tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/novelist-35981/articlesNovelist – The Conversation2023-02-15T12:21:41Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1996192023-02-15T12:21:41Z2023-02-15T12:21:41ZSalman Rushdie’s Victory City review: a storyteller at the height of his powers<p>Victory City is an epic chronicle of the rise and fall of Vijayanagar (the capital city of the historic southern Indian Vijayanagara empire), which acquires the name “Bisnaga” through ill-fated attempts at pronunciation by a Portuguese traveller.</p>
<p>The story unfolds as a fictional retelling of Bisnaga’s history, premised on the archaeological discovery of the Jayaparajaya, a poem by a writer named Pampa Kampana. Readers are told that its title translates as “Victory and Defeat”.</p>
<p>The unnamed narrator’s voiceovers and alternative versions of stories alert readers to the intersections of memory, memorialisation and history. As the narrator explains: “We knew only the ruins that remained, and our memory of its history was ruined as well, by the passage of time, the imperfections of memory.”</p>
<p>Throughout the novel, Rushdie explores the process of writing history – how it is recorded and how significance is apportioned. As Pampa Kampana states: “History is the consequence not only of people’s actions but also their forgetfulness.” </p>
<p>Rushdie is interested in how history is argued over and rewritten in contemporary moments. In particular, he takes aim at the populist exploitation of historical narratives for political gain. We hear that “fictions could be as powerful as histories” and that – paradoxically – “they were no more than make believe but they created truth”.</p>
<p>Through her poem, Pampa Kampana generates in Bisnaga’s inhabitants a collective stake in the city and the civilisation it wants to build. The novel chronicles the fate of the city through successive rulers, who ultimately cause its downfall. </p>
<h2>Victory City’s place in Rushdie’s oeuvre</h2>
<p>Victory City takes an interesting position in Rushdie’s wider body of work. In some ways it could be read as a companion volume to ideas he explored in The Enchantress of Florence (2008), where a European traveller arrives at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, claiming to be the son of a lost Mughal princess, Qara Köz, with magical powers. </p>
<p>Women take a central role in the world-building of both novels – Pampa, like Qara, is an enchantress.</p>
<p>Victory City also marks a return of sorts for Rushdie, who has not set a novel substantially on the Indian subcontinent for over a decade.</p>
<p>At a time of resurgent nationalism, Rushdie’s turn to the historical epic is interesting in its recourse to medieval history and the lineages he develops. </p>
<p>It’s reminiscent of Telugu historical film epics such as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2631186/%22%22">Baahubali</a> (2015), or the historical worlds conjured by Hindi filmmakers such as Sanjay Leela Bhansali in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3735246/">Bajirao Mastani</a> (2015), or Ashutosh Gowariker in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449994/">Jodhaa Akbar</a> (2008). </p>
<p>Victory City – similar to The Enchantress of Florence – showcases Rushdie’s research. The novel includes a bibliography of the works he referenced, including the history of Vijayanagar from the early 14th to the late 16th century.</p>
<p>Rushdie’s training as a historian at Cambridge University resonates in his fiction. There are detailed descriptions of court life, city dwelling and of encounters with travellers. There is also an astute sense of the partiality of history and how perspective alters in the different telling and re-telling of the same event.</p>
<p>In this way, Victory City sharpens the reader’s understanding of the writing of history and how it can be used to serve certain agendas.</p>
<h2>Rushdie’s plea for tolerance</h2>
<p>Victory City is Salman Rushdie’s fifteenth novel and the first to be published since <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/salman-rushdie-wont-stop-telling-stories">he was brutally attacked</a> in August 2022, which left him with life-changing injuries. </p>
<p>Although completed before the attack, the work can be considered a riposte to what <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/salman-rushdie-alleged-attacker-reveals-reason-stabbing-1735100">Rushdie’s assailant</a> stands for in its appeal to kindness and tolerance. To think about Victory City purely in terms of this incident, however, does Rushdie’s marvellous epic novel an injustice.</p>
<p>Rushdie is an assured storyteller at the height of his powers, revealing once again how important India is as a fount of his imagination. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Salman Rushdie in a blue suit holding a microphone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Salman Rushdie in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://epaimages.com/search.pp">Rafal Guz</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Victory City is profoundly humanist. Throughout, there is an appeal to justice, respect and equality – and perhaps a prism through which to reflect on how these ideals are increasingly under threat. Rushdie gives us the words and stories with which to defend them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199619/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Florian Stadtler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Victory City marks a return for Rushdie, who has not set a novel substantially on the Indian subcontinent for over a decade.Florian Stadtler, Lecturer in Literature and Migration, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1899462022-09-08T12:31:46Z2022-09-08T12:31:46ZGhost islands of the Arctic: The world’s ‘northern-most island’ isn’t the first to be erased from the map<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482580/original/file-20220902-20-ywtp99.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C9%2C2015%2C1270&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">These 'islands' are on the move.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Martin Nissen</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2021, an expedition off the icy northern Greenland coast spotted what appeared to be a previously uncharted island. It was small and gravelly, and it was declared a contender for the title of the most northerly known land mass in the world. The discoverers named it <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-set-foot-worlds-northernmost-island-180978566/">Qeqertaq Avannarleq</a> – Greenlandic for “the northern most island.”</p>
<p>But there was a mystery afoot in the region. Just north of Cape Morris Jesup, several other small islands had been discovered over the decades, and then disappeared.</p>
<p>Some scientists theorized that these were rocky banks that had been pushed up by sea ice. </p>
<p>But when a team of Swiss and Danish surveyors traveled north to <a href="https://www.arctictoday.com/several-islands-recorded-as-the-northernmost-on-earth-are-most-likely-icebergs-and-will-disappear-again/">investigate this “ghost islands”</a> phenomenon, they discovered something else entirely. They <a href="https://www.space.dtu.dk/nyheder/nyhed?id=3767be72-335e-4f02-a277-87a39aaf5ffe">announced their findings</a> in September 2022: These elusive islands are actually large icebergs grounded at the sea bottom. They likely came from a nearby glacier, where other newly calved icebergs, covered with gravel from landslides, were ready to float off. </p>
<p>This was not the first such disappearing act in the high Arctic, or the first need to erase land from the map. Nearly a century ago, an innovative airborne expedition redrew the maps of large swaths of the Barents Sea.</p>
<h2>The view from a zeppelin in 1931</h2>
<p>The 1931 expedition emerged from American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s plan for a spectacular publicity stunt. </p>
<p>Hearst proposed having <a href="https://www.airships.net/lz127-graf-zeppelin/">the Graf Zeppelin</a>, then the world’s largest airship, fly to the North Pole for a meeting with a submarine that would travel under the ice. This ran into practical difficulties and Hearst abandoned the plan, but the notion of using the Graf Zeppelin to conduct <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/209526">geographic and scientific investigations</a> of the high Arctic was taken up by an international polar science committee.</p>
<p>The airborne expedition they devised would employ pioneering technologies and make important geographical, meteorological and magnetic discoveries in the Arctic – including remapping much of the Barents Sea. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oVP2pZX2yGo?wmode=transparent&start=185" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The expedition was known as the Polarfahrt – “polar voyage” in German. Despite the international tensions at the time, the zeppelin carried a team of German, Soviet and U.S. scientists and explorers. </p>
<p>Among them were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Ellsworth">Lincoln Ellsworth</a>, a wealthy American and experienced Arctic explorer who would write the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/209526">first scholarly account</a> of the Polarfahrt and its geographical discoveries. Two important Soviet scientists also participated: the brilliant meteorologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Molchanov">Pavel Molchanov</a> and the expedition’s chief scientist, Rudolf Samoylovich, who <a href="https://hgss.copernicus.org/articles/4/35/2013/">performed magnetic measurements</a>. In charge of the meteorological operations was Ludwig Weickmann, director of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Leipzig.</p>
<p>The expedition’s chronicler was Arthur Koestler, a young journalist who would later become famous for his anti-communist novel “Darkness at Noon,” depicting totalitarianism turning on its own party loyalists.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="The giant airship in a hangar with people standing beside it looking very tiny" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482818/original/file-20220905-14-ohmst6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482818/original/file-20220905-14-ohmst6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482818/original/file-20220905-14-ohmst6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482818/original/file-20220905-14-ohmst6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482818/original/file-20220905-14-ohmst6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482818/original/file-20220905-14-ohmst6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482818/original/file-20220905-14-ohmst6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Built in 1928 and longer than two football fields, the Graf Zeppelin was normally used for ultra-luxurious commercial passenger transportation. Financing for the science mission came in part from the sale of postcards with stamps specially issued by the postal authorities of Germany and the Soviet Union.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zeppelin_Graf_Zeppelin.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The five-day trip took them north over the Barents Sea as far as 82 degrees north latitude, and then eastward for hundreds of miles before returning southwestward.</p>
<p>Koestler provided daily reports via shortwave radio that appeared in newspapers around the world.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The experience of this swift, silent and effortless rising, or rather falling upwards into the sky, is beautiful and intoxicating,” Koestler wrote in <a href="https://ebin.pub/arrow-in-the-blue-an-autobiography-1.html">his 1952 autobiography</a>. “… it gives one the complete illusion of having escaped the bondage of the earth’s gravity.</p>
<p>"We hovered in the Arctic air for several days, moving at a leisurely average of 60 miles per hour and often stopping in mid-air to complete a photographic survey or release small weather balloons. It all had a charm and a quiet excitement comparable to a journey on the last sailing ship in an era of speed boats.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>‘The disadvantage of not existing’</h2>
<p>The high latitude regions the Polarfahrt passed over were incredibly remote. In the late 19th century, Austrian explorer Julius von Payer reported the discovery of Franz Josef Land, an archipelago of nearly 200 islands in the Barents Sea, but initially there had been <a href="https://english.radio.cz/julius-von-payer-teplice-born-explorer-who-discovered-franz-josef-land-8113568">doubts about Franz Josef Land’s existence</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482577/original/file-20220902-25-23tpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A map showing Franz Josef Land in relation to Greenland and Russia." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482577/original/file-20220902-25-23tpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482577/original/file-20220902-25-23tpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482577/original/file-20220902-25-23tpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482577/original/file-20220902-25-23tpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482577/original/file-20220902-25-23tpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482577/original/file-20220902-25-23tpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482577/original/file-20220902-25-23tpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Franz_Josef_Land_location-en.svg">Oona Räisänen via Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Polarfahrt confirmed the existence of Franz Josef Land, but it would reveal that the maps produced by the early explorers of the high Arctic had startling deficiencies.</p>
<p>For the expedition, the Graf Zeppelin had been outfitted with wide-angle cameras that allowed detailed photography of the surface below. The slowly moving Zeppelin was ideally suited for this purpose and could make leisurely surveys that were not possible from fixed-wing aircraft overflights.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We spent the remainder of [July 27] making a geographical survey of Franz Josef Land,” <a href="https://ebin.pub/arrow-in-the-blue-an-autobiography-1.html">Koestler wrote</a>. </p>
<p>“Our first objective was an island called Albert Edward Land. But that was easier said than done, for Albert Edward Land had the disadvantage of not existing. It could be found on every map of the Arctic, but not in the Arctic itself …</p>
<p>"Next objective: Harmsworth Land. Funny as it sounds Harmsworth Land didn’t exist either. Where it ought to have been, there was nothing but the black polar sea and the reflection of the white Zeppelin.</p>
<p>"Heaven knows whether the explorer who put these islands on the map (I believe it was Payer) had been a victim of a mirage, mistaking some icebergs for land … At any rate, as of July 27, 1931, they have been officially erased.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The expedition would also discover six islands and redraw the coastal outlines of many others. </p>
<h2>A revolutionary way to measure the atmosphere</h2>
<p>The expedition was also remarkable for the instruments Molchanov tested aboard the Graf Zeppelin – including his newly invented “radiosondes.” His technology would revolutionize meteorological observations and led to instruments that <a href="http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/people/hamilton.php">atmospheric scientists like me</a> rely on today.</p>
<p>Until 1930, measuring the temperature high in the atmosphere was extremely challenging for meteorologists.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482816/original/file-20220905-21-2jk3mi.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482816/original/file-20220905-21-2jk3mi.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482816/original/file-20220905-21-2jk3mi.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482816/original/file-20220905-21-2jk3mi.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482816/original/file-20220905-21-2jk3mi.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482816/original/file-20220905-21-2jk3mi.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482816/original/file-20220905-21-2jk3mi.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pavel Molchanov and Ludwig Weickmann prepare to launch a weather balloon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://radiosondemuseum.org">Radiosonde Museum of North America</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They used so-called <a href="https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/2453/SSHT-0053_Lo_res.pdf?sequence=2">registering sondes</a> that recorded the temperature and pressure by weather balloon. A stylus would make a continuous trace on paper or some other medium, but to read it, scientists would have to find the sonde package after it dropped, and it typically drifted many miles from the launch point. This was particularly impractical in remote areas such as the Arctic.</p>
<p>Molchanov’s device could radio back the temperature and pressure at frequent intervals during the balloon flight. Today, balloon-borne radiosondes are launched <a href="https://courses.imperativemoocs.com/monitoring-the-oceans-from-space-01/week-1-oceans-and-climate/topic-1c-climate-change/global-radiosonde-network">daily at several hundred stations worldwide</a>. </p>
<p>The Polarfahrt was Molchanov’s chance for a spectacular demonstration. The Graf Zeppelin generally flew in the lowest few thousand feet of the atmosphere, but could serve as a platform to release weather balloons that could ascend much higher, acting as remotely reporting “robots” in the upper atmosphere. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A balloon is launched from below the airship" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482817/original/file-20220905-14-nvf176.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482817/original/file-20220905-14-nvf176.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482817/original/file-20220905-14-nvf176.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482817/original/file-20220905-14-nvf176.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482817/original/file-20220905-14-nvf176.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482817/original/file-20220905-14-nvf176.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482817/original/file-20220905-14-nvf176.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">To launch radiosondes from the zeppelin, weather balloons were weighted to sink at first. The weight was designed to drop off, allowing the balloon to later rise through the atmosphere.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://radiosondemuseum.org">Radiosonde Museum of North America.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Molchanov’s hydrogen-filled weather balloons provided the first observations of the stratospheric temperatures near the pole. Remarkably, he found that at heights of 10 miles the air at the pole was actually <a href="https://bulletin.cmos.ca/early-exploration-of-the-high-latitude-stratosphere-part-i-pre-world-war-ii-era/">much warmer than at the equator</a>.</p>
<h2>Fate of the protagonists</h2>
<p>The Polarfahrt was a final flourish of international scientific cooperation at the beginning of the 1930s, a period that saw a catastrophic rise of authoritarian politics and international conflict. By 1941, the U.S., Soviet Union and Germany would all be at war.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.edubilla.com/inventor/pavel-molchanov/">Molchanov</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Samoylovich">Samoylovich</a> became victims of Stalin’s secret police. As a Hungarian Jew, <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/arthur-koestler/">Koestler</a> would have his life and career shadowed by the politics of the age. He eventually found refuge in England, where he built a career as a novelist, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yogi_and_the_Commissar">essayist</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleepwalkers_(Koestler_book)">historian of science</a>.</p>
<p>The Graf Zeppelin continued in commercial passenger service principally on trans-Atlantic flights. But <a href="https://archive.org/details/hindenburg00moon">one of history’s most iconic tragedies</a> soon ended the era of zeppelin travel. In May 1937, the Graf Zeppelin’s younger sister airship, the Hindenburg, caught fire while trying to land in New Jersey. The Graf Zeppelin was dismantled in 1940 to provide scrap metal for the German war effort.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189946/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin Hamilton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The new discovery echoes a mission in 1931, when a five-day zeppelin flight sent robots to the stratosphere and redrew the maps of the high Arctic.Kevin Hamilton, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of HawaiiLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1858622022-06-27T05:36:36Z2022-06-27T05:36:36ZThe literary life of Frank Moorhouse, a giant of Australian letters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470982/original/file-20220627-14-l28jv8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C145%2C788%2C917&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Frank Moorhouse (1938-2022).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kylie Melinda Smith</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Frank Moorhouse, who died in Sydney on Sunday, made a significant and multi-faceted contribution to Australia’s literary life. </p>
<p>He was born in 1938 in Nowra, which he described as “a small Australian country town (two weekly newspapers but no public library)”. At the age of 17, he became a cadet journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald. His career as a fiction writer began – as do those of many writers today – by publishing short stories in literary journals: Southerly, Overland and Westerly. </p>
<p>In the 1970s, Moorhouse became known as one of Australia’s foremost experimentalists in fiction, working with discontinuous and fragmented narratives in his short-story collections Futility and Other Animals (1966), The Americans, Baby (1972), and The Electrical Experience (1974). </p>
<p>This was the period that saw Moorhouse join a flourishing community of writers living and working Sydney’s Balmain, including David Williamson, Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Vicki Viidikas, Bob Adamson, and others. Moorhouse claimed that Salman Rushdie was also temporarily part of the gang. </p>
<p>In 1972, with Carmel Kelly and Michael Wilding, Moorhouse co-founded the magazine Tabloid Story, “as a traveling exhibit for the short story”. Its mission was resist established modes of fictional realism, especially those that predominated in Australia. </p>
<p>This resistance included a willingness to write about sex. The Brisbane Vice Squad received complaints about one of the stories Moorhouse published in the first issue of the magazine and subsequently seized all copies from the University of Queensland campus.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470986/original/file-20220627-18-ky45j3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470986/original/file-20220627-18-ky45j3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470986/original/file-20220627-18-ky45j3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470986/original/file-20220627-18-ky45j3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470986/original/file-20220627-18-ky45j3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470986/original/file-20220627-18-ky45j3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470986/original/file-20220627-18-ky45j3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470986/original/file-20220627-18-ky45j3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Frank Moorhouse signs copies of Cold Light, the third book in his Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, Sydney, November 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mosman Library</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Throughout his career Moorhouse wrote explicitly and shamelessly about sex, especially in relation to fluid gender and sexual identities. He described himself as bisexual. He is one of the most high-profile queer Australian writers of his generation, unusual in that he has long written publicly about his sexuality. </p>
<p>Sexuality was one lens for Moorhouse’s longstanding and shifting relationship with Henry Lawson, and The Drover’s Wife in particular. The explicitly satirical take of his 1980 story was eventually replaced by the appreciative and autobiographical approach of The Drover’s Wife: A Celebration of a Great Australian Love Affair (2017). In this late work, Moorhouse speculates about Lawson’s sexuality as a prompt to think back on his own sexual history. </p>
<p>Although he steadfastly espoused the pleasures of the good life, Moorhouse worked to advance the interests of Australian writers. He held positions as union organiser for the Workers Education Association and the Australian Journalists Association. He was president of the Australian Society of Authors from 1981 to 1983. </p>
<p>Moorhouse was also actively involved in campaigns to protect the conditions under which authors worked in Australia. He was the plaintiff in a high-profile court case protecting authors’ copyright (University of NSW v Moorhouse, 1975). He spoke out about the parlous state of financial support for the literary arts in Australia, campaigned against censorship, and published a book-length account of ASIO’s surveillance of Australian citizens. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bringing-edith-home-frank-moorhouses-cold-light-7270">Bringing Edith home: Frank Moorhouse's Cold Light</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470987/original/file-20220627-18-8tb7c5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470987/original/file-20220627-18-8tb7c5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470987/original/file-20220627-18-8tb7c5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470987/original/file-20220627-18-8tb7c5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470987/original/file-20220627-18-8tb7c5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470987/original/file-20220627-18-8tb7c5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470987/original/file-20220627-18-8tb7c5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470987/original/file-20220627-18-8tb7c5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Moorhouse’s most significant achievement is the “Edith” triology: Grand Days (1993), Dark Palace (2000) and Cold Light (2011). These three novels are the most sustained and successful fictional engagement with the world of politics and international relations in Australian literary history. </p>
<p>“Politics is narrative, a fiction,” Moorhouse wrote in in 1981. The Edith novels dramatise the affective life of politics in heartbreaking detail. Edith Campbell Berry is a wonderfully engaging and flawed protagonist: a young Australian woman who sets her sights on the League of Nations and whose development as a person becomes inextricably bound up with the fortunes of that institution. </p>
<p>The novels trace Edith’s investment in the successes and failures of international cooperation – and her relationship with the gender-fluid diplomat Ambrose Westwood – in a way that enables the reader to understand something of how personal life and political commitment can be intertwined.</p>
<p>The career of Frank Moorhouse was marked by earnestness and experimentation, political commitment and irreverence. His old-school cosmopolitanism saw Grand Days controversially ruled ineligible for the Miles Franklin Award in 1994, on the grounds that it did not meet the criterion that it represented “Australian life”. Its sequel, Dark Palace, went on to win the award in 2000. </p>
<p>Moorhouse produced a huge body of work: autobiographical and journalistic pieces, short stories, collections, nonfiction books and novels. He was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1985 for his services to literature. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/is-writing-a-way-of-life/">an essay published in Meanjin in 2017</a>, Moorhouse wondered </p>
<blockquote>
<p>how a young man from an Australian country town could identify and aspire to belong to a way of life called “literary”? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Moorhouse set the example himself. Over the course of his long career, he changed the nature of Australian writing, worked to improve conditions for authors, and delighted his many readers: a life called “literary” indeed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/185862/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julieanne Lamond is the president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. </span></em></p>Frank Moorhouse devoted himself to advancing the interests of authors, but his greatest legacy is his own writing.Julieanne Lamond, Senior Lecturer in English, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1426882020-08-05T11:41:44Z2020-08-05T11:41:44ZHow cities are taking centre stage as characters in novels<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351112/original/file-20200804-20-uum6t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4243%2C2831&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shinjuku, Tokyo. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/tokyo-november-13-billboards-shinjukus-kabukicho-1012724596">Luciano Mortula - LGM/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Cityscapes have long played an important role in literature. They serve as backdrops for writers looking to explore themes of isolation, destitution, crime and excitement. </p>
<p>In Stephen Crane’s 1893 novel <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/332606/maggie-a-girl-of-the-streets-by-stephen-crane/">Maggie: A Girl of the Streets</a>, New York City is a constant presence in a family’s struggle with poverty, alcoholism, and a young girl’s fall from grace. Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview31">In the Skin of a Lion</a>, set in 1930s Toronto, uses the city’s past to expose the controversial history surrounding its construction and the involvement of the migrant population. </p>
<p>While the city is set to remain an important part of fiction, its role is starting to change. Cities are being brought to the forefront as characters in their own right. This use of cities in fiction is an area I am investigating in my <a href="https://www.cardiffmet.ac.uk/education/research/Pages/Research-Students.aspx">PhD research</a>, which explores the use of space in the novels of Japanese author <a href="http://www.harukimurakami.com/">Haruki Murakami</a>. </p>
<h2>Giving life to the city</h2>
<p>Primarily, the change from the city as a setting to a character is done in one of two ways. The first is to take a posthumanist approach, which gives a kind of artificial life to a city through a combination of technology and machines. The second is a more organic method, which portrays the city as a lifeform able to feel, breathe – and like all organic life, able to die.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Photograph of author NK Jemisin, a Black woman wearing a red top." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351283/original/file-20200805-22-bsppbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351283/original/file-20200805-22-bsppbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351283/original/file-20200805-22-bsppbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351283/original/file-20200805-22-bsppbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351283/original/file-20200805-22-bsppbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351283/original/file-20200805-22-bsppbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351283/original/file-20200805-22-bsppbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Author NK Jemisin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N._K._Jemisin_(cropped).jpg">Laura Hanifi/CC BY-SA</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Benjamin Oliver’s 2020 debut novel <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/18406024.young-adult-fiction-review-loop-ben-oliver/">The Loop</a> is an example of the posthumanist approach. It features a technologically enhanced society completely dependent on the city: a sentient creation of machinery and computers.</p>
<p>NK Jemisin’s 2020 novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/14/the-city-we-became-by-nk-jemisin-review-a-fizzing-new-york-fantasy">The City We Became</a> takes a more organic approach in its establishment of the city as a character. In this case, the novel’s cities are alive. They are organisms able to grow, mature, sicken and die. The hum of traffic and the noise of construction is the city’s heartbeat and the sewers its digestive system. </p>
<h2>Living Tokyo</h2>
<p>Haruki Murakami combines the organic with the posthuman in his 2004 novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jun/09/fiction.harukimurakami">After Dark</a>.</p>
<p>The narrator is a machine – a CCTV-style camera, able to move seemingly unhindered throughout the city. The narrator does not reflect on itself but does convey strong feelings as it depicts the events of the novel, leaving us to assume it is some form of artificial intelligence. </p>
<p>The novel, however, begins with this artificial narrator describing the city as akin to an organism: a combination of intertwining organisms connected by numerous arteries which “stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells”. </p>
<p>The city is a character in its own right. It is a living, breathing entity that sleeps, seemingly unaware of the events and spaces that the protagonist, a young woman named Mari, stumbles into. </p>
<p>After Dark is a story of two sisters who have grown apart. The novel takes place after the last train has left Tokyo, leaving all those remaining in the city trapped until morning. Mari, like many Murakami characters, is unable to find solace at home. Her sister, Eri – a beautiful and popular girl – has withdrawn from society and entered into a state of seemingly unending sleep. Insecurity and guilt over her sister’s current state drives Mari from her family home and into the city. </p>
<p>Despite Mari’s desire to remain an invisible customer of an all-night <a href="https://www.dennys.jp/language/en/">Denny’s restaurant</a>, she is swept up in the stories of characters who belong to the night. These characters are the embodiment of the city. They are an essential part of its lifeforce, and they are all connected. Each character has “a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective entity”.</p>
<h2>A mirror to humanity</h2>
<p>Murakami’s city is a reflection of his characters. On the surface, the city is a combination of seemingly dark and dangerous places. Yet within its walls are pockets of safety, comfort and human connection. Murakami uses the city to tell the story of those characters who frequent the streets after dark.</p>
<p>Writers like Murakami feel a responsibility to reflect important aspects of society in their fiction – and this is what we are seeing with the changes to the ways writers portray and use fictional cities. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="People on pleasure boats on a lake with cherry blossom in foreground and skyscrapers in background" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351285/original/file-20200805-372-zxjhs0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351285/original/file-20200805-372-zxjhs0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351285/original/file-20200805-372-zxjhs0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351285/original/file-20200805-372-zxjhs0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351285/original/file-20200805-372-zxjhs0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351285/original/file-20200805-372-zxjhs0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351285/original/file-20200805-372-zxjhs0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ueno Park, Tokyo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/tokyo-japan-april-2-cherry-blossoms-380652628">Takashi Images/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>We care about our carbon footprint and about the air our children breathe. So we nurture our cities. We add green spaces, we recycle, walk, cycle, use public transportation. We are proud of our cities and we think of them as a part of our identity. They are an important part of the way we live and we have come to depend on them. </p>
<p>It is no wonder writers are starting to see the city as a living entity. They are bringing the cities to the forefront of fiction and breathing life into them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142688/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gemma Scammell is affiliated with Cardiff University.</span></em></p>In recent fiction, cities are coming alive.Gemma Scammell, PhD Researcher in Literature, Cardiff Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1259402019-11-11T19:00:11Z2019-11-11T19:00:11ZHidden women of history: Frances Levvy, Australia’s quietly radical early animal rights campaigner<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300427/original/file-20191106-88414-it31dx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elephants destined for Wirths' circus on a ship's deck circa 1925. Early last century, Frances Levvy asked school students to write an essay on whether the exhibition of wild animals in travelling menageries was consistent with humanity.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">By Sam Hood ca. 1925-ca. 1945, State Library of NSW</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In <a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-marau-taaroa-the-sydney-schooled-last-queen-of-tahiti-122539">this series</a>, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.</em></p>
<p>We are all touched by relationships with animals — as domestic and working companions, wild inspirations, threats, or pests. </p>
<p>Some of us may know about the enduring worth of organisations such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Fewer of us may know about the 19th century foundations for animal advocacy among ordinary women beginning, more often, to find their voice in the public sphere. </p>
<p>The life of Frances Deborah Levvy (14 November 1831–29 November 1924) is worth revisiting because her ethical, political, and journalistic contributions speak to our current concerns for the more-than-human world. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-flos-greig-australias-first-female-lawyer-and-early-innovator-119990">Hidden women of history: Flos Greig, Australia’s first female lawyer and early innovator</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>A mainstay of the New South Wales’ branch of the <a href="https://colonialgivers.com/2016/09/21/womens-branch-of-the-society-for-the-prevention-of-cruelty-to-animals/">Women’s Society for the Protection of Animals</a>, Frances, with her sister Emma Clarke, founded Australia’s first Bands of Mercy. Membership of the Bands required pledging on entry: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I promise to protect all animals from ill-treatment with all my power. When I am compelled to take the life of any creature, I will spare all needless pain.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Bands of Mercy were based on the Bands of Hope, formed in the United Kingdom to support the temperance movement and, like them, were formal voluntary organisations in communities. Founded in 1875, they helped young people learn about and model the humane treatment of animals, coming under the RSPCA from 1882, the same year they were introduced into the United States. It was Levvy who then introduced <a href="https://bekindexhibit.org">Bands of Mercy</a> in Australia in the mid-1880s, growing the membership from 15 to over 20,000 people over her life. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300422/original/file-20191106-88382-1xudohn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300422/original/file-20191106-88382-1xudohn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300422/original/file-20191106-88382-1xudohn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300422/original/file-20191106-88382-1xudohn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300422/original/file-20191106-88382-1xudohn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300422/original/file-20191106-88382-1xudohn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300422/original/file-20191106-88382-1xudohn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300422/original/file-20191106-88382-1xudohn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Circular Quay harbour, Sydney, Australia, undated.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stock photo ID: 544124516, uploaded 4 July 2016</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Born in Penrith, <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/levvy-frances-deborah-13044">Frances was one of four children of Barnett and Sarah Levey</a>, the former a watch-maker and theatre director, both from London. When Levey died in 1837, his widow converted from Judaism to Christianity, which appears to have shaped Frances’s moral and religious outlook. On their mother’s death Frances and her sister Emma adopted the surname Levvy. After moving to Newtown in Sydney in 1874 with her sister, Frances later went to Waverley where she lived - single and focused on her mission - until her death in 1924.</p>
<p>Clues to what motivated Levvy’s lifelong dedication to the humane movement are found in The Daily Telegraph of Tuesday 30 January 1906. There, the reporter describes Levvy in ways that map onto ideas emergent at the time that women’s apparently natural propensity to nurture in the private sphere could spill into the public arena and contribute to social progress. </p>
<p>Levvy is painted as having:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a gentle, persuasive manner … intensely in earnest in her whole-hearted and disinterested wish to save our dumb [sic] friends from ill-treatment … the right woman in the right place. It is so eminently a woman’s work which she has undertaken, to inculcate gentleness and kindness in the hearts of the children of our city … </p>
</blockquote>
<p>When <a href="https://bit.ly/36mQONH">asked by the reporter</a> if she thought animals have souls, Levvy replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It seems to me that it is not at all improbable. There is an evident wish to believe it. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>‘Loving friend of dumb animals’</h2>
<p>Over several decades, Levvy effectively harnessed the printed word’s power to influence how animals were treated. She developed and edited a monthly periodical, The Band of Mercy and Humane Journal (1887–1923), which inspired offshoots such as The Band of Mercy Advocate (1887–1891).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300397/original/file-20191106-88394-1c5mtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300397/original/file-20191106-88394-1c5mtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300397/original/file-20191106-88394-1c5mtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300397/original/file-20191106-88394-1c5mtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300397/original/file-20191106-88394-1c5mtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300397/original/file-20191106-88394-1c5mtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300397/original/file-20191106-88394-1c5mtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300397/original/file-20191106-88394-1c5mtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first edition of the Band of Mercy Advocate.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">to come</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Levvy was equally adept at building community networks, and coalitions and defying moral strictures regarding the public conduct expected of “ladies”. As one report on her work (replete with deeply gendered and class-based assumptions) noted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The draymen and vanmen at the wharves and the drivers at the cab stands are regularly visited by this loving friend of dumb animals, from whom they receive copies of the Band of Mercy journal. This paves the way for a little general conversation on the subject of kindness to animals, and then some particular instance is … [introduced]; a horse has gone lame or has a sore shoulder, which should be dressed with a decoction of tannin — or the flies are stinging and worrying, and it is suggested that … pennyroyal added to a pint of olive oil should be passed lightly over the horses to secure their immunity from this pest. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300396/original/file-20191106-88382-rdzgko.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300396/original/file-20191106-88382-rdzgko.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300396/original/file-20191106-88382-rdzgko.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300396/original/file-20191106-88382-rdzgko.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300396/original/file-20191106-88382-rdzgko.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300396/original/file-20191106-88382-rdzgko.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300396/original/file-20191106-88382-rdzgko.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300396/original/file-20191106-88382-rdzgko.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A horse carriage with rider, Sydney, Australia, 1924.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stock photo ID: 1065147264, uploaded 8 November 2018</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It has been suggested that Levvy’s “greatest capacity was for writing” and my own research shows that an astute use of the periodical press ensured her work was known and supported. The editors of Boston’s The Woman’s Journal, wrote glowingly of her work in 1888, noting her journal provided “a place of record for the good deeds done”. In 1906, it described the journal as having “the distinction of being the first newspaper of the kind in Australia”.</p>
<p>The power of the press is worth stressing here, because it underpinned growing freedoms of speech and capacities to challenge the status quo that Levvy tapped into. Debates in the press around animal protection touched on fashion (and its relationship to prescriptive forms of femininity and consumerism) and sport (with its association with betting).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300415/original/file-20191106-88414-129wbwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300415/original/file-20191106-88414-129wbwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300415/original/file-20191106-88414-129wbwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300415/original/file-20191106-88414-129wbwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300415/original/file-20191106-88414-129wbwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300415/original/file-20191106-88414-129wbwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300415/original/file-20191106-88414-129wbwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300415/original/file-20191106-88414-129wbwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">S.T. Gill, Kangaroo Hunting, The Death, from his Australian Sketchbook (1865).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library of Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Seeing young people as agents of change</h2>
<p>In her writing and activism, Levvy often turned to children and, through them, to women — whose power she thought should extend from private to public spheres.</p>
<p>The 1906 report in The Daily Telegraph also describes how she gave lessons on animal protection at schools. She educated boys about the most humane method of transit of stock by rail, or training a colt to harness and saddle. And she set the following essay topics for mixed sex, upper level classes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Does civilisation in any way depend on possession of animals? Give reasons, state requirements, and value of poultry-keeping, incubator, food, incidental diseases. Is it suitable work for women and girls? Bee-keeping: Requirements and value. Hives, honey-producing flowers, food in winter, etc. Is it suitable work for women and girls? Is the exhibition of wild animals in travelling menageries consistent with humanity? Give your reasons.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300426/original/file-20191106-88382-1va7jo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300426/original/file-20191106-88382-1va7jo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300426/original/file-20191106-88382-1va7jo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300426/original/file-20191106-88382-1va7jo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300426/original/file-20191106-88382-1va7jo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300426/original/file-20191106-88382-1va7jo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300426/original/file-20191106-88382-1va7jo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300426/original/file-20191106-88382-1va7jo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Six Wirths’ Circus elephants with their attendants and a Shetland pony cross the Sydney Harbour Bridge as part of a publicity stunt in 1932.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Levvy, herself, reflected in 1906 (in relation to her work on equine welfare):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The difference between now and twenty years ago … is most marked. It is hardly ever now that one sees a sore-backed, lame, miserable-looking horse in the streets. Look at the cab horses and cart horses, what fine, well-kept animals they are. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>After Levvy’s death on 24 November 1924, the former NSW Minister for Education, Joseph Carruthers, paid tribute to her and announced a school essay competition in her name. Internationally, the Bands of Mercy began to lose momentum between the world wars, and languished after 1945. Although <a href="https://sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/products/83132">Peter Chen has provided a detailed time-line of developments in animal welfare in Australia</a>, he does not record a date for when they ceased here. </p>
<p>Levvy was of her time. She was, for example, deeply immersed in the progressive, democratising, and evangelical impulses that marked the 19th century. </p>
<p>But she was, I think, also ahead of her time, being among those women who understood and used the power of the press for socially transformative ends, and who recognised that young people are not citizens in waiting but active and influential agents for change. </p>
<p>At a time when the treatment of both animals and children was often questionable, and often based on narrow ideas of them as property, her actions and ideas were quietly radical and highly effective.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125940/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elaine Stratford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Born in 1831, at a time when animals were widely regarded as property, Frances Levvy used the power of the press and the passion of children to advocate for their welfare.Elaine Stratford, Professor, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1036332018-11-08T10:50:51Z2018-11-08T10:50:51ZKristallnacht 80 years on: some reading to help make sense of the most notorious state-sponsored pogrom<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244310/original/file-20181107-74783-1b8ixhf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">German citizens in Magdeburg the morning after Kristallnacht.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">German Federal Archive</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the evening of November 9 1938 a Nazi pogrom raged across German and Austrian cities. Nazis branded the atrocity with a poetic term: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/09/us/the-road-to-extermination-kristallnacht-lessons-pondered-by-historians.html">Kristallnacht</a> or “Crystal Night”. In that branding, fiction took hold. In English it translates as “The Night of Broken Glass” but that also tames the horror. Yes, broken glass from Jewish shopfront windows littered the streets, but also hundreds of synagogues and Jewish businesses were burned to the ground while Jews were beaten, imprisoned and killed. </p>
<p>Eight decades later, novelists are still trying to make sense of the pogrom – which was was designed to give the Nazi Party’s antisemitic agenda the legitimacy of public support.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Herschel Grynszpan just after his arrest on November 7 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bundesarchiv Bild</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kristallnacht marked a new epoch. Earlier pogroms, such as in Russia, were popular riots – now, for the first time, an industrial nation turned the forces of the state against an ethnic group within its own borders. To get away with this, a state needs to control the narrative. In this instance, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was the key player. When a young Polish Jew named <a href="http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/grynszpan.html">Herschel Grynszpan</a> entered the German Embassy in Paris and shot a German official, Goebbels saw the possibilities. He used news of the event to trigger Kristallnacht.</p>
<h2>Fear and disbelief</h2>
<p>The state that attacks its citizens also turns on its writers and free-thinkers – people who can construct a counter-narrative. The future Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti and his wife, the writer Veza, were such people. “We shall remember this November”, a Jewish character reflects in Veza Canetti’s novel <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/veza-canetti-the-tortoises/a-44559543">The Tortoises</a>, “when we are all being punished because a child went wrong and was led astray”. </p>
<p>In the wake of Kristallnacht, the Canettis fled Vienna for Paris and by January 1939 had settled in exile in London, where, in a feverish three months, Veza wrote her novel (unpublished until this century). It provides a window on how intellectuals fought to understand the unimaginable as it unfolded. “The temples are burning!” says one character. “Can you believe that’s possible?” asks another. So why don’t they go and see for themselves? “People haven’t the heart. They feel like criminals. They believe the temple will strike them down if they watch and don’t do anything about it.” </p>
<p><a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-59643-119-5">Emil and Karl</a>, the first published novel to feature the pogrom, came out in New York in February 1940. <a href="http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731-0172.xml">Yankev Glatshteyn</a>, a Polish Jew and immigrant to the US, wrote it in Yiddish to alert American Jewish youngsters to the perils facing their European kindred. It features two friends, one a Jewish boy and the other the son of socialists. Forced to scrub streets clean with their hands after Kristallnacht, both boys learn they must flee their country if they are to stay alive.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Novelist Christa Wolf was 27 when she witnessed Kristallnacht.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/arts/christa-wolf-dies-at-82-wrote-of-the-germanys.html">Christa Wolf</a>, who forged life as a writer in what became East Germany, fed her memories of the night into Nelly, a character in her 1976 novel A Model Childhood. Nelly knew nothing of Jews, but in that pogrom she witnessed a burning synagogue. “It wouldn’t have taken much for Nelly to have succumbed to an improper emotion: compassion,” Wolf reflected. “But healthy German common sense built a barrier against it: fear.” These asides of bitter irony note the chilling reality of the time: those who showed sympathy for the plight of the Jews risked sharing their plight.</p>
<h2>Still burning</h2>
<p>So to the 21st century. With events such as Kristallnacht locked away in history, what use are we novelists? Novels unlock history. Governments maintain their hold on narratives that justify abuses of power – but novelists can invert that narrative order to reveal neglected viewpoints.</p>
<p>In 2009, Laurent Binet novelised the life and death of Reinhard Heydrich (a man known as “Hitler’s Brain” – the German acronym which gives the book its title: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/16/hhhh-laurent-binet-review">HHhH</a>. Under orders from Goebbels, Heydrich set the November pogrom in motion. Binet maintains clinical control of the story, anchoring it to archived fact. Heydrich is shown measuring Kristallnacht’s efficiency, including the cost of all the broken glass.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The interior of Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, Berlin, which was burned on Kristallnacht.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Center for Jewish History, New York</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Michele Zackheim’s <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/03/28/facts-first-an-interview-with-michelle-zackheim/">Last Train to Paris </a> (2013) an American Jewish female journalist is dispatched into Nazi-controlled Berlin. Highlighted here is not the broken glass, but the fires. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[With] no wind, clouds of smoke were perched on top of each burning building. In between the buildings, perversely, as if Mother Nature were laughing at our idiocy, we could see the stars.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those fires also burn a synagogue in a remote Austrian town in <a href="https://www.jilliancantor.com/">The Lost Letter</a>, the 2017 novel by Jillian Cantor – a novelist who focuses on 20th-century history. Cantor’s novel follows Zackheim’s in looking back over decades, seeking emotional engagement with distant tragedy.</p>
<h2>All the toys in the world</h2>
<p>Günter Grass was ten on Kristallnacht, the same age as Oskar in his novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/oct/07/the-tin-drum-gunter-grass">The Tin Drum</a> (1952). The Jewish toyshop that supplied Oskar’s drum was burned down that night and the shop owner killed himself – “he took along with him all the toys in the world”. A character akin to Grass appears in John Boyne’s 2018 novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/05/ladder-to-sky-john-boyne-review">A Ladder to the Sky</a>. In his teens <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/nobel-prize-author-guenter-grass-i-was-a-member-of-the-ss-a-431353.html">Grass joined the Waffen-SS</a> – a fact he kept secret until old age. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A column of Jews being deported ‘for their own safety’, in November 1938, following the Kristallnacht pogrom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Federal Archives</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Boyne’s book, the central character, a writer, took actions after Kristallnacht that destroyed a Jewish family. Like Grass he contained the story for decades. Of course, the true storyteller must share and not conceal stories. Wolf showed us how fear was a barrier against compassion. Boyne makes us face the consequences of overcoming such fear.</p>
<p>Once people would have said Kristallnacht was unimaginable in a modern context. But they were wrong – <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/the-roma-peoples-hungarian-hell/">do Roma feel safe</a> from the actions of the Hungarian State today? How safe are the Rohingya in Myanmar, Mexicans in the US, the Windrush generation in the UK? </p>
<p>Through fiction we can enter history, encounter suffering and exercise compassion. We close our book, awakened. Fiction sharpens memory for when history repeats itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103633/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Goodman's new novel J SS Bach, which tackles the themes of the Holocaust and Music and stems from the historical events of 1938, comes out from Wrecking Ball Press in March 2019. </span></em></p>Eight decades on, the thought of the state encouraging people to attack groups of citizens is hard to believe. Here are some books that might help.Martin Goodman, Professor of Creative Writing, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/940502018-03-29T09:41:45Z2018-03-29T09:41:45ZWill Self: why his report on the death of the novel is (still) premature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212217/original/file-20180327-109172-tp3izl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C8%2C780%2C471&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:13323-Will_Self_Reading_-1786.jpg">Texas A&M University</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Will Self has declared the novel is “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/will-self-the-books-interview-alex-clark-phone-memoir">absolutely doomed</a>” – ironically, in an interview to promote Phone, his latest outing in the very medium he is condemning to death. Even casual readers will note that this isn’t the first time that the reigning Eeyore of British literature has announced the imminent passing of our most popular literary form. </p>
<p>Since 2000, Self has used the occasion of the release of his own books to repeatedly argue that the novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/will-self-the-books-interview-alex-clark-phone-memoir">is destined to</a> “become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony”. During his promotional duties for Umbrella, Self asked whether we are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/25/will-self-humans-evolving-need-stories">evolving beyond the need to tell stories</a>, while in 2014 he announced the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction">declining cultural centrality of the novel</a> due to the digitisation of print culture in an article to promote Shark.</p>
<p>Self’s obsession with killing off the novel might be more about ego than revenge, but his repeated attempts to plot its downfall form part of a much wider lament. For centuries, writers have been proclaiming the imminent passing of the novel form. More than 60 years ago, JB Priestley called it “a decaying literary form” which “no longer absorbs some of the mightiest energies of our time”. More recently, Zadie Smith complained of <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/">novel-nausea</a>, while <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/david-peace">David Peace</a> has asked how it is still possible to “believe in the novel form” because “<a href="http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2016/03/09/peace-preferisco-le-storie-brevi-il-dallindividualismoMilano14.html">storytelling is already quite ruined</a> by the individualism of Western society”.</p>
<h2>Difficult reading</h2>
<p>Reading beyond the exhausted sentiments and sensationalist headlines provided by self-harming novelists, what these sentiments collectively highlight is not the death of the novel at all, but the decline of “literary fiction”. Self’s explicit cultural fear is that a serious kind of novel – novels such as his own – that confront us with “<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/111963/will-self-umbrella-novel">difficult reading</a>” are destined for relegation to the realms of classical music and fine art. What Self’s repeated attempts on the life of the novel actually articulate is a deep-seated fear of the devaluation of literary fiction and its dethroning from a position of economic, popular and critical dominance as a result of the new contexts provided by a social media age.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"975399102849650688"}"></div></p>
<p>Prophesying the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33717596">imminent demise of the novel</a> at the hands of digital technology has become popular in contemporary critical discourse, especially as the form entered the new millennium. Self is one of many authors who have publicly debated the challenges of writing novels in a digital era. </p>
<p>Andrew O’Hagan recently argued that the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/17/privacy-literature-social-media-andrew-ohagan">intense personal perspective</a> offered by platforms such as Twitter and Facebook means that the novel has nowhere left to go in offering an inside account of the lives of others. The crux of both O’Hagan and Self’s sandwich-board arguments ultimately lie in a belief that future readers will be unwilling to disable connectivity and engage only with a physical form of text in relative isolation from the hyper-networked society around them.</p>
<p>But the “death” of literary fiction does not have to come at the expense of the rise of the popular – or of the digital. Smartphones and streaming can sit alongside literary awards and “difficult” novels and offer us vital insights into, and ways of representing, contemporary experience. The novel is perhaps the most hospitable of all forms and opens itself willingly to new voices, languages and technologies. And not all writers are hostile to the impact of the digital on literary form – in their use of social media to tell stories in new ways, both <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/great-american-twitter-novel">David Mitchell and Jennifer Egan</a> have proved that the novel has an innate ability to ingest and adapt to a rapidly changing world. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=623&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=623&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=623&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The novels of a Self-publicist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ebay</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Importantly, the novel also presents us with perspectives and experiences different from our own. In its contemporary concern with the trope of an “other” who transgresses the boundary of the domestic home, the 21st-century novel offers a vital consideration of the implications of a <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/in-conversation/interviews/2016/oct/ali-smith-on-autumn/">post-Brexit Britain</a>. The novel disrupts and challenges, and in turn elicits responses from readers to, the contemporary concerns it presents.</p>
<h2>Understanding the world</h2>
<p>The etymology of the word “novel” lies in the “new” – and all evidence suggests that the form will continue to evolve – and ingest, rather than ignore, the new languages of the contemporary. The novel – whether in the form of literary or “popular” fiction – helps us to understand the world in which we now live and informs our attempts to navigate both the past and the future. As well as its long-argued innate value, this capacity of the novel to help us negotiate the changes of the present is also key to its survival – and evolution – in the coming century.</p>
<p>As a case for its vitality, Self’s pervasive campaign against the novel couldn’t be more helpful. In repeatedly citing the death of the novel, Self and his band of merry naysaying novelists whip up resolve and resurrection of the form in a context of challenge and change. In doing so, their comments remind us to value this familiar, yet continually innovative form that continues to adapt, ingest and shape-shift, remaining relevant to each generation of readers – and writers. </p>
<p>Literary snobbery and Modernist nostalgia aside, Self’s headline-grabbing soundbites encourage new understandings of wider shifts in novel writing and reading in the 21st century. With writers continually sticking more nails in its half-open coffin, the novel seems destined to remain stuck in critical debates that remain wilfully oblivious to its sustained success in the new millennium. </p>
<p>Emerging from a long winter of discontent, perhaps it is the strange fate of the novel to exist in a permanent state of imminent demise and doom, with an innate awareness of itself as the one genre that literature simply cannot do without.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94050/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katy Shaw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Literary fiction is robust enough to withstand the challenges the 21st century throws at it.Katy Shaw, Professor of Contemporary Writings, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/816582017-08-03T00:04:13Z2017-08-03T00:04:13ZWorth reading: Future visions of women, war, time and space<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180090/original/file-20170727-8492-1uz4jp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3000%2C1998&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Former Globe and Mail newspaper reporter turned novelist Omar El Akkad contemplates his debut book _American War_ in his publisher's Toronto office in this 2017 file photo. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.cpimages.com/fotoweb/cpimages_details.pop.fwx?position=3&archiveType=ImageFolder&sorting=ModifiedTimeAsc&search=omar%20and%20el%20and%20akkad&fileId=7ED4E565C8CEED276553137C3F07278F0211563F5E7047DF3AAB663AE59BB0CF1642B0B80D34257E6710EC2568FB7698B59B4D70A14C35A58152C97161CDE0D6B04E7CE9AA485A90E4AEC54C277A369E3B7CAC16A4D3910C42F841C1FF39A6F82A1B1FF576DC98DF2CBC8470DC9E2A6ECB3FE13564EA8A05F21FEEB4402E3B87313C2338D9C9BAFAFBE8F7FDA2D826E5">(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young)</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s note: The Conversation Canada asked our academic authors to share some recommended reading. In this instalment, Bryan Gaensler, an astronomer who wrote about how an <a href="https://theconversation.com/humans-in-2167-internet-implants-and-no-sleep-79402">life will change for people in 150 years</a>, highlights a few of his recent picks.</em> </p>
<p>My passion is science fiction. Here are my favourite sci-fi books that I’ve read this year:
</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>The Power</em> by Naomi Alderman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29751398-the-power"><em>The Power</em></a></h2>
<p>by Naomi Alderman (Fiction. Hardcover, 2016. Penguin.)</p>
<p>Women around the globe spontaneously develop the ability to deliver electric shocks through their fingertips. As they begin to use this power to intimidate, control and kill, the world order is turned upside down.</p>
<p>A spectacular novel, and surely the favourite to sweep all the sci-fi book awards for 2017. People can be both cruel and good-intentioned, often at the same time. Introduce a new power imbalance, and society is abruptly transformed. Wonderful writing, and a whopper of a story twist. Turns <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> on its head.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>American War</em> by Omar El Akkad.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32283423-american-war"><em>American War</em></a></h2>
<p>by Omar El Akkad (Fiction. Hardcover, 2017. McClelland & Stewart.)</p>
<p>A hundred years from now, Florida has vanished under the seas, the Bouazizi Empire is the new world superpower, and the United States has begun its second civil war. In the South, a young woman ends up in a refugee camp and is slowly radicalized into terrorism.</p>
<p>An intense, moving portrait of a future America that maybe isn’t the future after all. The characters are complex and the story is all too real. A spectacular debut.</p>
<p> </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>All Our Wrong Todays</em> by Elan Mastai.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27405006-all-our-wrong-todays"><em>All Our Wrong Todays</em></a></h2>
<p>by Elan Mastai (Fiction. Hardcover, 2017. Doubleday Canada.)</p>
<p>Tom Barren travels back in time, accidentally alters the course of history, and returns to a horrifically changed, dystopian present day. The catch? Tom grew up in a utopia of flying cars and moon bases, and the dystopia that he finds himself trapped in is <em>our</em> timeline, warts and all.</p>
<p>A gem of a story that provides several new twists on time travel. If you’ve screwed up the timeline, should you fix it? What if there were two different ways to travel through time, with different rules and different consequences? And under all of this is the classic sci-fi question writ on the scale of billions of lives: Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few? Hard to put down, with a lovable lead character.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>4 3 2 1</em> by Paul Auster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30244626-4-3-2-1"><em>4 3 2 1</em></a></h2>
<p>by Paul Auster (Fiction. Hardcover, 2017. McClelland & Stewart.)</p>
<p>The life story of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, born in 1947 in Newark, N.J. Except that this is the story of four identical Fergusons, each of whom take divergent paths as their lives play out.</p>
<p>A tour de force story of adolescence and the path not taken. It’s hard to believe a single author could possibly cram so many real-life details, emotions and characters into a single book. Extraordinarily memorable and engaging.</p>
<p> </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>The Collapsing Empire</em> by John Scalzi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30282601-the-collapsing-empire"><em>The Collapsing Empire</em></a></h2>
<p>by John Scalzi (Fiction. Hardcover, 2017. Tor.)</p>
<p>Humans have spread throughout a galactic empire, our worlds interconnected by faster-than-light wormholes. But what happens to trade, the economy and civilisation itself when the wormholes start to break down?</p>
<p>A fun and fast-spaced space opera, centred on some forthright women and some fresh ideas. In the spirit of Asimov’s <em>Foundation</em>, Scalzi explores the theme of the downfall of empire on a galaxy-spanning scale.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81658/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bryan Gaensler receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and from the Canada Research Chairs Program.</span></em></p>Astronomer Bryan Gaensler picks five speculative and science fiction novels worth reading, including Omar El Akkad’s American War.Bryan Gaensler, Director, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of TorontoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/737902017-02-28T14:52:01Z2017-02-28T14:52:01ZRest in power, Miriam Tlali: author, enemy of apartheid and feminist<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158727/original/image-20170228-29917-u3nyzn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait of Miriam Tlali as part of Adrian Steirn’s 21 Icons South Africa project. Date: 15.10.2014.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Adrian Steirn/Courtesy of 21 Icons South Africa</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Renowned South African author <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">Miriam Masoli Tlali</a> passed away on February 24 2017, aged 83. Born November 11 1933 in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, Tlali was the first black South African woman to publish a novel in English within the country’s borders. She is best known for this work, first published as “<a href="http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/tlali/mukhuba3.html">Muriel at Metropolitan</a>” in 1975 by Ravan Press. </p>
<p>It was re-issued in 2004 by the title she had preferred from the start, “Between Two Worlds”. Based on her time as an administrative assistant at a furniture store in downtown Johannesburg during the height of apartheid, the novel documents the daily humiliations of petty apartheid. There were two types of apartheid, grand apartheid and the petty version, which the <em>New York Times</em> once <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/14/opinion/before-it-s-too-late-in-south-africa.html">described</a> as,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the practice of segregation in the routine of daily life – in lavatories, restaurants, railway cars, busses, swimming pools and other public facilities. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Muriel at Metropolitan”/“Between Two Worlds” was the first literary text that portrayed the degrading conditions under which African women laboured during apartheid. It highlighted how strict influx control into “white” cities hampered black women’s opportunities for employment and fulfilling family lives.</p>
<p>Tlali hated the original title of her first novel. She agreed to have it published under that name because her mother was close to dying, and she wanted her to see the novel in print before her death. In the preface to “Between Two Worlds”, Tlali recounted that after the novel’s publication: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I returned to my matchbox house in Soweto, locked myself in my little bedroom and cried… Five whole chapters had been removed; also paragraphs, phrases, and sentences. It was devastating, to say the least.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite these misgivings, “Muriel at Metropolitan” made a big impact globally. Forty five different editions of the novel were published between 1975 and 2005, with translations into three languages.</p>
<h2>Protest literature</h2>
<p>Tlali recovered from her devastation, going on to publish the Black Consciousness novel “<a href="https://theconversation.com/under-the-influence-of-the-black-consciousness-novel-amandla-62374">Amandla</a>” (1980). It was grouped by critics as part of the “Soweto School” of protest literature. </p>
<p>The novel is a rich evocation of the youth uprising against apartheid education and the apartheid state in 1976. Inspired by the uprising and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a>’s Black Conciousness <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/defining-black-consciousness">ideology</a>, it centres around Pholoso, a young freedom fighter who rallies the youth of Soweto against apartheid. He goes on to become part of the underground resistance, eventually going into exile.</p>
<p>Soweto, and its abject relationship to the wealthy Johannesburg, was an enduring concern for Tlali in her fiction. She published “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1118155.Footprints_In_The_Quag">Footprints in the Quag: Stories and Dialogues from Soweto</a>” (also published as “Soweto Stories”), a collection of short stories delving in the experiences of Sowetans (mostly women) in 1989.</p>
<p>She also published a collection of short stories, interviews and essays in “<a href="http://www.news24.com/Archives/City-Press/Behind-the-Icon-Miriam-Tlali-Her-story-20150429">Mihloti</a>” (1984), published by Skotaville Press, which she helped establish. Tlali was also a frequent contributor to the anti-apartheid literary journal “<a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/staffrider-magazine-1978-1993">Staffrider</a>”, which she co-founded. The journal was an important vehicle for publishing black literature and criticism during the apartheid years, often the only South African outlet for black creative writing.</p>
<h2>Enemy of the state</h2>
<p>Because of her stature internationally and the political content of her novels, Tlali became an enemy of the state. Both her novels were immediately banned by apartheid censors. Her political and literary prominence made her a target of the regime’s notorious <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03446/05lv03497.htm">Security Branch</a>. This dreaded secret police unit repeatedly harassed, arrested and assaulted Tlali as a tactic of intimidation. </p>
<p>When I interviewed her in 2006, Tlali recalled being brutally beaten in her home in Soweto by police on several occasions. During those years, she would wrap her manuscripts-in-progress in plastic shopping bags at the end of each day, and bury them in her back yard to avoid police confiscating them during raids.</p>
<p>Despite this persecution, Tlali never countenanced leaving her beloved Soweto. For her, going into exile was “unthinkable”, though she travelled frequently to take up residencies and teaching opportunities. </p>
<p>She recalled, on her return to South Africa from a residency at Iowa State University, having to smuggle her manuscript off the plane. Police were waiting for her at passport control, ready to seize any politically incendiary material. Tlali gave her manuscript to an American on board the flight while waiting to deplane. She quietly retrieved it from the American embassy at a later date. </p>
<p>She was also resident at Yale University between 1989 and 1990, wrote a play, “Crimen Injuria”, while at a residency in Holland, and was often more recognised internationally than in her own country.</p>
<h2>Intersectional feminist</h2>
<p>Tlali was an intersectional feminist long before this term was coined by <a href="http://www.aapf.org/kimberle-crenshaw/">Kimberlé Crenshaw</a> in 1989. Or before intersectional feminist politics was made current in South Africa by the <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/topics/rhodesmustfall-23991">#RhodesMustFall</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%23FeesMustFall">#FeesMustFall</a> student movements.</p>
<p>Her fiction, at first dismissed by literary critics (mostly men) as too descriptive – they say it had an almost stenographic quality. It is the only work of its time and place that systematically dissects the overlap of apartheid racial discrimination and patriarchal oppression. Tlali’s fiction depicted the intersectional nature of African women’s oppression under both of these systems. </p>
<p>She belonged to the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/womens-national-coalition">National Women’s Coalition</a>, which advocated for the inclusion of women’s rights in South Africa’s constitution in the run-up to the first democratic election in 1994. As a member Tlali had an incisive analysis of women’s oppression, and was a passionate advocate against gender-based violence. </p>
<p>This is a prominent theme in her fiction. Both “Amandla” and “Footprints in the Quag” highlight the occurrence and effects of domestic violence, rape and sexual harassment in the township of Soweto. Yet her women characters are not victims – they fight back, physically or through educating their communities. They carve out for themselves social spaces where they are able to organise against such abuse. </p>
<p>Tlali received numerous awards during her lifetime, most notably, the Presidential Award, the <a href="http://www.gov.za/about-government/national-orders-awards-28-october-2008">Order of Ikhamanga (Silver)</a> in 2008, as well as a <a href="http://sala.org.za/2005-2/miriam-tlali/">lifetime achievement award</a> from the South African Literary Awards.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73790/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Boswell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Author Miriam Tlali was an intersectional feminist long before this term was coined or its politics made fashionable in South Africa by student movements.Barbara Boswell, Senior Lecturer, English, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/732402017-02-23T11:32:49Z2017-02-23T11:32:49ZA Clockwork Orange: ultraviolence, Russian spies and fake news<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158066/original/image-20170223-24090-1ha9jj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A painting of Alex played by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick's film of A Clockwork Orange.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nossreh/10788576943/in/photolist-hrmh4i-a3hiMe-5HkADe-kjdoG4-qpev96-qpebYi-GuDoMM-bDgqZX-qn8aoy-qphcPa-bmgf65-q82Prz-q81Mjx-q7Z3EM-ebfyR2-6s9p18-6WiAbf-psEDvP-qpqyLZ-qpqZUe-49znPR-qpqJ7c-jhHPDv-4q9gbY-b1hmFV-4BqKVo-q7XHrZ-6NSk1D-q7TUm3-qpfBvH-qph9ue-qpexCK-q7Rqb9-qprZb8-qpqr3c-awG2mJ-6T8D43-qpmXbo-RLWSav-qn7Y5S-q81cx2-qpfiNP-q81HMT-qn9Mih-qppsQx-b1gPUk-qn97Uy-qpmRUG-q7RdpS-pPPao1">Alex DeLarge/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The writer Anthony Burgess is most famous for his novel, <a href="https://www.anthonyburgess.org/a-clockwork-orange/">A Clockwork Orange</a>. This month marks the centenary of the writer’s birth and his dystopian vision still casts a long shadow over popular culture. But what is perhaps more intriguing is how the book was once drawn into a world of Russian espionage, fake news and paranoia.</p>
<p>During his lifetime, Burgess wrote over 30 novels, 25 non-fiction books, three symphonies and countless other musical works. But 55 years after its publication, it’s still A Clockwork Orange which has the most enduring influence.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158069/original/image-20170223-24069-1b6bq5e.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158069/original/image-20170223-24069-1b6bq5e.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158069/original/image-20170223-24069-1b6bq5e.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158069/original/image-20170223-24069-1b6bq5e.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158069/original/image-20170223-24069-1b6bq5e.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158069/original/image-20170223-24069-1b6bq5e.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158069/original/image-20170223-24069-1b6bq5e.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anthony Burgess.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhillary/13880336105/in/photolist-o163Lo-RLVwFN-8iR9VZ-r7gcCH-sKro4-8k5o2E-nYSVTq-pyN6Qr-nYV6jK-hrmh4i-n9ymkK-CMMkJ4-ctaCoE-HxRwA-JeeWDz-9cMzkC-2oCBDj-ctaBR7-awG2mJ-hBqiL1-7SL7NW-hBq9EK-asYndC-9kixTJ-3snvph-7HSBEN-78efe6-oRKZnd-Ne8h4g-9oZTYw-C8Hp2V-BFAa63-xw4JWE-xuyzXf-wA1HWp-xfoeBT-xwTevn-PyGRgh-NRfqE5-t5XkhS-7yDMpo-62ok9R-4SpLFM">Mark Hillary/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the more unusual examples of this influence was the novel’s appropriation by the espionage community. During the 1970s, the title supposedly became the codename for an <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q6NTDAAAQBAJ">alleged campaign</a> to undermine the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Prompted, apparently, by fears that Wilson was a Soviet agent and that he’d been placed in office after the KGB had poisoned the previous Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell.</p>
<p>Elements within the British secret service are alleged to have bugged his staff’s phones, burgled their houses and instigated a campaign to spread false rumours about him through the media. All of this was intended as a precursor to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/15/comment.labour1">a coup</a> which would see the army seize Heathrow airport and Buckingham Palace and put an interim prime minster in place. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158068/original/image-20170223-24069-1hqbsal.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158068/original/image-20170223-24069-1hqbsal.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158068/original/image-20170223-24069-1hqbsal.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158068/original/image-20170223-24069-1hqbsal.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158068/original/image-20170223-24069-1hqbsal.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158068/original/image-20170223-24069-1hqbsal.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158068/original/image-20170223-24069-1hqbsal.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bluesmuse/3990612536/in/photolist-75CW5q-nYV6jK-9FzHi-q7Ta8j-fcVZWp-98aS95-nY9JWn-7KLqt7-CMMkJ4-68NJ1m-5izAWS-A6MxW-2gAtam-jsQcTt-qhiHy1-FaM2m-7Djxem-7Z7K7n-eruDvh-DkEHA-4MvSPo-4mFX7x-fdbjhS-7HSBEN-7FU5HR-5yHDQA-D5Dd3-fdbj3d-8usmkU-FaM2o-ctaCoE-bne7jH-7yDMpo-4oMvBb-8EasUc-73CZjH-9cMzkC-5oQeWm-aCu6hf-4vbkXL-fWpfY8-8vmgVj-6bCcBm-dCafZ-NgJ5f-7xXesw-ctaBR7-bw96ft-6arB9-5yX6GV">Simon Zirkunow/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The symbolism of the use of this title – of a novel about state brainwashing and civil disorder – is inventive, to say the least. It also has a strange resonance today, where again there’s rampant speculation about the way fake news and the use of “kompromat” (compromising material) is being used to manipulate Donald Trump who some fear is under the control of the Russian secret service.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"832238070460186625"}"></div></p>
<p>This story may appear as something of an outlier in the influence the book has had. But politics and culture have rubbed shoulders throughout its history.</p>
<p>Someone else who was greatly influenced by the book was David Bowie. In the early 1970s, he’d wanted to make a musical of another famous work of dystopian fiction, 1984, but George Orwell’s widow, Sonia, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/david-bowie-dreamed-of-turning-george-orwells-1984-into-a-musical.html">refused him the rights</a>. Instead, he adapted his ideas into Diamond Dogs and created his own dystopian world: a broken society where “<a href="http://www.fabulousfreaks.uk/diamond-dogs-album-info">a disaffected youth … lived as gangs on roofs and … had the city to themselves</a>”. </p>
<p>In the Britain of that time, with its food shortages, power cuts and IRA bombings, an artistic fascination with these ideas isn’t that surprising. The bleakness of the social landscape shared much of the <a href="https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/1984-dodo/">mood and outlook</a> of the post-war period in which Orwell was writing. But the world that Bowie ended up imagining arguably has as much to do with Burgess’s “<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Clockwork-Orange-Music-Modern-Plays/dp/0413735907">world of adolescent violence and governmental retribution</a>” depicted in A Clockwork Orange. </p>
<p>Coincidentally, Sonia Orwell also played a bit part in an incident which was formative in the inception of the novel. In 1944, when Burgess was stationed with the army in Gibraltar, it was Sonia Orwell who <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/clockwork-orange-1124980.html">sent the letter</a> informing him that his wife, Lynne, had been attacked in London by four GIs. Lynne suffered a miscarriage and it seems likely that the incident contributed to her later ill-health and early death. </p>
<h2>Violence and catharsis</h2>
<p>Not only does A Clockwork Orange explore a society overrun by random acts of recreational violence but Burgess also includes a scene in which an unnamed writer is attacked and forced to watch while his wife is raped. In his <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/57023/a-clockwork-orange/">introduction</a> to the novel, Blake Morrison suggests that writing this was a form of catharsis for Burgess – although later in his life Burgess spoke of the dejection he felt at the accusations that his artwork was some sort of promo glamorising violence. </p>
<p>Following a failed attempt by the <a href="http://psychobabble200.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/august-14-2009-lost-world-rolling_25.html">Rolling Stones to film the novel</a> and Andy Warhol’s highly <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059880/">experimental take on it</a>, Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated adaptation came out in 1971. This further bolstered the cultural impact. Bowie, for example, borrowed from both its visual style and soundtrack for his <a href="https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/category/the-rise-and-fall-of-ziggy-stardust-and-the-spiders-from-mars-1972/">live shows</a>, while his <a href="http://www.5years.com/countdown30th.htm">fascination</a> with Burgess’s invented language, Nadsat, was to continue right up until his final album Blackstar, which features a song <a href="https://genius.com/David-bowie-girl-loves-me-lyrics">mostly written in it</a>. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">David Bowie - Girl Loves Me (Audio)</span></figcaption>
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<p>In 1973 – around the same time as the Wilson plot was first being hatched – Kubrick withdrew his film version of the novel from British cinemas, following several high-profile cases of supposed copycat violence. For Burgess, the film had always been a mixed blessing. When the novel came out in America, his publishers decided to cut the final chapter, which shows the protagonist grown up and wishing to settle down and start a family. Instead, it ends with him unrepentant and returned to the psychotic mindset that he’d had prior to his brainwashing treatment. It was this version that Kubrick filmed.</p>
<p>Burgess felt this prevented the book from working properly as a novel, where moral growth is a part of the essence of narrative. He saw the decision as symptomatic of the politics of the times – his book was Kennedyan, he wrote, when what was wanted was something Nixonian, “<a href="http://wwnorton.tumblr.com/post/3971470377/a-clockwork-orange-resucked">with no shred of optimism in it</a>”. He <a href="http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2007/01/23/juice-from-a-clockwork-orange/">concluded</a>: “America prefers the other, more violent, ending. Who am I to say America is wrong? It’s all a matter of choice.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73240/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Seargeant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>On the centenary of Anthony Burgess’s birth – A Clockwork Orange had a profound influence on the cultural and political landscape.Philip Seargeant, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, The Open UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/730752017-02-21T20:09:22Z2017-02-21T20:09:22ZIn tribute to Peter Abrahams: a champion of pan Africanism and anti-colonialism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157486/original/image-20170220-15931-4pqoql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Peter Abrahams.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">South African History Online</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South African literary icon and Pan-Africanist, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/peter-henry-abrahams">Peter Henry Abrahams</a>, died in his adopted home of Jamaica on January 18 2017. He was 97. The author of some 12 novels, Abrahams was also a stalwart in the anti-colonial struggles dating back to the 1940s. Until the end he remained an acerbic and incisive commentator on global and Pan-African affairs.</p>
<p>He was born to an Ethiopian father and a mixed race South African mother in Vrededorp, a suburb in Johannesburg, South Africa. As a 20-year-old, Abrahams left his birthplace in 1939 after running into trouble with racist police and authorities in his deprived settlement. After an eventful journey by ship, troubled by hostilities during World War 2, he eventually arrived and settled in London, England. There he began a career of activism as a left wing journalist and Pan-Africanist in the 1940s.</p>
<p>Peter, with a natural storytelling talent, had learned writing skills from his mother and from religious mentors who rescued him from further trouble as a militant youth in Vrededorp. These skills and talents were to serve him well during his exile in London and later in Jamaica, where he settled in 1956 with his second wife Daphne.</p>
<h2>First novel</h2>
<p>While in London during his early literary pursuits his first novel, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40238962?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">“Dark Testament”</a>, was published in 1942. His second book <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3819636?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">“Song of the City”</a>, published three years later, confirmed him as being among the first successful black South African writers being published in Europe and the West. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157482/original/image-20170220-15882-1skaguk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157482/original/image-20170220-15882-1skaguk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157482/original/image-20170220-15882-1skaguk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157482/original/image-20170220-15882-1skaguk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157482/original/image-20170220-15882-1skaguk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157482/original/image-20170220-15882-1skaguk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157482/original/image-20170220-15882-1skaguk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The cover of ‘Mine Boy’.</span>
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<p>His already prolific writing career next saw the publication of the semi-autobiographical and seminal book <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20109544?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">“Mine Boy”</a> in 1946. It charted the travails of a country youth seeking to survive in the frightening and oppressive environs of big city Johannesburg.</p>
<p>With “Mine Boy” Abrahams became the first author to bring the horrific reality of South Africa’s apartheid system of racial discrimination to international attention. Published two years before Alan Paton’s acclaimed <a href="http://paton.ukzn.ac.za/Collections/Crythebelovedcountry.aspx">“Cry, The Beloved Country”</a>, which also exposed the tragedy of apartheid, “Mine Boy” was also significant because it made Abrahams one of the first black South African authors to become financially successful. With over a dozen books and countless newspaper and magazine articles published, Abrahams has since become established as an authority on the problems of race not only in South Africa, but in the world.</p>
<p>Several other novels were to follow in London, even as Abrahams became more and more engaged in the anti-colonial struggles of the time. He interacted with other political activists such as <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/jomo-kenyatta">Jomo Kenyatta</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/president-seretse-khama">Seretse Khama</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/dr-kenneth-kaunda-former-president-zambia-born">Kenneth Kaunda</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/former-tanzanian-president-julius-nyerere-dies">Julius Nyerere</a> and <a href="http://www.blackhistoryheroes.com/2010/09/kwame-nkrumah.html">Kwame Nkrumah</a>. Those names now resonate as leaders of the legendary generation of anti-colonial, Pan-African activists who led their respective African countries to political independence. </p>
<p>At this time, his South African compatriots under the leadership of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/nelson-rolihlahla-mandela">Nelson Mandela</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/oliver-reginald-kaizana-tambo">Oliver Tambo</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/walter-ulyate-sisulu">Walter Sisulu</a> and others persevered politically (and in some cases militarily) in the struggle against apartheid. For his part, Abrahams waged a war by wielding a mighty pen. He brought the unfolding racist atrocities in South Africa to the attention of the wider world. This he did through an ever-expanding body of compelling political and literary works, as well as through his intellectual activism.</p>
<p>He played an important role, alongside journalist and Pan Africanist <a href="http://silvertorch.com/about-padmore.html">George Padmore</a> of Trinidad and Tobago, American intellectual and activist <a href="https://donate.naacp.org/pages/naacp-history-w.e.b.-dubois">WEB Du Bois</a> and others, in <a href="http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/padmore/1947/pan-african-congress/index.htm">organising</a> the <a href="http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/30/058.html">Fifth Pan-African Congress</a>. Held in Manchester, England in October 1945, the congress was regarded as a unifying event in the multifaceted, disparate, colonial struggle of the time. Abrahams was among the representatives of the African National Congress (ANC). He was elected as chairperson of the movement’s publicity committee, alongside a young Nkrumah.</p>
<h2>Jamaican independence</h2>
<p>By 1956, he accepted an invitation from <a href="http://jis.gov.jm/heroes/norman-washington-manley/">Norman Manley</a>, Premier of Jamaica and leader of the Jamaican independence movement, to provide advice and editorial services in Jamaica and the Caribbean. He soon acquired a hilltop property overlooking the city of Kingston, a home he called Coyaba.</p>
<p>Abrahams became prominent as journalist and radio commentator in Jamaica. He also continued his career as a novelist. Acclaimed books penned in Jamaica were released globally. These included such widely respected works as <a href="http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-61/view-coyaba">“The View from Coyaba”</a> (1985) and his <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/994599.The_Coyaba_Chronicles">memoir</a> “The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the 20th Century” (2000).</p>
<p>Abrahams was to serve Manley’s younger son, Prime Minister <a href="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Michael-Manley---the-visionary-who-will-never-be">Michael Manley</a>, in the historic social restructuring of the 1970s. This included the engagement of Abrahams as the principal advisor in the government takeover and reform of Jamaica’s leading radio network, Radio Jamaica, from the British Rediffusion Group.</p>
<p>Responding to question I posed to Abrahams in a July 2004 <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02560046.2011.639959">interview</a>, he defended a new model of media ownership he had developed. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He (Michael Manley) wasn’t quite sure what the model was but he knew it had to be ‘people-based’. So he called me and we had a long session. What the Re-diffusion was saying to him was, ‘all right, you take it over but give us a management contract and so much per annum’. So they would be getting their money anyway. I said to him I don’t think you need to give them a management contract. I am convinced that there are enough Jamaicans who can run this thing without a management contract.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His model succeeded and is among the seminal achievements in Jamaica of this 5ft 6in (1.52m) <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-278276715/an-interview-with-peter-abrahams-custodian-and-conscience">giant</a> of an intellectual, activist and author. </p>
<p>His passing cannot erase the phenomenal contributions he made to the anti-colonial struggles in Africa and the Caribbean, his scholarly eminence and his seminal leadership of media reform and commentary in Jamaica.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73075/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hopeton Dunn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>South African-Jamaican intellectual, activist and author Peter Abrahams died in January 2017. He will be revered for his contributions to the anti-colonial struggles in Africa and the Caribbean.Hopeton Dunn, Professor of Communications Policy and Digital Media, University of the West Indies, Mona CampusLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.