2020 50 Book Challenge

[FlyingMonkey]

22. Life in the West by Brian Aldiss

Brian Aldiss was one of my favourite science fiction writers and I used to see him around a bit back when I lived in Oxford, where he was the literary critic for the local newspaper. However he didn't just write SF. His autobiographies are very good, and he also wrote two different sequences of literary fiction, which both have strongly autobiographcal elements (and a couple of other standalone novels). The first and more brash sequence was the Horatio Stubbs trilogy, and then there was the Squire Quartet, which starts in the early 1980s with Life in the West. In some ways, this is a typically English bourgeois novel, with family life and tensions around a small country house in Norfolk forming a major part of the story. But it also has things in common with David Lodge, with its sometimes very funny portrait of a pointless academic conference in Sicily, with lecherous male academics pursuing the one or two interesting women at the event. And then there is more than a touch of Le Carré too, with its Cold War backdrop, and the central character Thomas Squire, not only a popularizing of trendy cultural academic ideas in the manner of MacLuhan, but also a one-time intelligence operative in Yugoslavia, who is also assessing the Russian attendees at the event. It is somewhat dated, but that's partly because Aldiss is gently mocking many of the characters with their pretensions and prejudices, and the way in which they confirm to national and class stereotypes, but it's very well-written, witty and certainly worth your time.

I am now moving on to the other novels in the sequence, amongst other things.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

CD, if you thought that this was good (I won't say "enjoyed it", as it sounds rather harrowing) then you may also want to look at "Nobi", or "Fires on the Plane" by Ooka Shohei. It's about the Philippines, rather than New Guinea, campaign but also talks about the pointless deaths and suffering by troops on both sides, plus the level of barbarity that people can descend to in wartime.

Forget the fiction go straight to Kokoda by Paul Ham.

 

[California Dreamer]

Forget the fiction go straight to Kokoda by Paul Ham.

It's arguable that this was memoir; he did fight in the Japanese campaign in PNG.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

It's arguable that this was memoir; he did fight in the Japanese campaign in PNG.

My father was at Milne Bay amongst other places. An Uncle worked as a medical orderly for (Saint) Weary Dunlop at Hell Fire pass.

 

[California Dreamer]

My father was at Milne Bay amongst other places. An Uncle worked as a medical orderly for (Saint) Weary Dunlop at Hell Fire pass.

My dad was in the navy, on a minesweeper in the Pacific. He was actually present when the Japanese navy signed their surrender. He never talked about his war experience, neither did his mates.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

My dad was in the navy, on a minesweeper in the Pacific. He was actually present when the Japanese navy signed their surrender. He never talked about his war experience, neither did his mates.

The Greeks said “come home with your shield or on it” they didn’t say what to do once you got home. For that generation PTSD was something that was a part of life.

For the most part they went to the pub and drank. But ex AIF did talk once they had a few.

I heard and know a lot of stories growing up.

 

[Journeyman]

My dad refused to talk to me about his experiences in the British Army in Europe in WWII, no matter how many times I asked. His experiences turned him into a lifelong atheist, pacifist and socialist. My dad tended to view with disdain, soldiers who talked about wartime experiences. He may have been mistaken, but his opinion was that they'd probably got off lightly in the war if they wanted to get together and talk about it. Dad just wanted to get on with life and leave those experiences behind him.

His dad didn't talk about his experiences in France in WWI, either. My dad told me that my grandfather didn't collect his service medals and never went anywhere near the British Legion (the equivalent of the RSL). He was "lightly gassed" in the trenches and suffered from difficulty breathing in the damp UK winters ever afterwards.

 

[FlyingMonkey]

It's appropriate, given the current discussion, that war would feature centrally in the novel I've just finished.

23. Forgotten Life by Brian Aldiss

The second in the Squire Quartet features two brothers, Joseph and Clement Winters, who grow up in unpreposessing surroundings in Norfolk between the wars, with parents who seems to care little for them. Joseph, the older brother is just old enough to enlist at the end of WW2 and ends up in 'the forgotten army', a mix of British and Indian troops who liberated Burma from the Japanese forces and then moved on after the official end of the war into Indonesia. The war in this work seems to be as much about endless waiting, being carted from one place to another, mud and poor hygiene as it is about actual fighting, very little of which takes place. In Indonesia, Joseph has an affair with a married Chinese woman but neither of them in the end can change their lives to make it work more permanently. Abandonment, regret and a succession of temporary relationships colours Joseph's life, which ends in poverty even though he has had reasonable success as a historian of South-East Asia. Meanwhile his far younger brother, Clement goes into psychiatry, and a happy marriage, which changes after the death of the couple's young daughter. His wife decides to write and becomes a wildly successful fantasy writer, essentially supporting Clement's more respectable but much less lucrative academic career. When Joseph dies, Clement has to sort through all his brother's papers and letters and piece together not just Joseph's 'forgotten life' but perhaps also his own.

This novel continues thematically from Life in the West, dealing with the end of colonialism, but the persistence of class divisions and attitudes, academic and writing life, and the ongoing changes to English society in the 1980s with Thatcherism. Like Life in the West, while it is well-written (but more subtle than that novel) and to me, fascinating and hits home personally, especially with the description of Joseph's brutal minor boarding school, I'm not sure it's a novel that would be that interesting if you aren't English or an Anglophile.

 

[California Dreamer]

His dad didn't talk about his experiences in France in WWI, either. My dad told me that my grandfather didn't collect his service medals and never went anywhere near the British Legion (the equivalent of the RSL). He was "lightly gassed" in the trenches and suffered from difficulty breathing in the damp UK winters ever afterwards.

My grandfather was at Fromelles, in the second wave. He got sent to the trenches by the generals a day after watching 5,000 of his mates get slaughtered in a single day. I cannot imagine how hard that must have been. He came home a broken man and took to the drink. My mum despised the ANZAC Day bullshit and always railed against the bastards who sent an entire generation of young men off to be killed.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

F..k Mumble F..k don’t know what is going on here.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

The experience and impact of war is different for each individual who is faces its horrors.I wrote this initially back in 2004 and had it published on a now vanished website.

Spoiler: Requiem

REQUIEM; SIGNS NOT THINGS ARE ALL WE SEE


Copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved 2004

September 1939. Beyond the horizon a slow red could of dust materialises and begins to grow. A cacophony of boisterous sound shifts within the red cloud. The sharp crack of stock whips intertwines with lowing cattle and the shouting of men as they urge the beasts on through on through the red dust. This mob of men, horses, dogs and beasts has been up in the gulf country for six months. The mob moves with a life of its own through the red dust as they march home to Roma.

The world of men has turned since they’ve been fattening the mob for slaughter in the gulf country. Mars has led the world to the brink of war. Amongst this mob of beasts and men are ‘Les’ and ‘Rudy’, brothers. The pair have lived a hard life, placed in an orphanage as children then farmed out to relatives across Queensland and NSW. Mars has decreed that more hardship will come. The men sit high within the red dust cracking whips and urging the beasts forward, as the camp dogs dart in and around the mob of cattle, barking and nipping at fetlocks to move them along. The red dust envelops the cacophony of man and beast.

As the red could advances to Roma, my Mother ‘Ettie’, and her family sit in the parlour of their home in Edmund Street, Charring Cross in Sydney. The family of thirteen crowds around the radiogram to listen as Prime Minister Menzies, declares, ‘It is my melancholy duty to inform the Australian people the nation is once again at war with Germany.’

In Roma the red cloud lingers at the edge of town with its echo of man and beast. When the cattle are penned in the sale yards and the men have washed the red dust from their skins and had a beer or two, the talk turns to Europe and the War. War, the great adventurer is knocking at their door. It doesn’t take the brothers long to decide that as soon as their paid there off to Brisbane to enlist. My father’s uncle, who says he knows a thing or two about war attempts to bribe my father into with the promise of leaving the family station to him once he goes West, but on the condition that he gives up this foolish notion about enlisting, ‘why your not even twenty one yet.’

No! No discussion. No reflection and no wavering. Les has made up his mind. The brothers have been together since their Mother dumped them in an orphanage when they were aged four and six and nothing is about to separate them now. ‘You stupid bastards do you have any idea what your getting into, its not a day at the races its War, WAR,’ he shouts.

Across the night sky the laugher of Mars is heard at the folly of men. Mars lovingly embraces the world with his mantle of misery and in six long years of attrition and sorrow fifty five million lives will be forfeited to appease his desire.

The next morning amid curt farewells Les and Rudy began the ride from Roma to Brisbane to enlist. It took days of sleeping rough under starlit skies warmed by campfires. Rudy enlisted in the Second AIF as QX 9084. My father having no birth certificate, or means of identification was declined admission to the army, which always stuck me as odd seeing the enlisting Sergeants would normally tell them to ‘come back tomorrow when your twenty one.’ Australian history abounds with tales of young men aged 18 and younger enlisting in the AIF for the Great War. Secondly it probably saved his life for Queenslanders formed the bulk of the 8th Division, where another brother served, which fought down the Malaya Peninsula against the advancing Japanese only to be taken POW in Singapore In 1942.

The brothers sold their horses and saddles and put the lives of stockman drover behind them forever. Neither would return to droving after the war. As for their Uncle he died when they were in Palestine and disappeared from the family narrative.

They brought a 1937 Indian Chief motorcycle on which the two of them rode down to Sydney. My father told me it took them a week to arrive in Balmain.

On the 5th of January 1940 my father enlisted at Victoria Barracks, Paddington, and became NX 21546. In February 1941 Les and Rudy embarked for the War in the Middle East from the finger wharf at Woolloomooloo.

As a young child I was never told of the boredom, mundane routine and sheer unmitigated horror that makes up a soldiers life. My Father never spoke of how high explosive rendered the human body into monstrous sculptures, how the desert sands soaked up the blood of men, or the mud and malaria of the Pacific jungles. The tales my Father told me as a child were of a variation on boy’s own adventure stories. At a two up school in Cairo my Father claimed to have thrown five straight heads, ‘no mean feat let me tell you.’

I was taken by the story of ‘Horrie the racist term for brown people Dog.’ Horrie was an Egyptian Terrier adopted by soldiers from the 2nd/1st Machine Gun Battalion. Horrie’s hearing saved the lives of many men from German air attacks and Horrie served with distinction in Libya and was wounded in the evacuation of Crete. When these troops came back from the Middle East they smuggled Horrie into Australia in 1942. The authorities found out about Horrie in 1945 when a book recounting his adventures was due to be published, the Government flying in the face of public opinion declared Horrie a threat to the health of Australian animals. Horrie was taken out and shot in March 1945 or at least that is what the public and the authorities knew. In 2008 at the AWM I found out the truth about Horrie. His owner Jim Moody swapped dogs with a stray from the local pound who was put down in Horrie’s place. “After all we had been through do you think that I would let them kill my mate?”

1941 on a troop train outside of Damascus a young Arab body comes running up to their troop train and yelled ‘Hey dig, dig, you buy whisky, Johnnie Walker good one mate’ ‘Hey Mustafa give us a look, come on give it up son’. My Father inspected the bottle and saw the seal was intact. ‘How much?’ ‘For you dig two pounds.’ ‘Two quid! Back it up sunshine.’ The haggling continued till the price was agreed upon and money exchanged hands. My Father cracked the bottle and took a swig, ‘What the ****, its full of cold tea.’ ‘Well at least its not camels piss.’ His stoic companion replied, upon closer inspection a small hole was found to have been drilled in the base of the bottle caused by a hot poker and the contents drained and The bottle repaired. From then on every bottle they bought was scrupulously examined.

One of my Fathers mementos from the war that fascinated me as a child was a Sam Browne belt where he’d sewn the cap badges of various regiments and nationalities. One badge in particular was of a Palestine Police officer obtained after a brawl erupted in a Jerusalem club between Australian and British troops. The Palestine Police arrived to quell the affray and in my Father’s words ‘ this mongrel pommy copper belted me with his night stick so I knocked him flat and stole his hat, mind you some smart bastard made off with the till while the fight was on.’ The Palestine Policeman’s badge still sits on the Sam Browne belt. When my Father died my I took a Royal Core of Engineers badge emblazoned with Hermes also known as Mercury the messenger of the gods as a memento of the time he spent in the Old Testament lands.

Upon their return to Australia the brothers were stationed in Queensland, which had been over run by Yanks, ‘over here, over paid and over sexed’. The Americans were better attired, had money and manners to match and hence the attention of the women. My Mother told me one night she was at the State Theatre in Sydney watching the movie Bambi. At one stage Bambi cries out ‘mother, mother, where’s my mother?’ Then The booming voice of a digger cried out, “She’s gone out with a bloody Yank love,” whereupon the theatre exploded with laughter.

In Queensland resentment between the Diggers and the Yanks simmered till it erupted on 26th November 1942 in ‘The Battle of Brisbane.’ My Father and a group of fellow soldiers from the commando training school were stoped on the King Georges Bridge at a sand bagged machine gun emplacement. When questioned as to their movements the officer in charge replied that ‘we’re were off to join the fun.’ They were subsequently separated from an assortment of brass knuckle dusters, coshes, and small arms. They were told duly admonished by the senior officer at the checkpoint and sent back to base. The riots, caused by the death of an Australian soldier killed by an American MP, lasted for three nights and entered Australian folklore.

In 1945 at the end of hostilities my Father and Uncle were offered roles in the Australian occupation force which was to be garrisoned at Hiroshima. In his words, ‘I’d had a gutful of army life.’ My Father marched in the Victory parade in Sydney before being demobbed and then tossed his medals in a draw, where they stayed out of sight and out of mind. At first it was good to be back home but he found that he couldn’t settle down. So he headed North to cut cane in Queensland then toured Tasmania. He wound up working for years on the Kiewa dam project in Victoria then as a locomotive engine driver on the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

At a dance in Sydney in 1953 he met my mother and told her she would marry him. My Mother laughed him off but there must have been something for in 1955 they were married.

One night a year after they were married my Mother awoke to find my Father strangling her, he was dreaming of an incident involving hand-to-hand combat with a Japanese soldier at Tarakan in 1945. She frantically beat him away, and he broke down as he told her ‘This Nip bastard leap out of a bush and knocked me flat, I tired to bayonet him but couldn’t get the blade into the mongrel, I didn’t have one in the chamber and he just kept coming back at me every time I knocked him down, in the end I had to strangle the life out of the bastard, it was him or me.’ Japanese soldiers held fast to the cult of Bushido and refused to surrender in the face of defeat. In 1956 ensconced in the safety of their marriage my Father spoke for the first time to her of the horrors he had witnessed in the War. It was a common story of death and bloodshed, retold in many Australian households during the 1950’s.

The War was black and white photos and films; even now I mentally picture the years of the Second World War in stark black and white. I have a picture taken by a street photographer of my Mother with a group of friends in Hyde Park when Peace was declared in August 1945. Their smiles still radiate ecstasy and bliss sixty years after the War’s end.

As a working class child I grew up in the omnipotent shadow of the War. I had a wooden fort made by my Father based upon the design of the fort in the film ‘Beau Guest.’ With my Australian toy soldiers, in their khaki of the western desert, I would constantly destroy the Africa Core of Field Marshall Rommel on the lounge room floor.

After an afternoon in the pub he once told us as teenagers how in New Guinea he looked after and cared for the needs of the native bearers, ‘you’d see that they received their rations and see the medics if required.’ They were paid a bounty of a shilling for the left ear of a Japanese soldier. ‘One morning, one of the blokes came in and gave me this bag, it must have had four quid in it, so I took it up to our CO a right snob and green he was.’ ‘What do you want Private.’ ‘Four quid for the bearers sir.’ ‘Four pounds?’ ‘Well he took one look in the bag saw all the ears turned green and threw up.’ ‘LES not in front of the children.’ Mum admonished for assailing our tender ears with such horror.

In 1982 I was at home with my Father watching ‘The World at War’ my Father became pale and began to shake I asked him what was wrong, he muttered ‘Jesus wept, Jesus wept.’ I went and comforted my Father as he had done for me as a child.

I remember fetching something from him from his bedroom cupboard and out tumbled dozens of unopened packets of Valium that had been prescribed for war neurosis. They would be eventually put out with the trash unopened.

In 1987 my Father died at 68. After his cremation my Mother and I found a niche in the commemorative wall at Botany Cemetery for his ashes. Which directly faced Bunnerong Power Station where he worked as a rigger for twenty-seven years. His plaque bears the rising sun badge of the AIF and is inscribed “always in our hearts.” The sun shone on the wall when he would have been relaxing at morning smoko, my Mother touched it and kissed it, ‘He would like this.’

 

[California Dreamer]

I read a book a while ago that brought home the fact that the Trojan War was fought not far from ANZAC cove, where the Gallipoli invasion started. Nothing much changes, over thousands of years.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

@California Dreamer There is a line in Joseph Heller‘s Picture This where (I think) Aristotle tells the bust of Homer “you don’t go and wage war in a foreign country unless you intend to live their permanently”

 

[samtalkstyle]

9. Volker Kutscher - The Silent Death

A good follow up to the original, though with a noticeable change in tone. I preferred the tone of the first, and found this one's twists more predictable than the first.

But I still enjoyed it and look forward to reading more of the series.

 

[Journeyman]

Spoiler: Books so far...

1. The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay

2. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

3. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

4. The Tyrant's Tomb, from the Trials of Apollo series by Rick Riordan

5. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, by John le Carre.

6. The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman

7. Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz

8. Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami

9. Momo, by Michael Ende

10. Boy Swallows Universe, by Trent Dalton

I started this with very high hopes, as it had great reviews. It was a good book, and I generally enjoyed it, but it didn't grasp me as much as I hoped it would. There were bits that jarred - I thought that the "magical realism" parts didn't fit with the rest of the book, and that some parts were a bit long and could have been trimmed by some judicious editing. However, the characters were entertaining, it was interesting, and as someone who grew up in Brisbane around that time it resonated with me. I still recommend it but I was hoping for a bit more.

11. Fascists Among Us - Online hate and the Christchurch massacre, by Jeff Sparrow

I picked this up at the airport last week (the last flight I suspect I'll be taking for a while!) and read about half of it on the plane. It's not a long book and, as such, does more of a surface skim than a deep, theoretical dive into issues about modern-day Fascism/neo-Fascism, the alt-right, 4-chan and 8-chan, meme culture, shitposting and other such things. I thought it was really well written and interesting and have passed it on to my son to read, as he's currently studying the inter-war era for high school history, so this will provide him with an interesting historical comparison.

As an aside, I've had some dealings with white supremacists (primarily members of outlaw motorcycle gangs) and although there's no doubt that some of them are morons, that is certainly not always the case. They can be very erudite and well-spoken and able to talk very convincingly about their philosophies and reasons but then when it suits, suddenly change into a far more casual and offensive mode of speech, so as to suit their audience.