Spring Reading Tag

How to use the extra hours of light

This is really a Booktube thing (I came across it on Victoria’s wonderful channel, Eve’s Alexandria), but I don’t have a Booktube channel, because I cannot even contemplate a) my hair and un-made-up face on video; I can handle photography because it allows for posing, and b) audio of my ridiculous speaking voice with its wandering accent. So I have hijacked this tag—because I fancy doing something a bit frivolous and non-review-related—and turned it into a normal, twentieth-century blog post. Forgive!

1. What books are you most excited to read over the next few months?

WELL. I have a pile of proofs for the next three months, so I’ll have to select a few to highlight. I’m incredibly excited about the genre-bending The Fact of a Body, a combination of true crime and narrative non-fiction/personal essay by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, and about Queer City, Peter Ackroyd’s history of LGBTQIA London. I’m also eagerly anticipating Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir The Hate Race, which if it’s anything like her story collection Foreign Soil will be amazing, and Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, a definitive history of anti-Black thought in America. Non-proof-wise, I need to read George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo stat, and I have the second Slough House book by Mick Herron (Dead Lions), China Miéville’s The City and the City, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing, all lined up.

2. What book most makes you think of Spring, for whatever reason?

Obviously, The Enchanted April—what’s more spring-like than rediscovering love and happiness in a coastal castle in Italy? Less obviously, Anna Karenina, which I’ve read two or three times, always in the spring. (The big Russians are impossible for me to get through without the incentive of light evenings.)

3. The days are getting longer – what is the longest book you’ve read?

Probably The Faerie Queene, or The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (aka The New Arcadia, which is a good deal longer than The Old Arcadia.) I can’t check the latter’s page count, but the former is 1,248 pages of densely printed early modern allegorical poetry. Plus endnotes.

4. What books would you recommend to brighten someone’s day?

I always, always recommend I Capture the Castle for questions like this, because it’s lovely and tender and detailed and eccentric and you don’t have to work hard to get into it. But I’d also say The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett—so short, so adorable—and, if cheering up is essential, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which may be the funniest book I’ve ever read. If Toole isn’t your style, Bill Bryson might do: I love A Walk In the Woods, where Bryson tries to walk the Appalachian Trail, and The Lost Continent, charting a Great American Road Trip, with equal affection. And there are the Adrian Mole books by Sue Townsend: equal contenders with Toole for funniest books in English.

5. Spring brings new life in nature – think up a book that doesn’t exist but you wish it did. (eg by a favourite author, on a certain theme or issue etc)

Victoria already mentioned the third book in Hilary Mantel’s series focusing on Thomas Cromwell; to that I’ll add a sequel to Nicola Griffith’s Hild, a lush, detailed novel about the girl who became Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, of which we were promised a second volume some years ago. Also, a book I’ve already declared I’m going to write myself, about parenthood, where the mum is a brilliant but detached theoretical physicist and the dad struggles to find self-fulfilment and identity after becoming a father. (Spoilers: he eventually opens his own yoga studio.)

6. Spring is also a time of growth – how has your reading changed over the years?

Obviously, the answer to this depends on how far back I go. My reading records span nearly a decade—it was June 2007 when I started writing down the title and author of each book I completed—and two things strike me about that stretch of time. One is that I read with much greater direction now; when I was fourteen, I basically wandered around picking up things that looked interesting or that I thought I ought to read, which meant I covered swathes of 18th, 19th and 20th century fiction, but missed a lot of stuff that wasn’t high-profile (though I did read Tobias Smollett, which almost no one does.) These days, while I don’t project my reading terribly far into the future, I have a sense of what I’m interested in at the moment, and tailor my book acquisitions to help me build a picture of a field or a genre or a time period. The second thing is that my speed of reading has increased. In high school I could finish around twelve books a month; in university that dropped because of coursework, which led to a lot of bitty reading (individual articles or essays instead of whole monographs); at present, less than four months into the year, I’ve read nearly sixty books. I think, also, I’m now using the critical skills developed at university to engage with contemporary texts, which I didn’t do much before—I had some sense that a book needed to be Old or A Classic for me to use those tools on it, which strikes me now as kind of a sweet but callow attitude.

7. We’re a couple of months into the new year – how’s your reading going?

See above—really well! It could be the best year since records began. The vast majority of what I’ve read, too, has been very good. I’ve encountered a lot of authors for the first time who’ve convinced me I have to read more of their work: Mick Herron, Joanna Kavenna, Rick Bass, Kei Miller, Colson Whitehead. I’ve read a lot of debut authors who have impressed me: Laura Kaye, Daniel Magariel, Danielle Dutton. I’ve had an amazing time shadowing the Baileys Prize. It’s all going swimmingly so far.

8. Any plans you’re looking forward to over the next few months?

Not especially—I haven’t signed up for any challenges or clubs. But I’m excited to read through the backlists of some of the authors I’ve just discovered. And I would like to do a bit better with reading the older books on our sitting room shelves which come from the Chaos’s grandparents’ house: I’ve quite a substantial reading gap in the shape of C20 men (William Golding, Robertson Davies, C.P. Snow, Laurence Durrell), which they could help with. Plus the collection includes Japanese lit, science, and poetry, all of which looks interesting too.

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Two Utopias: Thoughts on Walkaway and Naondel

These two books are, on the surface of it, about as different as you can imagine. Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow, is resolutely for adults (with a lot of graphic sex); Naondel, Maria Turtschaninoff’s follow-up to last year’s Maresi, is, despite its girth, a middle-grade YA novel. Walkaway believes in the power of technology to save us; Naondel places its faith in earth magic and the maternal life force. Walkaway is profoundly, almost giddily, optimistic about human nature; Naondel shows us a humanity that is near uniform in its brutality. And yet for all these polarities – sci fi vs. fantasy; adults vs. kids; positivity vs. cynicism – the two books have some striking similarities, and even their differences are illuminating.

Both are about the drive, and the overwhelming need, to create utopias. Doctorow opens his book by introducing us to three characters: Hubert “Etcetera” Espinoza, so called because he has nineteen first names; Seth, Hubert’s slightly fratty but basically harmless friend; and Natalie, the scion of a minor branch of Toronto’s wealthy Redwater family. Hubert and Seth meet Natalie at a party (in one of the book’s many delightful coinings, it is a “Communist party”, where enterprising youths use 3D printing and microbial biology to create free dance floors, free speakers, and—crucially—free beer out of “feedstock”, useless industrial leftovers in an abandoned warehouse). At the end of chapter one, the party is crashed by drones directed by the forces of “default” society; one of Natalie’s friends, Billiam, falls fatally from a catwalk; Hubert, Seth and Natalie end up in the house of Natalie’s father, uber-capitalist Jacob Redwater; and the three of them, fueled by Natalie’s disgust over her family’s privileged arrogance and Hubert’s knowledge of other options, choose to “go walkaway”. Apparently, eighty years in the future, this will be a possibility: to join huge communal groups of people who don’t want to live in the wage slavery of late capitalism (where the rulers are not the 1%, but the .001%), and who use advances in 3D printing, network programming, and genetic modification to build lives for themselves.

The other way of living, in this world—the “default” way—is exactly like how we live now, but worse: go into deep hock to acquire degrees that are all but meaningless; reach age sixty-five without ever shaking the word “assistant” from your job title; live in constant terror of eviction or joblessness. Domestic servants in the Redwater household are hired on an ad hoc basis through an app—much in the way that catering and hospitality agencies provide workers now—meaning that the maid or the gardener is rarely the same person twice. It’s not the sort of world that values anyone, other than absolute zillionaires. The appeal of rejecting it is obvious.

Naondel, meanwhile, is set in a country that clearly doesn’t belong to our world but which, judging from linguistics and economy, seems to be an amalgam of Arabic and Japanese culture. (This is a problem in itself, opening the novel up to charges of both exoticising and demonising Eastern cultures and their attitudes towards women. The Big Bad character is a brutal poisoner and rapist named Iskan ak Honta-che, which made me think of nothing so much as the rapey desert warlord in Game of Thrones.) In Karenokoi, very few people are both good and powerful. Power, by definition, corrupts. Turtschaninoff shows us a world where it’s not just the men who are evil, either; Izani, Iskan’s mother, is cold and cruel to her grandsons, while Lehan, the younger sister of a main character, is so infatuated with Iskan that she actually—albeit unknowingly—helps him to victimise another woman.

The whole novel is the foundation story of the Red Abbey on the island of Menos, where the first book, Maresi, was set. In Maresi we saw that kind of utopian, matriarchal society in action, and cheered as it destroyed a threat from outside. In Naondel we see why it’s necessary: the only place for women in Karenokoi is a subservient one. Interestingly, though, Turtschaninoff’s attempts at creating diversity among her characters cause a continuity problem. Several of the women who eventually escape from the dairahesi (harem) of Ohaddin Palace are from other cultures: there’s a woman from a nomadic tribe with strong spiritual connections to the earth, another from a tree-dwelling people who has the power to control others’ dreams. When they escape—as we always know they will—why don’t they make for one of these lands, where women and their powers are revered or at least respected? One suspects that it’s because the mechanics of Turtschaninoff’s plot demand otherwise. They have to settle the island of Menos and establish the Red Abbey; we knew from the moment we opened the book that it would end this way. To make that happen, we get a bit of authorial hand-waving that acknowledges the problem without digging into it, which limits the book’s success.

Anyway. Both of these countries, clearly, are ruled by total bastards. The establishment of a utopia is the only way out of their uncompromising and dehumanising systems. But here Doctorow and Turtschaninoff part ways again. Doctorow’s bastards are, by definition, a minority, and a tiny minority at that. Pretty much everyone whom our hero/-ines meet in walkaway is compassionate, sensible, and positive about their ability to make a difference. They collectively embody the covered-dish principle, which Doctorow explains within the book itself: after a catastrophe, do you go over to your neighbour’s house with a covered dish of food, or a shotgun? If you choose the dish, even a neighbour who chose the shotgun is more likely to put it down and offer you some food in return. If you choose the shotgun, it’s very unlikely that things will end well for anyone. Walkaway is about people who believe fiercely that taking a covered dish is the right thing to do, and who make the right choice most of the time. When an aggressive inhabitant of a walkaway community tries to create a formal hierarchy, he’s stymied because people there simply abandon the place, rather than live under someone again. When police besiege another community near the end of the novel, they’re defeated in part by their own innate goodness: those who are trapped mobilise the Internet to find relatives of the policemen who are also walkaways, then broadcast appeals from police’s siblings, parents, and children, targeted at individual cops. Without fail, this causes them to drop their weapons. You may find this beautiful, or unbelievable, or – as I did – both; but there’s no doubt that it gave me more hope, post-election, post-Brexit, post-Westminster and Stockholm and Syrian gas attack, than anything more overtly political I’ve read in the past year.

Naondel, by contrast, doesn’t allow us to believe in the innate goodness of anyone other than our heroines. They are somewhat complicated, but their morally dubious acts are always implicitly justified: Kabira, the eldest, taunts her mother-in-law with breathtaking cruelty as the old woman lies dying, but she has endured decades of taunts in her turn, and has been denied access to her children. Orseola, the dreamweaver, is exiled from her home for a major social taboo, but her outburst stems from the fact that she is untrained in her craft, and frightened of her own power. Sulani, the warrior, murders people left, right and centre, but she is a warrior and—it’s implied—that’s just what warriors do. Outside of this circle, we actually see very few characters, and the minor ones—like the eunuch guards of the harem—are at best indifferent to the suffering of the women. At worst, they’re either mustache-twirlers (like Iskan, who all but cackles), or—as in the case of Iskan’s other concubines—vain and stupid.

This is largely down to the fact that Turtschaninoff’s gender politics are broad-brush. It makes a certain level of sense. She’s writing for middle school girls, who are just becoming aware of the fact that, yeah, people will judge you for literally anything, and, no, it doesn’t seem to be like that for boys. Unfairness is the engine that drives Naondel—at points I found myself becoming furious—and to be given a book that not only provokes anger, but legitimises it, is a big deal for a twelve-year-old girl. Doctorow’s utopia takes the opposite approach. It is almost post-gender. None of the major characters have long-lasting cishet relationships; they’re all either L, G, B, T, Q, or I, and relationship drama is kept at an absolute minimum. Crucially, cishet identities are most reinforced by people who oppose walkaway culture: by Jimmy, the guy who attempts to create hierarchy in a community by tearing down their best programmer for being female; and by Jacob Redwater, whose wife and daughter live in a world of gilded privilege but almost no real freedom.

I prefer Doctorow’s vision, probably appropriately: I’m an adult, and his gender politics are adult too. Naondel is still a book I’d recommend heartily to middle-grade kids and their parents; it has important things to say. I would just take care to balance it with something like Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet. For all her faults, Pierce at least recognised that women were capable not only of creating their own retreat from the world, but also of engaging with its injustices head on.

Thanks very much to Chrissy at Head of Zeus and Tabitha at Pushkin Press for the review copies. Walkaway will be published in the UK on 25 April; Naondel was published in the UK on 6 April.

 

One of the Boys, by Daniel Magariel

I’d seen him whip my mother with a belt before. The difference was: she deserved it.

I know—it’s not a very promising quotation to start a review with. Don’t run away. The ugliness of that “she deserved it” is the point; it’s where everything you need to know about this novel is located, and what you need to know is more complicated than simple, shopworn misogyny (although that’s a large part of it.) Magariel’s debut novel is told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy, whose name we never learn. As the book opens, he and his brother—also unnamed—are driving to New Mexico with their dad. They’ve won “the war”, their father’s name for the divorce and custody battle they’ve just gone through, and they’re about to start afresh. Except, of course, that they aren’t, or rather their father isn’t; he is simply moving the boys to a place where nobody knows them, where they’ll be isolated and easier to manipulate and control, and where he can fuel his cocaine habit unbothered by family or acquaintances. The reader clocks all this within the first chapter. The boy takes much longer, and the book—it’s very short, almost a novella at 165 pages—is about his journey towards understanding his father’s abusiveness and being able, finally, to reject it.

Unsurprisingly, this makes for tough reading. The reason it’s bearable is, largely, because it’s so short; this is no A Little Life, no relentless slog through hundreds of pages of sadism and misery. This is short sharp shocks: like that “she deserved it”, like the bizarre scene where the boy skips school, flirts with an older neighbour at the swimming pool and is nearly indoctrinated by her into the world of sex, like the father’s ability to flip from tender protectiveness to beating his naked child with the buckle end of a belt in the space of a second. The reader learns to be on edge, our constant bracing a mirror image of the permanent strategising going on in the boy’s brain.

The father is perhaps the best drawn character in the book. He is, of course, terrifying: Magariel shows us violent rage in ways that will make people who’ve experienced this sort of thing shake.

I was pulled from my brother’s body by my hair. My father’s backhand sent me staggering across the room. I crashed into the coffee table. Glass shattered around me, which seemed to send my father into a fury. He screamed that this was exactly what our mother had meant to do—divide and conquer. How had we forgotten? Why were our memories so short? Why weren’t we on his side? […] “Tell me you’re sorry. Tell me you’ll never do it again,” he said.

Upsetting though the physical violence is, it is not the most disturbing element of One of the Boys; that’s the last sentence in the quote above. Tell me you’re sorry. Hitting someone is one thing; trying to create a mindset that forces them to apologise to you for having been hit by you is a whole different level of manipulation and—although I don’t often use this word—evil. The incredible thing about One of the Boys is how it complicates that evil, how it acknowledges it and also shows us the father as, essentially, still a child himself. That doesn’t mean that he bears no responsibility for his actions, but rather, allows us to see that he isn’t an undifferentiated Big Bad to his children. “He could be so good to us sometimes,” the boy says, in heartbreakingly wistful retrospect. And he can: he often presents as a classic dad figure, providing fun and mischief and guidance. Even while the reader recognises that the father gets a self-aggrandising kick out of these sorts of performances, the appeal is obvious.

The father’s assumption of the heroic role is dependent on his making a villain of the mother, of course. He’s aided in this by the fact that she’s demonstrably imperfect: a weak-willed drunk whose immaturity apparently rivals his. Magariel makes the same point, with greater punch, that Emma Flint makes in Little Deaths: a woman needs to deviate only slightly from a norm in order to be open to charges of monstrosity. This is doubly the case when approval from a father is the reward for hating the mother; the boy notes that his mother’s approval never even seemed relevant to him as a child. There are some painful flashbacks to a moment when the boy and his brother decide to punish their mother in their own way: they throw water in her face and scream “We hate you! Fuck you!” That they’re doing it to demonstrate their loyalty to a man who repays perceived disloyalty with brutal physical assault doesn’t make it any less horrifying.

All the more of a relief, then, is the book’s ending: the boy has an opportunity to save himself and his brother by presenting himself, purple and bloodied from a recent beating, to a police officer. That’s where Magariel leaves us: blinking into the light along with our protagonist, hoping that this final act of “disloyalty”, this refusal to be “one of the boys”, complicit in his own destruction, will be enough to save him. As readers, we’ve seen the poisonous effects of silence and solidarity, but we haven’t yet, in this book, been taught to distrust the state. Where many books about abuse zero in on the indifference of police, children’s homes, and teachers, One of the Boys gives us reason to hope that these figures of public authority – unlike the private authority figure of the father – will do their jobs.

Which makes Magariel’s book, while definitely about the experiences of one particular child, also about something bigger: the abuses perpetrated more generally by a toxic ideal of masculinity. The boy and his brother are silent for so long because they want to belong to a social unit that is the familial equivalent of a treehouse with a NO GRILS ALLOWED sign. The father’s attempts to mould his children’s lives into a narcissistic male utopia is immature and destructive, but it recalls so much else: the worst of college fraternities. The worst of organised sports, with their “locker room banter” and their internal cruelties. The worst of private schooling. The worst of the military. These are worlds built on hierarchy and loyalty, on creating an image of a family, blood or chosen, allegiance to which is more important than individual lives. In showing the madness of this attitude through the microcosm of a family, Magariel offers a different way to be a man: sometimes the way to step up is to ask for help.

Many thanks to the publicity folks at Granta for the review copy. One of the Boys was published in the UK on 6 April.

The Patriots, by Sana Krasikov

“The point, my friend…is we’re all leashed pretty tightly to the era we’re living through.”

I went into The Patriots with only the vaguest and most limited of expectations: I knew the main character’s name, and that the action took place between the Soviet Union and the US, but almost nothing else. In part this is because the promotional materials, and the jacket copy, are also vague, and in part that is because The Patriots is difficult to summarise neatly. Were I to try, though, I would say this: that it’s about Florence Fein, an idealistic young Jewish woman from Brooklyn, who, disgusted by the failures of capitalism in Depression-era New York and chasing a summer romance with a Soviet she meets through work, decides to move to Russia. Once she’s there, she can’t go home again, and the book follows Florence and her young family through the depredations and the terror of mid-century Soviet life, as her innocence and fervour crumble. A secondary plot strand follows her son Julian, now in late middle age, as he returns to Russia on a business deal and tries to get his mother’s KGB file opened.

What The Patriots is really about is corruption, and not just corruption of the palm-greasing kind, but a profounder kind that destroys innocence. Florence’s and Julian’s timelines both follow this path. When Florence starts out, she’s almost invincible with belief. To move to the USSR is such a huge leap, and is something her parents are so discouraging about, that she finds herself almost forced into this level of conviction, just to survive the humiliation of being uncomfortable. As an American, she is all but expected to give up and go home after a month or two of being disillusioned by real hard work—but she’s stubborn, and she’s proud, and she refuses to give in. Cramped lodgings and poor food can be ameliorated by her special privileges as a foreigner, which means she gets to use better-stocked shops, but she finds this shameful; why should she be allowed to buy caviar and sun-dried tomatoes, when other honest comrades queue for bread?

The destruction of Florence’s innocence comes slowly. Trying to get an exit visa to visit her parents, she’s refused entry to the US embassy. Her American passport has already been taken by a clerk at a different office, and she’s issued a worthless “receipt”. Frightened and unprotected, and coming to terms with the fact that the country of her birth has abandoned her, she’s spotted leaving the embassy gates by Captain Subotin of the Cheka, the secret police. Subotin calls her in repeatedly over the next five years, demanding to be given the names and details of counterrevolutionaries—first in her workplace at a higher education institution, then from her time as a translator for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war. Krasikov tracks Florence’s state of mind over the course of her meetings with Subotin, from her naive belief that she can simply be “a mirror” of the world around her without implicating anybody, to her growing ability to strategise about the information she feeds him, right down to the moment when she—believing herself betrayed—gives him a name that really matters.

It can be difficult, especially from a contemporary point of view, to believe that anyone could ever be that innocent. For such skeptical readers, Krasikov has her secondary point of view character, Florence’s son Julian. Julian is also mired in some deep shit—in this case, corrupt insider trading between his (American) company and a Russian oil firm. His arc from indifference to potential complicity to moral arbiter parallels and complements his mother’s; he’s no saint, but we see how he juxtaposes American pragmatism with Russian romanticism, as Florence did, and how he chooses to reconcile those two conflicting impulses in a manner he can live with. We also learn that Julian has, historically, been Florence’s greatest critic: “She was a delusional narcissist!” he shouts at his own son, Lenny. The quotation at the top of this post is spoken to Julian in defense of Florence, by her brother Sidney, from whom she was separated by an ocean and a continent and a mountain of paperwork for most of her adult life. As a defense, it is emotive and eloquent—especially because, by the time we read it, we know exactly what Florence has had to go through as a result of the moral compromises she made—but it does not do to be ruled by emotive arguments when apportioning ethical responsibility. The fact that Julian manages to make a different choice stands as a quiet suggestion that, although we all live within our times, perhaps we don’t have to be ruled by them. Or perhaps he is merely lucky to live in a time where such a challenge is possible; we can decide for ourselves.

A minor gripe, if I can be permitted one, is that the book is slightly too long: especially in the book’s first section, before the move to Russia, the mechanics of the plot seem to creak into place very slowly. The payoff for that, though, is a world that draws you in and envelops you completely, and characters who are as vivid as friends. Krasikov tackles huge themes with aplomb, her writing as confident as a veteran’s. Particularly in the anniversary year of the Revolution, what she has to say on the compromises we make for idealism—for love of country—is worth reading.

Many thanks to the kind folks at Granta for the review copy. The Patriots was published in the UK on 2 March.

The Idealist, by Justin Peters

Knowledge is power. Therefore, free, unimpeded access to information is an inherently political issue.

Unless you keep pretty up to date with the tech community and the news that surrounds its activities, you may not know who Aaron Swartz was. On the other hand, if you were paying attention to US news in the early months of 2013, it’s possible that you do. In January of that year, Swartz was found dead in his apartment; he had apparently hanged himself. He had helped to establish the Creative Commons, and was one of the three founders of Reddit, amongst many other projects. At the time of his death, he had been indicted by the FBI under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and was facing up to ninety-five years in prison. His alleged crime involved downloading millions of articles from JSTOR, a database for academic papers. The FBI was convinced that he had intended to distribute them widely, and saw this as an infringement not only of JSTOR’s terms of service, but of US intellectual property law. Swartz, and the people he had spent most of his twenty-six years talking to and working with, believed that his action was a necessary step towards creating open access libraries, so that everyone—not just the people who could afford incredibly pricy journal subscriptions—could benefit from the work of publicly funded academics; that there was, in Swartz’s own words, “no justice in obeying unjust laws”, and that American copyright laws were fundamentally unjust and geared towards protecting corporations instead of empowering citizens. In The Idealist, Justin Peters sets out to explain not only why Swartz’s death was an unnecessary tragedy caused in large part by the state’s determination to hound him, but also the history and the rationale of the ideas he was fighting for in the first place.

It is outrageously informative on that history. Peters starts with the first legal battle over copyright in the United States: that of Noah Webster to protect his spelling textbook of 1783, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, from piracy. Webster wrote this textbook out of a sense of national pride, a desire to eradicate class divisions by giving poorer colonials a set of linguistic standards which would make them sound less like illiterate rustics. By doing this, Webster laid the foundation for arguments both for and against copyright provision for the next two hundred-odd years: the speed and ease with which information can be disseminated and/or acquired was subsequently framed in terms of public benefit. The question, in other words, has almost always been: Is it more or less advantageous to the general public to expand the public domain? Will it cause American creativity to flourish, or decline? Will access to literature and culture inspire people, or make them complacent? And—tacit but omnipresent in these discussions—how do you ensure that the rights of the creator are not simply a proxy for the rights of the corporation that distributes their work?

Amazingly, it has frequently been argued that it is in fact disadvantageous to the public to expand the public domain. Those of us who work, or want to work, as creatives can kind of see the point when it’s expressed the way it was in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing:

“Every time a Napster enthusiast downloads a song, it takes money from the pockets of all these members of the creative community,” Ulrich said, remarking that the “touted new paradigm that the Internet gurus tell us we must adopt sounds to me like good old-fashioned trafficking in stolen goods.”

(That’s Larry Ulrich, the drummer from Metallica.)

As we all know, this attitude served the music industry extremely poorly. One of the great virtues of Justin Peters’s writing is that he assumes his readers are bright but not experts—possibly not surprising given his background as a journalist for Slate—and I found him a particularly effective guide when he was explaining things like why the music industry failed so badly:

…[The] mainstream culture industries operate on a mildly coercive ‘push marketing’ model in which companies use advertising and promotions to create consumer demand for the products they want to sell, and the formats in which they want to sell them. Online file sharing repudiates ‘push marketing’ by allowing consumers to unilaterally decide what they want to consume and how they want to do so. As file sharing grew ever more popular in the early 2000s, bringing with it potential opportunities for new, collaborative models of marketing and production, the culture industries instead focused almost wholly on ways to regain their lost control.

This piece of explanation is equally useful when applied to the large academic and journal publishers whom Swartz was targeting when he started crawling JSTOR. I used to work for one—Taylor and Francis, which has recently acquired Elsevier, the main target of Swartz’s, and Peters’s, frustration—and it is a little alarming to realise just how blithely I accepted the idea that subscriptions to these services ought to be paid for. Consider this:

Tens of thousands of scholarly journals exist, and since the 1970s their subscription prices have risen at a rate higher than the rate of inflation […] but academic libraries are, more or less, compelled to subscribe. Every professor expects to find his specialization’s academic journal on the library’s shelves. Thus, many academic libraries wind up spending the bulk of their yearly acquisitions budgets on journal subscriptions.

That’s assuming that a library has a meaningful acquisitions budget at all. Many of them do not—or, at least, don’t have much of one. This plight is especially common in underdeveloped countries, where librarians have enough trouble keeping their computers on […] The result is an ever-widening gap between rich institutions and poor ones.

(A footnote to this section gives an example: as of two years ago, a print subscription to the journal Applied Surface Science cost institutions $12,471 per year.)

Online content distribution was meant to be a partial solution to this. JSTOR, however—the biggest online database of this kind of academic material in the world—struck a deal with publishers when it was first founded, promising that they wouldn’t lose out on potential profits by allowing JSTOR to collect their journals content. The result is that libraries still have to pay annual subscription fees, which are still prohibitively high, and access has not appreciably widened in any way. Meanwhile, the work of academics becomes commoditised—which really is not the point of academia, where you work on arcane and often expensive projects subsidised by benevolent instutitions and sometimes governments with the tacit understanding that whatever you find out will be freely shared for mankind’s general benefit—and, moreover, that commoditisation works only to enrich their publishers, not the academics themselves. It’s a system that screws almost everyone.

Peters’s book works so well because he spends a lot of time getting the reader up to speed on the debates behind these issues. It is not, however, solely a history; it is also a biography of Aaron Swartz, who conformed in many ways to the stereotypical image we might have of a hacker or a nerd. Though he was a brilliant, articulate thinker, and a talented programmer—he was contributing extensively to mailing lists by the time he hit eighth grade, and was a major player in the launch of the Creative Commons at the age of fifteen—he was also profoundly disdainful of authority. He refused to attend high school past tenth grade, and instead took classes at a local college. He had terrible body image and self-esteem issues, which manifested in eating rituals and a series of “cleansing” diets which terrified his friends. Photographs suggest a sweet, slightly diffident young man, but he was also known for getting straight to the heart of a problem, without anything like tact or diplomacy. He was desperately afraid of being seen as dependent or emotional. Asking for help, of any kind, from anyone, was his worst nightmare. He suffered from chronic depression. And, perhaps most damningly, his convictions led him to make statements about the duty of the hacker-citizen to liberate information. Much of Swartz’s clash with the FBI was exacerbated by this sort of personality baggage; he looked like what the government thought of as a bad guy.

“Looks like he is a big hacker, i googled him,” was one MIT police officer’s response upon Swartz’s arrest. Not Reddit cofounder; not Open Library architect; not computer prodigy or applied sociologist or Harvard affiliate or any of the other lines on his résumé. A big hacker.

And, before the FBI, Swartz’s brilliance and his privilege—he grew up in Highland Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago; he was exposed to computers from a very young age, having a father in the industry (Robert Swartz eventually worked as a consultant for MIT); he had the wealth and the support to enable him to drop out of schools, universities and workplaces when he found them too restrictive—caused problems too. There’s a reason the book’s title is The Idealist, and reasons why idealism is often, definitively, impractical. If you’re reading this as someone who tries to make a living by writing, you’ll probably already have thought of some good reasons for reasonably strong copyright laws. Another perspective comes from a librarian at UNC Chapel Hill with the splendidly mediaeval name of Bess Sadler, who approved of Swartz’s aims but, like most of the rest of us, had to live in the real world:

“I thought he was ethically right, but I was unwilling to put my own livelihood on the line with such strong statements [as Swartz’s Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto]… A librarian who issued a manifesto like that would be unemployable, and that’s something that should give us all pause.”

Which is not to say that it’s not a good idea, or that we shouldn’t strive for a world where creators and their work are sufficiently valued that they can easily afford to be generous, as people who contribute to free and open-source software very frequently are. (This isn’t to say that all F/OSS contributors are wildly wealthy. Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, was a mercurial megalomaniac who spent most of the ’80s living on a mattress in Urbana, Illinois, living off the rent paid to him by various lodgers. Modern house price absurdity—amongst other things—has made this strategy difficult for most young creators, though. It’s much more tempting to make your money in start-ups or industry first, and be ethical when you can afford to be.)

I could go on, and I probably will in bits and pieces, because this book is probably the single most important one I’ll read all year in terms of informing and challenging my ideas about power, information, and how technology should be used. It’s currently in vogue to encourage doom-mongering about the Internet: mainstream media reports often imply that it’s causing impotence, or school shootings, or apathy, or obesity, or bigotry, or festering hatred. It does these things, sometimes (hello, Breitbart! Hey there, 4chan! And Gamergate, and Twitter Support; I see you too!) But you don’t have to believe that, ultimately, that’s all the Internet is good for. It was first designed and used by people who wanted to build an infinite library. And that, bookish chums, is an ideal worth hanging on to.

Many, many thanks to Thogdin Ripley (another excellent name) at Duckworth Overlook for the review copy. The Idealist was published in the UK on 23 March.

Baileys Prize Shortlist Wishes

This is what I would put on the Baileys Prize shortlist if it were all up to me (which, obviously, it should be). The shadow panel has reached a group decision (with, I might add, a minimum of contention, though we’ve had some amazing and impassioned discussions about the various merits of each book), and our (un)official shadow shortlist will be posted tomorrow (Sunday). For now, though, here’s what I’d have:

The Power, by Naomi Alderman (my review)

What it’s about: One day, all over the world, women and girls discover that they have a power: they can harness and discharge electrostatic energy. From this apparently gimmicky premise, Alderman spins the stories of four people—three women and a man—who are affected by the new global order.

Why I picked it: For the ease with which it rises above those charges of gimmickyness. Alderman isn’t positing this for the sake of a cool premise; she’s interested in the most fundamental aspects of what makes human civilisation possible. The title is very apt: this book might seem to be about gender, but really what it’s about is power, and whether it is even reasonable to suggest that humanity is capable of creating a society where power is shared equally. It is the book from the longlist that most haunts me even now, weeks after reading it.

The Mare, by Mary Gaitskill (my review)

What it’s about: Velvet doesn’t know that she’s a natural horse rider until a summer trip courtesy of the Fresh Air Fund. For two weeks, she stays with Ginger, a childless artist in her late forties, and Paul, a professor at a small college in upstate New York. Across the road, there’s a stables. It’s there that Velvet meets Fugly Girl, a seriously damaged mare, learns to ride, and becomes invested in salvaging Fugly Girl’s spirit.

Why I picked it: For the strength, compassion, and rejection of stereotyping that Gaitskill brings to her character work. Velveteen is one of the most impressive fictional creations I’ve come across all year: a pre-teen of Puerto Rican descent when we meet her, she grows over the course of several years into a beautifully complex fourteen-year-old, full of age-appropriate longing to fit in and to meet boys, as well as distinctly mature concerns about her physically abusive mother Silvia, and, above all, a driving passion for horses. Silvia is almost completely inexplicable to soft, middle-class Ginger: a woman who tells her only daughter that she’s ugly, a woman who hits her kids, a woman who loves her kids so hard that she can’t show them any love. And Ginger is well-meaning, kind, and often very wrong, a refreshingly sharp take on white liberalism.

The Sport of Kings, by C.E. Morgan (what I wrote; scroll down)

What it’s about: The book follows the Forge family, one of Kentucky’s oldest racing dynasties, as Henry Forge attempts to create the perfect racehorse, and to retain control of his own family—specifically, headstrong daughter Henrietta. Meanwhile, Allmon Shaughnessy, a black ex-con, is hired at the Forge farm and must come to grips with Forge’s racism, his own past, and his interest in Henrietta.

Why I picked it: This book bites off more than most other books even glanced at this year (yes, I know that metaphor is mixed, thank you). Morgan wants to talk about everything: racism in America, drug-dealing, heredity, the mythos of the Old South, parenthood, the line between madness and dedication. If the novel is occasionally baggy, that’s because there’s a lot in it, and for my money, she integrates her themes pretty damn well. It was among the most ceaselessly entertaining and moving of the longlist contenders, and I like ambition.

Barkskins, by Annie Proulx (my review)

What it’s about: Much like The Sport of Kings, Barkskins focuses on the growth of an industry in America—in this case, logging—through the lens of family—in this case, the Sels and the Duquets, over the course of about four centuries.

Why I picked it: Did I say that I like ambition? Well, I do. Is this book flawed? Hell yes. Is that because it’s too long? Hell yes. Is it too long because Proulx is trying to make a point about time and legacy and the importance of taking the long view? Precisely. Is that point conveyed through characters who—sometimes—we get to know and love, with a staggering array of background detail that makes the whole thing (if you like detail) like a gorgeous tapestry, or (if you don’t like detail) like a metastasizing mess? Yes, it is. Ultimately I think one’s reaction to Barkskins comes down to whether you’re willing to forgive its sins in deference to what it’s trying to achieve, and in awe at what it actually does achieve. I’m willing.

First Love, by Gwendoline Riley (what I wrote; scroll down)

What it’s about: Neve is a young writer married to older writer Edwin. Over the course of scarcely two hundred pages, we learn about her marriage, her background, and her needy, manipulative, intensely deluded mother.

Why I picked it: First Love was not a book that I actually enjoyed reading, which is exactly why I’ve chosen it: Riley is so good at dialogue, at evoking tension and venom and the nuances of love and hate that often characterise parental and marital relationships, that you have to just stand back in awe. It ain’t pretty, but it’s a hell of a stylistic achievement.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien (my review)

What it’s about: Framed by a ’90s-set device where eighteen-year-old Ai-ming tells her family’s history to Marie, the daughter of a family friend, the book spans seventy years in the middle of the twentieth century in China. It covers the effects of the Cultural Revolution on a family, focusing especially on three young musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory, and the ways in which they bend or snap under ideological pressure, depending on their personalities.

Why I picked it: It’s by far the most sophisticated book on the longlist, and could stand as an example of a book that not only attempts the breadth and depth of Barkskins and The Sport of Kings, but fully succeeds—and in fewer pages. Thien’s characters are always people that we care about, and the dilemmas they face are so profound—how do you maintain integrity as an artist under oppression? Is there even a good reason for creating art when people are being killed daily for no reason?—and dealt with in such a mature fashion. I almost wish it hadn’t been as good, because it’s already done well on the Canadian and British prize circuit and it’s time for someone else to have the spotlight, but goddamn, the universal praise is well deserved.

Stay tuned for the shadow panel’s shortlist, to be revealed tomorrow chez Naomi (The Writes of Woman)…

6 Degrees of Separation: Room

This game is like “6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon” only with books. You can join in too; the rules are here.

First up: Room by Emma Donoghue, the story of a young woman who is abducted, imprisoned, and impregnated. We see it all through the eyes of the son she has with her captor—Jack, who until he is five years old believes that the room where they live is all that there is.

How you feel about Room depends on large part on how authentic you feel Jack’s voice is. I liked it (many others didn’t), but another book with utterly convincing child characters is The Light Years, the first entry in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s sprawling Cazalet Chronicles, which tells the story of an extended upper-middle-class English family before and during the Second World War. It is much less sentimental Downton-esque pablum than it is an illuminating and moving look at what life used to be like, and how in many ways the emotional beats of life in the ’40s were the same ones we experience now. It’s also (The Light Years in particular) very funny.

The Light Years is a book I often recommend to people who tell me they’ve enjoyed Barbara Pym. Excellent Women is probably her most famous, centering on a group of Anglican church ladies in a small English village. Great on group politics and genteel rivalry.

Pym came back into fashion after her books spent many years under the radar. Pushkin Press tends to perform the same service for writers, often from Eastern or Central European countries, who haven’t had as much press as they should have had in the West. Stefan Zweig has perhaps not been quite as obscure as some others, but the recently republished edition of his The World of Yesterday has definitely pushed him further into the public consciousness.

Another Pushkin Press book that I reeeally want to hit the big-time is Sand (review), by Wolfgang Herrndorf. It’s basically John Le Carré as directed by the Coen Brothers in one of their blacker moods, and it’s insanely good.

Herrndorf’s book has the opposite of a false bottom: a huge twist comes far too late in the day for it to be anything other than the real ending. Emma Flint’s Little Deaths (review), while the twist is less huge, achieves the same effect with its ending, finally establishing how we’re meant to feel about a character who’s been giving off mixed signals since the beginning.

And that’s all, folks. Next month the chain will start with Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. And tonight, I’ll post my personal Baileys Prize shortlist, so stay tuned. HURRAH.