Book review: Flat Earth News

You can argue that a free, independent media is not of foremost importance to a democratic political system, but only if you want to be wrong. I may be biased (my Honours thesis was on the topic), but I find the topic endlessly interesting. Nick Davies has been in the news recently as the Guardian journalist who broke the News of the World phone-hacking story in the UK, but this book - published in 2008 - also caused quite a stir on its release.

Davies's basic argument in Flat Earth News is that modern journalism is, by & large, a mere shadow of what it should be. Rather than serving to investigate issues and hold the powerful to account, most (not all, Davies is eager to point out) modern journalism is sloppy, rushed, written by non-specialists and based (often unquestioningly) on sources with their own agendas.

Flat Earth News is filled with examples - Davies certainly didn't make any friends in the journalism industry here - and while it is largely British-based, both US & Australian journalists also come in for scrutiny. Beginning by tracking the Millennium Bug hysteria of the late 1990s (an entire industry based on extremely unlikely scenarios increasingly exaggerated by decreasingly expert sources), Davies then looks at the root cause of journalism's current malaise: the commercial imperatives of modern media owners.

Interested in running news media primarily (perhaps only) to make money, these owners are unwilling to spend the money and take the time that quality investigative journalism demands. Instead, they pare newsrooms down to the bare minimum while expecting ever-increasing quantities of content. One study Davies commissioned found that journalists are now expected to produce three times as many stories as they were a few decades ago. This is not conductive to long, detailed, thoughtful work, but rather to simply throwing together whatever comes in with minimal checking - write down what someone says, perhaps get a reaction quote from an opponent and publish: the axiom of 'More With Less' in action. (Here in Australia we see an example of this with the ABC - without any increase in budget, they've launched a 24-hr news channel on top of their existing services. And every mainstream commercial news source is much the same - decreasing the size of the staff without decreasing the quantity of news produced.)

Davies terms these workers 'churnalists', since the focus is on churning out as many stories as quickly and non-controversially as possible. This makes them particularly susceptible to PR firms, acting for governments, commercial interests or well-resourced lobby groups. These firms understand the pressures on churnalists and tailor their products accordingly, so that their clients' message can be published with as few changes as possible. Churnalists and their editors/owners are also eager to rock the established boat as little as they can, so stories are inevitably reported from the same angles time after time. Davies also takes into consideration the pressure on journalists to produce scoops and front-page (or digital equivalent) stories, thus leading to what he calls 'The Dark Arts' of journalists employing barely (or sometimes not-even-remotely) legal methods for gathering news information. This section, of course, is now overshadowed by the Murdoch press's phone hacking techniques, but even without those developments Davies points to some truly shocking lengths that journalists will go to in order to break a story, however trivial the issue may seem.

Flat Earth News concludes with three extended case studies drawn from British newspapers: the gradual decline of The Times' Insight investigative team, the surprisingly pro-war (in Iraq) stance of the notionally left-leaning Observer, and the barefaced lies & institutional bigotry of the Daily Mail. While the specifics of these cases may be less-familiar to non-British readers, the stories are compelling enough - and the parallels to other media organs elsewhere in the world obvious enough - for international readers to not get bored.

One of Davies's main criticisms of modern churnalism is one which has been rattling around in my mind for a while now, and he's articulated it well. The obsession with 'balance' in much journalism requires both sides of a story to presented as equal: here's something the PM said, so here's the Opposition Leader's response, and who cares which of them is more accurate? The cases on either side of the climate change debate are equal and therefore should be reported as such, and who cares if that makes the overwhelming scientific consensus of only the same importance as a tiny minority view?

The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good newspaper or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces the objective truth... In reality, what they generally promote is not objectivity at all. It's neutrality, which is a very different beast.

Neutrality requires the journalist to become invisible, to refrain deliberately (under threat of discipline) from expressing the judgements which are essential for journalism. Neutrality requires the packaging of conflicting claims, which is precisely the opposite of truth-telling.

Tea review: Twinings Russian Caravan

Tea flavour: Russian Caravan
Tea type: Standard teabag
Drunk: Black, no sugar
Blurb: "A fragrant blend of Keemun and other fine China teas, producing a delicate nutty flavour".

So, I thought it might be fun to expand the world of Joel's Blog #1, featuring regular reviews of different sorts of tea in addition to my book reviews & other such junk. I can't remember why I thought this might be a good idea, but here we are. As a dedicated tea drinker*, and appreciator of many different types of tea, I'll try to cover a range - but must admit that I have a strong bias towards black teas, so you won't see too many green/herbal teas here. (At present, I have seven varieties of tea at home, with an additional one in the office, so those will provide a start, and by the time I get through those, I'll have picked up some more to review.)

Leading off is the somewhat-polarising Russian Caravan tea, here represented by the Twinings teabag version (they also do a leaf-tea pack). I first tried Russian Caravan back in 2004, when the parents of my then-girlfriend were given a sampler box of different tea varieties, and found that nobody wanted the Russian Caravan. So I decided to try it. It made something of an impression, although I don't think I drank it again until several years later at High Tea at the (Brisbane) Stamford, when I somewhat foolishly ordered a whole pot of it (in fairness: when they serve all-you-can-drink tea, you don't stick with the thing you've got at home). The rest of my table - none of whom were tea-drinkers - found the aroma distinctly disgusting (an opinion they choose not to keep to themselves). One of my tablemates, who has since become my wife, subsequently refused to be present while Russian Caravan tea was made or consumed, and only came around after I introduced her to Lapsang Souchong, a tea so, um, noticeable in its aroma (& taste, for that matter) that even through several layers of packaging it can make dogs weep and train tracks buckle. Next to that, Russian Caravan smells like slightly insipid water.

Its most prominent flavour is actually a smoky taste and smell - in that sense, quite neatly capturing the world of the long journeys by which the tea originally made its way from Asia to Russia (hence the name). It has a taste & smell almost of Australian billy tea, tea made over an open fire while camping. The Twinings packet suggests drinking it with milk or lemon, but - as usual for me - I prefer it black. That way the full flavour is allowed out, and despite the distinctive aroma, Russian Caravan is actually not a overly flavoured tea. Actually, it's quite a smooth flavour, quite drinkable, even though I wouldn't choose to drink it every day for the rest of my life.

Very possibly, the chief asset of Russian Caravan tea is that it is almost peerless among teas in evoking the world from which it comes. I don't know how it's possible for a tea to be the beverage equivalent of a camel & caravan trip from Asia to deliver tea to the Russian aristocracy of the 19th century, but somehow it is. If all teas were as successful in that aim as Russian Caravan is, the world would be a better place...


* Less-kind descriptions have also been used.

Book review: The Great Gatsby

As I noted back when I began this trip through the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby was the only one of his novels I had previously read. And thus, it's the only one for whom this read was a re-read. Since it's also Fitzgerald's best-known novel, I'll keep my plot-recounting even slimmer than usual, and focus instead on some thoughts I had about The Great Gatsby.
Unlike either This Side of Paradise or The Beautiful & Damned, The Great Gatsby is told in the first person, and this removes the slightly distant feel of the two earlier novels. Yet Nick Carraway is still something of a cipher - his character is not the central one of the book (or, at least, of the plot of the book), and even his relationships are relatively insignificant. His romantic relationship with Jordan Baker is never all that important - either to Nick, I suspect, or to us. And even his relationship with Jay Gatsby is oddly unimportant - I had remembered their friendship as being a focus of the book, but it's kept in the background, almost unnoticed - it doesn't seem to matter all that much to Gatsby, and doesn't really change Nick all that much either.

In fact, one of the notable things about The Great Gatsby as a novel is how short it is. In the edition I read, under 200 pages. And Jay Gatsby, although discussed earlier, doesn't appear until page 50. Somehow this seems wrong - when you think of the ideal of The Great American Novel, the sort of thing that comes to mind is something big, sprawling, vastly populated. Most of the other contenders for that (entirely arbitrary, subjective, frustrating) title do fall more or less into that category. Yet Gatsby is short, has only a handful of significant characters, takes place over a short period and is chiefly marked by containing a plot which serves much the same role as it does in Fitzgerald's other novels: as a frame for him to hang some characters and moods. There is a plot, of course, but it's not really Gatsby's selling point.

Instead, as always with Fitzgerald, we get characters and scenes painted with incredible vividness. Jordan Baker, for instance, is pegged in our minds the whole time: we know from the first time Nick meets her that there's something slightly dubious about her, and never quite shake the impression that a long-term relationship between her & Nick is neither plausible nor advisable. Yet we are never hit over the head with this - it's just something Fitzgerald sneaks into our consciousness. And, indeed, when she & Nick break up (er, spoiler!), it makes very little difference to the story or the characters. This is, again, Fitzgerald's slight coolness towards his characters. Other authors would have made a much bigger deal of both this relationship and its end, yet in doing so would have derailed the book, not to mention changed the character of Nick so much as to completely alter everything else. Nick Carraway is one of fiction's most passive narrators: skimming past his own life, providing only enough detail so we can understand what he wants to tell us about. Fitzgerald as author and Nick as narrator also make the interesting structural choice to let us know about Gatsby's past earlier in the book than Nick knows it in the story - clearly saying, 'people in this story are interested in this background. you shouldn't be, or at least no more than I want you to be'.

In the end, the theme here is pretty straightforward, if no less profound for that. We can't escape the past. As the famous final lines have it:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Or, as D'Angelo Barksdale would say:

The past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it: all that shit matters.

And that is why people still read The Great Gatsby, and still consider it one of the greatest American (or anywhere) novels of the 20th century.

Book review: The Novels of Eric Ambler

Posting has been a little light here recently, I know, since I've spent most of my life over the last few weeks engaged in marking essays. But I thought I'd do a little post on a series of books I've read over the past few months.

Near Central Station, on my way to work, is a bargain bookshop - full of remainders and other unloved but new books. They offer a completely unpredictable range of books, mostly pretty cheap, so I stop by there on a regular basis and see what's in stock. Sometimes I go weeks without buying anything, other times I'll pick up a handful of books on a single morning. The cheap prices can be good at inspiring me to check out things I probably wouldn't have otherwise, and Eric Ambler's books are a case in point. They had a few of his five books as recently republished by Penguin, in their Modern Classics line. The striking black & white photos caught my eye, and then the blurbs and quotes convinced me to pick up a couple of books by an author whom I hadn't even of until then. Over the next month or two they got in a copy or two each of his other books from this series, so I now have read all five that Penguin reprinted (he wrote more than that).

After the cover art, the thing that attracted me the most was some touchstones mentioned in the blurbs - Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock. Both of those are good comparions, so far as I'm concerned, so I paid my couple of dollars per book and started reading one (Epitaph for a Spy) that night.

The Greene & Hitchcock comparions were accurate. The latter's regular theme of Innocent Man Caught In Conspiracy runs through Epitaph, as well as most of the others (Cause For Alarm most particularly). Written during the late 1930s and early '40s, WWII is looming for everyone. Ambler effectively captures the tone of innocent - sometimes naive - men who get embroiled in international intrigue. The conventions of the IMCIM genre are pretty well established by now, of course, but some of that groundwork was laid by Ambler in these books.

Each of these books has its own charms. I found Uncommon Danger (the earliest of these five) to be a little weaker than the rest, but all of them pack compelling plots, well-drawn characters and tight prose into relatively short books. Ambler also sought to reflect a left-wing political perspective into his stories, arguing that the spy genre should not be the exclusive bounds of the political right (particularly during the WWII era). Thus both the villians and the plots are built on a more left-wing political perspective than most modern spy/thriller novels. The politics is certainly never preachy, however - Amber's aim, generally realised, was to incoporate his political leanings into the fabric of his novels without making them overtly political (& therefore tedious) novels.

I considered including some brief plot synopses here, but decided against it because they seem sort of silly when reduced to a sentence or two. And of course, to some extent, they are silly - spy or crime novels from earlier ages usually do sound as such, revolving as they tend to do around singular master criminals whose defeat signals the collapse of their whole network and organisations with names like The Red Hand Brigade and reliant on the non-existence of technologies (how many Agatha Christie novels, for instance, make sense in a world in which almost everyone has a mobile phone?). Thankfully none of Ambler's books are based on the Master Criminal Whose Death Or Capture Solves All The Problems, one of my least-favourite tropes in fiction. Nonetheless, Innocent Man Caught In Conspiracy stories perhaps fare worst of all when summarised. They rely for their entertainment value on the reader/viewer being pulled into the world, wondering how they would cope themselves, and knowing that the hero will 'win', but not knowing how that's possible. Yes, they can be silly, but they can also be a heck of a lot of fun.

Eric Ambler has been largely forgotten compared to some of his contemporaries, but unjustly so. Kudos to Penguin for reprinting his novels, and I'm glad to see that some of his others are also available from other publishers via Amazon. If you feel like a quick, entertaining but thoughtful read, I can happily recommend Eric Ambler to you.

Book review: Hangover Square

Most of us who read regularly have books that are on our radar for a while before we get to them. A casual reference somewhere, a review that sounded promising, having a look in a bookshop (tactile or electronic). As someone who not only reads a lot, but is always on the look-out for reading suggestions, I constantly have a bunch of books on a mental list that I mean to read sometime soon. (This is in addition to the bunch of books I have sitting on the bookshelf next to my bed that I mean to read sometime...)

Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel Hangover Square: A story of darkest Earl's Court was one such book. As often happens with these things, I can't put my finger on where or from whom I got the idea that I should read it, but over the last couple of days, I finally have. Sometimes these long-intended books are ultimately disappointments, or simply underwhelming. Hangover Square was neither: it is a compelling, involving, even moving book.

George Harvey Bone lives in London, in 1939. He scrapes by with bits of money from here & there, rarely working, but often drinking. He has fallen in with a small group of similar people - all in their late-20s-early-30s, and all of whom enjoy drinking their nights away. Central to this group, and George's reason for sticking with them, is the beautiful Netta. George is somewhat slow, friendlier than most of his group; Netta is contemptuous, an aspiring film star. So far, nothing out of the ordinary. But George is also prone to what he calls 'dead moments', where his genial, somewhat passive, personality is replaced by one in which he realises that it is his duty to kill Netta. When his head clickes back to normal after one of these periods, he has no memory of any of these thoughts. (None of this, I should point out, is spoiler: Penguin included it in their blurb, and indeed we learn all this in the first chapter regardless.)

Hangover Square is thus a portrait of two different sides of George, neither of which is fully aware of the other. It succeeds because both work: the straightforward George chapters are a moving story about a hapless fool infatuated with an awful woman (& make no mistake: Netta is one of the least-likeable characters I have ever encountered in fiction - she treats George appallingly, taking advantage of his doglike devotion to get him to pay for her to do things intended to attract other men, and not even stooping to basic civility in her relationship with him while doing so), and also trying to break out of wasting his life away via his drinking habit. The 'dead moment' chapters give a compelling feel to a clear case of mental illness, a man who is driven to kill someone, without really knowing why. That both sections are about the same man only heightens the tension.

In many ways, Hamilton has written a thoroughly modern novel - one that, with a few alterations of period detail, could have been published in the last few years. (Early on, characters treat ten pounds as a significant chunk of money, and are able to go out several nights in a row, including once to a high-class restaurant, off the haul. The imminent WWII looms over the book & characters, particularly in the last few chapters.) George, when not in his dead moments, is sympathetic despite his frustrating incapacity to ditch Netta. Hangover Square is often grim, and it will be the rare reader who finds Netta anything other than utterly despicable, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am glad I finally got around to reading it.

Book review: Flappers and Philosophers

Like almost all writers of fiction in the first half of the twentieth century (especially American ones), F. Scott Fitzgerald filled his time between novels with short stories, often publishing at least a handful each year. Early 20C USA was, in many ways, the golden era of the short story, with many magazines publishing them to a wide audience (radio & then tv, of course, would chip away at that before long). And current wisdom holds that nobody reads short stories anymore ('why bother learning new characters every 20 pages?' being the common complaint), although personally I love a good short story as much as I love a good novel - which is to say, a whole damn lot.

This collection contains most - but, frustratingly, not all - of Fitzgerald's short stories, published over a twenty-year span. And while Fitzgerald is probably best known for The Great Gatsby & Tender is the Night, several of his short works also rank amongst the best-known short stories in the English language.

The early stories (this collection is more or less chronological) are rightfully remembered as classics of their era: his second book of stories is even called Tales From the Jazz Age. Most of these stories have young protagonists seeking to find their place in the world, and while in some ways they seem like period pieces, many of the themes here are timeless (social climbers, friendship, unsatisfying marriages). The last two in the section are amongst the most famous: 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' (which bears almost no resemblance to the movie, other than the central conceit of a baby being born as an old man and getting younger through time) and 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz', a fantastic (in both senses) story of fabulous wealth.

The middle section (stories from the mid-1920s to the mid-'30s) shows both writer and characters maturing. Most of the characters are now young parents, and a sense of regret or disappointment with life does pervade many of the stories. During this period - when he also published his two most-famous novels - was Fitzgerald's peak as an author, and even more so than elsewhere in this book, the prose shines here.

Flappers and Philosophers concludes with a selection of Fitzgerald's later stories, including the Pat Hobby cycle (18 stories, just over 100 pages). Hobby is a perennially-49-year-old screenwriter in Hollywood, whose glory years were a long time ago and never that glorious anyway. Each story covers a new chance for him, although it usually just ends up being a fresh chance for him to embarrass himself. Living on short contracts (three weeks is about the standard), Hobby combines desperation with an almost astonishing lack of motivation or capacity for actual ideas or work.

At nearly 650 pages, and containing 45 stories, Flappers and Philosophers is a pretty immense collection (the two longest stories are in the 40-50pp range). For that reason, it might not be an ideal introduction to Fitzgerald, yet if you can get past that, the stories contained within are, almost without exception, wonderful. Aside from his ever-enjoyable writing, Fitzgerald demonstrates why short stories can be as, or even more, satisfying than novels: fully realised characters, subtly played-out themes, and the ready ability to mix a variety of moods, styles and ideas across a book.

Next on my ongoing trip through Fitzgerald's works: I return to 'The Great American Novel', The Great Gatsby.

Book review: The Pale King

One Monday morning in September 2008, I got to my desk in Parliament House, turned on my computer and began my morning, as i usually did, by reading the news on various websites. This particular morning, however, had a pall cast over it. I read that David Foster Wallace, one of my favourite writers, had died the previous Friday evening. After a decades-long struggle (or series of struggles) with depression, with his medication no longer working, he hanged himself.

Reading this, I felt as if I'd been punched in the stomach. Not only had Wallace been one of my favourite writers of novels, stories and non-fiction, his style encourages feelings of intimacy. Without ever having met him, I felt like I knew more about his mind than I do about those of people I've known for years. (A slightly haunting coincidence is that on that same Friday afternoon, Eastern Australia time, I was listening to him read one of his essays on audiobook as I travelled to Sydney from Canberra.) This was not an uncommon reaction, I was to learn as I read comments around the internet over the next few days and weeks.

Wallace's second novel, and most famous book, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Since then, he had released two books of short stories, two collections of essays and non-fiction, and a book on mathematics. His third novel, parts of which had been excerpted over the previous few years in various journals and magazines, was approaching completion at the time of his death. It has now been released, under the care of his long-time editor, in conjunction with his wife and his agent, as The Pale King.

Like Infinite Jest, The Pale King revolves around multiple characters, but the effect here, despite the clearly unfinished nature of the novel, is in fact less fragmentary than is Infinite Jest. All of The Pale King's characters work for the IRS, at the Peoria, Illinois Regional Examination Center. The first few chapters will likely throw many readers off, as we are introduced to some of the cast as they are traveling to the Center, some as children, some as young adults. At this point, none are connected in any way we can see. Some chapters are short, some are long. They are written in noticeably different styles, and the idea of there being a main character is thoroughly dismissed. 70-something pages in, we get an Author's Foreword, written by The Pale King's putative author, one David Foster Wallace, ex-IRS employee.

There's no way to hide that The Pale King is an unfinished novel (even by Wallace's standards - Infinite Jest famously ends on a moderately ambiguous note, some 1100 pages after it began, and his debut novel, The Broom of the System, actually ends mid-sentence). Yet the fragmentary, non-linear and distinctly plot-light The Pale King is nonetheless a satisfying read. Even had he finished it, Wallace would almost certainly have not tied together the various mini-stories or character (semi-) arcs anyway: it's really best seen as a collection of character pieces and interconnected short stories. It's also, as I am contractually obliged to mention in this review, as every other review has/will, a novel about the boredom and mundanity of working life, and the toll that can have on a person. Wallace was very specific that this book would not culminate in a big action set-piece: as one of his notes (included at the back of the book) indicates, he wanted to make The Pale King about: "Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens".

As mentioned above, the different styles of different chapters allows Wallace to unleash the greatest weapon he has in his pretty formidable collection of writing skills: his peerless talent as a writer of monologues (or occasionally dialogues) (see: the Brief Interviews With Hideous Men series from the story collection of the same name, or Oblivion's title story). Many of the chapters consist of various characters monologuing for various reasons (interviews for a documentary, lengthy Friday-night-at-the-pub life story tellings). Many of these are hilarious, revealing or otherwise entertaining. Indeed, I cannot stress enough just how enjoyable The Pale King is, containing as it does long stretches of David Foster Wallace at the top of his game. And David Foster Wallace at the top of his game is a pleasure matched by few other authors in my reading life.

I guess the final question is whether 'new' readers of Wallace will find The Pale King enjoyable. It's actually a difficult question: as I've noted, it's a remarkably accessible book (with the proviso that if you value plot above all else, you'll find little here to sink your teeth into), yet at the same time I feel strange recommending it to Wallace neophytes. The two collections of non-fiction are probably the best place to start, but I would also recommend his last book of short stories, Oblivion, as being the best taster for his fiction style, which in general is much more formally difficult than are his essays. It's also a good representation of his style in The Pale King - no surprise, since they at least somewhat overlapped temporally. It is, of course, a tragedy on multiple levels that The Pale King will be the last novel we can read from David Foster Wallace. But for me at least, that feeling is countered by the great joy I felt in reading it. The world is a tiny bit sadder for no longer having David Foster Wallace in it, but it is also a little bit better for having The Pale King.