Books I've read, May-June 2021 edition

Since the beginning of May it seems I have read four complete novels, all of them existing in very different areas of a large, amorphously defined supergenre that we may call “speculative fiction”.

The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller (2011)

The story of the life of Achilles, told from the viewpoint of his lover Patroclus. A 3,000-year-old tale full of gods and warriors and heroic blood being shed, told as a modern novel with modern-day storytelling conventions.

First, just on its own terms this is a very readable and enjoyable novel based on Greek myth. An engaging quick read. 

But second, this sort of novelistic treatment is very helpful for me. The truth is that never at any point of my formal education did I get taught the Greek mythology that Western culture has been referencing ceaselessly for millennia, and although obviously I picked up bits and pieces over the years, I never got it to really cohere in my head in a memorable way. It didn’t help that I never had a clear entry point, just a mass of stories about gods or humans or both, existing in a world without clear rules.

Repackaging Greek myth as a concrete story told with the conventions of a modern novel helps me build a mental scaffolding that makes it much easier to keep things straight in my head. Miller’s novel has really helped in this regard, as did her novel Circe, which I read last year. (Mary Renault’s fiction is also good for this.) This version of the story does have its idiosyncrasies, but as even a cursory look at Wikipedia makes clear, the story has existed in multiple versions since ancient times.

One thing that even I knew about the Achilles myth was the origin of the phrase “Achilles heel”: the notion that his heel was his weak spot because his mother had dunked him in magical water everywhere except there, and then had thought “eh, good enough”. This always struck me as extremely stupid and I was gratified that Miller gave this part of the story exactly the attention as it deserved: none, save for a solitary bit of mockery.

Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks (1993)

Sci-fi action adventure. Laser guns and spaceships. Iain M. Banks. This story of a wealthy noblewoman who gets the news that a religious sect that wants her dead has been granted a one-year period during which it can legally kill her is as much of a page-turner as any Banks thriller, and I pretty much raced through its nearly 500-page length on my Kindle.

This is some quintessential Iain Banks, set in a one-off universe: an isolated star system that’s been teeming with people and technology for tens of thousands of years, a palimpsest of wars and atrocities. In parts of the story he seemed to be channeling Douglas Adams, sometimes Adams in his more whimsical moods and sometimes in his existential angst.

Lincoln in the Bardo

by George Saunders (2017)

A very odd novel, full of historical tidbits and meditations on death, that I am frankly at an absolute loss as to how to describe. 

The plot could be described as a bit of supernatural-tinged historical voyeurism: President Lincoln’s young son Willie has just tragically died and his body has just been interred at a Washington DC cemetery where the spirits of the dead interact at night. These spirits inhabit the cemetery because they are still tied to the world of the living; they don’t even think of themselves as dead, only ill. Lincoln is so despondent over young Willie’s death that he visits the corpse at night, causing quite a commotion among the spirits.

I picked it up wondering if it would turn out to be unremittingly sad, but it’s not. The quirkiness of the point-of-view, alternating between the eccentric spirits of the dead, Abraham and Willie Lincoln themselves, and snippets from various actual nonfiction sources, is very lively and the fact that I genuinely never quite knew where Saunders was going with the narrative helped me deal with the morbid subject matter.

(Anyone who screams “but Lincoln in the Bardo is not speculative fiction!” gets a glare from me; I can make the tent as big as I want.)

84K

by Claire North (2018)

Theo Miller works for the Company, the conglomerate to which the government has outsourced much of its governing apparatus. Theo’s job is to calculate indemnity payments that convicted criminals must pay to the victims -- for instance, murderers have to pay more if their victim was actively trying to improve their health by joining a gym, or if the trauma of the murder means survivors must attend expensive counseling sessions. If you can’t pay, it’s the “patty line” for you -- not necessarily flipping burgers, but some kind of menial work must be done to help pay off your debt.

The setting is a dystopian England, but one that doesn’t come across as a future so much as a different version of the present, in which certain qualities have been exaggerated to bring them into stark relief. The world we see here is one that already exists for many people, is the unspoken message as I understood it. This story is not rainbows and roses. Rebellion against the Company means that a lot of innocent people get hurt, and the narrative does not shy away from that. 

The plot is launched when Theo runs across Dani, an old friend and lover from before he was Theo -- his whole adult life he has been living with an assumed identity. He really has no choice but to help her in her plan to bring down the whole corrupt Company structure. Dani has a daughter, who may or may not be Theo’s and who has spent her life in indentured servitude, and suddenly Theo has something to live for that’s more than just keeping his head down and surviving.

From reading other people’s reviews, I’ve gleaned that apparently many people are put off by the slow pace of this story. I thought it was just right, but then I’m a sucker for stories that effectively dig into the characters’ minds and psychology. If done well, it’s as compelling to me as a fast-paced plot.

Taiwan: A New History

 

Taiwan: A New History (Expanded Edition)
Edited by Murray A. Rubinstein

This is a collection of seventeen articles on the history of Taiwan, from before the Dutch colonial period to the end of the 20th century (the expanded edition adds an updated chapter that takes us to the year 2007). Compiled by Murray A. Rubinstein, who also contributed two articles on modern Taiwan, the book covers politics, economics, society and literature.

The chapters take us through a more-or-less comprehensive history of the country, though as a collection of articles by multiple authors, the coverage can be a bit idiosyncratic. Some chapters go into wonky detail, others less so. A novice to Taiwanese history may find it tough going at times, but there’s a lot here to interest a reader who’s already broadly familiar with the overall arc of Taiwanese history and would like to learn more.

I read the book sequentially, but the fact that it’s a compilation means the reader can jump in at any point without compunction. As most of the book was completed in the 1990s, much of the language and description comes across as a bit dated: in the introduction, Rubinstein writes of Taipei as the “stronghold of the ‘ethnic’ mainlander population that still dominates the central government”, and a bit later refers to the pre-MRT Taipei suburbs as “choking sprawl” (p. ix-x). Thinking historically, though, this is not an unfair description.

The unusual second chapter is one I will remember. “The Politics of Taiwan Aboriginal Origins” by Michael Stainton outlines three theories of the origins of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples: briefly, that ancestors of the Indigenous people migrated to Taiwan from Southeast Asia (the “southern origin” theory); that they migrated from China (“northern origin”); and that the ancestors of Taiwan’s Indigenous people, having migrated from what is now China in remote prehistory and after a long cultural incubation in Taiwan, eventually spread throughout Southeast Asia and became the ancestors of today’s Austronesian peoples.

But the purpose of Stainton’s article is not to weigh the evidence for and against the different theories; rather, he looks at how the different theories have been championed by various modern political ideologies, to justify Japanese hegemony in the first half of the twentieth century and Chinese dominion over Taiwan in the second half. As the chapter’s true focus is on modern politics, strictly speaking this breaks the chronological order that the book is arranged in, but in my opinion the chapter nevertheless makes sense here. It is inevitable that history will be appropriated and interpreted for political ends, a place like Taiwan will certainly be no exception, and Stainton’s chapter gives the sequential reader a foretaste of modern ideological battles.

From here the book progresses roughly chronologically, with various experts on Taiwanese history (mostly Westerners, with a few exceptions) sketching out overviews of their particular eras and topics.  As I mentioned, some chapters are wonkier than others, and authors come in with their own biases and preconceptions; I felt I detected a pro-KMT slant in “A Bastion Created, A Regime Reformed, An Economy Reengineered 1949-1970” by Peter Chen-main Wang, but not so in other chapters.

Most chapters focus on the political, economic and/or social aspects of a particular era of Taiwanese history, but some are more idiosyncratic. One early chapter, “Up the Mountains and Out to the Sea” by Eduard B. Vermeer, describes Fujianese economy and society in the 1600s and barely mentions Taiwan (the relevance to the book is that this was the era of the first large-scale Han migration to Taiwan, which was largely from Fujian). Later in the book, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang contributes two chapters on Taiwanese literature, a topic that I had been mostly unfamiliar with.

And then there's Robert P. Weller’s “Identity and Social Change in Taiwanese Religion”. In the book’s sole chapter that occasionally uses a Taiwanese romanization system (I’m not savvy enough to tell you which one) rather than Wade-Giles, Weller writes a fascinating overview of Taiwanese religion that fits in not only Tudi Gong and Matsu (or Tho-te Kong and Ma Co, in the chapter’s orthography) but also modern religious organizations as well. 

Weller credits the “amorphous” quality of Taiwan’s folk religion, with its variety of gods and beliefs in ghosts, as helping it survive social and political changes: “Had it ever achieved a truly systematic orthodoxy, this religion might have faced a crisis during Taiwan’s centuries of constant transformation. Instead, there has been a regular reproportioning and reinterpretation of the complex elements that had always been there.” (p. 353)

The narrative history chapters that form the bulk of the book contain lots of fascinating nuggets that I was formerly unaware of. For example, “Between Assimilation and Independence, 1945 - 1948” by Steven Phillips gave me an interesting look at Taiwan in the brief year-and-a-half window between August 1945 and February 1947, when the press was freer than it would be at any point prior to the 1990s, possibly because (oddly, considering official fears that after 50 years of colonial rule the Taiwanese were more Japanese than Chinese) the ROC authorities were surprised at the level of criticism they were receiving from their new Taiwanese subjects. 

“Taiwan’s Socioeconomic Modernization” by Murray A. Rubinstein, amid its general coverage of Taiwan’s development, gives us a fascinating description of Guanghua Market in Taipei in the 1970s: “a two-story bazaar where one could buy cheap antiques, old books and magazines, and student paintings. It was a delightful and always busy site that one could enjoy walking through, searching the stalls at one’s leisure.” (p. 374) A far cry from today’s electronics market that stretches far beyond the original structure. Later in the chapter, Rubinstein describes Taiwanese urban sprawl in the 1980s and 1990s, and while the intent is to stress the amount of growth and urbanization, it all seems positively quaint from the standpoint of 2021.

In the final chapters, authors Rubinstein and Cal Clark describe the period that laid the foundations of modern Taiwan politics, the Lee Teng-hui and early Chen Shui-bian administrations. I was reminded that while I like to think of myself as a politics nerd, I really am an amateur, and there is much I am unfamiliar with. I read of a strange time, not so long ago, when the National Assembly still existed, the Legislative Yuan was far larger than it is now, and the New Party was not only seen as a major force in Taiwan party politics, but occasionally teamed up with the DPP in short-lived anti-KMT coalitions, which needless to say would be unthinkable today. I need to read up more on how the structure of the ROC government evolved during this transitional period.

The sections on the evolution of cross-strait relations during the Lee Teng-hui and early Chen Shui-bian era also intrigues me, although I would like to read something more meaty than the tantalizing but short tidbits that these chapters provide, such as the interesting diplomatic case of Liberia, which tried to maintain full diplomatic relations with both China and Taiwan in the 1990s. I did notice the book never mentions the ‘1992 Consensus’, either the phrase itself or any particular agreement that the phrase could refer to, but to be fair the relevant chapter was completed in 1999, when the 1992 Consensus did not exist yet.

All in all, “Taiwan: A New History” filled in several gaps in my understanding of Taiwanese history (while making me aware of many other gaps), and exposed me to some interesting new perspectives. It’s not quite the English-language general introduction to Taiwan that I have been pining for, but the reader who already knows a moderate amount about Taiwan will find plenty of interest here.