Category Archives: Literature/Books

by | February 4, 2013 · 12:07 pm

How do you pay respect to the Hitch? With irony as good as this

By Robert Hainault

hitchens

Dear Readers,

I apologise for the length of my article. As Richard Seymour’s blog posts aggressively whine about the generality of many of the reviews of his book (which is all it is worth) I felt inclined to do him the small service of at least engaging with some of his arguments. The trouble I suspect many critics have been having is the same as the one I encountered: that there’s simply too much wrong in this book to go through it all in a thousand words or so. Several instalments is not possible on this website at the moment so I thought it might be fairer to simply write a longer article than is the norm so I can at least take a little of the breath out of the moan that I haven’t engaged with anything Seymour says. However, it might be unfair to let out too great a stream when you’re in a pissing contest with someone who can muster only a feeble (if noisy) dribble, so I shall not keep you too long.

I will finish my preamble with a quote from Seymour’s blog: “every spittle-lathered review of Unhitched by one of the unhitched actually results in a gratifying improvement in the book’s sales figures.  I’d like to see much, much more of this.  But I’d also like a proper review by someone who has read the book.” (You’ll notice he eschews his overly-scholarly tone in favour of a roughly sarcastic, generally adolescent style of writing which he prefers for his blog). To save this article having whatever tiny impact on sales it might, please contact me directly for a free PDF of it if you would like to read it.

Yours,

Bertie

***

After reading Richard Seymour’s article in the Guardian promoting “Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens” I knew I didn’t want to buy the book. Hell, after reading the title I knew I didn’t want to buy the book: a niggardly and unnuanced reference to the girthier and weightier tome by Hitchens: “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (in both physical and intellectual senses). It puts you in little doubt that the thesis of the book will be as generic and derivative as the title he so unsubtly cribs.

But then I have a problem. I must read the book in order to review it. But I don’t want to line Seymour’s pocket. Salvation came when a number of people offered me a PDF of it. Illegal, yes, but we’ll see if Mr Seymour is as keen to put on trial someone who is not only quick in mind but in body. And after all, property is theft. I am sure Mr Seymour, so opposed as he is to the pursuit of profit, will forgive me taking it gratis even if he is not willing to actively distribute it pro bono.

It is an irony that would not have been lost on Hitchens, that the preface is titled ‘Predictable as Hell’, for this book – published by Verso, an ‘imprint’ of New Left Books which claims to challenge ‘Imperialism and Capital’ (oh, those groundbreaking devils!) – has as its dedication the words, ‘To Marie, whose hatred is pure. With all my love.’ For love and hate were two sides of a coin that spun very rapidly on the desk of Mr Hitchens, a man who claimed his hatred ‘gave him the energy to get out of bed in the morning.’ Even before one has arrived at the first chapter, there is the doom-laden feeling that you are in the company of a man who likes to steal from his victim the sword by which he shall bleed.

Make it to Chapter One and you find the title ‘Christopher Hitchens in Theory and Practice’. Two proper nouns away from an infamous Hitchens polemic against the saint of Calcutta. It is rich for a man who criticises another for his supposed shift to neoconservatism to appropriate the style and language of his target when the Left has whinged for so long that the neoconservatives ungraciously purloined the rhetoric of radical socialism. Seymour goes further, citing Corey Robin: ‘From Burke onwards, conservatism has been adept at appropriating the ideas and modes of organisation of the Left, for essentially counterrevolutionary purposes: whether it is Joseph de Maistre’s appeal to “citoyens” or the neoconservative appropriation of internationalist rhetoric.’

It is fitting that an author so keen to imply Hitchens’ hypocrisy should implicate himself in such subtle hypocrisies. After all, are we not supposed to register the reference to the Kissinger trial as a bitchy comment on Hitchens’ own perceived warmongering? Gently, does it, Mr Seymour; if it’s too patently false to state, imply. A few pages on – ah, no. He’s just come right out with it.

Hitchens did not, as Seymour points out, simply adopt a posture of interventionism. Far from it. He rightly points out that Hitchens had long been in favour of it, though it falls to me to add the detail that it was only when he considered the motivation noble, with Hitchens opposing more interventions by far than he supported. A topic conspicuous by its rarity in this philippic is ‘internationalism’, as it was with this sentiment that Hitchens spoke so passionately in favour of humanitarian intervention: a sentiment rooted in his Old Left past and one that forced the older Hitchens to abandon the Left-wing movement as readily as it had abandoned its internationalist principles. Seymour hurries past this issue in a smokescreen of accusations of ‘imperialism’, and – for someone so fond of whining that people don’t read his book carefully enough – fails to engage himself with the old Left principle that the tyranny of despots should be opposed in favour of those who are oppressed, instead preferring to moan about Hitchens’ ‘largely sentimental attachment to the rhetoric of left-wing internationalism’.

Perhaps it is because I am on the Right that I am so keenly aware of the glaring fallacy of Seymour’s primary argument that Hitchens sold out to the neocons. While it may be customary for those on the far-Left to furiously wet themselves at the sight of any comrade defecting, Seymour is simply wasting a good pair of trousers. Hitchens was not, by any measure, a man of the Right. While the neocons may have a penchant for protectionism in trade and an inclination toward paternalism, their economics are predominantly laissez-faire. It is not only from this tenet that Hitchens profoundly dissented; the suspicion of positive discrimination, the disdain for radicalism, the appetite for gradualism, and the respect for tradition – so ubiquitous in Right wing circles – regularly squirmed under Hitchens’ nib. I may be an unashamed admirer of Hitchens, but while I feel an intellectual consanguinity with him in averring the paramountcy of free speech, the prime import of the individual and scorn for consensus, beyond these enlightenment fundaments we are not in political accord.

While Seymour is critical of the ‘clichéd’ and simplistic view of conservatism as ‘venerating tradition’, he redefines conservatism in line with Corey to a political stance ‘distinguished not by an appeal to tradition or the gradual emendation and improvement of the status quo but by violent adventurism, brutal modernism, and the desire to radically transform the status quo the better to preserve it.’ Which may conveniently fit the view he wishes to paint of Hitchens, but is far from satisfactory. Despite the original proponent’s obsession with conservatism, his definition is a very limited one, and no less simple or suspect than the broader etymological understanding of conservatism he dismisses.

The problem with this book is not – unlike its author’s sensationalist Guardian article – that it is a work of callow and ungallant schadenfreude. It may run through its subject with a stolen sword, but it doesn’t twist it as often as the titles might have us expect. It is almost a shame that Seymour attempts these few vainglorious attempts at satire, because in many places this is a book of forceful argument and historical conversance. Once he has shed the shadow of Hitchens, the author’s style is not without its merits. The problem with this book is that it gloats not over a slain Hitchens, but an erect if snicked one: less schadenfreude than wanton nastiness and and cynical exploitation of a man’s popularity; more often than not it feels like he is Hitching a ride on a famous name in order to draw attention to arguments that are bigger than Christopher Hitchens alone and are not, in fact, particularly relevant to the Hitch at all.

It must also be pointed out, lest anyone still is clinging to their belief that the Hitchens bubble deserves bursting over 130 pages: Hitchens himself did not ask for the fawning disciples he attracted. In Letters to a Young Contrarian his staunchest advice to the reader is to guard themselves against the desire to follow or emulate. It is why this book ultimately fails: it simply does not engage with a Hitchens the objective reader can recognise. Those of us who took something from his many works find ourselves slightly nauseated by the cult of Hitchens, and it is with great disappointment I watched Stephen Fry’s well-intentioned but obsequious encomium for Intelligence Squared. One feels it is this cult that Seymour seeks to disillusion, but those who are most enamoured with Hitchens’ legacy do not bristle to see Hitchens criticised. God knows there’s plenty to bash, and of such a prolific man of letters one can hardly expect otherwise.

But it is simply fruitless to devote any real time or energy to it, and by the end of the book we are still left wondering: why did Seymour write a whole book against one man, when a pamphlet on the rise of neoconservatism and bigotry would have been more fitting to the content? Hitchens took a near-sadistic pleasure in the fall of the huckster, the fraud and the hypocrite, and that is why he is so fondly remembered and so sadly missed. It is with a hollow imitation of this relish that Seymour has written his book, taking pleasure not – as he thinks – in the fall of an icon, but in small, rare blips in Hitchens’ feared logic. Worst, he uses those small failings to write an anti-conservative diatribe, lazily adumbrating a grossly inaccurate picture of Hitchens merely to tie it all together. In Seymour’s own words: ‘he is … an example of something broader.’ It may be considered necessary by those on the hard Left to trample upon a man’s reputation in order to make broader points. Those of us with more integrity might argue that if you wish to make a broad analysis you don’t need to use one dead man as your lens unless you realise it’s the only way to get people to read it. (Though credit where it is due: it does seem to have worked).

After all, there are far more fitting examples of ‘violent adventurism’ and ‘brutal modernism’: examples not to be found among the conservatives, or those the left would dub so, but among the National Socialists – a term understandably seldom used by those on the hard Left. And the same may be said of opponents of Islam: that there are real bigots who might have been better targets for Seymour’s relativist sob story. When you have to resort to saying this, you’re already proving my point: ‘There usually comes a time when a child begins to notice the inconsistencies and absurdities in the silly stories that grown-ups tell them in order to get them to behave. Christopher Hitchens was nine – a little late, if I may say so.’

For his many flaws, Hitchens did not share the corruption of his targets. It was with a mischievous grin that Hitchens promoted his own work with the much-used line ‘available in fine bookstores everywhere’. He made no secret of his vices, cracking ironic jokes about his own vanity with the quip ‘it’s my blue eyes’. He took a blatant pleasure in his paradoxical image of middle-bohemian hack crossed with champagne swigging English gentleman. Unlike many on the Left he was not ashamed of his public school accent or his Oxford education, yet he never paid respect to others on such superficial grounds – nor did he expect it in return.

When Seymour writes that Hitchens ‘became what he had despised – as Hazlitt put it, “a living and ignominious satire upon himself”’ he is crafting such a deft irony that it is almost a pity he lacks the self-awareness to appreciate it: the he is criticising a man for those ironies which Hitchens not only sought not to hide, but impishly played up to. This does not, as Seymour misses, constitute a fall, but a petty crow about those things which to the objective reader are charming and complex but hateful to those who bear the grudge of the snubbed socialist.

This is not the great polemic of the perspicacious moralist that one might find in abundance in the Hitchens canon. Though Seymour presents the inconsistencies within Hitchens’ arguments with aplomb, the trial of the man is a joke too clever for Seymour to understand, for it is the prosecutor who is guilty of the crimes of which the defendant is accused: myopia and dishonesty. And he is further guilty of the crimes the defendant spent his life bringing to light: literal-mindedness, pettiness, fanaticism and humbug. In places he makes good points, though he could have made them better in each case by using someone other than the Hitch as his example. Hitchens the warmonger? There are much better examples. Hitchens the chauvinist? There are much better examples. Hitchens the racist? I’m sorry, what? It ticks all the socialist boxes, but it doesn’t tick that big one advertised on the front of the book: Christopher Hitchens.

Seymour’s joyless crow brings plays upon the same flaws that Hitchens himself played upon, but without the wit, the intelligence or the irony, and illuminates with all the force of a searchlight on a midsummer’s day. Hitchens never pretended to be anything other than what he was: neither a man of the Right nor the Left, nor anything but a mortal man, but someone full-throatedly opposed to the partisan thinking with which Seymour’s exercise in socialist pornography is rife. The book is Seymour’s circle-jerk, only nobody else has turned up. From a lifetime of letters he has assembled a masturbatory portfolio of mistakes and contradictions that are titillating only to those whose whose fetish is the snap of the whip against that ripest of skins: the Leftie who defects to the Right. It stands to reason, then, that the favourable reviews for this book have come chiefly from the far-Left, while the mainstream press have written it off as little more than wank fodder for sad radicals.

If you want to read a criticism of Christopher Hitchens, read Christopher Hitchens, and leave Mr Seymour to his solitary vice. If you want to read the response to this squalid – if ostensibly scholarly – smear, go back and read some Hitchens: The Trial of Richard Seymour is there, lurking between the lines.

Robert Hainault is a columnist for Not So Reviews

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by | November 7, 2012 · 11:05 am

Nanowrimo Boot Camp – a quick and dirty guide to surviving national novel writing month

By James Garside

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month of November) is the time of the year when all common sense goes out of the window and you try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Just for kicks. Nanowrimo is great fun but it isn’t for the squeamish – if you’re serious about completing nanowrimo then you shouldn’t be reading this but for what it’s worth, this is the method that works for me.

Here are some quick tips and dirty tricks to help get you through the month:

Do the Maths

50,000 words in a month. That’s only 1667 words per day – you can do that in an hour if you leave your inner editor at the door. You’re not “writing a novel”, you’re writing 50,000 words. Don’t panic at the thought of writing so much; break it down into manageable chunks. A great novel is something written by Dostoevsky. A nanowrimo novel is just 50,000 words. THAT’S ALL.

Are you a Tortoise or a Bunny?

Slow and steady wins the race, but hard and fast is also fun. Best not get hung up about this. You’re writing a novel, not having an orgasm. Aim to write 2,000 words per day as quickly as you can. If you want to polish and refine them throughout the day, knock yourself out. But once you’ve got your words done for the day, you’re clear. How you go about it and what you do afterwards is up to you.

Think Slowly, Type Quickly

Set your watch. Try to write 2,000 words in an hour without stopping. It’s the most fun you can have in an hour – short of drugs or fucking. Sit down and knock them out so fast that you don’t have time to think, edit or fuss over what you’re writing. Don’t stop until your time is up. Spend rest of the day scribbling notes and getting ready for your next session. If it takes you all day to hit 2,000 words, TYPE FASTER.

Want to Increase Your Word Count? Lower Your Standards!

If you throw enough shit against the wall some of it will stick. These are words to live by if you’re a writer, or a monkey, and you have shit. Don’t press delete until December. If you write it wrong, just write it right next time. Pile them up. ‘Don’t get it right, get it written.’ No-one has to read your novel. Not even you. Take chances. Do something random. It’s ok to be crazy, absurd and fun – but screw literature.

Lost the Plot?

Don’t get hung up on plot. You’re just making a fix-up novel out of bits and pieces. You don’t even have to write them in the right order. Grab your story by the throat. Write whatever scares or excites you the most. Any time you think, “I can’t say that”, put it in. Keep your eye on the prize. You get across a pebbled beach fast if you focus on the sea, as you run, not by worrying about your poor feet.

‘Take Out’ Your Inner Editor

Your mind will come up with a billion excuses to stop writing and seductive things you could do instead. Whatever it says, it’s full of shit. Ignore it. Write anyway. If your inner editor gets in the way, write down what it says. Turn it into a character with a high squeaky voice and pink fluffy ears. Shoot it in the head. LAUGH! Then take it out to dinner. Promise to spend December, red pen in hand, demolishing your novel.

Do Your Time Like a Good Peon

If one day in a fit of madness you write 20,000 words – that’s great, but the very next day, you go back to writing 2,000 words. No days off. If you don’t have an hour, do it in 15-minute chunks. But at the very least put in your set minimum every day. Tell yourself whatever lies are necessary to keep your butt in the chair and you writing.

Don’t Obsess About What Pen You Should Use

Use whatever writing tools are to hand. I need three things: tea, a notebook, and an Alphasmart NEO. Tea’s essential, notebooks don’t die when you spill tea on them, and the trusty NEO is where I write a shitty first draft. If you don’t know why tea is important, you’re dead to me.

You Can’t Edit A Blank Page

The notebook is your friend. Scribble your surface anxiety in the notebook, all the mad stuff crowding your head. Include ideas for future scenes, lines of dialogue, botched first attempts, anything that might belong in the novel later but is in the way of what you need to write right now. That way you’ve already overcome the blank page before you sit down to write. Use them as a starting point for your next session.

Malfunction! Need Input!

Not sure what to write? Allow random input to decide. Write down your dreams, shuffle oblique strategies cards, roll dice, or pull in people and events from the world around you. Whatever comes up – just trust it and go with it. Write in silence. It’s hard for your muse to whisper in your ear if you’ve got headphones on. Write offline.

Avoid the nanowrimo forums until you’re done writing. Get your virtual hugs later.

Back Up Your Work

I know you’re smart enough to do this, but re-writing 50,000 words from scratch sucks, so backup to the point of paranoia and madness. I backup my NEO using Alphasync to Dropbox. Keep a separate master document – a text file of your novel – to submit to nanowrimo when you verify your wordcount. Make multiple backups. Losing your work when some smug ass has already told you to backup is less fun than rewriting.

Back Up Your Sense of Humour

Check your funny fuse. Give your novel a title that makes you laugh. I once called mine “Fuck You Inner Editor!” Bludgeon to death anyone that tries to stop you writing, with your novel, but only once you’ve verified your wordcount. Nanowrimo’s meant to be fun. Who cares if the end product is a bit shitty? It’s compost. Look through it for green shoots in December. It could hold the start of something wonderful.

For more information on Nanowrimo visit www.nanowrimo.org

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by | September 2, 2012 · 11:09 am

We all hear voices

By Ruth Ingamells

Not literally of course – don’t worry. I’m not suggesting that we’re all schizophrenics – I’m saying voices exist in their multiplicity in narrative and the novel.

I can hear you groan – but hear me out, you’ll see what I mean by the end.

There was once a brilliant – er – narratologist? No, no, that’s not right – philosopher? Better, better, though more specific, please – dialogist? Is that even a word? Come on, think! Think! Semiotician? Literary critic? You get my meaning. His name was M.M. Bakhtin.

Now, I have a confession to make, I am no scholar of his (yet), I have only read a couple of his seminal texts and I have yet to digest him properly. But (and what a huge, boulder-like ‘But’ it is), I know him enough to share with you the wonders of his theory of Heteroglossia.

Heteroglossia? It sounds like a magazine for closeted homosexuals. But it’s a brilliant term invented to express the compositions of voices in a novel. Layers and layers of voices that exist in novels everywhere. The clue is in the name: Hetero, meaning “different”, and glossa meaning “tongue”. Different tongues.

But surely the book is just one voice? The book itself? There’s one narrator (I guess), and there are the characters (and stuff) – hang on a sec. You’ve kind of already hit the nail on the head (part of it) – there’s the narrator and there are the characters –  well that’s already at least two voices. Even ill-formed, crippled characters have a voice.

Take “Game of Thrones”. For those of you who haven’t read it and only watched the series (you heathens, you), the book is split into chapters named after the character it follows. The novel is structured as points of views, perfect for such a character driven narrative. You have novels brimming with different voices, from Arya to Catlyn to Tyrion – though you never get Varys (so far), the voices that don’t speak tell us as much as the ones that do.

Within each chapter and voice hide more voices: the voice of the narrator, the voice of the character’s thoughts, the voice of the character spoken and the voice of the other characters within the Westeros reality. Neatly layered like angel cake.

Surrounding the many voices are the prologue and the epilogue (in most of them), voices in their own right not anchored to a certain character. This voice, separate from a specific person, resonates throughout the novels as an almost divine voice, divine and manipulating.

But every voice is riddled with bias. Every voice or language is burdened by the signature of the speaker, since no word exists without a speaker (or writer). There are no neutral words, words in a vacuum have no meaning. Although, do not suppose, then, that every voice in a novel reflects the opinion of the author.

Imagine it like this: an author puts their voice into their writing, and out of it comes a whole array of other voices that conflict and overlap – like a prism. Let me explain. You remember in Physics at school when you had to pass a beam of light through a prism (see above)? You put one beam through and out of it comes a whole range of colour. The beam splits. Similarly, the voice an author puts into the book never results in the same thing. It splits into layers and layers of other voices that no longer represent the former beam. The voices are no longer (really) the author’s.

Voices in a novel are a refraction, then, rather than a reflection of the voice of an author.

Let’s apply this to another work of literature – the Bible. A perfect example of Heteroglossia. Not only does it contain many different books written by different authors, but it has been written in many different languages – translated in and out of meaning, again and again. All of it is claimed to be the voice of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” refracted into many other voices.

Regardless of whether this is true or not, there are so many ideas and opinions that bang heads in these wafer thin papers. It’s like a household where no one gets on and everyone argues with hideous passive aggression. In and among it all, the character of God speaks like a crackling, malfunctioning radio – barely audible, if it exists. The character of God is not the point of the narrative. (Those of you who are religious will undoubtably disagree). The book is stratified into multi-vocal layers, expressing history, philosophy, literature, and a shed load of characters. More of  a library than a book.

The novel is just one manifestation of Heteroglossia. Once you speak, you create discourse, once there is discourse there is disagreement and disagreement allows you to define yourself. You are made up of many different voices. The one that comforts, the one that berates you, the other the bully. There is a voice inside of you that tells you to jump of that cliff, and another that tells you not to.

So don’t think that Heteroglossia has nothing to do with you, that it’s a term you can escape. You are as entangled in it as I am and that’s a good thing because can you imagine a world with just one tyrannical voice? It would be so very dull.

Ruth Ingamells is Editor of Not So Reviews

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by | August 29, 2012 · 7:07 pm

We’re looking for an Assistant Editor!

The web’s most quietly subversive cultural commentary website Not So Reviews is looking for an Assistant Editor to join its editorial team.

Working closely with the Editor and Deputy editor, your responsibilities will be sourcing content from potential and existing columnists, proofreading and approving articles, managing and expanding NSR’s social media presence, and contributing an article or two.

This is an unpaid position but all in all the position is very part-time, requiring about an hour of work a day and perfect for those looking for further experience in the field of journalism and to be involved in an up and coming publication.

Necessary requirements:

- Reliability

- Some experience with journalism

- Some experience in proofreading

- A passion for writing and culture

- The ability to work as a member of a team

- Proficiency in WordPress

Send us your CV and a little note detailing your experience and what you’d like to get out of the position by the 20th of September.

Send all applications (and questions) to not.so.reviews@gmail.com

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by | August 19, 2012 · 9:23 pm

What makes a good line great?

By Ruth Ingamells

Those who read often will know the pleasant feeling that comes after a whopper of an opening line. It’s like that first sip of coffee, the first time you slip into bed, running your tongue over your teeth after brushing them, catching that train you thought you would miss or popping bubble wrap. There is a sense of relief that satisfies the pre-reading apprehension. It’s perfect! You’re not really sure what the author is trying to say yet, but, you know with stubborn certainty they couldn’t have said it any better.

This relief can take many forms.

Often a perverse feeling or sober awareness of something dark and distressing. It can be a mysterious feeling – you’re hungry and the author is not going to feed you freely. Sometimes a poetic feeling, where it takes several reads before epiphany. It can be humorous, an irony or perfect misunderstanding pulls a smile from a nervous mouth. The relief can be edged with discomfort at times when you’re not entirely sure you should have read something so personal. Occasionally it’s just so damned brilliant you can’t help but feel slightly jealous because that line has been thought now, and it wasn’t yours.

The disturbing

is the first line which makes you wince with distaste, and winds you slightly because it speaks to you darkly.

“Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.”

Okay – what the fuck is going on? The premise of the story is put before you (with all its legs and exoskeleton) and, to be honest, I’m not sure I’m all right with that. Insects are the part of nature we all cringe from. For good reason. If you’re not scared of, or disgusted by spiders, centipedes or cockroaches then there’s something wrong with your cute-o-metre.

“Nervous Conditions” by Tsitsi Dangarembga: “I was not sorry when my brother died.”

A line which made me blink and release a breath of ‘wow that’s heavy shit, man’. You do not have to be physically disturbed to tap into darker places. You know the book you are about to read will not induce shits and giggles, because horrible things intrigue us. We like things that breach the fluffy border of normality and venture into stranger lands. They are places we cannot go in reality, so where better to explore than in a book?

The “I am” 

is a direct way of introducing the protagonist. An obvious but classic technique. The point is to state the facts, according to the narrator. The way things are, what the person is and what you can expect from them.

“Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: “I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”

“Burned Alive” by Souad: “I am a girl. A girl must walk fast, head down, as if counting the number of steps she’s taking.“

“Infinite Jest” by David Foster-Wallace: “I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.”

We have to accept the reality of the narrator. I’ll spare you the literary jargon and just say this: the reason why it is such a powerful technique is because it refers to our own reality, our own story, narrated by an unreliable, singular person – ourselves, of course.

The Question

is always rhetorical.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: “Who’s there?”

“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand: “Who is John Galt?”

“A Clockwork Orange” by Antony Burgess: “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

All books question things, they might as well be honest about it (although I know I’m being a bit cheeky putting Shakespeare in there). Questions are active, and aggressive. We like stuff to happen in our stories – we all loved reading about adventures as children. Ask a question and you’ve already hooked the reader because they want to know the answer.

The witty

ones never fail – if they work.

“Earthly Powers” by Antony Burgess: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

“Night Watch” by Terry Pratchett: “Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.”

Everyone likes the funny guy. It’s a law of nature. And humour can be found in the unexpected and the sexual (and fart jokes – because I’m sorry they’re hilarious). The funny beginning will always appeal to the largest audience, since we all love the serotonin that ensues. When an opening line can make you laugh, it’s a success in my book.

The poetic

will capture something beautiful, and you will be left breathless.

“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”

I…er… I don’t really know what to say about this, it’s wonderful, beautiful, perfect. Damn you Nabokov and your incredible command of the English when it was your second language.

The mysterious

is more about what is not said. It is indicative and uncertain.

“The Go-Between” by L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

“A Scandal in Bohemia” by Arthur Conan Doyle: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.”

“Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie: “I was born in the city of Bombay ….. once upon a time.”

The mysterious beginning unsettles you and, if you’re the analytical type, is impossible to ignore. Like how we love murder mysteries, we love stories to whisper rather than shout. As much as we love cliff hangers, we love a beginning to smoke enigma.

Introduce a bit of mystery; no one likes to be spoon fed.

The conditional 

suggests an alternative.

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born“.

“Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk: “If you’re going to read this, don’t bother.”

“A Series of Unfortunate Events” by Lemony Snicket “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.”

When an “if” begins a novel, it begins on the wrong foot entirely intentionally. You’re expecting a confident, omniscient narrator and instead you get an objection. The conditional is a characteristic of the underdog who is as shy as you are.

The ending

The objective is to get someone to read, and audiences are fickle, hungry creatures that won’t accept stale bread – they want something more substantial to chew on, and the whole meal will be a disappointment if the first bite isn’t a pleasure. I’m sure you have your own favourites that give you a literary erection, and by all means, write them below! Beginnings, in my opinion, are always more interesting than endings.

No dark and stormy nights need apply.

Ruth Ingamells is editor of Not So Reviews

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by | August 8, 2012 · 6:20 pm

Science and self-determination

By Petros Fessas

One of the strongest narratives in works of fiction is the process of taking life in one’s hands and turning it around, no matter when or how drastically – the idea of an individual’s capability of dramatically changing him or herself.

It is compelling to explore how current scientific knowledge supports that ideal not in fiction, but within our cultural reality. The mythological, religious or scientific explanations embraced by humans throughout time have always contributed a part in their view of life: today, science plays a role in determining what we feel because it determines what we know about the world and, more importantly, about ourselves. The realisation of what a human being is and to what extent it can “create itself” comes through the study of the sum of available scientific truths and carries with it the potential of defining a collective sense of optimism or pessimism within society.

It might be sensible to argue that the current set of answers that biology provides for the question that we humans ask ourselves – what are we and what can we be? – serves to detach us from our ideal of change and changeability.

In the pursuit of acquiring the answer to what defines our physical characteristics and personal traits, we have stumbled upon the nature-nurture duo. We are the result of a complex interplay between genetics and environment. The contribution of the former is deterministic, absolute. We can’t really argue with what our nucleic acids have decided for us. For the majority, the prospect of genetic engineering giving us creative control over ourselves is, disregarding the field’s progress in the fight against disease, a dead end. The public assigns a dystopian nightmare to the idea of on-demand rewriting of the genome to optimize a person’s traits: partly because we don’t know enough to master it yet and partly because it would possibly be prone to socially asymmetrical exploitation.

What we are left with is the other half of the equation: the effect of environmental cues on our identity. We certainly have some control over our surroundings and their impact on us. But the length of the period of plasticity for each characteristic is limited. More specifically, our neurological make-up does not allow for a lifetime of constant transformation of the brain’s wiring but rather favours the existence of critical periods within our development during which the nervous system needs to be exposed to certain stimuli in order to attain specific capabilities. If it is not stimulated, or if it is, but outside the critical window, our brain never forges the connections required for the trait at hand.

Does the theory of critical windows in development drive us even further away from our aspiration of being able to define ourselves? To answer this, it is purposeful to explore the extent to which the theory applies to human characteristics as they increase in complexity.

From an anatomical and physiological perspective, it is certain that our development is a game of temporality: for example, it has been discovered through (not so ethical) experimentation on primates that if a newborn is deprived of light stimuli for a certain time period soon after birth, the neurological circuitry that supports vision never develops, even if the eyes are exposed to light either before or after that interval.

But do behavioural and personality traits take shape within equally distinct periods of malleability and then solidify in the same manner? This is certainly much more difficult to assess, but it’d be easier to begin with characteristics that present themselves with discontinuous variation, like sexual orientation, for which individuals almost always fall in one of a few relatively distinct categories. Although relatively certain about its biological (and not social or cultural) nature, science cannot yet claim to have uncovered the mechanism underlying the definition of sexuality but a great deal of the theories approaching the question center around brain structure. More specifically, a certain part of the hypothalamus has been found to be dimorphic, to develop differently between “androphiles” and “gynephiles”. The settling of this part seems to be dictated by the levels of androgens present in the mother during a critical period late in pregnancy, which can vary according to stress.

Other aspects of personality that vary continuously (think bell-shaped graphs) from individual to individual are largely determined irreversibly within critical windows. In the case of language, neurolinguists assert that if a child is not brought up for a period (of disputable length) in the beginning of its life within a word-rich environment, it will never acquire full grasp of verbal expression and grammatical structures. On another note, based initially upon the observation that the five year old brain is ninety percent of its final adult size and then backed by neurochemical findings, brain scientists have inferred that intelligence too has its own critical period in the five years after birth. The more neuronal pathways that are walked upon during this window, the more elaborate the brain’s connectome will become.

Developmental biology, like genetics, provides us with examples that gradually push us towards the abolition of the wishful thought that the self could be plastic. Instead, we find that our physical and psychological identity is cemented well before we even become conscious of it and that our body and personality will never stray too far away from preset lines, however strongly we wish differently.

We conclude, in the end, through an apparent denial of our dream to be in control, to a pessimism whose nemesis is after all science itself, science with its contact lenses and gastric bands, with its transplantations and artificial hearts and cosmetic surgery. A pursuit that discovers determinism and all it does is to strive to escape from it.

Petros Fessas is currently serving in the Cyprus National Guard for another year and will read medicine at Cambridge after that

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by | August 6, 2012 · 3:02 pm

No one should have to walk the green mile

By Naomi Upton

In the novel “The Green Mile”, Stephen King tells the tale of John Coffey, a 6’8 black man falsely charged for the rape and murder of two young white girls. In reality, we would like to think this man would be released after his false conviction. Yet the setting King uses is inspired by the Louisiana State Penitentiary; a setting in which the ‘guilty’, alongside the falsely accused, are put to a horrific death for their ‘crimes’ through execution in the electric chair.

I lost many of hours of sleep devouring this book. The stark and painful reality of the monotonous process echoed throughout the whole novel – with the day-to-day events of the supervisors at death row, or “The Green Mile”, being overshadowed by the haunting presence of “Old Sparky” and the painful fates of the inmates.

I cried buckets.

Innocent John Coffey’s death was a particularly harrowing event, but I surprised myself when I found myself in absolute floods of tears at the death of Eduard Delacroix. Delacroix is portrayed as a guilty, insane mass murderer. While we warm to him throughout the novel, we cannot forget his crime. He is a killer. Yet my mind couldn’t eradicate the thought: this is so wrong, and yet this happened. In real life, not just in books. It still happens. I wasn’t ‘sad’ because he had been killed. I was angry. Angry because real people are forced to wait and watch the clock and greet death at a specific time. Real people are derogatorily forced to lie with their arms strapped to a table as an audience of vitriolic spectators watch as they die. Like an animal being put down. The novel haunted me for a while because, for some reason, my mind was not at all happy with the concept. I personally feel no one else’s should be either.

The death penalty, or capital punishment, is currently actively practiced by 58 countries. Most societies in the world have a history of the practice. Today, it is generally reserved for crimes of murder, yet some countries use it as a consequence of drug trafficking, rape, adultery and crimes against religion. There is a gruesome history of methods: the guillotine, strangulation, gas chambers and stoning are just some of the processes that have been abolished for the more ‘humane’ lethal injection. This year, it is estimated that just under 19,000 people worldwide are already awaiting the death penalty. 63% of surveyed Canadians believe the death penalty is sometimes appropriate. There is clearly still support.

George Bush once said, “I don’t think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge. I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other peoples’ lives.” This idea of ‘deterrence’ and ‘protection’ is key in the arguments that support the practice. By taking these people off the planet, innocent people are protected. By observing and being aware of this act, society is more likely to behave in a moral way to avoid this consequence. It seems logical I suppose.

In response to Mr Bush, by executing people we save lives do we? Wow – perfect sense. There is a concept called imprisonment, widely practiced across the globe, by which dangerous people are removed from society. No death. No suffering. No danger to the public. Prison allows time for retribution and forms of redemption whilst discouraging acts of immorality. In the famous 1924 case of Nathan Leopold, a convicted murderer spared from the death penalty, he used his time to help in the education of the other inmates and worked as an x-ray technician in the prison hospital. He helped society. His death on the other hand would have no beneficial consequence. The expense of imprisonment is also often perceived to be an argument. To house so many guilty people costs: food, healthcare, security, general wellbeing. But can we really compromise life for money?

Life cannot be compromised. It is the key basis of society – it is society. It is the only thing we own and to have it taken away by another is not right. Yes, many of those who are put to death have killed another. Maybe several people. Yet it is a ridiculous case of hypocrisy to oppose an idea and endorse it simultaneously. We gain nothing but a bittersweet revenge that should not be promoted for fear of the idea of death being trivialised.

We may think that if someone were to murder someone we love, we would like to see them suffer the same fate. Capital punishment is a painful, horrific procedure. Life imprisonment, whilst emotionally difficult, produces no physical pain, no hypocrisy, and could be viewed as perhaps a better form of retribution. Living with your actions seems a lot worse. In death we cannot consider, we cannot regret and more importantly, we cannot learn. We are only human. We can learn from our mistakes. Whilst there are boundaries on the term ‘second chance’, without it we are left with blood on our hands we cannot wash off. Blood that could not have been spilled and a situation that could be geared to better the being it once belonged to.

What about mistakes too? In “The Green Mile”, John Coffey was falsely accused and still put to death. Timothy Evans, who was falsely accused of killing his baby daughter when it was in fact his fellow tenant, was put to death in 1950 in the UK. Derek Bentley, a mentally challenged man from the UK, was put to death in 1953 for the murder of a police man, when it was in fact someone else who fired the gun. Should those responsible for the mistake be put to death too? What we can learn from this is that death is not a small matter; it cannot be deleted or undone if we change our minds. It is final. A consequence with such finality attached should not be used when mistakes can be so easily made.

So, if we allow capital punishment in certain countries, what does that mean for the rest of the world? This ‘culture’ of death has no beneficial moral implications. It leads to the attitude that death is the only answer to those who have done wrong. It leads to the view that society has no capacity to forgive or allow its members to learn and would much rather dispose of these seemingly emotionless burdens to society. No, crimes should not be committed and the people who commit them should be punished. But punishment should have purpose. I cannot find a purpose in death.

I recently watched a Channel 4 documentary written and directed by Werner Herzog, which explored the lives of death row inmates. They spoke tenderly of their families. In their eyes you could see how sorry they were. They were truly angry at their actions. These people are as real as the fear of death they all possessed. They’re not images on a screen or printed letters that make up a name on a page. At the end of each episode, the screen fades to black and if those who were interviewed had been executed between the making of the documentary and its running, their name and date of death were shown. One cannot help but feel the sense of loss.

Humans have no right to play at a game they should have no real control over. It is no justice to hypocritically carry out what we should be discouraging in the process. We need to learn to allow forgiveness and allow punishment in its proper form. Justice that is just. No payback. No revenge. No opportunity for mistakes. We can’t risk the most precious thing in life; we cannot risk life itself. So we should pity those we wait for their end point. We should feel lucky to live in a country where such injustice is forbidden and only hope that one day society can allow proper justice to be a universal concept of learning through life, not death.

Because, as in the final line of Stephen King’s novel: “We each owe a death, there are no exceptions… but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.”

Naomi Upton is currently studying A levels and hopes to study English Literature at University. She is a proud feminist and philosophy fanatic

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by | August 1, 2012 · 9:52 am

Mr Hainault the Liver Bird Part Two: Bertie Meets Bertie

By Robert Hainault

The second of Mr Hainault’s writings about his exploits in Liverpool. This time he inadvertently vandalises a piano and creates public disorder with a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Read the first part of his adventures here.

My second day in Liverpool started considerably later than the first. The night had whipped at my heels, forcing me into every bar on the way back to my hotel, so I ended up wedded to my bed until just shy of noon, the light stabbing me in the eyes as I lay gripping the pillow in white knuckled terror and shaking as though I might die at any moment. It wouldn’t have been an unwelcome development. Live I did, though, and after running my head under the cold tap and smacking myself in the face a few times in front of the bathroom mirror I began to feel a little more human. After pouring a bucket of ice down my trousers and giving myself one last great sock in the teeth I was ready for brunch.

I took a weightless stroll to Liverpool One, a small capitalist commune for the heavy of wallet and light of wardrobe, and took a coffee under a parasol near to where some young attractive things were busking at a piano.

It was the Liverpool piano festival, and accordingly, upright pianos had been satisfyingly plonked all around the city for anyone to play. I thought for a moment that my preconceptions about Liverpool had been quite unfair, as not a single one had been smashed, scrawled on, pissed against, or smeared with excrement. Then I realised that the ruffians must have been moved in to ghettos in advance of the Olympics. Presumably they are very large ghettos.

There were three of these charming buskers. An average pianist, a below-average singer and striking arab boy playing a cajón in such fashion as to have to sit with his knees very far apart and his groin pointing at me like a loaded gun. As is the case when people are facing an aggressive-looking firearm, I was mesmerised and unable to look anywhere except right down the barrel. It’s not quite a perfect analogy, as, of course, I would quite liked to have been shot.

Once the three musicians had exhausted their programme, I took my coffee and shopping bags over to the piano and gave the thing a good seeing to. The problem, of course, with outdoor pianos is that it is so very difficult to make them sound loud. Regardless, I persevered, giving coffee-sipping shoppers a rousing rendition of the Revolutionary Étude and a few hammer-horror inventions of my own. Poor thing; once I had finished with it all it could muster was the whisper of a lover who had roared a little too loudly during the act. It would seem that lecherous Londoners in bow-ties pose more of a threat to the pianos of Liverpool than rowdy, tracksuited Liverpudlians. Nevertheless, the locals didn’t seem to mind and I received a very enthusiastic ovation, which I took with a modest six encores.

After I had peeled from my face the knickers of my adoring fans (alas, no boxer shorts; I knew I should have played some Beethoven), and pocketed as much money as I could coerce from them, I returned to my table to begin one of the books I had bought earlier: ‘The Code of the Woosters’ by P.G. Wodehouse.

I am abashed to admit that I had never read any of the Jeeves and Wooster books, and I thought it about time that one bumbling Bertie met another.

‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection,’ said Stephen Fry of Wodehouse once. ‘You simply bask in its warmth and splendour.’ God, how right he was! It is truly magnificent stuff. There’s really not much else I can say about it without leaving ugly fingerprints all over its polished sheen. Allow me, instead, to offer a few glimpses of Mr Wodehouse’s rays:

About Bertie’s Aunt Agatha: ‘who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin.

About Madeline Bassett: ‘a droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits.’

And about arriving in the country: ‘The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.’

Even when one isn’t laughing one simmers with joy at the gloriousness of it. It is like slipping into a warm bath: the muscles slacken, the skin prickles gleefully, the cheeks pull the mouth into an irresistible dopey grin.

But there aren’t very many moments when one is not laughing.

I should explain that I have a rather bizarre and intrusive laugh. A peal of hyenine shrieks that one of my friends describes as being ‘audible to all within a five mile radius.’ My reading Wodehouse in a public space could, then, be described as an antisocial act, and, sure enough, the crowd that had so clamoured to hear my pianistic thunderings now began to disperse. Frantic parents rushed to evacuate their hysterical children, jamming their ears with old tissues, bottle corks, tampons. An outraged woman, her hands full of her own hair, snatched back her lacy undergarment with a disgusted look, as though somehow I had misrepresented myself. A nearby tramp, too weak to flee, smashed out his brains on the side of a Tesco. Hearing the approaching sirens, I collected my things and hurriedly absconded.

I left Liverpool with a sense that I had achieved something, though quite what it was I cannot say. As I crossed the Pennines again, my ears – unable to cope with the altitude a second time – ran with blood and I turned on the radio to distract myself. ‘Three killed in terrorist attack. There are suspicions that Al Qaeda have been using new sonar technology to -’ I cut the radio off. I had to concentrate on the road; I don’t really know how to drive.

To be continued…

Robert Hainault is a columnist for Not So Reviews

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by | July 28, 2012 · 1:26 pm

Holmes on the couch

By Ruth Ingamells

I thought I’d do a psychoanalysis of Sherlock Holmes. Partially because Freudian readings often anticipate the dark and disturbing and partially because they tell us something about ourselves (but mainly because of the dark and disturbing bits). To dare psychoanalysis requires questioning the self – always a dangerous but inevitable path.

For my psychoanalysis I will be using two main sources: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories and the most recent BBC interpretation. I’m sure you’ve come into contact with one if not both. If you haven’t watched the BBC series you might not want me to spoil it for you, I suggest you go watch it (now) then come back.

Now, sit back, relax, and tell me about your mother…

Just kidding. My psychoanalysis will be a look into the characters themselves, what they represent in the narrative as a whole and hopefully it’ll give you an insight into the darkness of Sherlock Holmes.

“I think you’re damaged, delusional and believe in a higher power – in your case it’s yourself,” says Ms Irene Adler in the BBC’s recent rendition. She sits naked on the sofa, one of the few times Sherlock (the dishy Benedict Cumberbatch) undergoes the ‘Holmes treatment’ analysis – and she’s right.

Sherlock’s ego is explosive; he is nothing but ego. His character would be boring were he laden with common anxieties, and no one would care if he solved mysteries in a normal way. The brilliance of Sherlock Holmes is his ability to ‘read’ a crime scene, because behind every crime scene is the story of an evil act.

Sherlock Holmes is a nicotine/cocaine addict, info-maniac. Imagine having so much information at your fingertips (in his ‘mind palace’ apparently). But his drive is a simple one: to rationalise, and it’s something we can all relate to since we all do it. We have a morbid curiosity in serial killers and rapists, because we all want to know ‘why’.

What a good-old Freudian ego Holmes is. Rationalise, understand and deduce. Hungry for stimulation, affirmation and attention.

Not far behind his google-brained buddy, Dr John Watson marches as his flawed but kindly counterpart, asking the questions we would ask as an avid listener. A story-teller in his own right of Sherlock’s tales and a different part of the ego – the true ego full of doubts and consciousness who protects the other, more sullen, part of himself. There is always a part to the ego that coddles the other, to even the keel and keep it sane.

Sherlock Holmes: what the ego wants to be; John Watson: what the ego is.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this, and we all know (I hope) Freud’s psychological structure – the ego, the id and the super-ego.

We’ve covered the ego in Freud’s psychic apparatus, and it seems prudent to move onto the insidious id. He pokes the proverbial scab of society to provoke a reaction. Moriarty, Sherlock’s mirror, is the master criminal who just wants to see the world burn. And what is the detective without the criminal? Their friction results in inevitable violence: “Holmes spent months in a private war against Moriarty’s criminal operations” (Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem”).

Moriarty is bestial hunger. Determined to consume the world under the excuse of boredom. It’s worth saying there is a difference between the BBC version of Moriarty and the books. Conan Doyle leaves a lot to the imagination – we barely meet Moriarty (two stories) but we understand from his crimes that he is rapacious and calculating with an obsession with chaos.

“I’m so changeable! It is a weakness of mine. Although to be fair to myself, it is my only weakness,” says Andrew Scott in the TV series – in my opinion the perfect Moriarty because he’s just so damned scary . There is something fundamentally frightening about a person who acts regardless of consequence – or rather – just because. Because he’s bored. Because he wants to. A reactive and volatile creature, the id is driven by instinct and a boiling body full of temper and excitations.

But the id is supposed to be hidden deep underground. The ego should never come into contact with the id directly – but Sherlock and Moriarty do. Previously Sherlock comes into contact with the result of the id – the crimes – but never the id singularly. So long as one is aware of the other, only one can survive. The id has surfaced into consciousness so what can the ego do but to drown him back into subconsciousness? As Holmes ‘kills’ Moriarty he has to kill himself. In the books they both fall into the river where the ego buries his troubled counterpart. Andrew Scott’s Moriarty kills himself to push Sherlock into his final fall. But Sherlock survives because he is the ego, and because he just cannot die while the stories continue because the stories are him as much as his character. And while John Watson is watching, Sherlock Holmes cannot die.

So, you’ve heard me out so far and you know who the id and the ego are, I assume you’re wondering who the father is? Who is the superior super-ego who contains, meddles and reprimands? They must be related. Mycroft Holmes, the older brother, who spiders his way through bigger things than Sherlock: “All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.” Conan Doyle writes. Like Moriarty he appears on the periphery of the stories, and we only meet him in four – the ego takes up all the room – but he serves as momentum for Sherlock in many ways. It is Mycroft who sends Sherlock on many of his adventures and it is Mycroft whose intellect transcends his brother’s to the extend of apathy. Mycroft needs more than solving crimes to keep him occupied.

“Don’t make me order you,” says Mark Gatiss, slightly tired of Sherlock’s petulance, in series two he serves tea: “I’ll be mother” – a little creepy don’t you think? and further on mocks Sherlock’s sexual naivety: “Sex doesn’t alarm me,” Sherlock pouts, “How would you know?” taunts Mycroft. The super-ego, while caring for the ego, mocks, orders and contains it. There is something terrible about the super-ego which the books capture better than the series. Mycroft is meant to be formidable – something which Guy Ritchie’s abortions of films completely failed to understand with Stephen Fry’s bumbling Father Christmas.

Mycroft will always be there to keep Sherlock in hand and keep him on the right side. In the books he often goes to Mycroft for help. In the series, despite his sulky attitude toward Mycroft, Sherlock will always attempt to please him, as the ego does the super-ego.

Among all this Sherlock and Watson are tugged between Moriarty and Mycroft, although, ultimately, the stories are really about them. We do not love the stories because of Moriarty or Mycroft, we love them because of Sherlock Holmes and his marriage to John Watson. Their semi-homoerotic relationship make the stories work, one without the other would be brain damage.

 Ruth Ingamells is editor of Not So Reviews

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by | July 22, 2012 · 2:00 pm

“Of Mice and Men” and ethics

By Petros Fessas

I recently had the agonizing, stimulating and wonderful experience of a medical school interview. As is natural for such a notorious assessment, the interview is an industry on its own right: there exists preparation literature for all types of it, including the one for aspiring medics. In my examination of the “possible questions” sections of a few of these books, I came across a quite basic ball-toss: “Tell us about an interesting book you read recently.”

As I wracked my brains for an answer, I was drawn to a very particular part of a very particular work: the twist ending of the simultaneously humble and glorious American high school staple: John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.

The brilliance of the novel is how it leads the reader to ponder whether George’s final act of murder is justified: it effectively grabs the reader by the ankle and drags him into the deep waters of social darwinism.  For a minute we believe that Lennie is indeed better off dead in Steinbeck’s unjust world: for a minute we forget that it is the world that needs to change.

Using “Of Mice and Men” to initiate a medical ethics discussion is problematic and controversial. Lennie does not express any wish to be put to death, nor is he entirely incompetent to make informed decisions. He doesn’t have an inescapable future of torturing pain and death: his friend George does all he can to mislead the raging crowd away from him. Finally, it can be argued, on the basis of his mental impairment, that accusing him of murder is wrong in the first place. Essentially, “Lenny’s euthanasia” is no euthanasia at all: it is very far from being a standard textbook case.

In examining George’s motives, we stumble upon questions that are best avoided: Does George shoot Lennie to free himself from the burden of a cripple? Lennie, despite his innocent child’s mind, has a history of getting into trouble and upsetting his friend’s plans. Before his life is taken from him, Lennie realises how much he is disappointing his friend and feels guilty for it. The notion of guilt forms the basis of a very solid argument against euthanasia: the chronically ill patient that requires years of personal and financial support from their family may be led to suffer the feeling of being unwanted and seek to painlessly terminating their life.

Nevertheless, Lennie does not ever approach this intense a feeling of guilt: his murder cannot be taken as euthanising based on this idea.

George wants to free Lennie from the humiliation and suffering that would coming with his being discovered by anyone seeking to punish him for his present or future misdoings. But that is a decision that rests upon Lennie: he is not beyond the mental line that would rob him off his autonomy. Additionally, one could never argue for euthanasia to preserve an incompetent patient’s dignity. Only a life of irreducible suffering could ever be discussed to be, on utilitarian terms, a heavier “load to carry” than a painless death.

What if we buy into an altruistic motive for murder? Lennie poses a danger to society with his reckless use of his physical power, so George decides to protect his future victims. This is irrational: the logical, sober friend would be better off nurturing, protecting, teaching patiently what right and wrong might be. Well, we could then argue the government is playing George: While a mentally intact penalized criminal is assumed to have sought remorse during their imprisonment and to have seized being dangerous to society, mentally impaired individuals with suspected violent behaviours can legally be kept under preventive detention in asylums until their treatment is (ever) proven effective. Doesn’t this ignore the civil rights of a  certain population group in favour of the majority’s sense of security? Certainly though, life-long detention on psychoactive drugs and sedatives is not equivalent to murder. (Or is it?)

Steinbeck’s classic is so masterful that it could never have provided the basis for an interview-appropriate debate. Murder is always wrong. The very fact that this is ever questioned while discussing a book is indicative of its magic. Fortunately, good literature is not straightforward. Unfortunately, medicine isn’t either.

Luckily, the question never came up.

Petros Fessas has plenty of time to think – he is serving in the Cyprus National Guard for another year. He will then read Medicine at Cambridge

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