Correcting the past

That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

How can you travel into the past without changing the present? That question lies somewhere in most time-travel novels, but few writers deal with it as directly as Connie Willis does in her 1998 novel To Say Nothing of the Dog. Another in her series of novels about historians of the future studying history by going back into the past, this screwball comedy of a story has as its main focus an attempt to correct missteps made by other historians that might affect the outcome of World War II.

Seemingly incidental events can have big consequences, and so historians Ned Henry and Verity Kindle are sent back to 1880s England to return a cat and to see that the cat's owner, a girl named Tossie, marries the right man, a mysterious Mr. C. They know from a diary fragment that she is supposed to meet Mr. C on a certain date, but how can they bring them together when they don't know who Mr. C. is, especially when she is already engaged to marry another man?

This all gets very confusing for anyone who is not Connie Willis, but she maintains the comedy and the banter at such a high level that readers shouldn't mind too much. Not as satisfying as her later comic novel Crosstalk, this is nevertheless an enjoyable romp through time, with stops in the Coventry cathedral during the 1940 bombing, a medieval dungeon and elsewhere along the way.

The novel is filled with literary references to William Shakespeare, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and other writers. Ned even sees the three men in a boat that inspired Three Men in a Boat.

Willis also dips into metaphysics. Religion has been ruled nonessential by Ned and Verity's time — sort of how most governors and mayors regard it during the present virus — yet time itself becomes a mystical force that rules the universe. The "continuum wanted those things to happen," we are told.

Willis makes the same mistake made by a number of authors writing about the future — George Orwell, for instance — by not setting her story far enough into the future.  Our historians are from the year 2057, time travel was invented between 2013 and 2020 and cats became extinct in 2004. Apparently she never imagined people would still be reading her novel in 2020 and finding those dates laughable. That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.

A mismatch made in heaven

The problem with book critics — and at a minor-league level I guess I am one — is that they tend to think they know better than authors how they should have written their books. You can imagine the possibilities, both comedic and dramatic, when a literary scholar marries his favorite author. Michael Frayn does exactly this in his 1989 novel The Trick of It.

Frayn tells his story in a series of letters from Richard, a professor in England, to his friend in Australia. Richard has made himself an authority, even the authority, on the author he refers to as JL, and sometimes as MajWOOT (major writer of our time). She accepts his invitation to speak at his college, they wind up in bed together and sometime later are married. Then the real problems begin.

Richard has no interest in teaching any other writers, yet lecturing about and writing about his own wife's novels has become awkward, eventually causing him to accept a teaching position in Abu Dhabi, of all places. JL follows him, though unhappily, on the assumption that she can write anywhere.

The bigger problem is that JL, who has never even read anything Richard has written about her, won't take his advice. He is convinced he knows how she can improve her writing, but she refuses to listen. Her popularity increases when one of her books is adapted for a television miniseries, while his own small place in the literary universe evaporates — except perhaps for those letters.

Frayn's novel makes amusing, and sometimes confusing, reading. Many readers will be put off by its showy narrative style, but I am not going to suggest how he might have made it better. I found it a delight.

Slow down and think

 "Books slow me down and make me think, and the Internet speeds me up."

Student, quoted in Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf

That student, whoever it might be, has already learned something important. Books slow us down. Books make us think. Both are good things.

Most of us, because we are busy or just impatient, usually want to do more more quickly. We try to do two or more things at once. We speed through one task in order to move on to the next one. Even in leisure time, most people today have their phones in their hands when watching television or even when engaging in conversation. This need for speed is not necessarily something new — some of us remember Cliff's Notes, which made it possible to get the gist of a book without having to actually read the book — but technology has made it easier to speed up our lives. Not just easier, but all but unavoidable.

It has become difficult to slow down even when we want to, as with a good book or, for that matter, a leisurely walk in the park. I try to spend a few hours each day reading books, yet even with this habit formed over the years, I still find it difficult to focus, especially on difficult books, for more than a few minutes at a time. I am always eager to take a break for a cup of tea or a game of Spider. So I can easily understand why books, not e-books but real books, have become more of a challenge for anyone who spends a lot more time with their phones or tablets each day than I do.

There is a conviction in our culture today that students who do not have a personal computer in their classrooms are somehow disadvantaged. Perhaps the real disadvantage falls on those who do not spend enough time each day with books they can hold in their hands and turn the pages one by one. Compared to reading — or skimming — on the Internet, this seems slow. But, as the student said, it makes us think, and by pausing to turn pages it gives us time to think. Books make it easier to reread interesting passages, to underline if we are so inclined, to bookmark our place, and to remember what we read.

Changes in the reading brain

When language and thought atrophy, when complexity wanes and everything becomes more and more the same, we run great risks in society politic — whether from extremists in a religion or a political organization or, less obviously, from advertisers.

Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

In her 2018 book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf cites a number of scientific studies indicating that while people may be reading more each day on their smartphones and computers than ever before, their ability to comprehend what they're reading has decreased. They can't stay focused on one thing for long. Their reading usually involves a lot of skimming and skipping, not concentration on a single subject.

Yet what really convinced Wolf was when she tried to reread Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi, a novel she had loved when she was in college. Now she found it difficult to focus her attention on it for more than a page or two at a time. "The rapid speed to which I had become accustomed while reading my daily gigabytes of material did not allow me to slow down enough to grasp whatever Hesse was conveying," she writes.

If Wolf, an authority on reading and former director of the Tufts Center for Reading and Language Research, finds this to be true, imagine how true it must be for the rest of us, and especially for children who spend much of their day on computers, even while in the classroom.

Children and their education are major concerns of Wolf, who is also an expert on dyslexia. She is a big believer in reading to children, including those too young to actually understand what is being read to them. She is enough of a realist to know that turning back the clock on the digital age is not possible, but she does advocate for exploring ways to use computers to increase, rather than decrease, attention spans.

The implications of this dumbing down of readers of all ages are vast. "Sometimes we outsource our intelligence to the information outlets that offer the fastest, simplest, most digestible distillations of information we no longer want to think about ourselves," she says. It was once thought that the Internet would make possible an even greater diversity of thought and ideas, yet as sites such as Google, Facebook and YouTube have become more powerful and have begun to censor ideas they disapprove of, the opposite has become true. Those incapable of seeking truth on their own could become sheep easily led.

Shyness doesn't sell books

 I've often wondered how I would have managed if I'd been born with a stammer or chronic shyness. The modern writer has to be able to perform, often to a huge audience. It's almost like being a stand-up comedian, except that the questions never change and you always end up telling the same jokes.

Anthony Horowitz, The Word Is Murder

Neither a stammer nor chronic shyness should be a handicap for a writer, and until recently it wasn't. Many, if not most, writers have been at least somewhat introverted. It can be difficult for extroverts to sit alone in a room for long periods of time and write. They want to get up and go somewhere and do something with other people. Instead of writing about their lives, they just want to live them. Introverts live their lives, then want to take time to think about their experiences and their ideas. Sometimes these thoughts come out in written form.

Lewis Carroll was shy. So was E.B. White, Joan Didion and so many, many others. Other writers have probably had stammers. It didn't matter. Nobody stammers on paper, and it is on paper where writers are most themselves.

What Anthony Horowitz is referring to in his novel The Word Is Murder is how in today's publishing world authors are expected to sell their own books. In the old days money was set aside for publicity campaigns, and ads ran in many major publications. I can recall when a large ad for an Anthony Grey novel called Peking ran in Sports Illustrated for several weeks in the 1980s, and the novel has nothing to do with sports.

Most newspapers of any size carried book reviews. Today there are fewer newspapers, very few of which still carry book reviews. There were literary critics, such as Alfred Kazin, who were almost as well known as the writers they wrote about, and to be written about by one of these critics was all the publicity necessary to sell quite a few copies.

Those days are gone. Now writers can't just finish one book and start on the next one. In between they must go out in public and sell that book. That means doing signings in bookstores, making speeches at book fairs and festivals and often sitting behind tables covered with their books for entire weekends talking with readers. They are also expected to make videos to promote their books. On YouTube you can find several videos featuring Horowitz talking about his various books. There is no sign of either shyness or a stammer. Lucky for him. But think of those writers, and there must be many of them, who cannot speak as fluently as they can write. This part of their job must be a torment for them.

J.K. Rowling is one shy contemporary author who has managed to sell a great many books. Most of those like her are not as fortunate.

Like true crime

Making fiction sound like fact is the goal of most novelists, but few writers succeed in this objective better than Anthony Horowitz in The Word Is Murder (2018). The story seems so real that readers will be tempted to double-check the cover to make sure it really does say "a novel."

This is because Horowitz makes himself the narrator and a major character, and he goes into some detail about his career as a novelist (The House of Silk) and as the writer of the Alex Rider books for children and Foyle's War, shown on BBC and PBS. He even makes characters out of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson when he has a conference with them about a movie script he has been working on. The line between truth and story becomes something of a blur.

A former police detective named Daniel Hawthorne comes to Horowitz with a proposition. He asks Horowitz to write a true-crime book about a murder he is investigating as a police consultant. He wants Horowitz to be the Watson to his Sherlock Holmes, in other words.

Hawthorne was fired for reasons he declines to explain, but because of his exceptional skill he is hired whenever a difficult case comes along. Such a case is the murder of Diana Cowper just hours after she had made her own funeral arrangements. Horowitz doesn't like the idea of writing a true crime book and sharing royalties with someone else, and he likes Hawthorne even less, yet the case sounds too intriguing to pass up.

Ten years previously Diana Cowper had been the driver in a hit-and-run accident in which one boy was killed and his brother permanently disabled. Does her murder have something to do with this? Or is it somehow related to her son, Damian Cowper, a major Hollywood star? Like the cops, conducting their own investigation, Horowitz has his own theories about the murder, and like the cops he is always wrong.

Horowitz has written novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, and now he gives Hawthorne Holmes-like abilities. Mystery lovers will enjoy this tale, and they will be happy to know Hawthorne returns in The Sentence Is Death.

Saving the great horses of Europe

If you attend a performance by the Lippizzan stallions, as I have on at least three occasions, you are likely to hear a story about how Gen. George Patton saved these horses at the close of World War II. The whole dramatic story, in which Patton played a small but important part, is told in The Perfect Horse (2016) by Elizabeth Letts.

In 1941, the U.S. Army decided horses no longer had a role to play in modern warfare, and the cavalry switched entirely from horses to tanks. Not so most European countries already mired in war. Horses were still important. The German army, for example, used an estimated 2,750,000 horses, mostly to pull wagons and guns. Most of these horses became casualties of war. As the war made food scarce, horses became an important food source, especially for the advancing Russian army near the end of the war.

And so the threat against the Lippizans at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, as well as against other prized horses in Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe, became intense. Betts details the efforts of various people, including some German officers, to protect the most valuable horses. Yet the greatest threat came near the end of the war when these horses, which had survived the Nazis, were now threatened by the Russians.

Fortunately the U.S. Army still had officers, including Patton, who rode horses earlier in their military careers and continued to appreciate them. This led to a daring rescue of many valuable horses just before the end of the war, saving them from the Nazis, the Russians and the many hungry people in Eastern Europe.

Many of these horses were shipped to the U.S.,  where the Army, now out of the horse business, didn't know what to do with them. The horses were mostly unregistered and, despite their excellence, were not in great demand when the Army tried to sell them. So the ending of this story is not as as upbeat as we might wish. Yet the Spanish Riding School in Vienna was saved, and Arabian horses, such as the great stallion Witez from Poland, became recognized as the one of great horse breeds.