James’ Cultural Amnesia (2007) is about important ideas of the 20th century, ideas we should not lose as the 21st speeds away. The book focuses primarily on people and events from 1920 – 1960 in continental Europe and the political phenomena Nazism and communism, both of which James unequivocally characterizes as pure evil. He champions nearly forgotten intellectuals and artists who fought against, or collaborated with, this – to steal a phrase misused by G.W. Bush – axis of evil. He brooks no excuses for communism, excoriating leftest intellectuals who spoke lovingly of imagined communist ideals, tacitly supporting the outrages of Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Cultural Amnesia is organized around mostly forgotten writers’ words, upon which James builds a series of interconnected essays addressing his themes. His writing is critical enough to establish his arguments persuasively and personal enough to make them worth caring about. His few rough edges evidence his passion for ideas more than any lack of verbal grace. Each essay addresses an author, but usually diverts deeply into the thought behind the words, often leaving the words’ source in the background. His essay featuring Arthur Schnitzler, for example, is mostly about how Bertolt Brecht can be one of Germany’s two outstanding 20th century poets (the other is Rilke) and, at the same time, be a fool, a dreadful man, and an abettor of tyrants. He does this with most of those he features except for the few Americans he quotes. Dick Cavett and Michael Mann receive almost biographical treatment.

In addition to his thorough analysis of the intersection of culture and totalitarianism – conclusion: they don’t mix well – James explores the art of elegant writing, and, bravely, elaborates on the quality of writers’ working in many languages. He seems to have learned the major European languages by going to libraries and coffee shops to read beautiful books in German or French or Russian or Spanish accompanied by only the appropriate translation dictionary. He repeatedly recommends this practice to others who fancy learning a little Serbo-Croatian or whatever.

Cultural Amnesia comprises 850 demanding pages and qualifies as a monumental work of neglected importance, in danger of not receiving the attention it deserves much like the words and people that fill its pages. (I picked up my remaindered copy for $3.95.) Each essay is beautifully crafted and, taken together, provide a perspective on the 20th century that is rapidly fading. Let’s hope this perspective lives on, at least in this unique and engaging book. Buy it through Amazon alternative sources, many of which will sell it to you for the bargain basement price I paid. It’s worth each one of those 395 pennies.

Read more about Clive James in the words of Clive James. This self-penned biography is winning beyond any words I could use to describe it.

As for our heroine (anti-heroine?), Becky Sharp, I’ve yet to see any redeeming qualities in the little bitch whatsoever. I suppose the fact she asserts herself and looks out for her own interest in a world that rejects her for all the wrong reasons is, per se, a good thing, but means count, I think. How a character deals with her dreadful lot matters and I can’t really take heart when a resourceful poor person uses her skills to relentlessly exploit those around her, essentially imitating their behavior toward her. Maybe in life this works. In fiction, I think not. Ultimately, of course, I doesn’t work for Becky either, which may be the much-labored moral of our story.

The glorious nineteenth century novel has many more worthy candidates to offer for our reading pleasure. I may finish this one, but only after I’ve finished all of Hardy, Eliot and Dickens.

Perhaps this is the point of this epic poem, the hopelessness of noble deeds, the futility of the truly righteous act. Or perhaps that noble deeds, while still noble and necessary, all have an obverse effect, that they serve primarily to maintain a frustrating balance between good and evil, between light and dark. Perhaps, then, the only road to progress on this epic scale, is to make certain the noble deeds are slightly more noble than the evil deeds are evil.

My god…I think I just discovered liberalism.

No lake water lapping with low sounds, I am alone here, in my free hut,
my cluttered hut,
I ought to have brought a lover here, they say,
but in my lonely hut I am alive, I live.
Not in the bee-loud glade, my hut, but I can breathe here in my melancholy hut.

The fence sags, each rail a long, gray grin,
with four-by-fours to slow its collapse.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

In Never Let Me Go, Hailshum, a school for special children, reveals its nature and purpose slowly and always through the eyes of several of its…uh…students. Cathy, Ruth, and Tommy are friends of a sort who, like all friends, play and fight and spar and love with each other in their years at school and later.

Spoiler alert! Skip to paragraph after this blockquote to avoid it!

Hailshum is a special school for those whose lives are defined by their eventual donation of organs to save others. The idea of institutionalized organ harvesting seems less foreign than it once did, less foreign than in the innocent days before September 11, 2001. Government institutions’ imposing solutions to problems we may not have has become standard practice, hasn’t it? Even an old liberal like me can see the inexorable creep of big brother and his sister agencies charged with keeping us safe. Can a program to keep certain people alive and kicking be far behind?

One of a number of special schools to raise donors, Hailshum encourages healthy sex (regular sex contributes to a healthy body) and prohibits pregnancy and marriage, conditions which, apparently, do not contribute to a healthy body. Close relationships flourish, but the important talk with pre-teens is not about sex – it’s about donation and its implications. Society at Hailshum provides some comfort for its students, students for whom the larger society is clearly the enemy.

In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro exposes his characters with all their charms, their weaknesses and their ugly parts. In this, he shows us their deep, confused humanness; he shows us the humanness they share with us.

Cathy, Ruth and Tommy live at that intersection, the intersection of science, society and identity, living with bumpy stoicism the lives science prepared them for. Society has decided it needs them, it seems, and they need each other to find meaning and love in the imposed hollowness of their lives. They, like we in ours, find some, but never enough.

Ishiguro tells us their tragic and ordinary story with the gentleness that distinguishes his work. Let no one tell you otherwise; this book is masterful.

A coincidence…that’s all. But…The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is about witchcraft. I’m jus’ sayin’…

• On chastity – “…be chast in thy flaming Days, when Alexander dar’d not trust his eyes upon the sisters of Darius…”
• On avarice – “Let the fruition of things bless the possession of them, and think it more satisfaction to live richly than dye rich.”
• On integrity – “They who thus timely descend into themselves, and cultivate the good seeds which nature hath set in them, prove not shrubs, but Cedars in their generation.”
• On the honest self – “Stand magnetically upon that Axis, where prudent simplicity has fixed thee; and let no Attraction invert the Poles of thy Honesty.”

Only a little start on Sir Thomas, but who’d have thought such wonder from one so unseen by most of humankind.

Arthur Phillips comes close in his complex and compelling ghost story, Angelica: A Novel. Phillips tells his story from four points-of-view – the wife Constance, the spiritualist advisor Ann, the husband Joseph and the daughter Angelica – and skillfully weaves layers of events, images (real and ghostly), emotions and perceptions into an ultimately gorgeous tapestry of fright and discovery. In Angelica’s adult words, the four stories work like “…jagged wheels, their interlocking teeth each driving the others onward.”

In Victorian London, the wife, Constance, is certain some ghostly force is harming, or about to harm, her daughter, four-year-old Angelica, and the perceived harm occurs at the same moments her vivisectionist husband, Joseph, pursues his nineteenth century “spousal rights.” Or so it seems to Constance. She receives some confirmation of this disturbing correspondence from her consultation with Ann, the spirtitualist who is also a former actress. Angelica’s reactions to her father swing from inexplicable terror to inappropriate affection, and virtually convince Constance that the ghostly visitations are connected both to Joseph’s advances and to foggy memories of own abusive father, Douglas. More details would require the dreaded spoiler alert.

Phillips unwraps his story in four sections, unveiling one character at a time. His pace predictably slows after the first shift in point-of-view, when Ann retraces too much well-considered exposition. Presenting the novel’s four points-of-view this way is somewhat less satisfying than presenting them simultaneously could be, breaking portions of narrative into smaller POV chunks, alternating between characters within each section. This approach would involve less duplication, an effect that creates more reader frustration than narrative suspense. With this latter approach, Phillips’ careful plotting would feel less contrived, less like it was mapped out on the wall of his study.

Nonetheless, Angelica: A Novel is a dazzling psychological mystery, an enthralling ghost story, and a deeply moving study of four rich and alive characters. I may even read it again.