I finished one book today and began reading another one straight away. I am lucky to have had a large pile of interesting books to work through after winning a number of books in a competition earlier this year. It was at a sort of Christmas-like get together for members of my girlfriends' comedy troupe the Maydays, hosted by John Cremer. John likes to give away all the books he's read in a year with a name-that-tune game, this time with Bob Dylan songs covered in a reggae style! The first person to shout out the correct title got to choose from a selection of books:- and there were quite a few I had my eye on, luckily my Bob Dylan knowledge and my reggae deciphering skills enabled me to get about 8 (I think).
I've just finished reading Moondust by Andrew Smith, a book about the moon landers that I thoroughly enjoyed, and have started reading Mud, Blood and Poppycock, a book about the First World War by Gordon Corrigan.
Going from one to the other, and this is early days I might add (I'm only part way through the introduction where Corrigan outlays his intentions for the rest of the book); I am immediately struck by a slight distaste for Corrigan. He wants his book to be a revisionist text, redressing the bias towards pacifism in historical accounts of the Great War.
At least twice already he has taken umbrage with people stating that the war was 'unecessary and tragic' and yet has no problem discussing fondly people who enjoyed their wars, despite playing witness to the deaths of friends and gross humnan tragedy on an epic scale, and I'm only on page 21!
I can see where Corrigan is coming from, no soldier wants to risk their life in a brutal conflict and come home to find they are not venerated by the people back home they thought they were protecting. They don't want to think of their wars as tragic, as a waste of life, it can be belittling in the extreme to be told the focus of your life, whatever that may be, has been ultimately pointless.
He makes some good points already, and reasons and argues them well, but I'm afraid he may miss the point in all this bad press the old wars have gotten. It's surely a good thing that the global conflcits of the 20th Century are deeply unfashionable and unthinkable in todays climate. We don't mind sending a few troops to tag along to America's latest evangelist drive to inflict it's own corrupt version of capitalist democracy on a far off alien land, perhaps to keep men like Corrigan feeling useful; but overall we'd like to pretend that we're all anti-war and pro-diplomacy and that our governments will do anything in their power to avoid large-scale and long-term conflict. This is the result of decades of bad mouthing those wars.
Perhaps Corrigan is right that the commanding officers of British forces in the First World War have gotten a raw deal in the history books... his description of what the average person thinks of WWI is accurate and his debunking very interesting so far, so I will no doubt read the whole book, and maybe by the end I'll have forgiven him for his soldierly attitudes and conservative values.
The thing that really struck me though, immediately within a few sentences, is that compared to Andrew Smith, whose been a cosy companion for the last month with Moondust, I just am not going to like Corrigan. It's fascinating how easily I am swayed to like or dislike an author, or the voice he chooses to use. Andrew Smith's enthusiasm for the moonmen was infectious and the book turned into a real page turner for me, even though I was never really that bothered before. I even felt compelled to watch Apollo 13 after finishing, even though I ignored it the first time round, thinking it would be boring. Smith's novel is a personal journey - what did the moon landings mean to him and what did they mean to the moonwalkers themselves and what did it mean to Smith that they meant what they meant to the moonwalkers? (I could be shot for that terrible sentence construction).
I don't think it's just a case of having an interest in the subject and therefore liking the authors voice, I tried to read one of Richard Dawkins books once and, despite agreeing with almost everything he said, I hated the way he said it. You could feel the hubris dripping from each sentence. He's not just an aetheist, but an evangelical one. He is contemptuous of anyone whose beliefs differ from his own, it would appear, and therefore he's almost unscientific! Science is about theories: proposing one and supporting it with evidence whilst being able to adapt if the evidence proves your assumptions were incorrect. It seems unfair to outright dismiss peoples feelings of spirituality... one thing a number of moon-voyagers had in common was discovering a sort of spirituality in space in spite of their scientific backgrounds. On the return journey, staring at the distant earth as it grows larger in the portholes, several of the moonmen speak of an awakening spiritual sense, of a connection to the universe they'd not felt before.
Some went on to define this as god, and worship that deity as they saw appropriate. I got a glimmer that it could be that 'god' is a human desire to put an unarguable answer to an unknowable question... and clearly up there in space you'd be pretty overwhelmed by the vastness of the unknown - I'd imagine the guys that orbitted the moon (waiting to collect the guys on the surface after their exploration) mast have had the most accute experience of this as they passed round the dark side.
I suppose the point I'm fumbling into here is that our awareness of the unknowable questions is the crux of the unique mental capacity that seperates us, as far as we know, from the other animals here on planet earth. God then, would have been invented as an early method of preventing our awareness of these ultimate questions from over-powering us and shutting us down. The universe is vast and unknowable, but we can blame that all on 'god' and get on with our lives... as our lives have become more advanced 'god' concepts have generally become abused, because they require a fixed position, an ideolgical standpoint. You can't shift your ethics to fit the current situation if your ethics are based on a fixed idea of god, attached to a time and a place and some holy books. This lack of adaptability is what's made religion become increasingly irrelevant to modern societies which might be why I have difficulties liking Dawkins and Corrigan too.
I sense from them a similar fixed position, like the opposing forces digging in to their trenches in the Great War. Dawkins wants to raise up Darwinian evolution and selfish genetics and I imagine him having trouble shifting position if fundamentals of his science were disproven. Corrigan, although I'm probably being unfair basing so much on a handful of pages, seems unable to regret the past, he wants to glorify the sacrifice of brave warriors, but can't see that when we venerate the heroes of one generation we feel the call for new heroes in our own and that actually the future world would be a far better place if there were no soldiers left anywhere.
Andrew Smith, by contrast, is hard to put down because his book is infused with the desire to learn more about a fascinating subject and in so doing bring it to a wider audience, rather than a desire to correct us all in our wrong thinking about a subject the author knows far better than us.
Another book I read very recently, that I've been trying to think of a way to slip in to this discourse is Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi. Hers was a voice I enjoyed thoroughly, and hers a story I valued learning. I think, with Iran being the subject of a lot of hostile news reporting and American fears that developing nuclear power stations and early attempts at a space programme (I believe they recently put their first sattelite in space) will inevitably lead to nuclear weapons; this book should be widely read here to give some historical context to the situation there. (I'd like to say more about it, but feel like this blog is already over-long)
I've always been deeply suspicious of America (who landed men on the moon with NASA and dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end Japan's involvement in WWII) when they talk of a foreign policy desire to prevent other nations from acquiring nuclear power or the capability of launching objects into space. It seems wrong that they can have something, continue to use it and then decide it is unsafe for the world for other places to obtain it - it's extremely arrogant. If we all shared our technologies and promoted their peaceful applications we'd end up saving a lot of the world's resources from being wasted as they are pumped into armed conflict.
One of Smith's salient points about the Apollo programme, in discussing the cost and whether or not it was worth it, was that although the price tag of $25.4 billion is shocking, and unforgivable when compared to US shortfalls in healthcare, housing and education throughout the period; the Vietnam war cost America equivalent to $662 billion over the same 10 years.
If I ever have kids they'll certainly be playing with toy spacemen and not toy soldiers.
