Category Archives: Book reviews

2018, 279 p & 60 p. footnotes

Perhaps it’s a function of geography and economics, but here in Australia at this time we are more concerned about the rising power of China than we are about the rising power of Russia. Nonetheless, we’ve been aware of it through reading about the U.S. election and the Mueller Report, through watching with curiosity the Maidan protests in Ukraine, and more tragically through the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH17, which prompted particular Australian attention because of the large number of Australians on board.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Russia, Europe and America’ and with its very current focus, it seems a little incongruous that it should be written by a historian, rather than a political scientist.But historian Timothy Snyder is, and he was a close associate and friend of the late Tony Judt, another acclaimed 20th century historian. Echoing the title of F.A. Hayek’s treatise on market liberalization, The Road to Serfdom, Snyder’s book explores the danger posed to the Enlightenment values of reason and reasonableness through two linked historical narrative forces: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity.

The narrative of inevitability is the sense that the future is just more of the present, with nothing further to be done, as exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s hubristic and premature claim of the triumph of Western-style liberal democracy marking “The End of History“.  Communism prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had its own politics of inevitability: “nature permits technology, technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia”. (p.7)

When the politics of inevitability collapses, as it did in 1991 for the Soviet Union and in the wake of the GFC for Western economies, it ushers in the politics of eternity. He focuses on Russia, but any country could slip into the politics of eternity (and indeed, perhaps several other countries are already doing so). The politics of eternity places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood (p.8), where progress gives way to doom, crises are manufactured and manipulated, and citizens experience elation and outrage at short interval (p.8). In both forms of politics, history and facts are used in particular ways.

Inevitability and eternity translate facts into narratives. Those swayed by inevitability see every fact as a blip that does not alter the overall story of progress; those who shift to eternity classify every new event as just one more instance of a timeless threat. Each masquerades as history; each does away with history. Inevitability politicians teach that the specifics of the past are irrelevant, since anything that happens is just grist for the mill of progress. Eternity politicians leap from one moment to another, over decades or centuries, to build a myth of innocence and danger. They imagine cycles of threat in the past, creating an imagined pattern that they realize in the present by producing artificial crises and daily drama. (p. 9)

Snyder argues that Russia was the first 21st century power to reach into the politics of eternity, and that it has been increasingly successful in exporting it to other countries.  He points to Vladimir Putin’s championing of the fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin, an early critic of Bolshevism who was expelled from Russia in 1922. Impressed by the ideas of Hitler and Mussolini, Ilyin proposed a lost, innocent “Russian Spirit” which would throw of the Bolshevism inflicted on an innocent Russia by the West, which would be rescued by a manly, virile redeemer who would unite his people to welcome God to return to the world and help Russia bring an end to history everywhere.  Vladimir Putin identified Ilyin as his chosen chronicler of Russia’s past (even though Ilyin was no historian); he organized the repatriation of Ilyin’s remains from Switzerland to Moscow for reburial in 2005, and he ‘brought home’ his papers from a university in Michigan. His essays were reprinted and reportedly, given to all Russian civil servants.

The purpose of his book, Synder claims, is “an attempt to win back the present for historical time, and thus win back historical time for politics” by “trying to understand one set of interconnected events in our own contemporary world history, from Russia to the United States, at a time when factuality itself was put to the question.” (p.9). His book moves roughly chronologically from 2011 onwards in six chapters titled as opposites: Individualism or Totalitarianism; Succession or Failure; Integration or Empire; Novelty or Eternity; Truth or Lies; Equality or Oligarchy.  He identifies two of Ilyin’s strategies at play: first, identifying enemies to the Russian spirit – homosexuals, Muslims, Jews, separatists, and second, exporting to other countries an attack on truth and facts by outright lies and manipulation, with the aim of using disinformation to divide and polarize democracies (most particularly U.S. Europe and Britain).

We saw the first of these at play in the Breslin school massacre and the Moscow theatre siege, which were blamed on Chechen separatists. With the invasion of Crimea, the poisoning of Alexander Litvenenko and the Skiprals in London, the ‘intervention’ in Ukraine, and the shootdown of MH17 we saw outright lies as the Russian government denied all involvement despite clear evidence to the contrary. We have seen how Vladimir Putin models himself as a hyper-masculine, horse-riding, shirtless ‘redeemer’- and indeed, with the exception of Angel Merkel and Marine Le Pen, women have no place at all in Snyder’s book. And with the Mueller report (which had not been released at the time of publication of this book) we see Russian influence in American politics, even if Mueller did not directly link it with Trump personally. Snyder suggests that Russia is content to use Trump as a ‘useful idiot’, pumping him up as a ‘successful businessman’ and allowing him to sow his own distrust and manipulation of facts. Russia is happy for the European Union to turn on itself and splinter through Brexit,  and it has the computer networks and resources to give prominence to far-right politicians in the West and prod these forces into action.

This book is meticulously footnoted, drawing both on newspaper articles (as one might expect in such a recent history) and academic texts. It is a fairly complex read, and in joining the dots it ranges across countries and events. In doing so, he takes the time to explain the event before weaving it into his broader argument. I found this book chilling and depressing. I’m not sure that individuals are going to have the strength to resist such powerful forces, and everywhere I look – America, Britain, Europe – I find even more reasons to despair.

Perhaps he didn’t want to end up at such a bleak destination because he closes his book by arguing the importance of truth; distinguishing between the true and the appealing, and resisting cynicism. “To seek the truth means finding a way between conformity and complacency, towards individuality.”(p 278)

If we see history as it is, we see our places in it, what we might change, and how we might do better. We halt our thoughtless journey from inevitability to eternity, and exit the road to unfreedom. We begin a politics of responsibility. (p.279)

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 9

2010, 314p.

I’ve been in Brisbane for the last week, and it seemed a perfect time to read Matthew Condon’s Brisbane, part of New South’s suite of books  about Australia’s capital cities written by established literary authors who had grown up in that city.  This is the first time I’ve read one of these books about a city other than my own, and you can read my response to Sophie Cunningham’s take on Melbourne (my city) here.

These books are not history books in themselves, but are instead a literary response to the city.  The author can choose her/his own approach.  But history is almost inevitably drawn into the analysis, and I was a little surprised that Condon didn’t draw more on his own work into Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Brisbane of the 1970s and 1980s, which informs his own trilogy of the time (Three Crooked Kings, Jacks and Jokers and All Fall Down– none of which I have read).

Instead, there are two motifs that Condon uses in his book.  The first is ‘the boy’, who I strongly suspect is Condon himself, who hidden under his Queenslander house in Brisbane in the 1960s, draws a map of the city in the dirt, marking his own significant places.  The second motif is an obelisk placed in the city under the aegis of Frank Cumbrae-Stewart, then president of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, as part of the centenary of the settlement of Moreton Bay. The odd thing is that the obelisk is placed in a most inhospitable place that is not the right spot anyway. You can read about my own adventures trying to find the damned thing here.

The book moves slowly in a roughly chronological fashion, but there are lots of flash-forwards and backs, with the memories of ‘the boy’ interwoven throughout. The writing is beautiful and evocative, steeped in Brisbane sunshine and a little abashed at Brisbane’s try-hard attempts at sophistication and modernity.  I suspect that this whole series is aimed at readers who are very familiar with the cities described, and I found myself a little frustrated at the lack of a map and the easy assumptions made by the author that a stranger would immediately know suburbs and locations.   But this insider-ism honours the intent of the books to be travel-books-without-leaving-home, written for those ‘at home’ rather than visitors. They are impressionistic rather than instructive.

That said, I think that my experience of Brisbane was enhanced by having read this book, despite being an outsider, and next time I go to another city featured in the series, I’ll read that city’s  book too.

My rating: 8.5

Sourced from: ebook from SLV.

2019, 231 p.

In August 2007 an article about the Vietnam Veterans Motorcycle Club appeared in the  Good Weekend magazine insert that accompanies The Age. Written by journalist Mark Dapin, it was based on interviews with members from the Queensland chapter, hard-drinking men, many of whom suffered with PTSD. They told Dapin of seeing (and even being involved in) atrocities during their tours of duty, of being flown home in the dark in a futile attempt to avoid protestors at the airport, of being spat at, being jeered as ‘baby killers’, having paint poured on them, and smarting from the absence of welcome home marches.  He reported what he heard.

But after over 160 interviews, six years of study, a non-fiction book and a Ph.D. on the topic, Mark Dapin would no longer write that original article in the same way. In a way, this book is a long mea culpa for his easy acceptance of what he had been told. In his opening chapter ‘The myths I helped to make’, he writes

I no longer believe a significant number of people in the 1960s and early 1970s regarded Vietnam veterans as baby-killers, bludgers or morons- although negative stereotypes of the returned men existed in some circles, and those stereotypes altered, mutated and probably intensified from the late 1970s through to the mid 1980s…I do not think Australian students poured paint over returning soldiers in Australia in 1972 – or that they held any protests against returning soldiers that year. I doubt that many – if any- Australian veterans were spat upon. I do not think many – if any – Australians committed large-scale atrocities. I know no serviceman was flown home in the middle of the night specifically to ‘avoid protestors’. But I also know that I wrote my story in good faith. I believed what I was told, and I am certain the men who spoke to me felt they were telling the truth. (p.9)

Dapin’s book addresses the most prominent myths that have arisen out of the Vietnam War. Many of them are not even recognized as myths: most of them circulate in everyday commentary, propelled by politicians, journalists and historians like Paul Ham, whose Vietnam: The Australian War is too enthusiastically embraced by veterans as the definitive history of the war.

In succeeding chapters, Dapin unpacks the various myths attached to the popularly-received image of Vietnam. There have been claims, most stridently in Ham’s book but often echoed by Vietnam veterans themselves, that  no national servicemen were forced to serve in Vietnam and that, in fact, they were all given a chance not to go. In his appendix Dapin publishes the correspondence between radiographer David Wittner and the Minister for the Army Andrew Peacock that makes it clear that national servicemen were sent to Vietnam against their will.

He looks at the ballot system used for selecting National Servicemen.  One of the most widely-distributed myths is that Normie Rowe was falsely drafted into the army (still referenced on his Wikipedia page).  Dapin explains there was no conspiracy to enlist this pop singer: his birthday did come up in a supplementary ballot for men who were out of the country, as Rowe was, during their registration period.

He rebuts the idea that there were no welcome home parades as soldiers returned. It was the perception of a lack of welcome that prompted the Welcome Home Parade and National Reunion in Sydney in 1987, fourteen years after the last soldier returned.  In his appendix is a table of the sixteen welcome homes of the Vietnam Years, listing the estimated size of the crowd and the number of marchers (although I note that there are none in Melbourne?). He cites multiple newspaper articles from the time that laud the enthusiasm of the crowd and make mention, if at all, of only ‘a few’ demonstrators. At the sixteen parades he identifies, there was no blood thrown, although one protester, Nadine Jensen, did smear two men with red paint, kerosene and turpentine, at a Sydney welcome-home parade on 8 June 1966. That was the only incident of its kind. The only time an appreciable number of demonstrators confronted returning soldiers was when 20 demonstrators tried to join the end of the parade with their banners on 9 December 1969 in Adelaide.

Likewise, he could find no newspaper evidence at all of airport demonstrations against returning soldiers, although he did find evidence of a protest against the South African surf-life saving team which was heavily reported, and a small three-person protest against Dr Benjamin Spock, opponent of the Vietnam War when he arrived at Brisbane Airport in 1971. It is true that the soldiers often flew in at night, and the army’s own bureaucratic procedures delayed them until the early hours of the morning. But the nighttime scheduling was not to avoid protest but occurred instead to accommodate the daytime commercial needs of the airline companies who were providing the flights.

To the extent that there was jeering and anti-Vietnam protest, Dapin suggests that this arose later, in the 1980s onwards. There was  a report of spitting directed towards Harold Holt, and another at the May Day celebrations in Melbourne in 1972.  There were, of course, the huge Moratorium demonstrations, and in Adelaide, there was a confrontation between demonstrators and civilian- dressed soldiers from the 3RAR in May 1970.

Even the song ‘I Was Only 19’ has a complex history. Frankie Hunt, on whom the song is loosely based, changed his story about his Vietnam experience as he told it in 1987, 2005 and 2015 increasingly incorporating all the myths and tropes of thrown fruits, epithets, and calls of ‘child killers’. Yet Hunt himself did not ally himself with conservative forces and marched with the anti-nuclear movements.  Dapin does suggest that some of the so-called airport demonstrations were in fact anti-rape demonstrations of the 1980s, prompted by the women’s movement. Caution abounds as he writes:

I might feel emboldened to argue that the Vietnam-era national serviceman symbolized a certain kind of tough, disciplined, militarised masculinity that fell out of favour in the 1970s…that the later drafts of soldiers felt that Australia had shifted socially while they were away in Vietnam, and altered even further once the war ended… (p 202)

It is one thing to disprove myths: it is another to grapple with the question of why his interviewees told the narratives they did.  He cites Frank Bongiorno who notes that history has defined itself as a form of truth-telling in the face of myth (p.205). It makes it easy to condemn ‘oral history’ but he accords with the words of C. P. Stacey, the official historian of the Canadian Army in the Second World War who wrote

One very seldom encounters a deliberate liar [but] there were considerable numbers who lied to me while honestly believing they were telling the absolute truth. (cited on p. 205)

So what has happened here? He suggests that perhaps Australian veterans have incorporated the stories of American veterans, both in their homecoming response, and even the committal of atrocities. Film depictions have taken on the appearance of memory. Events from one phenomenon like the anti-rape demonstrations become merged into others, like the  homecomings. Stories, quoting unidentified sources, are published and become incorporated into individual narratives and become solidified into historical ‘fact’. Historians and journalists are squeamish about rebutting assertions presented as fact by a man sitting directly in front of them, and there is not enough rigour in fact-checking afterwards.  He is perplexed that the story of the conservative, pro-war forces, which dominated politics during the 1960s, has remained untold.

It seems to me now that mythology dogs and distorts the Australian soldier’s Vietnam experience, from its beginnings (for some) in the workings of the national servicemen’s birthdate-lottery selection process – to its end, in the lost memories of the 16 often enormous, enthusiastic wartime welcome home parades…when I talk about some veterans’ stories as mythological, I do not consider them to be mistaken or dishonest, but tales that are based on archetypes- the rejected returning serviceman; the soldier as a dupe of higher powers; the man-hating feminist; the fanatical agitator- and told to make sense of subsequent events. It has been said [by oral historian Alessandro Portelli] that ‘what informants believe is indeed a historical fact (that is, the fact they believe it) as much as what really happened’ but people believe all kinds of things, for reasons that range across the whole breadth of human experience. (p.17, 18)

In many ways, this is a brave book.  He unsettles the territory, interrogates dates, looks to contemporary rather than retrospective reports and makes things much more complex and contestable. Many people, most particularly veterans, politicians and some historians, will not like what he writes. He writes that he hopes that his book might put some of the myths of Vietnam to the sword, but he is not optimistic. Nor am I. I’m not sure that his book will challenge the big fat military history books written by authors whose names are in bigger font than the title…yet.

My rating: 8.5

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Some good reviews: David Stephens on the Honest History website and Hamish McDonald in the Saturday Paper, whose review prompted me to read this book.

1969, 256 p.

John Stanley James (1843-1896) , a.k.a ‘Julian Thomas’ and ‘The Vagabond’ was a journalist, originally of Staffordshire England, who ended up in Australia and the New Hebrides. His most famous articles were written in Melbourne in the 1860s through to the 1880s, where he worked under-cover in what we would now call immersive journalism, which was published in a number of newspapers, most notably the Argus. I hadn’t heard of him, and neither had Jill Giese who featured him in her The Maddest Place on Earth (see my review here) but he has been on historians’  and journalists’ radars for some years. He has even been inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame!

The version I read of this book was published in 1969 with an introduction by historian Michael Cannon. It has been recently republished by Monash University Press, with the original 1969 Cannon introduction supplemented by additional essays by Robert W. Flippen and Willa McDonald. I had heard podcasts of their presentations to the RHSV (see my review here), so having heard about their discoveries about James’ life, I felt comfortable enough with the older edition where Cannon signposts the very absences that Flippen and McDonald were to fill.

2016

The chapters in this book are taken from his newspaper articles that deal with Melbourne and Sydney only,  illustrated by sketches from Punch, The Australasian Sketcher and the Illustrated Australian News. They have been arranged in six parts, reflecting their content.

In Part 1 ‘Down and Out’, James visits the places where the indigent gathered, often working ‘under-cover’. He pretends to be an outpatient at the Melbourne Hospital, where it takes him four attempts to be attended. He visits the police court (as Helen Garner was to do 140 years later) and visits the refuges and services offered. He compares the lodging houses in Melbourne and Sydney,  and writes about the Waifs and Strays of Sydney where his writing evokes Charles Dickens. He eats at a Sixpenny Restaurant and goes to the Melbourne General Cemetery to witness pauper funerals.

Part II “Life in Prison’ draws on his four-week undercover assignment at Pentridge Prison, where he works in the different divisions of the jail. In  Part III ‘Middle Class Morality’ he turns his attention to the churches including fashionable Scots Church in Collins Street, under Rev Charles Strong (who later formed the Australian Church), the suburban parish church of South Yarra and the bazaar at St Luke’s Church Emerald Hill. He turns a jaundiced eye to ‘Sabbath Breaking’ in Sydney at the theatres and bars.

Part IV ‘Cold Charity’ takes him to the Immigrants Home, the Benevolent Asylum, the Sailors Home, a Ragged School and fostering-houses for neglected children.  He picks up on this theme in Part VI ‘The Demi-Monde’, where he goes to the Magdalen Asylum at Abbotsford (now an artistic and cultural centre), and a Protestant Female Refuge in Carlton.  In Part V ‘Manly Sports’ he describes a football match and boxing rounds.

He often sets up oppositions within these chapters, where he compares organizations of different sectarian and social hues.  His language is often racist, with particular disdain shown for Jews and Chinese. It is disconcerting to hear his praise of the Magdalen Asylum, given what we now know about them, but his writing is very much of its time. In spite of this, his humanity, concern for the ‘underdog’ and his scorn for hypocrisy and cant shines through.

It was only when the end of the book was approaching that I realized that I hadn’t read the one thing that I had borrowed the book for- his expose of conditions in the Kew and Yarra Bend asylums. They are not included, and so I had to turn to the original newspaper sources instead through our wonderful Trove. It was interesting reading them in their newspaper format instead of the reader-friendly reproduction of his articles in book-form in ‘The Vagabond Papers’. (If you’re looking for them, they are in the Argus No I 22 July 1876; No. II 29 July 1876; No. III 5 August 1876; No. IV 12 August 1876; No. V 19 August 1876; No VI 26 August 1876). It made me realize how unaccustomed I am  to reading long-form journalism, especially with such small font and narrow columns.

I’m really pleased that I have met ‘The Vagabond’. He was years ahead of his time in his journalism, which is vivid and engaging, giving a good (if colourful) picture of Melbourne and Sydney from the bottom-up.  And what a fascinating personality, full of contradictions!

2018 (English translation, originally 2015), 505 p.

When I learned that there was a new Juan Gabriel Vásquez book available, I made sure to put a hold on it as soon as it became available at the library. I had really enjoyed The Sound of Things Falling and looked forward to this new book. But I must confess that for about the first 100 pages I felt disappointed. Was this even a different book? I wondered. Many of the same elements were in both books: the tone of the narrator, who becomes obsessed with a murder at the same time as his partner is undergoing a health crisis; the fictionalization of a real-life event, and the sticky web of crime and conspiracy in Colombia. Is Vásquez only capable of writing the same book over and over?  That question still lingers, even though I was soon won over by the author’s smooth writing (no doubt ably assisted by an excellent translation).

The narrator is Juan Gabriel Vásquez himself, so already the lines between fiction and memoir are blurred. He becomes drawn into his friend Doctor Benevidas’ obsession with the (real life) murder of Colombian politician Jorge Eliécer Gaítan on April 9, 1948, an obsession that was almost handed down from father to son. Vásquez learns that his friend is not the only one obsessed: so too is Carlos Carballo, a former student of Dr Benevidas’ father, who conflates this assassination with other historical assassinations including J. F. Kennedy and the 1914 assassination of Liberal leader General Rafael Uribe Uribe. So there is this whirlpool of assassinations and conspiracy theories, investigated to the point of madness by amateur historian/detectives. Vásquez finds himself drawn into this whirlpool, while at the same time distancing himself from the conspiratorial world-view that propels it.

The book unfolds almost like those Russian dolls, starting off with one assassination, which is then likened to another, and then another.  There are stories within stories, each subtly but recognizably different from the other. The historical detail is rich, as I found when I googled to supplement my sketchy knowledge of Colombian history. This is not a bad way to have your history delivered, but Vásquez plays tricks too. He inserts completely fictional artefacts into the story, and makes references to his own fictional characters in his earlier books, as well as referencing other Latin American writers like Borges and, in a factual sense, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There are photographs in the text, like a W.G. Sebald text, and the book is permeated with that same elegiac Sebaldian tone. It feels baggy and discursive, but it is always controlled.

So after playing with your head for 500 pages and making you feel as if you are stuck in one long Oliver Stone documentary, where does Vásquez leave you? The line between fiction and truth is blurred for him, as well as for you:

There are two ways to view or contemplate what we call history: one is the accidental vision, for which history is the fateful product of an infinite chain of irrational acts, unpredictable contingencies and random life events (life as unremitting chaos which we human beings try desperately to order); and the other is the conspiratorial vision, a scenario of shadows and invisible hands and eyes that spy and voices that whisper in corners… where the cause of events are silenced for reasons nobody knows (p. 496)…it would no longer be the fictional characters of that novel who would occupy my solitude, but a true story that showed me at every step how little I had understood until this moment of my country’s past, which laughed in my face, as if making me feel the pettiness of my narrative resources before the disorder of what had happened so many years ago. It would no longer be the conflicts of characters who depended on my will, but my attempts to understand truly and for ever, what ..had [been] revealed over the course of several encounters that were now blending in my memory (p. 501)

This is a complex read, but a compelling one. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for 2019.  I’m frustrated that it is so similar to his earlier book, and yet I can’t help feeling that this similarity is completely intentional – that it is all part of a bigger vision. And so, when his next book comes out, I’ll be rushing to read that too.

My rating: 9.5

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.