The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, written when the author was 19 and published in 1818, was so ponderous a departure from traditional Victorian fare that it shocked not just the nerves but also the sensibilities of staid British society. The outrageous tale of a monster sprung from inanimate matter-- and capable of quoting Milton and Goethe--who then turns against his creator, heralded a brave new voice.

From there to the 1931 cinematic adaptation by James Whale, in which a menacing, unforgettable simulacrum of our nightmares is brought to haunting life by Boris Karloff, Frankenstein has, through the ages, plumbed the familiar God-versus-science divide to argue against technology ruining our best instincts...read more>>>

How Not to Write a Dead Novel

Sarah Hall’s second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and that brush of encouragement has carried her though to her fourth work now, How to Paint a Dead Man. At best an uneven book, How to Paint a Dead Man tips its hat to Hall’s well-regarded ability to craft sentences of near-perfect beauty, without really being a novel in the conventional sense.

Four chapters that recur through the book recount the lives of four artists. There are the Italians in the 1960s: Annette Tambroni, a blind florist who once harbored dreams of becoming an artist, and Signor Giorgio, a world-renowned painter of bottles who is dying of cancer. Respectively called “The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni” and “Translated from the Bottle Journals” Annette’s and Giorgio’s tales are filled not with “life”, but with wistful reminiscences of lived moments and stolen delights.

Annette’s mother, for instance, is intensely protective of her, crafting elaborate fictions to scare Annette into submission, in a bid to protect her from any harm. This lends Annette’s narration a dream-like quality, gently carrying pain within it. Every Sunday, she visits the cemetery where her father is buried and contemplates the long life, still unlived, that she must pass without a template on how to go about it.

Giorgio’s testimony is largely philosophical musings, and while reading it, I sincerely came to question its inclusion in a novel. These are the last cries of a dying artist, one who must accept his lost vitality and emergence into a sort of tragic figure for his admirers. A heavy sadness lingers over this narrative, punctuated by rather abstruse sermons on life and the meaninglessness of it:

“My visitors indulge me. They are charmed by my antiquity and my devotion to this place. Later they walk back to the station along the road, and perhaps halfway they kneel with an ear to the ground. And perhaps they hear their own blood, and then the traffic in the town, and then a deeper rhythm. They get up, and brush the dust from their knees, and they continue walking. If everything seems lost, I tell them, trust the heart.”

Such heavy sentences when the reader has been provided only the slight background of their creator dying of cancer load the book with a seriousness it has not earned. This may have something to do with the time that these two fragments are set in—perhaps Hall just imagined her characters from a pre-consumerist era to deal with pain and loneliness in subtle, gentle ways, and not indulge in unclean behavior of any sort. Whatever the reason, there is a sense of something not being whole in these narratives.

How to Paint a Dead Man comes closer to a novel in the other two strands: of a father-daughter artist duo in contemporary Britain. In “The Fool on the Hill” Peter Caldicutt (who used to write letters to Giorgio as a student) is a noted landscape painter who bases his drawings on real scenes that he harnesses from walks in the countryside. On one such excursion, his leg gets trapped inside a mountain crevice and Peter spends the night waiting for help. This launches a series of memories that carry him through the night, but thankfully, here the force of life and vigor flows through the narrative, and pain and resilience are evoked in life-affirming ways.

The most interesting and also the central fragment, “The Mirror Crisis”, concerns Sue Caldicutt, the young daughter of Peter, who is trying to find success as a photographer. Sue is grappling with the death of her twin Danny in a bicycle accident. Allowing her to grieve over a twin lets Hall develop her penchant for fine sentences with real felicity, since here, the emotion comes across as real:

“You’re not crazy. You must emphasis this point and remind yourself of it. You are not crazy. And you’re not being coy, or difficult. This isn’t about fashionable social detachment, the current trend for woe-is-me, or wanting to be the cool detached outsider. You can’t quite catch sight of yourself as you go about your life, that’s all. Your body doesn’t contain its spirit, just as the mirror has relinquished your portrait. You are elsewhere.”

Narrated in the second person, this is the most effective part of the novel, as Sue starts on a self-destructive affair with the husband of a friend to drown her grief. The writing is raw, frequently sexual, and also—in a novel that once threatened to lose itself in philosophical meanderings—satisfyingly fictional.

The life and times of Thomas Cromwell

Tudor England has always made for great yarns. The mix of lustiness and unpredictability about the reign of Henry VIII has inspired countless artists to make the period their muse. Over the centuries, plays, novels and paintings have tried to evoke the ineffable spirit of the age. What is it that drives this fascination with the Tudors? Is it an instinct to capture the thirst for power that characterized the period, or is it something deeper — a search for the very roots of modern English life?

Hillary Mantel, who has tackled subjects as diverse as the French Revolution in "A Place of Greater Safety" (1995) to her own dysfunctional past in "Giving Up the Ghost" (2003), is an ideal choice for a project of such breathtaking scale. Henry VIII's was a quicksilver monarchy, underscored by the fact of his six wives in rather quick succession. Henry is routinely portrayed as the lascivious royal who, in his quest to get a male heir, went to war with the pope — a definitive break that led to the separation of the English Church from Rome.

Setting out to capture the nub of this era, Ms. Mantel has done something outstanding — she has achieved a genuine voice for the time. And that voice tells us the life of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's boy who grew up to become Henry's chief minister. Born into humble and violent beginnings (in the book's first scene, a young Thomas is beaten to a pulp by his drunk father), Cromwell came to rule England by proxy, such was his power.

Ms. Mantel shifts her narration back and forth in time, so that we never learn the correct chronology of events, and this may create problems for a reader who is not in the know. Henry divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, because she was unable to give him a male heir. He then married one Anne Boleyn, who was also incapable of fulfilling that particular wish. Henry would go on to marry four more times.

Irrespective of the need to know this background to appreciate "Wolf Hall," the story of Cromwell's rise shimmers in Ms. Mantel's spry, intelligent prose. By the book's second scene, for instance, Cromwell has morphed from the gangly abused youngster to the slick lawyer for Cardinal Wolsey, Henry's confidant who later fell out with him over his failure to get Henry's marriage to Catherine annulled. The relationship between Cromwell and Wolsey is that of hunter and prey. Initially a leonine figure wielding absolute power, Wolsey loses everything, including his life, to Cromwell, who uses the opportunity to endear himself to Henry.

It is in capturing such twists and turns of fate — so common to the Tudors — that Ms. Mantel shines. She leaches out the bones of the story as it is traditionally known, and presents to us a phantasmagoric extravaganza of the characters' plans and ploys, toils and tactics. There is rich dialogue here, removed from its datedness and assigned a very contemporary charge.

Beyond this, however, there is also a certain aim to Ms. Mantel's art. Regardless of the reasons behind the drift, Ms. Mantel is, and makes her reader be, appreciative of the English break from papal authority. England under Henry VIII is grateful for finally having its own church and being allowed to read the Bible in English. And by keeping Cromwell at the center of the drama, Ms. Mantel celebrates the intelligence and generosity of spirit too often denied Cromwell (most notably in Robert Bolt's "A Man For All Seasons").

Such is the vastness of Ms. Mantel's project that there is the fear at some points that she will not be able to pull it off. The novel, after flitting from one mise en scène to the next, abruptly closes on Cromwell planning a trip to Wolf Hall to arrange an alliance between Henry and Jane Seymour, his third wife who will finally yield the dynasty a male heir — Edward VI. Is Ms. Mantel pointing us to a possible sequel?

Be that as it may, the crackling energy of her narration, the eternal spark of her subject, and her assiduous determination to rescue the reputation of Thomas Cromwell — all these make "Wolf Hall" quite perfect an enterprise by itself.

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This review appeared in Washington Times. "Wolf Hall" has been shortlisted for this year's Booker. Read more about the Booker Prize by clicking on the "Booker" tag below this post.

Reliquary of nostalgia and pain

AS Byatt’s last major work was the 1990 Booker Prize-winning Possession, a tale of romance set in the highbrow London academia. She has been a major writer of our age, churning out novels, short stories and poems with commendable fecundity. Her quartet about members of a Yorkshire family, begun in 1978 with The Virgin in the Garden, and completed in 2002 with A Whistling Woman, is a sprawling account of mainstream British life in mid-20th century.

Byatt’s work has tended to jump around the edges of fiction, melding commentary on the age — its culture and passions, its secrets and darkness — with the storyline. In The Children’s Book, her latest work on which she worked the last few years, her gaze turns to the Edwardian era, evoked recently in Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover and David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk.

Olive Wellwood is the writer of children’s books and mother to a large brood, not all of whom may be her own. With her Fabian husband Humphry and sister Violet, she presides over Todefright, their house in Kent. At the novel’s beginning, Tom Wellwood, Olive’s son, and Julian Cain, the son of a museum curator, discover an indigent boy, Philip Warren, hiding in the basement of the South Kensington Museum. Philip is brought home and later sent to work with Benedict Fludd, famed potter under whose tutelage Philip will find great fame.

The story revolves around the three families: the Wellwoods, the Fludds and the Cains, and is set in the period from 1895 to just after the First World War. Byatt dips in and out of their lives even as she draws an elaborate portrait of the age—that innocent pre-war period, when artists discovered new modes of thinking and being. The Fabians, including poet Rupert Brooke, tried to usher in a gentler world, where socialism would be the guiding force of life. Women campaigned for equal voting rights and for the right to earn degrees at university, and artists tried to live in new, dangerous ways.

The characters in The Children’s Book all grapple with these momentous political changes, even as they discover dark truths about their identities. Benedict Fludd may be a world-renowned potter but he is also a sullen father with an untoward attraction for his daughters. Dorothy, the daughter of Olive and Humphry, discovers that she is not Humphry’s daughter after all, but of a German puppeteer. Tom, most gifted of the Wellwood siblings, discovers that he is ill-suited to life in the real world, and spends his time in the marshes and greenery surrounding Todefright.

But really, the novel is about Olive. She writes stories for each of her children, and keeps them in a case, to be picked and read and added to at random. The stories are supposedly for the reading pleasure of the children, but the writer in Olive frequently uses them as starting points for more elaborate fictions. This ploy of a story within a story allows Byatt to showcase the wickedness of all art. The stories that Olive writes are about monsters and fairies, dark corners and sudden joys—all childhood territories. Yet, in their evocation of a perfect time, the stories are also reliquaries of nostalgia and pain.

The one for Tom, concerning a young boy who has lost his shadow, is developed by Olive into a critically and commercially acclaimed play, Tom Underground. Tom, having confined himself to his pastoral paradise, cannot bear the publicising of his most cherished story, with devastating consequences for the Wellwoods’ personal happiness.

Byatt’s writing is so well-researched that The Children’s Book could well have been a consummate history of the era. Since the characters are potters, writers and general art enthusiasts, the book brims in rich pictorial description, which includes a guided tour of the Paris Exhibition of 1900. But more than that, Byatt’s book is an astute moral lesson. Amidst the confetti of fame and glory that is liberally sprinkled on the characters—who wander in search of an anchor, one can’t help wonder what price a place in history books?

By the end, Todefright has become a ghost of its former self, and even though Byatt, given as she is to breaking stereotypes, may not like it, nostalgia for an unquantifiable past has taken over the novel. Most men have been lost to the War, and most women carry on forth, but lacking the lustre that imbued their former lives. There is something satisfying, but also tragic about the best hopes for retaining something, as it were, always ending up as just hopes. The Children’s Book, then, is about that: our failed tendency to believe that anything, anything at all, can be preserved.

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The Children's Book has been shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize.

Bombay blues

Since Vikas Swarup’s Q&A found global success through its adaptation in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Mumbai has been in the news for its seedy underworld life and the interesting characters that populate it. James A Levine, a medical doctor by profession, hops on to the bandwagon and draws a convincing portrait of the city’s red-light districts.

Levine’s tale flows from personal observation. As an internationally renowned medical practitioner, he was invited by the UN to tour the slums of Mumbai to witness first-hand the rampant disease and illicit trafficking that mark the metropolis’ Cages Street. The street derives its name from the cage-like structures that are kept outside each house on the street and which are used to “display” underage girls to prospective clients.

Fifteen-year-old Batuk is one such girl, sold to sexual slavery by her father when she was nine. Writing her experiences as an underage prostitute in a diary, she comes to pen what will become “the blue notebook”. The trope of having an uneducated person narrate their own experience has recently been used, to successful effect, in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Levine explains this convincingly by having Batuk nursed out of tuberculosis by a caretaker who encouraged her to learn to read and write.

The novel is an often uncomfortable read, describe as it does, in spare prose, the broken dreams and the physical and mental defiling of Batuk. Levine does not preach and writes his story from Batuk’s clear-eyed perspective. There is a clear hierarchy when it comes to prostitutes, Batuk explains at one point, with girls like her from the Cages Street being at the bottom.

Yet, there are glimmers of hope that Batuk locates in her writing, a refuge from the harsh reality of her world. Filling up her notebook after servicing a customer, she says: “He may have taken my light and extinguished it, but now within me can hide an army of whispering syllables, rhythms, and sounds. All you may see is a black cavity that fills a tiny girl, but trust me, the words are there, alive and fine.”

The book scores as a prostitute’s personal testimony, but Levine goes overboard in mixing up Batuk’s story with the side plot of a carnage at a five-star hotel where she was present. While this may have been done to finish the story on a suitably climactic scale, the novel risks falling into pulp territory. No neat endings in this story as Batuk, lying in hospital and a prime suspect in the carnage, finishes off with: “There is only a little ink left.” Perhaps that is how all blue notebooks end.

Poppy terror

Gretchen Peters’ interesting new book, Seeds of Terror, points the reader to America’s misguided efforts to locate the crux of terror emanating from the “Af-Pak” region. Peters, who has covered Afghanistan and Pakistan as a reporter for over a decade, stresses the importance of probing how opium trade has become a ready source of income for the al-Qaeda’s rise and continued relevance.

What gives heft to Peters’ analysis is her extensive travels through the heart of opium country, primarily the Helmand Province in southwest Afghanistan. She also visits other countries that connect the dots of the global drug network, and speaks to several US military strategists who are fighting the war against the Taliban on the ground.

The first myth that Peters busts is the hackneyed cry that the fight against Islamic terrorism should start with addressing the genuine grievances of those who are attracted by its seductive appeal. Peters elaborates the economics of the opium trade to show how dependent the Afghan economy is on poppy cultivation, and how the Taliban and al-Qaeda run their global enterprise of hate on the back of billions of dollars that drug trafficking generates.

The trouble with Afghanistan’s drug problem is accentuated by the easy conduit for drugs that countries in its neighbourhood provide. Intelligence agencies in Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and others work in cahoots to transfer drug shipments to the West in exchange for funds or even weapons. As Peters elaborates, “From the fields of Helmand to the hawala stands of Dubai, elaborate mechanisms filter drug money through the Taliban hierarchy...On the district level, each farmer will receive a handwritten receipt for 10 percent tax paid to the local Taliban subcommander...Each district commander has to kick a percentage of the taxes he collects up to his regional commander; then it goes to the provincial commander, and so on up the food chain.”

Peters delineates in shocking detail the trajectory of drug flow from the tribal regions of Afghanistan to all parts of the globe, including western Europe and the US. If there has been a singular failure on the part of the international community, it is not the unexpected outcome of the ideology-driven wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that the West has still not been able to nip the byzantine money laundering channels the traffickers plug with impunity.

Peters is not one to push ideology in her own text. While deriding the West, especially the US, for failing to contain drug trafficking, she also, reasonably, chides the US for being short-sighted in its pursuit of larger geostrategic goals. This is brought out most starkly in the US’ patronage of Afghan fighters who fought the might of the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1980s. It is the ghost of that Cold War era conflict against communism that is haunting the US is a different disguise today.

Peters shows how the US policy to “itemize and prioritize” the various issues has failed to create a holistic approach that would be conducive to victory in Afghanistan. She cites a conversation between an official of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the US Ambassador to Pakistan in 1986, where the Ambassador listed drugs as the third-biggest priority, after “fighting the Soviets” and nuclear proliferation.

It is a measure of the time warp that the US administration has been caught in that 20 years on, as the US faces a renewed crisis in the region, it is still too fixated, this time on the threat from radical Islam, to worry about addressing the region’s drug problem holistically.

Peters’ final assertion concerns the growing appetite among US policymakers for an aggressive aerial spraying campaign to wipe out Afghanistan’s poppy crop. This is the perfect way, the argument goes, to deny the insurgents and terrorists much-needed funding.

Peters lambasts this proposal and exposes its short-sightedness. “Wiping out poppy fields,” she says, “would actually drive up poppy prices and put more money in the pockets of drug dealers and terrorists.” Moreover, she cautions, such an approach would be economically devastating for Afghanistan, since income from poppy cultivation contributes 30 per cent of the country’s GDP.

Seeds of Terror is an eye-opening account for the lay reader, accustomed as he is to fire-and-brimstone pronouncements by administrations past of the need to “smoke ’em out”. The book cautions against the easy route of one-size-fits-all solutions. Afghanistan, an ancient society driven by strong tribal links, is a puzzle waiting to be cracked. Hubris won’t do, Peters seems to say, and a concerted strategy, separate from America’s larger middle eastern interests, will have to be employed if America is to have any hope of exiting the battleground in the foreseeable future.

Brilliance couched in criminal self-obsession

A direct descendant of indentured labour who had moved to Trinidad from India, rising from humble beginnings to go on scholarship to Oxford, finding his calling in the written word, and scorching the literary scene with incisive forays into hitherto unexplored territories. That is the life historian Patrick French set out to chronicle.

It was an unexpected thing to do for a writer. V S Naipaul, narrator par excellence of the agony of the immigrant, a writer who had built a career describing the diverse ways in which identities shift in foreign lands, let his biographer Patrick French unrestricted access to his private correspondence and to the diaries of his wife, Patricia Hale (Pat), kept at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.

It was to be a mixed blessing, arrived at after much introspection. For Naipaul is not an easy man, least of all, an easy husband. His hankering for truth is his fiction may have extended to an unnatural striving for a brutally honest account of his own life, a wish granted by his biographer.

Meeting Naipaul as a fellow student at Oxford, Pat disregarded her family's doubts about him to enter an alliance that would, ultimately, become the death of her. Over the course of several decades, Naipaul reduced her to a pale effigy of her former self. He forced her to become his cook and typist — so thorough was his indoctrination in hate that Pat, the silent gullible wife, felt honoured in surrendering to his genius.

Later, Naipaul began a torrid affair with Margaret Gooding, an Argentine woman from Buenos Aires. French's biography is the most damaging to Naipaul's reputation in portraying the monster that he could turn into with the women in his life. When Margaret revealed a one-night stand to him, he beat her repeatedly for two days, relishing in her acquiescence.

While Pat knew about Margaret, she was embittered by Naipaul's proud assertions that he had started visiting brothels three years into their marriage. Pat was weak with cancer, and Naipaul concedes to French that his verbal volleys may have hastened her death.

Naipaul's bad behaviour did not stop there. He fell for a third woman, Pakistani journalist Nadira, after Pat's death, and asked his agent Gillon Aitken "to sort out the mess" with Margaret. "I feel that in all of this, Margaret was very badly treated. But you know there is nothing I can do. I stayed with Margaret until she became middle-aged, almost an old lady," he says.

Naipaul's corrosive gaze extended to large swathes of his life, including his writing. As a journalist, he was a scathing, original chronicler of the social pitfalls in the lands he visited: India, the home of his ancestors, in "An Area of Darkness"; and Trinidad, the land his ancestors adopted, in "The Middle Passage". Further, "Among the Believers" was the result of his excursions into the heart of radical Islam, much before such writing gained widespread readership.

A one-time friend and fellow Trinidad writer (Naipaul hates this label), Derek Walcott was also not spared the famed acerbic tongue. In "A Writer's People", Naipaul slammed the veteran's writing as being symptomatic of Trinidad's cultural barrenness. Naipaul's dismissive attitude toward friends and agents completes a portrait of brilliance couched in criminal self-obsession.

"The World Is What It Is" is an apt title for Naipaul's biography, for little that happened in this man's life played to convention. French must be congratulated for undertaking an intimidating task that involved poring over hundreds of documents and spending time in the august company of a man who must have seemed, with every passing day, less and less deserving of the attention.

Real to the touch

The Sherpa and other fictions is a collection of nine short stories by first-time writer Nila Gupta. Gupta is a a second-generation Canadian. She was born in Montreal, spent a part of her childhood in Jammu, and then went back to Canada.

Each of the stories is the collection is about people who are part-Canadian and part-Indian. But the stories are not strictly about the immigrant experience. While the characters wrestle with the pull of "home", there are larger undercurrents driving their returns to India. Gupta captures these undercurrents with humanity and insight.

In the title story, the daughter of a Canadian immigrant returns to Jammu to meet her Indian relatives. The father has had no truck with India since he left, for his own reasons. The daughter though welcomes India and India welcomes her with open arms. "It seems to me that I am related to everyone by blood or marriage and my head is spinning to keep up with the complex relations and unfamiliar terms," she tells the reader at one point.

But there is a certain reason for her visit—to meet Madam Jaune, an unmarried woman who had once wished to adopt her. Is she able to accomplish her motive or does the weight of the past, her father's, make her decide against it?

Lonely ladies battling circumstances is a major theme in this collection. In "The Mouser", Mala Lalla is believed to be losing her mind, as she watches over an army of mice in her kitchen. Her son Ahmed is a gay man who stays in faraway Toronto (there is another tale about homosexuals in the collection, where gayness is a central theme). Sadia, a cousin of Ahmed's, is sent to look after her. We learn that Mala Lalla has been scarred by Partition and Sadia, meeting two young people in the neighbourhood, awakens to her own sexual blossoming. Their lives intersect (over mice), and slowly revealing the burdensome past of one and the jumpy future of the other, Gupta scripts the best story of the collection.

Miss Kamla Vati cares for children of refugees and people on the run in conflict-scarred Kashmir in "In the House of Broken Things". One of the children she educated has grown up and visits her with his wife at a time when her house has been attacked by those who believe that Miss Vati is a "sympathiser". (The Kashmir conflict provides a nostalgic and political setting to the collection.) Torn between Miss Vati's troubles and his wife's demands to move on, the man will decide if he must let go of the past for the future or vice-versa.

Nila Gupta's debut collection flits between India and Canada and crosses boundaries at every instance: boundaries of religion, gender, sexuality and nation. Which is why her characters and stories are so real to the touch.

Crying for deconstruction

At a time when Barack Obama is the US President, it may take some effort to remember a time when blacks were not allowed to share the same seats as whites in buses or live in the same neighbourhoods. However, the rights that blacks enjoy have come after much struggle. Kathryn Stockett's The Help showcases one such struggle—of black women who worked as maids in white households, who raised white babies and who, once those babies grew up and the poison of racism made it impossible to tend to the grown-up children, left to tend to new families.

Stockett assumes the voices of three narrators, who tell their stories in alternating chapters. The setting is 1960s' Jackson, Mississippi, when the old walls of segregation are being weakened little by little by news from the outside world. There's Aibileen Clark, a maternal black maid who works at Miss Leefolt and looks after Mae Mobley, Miss Leefolt's daughter. Minny Jackson is Aibileen's friend, with a reputation, apart from being the best cook in the town, of having a mouth loud enough to get her kicked out of her jobs. Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who dreams of finding a job in the New York publishing world. (Her story closely resembles Stockett's own, who also moved from Mississippi to New York to work for a magazine.)

Their stories come together when Skeeter is advised by a stern New York publisher that she ought to write not about lazy subjects but "about what disturbs you." Having grown up in a town where racism swings from the outright "activism" of her childhood friend Hilly Holbrooke to the insidious hate of her own mother, Skeeter decides to undertake a secret project chronicling the experiences of black maids, that is, the details of spending their lives working for white families.

The Help is the story of how Aibileen, Minny and several other maids come to share their stories of love and bitterness with Skeeter over coffee in Aibileen's house, a project of such secrecy that Skeeter has to tell her mother she is working on a life of Jesus Christ. Mississippi in the 1960s is the zenith of segregation, made all the more apparent for the voices raised against it. At a crucial point in the book, an NAACP member is shot in the head in front of his family. Libraries don't allow blacks to enter and a black man's tongue is taken out for speaking to an "outsider" about the "situation".

In such a scenario, Skeeter drives up to Aibileen's every other day and— after a false start— begins taking diligent notes on her typewriter. The women talk about everything, from being made to pay for the silver they never stole to being helped unexpectedly in a moment of sudden misfortune. Stockett makes the stories the central theme of the book (even though, unsatisfyingly, we never hear most of them) but she also allows minor distractions in the form of Skeeter's on-now-off-now alliance with a handsome young man, or the sidelined story of Minny's abusive husband.

The villain of the piece is Hilly, a stock racist who, at the novel's beginning, is championing the building of separate toilets for black maids. From here to her final humiliation (an exciting sub-plot relating to the eccentric but golden-hearted Minny), The Help moves through several nerve-wracking twists before coming to a — what can only be called — rather hastily-arrived finale.

The Help has its heart at the right place, and in its imagining of the black women's voice, it lends an authenticity which only a personal experience could have supplied. In a moving afterword, Stockett reveals how she never understood the silent suffering of her own black maid until long after her death which happened when Stockett was only 16.

However, the book must be accused of borrowed characterisation. Consider Aibileen who matches every stereotype that one may harbour about black people, not seeing the irony of her own observation on meeting one of her white kids, now grown up:

"And how I told him don’t drink coffee or he gone turn colored. He say he still ain’t drunk a cup of coffee and he twenty-one years old. It’s always nice seeing the kids grown up fine."

This description, and many such, made me a little uncomfortable, because they played into the long-suffering image of black people that has been mythologised by popular culture—the gentle sacrifice, the immense capacity for self-denial. Why are black characters so devoid of ill will in novels about racism? How do they stand being good to the children they raise, knowing fully well that they will grow up to become dyed-in-the-wool racists? It completely boggles the mind. It actually reminds me of how prostitutes are mostly shown to have hearts of gold, like the reader would be uncomfortable with any other description, lest it accentuates the reader's imagined discomfort with her morally compromised position.

The Help is a well-written, imaginatively peopled (in fact, too imaginatively) novel. But in a post-racial world, I would like to read about characters that are real and don't fit such easy patterns as the long-suffering black maid, the evil white woman who meets her comeuppance, and so on.

All you who toil tonight

When Alain de Botton received a rather uncomplimentary review for this book in the New York Times, he went ballistic: “Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value... I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

Leave aside the qualities of the review itself, de Botton’s outburst suggests that in spite of the huge amounts of research he poured into this book — which purports to divulge the pleasures and sorrows we derive from the monotony that defines one-third of our lives — he clearly hasn’t understood the rules of his own work. You shout at the reviewer and you expose yourself to be the self-centred crybaby that you are.

Be that as it may, the book is, strictly speaking, undeserving of the viciousness that characterised the NYT review. De Botton, pop-philosopher extraordinaire, travels far and wide in his quest to offer “a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.”

He covers ten professions broadly, as diverse as aviation and biscuit manufacture, and accompanies his analyses with photographs straight out of a coffee table book. In each case where it’s possible, he travels from source to sea, making this a book of reportage the likes of which one encounters in New Yorker and Granta—10,000-word pieces offering a personal take on an issue of importance.

De Botton’s smooth flow, which he demonstrated in such wide-ranging books as How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) and The Architecture of Happiness (2006), stands him in good stead here too. Chapters on staid subjects like “Logistics” gently hum with the glow of his language. Writing about warehouses that dot the English landscape, he says: “One looks up at their cathedral-like ceilings and finds, instead of angels, workaday, economical spans of steel punctuated by fluorescent strips, which guide the onlooker’s eyes back to rows of symmetrical shelving and the hurried motions of forklift trucks.”

He finds teeming ocean life—all dead, of course—in one section of the warehouse and this prompts him to find out how a tuna fished in Maldives makes it to a Northamptonshire warehouse in a matter of hours. As he journeys, this time from sea to source, he begins to realise that his leisurely project may not be so easy after all. Sea food exporters are reluctant to speak to an outsider, least of all a writer sneaking around for trouble. De Botton visits Male, the capital of Maldives, where he encounters silence until the country’s minister of fish makes a few phone calls and launches him on his trail. Really, the book is as much about pleasures and sorrows as the pulls and pressures of work.

One thing de Botton is especially attuned to is bursting bubbles. The chapter on “Rocket Science”, which term we associate with IQ scores of 140-plus, is a subtle exploration of the disillusionment of bright young minds who enter this field to make a lasting contribution to humanity’s body of knowledge. Yet, in de Botton’s chapter, we come across the painstaking work on a satellite which will merely beam signals for a children’s TV station in Japan. Routine, humdrum work—much too removed from intimations of glory.

De Botton tackles such brick-and-mortar topics in other chapters, notably “Transmission Engineering” and “Aviation”. But the real thrust of the book comes with “Career Counselling” which goes to the heart of de Botton’s Holy Grail: Is work meaningful?

The spotlight shifts to Robert Symons, a fifty-five-year-old psychotherapist who is less counsellor and more motivational speaker. The irony of Symons’ job is not lost on de Botton: to help, with an archaeologist’s precision, people to decide which job would suit them the best, only for them to subsequently realise that the world of work does not ease into such unguarded cheeriness. It is no picnic that can be chosen, altered and left at will.

In a roundabout way, this applies to de Botton’s project as well. Having set out to discover the details of work life as a detached outsider, he discovers that his posh accent and head-in-the-clouds ideas about real work are often at odds with the vast majority of toiling humanity. Hailing from an affluent background that allows him the luxury to go on such wild goose chases, de Botton’s rich language and slight concerns sit uncomfortably in a book about drudgery and endless hopelessness.

And yes, there is also the little matter of his reaction to unkind reviews.