Book of the Month: Blaming (Elizabeth Taylor)

Blaming is Elizabeth Taylor’s last novel. Taylor was dying when she wrote it, and, according to her daughter, Taylor knew that she was dying. As the cancer eating Taylor from inside grew, so did her determination to finish the novel. There are unexpected deaths in the novel, which dexterously explores the feelings of bereavement: helplessness, anger, guilt, and blaming; and one wonders whether the knowledge that she was not for long for this world was a determinant of the way Taylor, a cheerful personality (according to those close to her) who believed in living life to the last moment, shaped the story and its progress.

Anne and Martha are the two protagonists of the novel, who meet on a cruise. As the only English-speaking people on the cruise the two women form temporary camaraderie people, who have not much in common with one another, form on holidays, and which, Anne is certain, will not blossom into a friendship beyond the cruise. However, the fate has something else in store for her. The lives of the two women, who could not be more different from each other in respect of their attitudes, viewpoints, sensibilities and perceptivity—one, a middle-class, middle-aged, stolid, haughty, and somewhat snobbishly upstage English housewife with conservative tastes; the other, a young, somewhat abrasive American, an aspiring writer with mood swings—, are intertwined by a tragic event. Anne’s husband Nick, who, we are told, is recovering from a chronic, serious ailment, dies suddenly in Istanbul. Stranded and utterly bereft in a foreign land, Anne accepts the succor Martha—who cuts short her cruise in order to be with Anne in these difficult times—provides. Back in England, however, Anne rebuffs Martha’s attempts to get in touch with her, as much for her desire not to want to be reminded of the Istanbul nightmare with which Martha will forever be associated as for her, Anne’s, wish to go on with her quiet, aloof widowhood. However, Martha is not so easily rebuffed; she has a way of getting under your skin. Martha finally secures an invitation and re-enters Amy’s life and, despite herself, Amy begins to warm up to the brash, quixotic and irritatingly intrusive young American, and her lover—the penurious and stingy, almost ungenerous, and outwardly passionless Simon. When Simon is transferred back to the USA he asks Martha to marry him, and she, on an impulse and much against her better judgment, consents. Before leaving for America, Martha visits Amy one last time.

Elizabeth Taylor, together with the other Elizabeth (Bowen), belonged to that category of women writers—Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rosamund Lehman, Olivia Manning, Rose Macaulay, E.H. Young and Barbara Pym are some other names that come to mind—who, for the want of better phrase, can be described as ‘English’. Most of Taylor’s fictional creations belong to the middle or upper classes; and their sensibilities, attitudes, haughtiness, and pretensions are quintessentially English middle-class. They take immense pride in their worlds which rarely extend beyond Home Counties, and generally view anything that does not fit neatly into their ordered, if somewhat limited, repertoire of experiences with suspicion that borders on condescension and distaste. (The reluctance to embrace new with open arms and hearts is not unique to the English Middle Class, though; the attitude of the Working Class towards anything newfangled is one of deep suspicion and hostility.) Amy, in Blaming, is a resentful traveller, the first thing that comes to her mind while walking barefoot in the grand mosques of Istanbul is verrucas. Bourgeois femininity perfuses Blaming as thick, sugary syrup permeates pastry. Taylor, however, never allows her narration to be weighed down either with mawkish sentimentality or crude satire, wherein lies her brilliance. The erudite writing may not induce a belly laugh, but Blaming is strewn with deliciously droll descriptions of English mannerisms, habits, idiosyncratic discourses, priggishness and a highly developed sense of entitlement that will seem whimsical to an outsider. The world inhabited by Taylor’s fictional creations may appear to be outwardly comfortable, even bland, but it is not without its share of intrigue and maliciousness. The cosy housewives, who lead cosy lives and speak précis, grammatically correct English, are capable of impressive deceit, conceit and petty cruelties—all so that they can score petty points over their social rivals. With almost surgical precision and aplomb, Taylor lays bare the frailties and fatuities of the world surrounding her. Most authors, it would be fair to say, draw inspirations from their environs, and it is no surprise that Taylor’s novels (with their astute observations and commentaries relating to the upper and middle classes) mirror the quiet middle-class, if somewhat limited, social milieu she mingled with. Born Elizabeth Coles in Reading, she was educated at the Abbey school (the same school to which Jane Austen, with whom Taylor is occasionally compared, went), and, before her marriage to John Taylor in 1936, worked as a governess and in Boots Lending Library. She lived in Buckinghamshire for almost all of her married life, and, whilst leading a well-to-do middle class life—dallying briefly, like all well-to-do people with conscience, with Communism, and holding lifelong left-wing sympathies—, surrounded (probably) by a happy family, produced a dozen novels, all of which ‘shrewd and affectionate portrayals of middle-and upper-middle-class English life’ (according to an introduction by Virago which reissued a number of her out of print novels a few years ago), at a steady rhythm, over three decades.

A special pleasure of reading Blaming is some or more of the characters, be they the eccentric factotum of Amy or the precocious daughters of her son, James. The conversations of Isobel and Dora, Amy’s granddaughters, are hilarious; they also reveal the keen eye Taylor had for how children talked and behaved. According to Taylor’s daughter, she found children’s conversations interesting and would talk with them for hours. Some of the conversational gems in Blaming were taken from the comments Taylor had recorded from her granddaughters’ conversations (whom she looked after) in real life.

Taylor, although she is rarely credited for it, was a modern novelist. The plot of Blaming, such as it is, can be summarized in two sentences; it is a vehicle for Taylor to explore themes such as guilt, recrimination, and emotional connectedness. Amy is left staggering in the wake of a sudden traumatic event—the event itself, the death of her husband, is elided, as if of no importance other than a catalyst for what then unfolds—that is to have a profound influence on her life, but the adjustment does not influence her moral compass in a meaningful way, does not broaden her horizons. Taylor’s vision is unsentimental and remorseless. At the end of Blaming one is left with a feeling of muted bleakness. This is a splendid, erudite and superbly intelligent novel.

Holiday in CAR

Have you heard of Bangui? No? Never mind. How about Bossangoa? Does the name ring a bell? No? I guess I shouldn’t bother with ‘Barberati’, ‘Carnot’ or ‘Bambari’. All of these are towns (or cities) in a country called ‘Central African Republic’ or ‘République Centrafricaine’, in French. I am not making this up. This country does exist and, as the name suggests, it is situated in Central Africa, five hundred miles north of the equator. It is a landlocked place, surrounded by countries like Cameron, Chad, Sudan, Republic of Congo, and last (but not least) Democratic Republic of Congo (not to be confused with the Republic of Congo). It was the former French colony of Ubang-Shari, which, upon its independence from the French in 1960, became ‘Central African Republic’ or CAR.

What did you say? Sounds interesting? You would not mind visiting it? Well, if it is the ‘real’ Africa you are looking for, according to one website, Central African Republic (CAR) may just be your ticket, ‘a country of staggering rare natural beauty, with some of the world’s most amazing wildlife’. It is slightly smaller than Texas, which makes it pretty big—Texas, as we know, is pretty big—the additional bonus being there are no Texans in CAR, although they would definitely consider visiting the country with their families and children (who are called Chardonnay-Mercedes and Tyler-Morgan) soon as there are decent eating joints opened in CAR, serving hambergers or grilled T bones or, for that matter, any flesh incinerated at 325 degrees. You can watch the gorillas and elephants in the Dzanga-Sangha National Park, situated in the south East Corner of the country, provided, of course, you manage to get there. The people of CAR, comprising more than 80 tribes or ethnic groups, are open, friendly and generous. You visit them in their huts and they will be very happy to share with you whatever tree-roots they happen to be sucking on to. CAR remains, sadly, the most underdeveloped, disunited and poverty-stricken country in Africa. Which, you will have to admit, is impressive. It is quite an achievement to pip so many other worthy contenders in that continent to the post and emerge a winner. And—here is a surprise—the country should be, in fact, prosperous, rich as it is in important minerals such as Uranium, and dimonds.

Let us look at the history of CAR in the last hundred years. The French occupied it in the 1880s. Why did they go there? You can make your own guess (rich source of minerals and dimonds is a clue). The French occupied an area they imaginatively labelled as the ‘French Congo’ (after the river Congo), which consisted of what is now CAR, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo. The French, of course, were not the only European thieves looking to loot Africa: Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom also wanted a share of the booty. They, the French, labelled what is now CAR Ubang-Shari, because most of its territory is within the basins of the rivers Ubang and Shari. Its capital was Bangui. What was French Congo called before the European occupation? Who knows? We are not interested in trivia, are we? Over the next several decades, the French, like all self-respecting European imperialists, proceeded to systematically siphon off wealth out of Ubang-Shari. In the first decade of the French rule, slave-trading was rife, carried out by local African satraps and tribal rulers, with whom the French formed dubious treaties and whom they provided with weapons to carry out raids. Which, come to think of it, is understandable. Why would you go, uninvited, to distant lands unless you have ambitious, honourable aims such as governing the natives (who did not know how to feed themselves unless a banana dropped off a tree) in the European style (with important but necessary modifications so as to accommodate their inferior culture and intellect), and ramming Christianity down their throats (50% of the country’s population, as a result of tireless Christian missionaries beavering away, has become disciples of J. Christ, while 35% still, stubbornly and ignorantly, adhere to what Christian websites describe as ‘indigenous beliefs’; the remaining 15% have become Muslim). It was only fair that the natives showed their gratitude for your noble endeavours. What the French also did—another frequent hobby of the colonialists—is to arrange, then rearrange, then arrange again the geographical map of the country (and the area), not, of course, bothering to take into consideration trifles such as the wishes of the people, which, if you give it a thought, actually made sense: if the natives had the initiative, they would have done all these things themselves. Since they were obviously not up to the task someone else was going to have to do it for them. In 1890s, the French determined the boundaries of the French Congo with the neighbouring ‘Congo Free State’, an ironic name for a country which was, for all practical purposes, privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium—he was the sole shareholder, to use today’s parlance—and which included the entire area of the present day Democratic Republic of Congo, the DRC (how the Belgians plundered the natural resources of DRC and treated the natives is a story for another day), and the Germans who were controlling Cameron. In 1899, the boundaries with Sudan were fixed. Then, in 1905, the French united Ubang-Shari with Chad; in 1910, it was joined with the Republic of Congo and Gabon to become French Equatorial Africa. They ceded the Western region of the basin to the Germans, and were given, in turn, a free hand in Morocco; but ‘won’ it back from Germany during the First Great War. And that is how Ubang-Shari remained— as part of French Equatorial Africa—till 1945. 1945 was a momentous year in the twentieth century. It was the year in which Hitler, following his own dictum—‘If you win you don’t have to explain; if you lose, you shouldn’t be there to explain’—bid adieu to the world, and, after a brief interlude during which millions of Japanese were murdered by the Americans, the Second World War came to an end. The Europe—and the Europeans would have everyone believe, the world—was rid of the German nasty. Many of the European colonies decided that it was about time the colonialists went back to where they came from. The Ubang-Shari was no exception. The French, were forced to form local assemblies, and eventually, a decade later to be more precise, in 1958—the year in which French Equatorial Africa was officially dissolved—, grant independence. The French initially encouraged a Roman Catholic Priest called Barthelemy Boganda (he was taken away from his farming family, after his mother was beaten to death by the colonial police, and raised by the Roman Catholic priests) to be the leader of the local assembly, but tried to curb him when, to their annoyance, he did not tow their line and began to espouse totally unacceptable ideas such as Black emancipation and complete autonomy. Nevertheless, that is what happened, and, in 1959, the country was on the verge of getting its independence with Boganda poised to be its first president. At this critical juncture Boganda was conveniently killed in a plane crash. From then on, it has been a sad, though predictable, African story of one coup d’etat after another, with a cavalcade of rapacious, grandiloquent, and clinically insane leaders, propped up from time to time by their former colonial masters. What has been going on in the CAR, however, is, let there be no doubt about it, its very own mess. After Boganda was killed and enshrined into the country’s collective conscience as a great martyr—the myth of Boganda has grown exponentially over the decades, and the miracles attributed to him probably rival those of Jesus Christ—the French supported David Dacko. Dacko was a corrupt, nepotistic, and profligate ruler, who wasted country’s resources, and, within five years of independence, despite the French aid and increasing production of diamonds, CAR was staring down the proverbial barrel. Dacko then opportunistically turned to Mao, who was looking for openings to increase his sphere of influence, and requested interest-free loan. An alarmed France decided that Dacko must go and be replaced by a pro-West dictator. The man they chose was Colonel Jean Bedel Bokassa. Dacko was usurped in a French-assisted coup d’etat, by Bokassa, who was to declare himself, a decade later, Emperor Bokassa, and his piss-poor country, which he had plundered and despoiled, an empire. He too was removed in a French-backed coup (Operation Barracuda), the first of its kind in Africa in which foreign troops were used to remove a leader in power. While the emperor was visiting Libya, seven hundred French paratroopers invaded his palace and seized control of the capital. And who was the man who replaced the mad emperor? David Dacko. Decko’s second stint proved to be short-lived, and soon he was removed by General Andre Kolingba, who promptly suspended the constitution and ruled with a military Junta for years. Kolingba was replaced by Ange-Felix Patasse, who matched all of his predecessors in corruption and sectarian politics, if not insanity. In the last decade or so, there have been more coups in CAR than you and I have had hot meals. The current leader of the country, General Francois Bozize, is a veteran of several coups: having been involved in more than one unsuccessful coup over the past two decades, before achieving his lifetime ambition and staging a successful coup in 2003 that removed Ange-felix Patasse. Bozize now finds himself in the same unenviable position as that of Admiral Karl Donitz, between Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s unconditional surrender in the Second World War: presiding over utter ruins and having little control over large part of the country. The country is completely torn apart by the civil war that has raged since General Bozize grabbed power. On the one side are the government forces, while on the other side are the rebel groups, three of them. Needless to say, the rebel groups do not see eye to eye and probably hate one another more than they hate General Bozize. Wait! Did I give you the impression that there are two sides to this conflict? There is a third party. They are the bandits. Hordes of bandits roam the countryside, looting, pillaging and killing innocent people. The rebels say they have taken up arms to restore democracy, and they are going to save the population from the bandits and the evil government forces; all that they ask from people is money. The government declares that they are going to ensure security and usher in stability by putting a stop to all the coups—an ironic declaration from a man who can start a coaching class on how to start a coup—which means they are there to protect the people from the nasty rebels and the bandits; all they want from people is money. That is exactly what the bandits want too. If people do not pay the rebel taxes, they are obviously supporting the governmental forces and deserve the most severe punishment. If they cannot afford the government taxes, that is an incontrovertible evidence that they are in cahoots with the rebels and an enemy of the state, deserving swift extermination. The bandits do not care whom you are supporting; if you do not have money to give them, they will kill you; they will kill you anyway if the fancy takes them. The result? More than 300,000 people have been forced out of their homes in the last five years; one fifth of children die before their fifth birthday; and the average life expectancy is forty years. In large parts of the country, especially those controlled by the rebels and preyed upon by the bandits, there is no health care—Meningitis, Sleeping Sickness, Yellow Fever and many other infectious diseases people in the developed world have not even heard of are endemic; as is violence. The infrastructure is non-existent, with less than 500 miles of paved roads in a country one and half times the size of the United Kingdom. CAR, one of the richest reservoirs of natural resources and diamonds, languishes in poverty, as no investor has the guts to invest in a country where it is easier to start a rebellion than business.

Here is a description of what happened in one of the villages attacked by the government forces, as given on the BBC website:

“One such village, Beogombo Deux, is completely deserted. Crumbling walls, punctured with the occasional bullet hole, are covered with thick vegetation. The school house stands empty, with writing still on the blackboard.
The village chief, Jacques Berte, explains that government soldiers visited the village and accused its inhabitants of helping local rebels. ‘We were sitting peacefully at home in the evening when they burst into the village and started shooting at us. It all happened so quickly. We didn't know what was going on,’ he says. ‘The first person to die was my oldest son. He was just 19. He had only been married for six months….and it happened right in front of me. ‘They let me go because they thought I was too old. But they shot my boy. The bullet hit him in the back and then came out his chest. He just fell down and died. Another man tried to run from his house and they shot him in the back. They went inside and found his older brother and a boy. Then they took them both outside and shot them.’”

It is indescribably sad that there are parts of the world where people are being killed for a goat or a mattress or a saucepan; that there are parts of the world where people are living like animals in bush. Now the Bozize government has invited the opposition parties and the rebel armed forces for peace talks and Bozize has gone on a spree of signing ceasefire agreements. The aim, ostensibly, is to form a national, consensus government until the next presidential election. Will it work? You hope so for the sake of the poor people of this country, for whom successive decades of corrupt regimes have brought nothing but misery. However, one look at the rogues participating in these peace talks, everyone of whom has blood on his hands, makes your heart sink.

You have become quiet all of a sudden. Do I detect a waning of enthusiasm for visiting Central African Republic? Never mind. As an old Texan saying goes, you should not let so much reality in your life that there is no room left for dreaming.

Book of the Month: Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell’s third novel, is an ambitious tale of interlinked narratives.

The novel opens with the pacific journal of a mid-19th century traveller, and leads the reader, via a collection of letters of a 1930s’ wisenheimer from Belgium, a conspiracy-thriller set in 1970s’ American fictional city of Buenas Yerbas, a contemporary memoir set in modern-day UK, an archival interview of a 'fabricant' in the nightmarish future of cloning, rampant consumerism and 'corpocracy', to the oral testimony of a tribesman belonging to the post-apocalyptic future where the earth has become barren. All the sections, except the Half-Lives: The First Lucia Ray Mystery—an ‘acknowledged’ fiction—are intense first-person narratives.

The narratives, each an independent, well plotted and utterly riveting novella by itself, are connected with others by motifs, some of which obvious, some more subtle. Thus, the first section of the novel, the pacific journal of the stolid and relentlessly conscientious San Francisco notary Adam Ewing, which intriguingly ends in mid-sentence—a trick Mitchell pulls of fairly consistently throughout the novel: each section ends on a cliff-hanger—finds its way, eighty years later, inside Chateau Zedelghem, in Belgium, where it is discovered by the cad and self-styled genius Robert Frobisher, the most endearing protagonist of the novel, who is working as an amanuensis for an expatriate British composer while working simultaneously on his own sextet—the Cloud Atlas. The letters Frobisher writes to his friend, the scientist Sixsmith (his name, one suspects, is a play on the structure of the novel), are found, decades later, by Lucia Ray, a young, intrepid journalist working for a gossip-rag, Spyglass, after Sixsmith, whom she fortuitously meets in a malfunctioning lift, is murdered by the henchmen of the all-powerful corporate company he is working for when he is about to pull the plug on their multi-million dollar project of nuclear power plant because of the serious design-flaws which pose grave environmental threats. This ‘fiction’ is presented to the eponymous narrator of the novel’s next section—The Ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish—a bibulous publisher in the present day England who is on the run from his creditors, and who finds himself tragicomically incarcerated in a home of dementia sufferers after he suffers a mini-stroke, thereby not getting round to read the mystery to its dénouement. Mitchell then propels the reader without much warning into the dystopic world of Sonmi~451, a genetically cloned, inferior, ‘fabricant’ who subsists on soap and serves the ‘purebloods’, the ruling class within the dominant ‘corpocracy’, in a country ‘formerly known as South Korea’. Possessing a ‘soul’ because of an operation, Sonmi~451 is the accidental leader of a rebellion that is quashed most brutally, and she is executed. In this section, which is presented as an archival interview of Sonmi~451 prior to her execution, she describes watching a 'disney' [a movie] from the last century titled 'The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish'; her dying wish is to see the end of this movie, the only time she has experienced unadulterated joy. The sixth section of the novel, its most direful, takes place on the Big Island of Hawaii after 'the fall' [of civilization]. The earth has become a wasteland and is peopled by primitive tribesmen fighting internecine warfare. Amidst this desolation survive remnants of civilization that have some idea about the humanity’s past achievements and apogee. Somni~451 has become the Goddess of the tribesman, Zachry, who narrates the story in a thick dialect—making this section, at times, difficult to read—the origin of which is anybody’s guess.

In this pan-global—each narrative takes place in a different corner of the earth—, time transcending—the novels opens circa 1849 and within 300 pages the reader has ‘travelled’ centuries—daisy chain, with its—to quote a term adored by the academia—polyphonic spree, Mitchell gives a virtuoso performance. In an interview Mitchell readily admitted that the novel began with what he called the ‘Russian Doll’ structure. Said he: 'The main issue I had to approach was how to make the various novellas fit inside each other and to come up with ways of making the preceding narrative appear as an ‘artefact’ of the succeeding narrative. And the thing was to do that thematically, so the whole thing wasn’t a butcher’s shop exercise with stories meaninglessly presented in a gimmicky way, without adding up to much.'

The recurring motifs of the novel do run the risk of appearing gimmicky, even contrived, at places. The wayfaring of the comet-shaped birth-mark on the back of Somni~451 on more than one character is dismissed by Timothy Cavendish, who is perusing the manuscript of Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, as 'far too hippie-druggie-new age.'

Those obsessed with style haul Mitchell over the coals for not having found his own voice—his excellent debut novel, Ghostwritten had attracted similar criticism—but that is in fact the brilliance of this novel: each narrative, set apart in time, space and culture, has its own language which is vividly emblematical of the epoch it is describing. Mitchell is unapologetic about ventriloquising different voices. He declared in an interview: 'It’s a built-in advantage of the first-person narrative—you can use cranky language or even over-literary language. So you can commit all these ‘sins’ and not only are they not sins, but they add to character.' Cloud Atlas is an example of that, times six.

Those amongst us who believed Ghostwritten heralded the arrival of a major literary talent, will find the belief reinforced by Cloud Atlas. This is story telling of the highest order. Read it, and be captivated.

Book of the Month: Let's Kill Gandhi (Tushar Gandhi)

In 1947, hundred-and-fifty years of British rule in India came to an end. Severely weakened at the end of the Second World War, the colonialists finally accepted that they were not going to be able to hold on to the Jewel in the Crown of their empire.

The dying days of the British Raj witnessed horrific and senseless atrocities, and an undeclared civil war, which led to the partition of the country along communal lines—the day before India achieved her independence, a new country, Pakistan, came into existence on the east and North of India, whose people had very little in common save Islam—and the biggest forced migration of people in the recorded history.

Within six months of independence, Mohandas Gandhi, the Father of the Indian nation and a key player in India’s struggle for freedom, the pioneer of non-violence movement that became a beacon of hope for the oppressed and downtrodden, was shot dead at point blank range by a Hindu fanatic.

Six decades after the momentous event comes a Brobdingnagian chronicle of the Mahtama’s last days, the conspiracy, murder, investigation, and trial, Let’s Kill Gandhi, written by Gandhi’s great-grandson, Tushar A. Gandhi. This is not the first book to have been written on the Gandhi-assassination, which still arouses strong passion in India—many of the key persons involved in the trial (even the statement of Nathuram Godse, the man who pulled the trigger, May It Please Your Honour, has been published), have written at length on the subject—although, at almost thousand pages, it is, by a long chalk, the most voluminous.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part, which begins with the dramatic description of the murder—Tushar Gandhi, in an interview, declared that he did not want to lend credibility to the heinous act by allocating the weighty term assassination to it (‘Bapu's killing had no credibility, his murderers had no justification, neither the ones who pulled the trigger, nor the ones who sought to legitimise the act nor the ones who conveniently turned a blind eye could ever justify their actions, so I prefer the more honest and brutal term murder.’)—, deals with the profiles of the men involved in the conspiracy, the plot (such as it was), and the investigation of the tragedy. The second part deals with the last years of the Mahatma, and, linked to them, the sequence of events that led to the dismemberment of the country. The third and final part is about the trial, the executions, and the ‘fact finding’ Kapur Commission (constituted eighteen years after the murder to find out if there were any aspect of the conspiracy that had not come to the fore at the time of the original trial).

Tushar Gandhi is on a mission. He wants to put the facts straight. He wants to explode, once and for all, what he calls the lies and half-truths that have been passed off as whole truths surrounding the tragic death of his great-grandfather. This is a worthy aim. Mohandas Gandhi was one of the most remarkable human beings of the 20th century, a man ahead of his times whose doctrines of ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (insistence on truth) influenced many a generation, and, many may argue, has never been more needed than now. Yet the man described by Lord Casey, the governor of (undivided) Bengal, as a statesman amongst saints and a saint amongst statesmen, is accused, by the apologists of his killers, of being solely responsible for the partition of India. Gandhi, the malcontents argue, had abandoned the Hindus, and his policy of appeasing the Muslims encouraged Mohammad Ali Jinah (the founder of Pakistan) and his band of fanatics to make increasingly belligerent demands and wreak unspeakable havoc on the minority Hindus and Sikhs in provinces controlled by his communal Muslim League, eventually leading to the vivisection of the motherland. The ‘old man’ had become a liability and needed to be removed for the good of the country. Gopal Godse, the younger brother of Nathuram and a co-conspirator (he served a life sentence for his part in the conspiracy to kill Gandhi), remained unrepentant till the end. ‘We did away with somebody who was not only satisfied with the creation of Pakistan, he wanted to see Pakistan progress; he was in fact the father of Pakistan. Gandhi used to systematically fool people, so we killed him,’ said Gopal after his release from prison. These are the lies and half-truths Tushar Gandhi seeks to demolish. In the process he makes a few contentious, though not altogether new, claims, and tries to pass of what at best are conjectures as truth. Tushar Gandhi ties his yoke irrevocably with the Gandhian ideology and seeks to justify all the decisions and actions of the great man during those extraordinary times. He is avowedly emotionally invested in Bapu (the sobriquet by which Gandhi is frequently referred to in India) of whom he is a direct descendent. Gandhi remains perched on a pedestal; at no place in this meticulously researched and exhaustive book is he liberated from the straight-jacket of the Mahatma (Literal meaning: Great Soul) persona. Gandhi’s bitter political and ideological rival, the right-wing Hindu ideologue Savarkar, one of the accused in the Gandhi-murder trial (who was acquitted), is described stereotypically, his ideology dismissed forthwith (using stock terms of criticism) without actually clarifying its content, which makes the author susceptible to the charge of forsaking objectivity.

There is nothing in the first part which is not already known or published elsewhere. We learn about the rabid Hindu right wing views of Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte, which is explained by the fact that at a young age the two came under the influence of Savarkar, the evil messiah, spewing his theories of Hindu Rashtra (nation). Not much information emerges about the background of Madanlal Pahwa, who was born and bred in what is now Pakistan and came to India as a refugee at the time of partition. No attempt is made to understand the development of psychological profiles of the killers which is disappointing; the author appears simply to have lifted the already published material, in particular Manohar Malgaonkar’s The Men Who Killed Gandhi, which remains, to date, the best, most focused, and neutral account of the murder. Interestingly, the author has included Savarkar, the leader of the Hindu Maha Sabha (Literally ‘Great Gathering of Hindus’) and Gandhi’s ideological adversary, amongst murderers, even though he was completely exonerated by the courts. In author’s mind Savarkar is guilty—‘He [Savarkar] encouraged the efforts to assassinate Gandhi.’

The second part of the book gets wearisome not least because the author gets bogged down in small details from existing extensive writing—he quotes ad nauseum from the writings of Pyarelal Nayyar, Gandhi’s personal secretary during those turbulent times, and from the extensive correspondence Gandhi has left behind. Notwithstanding the cavalcade of minutiae, the author, to his credit, is able to convey the horror of the senseless violence as the ‘Frankestein of communalism’ gripped the country. The reportage-style, matter-of-fact descriptions of the atrocities inflicted on the helpless minorities in Noakhali, a remote region in the Gangetic delta (current day Bangla Desh), leave the readers with a harrowing sense of numbness. Mob lynching, beheading, burning, gang-rapes, forced conversions happened everywhere. The author lays the blame for this carnage on the Muslim League—the party in power in Bengal—and its communal chief minister, Shaheed Surhawardi, the perpetrators of violence, and the conniving British (who still controlled the army and police) who looked the other way as thousands were slaughtered. When the displaced refugees, in thousands, began to pour into the neighboring state of Bihar, bringing with them their tells of woes, the retaliatory violence, almost as brutal as that in Bengal, only this time directed against the innocent Muslims in Bihar, began. The statistics provided by the author beggar belief. In less than a week more than 350,000 Muslims fled their properties which were torched down by Hindu hooligans. Those who were not so lucky were killed and their bodies thrown into wells; in villages after villages wells were choked to the brim with dead, rotting bodies. The author alleges that the communal Hindu organizations such as Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayansevak Sangh—‘Voluntary Servants of the Nation’) were at the vanguard of spreading violence and religious intolerance in Bihar, once the seat of Indian culture that boasted the first university in the region and gave the world Buddhism, but now, at the end of British rule, reduced to an impoverished agrarian state with landless rural population. While the leaders of the Indian National Congress were busy hacking out terms and conditions of the transfer of power—by this time all in Congress save Gandhi would appear to have accepted the inevitability of partition which the British presented as fate accompli—Gandhi went on a ‘peace pilgrimage’ first to Noakhali and then to Bihar. He repeatedly rejected requests of Congress leaders, Nehru included, to return to Delhi where, they felt, he was needed to guide them through the bureaucratic quagmire and political chicanery of the British. Gandhi’s ‘peace mission’ in the devastated regions, where he was surrounded by very hostile atmosphere, was an act of supreme courage. He was 77, and in frail health. He rejected the offer of the Muslim League government to give him armed escorts as he trawled, barefoot, the remotest regions. He said, ‘All my attempts to bring about real friendship between the two communities [Muslims and Hindus] must fail so long as I go fully protected by armed police or military. . . I do not need it. I even feel embarrassed and it certainly interferes with my sadhana.’ Gandhi did manage to bring peace to the burning regions, albeit only temporarily. This part of the book is liberally strewn with Gandhi’s sayings based on archival material and verbal history obtained from eye-witnesses. The picture emerges of a man who had the courage of his convictions, unstinting faith in ahimsa—non-violence, and secularism, and who was not afraid to tell home-truths. While addressing a largely Muslim gathering in the heart of Noakhali, he said, ‘I am a servant of both the Hindus and the Muslims. I have not come here to fight Pakistan. If India is destined to be partitioned I cannot prevent it. But I wish to tell you that Pakistan cannot be established by force. . . I ask my Muslim brethren to search their hearts and if they do not wish to live as friends with the Hindus, say so openly. Hindus must, in that case, leave East Bengal and go somewhere else. The refugees cannot stay as refugees for ever. If, on the other hand, you want the Hindus to stay in your midst, you should tell them that they need not look to the military for their protection but to their Muslim brethren instead.’ In one of the villages, the Hindus decorated the route Gandhi was taking to welcome him. Gandhi said, ‘Did you realize that by indulging in this vain display you would acerbate communal passion? This display means nothing to me. . . but it will leave a legacy of ill-will behind which will continue to poison the communal relations in this village for a long time to come.’ As India burned in the communal holocaust—several thousands, both Hindus and Muslims, perished in the massacres in Bengal and Bihar, and several thousand more were going to die in the violence that would grip Punjab and Sindh when the partition finally became a reality—the British, who, even at that stage had the ultimate responsibility for the continent they had ruled for more than hundred years, pressed ahead with what they called the timetable of the transfer of power. What followed was months of intrigue in which a number of formulae ranging from Balkanization of India (vehemently opposed by the Congress) to the continued independence of the ‘Princely states’ (which were notionally independent during the Raj, although, in reality, were controlled by the British, the Maharajas being mere puppets), to the partition of India along the communal lines, endorsing Mohammad Ali Jinha’s ‘Two Nations’ theory (The Hindus and the Muslims are two separate nations and cannot live together—the basis of the formation of Pakistan—also espoused, to an extent, by the Hindu-supremacists, who, nevertheless, wanted India to remain undivided which would have run the risk of reducing the Muslims, had they seized power (although there was no danger of that, such was the popularity of Gandhi), to secondary citizens), were put forth. According to the author, no party covered itself with glory in this Machiavellian, and ultimately sordid, drama. Jinah, the leader of Muslim League and the founder of Pakistan, comes across as a ruthless manipulator, for whom the end justified the means. The ‘Direct Action’ of Muslim League, which unleashed an unprecedented reign of terror and violence, is a blot on humanity’s landscape. The conduct of the British could be termed, depending on one’s view, either as maliciously duplicitous or driven by a misguided sense of correctitude and a desire to be seen as fair to all parties. The author is in no doubt that the British were Janus-faced and phenomenally hypocritical—Lord Wavell, the last but one viceroy of India, comes in for particularly harsh criticism for his blatantly partial attitude towards the demands of the Muslim League—although he concedes that some members of the Labour government that had been swept to power in the UK at the end of the second World War had sympathy towards the cause of Indian independence, and were genuine in their desire to leave India. The British rule in India, in its last 50 years, had come to be increasingly despised, and the colonialists were using every trick of the trade to hold on to the hen which was still laying golden eggs for the empire. Frontmost among the British tactics was the ‘divide and rule’ policy, which the colonialists had used with great success in different parts of the world. The British knavishly took advantage of the historical mistrust between the Hindus and Muslims as well as the inherent divisions amongst the Hindus to further deepen the fissures in the fabric of the Indian society. Towards this end the paranoia of the Muslims was systematically stoked and simultaneously they were given preferential political treatment, creation of separate constituencies for Muslims (where only Muslim candidates could contest) being just one example. The British also attempted to treat Congress, the only political party that had genuine pan-Indian presence and appeal, as being representative of only upper-caste Hindus and sought to create separate constituencies for the low-castes of the Hindu societies. Needless to say, the British had no desire to uplift the downtrodden—their record as regards social upliftment of the masses was abysmal—but were only hoping that the opposition of various constituents to their rule would weaken, busy as they would be squabbling amongst themselves. These unrightous methods yielded partial dividends for the colonialists in the short-term in that it stretched their regime for a few more decades, but left behind a legacy that haunts the region even now. As regards dealing with the opposition to their rule, the British had a two-pronged policy. The revolutionary—the British called them terrorists—who were not averse to using violent tactics, were dealt with savagely. Many were summarily hanged or subjected to kala paani—severe and brutal punishment in cellular jails on remote islands such as Andaman, where they remained incarcerated for decades. Savarkar, one of the accused in the Gandhi Murder trial, and still revered as a great freedom fighter in his native state, was subjected to 50 years of kala pani for his ‘terrorist’ activities; he was released after 15 years and kept under house-arrest for further 14 years. It has to be said, though, that, because of the unprecedented appeal of Gandhi and his doctrine of non-violence, the violent, ‘revolutionary’ methods did not receive widespread support of hoi polloi. Gandhi, and the Congress he led, although they were not treated as brutally as Savarkar and his band of revolutionaries (or terrorists), were the real thorn in the side of the colonialists, not least because Gandhi, by dint of his methods, assumed moral high ground, which allegedly used to irritate Winston Churchill, Brition’s war-time prime-minister. Churchill famously described Gandhi as ‘Naked Fakir’. In a letter to Churchill from prison Gandhi wrote: ‘You are reported to have the desire to crush the ‘Naked Fakir’ as you are said to have described me. I have been long trying to be a Fakir and that naked—a more difficult task. I, therefore, regard the expression as a compliment though unintended. I approach you then as such and ask you to trust and use me for the sake of your people and mine and through them those of the world.’ By the time the second world war came to an end and the British began to face up to the possibility of having to give up India, the demand for the separate homeland for the Muslims had been taken up by the Muslim League and its president Jinah, himself an ex-Congressman. The Congress leaders, the author would have us believe, were men in a hurry. They were eager to assume power; they were worried the time was running out for them. Prolonged periods of incarceration—the British, not wanting any trouble in the colonies while they were fighting the Nazis, had imprisoned all the leaders of Congress, without any trial, of course, for almost the entire duration of the second World War—had broken their spirit and they had no fight left in them. The exception was Gandhi. Throughout his life he had not lusted after power. He did not hold any position in Congress; indeed he was not even a primary member of Congress for the previous 15 years. He was prepared to wait, and had taken the stance that the third party [the British] should vacate forthwith and ‘leave India to her Fate.’ He did not want partition, though he was not going to go against the will of the people; but he did not want the colonialists, who, in his eyes, had no locus standi, to act as arbitrators, which, he was convinced, would further vitiate the atmosphere. Some of Gandhi’s utterances, quoted in the book, seem improbably idealistic, almost naïve. Gandhi’s stance was not acceptable to any of the stakeholders, including leaders of his own party. The Congress leaders were in a quandary. On the one hand, they did not strictly need him as he did not hold any position in the party. Yet no one amongst them had his pan-Indian appeal. The moral authority Gandhi wielded seems almost surreal. The news of him going on fast would bring the country to a standstill; ordinary people of all creeds and cast would flock to his camp and plead with him to end his fast. In the last phase of his life Gandhi was able to put a stop, albeit a temporary one, to the violence by the sheer force of his righteousness. The Congress leaders were only too aware of this. They needed Gandhi to put his seal of approval on their proposals because they knew that the Indian public would listen to him. As Pyarelal Nayyar, Gandhi’s personal secretary, wryly observed, ‘They [the Congress leaders] were the ones, the word went round, with whom 'business could be done. The impossible old man [Gandhi] was put on a pedestal, admired for his genius and 'unerring hunch', consulted, listened to with respectful attention—and bypassed.’

The third part of the book deals with the investigations, trial and execution. As is the case with the other two parts, no new information or insight emerge. Nathuram Godse, the man who killed Gandhi, and Narayan Apte, the man prosecution successfully argued was the mastermind of the plot, were hanged. Savarkar was acquitted, as was Dr. Parchure, an ideologue of the Hindu Mahasabha in the central province, who was accused of supplying the pistol that Godse used. Digmbar Badge, another Hindu fanatic and an arms-dealer, became the witness for the prosecution (it was Badge’s evidence that the prosecution used to try to nail Savarkar: according to Badge, two weeks before the murder, he, Godse and Apte visited Savarkar at his residence in Bombay. Badge was asked to wait outside while the two conspirators holed up with Savarkar in his study on the first floor of the residence for several minutes. Then they came out, and as Godse and Apte descended the stairs Savarkar said, ‘Yashsvi Houn Ya’ (Be victorious)’; this was refuted by Savarkar as well as the other accused) while the rest, among them Gopal Godse, a weak-willed man and Nathuram’s younger brother, were given life imprisonment. As Apte and Godse were being led to the gallows, Nathuram, who, throughout his trial, had been a picture of brave defiance, went weak at the knees and had to be supported by the jail wardens, while Apte remained calm, almost serene. Savarkar, exonerated by the courts, was politically finished, and, wrecked by ill-health, stayed out of the mainstream politics for the remainder of his life. He remains a controversial, if peripheral, figure in the Indian polity to this day. The rest of the conspirators, upon their release from prison, led obscure lives and, to all outward purposes, remained unremorseful of what they had done. It is a shame that the author has made no efforts to trace their lives, post-release, and all of them remain unconvincing two-dimensional characters. The author gives detailed descriptions of the plot to murder Gandhi, such as it was. The picture emerges of men who, rabidly fanatic (and united in their hatred of Gandhi for different reasons) as they were, were no professional killers. The handsome Apte, the so-called mastermind behind the plot, comes across as a fantasist. He was also a blabbermouth, and left a trail of their activities longer than Mumbai-Poona highway. Indeed, the readers learn, the shooting that finally killed Gandhi was the killers’ second, impromptu, attempt within two weeks. They had unsuccessfully tried to set off a bomb in Gandhi’s evening prayer meeting a couple of weeks earlier. The police had arrested Madanlal Pahwa (who had set off the bomb, and who was sentenced to life imprisonment) who had clearly told them the names of the key conspirators and had predicted ‘Woh Phir Aayenge (They will strike again).' Quite why and how the police could not act on this information and stop the murderers in their tracks is unfathomable. While Gandhi did not make matters any easier for them by not allowing any security for his evening prayers, the police were guilty of breathtaking ineptitude. The author drops oblique hints that some of the senior leaders in Congress, in particular Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, the iron-man of independent India and her first Home minister, bitterly disappointed at being passed over by Gandhi, who favoured Nehru as his political heir, for the preimership, and possibly coming under the sway of Hindu fundamentalists, wanted Gandhi out of the way. What is incomprehensible is the blasé attitude of Morarji Desai, a staunch Gandhian, who became India’s prime minister decades later, at the age of eighty one. Desai was the Home Minister of what was then the Bombay province and was given all the information that should have been sufficient to arrest the plotters, more than a week before the murder. Inexplicably, Desai, whose secular credentials were never in doubt, chose to sit on this information. Whether there indeed was a political conspiracy that allowed the conspirators to have that crucial extra week after the failed first attempt will remain a matter of conjecture and will, no doubt, continue to provide fodder for the conspiracy theorists for years. For what it is worth, the readers learn (from the practically unreadable last section of the book) that the fact finding Kapoor Commission, formed twenty years after the Mahatma’s murder, did not find any evidence of political conspiracy.

This is a book born out of anger. In the foreword Tushar Gandhi writes: ‘I can never forgive them [the men who killed Gandhi], nor can I forgive the philosophy that created Nathuram Godse, the murderer. . . I felt extreme rage inside me. . .This book is a result of that rage that has been bottled up in me for far too long.’ By his own admission, Tushar Gandhi has not written anything new: ‘What I have written, has been known, but to very few people,’ said he in an interview he gave when the book was released. This is what lets the book down in the end: it has an investigative veneer, but all that Tushar Gandhi has done, so it seems, is sit with a pile of reports, books and private correspondence, and prepare an exhaustive (and at times exhausting) compendium. It adds no new information to what is already known, nor does it offer any insight into the psych of the killers. The author offers no real evidence to back up his claims and innuendos with regard to public figures such as Patel and Savarkar. These claims, therefore, have as much authenticity as the gossip in the breadline. That said the book is written with conviction, single-mindedness of purpose, and great passion. The Mahatma once said, ‘Anger is an acid which corrodes the vessel in which it is stored.’ One hopes that this cathartic book has given his great-grandson some peace of mind.

John Updike RIP

John Updike died of lung cancer, in a hospice, last month, at the age of 76. Many would say he was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, deserving of the Nobel. He was certainly one of the most prolific: in a career spanning five decades, Updike published 28 novels, 14 brick-thick collections of short stories, and 9 volumes of poetry. Add to this the countless reviews he wrote, on subjects as varying as golf, paintings, and cartoons—he was apparently an able cartoonist—, and you will get some idea of the intellectual fecundity of the man. Like the great Somerset Maugham, renowned for writing a few pages every day, 365 days a year—on days when he did not feel inspired, Maugham would fill pages with his signature—Updike, too, till the end, laboured in front of his typewriter for several hours every day.

It was ineluctable that some or more of the output was ordinary, especially his later works with their super-clever premises, which seemed mere vehicles for Updike to deluge his readers with digressive, random pontifications on whatever subject that happened to be on his mind at the time . The patience of all but the most generous reader would surely stretch and snap as they plough through Toward the End of Time, Updike’s 18th novel, as its senescent garrulous narrator yammers on about quantum mechanics and horticulture. The gimmicky Seek My Face, his 54th book, written in just one chapter—indeed one paragraph— left the readers less than enchanted with pages and pages of textbook criticism, and offered no new insights into the works (or lives) of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, the two artists upon whom two of the main characters of the novels were based. Gertrude and Claudius, his self-conscious prequel to Hamlet, was strangely devoid of any passion or drama, as it meandered along, never getting out of the far left lane. In Terrorist, his final novel, Updike showed glimpses of his sly wit and linguistic brilliance that had earned him legion of admirers in his distinguished writing career, but the novel, which, in contrast to his more recent novels, was well paced, suffered from a weak central plot and was ultimately unconvincing.

It seems that once he was through writing the great novels of American man (I am using the word in its gender specific sense) and the sexual revolution sweeping the middle classes in the sixties, Updike, driven by the need—an eye on the Nobel perhaps?—to move on to weightier subject matters, ended up writing plenty about not very much. What also became increasingly noticeable in the later works was his obsessively detailed eye for the quotidian. The unstoppably vivid descriptions of mundane occurrences such as a car being started and going past an observer or the preparation a tuna salad, running into several paragraphs and giving the reader no way-stations to pause for rest, served little purpose other than adding to their sense of ennui. The stylistic excellence and pseudophilosophical insights failed to camouflage the lack of coherent or, in some instances, plausible premise, and the work was about as captivating to the common reader as a monograph studying Julius Caesar's Latin and comparing its rhythmic structure to Byzantine hymns. The whole exercise, it seemed, no longer had any goals beyond enjoyment, dare I say egotistical?, of its own overbred faculties.

However, posterity will judge John Updike not on his lesser, autumnal offerings, but on novels such as the Rabbit books, the zeitgeist series that represented the silent American men of his generation (and won him the Pulitzer twice), and Couples, which made him famous and which won him the reputation of the novelist of sexual revolution, or, as a critic once put it hyperbolically, the novelist who kicked down the doors of American bedrooms. Updike made his reputation on effectively transcribing the angst of common people who outwardly appeared to be content with their lot; and the deliberately provocative manner in which he wrote about sex earned him millions of fans all over the world, but also made him vulnerable to the charge that what he wrote was mild pornography disguised as social insight. Be that as it may, Updike perhaps realised that the seam was too narrow, and moved on to different, abstruse, subjects. Shorn of new ideas he kept going by giving himself technical challenges; writer's block was but a surface for him to practise his craft. Herman Hesse, the great German novelist and Nobel Laureate, published The Glass Bead Game, in 1943. Hesse was 65 when his magnum opus was published. He did not publish a single novel in the remainder of his life. Not everyone has the courage or insight to accept that the stream of creativity has dried up. What you end up doing then, to borrow a phrase from Truman Capote, is typing, not writing.

Philip Roth, Updike’s contemporary and no less a chronicler of American, albeit Jewish American, adultery, was the first to pay him the following tribute:

‘[Updike is] our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable.’

Updike was an accomplished and technically gifted wordsmith. He had, in abundance, all the virtues a writer would dream of. Was he a great writer? Probably.

Book of the Month: The song Before It Is Sung (Justin Cartwright)

I will crush and destroy the criminals who have dared to oppose themselves to Providence and to me. These traitors to their own people deserve ignominious death, and this is what they shall have. This time the full price will be paid by all those who are involved, and by their families, and by all those who have helped them. This nest of vipers who have tried to sabotage the grandeur of my Germany will be exterminated once and for all.
Adolf Hitler to Joachim von Ribentrop (20th July 1944)

On 20 July 1944 a bomb inside a briefcase went off in Adolf Hitler’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’—his command post for the Eastern Front in Rastenburg, Prussia. The bomb was placed by Major Claus von Stauffenberg. The intent was to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazis. Hitler was not killed; he sustained injuries to his forearms and lost hearing permanently in his right ear. Stauffenberg, who had returned to Berlin, planning to seize the city, believing that Hitler was dead, was arrested and shot at midnight on the same day by a firing squad. Within days almost all the fellow conspirators of Stauffenberg were rounded up, and after a show trial in the People’s Court (set up to judge political crimes), presided over by the rabid Nazi Roland Freisler (who was to die a few months later during an air raid on Berlin), executed. The executions were carried out by hanging the conspirators slowly from meat-hooks; their death agonies were filmed and shown to the Fuhrer.

One of the co-conspirators of von Stauffenberg was Adam von Trott. Born into a wealthy, aristocratic Prussian family, von Trott came to the UK in 1931 as a Rhodes scholar and studied at the Balliol College, Oxford. While in Oxford, von Trott became friends with a Jewish philosopher the same age as he, who had come to the UK a decade earlier, from Russia. The young philosopher’s name was Isaiah Berlin. von Trott returned to Germany and trained as a lawyer. He visited England on a few occasions in the thirties. In 1940, von Trott joined the Nazi party and became the legation counsellor in the German foreign office. Charged with complicity in the July 20, 1944 plot, he was hanged a month later. His three young children were taken by the Gestapo, following Hitler’s decision to introduce Sippenhaft—‘Absolute responsibility of kin . . . a very old custom practised among out forefathers’ as Heinrich Himmler declared. von Trott was thirty five when he died. Berlin outlived his friend by decades, and went on to become one of the most influential liberal philosopher and historian of ideas of the twentieth century. He died in 1997, at the age of eighty eight.

The conspirators involved in the July 1944 plot joined the resistance movement by different routes. Stauffenberg, apparently, was appalled by the atrocities committed by the SS (Schutz Staffeinel) during Operation Barbarossa. von Trott’s path to resistance was as long as it was tortuous. After spending a year at the Balliol, where he formed a friendship not only with Berlin, but also with David Astor (who edited The Observer for well over two decades with great distinction) von Trott returned to Germany and worked as a public prosecutor in Hesse. While working in Hesse, von Trott wrote a letter to Manchester Guardian (in response to a report in it that Jews were denied justice in Germany). In the letter von Trott claimed that no anti-Semitism existed in the courts of Hesse. This letter, at the very least a grotesque distortion of what was going on in Germany at the time, incensed Berlin and put their friendship under severe strain. Whether it was irrevocably breached or whether it healed with the passage of time is a matter of opinion. David Astor, close to both men, asserted, in a letter to New York Book Reviews in 1998, a year after Berlin’s death, that after the temporary strain in the relationship following von Trott’s ill-advised letter to the Manchester Guardian, the two men renewed their friendship. Certainly, Berlin, in later life, spoke of and wrote about von Trott in glowing terms. In 1997, the year he died, Berlin invited von Trott’s widow and two daughters to visit him, and, later, wrote to his friends, ‘I enjoyed the visit of the Trotts very much. I did indeed talk about Adam as they wished me to, and said everything I felt and thought.’ However, all of this was after von Trott had redeemed himself with his martyrdom. It is not known whether in von Trott’s life (which was to end on a meat-hook at Ploetzwnsee Prison ten years after his letter) the two men—one an erudite, witty, liberal thinker; the other an admirer of Hegel and German idealism— managed to rediscover their friendship. On the eve of the Second World War, von Trott visited England, and later America, to shore up support against the Nazis. He had secret meetings with Lord Halifex, who arranged for him to meet the British prime-minister, Neville Chamberlain. He also met Felix Frankfurter in America. While in England, he briefly met Berlin and requested a letter of introduction to Fankfurter, which Berlin duly supplied. However, what did Berlin, and others in Oxford, really think of von Trott at this time? History tells us that von Trott’s efforts did not come to fruition; the allies did not support the anti-Nazi conspirators. Ignoring his friends’ advice von Trott returned to Germany. In 1940 (relatively late, it has to be said) he joined the Nazi party (what did Berlin make of it?) and, while serving as the legation officer, he also became a member of the Kreisau Circle—a group of intellectuals opposed to the Nazi regime.

What was it that made von Trott, who appeared, even to his well-wishers in England, to be an apologist (if not an enthusiastic supporter) of the Third Reich at one stage, risk his life while plotting for its downfall in less than a decade? How did he arrive at the point of his final, heroic, act? It is this question that Justin Cartwright explores in his splendid novel The Song Before It Is Sung (The title is inspired from a quotation of Alexander Herzen, the father of Russian socialism, ‘Where is the song before it is sung?’, which Berlin, a great admirer of Herzen, often cited.) Cartwright makes it explicit in the ‘Afterword’ that the novel is based in part on the friendship between von Trott and Berlin: Axel von Gottenberg of the novel is von Trott, and Eliya Mendel is Isaiah Berlin (Berlin’s father’s name was Mendel).

Almost six decades after von Gottenberg is hanged, Conrad Senior, an Oxford graduate and a former student of Mendel is bequeathed his, Mendel’s, cache of papers and letters. In a letter left for Conrad, Mendel indicates that he had been haunted to the end of his life by the suspicion (and associated guilt) that he might have treated von Gottenberg unjustly; that had he given more support to von Gottenberg when he came to the UK on the eve of the Second World War, von Gottenberg might have been spared his appalling death. Why does Mendel choose Conrad, who, post-Oxford, has not made much of his life? Because Conrad, while not Mendel’s ‘most brilliant’ student, is ‘the most human’. Conrad, whose life (as his increasingly exasperated and disenchanted doctor partner suggests unkindly) has been a series of nearlies, clutches to the Mendel papers as if it were a rope suspended over a pit of dragons. He decides that what Mendel wanted him to investigate was to find out whether or not von Gottenberg was a self-romanticizing, ceremonious, politically ambivalent, and gullible aristocrat who over-estimated his sphere of influence and paid with his life; or whether he was genuine in his revulsion of the Nazi atrocities and echt in his attempts to overthrow the Nazis. The Song Before It Is Sung is the story of Conrad Senior’s quest for the truth. It is a powerful exploration of guilt, human frailty, errancy, friendship, mortality, and courage. Cartwright weaves an intricate web, mixing, effortlessly, fact and fiction. The von Gottenberg of this narrative is a deeply-rooted-to-the Fatherland, Junker (landed nobility of Prussia), with a sense of noblesse oblige, and Cartwright effectively conveys the aura of tragedy and doom surrounding von Gottenberg. The story is recounted in two different timeframes; the narrative moves back and forth between past and present. As Senior becomes more and more obsessed with the dark recesses of the European history of the twentieth century, his personal life disintegrates. His partner finds solace in the arms of her work-colleague, and leaves him. As Conrad traces the inevitable trajectory of von Gottenberg’s life towards its doom, his own life, so it seems, is heading towards a different kind of annihilation. The parallels between Conrad’s life—in the here-and-now—and those of the two men he is investigating are subtle yet uncanny. It is also a testimony of Cartwright’s artistry that he seamlessly introduces the only truly fictional element—the romantic interests of the Prussian aristocrat and Jewish Don—in a novel teeming with historical actualities. At times, though, he appears to stray away from facts; or perhaps his interpretation of certain crucial events is different from that of von trot and Berlin’s common friends. Cartwright indicates in the novel that Mendel warns Frankfurter and other influential Americans that von Gottenberg’s motives were suspect and that he was not to be trusted. All the available evidence suggests that in real life it was not Berlin but his fellow Oxford Don Cecil Maurice Bowra who warned the Americans about von Trott. (Bowra continued to view von Trott as a Nazi and was unmoved when the news reached Oxford of von Trott’s hanging. In later life Bowra expressed bitter remorse for his treatment of von Trott.) At other times, Cartwright sets out on riveting historical what-ifs, which add to the intrigue. Conrad Senior is convinced that a film of von Gottenberg’s execution exists. In real life, von Trott was executed eleven days after his fellow conspirators, and it is unlikely that his execution was filmed. Gestapo kept him alive for a variety of reasons: aware of his foreign contacts they wanted to extract more information and possible wider ramifications of the plot; it is also possible that some in the SS might have wanted to keep him alive in order to buy their way out when Germany lost the war—for, surely, by then all except the gullible and the deluded must have known that they were staring down the abyss of defeat.

Cartwright is an astute, if acerbic, observer of the human quirks and peculiarities, which makes this novel an especial pleasure to read. Conrad Senior’s observations and views on life, and his relentless insight into human ambiguities may be sardonic, but they are not flippant or mocking. This is an erudite, deeply thoughtful novel with a serious message: humans are the authors of their own lives. As one reads the account of von Grottenberg/ von Trott’s last days, and his epic composure at the trial, one is left with the feeling that it could not have turned out any other way. von Gottenberg / von Trott could have stayed back in England instead of returning to Germany. He did not. He rejected the safe option which would certainly have seen him through the war to the comfortable obscurity in the post-war Germany; and instead embarked upon a path which he must have known, as the war progressed, could only have one outcome.

Victa placet mihi causa—albeit lost the cause does please me—wrote Lucanus almost two millennia ago. History, however, the hardhearted mistress she is, has no time for causa victa, and is excessively fond of causa victrix. That, perhaps, is the reason why the German resistance to Adolf Hitler, which culminated in the July 1944 bomb plot, has not been accorded its rightful place in history; and the persons involved, the plotters, are forgotten names; they are the unsung heroes. Justin Cartwright, in this highly accomplished novel, has made a persuasive case for causa victa. Poignant, elegiac, soulful and profoundly moving, The Song Before It Is Sung is a triumph.

Books Read In 2008

When 2008 began, I made the following resolutions:

1. I would read at least fifty books.
2. Of these fifty, at least ten would be non-fiction books.
3. I would read Pride and Prejudice.

I have always enjoyed reading fiction, and, while I make no apologies for preferring fiction to non-fiction—I have always thought that fiction demands more creativity—my non-fiction reading is not up to scratch. I added the third resolution to the list because I was getting fed up with the constant badgering to which I was being subjected by a friend who cannot believe that I have not read one of the greatest novels written in English. My attempts to placate him on this matter—‘I do not much go for pre-twentieth century fiction, and, with the exception of Hard Times, have not read any nineteenth century fiction’; ‘I do not think I would find the tale of an old crone trying to marry off her daughters by giving as little dowry as possible engrossing, however well written’; ‘There is no call for him criticising my reading habits seeing as he reads no more than ten books in a year (two of which are Harry Potter)’— brought no joy. In the end, just to shut him up, I added Pride and Prejudice to my reading list for 2008.

Of the three objectives, I fulfilled one, the first one. The remaining two, sadly, will have to be carried forward to 2009.

Below is the list of the books I read in 2008.

Fiction

1. An Underachiever’s Diary (Benjamin Anastas)
2. The Bottle Factory Outing (Beryl Bainbridge)
3. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
4. Jeeves in the Offing (P.G. Wodehouse)
5. London Observed (Doris Lessing)
6. And Where Were You, Adam (Heinrich Boll)
7. Aunts Are No Gentlemen (P.G. Wodehouse)
8. Jake’s Thing (Kingsley Amis)
9. On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan)
10. House of Meetings (Martin Amis)
11. Reader, I Married Him (Michelle Roberts)
12. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Alan Sillitoe)
13. The Giles Waring Haters’ Club (Tim Dowling)
14. Call It Sleep (Henry Roth)
15. Merde Happens (Stephen Clarke)
16. Bluebeard (Max Frisch)
17. Slam (Nick Hornby)
18. Ralph’s Party (Lisa Jewell)
19. Before She Met Me (Julian Barnes)
20. Accidental Woman (Jonathan Coe)
21. A Woman of My Age (Nina Bawden)
22. Children of the Revolution (Dinaw Mengestu)
23. Some Tame Gazelle (Barbara Pym)
24. The Playroom (Olivia Manning)
25. Crome Yellow (Aldous Huxley)
26. Gathering (Anne Enright)
27. Laughter in the Dark (Vladimir Nabokov)
28. Model Behaviour (Jay McInerney)
29. My Revolutions (Hari Kunzru)
30. The Masters (C.P Snow)
31. Girl with Green Eyes (Edna O’Brien)
32. Road to Wellville (T.C. Boyle)
33. To the North (Elizabeth Bowen)
34. The Song Before It Is Sung (Justin Cartwright)
35. Honey for the Bears (Anthony Burgess)
36. The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett)
37. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
38. Blaming (Elizabeth Taylor)
39. Coming from Behind (Howard Jacobson)
40. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)
41. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (Liz Jensen)
42. Tomorrow (Graham Swift)
43. The Kite Runner (Khalid Hosseini)
44. Terrorist (John Updike)

Non-fiction

1. Let’s Kill Gandhi (Tushar Gandhi)
2. Holy Cow! (Sarah Macdonald)
3. Mao The Unknown Story (Jung Chang & Jon Halliday)
4. My Invented Country (Isabel Allende)
5. Mistress’s Daughter (A.M. Homes)
6. The Fishes Come Home to Roost (Rachael Manija Brown)
7. After the Wall (Jana Hensel)
8. Among the Believers (V.S. Naipaul)
9. Literary Occasions (V.S. Naipaul)


A total of 53 books—one more than the number I read in 2007. The non-fiction, while it fell one short of the requisite number, was, still, an improvement over the number in 2007 (five). And, while I did not get round to reading Pride and Prejudice—I tried, I assure you; however, every time I picked up the edition in my collection, with Kira Knightley’s sickly, anorexic face on its front, I had the strange sensation of life-force sapping, and, it was all I could do to put the Jane Austin masterpiece back on the shelf and totter out of the library gasping for breath—it was not supplanted by another nineteenth century fiction, say, David Copperfield (which has also been on my ‘to read’ list); I did not read any nineteenth century fiction. It has been suggested that I should buy a different edition of Pride and Prejudice, preferably one which does not have Kira Knightley adorning its front. Let’s see.

There are many authors in the list above whom I read for the first time. In the non-fiction category, with the exception of Naipaul and Allende, I had not read the works of any of the authors (and I had read only the novels of Allende), although, as far as I am aware, Gandhi’s, Macdonald’s, Brown’s and Hensel’s literary outputs do not (yet) extend beyond the books I have read.

In the fiction category, there were nineteen authors– Benjamin Anastas, Michelle Roberts, Alan Sillitoe, Tim Dowling, Henry Roth, Max Frisch, Lisa Jewell, Dinaw Mengestu, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Anne Enright, C.P Snow, Edna O’Brien, T.C. Boyle, Alan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Yates, Liz Jensen, Khalid Hosseini—whom I read for the first time. I must admit to being stumped—to use that quaint English expression (according to Jeffrey Archer, who, surely, is as English as they come)—Lisa Jewell’s Ralph’s Party in this list. Mind you, I have nothing against the mother-of-two, who decided to try her hand at writing after she was made redundant from her job as a secretary, and Ralph’s Party, as far as I can recall, is an easy-to-read-on-the-toilet type of books which do not make undue demands on your intellectual capacity; it is just that I read such books only when I am stuck mid-air for in excess of eight hours (and even then I generally read Jeffrey Archer). In other words, life is too short to read books whose genres are not to your taste. (I use the expression ‘Life is too short to . . .' quite often; I find it serves a useful purpose; it seeks to give the impression that while you are ignorant, you are ignorant by choice.)

I read Updike after a long time. The last novel of Updike I had read was Seek My Face, a gimmicky, unsubstantial and unreadable novel, which did nothing to reassure me that Updike’s creativity was not in terminal decline. While Terrorist shows glimpses of Updike’s former linguistic brilliance and is nicely paced, the premise, like the protagonist, is unconvincing, and the novel, which offers no real insight as to why an educated, academically bright Muslim boy turns to violence, is ultimately disappointing.

Kite Runner is written by the Americanized Afghan writer Khalid Hosseini, who, apparently, is a doctor by profession. The novel was a commercial success and was made into a film. It is a formulaic, melodramatic, over-the-top, predictable, and not very subtle novel, which divides the world rather neatly into simplistic categories.

Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle cannot be more different from The Kite Runner, both in its subject matter and narrative style. This comedy of manners is a quintessentially English novel, rich in subtlety-it is not the kind of novel that would make you laugh out loud, but will bring a smile to your face. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved has been collecting dust on my shelf for the last fourteen years, although I have read some other novels of the 1993 Nobel Laureate, such as Jazz and The Song of Solomon. I finally read Beloved (which won the 1987 Pulitzer) after I attended a literary programme in which Morrison read from her most recent novel— a prequel to Beloved. I am glad I read Beloved, which, despite some annoying (and unnecessary) gimmicks, is a very good novel—probably not my most favourite Morrison novel, but well worth a read.

Before She Met Me is an early novel of Julian Barnes, one of my favourite writers. It tells the story of the modern day ‘Othello Syndrome’. It is a well-researched book, embelished by Barne’s trademark wit. The end stuns you as much for its violence as for unexpectedness. Not perhaps Barnes’s best, but well worth a read.

Crome Yellow, a satire on the upper-class English (and their affectations) in the 1920s, is Aldous Huxley’s debut novel, but you would not think so, so assured is his style.

Richard Yate’s Revolutionary Road was on my ‘to be read’ list for years. Yate’s wry, yet compassionate, novel of hopes (and their betrayals) of a middle-class American family,as it hurtles towards tragedy, is a great work of art. I will have to read other novels of this underrated genius.

The Masters is said to be the best of C.P. Snow’s ‘Lewis Eliot’ sequence of novels; it is also the book that has worn well. C.P. Snow’s tale of the intrigues and machinations of the election of the master of a college in Cambridge is remarkable as much for the great skill with which its key characters are drawn as for its superb, Dickensenian prose.

Road to Welville, the exotically named T Corghessan Boyel’s tale of John Harvey Kellog, the creator of Kellog’s cornflakes, is a riot. Boyle’s linguistic brilliance adds to the pleasure of reading. I shall be reading more of T.C. Boyle in the coming years.

If linguistic pyrotechnics get you what the Italians would call arrapato, then you should not miss Coming from Behind, Howard Jacobson’s debut novel. The plot, such as it is, is incidental; the novel is a vehicle for Jacobson to dazzle you with his crackling prose and wit. Jacobson is a great comic talent, sadly underrated.

Accidental Woman is the debut novel of Jonathan Coe, one of my favourite novelists. While it lacks the finesse of Coe’s later works and does not quite seem able to make up its mind which genre it wants to belong to, there is enough evidence in this slight (in respect of volume, not substance) novel the awesome talent Coe was going to turn out to be.

Alan Benet’s The Uncommon Reader is a sheer pleasure to read; this urbane and erudite novella about reading and its manifold delights can be enjoyed at many levels.

Call It Sleep is a multifaceted, at times deeply moving, novel of the Jewish imigrant life at the turn of the last but one century that I found remarkable as much for its black humour as for its innovative use of language. The poignancy is increased further when you learn of the deeply troubled childhood of Henry Roth, the inspiration for this autobigraphical novel.

Max Frisch's Blubeard was the only translated fiction I read in 2008. Frisch, whose better known translated works include I am Not Stiller and Homo Faber, has, in Bluebeard (the eponymous hero of Perrault's fairy tale), created a fascinating way of exploring old truths.

Of the nine non-fiction books I read in 2008, I shall mention three: Mao, the Untold Story is an extensively researched, meticulously referenced, eight hundred pages behemoth, which the Commuist regime in China dare not allow to be published. In seventy chapters Chang and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, trace Mao's life from his birth to death and, in the process, shatter every myth associated with the father of the People's republic of China. It is a bombshell of a book. Rachael Brown's All the Fishes Come Home to Roost is an engrossing, bittersweet account of the five years she spent as a pre-adolescent in the ashram of an Indian guru, Meher Baba, of whom her parents were disciples, in the backwaters of India. In an ironic, witty, humane, and genuinely affecting style Brown recounts the less-than-wholesome years she spent in the sleepy town of Ahmadnagar. V.S. Naipaul has the (undeserved) reputation of being anti-Muslim. Among the Believers, first publsihed in 1979, is Naipaul's account of his travels through Islamic countries of Iran, Pakistan, Indonasia and Malaysia. Written with his customary acerbity and relentless pursuit of ugly reality lurking underneath the patina of religious sohistry, the book is eerily prophetic.

My top three novels of 2008: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Alan Sillitoe), Jake's Thing (KIngsley Amis), and The Song Before It Is Sung (Justin Cartwright). I have reviewed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning on the blog, and shall review the other two in due course.