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Posted on 10 November 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Hi. I’m Nicholas Whyte, a public affairs consultant in Brussels, political commentator in Northern Ireland, and science fiction fan. This is my blog on WordPress, but you can also find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads. You are welcome to follow me on all of those, but I usually won’t add you back unless we know each other personally. If you want to contact me I prefer email to nicholas dot whyte at gmail dot com, or at my work address if it’s something to do with my job.

Since late 2003, I’ve been recording (almost) every book that I have read. At 200-300 books a year, that’s over 5,000 books that I have written up here. These are the most recent; I also record the books I have read each week and each month. These days each review includes the second paragraph of the third chapter of each book, just for fun; and also a purchase link for Amazon UK. (Yes, I know; but I get no other financial reward for writing all of this.)

During the pandemic I developed an interest in family history and have been recording my research here.

This WordPress blog replaced my Livejournal in March 2022. I was able to copy across all of my old Livejournal posts; unfortunately the internal links in old posts will still in general point back to Livejournal, and though I was able to import images, I wasn’t able to import videos, so it’s a little imperfect.

Comments welcome.

The Happiness Patrol, by Mick Stack (and Graeme Curry)

Posted on 7 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched this in 2007, I wrote:

The Happiness Patrol, from the dying days of 1988, is a fairly standard rebels against the system story, lifted by some fairly memorable characters and concepts – especially Sheila Hancock as the dictator, and her vicious pet Fifi. It comes close to looking convincing – the coherent style of the Happiness Patrol themselves is almost genius. I started off being quite impressed by how well the Candyman worked, but I had completely gone off him in the end, and the musician and the census official, while nice touches, didn’t quite seem to integrate into the whole thing. Not awful, but definitely not one of the great ones either.

When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

Continuing along this theme of rehabilitation [after Remembrance of the Daleks], I found The Happiness Patrol an excellent piece of sinister dystopia, following on from Paradise Towers. The interaction between Helen A and her retainers and servitors is tremendously engaging, with Fifi one of the great non-speaking parts (like the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona, only much more vicious); and one wonders why it came as a surprise to anyone to learn that it was a deliberate though not hugely accurate tilt at Thatcherism. Doctor Who does not do space opera terribly well, but this is not space opera, it is allegory played with bitter ironic comedy, and fits McCoy’s portrayal beautifully.

Watching it again I find myself somewhere in between. Great performances, but a lot of running around in circles in terms of plot, no real sense of how the various bits of city connect with each other, and people just standing around to be captured or executed. We’ve had more violent assaults on our willing suspension of disbelief in the Moffat and Chibnall and Davies years since, but it felt like the director was working more on the script than the audience perception.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Graeme Curry’s novelisation of his own script is:

She could not believe her eyes – the TARDIS was pink. From the shadows of Forum Square they had a clear view of the Happiness Patrol carrying their pots of paint and putting the final touches to their work. Daisy K stood some distance from the others, overseeing the job.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

I wasn’t overwhelmed by the original TV story, but Curry has produced a novelisation which is passionate and convinced – the rather odd plot holes remain, but liberated from cheap-looking special effects, it turns into rather a good yarn. Definitely one of those where the book is an improvement. Also an easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Helen A and her women warriors running around after Ace.

Nothing more to add. You can get it here. (Incidentally I tried tracking Bechdel passes and fails for all the fiction I read this year, but ran out of steam in June.)

Mike Stack’s Black Archive monograph on the story looks at its reception rather than its creation, which is fair enough given the changes in public notoriety the story has enjoyed. The first chapter, “Evaluation” looks at how poorly the story was rated by fans at the time and since, and asks “So, Is it Any Good?” He disarmingly admits its weaknesses: the padding of the plot, the unambitious design, the controversial Kandyman, the ambiguous postcolonial treatment of the Pipe People, Fifi; but comes back to the good performances.

The second and longest chapter, “Political Readings”, starts with the media flap in 2010 when several British newspapers discovered that the story had a critique of Thatcherism, and goes on to point out that spoofs of Thatcher were so universal on TV in 1988 that The Happiness Patrol easily slipped below the radar of contemporary critics. The real target, Stack argues convincingly, is authoritarianism of all kinds.

The third chapter, “Queer Readings”, addresses one of the other key points about the story. Its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces and its footnotes, is:

However, such bold statements are not universal or uncontested. In The Television Companion, Howe and Walker gave only a brief mention to the interpretation of gay themes, tentatively noting ‘some commentators have suggested that there is a gay rights message here’⁴. They do not take this observation further. Tat Wood, in About Time, went further:

‘While we’re debunking fan lore, the dispatched Andrew X (or Harold L, it hardly matters) isn’t wearing a pink triangle badge. Novelist / new series writer Matt Jones’ reading of the story as being explicitly and exclusively about gay rights misses the point, although none of his evidence (except the mention of the triangle badge) is actually invalid.’⁵

⁴ Howe and Walker, The Television Companion, p518.
⁵ Wood, About Time 6, p252.

The chapter points out that the story is actually very ambiguous in its use of queer / gay imagery. Pink is the colour of the oppressor here, not the liberator. The two main male villains escape together at the end – romantically, perhaps? On the other hand, the enforcement of happiness has echoes of the Section 28 debate of the 1980s (weirdly being played out again in attacks against trans people today). Personally I think that the ambiguity is itself rather successful.

The fourth chapter, “Happy Readings”, starts by citing the Easter 2011 sermon delivered by then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in which he mentioned the story in the context of the importance of happiness as a societal aim. (I met Lord Williams once, in passing, as I was heading to a meeting at the House of Lords and bumped into him at the entrance to Parliament.) Stack looks at the concept of happiness, and why Helen A is doomed not to find it. (Certainly she ain’t gettin’ much from Joseph C.)

A Coda comes back to the question of whether the story is any good. Admitting his own personal love for it, Stack concludes:

I leave myself open to the criticism that I have credited The Happiness Patrol with more intellectual clout than it deserves. However, what strikes me is the story more than holds its own when held up to scholarly scrutiny. It elegantly depicts totalitarianism, anticipates the reclaiming of the word ‘killjoy’, and provides a parable about the need to negotiate our emotions.

Again, the Black Archives have given me new appreciation for what a Doctor Who story I don’t especially love. You can get this one here.

Incidentally, the Seventh Doctor is proportionately by far the best represented in the Black Archive (apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors). 64% of the Seventh Doctor’s episodes are covered in Black Archives as of late 2024; the closest of the rest is the Thirteenth with 46%. The gap is even bigger just counting stories: 7 of the 12 Seventh Doctor stories now have Black Archives, 58%, twice the score of the Fourth Doctor, with 12 out of 41, 29%.

(Since you asked, the end of the table has the Second Doctor, with only 13% of his episodes and 14% of his stories, though we have also yet to see any Black Archives covering either the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Doctors.)

Next: Midnight.

Return to Ramillies

Posted on 6 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Battle of Ramillies in 1706 was one of the biggest battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, also crucial for the future career of the Duke of Marlborough, and the cause of what is now Belgium switching from Spanish to Austrian rule. 62,000 troops of the Anglo-Austrian alliance inflicted s severe defeat on 60,000 French troops, a quarter of whom were killed. I have seen a claim that it was the largest cavalry battle in history. On a much more intimate level, the doctor treating one of the veteran British soldiers for injuries received at the battle realised that the patient had breasts; this was the famous Christian Davis, aka Mother Ross., who had joined the army disguised as a man many years before.

I visited the site of the Battle of Ramillies with B eight years ago, and had fun climbing the ancient tumulus from which the French commander directed his army.

But in 2016 I was unable to find any memorial of the actual battle in 1706. The memorial at the centre of the village of Ramillies is to a First World War skirmish, not to the much bigger fight of two centuries earlier.

However, dedicated Googling eventually found a small plaque, placed in 2006 beside a shrine to St Donatus way to the north of the battlefield. I have marked it on the below map (taken from Wikipedia, showing the order of battle at the beginning of the fighting) with a blue X. I’ve also marked the Hottomont tumulus, to the southwest, with a blue circle.

So I set off with B to find it today. It’s about 30 minutes’ drive from her home, and she likes car journeys. I was unable to persuade her to smile for the camera when we located it, but she gives a sense of scale.

The plaque, placed by local enthusiasts for the tercentenary of the battle, speaks for itself, though I do find the placement a bit odd; it’s at the junction of two minor, unnamed roads, some way from the most intense point of the fighting.

The chapel is in poor shape. It could date from anywhere between the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the various heritage websites offer no clue. It is referred to in some sources as “la Chapelle des Quatre Tièges”, but I am unable to find a translation for “tiège” – it could perhaps be a dialect form meaning “tree trunk” from “tige”, which means “stem”. Within the chapel, St Donatus looks out cheerfully through a protective grille. (This is probably St Donatus of Münstereifel, who protects you against lightning and was a Roman soldier, hence the tunic.)

I also tried to find the nearby caves of Folx-les-Caves, which I visited in 2005; but they have been closed since 2019.

The best known books set in each country: South Africa

Posted on 6 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood	Trevor Noah	723,706	6,349
Disgrace	J.M. Coetzee	109,054	11,011
Cry, the Beloved Country	Alan Paton	75,975	9,603
Long Walk to Freedom	Nelson Mandela	88,752	4,980
The Power of One	Bryce Courtenay	90,350	4,752
Life & Times of Michael K	J.M. Coetzee	19,789	2,858
The Promise	Damon Galgut	44,804	1,146
The Covenant	James A. Michener	21,305	2,062

Trevor Noah has clearly made a big hit with Goodreads users, and somewhat less so with LibraryThing where his book is only third, behind two more traditional classics. There’s only one foreigner (Michener) on the list; unfortunately however it is an all-male list, with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing just missing the cutoff.

I disqualified two other books – Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee, which is set in an unnamed colonial outpost which doesn’t sound very much like South Africa, and The White Lioness by Henning Mankel, which is mainly set in Sweden.

Net up is Italy.

More on the widely sown seed of Benjamin Cleveland

Posted on 5 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

This is an update to my previous research on Benjamin Cleveland (1783-1853). He had eleven children with his wife Lydia nee Cooper, between 1805 and 1830; all but two survived to adulthood. However the DNA evidence fairly clearly indicates that he was also the biological father of my great-great-grandmother Sarah Smith, who was born in 1815; her legal father is recorded as a mysterious and largely absent Scot, embroiled in the misleadingly named War of 1812.

Through Benjamin Cleveland, I am related to my sixth cousin three times removed President Grover Cleveland, to my ninth cousin, sf writer Fritz Leiber, to Leiber’s third cousin, also my ninth cousin, Shirley Temple, and to my Worldcon colleague and seventh cousin twice removed Jesi Lipp. (NB there was a military Benjamin Cleveland, also born in 1783, who lived to 1858, five years longer than mine; but mine is a Yankee and the general was from Georgia.)

Poring through Ancestry.com on an insomniac night recently, I came across an interesting cluster of eight DNA connections who were linked to me and to other known descendants of Benjamin Cleveland. I found a family connection for all of them to Glens Falls, New York, and for seven of the eight I found a clear genealogical line of descent from a couple who I will identify here as John and Ophelia. Ophelia was born in 1840; John was born either in 1817 or 1820 – the documentation is unclear. One of my eight connections, F.W., is their great-granddaughter; five of them are great-great-grandchildren of John and Ophelia, including two daughters of F.W.; and one is the son of one of the great-great-grandchildren, making him the 3x great-grandson of John and Ophelia.

The eighth, C.P., caused me some head-scratching. He has researched a beautifully detailed family tree going back generations. However it seemed to me pretty clear that his mother was F.W.’s half-sister, born to a 17-year-old girl who then married her first husband (who is the person C.P. has in his tree as his grandfather) ten months later, but fathered by a grandson of John and Ophelia who later became F.W.’s father as well. C.P.’s DNA link to F.W. is that of half-nephew to half-aunt, which matches this theory exactly. His DNA links to F.W.’s daughters, N.K. and K.K., are also consistent with this hypothesis (half first cousins).

So the full family tree as I have reconstructed it is as follows:

(Click to embiggen; those on Ancestry.com are indicated with thicker box outlines, along with the strength of their DNA link to me)

The descendants of John and Ophelia listed here are:

C.P., provided that we believe my theory about his mother being the biological daughter of John and Olivia’s grandson C
F.W., definitely the great-granddaughter of John and Olivia, half-aunt to C.P.
N.K., daughter of F.W., half first cousin to C.P.
K.K., daughter of F.W. but with a different biological father so half-sister to N.K., also half-first cousin to C.P.
C.H., descended like the above four from the John and Olivia’s Son A, whose mother was F.W.’s first cousin and he is himself second cousin to C.P., N.K. and K.K.
D.W., descended from John and Olivia’s son B, second cousin once removed to F.W. and third cousin to C.P., N.K., K.K and C.H.
J.U., D.W.’s first cousin who therefore has the same relationships to the others mentioned above
G.T., J.U.’s son who is therefore first cousin once removed to D.W., second cousin twice removed to F.W. and third cousin once removed to all the rest.

If I am also descended from one of the parents of John or Ophelia, then F.W. is my half-third cousin once removed, G.T. is my half-fourth cousin once removed, and the other six are all my half-fourth cousins, ie we share a single 3x great-grandparent. My DNA connection to all of them is around 20 centimorgans, which is consistent with a relationship of around third/fourth cousin-ish. Significantly, we all also share connections with other descendants of Benjamin Cleveland.

I know that I am not descended from John or Ophelia, because all my recorded ancestors in America at that date are accounted for, and I have other DNA connections through all of them. (And also I would expect to see stronger DNA connections with John and Ophelia’s known descendants if I was also one of them.) On the other hand, I know that Benjamin Cleveland had at least one child out of wedlock, my great-great-grandmother Sarah Smith, born in 1815. So the likelihood is that either John or Ophelia was Benjamin’s extramarital child.

Both John and Ophelia came from the same village near Glens Falls. Benjamin Cleveland was living in Unadilla in the 1810s, over 200 km away across the state of New York, but if he was able to father Sarah Smith over in New Hampshire in 1815, a short excursion from Albany doesn’t seem unreasonable at the time of John’s conception in 1816 or 1819. By 1839 Benjamin had moved to Pennsylvania, a step in the westward trek that eventually took him to Wisconsin where he died in 1853. So it seems less likely that he was Ophelia’s father, since she was born only in mid-1840.

John’s mother, who rejoiced in the name Annis or Annice, was born in March 1797. She married Samuel, the man generally recorded as John’s father on 15 October 1820. John’s gravestone says that he died on 3 October 1889, aged (rather precisely) 68 years, 11 months and 26 days, giving a birth date of 8 October 1820. The 1880 federal census and the 1865 New York state census both give ages for him consistent with being born in late 1820. But there’s one crucial detail here – if Annis married Samuel on 15 October 1820, she can hardly have given birth to John the previous week! So the gravestone must be wrong.

The 1870 federal census gives John’s age in that year as 54, and the register of his Civil War service gives his birthday firmly as 8 October 1817. To me it’s pretty clear. The war service record is the one document that John is likeliest to have completed by himself, and it’s also the only one (apart from the gravestone, which we know cannot be right) that gives a precise date of birth. It was probably Ophelia who gave the census takers the information they wanted in 1865, 1870 and 1880, and also who gave instructions for the tombstone in 1883, and she may have been vague, perhaps deliberately so, about his precise age.

I am certain that John was born on 8 October 1817, three years before his mother Annis married Samuel; and that Benjamin Cleveland was his biological father. I still have no idea what business Benjamin was on, travelling so much around New York and New England, impregnating my married great-great-great-grandmother in 1814, and 19-year-old Annis in 1817. But the evidence of his active life runs in my veins, and in the veins of dozens of his living descendants.

Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston

Posted on 4 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (and the quote that it illustrates):

The pattern and character of local government must be such as to enable it to do four things: to perform efficiently a wide range of profoundly important tasks concerned with the safety, health and well-being, both material and cultural, of people in different localities; to attract and hold the interest of its citizens; to develop enough inherent strength to deal with national authorities in a valid partnership; and to adapt itself without disruption to the present unprecedented process of change in the way people live, work, move, shop and enjoy themselves (Royal Commission on Local Government in England, 1969a, p. 1).
This is a typical statement about the functions of local governments. Sharpe (1976), for example, recognizes three major functions for local governments. The first is the liberty function, with a strong local government system providing a division of power and responsibility and preventing the growth of a centralized autocracy. Secondly there is the participation function, with local government allowing individuals to participate in local democracy-often as a training-ground for later service in higher levels of government—and diffusing power amongst the populace. Finally, there is the efficient provision of services function. Certain services are local in scope, being concerned with local consumers only, and are best provided by local governments.

I had some very friendly correspondence with the late great Ron Johnston, professor of geography at Bristol, back in 2015-2016, culminating with him sending me an old paper of his, in which I spotted that he quoted from a document I had written twenty years earlier. Sadly he died in 2020, two months after his 79th birthday. (Though not from COVID, I understand.)

This is a basic undergraduate-level textbook looking at the politics of human geography, examining political systems in the UK and USA, getting deep into the weeds of why more government money is spent in some places than others, and the difficulties of designing good systems for the sharing of resources. I got it for the bits about electoral systems and gerrymandering, but I stayed for the wider analysis of the role of state and local governments in society. It’s all stuff that I more or less knew, but it was helpful to have it laid out like this. It would have been good to see some nods towards gender and geography, and some more countries than the USA and UK, but it is what it is. You can get it here.

I got this second hand (obviously) and, to my delight, I spotted that the previous owner is a retired Cambridge don who was a university official during my years in student politics. I have sent him a note but he hasn’t replied; he must be in his eighties by now.

This was the last of the stash of books acquired in 2016 that I had mislaid when I thought I had reached the end of that pile. Though I am still looking out for a couple that have not turned up yet.

Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez

Posted on 3 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Information emerges on a computer screen as lines and dots, but there are pieces missing. The DNA extracted from this tooth has spent more than a millennium in the ground, resulting in incomplete genome coverage.³ It doesn’t show the individual’s eye colour or provide information on their appearance. However, while the minute sequences of the DNA prove difficult to decipher, the chromosomes are clear. The team members search repeatedly, yet across every sample they find no evidence of a Y chromosome anywhere. Instead, there is a clear pattern of two X chromosomes.
³ Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson et al, ‘A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 164, No. 4 (2017), pp. 853-860.

A book asserting that there are lots of interesting stories to tell about the centrality of women in the Middle Ages, which basically is preaching to the converted as far as I am concerned. It starts however in 1913: Emily Davison, who was trampled to death by the King’s horse when her suffragette protest went wrong at the Derby, was a qualified and enthusiastic medievalist who saw the political empowerment of women as fully consistent with history.

Ramirez goes on to look at the Loftus Princess; Cyneðryð and Æðelflæd of Mercia; the Viking woman from Birka; Hildegard of Bingen; the women who made the Bayeux Tapestry; the women of the Cathars; Jadwiga of Poland; and Margery Kempe. It’s a solid piece of work which simultaneously rides the two horses of “these were remarkable individuals” and “women in general were much more important in the Middle Ages than you have probably been told”.

I didn’t know much about any of these particular cases, and had ever heard of some of the – and I’ve read quite a lot of medieval history in my time. So I felt enlightened and encouraged by the end of the book. You can get it here.

Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss

Posted on 2 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The crowd apparently hardly knew at first how to receive the Sultan of Turkey, but the universal good feeling was in his favor, and finally rounds of hand clapping and cheers greeted his progress along the splendid avenue.

This is a rollicking 1898 Edison fanfic sequel to The War of the Worlds, in which the nations of the earth, shocked by a Martian attack on New York, fund a retaliatory mission to Mars led by Thomas A. Edison and Lord Kelvin, with the author putting himself in first person in the middle of the fray. Edison has conveniently invented both a disintegration ray and an anti-gravity drive, so the large Earth expedition is ultimately successful despite tribulations along the way. (This is not a spoiler – the end of the story is given away by the title of the book.)

There’s an amusing fantasy diplomacy bit at the beginning with the rulers of the world converging on Washington and Queen Victoria dancing with President McKinley (she turned 79 that year). The cliches of space travel and war with other planets are explored here for the first time; the Martians are subhuman savages, with all that that implies; there is a beautiful human hostage, the last of her kind; and Thomas Edison wins the war, for humanity. (Apparently he was consulted about being made the hero of the book, and consented.)

The Project Gutenberg version is enlivened by the illustrations created by Bernard Manley, Jr, for the 1947 printing of the story. Manley lived to 91 and died as recently as 2012. You can get it from Project Gutenberg here.

Tuesday reading

Posted on 1 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow
Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop
The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al
The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch

Last books finished
The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline MacDonald
Desdemona and the Deep, by C. S. E. Cooney
“They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete
Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals, by Diane Duane

Next books
Burning Heart, by Dave Stone
New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Suzy Jagger
Monica, by Daniel Clowes

The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones

Posted on 1 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“The floor’s all wet,” he said.

Having enjoyed my return to Cart and Cwidder last year, I thought I should read the complete Dalemark cycle by Diana Wynne Jones. The Spellcoats was new to me; although the third published of the series, it’s the first in internal chronology, set in “prehistoric Dalemark” where the only written language is runes woven into garments – hence the “spellcoats” of the title.

It’s a different sort of society to most of DWJ’s books – a low-tech country coming into being, with indigenous inhabitants in conflict with newcomers, and evil men trying to take advantage of the situation, including through magic. Like a lot of DWJ’s stories, there is a long and transformational journey; like a lot of DWJ’s stories, there are siblings who have different talents and find different destinies. But there’s something attractively raw and pared-back about the setting here, along the banks of a primeval river, and there is a nice framework of telling the story as a woven rather than written text. Sorry it took me so long to get around to reading this. You can get it here.

This was the top unread book by a woman on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, but I’m also adding a small pile for the other two Dalemark books, Drowned Ammet and The Crown of Dalemark.

September 2024 books

Posted on 30 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 63)
South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton
Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez
Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston
The Happiness Patrol, by Mike Stack
Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes
Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald

Non-genre 3 (YTD 25)
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
Shame, by Annie Ernaux
Pook at College, by Peter Pook (did not finish)

SF 11 (YTD 72)
Titan, by John Varley
A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long
The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
The Running Man, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline Macdonald
Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney
“They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete
Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals, by Diane Duane

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 26)
Grave Matter, by Justin Richards
Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt
Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol, by Graeme Curry

Comics 1 (YTD 22)
The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al

6,700 pages (YTD 52,200)

11/26 (YTD 98/214) by non-male writers (Ramirez, FitzGerald, Ernaux, Long, Wynne Jones, Bulawayo, Macdonald, Cooney, Damián Miravete, Duane, Rumfitt)
1/26 (YTD 26/188) by a non-white writer (Bulawayo)
3/261 rereads (Steppenwolf, Grave Matter, Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol)

282 books currently tagged unread, down 18 from last month, down 70 from September 2023. At this rate I’ll have cleared the unread shelves in four years’ time.

Reading now
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow
Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop
The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al

Coming soon (perhaps)
Burning Heart, by Dave Stone
Doctor Who: 73 Yards, by Scott Handcock
Midnight, by Philip Purser-Hallard
New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyes and Suzy Jagger
Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley
Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell
The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch
Monica, by Daniel Clowes
Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman
The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck
Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang
The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy
Marriage, by H.G. Wells
How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling
What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman

The best known books set in each country: Tanzania

Posted on 29 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology; I am excluding books not actually set in Tanzania.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Green Hills of Africa	Ernest Hemingway	12,287	2,315
The Lioness	Chris Bohjalian	23,336	463
Paradise	Abdulrazak Gurnah	10,774	664
Afterlives	Abdulrazak Gurnah	11,782	481
We All Went On Safari	Laurie Krebs	660	1,081
Hard Rain	Irma Venter	4,002	140
Golden Boy	Tara Sullivan	2,227	223
Elizabeti’s Doll	Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen	320	540

I had to exclude a lot of books here which only briefly touched on Tanzania (eg Going Solo, by Roald Dahl) or are largely about somewhere else entirely (eg The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński). Not completely certain about She, by H. Rider Haggard, which could really be set in any one of a number of African locations.

Dismaying that the top two books here are about Americans on safari, but very glad to see local Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah putting in a strong showing.

Next up, while I’m in the neighbourhood, is South Africa.

Comet-spotting

Posted on 29 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I had one of those nights last night, and as I browsed the internet insomniacally, I came across some striking pre-dawn photographs of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS taken by one of my cousins in Hawaii. I checked and it seemed possible that I might be able to see it from the Torenvalk watchtower six km away from us, so got up at 6 and drove over.

Unfortunately the light pollution in our part of Belgium, one of the most densely populated parts of Europe, is too great. I got a nice photo of the Moon with Earthshine, and Regulus visible below it, but that’s all I was getting. The comet is lost in the haze on the horizon; the diffuse streak across the picture is a light beam from a streetlight, and the small streak on the left is an aeroplane trail.

You may not be familiar with the magnitude scale of brightness in astronomy. The human eye responds logarithmically to light, so a first magnitude star is 2.512 times brighter than a second magnitude star, and a second magnitude star is 2.512 times brighter than a third magnitude star. (And a first magnitude star is exactly 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude star, because 2.512 is the fifth root of 100.) Most people can see stars down to sixth magnitude in a nice dark sky far from any other light source, once their eyes have adjusted.

The earliest record we have of a classification of the magnitudes of stars is by Ptolemy in about 150 AD. His judge-it-by-eye measurements turn out to be pretty robust when compared with modern scientific measurements, and when an nineteenth-century astronomer called Norman Pogson proposed the ratio of 2.512 because it fitted Ptolemy’s classification rather well.

The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius, at magnitude -1.46 (the lower the magnitude, the brighter the star). Venus can get as bright as -4.9. The Full Moon is -12.7 and the Sun around -26.8. Those are fairly meaningless numbers; I find it easier to remember that Arcturus and Vega are almost exactly magnitude 0.0, Aldebaran and Spica around magnitude 1, and the six brighter Big Dipper stars between 1.8 and 2.4, with Mizar (the middle star of the Big Dipper’s handle) dead on 2.0 (though in fact it’s a much more complex system than appears to the naked eye).

This morning, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS’s brightness was 2.6 according to the most optimistic sources, and when I arrived at the observation tower, I could clearly see Regulus, which at magnitude 1.4 is three times brighter, and indeed the Big Dipper. But as dawn arrived, the Big Dipper was long gone, Regulus faded into the surrounding sky, and I could see that the sky where the comet should have been was even brighter, so I came home and went back to bed.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is predicted to be really spectacular in the evenings of the second week of October, starting from Wednesday 9th through the weekend. That’s something to cheer us up in the Northern Hemisphere as the evenings start to draw in. Keep an eye out for it!

Ernest Wante’s paintings in the Church of St Boniface, Ixelles

Posted on 28 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Yesterday I found myself lunching (for the second time in a few days) at one of my favourite Thai restaurants, La Deuxième Élément in Ixelles, and after lunch I spotted that the Church of St Boniface, which looms over the square, was open. One of the cultural loose ends that I have been thinking about chasing for a while is a report in Dutch Wikipedia that the church contains some of the work of fin-de-siècle artist Jean Mayné, so I seized the chance to go in and have a look.

There are four large paintings on the ends of the transepts in the church, and another in the Lady Chapel, all sadly somewhat dingy and in need of restoration. (Which may be tricky, as they are canvas glued to the wall.) The altarpiece is also flanked by two painted wooden panels which looked like they might be by the same hand.

Frustratingly, the church has a mini-exhibition about the stained glass windows, which have recently been restored, but there was nothing about the paintings or the altarpiece – nor are they mentioned in the bilingual leaflet you can get online, though I found an older pamphlet with more info.

I took photos of them all, hoping that they might turn out to be obscure works by Jean Mayné. But a bit more research this morning revealed that they are actually by a different fin-de-siècle artist, Ernest Wante, who was much more into religious art. Next time you are enjoying La Deuxième Élément’s yummy Keng Kaï Noh Maï (my personal favourite), do take a moment afterwards to pop across the road and look around.

(Also – it became clear in my research that the St Boniface here is the 13th-century Brussels bishop, not the 8th century martyr.)

Jesus heals the paralytic (1923). Strictly speaking this should be an indoor scene. Note the chap brandishing his crutches in joy, though the guy in front of him with a walking stick seems less sure.

“Suffer little children to come unto me” (1923). Interestingly multi-ethnic crowd. The young woman at the front looks to me like she is wearing a fin-de-siècle dress.

The Adoration of the Shepherds (1910). Accompanied by angelic choir, sheep, ox, ass and goat. When I went back for another look I realised that someone has squiggled over the baby with green felt tip pen.

Shows how St Boniface tested out a supposed fragment of the True Cross at the abbey of Hooidonk, by seeing if it sank in water. It did, and started shedding drops of blood. Boniface actually recorded this himself. (1909)

The angels come to help St Boniface serve Mass. Oddly enough he didn’t leave us personal documentation of this incident.

The stained glass windows looked interesting too, but I was in a bit of a rush to get back to the office and will have to return for another look. And I’m still wondering about the rumoured work of Jean Mayné. Maybe it was just a mistake by whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry.

Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt

Posted on 27 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He wasn’t entirely sure if Ruby was listening to him. She was standing still with the toes of her shoes touching the edge of the cliff, completely enraptured by the dinosaurs. Of course she was! Who wouldn’t be?

When I wrote up the most recent season of Doctor Who, I commented of this story:

The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?

I watched it again before reading the book and writing this post, and what struck me is the mismatch between, on the one hand, brilliant effects and performances, and on the other, a really poor story concept. Nothing about the situation makes sense, and re-watching it only draws your attention more firmly to the plot flaws. No doubt this is why they slipped it out as part of a double on the same night as Eurovision.

I ranked it second last of the eight stories broadcast (so far) this year, and the Twitter #DoctorWhoRanking2024 rated it 312th of all 321 Doctor Who stories ever, which may be a little harsh.

Alison Rumfitt is new to Who writing but has a couple of horror novels under her belt. This is a decent novelisation, adding a little top-and-tail narrative about a child and a monster, and digging a bit more into Ruby’s background and the resonances of the babies for her. There are also a couple more poo jokes, I think (I didn’t go back and check.) It may be difficult for an established writer to stamp their own authority on a Doctor Who story that they did not actually write, but I guess that wasn’t the point, and it’s perfectly serviceable. You can get it here.

Shame, by Annie Ernaux

Posted on 26 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third section:

Les deux grandes villes de par chez nous, Le Havre et Rouen, suscitent moins d’appréhension, elles font partie du langage de toute mémoire familiale, de l’ordinaire de la conversation. Beaucoup d’ouvriers y travaillent, partant le matin et revenant le soir par « la micheline ». À Rouen, plus proche et plus importante que Le Havre, il y a tout, c’est-à-dire des grands magasins, des spécialistes de toutes les maladies, plusieurs cinémas, une piscine couverte pour apprendre à nager, la foire Saint-Romain qui dure un mois en novembre, des tramways, des salons de thé et des grands hôpitaux où l’on emmène les gens pour les opérations délicates, les cures de désintoxication et les électrochocs. À moins d’y travailler comme ouvrier sur un chantier de reconstruction, personne ne s’y rend vêtu en « tous-les-jours ». Ma mère m’y emmène une fois par an, pour la visite à l’oculiste et l’achat des lunettes. Elle en profite pour acheter des produits de beauté et des articles « qu’on’ ne trouve pas à Y. ». On n’y est pas vraiment chez nous, parce qu’on ne connaît personne. Les gens paraissent s’habiller et parler mieux. À Rouen, on se sent vaguement « en retard », sur la modernité, l’intelligence, l’aisance générale de gestes et de paroles. Rouen est pour moi l’une des figures de l’avenir, comme le sont les romans-feuilletons et les journaux de mode.

The two big cities from around these parts, Le Havre and Rouen, arouse less suspicion; they are inscribed in the linguistic memory of all families and belong to ordinary conversation. Many factory hands work there, leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening on the micheline, a small local train. In Rouen, the larger city, closer to us than Le Havre, they’ve got everything you need – department stores, specialists for every type of complaint, several cinemas, an indoor pool for learning how to swim, the Saint-Romain festival lasting the month of November, tramways, tea rooms and huge hospitals where people are taken for major operations, detoxification programmes and electroshock treatment. Unless you happen to be a labourer working on a building site, you would never go there in your ‘everyday’ clothes. My mother takes me there once a year to visit the eye specialist and buy me a pair of glasses. She takes advantage of the trip to purchase beauty products and other articles ‘you can’t get in Y’. We never feel quite at home there because we don’t know anyone. People appear to dress and speak better than in the country. In Rouen, one always feels slightly ‘at a disadvantage’ – less sophisticated, less intelligent and, generally speaking, less gracious in one’s body and speech. For me, Rouen symbolizes the future, just like serialized novels and fashion magazines do.

Translated by Tanya Leslie

Out of curiosity, because Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, I went to Filigranes near my office and got hold of this – I think because it was the cheapest on the shelf of English translations of her work. It’s a very intense story of a teenager in provincial Normandy in 1952 and the poisonous relationship between her parents – the very first sentence is “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” The environment is dominated by social inequality and unthinking piety, not a million miles or a million years from the Catholic Belfast where I grew up. Clearly autobiographical, and I understand it’s rooted in Ernaux’s bigger project of re-examining her entire life in fictional form. But I suspect this is a good taster, at only 85 pages. You can get it here (and here in French).

A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long

Posted on 25 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

His instincts stirred, the deep-seated ancient knowledge of hunter and hunted, intuitive and primal. Standing still as a statue, the late afternoon crowds flowed around him. Light broke through a far off gap in the clouds and fell on her. She glowed with it – special. He couldn’t shake the sense that she was special. And that discomfited him more than he could say. Mistle had already noticed her, after all, and it took something mighty special to get him to crawl out of whatever bottle he was currently drowning himself in.

Fantasy novel set in Dublin – very much in Dublin, firmly moored to the city’s landmarks, and yet also a Dublin that exists in parallel to the supernatural world of Dubh Linn where the Sidhe keep an eye on us mortals and often intervene. Our teenage protagonist discovers that she is connected to both worlds and has a destined role to play in the battle between evil and not-quite-so-evil factions on the supernatural side. Well observed, in terms of both human and physical geography. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018 and also the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. (Sorry Ruth!) Next on the former pile is Yes Taoiseach, by Frank Dunlop; next on the latter is Lost Objects, by Marian Womack, but it will have to wait until I have finished all my 2018 books.

Tuesday reading

Posted on 24 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow
The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline MacDonald
Desdemona and the Deep, by C. S. E. Cooney

Last books finished
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes
The Running Man, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Pook at College, by Peter Pook (did not finish)
Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald

Next books
The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al
Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop
“They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete

Grave Matter, by Justin Richards

Posted on 24 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter”

‘I think you could do with a good stiff lemonade,’ the Doctor told Peri gently.

My rereading of Who books which I failed to blog on first reading them a decade ago has thrown up some interesting finds, and this is one of them: the Sixth Doctor and Peri land on a Scottish island where something is up, specifically the islanders are turning into mind-controlled zombies; Doctor Who meets The Wicker Man meets Night of the Living Dead. The setting is very vividly evoked, and the solution to the mystery gradually revealed; but it’s the portrayal of a small isolated community under siege from ‘orrible forces that really sits with me. A good ‘un. You can get it here, at a price.

Next up: Burning Heart, by Dave Stone.

Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse

Posted on 23 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third section:

Der Steppenwolf hatte also zwei Naturen, eine menschliche und eine wölfische, dies war sein Schicksal, und es mag wohl sein, daß dies Schicksal kein so besonderes und seltenes war. Es sollen schon viele Menschen gesehen worden sein, welche viel vom Hund oder vom Fuchs, vom Fisch oder von der Schlange in sich hatten, ohne daß sie darum besondre Schwierigkeiten gehabt hätten. Bei diesen Menschen lebte eben der Mensch und der Fuchs, der Mensch und der Fisch nebeneinander her, und keiner tat dem andern weh, einer half sogar dem andern, und in manchem Manne, der es weit gebracht hat und beneidet wird, war es mehr der Fuchs oder Affe als der Mensch, der sein Glück gemacht hat. Dies ist ja jedermann bekannt. Bei Harry hingegen war es anders, in ihm liefen Mensch und Wolf nebeneinander her, und noch viel weniger halfen sie einander, sondern sie lagen in ständiger Todfeindschaft gegeneinander, und einer lebte dem andern lediglich zu Leide, und wenn Zwei in Einem Blut und Einer Seele miteinander todfeind sind, dann ist das ein übles Leben. Nun, jeder hat sein Los, und leicht ist keines.

And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape in him than to the man. So much for common knowledge. In the case of Harry, however, it was just the opposite. In him the man and the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and deadly enmity. One existed simply and solely to harm the other, and when there are two in one blood and in one soul who are at deadly enmity, then life fares ill. Well, to each his lot, and none is light.

My record-keeping is not always perfect, and I discover now that I actually read this back in 2007. I wrote then:

It’s fundamentally a depressing German psychological-mystical novel, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. I was very much drawn into the narrator’s story of reconciling what he imagines to be the two sides of his own nature, and coming to terms with music, dancing and sex while remaining true to himself. The ending is a bit peculiar but that is in keeping with the tone of the rest. As I look back at my entries about Nobel prize-winners I see that I’ve ended quite a lot of them with the feeling that I might read more by that author, but this time I really mean it!

In the following 17 years my tolerance for whiny male protagonists has decreased, and I’m afraid I found this very unsatisfactory on a reread. I found the protagonist dull, self-obsessed and needlessly unpleasant to other people. It is mercifully short at least. You can get it here.

I (incorrectly) thought that this was my top unread book acquired so far this year, and my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on both of those lists is The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck.

Decision time: local elections 2024

Posted on 22 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

We had three elections back in June, and we have another two next month: on Sunday 13 October we will choose the members of our local council and the council of the province of Flemish Brabant.

As my long time reader knows, I like to put questions to the candidates in each election before the vote comes up, picking an obscure but crucial issue and asking their views. Last time around it proved a very helpful tactic.

This time around it has been less helpful. The storm in a teacup exercising us locally is whether or not a supermarket should be built on the land behind the recycling bins 500m from our house. A couple of NIMBYs have managed to block it so far, to the annoyance of those of us who would prefer not to have to trek a couple of miles up or down the road to the nearest shop.

I wrote to the four groups who were standing in the election as of last weekend, and three of them wrote back to me saying that they were strong supporters of the need for a supermarket, in terms which really left little to choose between them. The fourth, the nationalist NVA, did not reply, but I was not going to vote for them anyway. (The three who replied were a coalition led by the liberal Open VLD party, the Christian Democrats, and the Green party in coalition with the Socialists.)

Since then, a fifth faction has entered the fray, a splinter group from the NVA led by a former mayor. I really can’t bring myself to consider voting for the NVA, a nativist populist party who hate migrants (such as me). They’re not as bad as the extreme Vlaams Belang, who are not standing here, but that’s not saying much. The fact that the former mayor has split from them is the best thing about him.

In the last election, the NVA were the biggest party locally, but three of the other four ganged up against them and out local administration has been led by the CDA (Christian Democrats) in partnership with the Greens and Socialists. (Apparently three of the seven elected NVA councillors have since left the party.)

The numbers on the left in the lower table refer to the order of the parties on the ballot paper.

This time around, a couple of things have changed, partly as a result of new legislation aroudn the local council elections. First of all, the party with the most votes automatically gets the position of mayor. Second, voting is no longer compulsory. Third, the Greens and Socialists are running a joint slate here called “Samen” (“Together”). In the last election, they had 34% of the votes between them and would have won 8 seats as a bloc, due to the way the voting system works. (The Imperiali method, if you’re interested.) As it was, the Socialists lost out on a second seat in 2018 by a mere three votes, and the Greens won five.

As I mentioned previously, we had elections for the European Parliament, the Belgian Chamber of Representatives and the Flemish Parliament back in June. The results are published at municipality level, and in our area they were as follows:

	EU Parliament	Belgium Chamber	Flemish Parliament
NVA	23.51%	29.74%	28.46%
Socialists	13.28%	15.17%	14.98%
Green	18.21%	12.90%	13.88%
Christian Democrats	16.4%	15.01%	13.72%
Open VLD (liberals)	11.13%	10.27%	11.31%%
Vlaams Belang	11.11%	10.12%	10.83%
PVDA (hard left)	3.67%	4.29%	4.56%
Voor U (minor right)	1.03%	1.14%	1.05%
Volt (EU federalist)	1.66%	–	0.37%
Others	–	1.36%	0.82%
Socialist + Green	31.49%	28.07%	28.86%

For the European and Flemish elections, the combined Green/Socialist vote exceeded that for NVA, and they weren’t that far behind in the election for the Belgian Chamber either.

In a municipal election there’s not all that much to choose between the candidates, and I’m broadly content with the current administration’s performance. My personal priority is to prevent NVA coming top and claiming the position of mayor, and it’s pretty clear that the best way to do that is to vote for the ‘Samen’ joint ticket of the Greens and Socialists. So that’s what I intend to do.

(I’ll actually be away on election day, so will either vote early or by proxy.)

As for the provincial elections, I’ll vote for one of the parties that wants to abolish the provinces; I don’t see the point of having them.

The best known books set in each country: the UK

Posted on 22 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone	J.K. Rowling	10,371,677	137,024
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	J.K. Rowling	4,340,803	109,647
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets	J.K. Rowling	4,061,552	112,957
1984	George Orwell	4,784,316	83,782
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	J.K. Rowling	3,815,466	104,567
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows	J.K. Rowling	3,807,948	98,539
Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	4,369,161	82,844
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix	J.K. Rowling	3,480,151	103,139

I normally list the top eight books set in each country. There is no prize for guessing what the ninth book would have been.

The first time that I have read all eight!

I disqualified The Hobbit, though it is arguable that Tolkien intended a continuity between the Shire and England.

I might do Wales and Northern Ireland separately when I get to that stage of the population rankings.

Next up is Tanzania.

Liz Truss and Northern Ireland: Examining Anthony Seldon’s narrative

Posted on 21 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I very much enjoyed Sir Anthony Seldon’s book on Liz Truss’s brief and disastrous term as Prime Minister of the UK. But one point really jumped out at me as extraordinarily inaccurate. He reports that her engagement with the EU, while prime minister, opened the way to the eventual Windsor Framework signed between her successor, Rishi Sunak, and the EU the following year, and indeed highlights this “pathbreaking work” as the sole foreign policy success of her premiership.

Like much of Seldon’s book (including many of the best bits), this is probably based on an assertion from a single source, and I think Seldon could usefully have questioned it. It very much clashes with the received narrative of Truss’s relations with the EU in relation to Northern Ireland.

The best quick summary of that received narrative, i.e. what we all thought had happened, is laid out by Truss herself in her own book. She discusses the topic in a short section at the end of Chapter 8, her experience as foreign secretary (rather than as Prime Minister). She tells how (despite discouragement from “lots of people”) she decided to take over the EU dossier from David Frost when he resigned in December 2021 and “put in a call to Boris and expressed my thoughts on what we should do to take on the EU over the unworkable and damaging Northern Ireland Protocol”.

In her version, Johnson duly gave her the role of dealing with the EU, but negotiations with the EU got nowhere, so “I then prepared a law to put through Parliament with Attorney General Suella Braverman. This became the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and used the doctrine of necessity to overcome international law issues.”

The Bill got through the House of Commons before Johnson’s resignation, and he and Truss then planned to use the Parliament Act to force it through against the House of Lords. “It never got to that point, as my successor withdrew it. Yet the Windsor Framework that he installed in its place simply does not resolve the issues. Too much was given away to the EU. That is why I could not support it.”

I don’t agree with most of Truss’s political judgements, but I also don’t dispute any of the historical facts that she states. (The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill did make some progress in the House of Lords before it was withdrawn by Sunak, but Truss can be forgiven for missing it.)

Seldon’s version is very much at variance with the historical facts as I understand them to have been and as Truss reports them. He introduces the topic in Chapter 5, on Truss’s foreign policy as prime minister. He starts by framing the issue tactically, as one where Truss could gain the support of “the ‘no-surrender’ ERG MPs”. Seldon describes the Northern Ireland Protocol as “stuck together by Johnson in 2019 to replace May’s ‘backstop’ to ensure Northern Ireland would remain aligned with the rest of the UK post-Brexit” which is inaccurate on several points, most notably that the Protocol ensures that Northern Ireland will remain aligned with the EU, not the UK.

Seldon goes on, “For two years, inertia had reigned while hardline Brexit minister David Frost had been overseeing it. But possibilities for progress were suddenly opened up when he resigned from Johnson’s government the weekend before Christmas in 2021.” It’s a peculiar positioning of blame for the failure of the EU-UK negotiating process in 2020 and 2021 on Frost. First of all, even unsympathetic observers would cut Frost a little slack due to the global pandemic. Secondly, the perception in Brussels at least is that Frost was only channeling his master’s voice, and that Johnson was the real problem.

Seldon: “Johnson alighted on the Foreign Secretary as the ideal figure to take on the matter. Truss had no delusions that the master schemer was offering it to her knowing it would be ‘a poisoned chalice’, a clever wheeze his team had concocted to trip up a rival whose star continued in the ascendant… Her team fully intended it would rebound against No. 10.” This is completely at variance with Truss’s account of her volunteering for the task, eyes wide open. They cannot both be right. Possibly Seldon’s (justifiable) contempt for Johnson is misleading him here.

Seldon: “Their rivalry reached a high point in March when a paper she had placed in his PM box was leaked to the Sunday Telegraph. The press report, which painted her as trying to stop Johnson from invoking Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, provoked fury against her among Brexiteers. ‘It was not true, and they knew it. It was No. 10 making mischief so Johnson could be seen to be tougher on Northern Ireland than Liz, and good in the eyes of the right wing,’ said an aide. Truss was furious; ‘We’re not going to submit anything on paper to No. 10 ever again,’ she fumed. She stormed into No. 10 to see Johnson on Monday 28 March, the day after the article appeared. ‘Right, we’re going to legislate on this, no compromises,’ she told the PM, one aide recalled. They agreed that any hope of support from the EU was forlorn, and from their deliberations emerged the hardline Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which ground through the system until Johnson resigned in July, for her to pick up when she became PM.”

There are a number of inaccuracies here. The leak that annoyed Truss appeared on 13 March, not 27 March as Seldon implies (it is dated 12 March on the Telegraph website). The lede is that Truss had “set out plans to put the potential triggering of Article 16 on hold because of the Ukraine crisis and instead help Northern Ireland businesses with an ‘economic stimulus’ package including tax cuts.” It also quotes “Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, [who] warned that it would be ‘risible’ to shelve the triggering of Article 16 until later this year because of the war in Ukraine.”

What did appear on 27 March was an interview with Truss where the Telegraph noted that “she does not deny having shelved the idea of triggering Article 16 any time soon, because of the need for a united EU front in the face of Russian aggression”. The problem was not the leak, but the fact that she did not push back firmly enough in the interview on the suggestion that she was wobbly on bashing the EU; not for the first or last time, she lost control of the message, and blamed it on someone else (Johnson in this case). In Seldon’s version, it was from this moment on that Truss and Johnson determined to align on Northern Ireland and legislate to break their previous commitments and international law. I wrote in May 2022 about the foolishness and short-sightedness of their position.

Seldon comes back to the topic when he brings Truss, by now Prime Minister, to New York for the UN General Assembly, in a rush after the Queen’s funeral in September 2022. “Truss’s political team said she should go, and she herself was anxious to have her planned bilateral with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the Northern Ireland Bill… She ended up seeing von der Leyen twice and she proved key to unblocking the impasse. Their meeting secured agreement for back channels to open up, and for ideas to be explored and tested. After the Mini-Budget[,] momentum was lost, and it was left for Sunak to pick up the pieces. The result was the Windsor Framework of February 2023, a legal agreement between the UK and the EU to adjust the Northern Ireland Protocol, bearing more than a passing reference to the ideas that Truss had promoted the year before.”

(Seldon then spends some time on Truss’s meeting with President Biden, which was also coloured by the Northern Ireland issue, but I don’t have space for that here. I am trying to track down an amusing report that Truss instructed the British ambassador in Washington to complain to Biden’s chief of staff that he was listening too much to his advisers Jake Sullivan and Amanda Sloat on Ireland; Biden’s team apparently told the ambassador to get lost. I happen to know Amanda Sloat, who has spent more time in Northern Ireland than the entire Truss government combined. Or the Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak or Starmer governments, for that matter.)

I don’t find any contemporary reference to Truss and von der Leyen having had more than one meeting in New York on 21 September, or any other meeting anywhere else at any other time (they don’t seem to have interacted at the Queen’s funeral), and the statement post-meeting (and press briefing around it) suggests that they mainly talked about Russia. Truss and von der Leyen probably did agree back-channel communication to de-escalate tensions – it rings absolutely true for both of them – and of course one would not expect to see that in any contemporary reporting. Truss had already had a calm meeting with then Taoiseach Micheal Martin on 18 September, in the margins of the Queen’s funeral, leading to lower-level meetings on 6 and 7 October; but neither she nor Seldon mentions the Irish government at all in their books – it is of no importance to either narrative.

The one intervention that really did make the difference in terms of mood music during Truss’s premiership was the heartfelt apology to Ireland from Steve Baker, former Brexit hardliner turned Northern Ireland junior minister, during the Conservative Party’s annual conference. Baker was undergoing his own struggles at the time, as we now know, and Truss said that he was “speaking for himself”; but it made much more difference to the atmosphere than anything Truss did in public. The Irish Times ran a piece on 5 October (in advance of the 6/7 October talks mentioned above) wondering if the new mood music could be taken seriously, hopefully citing Martin’s conversation and also sources close to von der Leyen. Of course, the writing was already on the wall for Truss’s premiership by then, so it hardly mattered much. Perhaps it did matter a little.

I am particularly puzzled by Seldon’s assertion that the Windsor Framework of February 2023 bears “more than a passing reference to the ideas that Truss had promoted the year before”. The word “reference” here is presumably a mistake for “resemblance”. The puzzling question for me is: what ideas had Truss promoted the year before? The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which is the only such idea mentioned in Seldon’s earlier chapter and the only one mentioned by Truss herself in her book, was a unilateral revocation of parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement; you cannot draw a straight line between it and the Windsor Framework, which is a rather modest, mutually face-saving adaptation of the original Protocol. Truss herself certainly didn’t see them as related; she spoke out against the Windsor Framework, voted against it when it came to the House of Commons, and as noted above criticizes it again in her book.

POLITICO published an in-depth account of how the Windsor Framework was negotiated on 28 February 2023, the day after it was signed. The lion’s share of the credit is given to three British officials, Tim Barrow, Mark Davies and Brendan Threlfall; but I’ll admit that the article does give some mild kudos to Truss, basically for not being Boris Johnson and therefore changing the atmosphere of UK/EU relations for the better. (Other people given more credit than Truss in the piece include Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly and King Charles III.) Even so, the piece says that Truss “soon became ‘very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU’.” I suspect that this is standard Truss language for people who won’t do what she wants; she makes similar comments about others in her book.

So, coming back to Seldon: it is decidedly odd that he gives Truss credit for the Windsor Framework, when it is clear that she herself thinks that the Framework is a dud and that Sunak threw away all her hard work. The consensus from other sources is that under Truss, relations with the EU improved simply because she was not Boris Johnson. I find it difficult to give her much credit for this – it’s not as if she had any choice in the matter. It’s a shame that Seldon allowed himself to be mesmerised by his anonymous source, without checking the details a bit more carefully.

As always, if you read a book on a topic you don’t know all that well, and there is a bit in the book about a subject you do happen to know something more about, and that bit of the book is wrong, it’s a healthy warning about how seriously the rest should be taken. I’m still recommending Seldon’s book, which you can get here – just not as heartily as I would have liked.

Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin

Posted on 20 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Prime Minister has to be both manager of their team as well as the captain on the pitch. ‘Hero Prime Ministers’ who try to do too much themselves, like Chamberlain in the Munich Crisis or Eden during the Suez Crisis, and who become detached from their Cabinets, become unstuck. This is what happened to Blair over Iraq, or Thatcher over the poll tax at the end of her premiership. Spurned Cabinets will eventually bite the Prime Minister. Hero premiers never end well.

This 384-page book covers the 49 days of Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership in intense detail. It’s the latest in a series of books by Seldon on British Prime Ministers, looking at the qualities which make for good (and bad) leadership, and how Truss’s ascent and downfall illustrate those characteristics.

The fundamental of the story is that Truss launched both a plan to help households with the cost of energy bills, and a bigger plan to cut taxes, without offering any hint about how the books would be balanced, indeed insisting that there would be no cuts to public spending. The Treasury, whose job it is to point these problems out, had been muzzled by the sacking of its chief official on Truss’s first day in office. In her own memoir, Truss is fixated on a particular set of financial instruments that she had never heard of and which started going wrong as the crisis spread, and blames other people for not briefing her.

But the fact is that there was never any plan for funding either the energy payments or the tax cuts, and Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were completely unable to give a straight answer to the question of where the money would come from, making them look financially illiterate. (Because they were.) The disintegration of the government rapidly followed. Truss blames the ‘deep state’ for her downfall; Seldon sees the problem as ‘deep incompetence’.

One of the headlines from media coverage of the book is that Truss supposedly considered cancelling cancer treatments by the National Health Service. This is not quite reported in the text; on 12 October, the day when reality broke in and the Truss team started frantically looking for £70 billion in savings, Shabbir Memali and Adam Memon, respectively economic advisers to Truss and Kwarteng, told Alex Boyd, Truss’s energy adviser, “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” (Boyd is obviously Seldon’s source.) It’s not a direct quote, barely even an indirect quote; my suspicion is that someone somewhere said, “Oh fuck, £70 billion is what the NHS spends on cancer” and the inference was drawn. Honestly, it’s clear that Truss had no specific ideas at all – which was part of the problem – and would not listen to anyone who told her this could be an issue – which was also part of the problem.

Another part of the problem was her leadership style, and given that Seldon and Meakin’s technique is to interview those close to the action and take those accounts as gospel, this is the part of the book that really does excel, even though I think some of the data could have been queried a bit (more on this tomorrow). In particular, Seldon finds her wanting in the skill of appointing good people and listening to them.

A point he doesn’t dwell on, but that is obvious to even the most casual observer, is that Truss is a very poor communicator. The local radio interviews after her mini-budget were the beginning of the end, really early in the game (29 September, in fact). The final blow, which fell suddenly and unexpectedly, was a completely avoidable breakdown in communications between Truss and her Chief Whip about a House of Commons vote on a relatively minor issue. She’s just not very good at people.

The best bit of writing in the book, however, is about an event that Truss had absolutely no control over: the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Truss had been briefed when she went to Balmoral for her formal appointment as PM that the end was much closer than most people knew. But when the moment came, she and a few aides crowded into the Downing Street flat for Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to get the news from his palace equivalent, Sir Edward Young. It’s certainly an event that will be remembered much more vividly than any other moment of her premiership.

This is not a perfect book; Seldon has an axe to grind about the extent to which Truss proves or disproves his own theories of good prime minister-ship, and grinds it hard; he takes his sources too seriously; he under-rates the importance of communication as a skill; he is very wrong about Northern Ireland, so wrong that I’m going to write another whole blog post about it. But all in all, it’s an engaging and fascinating account of an extraordinary political car crash, and you can get it here.

South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton

Posted on 19 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When the gale cleared we found that the pack had been driven in from the north-east and was now more firmly consolidated than before. A new berg, probably fifteen miles in length, had appeared on the northern horizon. The bergs within our circle of vision had all become familiar objects, and we had names for some of them. Apparently they were all drifting with the pack. The sighting of a new berg was of more than passing interest, since in that comparatively shallow sea it would be possible for a big berg to become stranded. Then the island of ice would be a centre of tremendous pressure and disturbance amid the drifting pack. We had seen something already of the smashing effect of a contest between berg and floe, and had no wish to have the helpless Endurance involved in such a battle of giants. During the 3rd [March 1915] the seal meat and blubber was re-stowed on hummocks around the ship. The frozen masses had been sinking into the floe. Ice, though hard and solid to the touch, is never firm against heavy weights. An article left on the floe for any length of time is likely to sink into the surface-ice. Then the salt water will percolate through and the article will become frozen into the body of the floe.

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1915-18 ended in failure, but gloriously documented failure. Ernest Shackleton planned to lead a party across Antartica via the South Pole, from the Weddell Sea south of the Atlantic to the Ross Sea south of the Pacific, to meet up with a second group based there. Disaster struck; both ships got stuck in the ice and were eventually destroyed; Shackleton led his own crew to precarious shelter on Elephant Island, off the Antarctic coast, and then undertook a 1300 km journey in an open boat to South Georgia to secure rescue; amazingly, all of the Weddell Sea group survived. (All of the humans, that is; the dogs and the ship’s cat were not so lucky.) Another rescue party then had to go and find the Ross Sea party, three of whom had died in the meantime. They returned to civilisation to find that the war, which had broken out just before their departure with promises that it would end quickly, was still raging, and most of the expedition members dispersed to join the forces.

The 100th anniversary edition of Shackleton’s expedition report is beautifully illustrated with the many photographs taken on the spot, including the poignant moment when the Edncurance slipped below the ice of the Weddell Sea (to be found 106 years later). Shackleton’s diaries, always intended for publication, are vivid about the difficulties faced by his group, and the extraordinary challenges of the punishing environment. The Ross Sea group’s records are less detailed, and it’s pretty clear that Aeneas Mackintosh, the leader, lost his nerve at quite an early stage, and eventually died in a futile attempt to cross the ice of McMurdo Sound. But these were very tough circumstances.

What really struck me was the confidence that Shackleton in particular had about navigation. The South Pole is really just a dot on the map, but he was sure that if he had landed he would find it, and there was no doubt in his mind that he would find the Ross Sea team once he crossed the continent. He writes of supply depots left by previous expeditions that he locates and uses. In particular, I’m stunned by the navigational feat of finding South Georgia in the vast ocean.

One does have to wonder what it was all for? The scientific advances made were minimal, and the expenditure of resources huge, not to mention the fact that lives were lost. Fifty years later, the space race attracted greater resources and press coverage, but one senses the same kind of drive for exploration behind it. Shackleton himself died on South Georgia in the early stages of another expedition in 1922 aged 47, of a heart attack brought on by stress. I guess the story of the expedition, doomed as it was, is a compelling record anyway. You can get it here.

When I was a student in Cambridge in the 1980s, I used to visit Ray Adie, head of the Scott Polar Research Institute, whose wife was a distant cousin of mine. He achieved notoriety as a young geologist by proposing that the Falkland Islands had once been part of Africa that had split off and rotated by 180 degrees, a wild idea in the 1950s which is now widely accepted. He had helped prepare Vivian Fuchs for the successful Trans-Antarctic expedition forty years later. I wish I had asked him more about it.

South was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman.

Set in 2025 #3: Titan, by John Varley

Posted on 18 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

No one had ever tried to orbit a toroidal body. Themis was 1300 kilometers across and only 250 kilometers wide. The torus was flat along the outside, and 175 kilometers from top to bottom. The density of the torus varied radically, supporting the view that it was composed of a thick floor along the outside, an atmosphere about that, and a thin canopy arching overhead holding the air inside.

When I started my research on science fiction books set in 2025, this was one of the first that emerged. The date in the first two chapters is specified as May 2025, but we are told that the end of the book is set eight months or so later, so I guess it eases into 2026. I am still counting it for 2025.

This is John Varley’s best known book, as measured by Goodreads and LibraryThing readership. Published in 1979, it’s a clear riposte to Ringworld (1970) and Rendezvous with Rama (1973), in that the protagonists discover a vast alien structure, but it’s permanently in our solar system (orbiting Saturn as a more obscure moon) and also sentient, a huge wheel with individual segments of the rim each having their own micro-environment. Our protagonists, a group of sexy astronauts, go through the usual quest to find out what is really going on and make discoveries about themselves as well as about the world. I must say that I enjoyed it a lot. You can get it here.

As with the last two sf stories set in 2025 that I sampled, there is an interesting look at reproductive rights. When the crew first land, the women all discover that they have been made pregnant by the entity behind it all, and the medical chap on the crew terminates the pregnancies without a fuss. There aren’t a lot of sf books that deal with abortion.

Next in my list of books set in 2025 is The Running Man, by Stephen King.

Tuesday reading

Posted on 17 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes
Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards
The Running Man, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

Last books finished
Shame, by Annie Ernaux
Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt
The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez
Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston
Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol, by Graeme Curry
The Happiness Patrol, by Mike Stack

Next books
The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline MacDonald
Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald
Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al

Posted on 17 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third story:

Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics featuring companions Alice Obiefune and The Sapling, a sentient tree-like being. I found this one a bit episodic, four different stories none of which really advanced the arc for any of the main characters. The best is the first one with the Ood, by James Peaty with art by Ian Culbard (who never disappoints). You can get it here.

All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Posted on 16 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She [Polly] had been kneeling in front of the lavatory having been wrenchingly sick, as she had been every morning for the last week. It was a very old-fashioned lavatory and she had to pull the chain twice. She bathed her face in cold water and washed her hands just as it was reluctantly turning tepid. There wasn’t time for a bath. There was the children’s breakfast to make – the nauseating smell of eggs frying came immediately to her, but the children could make do with boiled ones.

This is the climax of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s superb Cazalet series of books, published in 1983, 18 years after the previous four (which came out in 1990-95) and set ten years after the end of the Second World War which dominated the previous books.

It shows an upper class family in the grip of social and economic change, with the entire basis of their world up-ended by the transformation of post-war Britain. The book starts with the death of the matriarch of the Cazalet family, and ends with a set-piece Christmas celebration in their family home, which they must now leave; in between we see the further development of the well established emotional patterns of behaviour between the Cazalet siblings and their spouses and lovers, and how the next generation starts to make similar mistakes.

At over 500 pages, it seems invidious to single out any plot line, though the same-sex relationship between Rachel Cazalet and her lover Sid is perhaps the most striking (with plenty of competition). I have really enjoyed the five volumes – The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and now All Change, and strongly recommend them to anyone looking for a 2600-page reading challenge. You can get All Change here.

The best known books set in each country: Thailand

Posted on 15 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in Thailand. Also I should probably have posted this earlier, since some current estimates give Thailand a higher population than France of Germany.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Windup Girl	Paolo Bacigalupi	75,784	6,325
The Beach	Alex Garland	89,724	5,048
Cockroaches	Jo Nesbø	59,872	2,342
Bangkok 8	John Burdett	10,751	1,876
The Bridge Over the River Kwai	Pierre Boulle	9,928	1,484
Bangkok Tattoo	John Burdett	5,429	1,021
Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle	Dorothy Gilman	5,181	852
Fieldwork	Mischa Berlinski	4,421	763

An unusually close race at the top, with The Beach only 6% behind The Windup Girl in aggregate rating. John Burdett’s series of thrillers set in Bangkok sound interesting.

A very white and mostly male take on Thailand here, as rated by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. The top book by an Asian writer is Hush! A Thai Lullaby by Minfong Ho, who is Chinese but was brought up in Thailand. The top book by a writer of Thai origin is A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat, who however was born in the USA and has lived there most of her life. Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of the short story collection Sightseeing, was born in the USA to a Thai family and brought up in Bangkok.

I disqualified five other books which had been frequently tagged as set in Thailand by LibraryThing and Goodreads users. They were This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel (seems to be mostly set in Seattle); The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan (seems to be less than 50% in Thailand, with significant chunks in Australia and also Japan); The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner (set in many countries, including Thailand); Platform, by Michel Houellebecq (mostly set in France); and The Orchid House aka Hothouse Flower, by Lucinda Riley (mostly set in England).

Next up is the United Kingdom.

Jane McNeill – the missing link between C.S. Lewis and Helen Waddell

Posted on 14 September 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I’ve just finished reading the first Helen Waddell biography, Mark of the Maker by Monica Blackett, and I was again struck by the fact that she doesn’t seem to have had much to do with C.S. Lewis, who like her was from Northern Ireland (indeed, also from County Down, though from a different corner of the county), and like her made his name in England, as an expert on literature and religion.

There were of course differences between them: Helen Waddell was a decade older, her emphasis was more on literature while Lewis’s was more on religion, she never got a tenured academic job while he was at Oxford from his teens, she split her time between London and County Down as an adult while he rarely if ever went back to Belfast. In his memoirs, David Bleakley, who I remember well as a fading political figure in the 1990s, gives an insight of conversations with Lewis at Oxford in the late 1940s:

I was disappointed that he could not be drawn on Helen Waddell, whose “star” was high and with whom he had much in common. Helen was a great favorite back home, where she was held in high esteem at Queen’s University.

Helen Waddell never mentions C.S. Lewis as far as I can tell, and Lewis’ most substantial reference to her is in a letter dated 16 February 1921 (when he would have been 22 and she 31), and then nothing else afterwards, even though their paths must have run close together. In 1921 he wrote to his father of an Oxford dinner party:

I met a friend of the said Tchainie’s the other night at the Carlyles, a girl called Helen Waddell whom you may have heard of. When last I saw her she was lying face downward on the floor of Mrs McNeill’s drawing-room, saying rather good things in a quaint Belfast drawl.

‘Tchainie’ Is Jane Agnes McNeill (1890-1959), a schoolmate of Helen Waddell’s at what is now Victoria College. Jane’s father, who died in 1907, was the first headmaster of Campbell College, the Belfast school which Lewis later attended. Jane and her mother took Helen Waddell on a trip to France in 1924, during which Helen Waddell wrote this poem:

JANE or The Perfect Traveller

She likes to travel in the train.
She never smells an open drain.
On boats she talks to stewardesses,
And gives advice in their distresses.
She is not sick in any swell,
But only in each new hotel.
And even in Paris summer heat
She wears goloshes on her feet.

Jane McNeill was also close to C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren, and one gets the impression that they had spent a lot of youthful hours at her mother’s house in Belfast. Both of them dedicated books to her – in Warren’s case, his second book, published in 1955, The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine (his first book, The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV, was dedicated “To My Brother”).

Ten years earlier, in 1945, C.S. Lewis dedicated That Hideous Strength to “J. McNeill”. Following Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, it is the third of his Space Trilogy, whose central character, Elwin Ransom, is based on J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewisian lore has it that Jane did not like That Hideous Strength, and did not really appreciate the dedication.

When Jane McNeill died in 1959, four years before C.S. Lewis and six years before Helen Waddell, Lewis wrote in The Campbellian, the magazine of his old school where her father had been headmaster:

Molliter Ossa Cubent
[‘May Her Bones Lie Softly’, a quotation from Ovid meaning ‘Rest in Peace’]

Of Miss McNeill the charitable lady, the teacher, the member of committees, I saw nothing. My knowledge is of Janie McNeill; even of Chanie, as we sometimes called her, for she had the habit, common in some Scottish dialects, of ‘unvoicing’ the consonant ‘J’. Obviously there is a great deal I never knew. Someone writes to me describing her as a mystic. I would never have guessed it. What I remember is something as boisterous, often as discomposing but always as fresh and tonic, as a high wind. Janie was the delight and terror of a little Strandtown and Belmont circle, now almost extinct. I remember wild walks on the (still unspoilt) Holywood hills, preposterous jokes shouted through the gale across half a field, extravagantly merry (yet also Lucullan) lunches and suppers at Lisnadene, devastating raillery, the salty tang of an immensely vivid personality. She was a religious woman, a true, sometimes a grim, daughter of the Kirk; no less certainly, the broadest-spoken maiden lady in the Six Counties. She was a born satirist. Every kind of sham and self-righteousness was her butt. She deflated the unco-gude with a single ironic phrase, then a moment’s silence, then the great gust of her laughter. She laughed with her whole body. When I consider how all this was maintained through years of increasing loneliness, pain, disability, and inevitable frustration I am inclined to say she had a soul as brave and uncomplaining as any I ever knew. Few have come nearer to obeying Dunbar’s magnificent recipe (she knew her Dunbar):

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry.

The two descriptions, thirty-five years apart, give an intriguing picture of a woman who was a close friend to two people who were not friendly with each other. I see that the New York C.S. Lewis Society published an essay on “Jane McNeill and C.S. Lewis” by Mary Rogers in 1979, but cannot access it from their website. Maybe I’ll do some further research some day.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Welcome

Featured

The Happiness Patrol, by Mick Stack (and Graeme Curry)

Return to Ramillies

The best known books set in each country: South Africa

More on the widely sown seed of Benjamin Cleveland

Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston

Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez

Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss

Tuesday reading

The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones

September 2024 books

The best known books set in each country: Tanzania

Comet-spotting

Ernest Wante’s paintings in the Church of St Boniface, Ixelles

Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt

Shame, by Annie Ernaux

A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long

Tuesday reading

Grave Matter, by Justin Richards

Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse

Decision time: local elections 2024

The best known books set in each country: the UK

Liz Truss and Northern Ireland: Examining Anthony Seldon’s narrative

Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin

South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton

Set in 2025 #3: Titan, by John Varley

Tuesday reading

The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al

All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

The best known books set in each country: Thailand

Jane McNeill – the missing link between C.S. Lewis and Helen Waddell