10.
BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ Is it? The pen probably changes society more successfully in the long term than does the sword. Governments that want to destroy opposition have traditionally done it by the heavy-handed use of swords, guns and bombs. After thousands of years they still haven’t learnt that such attacks stiffen resistance instead of destroying it.
Israel and Palestine are examples of two states that haven’t figured this out yet. The pen, however, gets deep inside people’s hearts and minds, and works away quietly in there, eventually, sometimes, causing a revolution. Now that’s powerful!
Born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, William Shakespeare (Will to his friends, The Bard to his fans) was an actor who did a bit of writing in his spare time. Gradually, however, he became better known for his writing than for his acting. As the centuries rolled on, he became more and more famous, until today he’s almost as well known as Coca-Cola and Pizza Hut. He wrote plays and poetry, although it’s only fair to mention that some people believe that he didn’t actually write them himself, that for some reason they were written by someone else but published under his name.
Most of the poems are sonnets (fourteen-line poems) and there are many beautiful love poems among them, although if his reputation depended upon them he would hardly be remembered today. And, to be honest, some of the plays were dogs. But the best six or eight are sublime: human creations as beautiful as the Sydney Opera House, the paintings of Monet, the music of Bach. Shakespeare wrote tragedies, comedies and romances, and the most famous, in my order of preference, are Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night.
Why is he the Sir Don Bradman of writing? Well, because he understood human passions and behaviours like few before or since, because he used the English language with consummate skill and because, in reflecting ourselves back to us, he caused us to see the world in a richer and wiser way.
The popularity that his plays enjoy around the world is evidence that he is a writer for the universe, and that wherever humans gather they will appreciate Will Shakespeare’s work.
In the old days, groups of Christians often went on pilgrimages to places they thought of as holy, like Jerusalem or Rome. In England, people sometimes made pilgrimages to Canterbury Cathedral, the home of the Church of England. Without buses, mobile phones or Sony Playstation 3s, it was a long way and the pilgrims got bored. Writer Geoffrey Chaucer used this situation as the basis for his book, which in some ways was the first proper novel in English. His group of fictitious pilgrims decide that each person will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back, to entertain the others. Chaucer set out to write all these stories for his characters, but he had given himself too big a task and he never got them finished. Still, he wrote enough to fill a decent sized book, and The Canterbury Tales has long been treasured for its humour, sharpness and clever characterisation.
Zola’s most famous piece of writing was not one of his many novels, but an essay he wrote in 1898 that changed French history. In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was arrested on a charge of spying for Germany. The news caused an uproar in France, and Dreyfus was vilified up and down the country. It didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind that he might be innocent. Gradually, however, evidence emerged that he was indeed innocent. But because he was Jewish, and because the real spy was (probably) a member of France’s ruling class, the government was happier for Dreyfus to rot in an appalling prison on Devil’s Island than to try to establish the truth. The army was happier too.
As public pressure grew to release Dreyfus, the government and the army dug in deeper and deeper, refusing to accept that there was any chance of his innocence. To help things along, senior army officers forged evidence to show Dreyfus was guilty.
The essay by Zola, coming when it did, was explosive. In an incredibly powerful piece of writing, he accused the government, the army and the courts of taking part in a huge cover-up. He named names, and they were powerful names. He accused some of the most famous men in the country of being cheats and liars. He was sent to prison for writing and publishing his essay, but by now the public were on fire, this time on the side of Dreyfus instead of against him, and eventually another inquiry revealed the truth. In 1906 Dreyfus was declared innocent. Some army officers committed suicide, other officers and politicians resigned, and Zola was carried through the streets of Paris on the shoulders of a cheering crowd. (Well, I don’t know if he was really, but I thought it sounded good.)
During the Great Depression of 1929 and the tough years that followed, a lot of Americans were out of a job and had to take to the roads and railway tracks. Among the people who suffered were farmers who had been scratching out a living on poor land and small farms. Many of these farmers lost everything when the Depression hit. In his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck tells the story of some of these people, in particular the Joads and the Wilsons. The Joads and the Wilsons are battlers, and their struggle to survive, to make it just to the next day, is simply and movingly described. Steinbeck brings home to readers around the world the effect of economic movements on real people in their everyday lives.
Not everything in nineteenth-century London was in good shape. People were regularly sent to prison for owing money, there was little protection for women or children, and the legal system was a nightmare in which justice played a very small part. The poor had to depend on charity, and charity was often handed out in an insulting and cruel manner. Into this grim scene came one of the greatest storytellers of all time. Charles Dickens had experienced a lot of tough times himself when growing up. He’d seen his father thrown into a cesspit of a prison for debt and he himself had been forced to work in a degrading and lousy job when only twelve years old.
Yet Dickens was able to write about the society in which he lived with humour, warmth and affection. In novel after novel he showed readers the best and the worst of life in England, and they responded with enormous enthusiasm, making Dickens one of the most famous men of the century. Most of his books were published as serials in magazines, and the effect on a magazine’s sales of having a Dickens serial was astonishing. They were so popular in Australia that when a boat from England arrived off Sydney Cove with the latest mail, people rowed out to meet it so they could ask the passengers what had happened in the latest episode of the Dickens serial they were reading.
It’s impossible to say how much Dickens changed the culture of the nineteenth century. But we can say that his impact was enormous, and that he made people aware of the need for a fairer, more humane society. Injustices were not so well tolerated after Dickens as they were before he started writing. His books are a little out of fashion at the moment, because they can be quite wordy, but masterpieces like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist (the basis for the musical Oliver), Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol (the story of the stingy Mr Scrooge) and A Tale of Two Cities are still great reads today.
This story of an Englishman wrongly convicted of a crime and sent to the penal colony of Australia is one of the early classics of our literature. It’s a grim read – not a lot of laughs – and it gets a bit melodramatic at times, but it shows the horrors of those early prisons. They were almost unspeakably terrible. There are scenes in this book you’ll never forget – especially the one where the escaped convicts start killing and eating each other until only two are left alive, and each of them knows that the first to nod off to sleep will be killed and eaten by the other.
Not long ago, this book was on every Year 9 or 10 English course reading list in Australia, and it’s probably still on quite a few. Young Scout Finch tells the story of a long hot summer in her little town of Maycomb, in the deep south of the United States, in the 1920s. Racism was a way of life, and an accusation of rape by a white girl against a black man would result in an automatic guilty verdict. But when Scout’s lawyer–father Atticus takes on such a case, a conviction suddenly doesn’t seem quite so certain. If you can get through the first chapter of the book, one of the most boring first chapters ever written, you’re in for a deeply moving reading experience – and one of the best endings ever written!
This Russian work has often been called the greatest novel ever written. It’s a long one, about fifteen hundred pages in most editions, but it tackles a big topic. The war between France, under Napoleon, and Russia, under Alexander I, is shown through the eyes of two Russian families, the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs, and two men, Pierre Bezuhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. Tolstoy’s magnificent canvas includes a huge cast of memorable characters, a wonderful portrait of Russian life, and fresh, honest observations about life and living.
This is another whopper, and you may have to put aside a year or so of your life to read it, but for a lot of people this is the best novel of the twentieth century. The main character wants to be an artist, and in many ways he has great success, but he suffers from a certain emptiness which gets worse as he gets older. It’s only towards the end of his life that he understands, as memories overwhelm him, just how his life fits together, and he then sets out to write his autobiography. This will enable him to achieve the artistic fulfilment for which he’s been looking.
Proust was able to write with stunning style, but beyond that, in the three thousand pages of Remembrance of Things Past, he spans a powerful period of European and French society, and writes about it with unusual insight, using complex characters who shed new light on the human race. The book was radical for its time and still has the power to provoke.
This epic novel by Australia’s only winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature tells the story of Stan and Amy Parker, their marriage, their children, and their deaths. In the struggle of the Parkers to carve out their farm and make a place for themselves in a continent that challenges them at every turn, White tells the story of European-Australians’ encounters with this country. Stan and Amy are not intellectuals, but they are strong and they have well-developed instincts. They work all their lives. White treats them seriously and with respect, and their story is both illuminating and moving.
This book, published in 1852, had a huge effect on America, especially the northern states. In telling the fictional story of the black man, Uncle Tom, Stowe made Americans think again about slavery. The book sold millions of copies throughout the world and, perhaps more than anything else, hardened the determination of many Americans to end the slave trade, one of the reasons the north went to war against the south in the Civil War. It is said that Abraham Lincoln, when he met Stowe, said, ‘So this is the little woman who made the book that made this great war . . .’
In the book, the slave Tom saves the life of a white child, and her father decides to set Tom free as a reward. But both the child and the father die before this can happen, and Tom is sold to the evil Simon Legree. Legree eventually whips Tom to death, but Tom dies with a vision of Heaven in his eyes and forgiveness for Simon on his lips. One of the most heart-rending moments in the book is a scene where a slave trader takes a ten-month-old baby from the baby’s mother and sells him for $45. When the woman realises, she commits suicide. The trader takes out his notebook and writes down her name under the heading ‘Losses’.