Seventeenth Century Scammers

The ALCHEMIST by Ben Jonson "Classic Edition" by Ben Jonson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With nothing but a few footnotes to help with the language, this is pretty tough going, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. At 4 stars, I'm going a bit on a limb, with so many other people giving it a 3 or less while comparing it unfavorably with Shakespeare. But I found it witty and amusing. I would like to understand it better, for sure, but the scams and tricks are clever and the action tight enough to amuse a reader, considering always this is a 400 year old play, not a modern novel.

A wealthy homeowner is away for weeks, and while he's out, his servant is using the house to run several scams with a pair of partners: a man posing (pretty convincingly) as a competent alchemist, cooking up potions and pretending to know astrology, and a prostitute posing as a respectable woman. They've got a number of people on the hook, telling them they're getting closer all the time to finishing the long process of making a philosopher's stone, confusing them with fancy alchemical language, putting them off, while making them bring in fabrics, costly metal items (to turn to gold), tobacco, and actual money. The marks will want to get rich and do either good works (so they say) or sleep with lots of women. It's a long scam, and though they're pulling it off, the neighbors notice the strange comings and goings and at a couple people suspect they're being tricked. It looks like they might pull it off despite a whistleblower tricking them, but they get interrupted in their multiple scams when the homeowner comes back weeks early and learns what's happening from his neighbors.

There is a happy ending of sorts, on top of a pretty good skewering of scammers, puritans, ambitious men, and fools of all sorts. This is one I would like to reread with a study guide, and make more sense of it. (Also, I'd like a version that avoids my pet peeve--I hate books that only give the first three letters of character's name at every line. It doesn't work for my brain. I have to rehearse who is who over and over. Doll is 4 letters, but we print Dol? How much room does this save? How many pages? Can't we just put everybody's name?) A more thoroughly annotated copy would also help.

Still, as is, I liked it, and think people looking for other plays from Shakespeare's times would probably also enjoy it.

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Where I Cringed a Bit

A Feast of Freedom by Leonard Wibberley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was odd.

Look, if this is supposed to be satire, it misses the mark, IMO. I expect it to be satirizing real things in the real world, the genuine state of affairs, the actual state of institutions or the actions of governments, mocking the way things are. But I don't see that. What's the point in satirizing a cartoonish version of institutions? An acerbic critique of government overreach in The Jetsons or a brutal takedown of law enforcement blunders on The Andy Griffith Show (to use 1960s references for a 1964 book) are equally pointless and unsatisfying.

The US foreign policy failures of the 50s and 60s and the various government dysfunctions are ripe targets. British, too. Maybe the author was too polite to go after genuine weaknesses and real disasters?

(You have to get pretty meta to find a way to claim that this story lands a solid punch on anything or mocks any real-world thing that needs to be mocked. At best, you can say that the story demonstrates that the native people would have been better off if they had never been colonized, that there's no good way forward once that has taken place. I'll give it that one, with reservations. I'm not sure that was his meaning or if it was just mine. Beyond that, making something out of the general incompetence of Western governments is a little funny, I suppose, but that's a pretty blunt attack.)

And if it's lampoon he was going for, well... that's easier. It should be funny. I didn't think it was funny. A few humorous lines at best. And I like the author; I was expecting it to be funny.

I really enjoyed the Mouse That Roared books. That series seemed clever and fun and on-target. This story of Pacific islanders that believe they were better off as British colonies and are forgiven for killing and eating an American vice president just wanders around any point. It's absurd, yes. It's weird. But if it makes someone laugh, I'd like to have them explain to me why. (I wouldn't, really.)

Maybe the difference in the tone of those books compared to this is in the balance of power. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick in the Mouse books is put in a position of strength, quite surprisingly, even though it's a tiny country. The powerful countries are humbled. That's the central conceit of those stories, and I thought it worked. The tiny country here, on the other hand, is at the mercy of superpowers and is left in the position of begging favors and hoping to be forgiven. It feels crummy, making the natives read like children that need a daddy, and if the author isn't actually punching down it sure feels like it sometimes.

Anyway, it's short. That's good.

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Where It Got Weird

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Some people think (or thought, over the last several hundreds of years) that this is a very funny book. And entertaining in an over-the-top, no-holds-barred kind of way. And they're welcome to that opinion. I didn't warm up to it much.

I found some things to like in this, and certain goals and ideas of my own kept me reading it to the end, but I read it in an amateur anthropologist way, not as a genuine reader, and in that role I found it mildly entertaining. On its own, as a book to while away the hours, this is mostly really... no fun.

That's why 2 stars.

Also, the casual misogyny (though likely normal for the period) gets old. More than half of the book (books, technically) is about Panurge wanting to maybe get married, but because he's certain that whoever he chooses will sleep around on him he goes to all kind of lengths to get advice. Some of that is funny; some is entertaining in a Gulliver's Travels sort of way; but much of it is just "ha ha women are terrible let's eat and drink and fart." Except he usually uses phrases like rogering a wench with his enormous tool, which is funny for its rudeness while being disturbing for its tone, for its disregard for the humanity of the unnamed women he's talking about.

Sure, his crudeness is kinda funny. So much shitting. So much farting. So many sex jokes. It's crazy. A quick flip through the book will show you two or three examples, no problem. It's all through the book. It was plenty. And juxtaposing that crudeness with his undeniable erudition is comic, just on the face of it, but it's not enough to carry the book.

However, this book had a point, or many, and in the places where Rabelais's satire is at least somewhat comprehensible to a non-Catholic non-French non-16th-Century-reader, it's more fun and more meaningful. He goes after the corruption of many of the institutions of the time, telling absurd stories that make some category of people look foolish. When he's mocking the pope or lawyers or astrologers or city leaders, for example, it still make sense even in 2023, and the poop and fart jokes are extra explosive (a joke he would totally make). That kind of satire works for me, a casual reader. But he loses me when he's attacking jobs or groups of people or institutions that no longer exist in any form I recognize, and that's a big chunk of the book. It's not his fault the world changed, but it's not the readers' fault, either. Just bad luck.

More narrowly, I didn't enjoy his style of lampooning. He'd make a point by exaggerating the number of something, but in a really goofy way, beyond extreme, like saying millions where dozens would have been a lot and thousands ridiculous. Think absurd and multiply it by Babe the Blue Ox. Pantagruel the giant is sometimes small enough to sit at a table with everyone, but in one section he's huge enough that Panurge travels across his tongue into his mouth where there are whole cities between his teeth. It's like Paul Bunyan tall tales except filled with--filled. FILLED--with classical references. (If erudition got stars, he'd have 20/5 from me. It doesn't.) Sometimes he had characters spouting learned examples from mythology and the classics to show that they were annoying, but sometimes I feel like he just couldn't help himself and he had to name half a dozen figures from antiquity who experienced a similar thing.

Or so it seemed to me.

Anyway, I read this for my own reasons and I'm happy enough with what I discovered here. My curiosity is satisfied. Glad to put it away now.

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Where Too Much Money Is a Bad Thing

The Mouse on Wall Street by Leonard Wibberley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another light, witty book in the Mouse That Roared series, poking fun at concerns of the Sixties. Nuclear war in the first; the space race in the second; and runaway inflation and consumerism in this one.

I couldn't work out whether the author meant for us to go along with the argument contained in the plot--that working people are better off relatively poor because they have no idea how to handle money without running up debt and crashing the economy--or if we're supposed to see it as satire going the exact opposite way. (Maybe he meant neither. That'd be clever.) As a proud aristocrat, Lord Mountjoy displays an attitude toward workers that is so paternalistic and condescending that he's ridiculous, which feels like direct comment on conservative economic intuitions, but his perspective proves to be the "correct" one in the end. How deep does the satire go? Or is it parody?

I dunno.

When a windfall gets divvied up among the small population of Grand Fenwick, it disrupts their normal economy. The people don't just spend but overspend, buying stuff they don't need until they're borrowing money and going into debt. I'm not sure that's how it would work, but for comedy, I guess it's fine. What I don't understand is why the government didn't consider using the money for public works--infrastructure, scholarships, endowment funds--but I guess that stuff's not funny.

Anyway, it's a pleasant read without any real-world angst, so in tone it's closer to a comic book than a novel for me. A nice change. And it was a pleasure to re-read these after whew like 40 years... It's a taste of melancholy that's a little more sweet than bitter.

YMMV. :)

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Where I Contemplate a More Hopeful World

The Mouse on the Moon by Leonard Wibberley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On rereading this book after about 40 years--I still liked it.

It's a slim book and a quick read; somewhat realistic and somewhat farcical; quite satirical and quite funny. Taken together, it's a winner.

This isn't biting satire, but whimsical, though it isn't less effective for that. It still forces the reader to think from the perspective of citizens of small nations and maybe reconsider (as an American) how much we walk on other people without considering their rights.

In some ways, the first novel and this sequel are both science fiction, imagining a world where a tiny nation develops some key new technology and uses it to leapfrog the superpowers in importance and genuine power. This science--a type of nuclear bomb in the first novel and a new type of nuclear power in the second--dismantles the power balance of the time (1960s).

It's a nice thought experiment, and the author uses it to tell a gentle satire on the politics of that time. It's also got a little comedy, a little romance, and international politics, making it easy to see why it was made into a movie.

So, good fun. I almost would give it all the stars except I don't want to oversell it. It's pleasant and amusing, and you would probably like it.

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