Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne

In my childhood home there was a sky-blue wooden bookcase, and in that bookcase there was a crimson canvas hardback edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.  Dean and Son was the publisher.  It's just one of those things: the number of times I picked out that book, opened it up, looked at it but never read it. 

The book, the bookcase and those times are all gone now, but the works of Jules Verne lives on in its various incarnations - in this case a Penguin eBook. Ones and zeroes instead of canvas and cardboard, LEDs and pixels instead of paper and ink.  Still, I've finally read it now.

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea was first published in serial form in 1869-70.  I am sure most readers will know the story is about the adventures of three men who are rescued from a shipwreck by the mysterious Captain Nemo and spend several months as captive guests aboard his technologically-advanced submarine.  In that time, they do a lap of the Pacific Ocean, cross the Indian Ocean, traverse the length of the Atlantic from  Spain to Antarctica and back again - twenty thousand leagues.

Although not prescient of technology such as submarines and aqualungs (they had already been invented, albeit in a primitive form), Verne very convincingly imagines their applications as both weapons of war and as the means of scientific exploration, and there are ample demonstrations of the two throughout the book.

While the various episodes in the story are interesting or exciting in their own way, too often does Verne allow didactic interludes concerning marine natural history to intrude on the story.  These often take the form of lists of the names of animals and plants and their taxonomy.  In the end, they seemed to take up space on the page without providing much understanding or argument about the subject matter.  As a result, while Verne has very successfully turned the science fact of his day into a work of speculative fiction,  he is not nearly as successful at imparting the sense of adventure he achieved in Journey to the Centre of the Earth or Around the World in Eighty Days

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

If Balzac had turned his hand to the fantasy genre, he almost certainly would have produced something like A Game of Thrones.  I do not mean that kindly.  But first, a quick look at what the book is about.

Seven kingdoms under the rule of one mad king.  A civil war.  The king is slain along with most of his family, two infant children escape to exile.  A new king elected.  Fifteen years later, not everyone is happy with the way things turned out.  Then the story begins. 

And what a big and long-winded story it is.  Whilst the action centers around eight characters, there is a huge number of supporting cast members.  Although story-lines develop around each of the main characters, this book is essentially about the dilemmas of Lord Eddard (Ned) Stark of Winterfell.  He has a terrible choice to make.  The rest is basically to familiarise the reader with the lands and politics of Westeros, and to set the scene for the sequels.

I know Martin's novels are very popular, as is the subsequent T.V. series.  I will say that at first I found myself engrossed in the story, but the book began to wear out its welcome at around the 300 page mark (that's about half way through).  Oh! for a persuasive editor.  There was so much that could have been cut out of this book without subtracting from the plot or narrative.  Way too much description - description in photographic detail (just like Balzac) - that neither advances the plot nor develops the characters.  Lots of repetition of the same ideas both in conversations and in internal dialogues.  On the other hand, most of Martin's prose is very good, and some of it is beautiful.  What a pity there is so much of it.

A Game of Thrones is the first installment in George R. R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire.  Five installments have already been published, and there are two more on the way.  Thanks, but no thanks.  You can keep the sequels, I'll watch the T.V. series instead.

Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer

Heinrich Harrer was a remarkable man.  At the age of 36, he was part of the first expedition to successfully climb the north face of the Eiger, an adventure he recounted in his book The White Spider.  

The following year, 1939, he joined Peter Aufschnaiter, another Austrian mountaineer, in an expedition to what is now northern Pakistan.  Here, they were apprehended by the British authorities, and when war was declared between Britain and Germany, they became prisoners of war.  They were interred in several POW camps until they finally ended up in Dehradun, near the foothills of the Himalayas. In 1944, after several attempted escapes, Harrer and Aufschnaiter finally succeeded in crossing the frontier into Tibet, where they sought political asylum, and here they stayed until the Chinese invasion in 1950.

The first half of Seven Years in Tibet recounts the details of the escape attempts and the journey from Dehradun to the Tibetan capital Lhasa.  This part of the story is one of high adventure and derring-do.  The duo and their companions showed incredible ingenuity, skill and pragmatism both in the devising and execution of their escapes and in their journey on foot through the Tibetan Himalayas.  On their way to Lhasa, they encounter by turns much hospitality and hostility, including some close brushes with death. 

The second half of the book deals with Harrer and Aufschnaiter's years in Lhasa as guests of the 14th Dalai Lama and his administration.  This part of the tale is of a more sedate nature.  It mainly provides an ethnographic account of life in the Tibetan capital in the latter half of the 1940s, and recounts how the two Europeans were called on to undertake public engineering works.  With the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Harrer and Aufschaiter made their way into Nepal, to be followed shortly by the teenaged Dalai Lama as he began his long exile.  Harrer notes the invasion spelled the end of feudalism and the beginning of industrialisation in Tibet.

Seven Years in Tibet is well-written.  Throughout his compelling adventure narrative and his insightful account of a now-vanished way of life, Harrer never loses sight of the humanity of the Tibetans he encountered, and the warmth and affection he felt for the people is present on every page.

Harrer died in 2006, aged 93, having spent the intervening decades undertaking further adventures and bringing the plight of the Tibetan people to the attention of the world.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

A is for Atwood, and welcome to 2015.

The Handmaid's Tale - is it a rewrite of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four?  That was the question I started asking myself with increasing frequency as I worked my way through this book.  It is a question I still haven't satisfactorily answered.

Where Orwell explored how power, violence, surveillance, collaboration and language can be used by a minority to subjugate a majority, Atwood explores how the same methods can be used to subjugate women.  These can be either overt or subtle.  It is of interest to observe how some individuals will relinquish personal freedoms, such as the freedom of speech or expression, for the guarantee of food, shelter, warmth and work, or to be free from punishment or social opprobrium.  How is it that aspects of a society work in such a way to make some women work against the interests of women in general?  These are some of the matters Atwood explores in this book.   

The Handmaid's Tale is a first-person account of a young woman who identifies herself as Offred.  She lives in the near future in the Republic of Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian state that replaced the United States of America after some unspecified ecological and military upheavals.  Political and administrative power has been placed in the hands of a minority of men.  Women have been relegated to the roles of wives for both the elite and the workers, invigilators of social orthodoxy, prostitutes or child-bearers.  There have been demographic upheavals too:  human populations have crashed, and there has been an epidemic of sterility  Offred is a handmaid, a woman who has yet to be proven barren (Atwood's word) and must compulsorily attempt to bear children for the Republic.

Is it better to die on your feet than to live on your knees?  If history is any guide, the probable answer is "no" for most people for most of the time. If we are to look for an answer in the behaviour of the characters in The Handmaid's Tale, we may discover the simple and complex reasons why this may be the case.