'A little guide to some history books I've read this year'

In my various meandering readings of books and stuff, I have also had time to become a keen devourer of history. Back at the start of this year, eleven months ago, I had to receive a filling at the dentist. Leaving the surgery on a cold winter morning with half my face numb and feeling rather sorry for myself, I decided to tarry in the bookshop for a while before I braved the walk back to my place of employment, and drifted about the history shelves in search of something to cheer me up. I ended up leaving with a number of books which I have since dutifully read from cover to cover, and all of which I can recommend for your good self to acquire should you have a craving for such things.

Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

Throughout history, many states/nations/countries have disappeared or been conquered, or destroyed, resulting eventually in the modern framework of countries in place today. Such places are largely forgotten by people nowadays, and rarely get whole books to themselves on the shelves of a high-street bookshop, but this book by Norman Davies seeks to correct that oversight. Each of the fifteen chapters is devoted to a separate vanished nation, recounting a brief history of places such as the Visigothic kingdom of Tolosa (Toulouse), the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Prussia, Aragon, and the various kingdoms, duchies and counties that have all borne the name ‘Burgundy’. By focusing on such a broad category as this, Vanished Kingdoms is actually, weirdly enough, a history of Europe as a whole as seen through the eyes of states that eventually lost out in the bid for survival; with the Kingdom of Aragon, we get to see an overview of Spanish unification from the point of view of a mediaeval Mediterranean maritime power, while with Burgundy, a barbarian kingdom established on the ruins of the crumbling Roman empire becomes a pawn in the games of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire which splits into the precursors of France and Germany, Burgundy falling and being revived many times over the course of nearly a millennium until it becomes instrumental in the unification of the Low Countries, a grand nation sitting right between France, Germany, and England, before it was finally finished for good in a series of disastrous conflicts following the Hundred Years’ War. In Etruria we get to witness the French Revolution and Napoleonic attempts to redraw the map of Europe by seeing their effects on a small French client-state in Italy. The chapter devoted to Byzantium (the later, mediaeval Roman empire in modern-day Greece and Turkey) was disappointingly brief, and was more focused on subsequent historical slurs and recent revival of interest about the thousand-year period than about the state itself, but it was still a well written section that outlines some very important points on the nature of history itself.

          I can thoroughly recommend this book. It’s long and detailed, but is clear and easy to read, and will drastically broaden the horizons of anyone to read it. If you have money, then use it to buy this book – or if you’re the sort to go to a library, there might even be a copy there somewhere. Either way, you will become a better and more interesting person for having read it.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – 28 Selected Chapters by Edward Gibbon

Sometimes cited as one of the greatest works of history ever written, this immense six-volume behemoth was published at the tail end of the 18^th century. Yes, it’s that old. Edward Gibbon was a Georgian bibliophile who one day made the decision to devote his life to writing a full and complete history of the decline and eventual fall of the Roman empire, a period which spans 1,200 years of history, and witnesses the rise of Christianity and Islam, the barbarian invasions and the establishment of the European kingdoms, the slow dwindling of the later/Byzantine-Roman empire, the Crusades, the incursions of the Turks and Mongols, the lives and reigns of hundreds of emperors, and starts of and finishes up in Gibbon’s own Europe of the 18^th century before the French Revolution and subsequent wars ever took place. Out of a total of 71 chapters, I found this edition sporting 28 of the things for exactly four pounds. There was no way I could leave it there.

          Each of Gibbon’s 71 chapters is like a short book in itself, constructed of immense paragraphs and many line-sprawling sentences that take the utmost concentration to read, but if one can stomach the near-impenetrably aristocratic language and the driest sense of humour I’ve yet seen printed on a page, the rewards are certainly worth it. He does not dwell on any one thing longer than necessary, and his authority and character is turned to so many different people, ideas, events, periods and processes that you feel well and truly enlightened for having experienced it. He practically invented modern history, and his attempt to remain as objective as possible and his frequent use of primary sources makes him still highly relevant in the study of history today, though his overly scathing view of just about everything he writes about somewhat undermines this. Basically, he was the 18th century equivalent of Charlie Brooker or Yahtzee Croshaw. Sadly, like many Enlightenment thinkers, he was adversely biased against Byzantium (the eastern portion of the Roman empire that survived the so-called ‘Fall of Rome’ in the fifth century by a further millennium), but that he devoted volumes four, five and six to its study and that of the other nations and people at work at the time makes him a thoroughly inclusive historian, near unparalleled in the scope of his writing, and was one of very few writers to actually consider such things worth writing about in detail before the 20^th century.

          Most of the selected 28 chapters in this copy concentrate on the empire of the second, third, fourth and fifth centuries, with a few later chapters devoted to the rise of Islam, the Turks, the Crusades, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but those which are not included are still summarised adequately, and should one wish to research further then the missing chapters can easily be found on the internet. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone who is not very interested in this subject, but I hope that you now feel sufficiently informed about one of the most important works of history ever written, and may wish to have a taste for yourself.

Byzantium by Judith Herrin

In case you have not worked it out yet, based on the references in the previous two history-book reviews, I have a keen interest in something called Byzantium or, as it is erroneously known, the ‘Byzantine Empire’. The Roman empire survived in the eastern Mediterranean for much longer than most people are even aware of, ruled from the grand city of Constantinople, and has subsequently become known as Byzantium in order to arbitrarily distinguish it from the larger and more philosophically inclined ‘Classical’ Roman empire, and as such it has received little but contempt and derision from western academics for centuries, or else has been entirely ignored. Judith Herrin’s book seeks to put that right, by presenting an accessible and informative picture of something which, for most people, is completely new and unheard of.

          Rather than being a chronological account of the thousand-year history of this state, which can get tedious and repetitive very quickly, she instead writes about particular aspects to the empire; its religion, culture, technology, interactions with other nations and peoples, and the most significant events of its long and incredible history. This little parachute-diving approach to history is a good way to get an introduction into the subject, and  I can heartily recommend this book as the best way to experience something dramatic and new. Learn about the Eunuchs who all but ran the government, the history of the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia which still stands majestic and proud in modern-day Istanbul, the beautiful mosaics and art that lay hidden in Turkish mosques for centuries, and about the genesis of that most useful piece of western tableware, the fork.

A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

I won’t talk for long about this one, as unless you enjoyed Judith Herrin’s excellent book then this title will be of little interest or use to you. This is essentially a piece of old-fashioned blah-blah narrative history, telling the story of events, emperors, wars, and stuff in a chronological order, and with some pieces of anecdotal diversion to try and make it saucy to the casual reader. While it is fully accessible to the average human, I feel it gets a little lost in its own millennia-long story, and takes a delight in the perverse sidelines and gossip that makes it feel vaguely insulting to the civilisation it pertains to be telling a history of. Like I say, the best way to get into Byzantine history is to go for Judith Herrin’s Byzantium instead, although I will admit that there are some good stories to be found in Norwich’s history, and it is a way of filling in some of the gaps and details in the chronology that Herrin’s parachute technique leave out.

Bibliotism

Davies, Norman. Vanished Kingdoms. Penguin: St. Ives. (2012 [First Published 2011])

Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – 28 Selected Chapters. Wordsworth Editions Limited: St. Ives. (1998 [First Published in Six Volumes 1776-1788])

Herrin, Judith. Byzantium – The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Penguin: St. Ives. (2008 [First Published 2007])

Norwich, John Julius. A Short History of Byzantium. Penguin: St. Ives. (1998 [First Published 1997])

Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding

All right, I admit it; I quite liked this book. It was easily digestible, had a relatively original style, and did induce me to chuckle once or twice – which, for a comedy, is about the best you can ask for. I have never seen the film, and due to the fact that I suffer a mild allergic reaction to the sight and sound of Hugh Grant it’s doubtful I ever will; thus I went in fresh, having only a vague notion about what the whole thing would be about.

          The eponymous protagonist (fancy words what I learned in school, which sort of means the hero what the thing’s named after), strangely enough called Bridget Jones, is a single, unmarried lady in her mid thirties living the stressful high-life in the bustling metropolis of London during the 1990s. The book itself, in no way hinted by the title, takes the form of her personal diary through the entirety of a year, and the reader is bombarded with insight into the character’s day to day thoughts, interactions with friends, disastrous romantic life, and her insatiable obsession with her own weight. At the forefront of everything is her own crushed self-esteem, repeatedly brought down by the fluctuations of fate and her repeated failure to form any kind of lasting relationship; a state of affairs constantly hammered home by her interactions with family and married friends, to whom she is seen as some sort of ridiculous aberration – a woman still single in her thirties. Bridget Jones then is a tragic-comic hero*, constantly beaten to a pulp by life, the universe, and everything, yet presented here for our amusement.

          One of the things I like most about this book is its sense of time and place; the day to day life of an English person in the ‘90s. Communication is still done largely by corded telephones, the video-recorder is an impossible device to program, numerous mentions of Princess Diana as not having been canonised, Blind Date, the Balkan conflict, and not an internet in sight. Okay, this really doesn’t paint ‘90s Britain in a good light, and it’s not meant to; it’s perfect self-deprecating humour all about how bleak modern life was at the time (as if it’s not still bleak nowadays). Helen Fielding clearly understood what the ‘90s was about, and if I had read this book at the time I was jotting down my wacky theories about that weird decade a couple of months ago, I might have brought it out as an exhibit.

          The characters then; there’s Bridget Jones herself, who fulfils the Holden Caulfield role of providing a vivid first-person insight into her world, and everything else comes further down the queue. Of the other characters there seem to be millions, too many for me to keep track of, but the important ones do at least stand out: such as her mother, the arsehole of a scumbag boyfriend Daniel Cleaver, the two friends Jude and Sharon/Shazzer, and the gay best friend Tom (I’m not actually sure where or when the gay-best-friend trope first took root, but here it is in mid-‘90s British popular literature. I have to say I’m mildly curious if there are earlier examples floating about). These other characters are mostly there to serve the purpose of adding more colour and drama to the protagonist’s tale, and aren’t really worth mentioning any more than that – except for the mother, who does a complete 180 on her forty-year life as a housewife by leaving her husband for a younger Portuguese man, goes into a career in television, and hurricanes into her daughter’s life throughout the book, leaving a trail of chaos in her wake.

          The plot is mostly just random things happening, with the plot-threads of relationship-seeking and mother’s midlife crisis running throughout until everything is resolved at the end. I’ve heard that it’s a modern take on Pride and Prejudice, though I’ve not actually read that yet so I can’t really comment; it has an actual Mister Darcy, though, and P&P is blatantly mentioned a few times during the book, so I can fully believe that claim. Basically Bridget Jones falls for an arsehole, spends much of the book alternately trying to seduce the arsehole, then resist the advances of the arsehole, eventually gets involved with the arsehole, realises he’s an arsehole, dumps the arsehole, and then falls for Mister Darcy, who it turns out is not an arsehole, which just about sums it up. Does that sound anything like P&P?

          So yes, I am moderately in favour of this piece of ‘90s popular fiction. It’s amusing, insightful, and is quick to read. I don’t even mind the dodgy punctuation in the name.

________________

* While the word heroine is probably expected here, I refuse to use this word due to its phonetic similarities to the name of a certain dangerous and illegal substance, and so I shy away from its use – either in the lingual or physical sense.

Biblioism

Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Picador: Chatham. (1987 – of which there must be some serious printing error or something: says ‘This edition published 1987 by Picador’, which was nine years before it was actually written. It probably means 1997, and somebody just made a hilarious mistake. [First published 1996]).

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut

“They don’t want anything but smilers out there,” Trout said to his parakeet. “Unhappy failures need not apply.” But his mind wouldn’t leave it along at that. He got an idea which he found very tangy: “But maybe an unhappy failure is exactly what they need to see.”

          He became energetic after that. “Bill, Bill--“ he said, “listen, I’m leaving the cage, but I’m coming back. I’m going out there to show them what nobody has ever seen at an arts festival before: a representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives to a search for truth and beauty – and didn’t find doodley-squat!”

          [Excerpt from: Kurt Vonnegut; Breakfast of Champions. Vintage: Croydon. (2000 [first published 1973]). P. 37]

Right now, I am prepared to believe that Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most cynical people who has ever lived. Reading his books is like staring at some nightmare parody of the world we live in, a nightmare made all the worse by how familiar it all is. In Vonnegut’s world, everything is shit – and while the book is not entirely pleasant to read, it draws you on, and on, and on, crawling through the awful bleakness and trying to ignore just how true to life it feels. Sometimes it really makes you laugh though, with its wild tangents, random observations, childish pictures and dead-pan delivery – you get the impression that despite all the horror presented within, the book itself is smiling in a sort of grim anti-humour.

          Much like Vonnegut’s earlier book, Slaughterhouse 5, which I recommend to you with every fibre of my being, Breakfast of Champions is wrought from the same style; short, direct sentences, self-contained yet interlinked paragraphs, sprawling tangents, and the author’s all-pervasive tone. All throughout the book it feels as though some random guy is explaining all the different little ways in which life is horrible – no, scratch that, it’s like an outsider’s guide to the human race. He presents them – people, I mean – as essentially organic machines, objectively showing us all the complicated little ways in which they can go wrong. The writing seems quite cold, distant from the subject matter, almost objective in the way it splats out its insightful views, despite the ghastly things it’s always going on about. ‘This is the way the world is’, it says, calmly describing such awful things as suicide, environmental damage, racism, and rape. ‘And fuck me if I’m going to pretend it isn’t so, like just about every other story in the world’. Here you don’t get heroes and villains, a roaring whirlwind plot, a happy ending – heck, you’d be hard-pressed to even find something that can be considered an ending here. And the writer explains, in the body of the text itself, why he has included the plot points and characters he has, and why he doesn’t like such artificial things as story endings.

          The story itself is rather simple, if you choose to see it that way. Dwayne Hoover is a successful car-salesman in some God-forsaken city in the middle of America, and he is going mad – in the actual mental illness sort of way. We are told about the ending at the beginning of the novel, as Vonnegut likes to do, in which Dwayne Hoover finally snaps and goes on a rampage, hurting many people in the process. He will become unhinged after reading a cheap novel by Kilgore Trout, a failed science fiction writer who also appeared in Slaughterhouse 5, and who gets invited to Dwayne Hoover’s home city as a guest for an arts festival. The subsequent novel offers a few details about Kilgore Trout’s journey across America, and Dwayne Hoover’s traumatic few days of mental illness before the two of them finally meet, as well as a hundred different things the author decided to chuck into the book; such as the odd plot-synopsis of Kilgore Trout’s work. They’re all a sort of crummy kind of cheap sci-fi, yet they all serve as something the reader can easily understand, a lens with which to look at the world and thereby better understand what the book is trying to convey. In one such plot synopsis he tells the tale of an alien species who consider eating in the same light as humans consider sexual intercourse; leading to entirely food-based films which they consider racy pornography. Weird, yes? But deeply astute when you actually read it.

          Let’s talk about the pictures now. Throughout the entirety of Breakfast of Champions are doodles and simple ink-drawings by the author, usually to illustrate something that he has just mentioned. Being a guide-book for somebody who is ignorant of the human species, and of American culture specifically, we occasionally get a childish little drawing of something the average reader might take for granted, such as an American flag, the date 1492, an apple, a rattlesnake, and a stork carrying a baby. This helps in illustrating, quite blandly, such things as the differences between two completely different sorts of beaver, two different things that are both called beetles, the differences between a chicken and a chicken prepared by a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and multiple lorry profiles with different words on the side. These frequent basic doodles, coupled with the simple, direct voice of the author, and the banality of the subject matter all go to make the book seem like the mad ramblings of a crazy person. Which of course it is; and it’s amazing. Sometimes you’re caught between laughter and tears, unsure of how to react to this bleak, barefaced look at the world.

          If I had one criticism of this book, it is that maybe, just maybe, that it is not quite as good as Slaughterhouse 5. Breakfast of Champions is a bit longer, and somehow does not feel quite so focused as the previous one; don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing less than a brilliant piece of Vonnegut, and as the first of his books I ended up reading it converted me into an instant fan, but I might be inclined to recommend it to people only if they wanted more than Slaughterhouse 5 offered. Then again, it’s not really a proper criticism; I’m just saying that maybe shorter is better for something as unusual as this – but then, I have no problem with people going and getting themselves a copy of this as a first-time reader. They’re both brilliant, and more people need to know about them.

Bibiary

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. Vintage: Croydon. (2000 [first published 1973]).