Sarah Moss — Cold Earth

Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth (2009) starts off well. Via first-person letters, the book recounts six students’ fraught archaeological field trip to Greenland, as spooky sightings in the night and news of a killer flu pandemic back home gradually drive them to a state of perpetual fear. Moss succeeds admirably in building an eerie and apocalyptic atmosphere.

But neither the ghosts nor the virus develop into a tangible threat, and the only shock is how uneventful the novel is from therein. The plot threads peter out into nothing, and the ending is abrupt and unsatisfying. There’s no action, no mystery, nothing to make you jump, no one goes anywhere, and the author supplies no insight into Norse culture or archaeological practice. It’s hard to convey the scale of my disappointment with this one, as the premise is so promising.

On the cover, bestselling novelist Scarlett Thomas endorses Cold Earth as “one of the most powerful and gripping debut novels I have ever read”. On the acknowledgments page, Moss reveals that “Scarlett Thomas encouraged me from before the beginning … I thank my colleagues in the School of English at the University of Kent, especially Scarlett Thomas …”.

Don’t be surprised if, next time you’re walking past a bookshop, Scarlett Thomas personally walks up to you and tries to flog you a copy of Cold Earth. I’d ignore her if I were you, since there are many young novelists who can do better than this — but lack the benefit of big-name backing.

M. J. Hyland — This Is How

M. J. Hyland has an unusual fondness for violent misfits. In her excellent novel Carry Me Down (2006), her pubescent protagonist John Egan learns the hard way that covering mummy’s face with a pillow won’t necessarily make her any happier. Now, in This Is How (2009), Hyland presents the story of Patrick Oxtoby, a down-and-out mechanic in a seaside town who turns out to be a budding Raskolnikov tribute act. In a drunken rage, poor anger-prone Patrick learns the hard way that clobbering someone with a wrench can have serious consequences.

The publisher seems oddly reluctant to tell you that this is a book about the aftermath of a violent crime, referring only to Patrick’s “tragic undoing” and supplying a pretty little cover with a man and a dog. In reality, this misleadingly advertised novel is a compelling and macabre journey to the dark side of human existence.

Like Carry Me Down, This Is How is told through sparse, present-tense, first-person narration that rattles along at a crackling pace, capturing Patrick’s shock and vulnerability as events spiral rapidly beyond his control. The result is a gripping, readable and surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of a memorable antihero.

Patrick protests his innocence on the grounds that he never “intended” to do anything wrong:

My mind played hardly any part but my body acted and, as far as the law is concerned, my body may as well be all that I am.

Is there some truth in this “don’t blame me!” determinism? Is it Patrick really responsible for his own actions? This is the central question the novel explores. Hyland’s aim is to fill in the shades of grey where society would sooner see black and white, and in this she succeeds.

Personally, I don’t buy Patrick’s argument. Anger, loneliness, loss of control, ignorance, drunkenness… these are causes of violence, but not excuses. We don’t have to let our irrational bloodlust get the better of us, and when we do, we’re responsible for what results. It’s left to the reader to decide whether Patrick deserves to be held accountable for his horrific deed. If you read it let me know what you think.

Michael Chabon — The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

It’s 1939. Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay are young Jews in New York. Joe is a Czech newly evacuated from Nazi-occupied Prague. Sammy is his American cousin. Strapped for cash, the pair take to writing comic books.

Their work, like many comics of that “golden age” for the artform, poignantly conjures up a vision of the world as it ought to be, but isn’t. Their superhero, the Escapist, is a godlike figure, metering out salvation and justice in lieu of the official God, who is apparently out for lunch.

Michael Chabon’s lengthy Pulitzer-prizewinner, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), evokes this lost world in intricate period detail, evincing a wealth of careful research. It’s one of those books that’s terribly eager to win historical brownie points, to the extent of chucking in cameo appearances from Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí.

Yet it’s far from a bland historical document. Chabon tells a story that’s just a little bit larger than life in every dimension, full of dramatic incidents and strange coincidences. I don’t have time to recount the 650 pages of twists and turns. Suffice to say, it’s compelling, but at a cost. It’s just slightly implausible, all the way through, not so unlike a comic book. It’s then jarring when Chabon includes genuinely tragic moments, which end up feeling like just another plot twist.

Chabon teases out the similarity between comic book superheroes and the Golems of Jewish folklore: mythical clay monsters who, when teased into life, kill the oppressors and save the oppressed:

The shaping of a golem, to him [Joe], was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something — one poor, dumb, powerful thing — exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of the vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straightjacket of physical laws.

Of course, all this talk of heroes can only end in pathos. Golems and superheroes are not real. No one could save the Jews from Hitler. We know that already. When Kavalier goes to war — in a short, surreal interlude  — he tries to play the Golem for real; but, posted to Antarctica, his utter impotence against the juggernaut of history is brought home to him in devastating fashion. Joe comes to realize all the more keenly the need for escape.

The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble and necessary service in life.

The novel is an unsubtle, extended argument that, despite its unreality, comic book escapism really is worth something. Myths keep hope alive.

Did I like it? Well, I got to the end, which is a testament to Chabon’s silky, flowing style. The book is a pleasure to jump into. But, for me at least, the novel shows the limitations of historical fiction. Reading their highly novelistic “adventures”, I became acutely aware that Kavalier & Clay are no more real than Batman & Robin.

I think there’s something to be said for fiction that’s a little less showy than this, and tethered a little more closely to reality — fiction rooted in the author’s real, lived experience, rather than in a mountain of meticulous research.

Kazuo Ishiguro — Nocturnes

Kazuo Ishiguro is a proper writer: a book every four or five years, and, when they come along, they matter. His seven books, spanning thirty years, are the milestones of a lifelong meditation on longing, nostalgia, regret, emptiness, and how on earth to cope with it all.

His new book, Nocturnes (2009), has the usual Ishiguro trademarks. First-person confessional narration, a conversational tone, nostalgic themes, oddly formal dialogue: a style reassuringly simple and instantly familiar, refined and polished over a stellar career.

Perhaps “reassuringly simple” is not a hallmark of a great author. If I wanted to be uncharitable, I’d say that Ishiguro has been peddling the same wares for three decades. But whatever you make of his prose, his stories touch the heart and stay in the mind, and that’s a boast flashier writers can rarely make.

Reading Nocturnes, described on the jacket as a short-story “cycle”, is like reading five Ishiguro novels in miniature. He’s still the quintessence of himself, but here that essence is condensed and compressed into small, 30-page doses.

Like the nocturnes of Chopin, Fauré et al. from which the title derives, these are mood pieces, Romantic and pensive, evoking thoughts of finality and transience, of the passing of the day. Troubled relationships, usually marriages, lie in the background throughout.

The “nocturnes” are surprisingly uneventful, with a tendency to end on quiet, anticlimactic notes. In all five pieces, the characters come first. Fiction is all too often about authors moving their characters around like chess pieces; but Ishiguro’s world is populated by free agents who flitter briefly across the page, fail to behave in a particularly novelistic way, then disappear back into the gloom of their real, monotonous lives. This wonderful, non-chessy writing is the secret to Ishiguro’s success, and it’s much in evidence here.

But there’s a niggling feeling that Ishiguro is capable of more than this. There’s enough overlap between the stories to make me wonder why he didn’t stitch them together: there’s little to distinguish the various narrators, and characters from earlier stories reappear later on.  I don’t know whether to be impressed that Ishiguro didn’t feel the need to merge the stories into a novel, or disappointed that he didn’t bother.

Expect a work as distinctive and unforgettable as The Remains of the Day (1990) or Never Let Me Go (2005) and Nocturnes will fall short. But it’s not some miscellaneous collection of unpublished scraps. Nocturnes is a finely crafted whole; cultured, elegant and captivating.

P. D. James — The Private Patient

I’ve never reviewed a crime novel on this blog, for the simple reason that I haven’t read one in a long time. But I was happy to make an exception for the latest from P. D. James, unchallengeable doyenne of the classic English murder mystery.

James is 88, and if the thought of churning out 400-page novels at that age impresses you, spare a thought for her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, who’s been wrestling culprits to the floor since 1962. I can only assume he’s been drinking the same elixir as James Bond, and gets younger and more muscular with each new case.

The setting for The Private Patient (2008) is, naturally, a decaying outpost of provincial privilege with a spooky and claustrophobic atmosphere. Rhoda Gradwyn, a fearless investigative journalist with a fair tally of accumulated enemies, books in to the private Dorset clinic of her plastic surgeon, George Chandler-Powell. The purpose of the visit: the removal of a deep scar across Gradwyn’s cheek, inflicted during childhood. The operation is completed successfully. But the following night, bandages still wrapped round her face, Rhoda is strangled in her bed.

Helpfully enough, the clinic, a beautiful yet intimidating Tudor manor house, is an enclosed space chock full of suspects. Two of the staff have longstanding grudges against Gradwyn, another has a dark past that has caused her to assume a new identity, one of Rhoda’s friends stands to gain from her will, and Chandler-Powell’s two medical assistants both have reasons for wanting to ruin the surgeon’s reputation. So whodunnit? And what is the significance of the ancient stone circle outside the manor, where a witch was once burned, and where strange lights were seen on the night of the murder?

The Private Patient is a novel resolute in its conformity to the conventions and clichés of its genre, but it’s a class act nonetheless — the work of a novelist rightly confident of the continuing power and relevance of the old Agatha Christie format. The story thrills and entices, like it should, but it’s also familiar and pleasurable, a book to be dipped into at leisure rather than one to be read from a grim compulsion to get to the end. James is simply a terrific writer, elegant, erudite and concise. She pries into her characters’ private thoughts and private places with a forensic precision and an eye for detail.

What James sees, perhaps more clearly than anyone writing today, is that the detective novel owes its persistence to its power as memento mori. Death touches everything yet remains hidden from view: “how briefly death is allowed to interfere with life,” muses Lettie, the clinic’s accountant, after Gradwyn’s death. Detective novels take us to the edge of that unspeakable abyss; but then, with their tidy resolutions, bring a necessary measure of solace and reassurance.

At one stage Dalgliesh contemplates that “few of us will die with the dignity for which we hope … Whether we choose to think of life as an impending happiness broken only by inevitable grief and disappointments, or as the proverbial veil of tears with brief interludes of joy, the pain will come.” But if this is an expression of the author’s inner fears, the book’s final lines (from the perspective of Annie, a rape victim only tangentially involved in the plot) counter them, arguing that, despite everything, we can draw consolation:

Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all we have.

If this should prove to be James’s final word, it will be an epitaph as crisp and measured and apt as the Dalgliesh series deserves.

Roberto Bolaño — 2666

I think it’s fair to say that the gushing press reviews of 2666 (2008) have glossed over its shortcomings. In dwelling on them here, I don’t mean to diminish the status of Roberto Bolaño’s achievement in this opus postumum, newly translated into English by Natasha Wimmer. 2666 is a serious and weighty work that will no doubt be studied in academia for many years to come.

But critics don’t always see the wood for the trees. 2666 has a verdant clump of postmodern trees (it’s self-referential, ironic, amoral, hypertextual, digressive, transgressive, subversive… ) but the wood has somehow gone AWOL — the novel is exhausting, dispiriting and almost unreadable. It would be futile to attempt a plot synopsis here. There are countless strands, each appearing from nowhere and ending abruptly. 2666 is a panorama of dreams and hallucinations and murders and rapes; a book populated by one-armed painters, mad poets, sacraphobes and Nazis; enormous and disjointed, violent and grotesque, and very difficult to actually enjoy at any stage.

Everything is done to ludicrous excess: this is a book in which individual sentences can last five pages and paragraphs even longer. It’s a book in which, infuriatingly, three hundred pages are given over, virtually without interruption, to forensic descriptions of the violent murders of women. The problem with this sequence is not that it wallows in depraved violence, but that the grim repetition is numbingly tedious. Emotionally, for all its absurd scope (why read ten different novels when you can read one by Roberto Bolaño?), 2666 is as cold and dead as its female characters.

I’m not blaming Bolaño. 2666 is a first draft. Tragically, Bolaño died before editing and redrafting could take place. He left behind manuscripts for a series of five books, which his estate decided to cobble together and publish in a single volume, under a possibly meaningless numerical title Roberto had once suggested. All five parts involve the fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa, but the links between the parts are pretty tenuous and the book reads more like an anthology than a novel. This can’t be helped. But it can’t be papered-over either.

Ah well, say the critics: one book can’t have everything, and this does have all kinds of postmodern bells and whistles. My reply: sorry, but it doesn’t get the basics right. Of course great authors take the novel far beyond the conventional “A to B via C” storytelling of its more populist forms, but, in so doing, they remember their readers. From Dostoevsky to Coetzee, Dickens to Bellow, Faulkner to García Márquez, great authors never forget to make you care about what happens next. In Bolaño’s hellish postmodern creation, the silent contract between reader and author is broken: there’s nothing to care about, nothing at stake, and no reason to keep reading.

I suppose most people who have read it so far think differently. Me and 2666 enjoyed each other’s company even less than me and The Da Vinci Code. If you’re looking for a cleverer review than mine, try Open Letters — this is quite brilliant. And there’s more at Just William’s Luck.

Junot Díaz — The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I tend to think that novels shouldn’t read like short story anthologies. But The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) does read like a short story anthology, and is still a great novel. Junot Díaz packs stories from three generations into his Dominican family saga, united by a connection to the brief and wondrous life of a second-generation Dominican immigrant in America, Oscar “Wao” de Léon.

In the mix are tales of the nerdy and hapless Oscar himself, of his granddad Abelard, of his mother Belí and of his sister Lola; they stretch from 1940s Santo Domingo to 1990s New Jersey. But the hopping around in space, time and perspective doesn’t make for a disjointed read. On the contrary, the book builds up a rattling momentum. The more you learn about this family, the more you want to know where fate will take it next.

Oscar Wao is warm, genuine and life-affirming, a book populated by likeable dreamers struggling against the odds, each rendered by Díaz with humour and vitality. It’s a Pulitzer-winner that’s already been praised to the hilt, and rightly so — so I won’t get lost in superlatives here. I’m just going to sum up some of Oscar Wao’s most memorable elements.

1. The spanglish

Listen palomo: you have to grab a muchacha, y metéselo. That will take care of everything. Start with a fea. Coje that fea y metéselo!

Díaz’s prose is peppered with Spanish vernacular — “Oscar Wao”, Oscar’s college nickname, is “Oscar Wilde” with a Hispanic accent. Sometimes it’s pretty hard going for a poor monolingual like me. I felt like an interloper, sneaking in on a story meant for a Hispanic audience, sometimes only getting the gist of the dialogue. But somehow the result is an experience far richer and more authentic than it would’ve been had everything been implausibly rendered in perfect English. This is how the characters speak and think, and giving the narration this true-to-life patois, though a bold move, was the right thing to do.

2. The magic

What can I tell you? In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow.

Oscar Wao is full of talk of curses and countercurses, men without faces, and the strange black mongoose of fate. It’s almost magical realism, only that, for Oscar, the only mythology that really counts is that of the comic books and fantasy novels he reads (and writes) obsessively. So our third-person narrator quotes wisdom from JRR Tolkien, Frank Herbert and Alan Moore, and mixes up Domican folk mythology with references to Dune, Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. It’s a wonderful cross-cultural cocktail.

Is Díaz mocking the magical realists here? I don’t think so. He’s showing that our allegedly “disenchanted” modern pop culture can imbue things with as much fantastical significance as any ancient superstitition. Oscar’s interpretation of the past is inflected with the fantasy tropes of his American-nerd present.

3. The politics

There was such fear, the sickening blood-draining fear of a drawn pistol, of waking up to find a man standing over your bed, but held, a note sustained indefinitely.

Oscar Wao tells of a people crushed under the yoke of Rafael Trujillo, one of the twentieth century’s cruellest dictators — and that’s saying something. Like Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987) and Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, 1985), Díaz confronts one of the grimmest episodes in the story of the New World.

How do you write about something like that? How do you touch wounds so deep in the Dominican psyche? Díaz tackles the issue almost head-on. He doesn’t merely hint at or symbolize the murderous, state-sanctioned violence of those times. He doesn’t shy away from the big picture — he exposes you to the gritty details of Trujillo’s thuggery. He remembers the genocides, the denunciations, the Secret Police and the Kafkaesque surprise arrests, he remembers who was murdered, when and how.

So why “almost” head-on? Because most of the gore is put into footnotes. Yes, footnotes, in a novel. A brave and clever move, because, as Tolstoy saw, grand historical arcs should be secondary to the lives and deaths of real human beings. Díaz remembers Trujillo, often comparing him to Sauron — but he demotes him. Trujillo doesn’t deserve to be a protagonist in this story, so his evil deeds are shoved outside the main text.

The end product is not a political novel. It’s a novel set against a backdrop of brutality and oppression that casts a long shadow, but in which centre stage is reserved for a handful of human beings driven only by the hope of love, acceptance and survival.

Steve Fuller — Dissent over Descent

The wonderful thing about Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), whatever you make of the theory advanced within it, is the way it’s written. For anyone who wants to make a scientific argument, Darwin is the exemplar. Be cautious, never dogmatic. Infer, never assert. Base your reasoning on hard evidence, never the word of other authors. I can’t help but think that, when held up next to Darwin’s classic, Steve Fuller’s silly and shallow defence of Intelligent Design, Dissent over Descent (2008), reveals the intellectual gulf between the two rival theories.

The strange thing about Fuller’s book is that I doubt it’s the kind of defence a typical Intelligent Design advocate (say, Michael Behe or William Dembski) would actually want to hear. Fuller stood up for Creationism at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District (2005) court case, but he’s actually a sociologist — not a biologist, and not a Christian fundamentalist either. He’s on the frontline in the “science wars” — he’s the sort of postmodernist academic Alan Sokal parodied in his famous hoax.

So what does Fuller believe? He sets out his credo in the introduction:

While I cannot honestly say that I believe in a divine personal creator, no plausible alternative has yet been offered to justify the pursuit of science as a search for the ultimate systematic understanding of reality.

It’s not that Fuller prefers Bible stories to scientific stories. He thinks neither gives us an understanding of reality. Fuller’s cynicism about Darwin’s theory appears to be motivated by an all-pervading scepticism about the ability of science to tell us anything about reality at all. Evidence of this scepticism — this fundamental doctrine that science is not to be trusted, that its claims are “unjustified” — can be found all the way through.

Fuller’s stance here rests implicitly on the philosopher David Hume’s (1711-1776) brand of scepticism about the unity (or uniformity) of nature. We don’t know, says Hume, that nature is lawful and predictable. We don’t know that the future will be like the past, or that unobserved instances of a given phenomenon will be like the observed instances. So we don’t know that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that the vacuum in my lab is like outer space, or that the bacteria in my Petri dish are like bacteria in the soil. And we don’t know (pace Darwin and Charles Lyell) that the world we live in was formed by natural processes acting constantly and regularly for millions of years. Hume’s challenge to commonsense reasoning is the problem of induction, and to justify scientific claims about the world like Darwin’s, we need a response to Hume.

About 50 pages in, I suddenly realized that Fuller, whether he realizes it or not, is in the grip of Humean scepticism:

STS researchers do not question the actual results of scientific inquiry, only the larger significance ascribed to them: what licenses extrapolations from the lab or the field to the world at large?

He assumes that, since there is no obvious answer, scientists actually “make the world conform to the lab or field”.  He tells us that “incentives and conduits are introduced to ensure that the world behaves in accordance with the findings”.  He reveals that “calling something ’scientific’ is to sign a blank cheque to construct the world in the image and likeness of our theories”. Finally, he delivers his grand verdict, in italics:

Scientists can only make sense of a world they could have created.

The success of modern science, then, “certainly vindicates the idea that nature has been designed with sufficient intelligence to be susceptible to purposeful human modification.”

I suppose what Fuller is proposing here is a kind of “God Solution” to the problem of induction. To have knowledge of the world, we must believe the world to have been intelligently designed. Reject this and, according to Fuller, inquiry into nature will seem futile.

This is bizarre. Fuller’s stance is apparently that the world has to have been intelligently designed for us to have scientific knowledge of it. I don’t think any rigorous argument can be made in defence of this, and Fuller certainly doesn’t have one. The upshot of Hume’s sceptical argument is, arguably, that we just have to presuppose that nature is lawful and predictable. We have to presuppose that we can infer from our data to the facts about the world. But we don’t also have to presuppose that the world was intelligently designed.

So Darwin, examining his Galapagos specimens, had to presuppose the uniformity of nature in order to consider them representative of living beings from the Galapagos. And he had to presuppose the uniformity of nature to maintain that life on the Galapagos was formed by the same processes as life everywhere else. But what Darwin discovered, given these simple presuppositions, was that this could all have come about without an intelligent designer. Presuppose only the existence of regular, mechanical laws of nature, and suddenly you can explain the origin of species.

Dissent over Descent is a mess. Arrogant, rambling and unpersuasive, it’s provocative for the sake of being provocative, full of odd sociology jargon and sweeping generalizations. But I’m glad I read it — because it reveals how thin some of the arguments against the theory of evolution really are. Read this, read the Origin, and decide for yourself. I gave Fuller a hearing, and there was nothing to hear.

Philip Roth — The Ghost Writer

No one writes books about Philip Roth quite as well as Philip Roth. Sometimes I feel as though I know more about what it’s like to be a male Jewish writer from Newark than I know about what it’s like to be me. The Ghost Writer (1979) is one of Roth’s many semi-autobiographical fictions, and the first to feature enduring Roth alterego Nathan Zuckerman.

… I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman …

Zuckerman, an up-and-coming literary star of the 1950s, stays one night in the remote home of his reclusive literary idol, E. I. Lonoff. He’s joined by Lonoff’s emotionally frayed wife, Hope, and his beautiful young possible-mistress, Amy Bellette.

Lonoff is an aging man weighed down by the burden of his art, and the ruin a lifetime of “turning sentences around” has inflicted on his marriage. Zuckerman is a young man weighed down by the burden of Jewish identity. His father has turned on him, accusing him of betraying the Jews by portraying them in a negative light. Roth suffered similar criticism after the publication of Goodbye, Columbus (1959).

During the night, strange things happen. Lonoff has a spectacular clash with Hope and a mysterious erotic encounter with Amy. Nathan, an accidental spectator to Lonoff’s bizarre private life, mulls over how to win back his father’s support.

Outrageously, he starts to harbour the delusion that Amy is Anne Frank, living in America under an assumed name. This, he thinks, will solve his problem: if he marries Anne Frank, people won’t be able to call him a bad Jew any more.

The Ghost Writer is a wry and touching portrayal of the pitfalls of literary life. An old writer who seems to have everything turns out to be trapped and miserable. A young writer who seems to have everything turns out to be cracking under the weight of expectation.

It’s a slim novel telling a simple tale, and as such lacks the monumental significance of Roth’s later masterworks. But in its own discreet way, it’s every bit as touched by greatness. I think of Roth’s writing hand as some kind of wild animal, loosely tethered to the genius in his head. Like all Roth’s best work, The Ghost Writer is scabrous, irreverent, wacky and witty. Unlike most of Roth’s best work, you can read it in a spare afternoon.

You can read more about The Ghost Writer here and here.

Peter Singer — The Life You Can Save

Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation (1975), is a well-known guru of “applied ethics”, though perhaps an equally accurate term for it would be “secular preaching”. In this compact and fiercely argued piece of pop philosophy, Singer turns his attention to Third World poverty.

Singer starts off in typically aggressive fashion, arguing that it is wrong not to give as much of your income as you can to development charities. He then argues that Western nations, America in particular, don’t give very much to such charities. He discusses how we could persuade people to give more, which charities are pound-for-pound most effective, and how small donations make a big difference in the Third World.

In the final chapters, he goes into turbo-preaching mode. He tells us how our lives need to change to meet his demands. He presents a complex sliding scale, where the well-off give 5% of their income, and the superrich give a third. He openly admits this is a compromise: we ought to give far more. He then slams celebrities who fail to meet his standard, such as Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire who has given a mere $900m to charity.

Singer is a famous utilitarian, and there is lots of utilitarianism behind the scenes here. The basic argument is roughly that, if something is bad (i.e. a person suffering from poverty), and you can prevent it by sacrificing something less important (i.e. your disposable income), it is wrong not to do so.

The difficulty, even if you accept utilitarianism, is that weighing up benefits versus costs like this is notoriously tricky. Singer flags up a problem for his own position: if Warren Buffett had given away his first $1m, he would never have been able to give away the $30bn he has now pledged. So by reinvesting rather than donating his $1m he “saved lives” — thousands of them.

Singer uses the phrase “saving a life” loosely, as referring to the alleviation of a person’s suffering as a consequence of the work of development charities. On this definition, it’s impossible to tell what will “save” more lives: giving now, or investing your money so that you can do more later. We never know the consequences in advance when we donate now or invest for later, so we never know in advance which option will do most for the greater good.

Because of this, the phrase “saving a life” is inappropriate. It’s emotive. It makes you think that giving money to the world’s poor is something equivalent to diving into a pond to save a drowning child — a comparison Singer actually makes. But you’re not diving into a pond: you’re sponsoring a particular long-term cause from a distance. There’s no shame in holding on to your money in the short-term, and there’s no shame in using your money to sponsor another cause instead.

I agree broadly with Singer’s sentiment. The problem of poverty is troubling. Of course it is.  But I don’t like his “naming and shaming” strategy, and there’s a question mark over his basic argument. And there is another more practical problem for Singer: his view implies that no one should buy this book. How can you justify buying a hardback when children in Africa are starving?