In the Penny Press! Ovid and John Masefield!

Some fun and interesting things in this week's London Review of Books and the TLS.

Mark Kishlansky writes a very good, succinct piece on the Restoration, reviewing a new massive two-volume history by Tim Harris. Kishlansky's review is negative, which is surely not something an author wants to read after spending 1100 pages on his subject (we'll see what other critical organs have to say about the books), and one thing he writes distracted me from the rest of his review:

Kings refused to justify their actions, or, as in the case of the secret Treaty of Dover (signed by Charles and Louis in 1670), were deliberately misleading about them. Divine-right monarchs didn't always care about the opinions of their citizens. Kings reigned, a concept so out of fashion as to be almost unrecoverable.

A ruler who believes he acts on God's wishes, who deliberately misleads, and who does what he does without reference to the opinions of even the majority of his people? Such a concept may be "unrecoverable" in the UK, but who in present-day America wouldn't offer a rueful little laugh at the suggestion that it's gone from the world entirely?

Also in this issue, Denis Feeney has a very good, verp penetrating piece on Ovid's exile years. He's reviewing Peter Green's new and excellent translation of Ovid's exile poems, but he takes the opportunity to examine many facets of Ovid's time at Tomis, at the furthest edge of the Roman world.

My only quibble? Feeney writes that Ovid's tragedy 'Medea' is "the only work of his that did not survive to the age of printing." This is hardly the case. Not only does Feeney ignore the raft of little or occasional poems alluded to in Ovid's extant works, but he overlooks the fact that Ovid himself mentions one other work of his we don't have, potentially the most interesting thing he ever wrote: a work in the language of Tomis. For me the idea has always been fascinating - the picture of this most cosmopolitan of poets, exiled from the greatest city in the world and fetched up at the ass-end of nowhere, but still compelled to write - and not only to write, but to seek an immediate audience, even if he had to learn an entirely new language to do it. There's no doubt at all that the world of literature is markedly less for the lack of the great works Ovid would have created if he'd been allowed to remain in Rome (or even if he'd been allowed to return). But even so, the exile poems are weird and sad and a little crazed and ultimately very beautiful, I think, though in a very bleak vein.

Over in the TLS, in addition to a long and masterful damnation by Brian Vickers of the new Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare (after ten or fifteen paragraphs, reading it had all the visceral fascination of watching a bloodsport), there were two fun little bits.

The first was in the letters page, where Richard Boston writes in response to the disclosure last time that Poet Laureate John Masefield would always submit his poems with stamped, addressed envelopes - in case of rejection. Boston writes:

Near the end of Masefield's life, I was working for your predecessor, the late Arthur Crook, on the TLS. One day, A.P. Ryan, who had the not very onerous job of editing the Times's sole book page, sought our advice on what to do about the bard's latest contribution. Masefield had written about a royal visit to Australia. Unfortunately, the old boy had got his wires crossed.
The visit had been to Austria. An easy mistake: the names of both countries begin and end with 'A'. Easy solution: remove the 'al' from 'Australia'. This proved not to be enough. The people of Vienna would still have been not the only ones puzzled by the references to kangaroos and boomerangs.
This may well have been the only occasion on which the stamped addressed envelope had to be used. I have the idea that it may also have been, sadly, the last time Masefield sent in a poem. I do hope that someone, somewhere, somehow has a copy of the Australia poem.




I'd bet my last farthing this plea either turns up the long-lost Australia poem or turns up some egghead clarifying the poet's mistake. I'll keep you posted.

And of course there's the main attraction of the TLS, at least for me: the magisterial smackdown. This is not a sunny, bird-chirping book review where everybody is presumed to be doing their best and if you can't say something nice about somebody, you don't say anything at all. This is the NFL, and sometimes it can be delightful (like, for instance, if you hated your older brother and his book received just such a spanking).

Take the case of Lisa Chiu's new book When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish - and other tales about the genes in your body

Jonathan Hodgkin spends two paragraphs of his three-paragraph review summarizing and describing, and then he finishes with this:

This survey of human genetics, written for a general audience, is readable and sometimes engaging, but it is carelessly written and inconsistent in the level of explanation used. Technical terms are introduced before being adequately explained, and several of the stories are left dangling unsatisfactorily, or ended with a labored pun. Chiu also misses some key points - for example, she writes about the discovery of FOX2P, the first candidate for the 'gene for language', but fails to mention one of its most exciting and suggestive properties, namely its remarkably rapid evolution. Better books of this type have been written, such as Matt Ridley's Genome and Armand Leroi's Mutants. When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish has the advantage of being reasonably up to date, but otherwise there is not much to recommend it.

Hee.

The review stops, as they all do, just one step short of advising the author to go out and kill themselves.

Aside from those two wonderful publications, the only ITPP news comes from this morning's Metro, which has a one-paragraph (naturally) blurb enthusiing about World War Z. So now that all the STUPID people in Boston have been made aware of the book, it only remains for the Globe to tell all the ordinary people and the Phoenix to tell all the smart people. Fingers crossed ...

books! zombies, ponds, and loners!

An abundance, an embarrassment almost, of good reading lately has succeeded entirely in wiping the rancid aftertaste of Bully Boy from my mind. Naturally, this makes me happy - reading is one of my foremost pleasures, so a bad patch of it can make my entire waking life feel a little wrenched.

After A Tale of Two Summers I read Saint Iggy by K.L. Going, the author of the really good teen fiction book Fat Kid Rules the World. Saint Iggy is cut from much the same cloth - a memorable loner as the main character, and graceful, fun, fluid, intelligent writing throughout. Before I was half-way done with it, I'd forgotten my dissatisfactions with A Tale of Two Summers. Saint Iggy is hugely smarter as a book, and part of what lets it be so is the greater trust it reposes in the kids who'll be reading it.

I don't know an open-minded fiction-reading adult who wouldn't love this book strictly on its own merits. It was just the kind of smart, involving fiction that's a pleasure to read.

Just as I was finishing up Saint Iggy I struck broadside by an unlooked-for FANTASTIC book, Max Brooks' World War Z.

The book bills itself as a narrative history of World War Z, in which the nations of the world face annihilation at the hands of ... zombies!

Your cheesiness-alarms are going off, I can hear them from here. You're thinking no novel about zombies can be good in any way, unless in the exclusively silly way done so well by Sci-Fi Channel original movies. And in this case you'd be wrong!

Brooks has done an amazing job here, and he's taken the best - really the only - tone for the job: complete seriousness. He's imagined exactly how a plague of zombies would spread, what responses it would evoke from the living world, and what the long-term consequences would be. This book is twice as well thought-out than John Grisham's last three combined.

If you still don't believe me, if you're just close-minded enough to still be repeating to yourself "Oh, I don't know ... zombies ... doesn't sound like my kind of thing," then try this: try telling yourself that Brooks is just USING zombies as a metaphor for ANY world-wide pandemic - the initial misdiagnoses, the failed containment attempts, the aftermath. OK, so you're too much of a fiction snob to read a zombie novel - but surely you're JUST ENOUGH of a fiction snob to read a zombie ALLEGORY, right?

Of course Brooks ISN'T using zombies as a metaphor for anything else - that's a huge part of what makes this book so damn fun to read. No, this boy's got zombies on the brain, is fascinated by them, and World War Z only benefits from that. This is really the ultimate zombie novel, just like "Dawn of the Dead" is the ultimate zombie movie.

So cast aside your knee-jerk reactions and give World War Z a try! I myself found reading this zombie-Iliad tremendously enjoyable - I'd be willing to be you will too.

And just as I was finishing World War Z I came across a $2 copy of Alexandra Marshall's Still Waters, a natural history of America's freshwater ponds. This book came out in 1978, yet somehow I'd managed to miss it all this time.

Boy, am I glad our paths crossed at last. It's a slightly oversized hardcover with loads of fascinating black-and-white photos of every aspect of pond-life in all four seasons.

But the main drawing point is Marshall's writing, which is personal yet informative and always beautifully done. My young friend Elmo and I could tell you how rare this is - even in nature-writing, which tends to bring out the best in many writers, excellent prose isn't always a given.

Still Waters is out of print, but since it was produced originally to coincide with a Nova special, I'm guessing there's a healthy number of copies floating around out there. If you're at all interested in great nature-writing - and especially if you've ever fallen in love (as I have) with a particular pond or fen in all its seasons, you'll be well rewarded by hunting down a copy for yourself.

So there you have it, boom, boom, boom! Three really good books in a row, and my reading equilibrium is restored!

Up next? J.E. Lendon's book on warfare in classical antiquity, Soldiers & Ghosts. I confess to being a bit leery, since it was history done poorly that derailed my reading in the first place. But the book comes highly recommended by a friend whose opinion I trust (about books anyway ... he has deplorable taste in baseball teams), so it will be the meat of my next two hours.