Electric Eden by Bob Young

Rob Young's Electric Eden is intended to provide a history of England's visionary music. More than a straight folk music primer, this book argues for the existence of a specifically English approach to alternative culture—an impulse rooted both in nostalgia and utopianism, identifiable in the works of Blake and Ruskin as much as in the music of the folk revivalists and the rock bands they influenced. It's an ambitious project, running to over 600 pages and blending social history with music biographies, album reviews and political ruminations. Young even indulges in one ill-advised foray into dream-like prose poetry, though quite why he was allowed to do so escapes me.

The early part of Electric Eden is fascinating, especially if you are not well versed in the history of English folk revivalism. After an introduction in which he sets out a theory of folk culture as a type of time travel or liminal space, Young tells the story of Vashti Bunyan, a young folk singer in the 60s who first lived in a forest with her boyfriend, and then, having been evicted by the bank who owned the land, walked most of the length of the British Isles with a horse and cart before disappearing from public view, leaving only one record behind her. That's until, in the early 2000s, she got an Internet connection and a letter from Devendra Banhart, leading her to discover that she was a cult favourite. She finally got the confidence to release a second record. Bunyan's story is an endearing one, but for Young it also exemplifies how folk music works. For him, folk music is a journey into one's self as much as it is a geographical or temporal journey. Learning about folk culture also the act of creating that culture.

 This concept of folk culture as both a personal journey and the on-going invention of an imaginary past is convincingly brought home again and again throughout the book. Because folk songs were transmitted in an oral tradition, each singer has always been free to alter and invent, meaning that the original version of any song represents a kind of unknowable platonic archetype. The people who travelled around putting together the first collections of folk songs adapted the lyrics to fit with their conservative tastes and entirely neglected to record the most obscene material. Composers, like Vaughn Williams and Holst, who did a lot to popularise and rehabilitate the common man's music in the early 20th century, did so in the framework of a new style of composition. Even the guitar, now such a ubiquitous symbol of folk song and protest, was practically unseen in the UK before the late 1950s.

 The early chapters on the British folk revival, both within classical music and within circles of folk historians and musicians, are where this book is strongest. Anyone wanting to investigate the subject could do worse than to start here. Reading this book with a laptop to hand makes for many evenings of interesting listening and provides a decent introduction to the people who invented English folk music as we now know it. Young is also convincing on the natural progression from the early English folk revival scene to the folk-rock fusion style of bands like Fairport Convention. The story of the making of their album Leif and Liege is a fascinating one, full of tragedy and inspiration. Later the book covers the ways tragedy and inspiration also marked the life of Sandy Denny, the singer who, on Leif and Liege, interpreted the old songs so well and provided her own haunting murder ballad towards the album's end. For me, having little knowledge of this material before hand, it was a pleasure to get to know the music and these small histories were fascinating.

 However, Rob Young also dedicates many, many pages of this book to a series of late 60s and early 70s bands and musicians whose stories are less interesting and whose music has not dated nearly so well. How much a reader enjoys many of the chapters towards the middle of this book will depend on how much one cares about people like The Extraordinary String Band. For me, there came a point when I grew sick of the period in question and felt a weary sense that Young was aiming to be exhaustive purely so as to avoid the criticism that he had left someone out. What's more, the bands and musicians I most would have enjoyed reading about—people like Pink Floyd and Kate Bush—figure more as supporting characters.

 Fortunately, as the book goes on, Young expands his focus. He writes a long section about the cult film The Wicker Man, and explores the mid-20th century development of witchcraft as a spiritual and cultural movement. A long section of the book also provides a discussion of the growth of the music festival, the origins of Glastonbury, the travellers movement, and the ultimate war Thatcher's government waged on freedom of assembly, culminating in the Battle of the Beanfield, at which a large number of travellers, revellers and crusties were given a serious beating on their way to their annual gathering at Stonehenge, around which the police had erected a barbed wire fence. Young frames all this as a kind of battle for the soul of the nation—a fight for the right to use certain sites. He argues that the free festival scene had its origins in an idea of a less technological, more cooperative and nomadic form of living that was as much a paranoid response to the idea of a post-nuclear world as it was an idealistic rejection of consumer society. As much as this vision was only ever really available to a marginal few, Young argues, it's indicative of the utopian power at the heart of what may at first seem to be the conservative impulses of folk culture. This plays to a well known narrative of the 1980s as the point in time when Great Britain lost its ability to dream, an ability Young would seem to like to see restored via a semi-spiritual engagement with an idea of Avalon.

 It's difficult to know, really, how honest this account of the free festival scene actually is, given that the whole thing was over by 1985. Was there ever a real possibility of social change? I knew a lot of people who went to free parties in the early 2000s, and I went to some of them too. People used to talk a lot of against-the-social-contract, smash-the-state talk, but the whole thing always seemed to be more about drugs and getting attention through terrible Drum & Bass "freestyling" on the topic of Iraq than being about any kind of plausible challenge to the status quo. Maybe that's because the people I knew were just folks who had read No Logo and started slumming it, while the crusties in the 80s really lived the life, dreamt the dreams and had real dogs on ropes. I don't know. What I do know is that as Electric Eden wears on, it becomes more and more difficult to trust Young.

 Rob Young's history of folk echoes his own insight into folk culture as an invented past. His aim is to create a reality, as much as to chronicle one. Electric Eden is all about presenting a dream of a better England. It is vitally important to Young's narrative that folk music and folk culture are seen to be progressive forces, not conservative ones. He puts it like this:

 "In the global history of class struggle, revolutions are typically assumed to bring about fundamental changes, recasting political and social paradigms and remaking the world anew for a permanently altered future. That was true of the Communist Manifesto... just as it was true of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the social engineering of Hitler's Nazis, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge of 1970s Cambodia, to name a few. But revolutionaries are equally inclined to turn the wheel backwards, fighting to restore a perceived lost estate or denied birthright, than campaigning for a gleaming, high-technology future. From Winstanley and his Diggers ... to the Parisian Situationist sloganeers of the May 1968 disturbances, daubing walls with "Sous les paves, la plage!" (Beneath the paving stones, the beach!), there has always been this desire to prise open the veneer of modern industrial society and reconnect with a fundamental mode of existence. "

 The problem here is that in order to align folk music with the more acceptable face of revolution— the Diggers and the Situationists, as opposed to the Nazis and Khmer Rouge—Young has grossly distorted the truth. Despite what his cherry-picked quote might suggest, the Situationists were not a nostalgic, anti-modern movement. Amongst other things, members of the Situationist International wanted to use modern technology to redesign the city so that it was a constantly moving place of play. They were universalists who rejected tradition and aimed to use modern architecture as a liberating force. The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, far from aiming to "remake the world for an altered future," wanted to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages. After year zero was declared, you could get your hand cut off for wearing a watch and get killed for wearing glasses, since both of these were perverse western innovations. If anyone ever wanted to "prise open the veneer of modern industrial society and reconnect with a fundamental mode of existence," it was Pol Pot.

 Likewise, when Young argues that the image of horses on the cover of Jethrow Tull's album Heavy Horses shows an unimaginative Luddism, it hard to see this as anything other than a convenient reading designed to support his narrative and play to his tastes. There is no reason this image is more conservative than the artwork for any of a million folk record sleeves, except that it was released in the year that Young wants us to believe marked the end of an era. This kind of opportunist reading of symbols will be familiar to anyone who has ever written an English literature essay in which they began with a theory about a book and then browsed the unread volume for quotes they could twist to support that theory. In other words, Young is writing a polemic, and the veracity of the details are less important to him than the overall arc of his argument.

 This is why, while towards the end of the book Young dedicates a lot of time to Julian Cope, a man who researches stone circles, makes rock and roll music influenced by pagan ideas and subscribes to a hippyish, liberal, left wing philosophy, he says very little about the neo-folk scene. Neo-folk is rife with bands suspected of holding far right, even fascist sympathies. Though Young alludes to the scene's existence, Death in June's use of Nazi uniforms and SS runes, and David Tibet's strange religious theories about Hitler would muddy the waters of Young's lake so badly that he ellects not to discuss these issues at all.

Electric Eden is a music book that doubles as a social history, but it is one with an unreliable narrator. Reading it is like spending a long night drinking in the company of a talkative man with a massive record collection, a good knowledge of English history, a personal politico-spiritual vision which he believes ties it all together, and a burning desire to share all of this with you. How much you enjoy the experience probably depends on the degree to which that kind of night appeals to you, and how far you think his enthusiasm compensates for his biases. As you wander home in the early light, your hangover already creeping in, you'll probably find yourself muttering, shaking your head—partly in wonder and partly in frustration—your mind full of new knowledge and snatches of old songs, but echoing too with all those counter-arguments he wouldn't let you finish. 

  

The Case of Mary Bell by Gitta Sereny

In 1968, Mary Bell, then 11 years old, and Norma Bell, thirteen years old and no relation, stood trial for the murders of two little boys in Newcastle. Their trial took place in adult court and their names were released to the press to prevent the possibility of rumours spreading locally about other children. Thus Mary Bell became a notorious child-murderer before she reached puberty. A narrative soon developed around the trial and the crime, a narrative that remains to some extent intact to this day, which held that Norma Bell was an easily-led child of sub-average intelligence, while Mary Bell, far more intelligent, was an aberration, a fiend, an inexplicably evil monster.

Gitta Sereny's book, first published in the years immediately following the case, seeks above all to reject this concept of the evil seed, and argues that no trial of a child who has killed is morally worthwhile unless it seeks to understand not only what happened, but also why it happened. Perhaps, she suggests, greater understanding might prevent such a thing happening again. It might also help society understand how to deal with young people like Mary Bell, who are, on the evidence of their actions alone, deeply disturbed.

Sereny has worked with disturbed children. She writes generously and compassionately about everyone involved, and writes from a belief in the need for serious reform of the justice and social service systems. But the truth is also that Mary Bell is endlessly fascinating, and it would be facile to pretend that this doesn't account for part of the book's great appeal. She is simultaneously terrifying, confusing and endearing, and many people who had contact with her in the years this book recounts spoke of the inexplicable hold she could have over a person, and of the complex emotional reactions she awoke in those who were charged with dealing with her. Reading this book, one experiences a similar mix of emotions and unlikely attachment to the child murderer.

The book begins with the events of the summer when the killing occurred, and any discussion of the subject probably requires a quick explication of those events:

On 11th May 1968, Mary and her friend Norma "found" Mary's cousin injured and bleeding behind some sheds. They came to his aid and were later asked to give statements to the police.

The following day, a local mother complained that Norma and Mary Bell had assaulted her three daughters in the local nursery's sandpit, leaving visible marks on the neck of her seven-year-old. The two girls again gave statements to the police. These statements are reproduced in the book. In Norma's account Mary asks one of the children, "Do you know Mary Bell?" and when the the girl replies, "You are Mary Bell," she says, "No I'm not. Can you fight Mary Bell?" She then asks, "What happens if you choke someone, do they die?" and then begins to strangle the girl until the child turns purple. Norma ends her account by saying that she is no longer Mary's friend. What is disturbing though is that Mary's own account is almost identical to begin with, except that she has Norma asking, "Do you know Mary Bell," and then saying, "Do you wish Mary Bell was dead?" Mary then claims she went behind the shed from where she couldn't see what happened next, but from where she did hear some screaming.

On the 25th of the same month, Martin Brown, four years and two months old, was found dead in an abandoned building. Mary and Norma were observed near the scene and they tried to enter the room where he was found. The cause of death was unclear. The policeman working on the case considered asphyxiation as a cause, but dismissed this because Martin's throat was unmarked. (While it is possible to strangle a four-year-old without leaving a mark, explains Sereny, an adult will almost always apply unnecessary force and cause lasting discoloration or damage.) The following day, the local nursery building was broken into and vandalised. Weird notes were found inside, scrawled in childish writing. They read as oblique confessions to the murder but were dismissed as a tasteless prank. The following week Mary Bell and Norma were arrested breaking into the same nursery.

In the meantime, Mary Bell knocked on the door of Martin's house and asked his mum, smiling, if she could see Martin. "Oh, love," said Martin's Mum, "he's dead." Mary, still smiling, said that she knew he was dead. "I wanted to see him in his coffin," she explained. Later in the book, Gitta Sereny discusses the diagnosis of two examining psychologists who stated that Mary Bell was suffering from a psychopathic personality. For me, even as an interested layman, this early incident was a clue that Mary was a psychopath. It also seems that she wanted to get caught. That same week she told other children that she was a murderer and had murdered Martin Brown. Sereny sees all this acting-out as a series of cries for help, which, had they not been ignored, might have prevented what happened next.

Almost exactly two months after the death of Martin Brown, Brian Howe, a child of less than three and a half years old, was found murdered in some waste ground not far from where Mary and Norma lived. Mary and Norma were interviewed several times. Mary called attention to herself by trying to implicate an innocent boy who often played with Brian. Norma eventually implicated Mary, who then accused Norma of the murder.

Having laid these events out in detail, the book goes on to deal with the two girls' time on remand and with the trial. Sereny discusses how the trial was adapted to fit the requirements of two very young girls, how everyone involved did their very best, but how ultimately they were hamstrung by the structure of a criminal trial designed for trying adult defendants, which may not in the end have benefited anyone. Throughout the process, Norma was emotional and childlike, while Mary Bell seemed composed, except when she grew angry. Faced, as an eleven year old, with impossibly complex legal jargon, she nonetheless followed the trial and carefully adapted her account of events to incorporate plausible explanations for evidence she had heard presented against her. She was often blank-faced and was able to discuss topics like murder and death without apparent concern. Sereny points out, though, that all Mary's anxiety was visible in her hands. She constantly made weird gestures and stretched her fingers apart. Mary's vocabulary was also very advanced for her age, and her ability to keep track of the discussion uncanny. She was able to confuse and get the better of her interrogators on more than one occasion. All this ultimately worked against her though, since it supported the idea that she was the instigator and Norma was merely a stooge. Mary alone was convicted. What was completely absent from the trial, and this is why Sereny says she felt compelled to write the book, was any discussion of either girl's background.

And this aspect of the case was not missing only from the trial. For many years Mary's childhood experiences were not known to her carers, and despite being diagnosed as "of unsound mind," she was given little or no psychiatric treatment. Sereny would later write a whole book, Cries Unheard, about Mary Bell's childhood, a book that exposes unsuspected levels of abuse, but even the single chapter of The Case of Mary Bell dedicated to the topic makes it clear that Mary's mother, Betty Bell, was a very unwell woman from very early in her life. Had Betty received psychiatric intervention, or had Mary been removed from her care, argues Sereny, perhaps the damage could have been greatly reduced all round. Sereny is polemical about the need to separate children from unfit parents, a position which might seem controversial until you know that Betty tried to kill Mary Bell on at least four occasions.

Just as there was a lack of medical expertise or psychiatric intervention in Betty's life, so there was for a long time no medical dimension to Mary Bell's captivity. This was a girl in serious need of treatment which, for a long time, she did not receive. Those who dealt with Mary were often dedicated and enthusiastic, but Sereny argues that they needed the support of psychiatrists and psychologists; support which simply was not there. In fact, the ignorance of those with responsibility for the child seems shocking. Sereny discusses more than once Mary's ability to make her adult carers feel they had some kind of special connection with her, some affinity nobody else had. In detention, at least one of Bell's mentors had to resign after becoming convinced Bell was innocent. Several others were unable to cope with Mary's rejection of them. Her mother was allowed visitation rights, despite being the source of many of her mental issues, and was even allowed to photograph Mary in her underwear. The institution where she was held believed they were "doing miracles" with Mary, even as two batches of hamsters died in her care from neck-related injuries. 

The Case of Mary Bell was reprinted in the 1990s, following the death of James Bulger at the hands of John Venables and Robert Thompson. Appended to this later edition is Gitta Sereny's account of the trial faced by Venables and Thompson, which again took place in adult court. To some readers this addition might feel a little exploitative, as if the aim were to resurrect the Mary Bell book with the addition of contemporary material related to a completely separate crime to give it relevance. And to a certain degree I sympathise with this idea, because the two cases are strikingly different in at least as many ways as they are similar. The core ideas of Sereny's argument are, however, relevant to both trials, and it's instructive to see how little had changed in the intervening two and a half decades. More than this though, the Bulger case highlights the destructive consequences of the justice system's disinterest in the motivations and reasons for this kind of crime.

Sereny contends that the murder of Jamie Bulger was a sex crime, and that until this was understood, very little of value could come from the proceedings. The behaviour of the boys during questioning, especially in relation to the batteries found near Bulger's body, supported a sexual motive from early on. It was eventually established that the two killers had forced the batteries into Bulger's mouth—a behaviour which Sereny claims is almost always a sexual act in children. The sexual nature of the crime was in fact clear to the police, but it was felt that discussion of this aspect of the boys' actions would cause only unnecessary distress. Sereny suggests that without taking all this into account, and with no attempt to understand the two boys' backgrounds, the best we can hope for from legal proceedings is a punitive custodial sentence, which might well be necessary, but should be regarded as the absolute minimum response to such a crime.

The second edition of The Case of Mary Bell was published in 1998, and when the two boys were eventually released, sure enough, one of them was sent back to prison for reoffending. It's interesting to note that while Sereny and others suggested that Robert Thompson, who was likely sexually abused himself, probably instigated the sexual element of the original crime, it was in fact John Venables who ended up getting sent back inside for child porn offences. Perhaps Sereny misunderstood the dynamic of the crime, or perhaps Venables' sexual development was stunted by the traumatic crime he committed as a young boy, or by his being condemned to negotiate puberty and the journey into adulthood in a punitive institution.

Either way, the addition to the book of the Bulger material was tragically vindicated by this turn of events and further underlines the key message that Mary Bell was not an aberrant, evil soul, but a vulnerable child damaged by an appalling formative situation.

The girl that emerges through the pages of this book is intelligent, manipulative, strange and impossible to fully understand. She is emblematic of the total failure of society to grasp either the causes of violence or the best approach to dealing with child offenders. The Case of Mary Bell strongly rejects the mainstream discourse around "evil" children, which tends to suggest that we should save our compassion for the victims of murder and for their families. This is a story full of victims, it argues, all of whom deserve our compassion.

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

To say that Pulphead comes recommended would be a bit of an understatement. On Amazon, pretty much the only negative review of the book is a rant about the decline of the essay form written by a man who only ever gives one-star reviews and claims to be a Pulitzer Prize winning short story writer. A quick Internet search reveals that the closest this individual has come to the winning the attention of the Pulitzer Prize committee is a rabid comment he once posted on their official website. So let's regard Amazon as a forum of unanimous praise. In more established outlets, the book has drawn favourable comparisons with David Foster Wallace's essay collections. In fact, someone writing for The New York Times Book Review stated that Pulphead was the "most important collection of magazine writing since A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

As with anything that comes with so much positive hype, it's initially difficult to enjoy Pulphead. The first piece in the book is an account of a Christian Rock festival, most of which Sullivan dedicates to recounting his experiences with the enormous vehicle he is forced to hire for transport, and a group of 20-something mega-Christian woodsmen who he ends up befriending onsite. There's a flashback to his younger days as a believer, and a brief discussion of the possibility that Christian-rock is the only genre of music to have effectively excellence-proofed itself, but mostly the piece is a portrait of the author, his wheels and a group of guys he once met. The autobiographical nature of the writing, combined with the way Sullivan mixes slang, Christian jargon, straight magazine prose and arcane vocabulary might remind some readers of an eloquent blogger, or summon the spectre of Hunter S. Thompson.

But this comparison with the King of Gonzo is not as negative as it might seem. Most writers who take influence from Hunter S. Thompson tend to ape his irreverence, wild metaphors and penchant for detailing his own substance abuse, while lacking his respect for language and forgetting that it was his originality which made him popular in the first place. What Sullivan has in common with The Good Doctor is his ability to make himself an asset to the story, revealing unexpected truths as a result. Everything Sullivan examines he can trace back to himself. As Henry David Thoreau said, "We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking." Sullivan leaves no such room for forgetting. Pulphead is gleefully subjective, and it ends up all the more convincing for it.

It also becomes apparent, as you read further, that Sullivan's use of language is extremely flexible. He adapts it greatly depending on his subject matter. When he writes about a Tea Party rally, he writes the best part of the piece in the first person plural, such that for a while I was almost fooled into believing he was a supporter. It's a clever move and one which highlights the writer's ability to sympathise with his subjects and their concerns.

His essay about the TV show, The Real World USA is probably the most extreme example of this linguistic empathy. The piece is full of "I was like..." and "He goes..." in place of the usual dialogue markers, and features Sullivan addressing his readers as "bros," and refusing to explain the concept of the show because, "Fuck it! You know how it works." These are all ticks that could be initially irritating if you don't find them amusing, but Sullivan adapts the argot of airhead reality TV stars in order to expound a thesis on the genre which was new to me and also very persuasive.  And I quote:

There was a time when people liked to point out that reality TV isn't really real. "They're just acting up for the cameras." "That's staged." "The producers are telling them what to do!" "I hate those motherfuckers!" and so forth. Then there was a sort of deuxieme naivete when people thought, Maybe there is something real about it. "Because, you know, we can be narcissistic like that." "It's our culture." "It gives us a window onto..." And such things. But I would argue that all these different straw people I've invented are missing the single most interesting thing about reality TV, which is the way it has successfully appropriated reality. 

He goes on to explain that reality TV casts are now made up of people who have spent years watching reality TV, and that being on a reality TV show is now simply a right of passage for many people. The casts of these shows now comprise of:

people whose very consciousness [has] been formed by the shows... Now, when you watch a reality show—when you follow The Real World, for instance—you're not watching a bunch of people hurled into some contrived scenario and getting filmed, you're watching people caught in the act of being on a reality show. That's the plot of all reality shows, no matter their cooked up themes.

This situation has meant that producers need to work harder and harder to find people who aren't "hip" to the game, and who will come into the programme and display some semblance of spontaneity. "Have you seen reality TV recently?" asks Sullivan. "From what can be gathered, they're essentially emptying group homes into the studio. It has all gotten very real."  

This short essay on the meaning of reality TV appears in the middle of a profile of a man called the Miz, who became a star on an early series of The Real World, and has since made a living being that guy off the real world, travelling from city to city to do meet-and-greets and spend several hours of heavy drinking and "straight wildin' wildin'" in sponsored nightclub appearances. (There is, apparently, a whole economy based around what people do once they've been on a show.) Embedding an editorial or historical essay into an otherwise narrative piece of writing or a portrait of an individual is one of Sullivan's key techniques. It's a technique that serves him well.

In fact, the book is probably at its strongest when it comes to profiles of musicians. Sullivan has a rare ability to write about music, but he also has deep sympathy for his subjects and he manages to write about both Axl Rose and Michael Jackson in a way that humanises both figures while dissecting American society at the same time. The piece about Michael Jackson, written after his death, is particularly moving. Sullivan places Jackson back in American history. He contrasts the way that Jackson interacted with the black press with the way he spoke to mainstream journalists, and points out that all the majority of us have ever seen of Jackson is a man defending himself against a hostile white media. It is so difficult for me to remember that Jackson was a black man that I had never even thought of this before. Sullivan also writes at length about the talent and drive Jackson had, at one point giving a description of Jackson's famous televised Billie Jean performance—the first time he publicly did the moonwalk—which is so well written that when I watched the video I saw at least two things I'm sure I otherwise would have missed.

Axl Rose, on the other hand, is shown to be a man best understood in relation to the fact that he escaped from a shit-kicking life of petty violence, drudgery and bigotry in central Indiana, a place Sullivan describes as "nowhere." And Sullivan is qualified to make the case. He's talking about the place where he grew up. He goes in search of Rose's old friends and manages to make Guns 'n' Roses lyrics seem to be the howl of a soul without a home.

I hope it is clear now that Sullivan is never just writing about the subject at hand, but always about a myriad of cultural concerns and connections. His pieces on lost Blues singers and hidden American Cave paintings are complex interventions into America's view of itself. And all the while, he is a very entertaining writer. Sometimes he is fucking hilarious. By the time it gets to the end of the book, where Sullivan discusses TV show One Tree Hill's use of his house as a set, or gives an account of a stoned trip to Disney land, he has won you over so much that you welcome these further dispatches from his life.

So I'm adding my voice to the chorus of approval for Pulphead, something which can only reduce the chances of your enjoying it when first you pick it up and begin to read. You should persevere though. It'll be worth it.

Nicholas Carr - The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we read, think and remember.

'The Shallows' is haunted by the presence of HAL, the malfunctioning supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and specifically by the scene towards the end of the film when HAL pleads for its life, or rather for its memory circuits: "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? . . . Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid." At the beginning of the book Carr positions himself as HAL, his mind, like the computer's memory circuits, not going, but changing: "I feel it most strongly when I'm reading . . . I feel like I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." By the end of the book, having explored the impact of the Internet on our brains, our minds and our emotions, Carr has changed places. He now stands with the human figures in the film, who, in contrast to HAL's "outpouring of feeling . . . go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency." This, he argues, is the inevitable outcome of our increasingly addictive, and increasingly dependent relationship with the Internet.

The thrust of his argument is that the response/reward distractions of the Internet, the multimedia, the hyperlinks and the adverts, the tabs and the windows within windows, the e-mail alerts, the social web-site updates, are all together eroding our mind's long established habit, born of Gutenberg's mechanical printing press, of deep and linear reading. And in turn our inclination and ability to think deeply. This is the 'intellectual ethic' fostered over centuries by the 'technology' of the book. It is not, Carr argues, the intellectual ethic of the Internet: "we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler."

Much of the earlier part of the book charts the biological and neurological history of the human brain, from Aristotle's theory that the brain acted something like a refrigerator to cool the blood, to the Industrial Age metaphor of the brain as a mechanical contraption, each part fixed and unchanging, to the prevailing modern day understanding of the brain as something altogether more organic, as something that is able to adapt, sometimes within a period of days, to environmental stimuli. Thus our brains "register and record experiences in neural pathways" and these pathways strengthen or weaken according to habit. Our brains behave like plastic.  Carr cites lots of research to illustrate the point. For example, a British research project  involving London cab drivers, which found that, "the drivers' posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial representations . . . was much larger than normal . . . (and) the longer a cab driver had been on the job, the larger his posterior hippocampus tended to be." And then there is an experiment in which two sets of pianists are asked to practice a melody, each group with keyboards but one group only imagining that they are playing. The result is identical brain activity in both groups. The point of course is that our brains, and specifically the pathways therein, evolve according to our thoughts, and our thoughts in turn evolve with the technologies we use.

From this premise Carr asserts that the technology of the internet, as well as fostering a more distracted 'juggler's' mode of thinking, has encouraged a shallower way of thinking too, in large part because we have come to use the internet, and the computer more generally, as an external source for our memories. Put simply, and in modern parlance, we have outsourced our memories. And while this in itself may not be a revolutionary idea, the simplicity and clarity with which Carr illustrates the workings of our memories makes it at least a forceful, and subject to your way of thinking, a frightening idea. He explains that we have two parts to our memory, our working memory, capable of storing no more than four or five separate ideas at any one time, and our long term memory, a much larger space where some of those working memories settle down, and take root. It is how the Internet effects the dynamic between these two parts of our memory, one the thimble, the other the bath-tub, which provides, to my mind, the book's most compelling indictment of the Internet's influence on our brains.

Just a note here on that "to my mind." This book is not set out as an indictment. It does not read like a polemic. It is not a Luddite's attack on the Internet, informed by a nostalgic conviction that the best of times are in the past. It is a lucid and empirical, and also human account of the impact of a technology that has become an integral part of so many of our lives.