What I’ve been reading lately, part 61

It’s Not Me, It’s You — Mhairi McFarlane

A re-read of the second McFarlane book I read. I liked it a lot back then, but was only gradually coming to terms with the fact that a chick-lit author was becoming one of my favourite writers.

I’ve long since got used to that idea, and eI xpect to do more re-reads as I wait for her to write more. It’s Not Me, It’s You would be good entry point to her oeuvre.

The Illustrated Tarzan Book no. 1 — Edgar Rice Burrows

I follow Project Gutenberg’s “new books” feed on Mastodon, and it’s a joy to see so many new public domain books becoming globally(*) available each day. One of the books I saw mentioned as newly added was this illustrated derivative of Burrows’ original Tarzan of the Apes (1912), which I’d not read. In retrospect, I should have read that the original instead of this, in which the prose has been pared down to the barest essentials. It’s still a ripping yarn, though, and was enjoyable enough for the hour or so that it took to read.

(*) OK, not technically globally available, since different countries have different copyright regimes, and books that are public domain in the USA (and so eligible for Project Gutenberg) may not be in the public domain in some other jurisdictions. But you know what I mean.

Racism in Tarzan is an interesting topic. A lot of what people say seems to boil down to “If we assume that the apes in the book are supposed to represent black people, then we can see that Burrows thought black people were like apes”. And yet it’s really not necessary to invoke such manoeuvres to find abundant racist assumptions throughout. It’s not just argued that the white explorers are much better men than the black natives; it’s taken absolutely as read, as an axiom of the universe. It leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.

Boundaries: when to say YES, when to say NO, to take control of your life — Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend.

This is a fascinating book by two Christian psychologists, arguing that many of our problems in life come from a failure to maintain or our boundaries or to respect other people’s. They illustrate this contention with many, many anecdotal examples (some from real people; some, I think, made up). And they show how the same broad principles apply in many different areas of life. There is profound insight here.

That said, by the time I was two thirds of the way through, I felt like I’d had enough. I ploughed through the last third out of a sense of obligation — I have a strong completionist streak — but I wasn’t constantly thinking “Yes! That makes sense!” any more by that stage.

The thing is, most Big Idea books have shot their bolt by the time you’ve read the first chapter (for example The Five Love Languages) or sometimes even just the title (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus). So Boundaries is definitely beating the averages here.

Recommended, despite my reservations.

The Ministry of Fear — Graham Greene

A war-time mystery-adventure, written in 1943 while the war is still on and its concerns of espionage within Britain must have felt uncomfortably close to home. It concerns Arthur Rowe, a man haunted by a dark past, who inadvertently receives some important stolen goods and is hunted in a disconnected, nightmarish way that involves situations not being what they seem to be, people not being who they seem to be, and a liberating loss of memory.

In some ways it reminds me of The Man Who Was Thursday — both of them compelling, bewildering books written by Catholics with an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world. The big difference is that Thursday feels like a wild dance and is often very funny, while Ministry is gloomy and oppressive. Ironically, Thursday has the subtitle “A Nightmare” while Ministry is subtitled “An Entertainment”. I think those labels are the wrong way round.

I was intrigued enough by the book to watch the 1944 film (which came only only a year later). It’s poor: it makes lots of completely unnecessary changes (e.g. the name of both lead characters), messes with the plot it many ways big and small, discards a whole important section of the book (the post-amnesia stay in a convalescent home) and loses all the atmosphere of guilt and secrecy. Very disappointing. I was not surprised to read in the IMDB Trivia page that:

Paramount paid Graham Greene £10,000 for the film rights to his novel, money he was very glad to have in wartime England. However, he was very disappointed in the film, especially as it had been directed by Fritz Lang, a film-maker he especially admired. Years later, Greene briefly met Lang, and the director made a point of apologizing to him for the film.

Here’s Looking at You — Mhairi McFarlane

Another re-read, and this time I got so hooked that I stayed awake till 3am to finish it, even though I more or less remembered from my first time through how it would end. This is the one where we follow Anna Alessi, an English-Italian woman in her early thirties, as she does her job as a history researcher at UCL while overcoming trauma from her school days and figuring out whether she’ll ever find a man she can respect. But really, the specifics of the plot are not that important. What counts here is the way the breezy easy reading works as a device for smuggling in properly empathetic insights about, well, what it is to be human. Is that a lot to attribute to a chick-lit novel? Maybe. But I think it’s right.

The Ipcress File — Len Deighton

A classic spy novel, made into a classic spy film (which I’ve not seen yet). It was Deigton’s first, published in 1962, and made his reputation. I found it bewildering to read: I never quite had the sense that I properly understood who was really who or what the various people’s motivations were. But that’s not a criticism: I think it’s completely appropriate for a story in which the unnamed narrator (the film later gave him the name Harry Palmer) also doesn’t entirely know what’s going on, and it’s dramatically effective for us to share his confusion. The whole thing left me fascinated but dissatisfied. I expect to read more by Deighton.

John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs — Ian Leslie

A very good friend who shares my love for the Beatles spontaneously bought this for me — it wasn’t my birthday or anything. And I absolutely devoured it. It’s a beautiful and human book that tells a very familiar story from a new perspective. On one level, it awoke the non-Tookish side of my Hobbit nature: “they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradiction”. But on another level I found it deeply moving to feel some part of what John Lennon and Paul McCartney felt about all the extraordinary things that were happening to them, and about each other.

I have quibbles. Because of the book’s focus on the John-and-Paul relationship, George and Ringo get necessarily short shrift, and that seems unfair to both of them. The book inexplicably skates right over The Long and Winding Road, which years ago I described as the greatest love song ever written by one heterosexual man to another.

But in the end what stays with me is the tragedy — and I mean this in the classic sense — not just of the Beatles’ break-up, but of their inability after 1970 to relate to each other on more than superficial terms. These four men who had been through so much together, and had been the best of friends in the most intense of situations, ended up communicating obliquely though interviews in Rolling Stone. That Paul never properly reconciled with John before Mark Chapman took that possibility away forever hurts my heart. How Paul feels about it, I can barely imagine.

Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night — Sophie Hannah

Hannah is an excellent writer (Haven’t They Grown, The Couple at the Table), so I was confident I would enjoy her take on Agatha Christie’s best-known detective. And I did, but I didn’t feel it had that spark that has made her own novels so compelling to me. I’m not sure what to make of this. I think if there are going to be Poirot continuation novels, then Sophie Hannah is good person to have writing them; but at the same time, I’d rather she invested her time in more of her own work rather than this sort of high-quality hack work.