Tag: politics

Lee Levin, The Messiah of Septimania (Today’s Young Grandparent 2010)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10482907-the-messiah-of-septimania?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=7soKxY7KqF&rank=1

The plot of this book is built around two myths—one well-known, one not so well-known. It is a popular theory that Alaric the Visigoth stole the Treasures of the Jerusalem from the Temple and took them to southern France, where they were paraded on Easter Sunday in Toulouse for 70 years. A lesser-known myth proposes that the Jewish kings of Septimania, an autonomous Jewish kingdom in the Languedoc lasting 140 years (768-900), intermarried with Merovingian royal houses. Arthur J Zuckerman suggests that Septimania’s first Jewish king Makhir was the same person as Thierry IV, count of Narbonne.
It also weaves in some of the myths in the Chanson de Roland.
Arian bishop Genseric, a Visigoth descendant, shows his acolyte Guibarc the reliquary of Rhédae Castle. Ishmaelites (Arabs) are at the gates, and if Genseric should die in the invasion, he wants Guibarc to protect the treasure in this acacia-wood box. His eyes behold the Golden Menorah of the Treasure of the Jerusalem Temple, brought to Rhédae by Alaric from Rome.
17-year-old Charles (who will become magne) has arrived at Narbonne after his father Pepin the Short’s disastrous siege. He faces watching his son’s sun rise as his falls.
Who do we have inside, Charles thinks. Half the population of Narbonne are Visigoths, Arian Christians, and the other half are Jews. Let’s bribe the ‘greedy Jews’, he thinks. But the Jews of Narbonne want more than Pepin’s dwindling treasury. They want their own kingdom. Conveniently, this will put Pope Stephen’s nose out of joint, whom Pepin blames for not offering concrete support against the Saracens. To seal the deal, Charles weds Makhir to his aunt Princess Alda, daughter of Charles Martel. Alda becomes Archbishop Agobard’s spy in the Cortada Regis Judæorum palace in Narbonne.
Exilarch Hakhinai convinces Narbonai ben Zabinai (aka Thierry IV, aka Makhir) that he is not only king of Septimania, but also the Messiah. There is treasure at stake—an encoded document.
There is a great deal of attention spent on the question of whether Makhir was, or thought he was, the Messiah, which, personally, I think misses the point. I’d admit to being fairly interested in ‘where is the treasure now?’, but I’m mostly interested in this supposed marriage.
This is a juicy tale, incorporating several of my favourite myths. Secret codes, buried treasure, holy royal bloodlines, Roland—yum yum.
But Alda and Makhir? Why on earth would Charlemagne have arranged this marriage? Levin proposes a scenario in which such an alliance might have been believable. His story is fun, but no more credible than Zuckerman’s.
Very poorly edited.

Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (Beacon Press 2004)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60931.Kindred?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=SNnGMIV7Kn&rank=2

Dana has lost her left arm in an ‘accident’ the police are trying to blame on her husband Kevin.
She remembers the first time. She feels dizzy; she saves a red-haired white boy from drowning. The second time happens after dinner. She is with the boy, who is now older, in a burning room. He tells her the year is 1815. His name is Rufus Weylin.
She follows eight white men, a ‘patrol’, to a slave cabin in the woods and witnesses the sort of atrocities the slaves are used to.
The next time it happens, she is armed with a switchblade and a map, and brings Kevin with her. Rufus has broken his leg.
It takes a while before the modern couple understand the social rules in this culture—the impossible distances between white and black, slave and free, man and woman, adult and child. The experience is quite different for Kevin—a white man—than for Dana. He can be a time-travelling observer; she gets ‘drawn all the way in’.
The social dangers are accompanied by physical dangers. She and Kevin need to survive, together, in order to get back.
We never understand the mechanism by which she time-transports, but the reason is remarkable. She and Rufus are boun, by a bond that transcends time and place. This helps us to understand her conflicted feelings toward the evil slavemaster.
This extraordinary device gives us the emotion and detail of a first-hand account at the same time as a 21st century sensibility. This is especially useful in revealing how the oppressors used the slaves to enable their own oppression—by threatening their loved ones with being whipped, sold or killed. Alice tells her, ‘you ain’t no field nigger, but you a nigger just the same’.
More historical fiction than sci-fi, innovative and genre-bending.

Ian McEwan, Lessons (Knopf 2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60092581-lessons?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ElWUVnYtMf&rank=1

Roland Baines looks back upon his life and the painful yet arousing memory of his childhood piano teacher. The remembered perfect happiness of a twisted first love, which he struggles and fails to recreate. His baby Lawrence is in his lap, his half-German wife Alissa gone, leaving only a note. She becomes a famed author, but, inexplicably, refuses any contact with her son.
There’s not a lot of action or story. It’s mostly Roland remembering his life and reflecting on things.
It launches perhaps too soon into the life histories of their parents and grandparents. Readers have to care enough about the protagonist before we’ll willingly sit through the boring stuff. What we really want to hear about is the piano teacher.
What makes it interesting is seeing it through the child Roland’s eye. He’s a child when his father is stationed in Libya. Then he is shipped off to boarding school at a tender age, not yet understanding the whys and wherefores of ‘unspoken family problems’ and of the world. The nation-wide conspiracy of delusion during wartime is mixed with the child’s natural innocence. Roland traces the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance in Germany through the eyes of his then-journalist mother-in-law Jane.
As a young adult, Roland makes several trips to East Germany, which he believes to be ‘a socialist country’—that is, until his friends start being arrested.
As Roland and his grown siblings unravel the unspoken secrets in their family history, three generations—Jane, her daughter Alissa, then Lawrence seek expiation for the dysfunction in their childhoods. Roland has to seek his, too.
I identify with both sides of this family. Like Alissa and Jane, motherhood killed my dreams—though, of course, a sacrifice worth it for the sake of bringing love into the world. Like Alissa, my children’s father wanted no contact with them, a mystery which died with him.
The writing is, as always for McEwan, gorgeous—not a word wasted. Like the McEwan masterpiece, Atonement, this one grows on you.

Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (Pantheon 2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56753473-worn?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=srDgYhsohK&rank=1

Here is the social history of clothing, its history and economics rather than fashion.
The impact of class is not ignored. In early mediaeval Germany, for example, there was conflict between organised guild weaving and home weavers. Later, labour was divided by sexism and racism. Mothers entered the early factories with children in tow.
Before the 1880s under ‘coverture’, married women possessed nothing of their own other than their ‘linen’. Until 1964 black women were barred from working in textile factories, seen as high status work as compared to domestic service. In 19th century America often the only economic option for a woman was to take in ‘piecework’, embroidering linen at home.
The structure of this history is wonderful. It’s not organised chronologically (boring) but rather by fabric—first comes linen, then cotton—its history, technology, economics and effect on humans. By the time we get to cotton the labour is by African slaves, and it is brutal.
She outlines not only the mechanical processes involved in industrial weaving and knitting but also the climate change caused by water-hungry cotton growing, increased reliance on fossil fuels, enforced labour of ethnic minorities and the threat to silk production of environmental challenges to pollution-sensitive mulberry trees.
Synthetics have offered the industry mass-production, but often at a high environmental, sometimes poisonous, cost. The industry also created its own gravedigger; Worn outlines the history of labour resistance to exploitation and capitalist class thuggery. Today’s EPZs (export processing zones) make employing underpaid non-union third world labour and systematic exploitation of raw materials easy. International trade agreements like NAFTA legislate to globalise exploitation. Big retailers like Walmart and Zara have such buying power they squeeze sweatshop workers’ wages and safety.
This is from a ‘material culture’ (pun intended) standpoint, textiles rather that fashion. “A shirt may say ‘Wisconsin’ while its tag reads ‘Made in India’, but the real political story lies in its polycotton blend.”
It reads like Cod or Nathaniel’s Nutmeg. It’s a history, but juicy, full of anecdotes and human details, a tapestry drawing into the weave women’s oppression, class and technological development.
It is highly researched, the author having travelled all over the world visiting factories and interviewing clothing-makers.
Colour illustrations would have enhanced the text. Indeed, for a subject like this, I would think it almost obligatory.