The Siege, John Sutherland

Dorking Book Reading Club 10aug23

This is a book I would certainly not have chosen without the Book Club. I expected shallow characters, stereotypical attitudes, very plot driven with lots of suspenseful twists and turns. I definitely got the last of these. Mr Sutherland proved to be very good at building tension and handling unpredictability – difficult to do convincingly when, behind the scenes, the author knows exactly what he wants to say and has complete control of all he creates. But I got a lot more than these…

First of all, I wasn’t expecting such a positive view of the Christian faith. I have become used to my beliefs constantly being portrayed as bigoted, out of touch, anti-rational, living in the past, humourless, hypocritical, judgemental, and so on. We seem to be fair game for every kind of resentful prejudice in a way that is not applied to other religions or world views. This is also true of crime fiction: whenever the clergy are present, it turns out to be the vicar what done it. So I am very grateful to Mr Sutherland for offering a much kinder and definitely more realistic presentation. The Church where the action takes place has invested in up to date facilities because it has a huge ambition to serve its needy local community. The vicar is open hearted and full of humanity…

But above all it’s the figure of Grace, who is at the heart of the book, who embodies a lived Christian faith. Her name is no accident, as the reference to Amazing Grace indicates. Grace is the virtue that cares, forgives and turns the other cheek, which is set forth in the story of Jesus Christ. He comes in humility, makes Himself vulnerable and endures the cross for our sake and for our redemption. This is love in action for those who can never be worthy of it – but God loves us anyway, and will do whatever it takes to bring us back, if we choose…

So Grace just keeps on giving. She is there for her friend Rosie the vicar, but also for the Syrian mother and children whom she has just met for the first time. When she has the opportunity to escape, she won’t take it, in spite of her desperation to be reunited with her son Isaiah, because she won’t leave until everyone else is able to come too. In the end she is even capable of seeing the humanity of someone who seems to have nothing but hatred and lies in his life, and to offer hope to her terrorist captor.

If this makes her seem an impossible goody-goody, she isn’t. It’s her own struggles with bereavement – her husband who died of cancer, her son who was murdered – that make her more aware of the struggles and suffering of others. Instead of hardening her, those struggles softened her. Instead of weakening her, they strengthened her, for she is strong! She is the one who transforms the entire situation because she is strong enough to care and thus to make herself vulnerable to others. Dealing with someone who is all hard edges, full of ideology and hatred, she offers a love for which he has no answers. Her vulnerability touches the vulnerability buried very deep under his angry dehumanised psyche. I did not expect to be moved by this book, but I confess, I wept.

Yes Grace finds it hard to pray in her desperate situation – who wouldn’t? Yes she is unable to return to the fatal church hall where she experienced so much trauma, just as we would be unable. Yes of course she needs counselling and support. Initially I expected her to be a cliché, big black momma, all heart and maternal instinct, but she is so much more. It’s so difficult in fiction to create “good” characters convincingly, but in Grace the author incarnates goodness in a way that humanises rather than dehumanises her. Clearly Sutherland admires and appreciates the values by which she lives.

Comparable processes are going on with Alex, the police negotiator, too. Although much is made of the professionalism of the police, shown in their deployment of resources, their detailed procedures and the rigour of their application to the task, Alex and his team’s best work comes from making genuine human contact with Lee the terrorist, trying to understand him, to get alongside him and even to offer the possibility of a more humane set of values to him: to be trustworthy, understanding and compassionate.

These attitudes make you vulnerable, so this is also a story of Alex’s redemption from the past trauma of a negotiation that went terribly wrong. Somehow he manages to overcome his hurt and reconnect with the hostile Lee. But it is also the story of Lee’s radicalisation and ultimate redemption as he discovers new possibilities through human connection. Grace even comes alongside him as he awaits trial in prison. He is offered at least the hope that life can be different, that a new start is possible.

Finally, the book is very positive about the Metropolitan Police, very timely in view of all the bad news that they have brought upon themselves lately. As portrayed by Sutherland, they are extraordinarily professional, dedicated and thorough, unequivocally a force for good. There is no racism, sexism or veniality in Sutherland’s Met. There isn’t even bickering. There are strong, effective female leaders, like Pip who leads the negotiating team. There are no officers who secretly feel that Lee may have a point, that maybe there are too many foreigners over here. If only reality were actually like this!

 

A Man Called Ove: Fredrik Backman

U3a Reading Group 29jun23

Ove would clearly be put on some spectrum or other these days – autism? OCD? He finds machines much easier to deal with than people, diagrams more fulfilling than friendships, and routines more comfortable than the baffling complexities of relationships. Signs must be respected! He takes refuge in the past because he coped with how life was back then and feels everything modern is a vexatious complication. His skills are dismissed as no longer required in the modern world – but that turns out to be not quite the case…

It’s to the author’s credit that he doesn’t medicalise Ove but allows us to get to know him a little bit at a time as a person. He tempts us to dismiss Ove as a cantankerous, stuck in the past old grump, but then undercuts that with passages describing his courtship with his wife that are almost lyrical, and then poignantly undercuts again with his despair following her loss to cancer some months before the action of the novel begins - not to mention their shared despair following the death of their only child.

This despair leads Ove, in narratives of the darkest shades of humour, to attempt suicide in various ways. His wife was clearly the anchor of his soul. She negotiated all those tricky relationships for which he was so manifestly under-equipped. She understood him – he was like her father in many ways – and valued his skills. Without her he is completely lost, like a machine that is irreparably broken, and can’t see any reason to go on living. His despair isn’t so much emotional as rational – just what is the point without her?

However this is a novel of redemption. Ove is not however saved by a Redeemer figure but by the local community of which he has largely been oblivious. Through a series of encounters they intrude again and again into the desert of his inner life, often at precisely those times when he is trying to carry out yet another suicide attempt, so much so that the coincidences begin to seem too improbable, unless we make allowance for the farcical element. The outcome of one attempt, suicide by jumping in front of a train, turns into a rescue, because of which Ove becomes a local hero.

I am not sure if communities are really as totally engaged with each other as the one portrayed in this book, especially in Scandinavia where I fancy privacy and non-intrusion are highly valued. Perhaps that’s why the first person to really connect with Ove is an Iranian neighbour, Parvaneh, who has absolutely no qualms about knocking on his door when she wants anything, no matter how frosty his reception of her might be. 

Comparisons may be drawn between A Man Called Ove and Forrest Gump – both feature people who seem to be misfits but turn out to have a deeper wisdom and to be worthy of respect. It’s hardly a surprise that Tom Hanks was cast as the star of the film versions of both novels. There are also possible comparisons with Groundhog Day, not only with the black comedy of repeated suicide attempts but also with the education of the chief characters to be more aware of and open to their fellow human beings. However with Bill Murray's character in GHD it's selfishness, not loneliness and grumpiness, that he needs to unlearn.

Lessons I would like to draw from Ove are to understand that there may be terrible pain underlying the antisocial exteriors of our fellow human beings, and to remember what a killer loneliness is in contemporary society.

 

The Man From London, Georges Simenon

I found this book difficult to enjoy initially because none of the main characters is likeable. It's a seedy world where nobody is really bothered about anyone else except when they can get something out of them or are professionally required to be involved.

The central character, Maloin, manifests this malaise. He’s domineering, angry and sullen with his family, bored with the colleagues from whom he pilfers brandy, unfaithful to his wife with Camelia, the town prostitute, and sees the murder to which he is an eye-witness as an opportunity for personal gain. Sleazy.

The atmosphere of a sea port in winter with its highly mechanised routines and its cold and foggy inhospitability is well caught. The ancestor perhaps of so many police procedurals on TV, where a bleak background seems to be an essential contrast to the cosiness of say the drawing room thrillers of Agatha Christie?

Nobody communicates in this place – not really. Yes they go through the motions: “How are you today?” “Fine,” or “Morning Louis” - “Morning Baptiste” but these are reflexes. Nobody is really connected to anybody else. Even the most intimate relationships, husband and wife, parent and child, are so deeply imbued with boredom and resentment that they hardly look at each other. The failures of communication between English and French characters arising from the lack of a common language underscore this universal failure to communicate one’s own personal being. It’s just as bad in England: Brown has been deceiving his wife and children about his true lifestyle for years.

The interaction between Maloin and Brown is oddly like an inverted love story. They become intrigued by each other, wonder what each other is thinking, are on constant look out for each other, study each other’s faces and expressions, speculating what the other is really like – except that they are fact falling in enmity, not love. In the climactic scene in Maloin’s boatshed they grapple face to face and body to body but of course with all its physicality it is a deadly fight, not a tryst.

Yet Maloin actually wanted to come to the boatshed in peace. He had compassion, it would seem, strangely enough in the emotional desert of this book, on Brown, who has been locked into the shed for some time without food or warmth.

This scene is a dreadful parody of true communication. Maloin cannot be completely sure that Brown is in there – he might have broken out somehow in the long time available to him – but he decides to reach out to him anyway. He’s brought sausage, pate and sardines for a man he knows to be starving. Almost desperately, Maloin cajoles, entreats and threatens in order to persuade this Brown that he can’t be sure is there to show himself and take the food he needs. All the time, Brown is standing in the shadows behind him, waiting to strike him with a metal hook and kill him if he can.

But of course it is Maloin who ends up killing Brown, in self defence. He is almost apologetic about this, especially with Mrs Brown, who comes with the Scotland Yard detective inspector to view the body. Characteristically he cannot communicate any of his feelings to her because he knows no English and she no French.

Maloin’s attitude during the coda of the story in which he is in custody, charged and sentenced is extraordinary. He has no wish to explain or justify himself even though a plea of self-defence is ready to hand. He is contemptuous of the process and the people involved in it. He seems to feel that he has gained something from his experiences that they cannot understand or participate in, and which is incommunicable to them.

Could it be that his compassion for Brown and his attempt to reach out to him as a fellow human being, even though violently rebuffed, has taken Malois to a new level of being? That he feels authenticated by his own compassionate act in a way that he never could by the life of surliness, routine and self-serving that he has settled into?

And so a familiar landscape starts to loom out of the Dieppe fog. Aren’t we in the land of the French existentialist novel? Isn’t this rather like L’Étranger, where Camus’ anti-hero finds he has killed someone without really wanting to or knowing why or how? Where people live a drifting, inconsequential and purposeless life, unless they can find some action that will raise them into actual personhood? Isn’t this what Malois has done, however feebly he is able to articulate it, in The Man from London? And isn’t it an interesting departure from Camus’ world that the act which validates Malois’ humanity is an act of compassion?

With thanks to Dorking u3a readers' club.

Empireland - Sathnam Sanghera

I am now going to commit social media suicide by criticising Sathnam Sanghera’s study of the British Empire, in spite of its huge sales and near universal acclaim. I’m white British and therefore setting myself up to be cast as an evil imperialist, and Mr Sanghera is brown and therefore another innocent victim of imperial wickedness. In short, how dare I?

But there is a reason why this book must be criticised, and that is its lack of decent analysis. Mr Sanghera is proud of this. As far as he is concerned, the Empire and all its deeds are absolute evil. To analyse, to compare this atrocity with that, or the British with any other Empire, is to keep “a balance sheet of evil” – a phrase he uses a number of times. It doesn’t matter whether we are trying to say that the Empire might have done one or two worthwhile things at some point in its long history, or whether we assert that other Empires also did bad things: to find any good point about the Empire, or any bad point about other Empires, is to make a compromise with absolute darkness. That’s what Mr Sanghera’s means by his “balance sheet” metaphor – a dirty compromise.

I have a lot of sympathy with this. Atrocities are absolute evil and were committed in large numbers by the British Empire. No excuses for the massacres of civilians, the first concentration camps, the slave trade, genocides in Australia… they are inexcusable. I even know of some deeply wicked acts committed by the British that Mr Sanghera doesn’t mention, for example the cutting off of the thumbs of Bengali weavers by their British masters to prevent them competing with the cotton mills of Lancashire, which deeply incensed my Bengali friend Patrick and should incense anybody who cares about justice and mercy.

The trouble is that when we refuse to analyse, compare and contrast, we are also refusing to understand what went wrong and, most importantly, to learn how to do better in future. Let’s take some examples. How is it that tiny British forces were able to rule hundreds of millions in India? I don’t know the answer and Mr Sanghera does not do anything to help me find out - unless it was by the diabolical power of their inveterate wickedness. But I suspect that it could never have happened unless it had been in the interests of large numbers of Indian people at the time to support the British. Maybe there were people who didn’t do that well under the previous arrangements, for whom rule from London offered a fresh set of opportunities. And the previous arrangements were, in large part, another Empire: the Moghuls. I believe (although Empireland fails to inform me either way) that these Persian rulers invaded much of India, imposed Islam on huge swathes of the population, fought incessantly against Mr Sanghera’s own Sikh ancestors and extracted a great deal of wealth from the economy. If so it is hardly surprising that there might have been benefits, at least for some, in the arrival of a new order.

Or let’s take the Amritsar Massacre. The horrific murder by armed British troops of several hundred civilians engaged in a peaceful protest quite rightly sends Mr Sanghera ballistic with fury. And yet, and yet, there is a telling comparison that demands to be made. In the Peterloo Massacre British troops were sent to cut down the working class people of England who were also engaged in peaceful protest. In both atrocities, women, children and the elderly were cut down without mercy. So the same British ruling classes that massacred brown people in Amritsar also massacred their fellow Brits at Peterloo. Doesn’t this show us that we need to look at the Empire in terms of class and not only of race here. It’s the merciless brutality of the British aristocracy to those, whether white or brown, whom they considered their inferiors. Couldn’t we have learned something useful by exploring this class element? Not it seems according to Mr Sanghera.

And so to the unsayable, or at least very rarely said, about the background to the history of British involvement in the slave trade. It seems that the great majority of slaves traded across the Atlantic were not captured and dragged from their homes by British soldiers, notwithstanding Alex Haley’s Roots. They were in fact mainly purchased from existing slave markets in West Africa, which were largely run by other black Africans. 

This by no means exculpates British slave traders. The vastly expanded markets they opened up in North America and the Caribbean immensely increased the scale of human suffering and the brutal conditions they inflicted on their human cargo were an abomination. Nothing should ever be allowed to mitigate or excuse the great evil done to millions of our fellow humans through the Atlantic slave trade. But a more nuanced picture is demanded by its history: a more complex history of race, for example. It seems that some ethnic groups enslaved and sold others because of religion rather than race. The slave markets had already been trading people into Islamic Empires for centuries before the British, sniffing a commercial opportunity, broke in. People were traded, not because they were black like their captors but because they were kaffirs – pagans – and therefore considered subhuman. 

I think it’s very typical of the British Empire that the trade in human flesh was treated as a commercial matter. As in the Opium Wars, the great sin of the Empire was to treat human beings as non-sentient, mere ciphers of profit and loss. This is the huge moral failure of the Empire that made it able to hoodwink itself into doing acts of incredible evil while hypocritically convincing itself that it was a force for good. I think Empireland might have benefitted from greater exploration of the ramifications this central issue and might even have found more to say about the new world empires being forged by multi-national corporations today. The British Empire began as the East India Company…

Just a couple more observations and then I will have done:

• I was disgusted by Sanghera’s highly personal and venomous attack on John Newton, former slave trader and who himself became a slave for two years in West Africa, but ended up as an anti-slavery campaigner very closely associated with the banning of the slave trade throughout the British Empire. Sanghera displays absolutely no acquaintance with Newton’s biography, which in itself denies any credibility to his views. It seems we don’t need to know what was done to Newton or why he did what he did, the sheer fact that he was involved in evil things means there can never be anything but condemnation for him. It’s that “no balance sheet with evil” schtick again – any attempt to understand how very brutal British life was for most Britons, at home and abroad, is a compromise with atrocity. But the really objectionable side to Sanghera’s views is that they admit no possibility that people can change. This is a conflict between a karma culture, where everybody pays to the uttermost farthing in the end, and a repentance culture where there is the possibility, even if most of the time nobody takes it up, for a real meaningful change of heart and life that can only emerge out of human brokenness. Modern cancel culture is destroying this life giving possibility but I find a culture with no hope of redemption intolerable.

• Small one – the castigation of Prof Hugh Trevor-Roper for saying in a 1970s textbook that black Africa has no history. If it is taken that he means that Black Africa has no worthwhile culture or institutions then Trevor-Roper would deserve all the condemnation S heaps on him. But I suspect he is speaking as an academic and lamenting the fact that black Africa has no Thucydides, no Herodotus, no Gibbon or Macauley. History means what is written down about the past, and if nobody wrote it down then unfortunately there just isn’t a history, to the great loss of all of us. What I’m really saying is I’m tired of Sanghera’s non-stop rush to castigate and condemn at every opportunity.

And so to my final shout – a huge omission from Empireland - there is no discussion of how and why it all ended. As far as I am aware, and as a non-academic historian I feel that I should show more humility in venturing opinions than Sanghera does, unlike the Romans or the Assyrians or the Persians or the Soviets, the British Empire is the only one that voluntarily surrendered control in order to liberate its subject peoples. Some analysis of why this happened would have been most welcome and would have shed an interesting light on what it was all about. If I am right to imagine that the key energy that drove the empire was commercial, the exploitation of opportunities to expand trade and make money, then it could simply be that, in the new circumstances of the post-war era, there was no more money to be made – that the British could no longer support an Empire that cost them more than it paid. In fact I think there is a good case to be made that one of the war aims of the USA in WW2 was to bring the British Empire to an end. But in addition there also seems to have been a growing repugnance among the people of Britain for Empire itself. The British people repudiated the massacre at Amritsar, condemned the participants and sacked the officer who commanded the murder of defenceless civilians. They’d had enough of atrocity and oppression and walked away.

Reality is not what it seems Carlo Rovelli

I can't help warming to Carlo Rovelli, he is such an enthusiast, for his subject of course but also for life, for experience, for poetry and architecture and beauty and music and ideas. I love it that he quotes Dante and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky (even if he mucks up his quotation of the Brothers Karamazov  – this really should have been picked up by his publisher!)

I also love a passage where he asks when does somebody's life really begin – when their mother first starts to dream of them? at conception? at birth? when they first recognise their own name or start to speak in their own words? It's beautiful and it is also part of his exploration of how we understand things and grow in knowledge, by interaction and not by prescription.

The summaries of the development of cosmological thought over time are extremely helpful for a lay person like me to get a sense of how ideas have grown and evolved from previous insights. He's really good on the personalities of the scientists and thinkers involved as well – though in his polemic against the Church as a dysfunctional system of knowledge, starting from a priori beliefs rather than the examination of what is before us, he fails to acknowledge just how many of the pioneering physicists to whom he attributes so much advancement were passionate and committed believers: Copernicus, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Cavendish and so on. At least he doesn't try to hide Lemaitre's faith from us!

I think his distrust of the Church relates to the Roman Catholics and their Magisterium, not to the Reformed Churches where people are expected to think for themselves and to explore God's world in accordance with the command in Genesis 1. The passion of these believing scientists was drawn from their conviction that they were exploring God's world, thinking God's thoughts after Him, and taking delight in what He has done. I don't think this was a straitjacket for them, more like a spur.

Basically Rovelli is arguing for the predominance of quantum mechanics over other understandings of the universe such as general relativity. He does this by asserting that gravity is not a continuum as in relativity but must be made of quanta in the same way that electro-magnetic fields turn out to be made of photons. The importance of this is that gravity in Einsteinian relativity is the outcome of the space-time continuum. If there are gravitational quanta then they are also quanta of space-time itself. Thus gravitational particles are in fact spatial particles. This means that all phenomena are quanta, every part of the universe is granular, and the disciplines of relativity and quantum mechanics are unified. In this unity quanta become everything and fields – such as the space-time continuum – have no place.

The enormous attractiveness of this is that a theory that explains lots of things is clearly much more powerful than one that explains fewer things. This is the driver behind the quest for a Theory of Everything which has been motivating so much of physics for a while now and has led to the development of string theory, brane theory and multiverse theories among others. It's surprising in fact that Rovelli doesn't specifically mention theories of everything.

The potential problems for theories of everything, and therefore for Rovelli who clearly belongs in this field, are twin. First is the multiplication of invisible and untestable entities which artificially expand explanations to cope with the complexity of what it is sought to explain. Examples include the requirement for a dozen or more additional invisible dimensions to get string theory to work, or the invention of large numbers of unverifiable extra universes to produce a multiverse. These all fall foul of the principle known as Occam's Razor: that a simple explanation is more likely to be true that one that requires the multiplication of hypotheses.

The second of the twin problems for theories of everything is the reductionism that tries to sweep away awkward aspects of reality by stating that they are "nothing but" some less awkward phenomenon. I'm going to argue that Rovelli resorts to this in presenting his ideas about quantum particles of gravity.

I hope the above is an accurate summary of the position Rovelli is moving towards. As a layman I can't claim to grasp every aspect of spin-foam and loop theory, especially the mathematical bits. But I can see that he is looking for a theory of everything even if he doesn't use the name. I also see that there is a problem with the invention of quanta of gravity whose only property is extension. I think I am right in saying that other particles have properties including mass, energy and charge. This makes them amenable to experimentation and observation. A particle whose only property is extension however seems to me to be one that is very close to untestability. How will we ever be sure they are there when we cannot observe them, weigh them etc etc? We seem to be in danger of a very close shave with Occam's Razor…

To my mind Rovelli's biggest difficulty concerns time. I am suspicious of any position that denies the reality of time as he does. Everything in the universe is conditioned by time. Rovelli can't escape this by pretending it's not a problem, asserting that there is no such thing as time, things just happen. But if there is no time, things can't happen. Every event from the Big Bang through the expansion of the universe to the fluctuations of quanta and the waves of energy that he describes constantly pulsating through the universe requires that there was a time before the event happened, a time when it happened and a time after it happened. To assert that there is no time is to assert that none of the events he describes can happen.

I think the source of Rovelli's embarrassment is that time does seem (to me as a non-specialist) to be ineluctably a continuum. It therefore conflicts with his primary assertion that everything in the universe is granular. It's very hard to see, at least in a dull commonsense way, what meaning granularity could have when applied to time.

In fact we know that time is fundamental to the universe because of the velocity of light. Velocity is meaningless without time. It means – doesn't it? – that an object, say a photon, is at one place at one moment and moves continuously until it reaches another place after a measurable passage of time. Since the whole universe is dependent on its relativity to the speed of light, time cannot just be brushed away as an inessential – can it?

When it comes to gravity, isn't time even more essential because gravity describes the acceleration of one mass towards another in metres per second per second? No time = no seconds = no acceleration = no gravity = no universe and no gravitational quanta either?

I think this is why Rovelli makes such heavy weather of his refutation of the ancient problem of Achilles and the tortoise. An object travelling close to the speed of Usain Bolt – say 10 metres/sec – will always catch up with and overtake an object whose speed is a mere 1/10 metres/sec. Repeated observation and experimentation will always demonstrate this. So when Zeno proposes that it is impossible for Achilles to catch the tortoise, all he tells us is that he has formulated the problem incorrectly. What Zeno has failed to do is to take time seriously. If the tortoise has a 10m head start, Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise was in one second, but the tortoise has moved 10cm forward. However after two seconds Achilles has travelled 20 metres and the tortoise is 9.8 metres behind having travelled a mere 20 centimetres (give or take a few microns because Achilles is travelling closer to the speed of light than the tortoise)

So why does Rovelli labour what should be a simple piece of empiricism over several pages?  Because, like Zeno, he fails to acknowledge the reality of time. Zeno creates an artificial problem by halving the length of each unit of time compared to the previous one, so that very soon each unit of time is cut down to a quasi-infinitesimal degree. Zeno is therefore denying the passing of time and so denies the velocity of both Achilles and the tortoise, since velocity is the measure of distance over time. Zeno commits an absurdity by setting forth a problem about time while dismissing the role of time.

Unfortunately Rovelli accepts Zeno's premise instead of rebutting it. He has to get right down to the granularity of the universe on the scale of the Planck constant to let Achilles win: he states that this granularity means that in the end you can't keep subdividing the distance covered forever. He really makes it sound as though it's all but a dead heat and Achilles only wins out by the width of a couple of quanta! But all we need to do is to accept that Zeno has mis-stated the problem by failing to grasp that speed is a correlation of distance and time to find that Achilles wins every time. Rovelli's distaste for the concept of time is the cause of his difficulties here.

Another area where Rovelli appears to labour unnecessarily is his demonstration of the curvature of space. He spends several pages explaining why two-dimensional Euclidian geometry doesn't successfully describe three dimensional surfaces. Perhaps this is where he believes most of his lay readership is at. Perhaps he intends it as a metaphor – since three-dimensional curves cannot be described using solely two-dimensional descriptions, how can we grasp four-dimensional space when we only perceive three dimensions?

But if this is what he is trying achieve he doesn't succeed very well. Frankly it reads more as though he is trying to describe the difficulties of three-dimensional geometry than as though he is demonstrating the curvature of space. Isn't it a fact of the Einsteinian universe that space time must be curved through this fourth dimension? Isn't this what gravity as a distortion of space time, the rubber sheet model, is indicating to us?

I think we have hit upon another problem with quanta of gravity here. These quanta are three-dimensional. Their only property is extension and this extension appears in the text to be in three dimensions only. Curvature through another dimension starts to look as though it is bringing in the dreaded Einsteinian continuum again.

Here is a thought experiment by which I personally feel convinced of the curvature of space through an additional dimension which we are unable to perceive:

• Get the most powerful telescope available and survey the universe as far out towards its edge as it will reach. As you gaze upon the most distant observable galaxies, be aware that the light has taken billions of years to reach you on planet Earth. Therefore you are seeing the universe as it was billions of years ago… But that universe was different to the one we inhabit now. Recall that the universe is expanding rapidly – so the universe when those galaxies emitted the light we now see it was much smaller… the galaxies were much closer together… in fact we are not only looking out to the edge of the universe but must simultaneously also be looking in towards its centre. How can the same act of observation be directed both towards the edge of the universe and towards its centre? Only if space is curved through a dimension we don't perceive.

It gets even stranger when we call to mind that those galaxies which are all rushing away from us so fast that the light they emit is red-shifted must also in some sense be rushing towards that centre at the same time? Can this be right? I think it must be because of the residual radiation from the Big Bang. How can this be spread fairly evenly across the universe as it has apparently been shown to be, when the Big Bang, having its origins at a single point, ought to be localised in some particular direction in three dimensional geometry? Only if there is a curvature through some other dimension.

I'm pretty sure my guesses, which I acknowledge to be under-informed, must be faulty, but I'd love to discuss them with someone who knows more. Nonetheless I suspect that Rovelli hasn't done justice to the issues here and I guess it's because they don't really sit well with his gravitational quanta.

A few briefer observations and then I'm done:
• I was puzzled by a passage somewhere where Rovelli says in passing that electrons don't all have the same charge. But surely a particle with a different charge or a different mass isn't an electron, is it? I'm probably showing a really pedestrian grasp of quantum fundamentals, but if there is the least element of randomness in the charge or the mass of electrons (or protons or neutrons) then atomic and molecular structures would be impossible – wouldn't they? And the universe we know and love could not then exist. In fact one of the questions I long to put to physicists is, how do we account for the regularity of these particles? They all arose from a Big Bang, so how did they manage to coalesce in such a regular way? I also speculate that perhaps dark matter and energy are particles which are not regular and so simply cannot be an observable part of the universe?
• Rovelli comments on Newton's description that the void of space is "God's Sensorium," saying that it is hard to know what Newton is getting at and speculating that Newton himself probably didn't know. I think he underestimates the extent to which Newton was an ardent believer in the literal truth of every word of Scripture. My guess is that Newton was thinking of a Scripture such as Hebrews 1:3, which states that the Lord "sustains all things by His word of power." The nature of space is therefore that which is known and sustained by God. It solves the Newtonian problem of "ether," that is, how can waves of energy such as light be transmitted through a vacuum when all other waves are motions in some kind of substrate. So there must be an "ether" or immaterial substance through which these waves pass. Quantum mechanics overcomes the difficulty by asserting that electro-magnetism works by particles. It's interesting that Rovelli has brought back a species of ether by asserting the existence of spatial particles.
• Odd to see the "Big Bounce" has bounced its way back into this book. I thought the Bounce had been discredited by the discovery that the universe is expanding too energetically for it to be possible for gravity to pull it all back again into a Big Crunch. If a previous universe had the same mass and same energy as ours it could not have gone into a Crunch or a Bounce. If it had less energy, where did the extra energy come from? If it had more mass, where the mass go? Stephen Hawking posited the universe arising out a singularity in 1986 in A Brief History of Time – but dropped it from The Universe in a Nutshell. Presumably the singularity was expected to be the remnant of a previous universe and research into the above difficulties had in Hawking's mind shown that the concept was improbable as above.

Unfortunately I seem to have written far more in criticism of this book than in commendation. This gives a wrong impression – I loved it! My comments are not because I think I know more about cosmology than Rovelli, which is absurd. Instead they are my attempts to explore the questions he has raised in my mind in this most stimulating work.

Colin Gibson January 2018

The Longest Journey E M Forster

This is a sad little book in spite of the blurb which says it could be Forster's best. The prose is always as beautiful and deeply felt as ever, the descriptions, especially of the English countryside, really call to you, but Rickie's struggles to give meaning to his life seem feeble and therefore unengaging. Even when he has actually thrown off the stultifying influence of his small minded wife, by taking to the road with his newly discovered half brother, he knows he is not going to be able to keep it up. Even though he sees her as his wife in name only, for some reason Forster says this only makes her hold on him more powerful. He is repeatedly described as a failure and this is most powerfully represented in his disability. He has a lifelong limp.

Rickie is in fact a victim hero of the kind which has become much more common in our era. As such one can't help feeling that he is a vehicle for the author's own self pity: misunderstood and undervalued by everyone around him, yet unable to reach across the isolation that cuts him off, his stories are the only means by which he can express his spiritual life - but nobody gets them, nobody wants them. He is not robust enough to press on with his vision in the face of this indifference, so he capitulates to their limited bourgeois outlook. Forster makes him a little too abject in this.

In this he is hampered by his unrealistic expectations of love and marriage. He believes he ought to idealise his new wife Agnes, as he clearly has idealised the memory of his dead mother. The trouble is this stops him seeing either of them as a real human being. It hands power in their relationship to his wife, whose spiritual life falls so depressingly short of Rickie's own. Rickie's ideals weaken rather than strengthen his ability to deal with reality. The failure of their marriage is powerfully conveyed by the neonatal death of their only child, following which they appear to abandon all sexual relations.

Forster's homosexuality seems to undergird some of the scenes in the story. In general women are a bad influence: there's a comic scene – I'm sure it's intentionally so – early on where Rickie and his circle of Cambridge friends are spouting callow philosophy in his college room. Suddenly a healthy, beautiful and confident young woman – Agnes – bursts in. One by one the young men all creep ignominiously away, completely unable to cope. I think most male undergraduates would react in exactly the opposite way.

Then there's Rickie's extravagant reaction to the news that his father has slept with another woman to produce his half brother: Rickie faints clean away, overcome by the thought of his father's existence as a sexual being. It's even worse when he later discovers that his half brother is in fact the offspring of his mother's affair with another man: this is a betrayal of the worship with which Rickie has honoured her all his life. I can't help feeling there's a deep disgust with female sexuality underlying all this.

So of the leading female characters, Agnes betrays Rickie's spirituality, his mother betrays his idealisation of her, and Mrs Failing, an eccentric aunt who has a veto over Rickie's finances, controls and manipulates everyone and is thoroughly malicious. Better keep away from women altogether, EM!

Interestingly, especially in our shallowly agnostic days, Rickie believes in God. In one scene he prays in agony of soul. Yet he also believes it is wrong of him to do this. It seems that it is bad form to pray over one's personal life, that God ought not to be engaged with our sufferings. This is very different from what I expect of Christianity, which I take to be about connecting our lives with God at all levels. I think this follows very directly on from the Incarnation: God and humanity are now bound together. It is almost as if the attraction for Rickie (and Forster?) is that God is not involved, that he needs God to be completely outside his daily experience, a sort of unmoved point beyond the morass in which everything turns out to be muddle and compromise. God must not be part of this shabbiness! It's bad enough that his mother and his wife turn out to be deeply imbued with it.

Two other reference points outside the morass are Rickie's friend Ansell and his half brother Stephen. Without wishing to discredit them as living creations of Forster's, they are also types. Ansell keeps out of the morass because of his rigorous (even if occasionally stupid) intellectualism: he will not do anything unless there is tight chain of reasoning to support it. He will not spout platitudes that cannot be rationally justified, in fact he will say all manner of confrontational things because he sees his propositions as inescapably logical. Stephen on the other hand is completely animal. He never does anything except by instinct and only acts for the gratification of his own desires. He is not beholden to any scheme of morality or principle or duty. He just does whatever he wants and if he doesn't like you, he biffs you. There is a kinship between them: both have an integrity, a wholeness, about them according to their lights and neither can stand any form of sham.

So if Stephen is the animal man and Ansell the intellectual man, Rickie is the spiritual man - the word "spiritual" is attached to him many times in the course of the story. And that is his problem: it involves him in being neither one thing nor the other, torn in different directions, without the ability to focus that these other two men display. He is trying to be open to life, but he carries a burden that makes life impossible to deal with. Like Christians, he is an alien and a stranger on the earth.

In the end, EM relents from persecuting his hero. Rickie triumphs – but in a small way which he gains no benefit from and doesn't even know about. He rescues his brother from under the wheels of a train, pushing him off the rails on which he is sprawling in drunken oblivion. As a result he himself is fatally injured and dies in agony – that limp that has always dogged him prevents his escape from the train. Rickie feels no sense of heroism about the rescue. He went out to look for his brother tired and disappointed with life, knowing that he would soon be sucked back into the morass, feeling that it all means nothing: "the whole affair (of living) was a ridiculous dream." He sets about the rescue wearily, from a mechanical sense of duty, and tries to save his own life in the same tired spirit – but too late. But in a tiny detail in the final chapter there is at least one good outcome from this miserable end: someone decided to build a bridge over the railway. There will be no more deaths, like the death of the child who was run over by a train earlier in the story.

The other modest vindication is that Rickie's unwanted stories, the work which has been his spiritual gift back to the world, finally find a publisher. It's all messed up, with a former colleague - a hypocritical schoolmaster - and Stephen the half brother fighting over the profits: but Rickie's work has finally come into fashion after he is dead. He has at last moved on from his victim status. The last trace of his life is in his art.

20 January 2017

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

This is deservedly a best seller with strongly coloured characters, plenty of action, lots of unexpected plot twists, and descriptions of extreme experiences. For its time it displays an unusual breadth and depth of learning, which never feels artificially imported by a show-off author, but which plays a key role in character and plot development. Tartt actually expects her characters to be motivated by ideas and ideals and the thirst for knowledge – it's great to come across an author who believes in her characters in this way.

It's clearly a young person's book – but that is to say in an exciting, not a callow way. Its young people are avidly exploring ideas, experiences, life. There is the desperation to be part of a group where you are accepted and known. There's the disillusionment, at first with the hollowness of much of the rest of life which makes their more esoteric pursuits so alluring, and later with their charismatic older mentor Paul, who in spite of his stirring words about "beauty is terror" drops his young protégés as soon as they seem likely to get him into trouble – this is a young person's "never trust anyone over thirty" cynicism.

Part of the power of the book is that you never quite know where you are or what is going on. Instead of an omniscient narrator, Tartt gives us Richard, feeling his way into a new place, a new intellectual and aesthetic realm, and into relationships with a new set of people. He only gradually finds out the horrible truths that encompass him or what is really going on in the lives of his new friends. In exactly the same way that in life we begin friendships with new people unable to know who they are or where the relationship may take us, so the other characters only gradually reveal their inner life to Richard's mind. And those inner selves themselves change as the pressure mounts on each one of them.

The story starts when Richard, who is a rather aimless Californian student, finds himself in an East Coast university, where he succeeds in breaking into a small elite of classics students with an enigmatic but inspiring teacher. The others are

·         Bunny – the least motivated student, very clever at irritating other people but little else, a sponger with no conscience, whose weak sense of loyalty to the group leads to the denouement.

·         Henry – physically powerful, introverted but in every way the Alpha Male who leads the group, a highly gifted scholar with an analytical mind which becomes too easily seduced and obsessed by the logical conclusions of his own theories, so falling into tragic mistakes that a less intelligent person would avoid.

·         Francis – patrician, also a very gifted scholar but less motivated than Henry, more able to see that wonderful theories can lead to devastating results, a homosexual.

·         Camilla – the only girl in the group, with a fey beauty, probably the quietest member, but all the boys, including Francis, are besotted with her.

·         Charles, twin brother to Camilla, whose self-destructive streak emerges and becomes more pronounced as extreme circumstances engulf the group. This streak manifests itself in incestuous jealousy of his sister, perhaps leading to actual incest – we don't know – and alcoholism.

The book was clearly written just before the advent of mobile phones for all and the Facebook generation. Slightly too often, bits of plot turn on people looking for a payphone and then finding that the person they desperately want to speak to is not in or will not answer.

Otherwise it reads like a very contemporary work. This is largely because of the social habits of the whole campus milieu and the complete lack of any moral consensus for anybody in that community. It is just assumed that everybody will take drugs, drink to excess, sleep around and all of that. Nobody even questions it. When Camilla and Charles are suspected of incest, nobody is horrified or even particularly surprised. When somebody is nightmarishly killed in one of the group's excesses, nobody suggests that confession of the truth is a possibility. When Bunny is murdered by the group, they are all terrified, horrified, not to mention massively inconvenienced. But nobody suggests it was wrong – Richard only really starts to consider this when he meets Bunny's grieving family for the funeral.

These then are people completely without any moral compass, any commitment to traditional mores, any boundaries at all. Paul their mentor finds Christianity faintly distasteful, the Jesuits rather less so than the rest because at least they aim for intellectual rigour: but it doesn't cross anyone's mind to ask, "Could this be true?" The use of the classics is rather like Shakespeare's, in the sense that it enables the author to take people completely outside the values of Christendom. It is impossible to avoid the reflection that their lives would have ended up far less severely damaged had they had any kind of ethical baseline. It's almost as if Tartt is pursuing a moral experiment – what might life be like for people who acknowledge no boundaries at all?

There are some longueurs. The section dealing with Bunny's funeral and the hideously awkward time that they as his killers spend with his family doesn't really take us anywhere much beyond some comedy of embarrassment and Richard's reflection mentioned above that perhaps murder is wrong. Tartt doesn't seem to be at her best here. She even names a billionaire character Paul Vanderfeller, a rather lazy combination of Paul Getty, Vanderbilt and Rockerfeller.

For me it is very odd that in their pursuit of Henry's obsession with Dionysian mysteries they actually experience an altered form of consciousness (except for Richard who hears about it later.) This includes an encounter with a mysterious interloper who may be Bacchus himself – who is certainly presented as a personification of their transcendental ecstasy (in the old sense of leaving oneself behind, not the modern meaning of intense pleasure). Yet they make nothing more of this experience. Nobody says, "is this the key to the universe?" or "have we met God?" Nobody reflects on its meaning for their ongoing lives. Nobody even seems to think it worth trying to repeat the experience. It's as if "an experience" is all that can be said about it – one amongst many, to be given no greater or less weight than any other event in this fugitive life. No truth value is accorded to this encounter with the divine – or daemonic. Good or bad (and it led to murder), it's just another thing that happened. Is this a Generation X thing – or possibly Y? To this extent the author's early assertion that the group is highly disciplined intellectually is suspect. They don't seem to focus on meaning, implication, or consequences. Instead Tartt means simply that they take their studies very seriously and work hard.

So their encounter with Dionysius – was it divine or demoniac? In their ecstatic frenzy they kill a stranger they bump into, tearing him apart with supernatural strength, as the Maenads were said to do in the Greek era. Then they murder Bunny as it becomes apparent that he is likely to betray them. Fear, jealousy (it looks like Henry and Camilla performed some kind of sex act to invoke the deity) and depression stalk the group, which is shattered by the pressure.

They all end up deeply damaged: Charles tries to murder Henry, Henry commits suicide, Francis tries to, Charles becomes an alcoholic, Camilla is unable to form deep relationships any more. Their great gifts are flung to the winds. It could be a morality tale about what happens to you when you mess with the occult, except that Tartt is too much of a writer to descend to the level of lectures: she lets her characters speak for themselves. It certainly calls for the classic tag "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." But perhaps Tartt's own classicism makes her fastidious about quoting what seems to be a Victorian line spuriously attributed to Euripides.

The other spiritual reflection I want to bring to this excellent novel is really from C S Lewis. In his essay on the inner circle, reflecting on an incident in Tolstoy, he considers that there are few things with greater power to make a decent person do evil than the desire to enter an esoteric group and to keep their approval. I suppose Tartt's title – The Secret Society – shows us that this is the dynamic she is seeking to explore. Henry's classics class has the hallmarks of such an inner circle: an elite group, it's closed to outsiders and looks down on them. It possesses esoteric knowledge, it's bound by shared secrets, and it keeps its own codes. In this atmosphere of exclusion from society at large the group creates its own rules, or lack of them, and feels no obligation towards the laws, customs and beliefs about right and wrong which obtain on the outside.

In this state of isolation anything is possible, including terrible things. It's powerful, it's intoxicating - and it totally devastates everyone involved.