of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, is not fortuitous at all.  Coming as it does right now, it’s entirely understandable that the artistic quality of the film doesn’t seem as relevant to many critics as the message it’s clearly supposed to carry.  (The joyful savaging it took from certain commentators is another issue.) But if this does happen to be coming to a cinema near you, I would urge you to give it a chance.  You might find that there is more to it than the hype would suggest.