In hope of the world actually turning out to be flat
I finished two books this weekend, both of which were set in the former Soviet Union, and both of which were a severe disappointment.
The first, which I confess I have been reading disjointedly over a period of several weekends, was “Pelagia and the White Bulldog” by Boris Akunin. For the past few years, Boris Akunin has ranked without doubt as one of my favourite authors. Well known in Russia (possibly under a different name) as a prolific writer of detective fiction, over the last four or five years his works have gradually begun to be translated into English. As a rule, I have to say that I’m not a fan of translations into English, because it annoys me if something doesn’t flow well, but on the whole I have found the Akunin translations to be excellent … with the exception of the fact that his first series of books has been translated in the wrong order (how did the publishers allow this to happen?!) with the result that I accidentally read the third book first, then moved onto the first book, and then had to wait twelve months for someone to fill in the gaps and translate the second.
What Boris Akunin is most famous for is a series of detective stories set in nineteenth century Saint Petersburg, and revolving around his dashing hero Erast Fandorin. You can’t read the books without being in love with Fandorin, and I have eagerly awaited each addition to the series to see what adventures will befall him next. These are not prim and proper Miss Marple detective stories, solving murders while sitting round a fire eating crumpets. Be prepared for plenty of duels to the death, the odd bit of Russian Roulette, and some genuine tragedy when someone who really shouldn’t have been allowed to die does 
For Christmas my parents bought me the first in another series of Akunin books, this time built around his heroine Sister Pelagia. As the name may suggest, Sister Pelagia is a Russian Orthodox nun, and a freckled one at that, who teaches in a girl’s school and occasionally helps out the provincial bishop solving mysteries. I wasn’t enthralled by this explanation on the back cover of the novel, but being such a fan of the author I nevertheless expected great things. I was sadly disappointed 
Imagine Miss Marple but less exciting and you’re getting the gist. The action start with Sister Pelagia being sent to investigate the death of some prize white bulldogs. Most fascinating. Luckily the action soon hots up with the discovery of some beheaded bodies in the local river and two attempts on the nun’s life, but even bits like that which I could make sound sensational fail to be because of the constantly irritating interjections of Sister Pelagia (she’s like a religious Pollyanna) and the bizarre tone of the narrative, which goes off onto random digressions about provincial Russian government in the nineteenth century and how the Bishop might increase the proportion of his congregation who are paying tax. There is one bizarre part which is so boring, it is actually enclosed in brackets which state that it isn’t necessary to bother reading it to follow the story. I felt like jumping up and down and screaming, “If it isn’t necessary to read it, why the hell was it necessary to write it?!”
So my advice, sadly, is to leave Sister Pelagia alone. She drove me up the wall, and I am a religious person well used to nuns. If you’re not of a religious bent, you may get to the end and find your hair in a pile on the floor beside you.
Having finished that on Saturday afternoon, I decided I felt in the mood for something humorous and so I picked up a book which I have been wanting to read ever since it was published and which someone had finally bought me for Christmas this year; “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian”. This is the sort of book which commences with three pages of quotes telling you how riproaringly funny it is, which seemed like a good omen…
Hmmm. Well, either I have had a sense of humour transplant or I have misunderstood the book very fundamentally. There wasn’t a single place where I laughed and I can’t even recall a place where I smiled. The novel, which was written by a Ukrainian woman, tells the story of an elderly Ukrainian father who suddenly announces to his two daughters that he is going to marry a big-breasted 36 year old from Kiev who wishes to start a new life in the UK. His daughters are obviously horrified, instantly seeing what he can’t; that he is being taken for a ride, and the novel charts the progress of his new wife as she comes to the UK, uses up all his money, begins to physically abuse him, and tries to resist divorce and deportation. Excuse me while I pause to split my sides… 
In the background to this, the story of the entire family is revealed; what happened to them during the war, how they came to England and so on. It is the sort of subject matter which could be fascinating were it well done, but this just simply isn’t. Any historical comment and detail is negligible, and by the end I can honestly say I had learnt sweet FA about the history or culture of the Ukraine, beyond the fact that they seem to say “tak” for yes the same as the Polish 
I read the book, 320 pages, within just a few hours reading time, which bears testament to quite how swallow it was. There was nothing to savour on each page, nothing to flick back to and meditate on again, nothing worth remembering once the back cover was finally closed. I was simply whizzing through it in order to be able to read something more worthwhile next weekend.
The only thoughts interesting thoughts it did provoke in me, about 3am on Sunday morning when I couldn’t sleep, were about assisted suicide. I wouldn’t expect the novel to provoke such thoughts in anyone else, based on the fact that there are no references to assisted suicide within in, and quite how I arrived at such a theme is something even a psychologist would probably struggle to work out. I suppose it was something to do with the theme of old age. The thoughts that I had were very lucid at 3am and seem somewhat less so right now, so that I’m not sure they’re going to comply and line up in order on the page for me. But one interesting thing I did take from it, which I can possibly manage to articulate, is the idea of the slippery slope.
The slippery slope is something which makes me laugh. I can remember being told once by a science teacher, I was about eleven or twelve, that the entire class was on the slippery slope to destruction. I can’t remember what it was we had done, but it was only some minor misdemeanour. For some reason though, the metaphor stuck with me for years; something to do with it being much harder to get back up than to go down and thus going down it should be avoided at all costs. Now I have absolutely no recollection of this, but when I was about 15 or 16, I apparently used to admonish my sister’s best friend (whom I disliked slightly) with the fact that she was on the slippery slope, whenever she did anything to annoy me (so probably ever day). I can deny this quite vehemently, but my sister apparently remembers it too, and it is such a running joke between them that I keep meaning to change my facebook explanation of how I met her friend to read “They met on the slippery slope. [Insert name of friend] was going in the wrong direction”. 
I’ve never actually gotten around to it, but the intention is there…
Anyway, the slippery slope. Such as I defined it aged 12, I have been going down it on a toboggan over the past few years. What’s more, I have no inclination to climb back up, I’m scared of heights anyway But what I was meditating on in the early hours of Sunday morning is how difficult it is to know whether you are at the bottom of any given slope. There are things I would have sworn blind I would never do five years okay, which I would happily do every day of the week now. Thus it follows that there are things which I might swear blind I will never do now, and yet will end up doing in the not so distant future. Interesting, and especially interesting to speculate on what things they might be. My thoughts at the weekend followed roughly this pattern and ended up in a position where they began to be able to envisage scenarios in which they might illegally assist a death, at which point they had shocked themselves so much that happily my brain decided to knock me out, and I had several hours of very peaceful sleep.
And so at the end we arrive at the title, which is a somewhat confusing way of doing things It is quite possible that the likes of Dawkins are right and the world is not a slippery slope but is actually perfectly flat, like Belgium. The would remove a lot of geographical excitement, but also the need to worry about whether one was feeling sufficiently guilty over one’s geographical position. For wherever I am on the slippery slope, I think my problem is less that I feel guilty, and more that I do not.
Tags: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, slippery slope