I wanted to read this again as soon as I finished it the first time. Though it’s a lot of work – a circuitous, fractured narrative that fills more than a thousand pages – there’s something addictive about it, which is appropriate, given that addiction is one of its key themes.

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace
Abacus 2007, Paperback, 1104 pages, £12.99

If you’re unfamiliar with IJ, start here. For this review I’ll assume a familiarity with the basic plot but I’ll try to avoid spoilers. Alongside my second reading of IJ I decided to read Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity: A Study of Infinite Jest.Carlisle summarises each section of the novel and then offers analysis of the key themes and draws together the threads of the story so far. I highly recommend it; it’s like having a highly astute friend read along with you. As I completed each section of IJ, I read the relevant section of Carlisle. It definitely deepened and enriched my understanding of the book.

Elegant Complexity

Greg Carlisle
SSMG Press 2007, Paperback, 524 pages, £36.48

However, even without the guide, the structure of IJ is easier to perceive on a second reading. Reading for the first time, it’s hard to keep track of the characters and the various strands of the plot. Those things are much clearer the second time. Knowledge of where the characters will end up makes it easier to track their path through the book.

It’s also easy, with just one reading, to assume that Wallace has poured everything he can think of onto the page, that this is, as I thought after my first reading, “a collection of scenes, essays and anecdotes that DFW assembles into a vague story”. I was wrong. This is as tightly honed as a 200-page novel. Nothing here is wasted and everything is thematically relevant. It’s mind-boggling that Wallace managed to coordinate so much material and is one of the reasons why I think this is a masterpiece.

Wallace’s concerns are communication, entertainment and addiction. Our desire to be entertained, to be absorbed in something without being challenged or made to work, becomes addictive and eventually leads to our withdrawal from the world, killing our ability to communicate with others.

This behaviour is cyclical and repetitive and so is Wallace’s novel. The novel itself ends with the characters in stasis, their fates hinted at but not detailed. Denied release, the reader is left craving more, like an addict, and one can simply turn to page one and begin reading again; the cycle will continue.

Cycles and circles are everywhere in the book, from the addict’s repetitive behaviour to the “annular fusion” process that provides power for the Organisation of American Nations, to the wheels of the wheelchair-bound Quebecois terrorists.

But there are plenty of other recurrences: the colour blue, for example, and water and the idea of heads as somehow independent of bodies. Mastery over the body requires inhabiting the head – as the novel’s tennis players do – but trusting the head too much can withdraw you from the moment, which is a problem for addicts. Take Gately’s realisation, for example, as he struggles with pain and withdrawal:

“Everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.”

This is so blindingly true that it seems obvious and yet it really isn’t. It’s a lesson that some of us never learn. But Gately comes to realise it:

“No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it.”

The thing that makes John ‘No Relation’ Wayne a better tennis player than Hal Incandenza is that he can forget a point as soon as it has gone. Hal’s game is affected by what has happened. Wayne’s is not. Wayne is completely in the moment.

These glittering shards of intelligence, like slivers of broken glass – bright, piercing and clear – are scattered through the novel. But Wallace isn’t entirely in his head, he writes with genuine heart too. This is one of the most compassionate novels I’ve ever read, one that comforts you just as much as it challenges you. It’s a book that begs you to understand that a realisation worked for is one that will stay with you. It’s a book that wants to show you how hard communication can be but that will, if you work, communicate that message clearly.

It’s a work of genius. It’s perhaps my favourite novel. You should read it at least once.

Related posts:

1. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Shane’s book 17, 2010)
2. Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide by Stephen Burn (Shane’s book 21, 2009)
3. White Noise by Don DeLillo (Shane’s book 11, 2010)

Jarhead

Anthony Swofford
Scribner 2004, Paperback, 260 pages, £7.99

As a lance corporal in a US Marine Corps scout/sniper platoon, Swofford was trained to kill, but didn’t ever get the chance. His memoir, first published in 1997, led a wave of more ‘thoughtful’ war diaries – see also Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers Reading Club – that examine the military experience through a personal, human lens: the experience of being a warrior.

A memoir is a strange breed, not so much a series of events as a series of events as seen through the lens of hindsight. The troublesome –if most interesting – bit is the space between what actually happened and the author’s retelling of it. Swofford cops straight to this: “What follows is neither true nor false but what I know.”

It’s a fair disclaimer: what he knows now, not necessarily what he knew then.

Stories of war benefit from this hindsight because without it, they are chains of events, tales necessarily dehumanised by their tellers because the military institution requires demands that. I have never been to war, but I am willing to stake my life on this: you cannot pull the trigger on someone’s father, someone’s lover, someone’s son, but you can pull the trigger on an enemy.

War dehumanises because it must. But afterwards, when that soldier is out of theatre and shaking old sand out of his desert rucksack, as Swofford is at the start of his book, then the most interesting story unfolds, hindsight and all: “I’ve been working toward this – I’ve opened the ruck and now I must open myself.”

Cleverly, this memoir tells two stories. One, the story of a soldier’s experience of war, smoothed by hindsight, and two, story of how he came to tell it, and of the frayed edges that threatened to unravel his grip on who he was and what he had done (or not done). This latter story interested me more, but Swofford’s book brings the two together in a very readable, memorable way. It’s not a light read, but nor should it be.

Swofford’s war story begins on August 2nd 1990. Iraqi troops have marched into Kuwait City and in California, US troops have been put on standby. Gorging themselves on beer and war movies, he and his platoon rev themselves up for what they believe is to come:

We are all afraid, but show this in various ways – violent indifference, fake ease, standard issue bravura. We are afraid, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to fight. It occurs to me that we will never be young again.

Swofford’s experience of war is of violence, order, failure, boredom, fear and love – not of country or mission, but of his brothers in arms. The heart of this memoir, though, is a rumination on the futility and frustration of un-becoming a warrior. Getting to war was easy, but getting away from it is nearly impossible.

Years after discharge, Fergus, an old platoon mate, reaches out to Swofford after executing a neighbourhood bully vigilante-style with his military-issue rifle. Swofford, coping with this part of his past and himself only by consciously ignoring it, suggests his friend seek some help. Fergus’s response is less defensive than it is accusatory: “We fired the same rifle. You have the same problems as me.”

Jarhead skips between Swofford’s sobering present-day struggle to unpack his own baggage, and the span of time that led up to it. Years spent learning to kill, days spent breaking down his rifle, hours passed reciting the same oaths of allegiance to his rifle and his unit, these all come back to slap him, hard, when the war ends without his doing the one thing he was sent there to do.

There is no upside to Swofford’s war experience: he hasn’t killed anyone – not even himself, though he came close on that count – but in some sort of uneven bargain, something in him has died anyway:

If you’d killed those men, you would’ve told your mother, “No, I never killed anyone,” and even though you have indeed killed no one and have told your mother this, she has still said, numerous times, while weeping, “I lost my baby boy when you went to war. You were once so sweet and gentle and now you are an angry and unhappy man.”

Jarhead is genuinely well-written – Swofford has an admirable ease with language and a real skill for short, telling descriptions. Subject-wise, his book is easy to read because despite the guns and military trappings, the story it tells is unmistakably, universally human.

Though at the time I was angry that the pompous captain took the handset from me and stole my kills, I have lately been thankful that he insisted on calling the fire mission, and sometimes when I am feeling hopeful or even religious, I think that by taking my two kills the pompous captain handed me life, some extra moments of living for myself or that I can offer others, though I have no idea how to use or disburse these extra moments, or if I’ve wasted them already.

Life changes us. We cannot stop this. But sometimes we can see it happening and summon the strength to wrestle these forces that conspire against us into a kind of submission. And if we are lucky, as I hope Swofford is, we may even learn from them.

Related posts:

1. Black Hearts by Jim Frederick (Sara’s book 8, 2010)
2. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Sara’s book 1, 2010)
3. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (Sara’s book 2, 2010)

The Moving Toyshop

Edmund Crispin
Vintage 2007, Paperback, 224 pages, £7.99

Cadogan is caught up in a mystery when he arrives in Oxford for a holiday. Walking into town in the early hours of the morning, Cadogan’s suspicions are raised by a toyshop. Finding the door unlocked, he makes his way inside and discovers a dead body. Before he can raise the alarm he is knocked unconscious. When he comes to, the toyshop has gone – replaced by a greengrocer’s – and there is no sign of the corpse. Baffled, he turns to Fen for help.

What follows is reminiscent of an Ealing comedy as Fen and Cadogan chase around Oxford in search of the truth.

Crispin enjoys himself throughout, throwing in all kinds of literary gags and satirical lines. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s the sort of book in which characters don’t go to the police when they’ve no earthly reason for not doing so,” says Cadogan at one point after Fen has refused to go to the authorities.

In quiet moments the pair play a range of literary games, listing “unreadable books”, for example, and “detestable characters” (”everyone in Dostoevsky”, Fen offers). Later they get a lift from a lorry driver who has become depressed by urban life after reading too much D.H. Lawrence.

Fen’s awareness that he is a character in a mystery novel – at one point he thinks up titles for Crispin’s subsequent books – is reminiscent of John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that Carr’s hero, Gideon Fell, has the same initials as Fen.

The solution to the puzzle is convoluted and slightly confusing but still fairly satisfying. However, the solution isn’t the point. This is an entertaining romp that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable speedy read.

Related posts:

1. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Shane’s book 26, 2009)
2. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Shane’s book 4, 2010)
3. The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (Shane’s book 30, 2009)

Will You Please be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver
Vintage 2003, Paperback, 192 pages, £7.99

Carver is widely regarded as a master of the short story, a man who reinvigorated an old form and made it his own, churning out four volumes of short fiction in the last twelve years of his short life. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is the first of these. The second, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, made Carver famous, but many of the 22 stories in this first volume of work are as powerful and evocative as any in the writer’s oeuvre.

“Write what you know” — so goes the edict handed to aspiring writers. Carver always did. A blue-collar man from a broken, hard-scrabble background, he didn’t escape into a new world with his fiction but recreated the world he knew, to staggering effect. Carver’s signature style, the style that remade the form, is known as minimalism, but it’s a label he rejected:

“There’s something about ‘minimalist’ that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don’t like.”

But was it his style, or a style imposed on him? Only after his second book was released — and his fame was ensured — did it emerge that Carver’s trademark minimalist prose might have had more to do with the editorial style of Gordon Lish, Carver’s editor, than the writerly sensibilities of Carver himself.

Carver moved out from under his editor’s thumb — perhaps to his own detriment, as various posthumously published works seem to show — after the publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and truly came into his own with his third volume, Cathedral. But in this first volume, the Carver/Lish dynamic is beautifully at work, the stories therein lean to the point of being spare, and more powerful for it.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is a collection of brief, unvarnished accounts of moments in the lives of ordinary Americans, moments that, through the distance lens of reading, are significant, maybe even because they are insignificant. These are people who believe life is going to get better, because it has to. Harry and Emily in ‘How About This?’ — opposites who have fled to the country to pull themselves and their lives together, and only been drawn apart:

He was reaching to light a cigarette with his last match when his hands began to tremble. The match went out, and he stood there holding the empty matchbook and the cigarette, staring at the vast expanse of trees at the end of the bright meadow.

“Harry, we have to love each other,” she said. “We’ll just have to love each other,” she said.

Carver’s protagonists are broken people, or people who have never been whole. His antagonists are the forces he wrestled himself before he saved his own life by becoming a writer: poverty, debt, alcoholism, anger, self-doubt, failure.

In ‘Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes’ a father involves himself in his son’s social life, picking a fight with the father of another boy and in doing so, bringing his own son to tears. It’s a moving take on boys and men, coming of age and mortality, and yet there’s not a shred of sentimentality in those eight pages. This is Carver at his early, unfinished best.

‘They’re Not Your Husband’ is another standout. After bullying his wife into losing weight, Earl shows up at her work and encourages other men to “look at the ass on her” but is pulled up by her coworkers:

“He’s a salesman. He’s my husband,” Doreen said at last, shrugging. Then she put the unfinished chocolate sundae in front of him and went to total up his check.

It’s just six pages long but, like so much of Carver’s best work, ‘They’re Not Your Husband’ is a telling moment from a much broader story.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is easy to read and re-read, each story significant in its own right. Yet as a collection of tragic, comic, human stories, this book marks the remarkable beginning of a brief yet genre-defining career.

Related posts:

1. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (Sara’s book 3, 2010)
2. Runaway by Alice Munro (Sara’s book 4, 2010)
3. Close Range by Annie Proulx (Sara’s book 6, 2010)

The power of fiction, the need to create and, most of all, to believe something are all key themes in Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco’s second novel. It’s a kind of intellectual Da Vinci Code, one that piles conspiracy theory upon conspiracy theory but always with tongue in cheek.

Foucault’s Pendulum

Umberto Eco
Vintage 2001, Paperback, 652 pages, £8.99

The book opens with Casaubon, an Italian intellectual and publisher, hiding in a Paris museum at night waiting for a mysterious group who, he thinks, have kidnapped his colleague, Belbo. While he waits he considers the events leading to this point and we drift into flashback. Eco layers the flashbacks, creating a labyrinthine narrative with frequent digressions into the history of assorted medieval sects, the occult and extracts from Belbo’s aborted attempts to write fiction.

Casaubon, Belbo and their colleague Diotallevi work for a small publishing house that deals with a lot of manuscripts from conspiracy theorists. They term these authors “the Diabolicals” and at first mock them. Later they have the idea of coming up with their own conspiracy theory, one that combines all of the crazy theories that cross their desks. What starts as an amusement eventually becomes something that they take more seriously and becomes dangerous once they realise that there are groups out there who believe that the trio really have uncovered a secret.

“Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel,” Eco told the New York Times in 2007. Life is too short to read books by Dan Brown so I can’t speak from experience here but I’d guess that the difference between the two books is that Eco seeks to satirise and deconstruct conspiracy theories while Brown seeks to titillate. Eco fills pages with arcane references and history and after a while I stopped wonder what was true, what was legend and what he had invented. It doesn’t matter – the content of the conspiracies is not the point of the book.

There is genuine tension in places and quite a lot of comedy but mostly this is an intellectual adventure concerned with the love of books and the pleasure of knowledge. It’s also a pleasingly ironic exploration of worlds within worlds, reminiscent of Borges. It’s a lengthy read but nowhere near as inaccessible as it might appear at the outset.

No related posts.

White Noise (Picador Books)

Don DeLillo
Picador 1986, Paperback, 326 pages, £7.99

To White Noise, then, which was DeLillo’s breakthrough novel and tells the story of a university professor who runs a course in Hitler studies and lives with his wife, their son and their children from assorted previous relationships. The professor, Jack, and his wife, Babette, are both strongly afraid of death and obsessed with the idea of which of them will die first.

The book has three parts. The first sets up Jack’s place in the university and his relationship with Babette. In the second, the family has to flee an ‘airborne toxic event’, caused by a chemical spill from a train. The final section has Jack investigating the mysterious medical trial in which Babette has been taking part.

DeLillo plays with the ideas of simulation and authenticity, examines notions of celebrity and looks at the increasing dominance of technology and mass media. It’s delivered with DeLillo’s wonderfully-crafted, perceptive prose. This piece from the Panopticist gives a sense of how much work goes into DeLillo’s writing. It also highlights one of the book’s problems, however. Towards the end of his article Andrew Hearst mentions the book’s “first laugh-out-loud line”:

“Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage.”

Humour is a very subjective thing but the joke just doesn’t seem funny to me and nor does much else in the book. That’s a flaw in a comic novel, clearly.

Many of the themes – academia and institutions, waste, media and consumerism, for example – are echoed in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which is one of my favourite novels. DeLillo was Wallace’s mentor so it’s likely that White Noise was an influence on Infinite Jest. I think, however, that White Noise suffers from my having read IJ first because Wallace handles those themes so much better. Wallace is not only actually laugh-out-loud funny but also deals in real emotions.

DeLillo pays lip service to real emotions but seems unable to bring them to life on the page. His central characters here are supposedly terrified of death but DeLillo can’t make this into more than an intellectual exercise. When confronted with the idea of death his characters toy with the idea of terror but I seldom believed for a moment that real feelings were at issue.

And then there’s the dialogue. I know I’ve already mentioned it but I can’t over-emphasise the realism-smashing, nails-down-a-blackboard cringe-inducing effect his dialogue has on me. For a writer whose characters talk so much, DeLillo has such a tin ear for how real people talk. The problem is most obvious with the children in White Noise: even the teenagers here sound like middle-aged men who think too much. Every character does. It’s like listening to a monologue by a schizophrenic: he thinks there are lots of people there but in fact there’s only him.

When people aren’t talking there’s a lot of marvellous writing going on and some thought-provoking ideas, such as The Most-Photographed Barn In America, which DeLillo feeds into his meditations on reality and simulation.

The weaknesses, for me, mark DeLillo out as a good, rather than great writer and White Noise is a good, but not great, book. Of course, even saying that puts me on the wrong side of most literary opinion of the last 30 years. It’s definitely worth judging for yourself.

Related posts:

1. Point Omega by Don DeLillo (James’s book 9, 2010)
2. Carry On, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse (Shane’s book 31, 2009)
3. One Day by David Nicholls (Kat’s book 5, 2010

Well, Thelwell’s certainly full of these caricatures, and the frankly terrifying Saddle Club series from the 90s scared any competitive edge out of my horse-mad tween self, but pony books from the 40s through to the 60s are wonderful, which was why it was so nice to find a couple hanging around my parents’ house.

As a child, Pink Pony was one of my favourites, up there with St Clare’s and Malory Towers as a totem of a childhood that was far removed from my own suburban London life. Half-French October (brilliant name) spies a beautiful strawberry roan foal in a field one day. Her parents have promised her a horse of her own and she talks them into letting her own it and break her in herself. Bearing, in mind she’s barely 12 when this pony appears, what 12-year-old do you know who could a) commit do that sort of challenge and b) what parents now would let her? Let alone having a pony in the first place, bloody expensive things that they are.

Coming back to this book after 15 years, what struck me was how unflappable the prose is. There’s no breathless gosh or cripesing. Children are treated as children, but they’re given responsibilities. October’s pony – Southern Cross – has a brother who is bought by a rival rider and whose initially gentle temperament is completely ruined by harsh treatment. Despite having a rocking name and being bilingual, October and her half-Italian best friend are treated as outcasts by the school’s popular set until a nasty accident wins them sympathy.

I bought this copy of Pink Pony from the wonderful Jane Badger shop, a one-man online operation specialising in selling old books at extremely good prices. I’ve picked up a number of old Armada favourites here and it’s well worth a look. Pony books are a great read, calming and nostalgic without ever letting fantasy overtake the realities of money and they make responsibility something to aspire to.

Related posts:

1. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Sara’s book 1, 2010)
2. History: A Novel by Elsa Morante (James’s book 2, 2010)
3. Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 24, 2009)

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Penguin Classics)

Georges Perec
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 320 pages, £10.99

This volume collects Perec’s non-fiction work, though ‘non-fiction’ is perhaps not the best term for such a parade of flights of fancy, odd word games and barely-contained lunacy. There’s also a clever Borgesian short story, ‘Le Voyage d’hiver’, in which an academic searches for the provenance of a mysterious book.

As I’ve said, there’s plenty of silliness here and some of it is a little tedious. ‘Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Colour’, for example, is simply a recitation of the messages from 243 postcards. It’s fair to say that after about 43 postcards the point is made and the remaining 200 messages are a slog. ‘Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four’, meanwhile, is exactly that: a list of everything Perec ate over the course of a year.

Elsewhere though, Perec’s obsession with life’s tiniest details is entertainment and thought-provoking. ‘Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books’ is comical in its absorption with the task of maintaining a personal library. Anyone who has ever attempted such a task will be able to relate to Perec’s problem, while also being pleased that they are not anywhere near as anal as the author, who offers 12 different ways of ordering one’s books.

‘Species of Spaces’, the 1974 book which takes up the first third of this volume (and lends it its name), is a wonderful meditation on the world around us. Beginning with a contemplation of the space on the page before him, Perec gradually moves outwards to look at the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the apartment building and so on, until he reaches the Earth itself and then, once again, space. It’s an endearing combination of the comprehensive addresses that small children are inclined to give themselves and a scientific undertaking.

In amidst Perec’s pendantry – why do we assign rooms based on their function, rather than, say, mood or days of the week? – are some genuinely illuminating observations. In being forced to look so closely at the things that surround us, it’s impossible not to notice those things that we’ve taken for granted. It’s a fascinating exercise and Perec is a brilliant guide, always writing with a smile.

That lightness of touch is extraordinary given Perec’s upbringing. He was orphaned by the Second World War – his father died fighting the Nazis in June 1940 and his mother is presumed to have died in Auschwitz. Though little in this collection is autobiographical, the fate of Perec’s parents is implicit in many of the pieces.

Perec’s own career was a short one. He died in 1982, 17 years after he was first published. He was 45.

Related posts:

1. Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer (Shane’s book five, 2010)
2. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (Sara’s book 3, 2010)
3. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver (Sara’s book 5, 2010)

Napoleon

F.J. McLynn
Pimlico 1998, Paperback, 749 pages, £16.99

McLynn is a rather leaden writer, and it is hard to stay with him through 700 odd pages without lapsing into boredom. His style is extremely repetitive, especially when writing about people in Napoleon’s circle for whom he has an obvious enmity. Chief among these are Talleyrand, Murat and the Emperor’s sister, Pauline. McLynn has a habit of using the same pejorative adjective every time he mentions one of these personalities (for Talleyrand, for example, it is invariable ‘venal’, for Pauline, ‘nymphomaniac’).

McLynn also has a problem with women generally. Hardly any woman in his narrative emerges well, and some are condemned out of hand for the simple exercise of their sexuality. Pauline is criticised almost every time she appears for her ‘insatiable’ sex drive, and so on. McLynn is never able to tell us what is immoral about having sex on a regular basis, or even why it should be wrong for a woman to have several sexual partners. Worse still is that males in the story, none more than Napoleon himself, are not judged on equivalent terms, so the act of sleeping with many women is merely a fact of their lives rather than a moral basis upon which to condemn them. This prejudice against certain individuals and patterns of behaviour clouds the entire narrative.

McLynn is better at showing how Napoleon, far from being the liberal lawgiver he is sometimes portrayed as, was a profoundly conservative leader whose main aim was to establish a new elite and nobility – what we would today call an oligarchy – to replace the one so recently swept away by the French Revolution. Napoleon was happy to deploy his considerable power to exclude enemies as well as to promote, ennoble and enrich his friends. In many ways, Napoleon was a ruler without ideology and reminds me powerfully of Vladimir Putin. The reason for exercising power was power itself.

Here again McLynn reveals the poverty of his moral vision as he derides the ludicrous procession of Napoleon’s family and friends to assume kingships and other ennoblements. Ludicrous they were, not because they were of insufficient class, as McLynn thinks, but because the very idea of these pompous and unaccountable posts is laughable in the first place. As a genuinely great contemporary of Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, was to remark, the very idea of kings is evil. Monarchies don’t become satisfactory when the incumbent is of sufficient “breeding”; they are simply unsatisfactory all of the time. If the French Revolution was fought for anything at all, it was this, and Napoleon betrayed it in the most comprehensive way possible. He truly was the enemy of progress.

Napoleon’s military record is considerably more patchy than is commonly recognised, with his few genuinely great victories (Austerlitz and Marengo foremost among them) dwarfed by the scale of losses sustained in Russia and the otherwise largely indecisive battles fought after 1805. Given that Napoleon fought so many battles, McLynn has no choice but to deal with them in detail, but his descriptions merge into one another and, without the aid of maps for most of them, the narrative is hard to follow.

McLynn is also willing to forgive Napoleon for his many egregiously egotistical actions and, despite laying the evidence of them out in comprehensive detail, sums up his account of the dictator’s life in terms that Napoleon himself could hardly have objected to. As with so many commentators on his life, Napoleon is allowed to escape the accretion of detail of his corruption, violence, misogyny and, above all, his ultimate failure, to become a figure of legend of far greater status that the sum of his parts would permit.

Napoleon was a morally bankrupt leader, a dictator, a reactionary, an enemy of liberty and of truth. He deserves the everlasting condemnation of history. McLynn entirely refuses to hand out an appropriate judgement and that is the greatest of his many failings here.

Related posts:

1. Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin (James’s book 4, 2010)
2. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Ian’s book 13, 2009)
3. Codename: Renegade by Richard Wolffe (James’s book 8, 2010)

Microserfs

Douglas Coupland
Harper Perennial 2004, Paperback, 384 pages, £7.99

While I have read most of Coupland’s work, Microserfs never made it to my bedside table. When the book came out, its subject matter — human life within an increasingly controlling tech infrastructure; the worrisome question of whether people were becoming less human and more tech-like — didn’t resonate with me and the book fell off my radar. But one boom, two busts and a whole rethinking of the digital-human divide later, Microserfs seemed like a worthwhile read.

I think time has proven Coupland’s fears unfounded, but I suppose I would think that: I adamantly believe that technology is becoming more human, as opposed to vice versa. (Full disclosure: I am employed as a writer at a very creative, agile tech company.) Yet Coupland’s exploration of the flexing lines between man and machine is a thoughtful one, even if the passage of time and the dulling of fears (was anyone really that afraid? Seriously, this was the nineties!) have cast a slightly earnest shadow over the whole thing.

The question at the centre of the book is whether change, specifically technological progress, is always for the best. Coupland’s introspective protagonist, Dan, is a techie at Microsoft and a card-carrying member of the cult of Bill. He is of a place where you can only be tech, but something doesn’t feel right.

While Coupland uses the set and accoutrements of dot-com boom culture as playing pieces, the book is less a Wall Street-esque meditation on that world and more an exploration of the interaction between the human experience and technology. The setting is just a vehicle, if an especially well-suited one. If you’ll allow me to go all meta for a moment — and wield a cliche to do it — the beating heart of the book is Dan’s exploration of his own human-ness and his subsequent reconstruction of his life in favour of a more balanced whole that is part techie and part emotionally, fluidly, unpredictably human.

I think Coupland takes the teeth out of his own argument by creating a binary (ho ho) and pitting technology and the human experience as mutually exclusive ways of being. Of course, they’re not, as Dan and his crew of techies and civilians eventually discover, but the journey to that point loses a bit of thrust with the whole hindsight thing: I already know technology can help me be human in so many meaningful ways (sharing experiences, connecting with people, and so forth).

There is a passage where one of my favourite characters, a body-building, Barbie-barneted ex-Communist named Dusty, initiates a historical tour through several isms — Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and the like. Each is implicitly held up the cult of tech, yet the triumphant ism, Coupland rather sweetly reveals, is of course the ism which isn’t: the human spirit, and the real, emotional, unprogrammable, physical human experience.

One of Coupland’s motifs is around shipping — as in, finishing software and delivering it. Being done. For microserfs, it’s all about shipping. Forget what you’re shipping and why, just ship it. It’s not hard to see the metaphor here and I wonder whether, had I read this book in its original context, I would have found this strand of the story as heavy-handed as I do now.

I would be curious to know what other first-time readers of Microserfs think, and whether they concur that the passage of time and relative humanisation of the tech industry have taken some of the punch out of Microserfs. The man versus tech crisis has been avoided, for now, and for me, Dan’s practical and existential tussles with it ring as slightly jejune.

Given my comment at the outset of this review that a Coupland novel is a process I’ll go through for a few quality Coupland insights, this was kind of like eating an Easter egg from a year gone by, only to find it overly sweet and with a slightly bland centre. Not bad, but not what I was hoping for. Still, I might have expected as much.

Related posts:

1. Black Hearts by Jim Frederick (Sara’s book 8, 2010)
2. Jarhead by Anthony Swofford (Sara’s book 7, 2010)
3. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (Shane’s book 15, 2010)