Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary

I haven't entirely stopped reading 'books about books,' but this one sets me back almost as far as Book Savvy did, if for quite different reasons. Manguel is clearly a serious reader and intellectual in a way that the author of Book Savvy, alas, did not seem to be. But here is another case in which the books take second place to personal reminiscences, and while Manguel (to me at least) is more intrinsically interesting as a narrator than the author of So Many Books, So Little Time, for my project at any rate such a book rather misses the point (which is not autobiography but literary analysis). I also tired of Manguel's anti-war rhetoric (much of the diary is composed in 2003) which reaches the moral low point of stating that as Americans enter Iraq "under the banner of 'liberators,' freeing Iraq of a vicious dictator in order to install American control in the region" there "is no moral distinction between figures such as Saddam and Bush" (218). This is after he includes the following anecdote:

Saddam Hussein wrote a novel under a pseudonym, but everyone in Iraq knew who the real author was. An Iraqi journalist exiled since 1999 in Berlin told me that, after Saddam's henchman had ransacked his house, killed his father and brother and beaten him until he was almost unconscious, one of the men placed Saddam's novel by his side, telling him that now he could try reading "something good for a change." (207)

There may be lots of reasons to mistrust the public stories told by the Bush administration about reasons for invading Iraq, and the outrageous violence in Baghdad right now should sicken the whole civilized world. Were America and its allies naive, hubristic, mistaken about their chances of success? Apparently so (though as books such as Ajami's The Foreigner's Gift and Packer's The Assassin's Gate detail, not for entirely blameworthy reasons). But surely the happiest scenario all round would have been a complete triumph of American plans for Iraq, and even now--well, the suicide bombers may be motivated in part by the American presence, or the invasion may have made this kind of tribal and sectarian horror show possible by removing the appallingly violent regime that kept its crimes more or less indoors, but it's not Americans blowing up students or shoppers or reconstruction projects. And despite everything, haven't Iraqi readers in fact been liberated in ways that are worth celebrating? If an honest reckoning today has to acknowledge weights on both sides of the scales, how could it have been obvious in 2003 that it was not worth trying? (How differently might the effort have gone if the world's free countries, including Canada, had spent less time congratulating themselves--in their free press--on not taking the risk and stepped up? They could have taken advantage of American leadership and might to prove, among other things, that United Nations resolutions have some teeth in them. Also, humanitarian motives [which Manguel implies would have sat better with him than the profiteering, imperialistic ones he attributes to the U.S.] surely should have brought countries like Canada into the coalition, not kept them out: they are good reasons for 'regime change' even if the change is only possible through allying yourself with the U.S.) As I have written about before, McEwan's Saturday seems to me to do justice to the tangle of reasons for being for or against the invasion. Smart, thoughtful, well-meaning people really can be on both sides of this debate, and Manguel offers no defense of his own position, simply reporting it (as if it needs no defense?).

Ian McEwan, Saturday

I approached Saturday with caution because of its rave reviews, but I found this novel entirely engrossing, genuinely interesting, original, and moving. Part of the surprise it held for me was Henry Perowne's cautiously supportive attitude towards the war in Iraq. I've become so accustomed to anti-war perorations from literary luminaries that I had no expectation that McEwan would offer anything different (I should have known better); the enormous uncertainty, the high stakes, the intolerable complacency of a pacifism that is content to leave Saddam in power, the difficulty of separating ends from means when responding to the call to arms made by leaders whose real motivations are surely mixed...I think McEwan did justice to the complexity of the judgments--the mental and moral balancing acts--called for by these circumstances. I thought the use of "Dover Beach" as a frame and model was brilliant: I can't believe I didn't recognize Perowne's situation at the beginning as analogous to that of Arnold's speaker until the poem appeared directly in the action. I'm curious about how or whether the initial encounter between Perowne and Baxter stands as its own analogue to the international situation: surely it does, and so Perowne's feelings of responsibility for the violent consequences also have some application to the wider issues, including perhaps his stance towards the invasion of Iraq. Why is he a neurosurgeon? At what level is the fascinating issue of the relationship between physical and mental states raised by Perowne's work on the brain also part of either the problem or the solution he posits for the world that lacks 'certitude' or 'help from pain'? The turn from the window to the lover in "Dover Beach" has been criticized as an objectification of the companion, sought not as an individual but as solace, as a solution to the ignorant clash of armies. Has McEwan avoided that solipsistic impulse on the part of his protagonist? Does his family have the solidity Arnold's love lacks? It is not credible in a simple realistic way that Baxter should be turned aside from violence by poetry, but how far is McEwan appealing to us to see some poetic essence (yearning, as Henry considers it?) as the saving grace in a world racked with 'confused alarms of struggle and of flight'? The novel seems far too political to be satisfied with an aesthetic turn away from the clash itself. McEwan's writing here seemed flawless to me, with all the richness of detail that made Atonement dazzling in its own way, but without the tendency I felt in that novel to abstraction or aesthetic self-indulgence: this book reads as if all of its details are necessary, and as if it is equally necessary that they be clear and concrete.

Books on Iraq

In preparation for teaching Ian McEwan's Saturday in my first-year class, I read a lot of non-fiction in the fall, including Fouad Ajami's The Foreigner's Gift: while it was fascinating and often illuminating, I also found it jumbled and disappointingly anecdotal when I was hoping (given the author's academic position) for more orderly analysis. Paul William Roberts's A War Against Truth is a terrible book: surely we don't need to be told that war is violent, cruel, and often tragic; we need to figure out when it is nonetheless the right, or the only, option. Roberts offers as wisdom the sophomoric statement that "the only thing war prevents is peace"--we might put on the other side of that, just for starters, that war ended the Nazis' "Final Solution," and that determined armed intervention might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Rwanda--and these are just the most glaringly obvious examples. The collection edited by Thomas Cushman, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for the War in Iraq, is by far the most thought-provoking and responsible book I've read so far on this topic; Pamela Bone's essay alone makes it worth recommending, especially in the face of the current wave of demands to pull Canadian troops out of Afghanistan. George Packer's The Assassins' Gate is very interesting but often seems slanted: when describing incidents involving both American errors of judgment and Iraqi decepton, for instance, he places all the blame on the Americans, even when he admits (as he often does) their good intentions. It's hard not to see a double standard at work: he does not seem to expect Iraqis to assist sincerely in the project of building their own free, safe society and takes almost for granted the sabotaging of reconstruction efforts, attitudes which surely are less complementary to Iraqis than the American idea (naive as perhaps it was) that they would rise to the occasion of their liberation from Saddam (the opportunities and assistance encompassed by Ajami's image of the 'foreigner's gift'). Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower was also interesting, and depressing; it helped me a lot in terms of clarifying the historical antecedents of the current array of crises, but the complex relationships between various Islamic factions and their competing interpretations of fine points of doctrine (concerning jihad, for instance) becomes almost too arcane to keep track of. At a certain point, these nuances matter far less than the results and their reception on the "Muslim street." There's a lot of public protestation about Islam being a religion of peace and about the differences between extremist (or "Islamist") versions of this faith and the beliefs and practices of typical Muslims, but until the marches in the streets are to protest, not cartoons or Papal speeches, but beheadings and suicide bombings in the name of Islam, I think my patience for such claims will continue to be limited. Reading these 'current affairs' books, which are most often by journalists rather than academics, I have been struck by the absence of systematic analysis or perspective on what often seems to be largely anecdotal material. John Keegan's The Iraq War, in contrast to these others, was clearer about contexts and historical connections and at least seemed more neutral in its presentation of events, though of course its insights are constrained by its timing (as it was published soon after the initial invasion was completed). Still, those who can't bring themselves to give credit for the ending of Saddam Hussein's appalling regime to the Americans and their allies could do worse than remind themselves by way of Keegan's book of the many reasons not just the U.S. but Iraq's neighbours should be glad to have this murderous and apparently delusional sociopath removed once and for all.