Alexander Baron (1) (1917–1999)
Autore di Jane Eyre [1983 TV Mini-Series]
Per altri autori con il nome Alexander Baron, vedi la pagina di disambiguazione.
Opere di Alexander Baron
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome legale
- Bernstein, Joseph Alexander
- Data di nascita
- 1917-12-04
- Data di morte
- 1999-12-06
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- UK
- Luogo di nascita
- Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, UK
- Luogo di morte
- London, England, UK
- Attività lavorative
- Writer
- Breve biografia
- Alexander Baron grew up in London's East End. The son of a Jewish immigrant, he became involved in left-wing politics during the 1930s and was active in opposing the Fascism rife in the East End at the time. He joined the army in 1940, and it was his experiences in the Second World War that gave him the material for his first novel, From the City, From the Plough. Other novels explore London life and historical themes, and he also wrote Hollywood screenplays and BBC television dramas and adaptations. Carl Foreman's classic war film The Victors (1963) was based on Baron's The Human Kind. He died in 1999.
Utenti
Recensioni
1 
MikeFutcher | Jul 27, 2020 |
MikeFutcher | Jul 27, 2020 | 
A dramatization of one of the most remarkable feats in history which itself fails to do anything remarkable. Alexander Baron's book is capable enough; he provides a solid narrative and gets the history right. But, aside from a few strong passages of prose (in a book that feels a lot longer than its 380 pages), there is little to convey to us the extraordinariness of the story of Hernán Cortés and his band of four hundred conquistadors who conquered an empire, and of the native woman who helped them.
I suppose the discordant note for me was the characterization. Marina, the native woman and titular 'golden princess', is for the majority of the story described as fierce, beautiful and intelligent, yet simultaneously portrayed as a meek, naïve puppy before Cortés (who in a number of scenes pats her on the head as she kneels at his feet). Cortés himself is magnetic, of course, but it an informed magnetism; we are simply told of the effect of his personality and will on others without experiencing them for ourselves. The reader is never duped by Cortés in the way the Spaniards and the Aztecs of the story are, and I think a greater historical novel would have achieved this effect, even knowing what we know about the man. Other characters – most notably Trifon and Father Olmedo, who otherwise are well-drawn – flip-flop between moments of noble, thoughtful tenderness and fanatical, unthinking zealotry. Baron seems stuck between a rock and a hard place; not wanting to stray too far from the historical truth, and yet needing to invent to fill in significant dramatic gaps in the historical narrative.
The erratic characterization does not sink the story, but it does dilute its finer moments. Even towards the end, you still feel like you are learning the characters. When you add to this the zealotry of the Catholic conquistadors – this is a story where just about everyone is unpleasant or outright cruel – you have a rather tough read, where the reader has to persevere even when the writing is good. I have no problem with applying myself to a book in order to take something of worth from it, but I also believe that an adventure novel – and The Golden Princess is certainly one of your classically-written historical adventure novels – should sweep you along rather than expect you to carry a burden. This is no reason to discard the book, but there is no reason to prioritize it either.… (altro)
I suppose the discordant note for me was the characterization. Marina, the native woman and titular 'golden princess', is for the majority of the story described as fierce, beautiful and intelligent, yet simultaneously portrayed as a meek, naïve puppy before Cortés (who in a number of scenes pats her on the head as she kneels at his feet). Cortés himself is magnetic, of course, but it an informed magnetism; we are simply told of the effect of his personality and will on others without experiencing them for ourselves. The reader is never duped by Cortés in the way the Spaniards and the Aztecs of the story are, and I think a greater historical novel would have achieved this effect, even knowing what we know about the man. Other characters – most notably Trifon and Father Olmedo, who otherwise are well-drawn – flip-flop between moments of noble, thoughtful tenderness and fanatical, unthinking zealotry. Baron seems stuck between a rock and a hard place; not wanting to stray too far from the historical truth, and yet needing to invent to fill in significant dramatic gaps in the historical narrative.
The erratic characterization does not sink the story, but it does dilute its finer moments. Even towards the end, you still feel like you are learning the characters. When you add to this the zealotry of the Catholic conquistadors – this is a story where just about everyone is unpleasant or outright cruel – you have a rather tough read, where the reader has to persevere even when the writing is good. I have no problem with applying myself to a book in order to take something of worth from it, but I also believe that an adventure novel – and The Golden Princess is certainly one of your classically-written historical adventure novels – should sweep you along rather than expect you to carry a burden. This is no reason to discard the book, but there is no reason to prioritize it either.… (altro)
"… beneath the servility accorded to a master there is always malice." (pg. 314)
A fine example of Alexander Baron's talent and appeal, King Dido is an accomplished character-driven story with a social conscience. It is a very bleak novel – particularly in its too-abrupt ending – as it follows the rise and fall of Dido Peach, who ascends rather accidentally to prominence in the criminal underworld of his slum in the East End of London (the year is 1911). Dido is a fascinating character and a tragic one – as Ken Worpole's introduction notes, there is something of the Heathcliff about him (pg. 15). His rise is facilitated not by ambition but by righting wrongs done to his family, and from then on it is a combination of his pride, his family ties and his social status as one of the working-class 'scum' in the eyes of many, that eventually dooms him.
Baron takes this opportunity to comment – perceptively but never didactically – on the nature of power and influence, not least in how the powerless react to power. This can take the form of petty resistance (see the quote with which I opened this review) or bovine acceptance. The latter is where Baron's social conscience shines through. Dido is a tough but fair man, honest and simple, who just wants to do right by his family. This code of honour leads him to overthrow the local gang leader and he finds himself taking the unwanted mantle. "Dido was a law-abiding man… The fight with Ginger had been fated. He still could not question its rightness. But since then his life had not been his own." (pg. 246). His attempts to better himself and to return to a clean-living life are foiled by class prejudice, the environment in which he lives and his own lack of conviction, itself seasoned by his life of deference to those 'above' him. Baron seems to be using Dido's arc to represent the trials of all those whose lives' course is not their own to determine; when he speaks of "all the inimical forces that had driven him to the slaughter" (pg. 349), there is an empathy here for Dido's rut that would not be out-of-place in modern socially-conscious portrayals of crime-ridden neighbourhoods like The Wire.
This is heavy stuff and, as I have said, it is a bleak novel. It is almost Dickensian in style, but without that author's occasional penchant for sentimentality. Nevertheless, Baron is a gifted writer and the book never feels plodding or hectoring. In fact, it is a very smooth and easy read, helped no doubt by Baron's keen sense of character and setting. When you're reading King Dido, you feel like you live amongst these characters. But if it is character and setting that gives the book an accomplished quality, it is its sense of social compassion which gives it endurance and vitality beyond just literary craft. It is this which validates Baron not just as a wordsmith but as an artist. Towards the end of the novel, as Dido's options are slammed shut on him, he realizes that "it was fight or go under now" (pg. 274). Perhaps that was always the case: this hard-nosed assessment could be applied to all of his 'choices' in the novel. Indeed, it could be a mantra for the whole working class, who remain – in Dido's time, in Baron's time, and in ours – as the fighting classes and, sadly, the struggling classes.… (altro)
A fine example of Alexander Baron's talent and appeal, King Dido is an accomplished character-driven story with a social conscience. It is a very bleak novel – particularly in its too-abrupt ending – as it follows the rise and fall of Dido Peach, who ascends rather accidentally to prominence in the criminal underworld of his slum in the East End of London (the year is 1911). Dido is a fascinating character and a tragic one – as Ken Worpole's introduction notes, there is something of the Heathcliff about him (pg. 15). His rise is facilitated not by ambition but by righting wrongs done to his family, and from then on it is a combination of his pride, his family ties and his social status as one of the working-class 'scum' in the eyes of many, that eventually dooms him.
Baron takes this opportunity to comment – perceptively but never didactically – on the nature of power and influence, not least in how the powerless react to power. This can take the form of petty resistance (see the quote with which I opened this review) or bovine acceptance. The latter is where Baron's social conscience shines through. Dido is a tough but fair man, honest and simple, who just wants to do right by his family. This code of honour leads him to overthrow the local gang leader and he finds himself taking the unwanted mantle. "Dido was a law-abiding man… The fight with Ginger had been fated. He still could not question its rightness. But since then his life had not been his own." (pg. 246). His attempts to better himself and to return to a clean-living life are foiled by class prejudice, the environment in which he lives and his own lack of conviction, itself seasoned by his life of deference to those 'above' him. Baron seems to be using Dido's arc to represent the trials of all those whose lives' course is not their own to determine; when he speaks of "all the inimical forces that had driven him to the slaughter" (pg. 349), there is an empathy here for Dido's rut that would not be out-of-place in modern socially-conscious portrayals of crime-ridden neighbourhoods like The Wire.
This is heavy stuff and, as I have said, it is a bleak novel. It is almost Dickensian in style, but without that author's occasional penchant for sentimentality. Nevertheless, Baron is a gifted writer and the book never feels plodding or hectoring. In fact, it is a very smooth and easy read, helped no doubt by Baron's keen sense of character and setting. When you're reading King Dido, you feel like you live amongst these characters. But if it is character and setting that gives the book an accomplished quality, it is its sense of social compassion which gives it endurance and vitality beyond just literary craft. It is this which validates Baron not just as a wordsmith but as an artist. Towards the end of the novel, as Dido's options are slammed shut on him, he realizes that "it was fight or go under now" (pg. 274). Perhaps that was always the case: this hard-nosed assessment could be applied to all of his 'choices' in the novel. Indeed, it could be a mantra for the whole working class, who remain – in Dido's time, in Baron's time, and in ours – as the fighting classes and, sadly, the struggling classes.… (altro)
Although I didn't love it as I did my two previous experiences of Alexander Baron's writing - From the City, From the Plough and The Human Kind - it is fair to say that I still found There's No Home to be very fulfilling. It didn't resonate as deeply with me as those other two books, but it was still a well-crafted novel aching with humanity.
The best summary of the novel actually comes from Baron himself in the very first paragraph of the first chapter:
"This is not a story of war but of one of those brief interludes in war when the almost-forgotten rhythms of normal living are permitted to emerge again; and when it seeps back into the consciousness of human beings - painfully, sometimes heartbreakingly - that they are, after all, human." (pg. 1)
You see, Baron's second war novel is not really a war novel. There is no combat (though, to be fair, there would be none in The Human Kind three years later either) and it is more about human relationships. There is an old saying I remember hearing somewhere about how if you want to provide conflict and a character study in a novel, then 'throw some characters together and apply heat'. That is essentially what Baron does here: the British soldiers are billeted briefly in a Sicilian town at the end of their invasion of the island in 1943. They interact with the Italian women (and to a lesser extent, the Italian children and old men); the 'heat' applied is the war itself, and how that gloomy presence colours and overshadows all their actions.
It is hard to summarise and review exactly what it is Baron does, but as always it is fascinating to watch his characters, even when they are doing something as mundane as eating dinner. Baron is a keen observer of human behaviour and has the remarkable knack of being able to fully realise a character you care about in just one or two lines. The main plot (insofar as there is one; the novel is more of a character study than a plot-driven story) is about the love affair between Craddock and Graziella (and this is nowhere near as cliché as you might be thinking!) but the other sub-plots also carry emotional impact. I found Nella's story to be especially heartbreaking, particularly as it began in such innocence.
Above all, it is Baron's perceptiveness and maturity in writing about sexual politics during the war which is the main strength of There's No Home. Baron has always been bravely frank about this sort of thing (see some of the vignettes in The Human Kind, for example) and There's No Home is a great illustration of his willingness to provide an unfiltered account of the reality of war and of life. In From the City, From the Plough, he offered an utterly realistic depiction of combat in war; in There's No Home, he offers a similarly realistic rendering of sex and love in war. It is not a bawdy or a crude novel; it just documents with courageous frankness how people try to hold onto their humanity in such peculiar circumstances. It is this unsentimental approach to all the consequences of war which allows John L. Williams, in his great Afterword, to correctly state that the book is "about the horror of war", even though this initially seems nonsensical as it "takes place almost entirely on one small street in a Sicilian town, a long way from the front line." (pg. 270).
But even though I recognise the achievement of There's No Home, I must confess that I did find it hard to engage with on occasion. It is a very insular novel, concerned more with emotions and thoughts and feeling rather than external stimuli. This is fine, of course, and fully suited to what the novel is trying to achieve, but it is less to my tastes and means you can lose your way on occasion. Baron's prose is also rather more dense than I had come to appreciate in the other two of his works I have so far read. In my past reviews, I've made no secret of my preference for sparser prose - something akin to the 'iceberg' theory, as Hemingway called it. And there was a spare, rugged yet refined prose which I enjoyed in From the City, From the Plough and The Human Kind. But Baron does not employ this style in There's No Home (though, to be fair, it is not the kind of story that suits it) and drops it in favour of a more lyrical style that occasionally reminded me of Dickens. It is a perfectly respectable style of prose, and many readers will prefer it, but it is not always to my liking and not what I expected after my previous experiences of Baron. Of course, these are my own personal experiences from reading the novel and it seems rather churlish of me to criticise Baron's style when a different style (i.e. one closer to From the City, From the Plough) would not have been able to tell the story. It's just that Baron's change of pace meant that I didn't devour the book; I didn't love it as I did his previous books.
It should be stressed here that my only objections (small as they are) are stylistic, not of the book's substance, and even then I admit they are rather unreasonable. The novel is great, a well-written character study with an aura of profound intimacy that Baron has always excelled at. It might not have been everything I expected, and I may not have appreciated it whilst reading it as much as I should have, but it is still a fine work of art.… (altro)
The best summary of the novel actually comes from Baron himself in the very first paragraph of the first chapter:
"This is not a story of war but of one of those brief interludes in war when the almost-forgotten rhythms of normal living are permitted to emerge again; and when it seeps back into the consciousness of human beings - painfully, sometimes heartbreakingly - that they are, after all, human." (pg. 1)
You see, Baron's second war novel is not really a war novel. There is no combat (though, to be fair, there would be none in The Human Kind three years later either) and it is more about human relationships. There is an old saying I remember hearing somewhere about how if you want to provide conflict and a character study in a novel, then 'throw some characters together and apply heat'. That is essentially what Baron does here: the British soldiers are billeted briefly in a Sicilian town at the end of their invasion of the island in 1943. They interact with the Italian women (and to a lesser extent, the Italian children and old men); the 'heat' applied is the war itself, and how that gloomy presence colours and overshadows all their actions.
It is hard to summarise and review exactly what it is Baron does, but as always it is fascinating to watch his characters, even when they are doing something as mundane as eating dinner. Baron is a keen observer of human behaviour and has the remarkable knack of being able to fully realise a character you care about in just one or two lines. The main plot (insofar as there is one; the novel is more of a character study than a plot-driven story) is about the love affair between Craddock and Graziella (and this is nowhere near as cliché as you might be thinking!) but the other sub-plots also carry emotional impact. I found Nella's story to be especially heartbreaking, particularly as it began in such innocence.
Above all, it is Baron's perceptiveness and maturity in writing about sexual politics during the war which is the main strength of There's No Home. Baron has always been bravely frank about this sort of thing (see some of the vignettes in The Human Kind, for example) and There's No Home is a great illustration of his willingness to provide an unfiltered account of the reality of war and of life. In From the City, From the Plough, he offered an utterly realistic depiction of combat in war; in There's No Home, he offers a similarly realistic rendering of sex and love in war. It is not a bawdy or a crude novel; it just documents with courageous frankness how people try to hold onto their humanity in such peculiar circumstances. It is this unsentimental approach to all the consequences of war which allows John L. Williams, in his great Afterword, to correctly state that the book is "about the horror of war", even though this initially seems nonsensical as it "takes place almost entirely on one small street in a Sicilian town, a long way from the front line." (pg. 270).
But even though I recognise the achievement of There's No Home, I must confess that I did find it hard to engage with on occasion. It is a very insular novel, concerned more with emotions and thoughts and feeling rather than external stimuli. This is fine, of course, and fully suited to what the novel is trying to achieve, but it is less to my tastes and means you can lose your way on occasion. Baron's prose is also rather more dense than I had come to appreciate in the other two of his works I have so far read. In my past reviews, I've made no secret of my preference for sparser prose - something akin to the 'iceberg' theory, as Hemingway called it. And there was a spare, rugged yet refined prose which I enjoyed in From the City, From the Plough and The Human Kind. But Baron does not employ this style in There's No Home (though, to be fair, it is not the kind of story that suits it) and drops it in favour of a more lyrical style that occasionally reminded me of Dickens. It is a perfectly respectable style of prose, and many readers will prefer it, but it is not always to my liking and not what I expected after my previous experiences of Baron. Of course, these are my own personal experiences from reading the novel and it seems rather churlish of me to criticise Baron's style when a different style (i.e. one closer to From the City, From the Plough) would not have been able to tell the story. It's just that Baron's change of pace meant that I didn't devour the book; I didn't love it as I did his previous books.
It should be stressed here that my only objections (small as they are) are stylistic, not of the book's substance, and even then I admit they are rather unreasonable. The novel is great, a well-written character study with an aura of profound intimacy that Baron has always excelled at. It might not have been everything I expected, and I may not have appreciated it whilst reading it as much as I should have, but it is still a fine work of art.… (altro)
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 17
- Utenti
- 386
- Popolarità
- #62,660
- Voto
- 4.2
- Recensioni
- 12
- ISBN
- 54
- Lingue
- 2
The novel follows Jack Agass as he returns to his working-class district of London in the years following World War Two, in which he has served, and his attempts to start a life for himself whilst overcoming unresolved insecurities and restlessness about his past. Baron – who was an admirer of Dickens – sometimes goes a bit overboard with the dialects for my liking, the cor-blimeys and the 'git aht of it's and so on, but the book provides an authentically working-class tableau without being a caricature, or condescending, or excessively sentimental. Dickensian flourishes – minor characters have names like Chick Woodruff, Mr. Pennyfarthing and Mr. Prawn – are thankfully few.
While it can sometimes be hard to tease out an overall purpose in such a cosy, character-driven book, Rosie Hogarth can be said to be about the good and bad aspects of pride. As one minor character says on page 272, this sort of working-class life is "hard when you're proud like me", and the book seems a loose meditation on the best way to navigate such a life. Without giving away the plot, by the end there are two points of view, represented by two characters: one who cites the political talking points about class and socialism and 'up the workers', and another who represents "that section of the working-class whose proudest possession is the word 'respectable'" (pg. 144) and who just wants a quiet life in which the family and the local community provide a foundation against whatever trials may come.
The book suffers from merely posing the dilemma – and quite loosely at that – without really biting into the meat of it. This reflects, no doubt, the author's angst at the time: he was a politically-active Communist who was beginning to turn away from the ideology without having found anything to replace it. But Baron's lack of resolution reflects the intractable problem of class-based poverty and leaves the reader adrift in how to respond to the novel. That said, the dilemma proves an interesting one to ponder, particularly when in the company of agreeable characters in a book that reads quicker than you would think.… (altro)