The title was a bit silly, though, wasn’t it? I lost momentum and didn’t finish. Twenty years later, I got another copy, having read that Travels with Charley represented a classic piece of travel literature, that most satisfying yet most unrecognized of genres. And who knew Steinbeck wrote other travelogues? Who has heard of his Sea of Cortez (1941), a report about a voyage from California to Mexico, or A Russian Journal (1948), where he heads off for a snoop around the Soviet Union?

Born and raised in California, where many of his novels are set, John Steinbeck spent the second half of his life in New York City, with frequent trips to England and France. At the age of 58, after a couple of strokes, he lit out from his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island with his (also) ailing poodle, Charley, to refamiliarize himself with America, its land and people. In a letter to a friend, he outlined his method of travel and his route.

In the fall – right after Labor Day – I’m going to learn about my own country. I’ve lost the flavor and taste and sound of it. It’s been years since I have seen it. Sooo! I’m buying a pick-up truck with a small apartment on it… bed, stove, desk, ice-box, toilet – not a trailer – what’s called a coach. I’m going alone, out toward the West by the Northern way….

And that’s what he did. In the truck he named Rocinante, which he painted on its side, he and Charley drove to Massachusetts and then to Maine before hitting Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana…. With a stockpile of booze, he rode around the United States in a giant circle recording conversations, observations, reflections, and offering up delectable vignettes of natural beauty. He writes, “I was told that a stranger’s purpose in moving about the country might cause inquiry or even suspicion. For this reason I racked a shotgun, two rifles, and a couple of fishing rods in my truck, for it is my experience that if a man is going hunting or fishing his purpose is understood and even applauded.”

Much of what was man-made in America disturbed Steinbeck. He was horrified and angered by the pollution, industrial ugliness, uniformity of communities, soulless trailer parks, and much else. He was also annoyed by people’s attitudes towards race and difference.

Where Steinbeck really shines is in his description of the landscape. Setting was crucial in Steinbeck’s novels and he’s almost showing off, proving to skeptics he still has it. He characterizes Montana as “a great splash of grandeur,” and talks about its terrain as “shouting color.” Mere samples; he can go on for whole pages, molding topography until the ear hears poetry and the mind sees a portrait. Consider this impression of California’s redwoods.

There’s a cathedral hush here. Perhaps the thick soft bark absorbs sound and creates silence. The trees rise straight up to zenith; there is no horizon. The dawn comes early and remains dawn until the sun is high. Then the green fernlike foliage so far up strains the sunlight to a green gold and distributes it in shafts or rather in stripes of light and shade. After the sun passes zenith it is afternoon and quickly evening with a whispering dusk as long as was the morning.

Travels with Charley is nice read – witty, poignant, lyrical – but did its author pull a Bruce Chatwin? Chatwin, a British writer of considerable talent, best known for his In Patagonia, was a first-class fraud. His writing is largely fiction passed off as travel literature. The New York Times thinks Steinbeck embroidered. So does Steinbeck’s son, also named John, who said that the conversations in Travels are bogus and that his father hardly talked to anyone. “He just sat in his camper and wrote all that (expletive).”

There’s a discussion between Steinbeck and a New England farmer about Nikita Khrushchev’s famous shoe-brandishing incident.

Steinbeck says, “What happened at the U.N.? I forgot to listen.”

“You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Mr. K. took off his shoe and pounded the table.”

“What for?”

“Didn’t like what was being said.”

“Seems a strange way to protest.”

“Well, it got attention.”

The chat continues for a page and a half. The only problem, according to Charles McGrath in his 2011 article “Reality Check for Steinbeck and Charley,” is that this conversation occurs several weeks before Mr. Khrushchev spoke at the United Nations. McGrath notes several other discrepancies and claims Steinbeck did a lot of the trip with his wife, Elaine, who, in the story, Steinbeck meets briefly in Chicago. Moreover, Steinbeck (and, perhaps, his wife) didn’t rough it all that much. He (or they) not only stayed in motels (which he acknowledges), but luxury hotels.

With this in mind, the conversations in Travels seem stilted. I noticed this, but chalked it up to being the vernacular of the times. I now see that it’s a bit like dialogue one would find in, well, a John Steinbeck novel.

Vrai ou faux, Travels with Charley quickly became a bestseller (and is still popular, with well over 200 peer reviews on Amazon.com), allowing readers to get a glimpse into the literary icon’s curmudgeonly yet sensitive personality.

The year this book was published happened to be the same year Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature. During his acceptance speech in Sweden, Steinbeck said, “the ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”

A tiny bit of embellishment is sometimes required in travel writing. But outright invention certainly constitutes grievous fault and failure. John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley is an American beauty, though perhaps not a natural beauty.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

I went on to read one book by Jonathan Raban and several by Paul Theroux (the godfather of travel literature, surely), but didn’t get around to Redmond O’Hanlon until recently. I suppose I should have begun with one of his more famous books, like Into the Heart of Borneo, In Trouble Again, or Congo Journey, but I found Trawler staring at me from a bookstore shelf one day not long after I had thought a good idea for a story would be to go out on a lobster boat in Eastern Canada and write about it. O’Hanlon has saved me the trouble.

I’ve never read anything like Trawler before. It is highly unique, and for that reason alone it deserves praise. Redmond O’Hanlon, an Oxford-educated academic, joins a Scottish fishing trawler from Aberdeen as it sails into the North Atlantic to go about its business. Yes, there are predictably humourous bits about the author getting seasick and banging his head on things and not being able to get his sea-legs, but this is not an account of a stodgy, over-educated Englishman and his laugh-a-minute travails aboard a working vessel staffed by a no-nonsense, unforgiving Scottish crew. It is more like a running dialogue; like one long, 340-page conversation with a somewhat no-nonsense, occasionally forgiving, extremely brave, superstitious, rather desperate, astonishingly knowledgeable, and slightly mad Scottish crew – members of which are both gracious and hostile, sometimes within the span of seconds.

O’Hanlon provides very little commentary, something I’ve never seen a travel writer do. Instead, he focuses on relaying what happens and what’s said, and if that sounds boring, it isn’t, because the experiences and discussions are so authentic and so convincing you feel like you’re onboard. When O’Hanlon is gutting fish with his tattered gloves in the fish room, listening to Luke explain how a hagfish evolved and what its defensive mechanism is, with tangents about love, life, hope, and fear, the narrative is oddly moving, mysteriously compelling. To say O’Hanlon has an ear for dialogue doesn’t quite capture his talent. Perhaps the author has a photographic memory (my first guess), or maybe there were whole days where he mainly took notes and didn’t mention this in his book, or he might have been recording the conversations, or I suppose he could have made much of it up – only the conversations are extraordinary, banal, weird, normal, angry, friendly, asinine, and brilliant. Many are not the type of conversations one would make up. O’Hanlon sometimes says incredibly daft things or rambles (because he’s out of his element, because he’s sleep deprived, because he’s a bookish nerd), which he immediately regrets, yet he records his statements and the responses anyway. Again, it’s all so real, and that’s what makes it all so strangely riveting. What of interest happens on a Scottish fishing boat? Well, just about everything if presented correctly. There’s no gloss, no sheen, no special effects –Trawler is like highly literary investigative journalism, with wonderful vernacular and lots of explanations about natural science and ocean life.

Because the account is exceedingly realistic, there are lots of disturbing bits (trawlermen tend to verbally abuse each other when they haven’t had any sleep in four days; and they tend to be unforgiving toward know-nothing landlubbers), but there are also plenty of deeply funny parts, and in addition to being unpredictable (how would you know when one of the crew is going to say something off-the-charts bizarre?) the humour is situational and fantastically awkward. British, in other words.

One part that really got me, that completely had me in stitches, had to do with O’Hanlon’s wanting to see a Force 12 hurricane. Apparently, he sort of requested or expressed a wish to see a fierce storm, asking to be woken up if he should be asleep when one occurred. One day he is woken up and sent to the bridge. Presumably, he thinks the skipper, Jason, is going to provide an overview of how a vessel like the Norlantean operates in a tempest. On deck, O’Hanlon is buckled into the First Mate’s chair. Jason greets him:

“Good evening, Redmond. Welcome to my bridge.”

“Jason,” I said, “yeah, good evening. But is this it? Is this a Force 12?”

“Aye,” he said, not looking at me. “Maybe. Maybe not. Who cares? Only you! But I’ll tell you this, Redmond. In my opinion, and please, feel free to disagree, I’d say it’s a stormy, stormy night.”

“Jeesus Jason,” I said, turning on him, for some reason, with real aggression (and holding tight with both hands to the arms of the chair, despite my chest-harness), “don’t you sleep? How can you do this?”

(Jason explains that he sleeps at home and that here he’s the ever-alert captain, responsible for everything, before lecturing Redmond on what was wrong with his generation and how it glorified and ruined dope.)

“When you were young, your kicks, real kicks, what were they? Jeesus, you sad old fucks, you lot who thought you were going to change the world (save us!) – you beatniks, hippies, flower-power jerk-offs, gentle layabouts, whatever you called yourselves, what did you really do? Books, fine, I’ll give you that. You loved books, and that was great. And you loved your music. But give me a break, look, so what? The fucking sparrows love their music. So you gave up and lay around and smoked dope or cannabis or hashish or gear or grass or hemp in spliffs or joints or whatever you chose to call it – all those words! Worse than winos! And that’s right, shit, I remember, that’s the word, you smoked shit, in a mental world of hippie shite, real shite, and in the least aggressive possible way you fucked up your own lives, and you took away the motivation for your children. And free love! Spare us! So it was all cool, man, to leave a chick and hang out with another. Except, fuck you, one of those chicks happened to be my mother. Yes, my mother! And to me, not to you, a mother is a serious business. And if you leave her, you ought to be shot!”

“Jason, hang on, what are you talking about? I thought you’d been here for ever. I thought your great-to-the-nth grandfather swam ashore from the Armada…”

“You know what I think? I think there’s nothing bad in itself about dope. Not in itself. Of course it does less harm than alcohol. Of course it should be legal. It’s piss-nonsense. But you people, you, my dad, the old UK hippies – you invested that shite with wisdom. Just because it made you feel good. A herbal ga-ga tranquilizer. It’s a plant, for Chrissake! Harmless. A couple of dreamy relax-me pills. No more, no less. And you made a fucking religion out of it!”

“Jason, hold on. Please – tell me about your dad, tell me about your mother.”

“My mother? She’s a Costello. Spanish. She was a great beauty in her time. Still is. And one of her very first boyfriends was John Lennon.”

“Christ.”

And on and on it goes – one conversation blends into another and into another…. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I would say by page 30, you ought to be hooked. Trawler is more than a simulated jaunt on a fishing boat, more than a documentary in print. It’s a commentary on the wonders, dangers, and absurdities of life.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

Hitch-22 is the best memoir I’ve read and better than any biography I’ve read. From a startling account about his mother’s suicide to a Socratic declaration of how little he knows (the spur which kept him learning and reflecting on his positions and beliefs), Hitchens’s crisp and articulate prose courses through 400 pages, drawing you in, propelling you on, causing you to reflect, and impelling you to learn more about the many subjects, historical events, themes, and memes he scrutinizes and dissects. It also sends you to the dictionary, a healthy exercise, surely.

And it’s not a conventional memoir. Apart from the section pertaining to his youth, there is little straightforward or chronological autobiography, and there is limited mention of things there should be, his wife and children for instance. Rather, after describing his upbringing (vignettes of his loving but tormented mother Yvonne, awkward chats with his kindly but conservative father “the Commander,” and the bizarre rituals and norms of British public school), the volume morphs into a study of personalities, events, and subjects that shaped Hitchens’s life and career as a journalist, a writer, a political commentator, a radical, an iconoclast, and a public intellectual of the first order. So, in the beginning of the book, we get chapters like “Yvonne,” “the Commander,” and “Fragments from an Education,” and in the middle and latter portions we get ones like “Salman,” “Mesopotamia from Both Sides,” and “Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul).” The final chapter, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” does not, as I thought it would, speak to the writer’s battle with cancer (indeed, there is no mention of the disease that took his life just two years after this book was published), but instead to the volume’s overarching theme, encapsulated within its apposite title.

Hitchens, you see, far from being an absolutist (one of the charges from his reactionary and absolutist detractors), has always been acutely aware of his many contradictions. Ever since he began his rabble-rousing at Oxford (by day; by night he socialized with profs and dons) he has been cognizant of the fact he has kept two sets of books.

Like so many intellectuals, Hitchens was drawn to the Left through Marxism (he was a very active member of the International Socialists), but unlike other big thinkers, he quickly saw the contradictions of Marxist ideology, the shortcomings and failures of Communist states, and the fascist nature of anti-fascists. But Hitchens’s outright rejection of the Left was the culmination of a process that occurred over decades. For anyone who has ever wondered or felt confused about just which notch on the political spectrum they occupy, Hitch-22 offers consolation. “Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator,” our Anglo-American narrator writes. “Change only the name and this story is about you.”

Reading this book taught me too many things to comprehensively list, and whetted my appetite for more. Apart from Bill Clinton’s Mayor Quimbyesque “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” (and Clinton, remember, was impeached for lying under oath) I wasn’t fully aware of just what a lying sack of bovine fecal matter he was. I did not fully comprehend the challenge to freedom of expression (and freedom in general) that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie represented. I did not really understand the severity of the situation in Iraq (or precisely how evil and fanatical Saddam Hussein and his sons were). But most of all, and although I’ve had suspicions for a while and have been tiptoeing back to the centre of the political spectrum, I never fully realized just how utterly brainless, extreme, and absurd the Left really can be. See members of this bleeding-heart’s society demonstrating against armed intervention so fascist states and military juntas can continue threatening their neighbours and torturing and murdering their citizenry; see them advocate for freedom of expression while denouncing books and points-of-view their point of view deems “offensive”; watch as people who call themselves liberal criticise all US foreign policy as crass and corrupt imperialism believing nothing the United States government does is motivated – in whole or in part – by morality; note the expression of satisfaction on Leftist faces when the planes hit the towers and thousands die. “Well, hey, America had it coming.”

“If Hitchens didn’t exist,” Ian McEwan said, “we wouldn’t be able to invent him.” The cynic thinks this is overstatement: the endorsement of a friend in exchange for a mention or reciprocal endorsement. But the cynic who reads Chirstopher Hitchens should have their cynicism replaced by clarity if not perspicacity. They should come to the understanding that McEwan’s statement represents the truth.

At the risk of stating the obvious or sounding hagiographic, what a pity Christopher Hitchens is no longer with us. He did what the media so often fails to do. Not only did he use reason and logic to point the way toward what to think, but how to think. He got us to question what we knew or thought we knew. And now that he’s gone, who’s going to replace him? I reckon someone of Hitchen’s intellect and drive comes along once every twenty or thirty years. Or maybe longer. There was Socrates…. There was Orwell…. The feeling I got while reading Hitchens’s commentary was something approaching awe, and I felt foolish for not having known who he was. Without question, I will read his massive book, Arguably (reviewed opposite my own book in the San Francisco Book Review). I’m sure the pages will practically turn by themselves. Will I agree with everything Hitchens says? Of course not, and I doubt he would have wanted it any other way.

Six stars.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World.

In any event, Cocksure revolves around Mortimer Griffin, a white-bread WASP from Caribou, Ontario who makes his mark in the London book trade. When an eccentric, self-obsessed Hollywood magnate named The Star Maker buys his publishing firm, Griffin is confronted by the fact he (Griffin) is not Jewish (many people think he is) and the impact this has on his career and personal life.

So, we’ve got a bit of a weak premise, especially for Richler, whose more serious efforts weave dozens of themes and characters together in a complex, erudite, and oh-so-satisfying mix. Regard, if you will, the literary pyrotechnics of Solomon Gursky Was Here, the profoundly good storytelling within the covers of Joshua Then And Now, or even the more conventional delivery and ba-dump tshewww! comedy of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. And we all know, or should, about the subtle intricacy and tragicomedy of Barney’s Version.

Humour helps Cocksure along – the bit about Griffin analyzing why he thinks about hockey legend Gordie Howe when making love to his wife is priceless – but some of the jokes don’t work. One does get the impression, however, the story must have been fun to write. The dialogue is good; Richler had that ear for vernacular. He never needed to describe the colour of the sofa or what was happening in the background; he just provided authentic and sustaining speech. And Cocksure’s characters are quite funny: the “ageless” Star Maker, for example, and Polly, who pretends she’s living in a movie, with scene cuts at all the dramatic spots.

It’s interesting to note that well into the twenty-first century, Mordecai Richler’s writing still pushes the envelope. He wrote Cocksure in 1968. Sure, it’s a bit ribald in places (the title being the clue), but that was the Zeitgeist, wun’nit? Still, the book was judged too risqué for some and was banned by WH Smith in the UK and by bookstores in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. We’ve come a long way, and we have writers like Richler to thank. In a CBC interview about Cocksure, Richler said, “I guess it’s a rather vile book. It’s really a novel of disgust. It’s meant to create discomfort especially among liberals who are so insufferably smug and self-satisfied about being moderately good.”

Cocksure is a decent read, but shouldn’t be anyone’s first Richler experience. I would wager you’ve got to “get to know him” elsewhere before you can appreciate this idiosyncratic, mocking little yarn. Cocksure might not achieve typical Richlerian heights, but it is fun; 4-stars fun.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

The character Kevin, Charles’s bother-in-law, is priceless – endless comedy, certainly based on a real person. Kevin is a kitchen-sitting, booze guzzling, card playing lout who likes to indulge Charles in banal conversation or locker-room talk about his sister (and Charles doesn’t seem to mind because he admits he thinks his sister is hot!). Kevin’s not a very nice person either, so he and Charles (or so Kevin thinks) seem to have a connection.

I wonder what Martin Amis thinks of this book. It was written in 1973, and Amis has since gone on to become a literary giant. Most writers wish their first couple of efforts would disappear.

I thought The Rachel Papers was a good read. I imagine twenty-somethings with good taste in literature (and a sense of humour) would find it a great one.

Troy Parfitt, author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

The novel flashes back to Joshua then, from his childhood in Montreal to his days spent on Ibiza to the months and weeks prior to his apparent accident – and what a ride it is. Richler fans should delight in the bits about Ibiza, having fun wondering just how much of it is autobiographical. We know Richler lived on the Spanish isle, and we know he had trouble with a German named Mueller (Dr. Dr. Mueller in the novel; in Austria each doctorate deserves a title) and that he had to leave suddenly, like Joshua Shapiro did. We also see Richler’s imagination flowing and spinning from his summer home at Lake Memphremagog, featured in Barney’s Version. And we see variations on Richler’s classic characters: the blue-blooded Hornbys, “rotten to the core” and cognizant of it, Jack Trimble: a man who scraped and clawed his way to the top, ignored by Westmount’s and McGill’s elite until they needed him to make money for them; Reuben: Joshua’s ostensibly dopey but street-savvy (former boxer, Bible quoting, Labatt’s drinking) father, Joshua’s sex-starved Jewish mother, uncle Oscar: forced to drive a cab at age 69, Joshua’s brother-in-law, a 40-year old rich brat (one of the Hornbys) who we think has been horribly framed.

This book really drew me in, but then I got lost a little in the middle. The flashback sequences are not dated, but like with Richler’s subsequent Solomon Gursky Was Here it’s not so much a matter of figuring out when the time-shift is but why. However, unlike the weightier and more literary Solomon Gursky Was Here, Joshua Then And Now didn’t make me wonder if Richler knew where he was going and if his descriptive wanderings weren’t inspired by too many glasses of scotch. In Joshua, the storyline straightens out, right on cue, and you see the method in the madness. At page 200, I was thinking, ‘This might be one of his weaker ones,’ but by p. 300, I was marvelling.

What a shame Mordecai Richler is no longer with us. There is no one in Canada writing books like his nowadays, and there is one less erudite social critic to lampoon the politically correct CBC, insincere politicians, the politics of special pleading, and other Canadian silliness. Richler possessed a humour, wit, intellect, and irony that just isn’t there now – and he was a better writer than just about anyone who wins the Giller Prize these days. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

David Adams Richards is easily the most famous writer to ever emerge from my native New Brunswick. He’s penned poetry, plays, non-fiction, and – most notably – fiction, including 14 novels, the latest Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul. He’s won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and the esteemed Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary honour. He was supposed to speak in front of a Canadian-literature class I took in high school, but had previous commitments. In university, I read Richards’s first book, The Coming of Winter, but didn’t quite get it. When I lived in Taipei, I found a copy of his Mercy Among the Children and was drawn in deeply, transported back to my quirky and rural home province. Mercy is a good novel (it’s the one that won him the Giller), and I’ve been meaning to explore others, but there are so many books and so little time.

Richards’s stories are often set in the Miramichi, one of New Brunswick’s four main cities. Richards employs stark realism tinged with dark themes. Characters are raw and real and converse in the vernacular. There’s crime, clannishness, ostracism, hypocrisy, prejudice, and poverty. The duplicity of human society features prominently, as does ambiguity; it may be obvious who the victim is, but Richards’s heroes are harder to spot.

At the library, 30 people were seated quietly. Richards was standing off to the side, looking apprehensive or bored. There he was: a Canadian literary giant. Why wasn’t anyone talking to him?

“Excuse me. Do you have a pen?” I asked.

“Ah, no,” he said, patting his pockets, “but there’s one on the table.”

The table was laid out with his books, including his Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul. I grabbed the pen, signed my own book, and presented it to him. I thought he might wince, supply an insincere ‘Thanks,’ and toss it aside the instant I took my leave, but he seemed genuinely interested.

“You wrote this?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re from Saint John?”

“Yes. I read your Mercy Among the Children when I was living in Taiwan, and really enjoyed it.”

“You read it in Chinese?”

“No, in English.”

“Because that one was translated into Chinese. On the mainland, though.”

“Did it sell?”

“I have no idea, but I remember the guy who did it. He was very nice. He wrote me a couple times to ask what things were, you know, to explain words so he could translate them. I remember him asking what a marshmallow was and I had to explain the word Legion. I suppose they wouldn’t have Legions in China. Whether it was translated well or not, I don’t know. The English version is that thick (two inches), the German edition that thick (three inches), but the Chinese translation is only about that thick (one inch).” Richards shrugged. “His English wasn’t perfect, but he was really nice.”

It was nearing that time, so I sat down, and the female MC introduced Mr. Richards – at length. But while she was talking, an interesting thing occurred. The author wasn’t really listening. Rather, he was reading my book. At one point, I heard him say to himself, “This is really interesting.” When it was time to take the stand, he took my book and his book to the podium. He set my book down and patted it. He looked at me and said, earnestly, “Thank you for the book.” Then he began to read.

The reading was followed by a Q&A. My questions, the first, were generic: “In fiction, do you know where you’re going? Do you have it planned, or just a rough idea?” I imagine he’s been asked that a thousand times. I should have asked something interesting like, “Is the hypocrisy of human society something you obsess about?” or “How much of wanting to be a writer was motivated by revenge?” Many writers are idealists and feel the need to comment on corruption and perversion. And it’s my theory that, for male writers at least, revenge is a key motivator, especially when starting out.

Writers hope to show every critic, every pretentious academic, every teacher who said, ‘Sorry, you don’t have it,’ that they do have it. Writers catalogue slights and conjure them when they need motivation. Mordecai Richler admitted this. So has Paul Theroux. In The Forest for the Trees, by Betsey Lerner, a book about writing and the business of writing, written by a publishing-industry insider for aspiring writers, the author talks about what motivates other authors, and revenge is right up there with need-to-be-heard.

The revenge question was the one I should have posed, but no, I asked the most limp-wristed question imaginable.

In addition to novels, and in true New Brunswick fashion, Richards has penned books on hockey, fishing, and hunting. He recently wrote God Is, about his Catholic faith. Reportedly, this raised the collective eyebrow of the Canadian literary community, with Richards claiming he’s now something of a pariah. I’m not a Christian, so God Is is not a book for me (but neither are books like God is Not Great, though I consider Christopher Hitchens an important essayist and polemicist), but I found Richards’s reasons for writing such a book, and the related advice he gave, interesting.

“Write what you know,” he said. “Write what you want to. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t curb your opinions to fit with someone else’s, which is what a lot of writers do. At some point, someone is going to tell you you’re wrong anyway, so you may as well write what you believe.”

It was the final idea I’d never thought of before: people are going to call you down anyway, so why even begin to compromise? That’s bloody good advice. Who cares about that cacophonous clang from the peanut gallery? Write for yourself.

Writers are often outsiders, but Richards seems an outsider to other writers, a role he acknowledges and appears to revel in (see revenge). He talked about how some time after he’d won the Giller, he was kicked out of a Toronto bookstore because of his appearance, and that he frightened the receptionist at his Toronto publisher because he was dressed like a lumberjack. Along with his art-imitating-life approach to writing, this is part of the reason I like Mr. Richards. He’s an anti-intellectual intellectual.

Richards also discussed the difficulty of getting published: you approach a publisher who tells you you need an agent. An agent asks you who your publisher is. Richards then relayed a couple of anecdotes about his younger days. His debut novel, the one I read in high school, was edited by the publisher’s son, though Richards insisted all the bits the kid “gutted” be stuffed back in!

The Q&A was followed by a signing, and the book I bought was one in the Penguin Books Extraordinary Canadians series. I had read the series’ Mordecai Richler biography by M.G. Vassanji and liked it, so I thought I’d check out Richards’s book on Lord Beaverbrook, a.k.a. Max Aitkin (1879-1964), a New Brunswick newspaper baron and the first lord of Fleet Street.

When I was a kid, I played hockey at the Lord Beaverbrook Arena and when I returned to Canada I worked briefly in a building called the Beaverbrook House. I’d been meaning to read about Lord Beaverbrook and knew of Richards’s book, so why not buy a signed copy from the author himself?

Beaverbrook was a real life Duddy Kravitz (a scheming little go-getter). He started his first newspaper at the age of 13, sold bonds door to door, and moved to Montreal to work on the stock exchange. He had a stab at law in Saint John, but then moved to England where he got into politics and built a chain of newspapers. He once owned Rolls Royce. He bought his way into the House of Lords, and was a friend of Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill. Churchill made him a member of the wartime cabinet and put him charge of aircraft (Spitfire) production.

Beaverbrook cut an intriguing figure: a money man riddled with contradictions. He was both decent and deceitful, an uncouth colonial and a calculating aristocrat. Though he loved Britain and her empire, it was an unrequited adoration. His publications were more tabloid than news, but his efforts in Spitfire production made him a hero. Richards’s heroes are not always easy spot.

Despite all his success, Lord Beaverbrook, was – above all – an outsider. Who better than Richards, who grew up less than two blocks from Beaverbrook, to write about him?

A few years ago, I wrote a book about travelling around East Asia called Notes from the Other China. Some people liked it, others didn’t. My first book, I’m not really happy with it and don’t recommend reading it. It’s derivative and disjointed, but it’s original, or so I thought. I was defensively touting its originality on a discussion board once when someone asked, ‘What about Pico Iyer’s Video Nights in Kathmandu?’ Another commenter chimed in, ‘Yes, I was just thinking of that one. He’s good.’

I thought, ‘Pico who?’

I bought Mr. Iyer’s The Global Soul, read half of it, and dropped it off at a second-hand bookstore thinking, ‘Life’s too short.’ I was also happy in a way. Iyer wasn’t that good. I found The Global Soul boring (brush fires in California) and fawning (the city of Toronto). ‘I can write better,’ I thought, and then, thinking there must have been something to the book that launched Iyer’s career, I bought Video Nights in Kathmandu and such illusions evaporated.

Video Nights in Kathmandu is a travel-lit classic. It’s beautifully written and realized. It’s insightful, engaging, and all those other favourable adjectives professional reviewers use to gush about a book. Iyer makes use of metaphor superbly, he uses just the right amount of comedy, he’s excellent at analysing and dissecting cultures, and he writes with genuine empathy, and it’s this last quality that taught me something about travel writing.

My go-to travel writer is Paul Theroux: opinionated, direct, fond of calling people fatsos; a cerebral and super-knowledgeable adventurer extraordinaire; a fascinating figure and fine writer who’s written about nearly every country on Earth – but an egotistical grump sure to have the last word. Most travel writers are cutting, even well-bred, Eton-educated ones like Colin Thubron and the elitist Jan Morris. Yet, Iyer isn’t cutting at all, and still manages to convey the absurdities of travel, the cultural misunderstandings, and the peculiarity that accumulates the further you wander from home.

This book was written in the 1980s, so it’s dated in a sense, but to readers with an inkling of historical awareness and appreciation this only adds a dimension. The book’s subtitle, And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, speaks to the Americanization of Asia, or at least the superficial appeal and influence of Hollywood movies and rock music. There are frequent references to Rambo and Born in the USA, but they’re acceptable, a thread that sews together the diverse bolts the writer visits: Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, The Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, and Japan.

I’ve been to most of these territories and countries, and reading about them in North America teleported me back to a quadrant of the world I lived in for over a decade. I especially liked the sections on Burma and the Philippines. I never made it to Burma; I’ve never read commentary so accurate on the Philippines.

Iyer didn’t spend all that much time in the region (though he returned, and still lives in Japan), but he compensates for a lack of knowledge with keen observation and by following what might writing’s golden rule: write about what you know. In India, Iyer ruminates on the film industry; in Japan, he sticks to baseball. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be interested in reading about the Indian film industry or Japanese baseball, but Iyer shows you they are extensions of the country and culture. He makes you want to read.

This book is a gem, and anyone wishing to head off to Asia for a spot of travel would do well to read it. More than three decades later, Iyer’s East Asia is still there.

Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World is well written, nicely packaged, and fails utterly in explaining why China is going to rule the world. But then, maybe we should it expect it to. After all, it’s not called Why China Will Rule the World, but with a title like the one it has, one can be forgiven for expecting a concrete explanation.

In this book, you’ll find academic prose, a massive select bibliography, 70 pages of notes, lovely maps and graphs, omissions of key evidence, wild speculation, unforgiveable leaps in logic, stupefying factual errors (Sun Yat-sen’s philosophy was not influenced by Mencius; it was influenced by Abraham Lincoln), and a thesis that, if you will, repeatedly repeats itself repeatedly, but offers little in the way of support.

Before we look at the tome in toto, let’s have a glance at its Taiwan section. The chapter on Taiwan gives a fairly accurate overview of China’s and Taiwan’s political history since 1949 and notes that 2009 saw a thaw in cross-strait relations. The two sides signed agreements regarding direct flights, and so on, therefore there might be ‘a resolution of disputes in the relatively near future.’

But those agreements were signed by the Nationalist Party, the organization that turned Taiwan into the Republic of China upon losing the Chinese Civil War. Never mind that China and Taiwan were only ever nominally united, and for a very short time (something Jacques fails to mention), a chief aim of the Nationalist Party is so-called reunification. Because it can’t have “reunification,” the Nationalists settle for closer ties with China. “Reunification” is impossible because the Nationalist Party’s rival, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won’t allow for it. Moreover, supporters from both parties don’t want it. Polls regularly show that something like 90 percent of Taiwanese people want nothing to do with China politically. The Taiwanese are incredibly passionate and politically motivated, and they make frequent use of their democratic right to demonstrate. Futurology is a fool’s game, but I would stake my life on the people of Taiwan turning their country on its head before capitulating to Beijing or being sold out by the Nationalists in Taipei.

Jacques says that if the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) gets re-elected and declares independence, China will likely invade Taiwan, but it’s highly unlikely the DPP will declare independence because their supporters don’t want them to. Something like 70 percent of Taiwanese people wish to keep the status quo. The Nationalists and many of their supporters would never go in for independence, either; neither would the United States. Politically, Taiwan represents a political conundrum and cross-strait relations are a knotty, complex affair. But not to Martin Jacques, who says ‘things are getter better; one day they might be resolved’ (quotation marks are mine). Such a sentiment is the type of hare-brained sloganeering you’d find on a Communist Party propaganda banner. Jacques has to say a solution is possible because if China is really going to rule the world, a prerequisite would be to gain control over the tiny, nearby, Chinese island that has underscored China’s impotence for six decades.

I mention the Taiwan section because it is representative of the rest of the book. With print, you can make obstacles and complexities disappear by not mentioning them, and you can make any scenario seem plausible. Just use the words ‘possibly,’ ‘likely,’ and ‘perhaps,’ and for variety’s sake, or to sound authoritative, say that certain events will transpire. Using the word ‘will’ makes you sound like an expert. Don’t complicate things with the word ‘because’ because that only leads to claims that people can dispute.

The thesis statement for When China Rules the World can be found on p. 15:  “It is banal, therefore, to believe that China’s influence on the world will be mainly and overwhelmingly economic: on the contrary, it’s political and cultural effects are likely to be as far-reaching. The underlying argument of the book is that China’s impact on the world will be as great as that of the United States over the last century, probably far greater.”

But why will it be greater?

You read the book’s two parts (I: The End of the Western World, II: The Age of China) and sift through their many subsections (e.g. Beijing as The New Global Capital) only to find the flimsiest of evidence.

Naturally, the reader wonders, ‘When China rules the world, in what language will the world take its instructions?’ and Martin Jacques deals with this in the section ‘Can You Speak Mandarin?’ Here, we find the usual: Mandarin has become popular as a second language in countries like South Korea and Thailand. It still hasn’t taken off in the West, however, perhaps because of the US’s and UK’s “abiding linguistic insularity and their failure to comprehend the wide-ranging implications of China’s rise.” Jacques goes on to say that Mandarin “will probably in time join English as a global lingua franca and perhaps eventually surpass it.” And then: “The nascent competition between English and Mandarin for the status of global lingua franca… is fascinating… because… they could hardly be more different: one alphabetic, the other pictographic….” Only, there is virtually no competition between English and Mandarin, and the situation is not nascent. Furthermore, Chinese script is not pictographic. This gaffe, along with the fact Jacques cannot pronounce the Chinese words he attempts to slip into conversation in his promotional videos, are clear indicators he doesn’t speak Mandarin. Not that I’m calling Mr. Jacques a hypocrite. That would be a grave insult to hypocrites everywhere. Perhaps it’s just that Jacques prefers to cling to his linguistic insularity and fails to comprehend the wide-ranging implications of China’s rise.

I was especially curious to see what Mr. Jacques would say vis-a-vis the exportation or appeal of Chinese culture. The relevant section is a mere three pages long. As examples, Jacques holds up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese food, and what he calls the “global reach of traditional Chinese medicine.” But Chinese medicine doesn’t have a global reach. Western medicine does. Chinese doctors practise Western medicine. They read medical journals in English. They become doctors by studying textbooks printed in London, Boston, and New York. Ask a Chinese doctor about traditional Chinese medicine and they’re likely to tell you it’s quackery. Also exportable, Jacques says, is kungfu, interesting to me because during the decade I lived in Chinese society I never met a single person who studied kungfu. I never witnessed anyone wearing the uniform; never saw a single kungfu school. There are kungfu comic books and movies from Hong Kong, but they are, like Jacques’s arguments, puerile.

The author’s examples go from superficial and silly to downright absurd. While acknowledging China’s media outlets don’t compare with the BBC, the writer says the potential of the People’s Daily and CCTV (China Central Television) shouldn’t be disregarded. The People’s Daily and CCTV are propaganda outlets for the Chinese Communist Party. Martin Jacques was the editor of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Marxism Today for 14 years. Not surprisingly, that’s not mentioned in the book either.

In addition to being a Marxist, Martin Jacques is a dyed-in-the-wool Sinophile, and in the end, Sinophiles are all the same: they are knowledgeable, articulate, dedicated embellishers. About the closest the author comes to explaining his thesis is by saying China will come out on top because it is not a nation-state, but a civilization state – only there’s no such phrase as civilization state; it’s a term Jacques invented. Jacques, and other Sinophiles, would have you believe that China is exceptional, not subject to analysis applicable to the world’s other countries and cultural entities. China is different. In fact, it’s so different the English language lacks the terminology to deal with it, but luckily for us, Martin Jacques has a patent on the required lexical items, and he’ll share them for just $29.95. Sinophiles resurrect the old ethos that China is mystical, inscrutable. They would have you believe that China is nigh impossible to understand and oh-so-hard to explain – unless they are the ones explaining it.

Martin Jacque’s When China Rules the World represents a wish, an exercise in pro-China propaganda, or both. The Englishman’s argument is unsubstantiated, graph-and-chart infused, pseudo-academic tosh. The concept of China ruling the world has nothing to do with China studies and is the wrong lens through which to view that country. There are plenty of highly engaging, informative, and honest, China books out there. This isn’t one of them.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

Gee whiz. What a success story. Look at China go.

 Stuff and nonsense, say Carl E. Walter and Fraser J. T. Howie in their book Red Capitalism: The Fragile Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise. After reminding the reader that China’s rise really is extraordinary, and that if not for a few key figures and events the country might have remained a monetary basket-case like it was prior to 1978, the writers reveal a series of unflattering truths through the medium of commentary embedded in case study.

China’s much-lauded model is a derailed version of the one envisioned by former vice-premier Zhu Rongji, not Deng Xiaoping. Zhu hoped to internationalize China’s economy, to create a break between it and the Party – to set it free. But the Party has too many competing special-interest groups, i.e. elite families and other cliques whose chief special interest is themselves. The face of China’s economy, its vaunted and gargantuan state-owned enterprises (SOEs), may have the veneer of Western corporations (they employ accountants, lawyers, are listed on stock exchanges at home and abroad), but are “not autonomous” and can “hardly be said to be corporations at all.” Instead, they are “completely dependent on their political patrons” (special-interest groups), never mind that the SOEs are Western creations (including the 20 or so listed in the Fortune Global 500) birthed by Wall Street. The aims of Zhu Rongji and American investment bankers have been thwarted by the state and its petty, factionalized interests with the upshot that China’s major companies are publicly listed, Fortune 500 pseudo-communist oligopolies. 

This situation makes for an atmosphere of instability, the authors argue. The Party, or rather: the dominant interest groups, can remove CEOs, order up mergers, initiate expansion into unchartered territory, or whatever they please. It’s not about what’s best for the “corporation,” it’s about what’s best for the political elites and their dependents.

In China, nothing is as it seems, and with this in mind the writers take us on tours of the banking sector, the bond markets, the stock markets, etc. The fulcrum of China’s economy is its banking system. By the year 2000, each of China’s major banks was badly managed and bankrupt. The government stepped in to recapitalize and, with the aid of Western advisors, restructure and reform. But the Party continued with its bad old ways, meaning it continued to order banks to lend to the SOEs, even though bad loans were still outstanding. Debt and losses accrued from non-performing loans are hidden, whatever it takes to keep the SOEs afloat in cash so the economy can continue to grow by eight percent per annum. Debt is removed from balance sheets, record profits and low problem-loan quotients are announced, and the boom-bust cycle begins again. While huge piles of debt are shifted from pocket to pocket, cadres lecture Westerners on the weaknesses of their financial systems.

And on and on it goes. The reader sees that the system and all its constituent parts appear fine on the outside, but are moribund and rotting on the inside. Any bona fide internal reform is trumped by a state-backed culture of myopic incompetence. The stock exchanges are state-of-the-art – and state manipulated. Institutions meant to work in tandem jockey for clout and position. The government has become addicted to debt (and burying that debt) to ensure momentum. The train can’t stop; if it does, its passengers might lynch the engineers. In 2009, rather than deal with unresolved loans from the 1990s, the banks went on a $1.4 trillion lending spree.

The subtext is that the Chinese are only fooling themselves, a perennial theme to the observant China watcher. Someone will be left holding the bag, and what a big, burdensome bag it is. According to Red Capitalism, China’s public debt (as of 2009) could be as high as 76 percent of its GDP.

As someone who’s familiar with Chinese history, culture, and society, but who only has a theoretical understanding of business and finance, I found this book engaging, but choppy. There are far too many acronyms, and a way of dealing with this issue should have been to use them sparingly or not at all. There’s a “list of abbreviations” (they are not abbreviations) on p. xiii, but not all of the acronyms are present, and, as mentioned, there are just too many of them. Here’s a sentence from p. 63. “By the end of 2006, BOC, CCB and ICBC had completed their IPOs and the AMCs shortly thereafter had finished their workouts for their NPL portfolios.” On p. 114, because there’s a chart, there are just 17 lines of text, but there are 14 acronyms. For a business report, perhaps that’s all right, but for a book, it’s unacceptable.

Another issue is consistency. We see National Champions, and then “National Champions”; Who’s Who and then Who’s Who, italicized (different and both incorrect – it should be who’s who). We see ‘every body’ when it should read ‘everybody’, and ‘a top’ when it should say ‘atop.’

The book also repeats itself – often. It requires summaries, but not repetition. Using a one-chapter-per-topic approach, the structure of a chapter should have been: introduction, main body, conclusion – like a textbook. If one must repeat, one should at least reword statements and consult a thesaurus.

Esoteric terminology is introduced and not defined. Amounts are sometimes written in dollars, sometimes in renmenbi, sometimes in both. There is little understanding of parallelism: you cannot write MOF and Ministry of Railways in the same sentence, just like you cannot write 1:23 p.m. and two-thirty in the afternoon in the same sentence.

Finally (and I hate to say it, but someone’s got to) there are too many interrogatives; sometimes they come in bunches, and it’s not always easy, or at least for a layperson like me, to know if they’re rhetorical or not.  Chapter Four, “China’s Captive Bond Market” ends with the line: “So the question again presents itself: why did China build its fixed income market?”, to which I mentally rejoindered, ‘Uh, I don’t know. Did I miss something? Are you going to deal with that in the next chapter? I was kind of hoping you would tell me.’ Never form an argument from questions, and avoid asking the reader questions,’ are fundamentals a professor would tell a first-year student.

Nevertheless, Red Capitalism is interesting and necessary. Like China itself, Westerners believe China’s economy is doing fine because that’s what’s reported and people don’t understand how it functions. Although privatized to a degree, financial entities and mechanisms are shackled to the state – and this is debilitating, not invigorating. China is sitting on a mountain-sized pile of bad debt, and, as Walter and Howie point out, it’s possible that pile will only grow during the coming years. They understand China well enough to know that problems, even mammoth ones, can fester and go unchecked for ages. Though enlightening, extracting pertinent information from this volume is, at times, tedious and in between the engaging bits one wonders where the editor was.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World