Booknotes 21-12-06
Nevermind, My Kingdom for a Horse and Clash of the Classics reviewed by Edward O'Hare.
My Kingdom for a Horse
30,000 years ago the ancestors of modern man began their first experiments with art. They mixed together simple paints and smeared them on rocks using their fingers. One of the earliest of these paintings was found on the walls of the Chauvet cave in the Ardeche. The image is of a horse. According to the art historian Tasmin Pickeral the reason primitive man depicted this creature was not arbitrary. In her new book The Horse: 30,000 Years of the Horse in Art she argues that throughout history artists have had a special affinity for horses and have used them as metaphors for every conceivable human impulse. From the chalk horses carved into English mountains to icons of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from the fury of medieval battlehorses to the beauty of the unicorn, Pickeral's book catalogues every great equine representation. She also explains why different artists chose the horse as a symbol. While the mystic poet and engraver William Blake saw the horse as the embodiment of the suffering of the human spirit, the Swiss Gothic painter Henri Fuseli considered them to be omens of doom. Toulouse-Lautrec unsurprisingly found lady horseriders a source of unending fascination. Gloriously illustrated and energetically written, The Horse is yet another reminder of how much art owes to nature.
Clash of the Classics
Book Notes rarely gives a complete endorsement of anything but Penguin's series of Modern Classics deserves one. Sleekly designed and usually accompanied by expertly written introductions, these books have kept alive many of the lesser known masterworks of 20th Century fiction and made them available to new generations of readers. Previously many of these titles were only obtainable after hours of searching the internet for exorbitantly-priced, dog-eared copies but it has emerged that not everybody is enamoured with Penguin's achievement. Random House has announced plans to make a bid for Penguin's crown in 2007. These will begin with the unveiling of the Vintage Classics range, a swanky repackaging of all Random House titles with fancy new artwork. The current Vintage roster includes Iris Murdoch, the author of Under the Net, and John Fowles, the author of The Magus, who died late last year. If this proves fruitful Random House will attempt to buy out the rights to the work of many other writers. The Penguin Modern Classics range includes 500 titles so Random House had better get ready to do some serious spending.
Nevermind
As a lover of paradoxes and other mind-bending mysteries, Book Notes has been drawn to a new work by the science writer Susan Blackmore. Conversations on Consciousness, which is out in paperback this week, is a collection of interviews that Blackmore conducted with some of the planet's most original and influential abstract thinkers including Roger Penrose, Richard Gregory, Susan Greenfield, Daniel Dennett and Francis Crick, one half of the team that discovered DNA. All of these scholarly chin-wags begin with one question – what is a human being? From this starting point the conversations move in every direction, into the neurological, the psychological, the philosophical and the theological. The main point under scrutiny is whether or not a person can be reduced to their mind. Also under consideration is the fact that the mind itself can be reduced to a brain-case full of gloop. The book speculates about how much of our personality, our belief-system and our view of the world is determined by the electro-chemical processes going on inside our skulls. Do we survive corporeal death? How can there be free-will if we are made up of the same material as the rest of the universe and bound by its laws? Think you know what you are? Think again.