Boxer, Beetle (5)

The Boxer Beetle web site has disappeared, so here is the best I can give you, from the ghost web: Boxer, Beetle. I reproduce the images below:

Boxer, Beetle (4)

Boxer, Beetle has been blurbed as hilarious. I would call it satirical in the extreme, but I haven't been laughing.

There are no redeeming characters in the book. Not only are the fascists obnoxious and stupid, but their would-be victims, the underclass East Ender Jews of London, are primitive and crude. Seth "Sinner" Roach is the crudest of them: a malformed boxer who lives to fight, who hates Jew-haters but has no political perspective, only selfish interest. His bizarre symbiosis with the anti-Semitic fascist entomologist and amateur eugenicist Philip Erskine and their mutual fate is the focal point of the mystery Kevin Broom is trying to solve under extreme duress in the present. As the narrative toggles between tracking down vanished persons and the obscure events of 1936, we descend further and further into the pit.

Erskine not only names a beetle he has bred after Hitler, he receives an effusive letter from Hitler. Sinner becomes a mercenary in a brewing battle in the East End as Mosley's fascists storm the area to confront the Jews, who are poised for battle.

Well, Broom and his kidnapper (and the latter's mysterious boss) finally solve the mystery of the boxer and the beetles, as do we in a flashback to October 1936. Both halves of the story conclude with no justice meted out to the bad guys, no good guys to win or lose, no redemption and no moral. This satiric portrait of degradation and fascism is a brilliantly written tour de force, well worth reading, but don't expect any wisdom to be gotten from it.

What this young man is about I do not know, or if this novel bespeaks a trend in Jewish fiction, but you can learn more about the author and his work at Ned Bauman's web site, which also links to his blog "Oh my god look at its little face!". Bauman, born in 1985, studied philosophy in Cambridge. Make of that what you will. There is also a bibliography for this novel. The references for artificial languages are:

The Artificial Language Movement by Andrew Large (1985)
Esperanto: Language, Literature and Community by Pierre Janton, ed. Humphrey Tonkin (1993)

Boxer, Beetle (3)

In the present (Chapter 12 of Boxer, Beetle) the narrator is kidnapped to Claramore, where the key to the quest is thought to be: an incident suspected to have taken place at a fascist conference in 1936.

Then we are back in 1936, at Claramore, the bizarre estate of the Erskine family. William Erskine, inheritor of the estate, rigged it up with high-tech (for 1936) inventions and gizmos in accordance with his vision of the technological future.

Sinner (Seth Roach) and Philip Erskine arrive for the upcoming conference. Pangaean gets mentioned a few more times (145, 149, 163). Philip's father William reads the son's manuscript and decides to have it bound. Later on as the drama at the household reaches a macabre climax, Erskine--which Erskine I'm not certain--has a morbid fantasy involving the third Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon.

It also bears mentioning that Evelyn, Philip's sister, is an aficionado and composer of atonal music, which she ends up attempting to justify to Sinner (171). I mention this noting that one of the prefatory quotes to the novel comes from Adorno on dissonance.

Chapter 13 (August 1936) teaches us that the entire family and the assembled fascist guests all belong in a looney bin. It's a bizarro Addams Family world, only truly morbid. And each fascist we encounter is crazier than the next; each insists on the peculiarities of his own cobbled together world view, such that none can agree and all end up bickering.

Chapter 14 begins with footman Alex Goodman obsessed with two goals: marrying Evelyn's maid, and securing a "top-class conjugal safety coffin." But that's normal compared to what transpires by the end of Chapter 15, as the insanity at Claramore reaches a climax, in more ways than one.

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In the past two days I have read 11 chapters (133 pages) of Ned Beauman's novel Boxer, Beetle. It's a real page-turner, compelling reading, superbly written, and highly absurdist.

Chapter 10 (Autumn 1881), on which I reported in my previous post on this book, is actually a historical digression from the main two plots. incorporates the real history of artificial languages into the fiction. Erasmus Erskine appears to be the grandfather of Philip Erskine, entomologist, eugenicist, Nazi sympathizer. His main occupation is finding and breeding beetles, until he secures the cooperation of gay, nine-toed Jewish Boxer Seth "Sinner" Roach to serve as a guinea pig for a eugenics experiment. This scenario takes place in Britain in the 1930s.

The other main plot takes place in the present, in which Kevin Broom, a collector of Nazi memorabilia, is sucked into a nefarious intrigue involving the sordid past just described.

At the end of chapter 9, Philip Erskine is forced by his father to leave beetles and boxers be for a time in order to complete another project:

"It was time to write the history of Pangaean--the Erskine dynasty's greatest pride, and greatest embarrassment."

So the chapter on artificial languages, though seemingly out of place, is a historical flashback from the 1930s, and pits not only artificial languages against one another, but anti-Semite against Jew.  Erasmus Erskine, creator of Pangaean, wants to abolish adverbs as well as Jews. In 1881, "on the same day that the Jews were driven out of Fluek, the adverbs were driven out of the English language." Meanwhile, far away in Poland, Seth Roach's grandparents prepare to fight off a pogrom.

Erskine, bigoted and obsessed, makes Pangaean so complicated and difficult, that even he can't master his language.

"He was even forced to consider putting the adverbs back in, but concluded that he had left himself no room for them, on the same day in June 1882 that Sinner's grandfather returned with his wife and daughters to Fluek, where they were told by local officials that, according to Alexander III's new Temporary Regulations, no Jews were allowed to settle in the countryside of Russian Poland."

So they left Fluek and ended up in Bialystok (in real life, the birthplace of Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto), where Sinner's father "was born on the same day that Erskine completed the 998-page first draft of the Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon."

Pangaean, of course, never existed, but the real history of the international language movement, with some historical distortions, serves as the backdrop for the unhappy fate of Pangaean. Erskine opposes Esperanto as a Jewish language, as did Hitler later on, but as fate would have it, Hitler ends up banning Pangaean as well as Esperanto.

Boxer, Beetle

First, here is the web site for the novel Boxer, Beetle.

The novel is prefaced by two quotes. The first is from Jane Jacobs, from her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The second:

"Dissonance is the truth about harmony." -- Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Who knew?

I don't follow trends in fiction generally, or even in various fictional genres, but I have taken note of several contemporary Jewish novelists who have immersed their imaginations in the cultural environments that would have been familiar to their great grandparents, often incorporating real historical figures, or creating alternate histories. Michael Chabon and Joseph Skibell come immediately to mind.  I suppose then it should not be too surprising that Esperanto and its Eastern European Jewish creator L. L. Zamenhof would appear in this fiction. Ned Bauman's novel, published in 2010, can be added to this list.

Entomologists, eugenicists, Nazis, and a Jewish boxer occupy this scenario. Chapter 10 (Autumn 1881) incorporates the real history of artificial languages into the fiction. Erasmus Erskine insists that in a true philosophical language, ambiguity would be eliminated. There is speculation about an alleged archaeological finding of a legendary ancient advanced civilization and the language its inhabitants would have spoken. Sudre's musical language Solresol is mentioned as is perhaps the oldest recorded example of an artificial language, produced in the 12th century by St. Hildegard. The era of a priori constructed languages is mentioned. In the same era in which pogroms in Eastern Europe are feared on a daily basis, Erskine pursues his project, until in January 1890 Erskine completes "the 998-page first draft of the Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon." Zamenhof's native city of Bialystok is also part of the story.

Erskine's friend Thurlow continues to discourage the project, mentioning Volapuk had already achieved success and was a far superior language than Pangaean and easier to learn. (The irony!) But Erskine is more irritated that someone of his acquaintance, Marcus Amersham, is working on his own artificial language Orba, and has a club devoted to it. Amersham's publications include forms to which the reader can subscribe promising to learn the language if 10 million other people do so. This fictional item is borrowed from real life Zamenhof's initial attempt to promote Esperanto.

Esperanto then makes its appearance: "But by 1901 Pangaean, Orba and Volapuk were all being swept aside by the onrush of Esperanto." A few paraphrased quotes from Zamenhof are adduced to demonstrate Zamenhof's Jewish motivation. Erskine learns about the forthcoming Delegation for
the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language (which in real life selected the dark horse Ido, resulting in the famous Esperanto-Ido schism),  and is determined to counterpose Pangaean to the Jewish cosmopolitan Esperanto and mold his language accordingly. Erskine, apparently, is an anti-Semite and presumably a non-Jew.

The 1903 Delegation could not gain assent to its authority, and so no new language definitely triumphed. Bauman correctly describes Hitler's animosity to Esperanto and the Nazi extermination of Zamenhof's family, but adds the fictional element that Hitler bans Pangaean as well as Esperanto. To Stalin's real-life persecution of Esperantists is added Stalin's unverified anecdotal inability to learn Esperanto and purely fictional inability to learn the fictional Pangaean.

And now the final SPOILER: Erskine catches Thurlow with his wife, with a book of Orba grammar between them. Devastated, Erskine discards his notes for the third edition of the Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon.  I have deliberately kept this description as dry as possible, because the actual writing is hilarious.

And undoubtedly the balance of this award-nominated novel is equally as entertaining.