On the European Referendum.

Before I start, I should warn you that this is a very long post, and a break from my usual, word-centric concerns. It is however an issue which I feel is very important. For the 'TL;DR' crowd, and for ease of navigation, I will include a bullet-point summary at the end, but the piece is intended to be a coherent argument, so I would recommend making a cup of tea and sitting down to read the whole thing.

Introduction

In under two weeks, we will be asked to make a decision as to whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union. This is probably the biggest political decision that our generation is likely to face, and many of us (myself included) feel like we are being forced to make this choice without being given adequate information. Under these conditions, many of us will go to the polling stations armed with little more than gut-feeling. In a way, this is how we always vote – choosing a political party is often an emotional decision which has more in common with choosing a football team than it does with balancing rational arguments – but this time the dividing line is less clear, with most of the media attention focused at the civil war within the Conservative Party. I believe that we should remain in the EU, but this is largely based on instinct. Over the course of this post, I intend to turn this instinct into a rational argument. This will not be a neutral post, but I will explore both sides, I am going to reference where my information has come from so that it can be verified, and I will try to avoid sensationalism.

What advantages does the EU bring?

One of the big problems of this referendum is that the British public does not really have a clear picture of what the EU is for. It is best known for allowing free movement of people within its borders, and for allegedly being very picky about the size and shape of our fruit and veg. One of the problems the remain camp seem to be facing is that many of its arguments for staying are based around abstract economic concepts, which do not engage the public as easily the leave campaign’s appeals to fear and patriotism. But, dry though the details may be, the fact remains that currently we export more goods and services to EU countries than we do to anywhere else in the world (44% of our trade goes there – worth around £226 billion – with the next biggest buyer of British goods and services being the USA at 17%)(source here). While leaving the European Union would not necessarily exclude us from trading with member countries there is no way of telling how long it would take to negotiate a new trade deal, and countries which have trade deals with the EU but are not members (like Norway or Switzerland) are required to follow EU regulations in the production of these goods and services, but have no say in what those regulations are (source here).

The big economic stuff is difficult to sell though, particularly as we don’t know what would happen if we were to leave. Perhaps we should look at how the EU affects our day to day lives in terms of employment law. It should be noted that, while UK legislation exceeds the minimum requirement for things like paid holiday and paid maternity leave, the European Union was instrumental in implementing these rights in the first place, and guarantees that it cannot be reduced below a certain level. It should also be noted that in some cases, while the UK currently exceed minimum expectations, British MEPs tried to block the initial inclusion of these rights into European law (a full analysis by an employment law specialist can be found here – you’ll have to scroll down below the initial graphic that he is responding to). Keep in mind too that the Conservative party has a track record of trying to opt out of things like the Work Time Directive, which determines how many hours per week employers can legally make their employees work (according to this Independent article).

The European Union has also played an important role in developing and enforcing laws relating to the environment, with legislation governing things like quality of air and water, carbon emissions levels and use of pesticides. Again, these laws would not necessarily be repealed if we voted to leave the EU, but it should be remembered that the UK government has tried to block some of this environmental legislation from being passed in Europe (more detail can be found in this Friend of the Earth Report). There is more to be said for staying in the European Union, but as we are talking about maintaining the status quo, it might be best considered by comparing it with some of the key arguments of leave campaign.

Why some people want to leave, and why I think we shouldn’t.

Cost

One of the most commonly cited reasons for leaving the EU is the cost of membership. It is true that the UK contributed £13 billion to the EU budget last year, once you remove the £5 billion instant rebate (actually more of a discount, as it never leaves the country), but it is also true that £4 billion of the EU budget was returned to Britain through investment in agriculture or in poorer regions of the country (see here). Yes, theoretically if we were to leave the European Union, this money could be invested directly into redeveloping poorer regions of the country, but we have to ask, do we trust the current government (or worse, Johnson and co.) to do this? Just look at what happened to Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse.

There are two other factors which need to be considered when discussing the financial cost of the EU. Firstly, that £13 billion sounds like a big number, but it amounts to only 1% of total UK spending (According to this YouGov breakdown of how tax is spent). Secondly, we should consider this figure in relation to the benefits that EU membership has for the British economy as a whole. This is a difficult figure to estimate, but according to this New Statesman article, the Confederation of British Industry puts the number somewhere between £62 and £78 billion, a fair return on our investment, given that it also helps to fund the benefits already mentioned.

Immigration

Perhaps more widely discussed by the Out Camp is the issue of immigration. This is an emotive issue which is hard for people to discuss rationally and, while the idea of controlled immigration is not intrinsically racist, it is an argument which attracts racists like flies to a turd. Arguments about immigration from the EU tend to centre around two contradictory strands: that migrants from within the EU are taking too many jobs which could be done by British people, and that migrants from within the EU are unfairly draining the British welfare system.

The second of these claims is easier to unpick. Research shows that people who came to Britain within the EU since 2000 have tended to contribute more in tax than they take in benefits. This picture is somewhat complicated when we consider people who arrived in the UK before the year 2000, as these migrants tend to be older and, like many older people, require additional help to come with the effects of age (source). People in this category have been in the UK for at least fifteen years – surely long enough to justify equal treatment with those who happen to have been born here.

Related to worries about the increased pressure on our benefits system is the concern that ‘health tourism’ is placing unfair strain on the NHS. The figures involved in this are complex, and take into account a number of different groups, including regular visitors to the UK from the EU (people who are resident here for part of the year, like students) and British citizens who live abroad. Remember too that while Britain is a member of the EU, you or I would receive free or reduced price healthcare if we were regular visitors or ‘non-permanent residents’ in other EU countries. If you are really interested in the figures, you can look here. All I’m going to say is that most of these numbers seem to represent visitors to the country who happen to need the hospital when they are here. For the few that do come here specifically for medical purposes, the NHS is not a charity and it should not be treated as such, but if somebodies medical problems are serious enough, and the cost of treating them is prohibitive enough that somebody thought they’d be better off travelling to an entirely different country for treatment, I’m not that interested in hounding them too much over it. In any case, most EU countries have pretty good medical care, so these people are likely to be coming from outside the EU. While Brexit might give us slightly more control over our borders, we will presumably still be open to tourists – unless we’re going to give each one a medical screening, I’m not too sure how leaving the EU would prevent this from happening. And one last word on this subject – hospitals have the option to charge non UK patients for services (outside of accident and emergency) but the costs of recovering this debt is not too far off the amount itself (source).

That other aspect of the migrant debate – that EU migrants are flooding the job market – is perhaps even more emotive. Understandably, people who have been out of work for a long time are not necessarily going to want to listen when people with apparently better job prospects (journalists, politician, English teachers with blogs, for example) tell them that they are losing out on jobs because they aren’t trying hard enough now (the ‘they do the jobs we don’t want to’ argument) or they didn’t work try hard enough at school (the ‘they are better qualified’ argument). I’m not suggesting that completely unrestricted immigration is the best of ideas, but this seems to be how most people think EU migration works. Before we can think about changing Europe, we must first decide to stay, so I’m going to start by looking at the migration situation logically, and then consider some of the facts and figures.

If unemployed British people cannot find work because there is not enough work to go around, leaving the EU may reduce some of the competition for jobs, but it could also plunge the economy into uncharted territory – evidence suggests that over 3 million jobs are linked to trade with EU countries. Jeopardising trade with Europe could put these jobs at risk, leading to an even more competitive job market. In this case staying is our best option.

If there are jobs available and they are being given to people who were raised and educated in the rest of the EU in preference to people who were raised and educated in the UK, we must ask ourselves why. If the answer to that question is that the people from outside of the UK are better qualified, this highlights a problem within our own institutions, and leaving the EU will not change this. Depending on how we leave, we may be able to reduce access to the UK and therefore limit competition but if we do, we may find ourselves with a shortage of skilled workers. In this scenario, our best option would not be to leave the EU, but to better prepare our workforce for the 21^st Century economy. If, on the other hand, the reason is that immigrants are taking jobs that British workers are unwilling to do, I suspect the reason lies not in laziness, but in a benefits system which does not make it easy for people to take part time, low paid or precarious jobs, as they may end up worse off than before. Reforming benefits is important, but discussion of it is beyond the scope of this post, and I will not attempt to do it here. I will say that leaving the EU would not make these jobs more attractive, or solve the problems which make British workers reluctant to take them in the first place.

If neither of the above scenarios are true – if there are jobs available, and employers are not choosing people from outside of the UK in preference to people from inside the UK – then we are left with a simpler picture. Finding work is difficult, and has been since the economic crash. Having a larger potential workforce (anyone in the EU who wants to work in Britain, for example) does make this more difficult, but when the economic benefits of being a member of the European Union help to create jobs, and when the European union helps to fund development of poorer areas, leaving is not the best solution. The best solution is to find ways to create more jobs, and to acknowledge that, as finding work in the current economic climate is difficult, we should find ways to better support those who are looking for work, both financially and practically, rather than vilifying them in the tabloid press and creating an increasingly punitive culture within the welfare state.

I suspect that there may be some element of truth in all of the scenarios described above, and again, while I broadly agree with the principle of free movement, I am not saying that we should not perhaps revisit some of the conditions of this principle. Staying in the EU gives us the best position to negotiate this, particularly when we consider the fact that, if we were to leave, but wanted to remain part of the European Free Trade Agreement (the least risky option, economically), then we would likely have to accept the free movement of people between the UK and the rest of Europe as part of the deal, as it is in Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. A fairly detailed account of the issues which would face Britain if it wanted to leave the EU and become part of the EFTA can be found here. So far, I have simplified the situation around immigration in the same way that many in the leave campaign do – by conflating all immigration into the UK. In fact, immigration from outside of the EU has traditionally been significantly higher, and is currently about equal. Even if we were to leave the EU, we would still potentially have large numbers of people coming to live and work in the UK (source).

Then there are the benefits of migration. Apart from the previously mentioned fact that migrants have made a net contribution to the UK, the immigration of young, working-age people is a way of spreading the tax burden created by an aging population (as shown in this 2013 study). It also helps us to cope with shortages of suitable workers in specific sectors, for example, recent research suggests that 26% of NHS doctors were trained outside of the UK (source), and 10% were from other places in the EU (source). I haven’t been able to find any statistics, but I very much doubt that there are large numbers of British-born doctors waiting in dole queues because of this. Sticking with the NHS, recent cuts in the number of training places available for nurses (source) mean that we are likely to become even more reliant on migrants to fill these vital roles in our communities.

And migrants don’t just work and pay taxes. They buy things in our shops, they start business, and have families. The ratio might not be a simple one to one, but larger populations also create jobs, as there is greater demand for goods and services. Public institutions like schools and hospitals might be put under increased pressure in the short term, but over time, the increased tax revenue will allow for more investment in these services, balancing out and creating more jobs in the process. Perhaps more important is the cultural impact. Since at least the end of World War Two[1], British culture has been enhanced and expanded through interaction with other cultures. We are lucky to have access to such a wide range of cultural experiences. Some people worry that this is undermining traditional British culture, but I can still get cream tea, watch a football match, drink a pint of Banks’ Mild brewed just over ten miles away from my house, or go watch a Shakespeare play. I can even, if I am so inclined, go Morris dancing. But thanks to sixty odd years of multi-cultural Britain, I can get jerk chicken, rice and peas delivered to my house, watch a Bollywood film at Star City or go to a pub where the Polish chefs serve szwajacar and suflak alongside British pub classics[2]. Again, I know that two out of three of these examples have nothing to do with the EU, but the principle that the mixing of cultures can enrich our experience remains.

Sovereignty

Vote Leave campaigners also love to talk about sovereignty, the power the country has to make its own laws. It is true that as part of the EU, we allow some decisions about the laws affecting us to be made elsewhere, but this is also true of other international institutions, like NATO. If we are concerned about our ability to make the decisions which are best for the country, then we should consider that, if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, it may be best to transfer some of our sovereignty elsewhere (source). Even with this transfer of sovereignty, Britain maintains some element of control through the European Parliament (where we can send MEPs elected within by our European constituencies) and through the Council of the European Union (where ministers from national governments meet to discuss specific policy areas). As a nation, we abdicate some of our sovereignty to the European Union in the same way that as individuals, we agree to live by certain laws in exchange for the protection that the law offers. Ultimately, while we have allowed the European Union to make some decisions for us, the very fact that we are able to hold a referendum shows that we still retain the option to take this transferred sovereignty back – the question is whether it would be advantageous to do so. I believe that the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that we are better off staying in the EU, and that the leave camp’s arguments about sovereignty have more to do with populist notions of national prestige than they do with any real world benefits.

Human Rights

Related to issues of sovereignty is the issue of the European Convention on Human Rights, which the Human Rights Act enshrined in British law in 1998. The current government has said that it wants to replace this with a British Bill of Rights, and some people who want to leave the EU use the Human Rights Act as another example of the loss of British Sovereignty. If this is something which concerns you, I suggest that you look at the list of rights protected by this act, here, and then ask yourself ‘are there any rights here which I do not want?’ Part of the problem here is that some elements of the media have caused us to erroneously think of human rights as something which prevents us from punishing criminals, or requires us to give porn to murderers or KFC to thieves, rather than as a universal standard for how all human beings should be treated. For more information, including a debunking of the ridiculous cases above, look here. If the British public were to leave the European Union because they no longer wished to be bound by the ECHR, it might be the first time in history that people have chosen to be given less legal rights. It would also be futile, as the ECHR is a treaty which is separate from our membership of the European Union, and is instead related to our membership of the Council of Europe – an international body which contains several non-EU states, and which the British government has no plans to pull out of (source).

Security

Some people worry that overly lenient application of human right’s law, combined with the European Union’s open borders policy, has created a threat to British security, particularly in our current age of international terrorism. There are several things to consider here. Firstly, we are not part of the Schengen Area, meaning that we retain the right to carry out passport checks at our borders, so we could still prevent known security threats from entering Britain. Secondly, the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in France and Belgium last year were French and Belgian citizens, so even if we were to close our borders completely (which not even the most extreme in the Vote Leave camp are planning on doing) we would still have some risk of home grown terrorism, while our current status allows us to make use of various resources, such as the European Criminal Records System. Leaving would not automatically deny us access to these things, but neither would it guarantee that we can continue to use them (source).

Conclusions

The European Union is not perfect. No large organisation is, but I believe that the benefits of membership far outweigh the risks of leaving. In this post, I have given a large number of reasons, often centred around complicated issues, but in the end, the main issue is whether you believe that our best option in a changing world is to co-operate with our neighbours or to go it alone. From our position in the EU, we can help shape a better future, both for the UK and for people across the continent.

Summary

• I believe that Britain should remain part of the European Union.
• Membership of the EU comes with a number of economic advantages which we may lose if we leave.
• The EU has helped to protect the environment, and workers rights.
• We are required to contribute towards the EU budget, but this allows us access to numerous benefits, and costs only a small part of our national budget.
• Immigration has brought benefits to our economy, society and culture.
• We have given the EU some control over our legislation, but this is a normal part of international co-operation.
• The Human Right Act is not directly tied to the EU, and why would we want to give it up?
• Being part of the EU allows for easy co-operation between different countries' security forces.

Further Reading

While writing this post, I have found the following websites to be balanced and informative:

Full Fact - The independent fact checking charity

The UK in a Changing Europe

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[1] Yes, I know I’m talking about non-EU migration here, but the principle still applies, so bear with me.

[2] The Stile in Wolverhampton, just round the corner from where I used to live.

Book Review: 'Waverley' by Walter Scott

I chose Waverley after rolling an eighteen – ‘a book I never finished’ – in my D20 reading challenge, and it is perhaps telling that there has been such a significant gap between this post and my last.

I first attempted Waverley during my second year at university, as part of a module on the Romantics, and it was this novel which caused me to break my vow to finish reading all of the required course material. This book begins a generation before the protagonist has even been born, then proceeds to explain his childhood and education in great depth, and in a style which even Scott himself admits is ‘what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus’. This sustained barrage of exposition was too much for me; I surrendered, and opted to simply write my assignments about a different text.

Returning to it six years later, the long trudge through the first volume still failed to enthral me, and it is not until the twenty-fourth chapter that the main thrust of the narrative begins. After this point, I quite enjoyed the novel, but there was part of me which begrudged the amount of time it took to get to there.  Part of my impatience with the earlier half of the novel stems from a sort of conscientious discomfort around the way that the aristocratic protagonist seems to see no problem with taking off on a months-long jolly around Scotland within weeks of beginning his military career.

Sense of entitlement aside, Edward Waverley makes a fairly likeable hero, in the Romantic bildungsroman tradition. He has a strong sense of honour, but is naïve, and has allowed Romantic novels and tales of chivalrous derring-do to shape his understanding of how the world works. Despite this, the character sometimes seems a little flat – particularly in comparison to others in the novel who are much more memorable. In particular, Scott draws warm, believable comic characters in much the same way that Dickens would a few decades later.

One useful aspect of Waverley’s ‘flatness’ is that he becomes a sort of blank space for the reader to project themselves upon, and it is through his English eyes that we are first introduced to exotic world of Jacobite-era Scotland. This journey takes place in stages, from the comfortable, pastoral England of his uncle’s estate, to the military encampment in Edinburgh, then on to the almost feudal Barony of Bradwardine, and ultimately into a highlands inhabited by outlaws and by tribal chiefs. This gradual march into the unknown has some sense of thematic importance, but unfortunately lacks a real sense of purpose until its final stage.

As a modern reader, it is tempting to see Waverley as a story of radicalisation, and the charismatic Fergus Mac-Ivor could be interpreted as a manipulator, guiding the inexperienced Edward Waverley into rebellion. However, we should be careful in drawing parallels with the radicalisation of young men into extremist causes in today’s society. Scott is ambiguous in his portrayal of the Jacobite rebellions, and while he is sure to show that his protagonist is, to some extent, tricked into pledging himself to the highlanders’ cause, he is also careful to include honourable and dishonourable characters on both sides.

Although some of Scott’s best writing comes in his description of the Battle of Prestonpans, his depiction of Waverley’s rebellion is strangely toothless. Despite volunteering with the Jacobites, Waverley seems to spend the majority of his time on the battlefield trying to prevent government soldiers from being killed. This is understandable, as contemporary readers may have found it difficult to sympathise with a hero who commits fully fledged acts of treachery, but it does soften the impact of the protagonist’s eventual disavowal of the Jacobite cause. Similarly, while Scott does offer some brief comments on the effects of war on the landscape, his most emotionally charged description is saved for Tully-Veolan, the great house of the Baron of Bradwardine. Scott is pre-occupied with ideas about inheritance and property, and on some level the novel can be seen as tracing Waverley’s growth into a suitable lord, complete with a suitable wife.

It is not just the rebellion which is toothless: the government’s response seems unbelievably lenient. While Mac-Ivor and his foster brother are put on trial and executed for their crimes (another of Scott’s finest scenes), Waverley and the Baron of Bradwardine receive convenient pardons with very little trouble, and the last chapter seems particularly contrived.

Despite its flaws though, I found Waverley to be an interesting read. While the first-volume is dry and overly-long, Scott does make good use of seemingly incidental details later in the novel. Scott’s self-aware authorial interjections seem to pre-empt Forster’s ‘One may as well start with the letters’ – one of my all-time favourite opening sentences – and serve as a reminder that novels have been experimenting with narrative voice since the very beginning. There are things about the novel’s structure which work very well, and it can be enjoyed as an early example of a historical novel, or as a straightforward adventure story, even if it fails to fully address the moral complexities of civil war.

Book Review: 'The Watchers' by Neil Spring

Warning – while I have tried to avoid major plot details, it is impossible to discuss my thoughts on this book properly without some spoilers.

Cold war paranoia, a remote Welsh village, mysterious objects in the sky and potential military conspiracy. These were the ingredients which attracted me to The Watchers by Neil Spring as I looked around the Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy section of Waterstone’s for the ‘genre’ book of my current reading challenge. I was also attracted by the fact that it did not appear to be part of one of the sprawling, multi-book sagas which are so common in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Not that there is anything wrong with long series, but they do not suit my current purpose of reading a wider range of different books.

The term genre is controversial; I could (and might) fill another blog post with my thoughts on the matter, but for this reading challenge, I am considering novels which are given their own section in bookshops to be ‘genre’ and everything in the general fiction section to be ‘non-genre’.

The Watchers tells the story of Robert Wilding, a parliamentary researcher who is sent on a secretive mission to investigate a series of UFO sightings in the Havens, the coastal Welsh village where he grew up. Along the way, he will re-unite with his grandfather – a religious fanatic – and uncover the details of his parents’ mysterious deaths many years before.

Spring makes good use of frame narratives to tell the story, hinting at wider ranging implications of the events on which the novel centres, and eventually setting the scene for a sequel (so much for my choice of a ‘stand-alone’ novel). Particularly interesting is Spring’s use of extracts from parliamentary reports, interviews with survivors and other in-world texts to allow us a range of perspectives and to build tension towards the novel’s climax. This is a much more successful technique than the ‘I thought it couldn’t get worse, but then it did’ style of foreshadowing which Spring somewhat overuses.

The Watchers hits all of the right beats for a thrilling super-natural mystery with a satisfying, action-movie set-piece at the end. It also incorporates a number of elements which I found to be potentially interesting. I like it when books have range of reference points and this one manages to take in noted occultist Aleister Crowley, the Egryn Lights, Ley lines and secret military experiments. The book’s title, The Watchers, refers to the angelic beings mentioned in the apocryphal books of Enoch, who are credited with the promethean act of imparting forbidden knowledge to mankind in the era before the flood. Unfortunately, this aspect of the Watchers is not really explored in the novel, and they become more generic fallen angels.

There is an irony in this, as the idea that knowledge should be shared freely rather than hidden away by those in power is introduced early in the novel: the protagonist’s mother is blinded during a protest about secret American nuclear weapons on British soil, and Robert Wilding is driven in part by his desire to find out the truth of these circumstance and to force the Americans to be more open about their actions in Britain. Wilding’s search for truth is set up in opposition to many of the other characters in the book, from the scared villagers, to the military, to his own grandfather, who are all withholding information from him. The Watchers mythos, which is sometimes associated with ancient alien conspiracy theories, would fit nicely with the story that Spring initially seems to be telling.

Perhaps one reason why Spring ignores the stories of the Watchers teaching mankind skills like writing, astrology, magic and blacksmithing, is that they are simply on the wrong side. While truth, and freedom of information appear at first to be among the books main themes, the power of Christian faith later becomes more prominent. This is an aspect of the book that worked less well for me. I do not know whether Spring is a Christian, or whether he merely found that Christian mythology allowed him the best framework for the story he wanted to tell, but I found this aspect of the book to be annoyingly preachy. One possible reading of the book would be that it tells the story of a character who has is unsuccessfully searching for truth and meaning in his life through secular institutions, but eventually finds it when he casts aside his scepticism and embraces the Christian faith which allows him to combat the power of evil. In this interpretation, it is also noteworthy that (spoiler alert) the local Catholic priest, who had allowed his doubts about Christianity to steer him towards Communist sympathies, ultimately finds that his weakened faith is not enough to protect him, and sacrifices himself in his attempts to save others. However, although I was not carried along by this aspect of the novel, I did find myself rooting for Wilding’s reconciliation with his grandfather, Randall Llewellyn Pritchard, whose apparent fanaticism is justified by the novel’s conclusion.

Despite my (non-militant) atheism, I do not, in theory, have a problem with religious art. The Exorcist (film, not book – which I haven’t read), for example is able to deal with the idea of evil in a clearly Christian context in a way which is both powerful and haunting. I do, however, think that making the ancient evil derive clearly and straightforwardly from Judeo-Christian tradition lessons its impact a little, in that it gives it makes it explainable. Once your eldritch abomination has a clearly definable origin story (complete with a kryptonite as simple as ‘believing really hard’) it ceases to be scary. I also wonder if one reason I did not get along with the novel’s Christian aspects was that I felt a little tricked into it – there were few clues set out for us to pick on, and it felt less like a plot twist, and more like a sudden realisation that I wasn’t reading the book I thought it was. This would, perhaps, have been forgivable if it weren’t for some other plot features which failed to convince. For example (Spoiler alert), the local ‘rotary club which doubles as an evil cult’ reminded me a little too much of the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost film Hot Fuzz for me to take it as seriously as The Watchers wants us to.

This is not to say that there is nothing to enjoy here. If you are looking for a straightforward supernatural thriller, and can stomach the evangelism, The Watchers provides a decent Dr Who style mystery combined with a high-stakes ending which, if it had taken place over New York, would not have seemed out of place at the climax of an Avengers movie. I enjoyed Spring’s innovative use of different texts, and he makes good use of classic Gothic tropes such as isolated villages, creepy hotels, ruined castles and pertinent warnings from seemingly crazy old men. I rarely found the novel to be genuinely unnerving – something I think is a key marker of success in a horror novel – but on a human level, Robert Wilding is a relatable and sympathetic narrator and many of the other characters are similarly well-drawn. Unfortunately, these successes did not, for me, outweigh the novel’s failures. I doubt I’ll be looking for the sequel.

Book Review: The Northmen's Fury - A History of the Viking World by Philip Parker

This year I’m using the power of the twenty-sided die to force myself to read more widely. My first role showed a 12 for ‘History, Myth and Legend’, and so I headed into Waterstone's with my Christmas gift card and had a rummage. With everything that has ever happened (and a significant quantity of things that didn’t) to choose from, it was a difficult decision. In the end I let my current obsessions choose for me, and selected Philip Parker’s history of the Viking world ‘The Northmen’s Fury’.

For a while, when I was in primary school, Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories took up the most space on my bookshelf. Those books first introduced me to the joys of reading and of history, but while I still find the past fascinating, I’m a little ashamed to admit that until I embarked on this project, I had never read a history book aimed at adults. For somebody who has not fostered the skill of reading history, The Northmen’s Fury is perhaps a difficult place to start. This is no fault of Parker’s – he writes clearly and engagingly, but he does so about a contradictory people, and across a field which is both temporally and geographically huge.

One thing that history has in common with the novel is that both concern themselves with cause and effect, but when the primary sources are as sparse and biased as they are for the Vikings, motivations can be hard to follow. While the Vikings had a writing system in the form of runes, they left little record of themselves other than a few monumental inscriptions often following a simple ‘X raised this rock in memory of Y,’ formula. One or two of these appear to corroborate information from the much later sagas, but they do little to help Parker tell the ‘story’ of Norse culture. This largely non-literary, largely pagan culture spent a significant amount of time attacking Christian neighbours who did keep fairly detailed historical records. Add to this the fact that many of their victims were monks – the very people writing those records – and it is little surprise that contemporary sources created the, barbaric picture of the Vikings that remains in many people’s minds to this day. They were, of course, sometimes capable of brutal violence, but no more so than many of their neighbours. Parker tells us of the massacre of the Danes who had settled in England, as ordered by King Aethelred, during which even the children of ‘those women who had consented to intermix with the Danes’ were ‘dashed to pieces against posts and stones’.

When the Vikings’ descendants did develop their own rich literary heritage in the form of the Icelandic sagas, Parker is careful to remind us that they were written down many years after the events described (presumably as the culmination of an oral tradition), and that many of them serve to legitimise the claims of this or that Norwegian royal house. While he acknowledges the potential unreliability of his sources, Parker does not shy away from presenting much information from them as fact – a decision which can be justified by imagining the difficulty and tedium involved in reading a book which presents every single action as something that may or may not have happened.

The difficulty in following the chain of causality is not always helped by the fact that the Vikings tended to travel widely, and Parker’s decision to divide up many of his chapters geographically (although some areas get different chapters for different periods), means that we sometimes have the same historical figure appear in different chapters without necessarily following their careers in chronological order. It should be noted however that Parkers systematic approach is useful in giving a sense of organisation to this history’s vast scope. Those readers who would like an approach which more closely examines the biographies of the period’s key players will find themselves well served by the book’s penultimate chapter: a set piece centred on the dual invasions of England in 1066 which follows lives of each of the three key players up to that point. Parker is seemingly helped here by the more detailed sources available for this period, and manages to shed new light on a period I thought I knew well. The life of Harald Hardrada is particularly interesting: he spent a number of years fighting in the Byzantine empire’s Varangian guard before taking his throne in Norway, and seemed to be the most experienced of the three generals vying for the crown of England.

I do not wish to suggest that Parker himself is responsible for the sometimes confusing nature of the book. He does a very good job of providing readers with a structured history of a people whose motivations are lost to time, and who sometimes do things which seem bizarre to the modern reader. For example, several of the kings of Viking Dublin seem to have abandoned their thrones to take up kingship of York, or vice versa, and at least one later changed his mind, returning to Dublin to oust the relative who had ruled in his place. Adding to the confusion is the fact that it sometimes seems as though almost all of the era’s major figures are called Harald or Olaf, and thus they almost all bear the patronym Olafson or Haraldson.

When I studied A-level Archaeology, the parts I found most interesting were the small glimpses we occasionally get into the lives of people from long ago. It is in these moments that this book is also at its best. For example, the small group of Norse Christians returning from the crusades who took shelter in the Neolithic tomb at Maeshowe on the Orkney islands, and occupied their time in carving coded runes into the walls with messages varying from boasts about the skill of the carver, to praise for Ingigerd, ‘the most beautiful of women’, and even a claim that a large pile of treasure that was removed from the tomb and buried somewhere nearby (probably an example of Viking humour – as Parker points out, the sparse, primitive grave goods we find in stone-age tombs are unlikely to have been of much interest to Norse warriors). While the style here is still very much that of a fiction book, we as readers are in the tomb with the band of crusaders while the storm rages outside.

As might be expected from a history of the Vikings (and probably of any early medieval group) the story we are told predominantly concerns the military elite, with the lives of the everyday folk fading into the background. This is understandable, as the farmers who likely made up the majority of the population had little opportunity to do much that would be worthy of record in sagas or in monks’ records. We do get more of an idea of the lives of ordinary people when Parker turns his gaze across the Atlantic to focus on the settlements of Iceland and Greenland, and the probable forays into parts of North America (interestingly, the Greenland colony, which almost certainly collected resources from the American mainland, made its last written records in 1408, and archaeological evidence suggests that the colony may have survived until the latter half of that century – only decades before Columbus’s discovery of America). In these chapters we are presented with a people who resisted any form of leadership which is too autocratic – both Iceland and the Isle of Mann have claims to the oldest running parliaments in the world – but whose isolation and infighting eventually caused them to submit to Scandinavian monarchies which would later neglect them in times of need.

As well as valuing independence, the Viking people are presented as being great technological innovators whose long-boats allowed them to strike deep inland along river courses, and whose navigational skills allowed them to build up a trading network which stretched as far as Constantinople and the Middle East. Their cultural sphere of influence stretched from Kiev and Novgorod in the east, to the shores of America in the west, but their lack of one unifying government – and their sometimes Game-of-Thrones-esque political infighting – prevents them from being considered as an empire on the scale of the Romans or the Macedonians.  

In the final chapters, Parker deals with the descendants of a small group of Vikings who settled in the  France, and went on to found dynasties across western Europe. He also discusses the 19^th Century cultural interest in the Viking myth and acknowledges how parts of it were appropriated by the Third Reich (although he does not mention the ongoing rift between Neo-nazi and non-racist factions in contemporary Germanic Neopaganism), a system of government which would almost certainly have appalled those Vikings who braved the unforgiving North Atlantic in order to avoid what they saw as increasing tyranny in Scandinavia and set up communities which we would now recognise as being run along democratic lines. In this respect it’s also worth noting that the Viking societies seemed happy to trade and intermarry with people of many different cultures and religions, and in areas like Normandy and Russia they eventually became fully integrated with the surrounding people.

This is connected to one of the core things I was reminded of by this book. History is always more complex than we imagine it. In popular culture, Vikings are very much the pagan outsiders ransacking Christian Europe, and while there is an element of truth in this, it is worth remembering that they were also shrewd traders, whose politics were deeply interwoven with their neighbours, particularly in the British Isles. I was also surprised to learn that, while it took a long time for Christianity to become established in the Nordic countries (and Norway had a pagan rebellion as late as the 12^th Century), there is evidence that there were Christians in Scandinavia at the very start of the Viking period, and Christians were involved in the settlements of both Iceland and Greenland. This should not be a shock, given the Viking age starts five centuries after the Roman Empire had made Christianity a dominant faction in Europe. One thing about the pop-culture Viking which does seem to be true is their preoccupation with being remembered in stories, and I’m sure the many Haralds and Olafs mentioned here would be pleased to see their names recorded a millennia after they passed into the afterlives of their chosing.

Next time I read a history books, I might opt for something with a narrower focus, but I very much enjoyed this overview of a period I have long been interested in. My next roll of the dice was an eleven, for a genre novel. I opted for The Watchers by Neil Spring. Watch this space for a review.

The D20 Reading Challenge, or 'How I plan to read more widely in 2016'.

I love bookshops, but they also stir a feeling in me which (to my knowledge) there is no word for: a sadness that however many books I read, there will always be good ones which I miss. I’m not much given to biblical quotation, but I’m inclined to agree with Solomon’s observation that ‘of the making of many books there is no end’, and there doesn’t seem to have been any let up in the intervening 3 millennia. And if I’m determined to add to their number, I know that I should be reading as widely as possible.

This is where the problem lies. The modern bookshop presents such tyranny of choice that it’s too easy to give up and stick to familiar names (meaning that you never discover anything new – less established authors are deprived of new readers and you end up with a narrow experience of the literary world). Worse, sometimes I am so overwhelmed that I give up, and leave empty handed.

With this in mind, I decided it was time for a solution – something to push me out of my comfortable reading nook. Turning to the twenty sided die, that universal symbol of geekdom, I devised the D20 reading challenge. It’s simple, just roll the dice and pick a book in that category. Roll, Read, Review and Repeat. The categories are not mutually exclusive, but nor are they meant to be. My version is below, but if you want to try it, feel free to substitute any of the categories with ones better suit you.

1. The canonical novel.

Probably not a controversial choice this, but despite my three years (*embarrassed cough*) of literature A-level, three year English degree, and my current role as an English teacher, feel that I’ve still only scratched the surface of the great corpus of English novels. More controversial is the concept of the canon itself. Not wishing to fall into that debate, for my purposed the canon is defined simply as ‘the novels any serious reader is ‘supposed to’ have read’.

2. 21^st Century novel

In pursuing the classics, it is easy to neglect the many novels that are being published here and now. Serious reader (particularly those who want to be writers) should be aware of what is going on around them. ‘Nuff said.

3. A novel which is an old favourite

One of the great pleasures of reading is in re-reading. It is always interesting to return to a favourite book after a number of years to see how your attitude to it has changed. As you reach new stages in your life, different aspects of the novel can seem more important – you may find that you interpret the ideas in the novel differently, or find yourself relating more to characters who didn’t interest you in the past. In the clamour for new and exciting reading experiences, it is important not to forget where you have come from. However, I would have been disappointed if this had come up first.

4. A new novel by a familiar author

‘New’ here meaning ‘one I haven’t read before’. Like anybody, I have my favourites, but there are not many writers who have more than one or two books on my bookshelf. This is a chance to further explore those authors who are under-represented, or to expand my collection of those writers I like the most.

5. A small press, local, or self-published novel

Because I know enough writers and publishers that deserve support, particularly in the Birmingham area. And because easy self-publishing is probably one of the most important developments in modern literature – it would be silly to ignore it.

6. Poetry – A new book by a familiar poet

My reasoning here is, unsurprisingly, similar to number four. This seems like a good place to mention that I am more interested in individual collections rather than anthologies or ‘selected works’ – a stance which probably goes back to being introduced to bands like Pink Floyd at a young age. Poetry collections, like albums, should be seen as one coherent unit.

7. A small press, local, or self-published poetry collection

This is perhaps more important here than it is with novels; independent publisher are the life-blood of poetry, seeming to make up the vast bulk of poetry publishing in the UK.

8. A poetry collection which is an old favourite.

All the things I said about ‘old favourite’ novels apply doubly here. The complexity of how language is used in poetry make changing interpretations even more likely, and its roots in the oral tradition mean poetry is designed to be repeated.

9. Poetry in translation

I used to avoid translated literature out of an immature snobbishness about it not being in its ‘original form’. I only read in English though, so if I kept up this attitude I would be missing out on entire cultures worth of literature. The issues surrounding the translation of poetry are interesting, and it could be argued that translated poems are more like new works which are intrinsically connected to their sources.

10. Poetry by ‘important’ poets

The idea here is similar to the ‘canonical novel’, but I have substituted ‘canon’ with ‘big name’ as many of the poets I am interested in for this category worked in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. This is the category for bigger publishers and the more famous poets, alive or dead.

11. A ‘genre’ novel

My relationship with genre novels could probably make up a blog post in their own right. For a long time they were all I read, and then there was a (thankfully brief) period of snobbishness around the beginning of my degree. Later, I came to my senses and realised that good writing is good writing whatever it is about, and that science fiction or fantasy writers take their craft as seriously as ‘lit. fic.’ writers. I still don’t read many genre novels though, purely because there are so many books of all different types that I want to read (which is one of the reasons I’m making this list). Genre in the sense that I am using it includes fantasy, science fiction, horror and crime. I accept the argument that ‘literary fiction’ is really another genre, but as that makes up most of my reading, I feel I should include a category to move me into other areas.

12. Non-fiction – History, legend and myth

As great as fiction and poetry are, I feel that it is important to also be well read and well informed about the real world. This is where my reading habits really let me down. Faced by so many exciting novels, I rarely browse in non-fiction for long. This is strange, because I do love learning interesting things, and I’ve always been interested in history in particular. The ‘legend and myth’ part of this category is designed to allow for older texts which include things which people once believed to be true and are there for written as non-fiction (for example, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which was written after Iceland had already been Christianised, but which was intended to keep record of the older beliefs which had shaped that nation’s culture). It should be noted that in all of the non-fiction categories, I’ll be looking primarily at books which are ‘writerly’ as well as informative.

13. Non-fiction – Memoir and travel writing

Around the same time that I had snobbishness about genre fiction, I also misguidedly thought that non-fiction is not really literature. This category is dedicated to Ian Marchant, whose ‘life writing’ module in the second year of my degree taught me that I was wrong.

14. Non-fiction – Philosophy, science and the social sciences

If the ‘history’ category is designed to keep me well informed on what has happened, this one is designed to keep me thinking about how things work, or at least how we think they do. That’s the logic behind putting philosophy and science together. Again though, I’ll be looking for books which are writerly as well as informative, so expect more pop-science and less text books.

15. A graphic novel

This is a means of storytelling which I have long thought of as interesting art form in its own right, with a format which is similar to prose, but has an entirely different set of tools to use. However, as there are so many books I want to read, it’s a format which I am still yet to really discover for myself.

16. A short-story collection

I love short stories. I love the brevity and the craft of them. Unfortunately for them, I love novels a little more, so this is an area of my bookshelf that has been a little neglected.

17. A novel in translation

Language and culture are intertwined, and as with poetry, I’m currently missing out on some of the best prose that other cultures have to offer. This category is designed to remedy that.

18. A book I never finished

I’m a fairly diligent reader, so there aren’t too many of these. But there some hangovers from university (The Monk and Waverley, for example) to polish off, and there are also books that have suffered from my habit of having two or three books on the go at once and my tendency to get distracted. It’s time to give them the attention they deserve.

19. Literary criticism, language and writing

These are the ‘how stuff works’ books that I would gravitate towards most naturally. I’ve given them their own category to push me into wider and more far-ranging topics for category fourteen. Their inclusion also reflects the importance of staying up-to-date and well informed in one’s own field.

20. Wild Card

I love the idea behind this category, and it could become the basis of a future reading challenge all on its own. The idea is that when I roll a twenty I will ask somebody whose opinion I trust (a friend or family member, a co-worker, a bookseller) what they think my next book should be, and read that.

Additional Information

I’m calling this a reading challenge because this year I intend to select all of my books like this (with the exception of books I need to read for work or books that I want to read as research for my own writing projects). To ensure breadth of coverage, the first time round I will eliminate categories as they have been selected, meaning that I will cover every category at some point this year. After that all the categories will be restored and repetitions will be allowed. The challenge will last for this year, or until I’ve covered every category. After that it will just be a way of selecting new books if I don’t have a specific one in mind. I haven’t included any drama categories because plays should be seen rather than read.

I’ve started already, throwing a 12 and selecting The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking World by Philip Parker as my first book. If you’d like to join me, with my categories or with your own, leave a comment below. If you don’t own a twenty sided dice (doesn’t everybody?) you can use this website to generate your rolls.

Book Review: 'The Wake' by Paul Kingsnorth

Hastings, 1066. For many of us this is where English history begins. Before this, we are taught, a few barbarian warlords wrestled the land away from the equally barbaric Celts in the power-vacuum left by the Romans, then squabbled over it for the next 500 years or so until William the Conqueror and his knights chased away the dark ages, restoring civilization, establishing Chivalry, and setting England on her path to the glorious empire of the 19^th Century.

The cliché tells us that history is written by the winners, and this particular propaganda has been persistent. It is pretty much the story I learned in primary school, and seems to have echoes in the ‘Our Island Story’ curriculum Gove was pushing a couple of years ago. This book, though, is concerned with the losers. For Buccmaster of Holland, 1066 marks the death blow for England, but it is not a clean wound. The Wake follows Buccmaster into the forests of Lincolnshire, where he becomes a ‘green man’, fighting a guerrilla war against the French invaders.

One of the challenges of historical fiction, even if it deals with primarily fictional characters, is how to engage readers in a story with a foregone conclusion. Kingsnorth approaches this by focussing on Buccmaster’s personal journey against the backdrop of a hostile foreign occupation. When telling a tale like this, there is a temptation to write about a heroic underdog, leading his noble but ultimately tragic people in a final stand against tyranny, but here the big historical players, William, Harold, and even Hereward the Wake, whose epithet gives the novel its name, exist only as distant rumours[i]. The Norman invaders are inarguably oppressive, but the inequalities in English society are accepted as natural by the characters, and Buccmaster does not see the irony in his adoration of the Anglo-saxon raiders who had crushed the existing Romano-British culture in the same way he fears the Normans will destroy the English way of life.

Buccmaster himself is decidedly unheroic. He is petty, arrogant, probably delusional and ultimately pathetic, but it is through his voice that the story is told. While he is sometimes a difficult character to like, it seems right that we should see these events from the point of view of somebody who is ordinary and flawed; most of us will only ever play bit-parts in the grand narrative of human history, and in Buccmaster, Kingsnorth gives us protagonist who struggles to see this, both as an individual, and as a representative of a culture in terminal decline.

One of the novel’s great successes is the way that it brings Buccmaster’s voice and his world vividly to life. This is achieved through Kingsnorth’s great experiment: in recognition of the fact that ‘our assumptions, our politics, our worldview, our attitudes’ are reflected in the language we speak, the novel is written in a ‘ghost tongue’ – an approximation of Old English designed to be accessible to modern readers. What could easily have become a gimmick is in fact one of the strongest aspects of the novel, and while the language takes a little perseverance at first (and perhaps more so if you aren’t already involved in word-geekery), it soon becomes natural. Other than a few of the more unusual words (most of which are covered by a glossary), I found that within a few pages, I was able to read and comprehend the language as it is, rather than needing to mentally translate. In fact, Kingsnorth’s ‘ghost tongue’ lives up to its name, as I found its vocabulary sticking with me after I had put the book down. In attempting to write in a language which has not been moulded by a thousand years of loan-words, and political, economic and philosophical change, Kingsnorth gives his narrator a speech which is rooted in agriculture, the natural world, and a pre-feudal view on human society, avoiding the trap of giving his 11^th Century characters 21^st Century minds. This ghost-tongue also has a lyrical beauty of its own: ‘it is early in the mergen mist is risan from the waters and on top of the waters is mos grene lic the grenest daeg and deop below deop in the blaec water can be seen great leafs what is suncan almost from sight. all is flat all this land is flat naht stands abuf the reods. low we is and we gan slow through the green and naht is to be seen but the water…’

This 11^th Century mind-set does not mean that the novel has no relevance today. Kingsnorth has written non-fiction about the loss of English cultural identity, and it is interesting to read the novel in a society where this is increasingly dominated by nationalists. The book offers no answers, but it did make me wonder if the paranoia about immigrants eroding the English way of life might stem from deep cultural memories. Whether you start English history at 1066 or in the 5^th Century with the first Germanic settlers, the national origin story is one of conquest and displacement. I do not wish to draw comparisons between the Norman conquest and the migration patterns of the last century – a top-down, military subjugation of the native population is clearly entirely different from a steady influx of families and individuals looking for greater economic or social stability – but I suspect these deep-seated invasion narratives from our early history have coloured some aspects of the debate on migration.

For the English of The Wake, there can be no period of gradual adjustment. When William the Bastard seizes the thrown, it marks a catastrophic end to the Anglo-Saxon way of life. The language may be unfamiliar, the protagonist unsympathetic at times, but this book offers an intimate exploration of the way people might react to such a complete destruction of their way of life while offering some insight to an often overlooked period of English history from the perspective of those who are not destined to be remembered.

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[i] It is interesting, as a modern reader, to experience a society where news cannot travel faster than a man can walk. The world seems bigger – more isolated. Important events are one step removed from the characters’ lives.

2015 - a statement of intent.

One of the great things about having a birthday in the doldrums between Christmas and New Years Eve is that I get to do all of my stock-taking in one go. Honestly, it's been a pretty exciting year. I'm not going to harp on about why in great detail like some sort of Christmas round-robin, but this year I've qualified as a teacher and seen my first novel* hit the virtual shelves. I feel a little bit of harping is justified.

But I don't want 2014 to be the year I peaked, so I'm hanging my New Years Resolutions on the web for all to see, aware that my faithful readers will be able to judge me if I fail. This year, I will:

• Blog here at least once a month with the usual selection of book reviews and other thoughts.
• Prepare a revised edition of my university poetry collection for publication on Kindle Direct Publishing.
• Submit some poems to actual journals.
• Attend  open mics and other local writing events.
• Start a new blog project (by the end of this week - watch this space).

* It's called Circ and it was the result of a collaborative project between myself and nine other writers, published by the excellent Pigeon Park Press. You can buy it here.