'How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide':Criticism for Beginners

So much for the death of the book. People have been predicting the demise of the hardback for over a century now — in his novel “The Time Machine” (1895), H. G. Wells imagined whole libraries turned to dust — but if book production is anything to go by, Wells was a worrywart. In the 1600s the total number of books available to a literate Englishman was about 2,000. Now, more than 2,000 are published a week, with 10,000 new novels every year. Given a 40-hour reading week, a 46-week working year and three hours per novel, you would need 163 lifetimes to read them all, John Sutherland calculates in his new book, “How to Read a Novel,” which aims to be a user-friendly guide to negotiating this morass. “Done well, a good reading is as creditable as a 10-scoring high dive,” he writes. “It is, I would maintain, almost as difficult to read a novel well as to write one well.” A dubious but nevertheless terrifying proposition, calling to mind the girl at the cocktail party in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” who declares to the room, “I finally had an orgasm, and my doctor said it was the wrong kind.” Is Sutherland serious? We can be scored on this stuff? By whom?

Sutherland is a well-known academic, critic and scholar. He was also chairman of the 2005 Man Booker judging panel that caused an uproar by giving the award to John Banville’s novel “The Sea” — “an icy and overcontrolled exercise in coterie aestheticism,” according to a writer in The Independent, as well as “a travesty of a result from a travesty of a judging process.” It’s hard not to read this book as a riposte of sorts, although anyone expecting the low-down on the judging process, or even an impassioned defense of Banville, will be disappointed. Sutherland recounts the affair with a tone of lofty perplexity: “How can a novel, examined so dutifully and on so many fronts, be judged at the same time as utterly bad and outstandingly good?” Later, he runs over Banville, taking him to task for misreading a squash game scene in a review of Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday.” “Banville does not understand the game of squash,” he writes, indisputably.

Would that the novel were so easily dispatched. What we have here is a biopsy of the form, from intertextuality (“it does give the reader a pleasing sense of ascendancy”), to CIP and ISBN numbers (“Do you know what those acronyms stand for? Do you care?”). This is not a bad idea, but Sutherland’s book seems a little unsure of itself, or its readership, and frequently courts the obvious. I liked his point about the first sentences of “Anna Karenina” (“All happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way”) and “Pride and Prejudice” (“It is a truth universally acknowledged ...”)being neither universally acknowledged nor even true for the novels they begin. But he also points out, in his chapter on titles (“titles play an important role”), that “The Odessa File” seems a title “reminiscent less of fiction than of an MI5 top-secret report.” Er, isn’t that the point? And is it right to praise the opening sentence of “1984” (“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13”) as an example of narrative suspense, on the grounds that it “will not yet divulge” the fact that Winston Smith is, in the coming pages, doomed to be captured and brainwashed by Big Brother? Is Sutherland really praising the first sentence of “1984” for not giving away the entire plot? Don’t most first sentences achieve that modest aim?

None of this would matter if Sutherland didn’t set such store by intelligence as the high bar we all have to aim for. “The ability to read a novel intelligently, I would maintain, is the mark of a mature personal culture,” he writes. The word recurs: “A clever engagement with a novel is ... one of the more noble functions of human intelligence.” And again: the key to choosing what to read is “intelligent browsing.” Does anyone go near the word “intelligent” without an armed escort these days? Until properly defined, it’s a word of use only to those in the business of spreading fear; and indeed, Sutherland’s book is curiously fretful and anxious, rising to a ringing endorsement of an actual novel only in its final pages: Sutherland loves Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” — good for him! — but winces at an offhand comment by Alain de Botton that the novel is “the most overrated ever.” “Perhaps he has a superior critical sensibility which, more correctly than mine, judges Thackeray inferior,” Sutherland worries. “I hope not.” A curiously sweaty entreaty with which to end his book: please God, let me be the superior one!

Anyone interested in the way people really read novels ought to turn to Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for The Believer magazine: they’re a real-time, on-the-ground account of one man’s monthly battle to square the number of books he buys with the number of books he actually reads, while fighting off the competing demands of TV, kids and soccer. Cultural anxiety is a good subject for a book; but Sutherland is, perhaps, too much its creature.

The Lost World of British Communism: Life and soul of the party

It's fashionable now to talk about British communism in the tone one might use for the Inquisition: something dreadful, but long dead. Even former communists often pass it off as a shameful indiscretion, only excused by youth and naivety.

But Raphael Samuel, one of Britain's most interesting historians, though he left the party (it was always just "the party" to those close to it) in 1956, never regretted, or felt the need to apologise for, the years he spent trying to convert his schoolfellows to communism. In the 1980s he was amused, but not ashamed, by the young man he had been, who "attempted to 'clarify' an aunt and uncle who were 'confused' about Yugoslavia and had come to doubt the Moscow trials".

These essays have been collected to mark the 10th anniversary of Samuel's death on December 9 1996, when he was 62 and at the height of his powers. (The publisher's promise on the press release that "The author is available for interview" will be hard to keep.) They describe the Communist party of the 1940s from the vantage point of the 1980s. The pressure to adopt the "how could I have been so blind?" tone was nothing like as strong then as it is now. In 1985 you could still say "I used to be a communist" or even "I'm still a communist" in almost any company. So these essays are as illuminating about the decade in which they were written as the decade they describe. They also have interesting things to say about what, in the 1980s, one was still allowed to call "the labour movement", of which the Communist party saw itself as a key part.

Even when they have broken away, the children of communists, as Samuel was, still share ways of thinking that the rest of the world does not understand, like former Catholics. Earlier this year I found myself chairing a debate about British communism and - as it turned out - mediating between two of the panellists, Bea Campbell and David Aaronovitch, writers, former communists, and the children of communists. I did this clumsily (and made things rather worse) because the sudden conflagration caught me by surprise. I did not share their past, and did not anticipate, or even quite understand, their hostility to each other.

Samuel describes, with wonderful anecdotes and supporting detail, a top-down organisation in which ultimate authority stemmed from the Comintern - the Communist International, firmly controlled by Stalin - and in which policies and strategies filtered down through the national executive to the rank and file.

He describes the rigidity of party discipline, quoting a worried letter sent in 1926 from the party secretary in St Pancras to the London District asking for advice: "... Mrs Kingston, although she has passed party training, and is therefore a full member of the party, does not accept the materialist conception of history, and she believes that communism is founded on idealism and not on materialism ... She is trying to form a group of people who think the same." The secretary had tried to reason with Mrs Kingston, but without success.

Communists were ambassadors for the party. So they were always soberly dressed and, according to Samuel, always sober, too. I wonder if he knew that the party leader, Harry Pollitt, loved his whisky, which was brought to him in a teacup whenever the abstemious Communist MP Willie Gallacher was present; or that the first chairman, Arthur MacManus, died young of alcoholism. MacManus had the honour of being buried in the walls of the Kremlin, the scene of many evenings when he out-drank even the hard-drinking Russians.

Fast-forward to the 1980s. Samuel's insights into the state of left-wing politics under Thatcher are some of the best things in this book, all the better for having been written at the time, not glimpsed through the prism of the new millennium.

The Communist party was by then divided into two warring camps, the old class warriors whom he remembered from his childhood, and the young men and women of Marxism Today. His sympathies were mostly with the old guard. He looked back on the ideologues of his childhood, not with the newly fashionable scorn, but with respect and affection. It was Marxism Today, he says, that reproduced the party's worst characteristics - its intolerance and ideological rigidity. "For the first time in its history the party is staging something approaching a full-scale purge. It is an odd way to celebrate the advent of pluralism," he writes.

The old guard talked of "correct politics". The Young Turks talked of "political correctness" (this was before every boring right-wing columnist tried to make himself interesting by saying he was "non-PC"). When correct politics clashed with political correctness, the explosion blew away the party of Samuel's youth. But you can't know the times without knowing the party, and Samuel makes a fascinating guide to it.

• Francis Beckett's Stalin's British Victims is published by Sutton.

'The Reliable Killer :' AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War

Here's today's puzzler: Name a Russian innovation that whips most everything America and Western Europe throws against it, has astounding firepower, and is unaffected by heat, cold, and sand. (No, it's not Maria Sharapova.) Need more hints? It's easily transported, and its familiar silhouette has made it a must-have fashion accessory certifying the rebel status of figures from the anonymous Viet Cong to Osama bin Laden. Give up? It's the Kalashnikov assault rifle, also known as the AK. Since its first large-scale production in 1947, this low-tech weapon of mass destruction has spread across the globe, doling out death from Afghanistan to the U.S.

If we need a reminder, the AK is graphic evidence that not every innovation benefits humanity. With one devastating, engrossing anecdote after another, author Larry Kahaner provides a chilling and perversely entertaining brief in AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War. Consider this:

• The AK was first unveiled by the Soviet Army during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Capable of 600-rounds-per-minute bursts of killing power, the weapon demonstrated its effectiveness while demanding few skills of the poorly trained, largely conscript Soviet army. The revolt was squelched. As many as 50,000 civilians were killed.
• Since that time, around 100 million AKs have been produced. The Soviets chose not to assert patent claims or charge licensing fees, allowing "wholesale production" of the weapon in countries from Bulgaria and Poland to China.
• During the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Soviets introduced an improved AK with a smaller, more lethal bullet. But the insurgent mujahideen likewise carried AKs, thanks to the CIA, which donated as many as 400,000 of them.
• With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of weapons flooded the globe. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, a huge supply prompted the rise of a thriving black market and a "Kalashnikov culture," in which AKs were everywhere.
• The AK has become the firearm of choice for at least 50 standing armies and uncounted ragtag outfits, from insurgents and terrorists to drug dealers and street gangs.

For inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov, inspiration came in 1941 in the form of direct contact with Nazi invaders' Schmeisser submachine guns. As the young tank commander recovered from his wounds, he vowed to create a weapon that would help defend the motherland. However, it took him years of tinkering, along with technical schooling, to perfect his brainchild, the Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947.

It was in Vietnam, Kahaner tells us, that the AK really earned its stripes. In jungle skirmishes, whoever pumped out the most rounds in the shortest amount of time won. America countered with its own automatic, the space-age-sleek M-16. But for years that rifle was reputed to have problems. One story, plucked by Kahaner from the Vietnam memoir of Colonel David Hackworth, illustrates the issues. Hackworth came across an accidentally exposed Viet Cong gravesite, yanked out a mud-caked AK, pulled back the bolt, and fired off thirty rounds as if the gun had just been cleaned. "This was the kind of weapon our solders needed and deserved, not the M-16 that had to be hospital cleaned or it would jam," wrote Hackworth.

The AK's story only gets darker from there. In Africa, the end of the Cold War led to cutbacks in aid, fragmentation of national states, and revived tribal rivalries. Beginning in Liberia and spreading to Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Rwanda, a new kind of war emerged, marked by vicious attacks on civilians and grotesque atrocities. And there was a new kind of combatant: children. In the Sierra Leone civil war of the 1990s, as many as 80% of combatants were estimated to be between 7 and 14 years old. "Armed with an AK, they were just as lethal as an adult," observes Kahaner.

Kalashnikov culture also spread to Latin America, beginning with the Nicaraguan Contra war of the 1980s. Again the U.S. helped spread the epidemic, as Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North's secret White House project shipped thousands of AKs to the counterrevolutionaries. Soon, "just as it had done in the Middle East and Africa, the indestructible and cheap AK worked its way from country to country, turning small conflicts into large wars" in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia.

Today the AK's place in civilization seems clear. In 2004, the Iraqi army, trained by the U.S. military, nixed American-made M-16s and insisted on being issued AKs. That same year, Playboy issued its list of "50 Products That Changed the World." Near the top--beaten out by only the Apple (AAPL ) Macintosh, the pill, and the Sony (SNE ) Betamax--was the AK, the embodiment of innovation's dark side.

Under the veil of sexuality

Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence

In modern-day Muslim societies, the struggle for greater sexual liberty is hampered by social taboo. Two recent titles attempt to remove the veil of modesty and secrecy surrounding homosexuality and the oft-neglected issue of female sexuality. They deliver surprises both to critics and defenders of Islam.

The first is Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East, by Brian Whitaker, the Middle East editor of The Guardian, Britain's leading liberal newspaper. The book boldly delves into one of the biggest taboos in modern Muslim societies with subtlety and sensitivity, addressing both Arab reformers and interested Western readers. The book provides fascinating insights into the lives of ordinary gays and lesbians, and how society views and treats them.

In fact, Whitaker describes his book as "not primarily a book about sex, nor even a 'gay book' in the usual sense. It discusses society, culture, religion, politics, reform and East-West conflicts."
The title, of course, alludes to the famous description of gay desire as "the love that dares not speak its name," which first appeared in an 1892 poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, and was immortalized by Oscar Wilde during his 1895 trials for gross indecency. Many of the issues with which Arab societies are grappling are familiar, having been faced by the gay-lib movement in the West.

Although I am straight, my interest in the status of Arab gays was triggered by the traumatic arrest and 13-month imprisonment of a former workmate, now living in Canada, during the infamous Queen Boat case in 2001 -- when 52 men were arrested on a tourist boat moored on the Nile in Cairo, long known as a gathering place for the Egyptian gay community -- which marked the start of the current crackdown in Egypt.

According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association, of the 81 countries outlawing same-sex acts, roughly two-fifths are Muslim. Whitaker's book focuses mainly on Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia to highlight the diversity and complexity of the situation. The Egyptian government has no anti-gay laws, and uses emergency legislation originally designed to crack down on Islamists for its campaign against gays. Lebanon has anti-gay laws, but a more tolerant counterculture is emerging. Saudi Arabia threatens homosexuals with the death penalty, yet has a vibrant underground gay scene.

One of the cases in the book, Hassan, leads a dual life as good son and gay campaigner. He has kept his homosexuality secret from his wealthy Palestinian family for fear of hurting them. Meanwhile, he is an active member of al-Fatiha, a U.S.-based organization for gay and lesbian Muslims.

Laila, an Egyptian lesbian, had a gentler family experience. Her mother once asked her if she "really liked women," and seemed relatively unperturbed by her daughter's disclosure. Laila has two possible explanations for this more relaxed attitude: Girls are less important to an Arab family's social standing, and some cynical families see it as a way -- like hymen restoration -- of protecting that prized asset, virginity. Many Arab people are not convinced that lesbianism really exists, and regard it as just temporary fun between girls.

"There is comparatively little on female homoeroticism in Qur'an, hadith [the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed] or interpretive texts," writes Kacia Ali, a professor of religion at Boston University, in her book Sexual Ethics and Islam. "Several factors contribute to the silence. . . . Perhaps the most important is simply that many legal effects of sex depend on penetration by a penis."

Ali's book explores the entire body of sexual ethics -- both homo and hetero -- from a feminist perspective. While academic and legalistic in tone, it helps shed light on the roots of certain inequalities -- such as the notions of polygamy and marriage to non-Muslims -- and shows that, while some of these disparities appear to be intrinsic to Islam and other Near Eastern faiths, most are due to the interpretive biases of male scholars.

Amusingly, the book also reveals the role of medieval Islamic scholars as sex gurus -- the Dr. Ruths of their age. For instance, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali wrote much about the importance of foreplay in the 11th century. "The husband should not be preoccupied with his own satisfaction," the sage advised. "Simultaneity in the moment of orgasm is more delightful to her."

The condemnation of homosexuality in Islam is not as damning or clear-cut as many believe, and it has largely been tolerated throughout Islam's history. Islamic societies "provide a vivid example of a 'homosexual-friendly' environment in world history," U.S. scholar of Islam Scott Kugle wrote in Sexuality, Diversity and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims (2003). This makes the current intolerance all the more surprising.

Ideologically, objections to homosexuality revolve around the belief that gay and lesbian sex cannot occur in a "licit" relationship, seen by the majority of Muslims as heterosexual marriage. "Same-sex marriage fundamentally challenges the basic sexual premises of marriage as a contract," Ali observes. However, some reformers are slowly challenging the view of what constitutes "licit" sex by focusing on consent.

Although many Islamic scholars permit anal sex in heterosexual relations, they ban homosexual sodomy, or liwat, as it is known to Muslims. This condemnation is based on an allegorical link with the Biblical tale of the Prophet Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah. However, the story of Lot's people in the Koran is fragmented and cryptic, and appears to be referring to rape and adultery, which, as Whitaker notes, makes it "unwise to claim that these verses condemn homosexuality."

The fact that Islamic scripture is largely silent on the subject makes the struggle for gay liberation a largely social one. A number of recent developments give hope for the future. In Lebanon, Helem, the Arab world's only official gay rights group, has aligned itself with other civil-rights organizations to push for the modernization of Lebanon's penal code. The group's Beirut office was one of the hubs of the relief effort during the recent conflict in Lebanon. "I think this is likely to strengthen Helem's position in the future," Whitaker says.

In Egypt, The Yacoubian Building, which has been the Arab world's bestselling novel since its publication in 2002, has a sympathetically portrayed gay character. Its film adaptation, released this summer, is the biggest-budget Arabic film ever made, and has become a box-office sensation. Despite calls to ban The Yacoubian Building by parliamentarians -- on the defensive because of the film's full-frontal attack on corruption in high places -- it has brought homosexuality out into the mainstream, sparking a much-needed public debate.

Sexual freedom is part of the general struggle for human dignity, which must be waged at every level. Change will come to the Islamic world when a critical mass of Arabs and Muslims begin to question the structures ruling their lives, from the family unit right up to presidents and kings.