Month: October 2014

Trash or Treasure

I was reflecting on silence today.  I was in anything but a quiet environment, given I was wandering through the Mong Kok and surrounding areas in Hong Kong, which is full of side street vendors, traffic, retailer after retailer, busy end of day crowds and  Occupy Hong Kong protestors.

The silence I was experiencing was not the silence of the external environment, but rather the silence one experiences when travelling alone.  I have been in Hong Kong on business and have spent much of the time outside of meetings not talking; something pretty unusual for me.

What has this got to do with books?  Well, I made reference to the restorative stillness and silence I enjoy when reading books in an earlier post (Bed-time stories for world leaders).  Usually reading takes me to a quiet place, but as I walked through the noisy crowds of Kowloon I realised sometimes I want a book to make a noise.  To scream, shout and explode.

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was a book that did this well, as did Charles Bukowski’s Post Office and Women. But it was the books of my adolescence that I remember most for this; leaving me breathless for the next chapter or book in the inevitable trilogy or saga.

Fantasy is a genre I never read much anymore, but it is my first love.  The worlds of magic, war, political intrigue and myth created by my favourite fantasy authors provided the much-needed noise to match the moods of my teens and early twenties.  It started with a cult classic, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, borrowed from my local library, which transported in a thunder-clap of adventure that has rung in my ears for almost 30 years.

I have read a lot of fantasy since, with my favourites including pretty much everything by David and Leigh Eddings (The Belgariad series etc.), Raymond E Feist’s Riftwar Cycle, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, Terry Brooks’ Shannara Trilogy and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.

But are these books any good?  I have avoided this question for some time.  What prompted me to think about it is the book series I’m reading now by Hugh Howey that includes Wool, Shift and Dust.  While more sci-fi or dystopian future than fantasy, they’ve given me a very similar experience as the fantasy books of my youth.  They viciously pick me up, shout their story in my ear and angrily consume my time. I can’t put them down and don’t want to.

I am incapable of determining if these books, much like the fantasy that stoked my love of reading, are actually any good.  Usually I snobbishly cast judgement over a book within ten pages, but with these books my powers of criticism are powerless against the escapist storytelling, engaging characters and political nuance.

I know it is not to everyone’s taste, but one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and so I guess it doesn’t matter if they are good or not; I love them and their words pile up around me like Scrooge McDuck’s gold in his money bin, and much like Scrooge I enjoy diving in whenever I get the chance.

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Well may we say…

I’m feeling quite emotional today. I’m thousands of kilometres from my darling wife who is juggling work, the house, the kids and a severe illness in her family.

And today as I sat on the exercise bike in the hotel gym (you the know, the ones with a TV built in so you can torture your mind while you torture your body), I saw the ‘breaking news’ headline that former Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, had died.

For those of you unlucky enough not to be Australian (sorry, the only time you’ll catch me being patriotic), Gough is probably the most iconic Australian politician in our country’s relative short history.  The title of this post references his most famous speech after being controversially dismissed from office.

While his government will be remembered for many mistakes, especially economic, in three short reformist years in the early ’70s as Prime Minister he: eliminated military conscription; got Australia out of the Vietnam War; abolished the death penalty; implemented universal health care and free university education; began the process of recognising Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional owners of the land; enacted the Racial Discrimination Act; made legislative changes to ensure equal pay for women; and refocused Australia as part of the world and part of Asia, not an outpost of a long-dead colonial European empire.

I have a lump in my throat just writing about it.

It is because of him and a few rare politicians like him in my lifetime that I became politically aware, studied politics at school and involved myself in student politics while at university.

This then got me thinking about how books can so easily tap in to the deepest recesses of our emotions and not only trigger powerful emotional responses, but also inspire us to act; to make a change in our lives or those around us.

Tuesday’s with Morrie by Mitch Albom was an example for me as I read it when my son was very young and it laid out what is important in life in a way that inspired me to want to teach to my children. Other books ring like poetry sending our emotions soaring; perhaps bizarrely, one book that did this for me was a graphic novel called Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware … truly extraordinary.

Other books tap in to darker emotions that make us: frustrated, angry or confused (The Magus, John Fowles), titillated (Money, Martin Amis; The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart); deeply, deeply depressed (The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati) or just shocked (Legend of a Suicide, David Vann).

The one author who has tapped in to my deep primal beliefs more than any other is GK Chesterton, through his essays, philosophical writing (Orthodoxy), criticism (What’s Wrong With the World).

It is obviously different for everyone, but what is it about these books that trigger such strong emotions?

On one level you could argue it is an author’s cynicism. There are some clever tricks they can use to trigger emotional responses, and they cynically deliberately employ these to masterful effect. Perhaps I am being too cynical.

It could be that we intuitively choose books because we know they will trigger a response, a response we’re craving. On the other-hand some writers, like song writers, painters, choreographers and dancers have a talent for writing stories that engage us so deeply we lay ourselves open to experiencing emotions we usually tuck away from the world as part of our normal daily lives.

So here’s to the memory of an optimistic leader and the memories of books that let us experience life more fully.

Non-fiction is a fiction

Something has happened in the 40 odd years of my life that only struck me this evening as I was trying to come up with something for this blog.

In that time I have seen a revolution in the popularity of non-fiction in two waves. The first was the rise of the self-help book and the second was the rise of the Internet.

Self help books have been around since the earliest days of written wisdom (probably the Greeks, but I’m no classical historian). However until the 20th Century they were pretty much exclusively for the elite i.e. those who could read.

The 1980s saw a massive increase in the focus on material wealth and the need for self-improvement. What then followed was a succession of self professed experts claiming to hold the key to everything from health and wealth to spiritual awakening and sexual prowess. Tony Robbins and his contemporaries became the new spiritual leaders in Western society.

In contrast, when I was a boy, we watched in awe as the full set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica was delivered to our home, which my dad then read cover to cover. That was his self-help. Wisdom came not through the opinion of a guru, but through the collection of knowledge and personal experience.

Then, when I was at university in the early ’90s, I saw the birth of the internet. It was amazing how we gravitated towards Bulletin Board Systems to share information or, more often, flame each other.

The rise of the internet that followed these early days saw people start to rely on Usenet, then Internet forums, then Excite and Alta Vista and finally Yahoo and the all conquering Google, for all the information they needed; people stopped reading books.

The problem with the rise of the self-help book and its gurus and the “all-knowing” interweb is that they present themselves as authorities of knowledge. While not necessarily claiming explicitly, they imply complete objectivity. We get sucked in to believing the information to be objectively and self-evidently true.

Fiction on the other hand claims nothing of the sort; it isn’t pretending to be anything other than subjective.

A novelist writes from personal experience, but not as themselves and never claiming expertise.

The truth is many are more expert than the most prolific self-help guru or Internet wiki-hero.

Take for example Hilary Mantel’s historical novels of Thomas Cromwell; pure fiction but ridiculously well researched giving insights in to a time and people that triggered earth-shattering changes in Western society. Mantel doesn’t pretend to be anything other than subjective but helps us understand some of how we came to be where we are now not through a profession of factual expertise, but through pure fantasy.

Extensive historical research aside, novelists also use allegory through their fiction to impart more compelling lessons than non-fiction writers. The Bible is an early example and more recently consider the novels of Mitch Albom and Paulo Coehlo.

When a friend in London, Donna Wright, told me about the impact Coelho’s The Alchemist had on her and a friend of hers I took notice. Donna is an intelligent, generous, hilarious woman, who doesn’t suffer fools and is not readily impressionable. It was a novel she described as something that could change your life, not through expert opinion but though a fable and pure allegory.

Albom has the same gift. If you can put aside the “preachy” nature of the parables, his books are infinitely more powerful than any non-fiction book or Google search result.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading well informed research and commentary. But I read with a skeptical eye aware it is a reflection of the author’s bias (unconscious or not) and will always avoid popular non-fiction pretending to be something it’s not.

Give me a little fantasy any day for an insight in to the truth.

Wordsmithing

I love words. What’s not to love? There appears to be a never-ending supply of them. If you Google “How many words are in the English language?”, you get answers like this one: “There is no single sensible answer to this question. It’s impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it’s so hard to decide what actually counts as a word.” (oxforddictionaries.com)

Good writers have an almost cosmic-size vocabulary.  Mine’s pretty limited in comparison, especially going by some of the words I’ve been noting down in a couple of books I’ve read recently; words I either loved the beauty of – the way they form in the mouth, or the sound they make – or had never seen before and had to look up the meaning of. Here’s a selection of recent ones: sophistry, alembics, capricious, palpebra, crepitation, eidolon, astrakhan, lachrymose.

But the difference between a good writer and a great writer is not the size of their vocabulary, it’s the way they use words.

Great writers bring words together, extra-ordinary and very ordinary, in ways that enlighten our minds, imagination and our hearts. They create new worlds, challenge us to think differently about our existing one, or simply make us discover parts of ourselves buried deep under layers of years, routine or mass media messages.

They understand the power of grammar.  The subtle, but no less impactful, way it alters meaning or sets the dynamic, tone or pace of a message.

They wield metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia and other literary devices taught in high school English like a maestro guides a symphony orchestra.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, for example, the conversations Philip Carey has with the drunk poet Cronshaw are a case in point.  They are the very essence of the book, even the name of the book reflects them.  Maugham is clever, his writing smooth, weaving simple words to guide the reader through complex ideas of philosophy, faith, dogma and politics.  He’s also funny, “You’re not a bad fellow, but you won’t drink.  Sobriety disturbs conversation“.

It’s why I love great books and advocate, in my small way, for a world where we celebrate intelligent writers and voracious readers rather than tolerate dumbed-down, lazy, mediocre writing.

But don’t mistake it for wordsmithing.

I was thanked for wordsmithing a proposal for one of my teams at work recently.  While well-intentioned, this really bothered me.  Wordsmithing carries with it an implication you’re just superficially micromanaging some words. That’s not what I had done.  The author’s ideas were completely buried in awful syntax, dreadful presentation and complete ignorance of grammar. I did not play with some wording, I rescued his ideas, pulling them out of quicksand. His ideas deserved to be rescued.

Francis Bacon once said “knowledge is power”.  It’s seductive in its simplicity and apparent self-evident nature.  But I’ve always thought it was hogwash.

Acquiring knowledge and doing nothing with it is intellectually anaemic. The use of knowledge is power. Until then it is no more powerful than ignorance.

It’s the same with words.  On their own they are nothing more than letters on a page.  But an idea well articulated can be the most powerful thing on the planet.  So here’s to a world where words are combined with intelligence and grace presenting ideas that make our minds leap and hearts soar.