Reviews and Comments

JM Coetzee's 'Jesus' trilogy is a series of novels-as-philosophy. They take place in an unfamiliar world, one where it is hard to tell if the people in it are ghosts or something more physical. In the first two books, the scene is set as the central protagonist Simón becomes a father figure for a young boy David, and later finds him a mother figure in Inés. Their travails in a world that seems ethereal, almost without violence except for sudden extreme acts, and led by bureaucracy is magically inventive.

This third book is the best of the trilogy. It is brief and a very quick read, and brings together some of the ideas Coetzee has been working on both in this trilogy and throughout his career. This includes the idea of being an outsider within a system, and how this can affect decisions and behaviours of those around you. Each character plays a role, and their role doesn't really change throughout the books – there is no extreme 'growth' or 'progression'.

In this book, David becomes ill after moving voluntarily into an orphanage, and his unique beauty helps to create a cult around him. His role is the 'Jesus' of the story, and his unique way of repositioning the world offers us as readers a chance to also rethink how embedded we are in our own structures and ontologies. In the end it is hard not to relate to the protagonist Simón and his more banal, practical view of the world, and I believe this is what Coetzee intends. Yet he too has unusual quirks and makes decisions that seem to contradict his otherwise pragmatic demeanour. The final words (and other references throughout) pay homage to Don Quixote, a more than fitting link in the maybe-imaginary world that Coetzee has created.

This is my first foray into the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, and it was an absolute treat. The book is divided into two essays, both presented at past conferences and then refined for the publication. Both are related, but quite different texts that examine our modern condition in the West, and how we arrived at it.

The first considers the role of civil war (and Arendt's idea of 'global civil war') as a point of 'stasis', something that flattens the division between family and state, and is entangled with it. This is done by analysing contemporary philosophy alongside Plato and Aristotle, looking at how Ancient Greece guided us toward this point of global stasis. The thesis is sound, sometimes witty, and brilliantly argued.

The second is even better. It looks at the frontispiece that was used as the cover for the publication of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan in 1651, and then analyses it through a social and historical lens, paying particular heed to the contradictions in the use of the leviathan as an image. Gradually, Agamben comes to the point: That the image is crucial to the book as a symbol of what Hobbes might have hidden in it. Leviathan is often seen as a critical text in the amalgamation of power by monarchy, and subsequently by controlling human bodies through 'biopolitics' (to use Foucault's word). Even more importantly, Agamben argues that Hobbes has entangled the state with a human (Christian) apocalypse, and he highlights the consequences of this entanglement for 21st Century political and social thought.

Both essays are wonderful, deep, frightening, and very timely.

Jeff Hecht is a well known authority on fiber optics. Both engineer and journalist, he has written technical manuals and social histories on the topic. This 1999 book is the only complete history of the technology that I could find, and it is comprehensive.

As every endless story must begin somewhere, this one begins with the telegraph and the laying of cables. Exploring the history of how commercial and scientific goals collided in the mid-19th Century Europe, Hecht builds a story of how fiber optic technology developed. He then records a very (very, very, very) detailed account of the various men that added one or another piece to the puzzle that eventually led to fiber optic and laser combinations that make fast internet a reality today. This includes some anecdotal moments alongside more linear lists of achievements by teams around the world working on optics, data transfer and lasers.

I read this because I am studying the history of fiber optics as part of an art project. I am not a specialist. But even with Hecht's well crafted storytelling and care not to over-focus on Western sciences, the story does get convoluted and a little dry at times. The book is also completely male-dominated, with only one female scientist referenced that I can remember. This is likely a sad reflection of gender exclusion in the field of optics in physics, rather than an oversight by the author. If you can allow for these points, the book is a fascinating and deep study of a technology that has a profound impact on our daily lives, and as comprehensive a history on fiber optics as I expect exists.

Kerri Ní Dochartaigh's first book, Thin Places was a marvel and a masterpiece that has enriched me in many ways, so it was always going to be hard to follow it with more of the same. And it's great to see that this book, Cacophony of Bone, took a less dreamlike and layered direction, instead choosing to experiment rather than rest on laurels. However, I think as an experiment it doesn't really work.

The book is split into twelve chapters. Each one is a month in the year 2020, a year that had a profound impact on so many of us, and also the year that Ní Dochartaigh became pregnant. I chose to read it month-by-month also, so that my body would be in a similar season to the author's as I read. The chapters all have a structure: (i) an overall thought on the month, entangling the personal with folk history and contemporary culture, (ii) a diary-entry sequence, day-by-day, telling of things that happened that month, and (iii) a poetic reflection on these two. In each chapter, the third section was by far the strongest, and on some (September to November in particular) they were magnificent. In each, I found the second section pretty much unreadable, just a series of moments that would be better left to a research diary rather than included in a published book (I don't really care to know what someone read on Instagram or what Wikipedia hole they went down; while the personal is interesting, it is less so over twelve whole months). The result is a bit muddled, sometimes honest and thoughtful, and occasionally blindingly brilliant. If someone is a writer, this insight into process might be much more interesting to them. For me, I feel the experiment didn't quite work out.

What to say about one of the most famous books of all time?

Most people know something of the story's synopsis: a teenage boy meets an ex-pirate and inherits a treasure map. He enlists the help of an educated doctor friend, who in turn enlists a squire, who puts together a crew. The squire is naive and inexperienced so relies on on the advice of a very helpful ship's cook, Long John Silver, to select the crew. They mutiny, many die, the treasure is lost, and lots of adventuring happens in between.

The story is a wild, swashbuckling tale. It features real names of pirates that once sailed the seas (such as Izzy Hands). It uses archaic tropes, such as how the distrustful pirates all have some disability or disfigurement that betray their darkness. It is a colonial tale, told by a wealthy white English boy who looks down on, and outsmarts, the lower educated pirate mutineers. It is a book of men (and a boy) with almost no women mentioned since the boy's mother leaves the story a short way in. It is violent, but generally those who suffer are the pirates, who garner little sympathy from the narrator. And even with these glaring issues, it is a great romp, a properly fun tale that justifies its enduring legacy as a popular favourite. It's also brilliantly written, richly described, with great characters. Worth a read with open eyes, for the characters and the setting alone.