…the shape of reality – the way I perceive the world – exists only because of Dr Who. Specifically, from The War Games in 1969, the multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton’s swan song.
And, on a different level,
Greendale is Postman Pat’s personal harem, isn’t it? ALL the kids in Greendale have his nose or his hair or both. ALL of them.
This is, frankly, the least impressive of any Hartnell series I have seen so far. (Though at this stage I am down to the least famous and least accessible stories – Galaxy 4, The Space Museum, Planet of Giants and The Web Planet.) The Sensorites themselves are pretty dire (early relatives of the Ood, I understand); so are most of the cast, with Maitland being the worst. It’s just ludicrous to have aliens who had never thought of the concept of disguise until our heroes introduce the idea to them.
And the basic point of the plot turns out to be the aliens’ concerns about the Earth people extracting their minerals. If this were a Jon Pertwee story, we would know just what it was all about. But instead we have numerous episodes of peculiar personality-based bickering amongst the aliens, which would be OK if we actually liked or sympathised with any of them, but we don’t.
There are some redeeming features. I actually liked the fleshing out of Susan’s character and her relationship with the Doctor; shame that this wasn’t taken much further in her three remaining stories. I thought that John, the human who is deranged and then cured, was good too but it was difficult to understand what he saw in Carol. And the actual plot that develops in the last episode, that there are insane astronauts hiding under the city contaminating the water supply, certainly does grab your attention.
But as for the Sensorites themselves? Poison the lot and take their molybdenum, I say.
I’m very pleased with this:
Canonical TV shows, in broadcast order
Novelisations, novels and audios in order of internal chronology
On a related topic, this looks very interesting, and several months to plan it in. Hmm, who do I know that lives near Portsmouth…
Back in January 1978, I was in my last year in primary school, coming up to my eleventh birthday; and Blake’s 7 started, the story of a group of desperate future freedom fighters battling against the evil Federation. I see that there is now a new version being webcast, and as soon as I can work out how to download these and convert to MP3s for easy listening, I’ll be onto it. (Technical assistance on this gratefully accepted.) (Though they are by Ben Aaronovitch, so not sure how excited I can get.)
But meantime I sat down and re-watched the first three TV episodes from 1978. After getting over my shock at how young they all look (all in their 30s, I think, so younger than I am now), I found myself really enjoying it. The first three episodes are a more tightly-linked narrative than the others, as Blake gets together his team and gets control of the alien technology of the Liberator. But they feel very different from each other as well; this is not yer six-part Terry nation Doctor Who story.
There are some surprising weaknesses in it – there are longueurs that would be intolerable in today’s Doctor Who, whose episodes are about the same length. One has to ask oneself why, if the Federation holds life so cheap (the body count in this episode must surely be one of the highest for the entire series), they don’t simply kill Blake off as they do so many others. Also the mind-control aspects of the plot, which are potentially very interesting in a Philip K Dick kind of way, are simply left aside by later writers if I remember rightly. But the atmosphere of the repressive government is brilliantly conveyed; these are people that you immediately want to fight against, and you want Blake to fight against them and win.
On one minor plot point: It is difficult to imagine framing someone on paedophilia charges being treated so incidentally in a drama written today. I wonder if Terry Nation got this one from Roger Zelazny’s Today We Choose Faces, published in 1973, where the narrator(s) (one of whose names is Black) do(es) the same thing to a minor character (who turns out to be his/their love interest’s father).
The Federation officials continue to be utterly horrible, with Leylan, who seems like the nice cop, unable to restrain the nasty Raiker. And the contrast between the functional Federation ship and the alien if dusty Liberator (not yet called that) is effective.
Again, it’s not clear who is going to be among the 7 until the very last moment – especially since, in fact, we are still not up to our full complement by episode’s end, with only five humans aboard the Liberator (we don’t yet know for sure that Zen counts as one of them).
Oddly enough the teleportation technology is an excuse for a significant exchange between Blake, Avon and Jenna. The two men have just discovered that they both had worked on a project on a similar technology back on earth; Jenna tells them sharply, “I didn’t work on it.” It’s almost a defining moment: the key relationship in the series is between Blake and Avon, and the women are sidelined now and mostly hereafter as well. I have written before about Terry Nation’s women characters, concluding by praising him for the introduction of Soolin in later Blake’s 7 series, but Nick Barlow pointed out that in fact she almost certainly came from someone else.
Anyway, I shall press on with these, and report back here as I do.
It’s only a short week in Brussels, and I somehow didn’t make it to the gym, but I got through another two Eighth Doctor audios on the commute, the second and third of the Big Finish series with Paul McGann and India Fisher playing his companion Charley Pollard.
This is the fourth ever Doctor Who story, broadcast in 1964, and the earliest one to be lost conpletely from the archives. It was also the first purely historical Doctor Who story, telling simply of an encounter between the time travellers and Marco Polo (and eventually Kublai Khan) in the late thirteenth century.
I bought the soundtrack with linking narration from William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the original series. It’s generally pretty good though the fifth episode sound quality is rather lousy. I was also misled by one of the hidden extras – the first of the three CDs includes also all seven episodes as MP3s without narration, and since this is nowhere stated I ended up loading them by mistake.
Took me a while – first started this the week before last, and took a break from it while I was travelling. But it is in fact very good. Seven episodes is about right for a leisurely plot, with Susan bonding with the maiden Ping-Cho, and the others dealing with the treacherous warlord Tegana and with Marco Polo himself, who decides to seize the Tardis and offer it to the Khan as his ticket home to Venice. (Or, as Croatian lore would have it, Korcula.)
It builds to a satisfying conclusion with the Doctor playing the Great Khan at backgammon, with the Tardis as the stake. Marco Polo himself, weighing in the balance his honour, his liking and respect for Ian and the others, and his desire to get home, is an interesting character study.
A shame, but I guess understandable, that they stopped making stories like this one after a while.
15) Dead Air, by Iain Banks
A gratifyingly easy read compared to some I’ve tried recently, this is the story of Ken Nott, a Scot who hosts a popular London radio show. The political disasters of late 2001 are mirrored in his personal life, as his dangerous affair with a gangster’s wife drags him into the underworld. Nott’s obsession with truth at a professional level (there is a rather peculiar show-down with a Holocaust denier) is contrasted with his difficulties with honesty in his sex life. Banks has a great ear for dialogue and for the different demotics of London. And the climactic chapters, where Nott tries and fails to avoid the wrath of his lover’s husband, are vividly related. Very enjoyable.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: The sisterhood of the travelling pants, by Ann Brashares.
14) [In Search of Lost Time #2] In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust
Having had my enthusiasm engaged by the first volume in Proust’s classic series, I started reading the second with some enthusiasm. (A shout out here to Odette, reading Proust in Foxborough, who commented on my last entry.)
I have to say that I found vol 2 a bit more slow-moving, alternating passages of eye-glazing introspection with some really profound and expressive descriptions of what love is like, and how we react to art and to artists (be they actors, writers, or painters). But a welcome surprise was that there is an actual plot, with the narrator’s rebuff of Gilberte near the start vaguely reflected in his relationship with Albertine, and with her other young friends, at the end.
I found myself very irritated by the publisher’s notes. (I’m reading the new-ish Penguin edition.) First of all, I hate end-notes rather than foot-notes as a general matter of principle. Second, while I don’t mind explanations of obscure references to contemporary or older French literature, I thought the editors went overboard in drawing attention to Proust’s minor plot inconsistencies. (Though I did wonder why these were never corrected by any of Proust’s French editors.)
I’m already realising that this is a set of books that I will have to re-read in perhaps five or ten years’ time.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey
Just in case you are interested: I’m mirroring all my Old Skool Doctor Who reviews to
:
First Doctor
Second Doctor
Third Doctor
Fourth Doctor
Fifth Doctor
Seventh Doctor
Eighth Doctor
But NB nothing will appear there that hasn’t already appeared here first.
Some time I shall think about how to systematise my reviews of the spinoff novels and audios as well.
13) The Druid King, by Norman Spinrad
The story of Vercingetorix vs Julius Caesar, not really successful because Spinrad can’t quite make up his mind whether it is fantasy or not, and whether it is for adults or young adults. Well, it will be useful background when I get around to reading Caesar himself.
12) Military Operations Macedonia: From the Outbreak of War to Spring 1917, by Captain Cyril Falls
Wonderful that the Imperial War museum has reprinted this volume (originally published in 1931), though it’s a shame that we lose out on the full-colour maps. Certainly the most comprehensive guide you’ll find, yet very dense – I might well have given up on my little research project (to be written up in more detail later) if I had started here instead of with Wakefield/Moody, Palmer and Price.
11) The Epic of Gilgamesh
It’s incomplete, but it’s raw and powerful; it is reminiscent of the Book of Job, but it has a flood in too; it has monsters, harlots, wise men and gods. Difficult to get started but then strangely compelling.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: Evening Class by Maeve Binchy
Nebula award winners here. One woman out of four (below average for the Nebulas); three first-time winners and one second-time winner; one born before 1942, two after 1951 and one in the period in between.
Well done Serbia on winning Eurovision; time for some good news there.
George Monbiot writes an article that I completely agree with.
For my last stop on this trip I decided to explore the town of Štip, which I had visited briefly on my first trip to Macedonia in April 1997, but appeared from Thammy’s book to have a lot more to recommend it. Indeed, it is a good reminder of the intermingling of cultures in this part of the world (and not in fact very far from Stobi, if you want to combine the two some day as a good day trip from Skopje).
Here, for instance, is a dilapidated mosque, built on the ruins of an early Christian church:
Here is the monument in Freedom Square to Alexander the Great:
Here is the monument a bit further along the river to the 561 Jews deported from Štip to Treblinka:
And here is the Bezisten, a former bazaar:
…now doing service as an art gallery:
And, as all former Ottoman towns ought to have, an old clock tower:
Saturday is often a day for getting married in this part of the world:
And I finished off the visit, and my trip as a whole, with a visit to the Kežovica mineral springs for a very convincingly mineral-tasting hot shower. The bath complex nestles into a crook of the hills:
One thing I have learnt from this trip is that the learning experiences of travel are the people at least as much as the scenery.
I gave lifts to a couple of hitch-hikers during my drive. One was a woman of perhaps my own age, who nattered away to me in a cheerfully obscene mixture of Serbian and German – the phrase “Pička ti materina!” was cheerfully interjected at points where I wouldn’t have used it. Though actually, I wouldn’t ever use that phrase anyway. Then she told me that she was “in sex-business”, normally doing the rounds of the autobahns in Germany and the Netherlands, but back home in Macedonia and having a day of rather slim pickings. I made it clear that she was out of luck with me, and dropped her at the point I turned off the main road for Valandovo. (My spirit of scientific enquiry wishes in retrospect that I had asked the going rate.)
Later on, after we came down from our climb, Bekir told me more of his life story; Gastarbeiter in Germany, economic asylum seeker in Austria, then kicked out and back to Macedonia. His house was not large, he and his wife and two kids have no electricity (Mehmet, who you have seen in the picture at the charcoal kiln, has moved out and lives with his wife and two kids around the corner). But he had been reading the latest issue of the Macedonian weekly version of the main Turkish daily, Zaman, and was well up with the affairs of the world. Only at one point did our conversation falter, when he told me that he had served a prison sentence in his late teens; “Ich hab’ ein’ Mann getöt’,” he said, and his face broke. After a moment we carried on talking, but about something else.
Well, the actual point of this trip was to explore and find out more about the battlefield where my grandfather fought the Bulgarians in 1915 (as opposed to the Turks earlier that year or in 1918). To guide me I had the maps below (respectively, from the books by Cyril Falls and Wakefield and Moody, and a modern one), some reminiscences written years after his death, and the excellent description of the battle itself by Ward Price. (A nod also to Alan Palmer who is informative on the geopolitics.)
Relating the map – especially three different maps – to the situation on the ground is tricky, and coming from Valandovo through Rabrovo I missed the crucial turning for Tatarli (because it was signposted for Čalakli) and was halfway up the pass to Kosturino before I a) realised my mistake and b) was able to turn on the narrow and twisting (though well-surfaced) road. There was a policeman at the junction, and I wondered if I had also somehow driven past the Irish war memorial that was supposedly in Rabrovo. Using my best efforts at mangled Macedonian and Serbia I asked him if he knew where the ирски споменик was. He looked blank, but then offered me a Greek military cemetery, only a few hundred metres away. I left the car and investigated. Sure enough, there it was:
But hang on – further up the hill behind it was something else:
Yes, I had found the monument to the 10th (Irish) division.
The setting is pretty spectacular, looking across the plain to the mountains, the Greek cemetery to the right, the road (which is actually signposted to Greece and Turkey) heading due south to Lake Dojran and the border. As you can see, it is fertile territory.
Encouraged, I returned to the car, waved to the policeman, and began the next stage. My hope was that I would be able to drive up the track marked on the map towards Memešli, in the valley east of the peaks marked as Crête Rivet and Crête Simonet. According to both Price and Falls, my grandfather’s regiment had held out on Crête Rivet for a day after the rest of the front line had pulled back to Crête Simonet; which made me feel pretty certain that that was the location of the anecdote passed on by my grandmother.
However, at this point the utter inadequacy of the maps in detailing the situation on the ground let me down, and I began wishing I had invested in a GPS system. I found myself in a clearing with numerous charcoal pits in varying stages of use. And at this point fate took a hand, with a local man, Bekir, offering to take me up the hill to show me the landscape.
Bekir spoke some German, which is how we communicated (my German is fairly fluent); we discussed the local vegetation, the resignation of Tony Blair, climate change, and the shocking state of the Macedonian economy as we climbed. As it turned out, he is actually an ethnic Turk, and he told me that all the villages nearby (apart from Sobri, across the valley) were largely Turkish-speaking; a legacy population of the Ottoman empire, kicked out of these parts by the Bulgarians in 1912, themselves kicked out by the Serbs in 1913, with my grandfather part of an unsuccessful attempt to save them from the Bulgarians again in late 1915 before they went back to Serbia in 1918. (Back and forth again during the second world war, and of course in independent Macedonia since 1992.) The landscape alternates between rocky and bushy; junipers and yew, mostly, but it smelt lovely.
Bekir guided me through the scrub to the top of the peak called Crête Simonet on the allied maps (I asked if there was a local Turkish name for it; he looked blank; the names were presumably given to the features by the French who had occupied the area in a counterstrike against the Bulgarians in early November 1915, handing over to the Irish at the end of the month) and I satisfied myself that I was in the right place. Here is the view north to Crête Rivet.
Was it from here that my grandfather ordered his men to descend diagonally, guessing that the Bulgarians would fire straight down into the valley and so miss them? Certainly if Crête Rivet is like Crête Simonet, a diagonal descent on the southern edge is favoured by the rock formations. (Presumably also the houses they allowed to be shelled belonged to Bekir’s wife’s relatives – he himself was from further north. He told me that the village of Kajali is completely deserted with barely any buildings standing; I guess we know why.)
On top of the ridge I found this interesting and clearly artificial arrangement of rocks, which Bekir said was either Bulgarian or Russian in origin.
One of the stones appeared to have been drilled and had traces of cement:
My first feeling was that this surely must have been constructed by the Allies, not the Bulgarians; it was open to the south, and clearly facing north. But on reflection, I think it may instead be what is left of the trigonometric beacon marked both by Falls and on the modern map just inside the 400m contour, a kilometre or so north of the village. (Which, incidentally, Bekir tells me is now generally called Čalakli, Tatarli being only one small part of it.)
The top of the ridge flattens out into a fairly clear platform several hundred metres long by three or four wide, the slopes dropping away to the scrub on either side:
I was too tired and the weather too hot to press on to the northern peak; also my short-sleeved shirt was inadequate protection against the scrub, so we declared a partial victory and, like the 10th Division in 1915, beat a tactical retreat. I had not been to the gym all week due to my travel, but this certainly made up for it.
Most of the local wildlife moved fast enough to get out of sight before my exhausted fingers could get my new camera to focus on it, but there was one exception:
We also said hi to Bekir’s son Mehmet who was busy making charcoal.
Bekir invited me in for a cup of Turkish coffee, and recommended that I should come back some time to do both peaks, which should take us about four hours; he also hoped I would bring someone who spoke decent Macedonian or Serbian, though I felt we had managed OK in German. I gave him what I hope was a decent tip, and drove off, feeling pretty triumphant. This expedition was something that had started out as a castle in the air, and ended with the kindness of a charcoal-burner. I do hope I get back there some time to do the fuller version.
Tipped off by Thammy Evans’ guidebook, I broke my drive for lunch at the ruined city of Stobi, which is conveniently located just off the main road north of Gradsko (not too far from Štip). An extraordinary and beautiful monument; I was the only tourist there.
The very first thing that catches your eye on the way in is the amphitheatre:
I spent most of my working week in Cyprus and Kosovo, and was basically feeling too ill to take many photos (see, if you are interested, my earlier galleries of Cyprus, Macedonia/Kosovo and Kosovo/Macedonia).
For somewhat complex logistical reasons, although I actually had business in Kosovo I flew into Macedonia, where the airports now proclaims its historical links with a local hero who was well-known for travelling, though better known for what he did while he was travelling.
Back in Skopje on Thursday night for a meal with my old friend V, and his wife T (who wrote the book).
And here is the Stone Bridge in the centre of town, like the Hagia Sofia reputedly built by Justinian (who was born in the neighbourhood). Another native of Skopje, of course, was Mother Teresa; there is a plaque in the (rather ugly) square on the far side of the bridge marking the site of the house where she was born.
Sorry for the many reviews this morning, I woke early here in Kosovo and decided to catch up.
PSA: I seem to be getting lots more anonymous spam comments on my posts, so in future all anonymous comments will be screened for my approval. (Get yourselves livejournal accounts if you want to comment regularly!)
10) Reclaiming Democracy: Civil Society and Electoral Change in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Joerg Forbrig and Pavol Demeš
A really good summary of the lessons for democratisation from the involvement of NGOs with the regime changes in Slovakia (1998), Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004). There’s a substantive chapter on each case, followed by a number drawing overall lessons. One overall conclusion made by several writers is that, far from the “colour revolutions” spreading, the remaining authoritarian leaderships in Eurasia have probably worked out how to prevent such changes of government from happening again (Belarus and Russia are often mentioned in this context). Each of the “revolutions” discussed benefited from a certain freedom in the media, which seems to me to be one of the key factors; sure, they all benefited from Western funding, but the same is true of many groups in countries which have failed to achieve regime change.
Ivan Krastev, in a typically thought-provoking final piece, makes the point that these revolutions should be seen not so much in the context of the transition from Communism in 1989-92, but more as European parallels to the recent left-wing changes of government in Latin America; in both cases, old corrupt elites booted out of office, though with the resulting governments going in opposite geopolitical directions on the two different sides of the Atlantic.
I’d have liked to see the authors explore two other questions. First, they all accept as fairly unproblematic the co-option of civil society on behalf of the opposition in an election campaign. Myself I think there are some consequences for the political neutrality of NGOs, and the political positioning of civil society as a whole. Second, while there is some discussion of the revolutions that didn’t happen, I missed any good unpacking of why the five cases under discussion are so different from, say, the overthrow of Ter-Petrossian in Armenia, or the BSP in Bulgaria, and Berisha’s previous government in Albania, all in 1997-98. I think myself that there is indeed a difference, but I would have liked it to be illustrated here.
9) Diary of a Teenage Girl, by Phoebe Gloeckner
One of the comics recommended by Nerve. Our fifteen-year-old heroine has sex with lots of people and writes it all up in her diary (though not with any degree of explicit detail). Rather depressing, and really pales into insignificance compared to Fun Home.
Top UnSuggestions for this book:
…and many more interesting choices!
8) Singing the Dogstar Blues, by Alison Goodman
This won the Aurealis Award; not sure what that says about its Australian sf competitors, because I felt that the prose was a bit clunky in places, and I saw the twist ending coming from miles away. Our heroine, studying a university course in time-travel, finds that she has been assigned an alien (one of a newly arrived diplomatic mission) as a partner, and in the end discovers more about her own past than she had intended. Potentially good material, but not really pushed far enough.
Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis
Another of my attempts to familiarise myself with the work of Nobel laureates. I found this book really compelling, the story of a bright woman from the city who marries the doctor in a Minnesota town. The small-mindedness of her fellow residents is pitilessly portrayed, as are their repeated efforts to keep her spirit crushed. The main character, with all her faults, is convincing and sympathetic. I might read more by this author.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: Alanna: the first adventure by Tamora Pierce
6) Kaddish for a Child Unborn, by Imre Kertész
I guess I shouldn’t try and read heavy literature while I am travelling and feeling under the weather, because I found the peculiar narrative structure of this book rather off-putting. The central human dilemma, an Auschwitz survivor who is looking back on his childlessness and his failed literary career, is an important one, but I couldn’t get into it.
5) Backdrop of Stars, edited by Harry Harrison
I picked up this collection (first published in 1968, though I got the 1975 paperback) in Dublin the other month, and Ken MacLeod, no less, commended my choice, saying that it had made quite an impression on him when he first read it. A baker’s dozen of stories by well-established authors (Aldiss, Anderson, Asimov, Ballard – they are printed by alphabetical order), some of which go some way to challenging comfortable political preconceptions (though one – L. Sprague de Camp’s “Proposal” – is I fear serious rather than satirical in its anti-feminism). It also struck me that a lot of the stories were really about death; the very first, Aldiss’ “Judas Danced”, is about an execution and the last, Mack Reynolds’ “Retaliation”, is a post-nuclear holocaust vignette (with a sting in the tale – the viewpoint characters, for whom the author has developed our sympathy, are Russians not Americans). Anyway, a good collection.
I am now going through passport control for the third time today. It isn’t often that I have been in four different countries before lunchtime. (But not completely unprecedented either.)
I took the opportunity of a six-hour layover between flights in Istanbul to go explore the centre of the city; the only other time I had been there I saw only what was visible from the taxi between airport and hotel.
This time was different. Though feeling really crap and cold-ridden, I made it safely into the middle of town, and basically orbited back and forth between the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque for two hours.
The Hagia Sophia (Ἁγία Σοφία, Holy Wisdom) basilica was built by Justinian in the 530s, and was the largest cathedral in the world for a thousand years.
But some of the original Byzantine artwork has resurfaced, or been restored:
From the doorstep of the cathedral, the ancient Hippodrome extends about 500 metres; halfway along its length, the emperor Theodosius erected an Egyptian obelisk in 390 AD. The Blue Mosque is in the background. Just consider the timescales involved: Thutmosis had the obelisk engraved in 1490 BC, almost two millennia before Theodosius brought it here; the mosque was built in the first part of the 17th century, over 1200 years after the obelisk got there; and roughly four hundred years later, I get to take a photograph of it.
The Blue Mosque itself is too vast for the humble tourist photographer to capture it, so you will have to be satisfied with the majesty of the entrance…
On the road for the next week (to Cyprus right now, Macedonia/Kosovo on Tuesday, back on Saturday). Really sore throat. Hope that improves…
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