Ian Jack (1) (1945–2022)

This was one of those books I found a joy to read. Of the seventeen stories, essays, and articles, I can call only two of them duds. The rest I’d rate four to five stars. All of them dealt with India and/or Pakistan: rural villages, big cities like Mumbai, memoirs of travelers to both. The India/Pakistan conflicts were touched upon in several, a subject which I didn’t know much about; one excellent article, “Jihadists” was about the conflicts that led to the 9/11 attacks and what was going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan afterward. Although the political commentary was outdated (most of the book’s material was from the 1990s) most of the writers were from India or Pakistan and so it was interesting to hear their viewpoints. The fiction was mainly slices-of-life from the lives of ordinary Indian people, like a businessman who is embarrassed by, but also enjoys, his wife’s singing talent (“White Lies” by Amit Chaudhuri).

Other favorites of mine were “What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat” by Chitrita Banerjee, in which an Indian-American cookbook writer describes her mother’s Indian widowhood customs, one of which is not eating any meat, ever again. According to custom widows are treated as bad luck in India among all classes and the older generation of women, at least, is still buying into this. It could have been another “Gee-it-sucks-to-be-woman-in-[name of country]” story that usually pops up whenever some Asian country in essayed, but the descriptions of the food were truly sumptuous.

The other article I enjoyed, also about a woman, was “Little Durga” by Shampa Banerjee (not related to the author above, Banerjee is something of the “Smith” of India). This was the adult recollections of the child actress who had played the role of older sister to Apu, the main character in the Apu movie trilogy of acclaimed director Satyajit Ray.

The other was the recollections of the actress who became famous for playing a little girl in an acclaimed Indian movie.

The two duds were an incoherent article/memoir about dervishes and a story about an Indian tutor, Ivy League educated, who agrees to ghost-write a college entrance essay for an unmotivated American girl living in Bombay with her expat father. The tutor has a bit of a crush on the girl. This wasn’t badly written, but just rubbed me the wrong way. First, the main character knowingly participates in fraud, second, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for spoiled teenage girls who can’t be assed to write their own essays, no matter how young and rich and beautiful they are.

The story just sort of… ended, without much of a conclusion, as most of the fiction did, and not a few of the essays. Which wasn’t necessarily bad, I enjoyed reading them. But I do wonder if that is considered the thing to do now when writing modern essays. I was raised, for example, to write a beginning, a middle, and an end, and if not handing the conclusion to the reader, point them to it with some very strong hints. But a lot of the material forced me to draw my own.… (más)

Like his previous work ("Before the Oil Ran Out", Secker & Warburg, 1987), this is a collection of Ian Jack's writings. The period covered in this book is 1989 - 2000.

The title of the current work might easily mislead, though, for it is by and large not a commentary on the state of the country as it is now; it is, rather, a series of observations about places and characters that, arguably, have been lost to memory.

Some pieces are brilliantly observed, such as 'Sepia' about the passing of time, or 'The Vivid Present' about the speech-patterns of youth, whilst his essay on the Hatfield train crash of 2000 ('The 12:10 to Leeds') is an excoriating analysis of the cause(s) and effect(s) of mis-management and the absence of leadership.

It is a shame that the book is not indexed, or the chapters given an explanatory sub-title, because the casual reader, or even one who is unaware of this volume, will overlook three cracking biographies, each of which adds to the existing body of work on the subjects.

So, 'Women and Children First' explores the life, death and also the funeral of Wallace Henry Hartley, violinist and bandmaster on the 'Titanic' when it sank.

'Kelver Kaff' introduces us to the life of contralto singer Kathleen Ferrier through the medium of her diaries.

And then 'Serampur' tells the story of Northampton-born William Carey and his extraordinary life as a baptist missionary in India.

I fear that readers seeking information about the lives of these three remarkable individuals will completely overlook this work, because there is no obvious reference to them in any of the usual signposts to its contents.… (más)

That rarest of books - the one where, when you've finished reading it, you immediately start to re-read it so that you can enjoy the word-pictures painted by the author again.

The title here may mislead. This collection of articles by the late Scottish journalist Ian Jack has nothing to do with oil - its abundance or its scarcity. It is, rather, a look at the state of the nation of Britain and abroad in the period from 1977 to 1986: what was happening in Britain and further afield, in other words, before the question of oil even arose.

There are sixteen well-written articles here which take as their starting-point an aspect of life in Britain in this period. They include : the end of the age of steam, as reflected in the life of a Glasgow engine-driver; a comparison of the working-class districts of Liverpool and Turin, seen through the eyes of their football supporters; a snapshot of a day in the life of the honorary secretary and co-founder of the Society of Advanced Meccano Constructors; and race-relations in Bradford, as witnessed by the former head of Drummond Middle School, Ray Honeyford.

In a nice touch, the author references two earlier 'state of the nation' books by JB Priestley and Louis MacNiece as he tours Yorkshire and the Hebrides. He also recounts what was probably one of the last interviews with Priestley when the latter was 88 years old.

This is a delightful collection of pieces by Ian Jack which show real insight into the lives of those he writes about. You would be hard-pressed to find a better description of life in the Falkland Islands in the 1980's, for example, than the beautifully-crafted chapter here titled "Don't cry for us, Argentina".

Sadly, this book is out of print. However, it's worth tracking down a copy if you can find one.… (más)