Isabel Hilton's Reading List

"I read this book a couple of times and the second time I did have a pang of, ‘Hang on a minute! Is this really nonfiction?’ One of the interesting experiences of being a judge this year is that the category of nonfiction has become much more creative than it was. The reason I asked myself that question is that this book is a scenario for what would happen if North Korea were to launch a missile at the United States. Now, fortunately, North Korea has not yet launched a missile at the United States, so everything that then happens in this book, hasn’t happened. But it is a scenario that is entirely based on documents, many of which have very recently been declassified, and on 10 years of interviews with people who were deeply engaged in the whole question of deterrence and of thinking about nuclear war and trying to prevent it. So the book is very rooted in fact. She describes what happens if an unusual missile is launched. It’s picked up quite early and it’s tracked to determine where it’s headed. It’s heading for the United States. They try to intercept it. They fail. It hits Washington. Then what happens? Essentially, you have about half an hour from the beginning of the episode to the end of the world. It is utterly terrifying. It is about what can go wrong. It’s about what happens when deterrence, which is all we have to prevent nuclear war, fails and then the fail-safe, interception, also fails. There’s also another launch from a submarine—also originating from North Korea—which is off the west coast of the United States. That hits a nuclear power plant and is a whole separate disaster. Because it’s a nuclear power plant, a different set of things happen. The book told me lots of things I didn’t know or hadn’t thought about. For example, it is now clear that the United States is under nuclear attack from North Korea, and it responds. But to respond to North Korea, the missiles have to fly over Russia. What does Russia do? Russia interprets that as an attack from the United States. The fail-safe there is to get Moscow on the phone, which they try to do. After several attempts, they get through, and Moscow says, ‘Get your president to call our president.’ But by then, they’ve lost sight of the American president, because he was being evacuated from Washington when the bomb hit. It’s a completely gripping but utterly terrifying scenario. It’s about the world we currently live in, an increasingly dangerous world, and it’s a really hard look at systems that we would probably rather not think about. It’s written very sparingly, very tellingly, very compellingly and you pretty much can’t put it down. You may wish you’d never read it, but you can’t put it down while you are reading it."

"There’s a connection with The Narrow Road to the Deep North because that book was also concerned with his father’s experience of being a slave laborer in the Second World War: he was an Australian captured by the Japanese. Question 7 also picks up on the nuclear theme, because Hiroshima is a key part of it. His father was unlikely to survive another winter. He was weak, he was exhausted, he was starving. It was also possible that the closing months of the war would have seen the slaughter of American and Australian prisoners at Japanese hands. His father was saved by the first nuclear bomb used by the United States on Japan, which helped to bring the war to an end. That meant he survived, and Richard Flanagan was born. In a curious way, Richard Flanagan owes his existence to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the world’s first nuclear attack on Hiroshima. That doesn’t make the use of nuclear weapons anything that can be defended, but the whole book is a meditation on the conundrum of life, of moral choices, on the connection between apparently unrelated things, on memory, on understanding. A lot of it is about his father and what he became after the war, and about his mother. It’s also about Tasmania and genocide in Tasmania by settlers. It’s about the shame of being descended from a convict family in Australia. It’s about HG Wells and Rebecca West. It’s about the connection that he traces between HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds and an exiled Hungarian nuclear physicist who understood the idea of chain reaction. It came to him in a flash of insight and it led him to understand that splitting the atom would inevitably lead to a bomb. Question 7 is the most extraordinary narrative which pulls together personal experience, the experience of his father, and revisiting sites that his father saw, meeting people—including Japanese former prison guards, people who were on the other side of his father’s experience—and then linking that through to both the cultural and the scientific history of the development and then the use of the bomb. It is a memoir but of expanded consciousness. Again, you can’t really put it down. It’s beautifully written. It’s very original in the way it uses reflection and fact and personal stories. Yes, that’s true. And what holds this part memoir, part science, part history together is the personal thread. The book begins and ends with a kayaking accident the author, Richard Flanagan, has in a river in Tasmania. He is rescued, but only just. He describes this moment when he is floating above the river, looking down at himself. Is that death? In the middle there is this extraordinary imaginative thread which, as I said, links his father’s experience, his own existence, and the wider history of the era, and does it beautifully."

"Yes, she writes extraordinarily well. I defy anyone who reads The Story of a Heart not to be moved by it. It’s the story of a nine-year-old girl who was involved in a car crash and her parents are told that she’s brain dead. They immediately ask if she can donate her organs. Her heart goes to a boy who has a heart condition and is in hospital, waiting for a transplant. He’s being kept alive with a mechanical heart, and suddenly a heart is offered. The transplant is successful. It sounds like a simple story, but she tells it extremely beautifully. She establishes a relationship with the family of both Keira and Max and, in the end, they meet. The parents of the donor, the little girl who died, are able to listen to her heart beating in the little boy whose life it saved. I have to tell you, as stories go, I am already beginning to weep just thinking about it. Again, it’s a book that once read is never forgotten. It’s told with extraordinary insight, medical knowledge and extraordinary sensitivity to the people involved. She tells their story, of something we take for granted, heart transplants, in a way that I’ve never seen it told before. It’s profoundly moving."

"This is another book that brought home to me how creative nonfiction has become. In terms of form, it’s very unusual. He refers to himself as ‘you’ throughout. So he talks about ‘your own failure, your this, your that’ when he means ‘I’, rather than the reader. Again, it’s a meditation on his parents, who are Vietnamese Catholics. They came to the United States and ended up in California, where they raised their two sons. It’s about the experience of being a migrant. What decisions do you make as a second-generation migrant? Do you embrace your parents’ mother tongue? Do you embrace English? For someone who ends up being a prize-winning author, this is a key decision. What’s the relationship with writing? What’s the distance that comes with your parents? It happens with every adolescent, but it happens in very different ways for migrant families, because it’s about the breach with the ancestral culture. How far does that go? What sort of things are remembered, and what sort of secrets are kept? He describes this from the perspective of the narrator but, as I said, in the second person. He’s playing a distant observer of his own emotions, feelings and choices. It’s not a formal, linear narrative at all. You feel you’ve entered into the stream of consciousness of somebody who is having this experience. And, curiously enough, it tells you more about the experience than it would have done with another narrative form. It seduces you into his thinking, his frame of mind, and his emotions in ways that are really illuminating. Migration is a highly contemporary and contentious subject. I found it very illuminating not about migrants as the objects of political discourse, but migration as the subject. For that reason, I and my fellow judges felt it really earned its place on the shortlist. Again, it’s a very original approach to memoir, that encompasses history, drama and indeed contemporary politics—although not entirely frontally. It’s not just about migration, it’s also a meditation on memory and reality and ‘what is truth?’ But it situates those questions that we all share in a context of biculturalism, of displacement, and of relationship with the past. It does a bit, although it’s mostly after that. There are visits back home. Those are told in the context of the relationship either of the parents or of the next generation to what is meant to be the ancestral past. That’s not entirely linear, because already in Vietnam, the parents had been moved to another province as part of a political movement. So they weren’t exactly leaving home in the straightforward sense. Also, when they get to the United States, they very determinedly set their eyes on the future rather than the past. They do revisit, but very little. It’s a functional relationship in which they have obligations to family back in Vietnam, which they discharge, but you don’t have the sense that they ever imagine returning. People who migrate under other circumstances often imagine returning, but you don’t get the sense that this family does. It is a rupture, but it’s not a rupture that they try to repair. They set their face to the future."

"It’s about one of the most important painters of his age, a man who helped to steer art towards post-Impressionism and was a huge influence on a whole generation. It’s also rather an extraordinary life about which I knew very little. The book is greatly assisted, I think, by a 200-page memoir which Gauguin himself wrote in the last two years of his life, which had been thought to be lost, but was rediscovered. The contentious part of Gauguin’s life, which no doubt others are very well aware of, was his time in Tahiti. It had a huge influence on his art but was controversial because of his relationship with various very young women (and when I say young, I mean 13- or 14-year-olds). She goes into this in quite an interesting way, with an ethnographic eye on the relationship. She’s very non-judgmental. The attitude of people in Tahiti about marriage, about sexual relations, about the relationship of young women both to their families and to their partners, is both interesting and more complex than you might imagine. She also clears him of the charge that he introduced syphilis to Tahiti, which there’s no evidence for. This is demonstrated by the discovery of four of his teeth, which for some reason he kept. They were discovered relatively recently and subject to scientific analysis and there was no sign of the standard treatment for syphilis. He was quite a difficult man. He changed partners fairly regularly. He had a marriage with several children, but decided to pursue his art, which took him away from his family. They relocated to Denmark and he came back to France. It’s an extraordinary picture of a hand-to-mouth existence of someone of great talent, but talent which was slightly ahead of its time. He’s constantly trying to get involved in exhibitions which are going to solve or relieve the financial pressures that are upon him. You get a picture of quite a multinational group of artists in a similar situation, all looking at each other’s work, often trying to support each other and help each other, though not always. He has a famous visit to van Gogh when van Gogh is clearly having a breakdown. Gauguin leaves just before van Gogh cuts off his own ear after threatening Gauguin with a razor. The book is full of incident and drama. And somehow, in the middle of this, Gauguin produced great art. Sue Prideaux is a master storyteller and a wonderful biographer, and the book really argued its way onto the shortlist without much resistance. She does do it quite persuasively. There is a lot of work here, a lot of context. There’s a lot of cultural understanding, and there is an effort at least, to allow the reader to make up his or her own mind, rather than the biographer dictating or mandating what view to take. She gives you a chance. You don’t have to accept the rehabilitation, but she certainly gives you a fair shot at it."

"Yes. Revolusi is an epic work, but it is a rather overdue one, because Indonesia is a hugely important country that has been very much neglected. The case that he is making is not only that we should care more about it because it’s a large country, with the world’s largest Muslim population etc. He also argues that the anti-colonial struggle in Indonesia was the first anti-colonial struggle. It triggered and set the tone for a whole series of anti-colonial struggles thereafter. The conference at Bandung in 1955 was the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement—another theme which is very much around at the moment. It’s time that we looked at the role that Indonesia played in shaping post-colonial thinking. Again, it’s very beautifully done. It’s a monumental work, and it’s an extraordinary story. Not only was the struggle against the Dutch an extraordinary story, but Indonesia was also occupied by Japan in World War Two because of its resources, which included oil. Indonesia is a massive archipelago with dozens of languages and cultures so the complexities of any struggle are going to be rather greater than for a smaller and more coherent polity. It’s a miracle that it’s a country at all but, somehow, it has worked. There’s a metaphor that he uses throughout the book. There’s a ship that sinks in the Java Sea, and he takes the shipboard metaphor of first-class, second-class and third-class passengers. Third class tends to be the Indonesians, but there are variations within all these classes. Sometimes somebody from one class ascends to the next one up, and someone from the second class might decline to the third class. It sounds like a banal metaphor, but the way it’s used through the book is very helpful, because revolutionary movements and loyalties are not necessarily simple. The whole book is shot through with the complications. There’s the mosaic of indigenous Indonesian cultures, the colonists and who they were, and then the people who are the product of relationships between the colonists and Indonesians. What are their loyalties? What role do they play? Then you have the complications of Asian colonizers versus European colonizers, and the role the Japanese play. Not just in Indonesia, but also in Burma, the Japanese claimed they were a liberating force who were driving out European colonists. They then tended to become almost as brutal as the Europeans that they had driven out, or in some cases more so. It’s a subtle and interesting book about a very important subject. Yes, it was long, complicated and brutal. Instead of the defeat of Japan and the end of the war leading to Indonesian independence, it led to an attempt by the Dutch to re-establish their colonial possession. The Dutch imagined that they would pick up where they left off and there was a lot of violence. In several of this year’s shortlisted books, you have an experience of war, very much from the ground up. In Question 7 it’s about the experience of being a slave laborer in Japanese captivity. In Revolusi, Van Reybrouck talks to a lot of people who are now very old. There are a lot of eyewitness accounts and recollections. It’s about the direct experiences of ordinary people caught up in these terrible, violent events—what it meant, the decisions they made, whose side they chose to be on, if they had the luxury of choosing. It’s about the leaders who emerge and rise in those moments, who then shape the next stage of history, which was a critical and important one. He’s arguing not just that this was an extraordinary passage of resistance to colonialism and the emergence of independence, but it then went on to shape the experience or the ambitions of countries who were going through a similar process. Funnily enough it may be partly because Indonesia was non-aligned. If you think that for a long time what we looked at was defined by the Cold War, Indonesia wasn’t a player in that sense. It is very large and very complicated. I suppose it’s also because Indonesia never tried to be a great power. We tend to pay attention to countries that challenge global power arrangements. The Bandung Conference was trying to do the opposite. It was saying, ‘We are here, we are us, and we will define our allegiances and our futures ourselves and not as a function of the confrontation between the USSR and the USA.’ We’re seeing a similar sentiment with the US-China confrontation, another reason this book is relevant. If you think of the US-China confrontation as a rerun of the Cold War, where is Indonesia in this? It’s a producer of a critical mineral: it’s one of the largest producers of nickel in the world. And China has established a very strong position in Indonesia mining nickel, which America is now worried about. Again, we’re seeing a very large and important country in the context of a confrontation between two superpowers. There are. The Story of a Heart is an outlier, but it just demanded to be there. Wild Thing also. But if you read them—as we did—in quick succession, you become aware of relationships. There’s a Zeitgeist feel to them. They’re very much about today, but each, in its own way, is drawing threads from the past."

"When I first arrived in China in 1973 there was a total of around 20 foreign students in the country. Now, of course, there are thousands, but at that time China had been closed and was very hard to get into – we were the first group allowed back into China since the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. It was a very strange and different country. I’ve been going back to China for more than 30 years now, and in that time China has had its industrial revolution and things have become steadily more polluted. When I lived in China in the 70s there were blue skies in the winter. Beijing in particular was famous for blue skies because they have a very dry winter, and so if you didn’t have a sandstorm you would see these lovely blue skies, very sunny and dry, if very cold. By the late 80s that had begun to disappear and they now haven’t really seen blue skies since the 90s. So it became visibly, steadily more polluted. Having watched the world’s biggest industrial revolution happen, it does make you think about our models of industrial and economic development and the cost of them. And about how unsustainable they are. So, with climate change it’s now become an extremely urgent issue. It is dramatic. I remember many years ago having to walk across a wooden bridge at Lo Wu to leave China, and all around were paddy fields and farms. And now if you go anywhere in that part of the world, apart from the fact that there are now very large cities, it is all covered with smog. And the rivers do run black. They do smell. It’s an environmental disaster. Hong Kong, which used to be pretty clear, is now affected by the smog from Guangzhou. People just get used to it. But if I think back to how it was when I first saw it, it’s really quite extraordinary. Well, the first thing to think about is that if you see photographs of, say, Leeds, in the 1890s, or if you look at what Monet painted at Westminster Bridge – if you look at what he was painting and if you look at these photos – you realise that they look very like parts of China now. Every industrial revolution has done this. So China’s no different, although the scale is extraordinarily large, and China is in many ways a very fragile environment. Although it’s a very big country it has a very big population, and only certain parts of the country can really sustain a dense population. Everything to the west is pretty much desert, the north is pretty arid, so you’ve got a very heavy pressure on resources. And with this industrial model, as our industrial revolution was, it’s a very carbon-intensive, get-rich-quick, clean-up-later kind of model. They just haven’t got to the clean-up bit yet. The problem is that they don’t have as much headroom as the Western industrial revolutions did when they began. Firstly, in terms of carbon emissions there’s no headroom at all, whereas when the British industrial revolution began no one knew about it. And the problem is, we’ve been putting out carbon now for 200 years and there’s no room for any more. It is true that we also had this very intense, polluting development, and we are still cleaning up. We’ve exported all our heavy industry to the developing world. So China is at the stage of polluting heavily, and I don’t know if they quite realise how expensive and difficult the clean-up is going to be."

"Yes, she does, and have a look at Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants. The environmental history of China is a very interesting one, and there is this mythology that Chinese peasants are somehow in tune with nature. But if you read Elvin you realise that in China there has actually been 2,000 years of unsustainable development and environmental degradation. It essentially comes from the model of a highly centralised state and its need to accumulate surplus wealth – and certainly under the old imperial system this was produced by the peasants. In fact, it was also the surpluses produced by the peasants that were used for a rapid industrialisation under Mao. And Mao’s of course was a particularly catastrophic period, both for the people and for the environment."

"Mao believed the theories of Lysenko: that man is in charge of nature; that nature is there to be exploited and that anything at all can be achieved with the right political attitude and a scientific approach. Well, they called it a ‘scientific’ approach, but actually it was very bad science indeed. Lysenko’s theories produced probably the worst famine in human history. In China, between the late 50s and early 60s, between 30 and 80 million people starved to death. Now, the abusive element of that is that nobody could argue against what Mao believed, what Mao dictated; everyone was too terrified to complain, to protest, to argue against it. And if they did, you know, they didn’t last very long. So the craziest ideas were put into practice. An awful lot of the damage that has been done to China was done during that Maoist period of millenarian socialism. For instance, they lost about 35 per cent of the grassland in Qinghai because Mao ordered that they should plough the grasslands and plant wheat – and when people said, you can’t plant wheat there, they were labelled counter-revolutionary. People were ordered to plough the grasslands, the top soil then blew away, so the wheat did not grow and the harvest failed. So they created desert. In fact, they’d been creating desert for a very long time, but it was a particularly accelerated period of creating desert which was this absolutely poisonous combination of political dictatorship and crazy science."

"It is. Or rather, Wolf Totem doesn’t actually cover the Great Leap Forward. It’s set in the period following the Great Leap Forward. But it is still Mao’s time. If you read Wolf Totem and another wonderful book – Julia Lovell’s The Great Wall: China Against the World – if you read those two together they provide an interesting illustration of what’s happened to the environment. Because that border – the border that has moved over history between the nomadic herders and the settled farmers – is also an environmental line. When the central state in China was weak, the barbarians, as the Chinese Han would call them, were able to reclaim their territories which went down to just north of Beijing, and it would sort of green-up again. But when the central state grew stronger and the Han moved north they essentially degraded the environment and created desert. So, for instance, when the Manchu held Manchuria and no Han were allowed to live there it was forested and fertile, but there is no forest left now. In 100 years they have deforested Manchuria. It’s interesting, isn’t it? It was a very controversial book in many ways. But Jiang Rong was saying things that, had a Mongolian said them, would have aroused nationalistic indignation, but which probably needed to be said. Wolf Totem contains certain things that have universal romantic appeal: wolves, tribesmen, and so on. But the message that central Chinese policies have been catastrophic for the people who were China’s neighbours – and who are now incorporated into China – very much needed to be said. And it was a way of criticising the party without it being about Han China. But it spoke for a lot of what had happened in Han China too. The problem is that they go on repeating this: they’re doing it now in Tibet and in Qinghai, all those western provinces which are now being subjected to mass Han migration and to intensive agriculture. They’re trying to monetise the nomadic herders – or rather, they did try to monetise them, now they’re trying to settle them into cities. It’s really a policy of misguided colonialism with catastrophic environmental outcomes. They’ve always believed that they knew best."

"Well, there are several things happening. North China, Beijing, is on the edge of desert and there’s been a huge population growth which is unsustainable. There isn’t enough rainfall to sustain a population, so they’ve been drilling deeper and deeper into the aquifers which are going to be exhausted quite soon. At the same time, because of poor environmental policies, the Yellow River, the mother river of China and where Chinese civilisation began, now fails to reach the sea for much of the year. This is because of over-extraction, but also because of degradation at the head-waters: deforestation, desertification. So there’s less water coming down it, there’s more water being taken out of it, and the alternative sources – the aquifers – are running out. And if you add to that uncontrolled industrialisation… Very little of the waste water in China, either industrial or domestic, is treated. They’ve taken the cheapest form of development which has the highest environmental cost. So if you’re pumping raw sewage into the rivers that carry your drinking water, along with industrial effluent, you run out of water. You end up with such water as you do have – which in any event is not enough – being unfit for any purpose whatsoever, as a great deal of water now is in China. You can’t even use it for irrigation. Well, the way China’s approached water management – again, over centuries – is that they’ve always tried to engineer their way out of a problem. There are two approaches: one is conservation and the other is engineering, and the Chinese have always favoured engineering from the Grand Canal onwards. They still do favour engineering: mega-projects like the Three Gorges Dam, or the big one now, which is the South-North Water Transfer. South China and West China for now have water and they propose this massive bit of engineering which will divert water from the south to the north. Now the problem is that in the long term, in 25 years, west China – or as some would say, Tibet – which currently holds the largest frozen store of fresh water outside the poles may not look the same. Unfortunately, it’s something of a climate change hotspot, something that China is also contributing to, having become the largest emitter of carbons in the world. The temperatures on the Tibetan plateau are rising faster than anywhere else in the world, and that means that the glaciers are melting. They’re melting quite rapidly. And that means that all the rivers that derive from them, which includes the Yellow River and the Yangtze, the Brahmaputra, the Indus – the eight great rivers of Asia, which derive to a greater or a lesser degree from these glaciers – will first flow faster and then shrink, and they will probably become seasonal. And that means that nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population is facing long-term, severe water shortage. Including, of course, China. So the diversion of water from the Brahmaputra to North China is of concern, not only for environmentalists but to everybody downstream, and that includes an awful lot of countries and an awful lot of people. China is sitting on the tap. China is the only country in that part of the world that is currently damming transnational rivers. No. International law is extremely weak on this, and there are no trans-boundary agreements in that part of the world, except on the Indus. That is one of those agreements that’s survived international hostilities of all kinds, because of course it involves India and Pakistan, and it’s held up despite everything that’s happened. But there are no trans-boundary agreements involving all the states on the other rivers. It’s one of the things that I feel we ought to pay some rather urgent attention to before this becomes a dispute. Water scarcity can become a source of conflict. Certainly India, being one of the downstream countries, is extremely concerned about China’s dam-building. There’s a famous book which was promoted by the China Ministry for Water Resources, provocatively entitled Tibet’s Water Will Save China. Well, Tibet’s water isn’t China’s water. Tibet’s water belongs to Asia . If you look at that region from the air, there’s this great horseshoe of mountains, and all the rivers in Asia derive from those mountains."

"Yes, he’s a great guy. Unfortunately he’s been having a bit of a difficult time. You can find a lot more from Pan Yue on China Dialogue , which contains many of his essays. He’s a very interesting thinker, one of the very progressive voices. But it is significant that you don’t really hear from him any more. Well, he’s one of a group in the sense that he has a big following, and he’s certainly done a great deal to help the environmental movement grow, but he’s not a politically powerful figure. He’s been passed over for promotion. The ministry for the environment – at one point at least, and it may still be true – had fewer personnel to look after the whole of China than there were working in Mao’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. You can’t have an effective environment ministry with 400 people looking after 1.3 billion. In the US, with its much smaller population, the ministry for the environment has in the thousands. Tens of thousands. So you can tell how much priority the government gives to environmental issues just by looking at the institutions that they’ve set up. Unfortunately they’re not very convincing. There isn’t any one authority powerful enough to do things like fine people properly for discharging effluent. It’s cheaper still to pay the fine than it is to install a water treatment plant in your factory. And so, of course, they simply pay the fines and they carry on. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So it’s very tough actually, and it’s very tough because you’ve got a very pernicious combination of political and economic power, and you have very few checks and balances because rule of law is very weak. If you look at what happens to environmental activists when they come up against economic interests – well, they don’t win. Very rarely do they win. Lawyers can be threatened, have their licences taken away, and there isn’t a free press. So if you think about the mechanisms for environmental clean-up in the West, in the end public outrage plays a part. People are concerned for their health, their children’s health; they feel that polluters ought to pay, that people shouldn’t dump their effluents into the public realm for the sake of private profit. In order to remedy these abuses you need a state that is very determined. And if you have a state in which the servants of the state, the power-holders in the state, have the same interest as the industrialists and the economic power-holders – which you have in China – then it takes a long time to bring any pressure to bear. It’s not that no Chinese care about this; there are a lot of Chinese who care about this. It just takes a while. And to balance this, China has made progress in terms of the laws that have been passed, and there are a lot of people doing very serious work on how to change things. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There is even now a public right to know and transparency and so on, so the mechanisms are beginning to be built, it’s just a matter of how to make them work effectively and slightly more rapidly. Yes. It’s just hard work."