Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

T.E. Lawrence
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1926 (Vintage edition with introduction by Robert Fisk 2007)

The ur-text of Middle Eastern war reporting and top of the reading list for US Army officers during the last war in Iraq.

At the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, the celebrated 1962 biopic very loosely based on Seven Pillars, a young reporter approaches Allenby [former commander in chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Lawrence’s paymaster] for a few words at Lawrence’s memorial service. “More words?” Allenby retorts, disdainfully.

After battling through nearly 700 pages of Lawrence’s dense and flowery recollection of his role in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in World War I, I can quite understand the sentiment – but what words!

My 2007 Vintage edition of Seven Pillars displays a neat endorsement by Winston Churchill on the back cover, calling it one of “the greatest books ever written in the English language”. He added: “As a narrative of war and adventure it is unsurpassable.”

As a narrative of adventure, the landscapes, characters and language Lawrence brought home from the Middle East are even more fantastic and otherworldly than anything Tolkein would later dream up for Middle Earth, and as a narrative of war it is still largely unrivalled.

This edition comes complete with a brisk and rather unsatisfying introduction by Robert Fisk, and the my final few pages dovetailed nicely with the BBC’s two-part documentary The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia, narrated by former Iraq provincial governor [and current Tory parliamentary candidate] Rory Stewart. Both draw parallels with the Arab Revolt and the insurgency in Iraq, and highlight the continuing importance of the lessons Lawrence brought home from his war in the desert almost a century ago.

Penn Warren, All The Kings Men

Robert Penn Warren
All The King's Men
1946

A beautifully constructed Pulitzer Prize winning portrait of American politics and corruption. Governer Willie Stark is almost a premonition of Nixon a full 20 years before he rose to power and a quarter decade before his fall (partly through the work of this book's near namesake).

Every page is poetry, every character fully described. Penn Warren's language brings the book's American South setting alive, and allows Willie Stark to seduce you though his actions are so abhorrant, and in this way Penn Warren created a wholly believable politician.

Favourite Stark quote, "There's something on everybody. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud."

I wonder if Nixon had this in mind when he sent out his "ratfuckers".

Maupassant, Bel Ami

Guy de Maupassant
Bel Ami
1885

I re-read this after hearing a pretty ropey adaptation on Radio 4 at the weekend. Maupassant's tale of the rise-and-rise of a Parisian journalist who gossips his way into high society is a rare book, if only for the fact that the villain wins out in the end.

However, perhaps the fact that the central villain George Duroy rises through a society of villains contains a deeper message on the corrupt nature of power.
Maupassant's reluctance to knock down his womanising, conniving journalist in the end perhaps stems from his own tortured life. The blurb at the back of my Penguin Classics edition states that at the time of writing Maupassant was "already under a sentence of death from syphilis". Perhaps he found a life of social and sexual debauchery that does not come with any consequences - and indeed positively leads to advancement - very appealing.

There is also a contemporary lesson in Duroy's means of financial advancement, when he cottons on to his editor's plan to manipulate the financial markets by whipping up the fervour for a war in Morocco.

Look how well some companies did when a gang of unscrupulous oil barons connived their way into power and, with the help of some acquiescent media editors, whipped up the fervour for war in another Islamic country recently.

Zola, Germinal

Emile Zola
Germinal
1885

Fantastic docu-drama on life in a 19th Century French coal mine. Drawn from Zola's own research in the mines, as well as his own fertile imagination, the book draws to a tragic conclusion of classical Greek proportions (with a few nods to Greek mythology along the way).