The Magicians by Lev Grossman

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

Although I keep trying to steer myself towards more serious books, I have a certain weakness for fantasy, a- childish- indulgence which I never fully outgrew. And so despite my efforts to grow up, every so - often -I- find- myself- drifting- back- to- pure - escapist - fantasy-books.

The past few weeks I’ve found myself getting into the same old boring routine. (It can happen, even when you’re living abroad.) There were many other more serious history books I was supposed to be making myself read, but since I had gotten bored and wasn’t making any progress on any of them, I decided to try and seek some escape in fantasy.
(It’s somewhat ironic that I picked this book up precisely for those reasons, since one of the major themes of the book is people using fantasy literature to escape from the dullness of everyday life.)

This book had been on my radar for a couple years or so now ever since I read a number of very glowing reviews about it online. In particular, I was impressed by how much praise the AV Club gave to this book [SEE THEIR REVIEW HERE] but other online publications like Salon.com also praised it quite highly [SEE HERE].

I was vaguely familiar with the author Lev Grossman. He writes for Time Magazine, and I used to have a subscription. Lev Grossman is a huge geek, which is great because so am I, and huge geeks often make great reviewers.
Most infamously Lev Grossman was the one responsible for sticking the comic book Watchmen on Times list of the 100 greatest novels a few years back (W). It’s a move I would personally disagree with this (Watchmen does a great job of deconstructing comic book superheroes, but at the end of the day its appeal is limited to only people with an interest in a very narrow genre), but I still admire a fellow geek move when I see one.

However Fanboys don’t always make great authors. (Fanboy fiction tends to be highly derivative). And I was slightly apprehensive about what kind of story teller Grossman would make. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The Review

If you haven’t encountered this book before, here’s the basic premise: The first half of the book is a take off on Harry Potter, the second half of the book is a take off on the Chronicles of Narnia.

Grossman is taking fantasy stories that we are already familiar with, but trying to retell them with a more pessimistic view of human nature. (I’m sure it’s no coincidence this book is written by a huge Watchmen fan.)

It’s an interesting idea. But in my opinion it fails in the execution.

The challenge in writing a book like this is to bring in enough fresh ideas to justify retelling these familiar stories.
Before he even gets to these twists, Grossman needs to spend a lot of time just recreating a setting analogous to Harry Potter, and a world analogous Narnia. This is very tiresome for the reader because we already know these stories. Once all this boring set-up work is done, Grossman can begin to play with these worlds and take them in new directions. But by this point the reader’s patience is beginning to wear thin, and that can put a lot of pressure on the last 3rd of the book to be more spectacular than it is.

In my opinion, the small twists Lev Grossman puts on the Harry Potter story does not justify 200 pages of retreaded material.

So much of this book is similar to Harry Potter. Which is intentional, I know. Grossman is deliberately trying to recreate the world of Harry Potter so he can add in his twists, I get it. But as I kept reading, I kept waiting for the big twists to come, and I kept getting disappointed.

Just like Harry Potter, the main character comes from a family where he’s largely ignored and unhappy at home (albeit not as extreme as in Harry’s case, but same idea.) Just like Harry Potter, through magical means he is taken to a mysterious magical school for magicians.

In his blurb for this book [LINK HERE], Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin writes, “Hogwarts was never like this.”

Actually, Hogwarts was a lot like this. Brakebills, the substitute Hogwarts school in this book, is clearly modeled on Hogwarts. Despite being located in upstate New York, the school is described as being Anglophone in style, which is meant to explain away all the carry-overs from J.K. Rowling’s books. Students board at the school, and eat together in magical communal dining halls. Prefects are appointed among the student body to help keep order.
The school grounds have all sorts of mysterious magical anomalies just like the campus at Hogwarts, but while all the changing staircases and talking portraits seemed new and fresh when reading about Hogwarts, it seemed boring, stale and derivative when reading about the magical campus of Brakebills.

The faculty at Brakebills are an eccentric bunch, similar to the faculty at Hogwarts. Although all of the professors help the students in the end, some of them seem to take pleasure in tormenting the students as well (not unlike Snape from the Harry Potter series.) Just like in Harry Potter, the faculty will often refuse to be direct with the students, and instead hint at things in cryptic manners.

Instead of being divided up into houses, the students are divided into academic disciplines, but these function pretty much the same way as the houses in Hogwarts. Just as in Hogwarts, the students don’t choose their groups, but their groups are chosen for them, in this case after a series of magical tests. The disciplines compete against each other in the magical game welters, a take off on quidditch .
The main character Quentin shares several similarities with Harry Potter. Although his home life is not as abusive as Harry’s, he does come from a home where he is largely ignored and relatively unhappy, and when the chance comes he desperately seizes onto this magical school as a way out of his previous life.
He’s not “the chosen one” in the same way Harry is, but he shows signs of being special. He’s one of two students to be allowed to skip a year at school, and the school faculty have trouble assigning him a discipline because he’s a special case.
Just as Harry entered the magical world as a complete naive, and had to be taught everything by his fellow students, so there are a couple passages which indicate that Quentin’s classmates somehow know much more about the magical world than he does, and (in passages that feel extremely repetitive of Harry Potter) they educate him about things like dragons or the game of welters while they simultaneous express amazement at his ignorance.
The other major character in this book, Alice, is very obviously similar to Hermione.

But more than that, the central premise behind the Harry Potter books was that magic was real, but it had to be meticulously studied at school in the same old boring way you learn chemistry or mathematics time table—the combination of the fantastical with the mundanity of school studies.

In passages I found very irritating, Lev Grossman spends a fair amount of time attempting to rekindle this same wonder at magical study for his own readers—As if nobody had ever read Harry Potter before and it was still a new concept.


This wasn’t Fillory [ed note: Fillory is Grossman’s stand in for Narnia]. In each of the Fillory novels one or two of the Chatwin children were always taken under the wing of a kindly Fillorian mentor who taught them a skill or a craft. In The World in the Walls Martin becomes a master horseman and Helen trains as a kind of forest scout; in The Flying Forest Rupert becomes a deadly archer; in A Secret Sea Fiona trains with a master fencer; and so on. The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
Learning magic was nothing like that. It turned out to be about as tedious as it was possible for the study of powerful and mysterious supernatural forces to be. The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstance of its casting, and a hundred other factors, all of which were tabulated in volumes of tables and charts and diagrams printed in microscopic jewel type on huge yellowing elephant-folio pages. And half of each page was taken up with footnotes listing the exceptions and irregularities and special cases, all of which had to be committed to memory, too. Magic was a lot wonkier than Quentin thought it would be.
(Page 55—one of several passages in the book detailing how hard it was to study magic.)

Several times while reading The Magicians I wanted to cry out, “I’ve already read this book. Oh come on! I’VE READ THIS BOOK ALREADY!”

In the later Harry Potter books, the tone gets a little bit darker. The happy carefree place of Hogwarts is invaded by dark magicians, and JK Rowling even goes as far as to kill off some of the teenage Hogwarts characters to heighten the drama.
Lev Grossman does the same thing in his book. (I’m not sure if this is supposed to be one of the “darker twists” his novel is advertised as adding, but it’s not. This is straight out of the Harry Potter playbook.)
JK Rowling never killed off a teenage character without first making us care about this person, and making the death seem meaningful.
Grossman, on the other hand, shamelessly, kills off a character that we barely know, who was introduced only a few pages beforehand, and who only exists in the novel for the purposes of being killed off. He then tries in the pages afterwards to extract some pathos from her death, but off course it completely falls flat because we never got to care about this character in the first place.

It’s always dangerous for a new novelist to force comparisons with a more established novelist. Grossman forces the reader to compare him to JK Rowling, and Grossman suffers from the comparison.

The Harry Potter series may have had its faults, but one of the great things about JK Rowling was the way she just got out of the way and let the characters talk. The characters in Harry Potter talked to each other a lot, and the character's personality didn’t have to be explicitly told to us by the narrator. Their personality just came out in the way they talked and what they did. As a consequence, I thought JK Rowling’s better characters, like Ron and Hermione, seemed incredibly like real people.
Other characters like Malfoy were a bit more one-dimensional, it’s true, but one-dimensional or not Malfoy could still pop off the page. You could picture in your head every snarl he made.

By contrast, the heavy hand of the narrator is very present in The Magicians. The characters get very little dialogue, and what little personality they do have often has to be just told directly by the narrator. In The Magicians, character personality is very likely to be delivered in passages like this:

Richard, of course, was the mysterious stranger who turned up with the other former Physical Kids on graduation day. He was a one-time Physical Kid, too, of the generation that preceded Eliot and Josh and Janet, and of them all he was the only one who had actually entered the world of respectable professional wizardry. Richard was tall, with a big head, dark hair, square shoulders, and a big square chin, and he was handsome in a Frankensteinian way. He was friendly enough to Quentin—firm handshake, lots of eye contact with his big, dark eyes. In conversation he liked to address Quentin directly as “Quentin” a lot, which made him feel kind of like they were having a job interview. Richard was employed by the trust that managed the collective financial assets of the magical community, which were vast. He was, in a quiet way, an observant Christian. They were rare among magicians.
Quentin tried to like Richard, since everybody else did, and it would just be simpler. But he was so damn earnest. He wasn’t stupid, but he completely lacked any sense of humor—jokes derailed him, so that the whole conversation had to stop while somebody, usually Janet, explained what everybody else was laughing at, and Richard knitted his thick Vulcan eyebrows in consternation at his companions’ merely human foibles. And Janet, who could usually be counted on to ruthlessly flense anybody who made the mistake of taking anything seriously, Janet waited on Richard hand and foot! It annoyed Quentin to think that she might look up to Richard the same way he had once looked up to the older Physical Kids. He had the definite sense that Janet must have slept with Richard once or twice back at Brakebills. It was entirely possibly that they slept together once in a while now. (Page 232-233).

As a consequence, many of these characters never come alive the way the Harry Potter characters do. You’re told what personality each character is supposed to have, but you really only see glimpses of it for yourself.

Right, so what twists does Grossman offer that’s supposed to justify this 200 page Harry Potter redux?

Well, the language is coarser for one thing. The word “fuck” makes the occasional appearance.
Then there’s sex.
The Harry Potter characters had plenty of romantic angst over the course of their 7 books, but although there was lots of “snogging” (the British term for make-out sessions, I believe) sex was never an explicit part of the Harry Potter world.
The characters in “The Magicians” are actively having adult sex. And occasionally things turn nasty, and one character will have sex with another as a sort of power play, or revenge sex.
So I guess that’s sort of a twist. But even here, if you substitute “snogging” for sex, this wasn’t entirely alien to the Harry Potter world. Harry Potter characters would occasionally snog someone for the purpose of making someone else jealous.

The other twist, the young-adult angst, is also not entirely alien to the Harry Potter world. Harry Potter characters also have a fair amount of angst about growing up and finding their place in this world that is retread in The Magicians.
What’s slightly different is that Grossman adds the element of ennui here. The Harry Potter characters are always on a mission, so they never really sit around getting bored with their lives. Grossman’s characters get bored despite having all the magical world at their finger tips. Or maybe because of having all the magic they get bored, since they don’t have to work for anything. At any rate, just like spoiled rich kids anywhere, they seek to escape their boredom through drugs and alcohol.
This is a twist, and it is new to the material, but it doesn’t really kick in fully until the characters graduate, and so you have to wade through 200 pages first to get to the twist, and, in my opinion, it’s just not worth it.

Then, the characters discover that they can escape to the magical land of Fillory. (Just as Brakebills is Grossman’s stand in for Hogwarts, Fillory operates as his stand in for Narnia).

This section is slightly more interesting, or at least better paced. First of all the Fillory world already operates as a book-within-a-book in the world of The Magicians, and so before The Magicians' characters even set foot in the land of Fillory/Narnia, they are already familiar with all the conceits and clichés of this world. Consequently we don’t have to have 200 pages of Grossman setting everything up first before he can begin to deconstruct it, and we just jump into the story quicker.

There then follows a Narnia like adventure.

One of the reasons I kept reading this book past all the boring Harry Potter redux sections was that I was really looking forward to the Narnia sections. The books cover (and all the positive reviews) promised a much darker macabre twist on the Narnia material, and I was really curious to see what these would be. I was fully expecting to be shocked and horrified, but, as with before, the twists Grossman introduces are disappointing and really predictable.

The first twist is the violence.

In C.S. Lewis’s books, there’s a lot of violence or implied violence going on, but of course it’s kept very clean as you would expect from 1950s children’s book. Characters may clash with swords occasionally, but you don’t hear about the swords being graphically plunged into someone’s guts.
In real life, of course, the conflicts described in these books would end up being a lot more brutal.
Of course you’re a fully functioning adult now, and you've probably figured that out already. But just in case it hadn’t dawned on you, Grossman treats you to about 30 pages of fantastic characters graphically killing each other: giant anthropomorphic rabbits getting their necks violently broken, and fox men getting knives thrown into their eye sockets.

The next twist is the Chatwin children (Grossman’s stand in for the Pevensie children from C.S. Lewis’s book.) become incredibly maladjusted to society as a result of their Fillory/Narnia experience.

It is true that in his books CS Lewis never explored what it would do to a child’s psyche to abruptly go from being a ruler of a magical kingdom to revert back to a school child again.

The recent Narnia movies, however, did attempt to tackle this question.
So once again this feels like retread ground to me. Granted Grossman takes it in a darker direction, but to me it’s still retreading the same theme.

Then, there’s a surprise twist at the end, which really isn’t much of a surprise at all, and which just made me groan when I read it. “Really? That obvious?” I said aloud to my copy of the book.

*****************************************************
* Sidenote: Although this book was highly praised by professional reviewers, most of the reviewers on Amazon.com share my disappointment with this book [SEE AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEWS HERE]. I probably should have checked out the Amazon reviews first and spared myself the disappointment.

That being said, some of my disappointment with this book may well have been the problem of high expectations. I probably allowed myself to be too influenced by a few reviews that praised this book too much.

I will say this for the book: it fully absorbed my attention while I was reading it, and I blazed through all 400 pages in only 3 days. (Which for me, anyway, is saying something. I’m one of those slow readers who usually gets about 50 pages into a book, then gets distracted by something else, and then ends up taking months to finish a short book.)
The reason I was so into this book when I was reading it was that I kept waiting for it to get good. And when I got to the ending and discovered that this was all there was to the book, I felt disappointed.

And yet even so, the very fact that this book held my attention for 3 days straight is probably saying something.

Maybe I should give it half a recommendation after all?

**********************************************************

Plot Holes, Spoilers, and Miscellaneous [The following section contains lots of Spoilers.]

There are a lot of plot holes, and other things that don’t make a lot of sense in this book.

I know it’s a fantasy book, and I’m not supposed to take it too seriously. But sometimes I can’t help myself. [Plus, for a book that was written in part to address what Grossman thought were plot holes in the Harry Potter and Narnia series (how he thought it was so strange Harry Potter didn't read fantasy books, etc), his own book contains an awful lot of plot holes.]

I’m not going to pick on all the things that didn’t make sense in this book, but I will highlight a few things:

* First of all, what’s the deal with Julia? Such a big deal is made of her, and yet was she just totally superfluous to this whole story, or what?
I understand she takes on an expanded role in the sequel, so maybe her inclusion in this book was just to set up her character for the sequel?
Except that in this interview [LINK HERE], Grossman says that he wasn’t originally planning a sequel when he wrote The Magicians.
So what was the point of Julia in this book?

* A whole lot of stuff with the Chatwin children just made no sense.
Quentin is repeatedly described as being obsessed with the Fillory books. He even seems aware of some of the scholarly research on these books. And yet it comes as a surprise to him when Alice reveals to that the Chatwin children who figure in the Fillory books are based on real life Chatwin children who lived near the Fillory books author Christopher Plummer.
You would think that this would have been one of the first things a real fan would discover.
Also the real life Chatwin child Martin Chatwin disappears in real life just as the Martin Chatwin character in the Fillory books does. You would also think this would be bigger news.
Then, at the end of the book we find that Christopher Plummer had been raping Martin Chatwin. It turns out this is the reason why Martin Chatwin had been trying to hide in the clock to begin with.
And yet, Christopher Plummer was also the person the Chatwin children went to in order to confide their Fillory adventures to? That doesn’t make any sense.

* From an interview with Grossman:

AVC: At first glance, The Magicians could be seen as a totally ironic look at fantasy. And then some of your characters reference things like Harry Potter and Oz by name. Did you have any internal debate about including those references?

LG: Oh, yeah. I even had external debates about it. [Laughs.] But here’s what I’ve always thought: It’s very weird that Harry Potter isn’t a fantasy reader. Here he is growing up in a closet, surrounded by an abusive stepfamily. I would think he’d be obsessed with and read nothing but fantasy. I did, and I didn’t even have an abusive stepfamily. When he gets to Hogwarts, it’s as if he’s never read a fantasy novel in his life. It’s obviously something that J.K. Rowling opted out of and chose not to deal with. But I thought it would be interesting if everyone who goes to my magic school has spent their whole life playing Gauntlet and Dungeons & Dragons and reading Narnia and Harry Potter. They would see everything through that lens and compare everything to what they’ve read about in books. I wasn’t making a big metafictional point; I just think that’s how it would happen. And I wanted to cue people that Harry Potter was part of this universe, yet I didn’t want to get super-overbearing about it. I also didn’t want to get into an intellectual-property lawsuit. [Laughs.] There’s just a couple winky-wink moments that hope aren’t too cute. There was a lot of debate within myself and with other people about how far to go with that. I didn’t want to seem like I was making fun of Harry Potter. I love Harry Potter. I just felt that my characters would make fun of Harry Potter.

I can see what Grossman is trying to do, but now he’s got an all-or-nothing problem going on here.
Either Grossman’s characters are aware of the Harry Potter books or they’re not. The couple passing references they make towards Harry Potter indicate that they are. But then it doesn’t make any sense that they wouldn’t reference Harry Potter more. Everything that happens to them is so similar to Harry Potter. When they first encounter this magical school for wizards, you would think that their first point of reference would be Harry Potter.

* So, I don’t get it, what was the deal with all those magical creatures they had to fight until they got to Ember? Were they all on Martin’s side?
Martin had conducted this elaborate plan to lure the Magicians into Ember’s prison, and then defeat them. Which was why Dint and Favel helped him lure the magicians there. I guess? But why Ember’s prison? And if it was Martin’s plan to encounter the Magicians in Ember’s dungeon all along, why did his creatures fight so hard to keep them away?
Did that mean Dint was fighting against the creatures on his own side for the purposes of the ruse?

* So, in the end we find out that Dint was working for Martin the whole time. But Fen wasn’t I guess? Because the characters all continued to refer to her death as a tragedy. How do we know she wasn’t working for Martin like Dint? And if she wasn’t, then what was her game this whole time? She must have known she was leading them to Ember’s prison, right?
And the river nymph? What was the deal with her? Was that ever explained?

* Time in Fillory apparently works just like it does in Narnia. No matter how little or how long you spend in Fillory, whenever you leave you’re back in the real world as if no time has passed at all. And when your in the real world, you have no idea how much time is passing in Fillory.
The book goes to consider effort to set this up and make this clear.
And then after all that, the ending of the book is totally inconsistent. What’s the deal with that? How come when Quentin finally exits from Fillory, time has passed in the real world?

* So, what was the deal with that dead guy in the beginning of the book? Was that ever explained?

[Sigh, and lots of other various other things in the book that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. But I’m done with it now. I’ve spent too much time on this book and this book review already. I’m moving on to other things that are more worthy of my time and energy.]

Link of the Day
Chatting with Chomsky 
and  Drone warfare's deadly civilian toll: a very personal view

The Magicians by Lev Grossman: Book Review (Scripted)

Part 2: The Magicians by Lev Grossman: Book Review (Scripted)

The Expendables 2

(Movie Review)

It was dinner and a movie night with a group of friends the other night. The movie playing was Expendables 2.

I had never seen the first Expendables, but my friends assured me that it didn’t really matter. There was no complicated plot I had to worry about.

It’s pretty pointless to review a movie like this. If I were in a bad mood, I could complain that this movie was a loud, stupid, mindless action flick, with lots of dumb one-liners, that was reminiscent of the worst excesses of the big dumb action movies from the 1980s.
But this movie is deliberately designed to be a tribute to the big dumb action movies from the 1980s. So you get exactly what you pay for I suppose.
If the movie seems at times like it’s parodying itself—well that’s because it is.

As a mindless action flick, it’s entertaining enough. As much as possible, try and turn off your brain before the movie starts. And make sure you bring in lots of salty snacks, candy, and coca-cola to shovel into your face while you watch this movie.

And yes, it was pretty cool to see Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme all together in the same scene. (And yes, also the other assorted action stars in this movie—Jet Li, Dolph Lundgrem, Jason Stathom).

My only complaint, if I had to make a complaint, is that none of the action scenes were all that spectacular. But what can you expect? Many of the stars are getting very old. (Chuck Norris is 71.) And so the movie requires them to do little more than hold guns and press the trigger and yell out dumb catch phrases.

Notes:
* There has got to be a lot of really easy money to be made as a Hollywood screenwriter. How hard can it be to write a story like this? Or come up with this kind of dialogue?

* I was never allowed to watch these dumb 80s action flicks when I was a kid. In fact, the conservative religious community that I grew up in blamed these ultra-violent Hollywood movies for just about everything that was going wrong in the world.
So how ironic is it that all so many of these movie stars are right wing Republicans now? Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris are active Republicans. (Adding in John Wayne, Charlton Heston, and Clint Eastwood, and for some reason it looks like we have a fine tradition of Hollywood action movie stars as active Republicans.)
Chuck Norris is famous for both his right wing views and his born-again Christianity.
It's hard not to wonder how he reconciles his day job with his Christian activism. When watching him machine gun several bad guys, you wonder, "Really, is this what Jesus would do?"
But I'm guessing he draws a clear line between escapist entertainment, and the real world. And come to that, so do I. Which is how I justify going to these violent movies.

Link of the Day
Why America and Israel Are the Greatest Threats to Peace

The Expendables 2: Movie Review (Scripted)

The AVclub today put out their review of Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Which I'm linking to just out of pure nostalgia.

During my phase when I was working my way through classic horror films, this was one of my favourites. Mostly for the same reason the review cites.

It works remarkably well. Plus it was one of only 3 movies in which all 3 Universal monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman) got to share the same screen. (House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula being the other two).

And it also brings back the original actors for the Monsters (Glenn Strange wasn't the original original Frankenstein, but he had played the monster before in previous movies. Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. are the pure originals.)

Link of the Day
The Washington Post (or at least its book blog)just this month reviewed The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore. This book is apparently back in print for the first time in 40 years.

It's nice to see this (relatively) obscure 1933 book, about Werewolves eating prostitutes during the Paris Commune, get some of the attention it deserves.
For my own review from 4 years ago, see here.

Stealing this link from a friend's facebook page:
The Black Cauldron: Is the movie that almost killed Disney animation really that bad?

Just for pure nostalgia's sake. With no other reason really.

But adding this note: Nostalgia's a funny thing. A few years ago I rented and re-watched the Black Cauldron again. Although it was a deeply flawed movie in many ways, I could never bring myself to hate it. All I could remember was how excited I was to see it as a kid. And all the other 1980s cartoons I was excited about during the same period. And how I spent so much of my childhood in my own little world either watching these fantasy stories or imagining them.

For the same reasons, I think this is why I hate most movies I watch nowadays, but love everything that I saw during my childhood. Perhaps the reasons why me and everyone else of my generation never warmed to the Star Wars prequels, for example.

Colonial Cambodia’s “Bad Frenchmen”: The Rise of French Rule and the Life of Thomas Caraman, 1840-87 by Gregor Muller

(Book Review)

The title of this book is Colonial Cambodia’s “Bad Frenchmen.” However, as the quotation marks indicate, the words “Bad Frenchmen” are not the words of the author himself. Rather the title comes directly from the phrase used by the French colonial office itself, “des mauvais francais.” The French colonial office used these words to describe members of their fellow countrymen who they believed were giving France a bad name and lowering French prestige, and by doing so were endangering the French mission to civilize Cambodia (mission civilisatrice).

In his introduction, author Gregor Muller explains his reasons for wanting to focus on these “bad Frenchmen.” According to Muller, we often think of colonialism as the strong oppressing the weak. In actuality, however, things were a lot more complicated. In the case of Cambodia, and in the history of colonialism generally, the actual colonizers who settled in the new territories were largely the social outcasts, business failures and riff-raff from their own country. They did not always identify with the interests of their own government, and they could at times side with the native population against their own government when it suited them.

As Muller explains on page 6:
Caramen’s story and the stories of his fellow merchants in Phnom Penh painfully illustrate that colonial rule in Cambodia was no well-oiled monolithic campaign uniting military, bureaucratic and economic aims in any preordained way. Instead, early colonization is shown to be a piecemeal affair composed of scattered and haphazard efforts, often initiated by individuals and sometimes resting on unexpected alliances across the ethnic divide. As such, these narratives are, I believe, worth telling. The goal is not to trivialize the injustice of colonial rule. But if these stories remain untold there is a risk, as Nicholas Thomas notes, that “not simply … a dimension of colonialism might be neglected but that its coherence can be radically overstated.” (p.6)

To illustrate this, Muller focuses in on the life of Thomas Caraman.

Thomas Caraman actually pops up briefly a couple times in The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia by Milton Osborne. Muller, who also read Osborne’s book, was intrigued enough by these brief references to go to the National Archives in Phnom Penh and dig out all the papers relating to Caraman, and then weave together the narrative that makes up the framework for this book.

From the brief view of Thomas Caraman we get in Milton Osborne’s book, he appears to be a successful French merchant who was influential with the Cambodian royal court, but not always on good terms with his own government.

In the much fuller picture we get from Gregor Muller, Thomas Caraman appears to be a megalomaniac who was not perhaps altogether in touch with reality.
Muller illustrates the huge gap between Caraman’s grandiose visions of himself on one hand, and his complete failure as a business man on the other hand. The gap between Caraman’s self image and reality is so great that often he does not appear to be completely sane. Muller does not attempt to diagnose him, but suggests at some points that Caraman may have been affected by a case of narcissism which affected the way he viewed the world.

Caraman had dreams of making it big in Cambodia, but has absolutely no business skills or cultural skills with which to do so. Like many of his fellow countrymen, he seems to simply have believed that he was guaranteed success in the colonies because of his white skin which he thought would open every door and smooth out every difficulty.
Instead, he spun from one magnificent failed business venture to another, but never really seemed to learn his lesson. After each failure he blamed everyone but himself, and then picked himself up and tried another business venture.

Although he developed a bad reputation with the colonial government, surprisingly enough, despite Caraman’s poor track record and complete lack of skills, his amazing confidence in himself appears to have been infectious. He apparently was a skilled enough talker that he was able to bamboozle various people into backing his ridiculous business plans every time.
(Reading this book, I was struck by how useful it is in the world to simply project a confident self-image. The lesson of Thomas Caraman’s life seems to be to project confidence, no matter what, and at least some people will eventually give in and follow.)

Gregor Muller reconstructs as much of Caraman’s life as he can through his surviving letters, and other archival documents. He then uses Caraman’s life as a frame to explore other aspects of colonial French society in Cambodia.
As a reader, it is not a framework I was entirely happy about, which brings me to the next section

Readability

So, is this a good book?
As always, that depends on what yardstick you are using to judge it.

As a work of scholarship, I think Gregor Muller has made a significant contribution to the field of history by rescuing Thomas Caraman’s story from the molding old papers in the Phnom Penh archives.

And when it comes to being informative, this book is very informative. I can’t deny I learned a lot about Cambodia and French colonial society from reading this book.

But as someone who reads history for a hobby, I primarily tend to judge these books on how enjoyable they are to read. And here I regret to say I must give this book low marks.

It’s not that Muller is a bad writer—his prose is very readable, and he displays some excellent talent for story telling in some of the narrative passages. My big problem with the book is the editing.
[I know some pedantic people are going to tell me that good editing is part of good writing, but for my purposes here I’m going to make a distinction between paragraph level prose writing and broader editing concerns.]

Take for example, the opening paragraphs to chapter 6:

William Hale held nothing against black people as long as they stayed in their place. In the course of his career he had learned to appreciate their work. For close to twenty years he relied on black slave labor to sustain his cotton-spinning mill in New Orleans. In antebellum Louisiana, where people were still bought and sold as property, William Hale thrived. Once the Civil War had formally ended slavery in the southern states, and with many former slaves gone north, Hale decided to move to a place where labor remained cheap and abundant, and where his white skin counted for something. Perhaps this was the prime reason that he wound up in Saigon soon after the French conquest of the Mekong Delta.
William Hale was the local representative of Jardine & Matheson, the largest Hong Kong Merchant house in the Far East, and he also dealt in insurance, shipping, and commodity trade. In 1874 the British Consulate listed him as representing “the leading British interests in the colony,” including the legendary Lloyd’s of London. Hale was a busy man and needed no further responsibilities, but he kept a watchful eye on developments on the local cotton market and hoped that circumstances would one day permit him to return to his former trade. With American plantations struggling in the 1870s and the demand for quality cotton high on the world market, Saigon’s traders were certain that cotton was Cochinchina’s future. Unsuccessful forays into that area in previous years had not diminished the general optimism regarding the potential of local cotton. When one day, in May 1878, Caraman walked into Hale’s office to tell him how he planned to revolutionize the Khmer cotton industry, Hale was therefore ready to listen.
(page 157)

The prose style of the above two paragraphs is well-written and quite readable. My problem, however, is that after a big introduction like this right at the beginning of a chapter, you would expect Hale to be one of the major figures in that chapter. Instead, after these 2 paragraphs, and a brief sentence on the following page [“Hale was so impressed by Caraman’s pitch that he loaned him several thousand piasters”] William Hale is never heard from again.

It may seem a small complaint, but these frequent false leads gave me a minor headache over the course of reading this book. I would often think the author was going in one direction, and then find myself suddenly following him down a different tangent instead.

My other complaint is that this book focused so much on analytical history at the expense of its story.
This is a matter of personal preference. If you like scholarly history books that are light on story but heavy on analysis, you won’t mind this. But I prefer to read books that tell history as a story, and I was frustrated because the story kept getting interrupted by long analytical sections.

Part of this is also perhaps disappointed expectations. After slogging my way through two rather dry books on French Colonial history in Indochina (The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia and the aforementioned The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia) I was hoping for more of a readable popular history, and the title of this book as well as the cover seemed to promise just that.

But this book is not primarily a biography. Caraman’s life does not make up the majority of this book, but instead Muller will use Caraman’s story as a jumping off point to go on at length about various digressions. (I suspect that in the end there just wasn’t enough surviving information on Caraman to fill up a whole book, and so Muller had to resort to various other subjects to fill out the pages. Or it could have been Muller’s plan all along to write a book that was heavy on analysis, I don’t know.)

I found the constant switching back and forth between narrative and analytical sections a bit jolting. Just when I felt like I was getting into Caraman’s story, Muller would go off on some digression for 10 pages or so. When the book finally got around to returning to Caraman’s story, I had largely forgotten what was going on with Caraman, and further more had stopped caring.

To take a typical example:
One of the more interesting events in Caraman’s life is when he was commissioned by the Cambodian king Norodom to procure certain items from France. Caraman manages to botch the job horribly, spending way more money than King Norodom was prepared to reimburse him for. When the king refused to pay for the items Caraman had delivered, an ad hoc tribunal had to be set up by the French colonial authorities to arbitrate the dispute.

It’s a fascinating story, but right at the climatic moment of the showdown, when the French tribunal is deciding its verdict, Muller takes a 23 page digression to talk about the French legal system in Cambodia. In the course of these 23 pages there are several digressions within the digression. We learn about the attitudes of the French to the Cambodian legal system, the history of French judicial control, and the question of whether Vietnamese nationals living in Cambodia should be subject to French law or Cambodian law. We even get yanked into various side stories, like a case about a Vietnamese woodcutter in French controlled Cambodia, and the question of whether Indians in Cambodia should have the same legal protections as European colonialists.

And then finally we get back to the story of Caraman and his legal dispute with King Norodom. At which point I had largely forgotten about this story, and had at any point stopped caring.

We get a few more pages about Caraman’s various misadventures in Cambodia, but then the next chapter (Chapter 5: Rules of romance and reproduction, 1877—79) takes some passing remarks Caraman makes about his Cambodian mistress as an excuse to go on a 30 page digression about every aspect of French interaction with Cambodian women.
In the course of this digression on colonial romance, Muller briefly returns to Caraman’s story to talk about a fist fight between Caraman and his Siamese Mandarin neighbor that attracted much attention, but then (without even bothering to say who won the fight) Muller goes off on more digressions.

And this is typical of the whole book. I found it very frustrating myself.

Also at the end of each chapter or section, the author has the tendency to explicitly spell out the lessons that can be learned from each subject, which unfortunately makes the book sound like a textbook.

But, as always, you should take my opinion with a grain of salt.
This book is popular among the expatriate crowd here in Cambodia, and I’ve talked to a number of other expats here who have also read this book. And so far, I’m the only one I’ve encountered who didn’t enjoy it. Everyone else seems to like this book, and even when I try to explain what I found frustrating about the book, they don’t agree with me.
So I seem to be in the minority on this one.

Interesting Points
Despite my frustrations with this book as a whole, there were several interesting tidbits to be gained along the way.

In spite of all the books flaws, there may be enough little interesting nuggets to justify reading it after all.
For example, during the Cambodian uprising against the French in 1884-87, there are some interesting (if rather horrifying) passages describing the torched earth policy the French commanders practiced against the Cambodian villagers. It's a reminder that the Americans were not the first Western power to commit atrocities in this country.

Also, among the expatriate crowd in Cambodia now, people who have read this book seem to enjoy drawing parallels between the French expatriate community described in this book, and the expatriate community in Cambodia now.
After some 40 years of civil war, Cambodia, or at least Phnom Penh, has once again become a place where large numbers of expatriates have chosen to settle.
In fact there's a new book out now, by a Frenchman, about the new expatriate community in Cambodia: Expatriates' Strange Lives in Cambodia by Frederic Amat [LINK HERE]. I've not read that book yet, but it might be the logical follow-up to this one.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky – US treatment of Bradley Manning “obviously improper” see here and here

Colonial Cambodia’s “Bad Frenchmen” by Gregor Muller: Book Review (Scripted)

On the Amalekites

So this link, How Christian fundamentalists plan to teach genocide to schoolchildren

...brings back a few memories.

I first remember hearing about Saul's destruction of the Amalekites in second grade. My second grade teacher (at my private Christian school) told us Bible stories every day.

It was in retrospect, a surprisingly thorough retelling of the Old Testament considering we were only in second grade.

To give her her due, my second grade teacher was very good at her job. We were too young to read the real Bible at that age, so she would just retell the Bible stories to us in language that we could understand.
It was one of those under-appreciated skills that looks deceptively easy, but very few people actually pull it off.

(I used to ask my mom to tell Bible stories just like our teacher did, but without success. Also once the student teacher took over Bible story time for a few days, and couldn't do it at all. She completely confused the whole class trying to re-tell the story about how Jeroboam and Rehoboam split the Kingdom of Israel into two parts. Then, a couple days later our regular teacher came back and started telling us the stories again, and suddenly it was back in a language we understood.)

Perhaps because she was such a good story teller, several of these stories stick out in my mind years later.

I remember well the story of Saul's extermination of the Amalekites. I remember it partly because it referenced back an earlier story. The teacher reminded us of how the Amalekites had attacked the Israelites in the desert, and in my child mind I immediately thought: "Oh no, was I supposed to have remembered that? I vaguely remember when they got attacked in the desert, but I didn't remember the tribe's name." (I was a typical first born and prone to panic easily in school when I thought I wasn't remembering everything I should of.)

Oddly enough, the brutal extermination of the Amalekites itself didn't particularly horrify me at the time. But as I said, we had already worked our way through several gruesome Old Testament stories by this point, and one more massacre more or less didn't seem to make a difference.

Plus we were children, and we accepted whatever the adults told us. If the adults told us it was morally right for the Israelites to kill all the Amalekites, we tended to accept it and just shove our own doubts into the back of our mind. (Or at least I did.)

It's only now in retrospect that I wonder why these kind of stories were taught to children. And why people think that children should get their morality from the Bible.

Also, it wasn't until later years (and the invention of the Internet) that I would discover that the destruction of the Amalekites is a thread that re-occurs several times throughout the Old Testament.
It's true that God orders plenty of other races are exterminated in books like Numbers and Joshua, but these appear to have been done in the hot blood of conquest. The extermination of the Amalekites is done in cold blood over the centuries. Even during the time of Saul, even during the time of Hezekiah, God still can not stand the fact that there are some people of Amalekite blood living, and he still orders the Israelites to systematically wipe them out.

It is in response to this that Chomsky gives his famous comments about the Bible. The link is here, but the relevant section probably deserves to be quoted here in full as well.

In response to a question from the interview that many people look to religion to provide moral codes, Chomsky replies:
Moral codes...You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible--not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide--I mean wipe out every Amalekite down to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert--not only did He do things like that, but, after all the God of the Bible was willing to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide--you don't know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of every species to stay alive--that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful.

(A couple disclaimers should probably be made at this point. First according to the Biblical account the Amalekites did ambush the Israelites in the desert, not just simply get in their way. But I'll make allowances for Chomsky because he's talking from memory in an interview situation.
Secondly it's probably also important to note thatChomsky's views on religion are more complex than this one quote would indicate. In other talks and interviews he does say that most of the progress movements of the last century have come out of the church, so he is no Christopher Hitchens, believing religious groups are always the root of all evil.)

There are of course numerous Christian apologetics for the Amalekite genocide, and you can find several of them on-line. This one seems to be the most thorough.
Good question...shouldn't the butchering of the Amalekite children be considered war crimes? By Glenn Miller.

I'm not going to try to refute this on a point by point basis. For me, I think you begin to lose your humanity by even entering into the debate. Once you even start entertaining the idea that these massacres are morally ok, then you've lost something. If that makes me close minded, then so be it I guess.

Link of the Day
Academic Freedom and the Corporatization of Universities

If I Were A Radio Producer....

I just finished working my way through the BBC Radio series: This Sceptred Isle (W). Again.

I've worked my way through this series several times now actually, and thoroughly enjoy it each time.
If you include everything, it's about 50 hours. But the nice thing about radio programs and Audio Books is that you never really miss the time

I've always been a slow reader, but I'm a big fan of audio books because I can put them on the in the background at my apartment when I'm doing my laundry, cooking, eating dinner, cleaning, getting dressed, getting ready for bed, et cetera.

At times I disagree slightly with some of the politics of the show. For example at the end of the last episode, there's a little polemic about how the the lesson of English history is that Britain works best when it has a strong central figure to lead it. This rubs my anarchist sensibilities the wrong way.

But this didn't stop me from appreciating what masterful storytelling the series used. Taking the listener all the way from Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55 BC to Tony Blair in 1999 in just 45 hours, the show gives just the right amount of details to keep things interesting, but at the same times keeps a strong narrative arch that avoids getting bogged down in the details.

It makes me wish NPR would do a similar project on American history. A comprehensive overview of American history lasting about 50 hours or so. (Or longer. I wouldn't mind longer actually). And taking us all the way through American history from the colonial days up to the present.

And so, if I were a Radio Producer, this is the project I would commission.

Actually--at the risk of sounding like a huge geek, this is what I would absolutely love: a year by year chronicle of American history.  Each year would get a one hour radio program dedicated to it.  Possibly two 1 hour radio programs for each year.  And then just systematically work your way through the entire history of America, from the earliest colonial settlements to the present day.
 The style would be the same as "This Sceptred Isle" where you would have a narrator's voice telling the story (instead of a panel discussion or various experts brought it.)  It would take a lot of work and energy to do the research and then to write it into a smooth flowing narrative, but you could start slow.  Maybe just one new program a month?  One new program every 6 months?  However long they needed to produce a quality series.
It would take forever to work all the way through American history on a year by year basis, but who cares?  Public radio isn't going anywhere soon (hopefully).  Take the long route and gradually accumulate a huge archive of radio programs that chronicle every year of American history.  Then you could sell collections of the archived programs on CD.   (If it takes several decades to work your way through all that history, you could start selling archived collections before the show as a whole is complete).  History geeks like me could buy them and listen to them at our leisure at home.  We would love it.

Just my humble idea to make the world a more interesting place.

Link of the Day
In Hiroshima's Shadow

This Sceptred Isle Radio Show: Review

Ayn Rand Back in the News

(And other digressions)

So I guess the fact that Mitt Romney's vice presidential nominee is a huge Ayn Rand nut has thrust Ayn Rand back into the news.

I don't know if you've been reading all the same internet articles I have, but here's all the interesting things about Ayn Rand I've learned in the past few days.

Via Phil I learned that Ayn Rand had a bizarre serial killer fan girl phase--article here.

And via Salon.com, Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them.

For my own thoughts on Ayn Rand, see my review of The Fountainhead here.

If you've ever read any Ayn Rand, it comes out very quickly that she is not a fan of Christianity.
It is ironic she has become the icon of the Republican Party then.

So just to be clear : If you're from the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, and you like Ayn Rand, fair enough I suppose.
But if you're from the religious right wing of the Republican Party, you really have no business praising Ayn Rand.

Also while we're on the subject of historical figures who are misunderstood by the right wing, Cracked.com has a good article on why the Right has completely misunderstood Thomas Paine, and why they really have no business using him as a symbol considering he was actually much more of a New Deal Democrat and  stood for just about everything they opposed.

I made the same observation a few years after reading a mini-biography of Thomas Paine.
And in fact if you wanted to go even further on this, something that the Cracked.com article only talks about Thomas Paine's economic ideas, and doesn't even mention that Paine really hated the Bible, and spent most of his intellectual energy in his later years writing about what a horrible book the Bible was. Which is yet another reason he would make awkward company with today's religious right.

To quote Thomas Paine on the Bible:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

(For full text see here).

And while I'm on the subject....
If you go back to the Cracked.com article linked to above: 8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite of What You Think, I also agree with them that it is totally stupid for anarchists to use Guy Fawkes symbols. See my review of V for Vendetta here to see me making essentially the same argument that they do.

(Actually the whole list is pretty good. My only nit-pick is #6. I think they are being a little bit harsh on people who like Che Guevara. Yes, Che had his faults. Yes, the whole misadventure in the Congo was not his finest hour. But that doesn't mean that he wasn't a symbol of anti-imperialism. And plus I think most of the people who wear Che Guevara T-shirts do know that he was in the Congo.)

Link of the Day
On Politics, Occupy, the Tea Party and the Global Financial Crisis

On The Passing of Gore Vidal

Since everyone else is writing on this, I might as well put in my two cents as well.

I've never actually read much Gore Vidal, although I've always been meaning to. After all, he seems like the kind of author who would be up my street: writes a lot of historical fiction from a liberal polemical standpoint.
His American Empire series in general, and Burr (W) in particular have long been on my list of "books to get around to someday."

The only thing by Gore Vidal I actually read was Julian (W). I read it in 9th grade for a book report project in English class. We were allowed to pick our own book for this project.
At the time I had no idea who Gore Vidal was, but I was going through my Roman Empire phase, and I was reading all the books our school library had on ancient Rome.

For anyone who's not yet read it, the book is a historical novel (apparently very well researched) about Julian--the Apostate--the Roman Empire who attempted to return Rome to Paganism years after Constantine had already made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Because the book is written from Julian's point of view, it is written to include his criticisms of Christianity, and what he sees as the virtue of Rome's ancient religion.

It is to the credit of my conservative Christian high school that they stocked this book in their library. But it was still a bit of an anomaly to find a book critical of Christianity in the school library, and, having gone into the book completely blind, I got really confused by it.
I kept waiting for Julian to realize his mistake, and for Christianity to be redeemed at the end of the book. When that didn't happen, I wasn't quite sure what to write on the book report.

This was 20 years ago now, so some of the details of the book are a bit vague in my memory. I remember it being well-written, but I also remember at the time feeling a bit restless with how slow the plot was moving. That could just have been because I was a lot more impatient at 14. I wonder what my reaction would be if I were to read it again now.
The other thing that sticks in my mind is the passages of the book dealing with sex.  If memory serves, it was nothing too explicit, but then I came from a Christian school background, and I was unused to any discussion of sex in a novel at all (aside from the moralizing anti-sexual polemics).   This may be another reason the book has stuck in my memory after all these years.

Link of the Day
Destroying the Commons