Oh gosh, I am terribly behind, I was still on thread 1 and haven't even finished that! Thank you southeast for the new thread.
4. Sad Little Men : Private Schools and the Ruin of England, Richard Beard
Last year I read this article in the Guardian, which I found interesting: www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard and I sought out this book, which is the longer version of the topics that Beard explores in the article.
I have very little experience of boarding schools, or indeed of any independent schools: no-one I know well has been a pupil at a boarding school, so I don't have any personal experience to base my opinions on. I found the article quite convincing, in an "I know nothing about whether this is true" way. Beard quotes many sources, from his own letters home from school to the memoirs and essays of authors educated at boarding schools throughout the 20th century.
His argument, summarised, is something like this: there are a small group of schools (long-established, mostly single sex, elitist) whose alunmi are over-represented in politics and other powerful positions in the country. Those schools, and their feeder preps, are deliberately old-fashioned, and in the 70s and 80s, when Beard and many powerful people in the UK were pupils, they were snobbish, cruel places where boys learned to suppress softer emotions, never to sneak or blub, to be hideously competitive and to believe that winning was everything and never mind who suffers for it. He traces this through the written sources and uses David Cameron and Boris Johnson as prime examples for his argument.
I didn't find it entirely convincing, although I suspect there are large chunks of the book which do reflect reality. He looks at certain high profile examples but I didn't think those few people were enough to carry the argument - every school will turn out unpleasant outliers, does that prove anything? Where do boarding school-educated left-wing politicians fit into his argument (Tony Blair would be a really interesting case study - he has the boyishness and the ability to walk away from messes, but did he have that callous imperiousness that Beard points out in Cameron and JOhnson?)? And what about the grammar school girls, Thatcher and May - they both led the Tory party, how were they different?
This wasn't a weak book - it was very readable and well-researched, with a lot of personal reflection. I just found myself thinking "Yes, but what about...." a lot, epscially in the later chapters - I think a good editor would have trimmed some of the repetitive content and directed Beard to plug a few of the potential holes in his argument.
5. Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel
Staying on the topic of schools, I was well taught in English Literature at mine (and went on to get a first class degree in it) but very poorly taught in Science. Our teachers were mostly hapless supply teachers with poor class control, and despite being a diligent student, I left school with a single GCSE in "Science". I am therefore usually very happy to read books which make beautiful use of language but poor use of science, although I entirely understand that others will not be.
The pandemic here seemed like a big old McGuffin - mostly happening off-stage in either the past or the future, and really just a device to bring the characters to the points of before and after, to give a reason for a situation where civilisation has been stripped back. What I took from this book was the role that music, art and the imagination played in the lives of the characters, of the connections between before and after that came through those channels. It made me think not so much of other post-apocalypic fiction (not, to be honest, a genre that I have read a huge amount of) but more of Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, or of the stories of orchestras and theatre productions in concentration camps.
I've always found it deeply moving how a fragment of poetry or a line of music from another time or place, written by someone whose life is unknown and often unimaginable to us, can shoot right to the heart and remind us of our common humanity. And during this recent pandemic, it's been notable how the arts in their various forms have kept us connected - to one another and to an idea of what our lives are outside of "all this". This for me was what Mandel captured in this book and (although I wish, personally, that there'd been more music) I found this theme, and the way it was handled, to be beautiful and poignant.