“Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire”, by Simon Winchester

 

400 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0060598617

Originally published in 1985, Simon Winchester’s Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire chronicles the author’s journey to find what’s left of the empire “on which the sun never sets”. This edition is a reprint from 2003, and the introduction alone is enough to display just how much changed in the 18-or-so years between editions. While I don’t always read the Introduction to a book, I’m I glad I did this time as Winchester shows just how much the unofficial “Empire” of Globalization has wreaked havoc on the nations of the Earth, not just of what is left of Rule Britannia. Don’t skip it.

As for the rest, Outposts is a fascinating travelogue for its era as we follow the author as he visits all the remaining territories of Great Britain, many of them obscure places about the globe – such as Tristan da Cunha in the Atlantic and Boddam in the Indian Ocean – populated by people who have been more-or-less forgotten by the British government. One of the best chapters is on the Falkland Islands, where Winchester arrived a few days before the Argentine invasion and where his description was particularly evocative, describing as he does a society stuck in a 1950s time-warp but where the work ethic had been utterly lost.

Winchester makes a number of cogent points about the governance of these places, showing how while French citizens in her overseas territories elect representatives to the Assemblée nationale, the people of Britain’s territories have no representation in Parliament whatsoever, even though they are generally staunch patriots. Furthermore, Winchester emphasizes how unfair it is that people in predominantly white territories have the right to move to Britain but those in non-white territories are treated as foreigners not permitted to do so (apparently some reforms have occurred since the book was written in 1985. I should damn well hope so).

But the main theme of the book is melancholy, as Winchester visits these remnants of what was once the greatest Empire the world had ever seen – 412 million people, or 23% of the world population at the time; 13,700,000 sq mi, or 24% of the Earth’s total land area – reduced to the original home islands and a few bits or land spread here and there. But oh, what bits: British Indian Ocean Territory, Tristan, Gibraltar, Ascension Island, St Helena, Hong Kong, Bermuda, British West Indies, The Falklands, Pitcairn…and the fact that list has shrunk yet more since this book was originally published makes it sadder still.

A fascinating double-history – of the remnants of a once-proud and, in some-respects, still-extant empire; and also of a vanished world not even 40-years gone – Outposts was an enlightening historical travelogue about the impermanence of Man’s accomplishments.

“To Hold the Crown: The Story of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York (A Novel of the Tudors)” by Jean Plaidy

 

416 pages, Three Rivers Press, ISBN-13: 978-0307346193 

To Hold the Crown: The Story of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York (A Novel of the Tudors) – I wasn’t sure just how much of this title is really relevant, so I quoted the whole thing – is the first historical novel in Jean Plaidy’s “Tudor Saga” – although it was in fact published last, in 1982 (it’s also known as Uneasy Lies the Head). “Jean Plaidy” was one of the many pen names of Eleanor Alice Hibbert (née Burford), with a different one for each of the literary genres she wrote in: “Jean Plaidy” was for fictionalized histories of European royalty; “Victoria Holt” for gothic romances; “Philippa Carr” for multi-generational family sagas; “Eleanor Burford” for Romance novels, her Mills & Boon novels and the Mary Stuart Queen of Scots Series; as well as several other books written under “Elbur Ford”, “Kathleen Kellow”, “Ellalice Tate” and “Anna Percival” – in total over 200 books over her life, which ended in 1993. Talk about prolific.

I got this book from 2^nd & Charles, using some of the $400 in credit I have there…not knowing that it was just one part of a sprawling, 11-book series that does, indeed, cover the madcap Tudors and their rule over the sceptred isle. I bought it because Henry VII – the First Tudor Monarch – gets such short shrift compared to his larger-than-life descendants, so that any book starring him would prove to be an insight into this most reclusive of kings. I also, in the back of my mind, had to decide if I wanted to read the other ten books in the series…but upon completion of this book that was a decided “NO”. Perhaps it was because Plaidy – or Hibbert, or whomever – was so damn prolific that this book suffers on any number of fronts, from lousy grammar in many places, to an overabundance of ellipses (seriously: 15 of the damn things in 8 sentences…on a single page!) to not capitalizing the beginning of a sentence nor putting a period at the end.

Besides all of that, I found the writing to be rather simplistic, tedious and repetitive; in attempting to express a concept – such as the fact that Elizabeth and her sisters got their good looks from their father, or that Elizabeth always sided with her husband, or just what the hell happened to her young brothers, or any number of other examples – Plaidy would describe it, then she would describe it again…and again…and again…it was like she thought the only way she could make her point stick in her reader’s mind was to shove it down their throat until they vomited, which seriously detracted from any enjoyment of the book. As you could well imagine. And don’t get me started on all the inner monologues in which one character after another gives detailed background information to the reader in which their recent past is chronicled, just in case you know nothing of Tudor history; fear not: they’ll tell you all you need to know in their heads, as people are wont to do.

The long-ass title is also not very accurate, seeing as how Elizabeth of York is in fact an ancillary character in this novel, barely a secondary player in a story that is, ostensibly, half hers; overall she is portrayed as a meek woman who bows to her husband’s authority in all things and never asserts her own will or opinion, an assertion I found difficult to believe. I do believe, however, that Plaidy gives an accurate picture of Henry VII as a rather joyless man who does what he feels is best for his country and his house, but lacks warmth and emotion, even toward his family; a cold fish who nevertheless put England right again after so many decades of war and death and destruction. In comparison to his heirs, it is no wonder that so sober and dedicated a king should be out shown by the minor suns that were Henry VIII and Elizabeth I – but if not for Henry VII, neither of these mighty Tudors would have ever been.

To Hold the Crown, then, was a disappointing read, and if this author’s other work is anything like it, then they will be all too easy to skip.

“Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found”, by Suketu Mehta

 

560 pages, Vintage, ISBN-13: 978-0375703409

Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is an insider’s view of this most-Indian of metropolises and has garnered a number of accolades: winner of the 2005 Kiriyama Prize (given to books that foster a greater understanding of the nations and peoples of the Pacific Rim and South Asia), winner of the 2005 Vodafone Crossword Book Award, one of the Economist 2004 Books of the Year, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist and shortlisted for the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize. And no wonder, as this book is a very personal work of a native Bombayite who left with his parents for New York at 14 before returning as an adult twenty-one years later to examine all that has changed and, often sadly, all than has remained the same, told mostly through interviews with both power-brokers and ordinary people.

Maximum City is not a book to be read in search of a single theme, but is rather best enjoyed for what it is: a seemingly random collection of tales told by those whom Mehta encounters as if by chance on the streets of Bombay (assuredly not a reality, though; some of these Very Important Personages had to approve interviews – but it seems rather spontaneous all the same). It is sprawling, no doubt, just as Bombay is, but that is to be expected; this enormous patch of humanity of 233 square miles into which over 12½ million people have been crammed could never be described in a linear narrative. Better to do as Mehta did and piece together the lives of but a tiniest fraction of the inhabitants of the Gateway to India into broad divisions and allow them to speak and dream and pontificate on their own.

And just who are these people? Well, there is Sunil, the Hindu nationalist who rises from street thug to the ultranationalist Shiv Sena party leader. There’s also Monalisa, the “beer bar” dancing girl who dares to dream of escaping her sad existence in a seedy bar by winning the Miss India beauty pageant. We have Ajai Lal, who claims to be the only non-corrupted policeman in Bombay. As well as an unemployed young migrant worker from Bihar, one of India’s most backward states, struggling to establish a career as a poet. And why have they all come to Bombay? As Mehta puts it, Bombay still gives them room to dream and still allows them to live “closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known”. The siren call of Bombay is the same as every city the world over, then and now: a new start in a place where nobody knows you.

“Every day is an assault on the individual’s senses, from the time you get up, to the transport you take to go to work, to the offices you work in, to the forms of entertainment you are subjected to”. That is life in everyday Bombay, and yet still people come. One is put in mind of a Dickensian cityscape in which 19^th Century industrial urban blight has been married to a tropical climate with loads of sex, Islamic terrorism and Hindu violence – “A City in Heat” in Mehta’s memorable phrase, an overpowering, exhausting, violent and chaotic patch of planet Earth which is every bit a “functioning anarchy” (to borrow John Kenneth Galbraith’s famously patronizing description of India as a whole). How the place functions is a mystery, but function it does, if imperfectly and unfairly for all of its millions.

Part history, part travelogue, part memoir, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found brings to life this supercharged world through its people, presenting a meticulous documentary of living, thriving and surviving on this teeming island that always seems threaten to slip into the ocean at any moment, taking its struggling population with it.

“The Dancers at the End of Time”, by Michael Moorcock

 

 

534 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041868

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. The Dancers at the End of Time was the tenth in this and includes the tales An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs. This series of novels and short stories is set at…the End of Time, an era “where entropy is king and the universe has begun collapsing upon itself”. The inhabitants of this era are immortal decadents who create flights of fancy via the use of power rings that draw on energy devised and stored by their ancestors millions of years prior. Time travel is possible, and throughout the books various points in time are visited and revisited; space travelers are also common, but most residents of the End of Time find leaving the planet distasteful and clichéd. Amongst the main characters besides Jherek Carnelian (one of the few humans at the End of Time to have been born naturally, rather than created) are Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a time traveler from the late 19^th Century, the enigmatic Lord Jagged, Miss Mavis Ming – and, the Fireclown. Incidentally, the title of the series is itself taken from a poem by a fictitious 19^th Century poet, Ernest Wheldrake (a pseudonym used by Algernon Charles Swinburne, ahem), which Mrs. Amelia Underwood quotes in The End of All Songs.

 

An Alien Heat (the title comes from the poem Hothouse Flowers by Theodore Wratislaw) was first published in 1972 and concerns the alien Yusharisp who comes to Earth to warn its remaining inhabitants that the universe is coming to an end, his own planet having already having disappeared. But the Earthlings are unfazed by this revelation from the stars, as they believe him to be yet another doomsayer, the End of the Earth having been predicted for centuries. But the crux of the story revolves around Jherek Carnelian and one Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a time traveler from Victorian England, with whom he falls in love and pursues across time. And so on and so forth…Moorcock’s work is more comedy than Sci-Fi – although there’s a lot of that going on, make no mistake – and as usual it features his flair for extravagant prose and exotic settings. But there’s more going on here, for An Alien Heat is also a warning against excessive indulgences and the damage they cause to people on a profound level. Civilizational collapse at the End Times…who doesn’t want to read about that? But this work displays a wit that is unique in Sci-Fi in a future in which “inherited millennia of scientific and technological knowledge” allows the remaining inhabitants to “play immense imaginative games, to relax and create beautiful monstrosities” as they revel in their decadence.

The Hollow Lands (whose title comes from the poem The Last Word by Ernest Dowson) came out in 1974, and continues the tale of Jherek Carnelian who, along with the other inhabitants of the End of Time, have resumed their ways as if Nothing Had Happened – only to be interrupted by the Lat, an alien species of piratical musicians (you read that correctly). As with An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands features innumerable descriptions of the End of Time, the fascination Carnelian has with the Victorian Era and the satiric parallels with 20^th Century Western civilization – circa 1974, that is. It is a little lighter and more humorous than its predecessor but it is obviously the bridge book in the trilogy as so much of this work is more of the same, with no real advancement in the characters or the story overall. And, perhaps this is just me, but The Hollow Lands seemed rather more absurd than An Alien Heat, as if Moorcock was trying to outdo himself from one book to the next. Nevertheless this book is still a worthy continuation of the tale begun in its predecessor and is a fun, exciting, well-written adventure romp, filled with aliens, lascivious immortals, wonky time travel and a comedy of errors in Victorian England. Perhaps writing these works was what Moorcock needed after having written about albino sociopaths and what not, and while not all of the humor has withstood the passing of time, it is still a rather fun romp all the same.

Finally, The End of All Songs (whose title comes from the poem Dregs by Ernest Dowson) appeared in 1976, in which Jherek Carnelian and Amelia Underwood meet Una Persson and Captain Oswald Bastable, who introduce themselves as members of the Guild of Temporal Adventurers (any Moorcock fan worth their salt remembers this pair). They explain the notion of the multiverse as the combination of all simultaneously existing realities before sending Jherek and Amelia back to the End of Time. There, Jherek finds all his friends who had vanished from 1896 alive and well, except for Lord Jagged who has yet to return. Amelia is now more tolerant towards the people of the End of Time, though still occasionally revolted by their lack of morals. She and Jherek resume the life they led in An Alien Heat – which is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a shell shocked, crazed Mr. Underwood (that would be Amelia’s husband), Inspector Springer and a dozen policemen – oh, and the crazy Lat. This last book in the trilogy is much darker than the first two, and the description of the earth as the end approaches and things begin to fail is chilling. But while pessimistic, The End of All Songs does have its positive moments, and the way in which it displays late 20^th Century society is, if anything, more obvious than it was when originally published. As with most science fiction, The Dancers at the End of Time is a commentary on the era in which it was written, and a particularly successful example, too.

“Frederick the Great” by Nancy Mitford

 

304 pages, Hamilton, ISBN-13: 978-0241019221

I don’t own Frederick the Great; I checked it out of my high school library way the hell back in the Righteous 80s when I went on my Great Fred tangent and read everything I could about this newly-discovered (for me) monarch. As I’m sure you recall, the author, Nancy Mitford, was the eldest of the famous (infamous) Mitford brood; in addition to this book and biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire and Louis XIV, she wrote classic modern-day novels such as Highland Fling and Love in a Cold Climate. I didn’t know any of that when I read this book, only that I wanted to cure my ignorance of one of the most important-ever German monarchs and fill a hole in my knowledge of German and European history.

It seems to me that Mitford writes history is if she were writing fiction: her eye is always on the telling anecdote or characteristic, and in her biography her Frederick would appear to have more character than even she is used to dealing with; he was the King of Prussia who was more comfortable with the ideals of the French enlightenment but with the morals of the Medici (as he would have described it himself). This eccentricity must have delighted Mitford, seeing as she came from a family of eccentrics, and the portrait she paints of Frederick and, indeed, of all international diplomacy is that of a collection of idiosyncratics who compete with each other by blasting the brains out of each other’s subjects.

However, the more I got into Mitford’s Frederick the more convinced I became that some rather important historical facts had been left out, that Nancy wrote what she wanted to write about and left the rest on the shelf. Overall, her biography has the feel of an overview, like one of those large-scale books that I get off of the Barnes & Noble remnant pile that are full of pictures and reproductions, strung together with a bit of prose. Her Frederick lacks the conversational touch that she brought to historical writing, which means long dry patches as Frederick fights his battles without much character analysis as to why this “Enlightened Monarch” made war against other rulers so that he could expand his power.

Frederick the Great is a good beginning for anyone wanting to know more about this most curious of rulers, full of fluid prose and colorful anecdotes. And pictures; lots of pictures. The focus of the whole is on Frederick’s cultural pretensions as he tried to out-French the French and be accepted as a great power and an equal of the same (this did not stop Frederick from making war on the French, however). Thus, if you are looking for a primer on his battles and diplomacy, it is light on these topics, although they are, of course, covered. It is also, for all of Mitford’s obvious admiration for the man, fairly even-keeled in its treatment of its subject. A useful and colorful addition to the man who ruled “Sparta by day and Athens by night”.

“Historic Photos of Detroit”, by Mary J. Wallace

 

220 pages, Turner, ISBN-13: 978-1683369295

Historic Photos of Detroit by Mary J. Wallace is just one in a whole series of books of historic photos, each of which focuses on a specific city and, sometimes, specific era of the place in question; this particular volume covers the era starting in 1900 through 1969 through nearly two hundred photographs, the quality of which are…alright, perhaps because they were printed on mass-produced matte paper rather than glossy, which I thought would have been standard for a photo book like this one. Wallace made her selections from the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University (where she worked as an audiovisual archivist) and from the Burton Collection of the Detroit Public Library, and so her familiarity with the material shows in the photographs chosen; many are of the lesser-known and even intimate variety, rather than a select few that become the standard due to their wider familiarity.

Wallace has divided her book into four chronological sections: the first from 1860 to 1899 (from the Civil War until the arrival of the automobile); the second from 1900 to 1919 (the birth of the auto industry through the end of World War I); the third from 1920 to 1941 (the early boom of the auto industry through the Depression); and the fourth from 1942 to 1969 (from World War II through the 1967 riots and the aftermath). What I most appreciate is the balance she shows in showing us images of the development in architecture with the photos of real people at work, in their fashions, and some historical events. Even when she picks the historical events, she selects an image that gives us a different perspective on the event. We all know the images of the fight of the Battle of the Overpass at the Rouge Plant. Not many of us have seen the image she shows us here of the peaceful demonstration before the struggle began.

A wonderful book from cover-to-cover, recapturing a lost era in which the Motor City was king of the world and an economic powerhouse envied by all. Would that we could become so again.

“Detroit: Engine of America”, by R. J. King

 

155 pages, Momentum Books, ISBN-13: 978-1938018114

How did a crude French settlement founded in 1701 along the Detroit River become the birthplace of the automotive industry in 1900? Well, I’ll tell ya…or rather, R. J. King will tell ya in Detroit: Engine of America and, as the editor of DBusiness magazine, DBusiness Daily News, Tech and Mobility News, Detroit 500 and Michigan Makers, there is no better person to relate the rise of Detroit (the book ends in 1900, so the fall is unrecorded). For so brief a book, King packs a lot into these mere 155 pages, as just about every important figure and event is brought up put in its proper place as to how it advanced the interests and development of Michigan’s First City. Divided into 11 Chapters, with each chapter dealing with a different decade, Engine of America’s broad argument is that, even before Detroit put the world on wheels through the automobile industry it was a key driver of American economic progress.

Seeing as, for much of this time, Detroit was a frontier town in the middle of nowhere, it was forced to become self-sufficient and develop all of its own industries to survive: first fishing, farming and hunting and then shipping, stoves, locomotives and related products, all propelled by western migration and immigration. By the time the automotive industry was founded, all the pieces were in place for Detroit to become the engine of the world. As Engine of America shows in so many ways, Detroit is a rather special place, being not only the oldest city in the Midwest – take that Chicago! – it is older even than the United States; it was always a magnet for immigrants, not only from overseas but, especially, from the East Coast (by 1830 up to 1000 people were arriving daily). So Detroit has always been a happening place, even if the rest of the country or even the world didn’t know it, and it still is. Just ask us.