Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves

Seven Days in New Crete is the story of a week in the life of Edward Venn-Thomas, who awakens in the far future, having been magically transported there by a coven of witches.  Here he finds a peaceful and prosperous society based on five distinct castes - there is a place for everyone, and everyone is in his/her place.  War has been transformed into a robust but harmless ball game played on Tuesday afternoons.  The problem with New Crete (as the society is called) is that it contains no real challenges or dangers, and the citizens are dull, unenterprising and unimaginative.  With the arrival of Venn-Thomas, all that is about to change.

Seven Days in New Crete was one of the first sci-fi books I ever read, and for this reason it has a special place in my heart. Graves has Venn-Thomas narrate the story in first person.  The story-telling is masterful, even if the tale is a bit weak.  Graves presents us with an intriguing future society.  Like Aldous Huxley did with Brave New World, Graves questions the value of a civilisation that is conformist and risk-free, and finds that it is not one worth having.  His problem, then, is how to rehumanise such a bland and ovine society.  The answer is: by re-introducing the seven deadly sins.

Graves wrote Seven Days in New Crete in 1949.  Its original readership would have been used to a world of shortages due to the Great Depression and WWII.  For them, an imagined world of peace and plenty may have played to their desires, and yet Graves' message is that evil and conflict are necessary if humans are to flourish.  Now that we in the West live in a society of plenty rather than scarcity, we may not be so easily shocked by Graves' thesis.  The question is: do we agree with him?

Publishing details: Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves (Quartet Books, London, 1975, pp.281)

Notes From Underground by F. Dostoyevsky

This story, first published in 1864, is considered by many - including Jean Paul Sartre - to be one of the first exemplars of existential thought in modern literature.

The story is told by an anonymous narrator, 40 years of age and living in St Petersburg, who initially says of himself: "I am a sick man ... I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man."  He also tells us that he is a thinker more concerned with "the highest and the best" sentiments than are his peers.

The narrator divides his story into two parts.  The first part occupies about a third of the whole.  In it the narrator ranges over a  number of philosophical and rhetorical questions, such as action and inaction, free will and determinism, and the nature of revenge.  In the second part, the narrator tells of a series of incidents that occurred over two days and nights when he was twenty years of age.  He reacquaints himself with some old school chums with whom he was never close and quarrels with them, then he disillusions a young woman about her prospects for a happy life.

By the end of the story, we find that the narrator, despite his knowledge of "the highest and the best", is unable to live up to his own high standards or live down to those of others - he is paralysed by inaction, which he fully recognises, and this leads him to be consumed with spiteful thoughts.

Shakespeare's Cassius was lean and hungry and thought too much, and "such men are dangerous".  Not always.  While Cassius was able to effect the assassination of Julius Caesar, the equally lean, hungry and pensive narrator can do no more than gnaw at his old wounds in a self-imposed exile from society - in his "underground".

This edition of Notes from Underground was translated by Jessie Coulson.  Coulson has managed to give us a text that is lively and contemporary in feel.  In a mercifully short 150 pages, Dostoyevsky has managed to give us a masterful insight into the psychology of a man who thinks too much and does too little.

Publishing details: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Penguin, London, 2010, pp.152

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is no Hermann Hesse. In his essay "Why They Read Hesse", Vonnegut states:  

Hesse is no black humorist. Black humorists' holy wanderers find nothing but junk and lies and idiocy wherever they go.  A chewing-gum wrapper or a used condom is often the best they can do for a Holy Grail.

Deadeye Dick is perhaps the blackest and least humorous of Vonnegut's novels that I have read so far.  In it we find junk and lies and idiocy.  One stray bullet alters, possibly for the worst, the lives of a clutch of people in the fictitious Midland City, Ohio.

The protagonist Rudy Waltz narrates the story.  He tells the tale of the decline in the fortunes of his family members.  Along the way we are shown the collateral damage done to those that come into contact with them.  No-one, except the Haitian cook and voodoo master, seems to come away unscathed.

The satire is dark, unrelenting and almost unbearable because of the absence of clowns -  Deadeye Dick, lamentably, is a Tralfamidorian-free zone.  Reading this book is certainly an experience, but a harrowing one. Admire the craftmanship, by all means, but be prepared for the essential horror that is life, as told by Kurt Vonnegut.

Midland City is the setting of another Vonnegut novel, Breakfast of Champions

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Barack Obama is the child of a marriage between a white woman and a black man. One of the things that intrigued me about the 2008 U.S. presidential contest was the way Obama nullified the issue of race. Whenever asked about race or ethnicity, he reached for the U.S. motto, E Pluribus Unum - "from the many, one". It takes all kinds of people to make the U.S. what it is, and being united as "one" is really the most important thing.

Rewind the clock to 1990. Barack Obama has been elected the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. This distinction was enough for Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, to offer him a publishing deal.

Obama originally intended to write a book about race relations in the United States; however, he ended up writing Dreams from My Father. Obama says:

When I actually sat down and began to write, though, I found my mind pulled towards rockier shores. First longings leapt up to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared, and ebbed, and then appeared again. I remembered the stories that my mother and her parents told me as a child, the stories of a family trying to explain itself … Compared to this flood of memories, all my well-ordered theories seemed insubstantial and premature.

What he produced is a personal, rather than theoretical, account: an “interior journey—a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” The book then is primarily about Obama's relationship with an absent father (whose place is filled in various ways by other elder males), and his search for a black identity (having been raised in a white household).

Obama's writing style is very good. He balances narrative and argument is pleasing proportions. His descriptions of people, places and situations are lean but acute, and his ability to analyse and explain social and political issues is top-notch.

Dreams from My Father is an incredibly honest account, and all the more so because it was written by Obama well before he became a politician. Worth reading