“The Bloody Crown of Conan”, by Robert E. Howard, illustrated by Gary Gianni

 

384 pages, Del Rey, ISBN-13: 978-0345461520

 

In the early oughts, Del Rey began producing the complete works of Robert E. Howard; The Bloody Crown of Conan, illustrated by Gary Gianni, was the third volume to be published. As with the first volume of the series, this volume continues its tribute to one of fantasy literature’s founding fathers by gathering together the next series of Conan stories written by Robert E. Howard, again published here in the order they were published: The People of the Black Circle, The Hour of the Dragon and A Witch Shall Be Born, along with various miscellanea featuring several untitled synopses, a draft story and notes for The Hour of the Dragon; added to all of this is insightful commentary and, of course, original artwork to complement the blood and guts you’re reading about. Each of these tales is a longer-form novella, as opposed to the short stories and snippets we got in the first volume, and it is indeed a delight to see everyone’s favorite Cimmerian once again striding the plains of the Hyborian age. No mindless, muscle-bound slayer he; rather, this Conan – Howard’s Conan; the ORIGINAL Conan – is the ill-educated yet crafty righter of wrongs and slayer of evil. Readers new to the character or, like me, who wish to get reacquainted with the Cimmerian are encouraged to take full advantage of this collection.

 

Really, Del Rey has done fantasy fans a service by republishing all of Howard’s original stories of his most famous of characters in their original form. With The Bloody Crown of Conan, we see Conan in expanded adventures, which allows Howard to flesh out his character somewhat while also slipping in some of the author’s subtle beliefs (Howard did not think that “civilized” was the same as “honorable”, for instance; indeed, after completing Volume one and, now, Volume two, he would suggest that for all their barbarism, barbarians are the more honorable specimen of humanity, as one’s word and honor is everything to them).

 

But we also see a kind of consistency with Conan here, with Howard placing his character in positions of authority: an Afghuli tribal chieftain in The People of the Black Circle, the King of Aquilonia in The Hour of the Dragon and the Captain of the Khaurani guard in A Witch Shall Be Born. As Howard suggests, Conan’s “barbarism” gives him an edge over his “civilized” adversaries, allowing him to navigate the perplexities of the lands he inhabits in ways his opponents couldn’t dream of doing – oh, the wolf is still there, waiting to strike, but it has been chained through self-discipline, although it is the trainer himself who holds the chain.

 

It has been suggested that, by around 1934, Howard had begun to grow tired of his most famous of characters; if true, it cannot be seen in this volume of stories, which still show Howard at the height of his creative powers and Conan still the original barbaric bad-ass he ever was.

“The Story of Greece and Rome”, by Tony Spawforth

 

Yale University Press, 392 pages, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0300217117

Tony Spawforth describes The Story of Greece and Rome as a “personal story” of classical civilization; as such, it is rich in references to contemporary culture, including Harry Potter, 300 and Troy, and it is for this reason that his book stands out in a crowded field of histories of the Ancient World for its liveliness and wit. Although aimed at readers “who have little or no background” in the subject, there is, I think, much to stimulate the experienced classicist, as well. In the earlier chapters there are some jerks in the narrative as Spawforth moves between describing historical events and museum pieces, the focus being on material evidence and archaeological discoveries, which is, nonetheless, a strength of the book.

And throughout the whole the sheer sense of wonder Spawforth still feels at the civilizations of Greece and Rome is thoroughly infectious. Spawforth manages to write about the histories of these Western cultural juggernauts while juggling many elements, facts, historical figures and cultural influences at the same time; it is impossible not to be impressed by his obvious erudition. Because of that, the story really flows with a continuity that many other, similar books on this topic sadly lack. The drawback of this (positive) attitude is that Spawforth cannot stop to examine anything in depth; he simply glides through time and places, pointing out interesting facts like an over-active tour guide hopped-up on caffeine.

This is a warning I’ve issued about other books, but it bears repeating with this one, as well: if you know a lot about Greek and Roman history, then you will be able to enjoy this book in full, for Spawforth offers few explanations of what he is describing, along with many references to people and places he (it would appear) assumes the reader is familiar with. But that fits with the author’s overall style, as he writes in a conversational manner, as if we were sitting around and he was relating this incredible tale (albeit a tale we have heard before). Not a criticism, really, but if you are a newcomer to the histories of Greece and Rome than I fear a lot of what is spoken of here will fly over your head, in spite of his earlier claim.

The Story of Greece and Rome is a sweeping, beautifully written story covering eight and a half millennia – from the first traces of Neolithic life in what we now call Greece to the fall of Rome in the late 400s A.D. We get the well-known stops on this tour (the Minoans, the Mycenaeans who displaced them, the Dark Age, the Iliad and Odyssey) before the rise of the Classical Greece that began Western civilization (or so we like to think, as Spawforth points out). Then Rome, from village alliance to world empire, meeting along the way Julius Caesar, Augustus, Cicero, Virgil, Nero and a cavalcade of generals, warmongers, thugs and, crucially, historians. It all here, and it’s all terrific, as Western culture, under the pen of a teacher and admirer, has never looked so good.

“The Mystery of Charles Dickens”, by A.N. Wilson

Harper, 368 pages, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0062954947

“The power which he proceeded at once to exhibit was the one power in letters which literally cannot be imitated, the primary inexhaustible creative energy, the enormous prodigality of genius…an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence”. Thus was the pronouncement of one brilliant writer, G.K. Chesterton, about another, Charles Dickens, and after reading A.N. Wilson’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens one will perhaps be better able to determine just where that inexhaustible creative energy and so forth came from (hint: it wasn’t a good place). The adjective “Dickensian” is well on its way to becoming overused (just like “Kafkaesque”), but it won’t go away anytime soon.

Just over 150 years after his death, Dickens is as omnipresent as ever, so be prepared to hear it over and over for the foreseeable future, as well as one adaptation after another of his works. Wilson’s work is nonlinear, beginning as he does with Dickens’s death and recreating that last day of his life as he makes the habitual hour’s journey from his home at Gad’s Hill to his mistress’ house in Peckham; there, he suffered a seizure and was returned to his home to die a respectable death, surrounded by his (estranged) wife and (some of) his many adult children. Wilson is also much focused on the final novel, the half-completed The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which he sees as a kind of ne plus ultra of his subject’s life and work – his life, especially.

In the last half-century or so, biographers of Dickens have chosen to focus on highly specific areas of his life and accomplishments – i.e., his relationship to family, to society, to the theater and so on – but the most incisive works have explored the man’s convoluted psyche. And oh, brother is it convoluted, for Dickens seemed to know and understand everything and everyone, a talent he displayed across fifteen novels, countless articles and not one, but two, magazines. But for all that, he seemed to lack self-awareness: today, with the benefit of history and hindsight, we can recognize how “the enormous prodigality of genius” that animated his writing and his life served not only to conceal, but to smother a profoundly conflicted nature – a “divided self”.

Exploring the dualities of Dickens’ temperament, Wilson makes much of his shamed secrecy about his ordeal as a child laborer in a blacking factory and his hatred of a mother who, he felt, did not love him. It would seem that, no matter how much Dickens accomplished in life, or the fact that he was probably the most famous and beloved writer in England, he could not escape the buried anguish of his early history: “I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back” he states in an autobiographical fragment published after his death, and bitterness over this episode may illuminate why so many of the maternal figures in his novels are hateful. But this divided self was a two-edged sword, as Wilson makes clear:

But the divided self is also a source of creativity. Dickens could see that the gallery of characters who had been buzzing out of his head since ‘Boz’ first ventured into print had not come from a calm, happy place, but from a cauldron of self-contradiction and self-reproach, a bubbling confusion of moral centres. The capacity to create fiction was an artistic way of describing the capacity to self-deceive. The creative urge was the artistic way of describing the urge that used, battered and, if necessary, destroyed the loves of those closest to him. It has been rightly said that the murderer in Dicken’s last novel [The Mystery of Edwin Drood] is himself a kind of novelist. He is shaping his own story.

Wilson is more than alert to Dickens’ tendency to punish fictional characters for the offenses committed by people in his real life, and combs the novels for evidence of these many dark impulses. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is not intended to be a comprehensive biography, and it contains little to no new information about its subject; rather, it is a work of reinterpretation (as dirty as that word can be) of Dickens and his work as it seeks to delve into the man’s sometimes impenetrable psyche to see what can be found and draw forth all that he can. Wilson has a keen sense of how writers operate and, combined with a seemingly natural intuition about human nature, has managed to create a perceptive and lively portrait of an obviously immensely creative and deeply disturbed artist, one whose work is with us now and will be for all time.

“Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979”, by Dominic Sandbrook

 

Penguin UK, 840 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1846140327

This is the fourth book in this series by Dominic Sandbrook on the history of Modern Britain and, just like the other three, it never fails to impress and inform without once being irrelevant or imbecilic. Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979 picks up the story at Wilson’s return in 1974 and journeys through the Callaghan years until Thatcher steps through the door of Number 10. It also proves that everything old is new again: idiot teachers teaching pointless subjects, racial strife, economic meltdowns, radical philosophies, over mighty unions, uncontrollable immigration…it’s all back, baby, but the first run-through occurred some five decades ago. If Seasons in the Sun was in need of a spokesman it would be Basil Fawlty: the decline of the UK in the eyes of the world is best reflected in Mr. Hamilton’s rant upon entering the hotel – “couldn’t find the freeway. Had to take a little backstreet called the M5” – while part two of the book (entitled “A damn good thrashing” in reference to an episode where Fawlty’s car breaks down; another symbol of the poor quality of British industrial products), while his tirade against men who carry themselves like “orang-utans” reflects the anxiety that the middle classes felt about changing social circumstances (would it be going too far to say that anyone who wants to understand the British middle-class psyche in the 1970s should take Fawlty Towers as one of their starting points?)

Anyway, as this little episode illustrates, Sandbrook is at his best when using the popular culture of the time as a kind of microcosm for what the hell was going on cross Britannia. The book opens with the trials and tribulations that George Lucas underwent while filming Star Wars in England, what with the film crew beginning “work at 8:30 before a mandatory tea break at 10. At 1:15pm they had an hour for lunch, and another mandatory tea break at 4:30pm. At 5:30pm the day ended. Lucas had assumed this meant they would begin wrapping up, but by the second day of filming he realized that stopping at 5:30 meant stopping at 5:30. Even if he were in the middle of a scene, the crew would stop dead when the clock reached the half hour”. He enquired if they would consider working overtime, and was told it would have to be put to vote each morning; whenever they voted on overtime, they invariably voted no. and this was just a friggin’ movie; when it came down to running the country, the unions were King and nothing happened without their say-so. Along with the strikes, there were shortages, 30% inflation, awful food, British–Leyland cars, suicidal trade unionists, clueless industrial management and the all-pervading sense of the inevitability of national decline (at least the soundtrack was good – mostly). Britain was indeed seen by all and sundry to be the newest “Sick Man of Europe”, not least by the British, themselves.

If you have read all of the author’s prior books in this series, then his modus operandi is by bow familiar: just read and select from a vast supply of secondary literature, covering not only politics, but also popular culture and social reportage, and throw it into the mental blender for a book to pop out. Sandbrook rightly insists that the years between 1974 and 1979 were important: as well as a prelude to Thatcherism, the period was “a decisive moment in our recent history”. Damn right. After the “Winter of Discontent” it was obvious to only the most blinkered that the Trade Unions had to be broken and put in their place, something that only the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher had the incentive to do. But of course it isn’t that easy, for Sandbrook takes what has become the conventional view that the real turning point in British politics came not in 1979 but in 1976, when James Callaghan and Denis Healey refused to reflate their way out of trouble and used the IMF to instill a spirit of economic realism into the Labour Party. Rather, Sandbrook believes that “there was rather more continuity between Margaret Thatcher and her avuncular predecessor, ‘Sunny Jim’, than we often think – even though it would pain both left and right to admit it”. This overstates the case, but it is true that Callaghan wanted to make many of the changes that Thatcher was to make but hoping to do so in a non-divisive way and so maintain a spirit of social solidarity. But the unions, through their militant action, cut him off at the knees and paved the way for the Conservative triumph. Thank bloody God.

“1984”, by George Orwell

 

328 pages, Penguin Books Signet Classics, ISBN-13: 978-0451524935

There are times when I am up in the middle of the night and think about George Orwell – it’s not what you think – and wonder: Just what would he think of us and the world we have created? Perhaps he would ask out loud, “How did I get it so wrong? The world hasn’t been divided into three totalitarian superstates, the privation and rationing of postwar Britain was not standardized by any Soviet-style central planning and labor camps and censorship are not the norm” – at least, not yet. Perhaps our awoken Orwell would see more parallels between our brave new world and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (reviewed on May 20^th, 2022), what with its and our legions of tranquil populations of pretty people living in a pleasing drug-and-sex induced semi-coma. And knowing what Orwell knew about real poverty, he could hardly fail to observe that the underclass of today’s Britain lives in relative splendor. Infectious diseases all but wiped out? High living standards? Daily showers? Compared even to middle-class people of his day, the average council-flats resident has comforts and leisure opportunities beyond measure. He needn’t spend twelve hours a day at harsh labor; he needn’t necessarily work at all. What Orwell hoped socialism would achieve has instead been delivered by a capitalist-funded welfare state. You’re…welcome?

None of this could have been foreseen in 1984, Orwell’s dystopian social science fiction novel in which so many now well-worn terms were first introduced: Big Brother, doublethink, Thought Police, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, memory hole, 2 + 2 = 5, proles, Two Minutes Hate, telescreen, Room 101 and, of course, Orwellian. Orwell once defined himself as a democratic-socialist in the essay Why I Write (published in the Summer 1946 edition of “Gangrel”), and he could write caustically about his former associates, as he did in this passage from his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier: “’Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England” (no wonder Orwell left). This is hard to square with the writer of perhaps the most famous book to stand athwart history, yelling Stop, but there we have it. And who better than a former Socialist to give warning about what his compadres were really about? Who better than an insider to tell you what is happening on the inside? Throughout 1984 we are witnesses to what to the radical left must seem like Heaven but which to everyone else can only be described as Hell: Surveillance, Futurology and Nationalism, although of a twisted kind that involves an obsessive sense of loyalty to some real-world entity; in this case, Big Brother.

All done in the name of The People, of course. Orwell thought of the People as decent enough, but he’d be baffled to observe today that the welfare state has created a class of lay-abouts who, liberated from economic anguish, shackle themselves to screens, drugs, alcohol and, in our modern world, technological terrors like the Internet. But considering the breadth of Orwell’s political thinking, it’s a matter of pure conjecture trying to decide just where on the political spectrum he’d be most at home today. Not, I think, as a Socialist, for his particular brand of socialism was primarily a response to the severe privation he suffered from while young. Rather, I would think that the modern Welfare State’s conquering of most brutal poverty would, I think, fire up the Tory side of Orwell: “Why” he would no doubt ask “does no one care about Character anymore? Should the state subsidize endless self-indulgence? Why do all of the enlightened liberals think that there should be no strings attached to welfare payments?” In Orwell’s essay on Kipling (published in the February 1942 edition of “Horizon”) he said that “‘Enlightened’ people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility”, so perhaps he wouldn’t be at all surprised at today’s domineering all-for-nothing ethos, for his bleak vision of this future – this Futurology, as he called it – was as chilling as one could imagine:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always…always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

I also believe that the Left’s speech codes would make Orwell rethink his socialist instincts, for one of the most notable themes in 1984 is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth where photographs and public archives are manipulated to rid them of “unpersons”, those people who have been erased from history by the Party. On telescreens almost all figures of production are grossly exaggerated, or simply fabricated to indicate an ever-growing economy, even during times when the reality is the opposite. This is especially poignant, for Orwell once associated Socialism with freedom of speech and believed that it was critical to his support for the movement, as he wrote in Why I join the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party] (published in the June 24^th, 1938 edition of “New Leader”): “And the only regime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech is a socialist regime. If Fascism triumphs I am finished as a writer”. Today, though, it is evident that the impulse to restrict speech is primarily a phenomenon of the Left, for so much speech runs afoul of the Left’s chief obsession, which is international identity politics. That same imperative is why the Left is suspicious of patriotism and why it is such a laughingstock in the book, with love of country replaced by perpetual hatred of fictitious boogeymen and the way in which allies are abandoned and taken up with lightning speed.

The private life is gone in 1984, as houses and apartments are equipped with telescreens so one may be watched or listened to at any time. Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones, the reading of mail, the employment of undercover agents and even the use of children to spy on their own parents. All done by the best and brightest to help the poor and downtrodden, of course. In The Lion and the Unicorn (published in the February 19^th, 1941 edition of “Searchlight Books”), Orwell writes of the “insularity” of his countrymen and the “[i]ntellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good. At bottom it is the same quality in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader”. Also in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell says that “I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, and that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone” (Good Lord; Orwell was a Reaganite), or again when he wrote in Politics in the English Language (published in the April 1946 edition of “Horizon”): “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’”. The Left’s present tendency to politicize everything would have simply horrified him.