12) Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey into the Inferno of American Justice, by David Feige

This is a very good book, in a number of ways, and perhaps it was a mistake of the publishers to market it as a book about the American justice system; it covers so much else. David Feige describes a day in the life of a public defender in the Bronx, where he worked for fifteen years, running from courtroom to courtroom with lengthy interspersed reminiscences about how he got there. The human stories of those who are damaged by the justice system – even those who are eventually acquitted – are described with compassion and occasionally humour. But he even manages to evoke our sympathy for those who are guilty:

Even after more than a decade in the system, I still fundamentally believe in the possibility of redemption and the value of every individual. I care for my murderous clients… Their shortcomings don’t disqualify them from my caring. But somehow, when I try to explain this in the context of my work, I’m met with blank confusion.

Reading this book on the reality of what the law does to people is an unsettling contrast with the glamorisation of cop shows on TV, be it the refined Morse or Dalziel and Pascoe, or even the more gritty but (I suspect) equally unrealistic Hill Street Blues in the old days. The biggest villains are certainly those evil judges whose sentencing is a mockery, and who cannot be reined in – indeed, the only likely effect of public opinion is to make sentencing practice harsher. (One of Feige’s clients asks in bewilderment, “Why wouldn’t any judge release me if they thought I was innocent? Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?”) I suspect that the Bronx is much worse off in that respect than anywhere I have ever lived, or am likely to live; but that doesn’t detract from the universality of the message.

David Feige is actually a very old friend of mine – the year I lived in the Netherlands, when I turned 13, he was a year or two older and introduced me and my brother to the delights of Dungeons and Dragons, and (in my case anyway) Roger Zelazny’s writing. So it’s very good to find that he has turned out as a force for making the world a better place.

11) Rite of Passage, by Alexei Panshin

Well, that’s it: I have now read every single novel that has won the Nebula Award.

And while this one is not in the top half of my list, it’s not so very close to the bottom either. Most of it is a rather good retelling of Heinlein’s Tunnel In The Sky, with better world-building and characterisation. Mia, our narrator and heroine, has grown up on a generation starship where the young folks must endure a month on the surface of whatever nearby planet is handy to become full citizens. Her father, incidentally, is a senior politician on the starship.

This better-than-average sf Bildungsroman is then completely wrecked by the concluding section, in which Mia’s people decide to blow up the planet on which she underwent her rite of passage – not because of the brutal treatment meted out by its inhabitants to her and her friends, not because they might be a potential military threat in the future, but purely because they don’t use contraception enough. A truly great author might have made this into a great sf story (or at least a satisfactory denouement), but unfortunately Panshin isn’t up to it.

So, an OK book with a terrible conclusion.

Did it deserve to win the Nebula? In an indifferent year, it would have been excusable. But this was up against the Hugo-winning Stand on Zanzibar, and also against two books that I reckon are better than either, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. So, as often happens, a very peculiar Nebula winner, but at least not one that is as embarrassing as The Terminal Experiment or The Quantum Rose.

Actually the full list of books I own but haven’t read is here. The ten most frequently tagged as “unread” by other Librarything users are:

1. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (☑)
2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen (☑)
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (☑)
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison (☑)
5. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli (☑)
6. The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (☑)
7. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (☑)
8. The Confessions of Saint Augustine (☑)
9. Villette, by Charlotte Bronte (☑)
10. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (☑)

10) Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo, by Iain King and Whit Mason

Iain King is an old friend of mine; I don’t think I’ve met his co-author, but the two of them together have written a fairly damning indictment of the international efforts to put Kosovo on its feet since the NATO campaign against Serbia and Yugoslavia of 1999. From the very beginning, international officials conceded to thuggery on the ground, committed by both the ethnic Albanian majority and by the remaining ethnic Serbs where they could manage it. UN officials retreated into a colonialist mentality, failing to implement their mandate and questioning their own ability to do so. (Kosovo’s electricity supplies now are in worse shape than they were before the conflict.) The highest ever per capita expenditure by the international community on post-conflict reconstructiuon has delivered indifferent results.

They have a list of prescriptions as to what could be done better in future. To me, the two key points – confirmed by this book – are, first, that any such international mission needs to move fast to establish the rule of law as a matter of extreme urgency; and second, that the end goal must be clear right from the beginning. The determination to put off deciding on Kosovo’s future independence led directly to the discrediting of the UN mission within Kosovo and the violence of March 2004, and has exacerbated uncertainty in the wider region.

There were one or two other points that occurred to me when reading. In Bosnia, politicians were reined in by the international community when they lied about what was actually in the peace deal. No such measure was ever applied or even threatened in Kosovo, with the result that nationalist fantasies continued to be peddled by the top leadership until the start of this year. Freedom of speech, sure, but malicious lies about the basis of government should at the very least have been countered by the UN.

King and Mason make the argument, though I feel they are not completely convinced, that holding elections in Kosovo before the moderates were in a position to win was a mistake. In my view that is wishful thinking. While in these circumstances elections do often simply confirm the hold on power of local thugs, at least they are now in by virtue of the ballot box rather than by force and it becomes thinkable that they can be removed. And anyway, the first elections in Kosovo did, in fact, remove from power many of the KLA-linked structures that had gained local ascendancy during the war.

I think this is the first book-length piece on the Kosovo protectorate, and it’s a thorough analysis, drawing of course among other sources from the work my own colleagues have been doing over the years. My one minor quibble are that some of the Serbian names are misspelt – the famously impaled Mr Martinović is Martimovic, Nenad Radosavljević has acquired an extra l in his surname, and Slaviša Petković’s first name is spelt Slavisha, as if in Albanian. But those quibbles apart, it’s a good book.

9) The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon

It’s almost two years since I read the original version of the 9/11 Report; thanks to Slate I became aware of this new and more approachable version, and bought it at the Borders shop on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, a couple of blocks from the site of some of the events it describes.

A few things jumped out at me differently on reading this version. I didn’t remember the original making such a strong point of the non-involvement of Iraq and Hezbollah in the events of 9/11. The key passage about the FBI agent who speculated that someone might fly a plane into the World Trade Centre has been toned down. But the utter confusion among the US top leadership on the morning of the attacks is even better portrayed in graphical form than by the written word alone.

Two years on, the Commission itself has added to the original text a pretty damning report card of the US response to making sure that it cannot happen again, with a bit more stress on the necssity of getting to grips with the Arab world than the original had, and a general condemnation of the apathy of the Executive and still more the legislative branches of government.

Anyway, this is an excellent adaptation – true to the spirit of the original, very well presented. Strongly recommended.

8) Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

This is very short, but very good. I was pleased (reading the intro to my Penguin edition after I’d read the book) that I spotted the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses – but this is much less hard work. I always like the narrative technique of looking at the same events from different perspectives, especially when the author gets the unreliable narrator technique right. Based on this I will look out for more – to my shame, I don’t think I had read any Woolf before.

7) The Terminal Experiment, by Robert J. Sawyer

This is not quite as bad a book as I had been led to believe. The prose is often leaden – in particular, the cringe-worthy opening passage which I think should be used as a model of how not to write in classes for impressionable young writers, and the numerous info-dumps idicating that the characters have read all the available scientific literature up to 1994 (which is a shame as most of the book is set in 2011). What appears to be the killer idea of the first half of the book – that science can detect the soul leaving the body at death – is simply forgotten for the last third of the narrative, which plays the rogue-AI’s in the net cliche as a murder mystery, leading to an unconvincing resolution. The detective character herself violates standard operating procedure by burbling her theories about the crime to one of the key suspects.

But apart from that, the characters were not too unbelievable and the exploration of the issues of artificial intelligence and the scientific basis of the soul not too undergraduate (with all due respect to my undergraduate readers). And he does predict a future Pope Benedict XVI. (Of course, whether the present Pope will still be there in 2011 is another matter.)

Still, it is pretty surprising that this won the 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novel. I confess I haven’t read any of the other nominees, and if this was voted better than them I don’t really intend to. (Actually, I may have read Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress – I know I read one of the later books in the series, and was seriously unimpressed.) The Hugo for the equivalent year went to Bujold’s Mirror Dance, which is the start of the superb four-book climax to the Vorkosigan saga (as continued in Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign).

This is not the worst Nebula-winning novel I have read – that title goes to either The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro or The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov – but it is certainly in the bottom four. I can’t decide if I like it less than Neuromancer, because I can’t remember anything about the Gibson book, even though I know I have read it several times.

OK, only Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin to go…

6) Girl with a One-track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door by “Abby Lee” [Zoe Margolis]

Many of us who write blogs like to occasionally fantasise that there may some day be a market for our words of wisdom. (Of course, some who write blogs are already established professional writers, so this does not apply to them.) Very few, however, manage to make the transition from blogger to published author on the basis of what is in their blog; I doubt very much that my book reviews from here will ever appear in dead tree form in your local bookshop.

Of course, that’s because I write about books I have read, and occasionally sf cons I have been to, or arguments I have had, or speeches I have made, and not about sex. The Girl With A One Track Mind has written a very entertaining blog about the sex she has had for the last couple of years, and managed (somehow strangely) to persuade a publisher to take it on, and here it is.

And it is an entertaining, in some ways rather a moral read. Sex with strangers, or semi-strangers, is not always satisfactory. Wildly successful sex does not necessarily lead to a wildly successful relationship. By the end of the book, she is firming up her ideas about what she wants from a long-term partner. In that way, the novel format is more sustainable than the blog – done properly, as it is here, it imposes a duty on the author of character development, of story arc rather than the episodic narrative we get from the blog.

The Sunday Times wrote an incredibly spiteful article exposing the author’s real identity – typical of the trash rag it is (a friend of mine who was briefly its foreign correspondent had to help the then foreign editor work out where the Balkan states were, one of many events that I thought Evelyn Waugh had invented for Scoop). However, she has since made a few more media appearances on her own terms. Let’s hope that her fears of being finished in her film industry career are exaggerated, and that she continues to write entertainingly and for profit.

My colleague in Belgrade has started a blog. Here he tells a story about me. Many of the details are wildly inaccurate but nonetheless entertaining.

PS – it should be added that Zoran Zivkovic is guest-blogging over at VanderWorld.

Am sitting at an internet terminal on Broadway, a couple of blocks from Ground Zero, where the five-years-on commemoration is taking place at this very moment. It is a very peculiar feeling. Not really one I can describe at any further length.

(Of no interest unless you are interested in Christianity)

This is the start of one of the five versions of the Creed supplied in our local parish missal:

I believe in the origin
of all life,
in a God who is Father-Mother.
The basis and meaning of my existence,
hope and prospect each day.

It is a pretty loose reformulation, to put it mildly, of the original opening of the Nicene Creed: Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεόν, Πατέρα, Παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων / Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem cæli et terræ, visibílium omnium et invisibílium.

Coming as I do from a rather conservative Catholic culture, I was stunned that our local church (presumably at the instruction of the Belgian hierarchy) recognises God as both Father and Mother in this way.

Of course this is a Good Thing, and it is entirely right to look behind the particular words agreed as the result of a political debate almost seventeen centuries ago to try and reformulate the essential message in language that is more relevant today. (We can debate whether or not they have actually succeeded – the punctuation and grammar are also rather loosely consructed, and the Belgian formula is much less specific than the Greek; but that’s a different matter.)

There’s still a bit of me that wonders, though, if the Belgian Catholics are praying with a different Creed to the Irish Catholics (and indeed the other Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and other Christians who use the Nicene Creed), are they still in the same church? (And then another bit of me responds, does that really matter so much?)

The picture is of our local church, taken by Carolien.

Given that I won’t use the laptop on the plane, but will need it once I get there, is it a viable solution to pack it in my suitcase, inside its bag, and send it off to be stowed in the hold?

Google Answers suggests that it is entirely feasible, though with certain risks, which I think I am prepared to take.

(Funny) A very long list of quotes from Terry Pratchett

(Serious) examines memory and reality

Will be in NY from late tomorrow night (like midnight) till Tuesday evening.

Then in DC from late Tuesday night till Friday afternoon.

Monday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings are free at the moment, if anyone has any suggestions?

5) The Last Word and other stories, by Graham Greene

A collection of short stories ranging from 1923 to 1990, compiled by Greene in the latter year, shortly before his death. Actually it is fairly clear why these stories have not been numbered among his more memorable works; they are mostly very short and while good illustrations of his style have little to engage the reader in terms of content.

ObSF: the very first story, written in 1988, is set in a future where the entire world has been united under a single government and follows the final days of the man who had been the last Pope. It reminded me of ‘s remark that “if you show me a planet with a single government I’ll show you the mass graves”. Another story, written in 1989 but set in 1997, tells of the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 being disrupted by a terrorist attack. Does any of Graham Greene’s other work count as sfnal?

Look at your LJ userpics list….

If you have fewer than 50 icons, pick every fifth one.
If you have between fifty and seventy-five icons, pick every seventh one.
If you have over seventy-five icons, pick every tenth one.
If you have fewer than ten, pick all of ’em.

List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly why you have it, why it’s interesting to you, what significance does it have.

	This was one of the first ones I made myself, from the famous Apollo photograph of the Earth rising as seen from the Moon. At first I was using it as the default icon for book reviews, but I decided that I preferred to use a part of an illustration of the cover of an Earthsea novel instead. Now I generally use it for sad or contemplative entries, especially for deaths. There is something awfully profound about the whole planet seen from a quarter of a million miles away.
	I wanted an icon that would be a good illustration for posts about the more military bits of my day job. There’s something very uncompromising about a tank. This one is Australian.
	I felt that all the icons I had designed myself were rather grim and unhappy, and so made this one, from the famous photo of Einstein, to illustrate particularly funny entries or comments. It’s impossible to look at this picture and not feel slightly cheered up, I think.
	The first American presidential election I can remember was 1976, and I was cheering (at the age of nine) for the candidate I had heard of, which was that nice Mr Ford. Since then, of course, I’ve come to realise that my personal politics are much closer to Carter’s, and that indeed Carter was the better president of the two. Nonetheless, despite his manifest flaws, Ford did put in place the CSCE process which was a much greater contributory factor to the fall of communism than any of Reagan’s military posturing. I also hope very much that he will defeat Reagan again, as he did in the 1976 primaries, by simply outliving the old fraud, and I have a ticker on my lj profile counting down the days until that happens.
	I made this icon to illustrate a single livejournal entry on the tangled history of Eastern Rumelia, now an integral part of Bulgaria, but at one stage a potential flashpoint in the geopolitics of Europe. I basically cut down one of the maps of the region that I found on WikiPedia to the point where only the word “Philippopolis” was visible. “Philippopolis” is such a fantastic name, don’t you think? Much more memorable (sorry, ) than the modern name of Пловдив.
	This is one where I not only made the icon myself, I also took the picture it is cut down from, a couple of months ago during the warm summer weather. This is U, my youngest, enjoying bubbles being blown for her in our back garden. I intend to use it to illustrate posts about my family.

Happy Independence Day, Macedonia!

I used to use the dry-cleaners near the office, the Rue de Bailli branch of 5àSec. Until this morning, that is.

I left my best suit in before the summer break for dry-cleaning, and unfortunately misplaced the ticket. I went back a couple of weeks ago, and explained what had happened, and they were most unhelpful. I gave them a description of the suit, and they promised to look again.

I went back again last week, and they said that they had looked but hadn’t found it. I gave them a more precise description of the suit and they promised to have another look, and would let me know by Thursday, ie today.

I went back this morning and again they said they hadn’t found it. I stood there, fortuitously backed up by a colleague who had just turned up to see if they could do some dry-cleaning for him, and eventually they said that if I didn’t believe them I could look on the rack for myself.

I found my suit in a very few seconds, exactly as I had described it, safe and sound.

I’m not going back there again. Neither is my colleague.

The BBC had two completely different and completely incorrect pronunciations of the name of the NATO Secretary-General this morning.

1) “Yap de Hop Sheffer” /jæp də hɔp ʃɛfə/
2) “Djap de Hupe Sheffer” /dʒæp dɘ hʊ:p ʃɛfə/

It is of course “Jaap de Hoop Scheffer” /ja:p də ho:p sχɛfər/ but I expect he’s used to it by now.

I’m very pleased to be addressing this meeting in your parliament building, one of the most beautiful parliament buildings in the world, and one of the very first to be constructed for that purpose.

It’s not a very well known fact that the first ever building specifically constructed to house a parliament was in Dublin, in the mid 18th century. Unfortunmately it was abolished in 1801, and the building is now a bank; today’s Irish legislature meets in a former lecture theatre, in a house built as an aristocratic residence.

The city of my birth also has a rather pretentious parliament building on a hill on its eastern fringes. If you visit, you will see the founder of the statelet standing outside, making rude gestures to his enemies in the south.

Of course, one of the features of your parliament is that you no longer have a Senate, so you have a very beautiful chamber which unfortunately has no content. Oddly enough, the same is true in Northern Ireland, where the rather less attractive Senate chamber (actually about the size of the room we are meeting in, but with only 26 members – they must have fairly rattled around) is also empty since the reforms of the 1970s. In Dublin, interestingly, the old House of Lords chamber is the only room of the old Parliament which still has the original decorations.

Let me now extend the metaphor of beautifully designed superstructures with no actual content to the topic of our meeting today…

4) A Time of Changes, by Robert Silverberg

Two more Nebula winners to read, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer.

I thought I’d read a fair amount of Silverberg when I was a teenager but this one had definitely passed me by. I thought it was rather good. The narrator, living in a culture so reserved that the words “I” and “me” are obscenities, gets hold of a drug that allows him to telepathically share thoughts with others, and sets out to revolutionise his society. Sounds a bit like a metaphor for the late 1960s, but I thought it was very well done. Would make an interesting paired reading with Dying Inside. Probably deserved to win the Nebula that year; I haven’t read any of the other nominees except The Lathe of Heaven which is not as good as this. It was beaten for the Hugo by To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which I guess is more of a Hugo book than a Nebula book. (As a Zelazny fan, I’d have voted for Jack of Shadows that year myself.)

Whoops.

I sent an email to a colleague yesterday including some very private and confidential comments made to me by a senior European Commission official about his personal differences with official EU policy on a certain very sensitive issue.

My colleague then replied to me with some more information about something else, which I thought was sufficiently interesting that I forwarded his email on to a couple of other Commission officials – and the Finnish presidency of the EU – completely failing to notice that my original email was still part of the chain.

Needless to say, the first Commission official was on the phone to me first thing this morning. I grovelled as grovellingly as I can ever remember having grovelled before, and have sent him an email promising to do anything I can in recompense.

A lesson there for everyone about forwarding emails. I confessed all to the boss, who says he has done much worse himself (which I can believe) and that I shouldn’t worry about it on his account (which is nice of him).

Whoops.

Well, what a contrast. The Cambridge anthropologist with an Irish accent (who is surely on livejournal, or knows people who are) scored 19 points on her specialised subject – the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. And the Scottish guy who chose the Rolling Stones had one of those mind-gone-blank moments, and scored only 3.

The general knowledge round was a bit more evenly distributed, but the pattern set in the first round was not broken.

And I felt very sorry for the student doctor on University Challenge who confused the ankle and the heel at a crucial moment…

I’ve written before about an intriguing episode in 16th century history: the death by poisoning of a senior Irish political figure, along with many of his followers, in October 1546 while visiting London. Thanks to and his daughter, I now have a copy of the definitive article on the subject, “Malice Aforethought: the Death of the Ninth Earl of Ormond”, by David Edwards, in the Journal of the Butler Society, vol 3, part 1 (1986) pages 30-41.

The Earl was probably the most influential Irish-born person in Ireland at the time, and he had gone to London to sort out a dispute with the representative of King Henry VIII, Sir Anthony St Leger. St Leger apparently swore that only one of them would come back to Ireland, and on 17 October the Earl and thirty-five of his companions fell ill after a banquet at Ely house in Holborn. Eighteen of them died, including the Earl himself, on 28 October.

However, Edwards argues pretty convincingly that the poisoning must have been accidental, from contaminated food. He points out that the dispute with St Leger had been resolved by the time of Ormond’s death – in fact, it was largely a misunderstanding engineered by the Lord Chancellor, who was thrown into the Fleet Prison as punishment. Indeed, as he was dying, the Earl actually named St Leger one of his executors, which indicates that he himself didn’t think St Leger was responsible. On top of that, it seems that poisoning was a pretty unusual murder method in the sixteenth century.

Thinking it through, I guess this is supported by one more piece of circumstantial evidence: that it took the Earl eleven days to die. That surely suggests a biological cause of poisoning, rather than a chemical one, and I guess that even now you would hardly attempt to poison someone by slipping them some rotten meat, so it makes it more likely that the problem was caused accidentally. (Having said that, if the Earl survived the initial trauma, it was probably his doctors rather than the poison that actually killed him; cf President Garfield, etc.)

We know the Earl was reasonably clear-minded in those dying days because he made a number of deathbed provisions, including the appointment of St Leger as one of his deputies, setting funds aside for his surviving servants to return to Ireland, suitably dressed in black livery, and also making provision for the continuing education of the son of his steward, James White, who was apparently one of the first to die. The son, Nicholas White, later achieved high office in Elizabethan Ireland, and was also a direct ancestor of mine, which is why I developed an interst in the story.

That’s enough for here; anyone who wants to see the full article let me know. And thanks again to and his daughter for tracking it down for me.

Available DVDs:

(will bold them as and when I get them; # for reviews)
The Beginning Boxed Set # # # #
The Aztecs #
The Dalek Invasion of Earth #
The Web Planet
Lost in Time #
The Tomb of the Cybermen #
The Mind Robber
The Seeds of Death
Spearhead From Space #
Inferno #
The Claws of Axos
The Three Doctors #
Carnival of Monsters
The Green Death #
The Ark in Space #
Genesis of the Daleks # #
Pyramids of Mars #
The Robots of Death
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
Horror of Fang Rock

Audio of old series with linking narrative

(will bold them as and when I get them; # for reviews)
Marco Polo
The Reign of Terror
The Crusade #
Galaxy 4
The Myth Makers
Mission to the Unknown / The Daleks’ Master Plan #
The Massacre #
The Celestial Toymaker
The Savages #
The Smugglers
The Tenth Planet #
The Power of the Daleks #
The Highlanders
The Underwater Menace
The Moonbase #
The Macra Terror
The Faceless Ones
The Evil of the Daleks #
The Tomb of the Cybermen
The Abominable Snowmen *
The Ice Warriors #
The Enemy of the World
The Web of Fear *
Fury From the Deep # #
The Wheel in Space
The Invasion
The Space Pirates
* irritatingly in MP3 format which I can’t play in the car.

3) What If? Alternative Views of Twentieth-Century Ireland, by Diarmaid Ferriter

This is a collection of twenty essays, of between eleven and fourteen pages each, summarising a series of radio discussions on RTÉ last year. I bought it because I find alternate history interesting as a genre, and was intrigued by its application to Irish history.

In fact hardly any of the essays is a real AH speculation; they are much more reflections on particular events, so “What if the Blueshirts had attempted a coup in 1933?” is really a consideration of what the Blueshirts were all about, with some reflections on why no coup attempt was ever really possible; and “What if Proportional Representation had been abolished in 1959 or 1968?” is simply an analysis of how Fianna Fail lost the argument at the time, with little speculation about what would have happened if they had won. There are also no less than three about single elements of the Irish media, (The Late Late Show, Magill, and The Irish Press) which presumably reflects the interests of those who commissioned the programme. Other areas suffer corresponding neglect.

The only essay that really does get interestingly into AH territory is “What if there had been no 1916 Rising?” which concludes, with Townshend (whose book had not yet been published at the time of broadcast) that the growth of militancy, and opposition to conscription, were such that Nationalism would have take a much more radical turn in 1918 with or without the Rising; indeed the discussants raised a slightly different and even more intriguing question – what if the Rising had been timed better, to coincide with the introduction of conscription, and/or had been better planned, so that in fact the insurgents had a better chance of winning?

Some of these covered areas I didn’t know much about, two of which were particularly interesting. From the AH point of view, the important question is not “What if Donogh O’Malley had not introduced free secondary education in 1967?”, but what if he hadn’t dropped dead six months later? A progressive and vigorous voice such as his, competing with Charlie Haughey for the leadership of Fianna Fail (as indeed his son nephew actually did, fifteen years later), could have given the 1970s a completely different political complexion.

Not in any way an AH essay, but one which revealed to me my own ignorance, was the one on “What if Frank Duff had not established the Legion of Mary in 1921?” I knew very little about the Legion of Mary, and to be honest don’t know an awful lot more now, but it’s obviously a very interesting story; also the only real attempt in any of the programmes to get to grips with what in other countries would be considered class issues.

So, an interesting bunch of essays, but probably more interesting to get hold of the radio programmes if I can.

RTÉ did a documentary on Flann O’Brien back in April;  kindly taped it for me, and I watched it this afternoon (see Sunday Times article here). On top of that I’ve been listening once more to the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series (the original – and still the best), particularly the second half (the original 7th to 12th Fits). The two resonated in ways I hadn’t quite expected.

I found the Flann O’Brien documentary awfully sad. The rejection of The Third Policeman by Longman’s in 1940, and the destruction of most of the printed copies of At Swim-Two-Birds around the same time in a German air-raid, obviously had a crushing effect on his morale. Unable to admit to his friends that Longman’s had rejected the book, he had made up stories of the manuscript blowing out the car window while driving through the countryside. Eventually in the 1960s At Swim-Two-Birds was republished, and he produced a couple of minor novels including some out-takes from The Third Policeman, but the manuscript of his masterpiece lay sadly among his papers until after his death. It is interesting that, like Douglas Adams, all his best fiction writing was done before he turned thirty (An Béal Bocht was published in 1941; he was born in 1911 – we could extend it by maybe a year or so for his three plays). He lived another quarter century as a Dublin newspaper columnist, wit and drunk – in the one surviving TV interview with him, conducted by Tim Pat Coogan in the early 1960s, he is embarrassingly inebriated.

Imagine if Graham Greene hadn’t moved on from Longman’s, and so had read and approved The Third Policeman for publication, as he did At Swim-Two Birds! O’Brien would have been able to get out of the civil service and become a full-time writer, years before they finally threw him out, and could have been a much greater literary, perhaps even political figure. But his defeat by Longman’s reader chilled his creativity, and a voice that might have been one of Ireland’s strongest was lost to the drink and smoke of the Dublin pub. He would still have been (as he himself admitted) overwhelmed by Joyce, but he would have been competing on more equal terms. As it was he had to deal with the consequences of celebrity for an early success which he was unable to repeat.

Which brings me to Douglas Adams. I’ve been fascinated to detect an actual plot and theme in the Secondary Phase of the radio series. The story is more Zaphod’s story than anyone else’s. He is the first of the major characters to speak (“I’ve recovered… Look, if it’ll help you do what I tell you baby, imagine I’ve got a blaster ray in my hand.” “You have got a blaster ray in your hand.” “So you shouldn’t have to tax your imagination too hard.”) and also very nearly the last (Ford: “I just want you to know that I respect you…” Zaphod: “Great.” Ford:”…just not very much, that’s all.”) Zaphod is the central character of most of Fits 7 and 8; the action in Fit 9 is roughly shared between him and Arthur, who then gets the lead for most of Fits 10 and 11, and then in the last episode the honours are more evenly shared again.

The story told about Zaphod is one of hubris and nemesis. He is brought to the Total Perspective Vortex where he discovers that the entire universe has been created for his benefit. The immediate effect is that he starts signing pictures of himself, “To myself with frank admiration”. But pride comes before a fall, in this case the thirteen-mile fall to the surface of the planet Brontitall, and he ends up locked out of the shack of the man who really rules the Galaxy – a position Zaphod had previously believed to be filled by himself – in the rain, without a spaceship.

Arthur’s story is a contrasting echo of Zaphod’s in that he discovers a fifteen-mile high statue of himself, created not because of any especially heroic deed but because he has behaved as normal (ie complaining, in this case about the quality of the tea made by the Nutrimatic machine). Although he is recognised as a moral leader by the bird people, he doesn’t let it go to his head, partly because they have made such a mess of it. (The man in the shack presents yet another approach to greatness, behaving as if it simply isn’t there.)

Adams is obviously more sympathetic to Arthur’s modest approach – he’s the one who gets the romance with Lintilla, he’s the one who gets our sympathy when he runs off with the spaceship at the end. But I think he is more fascinated by Zaphod. And I guess that’s true of a lot of us.

2) A Game With Sharpened Knives, by Neil Belton

Misha Glenny had been recommending that I get hold of this book since long before it was published, and now I know why. It’s a fascinating, multilayered novel about the physicist Erwin Schrödinger moving to Ireland in 1941, with his wife, and his lady friend, and his daughter by his lady friend, and how he falls in love yet again (informal polygamy rather than polyamory); there are a lot of bicycles, and a few cats (though perhaps not as many as you might have expected), and a real sense of the dreary claustrophobia of Dublin during WW2 (or “The Emergency” as it was known locally), and of the horrors of fascism on the continent and of the terrors of theoretical physics as a discipline. It draws quite a lot on Walter Moore’s 1989 biography but Belton makes the story all his own.

I twitched a bit at a few of the historical details – conversations about William Rowan Hamilton (the great nineteenth century Irish mathematician) tend to suggest that the characters have all read Hankins’ biography, not published until 1980; and the de Valera of the book is, though cold and chilling, a somewhat nicer person than the one that I have encountered through biographers and historians. (Belton’s fictional de Valera gets one of the best lines, talking of partitioned Ireland as “neither alive nor dead”, thus echoing Schrödinger’s most famous thought experiment.) Still, this is a novel, not a historical work, and it’s forgiveable.

A lot of talk, and not a lot of action, but I rather enjoyed it.

1) Doctor Who Short Trips [6]: Past Tense, ed. Ian Farrington

A bit more of a mixed bag than the two other collections I’ve read in this series, with some real turkeys – the nadir of the collection, interestingly, is an eight-page sketch which doesn’t appear to have been properly finished, by none other than Eric Saward. But there are some very good ones too, mostly sticking to the remit of setting stories in the past of earth’s history (though, of course, this is true of many Doctor Who stories anyway). I especially liked Jonathan Morris’ reconstruction, via Doctor Who Monthly and other sources, of an otherwise forgotten First Doctor story where Robin Hood turns out to be a) Ian’s double and b) a git. John Binns’ story about the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 puzzled me at first but had a great punchline. The rest are all (or almost all) OK. (The one about Shakespeare and Marlowe is inconsistent with Empire of Glass, but what the hey.)