Joseph Conrad’s anti-Russian novel: Under Western Eyes

Under Western Eyes was written by Joseph Conrad in 1911, after one unsuccessful revolution in Russia and before the rather more successful ones of 1917. It is a political novel, exploring the fates of revolutionaries abroad, while also displaying Conrad’s characteristic preoccupations with the conflicts of the human soul. When I read it for the first time, about four years ago, I did not like it. Its descriptions of Saint Petersburg were unrecognisable to anyone who had been there, but worse was Conrad’s virulent hatred of the Russian people and state, which in spite of assertions to the contrary in his author’s note, are neither well hidden nor very fair.

On a second reading, I now feel a little more understanding towards Conrad’s hate. I also have met various people whom we could call the Russian revolutionaries of our own day, including one friend who after a campaign against him involving physical beatings and bricks through windows was given 24 hours by the police to leave Russia or else his entire family would be charged with fabricated crimes. My personal experiences have also made me a little more sympathetic, including an incident one morning where the secret services raided my flat, throwing me against the wall and pinning me while masked men with machineguns and balaclavas conducted a search for something that wasn’t there and never had been (stolen cash).

Conrad’s novel talks a lot about the impulses we have to mysticise Russia: “that propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression is very Russian.” The problem is that the novel itself serves this mysticising impulse. Ultimately, Russia is not a special country. It is just a country with shoddy institutions and a consolidated media landscape which allowed autocratic rule to flourish in the early 21st century and reach a point where it was unchallengeable, even though the man in charge has lost his mind. Russia has sufficient democratic traditions to build upon, as some of the revolutionaries of the 19th century such as Alexander Herzen knew, but the informational control effected by the ruling powers has emphasised the more idiotic parts of Russia’s history – its sense of a special path, its victimisation and difference from everyone else. The result is that it is now indeed doing something unthinkable, insane, and uniquely awful in our day.

The story of Under Western Eyes concerns one Razumov (his name comes from the Russian for “reason”). An average student with no family, he dreams of winning a silver medal and establishing himself in a world where connections are everything. One evening, after the assassination of a member of Russia’s autocratic state apparatus, Razumov discovers in his rooms one Victor Haldin, who confesses to the murder. He asks for Razumov’s help in escaping the authorities and leaving Russia to join his family in Switzerland. Razumov, who has no revolutionary sympathies, first attempts to save Haldin, and then decides to betray him.

We next encounter Razumov in Geneva, where he meets Haldin’s sister Nathalie, and her mother. We also meet several other revolutionaries, encamped nearby, and the teacher of languages who narrates our story. To them, Razumov appears as Haldin’s successful accomplice, and he is welcomed in spite of his taciturnity and occasional outbursts of anger. In a letter to Nathalie Victor had described Razumov as one of those “unstained, lofty, and solitary existences.” He is the only friend he had ever mentioned, and this allows Nathalie to create a Razumov that blinds her to the real one.

But she is not the only one. Under Western Eyes is fundamentally about seeing – it’s in the title, after all – and what we cannot see. The characters are constantly making miscalculations and misjudgements. The first is Victor Haldin himself. He comes to Razumov, having come to believe that the latter’s quiet nature indicates his revolutionary sympathies – “There is a solidity about your character which cannot exist without courage.” It is not so. Razumov himself, like certain people I know in Russia, had believed that he could exist under autocracy without picking a side. That he could pursue his silver medal in peace. But as soon as Haldin enters his door, Razumov is forced to decide what he stands for. His illusions of the way his world is run are immediately knocked down.

When Razumov arrives in Geneva, Nathalie mentions her brother’s name to him and sees how “this distressed him. He was quite overcome.” She assumes it is affection for her brother and has no idea that it is rather guilt at being his Judas. When talking with Sophie Antonovna, another revolutionary, Razumov once again reveals something of his internal conflicts, to which she asks: “What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It’s absurd. You couldn’t have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was taken.”

Razumov himself notes that he has “the gift of inspiring confidence.” But of course, he too works at creating himself and cultivating these mistakes in others. While dealing with one revolutionary we read how “he remembered another detail and dropped it before her.” He uses what others know – the newspaper details of the crime, and secret letters that have reached the others, to tell them what they want to hear, while keeping himself from lying outright. They all believe him, some willingly, some after a little persuasion, but all do in the end.

The overall effect of this is to make an argument about the revolutionaries themselves – namely, that they are a bunch of incompetents. Conrad fits neatly into the tradition crafted by Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, which deals with revolutionaries, and he lies on the more cynical, dismissive end. His conservatism is similar to that of Dostoevsky in particular, which is funny because Conrad couldn’t stand the Russian. Peter Ivanovitch is a noted “feminist” whom Conrad demonises by showing how mean he is to a female servant. Various others are ridiculed by showing how dependent they are on money siphoned from the owner of the chateau where they all meet.

This is not new to us. Such irony we have encountered many times before, most obviously in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The key revolutionary there, Bazarov, says one thing and eventually, after he falls in love, does another. At first, he demands the negation of emotions and the total reliance upon rationality and logic, and then he starts throwing around such ridiculous words as “feelings”. This irony was Turgenev’s secret weapon. It allowed him to create a novel which, when it came out, divided both conservative and liberal Russians – with both accusing him of being too soft towards the “other side”.

Conrad’s has two main problems in Under Western Eyes, at least when we look at it against the backdrop of its Russian forebears. The first is that it could never divide opinion in the way that Turgenev’s novel does. This book is obviously anti-Russian. The revolutionaries and the state are both stupid, mean, and petty. Or, as Conrad writes in the author’s note, Russian history is just a cycle of “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny.” There are no sympathetic characters, except perhaps Nathalie Haldin. Even she appears out-of-touch and naïve. Razumov himself reads like a thing that an algorithm would churn out after having been forced to read Dostoevsky, over and over. He says cynical, spiteful, angry things without any real interest in them.

Sympathy is by common consent the thing that makes Russian literature most special. Conrad has no sympathy. He does not like his characters. He does not have any time for their views. And that leads to the novel’s second big artistic weakness – it really has very little to do with ideas. Nobody actually shares any interesting views on the rights of women or the future organisation of Russia. People are happy enough to advocate for a life of action and revolt over passivity, but that’s as far as we go. There are no debates, there is no passion. The only idea that really gets any airing is that Russia is a poisoned land, “where virtues themselves fester into crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt” and that autocracy is bad.

The attack on autocracy is made with some effectiveness. When at the end of the novel’s first part Councillor Mikulin, Razumov’s point of contact among the elite, asks Razumov where he will go next – “where to?” – it is positively chilling. We all know at this point that even though he has done something that benefits the state, he has also given up what little freedom he has had. Such relative subtleties are more effective than the constant complaints about autocracy, which quite frankly we do not need. Russian autocracy is/was awful – we do not need convincing. But learning about the way that it exerts its hold upon an individual is much more interesting for those of us with “Western Eyes.”

Razumov goes to Geneva as a servant of his state, and there his life unravels. The stories he is forced to tell about himself are insufficient to solidify his identity. In the end, it all collapses. To see the revolution from the side of an informer was new to me, and that is perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel. But the novel’s complex structure, namely a dramatization of Razumov’s journal by the teacher of languages, means that much of his soul is hidden from us. When we catch glimpses of it, it is suitably unattractive. “It was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most badly.” Such words are ridiculous for a man whose actions lead to two deaths. So too are his excuses and justifications: “I was possessed!”

Taken as a whole, in its refusal to engage with the ideas of the revolutionaries, or even portray them, the novel comes across as somewhat empty. In some sense, amusingly, it conforms to its own ideas about how little those of the West can understand Russia. But this will not do. Russia is comprehensible, it just requires time and effort. It is not special, just extremely poorly run. An orientalising impulse serves no purpose other than to excuse and legitimise the actions of the people who control the place. And legitimisation is the last thing that these people deserve. All in all, the novel is just okay. In this at least in my opinion, four years later, has not changed.  

Glaciers, Climate and Humility

In The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes describes the delight at the discovery of nature’s secrets that animated both artists and scientists around the time of the Romantics. Wonder, that sense of awe in the face of the mysterious and great, drove men and women to explore the world on ship and saddle and plumb its depths and farthest reaches. Few things were more exciting than glaciers, those vast marble-white creatures that sit at the tops of the world and lour down at us mortals beneath.

It was the investigation of glaciers that led to the discovery of the climate and its changes which are of vital importance to the present day. Surprisingly enough, however, it was not until the late 20th century that fears began to focus on global warming rather than global cooling. Initially, it was these masses of ice who were our enemy, unpredictable beasts whose movement downwards was felt to be unstoppable and perfectly destructive. The cooling of the planet would decimate crop yields and lead to mass starvation and social unrest, and as late as the 1970s the CIA was preparing for such a potentiality.

We know now, of course, that the present problem we face lies not in cooling, but in heating. After first briefly looking at the history of our understanding of the climate, I briefly consider the relationship between the technological mastery of the earth and human nature.

It was a Genevan scientist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who set off the beginnings of our understanding of the climate towards the end of the 18th century. A committed Alpinist, in his Voyages dans les Alpes he first used the word geology but was puzzled by the question of why we did not freeze to death during the night. This seems slightly silly at first glance, but if you shuffle off your knowledge of modern science you can see it for the challenge it once was. When the source of most of our heat is clearly the sun, why does that heat not disappear the moment the sun sets in the evening? Saussure built a kind of mini greenhouse in the 1770s and thus discovered that the atmosphere itself is capable of holding heat long after its sources have been removed.

One problem was resolved, but others remained. In the 19th-century, people were interested in whether there had been an Ice Age at all – not just the posthumously christened “Little Ice Age” of the 16th to 19th centuries – but an actual period of frozen wastes and mass starvation. This was proven by Louis Agassiz, another Swiss scientist with a passion for glaciers. In 1837, he suggested that there had indeed been an ice age, and the evidence was all around us – valleys, gorges, mountains, and so many boulders and stones thrown far from their homes. Agassiz evocatively termed glaciers “God’s great plough” for their work. For proposing that global temperatures had indeed been much lower, and for an extended period of time, Agassiz can be thought of as the founder of the idea of climate and its changes.

Finally, John Tyndall, a British scientist with a passion for the Alps, began investigating glaciers and their movements. Building upon the work of the others above, he realised that some gases, in particular carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) and water vapour, contributed to the greenhouse effect that Saussure had discovered. This was not enough to cause concern about a changing climate. It was only when the Swedish professor Svante Arrhenius began modelling the effects of changing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, reaching conclusions that are not too far from our modern models, that cause and effect were truly linked. Arrhenius himself was not worried. Writing at the end of the 19th century, he believed carbon dioxide concentrations were rising very slowly, and that it would take over three thousand years for figures to double. That was far enough down the road, and in any case, he held the view, not uncommon until relatively recently, that warming could only be a good thing – making the world more hospitable and increasing the yields of crops.

Of course, at the end of the 19th-century things were indeed so. This did not last. As the 20th century got underway the world only produced more and more carbon emissions from new inventions such as cars, the widespread electrification (on a coal power basis) of developed countries, and from a growing population that wanted to consume more and more. How exactly the world would change was still a subject of contention, rather than the consensus it is now, but there was no denying that the atmosphere was indeed changing. An American scientist, Charles David Keeling, created the famous Keeling Curve using data gathered at the Mauna Loa meteorological observatory in Hawaii (and then elsewhere too). This showed in unambiguous terms that the amount of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere was growing, and growing fast.

The Keeling Curve, courtesy of the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The shocking thing, and the one that really gives those sceptics who claim that the climate has always changed (and it has, that is true) and that humans have nothing to do with it no legs to stand on, is when we consider the curve over a longer period, as below.
The uptick is quite extraordinary, going far beyond the natural cycles beforehand. And it shows no signs of stopping.

It is amusing to think that we once thought that the ice was our problem, but not without its symbolic interest. Imagine a man or woman, standing before a glacier. The difference in scale is extraordinary. Unlike mountains, which are relatively stationary and thus pose no threat except to climbers, and bodies of water, which can be fished and dammed and bridged, glaciers are a force of nature that seems completely unmasterable. (These scientists were mostly writing before Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1867). If a glacier came, or if the temperature dropped, death would seem inevitable. Crops would fail, and cities would be swept away. And that would be it.

The damage from cooling is easy to visualise – just last year the world was rocked by images of French farmers, huddled around grape vines with torches, an almost medieval scene, as they tried to prevent a cold snap from destroying their harvest. But such images also reveal the problem with this great fear of cooling – it is so clearly remediable by heating. Houses could be insulated even in the 19th century, trees could be chopped for firewood, coal could be burned, and warmer clothes could be worn. If one were really being chased by glaciers, then of course a couple of (hundred thousand) sticks of dynamite could be used to break up the beasts and let what sun remained work upon them more effectively.

This fear of cooling reflects, we can say, the legacy of a pre-Enlightenment view of humanity, one where we were small and vulnerable to the world and God’s whimsy. The Enlightenment was not just a time of new knowledge, it was also a time of new mastery and power over nature, individuals, and whole societies. Glaciers appeared as something that, in spite of our advances, remained frightening and uncontrollable – an uncanny reminder that we were not as great as we thought we were. A kind of living white injunction to be humbler. But then we kept advancing, and soon we no longer feared even them. Human arrogance had won out. The kind of arrogance that was the darkest legacy of the Enlightenment because it allowed us to commit the terrible social experiments of the 20th century (Stalinism, fascism, and so on), convinced us that we not only had the might but also the right, to change the world.

In the case of the climate, we really could have benefited from learning our lesson in humility the first time around. The world is warming rapidly, the human and other animal toll is likely to be massive and, worst of all, entirely avoidable. But unlike with battling glaciers, where one is not a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but actually capable of fighting back effectively, we cannot so easily deal with heating. Fire brings warmth, but what takes it away? Even if you have the answer, it comes to mind far less readily than fire does to the question of creating warmth. We can take our clothes off, but public decency demands we exercise this ability within certain limits, and in any case, there are only so many clothes we can take off before we need to look at other options.

Fridges and air conditioners are not the solutions they may seem to be. Both of them actually worsen the problem because of their own chemical and electricity demands, which leads to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But even beyond that technical point, both fridges and air conditioners cool a small area, and an enclosed one. Hold the fridge door open and open all your windows and the cooling effects are so much reduced as to be essentially imperceptible. A fire might work the same way, but it heats much more effectively than these objects cool. And in terms of fuels, a fire can eat anything, whereas these things require electricity, which is comparatively complex to produce.  

Pretty much everything in the world is about heating. We heat oil to distillate it into its component parts, which we then heat to make our internal combustion engines work, build new chemicals, or power our power plants. We heat our food before we eat it, we heat our homes, and the production of the dyes we use in everything around us is dependent on heat too. Plastic is basically the result of heating certain chemical compounds to certain temperatures. The same is true of metals. How do you go from iron to steel? The answer, with some intervening steps, is heat.

Even when heating is not the primary factor, heat is the waste product. A gas-fired power plant heats water to produce steam, which puts a turbine into motion, generating electricity. What is left over is that heat. The smashing of mined ore that is part of its processing also produces heat. Within the home, our devices heat up when we use them too much. I am currently balancing my computer on a book so that it does not heat my lap. And speaking of my lap, the human body provides us with another example of heat’s omniprevalence. We heat up as we think, exercise, in a word live, and then lose that heat through things like sweating.

A glacier is an easy example of a cooling climate, the bad guy to be fought. When the climate warms, there is no such enemy coming. Instead, things just die. Deserts grow, plants don’t, natural disasters like hurricanes increase in frequency, and bad weather events like snowstorms and heat waves do too, but in all of these cases we are dealing with something essentially diffuse and impersonal. The problem cannot be dynamited away. And because it is a global problem, it is not as if we could just throw down a fridge and be done with it. Being a global problem, it is harder to accept it as our particular problem. A growing glacier is a specific issue for a specific place, while a shrinking glacier is a general loss, but because of its generality, we end up being only able to care so much about it.

This psychological issue is perhaps the main reason why so few people do any of the things that we can do to reduce global warming. (The complicating issue, one beyond the scope of this piece, is about whether individuals or corporations should be more responsible for emissions). Fire and heat are both easier to arrange than things to cool, they also have a more obvious effect with their burning. Likewise, the delayed effect of climate change, where today we are seeing the consequences of emissions released into the atmosphere quite literally before I was born, means that there’s an element of resignation in dealing with global warming which means that some people may simply not bother doing what they can.

I noted that at the time when people feared the return of the glaciers, they had every reason to do so, being comparatively less able to fight them off. Technological change prevailed, and the Enlightenment dream of power over all things was allowed to continue. Humans need to learn humility, but I doubt climate change is going to teach them it. Some of the most promising developments in fighting against carbon dioxide overproduction are likely to have the effect of letting us “off the hook” for our failure to reduce our consumption earlier. I have in mind technologies such as those for direct air capture, essentially giant reverse air conditioning units that suck carbon out of the air at immense cost and electricity demand, or perhaps nuclear fusion, which was in the news earlier this month.  

Of course, the alternative to being let off the hook – and I should be clear that these technologies are unlikely to save us, only compensate somewhat for our utter inability to do anything about reducing our demand for fossil fuels – is to watch our world disintegrate in fire and brimstone, metaphorically speaking and literally too in some places. A loss of diversity, a loss of nature, a loss of human life in the developing world, in particular, all of this is a catastrophe, even if it’s not “the end of the world”, only the end of “our world.” None of us wishes to see that either.

What then will change us? What then will bring humility? What then will lead a majority of us to take actions to build a better world, rather than continue statically upon the destructive paths that others have laid for us? I wish I knew. The world is a wondrous place, but wonder has not done enough, nor even has fear. Time will tell, I hope, what thing truly is needful. The alternative is not encouraging to think about.

This post was inspired by Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, and the information on the scientists comes primarily from it.

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain

What an extraordinary book this is. What a novel. The Magic Mountain is so easy to criticise – so fun to, even. It’s a ridiculous book. Even in John Woods’ translation, which is a great improvement on Helen Lowe-Porter’s, the characters sometimes sound as if they are still getting accustomed to human flesh, especially at the beginning. Of particular note is our main character, Hans Castorp, who laughs so much at things that are manifestly not funny that it seems as if he has perhaps swallowed too much laughing gas. Beyond that, we are constantly treated to such sentences as: “there was asparagus soup, followed by stuffed tomatoes, a roast with several vegetables, an especially well done dessert, and a tray of cheese and fruit.” This is incredibly dull stuff, the kind of detail we are pleased to be rid of in our more modern novels.

And yet, and yet. The Magic Mountain deserves the name. Thomas Mann’s novel takes us into another world, a world where I can be interested in the fact that the characters are having pineapple with their five-course dinner, because in this world the rules are different from our own. I have descended from the mountain every bit an evangelist. But another could quite easily descend, fed up and exhausted from the trip. The problem is that we come down and try to explain something that is to those below quite incomprehensible – even if we are criticising it we have to speak a different language, one it itself dictates. The Magic Mountain is its own world, for better or worse. We have to enter into it in order to work out what it is about.

Here is our plot. Early in the 20th century Hans Castorp, a young man who intends to work on a shipyard as an engineer, goes up a mountain to visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a sanatorium near Davos, where the latter is attempting to fight off his tuberculosis infection. Castorp himself comes down with something and spends seven years at the sanatorium, where he meets various characters – of note the Russian Madame Chauchat, the Dutchman with an imposing personality Peeperkorn, the Italian Settembrini, the Jewish Jesuit Naphta.

This is one of those books that contain multitudes. It is a desperately intellectual book. Virginia Woolf’s comment on Middlemarch, that it is a novel written for grownups, is very much true here. I cannot think how disappointed I would have been, trying to read this when I was younger. There is no action to entertain us. The emotions we and our characters feel are all intellectual, even the love that runs through the pages has something cerebral about it. And yet, the greatest complement we can make of this book is that it makes those intellectual emotions feel every bit as valid and as important as the kind of passions that make us want to abandon our families or murder somewhat innocent people.

The Magic Mountain is a book of learning. One of the most exhilarating chapters is entitled “Research”, and in it we sit through the night with Hans Castorp as he engages deeply with that most important of questions, “what is life?”. It is a question that seems to have less impact on our existence than those more common cursed queries, like “what shall I do?”, or “who is to blame?”. And yet, in ways “lyric, medical, and technical”, Mann throws us into the world of this other question. We hurtle, as if in the presence of a great magician, from the smallest atoms to the greatest of stars, as we and Hans Castorp seek the answers. The world seems to rush past us, brilliant and bright:

“The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike centre, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. That was not merely a metaphor – any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells”. A city, a state, a social community organised around the division of labour was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovered above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade.”

If this is too much for you, turn away now. In “Research” alone there are pages and pages of long, dense, blocky paragraphs. In other chapters we learn of things like music or botany. The chapter “Snow” has one of the most extraordinary descriptions of snowfall you will ever read, but it does go on and on. You must commit yourself to reading The Magic Mountain, just as Hans Castorp commits himself to treatment at the sanatorium. Any haste, any desire to get on with reading something else or getting to some action, will spoil the book completely. To invert a metaphor, in the same way that a beloved food can lose all of its taste when we are ill, when we do not have the constitution for it The Magic Mountain it will appear a hill of boredom. I know there were definitely chapters I rushed and shouldn’t have.

The Magic Mountain is a bildungsroman – it is about education, yes, but also about cultivation, that other idea of Bildung. It is about Hans Castorp growing from a relatively simple young man who is unable to participate in philosophical debates except as a witness to a man of respectable complexity, well-read, passionate about music, and willing and able to hold his own in any discussion. Just as the novel does not hide its engagement with learning, so too does it not conceal its engagement with teaching. “Pedagogy” is one of its watchwords.

Two characters are above all concerned with this – Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta. These two, who literally live next to each other, are the most obvious teachers for Hans Castorp in the novel. Their debates and discourses go on for pages, often without any kind of interruption or riposte. In any other work of fiction this would be horribly bad form, but again, The Magic Mountain is no normal work of fiction. It dazzles us with its ideas, so why should it be obliged to conceal them from us by chopping them up into manageable little phrases or numbing them with retorts before they have first demonstrated their full power? Put another way, if we are to take the ideas seriously, they must be expressed properly. And since, unlike a Russian novel, the characters here do not act their ideas out (with a few exceptions), we must make do with characters speaking their ideas out.

And what are those ideas? Well, we might say that Settembrini is a humanist. He is buoyed by a beautiful hope for a better world, a cosmopolitan world of peace and fairness. Even stricken by illness, he is a member of all sorts of international committees and organisations that aim to improve the world. To give an example of the sort of work he does, he is engaged with creating a volume for The Sociology of Suffering, a series of books that aims to categorise every sort of suffering in the world that it may then be eliminated through the power of reason. Settembrini is the bright light of the Enlightenment, the heroic intellectual that we never have enough of. “Order and classification are the beginning of mastery, whereas the truly dreadful enemy is the unknown,” he tells us. A hero he is, but also limited. There are only so many international organisations that seem to be doing very little other than convening which we can handle.

Leo Naphta is a Jew who became a Jesuit. It was he whom I was most excited to meet, opening The Magic Mountain for the first time. Described quite often as a proto-fascist, I wanted to make the acquaintance of this man who seemed to smell of forbidden knowledge. Naphta is every bit as incendiary as his name, with its similarity to naphtha, suggests. He is a nihilist, but as always that term is not hugely useful. What I can say is that he is in many ways the antithesis of Settembrini, even down to the ways that they decorate their respective rooms. Where Settembrini envisions are future world of progress, Naphta’s visions are all of blood and violence. The medieval church with its crude punishments dealt “to save souls from eternal damnation”, are far more valid to him than the punishments of the modern nation state, which thinks it is legitimate but is anything but. He is a destructive thinker, who at times reminded me of Nietzsche with his disregard for what we take to be “true”. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is – terror.” This is scary stuff, scary in particular because Mann articulates it so well. And Hans Castorp is taken in by Naphta, with his dark world and his hatred of everything bourgeois. So, at times, are we.

And there are other characters, each of whom, in their own way, has something to say – either by themselves, or through themselves. One of the most memorable is Mynheer Peeperkorn, an extraordinarily funny fellow introduced late in the novel. He is unable to express anything at all, his language comes in stops and starts and terrible bluster, but through his person he commands the attention of everyone – he has that thing every politician wishes they had: presence. In contrast to the two pedagogues his inability to fit together a sentence is all the more pronounced. (“What did he say? Nothing very intelligible, and even less so the more he drank”). But again, he has presence. Against the world of ideas, he seems to offer an alternative – drinking, eating, existing.

A Russian friend who has recently left their country told me recently that The Magic Mountain was their favourite book. Perhaps I should just leave this sentence here, hanging.

This is not a book for lovers of action, but for those who love contemplation. We need to be idle, even – possibly – sick to appreciate it properly. Were I stuck in bed for a month or a year, this is all I would want. It is all I would need. The Magic Mountain is the answer you want to give if you are asked what one book you would take to a desert island when you love Western culture but don’t want to look as basic as those who name the complete works of William Shakespeare. We may find it overly intellectual, but life is full of intellectual engagement for many of us, and if not intellectual then at least populated with ideas. Compared to reading a dry work about the history of ideas, we can read about Settembrini and Naphta who, even if they go on for page and page, at least feel autonomous, real, and serious in their views. They are excited in a way that a writer reporting on the views of the dead-and-buried never can be.

The Magic Mountain is a modern book. Although the “Forward” declares that a vast gulf divides it from the present (1924), it is not so. The arguments here about life and ways of looking at the world only became more relevant after the First World War. What happened, though, was that they were translated into actions – horrific, terrible actions, whose consequences we continue to feel to this day. Perhaps we can say this – The Magic Mountain reflects the last time when a bunch of Europeans could gather together on a frozen hillside to debate the nature of the world, before all of the innocence of such intellectual tomfoolery was lost.

The novel reminds me of one day, years and years ago, when together with two friends, while playing croquet on a well-maintained lawn by a trickling stream, hidden from the world by a stone wall, I debated the consequences of the People’s Budget of 1909. Thinking back on it now, there’s something sickly about the isolation that allows us to go so deeply into intellectual things. But there is something equally sickly about the attitude that never engages with any kind of ideas at all. The novel is a balancing act, well aware of itself and what it says, and the criticisms we might make of it from afar – about its lack of engagement with action and so on – are all answered within its pages. It is an encyclopaedia. It is a world. If we are able to enter it without losing our sense of the world around us, we will be rewarded with one of the most vital, the most intelligent, the most thoughtful books that we will ever read.

I just want to read it over and over again.