True Grit

I believe I picked up this Charles Portis Western at the suggestion of my esteemed colleague from Tejas. May his cowboy hats always be filled with ten gallons of whisky! Of course as loyal readers know, I often enjoy long, complex, and cerebral fiction. But sometimes you want for just a good old fashioned story well told. True Grit is a page turning action and adventure novel from beginning to epic climax. I think one of the most important aspects of this type of compulsive readability is the way an author controls the pace. Too many brawls and explosions in a row and the story turns into Batman 14: The Beating of Wings Will Continue Until Morale Improves. But too little or too subtle action and you end up reading Withering Heights. Novelists with a great sense of pacing (eg. Dostoevksky, Tolkien) seem to create a kind of fractal structure, where acceleration and deceleration sit alongside one another at all scales. Portis seems to have acquired this same knack of constructing multiple climaxes spaced so artfully that the story simply carries you along without your even realizing how it works.

What’s really unique to this novel, however, is not the good storytelling, but the peculiar voice of the narrator. There are other novels that use the trope of a child narrator to great effect (eg. The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn and The Good Lord Bird). In competent hands, this device can create a distance from the customs of the times that allows the author enough perspective to examine those customs without coming off as overly political or moralistic. Portis partially avails himself of this effect by having his story narrated from the first person perspective of a 14 year old girl. With this, he creates a flat and unsentimental look at some of the savagery of the Reconstruction era South; for young Mattie Ross, this ‘Wild West’ is just normal life. In this case, however, Portis takes the device a step further, because the story is actually narrated by the 40 year old spinster that little Mattie will eventually become (I trust it is not a spoiler to disclose that the first person narrator survives her youthful misadventure). We are not reading the reflections of an untutored girl, but those of a prim and churchgoing old maid. It’s this that accounts for the peculiarity of the voice, which alternately evokes our humor, sympathy, admiration, and boundless annoyance. It also adds another layer of indirection the story, since we more easily form an opinion about the character of an adult narrator, rather than treating them as something of a blank slate. The only comparison that comes to mind is the narrative tension that Percival Everett creates by retelling the adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of James. Though the final effect is completely different here, as it leads us to confuse rather than cleanly separate the two narrative perspectives. But this confusion is a key aspect of why the novel works so well.

Animal Architecture

I have no idea why Karl von Frisch’s survey of animals’ building habits appeared on my shelf, but it was a fascinating read. Frisch won his Nobel Prize for deciphering the bees' waggle dance, but here he surveys the constructions across the entire animal kingdom, from insects, through birds and on down to the mammals. When you read about them in detail, the techniques are simply mind-blowing, and though they are almost all innate or genetically programmed, they evince an evolutionary intelligence that AI can still only dream of. This is one of those books were you constantly disturb your drowsy wife with stuff like, “did you realize that the male Paradise Fish creates a nest for its eggs by blowing tiny bubbles under water that create a foam bed attached to a leaf?” or, “did you realize the protruding part of an Australian compass termite nest can be ten feet high and is always oriented with its axis facing North-South so as to present the lowest profile to the noonday sun?” or, “did you know that the male Brush Turkey incubates its eggs in a meter high pile of rotting compost whose heat it maintains constant to within a degree by adding and removing ventilation holes?” Many of the other construction techniques are as ingenious and as likely to wow a sleeping spouse as this collection suggests. And on top of all this fascinating ethology, Frisch’s writing is incredibly clear and concise, and the pictures and diagrams are wonderful. Get your cure for snoring today!

 

SPQR

I believe I picked up Mary Beard's "A History of Ancient Rome" because Paul Krugman suggested it was a great book. Say what you like about Krugman's politics, but please acknowledge that, especially for an economist, he is remarkably broad-minded, historically literate, and capable of writing in the English language. He also happens to be mostly correct about SPQR; it was a thoughtful and enlightening introduction to the history of Rome. It's only major flaw is that, despite leading "A Don's Life", Beard's English could use some serious red-pen barbering. How is it that someone who has been an academic for decades can still come up with sentences like this one?

By the end of the second century CE more than 50 per cent of the senators were from the provinces. They were not drawn evenly from different parts of the empire (none came from Britain), and some of them, like the first 'foreign' emperors, may have been the descendants of earlier Italian settlers in the provinces rather that 'native', but not all, or even most (SPQR, 522)

And how can any self-respecting editor not fix this sort of thing? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules!?

Examples of such linguistic atrocities abound, and clearly reduce the readability of the book. But I cite this particular one to give you a sense of those fascinating tidbits that redeem it. Because I had no concept of the fact that she points to here. It turns out that the Roman empire didn't work very much like we imagine empires are supposed to work. It certainly attacked and dominated all its neighbors for thousands of kilometers in every direction. And once it gained military control of an area it relentlessly extracted resources from it. But it also incorporated many of these people directly into Roman life, while still mostly allowing them to preserve all of their local uniqueness. Over time, Roman citizenship became increasing widespread, so that even people from Briton, or Egypt, or Greece could consider themselves 'Roman'. This process of absorption is how they ended up, at the height of the empire, with half the senate coming from somewhere other than Rome. So this little fact actually contains of wealth of insight into how Rome became so powerful – it kept expanding its politics to include the people it enslaved. Any resemblance between this strategy and the remarkable success of a certain modern capitalist empire are purely coincidental, surely.

The book is filled with all sorts of other surprising facts, word origin trivia, and eye-opening political analyses. Naturally, since this is the first history of Rome I've read, I can hardly be sure that Beard's account is not somehow biased or one sided. If it is, however, it's not clear on which side that would be; while she gives a necessarily selective overview of 1000 years of history, she had no particular political ax to grind as far as I could detect. Indeed, one of the refreshing things about the book is the frequency with which it admits what we don't know about this history. Beard is often at pains to point out that stories we receive from ancient sources have their own built in biased perspective, and that modern scholars often try build an elaborate theoretical edifice on scanty information. Along the way, almost casually, she does a fair job of outlining for us non-specialist how we came to know what we think we do know about this history – whether through Cicero or Pliny's letters, reveling epitaphs on tombstones, or archaeological explorations of former garbage dumps. Overall then, I'd recommend it as a good place to start if you just want an overview of the upward arc of Empire. The decline and fall are for another day.