“Sense and Sensibility”, by Jane Austen

 

299 pages, The Folio Society 

Sense and Sensibility, the first of Jane Austen’s novels, appears to be as straightforward a Regency romance as there is: Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters Elinor, Marianne and Margaret are forced from their home, Norland Park, a large country estate in Sussex, after the late Mr. Dashwood leaves the property to his only son, born to a previous wife. The women eventually find loggings at Barton Cottage courtesy of a distant relative, but this change in location separates Elinor from a close and (potentially) loving friendship with her brother-in-law, Edward Ferrars; it also introduces many new characters into their lives, including John Willoughby, the man that Marianne falls instantly in love with, and Colonel Brandon, who falls instantly in love with the flighty Marianne in his turn.

The crux of this tale is the differences between Elinor and Marianne and, especially, the differing ways in which the sisters navigate their romantic predicaments, which boils down to the “sense” of Elinor and the “sensibility” of Marianne. Elinor’s reserve vs. Marianne’s no-holds-barred approach to romance may seem wildly different, but their relationships share significant parallels and both young women must accept that they could learn something from the other. I mean, it’s all there: men and women of contrasting and complimenting characters thrown together with the chances of love thwarted by the social conventions of the period which prevent honesty and openness and instead breed duplicity and secrecy – but, upon further reflection, the discerning reader can see that Sense and Sensibility is also a carefully crafted critique of social ethics that leaves the reader with much to think over, then and now.

“I wish as well as everybody else to be perfectly happy, but like everybody else, it must be in my own way”. One cannot but smile when reading Jane, with her distinctive style and proper mannerisms, so in keeping with the Regency era in which she lived and yet so different from the same – such as the way in which she uses her characters’ personalities and foibles to convey truths, both acknowledged and unspoken, of early 19^th Century British society, what with the way in which she sets her scenes with this family of this social standing, living on which estate in which county, and with how many pounds a year (well, of course). Her style is such that she can disclose all of this to the reader through description and innuendo, allowing her readers an appreciation of her characters and their strengths and struggles.

One favorite tactic is her pairing of opposites, leaving one to wonder just how in the hell this couple or that pairing came about (opposites attract?). In regards to Sense and Sensibility, the prime couple in question are the sisters Elinor (sense) and Marianne (sensibility), so different one can’t help but wonder how these siblings  ever find common ground, but by bringing such disparate personalities agreeably together, Jane proves her point that there really is an idealized middle-ground, that happy mediums do exist between seemingly disparate ideals. At times the traits and aspects of her characters are spelled out for the reader quite explicitly, although there are many occasions in which the reader can find themselves tested when such things are not spelled out and in which one must read the dialog with a fine tooth comb, as it were, adding, I think, something to the enjoyment of Jane.

There are other parallels besides those between Elinor and Marianne or, for that matter, between Brandon and Willoughby. Austen was not writing in a vacuum, and there are several political connotations to the “sensibility” of Sense and Sensibility that compares and contrasts between this and other novels of the period that Austen was known to have read before and during the writing of her first novel. With everyone’s subtle (and not-so-subtle) intentions and motivations put on display for the reader, what with all of the conforming with and breaking of social norms and manners (along with the hints and suggestions of inner-turmoil and conflicts between private and public selves and all of those telling silences), Sense and Sensibility requires the one to read between the lines, and is as much a part of the story as the events of the plot.

One would think that this would be enough to drive the novel forward at a brisk pace but, alas, one would be wrong, for momentum, despite the parallel love stories introduced very early on, is rather lacking, and while the novel is full of heartbreak and lost love, the heroic couples of the tale see little actual page time together, which limits even the angst of unrequited love and is noticeable for its lack of Austen’s signature brand of romance (Elinor goes to such lengths to convince everyone that she’s not in love that it begins to ring true, while Marianne’s relationship with her husband-to-be is nonexistent until the book’s final chapter). There are times when the characters appear to be having conversations unrelated to the main story and I failed to question those instances and figure out what Austen is trying to say there; also, it is possible to miss the many parallels and contrasts between the characters, the sisters especially.

Another aspect of the book is that it is the younger, more passionate sister, Marianne, who drives the story along. For much of Sense and Sensibility we see Elinor and her “sense” reacting to the whims and whiles of Marianne’s “sensibility”, and all of the accompanying trials and tribulations of the Sisters Dashwood follow from the little scatterbrain who doesn’t know what she is about. So we must, then, ask the question: is Elinor’s “sense” all it’s cracked up to be, seeing as she is, for much of the book, flowing along in the emotional wake of her sister and conforming to the same? The peculiar (I think) twist at the center of the novel is that Elinor’s “sense” only makes sense by contrasting with sensibility; indeed, one could argue that she only reaches her right decisions or, at least, rationalizes their value by keeping quiet and assessing Marianne’s (many) wrong ones.

And this is the issue at the heart of Sense and Sensibility, the conflict between the need to express oneself against the social pressure to comport oneself accordingly, and the paradox of living in a society that requires you to be both sociable and private (there was, after all, a high prevalence of nervous-breakdown-type sickness in the late 18^th Century). Compare this with our own psychotic society in which women are evidently being conditioned to treat all men as potential rapists at best, and it positively makes one pine for unspoken desire and and sentimental stares.

“Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer”, by P. J. O’Rourke

 

233 pages, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN-13: 978-0871135209

It’s hard to believe that P. J. O’Rourke was ever a leftist, but according to him he veered to the right the day he got his first paycheck and saw the cost of the welfare state he and all of the other Long-Haired, Maggot-Infested, Dope-Smoking FM Rock ‘N’ Roller Types wanted…but there you have it, proof that a Conservative is just a Liberal who has been mugged by reality. In Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer, O’Rourke collects several of his works together from various sources in book form so that his right-wing fans wouldn’t have to stop to buying unwanted issues of Rolling Stone and other lefty publications (although it was published by Atlantic Monthly Press, damnit). This was back in the days when there was no Internet, no Conservative radio or Fox News; we only knew what the liberal left chose to tell us or, just as common, not tell us (The New York Times, for example, had deliberately hid the Russian famines and the genocide of Ukrainian farmers; from then on everything we were told of the Soviet Union was framed under the rubric of “moral equivalency”).

O’Rourke is at his sarcastic best in this book; for example, he does not mind being called a Nazi by liberals because “no one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal”. Speaking of the causes of the Soviet collapse, he writes that “a huge and totalitarian system with all its tanks and guns, gulag camps and secret police has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes”. In this fashion does O’Rourke explore the bewilderment felt by Conservatives and Liberals alike at the intensive hatred felt by its peoples at the “noble experiment” of Marxism. What must surprise the average reader today is that, although we do now have alternate news sources, the liberal media presents its biased news as if we Americans were still ignorant of the true state of the world. As just one example, the Obama Administration was and is presented with a holy nimbus surrounding it, despite its obvious incompetence and its failures. It is no wonder that American leftists have such a visceral hatred of O’Rourke that they cannot enjoy his wit and humor. For everyone else, this is a delightful, informative read.

“Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible”, by Benson Bobrick

 

398 pages, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, ISBN-13: 978-0399132568

There are, perhaps, better biographies of Ivan the Terrible than Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible by Benson Bobrick, and one of these days I should really go out and find one of ‘em…in the meantime, I have this. Ivan the Terrible refers to Ivan IV Vasilyevich, the Grand Prince of Moscow (from 1533 to 1547) and the first Tsar of Russia (from 1547 to 1584); his nickname comes from the Russian word grozny, which better translates to “fearsome” or “formidable” (think “terrible swift sword” from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, in which terrible is a good thing). So while there can be no doubt that Ivan IV was a son-of-a-bitch, he was a son-of-a-bitch with a purpose, as Bobrick shows throughout his book.

The author discusses the several disparate accounts of Ivan’s complex personality, described as he was at different times as intelligent and devout, but also prone to paranoia, rages and episodic outbreaks of mental instability that increased with age. His reign also saw the transformation of Russia from an insular, medieval state into a continental-wide empire under the new Tsar, though at immense cost to its people – and to even his own family; Ivan is popularly believed to have killed his eldest son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, which left his other son, the politically ineffectual Feodor Ivanovich, to inherit the throne, which directly led to the end of the Rurikid dynasty and the beginning of the Time of Troubles, a civil war that lasted from 1598 to 1613 that killed upwards of 2 million people, or a third of Russia’s population. Whoops.

Ivan conquered the Kazan, Astrakhan and Sibir, which thence made Russia a multiethnic and multi-continental state, developed a bureaucracy to administer the new territories, and triggered the Livonian War which ravaged Russia and resulted in the loss of Livonia and Ingria, but allowed him to exercise greater autocratic control over Russia’s nobility. All this and more is discussed by Bobrick as he places Ivan within the context of his time and place. Medieval Russia was a hard place to live, as any concept of freedom of conscience or basic civil rights were unheard of (Russia was hardly unique in this, but was then – just like now – viewed by most of the world as being especially harsh in these respects), and Ivan Grozny was an even harder Tsar to live under.

“The Art of War”, by Sun Tzu, edited and with a forward by James Clavell

96 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385292160

The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a concise treatise packed with wisdom, and countless reams of scholarly research has been generated in the millennia since Sun Tzu wrote this masterpiece. I bought this particular edition way back in ’83 when I was just getting into history; having also recently watched the TV miniseries “Shogun” fed my appetite for all things Japanese, as well, so buying a version of the ancient Chinese classic, edited by the Shogun-guy, seemed perfect. It was years – years – before I realized that this edition of The Art of War is, in fact, a kind of Cliff Notes version of the book and not the complete book itself; furthermore, this edition seems to jam all of Sun Tzu’s research into a bunch of inline notes into the text itself, and it is virtually impossible to distinguish what he wrote contrasted against what Clavell wrote. It’s not that the research is bad, it’s just impossible to read through. When I was 11, all of this was fine; I mean, how did I know that Sun Tzu wrote a hell of a lot more about war than he did in this work? I thought that all he knew of the subject was distilled into a succinct 96 pages-or-so. But, jaded adult that I now am, I can only say do not waste your time with this thing; go hither and find the full text as there must be scores available all over.

“Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future”, by Martin Anderson

 

256 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671709150

The late Martin Anderson was an American economist, author, policy analyst and policy advisor to Presidents Reagan, Nixon and Bush (41); under Nixon, he helped to end to the draft and create the All-Volunteer Armed Forces, while under Reagan he drafted the administration’s original economic program; so, a double thanks to you, Marty. In 1992 he wrote (deep breath) Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future, one of those many books I read in high school or soon after that helped to create my political thought. It would be nice to say that this 27-year-old book is outdated but, sadly (pathetically), it is not: the abuses he describes for almost three-decades ago are still going strong. One of Anderson’s contentions is that two groups of intellectuals exist in America, but that they rarely interact: on the one hand there are “Academic Intellectuals”, unanimously liberal on most issues, protected by tenure and accountable to virtually no one, for their only constituency is fellow professors who largely share their worldview; On the other hand are “Professional Intellectuals”, working in various media, government agencies and private think tanks that are far more equitably balanced between liberal and conservative. I would argue that this is as much the case today as it was when Anderson wrote this book. In effect, Anderson served as an academic whistle blower, pointing out the many ways in which Academics are not the objective, scholarly and dispassionate paragons of intelligence they proclaim themselves to be, but rather partisan promoters of a specific cause or causes. Think you can’t learn something from a 30-year-old book? Think again: all of the problems described then are alive and well now, to our shame and distaste.

“The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective”, by Kate Summerscale

 

384 pages, Walker Books, ISBN-13: 978-0802715357

Detective Inspector Jonathan “Jack” Whicher was one of the original eight members of Scotland Yard’s Detective Branch, established in 1842 (and the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket in Bleak House), and we, the public, get to know this man very well indeed in Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (incidentally, isn’t Mr. Whicher a humdinger of a name for a detective, and a real-life detective, to boot?). This book gives a clear account of the famous Constance Kent murder case that rocked England and mystified all in the middle of the 19^th Century. In brief, Sometime one evening in late June 1860, 4-year-old Francis Kent disappeared from his room in his house; his lifeless body was later found in the vault of an outhouse on the property, still dressed in his nightshirt but wrapped in a blanket with his throat slashed so deeply that the body was almost decapitated, along with several other knife wounds on his chest and hands. His nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, was initially arrested, but was later released when Detective Inspector Whicher arrested the boy’s 16-year-old half-sister, Constance, instead, on July 16^th, but she was later released without trial owing to public opinion against the accusations of a working class detective against a young lady of breeding. After the investigation collapsed, the Kent family moved to Wrexham in the north of Wales and sent Constance to a finishing school in Dinan, France. More than that…well, I guess you’ve gotta read the book.

While Summerscale does an in-depth investigative job in describing the murder, the investigation and the trials that followed, Suspicions is so much more than a real-life mystery, as the author shows how the case influenced the development of forensic science and detective work, the whole reason the Detective Branch was established in the first place. She also describes how sensationalist details of the case worked their way into the literature of the time in the novels of Charles Dickens (in the aforementioned Bleak House) and Wilkie Collins (in The Moonstone with his Sergeant Cuff) and detective fiction which came after. And while the case would seem to end unsatisfactory for everyone involved, Summerscale not only follows all the major figures and the lives they lived after this horrible crime, she also presents a possible solution of the crime which, if not entirely new, has not previously been given with such convincing details, bringing in new material not contained in classic accounts of the case. In short, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher places the facts of a particular murder within the culture of the day and shows how it shifted values and changed Victorian society.

“Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English”, by John McWhorter

 

256 pages, Avery, ISBN-13: 978-1592404940

Hmmmmm...what to do, what to do, what to do about a book that simultaneously interests and annoys you, for that is what Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter does throughout its brief 250-or-so pages. He engages in several fascinating subjects, such as a whole chapter dedicated to the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”. What the hell is that? I hear you ask Okay:

        Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that         cannot be understood by those who live in another language. The hypothesis states that the way             people think is strongly affected by their native languages.

‘kay? ‘kay. While interesting in and of itself, does it really deserve a whole chapter in a book that is purportedly about “the untold history of English”? There is also a discussion of the relativism of what constitutes “proper” English, which has only some incidental value to that history but doesn’t really advance the cause, as well as a chapter about possible visits by the Phoenicians to northern Europe and how that affected “Proto-Germanic” language, which is so speculative as to be of only passing interest and has, I would argue, no place in a book about the history of the language – that is, hard history which relies on facts and not theories. His discussion of the Scandinavian influence that resulted in English dropping gender for nouns, I found, was very good: the author basically says that it happened because Vikings learned Old English (badly) and so they just gave up trying to learn the Old English noun genders, like damn-near every European language has. And good for us, too; who needs a lot of repeat-words junking up the language?

As I read this book, however, it occurred to me that McWhorter was having an argument with the academics of the linguistic world that didn’t necessarily include us. As I don’t belong to this particular insular world, his sarcastic asides and acerbic innuendos were often lost on me, at least not after the first several chapters. Then there are the errors, which even a non-linguist such as I noticed, perhaps the most obvious one being a discussion of the very few languages that use clicks of the tongue: in enumerating them, the author omits the Naabeehó bizaad, the language of the Navajo, perhaps the one most known to the general public and the basis of at least some of code talkers in WWII from intercepting Allied messages. I mean, c’mon, man: Nicholas Cage spent all that time making a movie about them, and you couldn’t remember to include them in your list?

Sheesh.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is ultimately a weird book: while it seemed that McWhorter initially tried to write a popular discussion of what can be a very dry and technical field, his attempt at jocularity and colloquialisms appeared forced, as if he were trying to present the material to a classroom of high schoolers (English grammar is “freaky”, did you know?). He then lapses into fairly long, technical discussions to support his arguments, and a split-personality contrast to his earlier breezy, pop culture, wanting-to-be-liked voice emerges. I’d say the first half of the book is okay for adding some new twists to the history of English, even if the discussion gets repetitive and you have to take the author’s claims with a grain of salt. The second half seems to be filler.