Christopher Booker (1937–2019)

There is always an alternate perspective, and Christopher Brooker has done a remarkable job of giving us this perspective.

Yes, groupthink persists in those who believe global warming and climate change are on us. I believe we are in the midst of change. However, I also believe that some people who see a business opportunity are pushing this agenda and ignoring the impact of things like solar storms.

The question for me is this: is Christopher Brooker also affected by the groupthink of people who deny climate change?… (altro)

Despite being unashamedly biased, it's still a good history book on the EU. What the authors miss, is that whether or not the EU was created as an evil conspiracy to bring down perfidious Albion is irrelevant today. We are either better off inside or not. We're about to find out. All I want from the author now is to say how many years in the future does he want to take stock. The book ends with the prediction that initially we will be worse off. OK, for how long? Because if I'm dead before we're better off then it's a bit irrelevant to me.… (altro)

Christopher Booker is mostly famous for being one of the founders of the satirical magazine Private Eye, which he edited for a couple of years, and for his long and irritating career as a satirical columnist on the Telegraph, gleefully attacking anything and everything that he happened to disapprove of that day, from environmentalism to mini-skirts. The obituary in the Guardian quotes George Monbiot as describing Booker — obviously with reference to his tedious campaign of climate-change scepticism — as "simply a device to waste as much of other people’s time as possible … a computer programme randomly generating nonsense."

This Casaubon-like project to provide the Key to All Narratologies is very much in the Booker tradition, full of more or less random attacks on movements and writers he disapproves of, such as Romantics, Americans, women, Joyce, Lawrence, and anyone younger than Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. He also tosses out the predictable drive-by attacks on miniskirts, Beatles, feminism, Angry Young Men, and most politicians other than Thatcher, Eisenhower and Churchill. He even manages to be caustic about the satirists of the 1950s, apparently forgetting his own participation in TWTWTW and the Eye!

But of course that's not the main point, what we're here for is to be told "why we tell stories". And the answer to that turns out to be surprisingly simple, indeed it's probably the answer we would have come up with ourselves before reading the book: stories serve as paradigms for human life, teaching us things about the world and our human nature. Booker fleshes it out with Jungian archetypes and a lot of stuff about the struggle to get the Unified Self out of the clutches of the Ego, but that's what it boils down to. Classical stories move towards a resolution in which the protagonist gets the "masculine" and "feminine" sides of their personality into proper proportion (happy ending) or are destroyed after failing to (tragedy). Stories that don't fit into this model (all the most important works of 20th century literature) are flawed and unsatisfactory. So there.

So, a flawed, blinkered and rather pointless project, but it's still often quite a rewarding book to read, if you filter out Booker's professional contrarianism and just enjoy the steady torrent of plot-summaries running over you. Whatever major work of world literature you are looking for, somewhere or other in this book you will find a convenient thumbnail sketch of its storyline. And the same goes for quite a lot of cinema, visual art, folk tradition, world history, and the myths of the great religions of the world. This is something where Booker's journalistic training really comes in handy: the summaries are lively, short, reasonably accurate, and to the point.

There were a few chapters in the book where he really grabbed my attention, like the very clear historical analysis of the development of comedy from Aristophanes to Beaumarchais. But elsewhere he does ramble and repeat himself rather.

You have to admire Liam Gerrard's courage in taking on the audio narration of this elephant of a book, and getting all the way to the end without major mishap. I assume that his cheerful insistence that every foreign word or name in the book be pronounced as though it were English (Prowst, Dissard, etc.) is an act of subversion, although Booker might well have approved of that approach. As a listener you do have to remain quite alert to avoid getting mixed up between what he turns into Die, Fledermaus! and The Mousetrap, or between I, Vitelloni and I, Claudius...… (altro)