The weird interconnectedness of books

[Freewheeling Andy]

I've just picked up and started reading Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones. So far, so deeply impressed. As I was expecting to be after reading his excellent and quite obscure Biografi.

 

What is more odd, though, is how it ties in, entirely coincidentally, I think, with the last book I read. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond describes itself as a "history of how humanity has developed and succeeded over the last 13000 years". Not, you'd have thought, an obvious crossover point with a book about a civil war torn island off New Guinea, and about one of Dickens more popular character.

 

Strangely, though, Diamond spends a lot of time focussing on New Guinea, and the differences between the mainland and the islands, the differences both racial and cultural, which come from thousands of years of the influence of biogeography. Weirdly, even 20 pages into Mister Pip, I'm finding having read the previous book really useful in giving me a context.

 

All the more oddly, not long before Guns, Germs and Steel, I'd been re-reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Once again there are massive overlaps, with Diamond describing how the Chatham Island Moriori natives were overwhelmed when the Maori turned up with western weapons; something which is at the core of the first/last chapter of Cloud Atlas. And, when describing how the Pacific Islands developed, Diamond also goes on to describe how Hawaii, because of its geography, could develop a miltaristic kingdom of the kind that couldn't develop on the small islands like Chatham; and this resonates incredibly strongly with the central chapter of Cloud Atlas.

 

I wonder, when coming across stuff like this, whether an author like Jones or Mitchell has read Guns, Germs and Steel, and has decided to use his imagination to take himself on from there and create a whole new world on the basis of a few paragraphs in a factual book.

 

The same question occurred to me years back, when I had just read Dava Sobel's Longitude, and picked up Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Sobel mentioned, almost in passing, that Mason & Dixon had gone down to Cape Town to observe the transits of Venus. I wondered whether Pynchon had picked up that phrase and realised that the two surveyors hadn't merely drawn the line between Pennsylvania and Maryland which came to define the Union and Confederacy, and produced a huge novel on the basis of the single item from a non-fiction book.

 

Clearly, some books spin off from others, indeed Mister Pip is an obvious example; but I find it intriguing to think that authors have an ability to create worlds out of the smallest initial thought, the grain of sand in the oyster, so to speak.

[everydayxangels]

Mister Pip is such a gem. I am so fond of that book, and while it was not luminous or very climatic there was something honestly breath taking about that book.

 

And I agree with the main context of your post. I have been needing to read a general history book for a while now. Just to know the main idea of some event that took place makes the book more enjoyable.