You wake up in a prison, are freed, and learn you are the proud owner a world-changing destiny. You’re playing a first-person free-roaming RPG set in a lavish world full of side quests and monsters. What is the name of this game? The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim? Wrong. Oblivion? Wrong. Morrowind? Wrong. One thing’s for sure, right from the character creation screen: you can’t say Tainted Grail: TheFall of Avalon is hiding its influences. Starting the game as a prisoner feels like a deliberate homage. But this is not Elder Scrolls, not Bethesda. This is a different developer with a new story. So what is the background here? As this loading screen explains, we are in a darker sequel to Arthurian legend, where Camelot was destroyed by a plague called the Red Death.
All images in this post are screenshots taken via Steam from Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (dev Questline, pub Awaken Realms)
So Arthur and co fled to the mystical isle of Avalon, but that turned out to be even worse. A few hundred years on, the kingdom of Avalon is falling apart. That’s where the player character comes in.
Skyrim was the first thing I thought of, and the similarities still strike me sometimes. But as I played Tainted Grail I started to see more and more of what makes it distinct. I’m aware that it’s got a suite of smaller open worlds rather than one big Elder Scrolls monster map; so far, I’ve only been roaming in the first one, so this has not been a factor in my experience yet. No, the first thing to jump out at me was a difference in spirit. Without taking a moment to Wikipedia it, I’m going to guess that the developers are British. There’s something of the dark cheekiness of 2000AD. For example, slain enemies sometimes carry erotic fiction – a joyous anachronism given it’s written on parchment. Did monks copy it by hand in scriptoria? It’s a little moment of ‘Don’t worry, we can have a laugh here too.’
A terrifying grotesque giant, deep underground, pushing a lever as you do
That’s welcome because on the other hand Tainted Grail ramps up the ruin and slaughter. The dungeon where you begin is a refuge run by an order of priests who are trying to cure the Red Death. But things have gone horribly wrong. There aren’t just a few corpses here and there – there are bodies in cells, bodies on racks, bodies in cages, parts of bodies in cages and parts outside, and many, many torture chambers and blood-drenched laboratories. At one stage you fall through a hole in the floor into a cavern beneath, and you land on a gigantic heap of corpses.
When you go on out of the cave to a rocky beach there’s three shipwrecks. And a little way on, two or three more. Around the corner, five or six more shipwrecks. It’s not aiming for subtlety. But it goes deeper than tone: the combat feels less rudimentary than in Elder Scrolls, but not in that action-adventure console-port way that I often find annoying. It’s very intuitive. UI and inventory are noticeably easier to use.
Two men in a pub chatting about the issues of the day. Every detail of this moment could be happening in Sean’s Bar in Athlone
By this point in the game we have also encountered some terrifying grotesque giants, majestic statues, a strange, intense cutscene and a sojourn in a parallel universe of impossible topography and towers suspended at the moment of collapse. We also find ourselves in a blood-filled chamber where the emaciated body of King Arthur lies in a gothic sarcophagus, and we have been kinda-possessed by his spirit.
To be clear, all this in the starter area – the ‘Helgen’ of Tainted Grail.
The strange otherworld/ afterlife into which we wander to explore the dark history of Avalon
After that, I sail to the first open-world area. I have been told I have to steal Excalibur (by two different characters with different agendas), but I am free to roam at will, trade, loot, chat, do side-quests, and fight monsters and bandits. Here I started enjoying myself even more. The open world stuff strikes a good balance between freedom and direction.
The world is Celtic and Arthurian in its influences. The first merchant I met was coy about his true nature, but would not buy or sell anything made of iron. Demons roar at you in modern Irish. Cyclopean sword-in-stone monuments seem to float on the misty horizon. The characters often have Irish-language names, whose pronunciation the voice actors blithely butcher. But no matter.
‘May you die screaming!’ translated correctly into Irish and, in this case, pronounced correctly too
The world is smaller and tighter than in many open world games. You can still pick a direction and walk and see what you find, but you won’t go thirty seconds without finding something that an artist had some fun designing and that will try to kill you. This is a trade-off; we have a pacier experience, but less of the Skyrim or Red Dead Redemption sense of being in a real landscape. On the contrary, this place seems more like the magical kingdom it is, with everything amped up to the extreme. Everywhere, marred spectacle and broken monuments pose implicit riddles.
The side-quests sometimes leave you with some bleak humour at the end. A necromancer has been raising the troublesome dead at a local graveyard, as they are wont to do in games like this. The solution is to convince the necromancer that the only way he can make a breakthrough in his research is by experiencing death himself.
Other times it’s just grim. The red priests tried to cure a plague only to turn their haven into a vast cave complex of death. There’s a strong sense, underlined by the melancholy theme music, that King Arthur, too, tried to build something great and noble but has only wrought ruin and madness.
Ten hours in, I’ve explored three-quarters of this first zone, which is called the Shadow of the Horns. I’m starting to itch for the next area but I’m not ready to leave this one behind. I could probably walk to the main quest marker at this point, though I don’t know what kind of horrors and villains I’ll find on that road. There are a few side-quests I want to do but I will have to either level up or fight smart before I can tackle them.
Playing to your build is encouraged. For a long time I carried a sword because that’s what I’m used to doing from other games. It took me an embarrassing length of time to figure out how to read the stats fully, and to realise that I was carrying a weapon that was too heavy for me, and suffering huge penalties because of it. I switched to a kind of magical staff called an essence channeler, and because I have assigned my level-up points to Spirituality, I can use this weapon to full effect. I am now dealing several times more damage than before. Still, if I approach a fight lazily I’m going to end up dead.
Maybe I like Tainted Grail so much because it’s a welcome contrast to some of my recent gaming. In my search for an open-world experience I have strayed into the consoley realms of action-adventure. I’m thinking especially of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. I really liked many aspects of it, but it frontloaded some terrible sins so that I never got through to the parts of the game I really wanted to play. The player spends the first 30-40 minutes in cutscenes (or thinly-disguised cutscenes). It does not let me save and load the game. I have to play through the same challenges again and again from the same checkpoint.
I don’t know how developers think they can reconcile checkpoints with open worlds. Is it a file size issue? This is especially bad when it comes to boss fights or other challenges that you might have to play through five or ten times. It’s not repeating the challenge that I mind. It’s repeating the five tedious minutes of filler between the checkpoint and the challenge.
Another recent one was Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve played a lot more of RDR2 than I have of Valhalla and will definitely go back to it. I liked it. But I didn’t love it, because there were some of the same problems. You start the game wintering in the mountains and robbing a train. For me, in more than one sense, it was glacial and I was on rails. There were hours of linear hand-holding prologue. Hours! After that you have more freedom, but the missions maintain the same pace as the prologue. You have to commit to sitting down and playing for a long time if you want to make progress. And again, if developers want player freedom, they should let the player save their game.
How nice to pick up Tainted Grail and find a game that has depth and breadth but that gives me freedom. There’s a shorter prologue, within which you can design your character, hone your play style, explore a non-linear space, and make some consequential choices (as opposed to, shuffle around and listen to dialogue). Then you’re off the leash and wandering free within the hour. Of course, I’m not entirely comparing like with like. These are all free-roaming more-or-less open-world games. Assassins’ Creed is its own thing and Red Dead is its own thing, and maybe it comes across here like I’m criticising them for not being something they were never intended to be. I’m not, though – I’m just giving my own reaction to approaching Tainted Grail after playing them.
That’s my reaction after clocking up ten hours of play time, anyway: this is fun, this is engrossing, and I’m definitely going to give it another ten, at least.
For the benefit of those who have never been exposed to the spectacular world of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series, it’s about a post-apocalyptic future Earth where cities have been put up on wheels and scuttle around eating each other. Municipal Darwinism provides the backdrop to piratey adventure, salvagepunk and steampunk, epic journeys, Young Adult comings-of-age, civic-scale armageddons, and wars and power struggles with an edge of satire.
Thunder City marks the start of a third series, in between the original four and the prequel trilogy. You can pick up Thunder City without having read any of the others.
It delivers on steam, salvage and satire, within that fun type of story where a crew of colourful and diverse characters comes together to pull off a daring mission. The crew consists of a gladiator, a painter, a schoolteacher, a mercenary, an exiled prince and a – well, to describe the last one would be a spoiler, but the cover might be a giveaway. Their mission is to seize back the traction city of Thorbury, which has been taken over by a ruthless new mayor. This type of story lends itself perfectly to Reeve’s style, which is somehow breezy and substantial at the same time. These stories are epic and rich, but unlike his ponderous cities, Reeve never, ever gets bogged down. It looks effortless but he must really sweat over it.
The first chapter is capably written and engaging though it didn’t set me on fire; we follow Tamzin Pook, a young gladiator who fights robots in ‘the amusements’ in a mobile floating version of Margate. The first sentence of the second chapter was the point where I smiled and settled in for a good story: Miss Torpenhow, a teacher on Thorbury, feels a shudder in the deck and knows that her city has eaten something that disagreed with it. This is a warning for the characters and a promise to the reader that big trouble has just arrived. The chapter that follows is a good exemplar of the whole book: big events clip along, with the action always clear and crisp.
The prequels and original series dealt, respectively, with the beginning and the end of the era of traction cities. Those grand story arcs are heavy with the sense that the whole world is about to change in a fundamental way. In Thunder City, the fate of the world never hangs in the balance. For me that’s neither better nor worse, but suffice to say there are different stakes here. Instead of a sense of revolution, there is a sense of a status quo that will be restored.
Posh, hierarchical, olde-worlde Thorbury is disrupted by the ruthless technocratic regime of the self-made man, Gabriel Strega. Like some of the later villains in the original series, he wants to take Municipal Darwinism to its city-eat-city extreme. For him, art, aristos and ‘lovely old buildings’ are all items on the long list of things that can be torn down to feed the furnaces of the techno-accelerationist death drive. He’s a great villain to root against, but this sense of a return to the status quo is underlined by the fact that our crew of misfits is engaged in the conservative project of restoring an overthrown royal family. If this is a problem, the ending fixes it.
We see more of the Anti-Traction League – this time its more western component, the old and fading Zagwan Empire, who preside over the floating pubs of Gibraltar and super-intelligent octopuses. We get our first good look at Paris, whose central square features a statue of two deities who might be Asterix and Obelix.
I got more laugh-out-loud moments from this book than I expected. A showdown in a floating spa city ends with a character slamming a bowl of green and fragrant balm into a baddie’s face and growling the one-liner, ‘Consider yourself exfoliated.’
I had a mild worry, as the novel thundered on to its last hundred pages, that the final showdown on Thorbury would be deferred to a sequel. That would be a let-down – the stakes are right for this novel, but not high enough to sustain a sense of urgency across a series. It’s no spoiler to reassure you that Reeve is smarter than that: the story’s climax is a suitably pacy, exciting and satisfying struggle for the Thunder City of the title. But this crew are clearly set up for future adventures.
If I’d read less of Reeve, I would have worried that this novel would feel strained the way great stories sometimes do when the author – or another author – returns to them after a delay.Maybe the characters don’t click, the world doesn’t feel like it operates according to the same rules, the themes are muddled. But again with Thunder City the word ‘effortless’ comes to mind. I don’t know what he puts in the engine, but this thing runs smooth as a dream.
A final note on what Mortal Engines means in the 2020s – because earlier I used the word ‘accelerationist’ and had to pause and think about whether it was a metaphor. In the 2000s when London first chased a small mining town across the bed of the old North Sea, traction cities worked as a clever dig at neoliberal capitalism. Today you don’t have to read Philip Reeve to get the feeling that you live on a machine that’s ploughing a swathe of destruction across the world, that is tormented by eternal hunger, that is its own end and means; or to encounter a priesthood of powerful engineers who ask how but not why. Good thing the Gen X tech bros haven’t read a single book between them since well back into the twentieth century – if they’d read Mortal Engines they would by now be promising traction cities to hordes of eager investors. And we’d all be looking at the horizon saying, ‘It’s coming. It’s so scary. It’s going to change everything.’
What would the maps of our Solar System look like in a future where humanity spreads out beyond Earth? The arena of human activity would be a vast and mostly empty space whose few and small physical presences – moons, planets and asteroids – are in constant motion relative to each other. I don’t have a good answer to the question of how to map this arena on a flat plane, or even a globe or a hologram. But some novels I’ve read in the last few years have challenged me to imagine how people would live, struggle, and wage war over this arena.
Mapping the Solar System in The Expanse, Series 2. Syfy Network, Showrunners Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Naren Shankar.
These are interplanetary, not interstellar, scenarios. Since interstellar travel is just a fantasy at this point, the idea of a human diaspora confined to a single stellar system is a more practical and immediate proposition. Also, we know of thousands of exoplanets, but we know very little about them beyond what spectrography can tell us. When it comes to the planets whose names you learned in school, and the many moons, asteroids and dwarf planets, we have a mass of information from probes, including awe-inspiring photographs. If we want to populate worlds with imaginary human colonies, our neighbours in the Solar System leave less to the imagination. Even this more modest prospect is so distant, science-fiction authors are as good a bunch of people to ask as anyone else.
Here I will look at two works of fiction from the 2010s that set out to imagine a human race living, toiling and fighting across, but not yet beyond, our Solar System.
These works are:
Red Rising by Pierce Brown, and its sequels Golden Son and Morning Star (the Red Rising Trilogy, not to be confused with the Red Riding Trilogy by David Peace, whose action, confined to Yorkshire, is less ambitious in geographical scope);
andLeviathan Wakes by James SA Corey, the first book in the series called, and adapted for TV as, The Expanse.
A map of part of the Solar System, from Golden Son (Pierce Brown, Del Rey Books, 2015)
What about the other three Pierce Brown books, and the other seven or eight Expanse books? I haven’t read them yet (I’m one-third of the way through Caliban’s War and at about the same point in the TV show; Iron Gold is on my list). Anyway, for our purposes, these four novels give us plenty to chew on. But comments relating to the later books are welcome as long as people are tactful about spoilers.
The Condition of the Working Classes on Neptune
Darrow, hero of the Red Rising trilogy, begins his story as a 16-year-old living and working deep beneath the surface of Mars, mining Helium-3. He narrowly avoids death at the fangs of a pit viper, drinks and dances with his community, and shows us that he loves his wife (his people marry early). He knows, and knows of, no other life. As members of the Red caste, his people are the lowest, most downtrodden part of society. The author gives them some trappings of Irish culture, a light seasoning which is explained in-universe. Two other castes make a bloody entrance, the military Greys who keep the Reds down, and the aristocratic Golds who run the show. The Reds have hints of Irishness to suggest hunger and oppression; the Golds have lavish helpings of the language and culture of Ancient Rome to show power, glory and arrogance. The Greys have no culture, to show that they have no culture.
While the social order in Red Rising is a near-caricature of hierarchical societies from history, technology has advanced to a level not far short of godlike. Expensive devices allow the wearer to fly, turn invisible, etc, which makes the many battles and intrigues of the trilogy very interesting. This solar system is a canvas on which the Gold ruling caste (and Pierce Brown) can paint at will. Earth’s moon is covered by one great mega-city, Mars has been terraformed into a second Earth, with a lush and verdant Valles Marineris and many great cities, Jupiter’s icy moon Europa has become a rich ocean world, and so forth. Travel between these worlds can take weeks or months, and requires a large workforce of Blues, the spacefaring technical caste.
The 18th Brumaire of Nero Augustus
As the book and series go on we encounter more of the castes (such as Pinks, condemned to sexual slavery, and Obsidians, genetically-modified supersoldiers) and gain a broader view of how people live in this future. This is an ultra-extreme hierarchy, with castes not only defined by birth but through strict caste-apartheid and genetic modification. The Golds’ vendettas and repressions are truly monstrous. Rhea, a moon of Saturn, has been obliterated as the ultimate punishment of its rebellious lord. Rebellions by the lower castes are treated with even greater harshness, and as Darrow sets out on a mission to infiltrate and destroy the Golds (in the process humanising them for us without making their social order any more sympathetic), the threat of hideous tortures and certain death hang over him at all times.
The Golds are formally part of one polity, under the rule of Octavia au Lune whose power base is Earth’s moon. But they are a proud and resentful bunch. The Martian ruling class, led by Nero au Augustus, chafe under the au Lune dynasty. The Golds of the far-flung gas giants are rugged frontier people who have an identity distinct from that of the Core.
In the second novel, Golden Sun, an Iron Rain comes to Mars – that is, an enormous invasion from space consisting of elite soldiers in drop suits and a large number of massive ships. Golds are at the forefront of combat here, and again in Morning Star when we see space battles and boarding actions. These are sublime massive-scale spectacles. Victory requires a fairly complex coordination between the skillsets of different castes.
Material interests don’t appear to be the direct cause of their bloody wars. Rather, power struggles and personal vendettas are a predictable outcome of having an aristocracy bred and raised for conflict and domination. Grudges that go back to the Academy (the Hunger Games-esque agoge which is at the heart of the first book) have a real effect on who picks what side when civil wars break out.
But this is not only true of the Golds. In Brown’s stories, for Red as well as Gold, betrayal, loyalty, sacrifice and struggle are personal. Several characters in the ragtag rebel alliance are identified as socialists, but it’s as human beings with reciprocal personal obligations that Darrow relates to them as to everyone. Even within the rebellion, factional struggles are more about ‘You betrayed my friend three chapters ago’ than ‘You favour an alliance with the Silver bourgeois caste.’ The question of cross-class alliances does come up in Morning Star, but it is simply not a point of contention as it usually is in real revolutions.
Down and Out on Eros and Ceres
Turning to our other vision of the future Solar System, working conditions as imagined in Leviathan Wakes still might not pass muster with your union rep, but at least you have a union rep. The world of Leviathan Wakes is not as elaborately obscene as that of Red Rising but it doesn’t have much of the glory or glamour of that setting either. In spite of flashes of horror, this is a more gritty and blue-collar vision.
Jupiter, viewed from Ganymede. The Expanse S2
Mentions of a massacre of insurgent workers on Anderson Station imply that such events are rare. In the foreground of the book we have an atrocity of immense dimensions, the destruction of the main belt asteroid Eros and its million inhabitants. This is done not by a vindictive and repressive ruling caste but by a shady private corporation, Protogen, for purposes of R&D. The cover-up is only possible because there is a very distracting system-wide war raging at that time.
Forty billion people live on Earth, several billion on Mars, and only 50-100 million in the Belt and outer planets – the population of, say, Iran. This makes sense as, contrary to the fantasy of Earth’s ‘surplus population’ leaving for other worlds, moving people and stuff up the gravity well is difficult and expensive. This solar system is still very Earth-centric and that phrase, ‘up the gravity well’ is in common use, like ‘across the pond’ in our time. But space trade is lively. The dwarf planet Ceres, a focus of Leviathan Wakes, receives platinum, iron and titanium from the Belt, water from Saturn, vegetables and beef from Ganymede and Europa, ‘organics’ from Earth and Mars, power cells from Io, Helium-3 from the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus (like in Red Rising, Helium-3 is assumed to be very important). On Mars, terraforming is under way but at a glacial pace. Elsewhere, life beyond Earth means life in a habitat of some kind – ship, station, tunnel. This is very good for the TV series as much of the action can take place in cramped interiors.
Our two heroes are Holden, an officer on a water-hauler, and Miller, a rentacop on Ceres. Holden’s life on board ship, on journeys that can last weeks or months, is companionable but (until the inciting incidents of the novel) probably dull. Miller works for a private security company that maintains law and order on a world that consists of tens of thousands of kilometres of tunnels which are home to six million people and haven to a thousand ships on any given day. Miller’s perspective gives us a cross-section of the seedier parts of life on Ceres. The crime, chaos and paramilitarism that he encounters are, essentially, nothing that could not happen on Earth in our time.
Space travel is more challenging than in Red Rising. This is one of the only space novels I have read that doesn’t dismiss, by one means or another, the problem of inertia. There is a type of engine that can make spacecraft go extremely fast (still way, way sub-lightspeed), but it causes burst blood vessels, pressure bruising, joint pain, and ultimately permanent injury and death. This world works according to unforgiving rules.
Mars in The Expanse S2. Terraforming is a work-in-progress.
The Belter Manifesto
The powers-that-be in The Expanse are corporations and state bureaucracies. There is no swaggering dictator, little room for charisma. But neither is there any sense that popular masses exercise any democratic control. We have a capitalist technocratic set-up which is entrenched and stable. There are no castes, but the Belters’ height and physiques are the outer manifestations of a deep difference between them and the humans of the Inner Planets.
Earth is a distant presence in the novel, but a few of our major characters came from there. Martians can be menacing but are humanised. This is a story about the Belt. And inseparable from the Belt is its major political/paramilitary movement, the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA).
The OPA are sympathetic both in terms of their cause (better conditions for the oppressed Belters) and in terms of their general presentation (they are cool and fun, speak a colourful dialect, do interesting things). We also see that they commit atrocities, as when anger at the Inner Planets is taken out on random individuals. And while our main characters end up as allies of a particular faction of the OPA, they are also in conflict with them at various times. The authors give us a complex picture here, with positive and negative aspects that form a cohesive whole.
But The Expanse is not all grey. Good can be hard to parse, but evil means something. The destruction of Eros is carried out by a team of specialists whose brains have been engineered so as to remove their sense of empathy. Their leader, Dresden, gives an alarmingly coherent case for murdering a million people. The picture of evil that emerges here is scary because it is banal and grounded.
View from inside a Martian marine’s helmet, in combat on Ganymede. The Expanse, S2
Conclusion
Which of these works presents a more compelling vision of a human future in the Solar System? First I want to set down the kind of scenarios I would see for our spacefaring future, with the caveat that I’ve read little enough relevant non-fiction: mostly Carl Sagan and A City on Mars.
We can forget about the idea of escaping from climate change by going to another planet. It’s the other way around: we need to sort our shit out down here before we are going to be able to build the kind of technological and social base we will need to keep alive our early tentative presences on other worlds. Earth ten degrees warmer is still a far better place to live than Mars, and Mars is far better than anywhere else, and still terrible. Similar points go for anything else people might want to leave Earth to escape, such as war or class conflict. Space settlement on any great scale (accepting for the sake of argument that it’s even desirable) would require technological and social leaps forward of a kind that would take us beyond capitalism, to a higher level of productivity and technique, a higher level of economic equality and harmony with nature.
From the point of view of private profit, limited rewards would accrue from space settlement, especially weighed against the financial cost of sending people, supplies and equipment up the gravity well. If it proceeds at all, it will stagger and lurch through hectic and wasteful boom-bust cycles. The kind of irresponsible hype that we see around crypto and chatbots could help space capitalism to advance a little way in our lifetimes. But by the same token space capitalism, due to cost-cutting and the demand for investor returns, would bring about the kinds of situations where dozens or hundreds of settlers die in terrible catastrophes. Such scandals would tank popular support and investor confidence, and the snakes would cancel out the ladders.
So I don’t really see either Leviathan Wakes or Red Rising as presenting the most likely scenarios, simply because I don’t think space capitalism can pull it off, never mind space classical antiquity. But these visions both have important truths in them. The Expanse is the capitalist world order circa 2010 projected into space, so on the surface, it’s a simple enough call to say that it’s a more realistic and grounded vision of a human future in the Solar System. But reality often fails to be grounded or even ‘realistic.’ We have various hooting cannibals in power in some of the most powerful countries on Earth in the 2010s and 2020s, and we have seen the descent of the world’s foremost space-settlement advocate into fascist delirium. If Musk is calling the shots, the human future in the Solar System would probably look more like the world of Red Rising than that of Leviathan Wakes, with eugenics, hierarchy, and constant illiterate references to Ancient Rome. If I’m wrong, and we end up bringing capitalism with us when we go to other worlds, then there’s a good argument for projecting into the spaceborne future the feverish politics of our time.
Hi folks, this post represents me putting a rough-and-ready finish on a job I left half-done a while back. You’re reading a long-delayed conclusion to my series Before the Fall: Notes on The Dawn of Everything. I have now finally finished Graeber & Wengrow’s fascinating book and can offer my thoughts on the back half of it.
I had far fewer problems with the book as a whole than I had with the first few chapters. Experts who have criticised this book have generally thrown in a few nice comments as well, and it’s easy to see why. The Dawn of Everything, as the name suggests, is sweeping. I feel a wide range of people will find things in it that they really like even if they can identify places where they think the evidence is thin or where the reasoning invites a ‘well… not necessarily.’
Via Wikimedia commons: ‘National Museum of Anthropology – Teotihuacán. Reconstruction of murals in a patio of the Palacio de Atetelco in Teotihuacán showing coyote warriors.’ Photograph by Wolfgang Sauber.
It’s often argued that inequality and power structures are necessary in any sufficiently large population; once you go past a few hundred people, the argument goes, you need governments, ruling classes and bureaucracies. Graeber & Wengrow disagree, and this is the strongest point in the back half of the book. It’s demonstrated most clearly in their survey of early cities around the world (such as Teotihuacán and Mohenjo-Daro) that had egalitarian features. Outside cities, it’s also obvious in the clan structures of indigenous North America, imagined communities as big as a city that linked disparate strangers across vast distances.
I agree with the authors on this point around scale and have for a long time, and it was satisfying to read their arguments and examples. I can exercise power through my membership in unions, campaign groups, political parties, and through my vote. The late David Graeber would scoff at how limited these powers are, but the point is that these are powers I exercise precisely as part of a large collective, not as an individual or in a small group (and better versions of my union and my democracy can be pointed to or imagined). People can be powerless in a small, intimate group – an abusive family, a house share under a controlling landlord, or a tyrannical workplace – and powerful in larger collectives of the kind I just mentioned. In fact larger workplaces tend to have more power than smaller ones. It’s a bit like blaming environmental devastation on ‘too many people’ – what really decides the question is how the people are organised, not how many there are.
Via Wikimedia Commons: Español: Palacio del Sol visto desde la Pirámide del Sol, Teotihuacan, México. Photograph by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata.
Another idea that comes under fire is what I call tech-tree thinking. This assumption is there in the architecture of videogames but a lot of writers also assume that societies ‘develop’ or ‘achieve’ certain upgrades like agriculture or democracy, which provide a buff to their stats, while some other societies ‘fail’ to do so. Humans dabbled in agriculture without committing to a full-on farming life for many thousands of years. Some took on farming then gave it up when it didn’t work out for them. Some never bothered with it. And we find examples of democratic institutions throughout the archaeological, anthropological and historical record. These are not thresholds that peoples pass through or fail to pass through. They are things we can choose to do or not to do.
Here’s a point that never would have occurred to me, but that I found compelling: Graeber & Wengrow see (at least some) early cities as cradles of democracy, and trace the origin of aristocracy to the ‘heroic societies’ of nomadic pastoralists. In the picture they paint, democracies are developing in cities, aristocracies in the hills nearby. They trade with each other, but develop in mutual opposition. Later the aristocratic nomads conquer the cities, but for long periods after that royal power is circumscribed by powerful urban councils.
The most interesting story unfortunately also struck me as the most tenuous in terms of evidence. The authors paint a picture of a powerful kingdom developing along the Ohio river in North America, imposing the will of its rulers through mass bloodshed; of this society collapsing as the population migrated to freer places; of a cultural memory of this experiment in hierarchy and empire digging itself deep into the traditions and instincts of the North American Indians, even vast distances away; of this memory informing the development of an anti-authoritarian political tradition. It’s a great story because it shows indigenous political institutions as something other than ancient traditions; they were informed by a particular experience in the not-too-distant past. It’s compelling and could well be true, but the evidence related here doesn’t prove it. It’s an example of how your mileage may vary with some of the material in this book. Speaking of material, they sometimes advance explanations for things that I can only see as second- or third-order explanations. We hear that large scale adoption of certain crops depended on that particular crop arbitrarily being used for (that most convenient of phrases) ritual purposes.
Excavated ruins of Mohenjo-daro, with the Great Bath in the foreground and the granary mound in the background.’ Photograph by Saqib Qayyum.
I still see a lot of value in categorising different societies using the rubric of production, in seeing economics as something that sets broad but hard limits on what can happen in politics and culture. While I don’t think the authors share these ideas, they didn’t go out of their way to attack them either, though I expected them to. The promised ‘plague on both your houses’ did not descend; Hobbes came out a lot worse than Rousseau.
I’ve had this book for at least three years, I shit you not. I wanted to read it very carefully and take loads of notes, so what I was doing with my little series here, 14 or 15 months ago (Jesus Christ), was reading, note-taking and writing a blog post on each chapter. This project, modest as it was, ground to a halt after just five chapters out of twelve, and so did my reading of The Dawn of Everything. My interest in the book had somehow become an obstacle to my actually getting it read. I made zero progress for a long time, then bit the bullet, bought the audiobook, and got the rest all listened to in a couple of weeks. No note-taking and no twelve-part blog series, just this capstone on the job I left unfinished.
Second Foundation is the third volume of the original Foundation trilogy so before I get into it I’ll sum up what I wrote here on this blog about volumes 1 and 2, Foundationand Foundation and Empire.
I liked the deterministic mid-century materialism of Foundation. On the other hand, it could be smug and cynical and it was extremely of its time (imagine, someone probably died in combat on Iwo Jima knowing what the Seldon Plan was). It was quite dry, to-the-point, talky and minimalist.though it got more flashy and dramatic as it went on. Then at the midpoint of Foundation and Empire Asimov threw the old formula out the window. So long, mid-century determinist fable – don’t let the vast socio-economic forces hit you in the arse on the way out – it’s time for a fun swashbuckling adventure about a villain who can do mind control. This new formula boasted better characterisation and pacing, but overall I missed the tweedy old Foundation.
Second Foundation, like Foundation and Empire, contains two stories separated by a few decades. The first story concludes the story of the Mule, the psychic warlord introduced in the previous volume. He searches for and struggles with the Second Foundation. At last towards the end we get a glimpse of this mysterious institution.
Skirting around spoilers, we don’t see any more of the Mule in the next story. ‘Good,’ I said to myself. ‘We’re back on track. No more Space Yuri. We’re back to the Seldon Plan. Amoral characters as unwitting agents of vast historical forces. Empires hobbled by their own overextension. Kingdoms brought low by atomic hairdryers.’ But I ended up disappointed; this too was a story about psychic powers and mind control. We are focused on the Second Foundation in this story, and they just so happen to be a bunch of psychics like the Mule. Asimov labours to tie it in with the whole idea of psychohistory.
Dust jacket of 1953 edition
The Magneto in the High Castle
To get a sense of how I feel about this, imagine if half-way through The Man in the High Castle Philip K Dick had suddenly introduced Magneto from the X-Men. For the uninitiated, Magneto is, like the Mule, a mutant with special powers; he can control metal with his mind. So imagine if a good chunk of The Man in the High Castle is about Magneto picking up panzers and flinging them around squishing prominent Nazi leaders. Dick’s counterfactual 1960s Nazis are developing plastics, so I suppose they finally build a plastic tank and squish Magneto in turn. After Magneto is vanquished, there is one final episode in the story, concerning the Japanese Emperor, who it is revealed also has magnetic powers. Dick goes out of his way to explain this, somehow, with reference to the I Ching, in order to tie this absolute nonsense back into the original ideas of the story.
However fun this scenario would be, it would kind of distract from the fascinating questions that Dick uses his alternate history to ponder. To take another example, just for fun, imagine if half-way through The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, when we are invested in wondering how humanity is going to hold off an alien invasion, the clouds part and Jesus descends, turns a lot of water into wine, and dies on a cross somewhere half-way through Death’s End.
This is kind of what happens with the original Foundation trilogy. Its second half is fun and not by any means devoid of the interesting ideas we find in the first half. The mysteries – where is the Second Foundation? Who are its secret agents? Who is its mysterious leader, the First Speaker? – are solid with good development and payoffs. But they are mechanical. They have more to do with the craft of storytelling than with the science of psychohistory.
And, I mean… no doubt Dick would have written Magneto pretty well too, and would have found some time to ponder the nature of reality itself in between the scene where Bormann gets squashed by a panzer and the scene where Goebbels gets boa constricted by a lamp-post. But it would still have been a wild and irrelevant departure from a promising story.
The spiral galaxy Messier 83. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgement: William Blair (Johns Hopkins University)
Motivations
The second half of this volume presented some problems for me, even aside from all that. In this story a group of private citizens from the Foundation are hunting for the Second Foundation, because some people’s brainwaves have started to show up a little strange on the mind-reading machines, and it is suspected that the Second Foundation is interfering.
The motivations of this group of private citizens don’t make much sense. The Second Foundation saved them and it is part of the Seldon Plan, which is their secular religion. And then during the story, agents of the Second Foundation save their arses again and again. The two Foundations have no basis for conflict at all. In spite of all this, our Foundation characters remain determined to root out the Second Foundation and its agents with extreme prejudice. Not only does it seem perverse, it doesn’t seem urgent at all. There is no existential threat to the Foundation here. The story lacks urgency, unless it is our desire to see how the Second Foundation will stop these gobshites, but the author doesn’t really commit to that either.
It gets worse (and spoilers follow). When the Foundationers identify one Second Foundation agent in their own circle, they immediately torture and restrain him (p. 229, 1994 HarperCollins Voyager edition). When the Foundation crowd believe they have found fifty agents of the Second Foundation, they do not take long to decide on their narrow range of options:
‘What will we do with all of them… these Second Foundation fellas?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Darell, sadly. ‘We could exile them, I suppose. There’s Zoranel, for instance. They can be placed there and the planet saturated with Mind Static. The sexes can be separated or, better still, they can be sterilized – and in fifty years, the Second Foundation will be a thing of the past. Or perhaps a quiet death for al of them would be kinder.’ (p 232)
A subsequent scene confirms that one of these fates has indeed befallen the fifty agents. Though we are not told which one, it hardly makes a difference!
The early-1950s viewpoint of the author offers some sources of interest and amusement, and, occasionally for me, mild disgust. But I was struck in a nice way by this description of an automatic ticket machine as a futuristic wonder:
‘You put a high denomination bill into the clipper which sank out of sight. You pressed a button below your destination and a ticket came out with your ticket and the correct change as determined by an electronic scanning machine that never made a mistake. It is a very ordinary thing[…]’ (p 169-170)
We have that now, and the only abnormal thing there is using cash instead of card. My knee-jerk reaction is to think, ‘how quaint.’ But on reflection, what prescience.
Conclusion
So that’s how I felt about Second Foundation: enjoyed it, recommend it, but expected more and felt it could have been more.
My verdict on the whole Foundation trilogy (I haven’t read the prequels and sequels written forty years later, so for me it is still a trilogy): “The General” in Foundation and Empire and the first few dozen pages of “The Mule” in the same volume represent a kind of peak Foundation for me. It’s lost some of the excessive dryness of the first volume without yet taking on all the extraneous psychic stuff. After this point, it never stops being entertaining or having good ideas; to its credit, it never retcons; and in some ways the writing improves… But it loses touch with its basic theme. The author seems to have lost interest in the question of predicting and planning the future through mathematics and psychology.
No wonder it ends unfinished, only half-way through Seldon’s thousand-year interregnum. Maybe that’s for the best. The rise of the Foundation into a new Galaxy-wide empire would not have been half as interesting as its early struggles for survival. Let’s remember the assumptions the series is built on: that empires are good and interregna are bad. Later stories would have had to go back and deconstruct a lot of that, if they wanted to remain thoughtful and interesting.
Last year I wrote about Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), in which a small community struggles to preserve culture and technology on the fringe of a collapsing galaxy-wide empire. Hari Seldon, the man whose command of the science of psychohistory allowed him to predict the collapse, has laid out a plan for this community, the Foundation, to unite the Galaxy in ‘only’ a thousand years or so. Foundation is episodic, as every 50-100 years the Foundation is presented with a new existential threat and the question is ‘How will the immortal science of Marxism-Seldonism get them out of this one?’
The sequel Foundation and Empire consists of just two longer episodes, ‘The General’ and ‘The Mule.’ They’re both good and they’re both set in the same world, one after the other. But in tone, theme and style they are two completely different novels. With ‘The Mule,’ we can see Asimov completely throwing out the old formula and introducing a new one. His story about interstellar socio-economics becomes a boisterous space opera about psychics and mind control.
The first part of the book is peak ‘old-formula’ Foundation. I unambiguously love it. General Bel Riose, the most capable military leader in the decaying rump of the Empire, sets out to conquer the Foundation. His will, his ability and the forces at his disposal are all more than sufficient to the task. How can he possibly fail?
The main characters are two captives of Bel Riose: the old Imperial aristocrat Ducem Barr and a Foundation trader named Lathan Devers, who are trying to spoil the General’s design. Their mission centres on an apparent contradiction: they must pursue this task with urgency and initiative even as they maintain their faith in the inevitability of a Foundation victory through the Seldon Plan.
A part of my pleasure in this story came from the way our two main characters speak with very distinct voices. Here’s Lathan Devers on page 37 (2016 HarperCollins edition), faking indifference but with some measure of genuine conviction:
Listen […] what’s defeat? I’ve seen wars and I’ve seen defeats. What if the winner takes over? Who’s bothered? Me? Guys like me? […] Get this […] there are five or six fat slobs who usually run an average planet. They get the rabbit punch, but I’m not losing peace of mind over them. See. The people? The ordinary run of guys? Sure, some get killed, and the rest pay extra taxes for a while. But it settles itself out; it runs itself down. And then it’s the old situation again with a different five or six.
I’ve gone into Foundation’s influences on Star Wars before, but it’s so clear in this book, right down to the characters’ voices and attitudes. There are whole pages where we might as well be in the company of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Han Solo; Ducem Barr does a good line in traumatised reminiscences and holding forth about psychohistory the way old Ben does about the Force, and Lathan Devers would have you believe that he’s in it for the money, doesn’t give a damn about your struggle for freedom, and doesn’t have any time for far-fetched ancient belief systems.
Devers, however, is in it for the revolution. He tells the leaders of the Foundation that he wants to ‘spread the wealth a bit, and keep it from concentrating too much out of the hands that work for it.’ (78) And in the next episode we learn that ‘Devers died in the slave-mines […] because he lacked wisdom but didn’t lack heart.’ (89) This is part of a satisfying pattern where each episode by the way refers back to the characters in the previous one.
Compared with the earlier Foundation stories, this one has more detail, more drama, more interstellar travel, and more character. It even has some action. We get a few scenes with the Galactic Emperor himself. It’s still a very talky piece, as if Asimov wrote it with an eye to royalties from a radio play adaptation. But it’s a development.
The contradiction between individual initiative and historical inevitability is resolved very well. Without getting into spoilers, maybe the actions of our main characters were just part of a more general movement which could be predicted mathematically, or maybe they are there only to illustrate the broader trend. They didn’t solve the problem by their own actions – Ducem Barr remarks after the event that ‘through all this wild threshing up of tiny ripples, the Seldon tidal wave continued onward, quietly – but quite irresistibly.’ (76) But that doesn’t mean their actions didn’t matter.
First edition cover. From Wikipedia.org
The Mule
I grumbled about Foundation being very dry, talky and un-visual, and having almost zero women in it. The second half of Foundation and Empire blows all these complaints out of the water. The lead character, Bayta Darrell, is a strong and smart woman; there is more humour, travelogue, spectacle, more set-pieces. The narrator becomes sassy and sardonic.
At the same time it might be a case of “be careful what you wish for.”
There are things that would have been impossible in previous Foundation stories, not all of it good. Asimov moves from the version of sexism where you pretend there are no women in the entire Galaxy to the version of sexism where you describe women’s appearances more than you really need to, or have supposedly sympathetic men say patronizing shit to them. There is hack stuff, whimsical stuff, clichés: a silly clown who talks Shakespearian; a scene which is just making fun of the way women in a typing pool talk to each other; a psychedelic bit where a special musical instrument triggers hallucinations; an episode in which a villainous nobleman captures all the main characters because he wants to have sex with Bayta.
All in all, this story is written more like a traditional novel of its time. So on the one hand it’s better-crafted and easier to get into. On the other hand, it’s less distinctive. It becomes less about the things Foundation is about.
It starts very good, with all the strengths of the new formula on display. Asimov does a neat job of showing us how the Foundation has grown authoritarian and how its outside colonies of traders chafe under its rule and long for independence (as predicted by Hober Mallow and Lathan Devers). ‘Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.’ (89) Instead of giving us a page from the Encyclopedia Galactica explaining it all, the author conveys it through a sequence where a newlywed couple, one from the Foundation and one a trader, go on a family visit and end up being recruited by the Traders’ resistance movement.
So far, so good: we have a Foundation story but told in a more balanced and engaging way. It is setting us up for a story of class warfare and social revolution. Then all of a sudden it ceases to be a story about sociology or economics or politics and becomes a story about mind control. The Seldon plan is thrown into disarray by the appearance of a man who can hypnotize people. Haha! You didn’t consider that possibility, did you Hari Seldon? You dumbass.
Before I get into criticism of the Yuri’s Revenge turn, let’s just clarify that the story is good and fun and intelligent. The mysteries and twists are one step ahead of the reader. But it’s not a spoiler to say that for the rest of the trilogy the mind control never really takes a back seat. And I just didn’t get as much out of this series from here on out.
Suddenly it all gets a bit ‘Your command is my wish.’ Cover art for Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 Yuri’s Revenge (2001) featuring Udo Kier, a great German actor who passed away this year. Was the Mule a model for Yuri?
What’s my problem with the mind control? Science fiction stories are generally based on “what ifs.” In this case: what if we could predict (and subtly shape) the future development of society through psychology and mathematics? But half-way through the trilogy Asimov suddenly asks, ‘And what if, also, there was a magical guy who could permanently control the emotions of everyone he met?’ It complicates and obscures the original ‘what if’ question.
A defence of Asimov here would be to say that psychohistory deals only with masses of humans, so the mind control stuff is relevant because it’s something happening on the individual level that psychohistory can’t predict. This is stated explicitly a few times. But I just don’t buy it. There’s got to be a more subtle way of interrogating the role of the individual in history and the potential weaknesses of the Seldon Plan. Say, introduce a guy who’s really charismatic, or a small organisation that’s really disciplined. There’s a lot that can happen on a level lower than the actions of billions. Introducing magical mind control, no matter how much Asimov labours to explain it and tie it into psychohistory, doesn’t further explore the concept. It just takes the story somewhere else entirely.
The mysteries are no longer like “how will the Foundation exploit atomic gadgets to control their stronger neighbours?” and more like “Which of these characters is the big baddie in disguise?” and “Which of these planets is the secret base of the Second Foundation?”
I want to re-emphasize that this story is better on a craft level than what came before. My friends who read Foundation at the same time as me didn’t like it, because of the very shortcomings that are addressed in Foundation and Empire. But from my point of view Asimov threw out the baby with the bathwater here. My enjoyment of ‘The Mule’ was tinged with disappointment.
I’ve also read the third novel in the series, Second Foundation, and I will be sharing my thoughts some day soon. Stay tuned.
Bring the House Down has a killer set-up, a ‘WTF’ moment that grabs the reader. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival an earnest young woman, Hayley Sinclair, performs a solo spoken-word show about the climate crisis. Theatre critic Alex Lyons writes a gratuitously cruel one-star review within a few minutes of walking out of the show, sends it to his editor – then goes to a bar and meets the performer whose work he has just savaged. Alex and Hayley go back to his place, but he has meanwhile neglected to tell her that he attended her show, or that he has just humiliated her in a major national newspaper and probably crushed her dreams forever. Don’t worry, she finds out the next day when she looks at the morning paper in his flat. Her revenge is swift, merciless and very public.
After this explosive set-up the pace settles down but never slackens. What really makes this story is its narrator Sophie, Alex’s colleague, who is understated, cautious and quietly troubled in contrast to the outspoken and self-righteous confidence we see from other characters. She gives us a rounded view of Alex, which is not necessarily to say she makes him any more sympathetic. Nobody knows his bad sides better than she does by the end of the book, but she is disinclined to give him the kind of one-star review he freely dispenses. Her voice carries us through the novel with a tone of awkward discomfort mounting to a sense of personal crisis.
At one stage Sophie has to review a twelve-hour long historical drama (titled An Uncivil Peace) whose events she can’t follow and whose characters she can’t tell apart. But she gives it five stars and a gushing review (‘…blistering…’), because she feels that a lot of people put a lot of effort into it. Later, in a different mood, she attends a play about refugees staged and set inside a shipping container. The clever staging gimmick and the important topic fail to distract her from the clichéd dialogue, bad plot, and the offensive nature of a bunch of mostly white students portraying refugees. After scrupling and hesitating, she gives it a brutally honest review and a single solitary star. Soon after, she passes a poster advertising An Uncivil Peace which proudly boasts her five-star rating. She hurries past it, cringing.
The ratings she gave these two texts were pretty much arbitrary, related more to what was going on in her head at the time than to experience or quality. The one-star review was at least honest.
From Wikipedia Commons, a scene from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2009 or 2010
I was interested in how this novel explored criticism. I review stuff here on this blog, but you’ll notice I don’t give out ratings. If people want to know if they should watch some movie or read some book, I say: read what I’ve written about it; get a sense of what it’s like; get a sense from my words of what I, the critic, am like. You should be able to triangulate from that if a book is worth your time and money.
For example, how about this book? It doesn’t have orcs, spaceships or Bolsheviks in it, and yet I read it cover-to-cover and have nothing bad and plenty good to say about it. If you’ve been in Edinburgh during the Fringe, which I have, it probably helps. If you’re interested in art, journalism and the creative process, and like the narrator you are thirty-four and a parent of small kids, that will help too.
This book explores what is problematically called “cancel culture” and lets us make up our own minds about the characters. Victims who call out shitty behaviour are usually portrayed in the media as a mindless puritanical mob but this novel is generous and understanding, while allowing us to decide for ourselves how much of the reaction is going too far or missing the point.
Of course we need criticism that’s useful and not just PR; people have taken time off work and spent money to go to the Fringe, and they need to know if a performance is worth their while. But Bring the House Down makes you think about how critics who are in steady jobs are at a massive advantage in relation to artists, almost none of whom are making any money. The critic is in a reserved, defensive posture and the artist is making themselves vulnerable. No, that’s not fair.
Notice as well how our narrator Sophie becomes Alex’s only confidante. When he’s ostracized as a result of his fucking over women, he selects the nearest woman to be his emotional support. It seems perfectly natural to both of them.
See? I wrote some sentences and paragraphs that took you a few minutes to read. Wasn’t that more useful than the fake objectivity of a star rating?
And should you accept my judgement? Who am I? I wrote thousands of words about how much I love Tiberian Sun. I wrote a good review of Rebel Moon and I stand over it. I’m not pretending to be the fount of universal good taste and wisdom. I’m just telling you what I thought and how I felt. My liking something might be a sign that you won’t like it – but that’s also useful for you.
I would say to critics, if you have to rate texts, get granular and let us see under the hood – the way blogger vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com does. He breaks it down into categories like adrenaline, likeability and emotion, and explains every step of the assessment process, finally sorting his reviews into a hierarchy that ranges from ‘Brilliant’ through ‘Outstanding,’ ‘Good,’ ‘Not Bad,’ ‘Bad, but with redeeming features’ and ‘Just plain bad,’ to ‘Eye-gougingly, excrecently terrible.’
Even this kind of rating is not for me. In my opinion, the Vacuous Wastrel got jaded and overly-critical a little way into his Terry Pratchett read-through (although I love Pratchett, I would certainly get jaded if I was reading a heap of his books back-to-back). But it’s a lot better than giving us five points on a scale and leaving it at that. His judgements are transparent and useful and generally fair.
Maybe a certain text just isn’t for you, and your one- or two-star review will stop someone who it is for from experiencing it. Maybe you were having a bad day and weren’t receptive. Maybe you were twenty-five and loved it, but would have hated it an thirty-four, or vice versa. Maybe you’ll feel one way in the hour after seeing it, and another way a month later.
The other thing about my criticism is that I write when I have something to say, not necessarily when I love or hate something. I loved season 2 of Andor and took notes on it. But I never used those notes. That’s not a negative judgement on the best TV show I’ve seen in years.
These have been some of the meditations that Bring the HouseDown inspired and provoked in me. In light of them, you will easily understand why I don’t assign a star rating.
Introducing a wailing Youtube therapist, my AI girlfriend and the serious social problem of bus theft.
People have been talking about this for a while but 2025 has been the first year that it really sank in for me: computers and the internet are getting worse, and you…
Hang on. What’s this now? I can’t see the words I’m typing. There’s a big charcoal-coloured box blocking my word processor.
I know I’m offline. I don’t want to see ‘my feed’, I want to see the words I’m writing.
It won’t go away. Does it go away when I click? No. Do I just have to wait?
I’ve figured out that mashing my keyboard keys makes it go away. But the point is, I don’t want to see ‘my feed’ when I’m trying to write. It’s very distra…
UFO CRASH-LANDS IN POLISH FIELD
KATE MIDDLETON’S HAIR IS A DIFFERENT COLOUR
BRUCE WILLIS HAS DEMENTIA
I’M 42 AND ONLY ATTRACTED TO MARRIED MEN
7 SIGNS THAT SOMEBODY LIKES YOU ACCORDING TO PSYCHOLOGIST
FLIGHT ATTENDANT WARNS PASSENGERS: THIS IS THE SEAT YOU SHOULD NEVER SIT IN
10 ACTORS WHO HAVE AGED TERRIBLY
6 THINGS YOU HAVE TO KNOW BEFORE YOU BUY SOLAR PANELS IN IRELAND
THESE 5 FOODS WILL KILL YOU INSTANTLY
Oh look, I’m online now. And ‘my feed’ has popped up again. Ugh. It’s a load of clickbait… Wait. Bruce Willis? No, poor guy…
Shit. What was I going to write again?
I guess I was going to talk about how the internet is shit, how we are descending further every day into the Interslop. And I was going to illustrate it with some screenshots.
Like this one. More AI slop from ‘history’ pages. Yes, that man has horns. And the text whitewashes what was probably mass sexual slavery. And AI layers this earth-toned grit all over everything that just makes it all the more creepy and uncanny.
But it’s not just AI. And not everything has gritty dirt tones. Now when I want to open a PDF document on my phone, I have to sit through a video ad that usually looks something like this:
Jesus. Hasn’t the internet gotten really tacky? Just vulgar. And when it’s not tacky, it’s weird.
For example: If I’m listening to something on Youtube these days, I get sudden interruptions from a man’s voice wailing at me. And before I show you the screenshots I want you to read the words he wails. Please keep in mind that these words below are sung as if they are song lyrics, in a way that’s anguished, high-pitched, melodramatic and breathless:
…procrastination is a trauma response, not laziness… warning signs of dopamine-chasing behaviour in men… how hypersexuality and procrastination are interconnected…
So many questions. First, is this really happening, or am I hallucinating? Well, I took some screenshots so I know it’s real. Next question: why is this apparition saying this to me? Why does the algorithm think I want this? Who thought it would be good to put these words to music? I don’t leave it play til the end because it’s too unsettling, so I don’t even know what it’s an ad for. But it appears to be for some mental health or counselling app. Let that sink in: this is supposed to be good for mental health!
While we’re on the subject of ‘why did Youtube think I wanted to see this’ – introducing my new AI girlfriend:
Well. She seems nice.
Youtube also thinks I want to see an ad for a new AI programme that can create songs.
If it’s ‘very scary’, why is she smiling? Even the most pro-AI people appear not to be sure how they are supposed to feel about it.
In other internet news, Facebook now has ad breaks, which I like because it encourages me not to be on Facebook. It’s a little speed-bump on the mindless scrolling. But like everything, Facebook also now has prompts to use AI at every turn.
So you don’t have to write Facebook comments anymore. You can just sit back and let the bot answer on your behalf. But, well, there never was any obligation to write Facebook comments. If you don’t like doing it, you could just not do it. So who is this for?
But bless you, chatbot. You’re here to reassure me if I get frightened about bus theft:
‘Is bus robbery common?’!! It’s good that on top of reading my friends’ funny posts, I get to read AI’s unintentionally funny attempts to assert its relevance.
And if we didn’t have AI, we wouldn’t be able to create awesome, educational, valuable stuff like this:
If you asked me, ‘Who are the Irish?’ the simplest and most straightforward answer would indeed be: ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages, Brian Boru, Bring Boru, Saint Patrick, Newfoundland, Buenos Aires, Newfoundland.’ Well done, chatbot You’ve named two Irish people, one typo, one Welsh person, and some place names in the Americas.
Is ‘Bring Boru’ distinct from ‘Brian Boru?’ He would seem to be, because they have different stone busts. FYI, in case you thought these were real stone busts done by 11th-century Irish masons, no, no they are not, they were just made up by the chatbot.
This preoccupation with nationalities and haplogroups points to another feature that is emerging as the Internet descends into the Interslop. Like so much of the internet in general and AI slop in particular (for example, the creepy horned Aryan Icelandic family), there’s a just-about deniable racialist edge to it.
Being on the Interslop is a strange experience that’s hard to put into words. The closest I can manage is this: it’s like looking at the ads page of an old-time newspaper full of quack remedies and crackpot inventions, but with bizarre, apparently meaningless letters and numbers scrawled on the paper, as if in cipher, filling every margin. While you are reading, the village idiots of a dozen villages you will never visit are yelling in your ear. Meanwhile you are experiencing intervals of auditory and visual hallucinations. But you can screenshot and preserve these hallucinations and pore over them.
You might say it serves us right for putting 40-60% of all social interaction on platforms run for profit by the weirdest and most hubristic North Americans. But we didn’t really get to make a rational choice about it. There was no big vote in 2009-2010; everyone who was twenty just went on Facebook because that’s where everybody else was, and stayed there so they could keep up with their friends who moved to Australia. Youtube was good because it was where all the videos were. If social media had been basically a schizophrenia simulator at the beginning, I doubt it would have taken off. But now that the ascendancy of the big platforms has choked all the competition, they can show their true face, and get as messy and nakedly profit-driven as they want. I’m still going to share this on Facebook. What else am I going to do?
Of course, I know the real reason why the therapy ads were wailing in my ear about procrastination and hypersexuality. It’s not that anyone thought it would be a good idea. Nobody had to think it was a good idea. The people paying to run these ads are rewarded for quantity, not quality. And quantity is no longer an obstacle. In the time it took me to write this post, I could have pumped out many Gigabytes of eerie slop with minimal effort, and I would have got a hundred times more engagement. So why do I bother writing? Well. We were pretty innocent fifteen years ago. If we thought maybe privately-owned, profit-driven tech and social media monopolies might be a bad thing, we couldn’t yet put into words why. But we have no excuse now. Now we know what the online world starts looking like when you base everything on the pursuit of ‘engagement’ for its own sake.
I’m folding my promised conclusion on Dr Zhivago into this broader post on history in movies, dealing with it along with Kingdom of Heaven, Platoon and A Complete Unknown.
There was a game called Commandos 2 (Pyro Studios, 2001), a stealth adventure set in the Second World War. The game’s own manual contained a long bullet-point list of its own inaccuracies, ranging from ‘the bridge on the River Kwai was made of metal, and it was never blown up’ to ‘there are no penguins at the North Pole.’ It has stuck in my mind because I’ve never seen anything like it since, not in movies or games or TV shows, though now and then the afterword of a novel will include one or two confessions. But what an excellent idea: for a text to own its inaccuracies, to be deliberate about them, to signal, “What you are about to experience is part fantasy.” It takes a lot of confidence and maturity for the authors to risk undermining their own authority like this.
I wonder why this isn’t standard practise, why no government has obliged producers of historical movies to release an ‘accuracy statement’ for me to pore over. Maybe the answer is that a lot of history is open to debate, so these statements would open a can of worms. In a recent series I asked of the 1965 epic movie Dr Zhivago, ‘is it accurate?’ I couldn’t answer that question without getting into my own opinions and understanding of the era.
It’s not as simple as asking ‘Did what happens in X movie actually happen?’ The answer is going to be ‘mostly, no.’ But here are some questions to which we can give more interesting answers: ‘What is this movie saying about history?’ ‘How well is it getting this message across?’ and ‘Is that message accurate and fair?’
From Dr Zhivago (1965, dir David Lean)
Dr Zhivago
Let’s ask these questions of Dr Zhivago.
Parts of it are very good – individual monologues, scenes and images convey significant historical events in a dramatic, emotional, visual way. For example, I like how the Moscow street changes over the course of the movie. I mentioned Yevgraf’s monologue. It’s good that we have armoured trains, even though they are in the wrong place and time. This film gives us a strong sense of place, especially in the haunting train journey sequence. It is lavish in supplying the sets, crowds and explosions that give a sense of mass participation in events, of sharp conflict. Its slow pace and the care it takes to root us in its spaces are refreshing in the context of a lot of today’s cinema, with its short scenes and rapid cuts (see Oppenheimer, which I’ll mention later too).
I think that historical movies have their value even when they are inaccurate. They furnish the public with reference points (oh yeah, Roosevelt, the president from Pearl Harbor), and even when these reference points are good only as punch bags for criticism (Gladiator makes a mess of Roman-era battles, but here’s what they really looked like) they are performing some service in that at least. If scholars of history don’t criticize these movies, especially movies we like, we are missing an opportunity to teach. So even as I criticize Doctor Zhivago I cut it plenty of slack. Compared to a lot of other movies that bill themselves as historical, it’s solid enough.
The screenwriter, Robert Bolt, was a former communist who maintained links with the British communist party until 1968. I think this helps explain a lot about the movie: the way it humanises the revolutionaries, the care and feeling in the writing. Maybe this script represents Bolt, through the avatar of Yuri, getting over (or at least coming to new terms with) his love affair with October (Ten years later he wrote a two-act play about Lenin which I am curious to read).
The film appears to advance a thesis about the Russian Revolution: that while it was a natural response to Tsarist tyranny and war, it was itself tyrannical and violent – worse, that the Revolution represented the antithesis to individuality. I don’t agree with this view (you can find a lot of my own views here) but I assume you didn’t ask; the interesting question is whether the movie adds up to a good argument for this view.
Partisans in the forest, from Dr Zhivago
The Squid Game Baby Civil War
I don’t think it does. The movie’s message impressed me more when I knew less about the real history. I’ve already noted how many times Yuri is confronted by a mean Bolshevik or Bolshevik-adjacent person who is contemptuous of his poetry. In these conversations (first with Kuril, then Yevgraf, then Antipov, Razin and finally Komarovsky) the movie’s case is stated explicitly: that Yuri himself, his private life and his creative output are not compatible with the revolution. The movie is here overplaying its hand because Yuri is actually an understated, inoffensive, decent person, not a wild man or a troublemaker. So what people say about him does not accord with what we see. The theme has to be stated so bluntly in dialogue, again and again, because we don’t see it organically.
The movie presents the Revolution and its supporters generally in a negative light. To do so it too often it relies on exaggerations or inventions, or a collapsing of the timeline that goes beyond reasonable limits. This is a common failing in historical movies: the writer (who is working to industry deadlines and specifications) puts in what they assume was there and what the producers and audience expect to be there. So within weeks of the October Revolution we see a poet exiled for ‘individualism.’ A few weeks later we have villages burned by an army which wasn’t there as a punishment for aiding another army which also wasn’t there.
As regards the Civil War, we get some striking images but little sense of the whole to which they belong. The war enters and exits the stage according to the needs of the narrative, not according to its own logic. This reminds me of something more recent: in the third season of Squid Game we have a miraculous baby who never cries or needs to be fed, or even opens its eyes; its function is to be cute and vulnerable, to add tension to the bloody contest. The Civil War as presented by Dr Zhivago is like the baby in Squid Game. The war adds tension, and we are periodically reminded that it’s there (even before it’s there) but when it isn’t immediately needed, it is docile.
The movie as a historic event
A movie is a big undertaking and, more so than a book, its production and reception constitute historical events in themselves, and you have to be clear on whether you’re talking about the movie as a movie or the movie as an event. Let’s illustrate what I mean by straying over that line in relation to Dr Zhivago. Here I’m far more critical.
What was courage on the part of Boris Pasternak – writing a novel about Russia’s revolutionary years that dissented from the enshrined narrative – is on the part of western filmmakers not courage but complacency, because they are promoting a narrative that’s not at all controversial in their own part of the world. Pasternak doesn’t need to remind his Soviet readers that the Whites were powerful and reactionary, that the Reds brought about popular reforms, or that intervention happened; Soviet readers have heard all that a hundred times before. But Dr Zhivago’s cinema audience in the west is unaware of these parts of the context. And the movie goes further: it treats the revolutionaries with far less sympathy than the novel and makes key changes, such as Yuri being exiled from Moscow and Lara being anti- instead of pro-Bolshevik.
The Russian Civil War, like Dr Zhivago, was an international affair. This film was a US-Italian co-production with an English director and writer, filmed in Spain, Finland and Canada. Why is that important? Because the United States, Italy, Britain and Canada all intervened in the Russian Civil War, all kept it going long after it should have settled down; because the White Finns committed a terrible slaughter against the Red Finns in 1918; and because Franco, a fascist dictator who killed several hundred thousand people with the explicit purpose of preventing an October Revolution in Spain, was still in power when this movie was made there. The apparent complacency of the western filmmakers is really something worse: they are throwing stones in glasshouses.
I don’t think you have to be from a group (say, the Russian people) to write about that group. But if you put yourself in this position, you do have a lot more work to do to get it right. This movie wasn’t made with such an understanding. Few movies were in 1965.
You could argue that Bolt as a former communist is in some way a member of the tribe he depicts. He has, I guess, some kind of vulnerability here. It does come across in the writing and to some degree mitigates the complacency, the obliviousness, that I’m complaining about.
Kingdom of Heaven
Scholars of history still only know about a few topics. For example, I thought Oppenheimer (2024) was very good but I wouldn’t be much help to someone who wanted to know if it was accurate.
Kingdom of Heaven (2005, dir Ridley Scott) is a good historical movie, as far as I can tell (I can’t remember what’s in the Director’s Cut and what isn’t). In the broad brush-strokes of the story it tells, it corresponds to the books I’ve read on the Crusades and some scenes follow the primary accounts very closely, such as the scene where Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) offers a refreshing drink before personally executing Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson). Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom) is changed from an older, well-established power-broker in the Crusader States to a newly-arrived and penitent young knight who has an affair with the king’s sister. This change is so obvious, and at the same time historically inessential, that there is no concealment going on there, no sense of dishonesty.
There is a good example of where it simplifies history within reasonable limits: when Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187 he enslaved that part of the population which was not ransomed in a complex process; Kingdom of Heaven does not get into the weeds but presents the essential point, that Saladin spared the population from a massacre and most of them walked away with their freedom and all with their lives.
But there are individual lines that are pretty ridiculous. David Thewlis’ character says, ‘I don’t place much stock in religion.’ Dude, you’re a Knight Hospitaller in the 12th Century. You’re half-monk, half-knight and the only reason you live in this part of the world is because the Bible happened there. All your stock is in religion. Also, he’s not a merchant so I feel ‘stock’ is an ill-fitting metaphor.
Let’s consider the theme and this movie as an event. Kingdom of Heaven, considered as a statement on the War on Terror, is interesting. Robert Fisk reported on a screening in Lebanon where the crowd performed a spontaneous standing ovation following a scene where Saladin reverently places upright a crucifix which fell over during the siege of Jerusalem. I don’t know if this Lebanese audience was mostly Muslim or mostly Christian, but either way the reception is moving.
I read the film as liberal imperialist (we can all get along within the status quo), and personally I’m anti-imperialist (we can’t get along so long as the colonisers remain in charge of this land). But the film makes its case well. It presents two political tendencies within the Crusader States that really did exist. The faction around Balian had a more diplomatic and pluralist vision for the future of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, as opposed to Reynald and Guy who were aggressive and chauvinist. The parallel it suggests with the liberal and conservative wings of the pro-war coalition in the US in the 2000s is reasonable. There’s a lot of invention here, but in a medieval setting where we have scant records this is necessary. Screenwriter William Monaghan did a good job.
Charlie Sheen as Taylor in Platoon (1986, dir. Oliver Stone)
Platoon (1986) is an interesting one. I’ve read a few memoirs of US soldiers in Vietnam (If I diein a combat zone by Tim O’Brien and Chickenhawk by Robert Mason) and this movie is really true to those firsthand accounts. Director Oliver Stone was, of course, basing the story on his own experiences. It’s a highly authentic reflection of the experiences of US soldiers in the Vietnam War.
That’s the problem, too. How fair a reflection of the real history is it if we get a lot of movies from the US side and almost none showing the Vietnamese side? Millions of Vietnamese died compared to 58,000 US personnel; the Vietnamese still have landmines and the effects of Agent Orange. There’s just no comparison. The Vietnamese are not really humanised in most of these movies either.
Credit here to Oliver Stone, who gave a Vietnamese perspective in other movies he made. Further, he had a valuable story to tell in Platoon, and someone else couldn’t have told it and he couldn’t have told some other story in the same way. He does put Vietnamese people front and centre in the terrifying scene in the village, where we come within a hair’s breadth of something like the My Lai massacre.
But the issue stands. There are a lot of great movies about the Vietnam War but this is a hard limit to how great they can be as historical movies given this major problem.
A Complete Unknown
I have some thoughts on the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (2024, dir. James Mangold) that are relevant here.
This is another topic I’ve read about, and in my judgement A Complete Unknown is a very fine example of how to condense the messiness of recorded history (or in this case biography) into a dramatic and entertaining story. Dylan (Timothé Chalamet) gets a ‘composite girlfriend,’ Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who is mostly Suze Rotolo but also not; like with Balian, the movie is changing something without trying to fool us. The theme is well-grounded in real history and it lands powerfully. Dylan, like most of his generation, entered into the struggle for a better world but ultimately walked away. Those who tried to badger him into staying there against his will come across badly, but it’s left open for the viewer to make up their own mind what they think about Dylan.
I was mildly disappointed that we didn’t get to see Phil Ochs (except indirectly, when Joan Baez sings a cover of his song ‘There but for Fortune.’) We see a lot of Pete Seeger and a good bit of Johnny Cash and a couple of glimpses of Dave Van Ronk. If you ask me, Phil Ochs has far more business being in this movie than Johnny Cash does. He would be a powerful foil to Dylan, but I suppose that function in the story is carried out more than adequately by Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.
So Phil Ochs should be there, but the movie is busy enough as it is. The movie has simplified things within reasonable margins. *Huffs* I guess.
The above points suggest a few rules for historical movies, some positive, some negative:
If you find a good dramatic scene in the primary sources, absolutely use it (Saladin killing Reynald, Bob Dylan visiting Woody Guthrie).
If you want to change things, be obvious about it (Orlando Bloom, Suze Rotolo).
Simplify events within reasonable limits (Jerusalem 1187).
Ask if the world needs to hear this story (again) or if there’s a more valuable angle you can take.
You can tell other people’s stories, but only if you do the homework.
You probably shouldn’t make a moral judgement on a nationality which had basically no input in the production – but if you must, then find a way to make yourself and your audience vulnerable.
You can do parallels with today, if they actually fit and you do the work to show how they fit.
Your movie benefits from using a historical setting, but you have to pay the overheads. For example, if you want to have knights in your movie, don’t let any of them say ‘I don’t place much stock in religion.’
If you have to exaggerate and invent to make the theme land, you’d want to ask yourself if the theme is valid.
This is the third part of my notes on a re-watch of David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, a 1965 historical epic about the Russian Revolution. I’m going through it with an eye to historical accuracy.
The first two parts have been mixed – sometimes the crew really seem to have done their homework but we’ve also seen some things changed for the sake of simplicity (fair enough), some big things changed in order to reinforce the movie’s theme (Not so fair enough), and some things changed for no apparent reason at all.
Now it’s time to get to the part that most interests me, the film’s presentation of the Civil War. Unfortunately, it’s messier than anything we’ve seen so far.
The burned village
Yuri and his family are on a train passing through the Ural Mountains when they see a burned-out village and, on rescuing a woman from the ruins, learn that the Red commander Strelnikov ordered the burning to punish the villagers, who were falsely accused of selling horses to the White Armies. There are several ways that this is implausible.
First, this is winter 1917-18 in the northern Urals. Until the Czechoslovak Revolt of May 1918 this was a peaceful region. There are no Whites here to buy horses. Maybe this could be happening at this time in the Don Country or Turkestan, ie thousands of kilometres away. But not here. Even in the Don Country, or one of the other places where strings of battles flared up and died down at this time, we would be unlikely to see the burning of a village.
The Reds did worse things than this during the Civil War. But at this point in the movie we are only a few months out from October. The war has not begun yet, the cycles of violence have not had a few goes-around yet. And when we do see Red reprisals against a village, these would be targeted against the wealthier inhabitants.
What kind of atrocity would be plausible? A little later, food detachments descended on villages to confiscate surplus grain, and this naturally led to conflict. A scene serving the same purpose but involving some excess by a food detachment would make sense here, and the chronological fudge would be forgivable.
Strelnikov, armoured trains, Red Army
Armoured train interior. Note the machine-gun pointing out a loophole right beside Strelnikov’s desk. Neat detail.
Yuri goes for a walk while the train is stopped, and stumbles on an armoured train commanded by Strelnikov (a nom de guerre that means something like ‘shooter’). His real name is Antipov and he is Lara’s estranged husband. This is another of those scenes that gives the impression that revolutionaries were grievously offended whenever a man wrote poetry.
One of my readers, a socialist like myself, sent me this message regarding Antipov/ Strelnikov:
‘Hey interesting take on Dr Zhivago. I always assumed that Antipov was based on a crude portrayal of Trotsky ie not in bolsheviks or mensheviks, total fanatic and bordering on a latter day incel (‘the personal life in Russia is dead’ because of revolution, actually Trotsky wrote on how the revolution awakened the Russian personality [after] years of oppression) and then there’s his role in civil war later in the film.’
I replied:
‘Yes, the armoured train etc. maybe the filmmakers were going for Trotsky […] I see him more as one of these very romantic left SR types [members of the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks’ early coalition partners] who zigzags between sentimentality and ultra leftism […] He seems to me a lot like an early Red Army commander named Muraviev although important differences too.’
The first three de facto commanders of the Red Army (the above-mentioned Muraviev, then Vacietis and Kamenev) were non-Bolsheviks. Cooperation with the other parties and non-party individuals was the rule in these early days, especially with Left SRs and anarchists. That Antipov is resurfacing as a Red commander at this point makes a lot of sense.
Meanwhile his behaviour make sense for his character: his insistence on his ‘manhood’ and his apparent revolutionary ardour are a defence against the deep pain and vulnerability in him. If his private life really is dead, it haunts him. His fanaticism and cruelty would be a better fit for later in the war, but atrocities occurred this early (though not anywhere near here), often at the hands of non-party Red leaders like Antipov.
Two Red Army soldiers with pointed bogatyrka hats. All stills are from Doctor Zhivago (1965) dir. David Lean
The rest of it does not make sense. On the one hand I’m definitely glad that in the one movie about the Russian Civil War there is an impressive armoured train, staffed by Red Army soldiers in the pointy bogatyrka hats. It would be a shame if that never made it into the vivid colours of mid-century film (likewise with all the cavalry we see later, these are features of the Civil War).
But when we see the armoured train, it’s way too early! It’s the first fine spring day of 1918. It was snowing a few days ago. There are no armoured trains yet. Trotsky’s train first rode out in August 1918 and it was still just a train, no armour yet. Early armoured trains were makeshift; for example one in Turkestan was armoured with compressed bales of cotton.
What about the uniform worn by the Red Army soldiers? It had not yet even been designed. It was formally adopted around January 1919 and it was nearly a year later before most Red soldiers were wearing it. What’s more, the Red Army itself basically didn’t exist yet. It was a couple of months old, still very small, and entirely concentrated in the west, facing the threat of a renewed war with Germany. The Red Army wasn’t in the Urals at all, anticipating no military threat there (they turned out to be very wrong!).
This isn’t just a pedantic point of chronology. The movie is missing out on the most interesting and important fact: the Red Army just didn’t have its shit together at this stage.
What you would have in this region at this time would be Red Guards. They would be enthusiastic local civilians, say, part of the workforce of a local factory or mine, or a few hundred poor peasants. If the Whites reared their head, local people would flood into the Red Guards to meet the threat. They would do silly things, like abandon the frontline to go home for a hot meal and a change of clothes. But they would not burn a local village because their own houses would be in the village.
Yuriatin
We learn that the town of Yuriatin has changed hands: ‘first the Reds, then the Whites. Now the Reds again.’ Like the pointy hats and armoured trains, this would be plausible a year later but not now. No town in the Urals fell to the Whites before the Czechoslovak Revolt of May 1918.
We also learn that there are ‘the Reds in the forest. The partisans’. That’s another example of the movie’s bad habit of mentioning things way too early just because they are going to feature later (White Guards, Bolsheviks and now Partisans). A partisan movement developed across Siberia and the Urals later, after the Whites seized control. This movement really got going after Admiral Kolchak took over all the other White factions in his coup of November 1918 and began to persecute even the moderate socialists who had supported the Whites up to this point.
So that is how the Red partisan movement got started. They have no business mooching around in the woods in early Spring 1918. Who are they partisaning against? It’s like if a movie showed us the French Resistance taking refuge in the woods months before the German invasion of France.
The boarded-up mansion
Yuri’s adopted family have a mansion out here, which the local revolutionary committee has boarded up and declared property of the people. Landlords’ houses were indeed boarded up, to stop criminals from looting the books and fine furnishings and artworks inside (A few examples are given in Eduard Dune’s memoir, Notes of a Red Guard, in the chapter titled ‘Rob the Robbers’). Later the big house might be turned into an artist’s retreat or an orphanage.
Here we get the movie’s only hints at the land revolution. The Varykino estate – the land, tools, livestock and buildings – would have been divided up between local farmers back in autumn. We get a glimpse of this when a local man addresses Yuri’s adopted father as ‘your honour.’ His very likeable response is: ‘Now, now, now. That’s all done with, you know.’
But he is not so easygoing when he sees the house boarded up. Yuri has to warn his adopted father not to tear down the boards. That would be counter-revolution, and ‘they shoot counter-revolutionaries.’ Again, a year later this would be a reasonable. At this point it’s not true and nor would he think it’s true.
Likewise, later we have several claims that deserters from the Red Army are shot. If that were true, the Reds would have run out of bullets and lost the war. They had literally millions of deserters, and the penalty was to lose pension rights on a second offense. Armed mutiny or suspected treason were treated with great harshness but desertion was treated leniently.
The Last Tsar
We can be absolutely sure that it’s still 1918 because that summer, when Yuri and his family are settled nicely in the cottage, bad news comes.
‘Not another purge?’ demands Yuri’s adopted father. This is a very strange thing to say. The first ‘purge’ of the Communist Party took place several years later and consisted of expulsions, not arrests or executions. The script is giving the impression that the Bolsheviks, by summer 1918, have already been through multiple rounds of bloody 1937-style inquisitions.
But no, the bad news is not ‘another’ purge. It’s that Soviet authorities in Yekaterinburg have killed the Tsar and his family. This places us in July 1918.
What doesn’t come across in the scenes of idyllic rural life that frame this news is that over the last three months, in the cut between this sequence and the last, the Russian Civil War has begun and escalated wildly, and the Urals are ground zero. Those Red Guards drawn from the local mine or factory would have been swept aside by professional soldiers – detachments of the Czechoslovak Legion, bands of officers and Cossacks. Those who could not escape westward to friendly territory would become partisans or be killed. The revolutionary committee down in Yuriatin who boarded up the estate are likely most of them dead. You would expect the Whites, on taking Yuriatin in June or July, to have come up to the estate of Varykino and restored to its previous owners full possession of the mansion and its lands. At the very least Yuri’s family should have some soldiers billeted on them; they are at the front line, on a piece of ground that will change hands four or five times between now and mid-1919 when Yuri is abducted by the partisans.
Idyllic scenes at Varykino
So we don’t see war when we should, and we do see it when we shouldn’t.
Incidentally, we also hear that Strelnikov has gone to Manchuria. I don’t know why would have gone there, but if he has, he’s a dead man. It’s wall-to-wall White émigrés and Allied agents in Manchuria, and the most violent and depraved White warlords control the territory between here and there.
Where are all the counter-revolutionaries?
Yuri is forced to serve as a doctor in a partisan unit for, by my reckoning, a year and a half, from summer 1919 to the winter of 1920-21. The timeline starts to make some sense. We see a charge across ice in late 1919; I’m not sure of the tactics on display here but really anything goes, because nobody really knew what they were doing in the Russian Civil War. Anyway, this might be the crossing of the Irtysh river in November. After forcing the river the Reds took Omsk, capital of the ‘Supreme Ruler’ Admiral Kolchak. After that comes the Ice March, a long period of pursuit and mopping up. Then comes a long war against Ataman Semyonov and other warlords of the Far East, which drags on into 1922 (when the Reds take Vladivostok) and even 1923 (when the last White army is defeated). The various things we see in this sequence with the partisans could well be taking place during these lengthy, confused and far-flung campaigns.
Rapid changes of season in these scenes indicate the passage of time from mid 1919 to the winter of 1920-21 in 20 minutes of screen time (although later lines of dialogue indicate that we are still in mid-1920)
A major problem with this movie is that we don’t properly see a single White Guard in all its three hours. People opposed to the Revolution are phantoms off-screen. In this sequence, White Guards are rifle flashes in the treeline, distant fleeing figures, corpses. There is no indication of who the Whites are, what kind of threat they pose or to whom, or what they are fighting for.
The only time we see White Guards, it is a pathetic showing. They are a few dozen of what appear to be military cadets, young smooth-cheeked men in white uniforms. They are quickly mown down with machinegun fire, after which the Yuri and the Reds inspect the bodies with looks of mingled pity and disgust.
Note the irregular uniforms. There are even some sailors. This is what Antipov’s men should look like earlier in the movie, and their armoured train should be a line of bullock carts
The Red commander glares at the dead body of the White leader, a stuffy-looking officer, and growls, ‘The old bastard.’ This old-school Tsarist martinet has brought these kids on a hopeless crusade and gotten them all killed for nothing.
Presumably these are graduates of some military school set up under Kolchak. Kolchak’s officers did have a bad habit of sending raw recruits into hopeless offensives. In itself this scene is a fair comment on the White cause.
The problem is that it’s all we see. The Whites come across as small bands of foolish adventurers who don’t pose any real threat. In reality the Whites controlled three-quarters of the territory of Russia from mid-1918 to the end of 1919, and held onto sizeable chunks of it for years after. On the second anniversary of the October Revolution, their forces were simultaneously in the suburbs of Petrograd and at Orel on the road to Moscow. On two major fronts they massed over 100,000 fighters each, plus tens of thousands on most of the smaller fronts. They far outclassed the Reds in military expertise, and, thanks to the Allies, had parity or superiority in munitions and supplies. They also had the Allies themselves: several hundred thousand soldiers, sailors and pilots of the intervention. These White governments were repressive, violent and anti-Semitic. And they really had the potential to win the war.
When you know this context, it’s easier to understand why the Reds we see in the movie are a bit uptight. But it becomes less easy to understand why Razin, the partisans’ commissar, seems to think his job is to scour all of Russia punishing ‘dubious poets’ and ‘unreliable schoolmasters.’ No. That’s not the partisans’ job. Their job is to fight behind the lines of a brutal military dictatorship supported by the most powerful countries in the world.
By the way, Razin is another one to add to our collection of Reds who are offended by poetry.
Noel Willman as Razin, the partisan unit’s rather intense political commissar.
Gérard Tichy as Liberius, the commander of the partisan unit. The movie gives a general, though unsympathetic, sense of how dual command worked in the Red Army.
What is missing from this movie? There really should be a scene in which Yuri meets a plastered Cossack pogromist with earrings and a wild forelock, and a necklace made of gold teeth; or maybe a twenty-year-old who commands five thousand men, attends séances, wears the skin of a wolf, and snorts cocaine from the scalp of a murdered commissar. That would give a slightly exaggerated but reasonable impression of what the Whites were all about.
The war’s end
Yuri deserts from the partisans. He limps through a snowy landscape, pursuing huddled indistinct shapes which he imagines to be his wife and child. This captures the misery, confusion, exhaustion and dislocation of this moment in history, the winter of 1920-21. It was ‘Russia in the shadows,’ as HG Wells put it, the young Soviet Union bled white and traumatised from seven years of total war.
Yuri finds his family gone, but Lara is still around, and they shack up together. Komarovsky puts in an appearance, warning them that they are about to be arrested and shot and offering to protect them. Their ‘days are numbered.’
But why? Lara because she is the wife of Antipov/ Strelnikov, who has fallen foul of the Soviet regime for unspecified reasons; Yuri because of his ‘way of life’ – here we go again – ‘everything you say, your published writings, are flagrantly subversive.’ I thought his writings were individualistic, not subversive. And anyway, what has Yuri published in the last two years while riding around Siberia treating gunshot wounds and typhus?
By the end of the war the cycles of violence had taken many spins around and the Soviet security organs had developed harsh instincts. Since mid-1918 the Cheka and the revolutionary tribunals have shot tens of thousands of people, at a low estimate. So in one sense Yuri and Lara are right to be afraid and the film’s tone of doom and dread is not out of place.
But either Komarovsky is bullshitting them or the movie is bullshitting us. Lara has been estranged from Antipov since the outbreak of the First World War; I don’t think she would be on the radar of the authorities. And although many things have changed since early 1918 (a de facto one-party state, an all-consuming total war, years of hunger and epidemics) I feel the Soviet authorities would still really, really not care about Yuri’s poetry. He has never lifted a finger against the Soviet regime. His ‘way of life’ has consisted for the last two years of serving as ‘a good comrade [and] a good medical officer’ in a partisan unit behind enemy lines.
But Yuri and Lara believe that their heads are on the block. Lara and her two daughters, one a child and one unborn, go with Komarovsky. Yuri takes his chances with the Cheka, though they never do come for him, except in the form of Yevgraf who saves him from sleeping rough in Moscow.
Back to the framing device
Meanwhile back in the future, Yevgraf and his niece Tanya have been talking all night, piecing together the story we have just witnessed. Now they finish the last few pieces of the puzzle. They do so very well as far as story is concerned. Not so much the history. Tanya (Yuri and Lara’s daughter) was ‘Lost at the age of eight when Civil War broke out in the Far East.’ She was born in 1921, so this would be 1929 or 1930. There was a brief Sino-Soviet War in 1929, but no Far East Civil War.
Yuri’s death rings true. Many who lived intense lives during the Revolution and Civil War succumbed to illnesses in the decade after.BOf course, there were epidemics and a shortage of medical supplies. But there was also a physical and spiritual exhaustion, which is what does for Yuri in the end.
Lara, meanwhile, ‘died or vanished somewhere. In a labour camp […] A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid.’ The arrest of Lara appears to happen in the early 1930s, so before the 1936-9 terror. But it is still all too authentic. The population of prison camps run by the successors of the Cheka grew from 8,500 to two million in a few short years as the Stalin regime tightened its grip.
For all that, the film ends on an optimistic tone. Tanya plays the balalaika as her grandmother did, and her boyfriend seems kind, and rainbows grace the rushing waters by the dam.
And I’ll leave it there, at the end of the movie. I had a conclusion here but it ran on too long. I’ll finish and post that next week.
Meanwhile, if you want to read more about the Russian Civil War according to yours truly, check out my series Revolution Under Siege:
