ResoluteReader

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Seishi Yokomizo - The Inugami Curse

Seishi Yokomizo published seventy-seven detective novels featuring his Japanese detective Kosuke Kindaichi. This is the second to be translated into English, though it is the fourth in the original order, Kindaichi is disheveled and slouching - more Colombo than Poirot. But like all great literaru detectives he saves up all the information in his head until one final piece clicks into place.

The Inugami Curse deals with rivals for the inheritence of the Ingumai corporation, a massively wealthy institution who accured enormous profits in the run up to WOrld War Two. The head of the clan, Sahei Inugami, dies just after the war ends, and his complex web of misterisses and children find themselves competeing for the vast ammount of money to be inherited. Sahei creates an incredibly complex Will, in order to ensure that his favoured person, Tamayo, the daughter of the couple who adopted and looked after him, gets all. To do this, and to protect her from assassination, Sahei insists that to receive the cash she must marry one of his other three children.

Realistically the only reason this Will exists is to create the sort of complex antagonism that can lead to various family members being picked off. The murderer must be one who stands to gain from the crimes. And the killer or killers realise that they can also use the murders to wipe out Tamayo's claims.

Its convoluted, and readers will be pleased with the family tree for reference. The ending is satisfactory, even if you are able to work out some of it, the denouncement fits it together incredibly satisfactorily. This is the second of Yokomizo's books I've read. They've both been unique and of a high standard. How did he keep it up for the other seventy-five!

Related Reviews

Yokomizo - The Honjin Murders

Friday, December 29, 2023

Reg Groves - The Strange Case of Victor Grayson

Victor Grayson was a radical socialist who was elected in a stunning victory as an Independent Labour candidate for the Colne Valley in West Yorkshire in 1907. Today Grayson is barely remembered. If he is known it is more likely for his unexplained disappearance in 1920, rather than his politics. Over the years there have been several biographies of Grayson, which have tried to explain his life. Reg Groves' book was one of the first (though it was actually Groves' second) and it is a sympathetic exploration of Grayson's radical politics by someone who as a one-time Trotskyist was hardly sympathetic to the Labour Party, or the concept of socialism through Parliament.

Grayson was first and foremost a socialist, but his socialism went far beyond the politics of the official Labour movement. As a result he met with rebuff from the official movement, and hence his 1907 election victory was a massive surprise to them, based as it was on an enormous groundswell of participation and activity by working class women and men in the Colne Valley. Grayson had to do this as he lacked any sort of political organisation, beyond the most reduimentary. In fact, as Groves repeatedly points out, this was a limitation for Grayson personally and for the movement. During a national tour, under attack from the right of the Labour movement, Grayson one remarked, "I don't want to lead. I only want a group of men that will place first things first and stake their reputation on the issue." He was stung by those "timid socialists who share their parliamentary seats with captialists".

The occasion of this tour was the aftermath of Grayson's most famous parliamentary experience when he was expelled from Parliament for refusing to follow the business of the day. Grayson wanted to highlight the appalling conditions of the unemployed. More particuarly he could not comprehend that Parliament would not prioritise this, and that Labour went along with it. He was shunned by the official politicians, but his rebelliousness made him even more attractive to working people, who attended his meetings in their thousands everywhere. As Groves explains:

That was the first thing that went wrong. The way he was shut out from the Labour ranks, and the way they met his honest attack and open criticism with lies, slanders, evasions and trickeries; with the evil weapons that men would shrink horrified from using in their private lives but that seem to be an integral part of political struggle. He never quite believed that fellow socialists would behave in that way and, like a tiny pinprick, it jabbed at his idealism more and more pointedly as the fight grew in intensity. He had set out to fight the capitalists - he found himself fighting socialists; worse still he found socialist leaders joining with the enemy to destroy him.

Grayson's lack of political organisation meant that he threw himself into an enormous round of meetings, speeches and activity. It nearly broke him, and increasingly he turned to drink to cope. Here reality began to match the slander, and increasingly he found himself struggling. Every longstanding socialist knows the pressure of ongoing activity. Even Grayson's supporters understood it. The socialist journalist Robert Blatchford remarked that "We have a socialist MP but no socialist party". With such a party Grayson would have had support and political direction, as well as a body to discipline him and provide guidance. In its absence he was a one man band dedicated to overthrowing capitalism but not really understanding why.

Grayson did eventually help found the British Socialist Party, but this was hamstrung at birth by the sectarianism of large chunks of its membership. It is notable that the speeches reported by Groves by Grayson rarely seem to refer to actual struggle or give guidance to the movement. They are focused on electing other socialists and abstract propaganda. Neither of these is necessarily a band thing, but it really meant that Grayson offered nothing to workers who wanted to fight, other than inspiring speeches. As Groves says:

A one-man party cannot recruit. Propaganda without practical implementation is like faith without works - sterile. As the deep-rooted discontent became more and more expressed, as strife gew in the country, the workers requied from the socialists not just affirmation of faith but leadership in directing action to right the social wrongs.

Grayson could "win the crowds to a fighting socialist faith, but could show them no party likely to lead a way to socialism". Grayson's lack of politics was firmly exposed by World War One. Despite his radicalism, like most other parliamentary socialists across Europe he supported the war, being wounded on the Western Front and then touring to encourage others to fight. In this he followed the path of many better supported radicals in socialist parties, but nonetheless it was a tragedy. Grayson ended up recruiting workers to fight for a machine that was slaughtering other workers in the interests of British capital.

In 1920 Grayson disappeared. It wasn't immediately noticed that he was gone, as he was estranged from many and led a nomadic life. Groves avoids too much speculation, limiting himself to reporting on the most likely events. It is possible that he was killed because he was about to expose the corruption around a cash for peerages scandal. Later authors' have other ideas. In fact, in this regard Groves' book is somewhat wanting. In preparing his own biography of Victor Grayson more recently, Harry Taylor has written this article on Reg Groves giving an expert opinion and noting some strange absences and ommissions from Groves' work.

At his best Victor Grayson demonstrated that British workers' are not immune to the idea of radical socialist ideas. But his life is more a lesson in how not to fight for socialism. Nonetheless, while Reg Groves' book gives us some tactical lessons, it also offers activists an excellent overview of the early Labour Party at the turn of the 20th century. There's much here to learn from.

Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939

Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926

Molyneux - Marxism and the Party

Luxembourg - Reform or Revolution

Thursday, December 28, 2023

Walter Klaassen - Michael Gaismair: Revolutionary and Reformer

Michael Gaismair was one of the most significant radical thinkers and revolutionaries of the era of the Peasant War. In 1525, when the peasants rose up in South Tyrol, Gaismair was chosen as the movement’s leader. From then on, he fought to transform Tyrol into a radical Utopian society, based on equality framed by the “Word of God”.

Despite his importance, Gaismair is not as well known as other leading figures of the Peasant War. Numerous books have studied Thomas Muntzer, for instance, and other figures of the radical reformation are much better known. Part of the problem, as Walter Klaassen argues in this important biography, is that the material left behind by Gaismair is minimal. A handful of letters, and contemporary references and, most importantly, his outline for the radical constitution of Tyrol.

Gaismair thus has become a figure upon whom many different ideas can be imposed. Despite his radicalism, the Nazis named an SS Regiment after him in 1944 (though Klaassen wrongly describes this as a Wehrmacht Division). Authors of the left, following Engels, have occasionally described Klaassen as a precursor of Communist ideas - mostly based on his draft Constitution.

So what of the real Gaismair? Klaassen’s biography is almost unique in the English language, and he locates Gaismair’s radicalism in the reality of Tyrolean society - a society where the bottom strata suffered under the enormous “weight of oppression”. Klaassen argues that the economic squeezing of the nobility, the rotten corruption of the Church and the demands of growing capitalist institutions such as the Fugger banks, all conspired to squeeze the peasantry and urban workers. While Reformation ideas had some influence, Klaassen argues this was not as important as other areas affected by the Peasant War, as they had not yet penetrated deep into the relatively isolated Tyrolean society. Given these conditions, Klaassen justifiably says that revolt was “inevitable”.

When the rebellion exploded Gaismair was already reaching radical ideas, influenced in part by Reformation, more by radical Catholic voices but mostly by the evidence of everyday oppression. Gaismair was not a poor man - in fact he had a relatively privileged life. But he was able to identify, and articulate the grievances of the poor.

But Klaassen argues that the final push that Gaismair needed to move into a revolutionary struggle, was the way that Gaismair’s illusions in the ruler, Archduke Ferdinand, were cruelly dashed. In this, Gaismair followed many other medieval and early modern rebels by believing that the king, or monarch, would rule benevolently and according to ancient rights, were it not for cruel and corrupt hangers on. For Gaismair these were principally the clergy, but when Ferdinand moved to cheat and suppress the peasant movement, he was plunged into radical action.

Klaassen shows that Gaismair was a careful and tactical thinker. Despite lacking many texts, we see that Gaismair was able to apply discipline to the movement, at the same time as never breaking the democratic connection he had. He refused, for instance, to attend court, arguing that his “comrades” had to be consulted:

I therefore protest herewith that I am not obligated to appear before this court at this time in the absence of my comrades to reply to the charges… since they have given me no right or direction to reply and have themselves not been invited to appear.

The movement in Tyrol was not as radical as Gaismair was to become. In the famous Merano Articles, says Klaassen, “nowhere is the basic feudal arrangement challenged”. Eventually, in exile, Gaismair would do just that. His Constitution was a “completely new and different social order” and a “cry for justice”.

The twenty-three points of the Constitution, argue for a radical economic and political restructuring of society that saw power firmly in the hands of the masses. It was an order shaped by the Bible, the highest authority that Graismair knew. It was one that saw the power of the rich and the nobility destroyed - city walls would be knocked down so only villages existed. There were no special privileges and for those that lived in Graismair’s society, the Godless, those that opposed the common good and oppressors were to be exterminated. Democracy in terms of elections of officials and clergy was the rule, but so it was in collective decisions about taxation etc. Crucifixes and adornments in churches were to be scrapped (reflecting the influence of Zwingli on Graismair) and wealth was to be used to help the poor.

Klaassmen argues that this was no precursor to Communism as it was essentially a Biblical Theocracy. But this is inaccurate in the sense that Graismair was simply framing his Constitution with a radical interpretation of the dominant ideology – Christianity. It was explicitly anticapitalist in the sense that Graismair’s interpretation of the Bible saw the operation of capitalist interests like the Fugger banks as unchristian. This is most clear in the section on the Mines, added almost as a postscript which calls for their appropriation in cases where they are owned by “nobility and foreign merchants and companies such as the Fuggers, Hochstetters, Baumgartners, Pimels and their like”. These companies have:

Forfeited their right to them for they bought them with money acquired by unjust usury in order to shed human blood. Thus also they deceived the common man and worker by paying his wages in defective goods… They have made the poor pay for it, their wages have been lowered in order that the smelters can make some profit after buying the ore. They have raised the prices of all consumer goods after they gained a monopoly, and thus burdened the whole world with their unchristian usury… They are now justly punished and their activities prohibited.

Instead the people were to elect a manager to oversee the mining enterprise, and who is accountable for it. “No private person will be permitted to smelt ore”.

It is easy to see how some claim Graismair as a precursor, and despite Klassmen’s demonstration that he drew heavily on biblical references for his Constitution, it is right to celebrate this as an early example of revolutionary thinking.

Despite this mistake of interpretation, Klaassen’s book is an extremely important and insightful biography of Michael Gaismair. He demonstrates how Gaismair’s path to revolution was shaped by his sympathy with ordinary people and sensitivity to the oppressive nature of the world. There’s no doubt that Michael Gaismair could have had a peaceful and affluent life. That the nobility tried repeatedly to assassinate him, and eventually succeeded in Padua in 1532, five or six years after the peasant risings had ended, is testament to the fear that his radical ideas instilled in them. Walter Klaassen’s excellent book is a brilliant introduction to this revolutionary life.

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Terry Pratchett - A Stroke of the Pen

This collection of early stories by Terry Pratchett as been tracked down by fans from his early, anonymised stories, published in local newspapers in the 1970s. Reviewers, and Neil Gaiman in his introduction, have enthused about the detective tale about how they were tracked down, and emphasised how they demonstrate the younger Pratchett's developing talent for comedy fantasy.

This is indeed true, but fans of Discworld and Pratchett's later writing will have to look hard for anything but hints to his later works. There are occasional references, but they are few and far between. Indeed, most of the stories are not that good at all. By anyone but Pratchett they would have sunk into obscurity. In fact, they actually did, as the pseudonyms hid the stories well.

There are, of course, nuggets. But most of the stories were very crude. One of the most entertaining was a time travel story set on the Jurassic Coast, where a couple find a loophole into the distant past and learn that this past is a destination of future time travelling tourists. Mr Brown's Holiday Accident is an amusing precursor of The Truman Show. Talking of such parallels, The Gnomes from Home, about a couple whose garden becomes infested with Gnomes, shares a resolution with John Wyndam's classic 1950s story Pawleys Peepholes.

Unfortunately most of these stories fell flat, and only the most dedicated and completest of Pratchett fans should bother. It's hard not to think that the publisher was keen to issue these stories simply because they knew the fans would buy it.

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Seishi Yokomizo - The Honjin Murders

Seishi Yokomizo was one of the most prolific of Japanese mystery writers, yet is almost unknown outside of his country. Thankfully the first English translations of the novels featuring his detective Kosuke Kindaichi are now available, of which this, The Honjin Murders, is the first.

Set in the winter of 1937, but told by its narrator in the last year of the Second World War, the story is consequently framed by what we know happened in that conflict. So it depicts a pre-war rural order that was to be broken apart. The novel actually uses the story of a murder, and its resolution, as a way to frame this change - the old order literally disappears and decays.

The wealthy and upper-class Ichiyanagi family are celebrating the marriage of one of their sons, but after the celebrations, deep in the night, horrible screams are heard - and the music of a Koto playing. On investigation the bride and groom are found murdered, but there are no footsteps too and from the locked room and their seems to be no explanation as to why the murders took place. Suspicion immediately falls on a three-fingered man (a Koto is played with three fingers) seen in the area, until the dishevelled Kosuke arrives.

Yokomizo constructs a very clever plot, and soaks it in the ideas and atmosphere of the some detective writers - Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and Gaston Leroux. In fact characters refer to these repeatedly as they reference the "locked room" nature of the killings.

But perhaps of greater interest than the detective mystery itself is the cultural background. The cause of the murder is in fact the misogynist nature of upper-class Japanese society, and while this is skipped over somewhat in the conclusion, the modern reader should perhaps dwell on this a little.

An excellent read and I look forward to the further adventures of Yokomizo's Kosuke Kindaichi. Louise Heal Kawai's great translation also deserves acknowledgement and praise.

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Craig Taylor - Return to Akenfield

Forty years after Ronald Blythe published his seminal account of a Suffolk village, Akenfield, Craig Taylor returned to the villages that Blythe disguised as the fictional eponymous location, to look again at the lives of villagers. Four decades later the people that Blythe interviewed have mostly gone, as have the specialised trades that were on the cusp of vanishing in the first book. The village however, retains much of its identity, though there are more incomers, far fewer agricultural labourers and very different attitiudes. Work now is done by a handful of workers, and farmers tend to employ seasonal labour in ways that were inconceivable decades before.

In fact its to Taylor's credit that three of his interviews are with immigrant farm workers, two from Eastern Europe and one from Portugal. They recount the difficulties, the hard work and the costs of working in England for a few years, but all retain a belief they will return home with money to get their own farm.

There are also deep connections to the past. The first three interviews are with former orchard workers, a staple of the local economy, and now a shadow of its former self. These retired workers are wistful about the old economy, but mostly about the old varieties of fruits. The endnotes include copies of the handwritten lists of pear and apple varieties that one worker could remember. Dozens and dozens of varieties, some perhaps no longer in existence. These former workers recount the impact of technology and the way it changed production and labour.

In the original Akenfield we got a sense of agriculture in transition to a new intensified industry. In Return to Akenfield we see what that is. Chris Green, a dairy farmer explains

the likes of Wla-Mart and Tesco are not worried at all about us. They want the supply and that's all they care about. We see to a Footsie 250 company, quite large, and even they can't go to Tesco and Wal-Mart and drive a bargain. They still have to take the price and as as conseqyence the guy at the bottom of the chain, which is us, eventually takes the hit. And because we take the hit we have to take the subsidy, which comes off the taxpayer.

Return to Akenfield has little about class struggle. In Blythe's original the question of trade unionism ran through the book. Here there is little open struggle, though class difference remains. There is also much less poverty, though the lack of a mass agricultural workplace means that the poorest workers have moved away. Indeed the only real open differences are those between the retirees and commuters who've bought up expensive housing and feel excluded. The migrant workers refer to racism, but not in as great amounts as you might expect. One Polish worker says:

The work is difficult and the money is not so good. People here would rather get others to do the work. I think it is more easy for a person in this country to find the work he wants to do. And the work they wants to do is in an office or in a bank.

A farmer refers to paying gang-masters who pay the immigrant labourers. It smacks of a return to a very dodgy and poor past, when workers were highly exploited. That, however, did eventually lead to strikes and protests. Modern farming remains much more difficult to organise - though its clear that some farmers use the opportunity.

The book opens and closes with two interviews with Ronald Blythe himself. At the end he cautions about a rose-tinted view of the past and discusses how he put that into the original book deliberately:

I wasn't interested in quaintness or crafts, picturesque things necessarily. It's a slightly hard book, not sentimental. People always say 'the good old days'. People were extremely poor! Their houses were uncomfortable and damp. Children left school very early. In that village in that time it was very hard to get away, to do anything or to be yourself, and people worked and worked and worked until they died. Between the wars they were getting twenty-seven and six a week, they could be given the sack any minute, and they worked sixty to seventy hours a week on the land and often got one days holiday a year, Christmas Day.

Things, in many respects are better. Return to Akenfield then is a snapshot of a village that has been transformed, through change and struggle. It retains a link to the past - the young workers rennovating tractors are pleased that the older retirees get so much pleasure from sitting in their old tractors. But it is a village that has fundamentally changed. If Return to Akenfield lacks some of the intensity of the book it is trying to emulate, that is because it is about a period where great changes feel very distant. Forty years ago Blythe wrote in the shadow of two World Wars and the end of Empire. Craig Taylor wrote in the aftermath of the victory of neoliberal agriculture. Let's hope that by the time a third book is written, we have transformed things in a very different, less corporate way.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Mike Ashley - The End of the World: and Other Catastrophes

This collection of science fiction short stories that deal with the "end of the world" and "other catastrophes", as the title wittily puts it, does an excellent job of showing that fear of the end of civilisation did not begin with World Wars and nuclear weapons. Nor did readers' love of the genre. Mike Ashley has put together a selection of stories that are heavily skewed toward the 19th and early 20th century. Unless you are a connoisseur of early, and obscure, science fiction it is unlikely that you will have read many of these. The book is published by the British Library which helps explain the skewing of the stories towards British authors, and almost all of them are male - which probably reflects the era more than anything.

But there are some fine tales here which tells us a great deal about the times they were written in. The terrors that are inflicted tend to be of the astronomical type. Science had yet to conceive of nuclear weapons and global climate change, so the authors looked mainly to the unknown external threat. Clouds of gas, or bodies colliding with the Sun are just two examples. A trio of stories about threats to London are perhaps the most entertaining. I was very struck by Owen Oliver's 1927 story, Days of Darkness, which tells the very personal account of two people sat next to each other on an omnibus when the lights go out. As London descends into chaos and anarchy, food and water become scarce but our two heroes proceed to fall in love in a very Edwardian way. There's a distinct element of John Wyndham's cosy catastophe here.

Robert Barr’s Within an Ace of the End of the World (1900) is one of the earliest examples of climate change in a story. In his world, humanity has discovered how to make raw food from the nitrogen in the atmosphere. Rich men get even richer providing cheap food, but the changing atmosphere leads to chaos and insane levity as everyone breathes the new air. The only exception are two groups of men and women who have hidden themselves in "iron houses" with artifical atmospheres, one in the United States and the other in Britain. The story ends as the British men travel to the United States and find the eight women in their white dresses waiting. There's a strangely pacifist message at the end, as the author comments "The race which now inhabits the earth is one that includes no savages and no war lords. Armies are unknown and unthought of. There is no battle-ship on the face of the waters. It is doubtful if universal peace could have been brought to the world short of the annihilation of the jealous, cantankerous, quarrelsome peoples who inhabited it previous to 1904." Perhaps the imminent World War was focusing Barr's mind.

Perhaps the most fascinating story is the 1889 story The Last American by John Ames Mitchell. This is the account of a Persian expedition to the United States centuries after the latters collapse. In the classic tradition of such stories, the Persian explorers misunderstand and misinterpret the things they discover, and eventually find the Last Americans - plural. But they behave exactly as European explorers behaved and the tragic ending allows Mitchell to ruminate on the future of civilisation.

Just one story is of the "Mad Scientist" type, and its interesting to read. Warwick Deeping's The Madness of Professor Pye (1934) literarily has a scientist in a tower in Suffolk killing everything around him with a death-ray. It is notable for two appearances of Mussolini.

The decline of Britain is a major theme of many of these stories, and several see London destroyed, to the gloating of the rest of the world. In one story the population is replaced by people from the Empire. It's not hard to detect some Victorian fears there.

A couple of more modern stories round off the collection. Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains is well known. John Brunner's Two by Two is less well known, though its a fairly well known trope. The ending is fairly predictable.

While the selecton of stories is excellent, the collection suffers from a weak introduction. Mike Ashley's essay is really just a survey of the genre, rather than offering any discussion of the genre itself, or the themes. I'd have welcomed his thoughts on why people love "end of the world" fiction. Nonetheless, get hold of this for the stories - they're a cracking read.