Do and Die

Do and Die. The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34

Manini Chatterjee

Picador. First published in 1999

In the early 1930s, in the coastal hill district of Chittagong, in what is now Bangladesh, a small band of fiercely motivated young men and women banded together and carried out a series of raids on various authorities of the colonial British government. They were lead chiefly by the young teacher Surjya Sen, who was known respectfully and affectionately as 'Masterda'. Apart from the ongoing Independence struggle lead by Mahatma Gandhi, they were inspired by the Irish revolutionary movements against the British. They planned an armed uprising against the government in their district hoping to be able to take charge of the administration for at least a few months, and thus demonstrating the possibilities of such uprisings all across the country. They recruited a small army of volunteers, numbering about a hundred. After months of planning and preparation, which included the gathering of firearms and uniforms for disguise, the men split into four groups and simultaneously attacked the Telegraph Office, the barracks of the British volunteer armed force, the Police Armoury and the European Club. The first three attacks were successful and the revolutionaries were able to easily overcome any resistance they encountered. However, the attack on the Club did not happen. Even the advantages arising from the first three successes were not driven home. The attacking force did not take away the arms and ammunition that were available at the barracks and at the Armoury. Also many mistakes of communication were made, with the result that the British Police were able to mount a counter attack and drive the revolutionaries away into the hills. Lacking food and water, the revolutionaries survived on watermelons and biscuits for a few days, until the British reinforcements arrived and laid siege to their position atop the hills of nearby Jalalabad. Here the back of the uprising was broken. Many of the revolutionaries were killed. Many others escaped into the hills and forests, living to fight another day. A few were arrested, tried and sentenced to death or imprisonment. 

The revolutionaries who escaped, including Masterda himself and some of their other leaders, carried out a few guerrilla raids, and planned another major uprising in Chittagong, this time attempting to involve the general populace. After a year or two of this, they were all  hunted down and captured one by one. Many of the revolutionaries survived and rejoined civilian life.

This minor, but intense, war of independence was hardly noticed by the mainstream freedom movement lead by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. Though the Chittagong revolutionaries adopted tactics which were far different from the methods of Satyagraha, they were motivated by the same fierce desire to overthrow the yoke of colonialism. The leaders of the revolutionaries were almost all of them upper-middle class Hindu youth, but their outlook was secular, their politics were socialist, with some of them joining the Indian communist movements later on in life. It was perhaps these two facts, more than anything else, that account for the failure of the rest of India, the media and the other leaders of the Independence movement to accord sufficient attention and admiration to the heroic exploits of the these young men and women. For perhaps similar reasons, a recent (2010) Hindi movie with top stars and based on the uprising, failed to excite the audience as much as it should have.

Manini Chatterjee's book is a gripping one. It is divided into three parts. Part I is a brief survey of the conditions and precedents that engendered the uprising. Part II is a detailed description of the entire uprising, from the initial planning and secret gathering of strength by the movement, to the actual battles, to the final arrest, imprisonment and punishment of many of the key revolutionaries. The final part is again brief, an analysis and a retrospect. The facts appear well-researched and they are presented almost in the form of a novel. The book never descends, however, to any form of fictionalisation, such as for example, inventing any dialogue. Thus it remains a scholarly work, though nonetheless very readable. The title is a deliberate counterpoint to Gandhiji's famous call to 'Do or Die'. 

Riders of the Purple Sage

Riders of the Purple Sage

Zane Grey

Dover Publications. First published 1912.

Though this book has probably served as a kind of model for numerous writers of Western novels, including Oliver Strange and Max Brand, it differs in one key respect from all of them. It has a woman at the centre of the story, and the male characters all either help her or hinder her in her efforts to save and keep the family ranch. Jane Withersteen is the young (and of course beautiful) heroine who is left all alone to manage her father's ranch. She has a small bunch of loyal cowboys, younger than even her, who can be trusted to do as she bids, but who cannot be relied upon to face down the advances of the local chieftain, a Mormon 'Elder' called Tull. Tull wants to add Jane to his religiously sanctioned harem, and her farm to his already extensive property. Then Lassiter rides in. He is a gunman, initally disdained as an immoral criminal by Jane and her men, and indeed also by Tull and his men. But he stands up to the depredations of Tull and thereby gains Jane's respect, and eventually her love. In the end, she has to flee the country in his company, leaving the ranch behind for the powerful Mormon church to annexe, though Tull and all his men are killed.

There are extensive descriptions of the pastureland (overgrown with purple sage bushes) on which the action takes place, and much of the Wild West way of life described here is familiar to me from books and movies, all produced later, and probably leading off from this one. Even some of the specific locations and the actions connected with them are familiar. There is, for example, a hidden valley, accessible by only a narrow, hidden path over the mountain, with a small gold mine in the middle, where a couple of the lesser characters, Bess and Venters, spend a season, resting from illness and injuries and hoarding up the little gold that the mine yields. This scene invokes deja vu - 'Mackenna's Gold' and one of the 'Sudden' novels come to mind. Likewise, a large rock, balancing at the edge of a cliff, plays a crucial role in the final denouement, again a feature that has appeared in many books and movies - including the 2015 movie 'Mad Max: Fury Road'. 

But compared to the later Wild West books and movies, the action is slow, and the gunfights barely worthy of that name. There is none of the business of two strong men coming face to face on Main Street to match their gun-play skills at high noon. But it deserves its status of a minor classic, being, probably, among the very first books of the genre of the 'Western'.

In Xanadu

In Xanadu. A Quest

William Dalrymple

Bloomsbury. First published 1990.

In 1986 William Dalrymple, now a well-known interpreter of modern India to the West and to Westernised Indians, and the organiser of the glitzy annual Jaipur Literary Festival, was a student at the University of Cambridge, UK, when he applied for and obtained a scholarship to travel along the route taken all those centuries ago by Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu in China (then Mongolia). The book is an easy-to-read backpacking travelogue, narrating Dalrymple's more or less open-minded encounters with a variety of cultures and situations, all of which he approaches with an easy patronizing attitude typical of such travellers and such books. The fact that these encounters are mainly with ancient civilisations recently freed from the colonial burden lends an additional asymmetrical dimension to them, missing from the travel books of, say, Bill Bryson. One may argue that Dalrymple was a callow youth, a product of the late (or post) hippy environment that sent droves of white youth out East to gain 'mystic knowledge' and 'wisdom'. However, Dalrymple himself acknowledges no such motivation. He simply wants to travel, and to seek distraction from the mundaneness of his University curriculum. And therefore there is in the book a lack of any kind of self-consciousness, or any obvious expression of being conscious about the asymmetry. As Dalrymple notes in the 'Acknowledgements', which he wrote 26 years later, the book 'records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naive and deeply Anglocentic undergraduate. Indeed my 21 year old self - bumptious, cocky and self-confident, quick to judge and embarassingly slow to hesitate before stereotyping entire nations - is a person I now feel mildly disapproving of;...'

Be that as it may, if we filter out all the bumptiousness and suppress our resentment at the white man, a relatively poor or middle-class white man, being able to so easily go where he pleases all across the globe, the book is an extremely interesting, though narrow and impressionistic view of the countries he travels through - Israel, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and China. He ultimately reaches Xanadu, to the north of Beijing, only to be disappointed by the lack of any remaining hints of the past grandeur described by Marco Polo. All-in-all a very readable, light book.

The Museum of Innocence. By Orhan Pamuk

The Museum of Innocence

Orhan Pamuk

Translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely

Faber and Faber. First published 2009

Kamal is a wealthy young man in Istanbul in the 1970s, about to be engaged to be married to Sibel, a girl from his own class. About two months before the grand engagement party, he goes to a shop to buy a handbag for her, and suddenly falls in love with the shop girl, Fusun. Fusun is distantly related 'poor cousin', whom he has known from childhood and vaguely met on and off since then, but her beauty strikes him with full force only now. He has no trouble seducing her, and from then on, for the next couple of months, they meet regularly in a flat his parents have set apart for him, for some his most divine moments of sex. The rest of the book tells of what happens over the next couple of years as Kamal breaks his engagement to Sibel, and slowly gains the acceptance of Fusun's orthodox family, in the process neglecting his business. The story ends in tragedy, as all 'great' love stories must. Fusun dies in a car accident, and Kamal is left to pick up the pieces of their life together, almost literally, and arrange them in a 'Museum of Innocence'. 

I am writing this a couple of years after I had read the book, and realise that I have forgotten most of the details. What stays is with me is Pamuk's description of Istanbul upper-middle class and middle class life in the 1960s and early 70s. It is much as I imagine such life would have been in Bombay or Calcutta at about the same time, though this I gather only from some little personal experience on the fringes of that kind of society, and some reading. Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' and Vikram Seth's 'A Suitable Boy' illustrate comparable lifestyles. Also what stays with me about the book is the description of the Museum that Kamal has made by collecting bits and pieces of his life with Fusun - a lost earring, movie tickets, some pieces of furniture with special connotations for him, and so on. The narrator, Kamal, connects each item with some specific incident in the romance, and builds the story as a kind of a tour through the Museum. The writing is leisurely, slow even, actually a bit too slow for my tastes. I did not find the book especially noteworthy. It is more than 700 pages long, and requires an investment of time and effort which is not repaid, neither in terms of stimulating thought, nor in terms of reading pleasure.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? By Mindy Kaling.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Mindy Kaling

Three Rivers Press. First published 2011

Mindy Kaling is a very successful and famous writer/actor in American TV. She is born in US, I think, to Indian parents, and her second name is an abbreviation of Chokalingam, her father's name, who happens to be distantly related to me. So that, in fact, is my real interest in this book, which is addressed to American young-adult women, and not to Indian old men. Mindy is not physically a stereotypical stage, TV or movie heroine, and would be difficult to think of as a natural for her chosen career. But with her immense writing and acting talent, and her confident personality she has defined an attractive role for herself, one which does not require her to, presumably, change her physique or her personality. (This can happen only in America, I think. It would have been impossible in India. M. S. Subbalakshmi is a case in point. Despite her terrific musical talent, she had to completely suppress her personality and her background in order to be successful.)  

This book is vaguely biographical, and something in the nature of PGW's 'Bring on the Girls'. There are less anecdotes, however, and there things like the list of her favourite moments in TV comedy - things that would be interesting or funny only to a young American audience. Her writing is breezy and never very deep, but one can always sense the clarity and firmness of purpose with which she went about achieving her success. But except for this meta-story the book does not have much substance. It's not even very funny. 

Cities of Salt. By Abdelrahman Munif

Cities of Salt

Abdelrehman Munif

Translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux 

Vintage International. First published in Arabic in 1984.


This is a brilliant epic narration of the effect of the discovery of oil in the sands of Arabia on the pre-modern tribes that lived there. The story begins in a Wadi, an oasis, where exists a bucolic and pastoral lifestyle in harmony with the changing seasons, the availability of water and the regular arrival and departure of transiting caravans. The village social hierarchies are rigidly set, as they have been for centuries, comfortable, even if inequitable. The first faint inclination that everything is about to change comes from reports of foreigners, Americans, going from place to place in the desert, making mysterious measurements. A small bunch of these men also lands up in the Wadi, but soon departs. Their departure does not entirely soothe the dark fears that some of the elders have of what is portended. Their representations to the Emir, the local representative of the sultan, are met with only soothing platitudes. Soon the Americans return, and start setting up the oil extraction facilities. In the process they destroy the social system and the ecology of the place, displace hundreds of Bedouin tribesman from their ancestral lands, and annihilate a whole way of life. They find use for the skills of some of the tribesmen, who now become their servants and recruiting agents, inducting many of their fellow-tribesmen into unskilled, poorly paid labour on what was formerly their own land. A new hierarchy arises, and those who were once at the top are now with the rest at the bottom. Some rebel, and vanish into the desert to live nomadic slightly unlawful lives. Others migrate to the nearest towns and cities as refugees of an onrushing modernity. New forms of marginal employment arise. A port city is newly built, to serve as an oil trans-shipment facility. This necessitates the construction of plush quarters for the American, complete with air conditioned club houses and swimming pools. And not far away, but on a distant point in space-time, workers quarters are built - hot, airless sheds with tin roofs and cramped beds. A town grows up to serve the port, and some Western-educated Arabs start medical, legal and other professional services, leading to another point of contention and friction between the old and the new. The Emir, meanwhile, totally neglects his responsibilities to his people. He is well and thoroughly bribed, not just with money and services, but also with modern gadgets - a radio, a telescope, a camera. The story concludes at about this point, when one by one, the hold-outs of the old civilization pass away, and their way of life ends with them.

The book tells a tale that is full of echoes from around the world and from all times, that of a new civilization, a new way of life, not necessarily a better one, replacing the old. The story fits what is happening even now, for example in the hills and forests of Orissa or in Kudankulam. An ironic version of a part of the story is seen in the present day happenings in the Arabian Gulf countries - the Arabs are the new Americans, and Indians, Pakistanis and other South Asians are cast in the role of the exploited Bedouins. 

The writing is observant and fluid, as is the translation. There is some humour, especially in the confrontations of the Emir with modernity. The emotions are generally underplayed, and the rage and the depression that probably agitated the writer are not displayed. Though the narration is quite powerful for all that, it is difficult to understand why this book, and others by this writer, are banned (as noted in the blurb) in various Arabian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia.    

Sparkling Cyanide. By Agatha Christie

Sparkling Cyanide

Agatha Christie

St. Martin's Paperbacks. First published 1944.

A nicely told mystery about a young woman who apparently took her own life, rather bizarrely in the course of a dinner party. The story begins about a year later when there are premonitions of a similar repeat killing. Turns out, obviously, that the first death was murder, and the second is prevented. But how this happens, and how it is detected, is cleverly and charmingly related. The detective is not any of Christie's usuals - not Poirot or Marple, or even Tommy Tuppence. I doubt if the rather staid and colourless Chief Inspector Kemp appears in any other of her stories. 

William The Fourth. By Richmal Crompton

William The Fourth

Richmal Crompton

Macmillan Children's Books. First published 1924.

Fourteen rather brief stories describing William up to his usual shenanigans. Enjoyable reading, despite being repetitive. The first story pays passing heed to the left-wing political reaction to the gilded age. William's teenage brother and his friends set out to distribute wealth more fairly, but quickly change their minds when William, and his friends, redistribute their brothers' possessions. I have come across the same tired argument several times, both in comic settings, e.g. in PGW, as well in in more serious ones, e.g. in discussions with friends. It always fails to convince. Here of course, it is only a peg on which to hang a comic story, and may not actually reflect Crompton's politics. The other stories follow the standard hilarious templates. William has his photograph taken; helps unite a pair of lovers; has fun in the costume of a bear; takes his prim and proper aunt out to the fair, with surprising results; kidnaps a pretty and friendly little girl, who is quite willing to join in the fun; has a briefly riotous time in London; advertises and helps one of the local 'mom and pop' sweet shops over its corporate rival; manages to saddle a cat with two owners; arranges a show; and so on. Nice. 

For Bread Alone. By Mohamed Choukri

For Bread Alone

Mohamed Choukri. Translated from Arabic by Paul Bowles.

Telegram. First published 1973

This is a clear-eyed, unsentimental narration of the pre-teen to teenage years of the author as he was growing up desperately poor in Morocco in the early 1950s. His father was a brutal man who killed one of the author's brothers and allowed many more of his siblings to die by neglect. Desperate for food, for bare survival, Choukri roamed the streets of Tangiers and other towns. He stole, cheated, did odd jobs, sold drugs, tried his hand at pimping, everything. He had many encounters with the police, and once during a jail term, was introduced to Arabic poetry. That struck a spark in him, igniting a fire to learn to read and write, to become literate and to become a litterateur eventually.

The book is brief and sparse. There is no attempt to philosophize or to apologize. There is no exaggeration of the troubles, no sentimental navel-gazing of how things might have been different, better. There is not much idea of the political struggle for independence from France that was then ongoing. The book has an intellectual force that is belied both by its size and by the lack of widespread recognition for the author and his works.     

Vairamuthu Sirukathaigal

Varimuthu Sirukathaigal

Vairamuthu

Surya Literature (P) Ltd. First published as a collection 2015.

The book is a collection of short stories that Vairamuthu, the Tamil film lyricist and poet, first published in the weekly 'Kumudum'. There are forty stories in all, each of about 10 pages in length. They deal with a set of human emotions, in a range of backgrounds. The first story, for example, talks about a man working in the US, unable to attend his mother's lonely funeral in an Indian old age home. Other stories are of a similar nature. Some take place in urban settings, others in distinctly rural areas, apparently untouched by 'civilization'. Some are about the very poor and destitute, others about wealthy aristocrats, many about the middle class. There are a scattering of love stories, mostly with unhappy endings. There are few rather raw descriptions of sex. Some descriptions almost seem deliberately designed to disgust -  but that too is a human emotion, after all. One story is set in the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. It describes a man, trapped in the rubble with his love, keeping her alive by feeding her his urine! The story seems based on a real life occurrence during a building collapse in Bangalore, when two men kept alive by drinking each other's urine - or so it was reported. 

Altogether, the stories themselves are unimpressive, pushing banal and rather reactionary ideas about human relationships - though I am sure many fans of Vairamuthu, and the author himself, would strongly contest the use of these adjectives. Nevertheless, that's how I saw the work, suitable only to offer the middle class reader of the 'Kumudum' minor titillation as well as the momentary false comfort of being a consumer of 'literature'. The language is inventive and, as may be expected, lyrical. Many of the images Vairamuthu creates with his words are startlingly original. Also, the rural dialects of Tamil seem well-represented - though, not being much of a reader in Tamil, I hesitate to say too much about this. There are however too many puns, detracting from the seriousness of the story. In fact, often, even his serious images do not contribute to the flow, but seem to exist only to demonstrate the author's literary virtuosity.     

Superforecasting. By Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner

Superforecasting. The Art and Science of Prediction

Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner

Penguin Random House. First published 2015.

Philip Tetlock is a professor at the Wharton School of Management in USA. So right away we have an idea what the target audience is. I don't, I hope, fit the profile of a typical member of that audience, but all the same the book made interesting reading, even if the take-away lessons (a book of this sort is obviously built around such take-away lessons) were not particularly exciting. 

Tetlock and his collaborators ran a series of sociological experiments over a period of many years. They recruited thousands of volunteers from all walks and stations of life - well, not all; surely the uppermost and the very lowest branches of society would be vastly under-represented - and asked them to make predictions about all sorts of real-world events, such as the situation in West Asia, or the price of oil, or the possibility of conflict in Africa, or North Korea going nuclear, etc., etc. The events were tracked, and the predictions were matched against the actual outcomes. As far as I could make out from the book, the questions were formulated as binaries - yes or no. But the answers, especially in the later, more sophisticated rounds, had probabilities attached to them. The experimenters devised ways of rigorously and quantitatively evaluating the answers and could score each of the participants, on how well their predictions differed from random. They could thus identify some participants who did very well, over a period of time. They went back to these people, whom they dubbed 'superforecasters', studied their habits and came up with a list of common characteristics that could help anyone, so they say, make more meaningful predictions about anything at all. 

As would be expected in such a book, each rule is given a chapter to itself. One or two personal anecdotes, sometimes involving a superforecaster, introduces each chapter. Then the rule is stated and explained, with a great deal of padding. (After all, without the stories and the repetitive explanations, this would not be a book, only a rather extended review article in a scientific journal.) At the end of the book, authors helpfully summarize the take-away lessons, which I quote below.

1. 'Triage', i.e. work only on questions that you think are possible to answer.

2. 'Break seemingly impossible problems into tractable sub-problems'.

3. 'Strike the right balance between inside and outside views', i.e. those of experts in the field and those of complete lay-persons. Note the key word here is 'right', and each question will have its own 'right balance'.

4. 'Strike the right balance between under-reacting and over-reacting to evidence'.

5. 'Look for clashing causal forces at work for each problem'.

6. 'Strive to distinguish as many degrees of doubt as the problem permits, but no more'.

7. 'Strike the right balance between under- and overconfidence, between prudence and decisiveness'.

8. 'Look for errors behind your mistakes, but beware of rear-view mirror hindsight biases'.

9. 'Bring out the best in others and let others bring out the best in you'.

10. 'Master the error-balancing bicycle', i.e. practice predictions by using errors to correct just the right amount.

11. 'Don't treat commandments as commandments', i.e. know when to go beyond these rules.

These eleven rules or commandments are almost all of them pure management-speak. There is however some truth in them, and while following them is unlikely to dramatically improve one's personal or professional life, or one's finances, reading this book is not a bad way to spend a day or two. 

A Partisan's Daughter. By Louis de Bernieres

A Partisan's Daughter

Louis de Bernieres

Vintage Books. First published 2008.

This is another very sweet book by de Bernieres. It is much simpler than his other novels such as 'Birds Without Wings'. The story is straightforward. It is London in the mid 1970s. Roza is the daughter of a Serbian partisan who fought against the Nazis alongside Marshall Tito. Chris is a boring, and bored, English middle class medical representative, making painfully self-conscious efforts to escape his dead-end home, inhabited by a stodgy wife whom he calls 'the great white loaf'. One day, in an uncharacteristically adventurous mood, he sees Roza on the road, thinks she is prostitute, and tries to pick her up. She turns down his offer, but allows him to take her home - a broken down apartment in a building marked for demolition. Here, over the next few weeks or months, during repeated visits by Chris, Roza narrates her story, from early teenage in a united Yugoslavia, just breaking up into its various tribal components, to the streets of London and her current position. 

Alternating in narration between Roza and Chris, the book describes how Roza learnt the first facts of life at her home and at the University, her first love, her first heartbreak, her flight over the border to Trieste, how she got a job as a cook and lover on a sailing boat, her illegal entry into England, her experiences as a hostess in London, and her current status as a reasonably well-off layabout. Chris falls in love with her, but is unable to take it forward. He figures she may also be in love with him, but is not sure. Finally, high on drink, he tries to make love to her, with disastrous consequences.

As I said, a very sweet book, but more novella than novel. The book is set in a large typeface allowing it to go to 280 pages. But even without these publishing tricks, even as a slim novelette, the book is very much worth reading, enjoyable, with the de Bernieres trademark of lovely flowing language and sweetness and light.      

Farthing. By Jo Walton

Farthing

Jo Walton

TOR: Tom Doherty Associates. First published 2006.

Set in the background of a country sliding rapidly into fascism, the book is a murder mystery novel, and at the same time perceptive commentary on the present-day political situation around the world. It's  only grimmer now than it was a decade ago, when the book was published, and Walton's perceptions are now so much more relevant, in 'Modi-fied' India as much as in post-Brexit UK and in Trumpist USA. 'Farthing' is a country house in England, which, in this alternate history, is the seat and the name of the political faction which deposed Churchill and made peace with Germany just after Hitler had occupied France and the rest of Europe. The family party for that weekend at Farthing includes the man who conducted the negotiations with the Third Reich and signed the peace treaty. He is found dead in his bed, murdered, with dramatic marks indicating that it may have been a Jewish conspiracy to repay the man who betrayed them. Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate. In the manner of the classic detective novel, he calls in all the various inhabitants of the manor, one by one, and interviews them. Among them are the owner of the manor, his wife and daughters, and their husbands and lovers. One the husbands is the murdered man. And another is a Jew, who has married the youngest daughter. He is the first and obvious suspect. As the investigation proceeds, there are a couple of attempted murders, and suspicion is cast on each of the inhabitants, in turn. The final solution, when it comes, is satisfying, but the denouement is overtaken by political events, and the book ends on an uncertain and melancholy note.

The story is narrated by two voices. There is the attractive voice of Lucy Kahn, nee Lady Eversley, youngest daughter of Lord Eversley, who owns Farthing. Against family tradition and its politics, indeed against the wishes of all its members, she falls in love with, and marries, the Jew David Kahn. She and her husband are now only barely and grudgingly accepted by the family, and never admitted into the inner circles of confidence. Lucy fears that her innocent husband would be framed for the murder, something which would be all too easy, given the intense discrimination which that race faces in a Britain that has compromised with Hitler. The alternate chapters of the book, written by Lucy, are attractively breathless and deliberately bordering on the silly sometimes. The steel that lies beneath this fluffy exterior however is made apparent in her defense of her husband, especially in the final moments of the book. Altogether, Lucy is a charming character. The other chapters are in third person, mostly describing events from the point of view of Inspector Carmichael. These are straightforward, and most of the police procedures - the interviews, the collecting of clues, the follow-up investigation, the airing of theories - all these take place in these chapters.

The English aristocracy is described to be utterly corrupt and power mad. And the murder is mixed up with politics at the highest level. The men and women are shown to hop in and out of each other's beds almost at will. Lucy and David are exceptions, with their love genuine and strong. Lucy has her own code names for these couplings - 'bognor' for adultery; 'athenian' for a gay relationship; 'roman' for a straight relationship; and 'macedonian' for bisexual. There are other such amusing observations Lucy makes from time to time.

This is a wonderful book, much more than a murder mystery, and yet capable of satisfying on that level too. Walton ostensibly writes in the tradition of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D.James and others of that ilk. But while all those writers, no matter how deep (PDJ) or shallow (AC) psychologically, were adoring in their descriptions of the British upper classes, Walton is like Le Carre, contemptuous of the aristocracy, and firmly left-of-centre. 

Numero Zero. By Umberto Eco

Numero Zero

Umberto Eco

Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon

Harvill Secker. First published 2015

After 'Foucault's Pendulum' and 'The Prague Cemetery', this is the third of Umberto Eco's novels that deals with a deep, imaginary but widely believed conspiracy. The writing is far more lighthearted than the other two. Eco always writes with a mischievous sense of humour, spinning wild stories with a straight face, and making connections between virtually all events of importance. In this book, he is explicit about that, going so far as to choose E.M. Forster's words 'Only connect!' for the epigraph. And then proceeds to connect up current Italian politics with, first, the possibly faked death of Mussolini, and then with his possibly real death. 

The framing device is also a conspiracy. It introduces a media magnate - probably a Silvio Berlusconi surrogate - who wishes to publish a fake paper in order to scare and blackmail various celebrities, most of whom would have something to hide. He finances a small team of failed journalists to put together twelve issues of a paper with fake news. These first set of issues would be, he says, a model, and they would contain made-up news, based on events of the previous years. Thus they would be numbered issue 1 volume 0, issue 2 volume 0, and so on, leading to the title of the book. In describing the editorial conferences, Eco clearly savages actual modern day media practices, and not only of outlets like Fox News or Times Now. 

One of the team, slightly less cynical than the others, comes with the story of Mussolini's faked death. He says the dictator was not shot in 1945, as is officially held, but escaped to Argentina. He connects this episode with secretive fascist factions in many respectable institutions, even the Vatican. He builds a convincing narrative of these groups biding their time, building up their strength, and finally attempting a fascist coup in Italy to restore the dictatorship of 'Il Duce' (who is all while hidden in Argentine), only to be thwarted in their attempts by his sudden and importune actual death. He plans to investigate and gather evidence for his story, only to be murdered in mysterious circumstances. At this the rest of the team panics, and goes into hiding from the conspirators. At the end of the story, the narrator, who is one of failed journalists, starts to believe that in fact there is and was no conspiracy, and his fears are products of his own mind to connect up and try to find a common explanation for random coincidences. 

The book is funny, but not farcical. It can be, and is probably meant to be read as a serious but cynical indictment of the state of affairs in the media and politics, especially in Italy. Of course, with some essentially cosmetic changes of name, place and time, the stories would fit India, the US, and perhaps other countries as well. The book, in any case, is a brief, but accurate representation of the zeitgeist around the world. Umberto Eco includes as part of the conspiracy the possible murder of Pope John Paul I after only a month in office. He hints that this happened to save some of the officials of the Vatican Bank from having their embezzlement of the bank money exposed. The exact same theme connected to the Pope's death also occurs in the movie 'The Godfather Part III'. 

    

They Do It With Mirrors. By Agatha Christie.

They Do It With Mirrors

Agatha Christie

HarperCollins Publishers. First published 1952

Another murder set in a rich country house, with a fairly large cast of conventional AC characters. The owner of the house also runs an institution to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents on the same grounds, and that leads to some tensions that are exploited to lend weight to the story. Once again, I could guess, fairly early on, who the murderer is. So that makes it four times in the last four AC books. I hope that at least the next couple are less predictable. 

The narrative is full of British right-wing views and casual racism, which are unacceptable now, six decades later. But again, I should not take 'a spade to a souffle'.

  

Love and Math. By Edward Frenkel

Love and Math. The Heart of Hidden Reality

Edward Frenkel

Basic Books. First published 2013.

The book traces the early career path of the author, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is well-respected for his mathematics, and popular due to this book, which made it to the New York Times bestseller list, as well due to a movie about art and maths that he produced, directed and acted in. He is the collaborator of the well-known physicist-mathematician Edward Witten. 

Frenkel was born in Russia during the late 1960s. He showed precocious mathematical skills, but was unable to have a clear upward trajectory in Russian academia owing to rampant antisemitism. In this book he describes his encounters with the academic bureaucracy in Russia as he came of mathematical age at the time of Glasnost and Perestroika. Interspersed with the inspiring tales of heroic dedication to maths are his wonderful descriptions of the mathematics. He does not shy away from complete and detailed descriptions of the most abstruse mathematical ideas and theorems, offering many detailed proofs, which, however, are largely consigned to the footnotes - not given at the foot of the pages, but collected together at the back. (I wish he had followed a slightly different format - for example setting these more technical portions in smaller type, but along with the main text.) So he starts with the symmetry of numbers, goes on from there to talk about symmetry groups, and different objects that belong to the same symmetry groups - integers, real numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers and imaginary numbers - before going on to braids, which are also represented by the same symmetry operations. He talks about the Langlands program, about Galois groups and finite fields, about the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture and its connection to Fermat's last theorem, about modular forms and automorphic functions, about Riemann surfaces, manifolds, Lie groups, Kac-Moody algebras, automorphic sheaves, gauge theories, quantum duality, fiber bundles and branes. Obviously, in a book read over a week or so, it is impossible to convey anything but the most superficial acquaintance with these ideas. But even with this limitation, Frenkel conveys the beauty, the majesty and the mystery of modern mathematics. The best thing about this book is that excites the reader. It made me confident that the ideas described, while difficult, are not entirely in a different world of understanding, and that with a few years of effort, I, too, could access the concepts in satisfactory depth. Whether I will expend that kind of effort, of course, is an entirely different question. 

Frenkel is a modernist through and through, and has no time to consider, except disparagingly, the idea that the theorems constructed by mathematicians may be one version of the underlying nature of reality. He dismisses post-modernist ideas of the cultural relativism of maths (or of science, in general). In my admittedly extremely humble opinion the Wignerian unreasonable effectiveness of maths is just that - unreasonable. Is maths discovery, or invention?  Frenkel unequivocally calls it discovery. He describes the work mainly of white men (and a few Japanese), but neither acknowledges that fact, nor stops to consider the possible cultural biases that may introduce. 

Frenkel, as a Jew in Russia, had to fight a lot against the kind of prejudice seen, say, by 'lower' castes in India. And while he does not explicitly address politics in this book, his ideas clearly fall into the Universe of the Right. Maybe with good personal reason. 

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side. By Agatha Christie

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

Agatha Christie

Harper Collins Publishers. First published 1962.

The large manor in Miss Marple's village is taken by a famous actress, her husband and her retinue. At a party given by her in aid of a local charity one of the guests is murdered. And Miss Marple solves the murder. The title comes from Tennyson's poem 'The Lady of Shalott', about a lady who is cursed to look at the outside world only by its reflection in a large mirror facing the window. Once, Sir Lancelot passes by, and she sees his image in the mirror. Unable to resist a glance at the original, she turns around. And, 'out flew the web and floated wide, the mirror crack'd from side to side, the curse is upon me, cried, the Lady of Shalott'. I remember this poem from school. In this book, it refers to the indescribable look of near-horror, as though the curse has come upon her, that suddenly comes on the actress's face while receiving some guests, one of whom is eventually murdered. 

I think I have now cracked the AC code. About halfway through the book, I could guess the murderer, though of course, the actual motive, and the modus operandi remain unclear till the end. Those are usually rather contrived in her books, anyway. After my initial guess, I could follow, and appreciate AC's technique of misdirection. Shoals of red herrings are drawn across the reader's path, and each one on the main list of characters is presented as the possible culprit. But to me, these complications only served to solidify my guess more and more, finally to have it shown to be correct.

The first couple of chapters of this book are delightful. Miss Marple is now an old lady, being assisted to live, and resenting it. She shows a wicked sense of humour, missing hitherto in AC's characterisations of her. She also shows a slight come-down from her upper-middle class British bulldog views, and ends up making friends with a proletarian couple. She also teases and is in turn teased, but gently, by the detective policemen who bring the facts of the case to her, and seek her help in solving the murder mystery.    

The Girl in the Spider's Web. By David Lagercrantz

The Girl in the Spider's Web

David Lagercrantz

Based on the characters created by Stieg Larsson

Translated from the Swedish by George Goulding

Maclehose Press. First published 2015

This book is fan fiction. Poor fan fiction, at that. There is very little original in it, except, perhaps, the lack of quality. We meet Michael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander for the fourth time, (after The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, and the two other books) as they try to rescue and look after an autistic savant boy called August, who helps Salander decrypt a file she has downloaded from the NSA server after hacking it. She uncovers a conspiracy by NSA officials and some Russian gangsters to steal industrial secrets and sell them. The story meanders back and forth between Salandar, Blomkvist, various crooks, the police, and the NSA. All characterizations are halfhearted and stereotyped (computer experts are slobs, autistic children are geniuses...), the conversations are boring, and the action sequences are tepid. Only the character of Lisbeth Salander (which Lagercrantz has degraded, but not completely) keeps the interest alive till the end. The first three books in the Millenium series were not great, but at least we had Lisbeth, and we had some great action.  

A Pocket Full of Rye. By Agatha Christie

A Pocket Full of Rye

Agatha Christie

From the Miss Marple Omnibus, HarperCollins Publishers. First published 1953.

A crooked businessman is administered poison along with his breakfast in his country home, and dies in his London office a few hours later. All his family members are suspects. The case is investigated by an Inspector Neele. There are two more deaths - another family member, and one of the maids. The maid's death establishes a tenuous link to Miss Marple who invites herself to the household, makes her own investigation, with some exchange of information with Neele, and solves the case. The narrative mainly follows Neele, but his doings and findings are apparently meant to round out the story, and make a few misdirections. I guessed the murderer about a third of the way into the book, and the motive sometime later. Of course, these books are not mathematical puzzles, so you cannot guess everything. Still, as I remarked elsewhere in this blog, half the fun of reading AC comes from taking a bet with oneself regarding the criminal, and then carefully following the storytelling to try and sniff out the red herrings. Not a bad book, but not one of her best.  

A Caribbean Mystery. By Agatha Christie.

A Caribbean Mystery

Agatha Christie

From Miss Marple Omnibus, Volume II. Harper Collins. First published 1964.

The story is set in a fictional resort island called St Honore in the Caribbean. The resort is run by a British couple, with a background cast of local islanders, some of them blacks. The guests all are white, British, American, a couple of Spanish to provide the exotic suspects, and include Miss Marple. A series of three murders is finally, as usual, solved by the ostensibly goofy Miss Marple. This book is firmly in the middle of the bell curve of AC stories.