Book Review : The Broken Shore

The author of The Broken Shore , Peter Temple, was born in South Africa. Temple arrived in Sydney in 1980 and worked as a journalist, later moving to Melbourne to edit Australian Society magazine. He then turned to teaching playing an important role in establishing the prestigious Professional Writing and Editing course at RMIT University. In 1995, he retired from teaching to became a self-employed editor and full-time writer.

I found his explanation, to Romana Koval, for leaving teaching interesting, it goes without saying that I did not make the same choice:

At the point in which you are old enough to be the father of your students you should leave the room immediately. It's not a good moment. ... Until that point arrives you see yourself as primus inter pares, just the leader of the pack, and after that you start seeing yourself as some sort of patriarchal figure. In other words, they're looking at you, 'This guy is as old as my dad,' and I found that quite disconcerting. So as soon as I became conscious of it I stopped.

Temple's previous books include: The Iron Rose, Shooting Star and In The Evil Day. He developed a character called Jack Irish who is a lawyer, gambler and private eye. The Jack Irish books are Bad Debts, Black Tide, Dead Point and White Dog.

I first became aware of Temple and this book when it was discussed on The First Tuesday Book Club on ABC Television.

Another ABC book show is Ramona Koval's Book Show on Radio National. Koval interviewed Peter Temple on the show and summarised the plot as follows:

The Broken Shore ... is set in a small coastal community which in summer is a holiday village and in winter reverts to its bare bones. This spells development money, old rivalries, small town intrigues, and a turf war. The poor Aboriginal community in the vicinity provides a background setting for racism, blame and breakouts of violence.

Into this mix walks Joe Cashin, who was born here but went away to become a city homicide cop. After an injury on the job, he is sent back to the town to be a country cop, to restore his family home and to walk his pair of poodles - and to listen to opera and read books by Conrad, Mailer and Truman Capote. Then a prominent local man is bashed and left for dead.

This is a crime novel, its hero is a detective and it does involve a crime. As well it won the UK Crime Writers Association's prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award, also known as the Gold Dagger, claiming £20,000 ($A47,400) in the process.

In winning the award Temple is in top company as previous winners include Patricia Cornwell, Dick Francis, Ian Rankin, John Le Carre and Ruth Rendell.

The Broken Shore transcends the genre though with its exploration of character and setting, and its beautiful descriptive writing. It is a literary work masquerading as a crime novel.

Temple's major aim with the novel was to set it in a small seaside town, with the central character returning after building a career in the city to find that all the rottenness of the city could be found in this small town where he grew up. This required a more complex evocation of the rural community that is usually found in crime novels. The following is taken from a longer description of the town, pp 58 - 60.

A fishing boat was coming in, heading for the entrance. ... Just six boats still fished out of Port Monro, bringing in crayfish and a few boxes of fish ...

He drove along two sides of the business block, past the two supermarkets, the three real-estate agents, three doctors, two law firms, the newsagent, the sports shop, the Shannon Hotel ...
In the late 1990, a city drug dealer and property developer had bought the boarded-up, gull-crapped Shannon. People still talked about a bar fight there in 1969 that needed two ambulaces from Cromarty to take the injured to hospital. ... The new owner spent more than two million dollars on the Shannon. Tradesmen took on apprentices, bought new utes, gave their wives new kitchens - the German appliances, the granite benchtops.
...
Winter setting in. He thought about summer, the town full of spoilt-rotten city children, their blond mothers, flabby fathers in boat shoes. ... The men sat in and outside the cafes, stood in the shops hands to heads, barking orders into their mobiles, pulling faces.

But the year had turned, May had come, the ice-water rain, the winds that scoured skin, and just the hardcore left - the unemployed, under-employed, unemployable, the drunk and doped, the old-age pensioners ...

Much of the book moves with the leisurely pace of literature. Temple deliberately inserted quiet moments into the book to "give it air". Often these quiet moments involve Cashin walking his dogs. He introduced the dogs in the first two paragraphs of the book"

CHASHIN WALKED around the hill, into the wind from the sea. It was cold, late autumn, last glowing leaves clinging to the liquidambers and maples his great-grandfather's brother had planted, their surrender close. He loved this time, the morning stillness, loved it more than spring.

The dogs were tiring now but still hunting the ground, noses down, taking more time to sniff, less hopeful. Then one picked up a scent and, new life in their legs, they loped for the trees, vanished.

Reading the book, it sometimes seemed like a sequel; that Cashin's injuries both physical and psychic had been chronicled in a previous book. He does mention Rai Saris a number of times before describing how his injuries were caused in a surveillance of Saris the violent criminal. We have to wait until page 192 for this information. Temple leaves material out and the reader has to fill in the gaps; the story has no beginning or end, the author just chooses an arbitrary point to start. Another way of putting it is that the book describes as Marieke Hardy noted on First Tuesday Book Club,a pocket of time.

Related to this method is that there are loose ends not 'tied up with a bow' at the conclusion of the book. There is something artificial in stories where all mysteries are resolved. A few years ago we saw the film Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray. Nothing is resolved in that film but that leaves plenty to discuss and ponder after the film is finished. The loose ends in The Broken Shore give a sense of reality to the story. There might be a sequel to this book in the offing which might through light on some of the mysteries. There have been suggestions on some websites that Temple is writing a book with some of the characters from The Broken Shore though it seems not Cashin.

In the interview with Koval Temple discussed his approach to writing the book. He said that he started by 'taking it out for a walk'. As he explained:

When I say 'take it for a walk' it's the way of getting things started. As it develops its own momentum, I'm forced to backtrack always and to go back and tidy things up and do things again. At the end I'm forced to go back and see, to my own satisfaction, that it doesn't look as if it's been taken for a walk. I want it to have cohesion and I want it to have continuity and I want the narrative to drag the reader along if possible, but it's possible to do those things in retrospect, as it were, to go back and have another stab at it. But it's about just getting the vehicle moving for me, and that I have to do in a blundering and blindfolded way. The plot will reveal itself if you nag at it long enough.

I really enjoyed this book and thoroughly recommend it

Nightfall by Asimov and BC 22 5866

In September 1941 Isaac Asimov published his short story Nightfall. (In 1990, two years before Asimov's death, he collaborated with author Robert Silverberg on a novel-length revision of the original story.)

The story was inspired by a quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

The fictional planet Lagash (Kalgash in the novel adaptation) is located in a stellar system containing six stars (Onos, Dovim, Trey, Patru, Tano, and Sitha), which keep the whole planet continuously illuminated; total darkness is unknown, as are more distant stars.

A number of observations came together from academics in different departments of Soro University which lead to a startling conclusion:

• A psychologist is studying the effects of prolonged exposure to darkness


• An archaelogist discovers evidence that civilisation has suffered multiple cyclical collapses about every 200 years


• A journalist has learned some of the ideas of the group known as the Apostles of Flame, who believe the world would be destroyed in a darkness with the appearance of Stars that unleash a torrent of fire


• An astronomer calculates that once every 2049 years when there is only one star in the sky an eclipse (by a dark moon circling the planet) will plunge Kalgash into darkness

If you haven't read the novel and you have a penchant for Science Fiction get it out of your library and have a read. The book is a psychological thriller, but the reason for my posting on it is astronomical.

The six stars in Kalgash's system are obviously very close together. The primary sun of Kalgash is about the same difference from its star as the Earth is from the Sun. The other distance mentioned is a binary system (two stars revolving around each other) that is just further away than Saturn in the Solar System. A multiple star system this compact seemed something of a stretch.

Recently a real system that is even more compact has been discovered. This is called by the exciting name, BC 22 5866, and consists of four stars.

Universe Today describes the system as follows:

The stars are paired up together into binary groupings, and then these two pairs orbit a common centre of gravity. One pair orbits each other in less than 5 days - at a distance of a mere 0.06 astronomical units (1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun). The second pair takes 55 days to complete an orbit, at a distance of 0.26 AU.

And finally, the two pairs take about 9 years to orbit one another at a distance of 5.8 AU - within the orbit of Jupiter in our own Solar System.

One AU is almost 150,000,000 kilometres, so 0.06 AU is 9,000,000 Km. Given that our sun is 1.4 million kilometres in diametre, a separation of two stars by 9 million Kms is very close. The second pair are closer than As Mercury's distance from to the Sun is 0.36 AU, the second pair of stars in BC 225866 are closer than our sun to its nearest planet.

The stars in the system are too close to be resolved in the largest telescopes available. The configuration of the BC 225866 was determined by spectroscopic methods. It will provide plenty of food for thought for theorists.

Book Review: The Mathematical Universe

The Mathematical Universe was written by William Dunham, a Professor of Mathematics at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States.

The book is subtitled: An Alphabetical Journey Through the Great Proofs, Problems and Personalities. That is as good a one sentence summary as I could concoct. Consequently there are 25 chapters (not 26 as you would expect as X and Y are covered in one chapter). This structure creates difficulties for the author as logical progression is important in maths and it is unlikely a logical mathematical structure can be worked out in the order of the alphabet. On the whole Dunham manages this dilemma well, although there are some abrupt jumps - as he admits himself. The variation in topics is interesting in itself and the level of maths is not so difficult that each chapter needs a long introduction to preliminary ideas. It is not possible to discuss the maths in detail in a book only 295 pages long anyway. He is also able to concoct some logic to the order. For instance the first chapter is about arithmetic, which is a logical place to start mathematically and the first letter of the alphabet. He manages to discuss Newton in chapter K (Knighted Newton) and follow it with Leibniz, thus discussing their dispute over priority in calculus in consecutive chapters. Chapter X - Y on the Cartesian Plane precedes chapter Z on Complex numbers.

There are many ideas in this book that could be included in a review, but one particularly struck me while I was reading it. James Garfield was elected US President in March 1881. Sadly he was assassinated a few months later, but what struck me was that had produced a clever proof of Pythagoras Theorem. One wonders if the present incumbent of the White House knows what Pythagoras Theorem is. It is certain that he wouldn't have a clue about developing a proof, and what is even sadder he wouldn't have any curiosity the theorem or a proof.

For those with an interest in maths and familiarity with maths to a secondary school standard, this is an interesting and entertaining read.

The chapters are as follows:
Arithmetic - issues regarding whole numbers are more complex than might be supposed
Bernoulli Trials - primarily Jacob Bernoulli's discoveries regarding probability but includes conflict and rivalry with brother Jonann
Circle - circumference, area and particularly the calculation of pi
Differential Calculus - basic intro to the theory, with some applications such as calculating tangents and maximums, minimum and stationary points of functins
Euler - emphasis on the stunning breadth and depth of Euler's contribution to maths
Fermat - brief biography and description of some of his contributions, including Last Theorem
Greek Geometry - contributions of Ancient Greeks with particular emphasis on Euclid (of cause)
Hypotenuse - three proofs of Pythagoras Theorem
Isoperimetric Problem - to determine, from among all curves of the same perimeter, the one enclosing the largest area
Justification - general discussion of the idea of mathematical proof
Knighted Newton - Newton's strange and prickly personality as well as his enormous contributions to mathematics and physics
Lost Leibniz - Leibniz's contributions to maths especially calculus and his conflict with Newton regarding priority of its discovery
Mathematical Personality - what type of people are attracted to mathematics?
Natural Logarithm - e (ie 2.718281828459045 ... ) and natural logarithms; theory and practice
Origins - some very early mathematical landmarss; Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese and Indian
Prime Number Theorem - the proportion of primes less than or equal to a number is roughly equal to the reciprocal of the natural logarithm of the number
Quotient - development of the number systems (natural, rational, irrational and real) from the basic arithmetic processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and extraction of roots
Russell's Paradox - Bertram Russell's paradoxical personality and life and his mathematical paradox which involved the set of all those sets that are not members of themselves
Spherical Surface - how Archimedes determined the surface area of a sphere
Trisection - the impossibility of trisecting an angle using just a compass and unmarked straight edge
Utility - brief discussion of why mathematics and the natural world should mirror each other; followed by some examples of the usefulness of maths taken from trigonometry
Venn Diagram - a simple idea that was invented before John Venn, but he got the credit
Where are the Women? - why there haven't been many women mathematicians historically and how that has changed in recent times
X - Y Plane - the Cartesian Plane
Z - complex numbers

Book Review: Imagining Numbers by Barry Mazur

The full title of the book is:
Imagining Numbers
(Particularly the square root of Minus Fifteen)
In his preface to the book Mazur states that the book is "written for people who have no training in mathematics ... but who may wish to experience an act of mathematical imagining and to consider how such an experience compares with the imaginative work involved in reading and understanding a phrase in a poem." A major aim of the book then is to draw analogies between the imaginative process of mathematics and poetry.

Mazur returns regularly to parts of the tone poem "Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are" by John Ashbery. In pondering the inventors of writing Ashbery writes:

To what purpose did they cross-hatch so effectively, so that the luminous durface that was underneath is transformed into another, also luminous but so shifting and so alive with suggestiveness that it is like quicksand, to take a step there would be to fall through the fragile net of uncertainties into the bog of certainty ...

I would like some of the "bog of certainty" in Mazur's description of the relationship between poetical and literary imagining and the mathematical variety. I have an interest in poetry and literature on the one hand and mathematics and science on the other, but if Mazur provides an explanation of the relationship between imagining in the humanities and the sciences then it is beyond my ken. This book can be seen as a contribution to breaking down the division between the two cultures described by C. P. Snow - the Humanities and the Sciences. Snow might have overstated his case but something of a division still exists. Even if the book does not finally succeed in drawing a convincing analogy between creativity in the sciences and creativity in the humanities, the erudition of Mazur in both literature and mathematics show that it is possible for a modern expert in the sciences to have and interest and skills in the humanities.

Consequently the rest of this post will concentrate on the mathematical ideas in the book. Mazur's description of the development of the idea of complex numbers by a range of mathematicians over three centuries is interesting and compelling.

A brief note on typology. Square foots will be mentioned frequently in this post. I will not use the conventional square root symbol - √ - as it will require too many graphics, instead I will represent square roots using the computer terminology, so that the square root of 4 will appear as: sqrt(4).

As Mazur describes (p39) the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardono (1501-76) in his Ars Magna coming across an equation that contains (5 + sqrt(-15)) × (5 - sqrt(-15)) . There are three possible reactions to this piece of maths, but to make the discussion clearer I will use sqrt(-4).
A reaction from those who have little understanding of or interest in maths would be "what is all the fuss about? the answer is obviously -2" . Those who have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of maths would think 2i . Those who took some notice in their middle secondary school maths classes would be saying "that's impossible, there is no such thing as the square root of a negative number!" As i described in this post multiplying two negative numbers together will result in a positive one. If you multiply -2 by -2 the answer is +4, so there seems to be no solution to sqrt(-4). The problem for that point of view is that if you ignore the objection to square roots of negative numbers and just multiply out Cadano's expression you end up with the positive whole number 40, as demonstrated below:
(5 + sqrt(-15)) × (5 - sqrt(-15))
= 25 -5 × sqrt(-15) +5 × sqrt(-15) -(sqrt(-15)× (sqrt(-15)
-5 × sqrt(-15) +5 × sqrt(-15) cancel each other out os
= 25 -(-15)
= 25 +15
= 40
It is surprising that such an unusual expression evaluates to the simplest type of number - a positive integer. Although sqrt(-15) seems initially nonsensical if it is accepted without thinking too much about what it means it can produce acceptable results.

If we multiply the number line by -1 we rotate it by 180 degrees.

Writing sqrt(-1) is a little clumsy so mathematicians developed a notation for it" i . Sqrt(-4) can be written as sqrt(4) × sqrt(-1) which becomes 2i when sqrt(-1) is written as i . Numbers that contain i are called imaginary numbers but we can generalise the function by adding a real number to form a +bi. These are called complex numbers.

Previously we discussed multiplying by -1. What happens if we multiply a complex number by i? Lets see: i × (a + bi) = ai + b × i × i = ai - b (as i × i = -1). If you plot these numbers on a cartesian plane, with the real numbers on the X-axis and the imaginary ones on the Y-axis then it should be clear that multiplying by i is equivalent to rotating by 90 degrees. Mathematicians plot complex numbers on the complex plane with the horizontal axis for the real portion of the number and the vertical axis for the imaginary numbers. This makes sense if multiplying by i is equivalent to rotating by 90 degrees.

What happens if we multiply the complex number by i a second time. This is obviously another 90 degree rotation resulting in a cumulative 180 degree rotation - the same as multiplying by -1. That is multiplying by i² produces the same result as multiplying by -1. This might not be particularly surprising as i² = -1. We seem to have arrived at the same point from two different directions.

Many mathematicians use complex numbers without concerning themselves with the question of what imaginary numbers look like but for those or us who have less mathematical skill Mazur's description of i as a rotation of 90 degrees on the complex plane is satisfying.

This post just scratches the surface of the area of mathematics called Complex Analysis. Other reasons to believe in the reality of complex numbers is that complex maths is essential to a number of important areas of physics including Quantum Mechanics. Some time or other (when I learn something about it) I hope to further explain that claim.

Book Review: Two Lives

Introduction
I bought and read this book for two reasons.
The first is that Vikram Seth is a fine writer. I have read and enjoyed two of his other books: The Golden Gate a verse novel set in California and An Equal Music a book set in the world of classical music.
Two Lives is a biography of two of Seth's relatives. I am writing a Family History with my parents so my second reason for reading the book was to see how Seth approached the task of biography.

The two lives described in the book are those of Seth's great-uncle Shanti and his great-aunt Henny. These are a somewhat unlikely couple. They both lived more that half their lives in England. Shanti was an Indian and Henny was a German of Jewish extraction.

The story of how they steered their lives through the tempestuous 1930s and 1940s to finally marry is an interesting one. To read a brief description click on the link below.

How they met

Shanti decided, reluctantly, to take up dentistry at the urging of his brother, Raj who said, "In our family we have an engineer, an accountant, a judge and a doctor but no dentist. Why don't you train for that?" Shanti already had a B.Sc. qualification but was not confident of obtaining a job, so he applied to Paris and Berlin Universities in dentistry, and was offered places in both. He tried out Paris but he didn't enjoy France. He quickly went on to England where he was uncertain about studying in Germany as he did not understand the language. He went to Berlin, in July 1931, all the same and after accommodation at a number of different locations boarded with a Jewish family called Caros. The Caros had three children, Lola, Heinz and Henny. Shanti and Henny became friends but the relationship did not develop any further as Henny was being by Hans Mahnert, whose father was Henny's boss at work.

Shanti proved his talent with languages and dentistry as he succeeded in passing his course although it was in a foreign language. He had to learn German as well as dentistry. He passed his exams in April 1936, a few months before the infamous Berlin Olympics.

The rise of the Nazis formed a backdrop to Shanti's time in Berlin and the Nazi government was the reason for Shanti's departure from Germany late that year. He had been offered an academic position following the completion of his dissertation. (Incidentally, Henny's sister Lola typed the dissertation and corrected infidelities in his German.) This appointment was overturned by the Ministry of Education. Shanti reluctantly returned to England, only with hindsight realising how lucky he was.

Shanti's problems were not over though as his German qualifications were not recognised in England. He spent a difficult year in the beautiful city of Edinburgh sitting exams every two weeks and finally achieved his British dental qualification.

Meanwhile conditions in Germany went from bad to worse for the Jewish Caro family. Heinz managed to leave for South America in 1938. Henny, who knew some English, was sponsored by a relative of her boyfriend Hans. She arrived in England just a month before the war started. Her mother and sister stayed behind in Berlin.

World War II brought tribulations for all of those whose stories are related in the book. None worse than for Henny's mother and sister, Lola. Henny kept up an intermittent communication with them, which stopped after November 1942. The author found documents listing people who were transported on cattle trains to the concentration camps. He discovered that they were both transported in mid May 1943. There is of cause no record of their death, along with millions of other people, but it is unlikely that they survived in the camps for long. Henny did not discover the fate of her mother and sister until after the war.

Shanti joined the British Army as a dentist and saw action in North Africa and Italy. He corresponded regularly and affectionately with Henny. At the battle of Monte Casino in Italy he had his right arm blown off. Henny was working in England sharing with the English the privations of wartime Britain.

After the war Shanti and Henny were seen by their friends as a couple and in 1949 they were engaged and in 1951 they were married. Shanti managed to develop a successful dental practice even though he had only one arm. Their lives had been buffeted severely by the events of the first half of the 20th Century. They lived quietly as a married couple in the more relaxed and less violent second half of the century.

The structure of the book
As I read Seth's book, I was interested in how he structured it. In the family history that I am writing, I do not appear as the author. Although I am the author the sections on my father and mother are written in their voice. Dad's section is called Eric's Story and Mum's section, Edna's story. I will appear later in Stephen's story.

Seth could have taken a similar tack writing as a disinterested and non-intrusive author, but he chose another approach. He started the book with his arrival as a 17 year old to stay with Shanti and Henny. He come to England to continue his education. The first section is a brief biography of the author with regular reference to Shanti and Henny.It finishes with Shanti and Henny's deaths and describes the process of Vikram's decision to write the book.

Section 2 describes Shanti's life up to the end of the war. Section 3 is about Hunny. When the author came to write about Henny she was already dead. The conditions in Germany before, during and after the war, are described in correspondence between Henny and her friends, most of whom were in Germany. This is a fairly harrowing section of the book. The last two parts 4 and 5 describe the married life of Shanti and Henny.

The book comes full circle in the end and the author appears explicitly again. He describes visiting some of the locations described earlier in the book finishing with the house where Shanti and Henny spent their married lives.

One theme of Seth's book and our family history is the intertwining of private and public lives. Although my parents did not live in circumstances as dangerous as Seth's uncle and aunty, their lives were effected by the great events in the world, particularly depression and war.

My Book List

When I began my semi-retirement, in 2006, I started reading many more books and have kept track of the books that I have read. Here they are:

Literature
Madame Bovary by Flaubert
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffanys by Truman Capote
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Tokyo Station by Martin Cruz Smith
Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith
The Removalists by David Williamson
Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
The Art of the Engine Driver by Steven Carroll
Napoleon by Max Gallo
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Literary Criticism
How Novels Work by John Mullan

Detective and Courtroom Fiction
The Black Book by Ian Rankin
The Falls by Ian Rankin
Tooth and Nail by Ian Rankin
Master's Mates by Peter Corris
Saving Billie by Peter Corris
Hornet's Nest by Patricia Cornwall
Gallows View by Peter Robinson
A Dedicated Man by Peter Robinson
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Rumpole Rests His Case by John Mortimer
The Broken Shore by Peter Temple
Fleshmarket Close by Ian Rankin

Science Fiction
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke

Fantasy
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K Rowling

Biography and Autobiography
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandella
Truman Capote by George Plimpton
iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon
My Desert Kingdom by Jill Koolmees
Two Lives by Vikram Seth

History
The Dust of Empire by Karl Meyer
The Navigators by Klaus Toft
The Age of Empire by Eric Hobsbaum
Munich to Vietnam by Carl Bridge
A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield
The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert
The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward

History of Ideas and Essays
A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson
Love, Poverty and War by Christopher Hitchens
Poll Dancing: The Story of the 2007 Election by Mungo MacCallum

Environment
We Are The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery
Field Notes From A Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert

Biology
Climbing Mont Improbable by Richard Dawkins

Mathematics
Imagining Numbers by Barry Mazur
The Mathematical Universe by William Dunham