<abstract>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</abstract> <n>This book is also known as <i>The Stars’ Tennis Balls</i>, which is why this book was so familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place why. I’d <a href="{app}news/view_article.php?id=2459">read it before but under the other title</a>.</n> This is a modern re-telling of Dumas's <i>Count of Monte Christo</i>, with Edward "Ned" Maddstone playing the main role. He is a good-looking, sporty, averagely intelligent and socially well-placed young man to whom everything has always come easily because no obstacles have ever been allowed to remain in his way. He is blissfully unaware of how good he has it. He has a lovely, lovely girlfriend. He has some friends, all of whom hate him very much, for various reasons. These friends conspire to get him arrested, but a bad coincidence leads him into the hands of a secret service with every reason to eliminate him, as well. So, what starts off as an evil schoolboy prank that would have resulted in real but limited prison time or at least parole, turns instead to permanent banishment to a remote island of political prisoners. Ned is, to say the least, utterly out of his depth and bewildered beyond knowing. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this challenge, as he's never had to surmount a real challenge himself. At the island, he is psychologically re-programmed to believe that his previous life was a fiction produced by his madness. There he meets "Babe", another prisoner, put there because he was nearly unbelievably dangerously talented and intelligent. He was a spy who'd outlived his usefulness. Babe takes Ned under his wing and teaches him everything he knows over the next twenty years. Babe helps him remember his past and helps him decipher what happened to him. Babe dies of a heart attack and Ned takes the opportunity to escape the island. Armed with Babes bank account and knowledge (not the least of nine languages), he builds a software empire as Simon Cotter and plans his complex and nefarious revenge on those who wronged him. The manner of this revenge is intricate and exquisitely detailed and deliciously just. He does not stumble or deviate from his path, although he loses everything he'd perhaps hoped to gain, retreating to the island whence he came. <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Location 336-340">Mother and Father gave you that name. And the criminal part of it is that, as a name, it’s only just off. Roy or Lee or Kevin or Dean or Wayne, they’re the real thing. Echt Lumpenproletariat. Dennis and Desmond and Leonard and Norman and Colin and Neville and Eric are revolting, but they are honest. Ashley, though. It’s a Howard or a Lindsay or a Leslie kind of a name. It’s nearly there. It seems to be trying to be there. And that, surely, is the saddest thing of all.</bq> <bq caption="Location 361-362">Carry off the ease that belies any sense of anything at all having to be carried off, if that isn’t too baroque. Carry off that natural, effortless taking-it-all-for-granted air. But</bq> <bq caption="Location 371-376">Slowly you have become infected by a northern accent. Not obvious, just a trace, but to your sensitive, highly attuned ears as glaring as a cleft palate. You began to pronounce “One” and “None” to rhyme with “Shone” and “Gone” instead of “Shun” and “Gun,” you gently sounded the “g’s in “Ringing” and “Singing.” At school you even rhyme “Mud” with “Good” and “Grass” with “Lass.” Fair enough, you would be beaten up as a southern poof otherwise, but you have trailed some of that linguistic mud into the house with you.</bq> <bq caption="Location 446-448">“Shall we formulate it this way? Money is to Everything as an Airplane is to Australia. The airplane isn’t Australia, but it remains the only practical way we know of reaching it. So perhaps, metonymically, the airplane is Australia after all.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 482-485">Ashley wasn’t popular, he was fully aware of that. He wasn’t one of them. He sounded right, but he wasn’t one of them. He sounded too right. These cretinous sons of upper-class broodmares and high-pedigreed stallions, they were loutish and graceless, entirely undeserving of the privilege accorded them. He, Ashley Barson-Garland, stood apart because he wasn’t enough of an oik. Such splendid irony.</bq> <bq caption="Location 553-556">What she really wanted to say was “So we’re going to arrive at Lucca in time to find all the shops and cafés shut, are we? And as usual we’re going to have to wander around a completely empty and deserted town for five hours until everyone else has woken from their siestas. That’s a great plan, Pete.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 562-563">Portia realized that saying “Neither did I, you don’t have to ‘study’ something to know about it” would sound arrogant, so once again, she curbed her tongue.</bq> <bq caption="Location 765-770">There seemed to be millions out there who could not understand that their problem was not this or that injustice or social ill, but the diminished sense of self that caused them to blame anything other than their own bitterness and rage: to bolster this delusion, that was the supreme dishonesty. There were people who believed that their opportunities to live a fulfilled life were hampered by the number of Asians in England, by the existence of a royal family, by the volume of traffic that passed by their house, by the malice of trade unions, by the power of callous employers, by the refusal of the health service to take their condition seriously, by communism, by capitalism, by atheism, by anything, in fact, but their own futile, weak-minded failure to get a fucking grip.</bq> <bq caption="Location 787-788">Most people, after all, can imagine having terminal cancer, they can’t begin to imagine having brains.</bq> <bq caption="Location 820-822">shrugged with open hands as if to suggest that, while I may have picked up the odd pebble of interest on the shore, like Newton I was all too aware of the great ocean of knowledge that lay undiscovered before me.</bq> <bq caption="Location 886-888">“Cradle of democracy” indeed. Did he not know that Americans regarded Washington as the cradle of democracy, just as the French did Paris and the Greeks Athens, and no doubt the Icelanders Reykjavík, each with as much reason? Such typically casual arrogance.</bq> <bq caption="Location 902-906">The essential truth that people always failed to understand about intelligence, Ashley believed, was that it allowed its possessor deeper intuition and keener instincts than those granted to others. Stupid people liked to delude themselves that while they may not be clever, they were at least able to compensate with feelings and insights denied to the intellectual. Drivel, Ashley thought. It was precisely this kind of false belief that made stupid people so stupid. The truth was that clever people had infinitely more resources from which to make the leaps of connection that the world called intuition. What was “intelligence,” after all, but the ability to read into things?</bq> <bq caption="Location 1424-1427">“Well, please excuse me, your highness. I’m sorry I’m so shockingly unfamiliar with the delicate nuances of the social calendar. I’m afraid my time these days is taken up with trivial things like history and social justice. There just never seems to be enough left over to devote to the really important issues, like how the upper classes organize their year. I really must get round to it one day.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 2409-2410">“Here before you were a watery drop of seed down your sinful father’s leg, you miserable perverted gobshite cunt,” murmured Babe, resetting the white queen with great care.</bq> <bq caption="Location 2489-2494">His course of instruction began with games played by Phillidor and Morphy and masterpieces of the romantic age, games that, like paintings, had titles: titles like the Evergreen, the Two Dukes, and the Immortal. Ned was moved from these towards the age of Steinitz and the modern style, then to an understanding of a positional theory called the hypermodern that made his head ache. Next came an induction into opening play and counterplay whose language made Ned laugh. The Caro-Kann and the Queen’s Indian, the Sicilian and the French Defenses, the Gioco Piano and the Ruy Lopez. The Dragon variation, the Tartakower, and the Nimzowitch. The Queen’s Gambit Declined and the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. The Marshall Attack. The Maroczy Bind. The Poisoned Pawn.</bq> <bq caption="Location 2581-2585">But more than that, you understand the greatest chess secret of all. The best move you can ever play in chess is not the best move. No, the best move you can ever play is the move your opponent least wants you to play. And that you did time after time. You knew that I hate the turgid tactical hell of the French, didn’t you? I never told you, but you sensed it. Oh my God, boy, I could hug you I’m so proud.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 2634-2637">Babe’s brain and memory were, after all, a simple matter of genetic fortune, and he took no pride in them whatsoever: He had come to discover that it was his will and his will alone that marked him out from common men. And will—unlike cerebral proficiency—could be taught, passed on, and made to live forever.</bq> <bq caption="Location 2664-2668">“Fluency equals necessity times confidence over time,” Babe liked to say. “If a five-year-old can speak a language, it cannot be beyond a fifty-year-old.” “But a five-year-old can run around for hours, tumbling and falling over without getting tired,” Ned might often complain. “It doesn’t follow that a fifty-year-old can do the same.” “Bolshy talk. I’ll have none of it.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 2681-2683">“And all we have, you and I, is that very thing, time, and if we look on this as the most magnificent gift afforded to mankind, then we can see that in this place we are one with Augustine in his cell and Montaigne in his tower. We are the chosen, the privileged. We have what the richest man on earth most covets and can never buy. We have what Henri Bergson saw as God’s chief instrument of torture and madness.</bq> <bq caption="Location 2681-2684">“And all we have, you and I, is that very thing, time, and if we look on this as the most magnificent gift afforded to mankind, then we can see that in this place we are one with Augustine in his cell and Montaigne in his tower. We are the chosen, the privileged. We have what the richest man on earth most covets and can never buy. We have what Henri Bergson saw as God’s chief instrument of torture and madness. Time. Oceans of time in which to be and to become.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 2696-2700">But I had a conscience, Ned, and the day came when I went to see a writer friend of mine. I told him I wanted to collaborate on a book. A great book, to be published in America, for they would never have let it see the light of day in Britain. A book that would blow the whistle on every dirty trick, every hypocritical evasion, and every filthy lie that ever came out of the West in its squalid battle for supremacy over its perceived enemy. I’m not a traitor, Ned, nor never would be. I loved England. I loved it too well to let it sink lower than the level of a dung beetle in its pursuit of lost grandeur.</bq> <bq caption="Location 2708-2711">“Like anyone with a sliver of honesty in them, I believe what I find I believe when I wake up each morning. Sometimes I can only think we are determined by the writing in our genes; sometimes it seems to me that we are made or unmade by our upbringings. On better days, it is true that I hope with some conviction that we and we alone make ourselves everything that we are.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 2733-2741">“We have a heap!” Babe clapped his hands. “A heap of fir cones! Seventeen of the darlings. So Ned Maddstone is telling the world that seventeen is officially a heap?” “Well . . .” “Seventeen fir cones constitute a heap, but sixteen do not?” “No, I’m not saying that exactly. . . .” “There we have the problem. The world is full of heaps like this, Ned. This is good, this is not good. This is bad luck, but this is a towering injustice. This is mass murder and this genocide. This is child killing, this abortion. This is lawful intercourse, this statutory rape. There is nothing but a single fir cone’s difference between them, sometimes just the one lonely only little cone telling us that it represents the difference between heaven and hell.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 2964-2969">Whatever arrogance he may have displayed, Ned would never in those days have assumed that his feelings had primacy over those of others. That they could be so confident in their interpretation of him was an arrogance way beyond anything he had been capable of. They hid their rage. They pretended to like him. They coldly planned to disgrace him in the eyes of his father and his lover, as if he had no emotional life, no point of view, and no right to happiness of his own. That they could treat him as a symbol without life or capacity for pain marked them down as evil beyond imagining. There did not exist the faintest possibility that Ned could ever forgive them.</bq> <bq caption="Location 3105-3113">Babe opened the hand that had been grasping Ned’s. A small fold of paper was clipped between his fingers. “Take it. There is money there; perhaps after thirty years it is more than you can spend. The Cotter Bank, Geneva. When they found out that it was missing they came here to question me. I had hidden its trail and they were mad with rage. ‘Where is it? What have you done with it?’ I had been here no more than a month, but Mallo had passed that month jolting my brain with electricity and filling me with drugs. The violence of my behavior had given him no choice. I had known they would come, you see, and I wanted to be ready. When they arrived, I dribbled, I giggled, I simpered, I slobbered, and I wept. You would have been proud of me, Ned. I was the maddest of the mad. A ruin of a noble mind. They went away cursing, in the belief that they had destroyed the sanity of the only man who knew where all that money lay. I’d love to know how they explained it to their minister. Now, read that piece of paper, learn it, and destroy it. The Cotter Bank, Geneva. All the money will be yours when you leave here.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 3140-3142">“Good-bye, my boy. You have already saved my life. My mind will live forever in yours. Build great things in my memory and to my memory. We have loved each other. For my sake now, stop your howling. Go quietly and pass this last day in remembering. Remember everything. You take my love and memory with you forever.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 3339-3340">The Ned who traveled now was an entirely different being, a man of iron will, an avenging angel—an instrument of God.</bq> <bq caption="Location 4057-4059">No, the tide of history had washed weirder flotsam than Barson-Garland into Downing Street, and no doubt would do so again. If he succeeded in getting Simon Cotter to unbelt some of his millions and drop them in the Tory coffers, Ashley would take a deal of stopping.</bq> <bq caption="Location 4093-4094">“It grieves me to relate that I do not have the honor of Mr. Snow’s acquaintance.</bq> <bq caption="Location 4383-4386">The Barson-Garland Page was turning out to be something of a succès d’estime. Taking a cue from the regular columnists on the rival evening paper, Ashley found that he had a gift for tediously obvious opinions expressed in a formulaic polemical style that exactly suited the kind of brain-fagged commuter most ready to confuse polysyllabic misanthropy for intelligent thought.</bq> <bq caption="Location 5711-5715">I once shared a stage with Gore Vidal in Manchester, England, which was a very great honor indeed, although he did not appear to appreciate it. No, but, tush. Mr. Vidal was asked if he felt there had ever been an age in recent history that could boast so few good writers as the present. “There are as many good writers as ever there were,” he replied, and I wish I could reproduce on the page the trademark patrician Gore-drawl that transforms his lightest remark into a marmoreal epigram. “The problem is that there are so few good readers.”</bq>