New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 364.
The real point of transition in Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series from the small-scale novels of the early years (like The Mediterranean Caper and Raise the Titanic!) to the large-scale plots of his later books (like Sahara) was Deep Six, but the much earlier Vixen 03 still represents a tentative step in that direction. It is much more compact, but has something of the later book's divided plot structure, starting with two different threads that eventually tie together - Pitt's happening upon mysterious aircraft wreckage while on vacation in Colorado's Sawatch mountains with his girlfriend Loren Smith (introduced here for the first time); and the battle of the South African government against African-American expatriate Hiram Lusana's anti-apartheid guerrilla group African Army of the Revolution, in which each seeks the support of the United States.
The story has its share of implausibilities, particularly at the levels of geopolitics and technology. The D.C. hijinks, a frequent weak point of technothriller writing, have members of the House of Representatives making American foreign policy in a simplified, sanitized near-vacuum. (The soap operatic sleaze of the blackmail attempt against Loren merely underlines the absence of the real sleaze of practical politics from Cussler's portrait of the Beltway.1) The prospect of the U.S.'s supporting Communist-backed South African guerrillas against their government in the midst of the Cold War seems more like a rightist fear of radical (or radical chic) influence over American foreign policy than a plausible extrapolation. (We see Hiram Lusana lobbying in D.C. - with the help of Hollywood starlet Felicia Collins - but no Jack Abramoff-type making Pretoria's case, with the help of the Hollywood connections that brought us Red Scorpion.2) The Quick Death virus that ends up playing a key role in the plot is a rather convenient and casual creation, as its very name indicates. (It kills exposed humans in minutes, and renders infected areas uninhabitable for centuries - but while being unkillable by anything else, is totally and instantly neutralized by immersion in water.)
In fairness, though, authorial rigor in these areas (let alone insight into the great affairs of the day) is rarely the attraction of the Dirk Pitt novel. Rather what compels is the adventure Cussler spins out of them, and this book certainly provides its fair share of undersea exploration, nautical mystery and over-the-top action. It is the South African plot line which initially supplies the last, but the relatively tight writing and fast pace soon enough bring on the convergence. And this culminates in a climax that may have lost something of the retro appeal it had at the time of the book's publication, but which is sufficiently intricate, inventive and spectacular to remain one of Cussler's more memorable thirty-five prolific years on.3
1. One can also see the blackmail plot, like the heavier accent on sex in Cussler's '70s-era work, as a concession to the fashions of the period (and perhaps, the influence of a certain British predecessor), preceding our era of celibate action heroes.
2. It is worth remembering that Vixen 03 appeared the very same year as Graham Greene's classic spy novel The Human Factor, which offered a very different, and much more realistic, take on the situation.
3. This would be a matter of certain Defense Department procurement decisions which will be immediately apparent to any reader familiar with the 600-Ship Navy program initiated in the 1980s.
Monday, July 13, 2015
H.G. Wells' "Digression on Novels"
H.G. Wells was quite frank about the fact that when writing he was more interested in the broader "scene" than in the figures within it, and in a "ventilation of the issue" at hand than Flaubertian technical niceties--in the wide world, and considerations of it, than the "turns and tricks" of character and form.
That he worked in this way as a writer got him attacked by, among others, Henry James (in "The New Novel"), by Virginia Woolf (in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"), by that key figure in the development of the "New Criticism" and wrecker of quite a few literary reputations, Mark Schorer (in his essay, "Technique as Discovery"), all of whom had quite different ideas about just what makes literature worthwhile.1
By and large, those who wish to appear reputable stand with James, Woolf and Schorer, on this and many another point, with the result that Wells is far less reputable than he used to be. Still, it seems to me that it was those writers most attentive to scene and issue who were the first to make strong impressions on me as a reader, and have continued to make the strongest impressions--be they nineteenth century Balzacs and Tolstoys, twentieth century Lewises, or writers in that scene-and-issue-oriented genre to which Wells contributed so much, science fiction (even after I have become more appreciative of the view of James and company). And much as Wells may have failed to win the critics over to his way of thinking, I can think of no other who has made as strong and clear a case as Wells did for it in "The Digression on Novels" in his Experiment in Autobiography.
1. Besides Wells, he did a good deal of damage to the standing of Sinclair Lewis with a notoriously unflattering biography.
That he worked in this way as a writer got him attacked by, among others, Henry James (in "The New Novel"), by Virginia Woolf (in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"), by that key figure in the development of the "New Criticism" and wrecker of quite a few literary reputations, Mark Schorer (in his essay, "Technique as Discovery"), all of whom had quite different ideas about just what makes literature worthwhile.1
By and large, those who wish to appear reputable stand with James, Woolf and Schorer, on this and many another point, with the result that Wells is far less reputable than he used to be. Still, it seems to me that it was those writers most attentive to scene and issue who were the first to make strong impressions on me as a reader, and have continued to make the strongest impressions--be they nineteenth century Balzacs and Tolstoys, twentieth century Lewises, or writers in that scene-and-issue-oriented genre to which Wells contributed so much, science fiction (even after I have become more appreciative of the view of James and company). And much as Wells may have failed to win the critics over to his way of thinking, I can think of no other who has made as strong and clear a case as Wells did for it in "The Digression on Novels" in his Experiment in Autobiography.
1. Besides Wells, he did a good deal of damage to the standing of Sinclair Lewis with a notoriously unflattering biography.
The Hikikomori and the Lost Decade That Never Ended
Many years ago Welcome to the N.H.K. introduced me to the term "hikikomori."
Much as I enjoyed the show, looking back later I noted that it lacked a particular virtue in its treatment of its issue--what one might call a social vision. Certainly Tatsuhiro Sato's problems were explained in terms of personal psychology--and rather quirkily, too--so that while his story sheds light on what they are going through, it does not say very much about why they are going through it.
Still, some have tried to explain the matter, often interpreting it as a type of social withdrawal. Quite often commentators link it to the transitional years of the '90s in Japan's economic history, which badly damaged the conventional path to "success." Certainly not everyone who went to school got into a competitive college, and went from there to a lifelong job with a prestigious company and a comfortably middle-class standard of living in even the most prosperous years. Far from it. However, the realities of credentialing crisis, higher structural unemployment, contingent employment and generally stagnant incomes and decreasing job security, made both the goal and the means for attaining it seem much less plausible than before--and retreat a more attractive option.
However, such writers rarely seem to delve very deeply into those troubles. This makes their discussion less persuasive because what happened in Japan also happened pretty much everywhere else.
Still, it may be that the shock was sharper in Japan's case. To go by the data, it may be said that the post-war boom that came to a halt in much of the world in the early '70s lasted two decades longer there.1 And on the whole the change in incomes and living standards was larger. Where per capita income in the U.S. doubled between 1945 and 1991, it rose fourteen-fold in Japan during those same years.
This was in part a reflection of the fact that Japan was so much further behind the wealthiest nations at the start of this period; and of the fact that where the U.S. had boomed during World War II, Japan was devastated, per capita GDP in 1945 reduced to about half the 1940 level. Still, the longer duration of the boom years, and the more dramatic expansion of prosperity, doubtless had an effect on expectations. So did the massive stock-and-real estate bubble of those last years of the boom, which likely made things seem even rosier than they were (even if it was mainly a case of the rich getting richer).
And just as the period of growth was more dramatic, so was the stagnation that followed it. The "lost decade" of the '90s never quite came to an end, growth in the last two-and-a-half decades consistently feeble, even when measured by the common experience of other industrialized nations.2
In short, the boom in Japan was longer and more spectacular than in just about any other industrialized country, followed by a seemingly overnight transition to stagnation that was lengthier and deeper than in just about any other industrialized country, almost as if a switch had been flicked. The inflation and puncturing of a historic bubble amplified the effect. And so hard enough as the shift from boom to bust was elsewhere, one may imagine that it was even harder here.
Making matters worse, it is not the middle-aged Company Man but the new job-seeker just out of school who is most exposed to the shock, so that they feel it all that much more--and get that much less understanding from their elders. The difference in personal experience between one generation and another likely meant that when the son or daughter was in the unenviable position of answering the question "Why don't you have a job yet?" mom and dad were much less likely to get it--especially with the Japanese media breathlessly stigmatizing and scapegoating "freeters," "NEETs" and others who, for whatever reason, do not conform to societal expectations, a tendency which did not change in line with the new economic realities.
Does that explain everything about the situation? Of course not. But the more extreme pattern of the boom-and-bust, and the inevitable lagging of social attitudes behind it (which would seem commensurately extreme), does seem something to take into account when talking about how the economic situation contributes to a pattern of social withdrawal.
1. According to the statistics at the Maddison Project, between 1973 and 1991 American per capita GDP grew at the rate of about 1.8 percent a year, but the rate was 3 percent a year in Japan, more like what the U.S. had in its boom years.
2. The Maddison data indicate that per capita income growth in Japan was 0.7 percent a year--compared with 1.5 percent a year in the U.S..
Much as I enjoyed the show, looking back later I noted that it lacked a particular virtue in its treatment of its issue--what one might call a social vision. Certainly Tatsuhiro Sato's problems were explained in terms of personal psychology--and rather quirkily, too--so that while his story sheds light on what they are going through, it does not say very much about why they are going through it.
Still, some have tried to explain the matter, often interpreting it as a type of social withdrawal. Quite often commentators link it to the transitional years of the '90s in Japan's economic history, which badly damaged the conventional path to "success." Certainly not everyone who went to school got into a competitive college, and went from there to a lifelong job with a prestigious company and a comfortably middle-class standard of living in even the most prosperous years. Far from it. However, the realities of credentialing crisis, higher structural unemployment, contingent employment and generally stagnant incomes and decreasing job security, made both the goal and the means for attaining it seem much less plausible than before--and retreat a more attractive option.
However, such writers rarely seem to delve very deeply into those troubles. This makes their discussion less persuasive because what happened in Japan also happened pretty much everywhere else.
Still, it may be that the shock was sharper in Japan's case. To go by the data, it may be said that the post-war boom that came to a halt in much of the world in the early '70s lasted two decades longer there.1 And on the whole the change in incomes and living standards was larger. Where per capita income in the U.S. doubled between 1945 and 1991, it rose fourteen-fold in Japan during those same years.
This was in part a reflection of the fact that Japan was so much further behind the wealthiest nations at the start of this period; and of the fact that where the U.S. had boomed during World War II, Japan was devastated, per capita GDP in 1945 reduced to about half the 1940 level. Still, the longer duration of the boom years, and the more dramatic expansion of prosperity, doubtless had an effect on expectations. So did the massive stock-and-real estate bubble of those last years of the boom, which likely made things seem even rosier than they were (even if it was mainly a case of the rich getting richer).
And just as the period of growth was more dramatic, so was the stagnation that followed it. The "lost decade" of the '90s never quite came to an end, growth in the last two-and-a-half decades consistently feeble, even when measured by the common experience of other industrialized nations.2
In short, the boom in Japan was longer and more spectacular than in just about any other industrialized country, followed by a seemingly overnight transition to stagnation that was lengthier and deeper than in just about any other industrialized country, almost as if a switch had been flicked. The inflation and puncturing of a historic bubble amplified the effect. And so hard enough as the shift from boom to bust was elsewhere, one may imagine that it was even harder here.
Making matters worse, it is not the middle-aged Company Man but the new job-seeker just out of school who is most exposed to the shock, so that they feel it all that much more--and get that much less understanding from their elders. The difference in personal experience between one generation and another likely meant that when the son or daughter was in the unenviable position of answering the question "Why don't you have a job yet?" mom and dad were much less likely to get it--especially with the Japanese media breathlessly stigmatizing and scapegoating "freeters," "NEETs" and others who, for whatever reason, do not conform to societal expectations, a tendency which did not change in line with the new economic realities.
Does that explain everything about the situation? Of course not. But the more extreme pattern of the boom-and-bust, and the inevitable lagging of social attitudes behind it (which would seem commensurately extreme), does seem something to take into account when talking about how the economic situation contributes to a pattern of social withdrawal.
1. According to the statistics at the Maddison Project, between 1973 and 1991 American per capita GDP grew at the rate of about 1.8 percent a year, but the rate was 3 percent a year in Japan, more like what the U.S. had in its boom years.
2. The Maddison data indicate that per capita income growth in Japan was 0.7 percent a year--compared with 1.5 percent a year in the U.S..
Thomas Piketty and Pop Culture
Most reviewers (at any rate, those who do not instantly react with hostility to the mere idea of the project) seem to agree that Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is hugely impressive as a round-up of the available data on the subject of inequality.
It has been more vulnerable on the question of its analysis of that data. (James K. Galbraith had the measure of its weaknesses in his review.1)
However, the book is nonetheless packed with interesting and at times quite persuasive observations and arguments.
One surprise was the attention Piketty devoted to cultural depictions of wealth. Certainly his most extensive discussions of this type are of novels by Jane Austen and Honore de Balzac (particularly Sense and Sensibility and Pere Goriot). However, he also pays attention to more recent work--perhaps appropriately turning his attention from novels to American television. As he notes, explicit monetary reference has become less common as a result of inflation confusing the significance of numbers over even short periods of time.
More significantly, he notes that rentiers have been less common. Instead inequality is consistently presented, and justified, as a function of "disparities with respect to work, wages and skills . . . based on merit, education and the social utility of elites."
Not only does it often seem as if "everyone" in television dramas a member of a prestigious profession, but they tend to be at the top of that profession--a top litigator at a blue-chip firm, or a celebrated surgeon, for example. Corporate gods and tech billionaires are a dime a dozen. And their status is always made out to be a reflection not of the advantages of privileged birth, familial connections, school ties, mealy-mouthed careerist conformism, old-fashioned corruption, or sheer good luck, but their extraordinary personal excellence, first, last and always.
Indeed, "everyone" constantly name-drops the elite institutions with which they have been affiliated, on the basis of pure merit, it would seem, since "everyone" was first in their class, wherever it was they went. "Everyone" with a fortune is self-made, through extraordinary entrepreneurship, and very likely also the extraordinary technical skill that enabled them to invent something. And as if their career accomplishments are not enough, "everyone" speaks a dozen languages, plays the piano like a virtuoso, fences like Cyrano, fights like Bruce Lee, pilots their own plane and recites Shakespeare from memory (never mind when they would have had the time to learn all this), all while being immaculately groomed and unfailingly articulate in a way that somehow real-life CEOs, billionaires and chief executives (a Donald Trump, a Silvio Berlusconi, a Taro Aso) never seem to be.
Indeed, Piketty observes that "It is not unreasonable to interpret such series' as offering a hymn to a just inequality." And I suspect how one responds to such a hymn might be a factor in how we respond to such shows. Might it be that being beaten over the head with this "hymn to inequality" is a factor in the boredom or resentment so many feel toward Mary Sue and Gary Stu characters, unacknowledged in any explicit way because of a reticence to talking about inequality or class? It seems an idea worth considering.
1. The most important of these is that Piketty's book is "about the valuation placed on tangible and financial assets," rather than capital, as well as the distribution of those assets through time, and the inheritance of wealth from one generation to the next"--and that while it mostly covers this well, it is a more limited thing than the work's apparent "ambitions," or its "title, length, and reception" suggest.
It has been more vulnerable on the question of its analysis of that data. (James K. Galbraith had the measure of its weaknesses in his review.1)
However, the book is nonetheless packed with interesting and at times quite persuasive observations and arguments.
One surprise was the attention Piketty devoted to cultural depictions of wealth. Certainly his most extensive discussions of this type are of novels by Jane Austen and Honore de Balzac (particularly Sense and Sensibility and Pere Goriot). However, he also pays attention to more recent work--perhaps appropriately turning his attention from novels to American television. As he notes, explicit monetary reference has become less common as a result of inflation confusing the significance of numbers over even short periods of time.
More significantly, he notes that rentiers have been less common. Instead inequality is consistently presented, and justified, as a function of "disparities with respect to work, wages and skills . . . based on merit, education and the social utility of elites."
Not only does it often seem as if "everyone" in television dramas a member of a prestigious profession, but they tend to be at the top of that profession--a top litigator at a blue-chip firm, or a celebrated surgeon, for example. Corporate gods and tech billionaires are a dime a dozen. And their status is always made out to be a reflection not of the advantages of privileged birth, familial connections, school ties, mealy-mouthed careerist conformism, old-fashioned corruption, or sheer good luck, but their extraordinary personal excellence, first, last and always.
Indeed, "everyone" constantly name-drops the elite institutions with which they have been affiliated, on the basis of pure merit, it would seem, since "everyone" was first in their class, wherever it was they went. "Everyone" with a fortune is self-made, through extraordinary entrepreneurship, and very likely also the extraordinary technical skill that enabled them to invent something. And as if their career accomplishments are not enough, "everyone" speaks a dozen languages, plays the piano like a virtuoso, fences like Cyrano, fights like Bruce Lee, pilots their own plane and recites Shakespeare from memory (never mind when they would have had the time to learn all this), all while being immaculately groomed and unfailingly articulate in a way that somehow real-life CEOs, billionaires and chief executives (a Donald Trump, a Silvio Berlusconi, a Taro Aso) never seem to be.
Indeed, Piketty observes that "It is not unreasonable to interpret such series' as offering a hymn to a just inequality." And I suspect how one responds to such a hymn might be a factor in how we respond to such shows. Might it be that being beaten over the head with this "hymn to inequality" is a factor in the boredom or resentment so many feel toward Mary Sue and Gary Stu characters, unacknowledged in any explicit way because of a reticence to talking about inequality or class? It seems an idea worth considering.
1. The most important of these is that Piketty's book is "about the valuation placed on tangible and financial assets," rather than capital, as well as the distribution of those assets through time, and the inheritance of wealth from one generation to the next"--and that while it mostly covers this well, it is a more limited thing than the work's apparent "ambitions," or its "title, length, and reception" suggest.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Remembering the Battle of Britain
Along with the fall of the Third Republic and the founding of Vichy, July 10 marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain--which is, of course, being commemorated in quite a different fashion.
I was recently surprised to read that half (or more) of Britons aged 18 to 24 surveyed did not know what the Battle of Britain was.
Perhaps it was a surprise because, while in the U.S. we hear such stories all the time, we are less used to such news from other countries.
However, it may also be a matter of the impression we often get in the U.S. of the attitude toward history in Britain--in particular, that while Americans are uninterested in, British society is utterly steeped in the memory of the past, and not least that of World War II.
I think, for instance, of Simon Winder's book The Man Who Saved Britain, and his recounting of his childhood, which seemed utterly saturated with the war.
Of course, Winder (born in 1963) belonged to a different generation which, if it did not actually experience the war itself, was still surrounded by people who had been deeply affected by the conflict.
After all, Britain fought the war for six years--much longer than, for example, the United States did. Not only did some five million Britons served in uniform, but the civilian population was subject to extended periods of aerial bombing, which killed tens of thousands, and destroyed the homes and disrupted the lives of many more, so that a good many of them were driven to live in air-raid shelters. (Some people were even born in air-raid shelters. Jerry Springer was one of them.) U-boats stalked the surrounding seas, making even the food supply precarious. Between bomb damage and sunken ships, between the running down of the country's plant amid an all-out production effort and the sell-off of foreign assets, the country lost a quarter of its wealth (according to the official report, anyway), amassed vast new debts, went bankrupt. The result was that its people were subject to rationing, not just during the war, but for many years afterward.
And as one might expect from such a conflict, it had profound consequences: the end of world power status, and empire, and the old world order. It meant a change in the old order at home, too--Labor Britain, the post-war consensus. Some didn't much like this. (Ian Fleming was of them.) Others, more numerous one imagines but less privileged and so less likely to be heard, were more sanguine. But in either case this meant a very different world, and these events not the sort quickly forgotten.
However, today one would have to have lived beyond the usual life expectancy to have a memory of having held any position of real, official responsibility during the war. Anyone under seventy-five has no personal memory of the war years whatsoever. Anyone under sixty cannot even remember rationing or conscription.
The result is that the war, and even its aftermath, have long been receding beyond the mental horizon of most of those living now, in and out of Britain. Increasingly become the sort of thing one knows not firsthand, or even secondhand from the people around them, but only from history class, material learned for the test and then promptly forgotten, unless one particularly cares to remember--a thing that even the presence of such events in film and on television (say, Spitfires shooting it out with Daleks on Doctor Who) may obscure.
Just like the Battle of Waterloo, about which even fewer people know, to go by a survey for the 200th anniversary of Waterloo.
A lot of people seem to think that one's simply an Abba song.
I was recently surprised to read that half (or more) of Britons aged 18 to 24 surveyed did not know what the Battle of Britain was.
Perhaps it was a surprise because, while in the U.S. we hear such stories all the time, we are less used to such news from other countries.
However, it may also be a matter of the impression we often get in the U.S. of the attitude toward history in Britain--in particular, that while Americans are uninterested in, British society is utterly steeped in the memory of the past, and not least that of World War II.
I think, for instance, of Simon Winder's book The Man Who Saved Britain, and his recounting of his childhood, which seemed utterly saturated with the war.
Of course, Winder (born in 1963) belonged to a different generation which, if it did not actually experience the war itself, was still surrounded by people who had been deeply affected by the conflict.
After all, Britain fought the war for six years--much longer than, for example, the United States did. Not only did some five million Britons served in uniform, but the civilian population was subject to extended periods of aerial bombing, which killed tens of thousands, and destroyed the homes and disrupted the lives of many more, so that a good many of them were driven to live in air-raid shelters. (Some people were even born in air-raid shelters. Jerry Springer was one of them.) U-boats stalked the surrounding seas, making even the food supply precarious. Between bomb damage and sunken ships, between the running down of the country's plant amid an all-out production effort and the sell-off of foreign assets, the country lost a quarter of its wealth (according to the official report, anyway), amassed vast new debts, went bankrupt. The result was that its people were subject to rationing, not just during the war, but for many years afterward.
And as one might expect from such a conflict, it had profound consequences: the end of world power status, and empire, and the old world order. It meant a change in the old order at home, too--Labor Britain, the post-war consensus. Some didn't much like this. (Ian Fleming was of them.) Others, more numerous one imagines but less privileged and so less likely to be heard, were more sanguine. But in either case this meant a very different world, and these events not the sort quickly forgotten.
However, today one would have to have lived beyond the usual life expectancy to have a memory of having held any position of real, official responsibility during the war. Anyone under seventy-five has no personal memory of the war years whatsoever. Anyone under sixty cannot even remember rationing or conscription.
The result is that the war, and even its aftermath, have long been receding beyond the mental horizon of most of those living now, in and out of Britain. Increasingly become the sort of thing one knows not firsthand, or even secondhand from the people around them, but only from history class, material learned for the test and then promptly forgotten, unless one particularly cares to remember--a thing that even the presence of such events in film and on television (say, Spitfires shooting it out with Daleks on Doctor Who) may obscure.
Just like the Battle of Waterloo, about which even fewer people know, to go by a survey for the 200th anniversary of Waterloo.
A lot of people seem to think that one's simply an Abba song.
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