November 2017 book review

Welcome to this month’s media review. This blog covers the 2 books I have read this month. Please see the next one for movies.

WILD SWANS, by Jung Chang
Being the life and times of a Chinese woman, born a year after me, that is in 1952, growing up in the brave new world of communist China, and her antecedents, her mother and grandmother, who lived in no less turbulent times in the earlier part of the 20th century.

In 1906, or thereabouts, following the death of the last Emperor, they tried to hold a democratic election in a province in north-east China. But it was so riven by vote rigging, vote buying and other corruption that it has been held in China ever since As the reason why democracy can never work in China. This even though it has worked, after a fashion, in India, which is also a vast, incredibly heavily populated and diverse country. Whatever. The fact is that Chinese people have only very rarely in their history been able to determine their own destiny. From the Imperial dynasties, through the ‘reign’ of ultra-capitalist Chang Kei-Shek, through to communism, the Chinese have had leaders imposed on them without their having any say in it.

This book, with its deceptively straightforward and chatty style, is actually a small masterpiece. Jung Chang draws us into the strange and terrible world of her forebears, and then her own, in a way that is totally convincing, and never less than gripping despite its considerable length. And it is the little things, the minutiae of people’s lives as much as the great political events, that make it such an absorbing piece of writing.

For me the most terrible stories come from her own life, beginning with ‘The Great Leap Forward’ in 1959, where beloved Charman Mao, he who could do no wrong, decided that the people were wasting their lives, and indeed China’s potential as a modern, industrialized nation, by growing rice. So he forced them to become a vast army of steelworkers instead. Only trouble with that brave attempt at modernization: who’s going to produce the food? Seems Mao didn’t think, or more likely didn’t care, about that, because millions died in the artificial famine that came about as a result. Nice one Mao. Then of course the Cultural Revolution, where basically everyone was encouraged to denounce everyone else as a bad commie, allowing millions of perfectly good communists to be reviled, beaten or even murdered. And both these movements, it turns out; the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution were not about political theory turned to action, but about consolidating his own power base. I trawled the internet to determine the many facts Jung Chang lays out in this book- they’re all accurate.

Now we can see that Mao has to stand with Hitler and Stalin as one of the great tyrants of the 20th, or indeed any other century. Conclusion: a stunning read.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A sophisticated young man develops a kind of pre-Neitschean philosophy which suggests certain superior individuals may construct their own moral code which may even sanction murder. Practising what he preaches, he goes out and does exactly that. Then his conscience begins to trouble him...

I first read this book when I was 19, and because it remains not only his greatest achievement, but one of his most approachable works, I enjoyed it hugely even then. But that was over 40 years ago, and when my wife re-read it, also after a long gap, I thought I might give it another go myself. Boy, am I ever glad I did.

Crime and Punishment became a sensation in Russia when came out at the end of the 1860s, and soon found an appreciative audience beyond Russia’s borders. It has now come to be seen as one of the greatest of all Russian novels, with its superb characterization and apparently simple (though tremendously subtle in fact) plot. Give it another 20 years, if I’m still around, and I’ll probably read it again.
A wonderful, life-changing book.