Atonement, by Ian McEwan

This morning I finished reading Atonement, by Ian McEwan. It is a lovely book and should probably have won the Booker Prize, instead of only being shortlisted (though, since I haven't read the 2001 winner, I cannot be certain). I entirely agree with the newspaper reviews quoted on Amazon which say:

'Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence', Independent .
'Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book - A superb achievement which combines a magnificent display of the powers of the imagination with a probing exploration of them', Sunday Times .
'... a fascinatingly strange, unique and gripping novel', Independent on Sunday

And Amazon's own review, which says:

'Atonement, McEwan's first novel since the Booker-winning Amsterdam, is an extraordinary achievement and possibly the finest work he has yet published. It is a engrossing book, full of narrative suspense and wonderfully defined characters. It is also a consciously literary novel, with allusions to Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James, but with none of the ponderous self-importance that label often suggests. Atonement confirms McEwan's great talents and well deserves its place on the Booker shortlist.'

Atonement is a classic Booker novel, in that it deals with powerful events and their effects on a small group of people, in a style more commonly associated with a number of Irish writers - Elizabeth Bowen, Ann Enright, John Banville and Willian Trevor.

It is hard to believe that Atonement was by the same author as Amsterdam. The latter was a weak book, I felt, and not a worthy winner of the Booker Prize.

A small unnoticed extinction in East Congo

The tragic situation in East Congo is outside the scope of this blog. The scale of death and suffering is unimaginable in modern Europe, and nothing I say below should take away from the misery of the people who have suffered for years and who are still suffering in Congo.

Apart from the humanitarian situation my interest in north-eastern Congo is due to the fact that it is - or was - the home of many variants of the great African game of Mancala. In the brief period between the colonisation of central Africa and its decolonisation several anthropologists collected tantalising glimpses of the richness of the region in terms of variants unknown elsewhere. Many of the writers said that many other variants existed, but had not yet been documented. Decolonisation, and the collapse of civilisation in several important mancala playing regions, mean that they may now never be collected. The widespread disruption and death in the region now means that much of the memory of these games is being lost. A displaced people is likely to lose large parts of its culture, through loss of artifacts (game boards), loss of the people who know the rules, or the homogenising effect of mixing with other peoples in refugee camps.

Men are the main players of mancala, but the war has separated many men from their friends and their children, and the knowledge of the games may not be passed on. The children will be more likely to play football or cards - these effects were visible even before the war. So by the time the war ends, as it must some day, there may have been a widespread, unnoticed, unknown, extinction of many mancala variants.

In 1977 a young anthropologist, Philip Townshend, published the biggest study of Congolese mancala games ever: Les Jeux de Mancala au Zaire, au Rwanda et au Burundi (Les Cahiers du CEDAF, Cahier 3, 1977)(Not on the internet - I got it via the library of the ULB in Brussels). In it he gives details of dozens of games played all over the region, many of which are threatened with extinction. How many more there were, we can only guess. In his conclusion, Townsheld says that "this study does not claim to be exhaustive. There are undoubtedly a large number of other games that are unknown to us, and it would be interesting if other researchers could complete this preliminary study" (my own translation from the original French). Unfortunately those other researchers never materialised, but instead war came, and amongst its sad unfortunate casualties may be a large part of the regions gaming culture.

Whether additional knowledge exists in the Africa Museum in Tervuren just outside Brussels is hard to know. The Museum only allows accredited researchers access to its collections, and provides no real information on its website. Townshend, in another publication in 1979, stated that the Africa Museum has a good collection of boards, but whether it has also the playing rules that they need, is unclear. In any case, boards and rules in cold wet Belgium do not compensate for the death of games in their natural habitat. If the games are lost in Congo, they are lost as real games. Our diversity as humans has probably just shrunk in this, as in so many other, aspects.

Janggi - Korean Chess

A short time ago I bought a set for Janggi, the Korean version of the great chess family. Janggi is more closely related to Chinese chess (Xiang Qi) than any other version, and it is generally believed that Janggi derives from an earlier version of Xiang Qi.

Janggi is played on a board similar to that of Xiang Qi, but without the river, which obviously affects some moves (in Xiang Qi the elephant piece cannot cross the river). The pictures below show the two sides set up in a conventional arrangement, and the empty board (paper, as is also common for Xiang Qi):

The pieces used in Janggi are flat, as in all other East Asian chess variants. They have the name of the piece written on the flat surface, in green for one side and in red for the other (or, at least this is the commonestcolour combination -modern Korean sets use other clours, such as blue). The pieces are usually hexagonal, as shown below, but again, modern Korean sets (and one reported from 1895) can be circular as well:

My set are basically cheap plastic pieces - I would like to get better wooden ones, but they seem to be unavailable in Europe. Most games shops are unaware of even the existence of Janggi - I asked in Just Games in Camden Lock (London), a long established games shop, and the owner has never heard of Janggi, despite selling nice wooden sets of Xiang Qi pieces. In Korea, though, you can get lovely sets, but I cannot figure out how to buy them, as the sellers website is in Korean only.

There are a few good websites that explain the rules of Janggi, including (of course) Wikipedia, and the Chess Variant pages. Written information in English is quite scare, and quite recent. The original source was the great games historial Stewart Culin, who wrote one of the earliest descriptions in his 1895 book Korean Games:

Unfortunately, Culin's book is not easily available - Amazon.com has some copies available second-hand, but at a price. I don't remember where I got my copy, but I think it was not too expensive at the time. It is a Dover Publications reproduction from 1991 (ISBN: 0486265935).

The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi

I recently read The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel. For the first half of the book I was pleasantly expecting it to be like Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani, a book I really enjoyed. (Incidentally, when you put "Londonstani" into Amazon.com as a search word, the second item on the list of 18 hits is The Buddha of Suburbia - by a different author, and with no obvious connexction. Obviously I'm not the only person who saw the similarity!).

The Buddha of Suburbia is not, unfortunately, anything like as good as Londonstani. It starts with promise, but the characters fail to develop, the plot never really comes together, and the story quickly becomes unbelievable and, frankly, silly. Although Kureishi may be drawing on his own experiences (though I doubt this), it certainly doesn't resemble what I know of the lives of Indians in England in the 1970s (and I was there during that time, and knew Indians).

The book's publisher, Faber and Faber, on their website say that "The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel, is a tour de force of comic invention, a bizarre, often hilarious, and totally original picture of the life of a young Pakistani growing up in 1970s Britain".

Oh dear ... they haven't even read their own book. One of the recurring threads in the book is Karim's annoyance at being called a "Paki" - he is, of course, Indian (the frequent references to Bombay may also give this away). Like this little fact, the rest of their self-serving review is also wrong - it is not a tour de force - more of a forced first novel. Read it if you want, but it isn't worth the price of a new book (I bought mine second-hand, of course).

Culling my MP3

I usually run for an hour every Sunday morning in the Bois de la Cambre/Terkamerenbos in the south of Brussels. While running, I listen to my MP3 player. When you're running there is, of course, very little else you can do, so you tend to concentrate more on the music.

So during this hour or so I get the opportunity to really re-listen to my supposed musical tastes. Out of a large number of CDs I have had to select only 194 tracks to put on my MP3 (it is not, of course, an iPod); these 194 tracks should, therefore, represent those I like most; and to a great extent they do. But inevitably, the constant repetition of the same tracks over and over (I also listen to my MP3 on the way too and from work), makes clear that I don't, in fact, really like some of them. Some tracks I look forward to, and other I skip when they start playing. This has been a small revelation to me, as I had thought I liked them all.

So which are the winners and losers?

The tracks I skip past tend to be from Brian Ferry, Prodigy, and one or two from New Order. The current 'winners', that I look forward to, are also from the same era, and include Blondie, the Ramones, REM, and odd tracks by Black Sabbath (Paranoid, of course), The Buzzcocks, Tracy Chapman, and Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebels. Newer stuff includes NWA, Motorhead, The White Stripes, and the Cranberries. Some tracks by New Order and Prodigy remain among those I look forward to.

It's time for a cull. My MP3 is full to capacity, so I have to cut some tracks in order to make room for new ones. I think the old crooner, Brian Ferry is going to almost disappear. But who will replace him? I don't like a lot of the recent music, which I find fairly tuneless and dull (the Kooks, Coldplay, Radiohead, etc, though I increasingly like the Kaiser Chiefs), so I might have to go back and look through my CDs again.

Siren City

I live quite near one of the main arteries in Brussels. This means that, apart from good transport links, I am exposed to some noise from the sirens of the police, ambulances, and fire brigade. I don't mind this, as I reckon that the faster they get to where they're going, the better. It might be me that needs one of them one day!

But the other day I was crossing the road, when a car with a loud siren came racing down the road. Like everyone else, on foot or in cars, I made way for the emergency vehicle, only to see, as it passed me, that it was a vehicle from the water service! The water service .... ? What possible emergency were they in such a hurry to get to? A dripping tap?

So maybe all those sirens that provide the backing track to my city life are not as important as I thought. How many other non-urgent services have sirens on their vehicles? If they do not have a real life-and-death reason to be able to over-ride normal traffic rules, and demand privileged treatment, then they should not have sirens.

I was a millionaire

I own property in Ireland. Thanks to the enormous bubble in house prices since the mid 1990s (see Figure 2 on page 4 of this paper) I became a paper millionaire for a few years. It was, of course, only a 'feel-good' fortune - I had no intention of ever selling my home, or even using it as collateral to fund an affluent lifestyle. Now, thanks to the inevitable reversal of the Irish property boom, I am no longer a millionaire. But so what? Since I wasn't ever going to sell the house, and since I continued to enjoy the same level of pleasure from it when it was expensive as when it was cheap, am I any worse off? The answer, clearly, is no. I was lucky to have the house when it was worth next to nothing, I was lucky to own it when it was worth a fortune, and I will be lucky to own it in the future, regardless of the state of the property market.