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Near the beginning of How Fiction Works, James
Wood announces that his favourite 20th-century critics of the novel
are “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French
formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes”. His admiration does
not, however, prevent him from describing their ideas in his next
breath as “interesting but wrong-headed”. For at the heart of
Wood’s criticism is a quarrel with formalism.
This is not to say that Wood is reluctant to consider how
fiction “works” in the functional sense of the word. As its title
suggests, his third book of literary criticism is a kind of primer
that discusses the basic elements of fiction - language, character,
dialogue, and so on - drawing its examples from some of the
greatest novels of the past two centuries.
But Wood is deeply antipathetic to any suggestion that
literature might be understood solely as a collection of devices
and conventions. His response to an essay by the American novelist
William Gass, in which Gass slices one of Henry James’ characters
into a list of tropes, is unequivocal. Such an approach, he argues,
is “deeply, incorrigibly wrong”.
The observation that literature is a structure of words is
little more than a truism. It takes no account of why we read in
the first place. The most important thing is always how a fictional
representation relates to life.
At the bottom of all Wood’s inquiries is an abiding concern with
“the real”. There is no necessary contradiction, he argues, between
fiction’s artifice and its capacity to depict reality; indeed, it
derives much of its potency from the necessary tension between
these two aspects.
How Fiction Works is, in this sense, something of a
manifesto. Like Wood’s previous collections of critical essays,
The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, it
stresses the importance of realist practice in fiction, and in
doing so advocates a certain stance toward literature itself.
Wood is interested, not simply in how fiction “works” in a
technical sense, but in the rather more elusive sense of how it
affects us, how it brings realities to mind, how it teaches us to
become better observers of ourselves and others. He is particularly
interested in its ability to convey psychological insight. He is
always reading with an eye for this “sudden capturing of a central
human truth, this moment when a single detail has enabled us to see
a character’s thinking (or lack of it)”.
For Wood, who greatly admires the Russian realist Anton Chekhov,
detail is the lifeblood of great literature. As Chekhov well
understood, we tend to give ourselves away in our smallest
gestures. It is through precision of detail and vividness of
metaphor that fiction addresses our sense of the real.
This fascination with detail is both a strength and a weakness
of Wood’s criticism. He is, philosophically and temperamentally, a
close reader who rarely feels the need to step back and take in a
novel’s architecture. The glaring omission from the book’s chapters
on the various aspects of fiction is plot. When Wood discusses
narrative he prefers to speak of the flaneur’s gaze and the
development of free indirect style, rather than the workaday issues
of dramatic complication, rising action and denouement.
That Wood is not particularly interested in the way narrative
pushes toward resolution - the way it seems, on some deep level, to
demand it - is significant. However incorrigibly wrong Gass may be
about character, he was right when he said that all stories are
“sneaky justifications”.
Wood has good reason to be wary of plot. As he was apt to point
out in his timely attack upon the overheated style of fiction he
dubbed “hysterical realism”, there is nothing that destroys a
fictional work’s credibility quite so effectively as one outrageous
coincidence too many. It is plot, more than detail, that pushes the
limitless variety of experience into a particular shape. Life
simply isn’t like that, as Chekhov observed; but stories and novels
certainly are like that, including those couched in Chekhovian
ambiguity.
Of course, part of the difficulty in talking about how fiction
works is that it refuses to be corralled. The Russian critic
Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the novel cannot be considered a
genre because it has no fixed formal properties; it is, rather, a
constantly evolving anti-genre that omnivorously gobbles up
techniques and dialects. As Wood puts it, the novel is “the great
virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules
thrown around it” - including his own.
In the midst of a spirited defence of realism against those,
such as Gass and Rick Moody, who have expressed impatience with its
conventions, Wood digresses to observe that certain works by Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett might not depict “likely or typical human
activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts”.
One takes the point, but this is lame. It blithely goes against
so many of Wood’s arguments. Suddenly he wants to have his realist
cake and eat it. The “real” obviously won’t do as an explanation of
a story in which a man turns into a giant beetle, so “truth” steps
in to rescue an obviously important work from critical oblivion.
The “real” is fundamental to literature, it seems, except when it
isn’t.
By making reality interchangeable with truth, effectively at his
own pleasure, Wood makes both concepts promiscuous.
On this question, How Fiction Works might have
benefited from a more concerted engagement with some strong
exceptions to the general thrust of its argument: Laurence Sterne’s
classic anti-novel, Tristram Shandy, for example, which is
about the impossibility of realism; or more recent novels, such as
Catch-22 or A Confederacy of Dunces, which would
appear to be excluded from Wood’s definition of comedy on the
grounds that they are much too funny.
In The Irresponsible Self, Wood made it clear that he
regards farcical or satirical humour as an inferior mode, and this
preference was a feature of his critique of the hysterical
realists. But (as long as we are throwing the term about) there is
certainly no shortage of “truth” in Joseph Heller’s brilliantly
absurd anti-war novel.
Wood is aware of this promiscuousness and the equivocations it
requires. Realism, he acknowledges, is an indistinct and
problematic term; less an identifiable genre than an impulse in
fiction. He attempts to work around this difficulty by coining a
rather feeble neologism - “lifeness” - to denote “life on the page”
evoked via the “highest artistry”. This concept, he suggests, might
be applied to any style of fiction. But this makes “lifeness”
itself close to a truism: it says that what works, works.
Wood is nevertheless right to suggest that formalism on its own
can never be enough; it will never feel like a satisfactory
explanation of a great book. While there are cases where it could
be argued that authors have succeeded in wresting language away
from its denotative quality to revel in the free play of sound and
rhythm - certain passages in James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, for
example - no piece of writing, not even Finnegans Wake -
can set up permanent camp in pure abstraction without ceasing to be
language at all. In this sense, fiction does always enter into a
relationship with a reality beyond itself and can evoke the truths
of lived experience.
Wood’s deserved reputation as an important critic rests upon his
willingness to insist upon this central humanist impulse of
literature. How Fiction Works is a pithy, lucid,
inconsistent, argumentative and opinionated piece of popular
criticism. It deserves to be widely read.

Synplicity, supplier of solutions for the design and verification of semiconductors, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Synopsys, a provider of software and IP for semiconductor design and manufacturing.

When completed, the acquisition will expand Synplicity product portfolio and extend the market reach of its industry leading products. Under the terms of the agreement, Synopsys will pay USD 8 cash per Synplicity share, resulting in a gross transaction value of approximately USD 227 million, and approximately USD 188 million net of cash acquired. The transaction is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2008, and after the closing, Synplicity will become part of Synopsys, and Synplicity stock will cease trading. ynplicity strong product portfolio, expertise, and customer reach will be ideal complements to Synopsys, said Aart deGeus, chairman and CEO of Synopsys.

he combination will expand our presence in the systems and mid-tier market segments, will support our strategy to provide rapid prototyping capabilities to a broad set of customers to enable much faster software development, and will enhance Synplicity already strong offering in the FPGA implementation market.The acquisition is expected to help the companies accelerate the revenue growth in the rapidly growing market for SoC verification solutions. According to the Synplicity, the acquisition also provides the opportunity to leverage Synopsys advanced IC technology to further improve Synplicity FPGA synthesis products, and Synplicity will gain an expanded product portfolio with which to serve its approximately 1,800 customers.

Their joint statue towers above the passers-by in
Swanston Street, but their story has been a cause of mockery since
as long ago as Joseph Furphy’s novel Such is Life (1903).
They are usually known as Burke and Wills, respectively the
Irish-born leader of the expedition aiming to cross the continent
from south to north (returning proved to be the problem) and his
young surveyor. The order was derisively reversed in the would-be
movie comedy Wills and Burke (1985) where the acting of the camels
was more expressive and certainly more doleful than the principals
- Garry McDonald as Burke, Kym Gyngell as Wills and Nicole Kidman
as the actress Julia Matthews. The tale of the doomed explorers was
recently revisited in Alan Attwood’s novel, Burke’s
Soldier (2005). Now their turn has come again, and strangely,
in the first novel by Kevin Rabalais, The Landscape of
Desire.
Born in Louisiana, Rabalais now lives in Melbourne, but his
American origins may have led to the jarring descriptions of
ranchers and rustlers with whom Burke deals while Police Inspector
at Beechworth in the 1850s. Its title a dreamy blend of concrete
and abstract, the novel is an extended imagining of sketchy periods
in Burke’s life.
Beechworth, for instance, was more secure employment than the
prospects of finding gold for the young man “who sailed to exhume
his fortune from the tainted land” - Australia. Nevertheless Burke
chafes, eager for glory, but infatuated as well with Matthews, who
teasingly signs her letters as C for Cupid, and whom Burke
obsessively watches on stage. He understands that “He has reached
the point in life where there is no return”.
Rabalais’ method is to approach this once-familiar episode in
the national drama from a number of oblique angles. He starts with
a brief, portentous passage: “Other items lie scattered, wreckage
across the primal earth.” This is all that is left of the baggage
of the venturers who reached as far as the wetlands around what is
now Normanton.
One of them survived, John King, “a white man, orphan of the
desert sea”. He tells the rescuers led by Alfred Howitt “I am all
that is left”. King has been succoured by Aborigines, who remain in
this book, as perhaps they were for King, apparitions, appearing
and disappearing in the landscape. Howitt dominates the early part
of The Landscape of Desire, before our attention is
shifted to the troubled life of Burke, the longings of Wills.
The boldest invention that Rabalais undertakes is to depict
Burke’s European life, as a lieutenant in the Austrian army. This
is one of those episodes that seems (not least for Burke) hard to
credit. For desertion on the eve of the invasion of Sardinia, and
for his gambling debts, Burke is dishonourably discharged. After
drifting back to Ireland, he heads for Australia.
Rabalais elides Burke’s later brief return to Britain in an
attempt to enlist for the Crimean War in which his brother was the
first British soldier to be killed. It is then with Burke in
Beechworth that Rabalais engages us. But before now we have been
inclined to wonder what is the larger import of the novel, vivid
and unexpected as are its vignettes?
Sometimes the prose is staccato, like the ominous voice-over in
a motion picture: “What will they find? Who will be alive? Who will
have been maddened by the desert silence?” At other moments
Rabalais searches characters’ preoccupations about how they will be
remembered. After the official photograph of the party as it
prepares to set off: “We are preserved for the record before we
fall outside of history.”
More intriguingly, King is made to ponder what legends the
Aborigines might make of these white men in their midst: “How long
would it take before they recited stories of the ghosts who came to
live behind them on the creek . . . We might become a tale they
could pass up to future generations like buckets raised from a
well.”
Or not. Rabalais leaves the Aborigines as silent, admonitory
figures. Tracing his own course, backwards and forwards in time,
rather than onward in space, his debut is carefully wrought, a work
of glimpses rather than dramatic revelations. Finally it chooses to
rest in enigma, leaving us no more sure of where we have been than
were the doomed explorers.
Peter Pierce is a former professor of Australian literature
at James Cook University.

JG. Ballard famously characterised himself as a weatherman:
“I read the sky and see the coming storms.” But, like Walter
Benjamin’s tragic “angel of history”, he has been forced to look
backwards at the cataclysmic storm behind him. For Ballard, that
storm is the Pacific War, the source of the questions with which he
has grappled so creatively all his life. It is no surprise that it
should occupy such a central place in this autobiography.
Readers of Ballard’s loosely autobiographical novel, Empire
of the Sun, will recognise the panorama that emerges of the
full-bore, laissez-faire capitalist enclave that was Shanghai:
European and Chinese glitterati, revolutionaries and refugees,
gangsters and warlords, British, American and Japanese soldiers,
sailors and washed-up drifters and the mass of Chinese peasants
uprooted by years of civil war eking a living in the grinding
poverty of the streets.
It’s easy to see why young James Graham Ballard thought this
cruel yet enthralling phantasmagoria a “magical place”. His home
life was cold and emotionally sterile; children were “somewhere
between the servants and an obedient labrador”. The family’s social
circle was occupied with bridge, gin and gossip punctuated by the
occasional trip to a civil war battlefield to collect souvenirs and
observe the rotting Chinese corpses. Insulated, incurious and
assured of their natural superiority, they appeared blissfully
ignorant of the forces at work outside until the Japanese forced
them into Lunghua internment camp.
As much for its casual cruelties as its sheer destructiveness,
war was a revelation to James. It stripped things down to their
essence; even the most stable worlds were shown to be contingent,
transitory and little more than a “stage set that could be
dismantled, swept away into the debris of the past”. It also gave
him a repertoire of imagery that would fill his novels: empty
swimming pools, deserted cityscapes, abandoned prizes of bourgeois
life strewn across devastated landscapes.
Coming “home” to an England he knew only from A. A. Milne and
Just William, Ballard found a grey, defeated country ruled
by mysterious social codes, where even “hope itself was
rationed”.
Freudian psychoanalysis and surrealism’s rejection of
rationality - “where the deep revolutions of the psyche matter more
than the cosy dramas of everyday life” - exerted the most powerful
intellectual influence. He loved American film noir with its “hard
and unsentimental image of the primeval city”.
But it was in science fiction that he found an arena. Ballard
had little in common with orthodox American sci-fi with its heroic
imperial displacements into outer space. He was concerned with
inner space and the psychopathological impulses he glimpsed beneath
the gleaming surfaces of modern technology. What did the nascent
culture of advertising, consumerism and entertainment presage? And
what was its relationship to the “dead Chinese . . . in their
ditches” and the weapons that would make World War II seem like a
preamble?
Ballard’s most controversial novel, Crash, is a kind of
ideas laboratory where an intuition about the unconscious links
between cars, sex and death could be tested. This “psychopathic
hymn” was confronting in 1973 but in 1996 - the year before
Princess Diana’s death - reaction to David Cronenberg’s film was
even more strident. Perhaps the outcry tells us as much about a
failure of cultural imagination as it does about the
psychopathology of everyday life.
An audience accustomed to the conventions of good, old-fashioned
English realism and the redemptive tales supplied by an
all-pervasive entertainment industry was ill equipped for Ballard’s
surrealist parable. Though it was well received in France.
If Ballard’s books, particularly the early ones, can be thought
of as thought-experiments, it’s also true that his protagonists are
often more case history than character. The Drowned World
might seem prescient now, but Ballard was not concerned with global
warming any more than he was worried about the organic world
becoming crystalline in The Crystal World: he wants to
observe people reacting to catastrophe. This is the nature of his
craft and is what is so intriguing about his novels.
But this lack of regard for that centrepiece of contemporary
fiction - the self - is also what makes Ballard’s autobiography, at
times, unsatisfying. He can’t shift register from dispassionate
observer to emotionally involved participant.
We learn in a perfunctory manner about the death of his first
wife, Mary, and that he brought up three children as a sole parent.
People can do extraordinary things while their kids are asleep, but
few men, particularly in the 1960s, would have responded so
admirably to the discipline of “the pram in the hall”. This
explorer of psychotic currents beneath modern life, this sometime
inspiration for an acid-fuelled, counterculture, was a
whisky-and-soda family man dedicated to raising his kids in
suburban Shepperton.
In the final chapter, almost in an afterthought, Ballard tells
us that he is dying of cancer and that this will, in all
likelihood, be his final book. Valedictory maybe, but certainly not
self-indulgent. Miracles of Life is very much the
biography of the thinking writer, rather than the feeling man.
Ballard has spent his life thinking about the relationship
between the human psyche, violence, and the nature of technology,
and in so doing created an original, disturbing and influential
body of work. And I, for one, can’t look at a freeway, a mall or an
airport without some part of me registering a disquiet that I can
only describe as Ballardian.

VMware has recently announced a multi-year initiative aimed at expanding its India-based research and development (R%26D) operations. VMware president and CEO Diane Greene announced the initiative at a news conference in Bangalore. With this initiative VMware plans to invest USD 100 million (4 billion Indian Rupees) in India by 2010, build a new, state-of-the-art 82,000 square foot development center in Bangalore and double the company India-based engineering organization to more than 1,000 people in the next two years.

The new Bangalore development center expands on existing R%26D operations in Bangalore and Pune. The center supports new and ongoing research and development across the company entire portfolio of solutions for datacenter and desktop virtualization. The new 82,000 square foot development center is located in South Bangalore and includes a 4,000 square foot computer lab.reat products are built by great people. India has both an excellent technical education infrastructure and outstanding people. We highly value our Indian citizen employees,” said Greene. “India is also one of our fastest growing markets and where we have increasingly important system integrator partners. For these reasons, we are now substantively increasing our investment in India.VMware already has a strong presence across India with offices in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai. VMware entered India in 2004. according to VMware, the company has more than 300 customers and more than 160 channel partners in the country.

With offices in 5 cities, VMware employs nearly 700 people, including more than 500 developers, across India. It has established strong ties to local universities in India including IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, NIT Trichi, NIT Surathkal, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the RV College of Engineering.

AMD and its ATI Radeon HD 3400, ATI Radeon HD 3600 and ATI Radeon HD 3800 graphics products and the AMD 780G integrated graphics chipset has been delivered with the first full DisplayPort certification of PC graphics products by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA).

MD has been a driving force in the development of DisplayPort, said Bill Lempesis, Executive Director, VESA. he ATI Radeon HD 3000 series of graphics cards are the first source devices to achieve DisplayPort certification.The certified AMD products support Dell new DisplayPort offerings including the UltraSharp 3008WFP and 2408WFP Widescreen LCD Monitors. he ATI Radeon HD 3000 series represents the world first fully certified line of discrete and integrated graphics solutions, said Bruce Montag, Office of the CTO, Dell.

he VESA DisplayPort Certified Logo assures customers that DisplayPort products interoperate and provide a great digital display experience.According to AMD, this certification gives PC consumers next-generation display capabilities today. The company also added saying that, they will remain honored by being committed to deliver the ultimate visual experience to consumers with superb display technologies.

Yahoo and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, have announced an agreement to jointly support cloud computing research.

Under the agreement, CRL will make available to researchers one of the world’s top five supercomputers that has substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available for cloud computing research.CRL’s supercomputer, named EKA, is the world fourth fastest supercomputer. It has 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, EKA is the only supercomputer funded by the private sector and is available for use on commercial terms. This effort is the first of its kind in terms of the size and scale of the machine, and the first in making available a supercomputer to academic institutions in India.

The Yahoo CRL effort is intended to leverage CRL’s expertise in high performance computing and Yahoo’s technical leadership in Apache Hadoop, an open source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable scientists to perform data-intensive computing research on a 14,400 processor supercomputer, claimed Yahoo.”The Tata group has always contributed to scientific research in India, and the EKA will strengthen this cause further in the field of cloud computing. This partnership brings together Yahoo!’s leadership role in the development of Hadoop and CRL’s expertise in high performance computing, and will help bridge the gap between traditional supercomputing and cloud computing research in India,” said S. Ramadorai, chairman of CRL.EKA is expected to run the latest version of Hadoop and other state-of-the-art, Yahoo-supported, open-source distributed computing software such as the Pig parallel programming language developed by Yahoo Research.

War and Peace is like the trunk of one of Leo Tolstoy’s
beloved oaks, fed by invisible roots and producing numerous
branches that keep on spreading.
Among the hidden feeders were the fair copies produced by his
wife Sonya, who every night would transcribe her husband’s daily
scribblings; in the morning Tolstoy would seize on the pile of new
pages, cross out most of their contents, give characters different
names, move whole passages around, change plot-lines, and leave
another pile of illegible scrawls for Sonya to recopy the next
night - after she had checked the servants, supplies and accounts,
fed the baby and put the older children to bed.
Ilyusha, their second son, calculated that his mother’s
transcriptions would add to up seven complete copies of the
1000-page novel.
The tree’s many branches include several well-known English
translations, starting in 1904 with the pioneering work of
Constance Garnett, who gave us a wonderfully ladylike version of
the over-the-top Russian. Rosemary Edmonds ruled the Penguin roost
for many years, revising her 1957 version in 1978.
Two more appeared this century; notable was Andrew Bromfield’s
2006 translation of a shorter War and Peace, sometimes
mistaken for an abridgement. In fact this was the earliest draft of
the epic novel, innocent of the many additions that Tolstoy
incorporated every time he revised it, and meticulously pieced
together over 50 years by a researcher at the Tolstoy Museum House
in Moscow.
Containing “more peace and less war”, it was printed by the
Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1983, and also by a private publisher
at his own expense in February 2000.
Then, in 2007, along came the husband and wife team of Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who without lifting a finger
fulfilled the latest stipulation for all translation. According to
the professionals, there should be two people working on every
text, one a native speaker of the target language, and the other of
the original.
A furniture maker in New York married to a Russian emigre,
Pevear had previously worked in French, Italian and Spanish, but
knew no Russian. Volokhonsky, born in Leningrad, had studied
English in her hometown. Between them they decided to have a bash
at Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov after Volokhonsky ,
looking over her husband’s shoulder as he read David Magarshack’s
translation, kept finding fault with it. They decided to test
“their” method on three chapters: 1) Volokhonsky makes a strictly
literary translation with copious notes; 2) Pevear puts it into
good English, constantly consulting Pevear as to accuracy; and 3)
he reads his final version aloud while she follows the Russian
text.
Despite this brilliant methodology, the three sample chapters
were rejected by both Random House and Oxford University Press.
Highly praised by academics Pevear personally contacted, they
nevertheless found favour with only one small publisher, who
offered the couple $US1000 for the full job. When they pointed out
that this could take up to five years, he upped the offer to
$US6000. Fortunately, they also got a substantial government grant,
and after the translation was published, to great acclaim, in 1990,
were able to devote themselves to 15 more classics of Russian
literature.
Their Anna Karenina, first published by Penguin in
2000, received a huge boost four years later when Oprah Winfrey
chose it for her Book of the Month Club. Sales soared. (There was
even a spin-off for this reviewer. Trying to access my emails in an
Italian internet cafe, I almost deleted some “spam” from an unknown
“Harpo” in the US. It was in fact a commission to contribute an
article on the subject “Anna Karenina and Adultery” to the
Book-club website. Harpo - Oprah spelt backwards, dummy - is the
name of the Winfrey production company.)
Pevear-Volokhonsky (hereinafter P-V) are essentially guided by
fidelity to the original language, understood in the broadest
sense. For example: a great many of the conversations in War
and Peace are conducted in French, reflecting the aspirations
of the Russian nobility, but a custom Tolstoy personally
disapproved of.
Several translators have put these into English along with the
Russian, thus eliding the snobbery the French is designed to
express. P-V follow Tolstoy by providing footnote translations of
the French passages.
Now in their 60s and living in France because it is cheaper, the
couple have observed that when people speak they often stumble and
mix their metaphors. Translators usually correct characters who do
the same, but “We don’t”. Most translators also try to smooth out
Tolstoy’s own idiosyncratic, plain-speaking language, in which he
doesn’t care how often he repeats a word if he really wants to make
a point or delineate a character (Napoleon’s effete “small white
hands”; “the little princess with the short upper lip”, an
instantly recognisable feature borrowed from his cousin’s
wife).
Orlando Figes has pointed out that in a paragraph where Tolstoy
uses the past tense of the verb plakat, to weep, seven times,
earlier translators have been unable to refrain from varying it
with “cried” or “broke into tears’. The P-Vs are made of sterner
stuff.
I had always been suspicious of the anglicisation of the speech
defect of Nikolai’s army friend Major Denisov. Sure, he is unable
to pronounce his “r”s, but should he say “wabbit” for “rabbit”,
when the Russian suggests a more guttural sound? P-V’s solutions is
“ghr”, as in “the Ghrat”, the nickname of a disliked officer. It
may not trip off the tongue like “Wat”, but it does avoid
out-of-character foppishness.
The new translation has been extravagantly praised, as it
thoroughly deserves, but even granting its superiority, will it
sell enough copies? (If that is what counts these days.) The whole
P-V body of work is doing quite nicely thank you, so well in fact
that this War and Peace is sold at an amazingly low price.
A splendidly handsome hardback with fine pages and clear print, it
is a joy in every way. And that includes Tolstoy’s story.
Judith Armstrong, author of The Unsaid Anna Karenina
(Macmillan, 1988), is writing a novel based on the life of Sonya
Tolstoy.

DEEP in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the
words “Hello World” display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The
page is called the Acid2 Browser Test, and the web browser is a
preview of Internet Explorer 8, presented by its platform
architect, Chris Wilson.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” says a member of the
audience to more applause from about 3000 web designers and
developers at the Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed its
latest internet technology.
The Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by
the Web Standards Project to test whether a browser conforms to the
official standards for describing page layout, mainly focusing on
cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold: first, until now
Microsoft’s web browser, used by an estimated 75 per cent of
net surfers (although Firefox has been eroding that hold), has
never been close to passing the test; second, Internet Explorer’s
poor standards compliance causes significant extra work for web
designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and
work the same whatever the browser or operating system they are
using. Achieving this is difficult. Different browsers display the
same page differently, with IE often the worst offender.
Web developers now hope they do not have to insert conditional
code to account for these differences, but can deliver a standard
page to all browsers. “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be
very, very promising,” says Eric Meyer, an independent expert in
the field. “It’s very important, because the level of CSS support
in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS adoption by
authors, limiting them to less-advanced techniques and
capabilities.”
Internet Explorer has a curious history. Six versions were
released between 1995 and 2001, the time of the “browser wars” with
Netscape. Microsoft won the war and then did not release another
major version of the browser for five years - long enough for it to
become thoroughly outdated.
IE’s CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular
browsers. In late 2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some
problems but still lagged behind its rivals. “Differences between
browsers simply waste too much developer time,” says Dean
Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, without
mentioning the extent to which Microsoft created the problem.
Mr Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003,
explains why Microsoft took so long to address these deficiencies.
“It comes down to what we were doing with our time,” he says.
“Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as
Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.”
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages,
but XAML, Microsoft’s proprietary code for creating rich visual
content.
“In 2003 and 2004 we were making IE secure,” he says, referring
to the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Security remained the theme in IE7. The dilemma was that fixing
bugs introduced compatibility problems. “You can’t just flick a
switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have all
the servers and services in the world change,” Mr Hachamovitch
says. The result was that some websites looked worse than before,
because they detected that IE was accessing them and delivering
content that took into account presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft’s answer was to build “compatibility modes” into IE8.
The manner in which this was done remains controversial. The
question was whether to default to the IE7 compatible mode, or
default to the better standards mode, Mr Hachamovitch says. “(We
found in) releasing IE7 that web developers were slow to modify
their sites. We wanted to keep the web working.”
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default
like IE7. Page designers would have to include special code to turn
on IE8’s standards support. The decision was greeted with a hail of
protest because it might perpetuate a non-standard web.
Earlier this month, Mr Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had
changed its mind. “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default,
interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it
can.”
Apparently the key to that change of heart was a separate
strategic announcement last month, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability principles and promising “open connections to its
products, support for industry standards and data portability”.
According to Mr Hachamovitch, Microsoft now had “a more
interoperable way; a more compatible way”.
It sounded good, but what about browser scripting. The context
is important. Mr Hachamovitch had already stated that Microsoft
spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a more proprietary
technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser plug-in
called Silverlight.
This is similar in some ways to Adobe’s Flash, and supports rich
multimedia effects within web pages as well as the ability to run
applications written in Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser.
Web standards advocates are wary of them because they replace the
open web with content that depends on a proprietary plug-in.
The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the cross-platform Firefox
browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the browser itself.
A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and that is standardised by ECMA, the
European standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen
to see the current JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful
version called ECMAScript 4.0.
“Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0?” asks Mozilla’s
vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. The answer is that
JavaScript is the language of the net. We want to keep pushing that
technology forward to make it easier for people to build bigger,
faster, more secure websites.”
Asked if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0, Mr
Hachamovitch prevaricates and talks about competing demands on the
IE development team.
“Right now there isn’t really an ECMAScript 4 offering to
implement, there is an ECMAscript for discussion.” he says.
The Guardian

Near the beginning of How Fiction Works, James
Wood announces that his favourite 20th-century critics of the novel
are “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French
formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes”. His admiration does
not, however, prevent him from describing their ideas in his next
breath as “interesting but wrong-headed”. For at the heart of
Wood’s criticism is a quarrel with formalism.
This is not to say that Wood is reluctant to consider how
fiction “works” in the functional sense of the word. As its title
suggests, his third book of literary criticism is a kind of primer
that discusses the basic elements of fiction - language, character,
dialogue, and so on - drawing its examples from some of the
greatest novels of the past two centuries.
But Wood is deeply antipathetic to any suggestion that
literature might be understood solely as a collection of devices
and conventions. His response to an essay by the American novelist
William Gass, in which Gass slices one of Henry James’ characters
into a list of tropes, is unequivocal. Such an approach, he argues,
is “deeply, incorrigibly wrong”.
The observation that literature is a structure of words is
little more than a truism. It takes no account of why we read in
the first place. The most important thing is always how a fictional
representation relates to life.
At the bottom of all Wood’s inquiries is an abiding concern with
“the real”. There is no necessary contradiction, he argues, between
fiction’s artifice and its capacity to depict reality; indeed, it
derives much of its potency from the necessary tension between
these two aspects.
How Fiction Works is, in this sense, something of a
manifesto. Like Wood’s previous collections of critical essays,
The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, it
stresses the importance of realist practice in fiction, and in
doing so advocates a certain stance toward literature itself.
Wood is interested, not simply in how fiction “works” in a
technical sense, but in the rather more elusive sense of how it
affects us, how it brings realities to mind, how it teaches us to
become better observers of ourselves and others. He is particularly
interested in its ability to convey psychological insight. He is
always reading with an eye for this “sudden capturing of a central
human truth, this moment when a single detail has enabled us to see
a character’s thinking (or lack of it)”.
For Wood, who greatly admires the Russian realist Anton Chekhov,
detail is the lifeblood of great literature. As Chekhov well
understood, we tend to give ourselves away in our smallest
gestures. It is through precision of detail and vividness of
metaphor that fiction addresses our sense of the real.
This fascination with detail is both a strength and a weakness
of Wood’s criticism. He is, philosophically and temperamentally, a
close reader who rarely feels the need to step back and take in a
novel’s architecture. The glaring omission from the book’s chapters
on the various aspects of fiction is plot. When Wood discusses
narrative he prefers to speak of the flaneur’s gaze and the
development of free indirect style, rather than the workaday issues
of dramatic complication, rising action and denouement.
That Wood is not particularly interested in the way narrative
pushes toward resolution - the way it seems, on some deep level, to
demand it - is significant. However incorrigibly wrong Gass may be
about character, he was right when he said that all stories are
“sneaky justifications”.
Wood has good reason to be wary of plot. As he was apt to point
out in his timely attack upon the overheated style of fiction he
dubbed “hysterical realism”, there is nothing that destroys a
fictional work’s credibility quite so effectively as one outrageous
coincidence too many. It is plot, more than detail, that pushes the
limitless variety of experience into a particular shape. Life
simply isn’t like that, as Chekhov observed; but stories and novels
certainly are like that, including those couched in Chekhovian
ambiguity.
Of course, part of the difficulty in talking about how fiction
works is that it refuses to be corralled. The Russian critic
Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the novel cannot be considered a
genre because it has no fixed formal properties; it is, rather, a
constantly evolving anti-genre that omnivorously gobbles up
techniques and dialects. As Wood puts it, the novel is “the great
virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules
thrown around it” - including his own.
In the midst of a spirited defence of realism against those,
such as Gass and Rick Moody, who have expressed impatience with its
conventions, Wood digresses to observe that certain works by Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett might not depict “likely or typical human
activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts”.
One takes the point, but this is lame. It blithely goes against
so many of Wood’s arguments. Suddenly he wants to have his realist
cake and eat it. The “real” obviously won’t do as an explanation of
a story in which a man turns into a giant beetle, so “truth” steps
in to rescue an obviously important work from critical oblivion.
The “real” is fundamental to literature, it seems, except when it
isn’t.
By making reality interchangeable with truth, effectively at his
own pleasure, Wood makes both concepts promiscuous.
On this question, How Fiction Works might have
benefited from a more concerted engagement with some strong
exceptions to the general thrust of its argument: Laurence Sterne’s
classic anti-novel, Tristram Shandy, for example, which is
about the impossibility of realism; or more recent novels, such as
Catch-22 or A Confederacy of Dunces, which would
appear to be excluded from Wood’s definition of comedy on the
grounds that they are much too funny.
In The Irresponsible Self, Wood made it clear that he
regards farcical or satirical humour as an inferior mode, and this
preference was a feature of his critique of the hysterical
realists. But (as long as we are throwing the term about) there is
certainly no shortage of “truth” in Joseph Heller’s brilliantly
absurd anti-war novel.
Wood is aware of this promiscuousness and the equivocations it
requires. Realism, he acknowledges, is an indistinct and
problematic term; less an identifiable genre than an impulse in
fiction. He attempts to work around this difficulty by coining a
rather feeble neologism - “lifeness” - to denote “life on the page”
evoked via the “highest artistry”. This concept, he suggests, might
be applied to any style of fiction. But this makes “lifeness”
itself close to a truism: it says that what works, works.
Wood is nevertheless right to suggest that formalism on its own
can never be enough; it will never feel like a satisfactory
explanation of a great book. While there are cases where it could
be argued that authors have succeeded in wresting language away
from its denotative quality to revel in the free play of sound and
rhythm - certain passages in James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, for
example - no piece of writing, not even Finnegans Wake -
can set up permanent camp in pure abstraction without ceasing to be
language at all. In this sense, fiction does always enter into a
relationship with a reality beyond itself and can evoke the truths
of lived experience.
Wood’s deserved reputation as an important critic rests upon his
willingness to insist upon this central humanist impulse of
literature. How Fiction Works is a pithy, lucid,
inconsistent, argumentative and opinionated piece of popular
criticism. It deserves to be widely read.