Merchants 1, Culture 0

Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An enormous amount has been written, both online and in print, about the publishing industry in recent years – some of it perceptive; a little (a very little) well-informed; much of it complete rubbish, ranging from the ignorant to the merely opinionated.

The vast majority of this body of commentary has one common factor: its authors have a relationship with the industry, whether as insiders (publishers, agents, authors, booksellers) or as outsiders (mostly self-published authors). That is to say, everyone has some kind of an angle to play, a stance or interest (vested, conflicted or otherwise) to defend, or in plenty of cases an axe to grind.

That stops here. John B. Thompson has written Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century from perhaps the only possible and credible disinterested perspective – that of the academic. He has examined publishing as a business phenomenon, and based his work not on opinion nor on wishful thinking, but on five years’ systematic research, including some 280 interviews with industry insiders amounting to 500 hours of first-hand evidence.

A gamble that paid off

A Gambling Man by Jenny Uglow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Charles II is, in many ways, both too easy and too difficult a subject for a biography. He is one of those great defining characters of the British monarchy – like Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Victoria – whose reigns stand out in our collective memory for one or two well-known events, and about whom most people think they know plenty.

So Jenny Uglow takes a different approach in ‘A Gambling Man’. The book is indeed a biography of the Merry Monarch, but it focuses on the crucial first ten years of his reign, and on Charles’s many gambles to stabilise his three kingdoms during this period.

Her task is helped by the events of the period – restoration, war, plague, fire and constant sexual intrigue – which in themselves make for a rollicking good read. It is further illuminated by Pepys, whose voice, through his diary, offers us a ringside seat. (It’s astonishing how much he managed to witness first hand).

Given these ingredients, the greatest risk is that

The language of wit, not of hate

So This Is Depravity and Other Observations by Russell Baker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election that I first, all unwitting, encountered the phenomenon of American political commentary in all its ugly reality. My image of the American political commentator was based largely on The West Wing and on Alistair Cooke, that doyen of reasoned and courteous intelligence. There was no clear presidential winner; so, fed up with the ignorance of the British media on the subject, I started to visit American websites for enlightenment. A media industry that had picked Jed Bartlet as their fictional President would be bound to have something profound and insightful to say on the situation… right?

Arguably the greatest detective novel of all time

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This, the ninth of Sayers’s eleven full length Wimsey novels, is the one that lifts her above the category of twentieth-century female detective novelist, and places her among the literary greats.

It is a thoroughly satisfying mystery – sophisticated, complex, intellectually challenging. Everything in the plot is there for a reason; and the final explanation is ingenious and unexpected.

A poignant, thought-provoking study of religious warfare

Magdeburg by Heather Richardson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To far too many English readers, the Thirty Years’ War is a hazy shadow in the middle distance of history. We are aware of its presence but it has no direct significance or importance. And yet it shaped the balance of power in Europe for the following three hundred years, and was as critical a juncture for the continent as the Napoleonic Wars or the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain. It is against this momentous backdrop that Heather Richardson sets her novel.

The book opens as Magdeburg, proud bastion of Lutheran faith, is under siege by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor. Richardson draws a painstaking portrait of the domestic, commercial and spiritual life of a prosperous merchant city; of the cheerful hand-to-mouth existence of the soldier and the mercenary; of the claustrophobia of the era; of the fragility of life. It is an intimate pen-and-ink portrait on a human scale; a compassionate yet clear-sighted portrait of ordinary people, of their intelligence and determination and anxiety and fear, their courage and cowardice and venery.

Sesquisuperlative

Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Early in this book, Lymond is cornered in the streets of Lyon by various people intent on murdering him. With his companion Philippa Somerville he embarks on a high-speed chase through the streets and over the rooftops, involving extreme physical danger, courage, agility and a healthy measure of quick-witted verbal assaults on his attackers.

It’s a throwback to a similar episode in “Queens’ Play”, but it’s also a fair metaphor for the whole Lymond series. As a reader, I spent much of my time feeling rather like Philippa – pitchforked into situations of which I had no experience; forced to keep up by finding a mental toughness and agility I didn’t know I possessed.

This is the epitome of great historical fiction. Dunnett doesn’t stop to explain anything; she makes few concessions to a modern readership’s sensibilities; but she invites us into the sparkling, complex, contradictory world of the mid-sixteenth century, and shows us exactly what made that world tick. And in the process, she shows us a lot about what we too are capable of achieving.

I tend to read this book when I need to walk taller, when I need to achieve the impossible.

Read M.M. Bennetts on Dorothy Dunnett

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Challenging; harrowing; satisfying

The Company of Fellows by Dan Holloway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It begins so quietly, this novel. So unostentatiously. Granted, there are two corpses in Chapter 1 – it is a murder mystery, after all – but there is little, at first, to indicate that The Company of Fellows is anything other than just another detective story set in Oxford, following in the well-worn footprints of Morse.

The writing is a good deal better than Colin Dexter’s, which is to be expected. But in other respects the early chapters came as a surprise. For Dan Holloway is a tireless and selfless champion of alternative, edgy, indie writing (some of it, it must be said, a long way removed from his own literary calibre). Yet here he seems to be embarking on something more mainstream – an honest to goodness murder mystery, a thumping good read which manages to remain thought-provoking, told with flair, panache and insight.

It isn’t that simple, of course.

A book not to be judged by its cover

Burden of Desire by Robert MacNeil
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a complete surprise. Its title is at once misleading and accurate: one might easily expect Burden of Desire to be third-rate lightweight romantic escapism for a predominantly female readership. The only reason I read it was that I was urged to do so by a friend whose judgement I trust.

It is, in fact, an historical novel of depth, complexity and insight, which starts from a single event – the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbour, Nova Scotia, in 1917 – and traces the aftershock of that disaster through the lives of three main protagonists, a woman and two men. In examining the psychology of the sexual repression and liberation of a post-Victorian era, it provides a detailed, almost clinical analysis of – yes, you’ve guessed it – the burden of desire.

It is above all a study of conflict: the Freudian tension between sexual repression and liberation, certainly, but also the conflict between the entrenched hierarchical certainties of the past and the fluid uncertainties and passionate experimentalism of the present.

A cautionary tale for multitaskers and workaholics everywhere

The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London by Lisa Jardine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Professor Jardine does it again. She had a tougher task than with her equally scholarly biography of Wren (On a Grander Scale) in that her protagonist is both less well known and less – well, likeable – than Wren. However, she succeeds in drawing a convincing picture of Hooke as an overworked, irascible, but thoroughly competent man, who to a large extent was the powerhouse behind so many of the scientific, technical and architectural achievements of the Restoration era.

Hooke provides a cautionary tale for workaholics and multitaskers everywhere; his masters at the Royal Society were staggeringly intolerant of his work for the Corporation of London. Yet if one looks at what was going on in the 1660s and 70s – whether the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, or the unparalleled spirit of scientific enquiry within the Royal Society – and if one removes Hooke from the equation, it is difficult to see how any of it would have been achieved.

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Engrossing science let down by poor history

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The year 1660 was a turning point in British political, cultural and intellectual life. The restoration of King Charles II, after eleven brutal years of military dictatorship, awoke a new spirit of vibrancy and optimism in Britain. And one of the earliest yet most enduring results of the new era was the formation of the Royal Society.

It was a heady time and there are heady tales to be told of it, both in history and in fiction. Among the most successful of the latter are Neal Stephenson’s three-volume Baroque Cycle, and one suspects that it is their readership whom Edward Dolnick may have had had in mind when writing The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern Universe.