Sunday, 15th August, Semliki Time: 10:04pm
Sundays, at Semliki, are the day of rest. Rest means time to read and this afternoon I finally finished War and Peace , something that I feel is nearly akin to an African coming of age ritual. Sure, I wasn’t circumcised with a blunt, stone implement and, certainly, the elders didn’t scar my forehead with ceremonial cowskin blades and send me off into the bush to bleed for a month, but finishing War and Peace , I feel, is still at least something of an accomplishment. Having said that, I must profess that I actually really enjoyed it. Tolstoy has a wonderful ability to describe exactly how people act and what motivates them, without prescription and without judgment. His stories have villains, but they are not treated as such and nor are they demonised. Time after time, he perfectly captures the inconsistencies and minor hypocrisies common to human behaviour, without criticism and with an immaculate attention to detail. Okay, so sentences like “as women are apt to think” cropped up a couple more times than I was comfortable with but, otherwise, the man (or maybe the translator, I don’t speak Russian…) is without parallel. Onto the criticism…
The greatest tragedy of War and Peace , ignoring Bolkonsky, is that in the last volume and the epilogue, Tolstoy starts forgetting about the characters he illustrates so well. He focuses less and less on the Rostovs and the Bezukhovs and concentrates more and more of an over-egged and, at times, logically inconsistent criticism of the “great men” theory of history. Its not that I disagree with his argument (In short: Great men are as much subject to the ebb and flow of history as the subjects they supposedly “command”), it’s just that he makes the same point over and over and over again. At the start of volume four I was only passing interested in the epistemological fallacies of the French historian ‘Thiers’. By the end I passionately hated Thiers, not for his mistaken view of the forces driving the Napoleonic wars, but for causing Tolstoy to abandon the characters that I held so dear in lieu of his ceaseless and ultimately banal historiograpical equivocations. The actual ‘novel’ itself, that is, the story of the characters, is abandoned a full thirty or so pages before the book actually ends. I could have cried. Yes War and Peace is, by and large fantastic, yes Tolstoy makes some cogent and interesting points, but ultimately Anna Karenin is a far better novel. It’s among my favourite books, so if you’re ever deciding between the two, pick up Anna K without hesitating... unless you’re reading W&P for the sake of having read it, in which case, shame on you*. For that matter, if you have to choose between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the count is the better author, no questions asked.
Continuing in the critical vein but departing somewhat from the lofty heights of classic Russian literature, earlier Alex and I used to last smidgen of the day’s solar electricity to watch Aliens with the camp staff. Aliens is the follow-up to the fantastic Alien, the classic 1979 sci-fi horror flick that gave gory, parasitic birth to a whole series of sequels and spin-offs. To be frank, I was more than a little disappointed. Where Alien was a wonderfully paced, fantastically eerie and perfectly executed sci-fi horror story about a woman’s love for her cat, Aliens was an awkward, badly written and horribly predictable, marginally-above-par action film. Where the terse dialogue and shaky camera in Alien made things seem more real and, thus, scarier, in Aliens it rendered everything predictable and borderline kitsch. The aliens themselves were no longer ominous but just ‘a-bit-of-a-nuisance’ and the surreptitious workings of the mysterious ‘corporation’ were no longer sinister but painfully conventional. It's not that it was ‘bad’ - it was certainly entertaining – it's just that it wasn’t ‘good’. Having said that, Edson, Justice, Moses and Moses were very taken and will doubtless be talking about aliens for days to come.
*He says, with only the smallest nugget of hypocrisy.
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