QualityLand

So you're off to QualityLand for the first time ever. Are you excited? Yes? And quite rightly so!

QualityLand is set is some distant future (hard to say how distant, but they'll need to defrost the cryogenically-preserved Jennifer Aniston to film more rom-coms when her movies unexpectedly regain popularity), and despite the book itself being pretty funny (in the vein of Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut), the world it describes is dehumanisingly shallow and bleak – and pretty much exactly what we're scrolling ourselves towards. Control of human lives is taken over by a few big internet companies and their algorithms; governments are cynically run by self-interested, partisan boobs; and AI is poised to take over as the apex sentience on the planet. The plot was a bit predictable – a little guy attempts to push back against the system and incidentally wakes others up to their own predicament as cogs in the machine – but this was thoroughly entertaining and I am excited to see that QualityLand appears to be the first in a series by Marc-Uwe Kling.

As you don't yet know your way around QualityLand, we've put together a brief introduction for you. Two years before QualityLand was founded – or in other words, two years before QualityTime – there was an economic crisis of such severity that it became known as the crisis of the century. It was the third crisis of the century within just a decade. Swept along by the panic of the financial markets, the government turned for help to the business consultants from Big Business Consulting (BBC) who decided that what the country needed most was a new name. The old one was worn-out and, according to surveys, only inspired die-hard nationalists with minimal buying power. Not to mention the fact that the renaming would also divest the country of a few unpleasant historical responsibilities in the process. In the past, its army had been known to...well, let's just say they overshot the mark a little.

“QualityLand”, the country, is the future rebranding of Germany (focus groups first wanted “EqualityLand”, but the initial “E” was dropped for the marketing of domestic goods), and it seems important to read the book in this context. Schoolchildren no longer study History, they study the Future (leading to such absurdities as a popular play called Hitler!—the Musical, subtitled “The Story of Ado & Eva” and described as “The tragic love story between two controversial historical figures”; two adults who go to see the show have no idea who Ado and Eva were, and that's some bold erasing of the past in the vein of 1984.) Yet somehow in this future, QualityLand has expanded its borders beyond those of today's Germany – it's an oft-repeated fact that QualityLand 7 is a hotbed of terrorists and religious fanatics and a character says at one point, “I'd far prefer it if my briefs were sewn by a machine in QualityLand 2 than by some little girl in QualityLand 8.” (And while I think that these ideas may be even more interesting for German readers to encounter, and while I have seen people musing that by dominating the EU, Germany today seems to have accomplished economically what Hitler failed to do militaristically, I don't know if I completely buy in to the concept that decades out from now, Germany will be more globally influential than, say, China.)

At precisely the moment when Peter arrives home, a delivery drone from TheShop turns up. Peter is no longer surprised by occurrences of this kind. They don't happen by chance, for chance simply no longer exists.

As for the plot: The narrative is roughly divided into three points-of-view. Peter Jobless (males are given their father's profession as a surname, females their mother's – leading to such ironies as Juliet Nun and Scarlett Prisoner) is a low-level scrap-metal press operator, and like every other person in QualityLand, he accepts that TheShop will send him all of the items he wants before he even consciously knows what he wants. He also accepts that he has been given a personal rating between 2 and 99 that affects every area of his life – credit rating, where he can live, who he can date or marry, his job prospects, etc. When a drone delivers an item that Peter decidedly does not want, he begins a journey that will lead him (and others) to publicly question the inscrutable computer codes that govern all of their lives. Meanwhile, there is an impending election (the current president is on her deathbed and an algorithm has set the next election date for the day of her calculated death), and POV switches to the domestic scenes of the privileged and dimwitted backbencher Martyn Chairman:

Martyn has made the best of his limited possibilities: he has become a politician. A popular, well-established choice, parliament being a kind of modern-day monastery; a place where the upper classes can get rid of their superfluous sons.

And the campaign headquarters of John of Us, the first android made specifically to run for political office:

“I'm not voting for John of Us in spite of the fact he's an android,” he says. “I'm electing him precisely because he is! Machines don't make mistakes.”

Facing off against this progressive android (who proposes such radicalisms as a guaranteed basic income for all, funded by big banks and corporations) is the populist Conrad Cook:

“There's no one in the world less racist than me. No one. But that doesn't change the fact that these Mediterranean types are all lazy, negroes are all criminals, and Arabs are all terrorists. These are facts, pure and simple. And yet, I must emphasize this: never in the history of humanity has there been a man less racist than me!”

Interspersed throughout the story are more entries in the QualityLand Travel Guide (as quoted in the first two passages above), pop-up ads, and passages from newsfeeds (complete with combative comment threads and paid trolling). This does not look like a nice world to live in, and it's not that far off from the one I find myself in today. Maybe it's because it seems so plausible that QualityLand didn't feel radically original to me, but as it does seem to be the first in a series, this volume may have been more focussed on the world-building than the story-telling. In any event, I found this read to be completely entertaining and I would very happily pick up whatever comes next.

It felt kind of low-key ironic that this was the first library book I was able to pick up after the COVID restrictions were lifted - after 17 of the last 18 books I read being ARCs I downloaded onto my phone, the first nondigital book I've read in months was one about a hyperdigital future. So weird. And what would make it even better: if it was actually interactively digital; if you could read QualityLand on a screen and have the travel guide sections be navigable; if the popup ads actually interrupted the reading and you needed to press the OK button to proceed. Maybe some day.

Mayflies

He laid it on the table. Ephemeri Vita: or the Natural History and Anatomy of the Ephemeron.

“Eight engraved plates,” I read. “And the date, 1681.”

“A beautiful publication,” he said. “Swammerdam believed that no being was higher than any other being, a revolutionary thought at the time. He wrote this book one summer in Sloten, outside Amsterdam. He filled it with poetry and visions as well as anatomical observations.”

“It's really wonderful,” I said. “Mayflies.”

Author Andrew O'Hagan and I are about the same age, so I need to begin by acknowledging that Mayflies – essentially an examination of the anatomy of a friendship and the evolution of the people in it, firmly rooted in the times they live through – perfectly captured the era and spirit of my own youth before jumping ahead to my own, less manic, present. Opening in 1986, I perfectly recognised that group of wild youth, hair spiked and bouncing off the walls, listening to New Order and Joy Division and The Smiths; that was us; that was me, and I loved every bit of the first half. The second half revisits this group of friends in 2017 – now with their jobs and their families and their mortgages – and circumstances serve to remind us that we are but short-lived mayflies on this earth; and I loved this part, too. I enjoyed every bit of the writing – the big stories and line-by-line – and while I must recognise the particular nostalgic draw this had for me, I reckon it ought to appeal widely. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

What we had that day was our story. We didn't have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of all this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew. But I'm sure I felt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.

Told from the perspective of James (Jim, Jimmy, Jimbo; a bookish lad destined to use his brains to rise above his working class roots), Mayflies opens at the beginning of the summer of 1986, as a group of Glaswegian guys, late-teens/early-twenties, plan to attend a punk rock music festival in Manchester. The group is bound by their neighbourhood, pop culture, and politics (these are mostly the kids of striking coal miners in Thatcher's Britain), but they are primarily bound by music – and the joy and abandon that music provided was transporting to read about. The undeniable leader of the group of friends was Tully Dawson, and James states that in his prime Tully “had innate charisma, a brilliant record collection, complete fearlessness in political argument, and he knew how to love you more than anybody else. Other guys were funny and brilliant and better at this and that, but Tully loved you.” The trip to Manchester – all spare funds spent on tickets and a bus ride, the guys don't even know where they'll sleep – the banter between the friends, the joyful recklessness, the drinking and the dancing; everyone should have such an epic story in their past:

“Roll me on,” he said. He turned to us, all portly. “Onto the stage. Roll me.” Martyr for tunes, vampire for drink, Lincoln McCafferty crossed his arms over his chest and we rolled him towards the guitarist's fashionably buckled legs. In the universe of small humiliations, there can surely be few more effective for the guitar hero than the arrival at his feet of a rotund little Scottish guy high on Taboo. The guitarist, disturbed mid-song, shuffled and kicked as Limbo gripped on to his legs. I say gripped, I mean hugged, Limbo nodding in time to the music and gnawing the guy's jeans.

There is a wedding early in the second half of Mayflies and most of the friends are seeing each other for the first time in years. And just as with the titular insect, it can be hard to recognise the youthful forms in the adults we become; adolescence can appear to be an entirely different species. Even the music – as important as food and air at one time – has lost some of its importance:

It used to be so natural, dancing. Because the music defined you and the heart was in step. Then it leaves you. Or does it? Saturday night changes and your body forgets the old compliance. You're not part of it any more and your feet hesitate and your arms stay close to your sides. It's there somewhere, the easy rhythm from other rooms and other occasions, and you're half convinced it will soon come back. It's not the moves – the moves are there – but your connection to the music has become nostalgic, so the body is responding not to a discovery but to an old, dear echo.

Much more than a wedding happens in the second half, and the change in tone between youthful abandon and adult responsibilities can be jarring without benefit of witnessing the years in between, but that's like a mayfly too – moulting from nymph to adult, the only thing that matters is how little time we have in the end (apparently, the female adult mayfly's lifespan can be as short as five minutes; sigh.) A few more quotes:

• Being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience.

• You are a human being. And that's an unstable condition that ends badly for all of us.

• It occurred to me that though Clogs was young – he couldn't have been more than twenty-two – I thought of him as old, the way he leaned to one side, and smoked his cigarette like someone taking particular measures against pain.

Again, this felt written for me – I was backpacking in Europe in the summer of 1986 and met exactly these people; my friends back home were exactly these people – but no matter the reason, I found Mayflies to be perfectly satisfying.

When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers

 

These essays are not just field reports. They expand with reflections on love, family, life, and death and engage a range of emotions from wonder to humor. And because birds magnify our relationship to the natural world, you will read stories about habitat loss, declining species, birds that collide with buildings, or birds now extinct. Some too tell of small victories...It's a perfect read for a winter night when the wind is blowing and you are feeling out of sorts; it's an anthology to keep near when the birds are not. ~ Susan Fox Rogers, Editor

When Birds are Near is a collection of twenty-six essays, all focussed on birds, all written by serious birders. If they have anything in common it might be a feeling of avidity: whether the writers are commenting on the species visiting their backyard feeders or describing the lengths they have gone to in order to track down some rare sighting for their "life list", these are no casual observers; these are people with immense mental catalogues of field marks and birdsong, accumulated through years of study and experience in the field, and who are so in tune with the variety of birdlife surrounding them, that they have a heightened sense of their own place in nature. Not surprisingly, this enhanced communion with wildness makes for many essays lamenting humanity's deleterious effects on the natural world, but this collection is not a downer – there are many beautiful moments of awe, hope, and humour. The collection is a little uneven – I liked some essays much more than others – but there is much more good than otherwise and earns a solid four stars overall. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted might not be in their final forms.)

Nearly every essay had something quotable in it, so I'm just going to use this space to record a few highlights. To start with the timely: J. Drew Lanham (a university professor, poet and author) writes about his passion for birding in Red-headed Love Child. As a black man, he mentions the casual racism he can encounter while out in nature, and while chasing down Sandhill Cranes and rising early to watch the mating dance of Greater Prairie Chickens, he muses on the very different experience the Nebraska prairies must have offered to those men remembered to history as Buffalo Soldiers:

More than 100 years ago, black men of the U.S. Army's Ninth and Tenth Calvary and Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry followed orders and endured the extremes of heat, cold, dust, mud, insects, and disease that often plague the out-of-the-way places I go by choice to find birds. In between the daily tasks of surviving rampant racism from the U.S. Army, skirmishes with American Indians fighting (rightfully) to hold onto homelands, and incursions from Mexican patriots (trying to understandably reclaim lost homeland), I'm sure there wasn't much time for the leisure of watching birds or rising at dawn to witness a prairie ritual. But then again, this Nebraska trip was breaking brain barriers I'd long held as dogma. Maybe I was giving these brave men short shrift. I'd like to think that all of us, regardless of circumstance, find some way to appreciate the wonders of the world around us.

By way of contrast, Richard Bohannon (cartographer and college lecturer) writes in Little Brown Birds about being confronted by soldiers while entering a nature preserve adjacent to the site of a missile silo in North Dakota:

It's worth saying here that I'm a middle-aged white man driving a relatively new car, and all of the military personnel appeared to be white men, young enough to be my students. If any racial profiling was going on, it was to my benefit.

Jonathan Franzen (author of note and ardent bird-watcher) writes presciently in the humorous and thoughtful My Bird Problem:

When I went inside, no kids came running to meet me, and this absence of kids seemed to clinch it: I was better off spending my anxiety budget on viral pandemics and dirty bombs than on global warming. Even if I had had kids, it would have been hard work for me to care about the climatic well-being of their children's children. Not having kids freed me altogether. Not having kids was my last, best line of defense against the likes of Al Gore.

(Be assured that whether or not Franzen spent some of his anxiety budget on viral pandemic preparedness, this essay goes on to describe his transformation into an environmentalist for the sake of birdlife.) And just because I liked the writing throughout this one, I'll include this bit from Alison Townsend's (award-winning poet and author) Wild Swans:

Life is always harder than we think it should be. But it is ours, isn't it? And here were these magnificent birds, sailing along on our lake, going about their business and filling me with an awe that knocked me sideways and took me outside my small human concerns. Bound by cycles of seasonal change and patterns of birth, and renewal, the sight of the swans comforted me on some essential level, offering what I can only describe as the solace of wild things. If they could manage to do something this enormous, guided by star patterns and earth's magnetic fields, I could navigate my life, couldn't I?

I particularly liked the hopeful essays that point to some of the successes of human intervention (Christina Baal's In the Eyes of the Condor [I especially loved her helpless awe in the presence of these “thunderbirds”]; Jenn Dean's The Keepers of the Ghost Bird [about Bermuda's success in bringing the cahow back from the brink]; and several writers' encounters with Sandhill Cranes [and for that matter, Franzen espying Whooping Cranes as the 400th bird species on his life list]), but there's no closing our eyes to the fact that between habitat encroachment and climate change, humanity is driving countless bird species to the edge of extinction – and how much poorer will our lives be when the birds are no longer near? Much to love in this collection that brings that question to the fore.

Just a few more notes: The writers of these essays were routinely quoting from other authors; often quoting something more exquisitely interesting than they had to say themselves. A few examples -

If we have ever regarded our interest in natural history as an escape from the realities of our modern world, let us now reverse that attitude. For the mysteries of living things...are among the great realities. ~ Rachel Carson (in her acceptance speech for the John Burroughs Medal) 

The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. ~ Iris Murdoch (describing "a day when she was feeling anxious and resentful until she became entranced by a hovering kestrel")

If you don't love things in particular, you cannot love the world, because the world doesn't exist except in individual things. ~ Thomas Moore (in Care of the Soul)

And to return to Christina Baal (artist and environmental educator) and her essay on the California Condor:

To anyone who has ever seen Disney's The Lion King, vultures are birds that fly around sinisterly waiting for Simba to die in the wilderness so they can eat him. But to birders like myself, vultures are these incredible creatures that clean up after us humans and keep the world free from a myriad of diseases. Although my family thinks I'm crazy, I insist that these bareheaded birds that pee on themselves to keep cool and vomit as a means of self-defense are the most beautiful birds in the world. 

Just the day before I read this, the girls and I were sitting on lounge chairs by the pool as their Dad floated on his blow-up toy; head back, arms and legs spread wide to maximise his sun exposure. It caught my notice that there was one, then two, then three big raptors crossing the sky high above us, and my first thought was for the safety of Cormac and Peaches; a hawk or falcon couldn't pick up even these little dogs, but some kind of eagle might - and why did those three birds just circle back towards us?

I pointed out the birds to the girls and Dave, and as we all looked up, one of the birds dipped lower, and with its wide, brown wings and wrinkled, scarlet head, it was immediately apparent that these were turkey vultures. Ugly. Disgusting. As hunched and ominous as a trio of grim reapers.

The lead bird drifted down even a little lower, saw what he needed to see, and then floated a thermal easily back up and out of view. And that was the whole encounter. And I had to wonder what drew them near - if they were narrowing in on the scent of some dead animal in the park behind us, I wasn't aware of the vultures later returning to feast there. Could they have possibly seen Dave spread out on his floaty, spying him from some unknowable height, and circled down to check his pulse?

We'll never know - but unlike Baal, I did not find the sight of them majestic or beautiful (but having not lived her experience in the presence of actual California Condors, I will grant her her estimation of their majesty). For my experience: I want to record that sitting under three circling turkey vultures made me feel vulnerable and incredibly mortal; it's all too easy to imagine those pointy beaks daintily tearing flesh from bone - my flesh from my bone - and I'm not yet ready for the cleaning crew.

Inside Story

This book is about a life, my own, so it won't read like a novel – more like a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours. Ideally I'd like Inside Story to be read in fitful bursts, with plenty of skipping and doubling back – and of course frequent breaks and breathers. My heart goes out to those poor dabs, the professionals (editors and reviewers), who'll have to read the whole thing straight through, and against the clock. Of course I'll have to do that too, sometime in 2018 or possibly 2019 – my last inspection, before pressing SEND.

I've noted before that when it comes to memoir, I either want writers to tell me a life story that is so unusual that I learn something new about how others live, or alternately, I want them to use their personal biographies in order to illustrate something universal about all of us; either give me some new knowledge or unveil something relatable. That's it. With Inside Story, Martin Amis doesn't satisfy my (admittedly personal, perhaps unfairly limited) brief regarding memoir, and despite his reminder throughout that this is actually a novel, it reads like a celebrity autobiography; and a frequently dull and self-indulgent one at that. I appreciate the space that Amis devotes to the passing of his closest friends, I like his reflections on the craft of writing, and I suppose it has value for “Martin Amis scholars”, but I cringed every time the narrative returned to Amis' relationships with women (and particularly so with “the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps”, as described in the publisher's blurb; what a creepy and exploitative relationship that seemed, and especially as dissected with Amis' pals), and as for the rest (Amis' thoughts on politics and religion and literature), not much is sticking with me a few days after finishing this. I can see how Inside Story might be more engaging for another reader, but it didn't really work for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

“Yes, that's the way to go about it,” said my pal Salman (oh, and I apologise in advance for all the name-dropping. You'll get used to it. I had to. And it's not name-dropping. You're not name-dropping when, aged five, you say, “Dad”).

Good line, that – and there are, admittedly, plenty of good lines to be found here. Essentially, Inside Story seems to be about how Amis was shaped by the most important relationships in his life – not only did he grow up in a literary household (his father and stepmother, the successful novelists Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, were often visited by the celebrated poet Philip Larkin), but Martin Amis' own circle of friends included such heavyweights as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and his BFFs Christopher Hitchens and Saul Bellow. If some combination of these men represent a Holy Trinity of influence, then certainly poor Phoebe Phelps played the part of a doomed Magdalene – not the kind of girl one marries, but also not the kind of girl who disappears from history. Whether discussing Zionism with Bellow in Israel or atheism with Hitchens during his chemotherapy treatments, Amis uses this book to illustrate the development of his own ideas. As an example regarding his literary beliefs:

The first serious life-writer – come to think of it – was someone Saul and I always argued about (Saul having the higher opinion of him): David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930). D.H.L. started it and he started much else. In actuarial terms Lawrence (like Larkin, one of his greatest admirers) died without issue; culturally, though, he left behind him two of the biggest children ever to be strapped into highchairs: the sexual revolution and life-writing.

Amis discusses, admiringly, the work of many male writers, but other than his second wife's nonfiction and his stepmother's novels and perceptive advice, women writers don't come off so well – Virginia Woolf is evoked (more than once) only to describe her antisemitism, Alice Munro avoided contractions to the detriment of her short stories, and Iris Murdoch seems to only come up so Amis can compare her documented descent into dementia against Bellow's final years (to be fair, Graham Greene is also dismissed as a hack who “could hardly hold a pen”). I've previously stated that the continuing thread about Phoebe Phelps made me uncomfortable, but so did all of Amis' recounted discussions with Hitchens about his sex life. On the other hand, Amis was consistently charming when writing about his wives and children.

Inside Story includes some “essayistic detours” on craftsmanship and offers such advice as to avoid writing about the three great flow breakers in fiction – “certain sizable and familiar zones of human existence that seem naturally immune to the novelist's art” – sex, religion, and the recounting of dreams. And there is much on training the inner ear to avoid unnecessary clunkiness (as the tone deaf Graham Greene apparently indulged in):

When I'm at my desk I spend most of my time avoiding little uglinesses (rather than striving for great beauties). If you can lay down a verbal surface free of asperities (bits of lint and grit), you will already be giving your readers some modest subliminal pleasure; they will feel well disposed to the thing before them without quite knowing why.

(And I will happily agree that there is a pleasure to be found in reading Amis line-by-line.) To achieve this proper flow, Amis writes with a thesaurus and a dictionary at hand in order to find the exact right words (“just to vary the vowel sounds and to avoid unwanted alliterations”), but despite writing that choosing purposefully obscure words is a habit that immature authors eventually grow out of, Amis sent me often to my own dictionary looking up words like cafard or titivate; writing about a couple of Phoebe's friends, he notes their “talk was unswervingly footling and plutocentric” and I can't even find a definition for “plutocentric” (but, of course, can construct the meanings from its roots). It just feels so indulgent to decry the obscure while also employing it.

The book in your hands calls itself a novel – and it is a novel, I maintain. So I want to assure the reader that everything that follows in this chapter is verifiably non-fiction.

And ultimately, it feels so indulgent for Amis to keep insisting that this is a novel when it doesn't read like one. Inside Story didn't appeal to my tastes in memoir or novels, but once again, I'll acknowledge that it might be more engaging to others.

Land-Water-Sky / Ndè-Tı-Yat’a

The Medicine Man brought Mǫzhįą on a spiritual journey that led them far beyond the valley. As they travelled, the Medicine Man told Mǫzhįą many stories of the land, water and sky legends that had existed from time immemorial. All the while the Medicine Man gave offerings to the land and water in return. It took three days for the Medicine Man to tell Mǫzhįą what he needed to know. By the time the Medicine Man fell silent, they had reached their destination, a large island at the tip of the north arm of the great lake.

Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Tı-Yat’a is the debut novel from Dene author Katłįà, and as she writes in her Acknowledgments at the end of this book, her inspiration was to honour her people's tradition of storytelling – suppressed for too long – by adding her voice to that long tradition “with honesty and meaning”. Set in the Northwest Territories – and covering the events in that area from “Time Immemorial” through to the year 2030 – Katłįà focusses her story on legendary characters, both good and evil, and their interactions with both the first peoples of the land and those who came later. In the tradition of Cherie Dimaline and Eden Robinson, Katłįà imagines a world in which myths from Indigenous storytelling walk among modern humans, and often, the results are hair-raising. I wouldn't be being honest if I didn't note that the writing can be unpolished here (both the small and the large; in the sentences and in the overall structure), but I was always interested to know what would happen next and open to learning whatever Katłįà wanted to share with her readers. (Note: I read an ARC from NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Three stars is a rounding up.)

Once under, she was a child again swimming in the middle of the lake off the shore from where she once skipped rocks. She could see her grandfather waving at her from dry land, trying to get her attention, his arm moving slowly as if he too were underwater.

He walked into the shallows towards her, but a flash of lightning hit, and suddenly she was in the back of the police car that came to take her away from home. She yelled and banged on the window as she watched her grandfather swim out to save her.

Another flash of lightning, and Deèyeh was back in the treacherous current, deep underwater, being pulled deeper by a force much stronger than the current alone. She opened her eyes to see that she was looking into the eyes of the ancient creature that lived in the deepest part of the lake.

An ancient feud between Yat'a (the last Sky Spirit to be brought down to Earth) and the shapeshifting Nąą́hgą has lasted into the present day, with shadowy beasts lurking in the woods, ghostly apparitions appearing on the highway at night, and a charming man with hypnotic copper eyes overcoming young women's defences. Throughout the ages, we see how the people of the (fictional) Háyorîla Nation on the shores of the great northern lake interact with threats (mythic and actual), and there is timely commentary made about colonisation, the foster care system, land claims, and more. No matter what time frame we were in, I always believed in the world that Katłįà created.

Growing up, her parents would often bring Lafì to Nàejì Island, off the north shore of the lake just a few miles from where they lived. Her parents told her that the island was a sacred site where her ancestors once lived. They taught her the ancient stories that warned of the dangers of both man and beast, but she never paid attention to the important teachings. Now she understood that those stories were a warning for her to be careful about who she let into her life.

Ultimately, Land-Water-Sky is about the importance of storytelling to a people's culture – whether to establish a continuity of habitation for a land claim, to preserve a threatened language, or to teach a people who they are – and to that end, I appreciate that Katłįà both used an organic sprinkling of the Dene language in her work and “drew on the knowledge of the supernatural occurrences that are found in the North – to this day – if one dares to look”. Mahsi cho for the learning.

The Beguiling

It was only when he came to in the hospital three days later to find his hands amputated that Zoltán recalled what movie the whole sordid incident had reminded him of: But in The Beguiled, a bizarre 1970 Civil War gothic, Clint Eastwood's horndog Yankee soldier who wakes up to discover both his legs missing got what audiences thought he deserved: the Valkyrie-like wrath of woman scorned.

I remember reading Zsuzsi Gartner's previous book of short stories (Better Living Through Plastic Explosives) and loving it, so was excited to see what she would do with the novel form here in The Beguiling; in my experience, authors don't always excel equally at both formats. And Gartner pulls off a slick trick here: By conceiving of a fascinating and original frame story, the main character meets a bunch of other people who essentially tell her a wide range of beguiling short stories, and we readers get to have our cake and eat it too. And to be sure, the frame story felt increasingly tricksy for tricks' sake to me as it went along, but it eventually got to a place that proves the entire tale couldn't have been told any other way. Funny, bizarre, thoughtful, and jolting; this was a weird and satisfying ride. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

If this were merely another story of domestic or maternal discontent, there would be little point in dredging back through it all as if dragging a lake for a long-decomposed body. Oh, wretched me oh my, first-world problems, smart women bad choices, blah blah blah. Leave it to the fishes, the bottom-dwellers with their prickly whiskers. Leave the bones in peace to settle into the silt and accumulate barnacles.

Lucy's favourite person growing up was her cousin Zoltán – a soft-bodied, perennially friend-zoned lover of old movies and all around good boy – and shortly after Kinkos, the laughing yoga instructor, the Thing and its aftermath, strangers started approaching Lucy and telling her their darkest secrets: some criminal, some merely embarrassing, Lucy somehow becoming “a confession magnet, a lay confessor. A flesh-and-blood Wailing Wall.” Whereas Gartner's earlier book was (as I remember) a collection of strange stories centered on Canadian suburbia, the stories that the confessants share in The Beguiling are more global: still strange, still plenty of Canadiana, but also set in places like Denmark, Ireland, and Australia, too. We follow along with Lucy for thirteen years into her future, witnessing how the confessions – as much as she grows to crave them – disrupt her life, and despite me not wanting to give away any spoilers, I think I can add how delighted I was when the ending made me reconsider everything that had happened up to that point.

“If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was.” Maybe it's like that with unicorns and boyfriends, but words, once loosed into the world, become wild animals. When you flee from a wolf, you run into a bear.

With a blend of the surreal and the Gothic, words matter here. Gartner invokes the mythic and folkloric (Little Red Riding Hood, mermaids, the cave witch) and recurring, curious themes like wabi-sabi (that's how the light gets in), small men, tall women, and missing limbs. She makes social commentary:

These days the erasure of history, once the province of despots, is easily available to anyone with a Twitter account and a sense of outrage. The past is fair game all over the political spectrum; history in flux, as mutable as the future. The past a choose-your-own-adventure story. Each of your lives a deck of cards shuffled and reshuffled until the ace of spades turns up. If you're playing poker, that is, and not solitaire. If you can afford a deck of cards.

And conjures imagery that resonated deep within me:

The heart beats on the wrong side: somatic dyslexia. The spine a winding railway track unconnected to any stations. The hips smart as if bruised at the bone, but the skin remains unmarked. Bones themselves porous as coral skeletons. The freighted liver, a bulbous fangtooth fish. And the rest of my organs like more of those creatures found in the darkest depths of the oceans: the gulper eel, the baleful black sea devil, the tubeworms and other abyssal giants.

I don't want to risk spoilers by saying too much more but will reiterate that this novel is a little twisted but paid off in the end for me.

Further to the added remarks on my last post (on a book about Jung's theory of synchronicity and Mallory's offense when I explained that the author's stance was to dismiss the phenomenon as unscientific), Mallory came into the room where I was reading The Beguiling just as I had read:

Were these synchronicities turning out to be significant or was that too Jungian a way of looking at it? Was I merely in the grip of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (in which Baader and Meinhof themselves made cameos!) or was there something to be gleaned from these chance encounters – a purpose to my bearing witness?

Now, just like last time, Mal had come to fetch me to do yoga, and when I read her that passage, she said, "I'm not saying it means anything, but the theme of today's practise is 'believe'." As it turns out (and here's the only place I'll put a spoiler for this book), synchronicity and multiverses and "reshuffling the deck" is ultimately the underpinning of The Beguiling, so that's pretty weird to unintentionally read these two books back to back. I'm not saying it means anything, but...

The consolations of quantum physics or the consolations of religion: these are among our limited choices. But isn't any consolation a persistent illusion we force ourselves to believe because the alternative involves staring into the void?

Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect

Consider the idea of synchronicity: a term coined in 1930 by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung as an “acausal connecting principle.” Though he'd attribute the idea to dinner discussions with Einstein about relativity, along with personal analyses of dreams, coincidences, and cultural archetypes, the notion took flight after discussions with (Linus) Pauli about novel aspects of quantum physics that distinguished it from classical mechanistic determinism. In retrospect, Jung's insights about the need for a new acausal principle in science were brilliant and prescient. Nonetheless his low threshold for accepting anecdotal evidence about “meaningful coincidences” without applying statistical analysis to rule out spurious correlations was a serious failing in his work. Jung trusted his intuitive sense of when things were connected. But in light of the mind's capacity to fabricate false linkages at times, pure intuition on its own is not genuine science.

”We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here,” said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

Like Carl Jung (apparently), I was fascinated by the basic concepts of quantum mechanics the first time they were introduced to me and, like Jung, I have dabbled in misinterpreting what the theory has to say about how I, and all of human consciousness, fit into this illusory world. Who doesn't see themselves as the focal-point of a me-centric cosmos, solipsistically parsing coincidence as personalised messages from the universe itself? (Surely, not just me?) Although I haven't read any of Jung's works (despite being intrigued by his concepts of universal archetypes, the shadow, and the collective unconscious whenever I come across them), I have also long been fascinated by (what I understand of) Jung's theory of synchronicity – in the sense that I don't really believe in it as an immutable force of nature, but can't shake the feeling that it operates in my own life. To be sure: I'm a dabbler, a magpie of ideas, and as Synchronicity appeared to relate scientifically to some of my more esoteric interests, I suspected it would be right in my wheelhouse. And it was. But it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Starting at the very dawn of recorded scientific theory, author Paul Halpern traces the history of thought on cause and effect; and in particular, how that concept relates to light and the evolution of thought as to whether its speed has a definite, and unbreakable, upper limit. I loved everything about this historical journey – and especially loved learning how, throughout the ages, rational scientists have been unwilling to give up their more irrational beliefs in the face of indisputably contradictory evidence – and even when the narrative arrives at relativity, collapsing wave functions, and quantum entanglement, Halpern's writing is clear and explanatory enough to have not gone over my head. Ending with modern quantum theory (and seemingly acausal connections that have nothing to do with the universe sending me messages), Synchronicity is a fascinating read, beginning to end; not what I expected from the publisher's blurb but right up my alley nonetheless. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The advent of quantum mechanics was jolting for those traditionalists who used physics to divide the world into two parts: things that, at least in principle, might objectively be measured, on the one hand, and intangible phenomena, on the other. The latter category included things such as consciousness, the sense of free will (even if it turned out to be illusory), ethics, aesthetics, and other abstractions that seemed hard to quantify but were universally accepted to be real, along with all manner of purported supernatural and spiritual entities, from divine beings to ghosts, that attracted some scientifically minded individuals, but certainly not all. Certainly, thanks to movements such as psychic determinism, it had become fashionable in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries for some thinkers to argue that eventually everything will find objective, mechanistic explanation.

It's common knowledge that in our earliest days, there was no distinction made between the natural and the supernatural; it was perfectly logical to believe that the sun was being driven across the sky every day in a golden chariot. And when later thinkers began trying to separate the mundane from the divine, they still allowed their observations of what is to be coloured by their preconceptions of what ought to be; a prejudice that seems to dog us to this day. The Pythagoreans believed that numbers and geometry were the fundamental building blocks of the universe; leading to a study of numerology and a search for the “harmony of the spheres”. Plato also embraced an idealised view of the cosmos, and rather than seeking to make conclusions about reality based on observation, he endeavored to intuit its underlying perfection; what he called “forms”. And while Aristotle did embrace a type of observation-based scientific method, he described the solar system as geocentric with the sun, moon, and planets revolving around the Earth in circular orbits (although this doesn't perfectly jibe with their observed paths) because this was aesthetically pleasing to him; an unsupported idea that then persisted through the Middle Ages and the invention of the telescope. Johannes Kepler (who supplemented his income with writing horoscopes, as did many astronomers throughout history) used Tycho Brahe's breakthrough astronomical observations to create a heliocentric model of the universe, but was distracted by his quest to fit the five Platonic solids within the orbits of the five (known) planets. When Albert Einstein's theories of relativity opened the door to quantum entanglement (acausal, faster than light, events that can apparently even reverse the arrow of time), he refused to accept the logic of the math, dismissing it as “spooky action at a distance” that offended his own sensibilities. In more recent times, physicists have been intrigued by the Sommerfeld fine structure constant (the “sacred” inverse of 137, or very nearly that number) that some believed proved...something significant. Even today: “Although experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and elsewhere have yet to provide a hint of evidence for supersymmetry, many theorists remain optimistic, largely because of the concept's mathematical elegance.” I loved all of these stories as a connecting narrative of how scientific thought has developed over the millennia, but the most fascinating story that Halpern tells is about the strange collaboration between Carl Jung and Linus Pauli.

Pauli would cling in his later years to the visions of nature he held dear. Hardheaded when it came to judging others' theories, he remained emotionally committed to the idea that symmetry guides the universe. In a kind of cosmic seesaw all things must balance: spin up accompanied spin down, positive charge goes hand in hand with negative charge, synchronicity offers a counterpart to causality, back-in-time mimics forward-in-time, and mirror reflection echoes the original. In the traditions of Pythagoras, Plato, and Kepler, such was the symmetric world he cherished – a flawless, precious crystal.

I would love to read a book that just focuses on the relationship between Jung and Pauli – each of these seminal thinkers taking just enough from each other's theories to misinform their own ideas. That the misanthropic Pauli benefited from Jungian psychotherapy is a good thing – and I don't think it's too weird that Pauli often dreamed the solutions to the problems that deviled him in his waking hours; don't we all? – but the fact that he was the cause of the “Pauli effect” (apparently, sensitive lab equipment would break down every time Pauli even entered a university's science building) would naturally lead the great physicist to look for a justification for synchronicity at the quantum level. And Jung understood just enough of modern physics at the “colloquial level” to believe he had found the missing link between mind and matter – opening the door to some of today's most scientific sounding pseudoscience.

The cosmos is simply not a friendly place for know-it-alls; rather, like a James Joyce novel, it invites partial understanding.

I don't know if I've done Synchronicity justice in this review – these are simply the parts that seemed most shiny and collectible to my magpie mind – but I'll reiterate that I found this to be a totally fascinating, well-written, and educational read.

Mallory sat down beside me when I first started to write this review, and I must have had my eyebrows knit in concentrated thought because she asked, "What's that face for?"

I tried to explain that I felt like I had a tough line to toe with this review - that what most interested me in the book wasn't necessarily the raw science, but I didn't want to give the impression that I didn't understand (or accept) the science. When I then told her that the book is (more or less) about synchronicity and how Carl Jung learned just enough about quantum mechanics to give this pseudoscientific theory a veneer of settled science, and also about how Linus Pauli's ideas became contaminated by his dabbling with Jung's woo-woo, she was a bit offended.

"You know, Mom," she said, "a lot of what I've learned from Wicca is about harnessing the power of synchronicity. About sending energy out into the universe and receiving it back in meaningful ways. You know, like karma and connecting with nature's hidden powers."

I told her that as this book was written by a physicist, it comes from the viewpoint that synchronicity isn't a verifiable phenomenon, but also agreed that I can't help but recognise the power of coincidence when I see it in my own life.

Not long after, I interrupted my writing to do a yoga session with Mal - something we've been trying to do together as much as possible while still in isolation - and the theme of the day's practise was "synchronise". 

Now, that's not the same word as "synchronicity", and maybe all it does is prove how desperate the human brain is to make meaning out of random events, but when that word flashed on the screen and Mallory looked at me with raised eyebrows, all I could do was shrug and nod. Coincidence happens; and when it does, we feel the meaningfulness - and that's not easy to talk the brain out of. (And in that vein, I really appreciated the narrative thread in this book of all those great thinkers who were unable to talk their own brains out of the ideas that simply felt right to them.)

Utopia Avenue

 'Utopia' means 'no place'. An avenue is a place. So is music. When we're playing well, I'm here, but elsewhere, too. That's the paradox. Utopia is unattainable. Avenues are everywhere.

I read the majority of David Mitchell's books before I started compiling reviews on Goodreads, and in my memory, they were all four or five star reads; Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas, in particular, remain in my memory as some of my all time favourite reads. So it is with a heavy sigh of disappointment that I sit down to write yet another three star review, acknowledging that if the rating seems harsh to a reader who loved Utopia Avenue, it may just be that I have been led to expect something more original and engaging from this author. (Note: I received an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

   The Kinks' “Waterloo Sunset” comes on the radio. Elf looks out at Denmark Street. Hundreds of people pass by. Reality erases itself as it rerecords itself, Elf thinks. Time is the Great Forgetter. She gets her notebook from her handbag and writes, Memories are unreliable...Art is memory made public. Time wins in the long run. Books turn to dust, negatives decay, records get worn out, civilisations burn. But as long as the art endures, a song or a view or a thought or a feeling someone once thought worth keeping is saved and stays shareable. Others can say, “I feel that too.”

Covering a short time over 1967 and 1968, Utopia Avenue recounts the early days of a famed rock/folk/blues band of that name in swinging London. Filled with real life people from the artistic scene and brimming with period detail, Mitchell nails the historical novel angle; and by creating four distinct and relatable characters to people his imagined band, Mitchell sets up an interesting scaffold upon which to hang conversations about art and immortality and how to live a life. Somehow, though, this potential didn't pay off for me – interesting things happen in the personal lives of the characters, and I liked seeing how they turned those experiences into art; I was also interested enough in seeing how the music industry works and how long and hard artists need to pay their dues to become an overnight success (yet, is there anything new in this?); but between an overabundance of real life people flitting in and out and an ultimately shoe-horned tie-in to Mitchell's uberverse (which started out fascinating and eventually disappointed me), this didn't, in the end, really feel like a book about the core characters so much as a book about the times they were moving through (And is there anything new to say about the swinging Sixties London scene? At any rate, there's nothing new here.).

To briefly (and nonspoilery) address the uberverse: You'll see some familiar characters' names here (from Marinus and Esther to the band's guitarist discovering and being inspired by one of the few extant recordings of The Cloud Atlas Sextet, composed by Robert Frobisher), but this guitarist, Jasper de Zoet, is, obviously, the most direct reference; and it starts so good. In flashback scenes to Jasper's youth, we see him confronting an experience that might be supernatural or might be mental illness, and these scenes have a real Stephen King vibe; neither the character or the reader really knows what's going on or if the danger is real or hallucinatory. We eventually learn that this experience places Jasper as a hinge between the Horologists (last seen fighting their war with the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass in The Bone Clocks) and the necromancer Abbot Enomoto (last seen in the eighteenth century at the Mount Shiranui monastery in Japan's remote Kirishima Mountains, in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet),and what started so spooky eventually felt kind of lame and deliberate. (And I see that there are some reviewers who say they've read Utopia Avenue as their first David Mitchell, which is a total shame; I loved The Thousand Autumns and its mindblowing climax is given away here in a few explanatory lines.)

Line-by-line, there was much interesting writing. I liked when a character observed (in reference to a man blind to his wife's illicit affair), “An ounce of perception, a pound of obscure.” Or when Jasper and his photographer girlfriend are developing some photos:

   As they watch, a ghost of Elf emerges on the paper, in a state of rapt concentration at Pavel's Steinway. Mecca has the same expression now. Jasper remarks, “It's like a lake giving up its dead.”
   “The past, giving up a moment.”

But more than a few times, Mitchell put in some weirdly clunker lines that made me wonder if they were meant to be ironic, as when it is noted, “The silence in the studio was silent.” Or this spat between Elf and her boyfriend:

   Bruce sighed like a patient grown-up. “Why do you do this?”
   Elf folded her arms like a wronged woman. “Do what?”

If this was my first time with Mitchell, I might have thought him a bit amateurish, which he isn't – which then makes me wonder if those unartful lines were deliberate – but if so, why? As for the real life characters – they were hit and miss for me. I didn't recognise the puppyish energy given to the still unknown David Bowie, but I did like Rogers Waters being descibed as having “a smile that is both cloak and dagger”; I thought it was too forced to have Elf discuss sexism in the music industry with Janis Joplin during a very brief tête-à-tête, but I did like having David Crosby explain how it was commercialism that killed the Summer of Love. I thought it was sensitively explored how Jasper seems to be on the autism spectrum (and constantly needs to use contextual clues to determine the intent of other speakers: Irony? Humour? Sarcasm?), but I didn't know how authentic it felt to have him comparing psychoses with a just met Brian Jones or having Jasper bumping into John Lennon under a banquet table at a garden party as they both look for their “fookin' minds”. Protest rallies and police riots; free love and expensive consequences; gay rights and the patriarchy; Ho Chi Min and pirate radio; sex, drugs, and long-haired rock and roll – it's all in here and it all seems to suffocate the narrative.

   “Music is vibrations in the air, only. Why do these vibrations create physical responses? It's a mystery to me.”
   “How music works – the theory, the practise – is learnable. Why it works, God only knows. Maybe not even God.”
   “So, photography is the same. Art is paradox. It is no sense but it is sense.”

So, I'll end on that quote because it kind of says what my problem is with Utopia Avenue: I don't think it really works, and especially when compared with the Mitchell books that worked so well for me, this one doesn't feel like art.

And although it didn't have a home in my Goodreads review, I also want to note my bemusement at Mitchell writing that one Canadian character grew up with "Jokes about Newfies and Nova Scotians". Sure, there was a time when Newfie jokes were as common as snow at Christmas here in Canada (now, apparently, verboten), but although my Dad was born in Nova Scotia and he and my Mum retired back down there, and although I have lived in four provinces from east to west across this country, and visited most of the rest, I have never heard one joke about people from Nova Scotia. Not that the Bluenosers haven't earned some ribbing, as much as any Newfie ever did.

Humankind: A Hopeful History

An idealist can be right her whole life, and still be dismissed as naive. This book is intended to change that. Because what seems unreasonable, unrealistic, and impossible today, can turn out to be inevitable tomorrow. It is time for a new realism. It is time for a new view of humankind.

With the subtitle “A Hopeful History”, Humankind is exactly the kind of optimistic read I think I needed right now. With so much negative going on, I keep hearing, “What do you expect? People are the worst, a plague on the Earth!” And not only does that not solve anything, but it's so fatalistic as to suggest that nothing short of total human extinction could solve anything. With this new review of human history, Rutger Bregman not only busts a bunch of myths (and especially those based on social science experiments) about how rotten we humans are at the core, but by adding in stories of human decency and exploring some better ways of setting up entrenched institutions, Bregman shines a light on a more hopeful way forward. If the “nocebo effect” (If we believe most people can't be trusted, that's how we'll treat each other, to everyone's detriment) is as powerful as Bregman suggests, then a book like this that proves that humans are not basically evil is the first step towards building the society that works better for everyone. Just what I needed. (Note: I read an ARC from NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There is a persistent myth that by their very nature, humans are selfish, aggressive, and quick to panic. It's what Dutch biologist Frans de Waal likes to call “Veneer theory”: the notion that civilization is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation. In actuality, the opposite is true. It's when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.

For most of this study, Bregman reviews what famous thinkers, philosophers, social psychology researchers, and recent pop historians have written; often finding source material that contradicts what we've been led to believe their evidence shows. Bregman starts with the opposite philosophical poles of Hobbes (“The man who asserted that civil society alone could save us from our baser instincts”) and Rousseau (“Who declared that in our heart of hearts we're all good” and that “'civilization' is what ruins us”). Bregman decidedly comes out on the side of Rousseau (and from more recent times, on the side of Yuval Noah Harari of Sapiens fame), who all believe that the dawn of agriculture was the downfall of happy human co-existence (and Bregman even takes issue with Steven Pinker and his hopeful books about how violence has decreased over time because, according to Bregman, there's zero evidence to support the widely accepted idea that nomadic/hunter-gatherer societies were anything but peaceful). To counter the dim, but popular, view of uncontrolled humanity in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Bregman recounts the true story of a group of six Tongan boys who survived on a deserted island for over a year by creating a totally egalitarian society; to dispute the notion that men are jingoistic warmongers, he shares the incredible stats about how few soldiers in the major wars actually fired their weapons; to try and explain why it was the comparatively weak and smaller brained Homo sapiens who survived out of several competing hominids in prehistory, Bregman uses a recent study on the domestication of foxes to suggest that it came down to “survival of the friendliest”. If nothing else, Humankind is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection of stories.

I'm going to be honest. Originally, I wanted to bring Milgram's experiments crashing down. When you're writing a book that champions the good in people, there are several big challengers on your list. William Golding and his dark imagination. Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene. Jared Diamond and his demoralizing tale of Easter Island. And of course Philip Zimbardo, the world's most well-known psychologist. But topping my list was Stanley Milgram. I know of no other study as cynical, as depressing, and at the same time as famous as his experiments at the shock machine.

So, not only does Bregman confront Golding, Diamond, and Dawkins (actually, although I had never heard this, apparently Dawkins has disavowed his early notion of the “selfish gene”), but Bregman also spends a lot of the book writing about Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's shock experiments. I remember learning about Zimbardo and Milgram in more than one Psych course – as they both demonstrated something fundamentally awful and important about us humans – but I don't remember ever being told that Zimbardo was basically a fraud who manipulated his process and his results (but sure loved the fame that followed) and it hasn't become commonly known that while, yes, test subjects under Milgram were convinced to administer ever-increasing levels of painful shocks to unseen confederates of the experimenter, the results are much more nuanced than that (for example, subjects uniformly refused to continue if they were ordered to administer the shock instead of being encouraged to do it for the good of the experiment; believing that they were being helpful caused most to continue, against their own better natures, in the name of doing something good for society at large). Apparently, these experiments are still being taught because they seem to confirm what we all know – that people are just this thin veneer of civilisation away from brutality – and that's why we don't trust each other, and that's why we allow our governments to use lethal force against other countries and our own fellow citizens.

Myths are so insidious. I remember reading somewhere recently something like, “What do you think that dude on Easter Island was thinking as he cut down his island's last tree? Could he not see that he was literally cutting down his own civilisation?” This was written in the context of climate change – and why are humans so self-interested as to continue to do those specific things that will lead to our own doom – so it was fascinating to me to read here that, although deforestation is the accepted explanation for the collapse of the Easter Island society, Bregman didn't need to dig too deeply into the evidence to discover that the islanders didn't cut down their vast forests (as Malcolm Gladwell reported and which everyone then accepted as fact) to the very last tree, but that an invasive tree rat was carried to Easter Island on Peruvian slave ships: slavers took the healthiest people and unknowingly left the rats (which had no natural predator on the island) and of course their civilisation collapsed.

Other myths that deserve to be broken: The “bystander effect”. We've probably all heard about the murder of Kitty Genovese – killed on the doorstep of her NYC apartment building while thirty-some people watched and figured someone else would call the cops – but it turns out that her murder didn't happen that way (and when someone tried to correct the official account, the leading article's writer at The New York Times refused, saying that positive details would ruin the story). Also, the “broken windows” theory of crime control: Sure, the stats for serious crime went down when this practise was adopted in NYC, but it turns out that undue pressure was put on beat cops to make massive arrests for small misdemeanors and to discourage the reporting of major crimes (and apparently it was Zimbardo, once again, who did the one flawed experiment that served as the basis for this theory?) And also the notion that mass incarceration is the only way to deal with criminals because softer rehab options don't work (the sociologist who inspired this practise, Robert Martinson, eventually killed himself when he saw how his conclusions were applied; apparently, this former civil rights activist wanted to prove that all punishment was ineffective and “everyone would realize prisons were pointless places and should all be shut down”.)

And why these myths matter today: As Bregman notes, the broken window strategy for policing is a racist system:

Data show that a mere 10 percent of people picked up for misdemeanors are white. Meanwhile, there are black teens that get stopped and frisked on a monthly basis – for years – despite never having committed an offense. Broken windows has poisoned relations between law enforcement and minorities, saddled untold poor with fines they can't pay, and also had fatal consequences, as in the case of Eric Garner, who died in 2014 while being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes.

In an earlier story, Bregman recounts the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – when, despite terrible newstories of opportunistic murders, rape, and looting – it turns out that most residents acted with “courage and charity”. Even so, first responders were also hearing the stories of a city in chaos – the thin veneer had been breached and 72,000 troops were called in – and “on Danziger Bridge on the city's east side, police opened fire on six innocent, unarmed African Americans, killing a seventeen-year-old boy and a mentally disabled man of forty”. The myths we tell ourselves about human nature matter, and more insidiously, we shouldn't allow the myths perpetuated by trauma-hungry media (or other entrenched institutions) form the entirety of our perceived reality.

Could this be the thing that the Enlightenment – and, by extension, our modern society – gets wrong? That we continually operate on a mistaken model of human nature? We saw that some things can become true merely because we believe in them – that pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When modern economists assumed that people are innately selfish, they advocated policies that fostered self-serving behavior. When politicians convinced themselves that politics is a cynical game, that's exactly what it became. So now we have to ask: Could things be different? Can we use our heads and harness rationality to design new institutions? Institutions that operate on a wholly different view of human nature? What if schools and businesses, cities and nations expect the best of people instead of presuming the worst?

In the last section of Humankind, Bregman tells the stories of various institutions (a factory, a school, a healthcare service, a prison, a municipal government) that found ways to do away with bureaucracy and middle managers, and instead, empowered individuals to follow in the direction of their own instincts and motivation. His examples sound Utopian – if you treat people like they're good and smart enough to do things right, they will – but they don't sound universally applicable; still, it was hopeful to end on such an optimistic note. Maybe we'll get there.

I wrote about a lot here, but the book contains even more stories, experiments, and busted myths. I suppose because it contains so much, Bregman couldn't follow every strand out to my full satisfaction, and I found some of his quirks annoying (and especially, after suggesting we thrived through survival of the friendliest, Bregman continually refers to humanity as “Homo puppy”; dumb), but the good far outweighs the quibblesome; four stars is a rounding up.