Peter Ackroyd's 'The death of King Arthur'

From the occasional book reviews file: Peter Ackroyd's The Death of King Arthur.

>>>>>>

I wanted so much to enjoy this book. I hesitate to say 'love this book', because I'm not an Ackroyd fan, but the subject matter here - I am a die-hard Arthur groupie - should have made this an easy win.

However. I found Ackroyd's retelling flatfooted, emotionless, and barren. Stripped-back prose I might have admired, but here we get stripped back storytelling.

The King Arthur story has been a massive part of my imaginative life since I was little. My first introduction, I think, was Roger Lancelyn Green's 'King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table'. I still have a copy of the book, and have dipped into it frequently. [Green added the story of Sir Gawaine and the Loathsome Lady to the Arthurian repertoire, and it's one of my favourite fables of all time; that and Kipling's 'White Seal'.]

Green keeps the archaic language (hithers and thithers and thees and thous) which I found incredibly romantic as a kid. He gives a sense of the destiny that drives the Arthurian story - Arthur is a flawed man in a flawed world, trying to do the right thing, fated to fail. It's also a story of adventure and magic, quests and chivalrous acts.

From Green I moved on to T.H. White - first 'The Sword in the Stone' as a little'un, and then 'The Once and Future King' when I was in my teens. Whatever moral compass I have, I owe mostly to White. Some may find him verbose and cheesy: I find 'The Sword in the Stone' to be one of the most fine, most pure, most gently lovely things ever written. It also introduced me - through Merlin's backwards-through-time life - to irony and and a kind of proto-postmodern humour; grown-up humour.

'The Once and Future King' takes us from a funny, thoughtful, educational story to a full-blown tragedy. The triangle between Lancelot, Guinevere and Arthur drives the story, and what I have always loved about this version is that White tries to turn the three into real people, not ciphers. You sympathise with all three, and every time I draw near the end of their story, the tears come rolling down.

In my first year of university, I decided it was time to buy a copy of the daddy of them all, Malory's Morte d'Arthur. I've never even attempted to read it cover to cover - I dip into and out of it, visiting the stories I picked up through Green and White. And I love the lushness of the language. I don't bother to try to follow the narrative, I just soak in the words. It is a Romance, consistent with all that that means - a meditation on courtly love, chivalry, kingship, nobility, a set of lessons for listeners couched as entertainment.

So what does that leave Ackroyd? The problem is, when you strip away Malory's language but don't add any - for the lack of a better word - psychology, you don't have romance and you don't have any reason for the actions. You don't love anyone, and you don't fear for them. You don't have that sadness of history - that sense of experiencing a long-ago loss - that Adam Gopnik recently identified as a key aspect of chidren's love of fantasy:

What substitutes for psychology in Tolkien and his followers, and keeps the stories from seeming barrenly external, is what preceded psychology in epic literature: an overwhelming sense of history and, with it, a sense of loss. The constant evocation of lost or fading glory—Númenor has fallen, the elves are leaving Middle-earth—does the emotional work that mixed-up minds do in realist fiction. We know that Westernesse is lost even before we know what the hell Westernesse was, and our feeling for its loss lends dimension to those who have lost it.

Instead, Ackroyd left me dissatisfied, with a one-dimensional set of stories and no sympathy.

How to explain? Let's try this. Arthur is the son of Igraine, wife of the Earl of Cornwall, and Uther Pendragon, King of England. Uther fell for Igraine when she and her husband Gorlois visited his court, but when he tried to force himself upon her they fled for their castle. Uther, maddened for her, marched on Cornwall with an great army; Gorlois hid Igraine away in Castle Tintagel, and went himself to Caste Terribel, where Uther besieged him. Though many skirmishes were fought and many man killed, Uther came no closer to Igraine, and, as Malory puts it, 'for pure anger and great love of fair Igraine the King Uther fell sick'. One of Uther's knights went forth to seek Merlin to save the king, and in return for securing Uther's agreement that he would receive any one thing he asked for, Merlin agreed to get him into Igraine's bed.

Merlin conjured Uther into the likeness of Gorlois, and himself and one of Uther's knights into the guise of Gorlois's closest companions. When Gorlois rode forth to attack Uther's armies, Merlin smuggled the king into Igraine's bed, where Arthur was conceived. Uther left Igraine, and hours later she learned her husband had been killed in battle - bewildered and grieved, she kept her puzzlement over his seeming visit to herself. Within thirteen days Uther had secured the agreement of the nobles of England that Gorlois's widow should become his wife.

How then, to reconcile Arthur's seeming bastard birth with the legend? Here's how the four writers manage it.

Green elides the topic somewhat (fittingly, I guess, for someone writing for children in the 1950s):

...Uther fell in love with Gorlois's wife, the lovely Igrayne, and there was a battle between them, until Gorlois fell, and Uther married his widow.

He visited her first in the haunted castle of Tintagel, the dark castle by the Cornish sea, and Merlin the enchanter watched over their love. One child was born to Uther and Igrayne - but what became of that baby boy only the wise Arthur could have told, for he carried it away by a secret path down the cliff side in the dead of night, and no word was spoken of its fate.

Malory tidies the ends up so that Igraine becomes a heroine, and not an exploited and betrayed woman:

The Queen Igraine waxed daily greater and greater, so it befell after within half a year, as King Uther lay by his queen, he asked her, by the faith she owed to him, whose was the child within her body; then she was sore abashed to give the answer. Dismay you not, said the king, but tell me the truth, and I shall love you the better, by the faith of my body. Sir, said she, I shall tell you the truth. The same night that my lord was dead, the hour of his death, as his knights record, there came to my castle of Tintagil a man like my lord in speech and in countenance, and two knights with him in likeness to his two knights Brastias and Jordans, and so I went unto bed with him as I ought to do with my lord, and the same night, as I shall answer unto God, this child was begotten upon me. That is the truth, said the king, as ye say; for it was I myself that came in the likeness, and therefore dismay you not, for I am the father of the child; and there he told her all the cause, how it was by Merlin's counsel. Then the queen made great joy when she knew who was the father of her child.

Here's Ackroyd:

Day by day Igraine grew greater with child. Uther lay with her one night and asked her, on the faith she owed to him, whose offspring it was. She was too ashamed to answer. 'Do not be dismayed,' he told her. 'Tell me the truth, I shall love you all the more for your honesty.'

'I will speak the truth to you, my lord. On the night that my husband died a stranger came to Tintagel in his shape; he had the same speech, and the same countenance,as the duke. There were two companions with him, who I thought to be Sir Brastias and Sir Jordans. So I was deceived. I did my duty, and lay beside him in our bed. I swear to God that, on that same night, this child was conceived.'

'I know, sweet wife, that you are speaking the truth. It was I who came to the castle. I entered your bed. I am the father of this child.' Then he told her of the magic of Merlin, and she marvelled at it. But she was overjoyed, too, that Uther Pendragon was the sire of her offspring.

God, I hate that use of 'offspring'. The two passages are nearly the same, but I find Ackroyd's so charmless.

'The Sword in the Stone' doesn't explain Arthur's origins at all. The task of explaining this falls to four small boys - the brothers who would become Arthur's knights Gawaine, Gaheris and Gareth, and the traitorous Agravaine - huddled together in a draughty tower, telling each other a well-worn family story.

"So when our Grandfather and Granny were winning the sieges, and it looked as if King Uther would be utterly defeated, there came along a wicked magician called Merlyn --"

"A nigromancer," said Gareth.

"And this nigromancer, would you believe it, by means of his infernal arts, succeeded in putting the treacherous Uther Pendragon inside our Granny's Castle. Granda immediately made a sortie out of Terrabil, but he was slain in the battle --"

"Treacherously."

"And the poor Countess of Cornwall --"

"The chaste and beautiful Igraine --"

"Our Granny --"

"-- was captured prisoner by the blackhearted, southron, faithless King of the Dragon and then, in spite of it that she had three beautiful daughters already whatever --"

"The lovely Cornwall Sisters."

"Aunt Elaine."

"Aunt Morgan.'

"And Mammy."

"And if she had these lovely daughters, she was forced into marrying the King of England - the man who had slain her husband!"

They considered the enormous English wickedness in silence, overwhelmed by its denouement. It was their mother's favourite story, on the rare occasions when she troubled to tell them one, and they had learned it by heart.

One of the things that fascinated me, reading back over the different versions of this chapter, was that White's retelling takes Malory's words and inserts into the children's story verbatim:

"The chaste and beautiful Countess of Cornwall," resumed Gawaine, "spurned the advances of King Uther Pendragon, and she told our Grandfather about it. She said: 'I suppose we were sent for you that I should be dishonoured. Wherefore, husband, I counsel you that we depart from hence suddenly, that we may ride all night to our own castle."

Call me a romantic, but for me, White will always best convey the heart of Malory's tale. Sure, he brings a Tolkienesque dying-of-the-days to it, a note that Ackroyd strips out. But Ackroyd also takes all the emotional heft out of the story, and doesn't replace it with anything. I wish it was otherwise - I'm sure others will react differently to me - but, well, THWHITE4EVA.

[I drafted this review in my email. When I got to Goodreads, this was the final sentence of the very short description of the book: "This title presents readable accounts of the knights of the Round Table." I could have saved some typing ...]

Recommendations for Miss H

A friend asked me over Twitter to recommend some books for his 13 and a half year-old daughter, who's currently into Cathy Cassidy, Kate Brian and Melissa de la Cruz (three authors who, to be honest, I've never heard of).

A little research showed that Cathy Cassidy is a British YA author of what look like girly early-teen stories; Kate Brian is the pen name of Kieran Scott, who writes love-and-friendship stories for the same audience; Melissa de la Cruz writes for the same audience again, with witches, vampires and werewolves.

So - not my usual bag. But I figured we could move from here into some fantasy, of the fairytale and dystopian vein.

The trilogies

Three coming of age series with strong female and male characters

Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' - Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)

Patrick Ness's 'Chaos Walking' - The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men

Suzanne Collins's 'Hunger Games'

Time travel

I recommend Rebecca's Stead When You Reach Me to everyone I can. It is perfectly complemented by (in fact, is a direct homage to) Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

Everyone needs some Terry Pratchett

The Bromeliad series (Truckers, Diggers and Wings) - a community of gnomes tries to make it in the big wide world

The Tiffany Aching books - Pratchett is at his wisest and gentlest with these four books about the young witch Tiffany Aching

Everyone also needs some Neil Gaiman

Start with The Graveyard Book, then perhaps try Stardust (I have to say, I got all soppy over the movie version of this with Claire Danes too).

Ancient History

Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth, the first of a series of historical adventure novels set in Roman Britain.

T.H White's Sword in the Stone (okay - more fantasy than history) - this book about the childhood King Arthur and his education by Merlin is still one of the wisest and funniest books I know.

Easter reading

I'm taking a week off over Easter, and as always, I've been poring over and refining and re-refining my reading list. Here it is - biology, biography, romanticism, poetry, and a Pulitzer Prize winner:

Richard Dawkins The Greatest Show on Earth

Claire Tomalin Shelley and his World

Richard Holmes Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer

A.S. Byatt - The Virgin in the Garden (I'm on a Byatt re-reading junket, and it's proving very enjoyable) & Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their time

Theodore Roethke Collected Poems

Siegfried Sassoon The War Poems

And thanks to a give-away on Twitter from BooksellersNZ, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. By the way, you have until 3pm today to enter their mega Easter books giveaway - it's as easy as an email.

On what remains

I've been thinking a lot lately about the physical existence of books. Not in a metaphysical way, but a wondering-when-they-will-stop-making-them kind of way.

I think soon when people put a book to print, it will be because putting into physical form brings something that an e-format wouldn't make: like the colour-saturated pages of Lauren Redniss's 'Radioactive', or Judith Schalansky's 'Atlas of Remote Islands', where the restraint of the design plays off against the pleasure she describes into walking your fingers over a map. To make a book physical will be to make it covetable for its very form.

Then again - you can't predict the future. And the physical nature of books has a way of speaking, as much as the words in them. Take these two recent articles from the New Yorker book blog


One includes this photo of a library in Sendai, Japan, and muses on the outflowing of photos of books rocked from their shelves in the earthquake:

Books shaken to the floor provide a good visual measurement of the power of the quake: we can easily visualize how the rows looked before, how nice and tidy they were, and we can imagine the sort of force needed to dislodge them. But the images also allow us to glimpse the destruction in a relatively benign environment—books are not people.

The other describes the work of photographer Yuri Dojc, who seeks out and photographs Jewish books that survived the Holocaust.

I've been thinking about books and memories this year, waxing all nostalgic about issues slips. Remember those? The cards that got taken out of a book and tucked into a wooden box until you returned it to the Library? The flimsy sheet of paper glued into the inside back cover, and the satisfying ker-chunk of the date stamp as it imprints your due-date.




(Or the lack of an issues slip at all).

I want to bring them back. Partly because I loathe the slippery issues slips you get given now - useless as bookmarks and as reminders. Partly because I miss that joy of opening a book and realising you're the first person in twenty years to want it enough to take it out. And partly because of the sense of history and yes, even community, that builds up around a well-used issues slip. Yes, it would be very convenient to have the library catalogue hooked up to my calendar, so a reminder is inserted the day before a book is due. But it would be damn near romantic if you put a date-stamp next to the self-issue machine and let me mark my books myself.

Culture Gabfest

It only takes me 20 minutes to walk to work. I count myself blessed. But because it is human nature to want what we don't have, I occasionally envy people who come in from Featherston or Masterton on the train their lovely, long, passive commute (also, I acknowledge, nasty, crowded, limited and controlled).

I envy them because the world is filled with awesome podcasts and I have no place in my life in which to listen to them. I can't listen and work, I can't listen and run, I can't listen and read. I fit in one podcast a week while I iron, and my podcast of choice is Slate's Culture Gabfest (although occasionally I will be diverted by Melvyn Bragge's 'In Our Time', NPR's 'This American Life', the Guardian's science podcast, or the New Yorker's 'The Political Scene').

Just after I talked on Nine to Noon about the Google Art Project, I listened to the Gabfest's three hosts - Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner - cover the topic. It made me realise that I had approached the project with too many insider assumptions. I know how hard it is for large organisations (and small ones) to collaborate, I know copyright can be a bitch, I know the resources required for a project like this. But to hear the Gabfest call out museum's websites as generally a bit shit (user research everyone - read it and weep) and ask why Google Art can't simply perform the same role as Google Books - every artwork in every museum able to be found easily online - reminded me that sometimes you have to put your knowledge to one side in order to really assess the potential of a new thing.

This week, among other topics, the Gabfest covered a recent New York Times article about ebooks signalling the death of marginalia. As the three hosts noted, these stories about ebooks removing the romance of paper books are regular features in the arts sections of newspapers.

As a dog-earer rather than a marginalist, I'm not too worried about the fact that typing in a note in a Kindle edition of a book is different from scrawling your BULLSHIT!!! in a soft pencil. I can understand though that marginalia can give fascinating insights into what authors think when they read others' work, or, as one of the scholars rather quaintly puts it:

examining marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.

“It might be a shepherd writing in the margins about what a book means to him as he’s out tending his flock,” Professor Jackson said. “It might be a schoolgirl telling us how she feels. Or maybe it’s lovers who are exchanging their thoughts about what a book means to them.”

As a result of using Goodreads, I have come to realise that there are only a small number of people whose opinions I am really interested in sharing when it comes to books, and that I usually find the opinions of strangers are bemusing, or simply uninteresting (and, occasionally, unintentionally hilarious). I've obviously yet to have my egg-salad moment.

Marginalia - Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Book review: Sarah Bakewell ' How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer'

Annoyingly, I spent three quarters of an hour drafting a tremendous review of this book in Goodreads, and then promptly lost it by accidently flipping to Wikipedia (Goodreads needs an autosave feature). Here's the dim shadow of what may have been - I persisted simply because I think this is a terrifically good book.

I have been trying to read Montaigne's essays for about 12 years now. Montaigne entered my consciousness in my first year at university, when I somehow picked up the notion that every well-rounded reader should be acquainted with his writing.

However, my every attempt to grapple with the Essays has thus far left me flummoxed by the As and Bs and Cs that are scattered through the sentences, the snippets of Latin and French, and the roundabouts and whirligigs of the language. While every commentator dwells upon Montaigne's personal appeal to the reader (a dangerous seduction for those who find his writing seditious; a sense of self-identification for those who don't) I couldn't find my entry point.

Sarah Bakewell has given it to me. She notes at the end of this book that it was five years in the making, and I don't doubt that at all. Not only must the research and reading required been prodigious, but that crafting of research into the eventual structure of the book must have been a painstaking process (unless Bakewell is touched by a genius for textual visualisation).

A little background. Michel Montaigne (1533-1592) was a landowner, writer, politician and diplomat who live in the Aquitaine region of France, near Bordeaux (his father was a winemaker, and the label still exists). Montaigne lived through a period of French history characterised by religious conflict and civil war, but also an intellectual context that mirrored that of the Italian Renaissance, with great love and respect for Greek and Roman culture and philosophy.

During his life, Montaigne was perhaps better known for his influence as a politician and go-between in royal matters, but he was also known for his Essays; short pieces of that reflect from his own point of view on various topics. The word 'Essay' here comes from the French, essai, for attempt or trial - Montaigne's pieces were the first example of a new genre: short, subjective takes on a chosen topic.

Bakewell's book, as the title declares, takes the overarching question asked in Montaigne's essays - How to live? - and offers twenty answers drawn from the texts. Both the structure and the answers - Use little tricks; Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted; Don't worry about death; Reflect on everything, regret nothing; Be ordinary and imperfect - can sound glib. But both, when ventured into, prove to be rich, engrossing, pragmatic, and humane.

Bakewell manages to move roughly chronologically through Montaigne's life, setting his writing within his biography, his personal relationships, his work as a public servant, and his historical context. She shows us the prevailing intellectual modes of the day, and does an especially good job of explaining how Montaigne's writing has been received and perceived, used and abused up to the present day; from his contemporaries, who admired his application of Stoic philosophy and collation of extracts of classic texts, to Descartes and Pascal, who were horrified and transfixed by his Scepticism, to the 17th century libertins who celebrated his free thinking, four centuries of English readers and interpreters, who took some pleasure in adopting this son of France who was cast out from his native literary tradition and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books for 180 years, the modernist writers who wanted to replicate the immediacy of his writing, the sense of being fully-grounded in the present, and in today's world, the proliferation in the late 20th-early 21st century of the public-private personal essay in the form of the blog.

Each chapter, then, does not simply recap what Montaigne says about reading and remembering what you read, or marriage and how to raise children, or friendship, or how to prepare oneself for one's death. And it would not be that simple, as Montaigne's writing is not that simple. It would be easy to recast his writing as self-help speak: to achieve goal X, apply methods Y and Z. But that wouldn't be true to Montaigne's own approach, which was circular, occasionally contradictory, always exploratory, never authoritative, and often ended with a Gallic shrug, a wry smile, and whatever the French is for 'Eh, what do I know?'.

Underpinning Montaigne's essays - and his entire approach to life - are three schools of classic philosophy. My favourite chapter of Bakewell's book - 'Use little tricks' - lays out this territory, but to give a rough summary ...

Stoicism taught Montaigne to face up to the life unflinchingly. Scepticism taught him question everything to never take anything fro granted, to always seek other perspectives, and to avoid making or building off assumptions. And Epicureanism taught him to focus on the pleasure available in life whilst living in these ways.

All three schools, despite their different approaches, share one goal: to achieve 'eudaimonia', a way of living that is translated as happiness, or human florishing. This means living well, without fear, with the ability to enjoy every moment, by being a good person. The best way to achieve eudaimonia is through 'ataraxia' or becoming free of anxiety; of (consciously) developing the ability to move through life on an even keel. To do this, one must overcome two major hurdles: controlling one's emotions, and paying attention to the present. All three schools taught ways - little tricks - of achieving these ends. None offer an answer to the question 'How to live?'; none say that if you do X and obey Y you will be happy. Instead, all three offer a method, thought experiments and mental tricks that will help you calm yourself and bring yourself into the moment. From there, it is up to you. As Montaigne himself wrote: 'Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself'.

So Montaigne's essays show him attempting to live out these precepts, to apply them to moments like the death of a friend, the fear of armed bandits, the passing of a kidney stone, playing with one's cat (somehow, in a way I still don't fully understand, Montaigne's sudden switch of perspective, from seeing his cat as something he played with to himself as a toy for his cat, got him blacklisted by Descartes and led to his posthumous falling-out with the Catholic church).

Bakewell's book is utterly beguiling, which makes me think Montaigne must be too. So I am going to tackle the essays again, this time feeling a little more prepare, knowing what to look for, and ready to be surprised.

Book review: Steven Johnson's 'Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation'

I tend to avoid reading this kind of book. The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, The Black Swan. They all hit the web, and they all pass me by in a largely undifferentiated wash of bold typography, sentence-length sub-titles and (too) easily summarised central points.

I'm not sure now why I ordered 'Where good ideas come from' at the library, but having done so, I dutifully picked it up and settled in to read it over the long weekend. The double line spacing immediately gave me the sense that I was reading an extended blog post, and by and large, reaching the end of the book hasn't much changed my first reaction.

Johnson identifies seven key situations or characteristics and one key context that foster innovation. The introduction defines that context: the city. In the same way that a coral reef nurtures a vast biodiversity compared to the same square meterage of empty sea, closely packed urban environments nurture in one discipline are more likely to come into contact with ideas from another. From here we tumble through the seven situations/contexts:

The adjacent possible The phrase comes from scientist Stuart Kauffman, and describes the situation in which life originated on Earth. At one time, Earth was awash with a small number of simple molecules. Each of these could combine with the others in a finite number of ways, given certain catalysts, and then go on recombining and catalysing. This handful of simple molecules couldn't transform over night into a dandelion or an ostrich, because a whole bunch of innovations have to happen before then (like respiration). But surrounding each instance of each molecule was the adjacent possible - a slightly hazy boundary of what might happen. With each combination and transformation, the boundaries of the adjacent possible become bigger. Innovation fuels innovation.

Liquid networks Information and ideas travel best in liquid networks. Scientific breakthroughs occur not just in the lab setting - perhaps not even most often in the lab setting - but in discussion groups and cafeterias, where different perspectives can be brought to bear on a set of findings, or the 'error' in an experiment can be revised into proof for another concept. From here we move into modular office design, blah blah blah.

The slow hunch Ideas brew over time. Evidence is slowly gathered. Hunches work when they're connected to other bits of experience and evidence: this is why the Phoenix memo about 'suspicious persons' enrolling at American flight schools in mid 2001 didn't trigger any alerts that might have prevented 9/11 :it was filed into the FBI electronic black box, which is structured to prevent pieces of information from rubbing up against each other

Serendipity The chapter heading pretty much sums it up, although Johnson does a nice job of rebutting the argument that the web, and in particular being able to search for information, has driven serendipity out of our lives. Also - stop working, go for a walk, it might help you process information better than labouring over it.

Error Some inventions are the outcome of wrong outcome after wrong outcome after wrong outcome. The guy who invented vacuum tubes did so without ever figuring out how they actually worked. Xrays and daguerreotypes were both accidental discoveries. You get the picture.

ExaptationThis is where Johnson draws heavily on the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Exaptation is when an adaptation is further utlised for another end. Feathers were originally evolved to provide insulation: down feathers continue to perform this function, whereas flight feathers act as airfoils. An idea or finding from one field can be adapted into another. It's like the notion of weak ties ("popularised by Malcolm Gladwell") but somehow better

Platforms Stacked platforms don't just help information move; they recycle and amplify it. Coral reefs, beavers' dams, satellites and APIs. Government as platform. Twitter twitter twitter. You know the drill (or you don't, in which case this chapter might be a real eye-opener for you: the kind of thing you make your dumb-ass Web Strategy Advisory Group read so they'll go hey, yeah, go ahead, API everything!)

In the final chapter, 'The Fourth Quandrant', Johnson proposes two ways of investigating and visualising the history and conditions of innovation. One is the deep drill-down into a single case-study, where you hope the reader will take the points you're making and extrapolate them out. His book on Joseph Priestly and the 'invention' of oxygen is such an example. The second is to go wide, and try to categorise millennia or centuries of innovation and look for trends (as Johnson does here, looking at the speeding up of innovation before and after the establishment of cities, and looking at the last 500 years of invention in terms of individual vs. collaborative/distributed invention, and market vs. open contexts).

The book is subtitled 'The natural history of innovation', and Johnson like to reach down into the primordial soup* of neurons and evolution to draw parallels to human innovation. Darwin is his key motif; his musing on coral atolls open the book, and he is returned to frequently, on topics like slow hunches, serendipity and error. The thing is, I know my Gould. I've got a bit of a grip on Darwin. And recently, Nick Lane has thoroughly schooled me on evolution. While it's always a satisfying feeling to play 'snap' with an author (ah hah! I know that reference. I see your observation, and raise you this contradictory hypothesis!), I felt like all this bolstering was (a) a bit of a stretch - are neuron networks really like well-planned open offices? and (b) light weight compared to the reams and reams and reams of information that are out there - Johnson's few pages on the advantages of sexual reproduction compared to Lane's chapter, for example.

As a result, a lot of the book felt familiar, and often a little thin compared to richer examples of many of the topics that I've read elsewhere. Perhaps ironically then, the one theme I wish Johnson had focused on in more depth - perhaps even written about exclusively - was that of the commonplace book, the tradition of writers and thinkers keeping notebooks full of passages and quotations, mixed in with observations and recordings of their own. The commonplace book lay somewhere between self-help book, memory tool, encyclopedia, and meditative device. (Montaigne kept one, naturally, and also had his favourite passages inscribed on the rafters of his library.)

The English philosopher and physician John Locke started his first commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over time he developed a method for indexing these books, a method he felt sufficiently important to warrant writing up as an appendix to his major work, 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'. Working within the limits of two pages in each commonplace book being reserved for the index, which had to swell to encompass whatever he transcribed into it, he structured his index in this way:

When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to out into my common place book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I ook unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E.i. if in the space marked E.i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.

Even I recognise the 'if X, then Y' pattern of storing and retrieving data going on here. The commonplace book both stores information and allows one to retrieve it, and in the process of doing so, revisit and enrich the ideas once has already had.

From Locke, Joseph Priestly, and Erasmus Darwin, Johnson steps through to 'Enquire Within Upon Everything', a hugely popular Victorian how-to guide for everything from making flowers in wax to burying relatives. Tim Berners Lee named the first iteration of what would the world wide web 'Enquire' after a copy of this manual he remembered from his childhood.

Johnson himself uses DevonThink, an app that allows him to store and search texts, which has a search algorithm that forges relationships between them. It's interesting to see him recounting using Devon Think as a writing tool:

I write a paragraph about something - let's say about the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask DevonThink to find other passages in my archive that are similar. Instantly, a list of quotes appears on my screen ... Invariably, one or two of these triggers a new association in my head ... and so I select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of passages similar to it. Before long, a larger idea takes shape in my head, built upon the trail of association the machine has assembled for me.

[Apropos this, I found a lovely article over summer called The Theatre of Memory, about libraries as more than data storage, you should totally read it.]

So all up: I think this might be one of those reviews that means you don't need to read the book yourself, unless you having a burning desire to do so. Instead, go out and read Nick Lane, and Steven Jay Gould, and all sorts of other people writing about all sorts of other good things - that's where the good ideas come from.


*I read an essay recently by Michael Chabon where he talked about how he'll get obsessed with a word, and for days on end he'll have to fit the words 'monkeys' or 'washer' into conversation over and over again. He said this slipped into his published writing - an unusual word, say 'shrivelled', will appear twenty times in a single book, and occasionally get picked up by readers. Someone needed to go through 'Where good ideas come from' and edit out every second instance of the phrase 'primordial soup'.

Holiday reading list

For the past few weeks I've been mentally tending to my Christmas holiday reading pile, adding and removing and debating over books. Here's where I'm at now:

Non-fiction

I'm still working my way through the 2010 Royal Society science book shortlist. I'm currently reading (and loving) Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution:

Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretence to be popular, but it's more engaging if it's seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemistry without giving in to some sort of randy anthropomorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges, repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules really want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little gentle flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there.

From that shortlist, I also have Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Why Does E=mc2? on loan from the library to take away with me.

Essays

Having recently been bowled over by this 1969 interview with E.B. White, I've collected a copy of One Man's Meat, a 1944 collection of his essays, written on his farm in Maine.

And left-over from last Christmas: Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs.

Fiction

A buck three way - the first three books of Anthony Powell's Dance to the music of time in one chubby edition, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl.

Young Adults

The last book in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men has finally arrived in paperback, so I could finally satisfy my obsessive-compulsive need to have a copy that matched my first two books in the series. In an act of great sacrifice, I lent my brand-new copy to a friend who I recently put on to the series. I'll be collecting it back on my travels.

Chance

I'm housesitting for an avid reader during my holiday, so all the good intentions above may be swept away by the call of their bookshelf.

Dogears

Kara Walker meets sticky notes with Stipee bookmarks (photo via BLTD; packs of bookmarks available at Japanese Gift Market).

For the past year, I've been using stickers made to publicise ArtBabble as bookmarks - they're perfectly sized, resilient, and make me think of faraway friends whenever I open or close a book. When travelling I use plane tickets, although with Air New Zealand's handy iPhone app, I rarely get a physical ticket anymore. (Does anyone ever just marvel at how much the process of flying has changed in a decade? Ten years ago when flying home from uni in Dunedin I went to a tarvel agent to buy my tickets and got them in a little blue plastic pouch: today I buy them online, tap a reference number into my phone, then wave my phone at a scanner as I'm about to walk on to the plane. Who says we're still waiting for the future?)

Anyway. The more I use Goodreads to record what I'm reading, the more I find myself dog-earing pages in books so I can reference them in my write-up. I still don't have the guts (or bad manners) to pencil comments in books - not ones I own or ones I've borrowed) but somehow this naughty little habit has crept back up on me.

Then again, as ereaders become more common, I feel like celebrating the paper page - in all its vulnerability and tactility - even more. Dog-ears have become like lovebites - slightly destructive marks of enjoyment.

The pram in the hallway

In a recent Guardian article, Frank Cottrell Boyce took on Cyril Connelly's famous quote "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway."

Boyce writes engagingly about being, simultaneously, a father of seven and a full-time writer:

For centuries, writers have sung the virtues of staying connected to the routine and the mundane. Real creativity should feel like a game, not a career. Having to hang out the washing or get up and make breakfast helps you remember that your "work" is actually fun. And for it to stay fun, you have to be unafraid of failure. It's very powerful to be surrounded by people who love you for something other than your work, who are unaware of the daily, painful fluctuations of your reputation. I discovered recently that my youngest child thought I spent my days typing out more and more copies of my book Millions, so that everyone could have one.

In another take on parenthood and reading, Lauren McIntyre interviewed Kat Falls for the New Yorker book blog at the end of June. Falls took her 14 year-old son as her target reader:

He has a short attention span with books. Back then, he would have the computer screen open while he read, and I’d hear the IMs pinging. I always knew it was a good book if he ignored the pings. Now he has a cell phone. I watch him reading all the time with his cell phone next to him, and it buzzes when he gets text messages. It’s the same thing. I know he’s into the book when he ignores his phone. So that was my bar. You have to have a bar to set and that was mine: no boy is going to put this book down to answer his phone.

Falls also comments that the layout of the book contributes to the feeling of reading it:

I kept it very white on the page, intentionally, because I think your eye moves faster when it’s got lots of white space and it adds to the feel of the speed. You can rip down a page fast. I just know that when a boy sees a giant block of description that’s the first thing he skips.

If I think of some of the books aimed at teenage readers I've enjoyed the most, this is true of them too, especially the innovative type-setting of Patrick Ness's 'Chaos Walking' trilogy.

The product of parenthood, of course, is children, who grow from little creatures who you read to, sharing the experience with them, into people who have their own, secret, interior relationship with the written word and fictional places, people and situations. Perhaps this progress - from knowing what's going through their heads to not knowing - explains why the topic of what kids are reading is often discussed with some concern. I thought of this this morning when, digging through my Instapaper folders for the above links, I found this old one for Jill Lepore's feature on Anne Carroll Moore, the doyenne of New York's children's libraries at the start of the 20th century. Moore wielded huge influence over not just what was stocked, but what was published:

She never lacked for an opinion. “Dull in a new way,” she labelled books that she despised. When, in 1938, William R. Scott brought her copies of his press’s new books, tricked out with pop-ups and bells and buttons, Moore snapped, “Truck! Mr. Scott. They are truck!” Her verdict, not any editor’s, not any bookseller’s, sealed a book’s fate. She kept a rubber stamp at her desk that she used, liberally, while paging through publishers’ catalogues: “Not recommended for purchase by expert.” The end.

The story of Moore is also the story of E.B. White, that - to me, anyway - curious figure who both children and grammar fanatics hold dear. As Lepore writes:

The end of Moore’s influence came when, years later, she tried to block the publication of a book by E. B. White. Watching Moore stand in the way of “Stuart Little,” White’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, remembered, was like watching a horse fall down, its spindly legs crumpling beneath its great weight.

I'm currently reading a history of 20th century British publishing and - with the Second World War - women are finally beginning to figure (beginning with Eunice Frost at Penguin, and Diana Athill at Andre Deutsch). So to finish off this tangentially linked series of articles: a recent profile of Frost from the Telegraph.

Book, book, book, shelf

It might just be that I'm attuned to it, but bookshelves seem to be a topic of much discussion on the web right now.

On the book blog The Millions, Charles-Adam Foster-Simard writes about organising his bookshelves as only a 20-year-old can:

After the toil of the unmaking, now I have to rebuild my library up — restock the shelves that now stand cleared, poised, filled only with light and shadows. After some consideration, the first book I place back on the top left cube, is Beowulf, masterfully translated by Seamus Heaney, the beginning of literature in English. I have to rifle down the spines of a few piles before I finally locate it.

Next up goes Tolkien. I cannot resist — without him I’m not sure Beowulf would even be taught in schools at all. His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, first, to soften the transition, and then The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tree and Leaf, and The Children of Hurin. Then I place Herodotus, whom my girlfriend assures me thinks exactly like Tolkien. I am startled by my audacity. There is a jump from 10th century Anglo-Saxon manuscript to 20th Century fantasy writer to the father of history, a fifth-century Greek — my system is either creative or blasphemous.

Charles-Adam Foster-Simard links through to Sarah Crown and John Crace's more playful article on bookshelf etiquette on the Guardian. After noting that one of the first acts of recently-resigned British politician James Purnell was to rearrange his bookshelves, Crown and Crace run through some of the tried and possibly true methods of organising shelves:

I have a friend who arranges his books generically, with each genre bleeding into the next – science into SF; history into historical fiction. It took him days, but he was a happy man by the end of it. In Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Everything is Illuminated, a girl derides her lover for ordering his books by colour ("How stupid") – but the system retains a small but passionate following. One colleague orders her books according to which authors she feels would be friends in real life – regardless of the centuries that separate them.

Meanwhile, links to Anthony Dever's tumblr Bookshelf Porn have been flitting about on Twitter. As Monica Racic writes on The New Yorker's book blog, introducing Dever:

I am fascinated by the contents of people’s bookshelves. And I am equally interested in how people organize those books. The arrangement is often just as telling of a person’s personality as the contents of the shelves.

One of my own favourite bits of writing on this topic (which, lets face it, can all get a wee bit pretentious and coy - god knows my own bookshelves couldn't live up to this level of aesthetic or intellectual analysis: books are now being put where they can fit) is Anne Fadiman's essay 'Marrying Libraries' in her anthology 'Ex Libris'. It's not online, so you're going to have to find it on a bookshelf somewhere, if you want to read it. I'm sure, given a little time, I could find it on mine for you.

While you're at it

I recently re-read Peter Doherty's A Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize. While I still find the book over-long and over-written (although there is some terrific stuff in there about the business of being a research scientist) the thing that really struck me was how good the list of recommended reading is.

When I get to the end of a book that has piqued my interest, by an author who I've come to trust, I want them to tell me what they found helpful and interesting when they were doing their research. Not just a bibliography, but recommendations of where I should go next.

Reading Doherty's book put me on to James Gleick's bio of Feynman, James Watson's simultaneously wonderful and infuriating The Double Helix and a terrific book about the 1918-19 flu epidemic by John M Barry that I plan to re-read as soon as I get some breathing space. It also reminded me that Brenda Maddox's biography of Rosalind Franklin is still languishing on my to-read list.

Fifty pages into Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A short book about Darwin, Lincoln and modern life I flipped to the bibliography. And was delighted.

In one of the Darwin chapters of the book, Gopnik writes about the pressures Darwin was under as he finally sat down to write* On the Origin of Species

All the pleasures and pressures of the past decade acted on him: the pleasure of explanation in simple terms, the pressure of not being understood; the pleasure of having accumulated abundant examples, the pressure of succumbing to overabundant illustration; the pleasure of having a clear argument to make, the pressure of having to make it clear; the pleasure of pushing at last to make a summary of an argument, the crucial pressure of having Alfred Wallace, polite and deferential but, after all, also in possession of the same theory, waiting.

Of course, this is the same situation that faced Gopnik (and any other writer who's got to that stage where they sit down, photocopies and books amassed around them, and try to face down the blank screen). His 'bibliographic note' summarises this beautifully: 'The Darwin literature is merely immeasurable; the Lincoln literature is infinite. When you are already up to your armpits in it, you realise you have hardly dipped a toe.'

Gopnik provides two pages each of recommended reading on Darwin and Lincoln - not a list of books, but a brief summary of his research journey, of what he read, and what he learnt, and what he believes we will find useful and engaging. It's not just a bibliography, it's a deeply personalised recommendation, and I love it.


*From another great book about Darwin that I read earlier this year - Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith, a fictionalised biography by Deborah Heiligman for teenage readers, which focuses on the Darwin's marriage and the pressures Charles felt about the conflict between his development of a theory of natural selection and Emma's Christian faith - I learnt that Darwin wrote in a big chair in his study, on a board placed across the chair's arms, a picture I find entrancing.

Crazy beautiful

One of the reasons I continue to buy print books - and believe that I will, even when all the ebook readers reach our shores - is simply that I like the way they look on their shelves. And I like walking past my books on my shelves, and thinking about them. I recently read this article about the joys of leaving books unread, and while I wouldn't go quite that far, I do like catching glimpses of books on my shelves that I'm saving for the right moment, or will return to when necessary.

I think that's part of the reason why this (s)lavish recreation of Donald Judd's library appeals to me so much.



Partly it's because yes, the books you acquire and keep over a lifetime of reading and thinking become an aggregate that says something about the person you have become.

And partly it's because someone at the Judd foundation didn't think it was enough to simply catalogue all 10,720 titles. Instead, they thought it was important that we be able to see a shelf-by-shelf, book-by-book facsimile of the two rooms of Judd's library, and the placement of every single item. It's magnificent, and a wee bit insane.