A portico among the ruins of Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III’s Madinat al-Zahra Palace near Córdoba
Exactly one thousand three hundred years ago a mixed army of Arabs and Berbers reached the Straits of Gibraltar. It had taken the forces of Islam less than eighty years from their Prophet’s death to conquer North Africa. Now they were ready to carry their religion into Europe. In 711 they arrived in Spain, easily defeating the Visigothic armies that came against them. By 719 they had subdued the whole peninsula as far as the Pyrenees, driving any remaining Christian opposition into a small enclave of forest and mountain in the north and west. The rest of the country was absorbed into the culture of Islam.
At first it was rape and bloody conquest, as cruel as any invasion of the times. Perhaps the Visigoth peasantry came off lightly compared to what coastal areas of Northern Europe were facing from predatory Danes and Vikings, but few of the conquered Christians steeling themselves to heathen and alien rule as the 8th century turned into the 9th would have imagined that within a hundred years they would contentedly be celebrating their Mass in Arabic, that al-Andaluz as they had learned to call their country would have become a shining beacon of civilisation compared to the rest of Europe still slumbering in the Dark Ages, and that they had a Muslim Caliph to thank for a better and freer lifestyle than almost anywhere else at that time.
Partly this was a by-product of al-Andaluz’s enormous wealth. By the 10th Century, it had become a world power in its own right. With the profits from its trade its emirs had built beautiful mosques and palaces. A centralised state, it had a huge standing army, consisting of mercenaries and slaves from Eastern Europe and North Africa. Its glittering court attracted scholars from all over the known world. When the Emir Abd-ar-Rahman III declared himself Caliph in 912 (in other words asserting supremacy in Islam against the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad) there was much to justify his claim to have taken over the Islamic renaissance that had begun a century before in Baghdad. Córdoba, his capital, with a population of 500,000 people, had a huge paper industry, great libraries and pre-eminent schools of medicine, mathematics, philosophy, poetry and music. It was these sciences, many of their texts translated from Latin and Greek, that later formed the basis, when transferred to Northern Europe, of Western knowledge.
Andaluz’s unique strength, however, was the openness of its society, and this attracted even its enemies. Despite the fact that they were at war and dreaded the armed raids of the Caliph and his belligerent Wazir, al-Mansur, every year, affluent young men in the Christian kingdoms of Castile, León and Navarre at the beginning of the 11th Century would in private call themselves Ali or Mohamed. If they were ultra-cool they’d wear Moroccan jelabahs, sip sherbet under orange trees, dress their food with spices, listen to Arab music and take baths. The big dream was one day to visit Córdoba, because Córdoba was New York.
This attractive cosmopolitanism, and the reason why the inhabitants of al-Andaluz – Moors, Christians and Jews – could live in harmony was a result of the deliberate policy of tolerance practised by the caliphs. For sure Arabs ruled and Islam was the State Religion. The laws of the Prophet applied absolutely to every Muslim, and to non-Muslims in the case of dispute – but otherwise Christians and Jews, as long as they paid their taxes, could worship and govern their own communities as they pleased. Different laws co-existed. Nor were positions in the Caliph’s government denied to those of merit from the other communities. One of the chief ministers of Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III was a Jew, Hasdai Ibn Saprut, and Christians worked as doctors in Muslim hospitals and secretaries in the Chief Qadi’s office (the Qadi was the judge who administered Islamic law). In fact from the public bathhouse to the Caliph’s palace there was nowhere that people of different races and creeds did not mix freely.
It was not always so. Tolerance, as we are discovering in our own post 9-11 times is a fragile plant that all too often nurtures the enemies who seek to destroy it. It is particularly vulnerable to fundamentalism.
One spring day in 851 a Christian monk from a monastery outside Córdoba came into the city and publicly insulted the Prophet. The first reaction from the cultivated Moorish authorities was to reason with him. When he refused to apologise they reluctantly decapitated him for blasphemy as Islamic law demanded. The embarrassed local Christians were glad when it was all over. But the next week another monk came, and after him another. They too were executed. The provocations did not stop. The last to sacrifice himself was the architect of these demonstrations, since canonised as St Eusebius. The result was polarisation of the separate communities, curfews, martial law, a ban on Christians working in public offices, suspicion of the Jews.
Al-Andaluz recovered from that incident, but it was a sign of what was to come. By 1020 the Caliphate, riven with internal dissensions, had collapsed and al-Andaluz split into separate Muslim kingdoms. King Alfonso VI of Castile, the most powerful of the Spanish Christian monarchs, saw his chance and cleverly playing one Arabic state off against each other, in 1085 he conquered the Spanish emirate of Toledo. This was a time of increasing Christian fervour in Europe that in ten years would take a Christian army, sanctioned by the Pope, on crusade to Jerusalem. Alfonso, to assist his territorial gains, was able to profess a similar devotion in order to tap into this force. French monasteries provided him with money. Volunteer crusaders from the north stiffened his armies. The response from the beleaguered Moorish states was to call on help from a Taliban-like Berber tribe in North Africa, the Almoravids. The blue turbaned jihadis crossed over the straits and took the country for themselves. The tolerant spirit of al-Andaluz was crushed in the collision of opposing fundamentalisms. Civilization went into decline for many decades. It re-emerged briefly in the 12th Century. Moorish philosophers like Averroes later influenced learning in the West – but Córdoba was never again as glorious or tolerant as it had been under the Caliphate. And slowly the Christians gained strength and territory.
After 500 years of bitter religious warfare, known as the Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabella, monarchs of the united crowns of Aragon and Castile, took the last Moorish stronghold of Granada, recovering Spain for Christendom.
In the hundreds of years that followed, Christian Spain did its best to blot out the memory of what it considered to be its shameful Islamic past. The Inquisition expelled the remaining Muslims and later the Jews. The palaces of the Emirs and Caliphs were allowed to crumble to dust, the few remaining mosques were converted to churches. All that remained were a few castles and towers – and a few faint reflections of an eastern civilisation that had once dominated the land: courtyard houses with tiles and colonnades, flamenco, spicy paellas and gardens full of orange trees and palms became part of the national identity, but their Arab origins had been forgotten.
It was not until the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries that Spanish students of architecture and foreign travellers, inspired by the twin fashions for Romanticism and Orientalism, rediscovered this lost Islamic past. When, in the 1830s, writers like Washington Irving, archaeologists like James Cavendish Murphy and painters like John Frederick Lewis or David Roberts brought descriptions and lithographs of the wonders of the Alhambra Palace in Granada to the attention of the Victorian world, the effect was sensational.
Within a few years write-ups of the Alhambra, the hauntingly beautiful Mesquita mosque in Córdoba, the Arab-style colonnades in the Alcázar in Seville as well as the Torre Del Oro and the Giralda Tower in the same city were in every Baedeker and guide. Trippers in their hundreds came to Spain, braving the rough inns and mule tracks in order to luxuriate their senses on the fabulous arabesques and traceries in the Court of the Myrtles or the Hall of the Ambassadors in the Alhambra, their minds full of images from the Arabian Nights. French, German and English painters obliged the fashion and soon there was a whole school of artists conjuring images of slave girls in harems, Berber guards by imposing gateways and executioners with great scimitars beheading their victims on palace steps.
Times have moved on since then. Modern scholarship has dispelled most of the Arabian Nights fantasies of cruel sultans and beautiful odalisques. Why al-Andaluz fascinates today is because of its parallels to our own times. Our societies too have reached an unparalleled advance of sciences, art, civil society and personal freedoms, but in the wake of the war on terror and the recent collapse of some of our economies, the tolerance which has been the wellspring of our civilisation seems threatened.
For the Spaniards the Moorish period is no longer a time of national shame. On the contrary, in a country that in the last century suffered the horrors of civil war and a 30-year repressive dictatorship, recognising its Moorish past for what it was has been a liberating as well as enriching part of its national renewal. And much pride, mixed with sorrow. It is no coincidence that following the national tragedy in 2004 when trains in Madrid were attacked by al-Qaeda with much loss of life, the Spanish people, uniquely in the Western world, did not fall in behind America on its crusade against terror; they voted in a new Government that was against sending troops to Iraq. Perhaps after a millennium of intolerance – from the Spanish Inquisition to Franco – the Spanish understand divisiveness better than any other nation.
For the tourist, international or domestic, visiting the Alhambra or the Mesquita for the first or the nth time, there is poignancy as well as a beauty.
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Research trip to Cairo – Part 2
Then and now. Parts of Cairo have not changed in hundreds of years. Modern photos taken last week, compared to paintings by David Roberts R.A. (1796-1864).
Wandering down the southern part of al-Muizz Street, in modern and Ottoman times a textile market, one sees that certain fashions haven’t changed either.
Please click on thumbnails below to scroll through the gallery:
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- The Market of the Silk Merchants – High Fashion
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- The Market of the Silk Merchants
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- The Market of the Silk Merchants (David Roberts)
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- Minarets and the Zuweyla Gate
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- Minarets and the Zuweila Gate (David Roberts)
Click here to order ‘The Book of the Alchemist’ from Amazon.co.uk
Adam Williams has just sent these photos from Cairo where rumour has it he is researching a sequel to The Book of the Alchemist.
Please click on thumbnails below to scroll through the gallery:
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- Camels
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- The al-Futuh Gate
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- Inside the al-Futuh Gate
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- The Mosque of al-Hakim
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- The Mosque of al-Aqmar
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- The Qasaba
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- The Mosque of Amr, Fustat
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- The Old City
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- On the Nile
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Click here to read 'A Treasure from the Vault'
Adam has just updated the biography section of this website!
Adam Williams explores his colonial ancestry as the first treasure comes out of the Newmarch vaults.
Click this link to read more – A Treasure from the Vault
Click here to read 'A Boyhood Among Zulus'
Adam has just updated the biography section of this website!
In A Boyhood Among Zulus, Adam ponders his family’s South African roots.
Click this link to read more – A Boyhood Among Zulus
I was reading a new book from the Earnshaw Press today. It’s called ‘China Rhymes’ and is a collection of Old China Coast poetry, written in the 1930s by the “poet laureate” of the Treaty Ports, Shamus A’ Rabbit. It has recently joined the growing collection of books published by the Shanghai-based entrepreneur and man-of-letters, Graham Earnshaw, who a few years ago , set himself the magnificent challenge of rescuing for posterity all the early Twentieth Century out of print China Classics ( see the website Tales of Old China).
Rabbit’s light hearted poems and ballads are mainly the sort of occasional pieces that first saw light of day in the columns of newspapers like the South China Morning Post, Japan Times and China Mail and conjure a charming and irreverent picture of treaty port life, beautifully illustrated by the great Russian cartoonist, Sapajou (Volume I of whose own Collected Works has also just been published by Earnshaw Books. Get it! It’s beautiful! And a historical treasure).
‘China Rhymes’ made me recall various poems my mother remembered from her childhood in the 1930s in Tientsin (China’s northern treaty port) and which she repeated to me when I was little. But there was a difference. Most of the poems my mother taught me as a child were not in standard English, as Rabbit’s are, but in what was then called Pidgin. This was an argot of mixed Chinese and English adopted primarily for trade and later extended into every aspect of daily commerce. A language in itself, it was used all along the China Coast from the early Nineteenth Century until the mid Twentieth.
To talk – or even repeat – Pidgin is now considered to be somehow politically incorrect. as if it was another crime of Imperial Empire Builders to make Chinese coolies use a comic and demeaning version of English as part of the great National shame game (I was criticised for having a Chinese cook speak it to his British employer in one of my novels set in the 1920s) but nobody would have felt the slightest bit embarrassed or demeaned by it at the time. In fact, most Chinese and British talked to each other in the 1920s and 1930s in nothing else. Without the range of language schools we have today, it was very rare that Chinese or foreigners knew enough of each other’s language to converse fluently except for a small, educated minority – but trade had to go on, and Pidgin could be picked up by anybody. It was actually a very flexible language, and not unique either – there are several other originally ‘Pidgin’ type languages that have been adopted as main line ones – Swahili or Malay, for example, and the official language of New Guinea where the main newspaper was (and still is for all I know) called the New Guinea Talk Talk. But in its day the China Coast version defined Pidgin. It was mainly a transliteration of Chinese grammar using garbled versions of English words. Some of the phrases, “catchee” for “to have” or “to own”, “belong” for “pertaining to” and “makee” for “do” or “cause”, “top side” for “up” and “bottom side” for “down” were still in use when I was a boy in Hong Kong. In fact I have an abiding memory of a family outing to Macau. We alighted from the ferry and found a rickshaw puller.. We wanted him to take us to the beautiful Protestant Cemetery, which, as afficianados of colonial cemeteries and those with a passion for the melancholy of history will know, is a gem of its kind, its gravestones carved with the names of famous missionaries, diplomats and soldiers, alongside heart wrenching crosses and angels (so familiar in the tropics) that mark the graves of tiny children. But could we make ourselves understood to the rickshaw man? We tried English. We made an attempt at Cantonese, but the rickshaw puller stared us uncomprehendingly. Finally my mother lost patience: “Dead man long time down bottom-side,” she snapped, and we were pulled to our destination like a shot.
It was with enormous pleasure that I found in a second hand book shop a small yellow volume of verse, an 1887 version printed by Trübner & Co, Ludgate Hill, London , of the popular ‘Pidgin English Sing Song, or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect”. First published in 1876, it was the work of an American humorist and folklorist, Charles Godfrey Leland,, who was born in 1824. I’d never heard of him but I subsequently discovered that he’d lived a colourful life, taking part, among other things, in the 1848 revolution in France and the American Civil War. He is credited as having created the industrial art movement in the USA and wrote occult books. He was also, it appears, a sort of Nineteenth Century Gavin Menzies: one of his most successful books was called “ Fu-sang; or The Discovery of America by Chinese Buddhist Priests in the Fifth Century.” (for those interested there’s a biography of him that can be bought on Amazon Charles G. Leland: The Man & the Myth
While many of his poems are comic or nonsense rhymes:
Slang-Whang, he Chinaman
Catchee school in Yangtsze-Kiang,
He larn pidgin sit top-side gloun’
An’ leedee lesson upside down,
With Yatsh-ery – putsh-ery, snap an’ sneeze,
So fash’ he chilo leed ChineseSlang-Whang, when makee noise,
Wit’h he pigtail floggee állo boys,
Allo this pidgin much tim go,
What tim good olo Empelor Slo.
An’ no more now in Yangtsze-Kiang
Hab got one teacher good like Slang.
some are lyrical, like this ballad about a Chinese princess married off to the ‘colo-lan’ ‘ (cold lands) of Tartary:
Belongey China Empelor
My makee one piecee sing:
He catchee one cow-chilo
She waifo Tartar king,
Hab lib in colo-lan’,
Hab stop where ice belong,
What-tim much solly in-i-sy
She makee t’his sing-song:
“He wind he wailo ‘way,
He wind he wailo ‘long,
An’ bleeze blow ovely almon’tlee,
And cally a birdo song.“Too muchee li to China-side
T’hat-place he tlee glow high,
My fáta blongey palace,
All golo in-i-sy,
My wantchee look-see máta,
He máta wantchee kai,
My tinkey Mongol fashiono
No plopa fashion my.
Ai! Wind he wailo ‘way
Ai! Wind he wailo long,
An’ bleeze blow ovely almon’tlee,
And cally a birdo song.“He birdo wailo Pay-chin,
Chop-chop he makee fly;
That máta hear he sing-song,
How muchee dáta cly,
‘How tartar-side he colo’
How muchee nicee warm,
One dáta-chilo catchee
In-i-sy he máta arm.
Ai! Wind he wailo ‘way
Ai! Wind he wailo long,
An’ bleeze blow ovely almon’tlee,
And cally a birdo song.“He go top-sidee cow,
T’hat fashion tartar-side,
T’hat no be plopa fashion
For Pili-kai to lide.
Suppose he lib homo,
So-fashion he look-see,
He lide fo’ piece horsey
In coachee galantee.
Ai! Wind he wailo ‘way
Ai! Wind he wailo long,
An’ bleeze blow ovely almon’tlee,
And cally a birdo song.”He máta talkee Pili :
He Pili open han’,
He talkee, “No good fashion
Hab got in Tartar-lan’.
Must make one China town,
Must makee for he kai;
Must makee tartar-sidee,
An’ he no makee cly.”
Ai! Wind he wailo ‘way
Ai! Wind he wailo long,
An’ bleeze blow ovely almon’tlee,
And cally a birdo song.He sendee muchee coolie,
He sendee smartee man,
He makee China city
In-i-sy t’hat Tartar lan’.
He kai catch plopa palace
An’ coachey galantee,
No more hab makee cly cly.
My sing-song finishee.
Ai! Wind he wailo ‘way
Ai! Wind he wailo long,
An’ bleeze blow ovely almon’tlee,
And cally a birdo song.
Glossary
- Cow-chilo – daughter
- Colo lan’ – cold country ie Tartary
- Solly – in grief
- In-i-sy – inside
- Wailo – go
- Cally – carry
- Li – a Chinese mile
- Fáta – father
- Golo – gold
- Máta – mother
- Kai – daughter
- Plopa – proper
- Pay-chin – Pekin
- Chop-chop – quickly
- Pili-kai – Emperor’s daughter
- Homo – home
- So fashion he look-see – She would appear thus
- Fo’ – four
- Galantee – grand
- He máta talkee Pili – The mother addressed the Emperor
- Tartar-sidee – in Tartary
I suspect that Leland considered that he was writing seriously in a respectable dialect. (In his introduction he describes the language in philological terms and attaches a useful glossary at the end). ‘Pidgin English Sing Song’ was certainly a labour of love, and, politically incorrect though it may be for the sourpusses, reading him today is a delight.
Since it’s still the Christmas Season (still a few days off Twelfth Night) I’ll add one more of his poems, one which in the 1880s must, I am sure, have found itself scribbled on greetings cards all along the China Coast, because it is a reworking (in Pidgin) of something very traditional and English:
Littee Jack Horner
Makee sit inside corner
Chow-chow he Clistmas pie;
He put inside t’um
Hab catchee one plum
“Hai yah! What one good chile my!
Buy Adam Williams’ China trilogy – The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, The Emperor’s Bones and The Dragon’s Tail – from Amazon.
HISTORY
- Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War Volume III by Jonathan Sumption ( Faber and Faber)
You have to wait ten years for each volume but Jonathan Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War between England and France is of a scale and scholarship perhaps only matched before by Edward Gibbon with his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and to think that Britain’s leading and busiest QC is researching and writing these books in his spare time is astonishing. Once you open the pages you are in another world where chivalry marches pace to pace with realpolitik, and the actions of these kings, knights and brigands of old (as told by Sumption) have all the immediacy and tension of current affairs. He brings a forgotten past to life revealing the logic of a mediaeval world to be as pragmatic as our own. And meticulously he shows how the economics of war influence politics and decisions as they do to this day. In this volume, England’s fortunes decline after the triumphs of Crecy and Poitiers and the illness of the Black Prince is the prelude to the loss of most of Aquitaine. Tuchman’s ‘calamitous 14th century’ ends in a nadir of misgovernment for both exhausted kingdoms, to be manipulated by ruthless power brokers like John of Gaunt or the Duke of Burgundy, while fledgling parliaments try vainly to control their folly.. The very order of feudal society is shaken when the Men of Ghent rebel in the Low Lands and the Peasant’s Revolt erupts into London. Read this day by day narrative and savour an extraordinary recreation of history – while waiting with bated breath for the next volume in 10 years time!
- One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs ( Arrow Books )
I remember lying awake in a school dormitory waiting for the sky to go red. That was the night President Kennedy was shot and we were anticipating a nuclear dawn. I also remember the day the Cuban Missile Crisis ended. We hadn’t really understood what it was about but Mr Gregor, the Latin master, told us civilisation had been saved. President Kennedy subsequently became our hero. He had eyeballed to eyeball Khrushchev and the latter had given way. Michael Dobbs’ book on the Missile Crisis, published last year, brought back all the paranoia that was part of everyday existence for a generation growing up in the Cold War, but chillingly it also revealed that we did not know the half of it – and nor did Kennedy or Khrushchev. Having had access to released documents from Moscow and Washington about the Crisis, Dobbs is able to give us a minute by minute account of those thirteen days from the point of view of both sides and it is a chronology of near misses, mistakes, ignorance, false suppositions, accidents and cock-up by bit players out of the radar of the Kremlin or the Pentagon, ANY ONE OF WHICH might have led to the pressing of the button by either side. It is an object lesson in human stupidity and the most frightening book I have ever read.
DETECTIVE AND THRILLER
THREE NEW MYSTERIES BY THE INCOMPARABLE BORIS AKUNIN
- The Coronation (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
- She Lover of Death (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
- Pelagia & The Red Rooster (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
George McDonald Fraser is gone and there are no more Flashmans to fill the Christmas stocking each year, so I have transferred my allegiance to the great Georgian Japanologist, Grigory Chkartishvili, better known as the novelist, Boris Akunin, whose books sold in millions round the world have caused him to be described as Russia’s Ian Fleming – as well as a new Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov and Conan Doyle, for many of his allusions in his wittily written thrillers are nothing if not literary, and the reader is always teased and challenged as much as drawn along by the taut suspense, and even after seven novels, one is still not entirely sure what to make of his diffident but always clear-thinking hero, the immaculately dressed ex-civil servant, Erast Fandorin, who has – bashfully, one feels – taken his place in the pantheon of super sleuths such as Sherlock Holmes, Maigret and Hercule Poirot. A superb historical novelist, Akunin seems to know every alleyway of fin de siecle Moscow, through which stalk the devilish assassins and conspirators whom Fandorin and his samurai servant, Masa, will have to thwart. In contrast are Akunin’s Sister Pelagia novels, where a gentle, bespectacled nun lives quietly in a convent in the sort of dull provincial town so familiar to us from Chekhov and Turgenev – but Sister Pelagia, while sincerely devout, is easily distracted when a mystery or murder takes place, and then her passion for Paris fashion comes in handy and, with the blessing of her bishop, she’ll don a disguise to solve unspeakable crimes. The Pelagia novels are in some ways more accomplished than the Fandorins, and this latest and last in the series, which came out this year is – literally – Apocalyptic in its ending. 2009 was a treat for English-speaking Akunin fans – two Erast Fandorin novels and one Sister Pelagia published in one year! But there are at least three more Fandorins to come: He Lover of Death (let’s hope in 2010), The Diamond Chariot and Jade Rosary Beads.
C J SANSOM’S TUDOR DETECTIVE SERIES
- Dissolution (Pan paperback)
- Dark Fire (Pan paperback)
- Sovereign (Pan paperback)
- Revelation (Pan paperback)
I came late to C J Sansom’s mysteries, by way of his novel on the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Winter in Madrid, An excellent book, but it did not prepare me for the charm of his 16th century historical detective series, featuring the hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake. A reluctant investigator, each novel pitches him into the politics of Henry VIII’s England, a Renaissance police state that Sansom brings alive in all its squalor, exuberance and cruelty. The books combine cracking plot and a scholar’s historical touch. I listened to the series on Talking Books while doing my exercises on the treadmill, and never have I been so healthy, as I rushed to the gym each day to find out what happened next, devouring all four novels in the space of a month. Read them in order.
A HEROINE FOR THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY FROM STIEG LARSSEN
- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Quercus)
- The Girl Who Played With Fire (Quercus)
- The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest (Maclehose Press)
It is like a new sun on the horizon when an original writer comes and transforms a tired genre like the murder mystery into something surprising, exciting and new. Such is The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, the last volume of which came out this year. The novels are dark to the point of diabolism but they are firmly set in the societies of our day and the evils are topical, social and political ones. As thrillers they are un-put-down-able but they tear not only at the nerves but also at the conscience and the deepest shreds of one’s compassion. Larsson’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander, with her extraordinary bravery, resourcefulness and vulnerability is a heroine for our modern times, her every action a shout of defiance. She is terrifying in her vengeance and our hearts go out to her. The only tragedy of reading these three books (which will take out a week of your life because you will not be able to think of anything until you’ve finished them) is that there will be no more to come, because Stieg Larsson died shortly after completing them. It is literature’s loss.
LITERARY FICTION
- The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (Chatto & Windus)
The flyleaf of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones tells us it is the War and Peace of the Twentieth Century. In scale, scope, philosophy and accomplishment it matches the ambition of Tolstoy – but it is not a book of grand armies and generals; this is the story of the attempted extermination of the Jewish race, and the narrator is an SS officer. It is through his eyes we observe the war with Russia, the pogroms in Poland and Ukraine, the hell of Stalingrad and the bureaucratic nightmare of the Final Solution. Littell’s anti hero is no sub-human monster; on the contrary he is a cultivated, educated, philosophy-trained Francophile – that is Littell’s point: the horrific crimes of the Germans in World War Two were directed by the flower of European civilisation. This novel explores the uncomfortable proposition that anybody, in the same circumstances, the same historical period, under the same pressures, could have become a willing Nazi.
There are times that this huge, strange book enters avenues of the mind and soul that are properly the territory of the Marquis de Sade; it requires a strong stomach to continue reading. But Littell is a skilful artist who can write lyrically; he has an exact eye for detail and he is a conjuror of powerful metaphor when it suits him. He knows how to hypnotise, poison and seduce his reader onwards. Usually it is through the emotionless quality of his prose that he recreates the inexorable Nazi war machine. Long passages read like history. This is a military bureaucrat making his report, and after pages and pages of advance and slaughter, the mind is so numbed that one is almost transported physically into the apparatchik’s mindset and, horrifically, begins to accept the pragmatism and necessity of unspeakable actions. In literary terms it is a remarkable sleight of hand and sometimes you have to lift your head from the book and tell yourself, “No, what’s going on is unacceptable.” But, without knowing it, you have already been part brutalised; you realise that for long uncomfortable minutes you have mislaid your moral bearings. For the length of time you have been reading you have been living in the mind of a Nazi.
Only a writer of genius could have achieved this and Littell deserves the Prix de Goncourt and all the other honours he has received. The world has been waiting for a book to help us understand and internalise the Holocaust – after all,what else characterised the Twentieth Century but genocide? It still goes on – in Iraq, in the Congo. What IS this savagery under the veneer of civilisation? Are we always to be cursed by it? Can we ever exorcise it? Littell’s answer is not optimistic. There is no Tolstoyan consolation. In Littell’s post modern novel, moral certainty is absent. As the novel builds up to its surreal ending in the burning flames of Berlin, Mythology has become more valid than Reason. The edifice of civilisation collapses. The book ends in a Dance of Death. We are reverting to our primitive, pagan state, which he vividly evokes with images of tribesmen offering human sacrifice to nameless gods on the steppe. This reversion, Littell seems to be suggesting, is where the contradictions within our civilisation are leading. It is the human condition of our times.
This is not a book to love. It is too cruel and uncompromising, but there is no denying its brilliance, power and sometimes intoxicating beauty. For all its length it is a page turner, albeit often with horror and fearful anticipation. It is probably the greatest work of fiction to have been written during the first decade of the 21st Century.
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate Ltd)
I lived for many years in Putney, and the Green Man pub at the end of our road was always said to stand on the site of the smithy where Thomas Cromwell was born. I’d always secretly admired him. Clever villains are attractive, and ruthless, devious Cromwell was the cleverest of the lot, or so all our history books said. In this brilliant and prize winning historical novel, or rather historical memoir and meditation on the lines of Margaret Yourcenar’s marvellous Memoirs of Hadrian, Hilary Mantel, in her re-telling of Cromwell’s life, has certainly made him as devious and ruthless as history has him to be, but in getting inside his mind (for this whole book is told in a Virginia Woolf like internal stream of his consciousness) Mantel has delved deep and found Thomas Cromwell to be an honest, strong and – what is surprising – a good, even admirable man. In so doing she has created a fictional hero worthy of standing beside any in English literature.
In recreating her Tudor world, Mantel has focussed on its danger and corruption – not only from the cutthroat politics at court but also in the air and the plague that takes away Cromwell’s family. Mantel is telling a familiar story, that of Henry VIII’s passion for Anne Boleyn, but in her treatment it becomes new and exciting. Every sentence convinces us we are back in the Sixteenth Century. It is a world where conformity is survival and only the pragmatic can survive. Mantel’s Cromwell has been a mercenary in Europe, a textile merchant in the Lowlands, a banker in Florence and a lover in Venice, and this experience uniquely equips him to deal with the politics of a country that is abandoning the Pope to establish a modern state, whilst never compromising his character or his conscience. If you’re looking for a political thriller, you’ll find it in the pages, but this Booker prize winner is far, far more than that: it is a study of human strength and frailty, at the same time it is a meditation on how morally to behave in impossible times.
- A Whispered Name by William Brodrick (Abacus)
A Whispered Name, William Brodrick’s novel about the executions of deserters on the Western Front during the First World War, is a deeply humane book. Brodrick, an ex priest and lawyer, could be called a novelist of conscience, and what comes out of this, his third Father Anselm novel, is a message of hope, which is why I recommend it. It is beautifully written, with phrases and similes that linger in the mind. There is also a generosity of spirit in every characterisation. The officers and generals who mete out so-called justice to poor shell-shocked deserters are not evil men; on the contrary they are decent human beings doing what they think right (such were the army mores of the time)- and they become victims themselves too, because they have to live with the remorse for their decisions for the rest of their lives. The heroic sacrifice of one Irish soldier at the centre of the novel, which the clever plotting slowly reveals, is astonishing – but in Brodrick’s world there is redemption for everybody, even the bit players. The individual can choose whether he is to be brutalised or spiritually strengthened by war. In the short term one may not be able to stop evil, one can’t avoid being hurt by it, spiritually or otherwise, but one can make an internal vow not to accept it. Ultimately, Brodrick seems to indicate, it is through an understanding of communal suffering that societies can better themselves. A beautiful haunting novel.
THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
- Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About the Vote? by Humphrey Hawksley (Macmillan)
Top BBC journalist Humphrey Hawksley, travels on assignment through the third world looking at the question of how the introduction of democracy to a country – without an existing structure of law and civil society to bolster it – can often bring more harm to its people than good. The joy of this book, which has been widely reviewed, sparking much debate that goes to the crux of political thinking for the next century, is in the anecdote and the characters as we travel with Humphrey up rivers, into jungles, slums and sometimes the firing line of Iraq, to find out who are democracy’s victims – and then watch him go up the chain to take those responsible passionately to task.
- The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James Lovelock (Allen lane)
If ever there has been a prophet not listened to in his lifetime it is James Lovelock, the scientist who decades ago identified global warming and came up with the term Gaia to describe our imperilled planet. In his latest book he reluctantly concludes that it is now too late to stop the worst of its effects but remarkably has not lost his optimism or his scientific discipline. Not for him the fashionable palliatives of wind farms and carbon trading, still less organic foods. What is most refreshing about Lovelock is how politically incorrect he is as he steers us towards nuclear power and ingenious scientific options to keep human civilisation (ones suspects a quintessentially British version!) surviving. Whatever his idiosyncrasies we should certainly be listening to him before it is too late.
- The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars by Patrick Hennessy (Allen Lane)
An iPod blairing, testosterone-running, rap chanting, video rolling update on how a modern British officer fights a traditional war. Patrick Hennessy, whose articles I first admired in the Literary Review when he was serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, wittily, amusingly and always with eye to the immediate sensation – the buzz, the feel – takes us from officers’ training school in Sandhurst (surely the best description of a British boot camp ever written) to his first boring postings in Germany (FOR GOD’S SAKE when are we getting to A WAR!) , eventually to Iraq where if not the action at least he scents the real smell of war and finally to Afghanistan, where he finds in Helmland more action than he ever quite imagined he could take. If you want to know what modern warfare is like it’s all in these pages. As the world now questions whether it’s right that our troops should be there, this book serves an essential service in telling what the boys serving on the ground feel about it. As a father with a son at Sandhurst right now, it concentrated my mind mightily.
CHINA
Living and working in China, and writing about China, as I do, I tend for my own amusement to read about other things, but this year produced a particularly good crop of China books, of which I most enjoyed:
- City of Heavenly Tranquillity: Beijing in the History of China by Jasper Becker (Allen Lane)
Jasper Becker has written a beautiful and elegiac description of China’s capital city through the ages, with a bitter indictment of the communist party, which in its early years and to this day has presided over destruction of some of the city’s most beautiful buildings, above all the city walls and the loss of thousands of priceless artefacts.
- The China Lover by Ian Buruma (Atlantic Books)
The China Lover is the story of Yoshiko Yamaguchi who reinvented herself more than three times. Loved and hated as a young girl, she was Manchukuo’s most popular ‘Chinese’ actress, Ri Koran, who only escaped punishment as a collaborator when it was discovered she was in fact Japanese. On her return to Japan she was again a patriotic heart throb as Japan recovered its pride by building a democracy during and after the McArthur occupation, but she abandoned the new film movement to go to Hollywood in the personality of Shirley Yamaguchi. She was a flop and in her later years she became a journalist and politician espousing left wing causes, including support for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and in this role was as inspirational for young revolutionaries as she had been as a patriotic actress. This is more than the story of a life; it is a history of how Japan developed through and after the Second World War centring on one woman who seemed to symbolise each stage but whose own real personality remained an enigma or a fiction, which is why Ian Buruma chose to write this extraordinary and compelling story as a novel rather than history. In doing so he produces a chilling portrait of the vacuity that underlies the collective fantasies that have impelled politics in our age.
- China Cuckoo by Mark Kitto (Constable)
The story of a foreigner who came to China and made and lost a fortune (that’s a perennial China experience that dates back to the days of the tea clippers) but Mark made a new life for himself afterwards, running a café in a piece of paradise on the mountain of Moganshan. I haven’t been there yet although he’s invited me many times, but the joy of reading his funny, wise, witty and utterly charming book is certainly an inducement!
It’s sad when cultures cannot meet halfway. It happened after the Americans bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Every Chinese believed that it was deliberate while most Westerners thought it was an accident. The dislocation was surreal. No argument could bridge the gulf of understanding or mindset. Old friends and colleagues shook their heads and looked stony. It happened again yesterday when a Briton was executed for drug smuggling. 99% of Chinese approved the verdict, ridiculing our pleas that they test the poor man’s sanity. It was partly pride. They are strutting the world like a cockerel these days and will not be told what to do. The result of their obduracy is they’ve earned the anger of possibly their most friendly ally, for, as it appears, Akmal Shaikh died because mercy was considered to be a loss of face.
Wishing you a tranquil Christmas and a Happy New Year
Adam Williams
Click here to watch footage of Adam and Hong Ying’s wedding in an Italian hill-top village!
Last month China put itself on show when it celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC with a parade to end all parades in Tiananmen Square. The pride and delight of those lucky enough to get through the security screens to attend was shared by the hundreds of millions of ordinary folk who watched it on their television sets.
The organisers took pains to follow all the traditions established in 30 years of Communist rule. As usual it was a triumphalist manifesto, particularly an assertion of China’s military might. You’d have thought that displays of rocketry aren’t necessary in a world where interdependency is the G20’s new buzz word, but in China – even in today’s China which is not officially very warlike – tradition is important. The whole choreography was still that of the Cold War, patent Moscow 1949. Bright blue and green tanks it had to be.
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