Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #79

Coming Soon (?) from George R. R. Martin

Summer Reading & The Red Wedding, etc.

So we've been watching HBO's  Game of Thrones and, yes, we watched "the red wedding" episode last Sunday, as did, it seems, more people than watched anything else on cable-television that night.  More curiously still, more people watched that episode than actually subscribe to HBO.  (A fascinating story on NPR explains how this was possible.  Not to worry now, neither I nor the radio link should spoil the show for any who haven't seen it, or seen that episode.)  And we've now watched the finale as well.  For any who haven't read the George R. R. Martin books, or seen the show, and might be wondering what all this blaze in the Twittersphere etc. is about, that penultimate episode was a specially violent one, perhaps the most violent one to date. Moreover, good people, people important to the story so far, died.  Shocking.  As for the resulting television-fan-outrage, the wave of new memes and the rest, what all that means is that frankly, too few people read history.

 I should mention that I have not read Martin's books.  It's almost an exaggeration to say that I "perused" the first volume.  I did finally pick it up though, when after a very long wait, the last sequel finally came out to great fanfare a year or so ago.  (?)  I poked around in that first book for a couple of evenings, but that was all.  I'm not being snide.  I got a taste of the novelist's style.  That was enough.  Nothing wrong with it.  There's nothing, based on my brief experience, to say Martin's work isn't a fine example of the genre.  He's enormously popular.  His readers are devoted.  I know and love a number of them.  But, I wasn't going to read what looks to be only the first brick in a still rising wall, is all.

Now that may seem strange, considering my established devotion to long books, but there we are.  I'm not one for dragons, generally, a fact equally well established.

I prefer my Fantasy on film or television, and in smaller, more digestible doses.

I don't mean to be a tease by mentioning all this popular culture and then actually writing about a very old, and no longer very popular history. There is a point yet to come, I promise, but first a word or two on my summer reading project.

Even as I contemplate further reductions in my library, I have to admit I've had my eye on these beauties for a month or more, down the street at Magus Books.  I've been setting aside my nickels.  They weren't cheap.  (They still have a second, all but identical set, if you're interested.)  I've never seen this book -- and it is one book in six volumes -- but in a distinctly unattractive, academic, paperback edition which did not appeal.  Nevertheless, this book has been on my list now for a very long time, so when I saw these handsome old things on the shelf, and though it took me some time to finally make up my mind and my budget, I did decide to have a go at last, so here we are.

Pictured then is David Hume's History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second.  For any that still remember the name of David Hume, or know his writing as an important philosopher, it may come as something of a shock to know that in his own time, and for a good while thereafter, he was known primarily as an historian.  It took him more than fifteen years to write this book, which contains more than a million words.  The book has gone through more than fifty editions, and one way and another, has never been out of print since it was published in it's present form, in six volumes, between 1754 and 1762.

Hume believed that the nature of humanity didn't changed all that much; that history shows us more often at our worst than our best, and that most people, left to themselves, only really concerned themselves in politics and slaughter under the influence of religious and what we would now call ethnic differences. He also believed that the history of England, after a very rocky start, at the time of his writing this book, presented perhaps "the most entire system of liberty that was ever know amongst mankind."  That, you see, was the point of telling the story, really, the struggle to that point.

This would be the common theme for most of the greatest narrative historians of the last two hundred and fifty years or so; the struggle for a stable and relatively free society, unshackled at last from the old, exclusive loyalties to tribe and conquest, and defined by a progressive establishment of the rule of law and mutually beneficial civility.  From Hume, through all his successors in both Britain and the US, from Macaulay to John Richard Green, to Henry Hallam and William Prescott, and yes, Karl Marx, whatever their differences politically, this theme predominated until nearly our own day.  (I make that list from my own reading, admittedly limited by literary reputation and my own taste in such books more than the ultimate value of these books to present historians.  I see no reason to apologize for it.)  There have always been writers who took exception to this progressive reading -- here Gibbon and Carlyle come most to mind, again, mostly from the evidence of my own shelves, but I still think it a fair description of most of the major popular historians down to at least H. G. Wells, if no further.

It's all very easy now to dismiss this kind of history as too narrowly rhetorical to be entirely true, and there has been much hay made in the academic world of "historiography" in more recent days, by denying even the underlying premise of history as any kind of progress at all.  To which I say "stuff."  I am more than willing to concede all the limitations of such great writers as these, both in terms of their access to the historical record and their prejudices.  It takes a certain intestinal fortitude in the common reader of the 21st Century to read Englishmen of the 18th and 19th on such subjects as Islam and "foreigners" in general.  I also happen to think that we are now living in what may well prove to be the first truly Golden Age of history as fact.  There are, I should think, more thoroughly researched and accurate histories published in any given year of our Century to date than might have been possible in any previous period.

Why then read old boys like David Hume?  First because history as literature, at least in the period described from the middle of the 18th through the beginning of the 20th, produced more established masterpieces of narrative, in English, than any time since, and more history of lasting literary value than any time since the last Roman historian went into the ground.  What all these boys have in common with Livy et al is not only a gift for the description of character and event, but a tempered and coolly considered belief in what Pope described as "the proper study of mankind."  That can be quite refreshing after any time spent reading what's come after.  Secondly, because there have been few enough books produced in the whole history of books, at least books running to roughly a million words or more, that are still worth reading at all.  Why not read those big books that happen to be history as well as literature, if one is of a mind to read literature anyway, and big books, at least now and then, of a season?

And so we circle back, no?  It's clear from even just watching the TV adaptation and glancing through one volume of his novel, that Mr. Martin has read a bit of history himself.  My preference is for history without dragons and magic, as I've said.  One of the pleasures of Hume is his not-so-subtle distaste for what he cannot help but call "superstition" pretty much everywhere he meets it, from the Romans on, and not excepting any of the major faiths to touch his country since.  Refreshing and sensible, if still a little -- and deliciously -- shocking in a man writing more than two hundred and fifty years ago.  I suspect Mr. Martin's preference is for exactly those historical sources my friends from the Enlightenment and after could not help but disdain for their reliance on the supernatural; all the saga-singers and the monks who preferred heroes and monsters to men and women. A perfectly respectable preference, if not one I share.  That may be all it comes done to; a preference for magic or man.

As for the shock and horror of my fellow television viewers of the bloody Game of Thrones, I can only suggest they might want to avoid reading some of the stories, say, of the reign of King Canute, or even the details of more than one treacherous Norman noble party, or even the fate of conspirators, real and imagined, against the person of that great queen, the first Elizabeth.  History is a bloody business.

But then again, no.  I would make so bold at to suggest that a chapter of Hume on the Crusades, or of Gibbon on the triumph of Christianity might immunize the more parochial readers of even the best Fantasy fiction, and fans of supernatural television shows, against credulity thereafter.   Might do them all a world of good.  Did me.  I would deny no one who wants them their dragons, or their bottle-blond emancipators of brown people, etc.  I would however suggest that history sans magic, need not be without heroes and heroines, villains and adventure, thrills and chills, elevating sentiments and moral instruction.  Moreover, some of the greatest literature in ours or any language is to be found in books written by men who disdained violence and the arbitrary exercise of power, even as they chronicled the worst of it.  They did not put much faith in Gods, or have much patience for priests, nor give much credence to stories of ghosts or  witches. They disdained superstition.  They believed in a fallible humanity and in the strength of humane institutions.  Doesn't that sound rather more like us than not?

Not that there's anything wrong with reading about or watching such stuff.  History shows, people have been doing it for ages, and where's the harm?

I'll tell you what though, history's more help when it comes to reading a newspaper and trying to make any sort of sense of current events -- I find.  People still do that too, read newspapers, don't they?

A Caricature

A Boy's Own Favorites

Maybe it was because I had such a good time chattering books with my friend for the ten days he was up visiting. Perhaps any ten days away from the bookstore, without even the excuse of such good company might have left me no less giddy when I came back to work. Mine is a garrulous personality. I enjoy people, conversation, and almost all talk of books. Working in a bookstore then, some effort is required to shut me up. But I have learned to observe the constraints of commerce and chat customers, hopefully, only up to the point of purchase. For whatever reason though, I have yet to settle. My more usual manner eludes me. I found myself talking far past the necessity with customers at the cash register. I answered questions with an alarming honesty. (Had I read the new Dan Brown? Oh, dear.) Nothing irredeemable, you understand, but hardly the smooth efficiency expected of a clerk and cashier. And given the opportunity to make a recommendation, I took it.

My customer was the kind of mild, intellectual reader of fantasy fiction with whom I usually have little direct contact. I am seldom on the second floor for long, and almost never at the end of the room where the Science Fiction & Fantasy Section is. The familiars there are no more likely to stray from it than I am to stray into it. It was unusual then to have one of them approach the general information counter and ask for a recommendation. It was even less likely that I would be the bookseller to volunteer. But something in the manner of this man's question suggested a willingness to read beyond his genre, always an interesting challenge for a bookseller, and when queried, he espoused an interest in history and historical fiction and we were off. Beyond the fantasies of Terry Brooks et al., he had read and enjoyed all of Bernard Cornwell's novels about Napoleonic Wars, and the heroics of rifleman Richard Sharpe. He knew of, but had read less, of Patrick O'Brian, finding the sea a less congenial element.

Now what intrigued me about this reader was that his knowledge of literature, while far more extensive than my own within his preferred categories of fiction, went no further back than the last quarter of the last century. Understandable, considering his age -- I would guess he was in his late twenties -- and his profession, which had not required much in the way of the study of literary history. His favorite writer, he told me, was George R. R. Martin. That was what told me I had a chance. Anyone for whom that name is unfamiliar should try dropping it among Science Fiction and Fantasy readers of the younger generation, just to see how high one's stock rises as a result. Martin made his name writing the kind of serious-minded adventure fantasies that owe as much to comic books, military history and television action shows as they do to Tolkien. Over the years, Martin has written and edited anthologies of some of what I am assured by fans is the very best of martial fantasy. His heroes are troubled souls, existentialists in uniform, but no less likely to fight, and be killed, for that. Action, relentless and described in masterful and believable military detail, draws his readers along through one fantastic confrontation with melancholy and mayhem after another. His ongoing (and aren't they all, nowadays?) fantasy epic, A Song of Ice and Fire, is widely accepted as the best of its kind to date.

Just here, a confession. My knowledge of George R. R. Martin is almost all secondhand. I could not read the one novel I tried. Beyond the affectation of exotic proper and place names, de rigueur in the genre, and impossible for me to take seriously, I could not get past the author's boyish delight in, and to my mind, affected modern despair of war. There is always, in these contemporary masculine fantasies, more than a suggestion childish viciousness; a willingness to invent battles for the fun of fighting them, of imagining empires just to set them at odds, to set up tin soldiers, just to knock them down. Whatever the novelistic innovations in psychology and motivation adopted into genre from the literary fiction of the past century and a half, at heart, these fantasies seem resolutely to never grow up. The consequences of violence are accepted now: heroes die, wars are lost, innocents suffer, but little point is made of all this beyond a rather gloomy and shallow acceptance of the perpetual motion of masculine violence: imaginary kingdoms rise and fall, men and monsters are set at odds, etc., etc., and on it all just spins and spins. The systems of honor, servility and nobility being largely discredited by the serious study in recent times of the actual ramifications of colonialism, imperialism and militarism, the writers of bully fiction have been left without much to justify their triumphal epics, and their heroes, in consequence, have have been reduced to cynicism and an almost comically narrow march across the razor's edge between burlesque and a unhappy reversion to the quaint and antique.

Martin has acknowledged a debt to Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and in this I saw my chance and took it. Had my customer ever read Sir Walter Scott? Alexandre Dumas père? He had not. Oh! Here then was my opportunity to introduce him to the originals. Walter Scott invented the modern romance, made the modern hero, wrote better and at length, and believed sincerely in almost every story he wrote. If the Scots can be a burden to the contemporary reader, why not then try one of his English settings? The quality of language, the depth of feeling, the historical detail, should all appeal to any reader of historical fiction, fantasy or otherwise. And then there is the greatest of Scott's sons, the magnificent Dumas! Like most Americans, my customer knows the Musketeers only in their youth, by way of abridgments, cartoons and movies. Fantasy readers love long stories, and nearly no one ever wrote at greater length than Dumas. The Musketeers are traced, over book after book, from glory down to age and resignation. There is no better adventure, with no more touching conclusion, than Dumas' great series. Scott and Dumas were not burdened by history but rather reveled in it, in an innocence perhaps no longer possible, but all the more moving and rich for that. And their conclusions as to the efficacy of glory, particularly in Dumas, can be startling to the contemporary reader.

And so I gushed, and pushed books into my customer's hands, and chattered merrily about the unparalleled invention and excitement of the true romantics, of the pleasures to be found only in the first and best things of their kind, of real history, mixed with real art, and of the adult wisdom to be had from the best boy's books. Such books lead readers to history, actual, recorded human history, to real battles, real loses, real heroes, and heroines, and to a real understanding of friendship, and history, fatalism and honor, humanity and genuine humility, rather than the escape from reality proffered by even the accomplished masters of modern fantasy and pastiche. I overwhelmed the poor man with my enthusiasm. He left with one book at least from the stack I'd made him carry behind me.

A business, even a bookstore, can't afford that kind of rambling too often. Too much to be done elsewhere. And it is not really nice to use such a nice man so, just to hear myself talk. But what fun it was! And for all I know, he really might enjoy The Black Tulip, or Quentin Durward or The Talisman. He might even venture again out of the Fantasy aisles, if I haven't scared the poor soul away.