Danton: making it big in the revolutionary world
I read biographies far less often than someone of my historical bent would be supposed to. I often expect them to be dry – I’m not sure why – and I often prefer books on the minutiae of history, the stuff that often gets overlooked. That said, I have a soft spot for Alison Weir’s biographies – I’ve read most of her Tudor stuff, and I really liked her book on Isabella (“She-Wolf of France”).
One of my all-time favourites is a biography of John Dee, best known as an astrologer, alchemist and magician, but actually responsible for some pretty awesome science too. Against that is the fact that I have biographies of Dirk Bogarde (I am a big fan of the Doctor movies), Gandhi, Elizabeth I… and the Pythons autobiography… all sitting on my unread/true shelf (it’s a long story). I’d like to read more bios, they just don’t move up in the ‘must read’ queue.
This problem is exacerbated, for me, when it comes to reading of modern, controversial characters. Dee was controversial, and Isabella certainly was (and when I can get my hands on a good revisionist bio of King John, I am going to be all over it), but even I concede that arguing about them is slightly academic, although always with modern repercussions. I would desperately like to read a good biography of Trotsky – and Lenin, I guess, too – but who the heck am I going to trust? A popularist like Alison Weir? I don’t think so, sunshine. A historian of whose politics I know nothing? Problematic. I would love to read one written by Peter McPhee – God bless his Marxist soul – but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
And so we come to the fact that I have finally finished The Giant of the French Revolution. Danton: A Life, by David Lawday.
When I first started reading about the French Revolution I quickly decided that Danton was the man for me; Marat is too much a rabble rouser – although dying in the bath is sooo Greek tragedy – while Robespierre, with his insistence on continuing to wear ancien regime costume, clearly had gumption but his whole Republic-of-Virtue-or-die made me a bit uncomfortable. There are things about Danton that make me uncomfortable too, but… he’s so much larger than life, he had such energy, and he instructed his executioner to make sure to show his head to the crowd once it was off, because it was worth looking at. Plus, Gerard Depardieu plays him in a movie, and he was perfect.
So, the book. Lawday admits at the start that this is a slightly romanticised history, because Danton committed almost nothing to paper. There are no footnotes, although there are references at the back giving some indication of where ideas and quotes came from. And it is a bit romantic: Lawday sometimes lets himself go on flights of descriptive fancy about the streets of Paris and the countryside around Arcis, Danton’s birthplace; and he gets a bit smoochy over Danton and his wife Gabrielle’s relationship. The other romantic aspect, and the thing that annoyed me the most, was that Lawday’s vision of Danton as a hero apparently demanded that there be a genuine fiction-like villain for him to play against. Robespierre, the man probably responsible for Danton’s death, is the obvious candidate here, and Lawday goes out of his way to malign and belittle him as unmanly and insipid, in contrast to the testosterone-fuelled Danton. But what really, really got my back up was that Lawday also featured Manon Roland, wife of Danton’s fellow elected official Jean-Marie Roland. It seems clear that Mme Roland and Danton did not get along. Lawday, though, plays this up in sexualised and demeaning ways that were occasionally outright offensive. Having recently read Liberty, about the contribution of women to the Revolution – including Roland – this got my goat even more than it might have.
Sigh. Anyway, aside from that demonisation, I did really enjoy Danton. Lawday gives a good running explanation of the Revolution such that I didn’t get lost trying to figure out what else was going on at the time, and he does well at portraying Danton as intimately involved in most of the important events. Some of this may be exaggeration, but not all of it. It’s largely well written, although I’m not sure that I agree with The Economist that it’s “beautifully told”. It’s eminently readable, anyway, and captures the energy and urgency of the Revolution. I think this would be exceptionally good way in to the Revolution for someone with little knowledge of the events, but with a curiosity about people who shape events.
In other news, I am still struggling through Citizens. That is, in theory I am still reading it, but it’s at the top of my bookcase at the moment, not being read.
Dervish House
I have long been enamoured of Turkey. Actually, strictly speaking I have long been enamoured of the idea of Turkey: the decadence, the luxury, the it’s very different there. Over the last number of years I have come to the realisation that this idea, or dream, of the country is a very European one, and a very colonial one in many regards – it’s a view of “the East” that has existed in “the West” at least since the Romans had their snooty ideas about Egypt and Persia. Despite being well aware of its source, and feeling uncomfortable about that, there is still an allure in those incredibly not-politically-correct views. And that’s the point, of course: the allure comes from the (alleged) exotic nature of somewhere very ‘different’ (from Western Europe), and difference is always attractive. (The point, too, was that by identifying certain things like decadence as traits from over there, the viewer could take the prim moral stance and still enjoy it. But I digress….)
I got to thinking about these sorts of things in reading The Dervish House because it is set in near-future Istanbul: a city in many ways very similar to those of Western Europe, America, and Australia that I am familiar with, but with enough differences – real differences – that it retains an aura of the exotic. The story could, with some changes of course, be set in any city really. But setting it in Istanbul allows McDonald to do many things, not least of which is imbuing his setting with a deep sense of history that the relatively new cities of America and Australia just don’t have. Istanbul is very much a character in this novel; the complexity of the city itself – geographically, historically – is deeply important to the plot and the characters. There is even a character whose main interest in life is mapping the social history of the city, an idea I find very attractive.
The Dervish House is a simultaneously dense and frantic novel. In 472 pages McDonald covers five days in the life of the city, from the point of view of six main characters. An old Greek man, a young Turkish invalid, a successful businesswoman, an ambitious businesswoman, a no-hoper and a stockmarket player: with this cast, McDonald creates a vibrant city. Some of their stories interweave with one another, at one point or another, while others appear tangential; all combine to give a rich, rich view of the near future. Their plots are wonderfully varied: there’s romance, there’s adventure, there’s corporate espionage and shady deals and antiquarian detective work; religious fanaticism, world-weariness, wild success and disappointments. At times the writing is so dense that I had a little trouble following it, but the sheer beauty of it – along with the compelling sense that I needed to know what was going to happen – meant that wasn’t too much of a hassle.
One of the things that fascinated me about this book is that reading it as an SF reader, it’s clearly SF; there are enough references to nanotechnology and other futuristic things to ensure that. However, the date isn’t made clear until about two-thirds of the way through the book, and the technology isn’t really central, so it ought to have broader mainstream appeal, too.
A revolutionary feminist
The idea of being a revolutionary feminist isn’t exactly a ground-breaking one. However, in this context, it is, because the woman I’m referring to is Inessa Armand.
Never heard of her? What a surprise.
Have you heard the one about how V.I. Lenin, married but childless, had a lover who was kinda involved in the Bolshevik party?
That would be Inessa. Except that she almost certainly wasn’t his lover, but she was deeply, thoughtfully, and passionately committed to the Bolshevik party.
There are very few books, it seems, that look at the role of women in the Russian Revolution. There have been a few books written about Aleksandra Kollontai, which I’m keen to get my hands on – but for Westerners especially, she’s a ‘fun’ topic because she spouted all sorts of daring philosophies like ‘free love’ and that abortions ought to be legal. I also have a book on my pile to read that collates the reminiscences of women from the early Soviet era. But, really, compared to the number of books on Lenin and Stalin and Tolstoy, let alone the minutiae of aspects of the Revolution, women get short shrift.
R.C Elwood confronted this in 1996 when he wrote about Armand. He is very open about how he came to write the book, which I like: he’d been struck by some seeming inconsistencies around what little was written about her, he suggested one of his students write a thesis on her, and then… essentially his imagination was captured. One of the problems that he faced is that almost none of her writing has been published. While you can go read almost every little note or letter that Mighty Lenin ever committed to paper, not so for Armand. While it appears that she started several articles, most never got published – and the fault for that appears to lie with Lenin, who was dismissive of her work. And while she probably wrote many letters to Lenin, given the 130+ that he is known to have written to her, they have neither been collected nor published (or hadn’t to 1996; I haven’t seen any evidence of them, anyway).
Elwood’s is a well written, and well structured, biography. (It might seem obvious how to structure a biography, but within standard chronology I have read some truly confusing stuff.) He tells Armand’s story in a straightforward manner, and didn’t seem to me to be making too many leaps of intuition. He also incorporates a fair amount of history about the situation in pre-revolutionary Russia, and the immediate after-effects of the October Revolution; as with Lenin, Armand wasn’t actually in the country for the February one. Sadly, for Armand herself and in thinking about how she might have continued to influence affairs, she died in 1920 – while the Civil War was still going, before War Communism was repealed and the NEP introduced. Thinking about it though, this might almost have been a good thing, since she didn’t have to face Stalin’s rise to power.
My one quibble is Elwood’s use of the term ‘feminist’. He never theorises what he actually means by that, and whether he is using the term in a modern or a contemporary way. He doesn’t spend much time – and none early on – discussing what was obviously a problem for the Bolsheviks: that most women who identified as feminist at this time were doing so from a bourgeois perspective. Consequently, there were real problems for women who identified both as Marxist and feminist, since Marxists said women’s issues were a class problem, not a gender one. Anyway, this leads to some sections where it sounds like Armand evolved from feminism to Marxism, which I would take issue with and I’m not sure was Elwood’s intention.
There are lots of things to like about this book, but perhaps my favourite is the chapter focussing on the historiography of the notion that Armand was Lenin’s lover. Elwood details what he reconstruct of the earliest suggestions of such a relationship, then looks at the actual evidence, and points out all the flaws and inconsistencies. Of course, as he acknowledges, it is a possibility he was wrong; they (with Lenin’s wife Krupskaia) did spend a lot of time in the same places, and they did write to each other a lot. But the weight of the evidence at the moment says they were not involved like that. Apparently you actually could be female and have an impact on politics other than through your sex life. Who knew?
Revolutionary women
So, a while ago on the Coode St podcast, Jonathan and Gary wondered what it would be like if you tried to write a history of sf through the female writers. I think this is a most interesting idea, and relates to my desire to find women writing space opera.
Which relates to a book I’ve just finished reading called Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore. I was expecting it to be a book essentially looking at six women, all very different, and their experiences in the French Revolution. However, what I got was so much more than that. Alongside the bios – and they were really interesting women, all of them – I got a full history of the Revolution itself, almost entirely from the point of view of women. And the really, really cool thing is that it totally, totally worked.
Women were involved at every level of the Revolution. It was working-class women who marched on the palace in 1789 and scared the king and queen terribly. Women were involved in planning and suggesting policy in the convention’s various incarnations, and getting it passed too, thanks to both direct action on the streets and more indirect action in the various salons. Women were directly impacted, of course, by changes made to the laws – although they were not accorded citizenship rights under the great Declaration – and, perhaps more interestingly, perhaps stereotypically, but nonetheless dramatically, fashion was also of huge importance. Especially in the streets of Paris, what you wore was an immediate sign of your allegiances. In a world where there were laws about how could wear what, having women on the street insisting that everyone wear the revolutionary cockade was pretty influential. As was when aristocratic women, formerly the paragons of incredibly expensive haute couture, wore clothes that wouldn’t look out of place on a sans coulotte.
The women under investigation were Germaine de Stael, Pauline Leon, Theroigne de Mericourt, Theresia de Fontenay, Manon Roland and Juliette Recamier (all names missing accents, since I can’t figure out how to add them in). Leon is perhaps the most interesting, in some ways, because she was the most definitely working-class. I had come across her (and Mme Roland) in Marge Piercy’s City of Darkness, City of Light – daughter of a chocolate maker, active on the streets and probably in violence. Mericourt had probably been a courtesan, and was also immensely visible on the streets. The other four were all basically aristocrats, on various levels and with differing views on politics – what they wanted to get out of politics, and how they went about doing it.
Each chapter is based around one woman, but Moore weaves so skilfully that she keeps the larger story of the Revolution moving, and brings in the narratives of the other women as well. It’s a marvellously well-written book, which I thoroughly enjoyed – even though I was reading it for school! – and it’s now covered in (appropriately pink!!) comments in the margins. Hugely recommended to anyone interested in the French Revolution or women in history more generally.
Gods Behaving Badly
My mother told me to read this book, and after reading about Aphrodite and Apollo getting it on like rabbits I’m a leedle bit embarrassed by that.
The book’s by Marie Phillips; from what I can tell it’s a first novel. The Olympians live in a big old house in London, and it – and them – have definitely seen better days. They bicker and argue, and they still try to act as cavalierly with humans as in ‘the good old days’ – but their power is significantly reduced, which naturally feeds into some rather serious frustration. And then there’s Neil and Alice, the classic near-innocents who get tied up in a cosmic game…
You need a certain amount of knowledge about ancient Greek myth to get along with this book. Although some references are explained – like Daphne, and Orpheus&Eurydice – without a basic grasp on the personalities and traits of gods like Artemis and Aphrodite et al, I think you’d probably struggle to fully appreciate this story.
That said, with a rudimentary understanding, this is a very funny story. Apollo reduced to being an oracle on cable? Artemis the dog-walker? And let’s not even talk about Zeus… Perhaps the funniest two are Eros and Athene. Eros, the Christian. And Athene, mind-boggling intelligent… but articulate? Not so much. Even without an ancient Greek background, it would still be funny, since it’s obvious they’re gods and it’s obvious they’re not happy about their current place in the cosmos.
An amusing story that took me a couple of hours to barge through. Highly recommended for a bit of ancient Greek fluff.
Books I’ve read recently
Ines of my Soul, by Isabel Allende. I don’t usually read historical fiction – at least, not such recent historical fiction! My mum raves about Allende; most of her other work is contemporary literature, so I’m unlikely to read it. This one, though, is about Ines Suarez, a real Spanish woman who heads off to South America in the 1500s, following her husband. She ends up going to Chile with the conquistadors, when they conquer and settle there. It’s written as though it’s a memoir – old Ines interrupts the story of young Ines at various points, and she speaks directly to her daughter at a number of points. It’s a really fascinating story on a number of levels. There is, apparently, very little info about Ines, so this is very definitely a fiction, but I understand that Allende did a huge amount of research beforehand, so the conditions she describes (at the very least) will be based on fact. Then, old Ines reflects a lot on the whole idea of memory and writing autobiographies, throwing doubt on her own memories at various points, so that’s an intriguing philosophical line. And the writing – well, I read this in a couple of days, which I often do, but her prose is simple delightful to read.
Flood, by Stephen Baxter. Not my favourite Baxter, but still pretty good. The world is flooding… and no, it’s not a global warming polemic. Time span is 2016 to 1052. Some good characters, and interesting social and political reflections.
Chaos Space, by Marianne de Pierres. The sequel to Dark Space, this follows a number of characters – some of whom have finally met up, so their stories start meshing, which makes it all a bit easier to keep straight. There is a lot of weird stuff going on in this universe, and a lot in the background which is only just being revealed in this, the second book. It’s a fairly awesome space opera, although some of the characters tick me off. Still one of the most intriguing aspects is that her main character is Latina; it made me realise just how Anglo a lot of the future is projected to be (at least in the stuff I’ve mostly read; maybe that’s just a reflection of me).
twenty-six lies/one truth, by Ben Peek. About the weirdest book I’ve read in a long time. 26 chapters, each with ten or so entries; each chapter has entries starting with the same letter. It’s roughly “autobiographical” – although like Ines, Peek has a lot to say about the unreliability of memory, and when you pair that with his many entries on fraudsters and hoaxes of the literary world, it’s clear he’s sending up the whole idea of autobiographical ‘truth’. It also reminded me of Eddie Burrup, the male Aboriginal artist who sold a lot of paintings and was then revealed to be the female, white Elizabeth Durack; she’s a distant relative. Anyway, twenty-six lies is confronting, absorbing, and disturbing – mostly in a good way. I read it in a few hours. Half way through I realised it doesn’t have to be read in a linear fashion, but I’m stuck in my ways so I just kept turning the pages. And, at the end, I realised that in fact it does work linearly – there are revelations towards the end that change the way you think about the rest of it. You could read it haphazardly, it would just change your reception of some of the things Peek reveals, although it wouldn’t spoil the story as it would your bog-standard narrative. I also like the cover – typewrite art by Andy Macrae, and the art by Anna Brown, which I recognised from the Nowhere Near Savannah webcomic Peek and Brown collaborated on.
At the moment… Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light, by Mort Rosenblum. I had thought this would be more about the history of chocolate, and it does have some of that, but it’s actually more about chocolate today – the chocolate masters, the chocolate producers, the scandals, the individuals, different perspectives around the world. It’s made me realise that I am in no way a chocolate connoisseur, and probably never will be – living in Australia, and not having the money to spend on it! It’s brilliantly written… and I think I will go back to it right now.
I have *the* most awesome friends
So, I’m nearly done at work – am taking next year off to start my MA.
As a first-year teacher, I got assigned a mentor. Julie is wonderful: competent, enthusiastic, no-nonsense and endlessly encouraging. And she is fond of pointing out that before I knew her, I was dumb as dogsh*t.
Today I got to my desk, and there was a present – wrapped in handmade paper, with Matilda of Flanders (the subject of my thesis) printed on it. Inside was a blue tshirt, which she had had screenprinted: “Eleventh Century Queens Rule.”
I am stoked, and wore it all day. Such a lovely gift!
The Other Boleyn Girl
I wonder if Anne really was as scheming and conniving as this movie makes out… I’m not sure which I think is more believable.
And George?? Seems to me that that’s taking the slander and propaganda put out at the time a little bit too seriously. I find it very difficult to believe that there was any suggestion of incest. It was simply too taboo, surely. (The actor, though – Jude from Across the Universe! – lovely.)
Poor Mary Boleyn. How horrid to be dealt with like that… and to have history all but ignore you, too, after all of that! She is the most interesting of them all, I think, from this portrayal: George is weak; Anne is something of a bitch; Mary is simply too good for her own safety. Natalie Portman is surprisingly good in this role, as is Scarlett Johanssen.
Their mother – whom I can only ever regard as Duckface, thanks to Four Weddings and a Funeral – is magnificent in this movie. Eric Bana… usually I’m a big fan, but he wasn’t wonderful for me here. Maybe because he has quite a bit part, focusing as it does on the women; maybe because filling the shoes of Henry VIII is a big ask, and he’s just not quite up to it – or the script isn’t.
I also hadn’t realised that the gap between Anne and Jane was quite so short as the movie implies, but I guess it makes sense since one of the reasons for getting rid of Anne was the overwhelming desire for a male heir, and Jane seemed like a good option (as, of course, she was. Poor Jane).
Sad: no mention of the allegation that Anne ordered a French sword for the execution because it would be sharper and therefore swifter.
The costumes are simply delightful; I enjoyed the music, too, and the sets.
Rome
I am watching Rome!
That is, I’m into the second episode of the first season.
I still hate Octavian. Sorry. I like James Purefoy and Marc Antony, so that’s a lovely combination. Although I hadn’t expected him to be quite so… brutal… I like my Richard Burton view of him…
I also hadn’t expected the interest in the common people, which is cool. Nor the quantity of sex. (And the full-frontal nudity, too.)
For a TV show, this is a glorious production – as I had heard; it looks like a high-quality film! HBO must be rolling in it.
The Last Legion
Well, call me naive, but I did actually think that this movie would be at least partly based on history, which is why I was interested in watching it. Perhaps that indicates how little TV I watch, because clearly I hadn’t watched the theatrical trailer for it. Otherwise, I would have known that while the beginning is based on historical fact – the Goths being nasty buggers on Rome – the rest was a glorious fantasy.
Spoiler Alert! Stop here if you don’t want it a bit spoiled!
Once I saw little Romulus go for the sword, and read the ‘Latin’ inscription there, I realised vaguely in which direction it was heading… hello, Caliburnus! Not for nothing am I an Arthur tragic. Mind you, it did take my fuzzy little mind a while to realise the teacher was Ambrosinus and the captain Aurelius, so maybe it has actually been too long since I thought about it.
Anyway, once I realised that this was an Arthur-fantasy, I switched expectations and really quite enjoyed it. One one level, anyway, it was miles better than poor old Clive Owen’s Arthur, by which I was utterly disappointed (except for Hengist). To be honest I had been enjoying this one even before I realised what was going on: the nice prince/pauper moment at the start; Colin Firth in general; John Hannah… and the sets were quite nice too, except for that utterly CG statue the kid insisted on moping about on top of. (And as kid actors go, he wasn’t too hopeless.)
A couple of things disappointed me. Mira – well, it was cool to have a chick warrior (always is!), and it was obvious why she was included, but I thought the romance was a bit rushed. Vortigern – cool mask, but not enough back story. I was hoping to find out he was Ambrosinus’ evil brother; that would have been cool.
It does fascinate me that so often Rome is equated with either America or Britain… Firth’s not-particularly-rousing speech about Roman warriors and Roman hearts sounded like something that would appear in a patriotic movie today (it could almost be dubbed into Independence Day). Seriously, it makes me wonder whether these writers/directors know anything about that empire. Probably not.
Randomly Yours, Alex 