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Content by Jonathan Birch
Reviewer Rank: 848
Helpful Votes:
674
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Reviews Written by
Jonathan Birch (Manchester)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent, 3 Sep 2009
Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Darwinian Populations" is a wonderfully clear, insightful and original look at the process of natural selection from a philosophical point of view. With no maths and no technical jargon, the book is accessible to readers with no background in biology or philosophy, and deserves a wide audience, if only for its incisive criticims of Dawkins' "selfish gene" picture of evolution.
For Godfrey-Smith, the central concept of Darwin's theory is that of a Darwinian population: a population in which there are differences in reproductive success between individuals, caused by characteristics that are passed from parent to offspring. Illuminating discussions of the all-important notions of "reproduction" and "individual" are offered. Throughout, Godfrey-Smith strikes a balanced and cautious tone, emphasizing the continuing explanatory power of the central ideas of Darwinism while levelling serious criticisms at the now pervasive idea that evolution is all about genes.
A personal highlight is Godfrey-Smith's radical rethink of the relation between natural selection and drift. "Drift" is traditionally conceptualized as an evolutionary force to be contrasted with selection. On Godfrey-Smith's view, however, there is no fundamental opposition "in nature" between selection and drift. In both cases, differences in individual characteristics cause differences in reproductive success. The distinction is that, in paradigm cases of drift, the characteristics that make the difference between life and death are extrinsic to the organism, and their advantageousness is highly contingent.
For example, suppose half a population lives in Forest A, and half in nearby Forest B. One day the half in Forest A are killed in a forest fire caused by a lightning strike. Is this drift at work, or is it selection for living in Forest B? Godfrey-Smith's picture dispels the confusion: it's drift, since living in Forest A is an extrinsic characteristic, and its fitness advantage was highly contingent on where lightning happened to strike.
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Summertime
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by J.M. Coetzee
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: £10.76 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
A portrait of the artist... as a supporting character, 24 Aug 2009
Ostensibly, J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is a third instalment of autobiography, succeeding Boyhood (1998) and Youth (2002) (both of which, incidentally, are excellent). But this description belies the book's true nature in two ways. First, Summertime is so far from being a conventional autobiography it's essentially a work of fiction. Second, it's a terrific book in its own right, and can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of its forerunners.
The book begins in a style resembling Boyhood and Youth. Brief scenes from the life of Coetzee, now a thirtysomething in 1970s apartheid South Africa, are narrated in crisp third-person prose. Coetzee, we learn, is a down-and-out, unemployed and living with his elderly father, disgusted by apartheid but stuck in a rut of inaction verging on paralysis. But each scene stops abruptly, clearly unfinished, and after 15 pages the narrative stops altogether. What's going on? Here emerges the book's central conceit: Coetzee has died, leaving behind notebooks of assorted scraps. A would-be biographer, seeking to reconstruct "the story" of Coetzee's life, interviews a number of people who knew Coetzee at that time, and transcripts of these (fictional) interviews occupy most of the book's remainder.
The interviewees give us little vignettes in which Coetzee is a ghostly figure, a barely-there anonynimity, content to be manipulated and exploited by stronger characters: a man defined by his fleeting and unsatisfying connections to others. He is a supporting character. "I am perfectly aware it is John you want to hear about, not me," says Julia, Coetzee's one-time lover. "But the only story involving John that I can tell, or the only one I am prepared to tell, is this one, namely the story of my life and his part in it, which is quite different, quite another matter, from the story of his life and my part in it."
What a wonderful antidote to most autobiographies, in which the author is the protagonist in "My Story", steering a course through life like a Greek hero at the helm of a ship. Lives aren't like that. And what a remarkable fictional achievement, since, after all, the "interviews" are pure fiction. Coetzee imagines himself as he must have been viewed by others (scruffy, shy, maladroit, and not a bestselling-author-in-waiting), and does so with great perceptiveness and self-effacement, through a skilfully crafted range of utterly convincing other-voices.
John Berger famously wrote that "never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one". In this rich and intelligent work, Coetzee emphasizes that this goes for life stories too.
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This is How
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by M.J. Hyland
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: £7.76 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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15 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Food for thought, 26 Jun 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
MJ Hyland has an unusual fondness for violent misfits. In her excellent novel Carry Me Down (2006), her pubescent protagonist John Egan learns the hard way that covering mummy's face with a pillow won't necessarily make her any happier. Now, in This Is How, Hyland presents the story of Patrick Oxtoby, a down-and-out mechanic in a seaside town who turns out to be a kind of Raskolnikov tribute act. In a drunken rage, poor anger-prone Patrick learns the hard way that clobbering someone with a wrench can have serious consequences.
The publisher seems oddly reluctant to tell you that this is a book about the aftermath of a violent crime, referring only to Patrick's "tragic undoing" and supplying a pretty little cover with a man and a dog. In reality, this misleadingly advertised novel is a compelling and macabre journey to the dark side of human existence.
Like Carry Me Down, This Is How is told through sparse, present-tense, first-person narration that rattles along at a crackling pace, capturing Patrick's shock and vulnerability as events spiral rapidly beyond his control. The result is a gripping, readable and surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of a memorable antihero.
Patrick protests his innocence on the grounds that he never "intended" to do anything wrong. "My mind played hardly any part," he tell us, "but my body acted and, as far as the law is concerned, my body may as well be all that I am". Is there some truth in this "don't blame me!" determinism? This is the central issue the novel explores.
Personally, I'm not convinced. Anger, loneliness, loss of control, ignorance, drunkenness... these are causes of violence, but not excuses. We don't have to let our irrational bloodlust get the better of us. When we do, we're responsible for what results. It's left to the reader to decide whether Patrick deserves to be held accountable for his horrific deed. If you read it let me know what you think.
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8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Deserves every success, 10 Jun 2009
I doubt Grizzly Bear's sonorous brand of chamber pop will be pumping out on Radio 1 any time soon, and it's probably a bit too unusual for Radio 2. But this belies the fact that anyone with eardrums can enjoy the beautiful Veckatimest (named for a little island off Cape Cod), which is original yet accessible, lush yet melodious, and undoubtedly one of the best records I've heard this year.
"Two Weeks" and "While You Wait for the Others" are standout tracks on a standout album, immaculate recordings that stand testament to the work ethic of a band clearly determined to bring already brilliant songs as close as possible to perfection. The Brooklyn quartet sounds every bit as close-knit and harmonious as Fleet Foxes but have, for my money, by steering clear of the folk clichés and retro OohOohings of the Seattle band in favour of darker lyrics and a harder-edged sound, produced a set of songs that, while still festival-friendly, soars even higher and stirs more deeply.
It's wonderful.
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Cultured, elegant and captivating, 22 May 2009
Kazuo Ishiguro is a proper writer: a book every four or five years, and, when they come along, they matter. His seven books, spanning thirty years, are the milestones of a lifelong meditation on longing, nostalgia, regret, and how on earth to cope with it all.
Reading Nocturnes, described on the jacket as a short-story "cycle", is like reading five Ishiguro novels in miniature. He's still the quintessence of himself, but here that essence is condensed and compressed into small, 30-page doses.
Like the nocturnes of Chopin, Fauré et al. from which the title derives, these are mood pieces, Romantic and pensive, evoking thoughts of finality and transience, of the passing of the day. Troubled relationships, usually marriages, lie in the background throughout.
The "nocturnes" are surprisingly uneventful, with a tendency to end on quiet, anticlimactic notes. In all five pieces, the characters come first. Fiction is all too often about authors moving their characters around like chess pieces; but Ishiguro's world is populated by free agents who flitter briefly across the page, fail to behave in a particularly novelistic way, then disappear back into the gloom of their real, monotonous lives. This wonderful, non-chessy writing is the secret to Ishiguro's success, and it's much in evidence here.
But there's a niggling feeling that Ishiguro is capable of more than this. There's enough overlap between the stories to make me wonder why he didn't stitch them together. I don't know whether to be impressed that Ishiguro didn't feel the need to merge the stories into a novel, or disappointed that he didn't bother.
Expect a work as distinctive and unforgettable as The Remains of the Day (1990) or Never Let Me Go (2005) and Nocturnes will fall short. But it's not some miscellaneous collection of unpublished scraps. Nocturnes is a finely crafted whole; cultured, elegant and captivating.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Elegant murder mystery, 10 May 2009
P.D. James is 88, and if the thought of churning out 400-page novels at that age impresses you, spare a thought for her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, who's been wrestling culprits to the floor since 1962. I can only assume he's been drinking the same elixir as James Bond, and gets younger and more muscular with each new case.
The setting for The Private Patient is, naturally, a decaying outpost of provincial privilege with a spooky and claustrophobic atmosphere. Rhoda Gradwyn, a fearless investigative journalist with a fair tally of accumulated enemies, books in to the private Dorset clinic of her plastic surgeon, George Chandler-Powell. The purpose of the visit: the removal of a deep scar across Gradwyn's cheek, inflicted during childhood. The operation is completed successfully. But the following night, bandages still wrapped round her face, Rhoda is strangled in her bed.
Helpfully enough, the clinic, a beautiful yet intimidating Tudor manor house, is an enclosed space chock full of suspects. Two of the staff have longstanding grudges against Gradwyn, another has a dark past that has caused her to assume a new identity, one of Rhoda's friends stands to gain from her will, and Chandler-Powell's two medical assistants both have reasons for wanting to ruin the surgeon's reputation. So whodunnit? And what is the significance of the ancient stone circle outside the manor, where a witch was once burned, and where strange lights were seen on the night of the murder?
The Private Patient is a novel resolute in its conformity to the conventions and clichés of its genre, but it's a class act nonetheless -- the work of a novelist rightly confident of the continuing power and relevance of the old Agatha Christie format. The story thrills and entices, like it should, but it's also familiar and pleasurable, a book to be dipped into at leisure rather than one to be read from a grim compulsion to get to the end. James is simply a terrific writer: elegant, erudite and measured.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Entertaining but unmemorable, 9 May 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Geoff Dyer writes brilliantly, but his new book is oddly forgettable, serving as yet another reminder that he hasn't quite produced the masterpiece of which his formidable talent suggests he is capable.
First of all, it's not a novel. I read in an interview that Dyer planned to subtitle it "a diptych", but the publisher pointed out that this would be commercial suicide. The book in fact comprises two unconnected novellas, both of which are really thinly-fictionalized travelogues.
The first part, "Jeff in Venice", is a witty and sexy subversion of Thomas Mann's similarly-titled novella. In place of Mann's moral turmoil and sexual repression, Dyer presents Venice as an amoral tourist's playground in which our protagonist, middle-aged British journalist Jeff Atman, belts back bellinis with the art crowd at the Biennale and gets drawn into a steamy, cocaine-fuelled love affair that's as shallow as it is sordid. "Death in Varanasi" is rather less engaging: it's a gently-paced, largely descriptive first-person account of an unnamed middle-aged British journalist finding new age enlightenment in the Hindu Holy City.
The setting is the star in both parts of JIVDIV; the flaw is that both locations are so familiar and tourist-oriented already that another tourist's eye view is hardly necessary. The review of JIVDIV in The Sunday Times points out the problem: "[Dyer's] theme always seems to be What I Did On My Holidays, and in that sense he has not come far from English class in primary." It's a pithy putdown that Dyer invites and deserves.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Elegant and erudite, 17 April 2009
P.D. James is 88, and if the thought of churning out 400-page novels at that age impresses you, spare a thought for her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, who's been wrestling culprits to the floor since 1962. I can only assume he's been drinking the same elixir as James Bond, and gets younger and more muscular with each new case.
The setting for The Private Patient is, naturally, a decaying outpost of provincial privilege with a spooky and claustrophobic atmosphere. Rhoda Gradwyn, a fearless investigative journalist with a fair tally of accumulated enemies, books in to the private Dorset clinic of her plastic surgeon, George Chandler-Powell. The purpose of the visit: the removal of a deep scar across Gradwyn's cheek, inflicted during childhood. The operation is completed successfully. But the following night, bandages still wrapped round her face, Rhoda is strangled in her bed.
Helpfully enough, the clinic, a beautiful yet intimidating Tudor manor house, is an enclosed space chock full of suspects. Two of the staff have longstanding grudges against Gradwyn, another has a dark past that has caused her to assume a new identity, one of Rhoda's friends stands to gain from her will, and Chandler-Powell's two medical assistants both have reasons for wanting to ruin the surgeon's reputation. So whodunnit? And what is the significance of the ancient stone circle outside the manor, where a witch was once burned, and where strange lights were seen on the night of the murder?
The Private Patient is a novel resolute in its conformity to the conventions and clichés of its genre, but it's a class act nonetheless -- the work of a novelist rightly confident of the continuing power and relevance of the old Agatha Christie format. The story thrills and entices, like it should, but it's also familiar and pleasurable, a book to be dipped into at leisure rather than one to be read from a grim compulsion to get to the end. James is simply a terrific writer: elegant, erudite and measured.
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2666
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by Roberto Bolano
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: £11.97 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Very hard to enjoy, 12 April 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
I think it's fair to say that the gushing reviews of 2666 in the press have glossed over its obvious shortcomings. In dwelling on them here, I don't mean to diminish the status of Roberto Bolaño's achievement in this posthumously published work. 2666 is a serious and important novel that will be studied in academia for many years. But I think it's important that ordinary readers know what they're buying.
2666 is a first draft. Tragically, Bolaño died before the usual editing and redrafting process could take place. He left behind manuscripts for a series of five books, which his estate decided to publish in a single volume. All five parts involve the fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa, but the links between them are pretty tenuous and the book reads more like an anthology than a novel. No one knows what the title means.
For many readers these facts may set off a few alarm bells. 2666 is unmistakably first draft material. It's immensely long, disjointed, erratic and unwieldy. Everything is done to excess. Book 4, for example, is 300 pages long, and consists of nothing but hundreds of descriptions of the murders of women. It is the closest thing to a genuinely unreadable book I have ever come across. Not because it wallows in horrific violence, but because the endless repetition is numbingly tedious.
I'm sure that was Bolaño's intention, and academics will hold conferences about how Bolaño confronts the reader and defies the conventions of fiction. But as an ordinary reader, I'd prefer to read something readable. 2666 is like a Turner prizewinning artwork. Totally original, massively acclaimed... but almost impossible to actually enjoy.
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10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Extremely putdownable, 20 Mar 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
The Northern Clemency is a 700-page chronicle of mundane family life in Sheffield, 1970-2000. After reading it, I realized it might have been quicker, and more fun, to actually just go and live in Sheffield for thirty years.
It's not a bad book. The writing is clear and competent, the characters are nicely drawn, the attention to detail is impressive. But there are thousands upon thousands of books that are better than this, and life's too short. The Northern Clemency is uninspired, unmemorable and spectacularly overlong.
The publisher tells us it was inspired by "the great nineteenth-century Russian novels". And that's exactly what's wrong with it. If you want to read an interminable 700-page saga, why not read a great nineteenth-century Russian one? Don't waste hours and hours on the twenty-first-century Sheffieldian equivalent.
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