August 2018 book review

THE CAPTIVE and THE FUGITIVE, by Marcel Proust
“...At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I could see what shade of colour the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what the weather was like. The first sounds from the street had told me, according to whether they came to my ears deadened and distorted by the moisture of the atmosphere or quivering like arrows in the resonant, empty expanses of a spacious, frosty, pure morning; as soon as I heard the rumble of the first tramcar, I could tell whether it was sodden with rain or setting forth into the blue...”

This is how volume V of Proust’s magnum Opus begins, and I offer this brief extract to illustrate the crystalline beauty of what lies ahead.
          This book, or books, because they were originally published separately, has been alternatively known as ‘Albertine’s book’, because Albertine, Marcel’s inamorata, is both the captive, kept virtual prisoner by his terror that the moment she is out of his sight she will seek a lesbian encounter, and fugitive, because she eventually wrests herself from his tyranny. Now read on...

THE SECRET BARRISTER, by the Secret Barrister
Being a rundown of our venerable legal system, the worst in the world except for all the others, by a working criminal barrister. From the ‘Mag’s courts’, run by a bunch of amateurs with no right of appeal against their arbitrary decisions, all the way to the Court of Appeal, where appellants find it next door to impossible to reverse lower court’s decisions, this is a devastating takedown of a broken system.
          Having got far closer than I would ever want to the workings of the criminal justIce system /recently, I kept finding myself saying, “Oh my God! So that’s how I nearly went to prison for a crime I didn’t commit!”, but also reading tales of injustice even worse than my own. But the book’s overall thrust is that our justice system is seriously underfunded, but because most of us never actually get face to face with it, we don’t complain as we might about, say, underfunding in the NHS. We all get ill, we all see our doctor from time to time so we can see how that might affect us directly. Underfunding of the legal system just isn’t sexy enough to make it big in the news, especially with what he (or is it she?) calls the ‘inherent anti-defendant bias’ in the media. Shocking reading...

HIROSHIMA, by John Hersey
A year on from the world’s first live experiment in nuclear fission, in the summer of 1946 the New Yorker magazine sent correspondent John Hersey to find out from people on the ground what happened. He concentrated on 6 people who had by some miracle survived the inferno, and got them to tell their stories. What emerged was a 30,000 word essay, and it so impressed his editor that the New Yorker made the unprecedented decision to run the piece in its entirety in a single issue devoted solely to the story.
          Almost immediately the piece was hailed as a masterpiece of creative nonfiction, with its cool, almost dispassionate accounts of suffering brought about by the Great Flash. There is no moral judgement at all, Hersey preferring to leave that for the reader.
Footnote: you can read the full text yourself by typing the words “Hiroshima John Hersey full text” into google, and I promise you will be forever changed by the experience.