Bookshelf

AS:

Good morning and welcome to another edition of "The Bookshelf", here on SAfm, your news and information leader.  I'm Alan Swerdlow, joined again at the table this morning by Peter Terry and I'm very pleased to welcome back William Pretorius.  Today we hear about a new comic novel; we consider the philosophy behind sci-fi block-busters; there's a re-issue of a great Australian writer - one of his early works; and we consider a very unusual cookbook, an interesting and very different cookbook, arriving at a particularly apposite time because it's Heritage Month.  Well, Peter, let's begin with you.  Make us laugh.

PT:

The book's called "Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart" by Marius Brill.  Now, right from the time you pick this book up you know you're in for something a little bit different - a lot different, as it turns out.  The cover is a very cute bit of optical illusion.  I'd love to say that fancy French word but I'm sure I'll pronounce it all wrong - Trompe-l'oeil.  Well, there's the cover of one of those bodice-rippers, complete with sultry, raven-haired wench revealing a fair old amplitude in the pectoral department, and some naughty fellow's taken a felt-tipped pen and given her a beard and a moustache.  Now, the cover of this sultry romance has been peeled back to show that it's merely camouflage for the real book underneath, which is called "Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart", and the author's name is given as P. Pennyfeather.  On this cover is the imprint of a rubber stamp saying, "Shepherd's Bush Library, 7 Uxbridge Road, London W12 8LJ," etc.  A great wheeze!  Practical jokery of the type that appeals to the eternal undergraduate in me! 

These kinds of touches are all over the book, in fact.  On that page with all the copyright bumph, ISBN numbering and generally useless information, there's a tiny little detail: "Typeset in Granjon by Falcon Oast Graphic Art Limited, and in Attic by Marius Brill."  [LAUGHTER]  Eternal undergraduate in Marius Brill too, obviously!  I've no idea how old Mr Brill is but I get the feeling he's a youngish man, because there is such a youthful exuberance about his writing.  In fact, something of the puppy in him, because I get the feeling that Brill isn't always in control - but his zest is so infectious and his eye so bright that you forgive him the delinquent tale that knocks precious artefacts off the table and the chewed shoes on the lawn.

Talking of delinquent dogs, I have one: he's a curious mixture of Walt Disney, Dr Seuss, wildebeest, hyena, and baboon - the whole Kruger Park, in fact - and this book is a bit like that, which is why I mention it.  It's a real old mongrel - but aren't mongrels just that much more fun than thoroughbred wimps? - You bet! 

And so it is with "Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart".  Actually, this is two books, as the cover suggests.  Well, no, it's one book, of course - but it's pretending to be two books.  And "Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Yada-Yada" is hidden behind the cover of the trashy romance in the Shepherd's Bush Library for a very good reason: it is the most dangerous book ever written, and people who read it are feted to be liquidated by the British secret spy network - you know, MI5 or MI6 or whatever they're called.  And the chief liquidator - or one of them - is called Captain Remington Wilkinson-Gillette!  [CHUCKLES]  
That should give you an idea of the vein of schoolboy humour that Brill taps right through the nearly 500 pages of this mighty tome.  Typeset in Granjon or Attic, young Brill did a lot of typing!  A hell of a lot.  Possibly too much, in the final analysis.  But I digress.

The point is, you see, that Brill's alter ego, Paul Pennyfeather, has written the ultimate exposé of the greatest conspiracy theory of them all: there is no such thing as love!  It is a centuries-old fiction perpetrated by those empowered to keep their vassals in thrall, hence the very neat play on words. You and I will think, when we hear the epithet, "making love", of sexual activity - but in this context it means manufacturing love, a sort of fake alchemist's diabolical concoction.   Because, says Pennyfeather, no such thing exists: there is only really fear.  So, of course, this book's dangerous.  If the last great means of mind control is uncovered the world will become ungovernable. 

Now, a dollybird called Miranda picks this book out of the shelves of the library by chance - steals it from the library, in fact.  She has no idea what she carries in her bag but because this is one of the only copies of the book left undestroyed she becomes a target for the ruthless forces of Fascist darkness: she and the book must be destroyed!  And so the adventure starts, and Marius Brill's parody of the wonderfully brutal world of spy fiction gathers a crazy momentum which gets crazier and more violent and bizarre as the snowball gathers more snow on its unstoppable downhill avalanche.  Credit to Brill for not running out of snow too soon, because he actually maintains his momentum pretty artfully.  He's a clever lad - no doubt about it.  I've never heard of him but if this is his debut he's leapt from his chrysalis fully-formed, more or less.  You almost begin to wonder whether he isn't someone utterly brilliant like Tom Stoppard writing under a pseudonym - that clever, that witty and original. 

To be fair, there's a price to be paid for all the good qualities of the book.  He needed a tad more self-control.  There are lots of dreadful puns and other plays on words that are a lot funnier when you're very drunk and being silly in the pub.  The whole book appears to take itself so unseriously that one almost scales down one's respect for it - which is a bit of a pity, because I have to tell you that Pennyfeather's part of the book...  You get segments from "The Treasonable Documents" throughout the book.  The whole theory about why there is no such thing as love is actually brilliantly argued, and deserves serious consideration.  Really thought-provoking.  But it's a spoof wrapped in a send-up inside a parody, as Churchill might have said if he'd been reviewing this book.  And that's why it reminds me a bit of my dog.  It's an all-sorts, a hybrid, a mongrel.  The adventure bits are too far-fetched and tongue-in-cheek for you to really care or be anxious about Miranda's fate.  Still, there are plenty of fine set pieces.  And there is a love scene which ranks right up there as one of the most erotic I've read in a while.  But still Brill can't help himself when it comes to pricking the bubble.

Need I tell you that Miranda has a pet bird called Calaban (sp?) or that the hero of the book, who is one of the spies sent to destroy Miranda, well, his name is Ferdinand.  And, yes, they all end up on an island far, far away from Shepherd's Bush.  And does it all end happily?  Read it for yourself.  It's a hoot with enough serious resonances to make you feel you haven't just wasted a good few hours on nonsense. 

One thing I should add, though: the narrator, who tells the story with great verve and plenty of mischief - listen to this - the narrator is the book itself.  Yes, you heard me correctly!  Oh, Brill was having a huge amount of fun, and so will you, dear listener.

"Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart" is by Marius Brill, and it's a Doubleday publication.  Not sure of the price - but, as I say, it's a fairly hefty hardcover, and the UK price is twelve pounds ninety-nine, so it's never going to be cheap!

AS:

Well, I'm certainly going to look for that one! 

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But this sounds like something that I should be reading as well, William.  You've been investigating behind the sprockets, as it were.

WP:

Yes, of movies.  The sci-fi blockbusters.  And whenever I watch them I always think, "This is just mindless violence" - and lots of it.  Well, until now, that is.  A movie like "Terminator 3" for me is just explosions, car chases and destructive spectacle.  I've rather been watching philosophy in action.  This is according to Mark Rowlands, in his book, "The Philosopher at the End of the Universe".  I've been watching what he calls good, old-fashioned, high-octane, high body count, alien ass-kicking, robot-wrecking philosophy.  [CHUCKLES]  And he calls the movie "Sci Phi."  [MORE CHUCKLES]  Quite a nice touch!

Rowlands is actually a philosopher.  He's written a book called "The Body and Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes", and he wrote that for Cambridge University Press.  Now he suggests it's time to get out the beer and the chips, plonk down in front of the television, and get philosophical.

He starts with Frankenstein - and that's an illustration of the existential concept of absurdity, and of the difference between two perspectives we have of ourselves, the view from the inside and the view from the outside.  He puts it this way:  "The monster thinks it's loveable: the people who see it flee in horror".  So we have an existential crisis on our hands!  [LAUGHTER]  Then it's on to one of Rowlands' great philosophers, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  [MORE LAUGHTER]  I don't know if you can get your mind around that at this time of the morning, but in "Terminator 1" and "Terminator 2" Schwarzenegger deals with a mind-body problem.  Arnie plays a cyborg.  This highlights the difference between humans and machines, and that brings one to the matter of human intelligence and what actually constitutes a mind.  And I think we'd better leave jokes about Arnie's mind to one side, although Rowlands suggests a machine might not say, "I think therefore I am" but rather "I'm programmed therefore I am".  And that's not Arnie in real life, I hope!

Arnie, the great philosopher, then compounds the problem in movies like "Total Recall" and "The Sixth Day".  This last is about cloning.  Rowlands uses these forms to talk about genetics and the influence of environment, also about dualism, the concept that the mind is a non-physical thing of some sort and that humans are made up of non-physical mind and physical body.  And he does this through cloning.  If you clone somebody, if you're going to clone them exactly, is the mind going to be exactly the same?  What is the mind?  Do you actually exist as the essence of 'me' or are you just the input from somewhere else?  In other words, he suggests that the theory that the non-physical exists independently of the physical is the most discredited philosophy - in other words, keep away from dualism, as he calls it.

I wouldn't like to get into arguments on these points but Rowlands has little time for series like "Tough Spun Angel" or "New-Agers".   I don't think he'd really get on with Shirley MacLaine, who I read recently lives in Santa Fe, the New Age heart of the US, where apparently the chances of meeting an alien are much higher.  She has a doormat to her apartment that reads, "Aliens welcome".  [CHUCKLES]

AS:

I think Shirley MacLaine lives in Never-Never Land!  But that's beside the point!

WP:

In another book I read she believes that the pyramids are built over a very massive crystal.  But Rowlands cuts through all this in a very sensible and philosophical way.  He examines the nature of morality in a movie like "Hollow Man" with Kevin Bacon as an invisible guide, and because he's invisible he can do what he likes, so why have moral restraints?  What's their value? 

The author looks at good and evil and the Nietzschean superhuman in the "Star Wars" movies, and examines the meaning of life and death through "Blade Runner", in which cyborgs rebel in order to have their lives lengthened.  Why shouldn't we live forever, is the question tackled there.  Why do we actually die?  Whether cyborg or not!  [CHUCKLES]

Rowlands generally likes these movies.  He's not trying to create a fad but he actually teaches you to stop worrying and love Arnie quite a lot.  He admits in the beginning of the book that he doesn't like art house fare.  He says he'd rather settle down with beer and chips and watch the latest schlock.  He says you can learn so much more through it.   And it does work.  One should read this book and then go off to see a blockbuster like "The Hulk", for example.   If you look at "The Hulk" after reading this book you see all these philosophical issues are in there.  The nature of the human, the monster, cloning, the mind-body problem.   And one realises that "The Hulk" is actually a thinking person's blockbuster.  You do get them now, I think.  [LAUGHING}

The book, too, is a way of getting cinemagoers thinking.  And it's a solid, lively introduction to philosophy that makes an academic discipline quite accessible.  The book's published by Edbury Press and if I were them I'd strike a deal with all the film distributors to sell the book, especially at a massively discounted price.  Maybe if you get moviegoers thinking we may get better movies in time to come!  [LAUGHING]

AS:

A good sci-fi movie is certainly profound.

WP:

Yes, there are some very classic ones.

AS:

Yes, "2001" is a great one, chock-a-block with that kind of thing.  But real schlock such as "Independence Day" and "The Hulk"...  Well, "The Hulk" has aspirations.  Any of the "Star Trek" movies.  That really awful cod pseudo-intellectualism that you find behind it.  No, I'm not sure that I buy this - but I must read the book.

WP:

Yes, it's well worth reading.  It's fun.

PT:

Plato was a closet schlockist - you do know this?

AS:

Oh, of course.  [LAUGHING]  He had this little slate just outside saying, "Schlock written while you wait".  [MORE LAUGHTER]  Just recap on the details for us, William.

WP:

It's called "The Philosopher at the End of the Universe".  It's published by Edbury Press and it costs R143-00 for a paperback, which is not bad.  Books are coming down a bit in price these days - but not enough.

AS:

Not quickly enough, either.  Well, having fed the mind let's feed the body.  This is, as I mentioned earlier, Heritage Month, and it's great to see a new cookbook out on the shelves published by Struik, called "West Coast Cookbook", which has been compiled and put together by the Bergrivier Vissersvrouevereeniging, which is a body that was formed in 1994.  And this is what makes this a cookbook with a very big difference. 

In 1994 these women, who live on the West Coast, got together, a group of them, and decided to make an application under the new dispensation for a quota licence that would allow them to fish.  Up till then a traditionally male preserve, the licences and quotas being very strictly controlled, it took the women until 1998 to get their quota, but along the way this Vrouevereeniging became a very strong body and started doing all sorts of good for the community.  And the end result of one of the projects - just one of many - is this particular cookbook which assembles all those wonderful, simple, marvellous fishermans' dishes from the West Coast that we knew of from our youth and which have, I'm sure, long since disappeared from many people's memories. 

I spoke to Cynthia Joshua, who is one of the members of the Vissersvrouevereeniging...

CJ:

I wasn't part of the initial story.  There were three ladies - two sisters and a friend, and they were Jane Solomons, her sister Suzanne, and their friend Pury (sp?) Africa.  Just after the first elections, when quotas became available, they started throwing in applications for anchovy and sardine quotas.  That was in 1994.  And every year around about September, when the new applications had to be made, they tendered applications - that was up till 1998, when we received our first quota.

AS:

That's fantastic.  How many people belong to the Vereeniging?

CJ:

We currently have 176 ladies.  A couple of the ladies have died so their little share has been handed over to their daughters or sons. 

AS:

Originally, I believe, in terms of the fishing quota you didn't have your own boats: you couldn't go out and fish.   So you handed it over to a company to fish on your behalf, is that right?

CJ:

Correct.  That was Marine Products.  And the last lot of people from whom we got a better price was Southern Seas Fishing Enterprises, who are part of the empowerment group, Sekunjalo. 

AS:

The idea of this cookbook...?

CJ:

The idea was really the brainchild of Neville Sweijd, who was at the University of the Western Cape, in the Oceanography Department.  They had a social responsibility thing as well where they sort of did upliftment in the fishing communities.  And the guy who we got via another friend as a business consultant, to help us, introduced us to Neville.  This was Neville's brainchild, because he came to Saldanha Bay as a child.  He had some family who had ships here in the good old days, and then he was introduced to the cooking of the local community, of people working for his family.  We called meetings in homes where we had 10-15 people at a time.  It took me about two weeks of having meetings at night, after work, to explain and sell this idea to the people, and then get them to start bringing in recipes.

AS:

Did you have to persuade some people strongly?  Tannie So-and-So wasn't prepared to give up her recipes, for instance?

CJ:

Quite a number of them were not prepared to give up their recipes, because it's trade secrets!  [BOTH LAUGH]   In the first book, as you'll see, where they have that dried spaghetti type of thing, that is typically a West Coast dish: you don't find it anywhere else.   I learnt to make it from my sister-in-law, who was very dubious about giving me the recipe when I'd just married her brother.

AS:

That was Cynthia Joshua, talking about the Bergrivier Vissersvrouevereeniging, and the "West Coast Cookbook", which has been edited by Ina Paarman, who is, as we know, the queen of food in the Western Cape.  It's published by Struik and it's a very worthwhile project, I think, because the money from this is going towards an education fund to allow the children to escape from this way of life.  A bittersweet story - but it's incredible that the history of that place and the morés and everything that governed their lives has finally been put down on paper, and these wonderful recipes have been preserved.

PT:

It's really a snazzy-looking book!

AS:

Yes, it's very glamorous.

PT:

Are the recipes simple or are they quite sort of grand?  Because fish is fish is fish, in the end.

AS:

No, the recipes are comparatively simple, though there is, of course, the great story - which has caused quite a stir in the Western Cape - of Crayfish Frikadelle.  But it comes from a time when it was regarded as "weg-gooi vis".  It was for the poor, and it was going to be used as bait.  I remember going down to study, in the early 1970s, at UCT...   Even in those days crayfish was comparatively very cheap on the West Coast.  You could still pick it up.  It wasn't a rich man's food, as it is now.  The same applies to oysters and muscles and so on - all of which have become desirable but were regarded as, well, as the phrase has it, "weg-gooi vis". 

WP:

They were more abundant at the time.

AS:

Indeed.  "West Coast Cookbook", edited by Ina Paarman, is by the Bergrivier Vissersvrouevereeniging.  It has an introduction by Dr Ernest Messina. It's published by Struik and it goes for a very reasonable R149-95, considering that it's full-colour throughout.  It has this history and it has a marvellous presentation.  It's very special indeed.

Peter, let us return now to you.

PT:

All right.  When I was choosing books for review recently I came across a book by an author I discovered last year, and decided to nab it.  However, the book I read last year was his most recent novel and the one I picked up the other day wasn't, in fact, brand new.  Hot off the press, yes, but a re-issue of one of his earliest novels, actually his second.  I'm talking about Tim Winton.  Listen to this...

He was born in 1960 and this book was first published in 1984, when he was all of 24!  His first novel was published when he was about 21 - talk about a Boy Wonder!  Mind you, I was listening to a symphony composed by Mozart at age 10 the other day - terrifying!  According to the flyleaf in this new edition, Tim Winton has written 18 books, of which 9 are novels.  He's also written children's fiction, non-fiction and screenplays, play scripts and so on.  It obviously just kind of pours out of him.

Well, having read his most recent, and now one of his earliest, how does he measure up?  "Dirt Music", which I reviewed some time last year, was a hugely accomplished piece of writing.  He's an author firmly in control as he enters his forties.  In his early twenties - inevitably, I think - his sense of control is somewhat more mercurial.  But when a young man has been given that greater gift, it's to be expected.  It's like giving a youngster a steamed up stallion or a learner driver a 3.5 litre V8 Coupé - almost unfair to expect him to be in control all the time.  A prodigious talent!

I envy him.  I mean, when I was 24 I wasn't much beyond thinking about snaring pretty girls, and drinking beer, and idly wishing I could play Hamlet.  Listen to Winton at 24, describing a funny old man called Daniel Coupar, looking at his collection of shells:  "When times were hard, and rabbits rank with myxamatosis, and fish scarce, Daniel Coupar had subsisted on abalone.  It did not seem possibly now, as he stared at them, that the contents of these hulks had sustained him.  Thoughts and memories bore down on him.  Early in life, ideas had weighted him and excited him and punished him with their inconstancy.  Always he was taunted by the shortcomings of his mind.  When sometimes he came in sight of understanding, his thoughts faltered, petered out, and he failed to penetrate, as though wisdom had a hide too thick for him.  He remained dissatisfied with what he'd observed and understood, suspicious of what evaded him."   And there's much more - but I'll leave it there.  I find that passage so full of insight into the workings of an old man's mind.  I mean, what is written there is the kind of wisdom you only start arriving at in middle age!  How does a kid in his twenties know these things?

The book, as I say, is a bit uneven.  And that's a term I use relatively because it's still a very exciting accomplishment - although uneven in quality and uneven in plot.  Something like one man trying to control the billowing of a tent being put up in a gale: he can't quite harness his own talent.  He uses a holding form that I'd loosely describe as "Under Milk Wood".  He explores the lives of a small community on the West Coast of Australia.  Winton is from Perth.  He cuts from person to person, and this being a small whaling community we gradually begin to see how each person is inextricably linked in some way with everyone else.  The crisis in the book is a sort of Greenpeace attack on the activities of the whalers, and this splits the community down the middle, of course.  And as the split widens so a kind of invisible rope tightens around them all, threatening to strangle them as individuals and as a community.  Winton is at his at his strongest when describing people, and their thoughts and behaviours, in minute detail.  Like with "Under Milk Wood" he takes us right into the homes and souls of the people, and his acute powers of observation are stunning. 

One of the other facets of the book is a journal kept by one of Daniel Coupar's ancestors, Nathaniel, in the mid-1800s.  He was one of the first of the whalers in these parts, and his slowly loosening grip on sanity is a beautifully handled counterpoint to the various kinds of madness that overtake Daniel Coupar and Daniel's granddaughter, Queenie, and the insanity that overtakes the whole community in the end.  Whales, not surprisingly, are a constant motif throughout - and whales are an enigma: their apparent mass suicides are still something of an unresolved mystery while this slaughter of these massive, highly intelligent, endangered creatures is equally pointless today.  I get the feeling that perhaps the whales symbolise the future of the planet, and this tiny little community at the edge of a continent, at the bottom of the globe, hold that future in a delicate balance.  I daresay I'm being fanciful - but at least part of what Winton touches on for me is the plangent tolling of the bell.  Yes, folks, it tolls for thee! 

For all that I found "Shallow" slightly uneven I do think it's a remarkable novel and well worth getting and reading, as I think all Winton's books must be.   Pan Macmillan have published it here at R114-00.

AS:

Thank you very much indeed, Peter.  And thanks also to you, William.  That's all the time we have for today.  I'm Alan Swerdlow and "The Bookshelf" is broadcast each Sunday morning at nine.