“St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva”, by Jonathan Miles

560 pages, Pegasus Books, ISBN-13: 978-1681776767

I may, in future, have to reconsider buying histories of cities, as for some reason they never quite live up to whatever expectations I may have for them. In December 2017 I reviewed a history of Berlin and determined that, amongst other things, “not so much a history of the city of Berlin as a history of Germany from a Berliner’s (or Berlinerin’s) perspective” (is it pretentious to quote yourself?). So anyway, I find much the same with St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva by Jonathan Miles, a history of one of the world’s most improbable places: built on swampy ground (much like Washington, D.C., another improbable place), it is “damp, foggy, rainy, snowy, and fraught with agues, catarrhs, colds, quinsy [and] fevers of every possible species and variety” (thanks, Dostoevsky). It has been the site of devastation and suffering and has spawned monstrous ideas and monstrous people, but it has endured, if improbably, and has even attained a certain majesty.

Author Jonathan Miles likens the city to New York in being a gathering place of strangers, foreigners and people who wouldn’t easily fit anywhere else. The author also uncovers a few ironies, such as the fact that some of the city’s most impressive monuments were built by a French veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, who “submitted twenty-four different proposals in every known style, so it is hardly surprising that he won the commission”. Chronicling shifting cultural styles, including Czar Alexander III’s interest in making a more Russian city of his Russian capital (closing the popular Italian opera in the bargain), Miles turns in some familiar tales as well, populated by stock characters like Rasputin and Lenin. But perhaps not so familiar after all, since, as the author writes, the modern St. Petersburg is the city of the young, people for whom “the gulag is a distant epoch” and who are at home in the globalized era even if the Putin regime keeps them from realizing their potential. Well, the tyrants come and go, the philosophies morph and change, but the oppression just kind of sticks around, doesn’t it?

Miles also delivers architectural details along with lurid tales of orgies on ice and other debaucheries of court life, while futilely attempting to tally the denizens who succumbed to disease, cold, and political terror. Throughout out all he juggles three themes: the “murderous desire” of St. Petersburg’s elite; a ruthless succession of secret police organizations; and the city’s compromised cadre of musicians, dancers, artists, and writers; some of the latter – including Andrei Bely, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Nikolay Nekrasov – exposed the deprivation beneath the city’s gilded cupolas. But Miles’s lens is primarily that of an outsider and his analysis is simplified and colloquial. He describes in depth the opinions of foreign ambassadors, businesspeople, and tourists, yet the native Russians tend to blend into an undifferentiated mass. Miles visited the city in the 1990s and again two decades later, and goes so far as to suggest that the modern city is “in danger of sinking into the mire”. Unfortunately this work comes across as more empty hype than history.

“Francis I: The Maker of Modern France”, by Leonie Frieda

384 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0061563096

I had heard of King Francis I of France before, of course, but only as a secondary character in whatever it was I was reading at the time: biographies of Henry VIII, Charles V or Martin Luther; histories of the Reformation and Renaissance; or any number of other related topics. Thus, it was with a sense of excitement that I picked up Leonie Frieda’s Francis I: The Maker of Modern France, for at long last a major gap in my knowledge of this era was about to be filled as this secondary character was promoted from bit-part to leading role. However, after completing this book, I was glad that I had read so much around Francis, for though Frieda more-or-less succeeds in her attempt to rehabilitate François du Grand Nez, if I hadn’t read all that I had prior to this work, I feel that a lot of detail and backstory would have been lost and I would be none the wiser.

To begin with, Frieda explores why Francis I’s reputation has suffered such a serious decline for, allowing that Francis I was a “deeply flawed figure” (hell, yeah) who was committed to the principle of absolutist rule and violently suppressed dissenting religionists, the author lends him humanity by examining his scholarly and artistic interests. His personal foibles and drawbacks and failings and inconsistencies reveal more about the beginnings of France as a nation than about this deeply flawed figure who had the ambition, but not the means, of conquering the Italian peninsula but who nearly lost France. Frieda appreciates that this king had many critics and that his extraordinary achievements were in no small part from a Machiavellian skill that put his peers to shame. But as she shows, Francis was also a man of letters who supported the works of such luminaries as Andrea del Sarto, Leonardo da Vinci, and others, even if he sometimes experienced disappointment at their hands (Leonardo never produced the great work of art while residing in Paris that Francis hoped for, though he did leave the Mona Lisa, which explains why it’s housed in the Louvre).

“Had he acknowledged his errors, and devoted himself to furthering the interests of his country, [he] would now be regarded as among France’s greatest kings” is Frieda’s ultimate assessment, but he “was unable to leave the gambling table with his winnings”, in politics or war. This seems to be on par with most absolute monarchs throughout history; as for his gambler’s addiction, it could be argued that his continual throws of the dice were because events placed him in contention with the neighboring powers of Europe, including the Habsburgs of Austria and the pope. While Francis “mired himself in a succession of skirmishes and conflicts on too many fronts”, he took some interesting and daring risks, including forging a short-lived alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, leading to the arrival of a “large and potentially dangerous Muslim population” within France; another anti-Italian alliance with the pirate king Barbarossa led to the ransacking of the French fleet.

Francis saw himself as the first Renaissance king of France, a man who was the exemplar of courtly and civilized behavior throughout Europe. A courageous and heroic warrior, he was also a keen aesthete, an accomplished diplomat and an energetic ruler who turned his country into a force to be reckoned with…yet he was also capricious, vain and arrogant, taking hugely unnecessary risks, one of which resulted in his capture and nearly resulted in the end of his kingdom. His great feud with his nemesis Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, defined European diplomacy and sovereignty, but his notorious alliance with the great Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent threatened to destroy everything. With access to never-before-seen private archives, Leonie Frieda's comprehensive and sympathetic account explores the life of the most human of all Renaissance monarchs – and the most enigmatic.

“The Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor”, by Masamune Shirow

117 pages, Dark Horse Manga, ISBN-13: 978-1593078157

Okay, bear with me here: even though Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor would, due to its ordering number, appear to be the second volume in The Ghost in the Shell series, in fact it was published last. You see, these stories are in fact the “lost” The Ghost in the Shell stories, created by Masamune Shirow after completing work on the original The Ghost in the Shell manga and prior to The Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface, but never collected before now. See now? I knew that you would. And so, here we go…

Deep into the 21^st Century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred as humans rely on the enhancement of mechanical implants and robots are upgraded with human tissue. In this rapidly converging technoscape, the covert-ops agents of Section 9 are charged to track and crack the most dangerous terrorists, cybercriminals, and ghost hackers the digital future has to offer. Whether dealing with remote-controlled corpses, lethally malfunctioning micro-machines, or cop-killer cyborgs, Section 9 is determined to serve and protect... and reboot some cyber-crook ass! Ghost in the Shell 1.5 lacks the overall narrative arc seen in the other collections, but the stories themselves are still as dense and complex. Showing the collision between a near-contemporary society on the verge of a very messy cyberpunk infused technological singularity.

Much like in the original manga, Section 9 is effectively a hard-nosed special police force focused on dealing with the new and burgeoning issues of cyber-crime. This means that each story is often based around detective work in unraveling a strange and complex mystery. From dealing with walking dead people and the ever present issues of sentience in Fuchikomas, each of the stories make for an interesting and thought provoking read; this is a great collection of standalone cyberpunk stories set within the world of Ghost in the Shell, and while you don’t have to read them to appreciate the broader narrative arcs in the first and second manga collections, they work very well on their own merits as short stories within that same setting; in any case, the fact we have this collection re-released and in wide circulation is something I am greatly relieved to see.